Steve Jobs just gave his MacWorld address, and announced the following:
1) MacBook Air: the thinnest notebook ever — .76 of an inch at its widest point. 80-gig hard drive, 13 inch screen, built in Wi-Fi and bluetooth. No optical drive, though — you can get one as an accessory.
2) iTunes Movie Rentals — all major film studios on board. 3 bucks gives you 30 days to watch (but only 24 hours to finish once you’ve started watching, apparently), and then the file self-deletes. Watchable on PCs, Macs, iPods, iPhones and AppleTV.
3)Time Capsule — a back-up appliance, combining a wireless base station with a hard drive (up to 1 TB) – all Macs on your home network can be set to automatically back up to the Capsule wirelessly at whatever schedule you set. This is the one that I’m most jazzed about.
Nifty.
…and that sound is America’s bookies calculating the odds for how long some kid in a garage will crack the “self-delete” code….
24 Hours. Tops.
The sweet thing about the MacBook Air is that if you have a computer with an optical drive on your network, it’ll let you use that computer’s drive as if it was directly connected. So you could put an install disc into your desktop machine “over there”, and sit on the couch and use the disc on the notebook.
Nifty indeed. The MacBook Air looks very very nice. I’m curious how the download-movie thing will work while on a plane, though–I think that’d be one of the prime times for people to want movies.
Prediction
Apple is getting out of the computer business. Instead their focus will be on information, communication, productivity, and creativity. The next iteration of the iMac will be a computer/tv where the actual computer part will be a small module affixed to the monitor and direct wired to it. Such as the optical drive etc will be located away from the computer itself.