If you care at all about the Mac, you already know that the Macworld 2008 keynote presentation was this morning. And the evidence is good that many people do care: sites carrying live news from the keynote, including Twitter, Engadget, MacRumors, and The Unoffical Apple Weblog all had trouble staying up this morning, presumably due to thousands of people madly refreshing their browser windows.
But now that Steve Jobs is done speaking for the day and the reality distortion field is slowly dissipating, it’s time to step back a bit and ask what came out of the keynote that will really matter to web workers in the long run. Is it time to send more of your hard-earned money to Cupertino, or was this just another exercise in preaching to the converted?
There were four major announcements during the keynote. Let’s look at them one at a time:
Time Capsule – This is essentially a wireless NAS for Mac networks, tuned for doing backups from Leopard via Time Machine. Nice, but not all that revolutionary – vendors like LaCie could already sell you a 1TB Ethernet NAS for under $300, compared to Apple’s $500. Apple quality and wireless will be selling points here, but hopefully most web workers already have their backup solution in place.
iPhone Software Upgrade – If you’re an existing iPhone user, this is a nice upgrade, and a free one (well, nice unless you’ve been playing the unlocking game, in which case it’s the next step in the arms race). But if you’re a web worker hoping to write applications for the iPhone, it’s still time to hold your breath. The SDK is now planned for “late February.”
iTunes Movie Rentals and Apple TV Take 2 – Yeah, they’ll make a mint renting out movies from all the major studios at $3 and $4 a crack. But web worker impact? Not so much, unless you’re looking for a new way to kill spare time while waiting for your clients to answer emails.
MacBook Air – “The World’s Thinnest Notebook.” Yes, a notebook that fits in an interoffice mail envelope. Light and powerful notebooks are always good for those of us who work on the road, and this one appears to fit the bill. The multi-touch trackpad and optional solid state storage are interesting, though personally I’ll let someone else own them for the first few months and see what teething pains are reported. But if you’re one of those mobile workers who is willing to pay top dollar to be on the cutting edge, this is where the meat of the keynote was for you.
(I have to admit that my own personal gadget lust is kicking in over the MacBook Air, though I do not need another notebook; hopefully that will wear off before I remember where I hid the credit cards.)
What’s missing? The two biggest things I would have wanted to see as a web worker are an iPhone SDK and a stabler upgrade to Leopard. But we know both of those are in the works. So although some of the wilder pre-keynote rumors didn’t come true, and though much of it was focused on products that I don’t really care about as a web worker, I’m reasonably satisfied.
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