waffle

MacBook Air — thin. Amazingly thin. Too thin. Too thin to fit the stuff I’d like. I have a 120GB hard disk where I outsourced the Windows partition during Leopard installation, and I’m squeezing. The Air gives me a choice between 80GB and slow and 64GB and even more expensive, both of which are way too small. I’m waiting until the multi-touch trackpad trickles down to the MacBook Pro.

Time Capsule — good and cool. If Time Machine backup just works with it and not with AirPort Extreme base stations, mean.

Movie rentals + Apple TV 2 — fair. Renting a movie is a reasonable, working model. Getting 30 days in which to start watching and 24 hours to finish watching seems humane. Waiting 30 days from the DVD is released is complete bullshit. Being able to rent stuff from your TV wirelessly is the future. The free Apple TV firmware update is a good PR move (and probably economically sound since no one bought the first version in the first place).

Gruber has written two guesses about the upcoming MWSF that makes me wonder a little bit where he’s been.

The first one - admittedly probably more of a shot from the hip - is about Apple introducing a new network backup storage device for AirPort, so that you can back up to it with Time Machine. I’m skeptical about this not because it wouldn’t be great, but because they actually sort of did this last year when they introduced the pre-n AirPort Extreme base station which lets you plug in USB disks. It didn’t even make the keynote - and now a different version is supposed to garner banner teasing?

Apple did showcase wireless backup in the WWDC keynote, before they had to pull it a few weeks ahead of the Leopard launch. I’m guessing there’ll be a bunch of angry customers out there who had bought the AirPort Extreme just for the disk sharing if they were to introduce an entirely new option that did work. And of course, I’m not entirely sure Apple would need to start competing with the other vendors in this space (disks with wireless interfaces, not wireless routers with disk ports) - there’s already plenty of products that work well enough.

The second is - well, let me just quote the paragraph:

Things were dead quiet last year. And they seem pretty quiet again this year. Donning my Cupertino-Kremlinology hat, I can’t help but see last week’s week-before-Macworld debut of brand-new Mac Pros as a hint that their keynote announcements plate runneth over. But there’s a big difference this year — last year, speculation was running rampant about one particular thing, “the phone”; this year, not so much. The consensus rumors and guesses are interesting but not earth-shaking.

Speculation is running rampant about not only one but two things. The movie rental service on iTunes along with FairPlay versions (or links to such) on DVDs was confirmed so early, people are already starting to forget it’s going to be announced. And a “MacBook Air” (to be honest, I liked “MacBook Thin” better) is at least as hotly debated, partially credited and as vaguely-determined as “the phone” was last year. (I hope the rumors will also be correspondingly under-promising.)

To wrap up, I’ll make another prediction: Safari 3 comes out of beta on Windows. There’s been a “Coming Soon” department on the Download page which has listed the most prominent to-dos ever since the initial release at WWDC, and month by month they have shifted over into the release notes of the new betas. The only remaining “coming soon” is now literally “Localized menus and help”.

Update: Gruber published his detailed predictions, which okays the MacBook Air (which, as he said, he did last year, as did I, but nothing was normal in MWSF2007) and the iTunes rentals as pretty much done deals. He repeats his bet for a wireless plug-in-and-go backup disk. My prime argument for Apple not introducing such a product remains that the market is fairly well served with such disks - disks already produced in bigger quantities and thus cheaper. Better to work with other vendors on good Mac software, which is often missing for the few wireless disks that don’t offer a web interface and a pre-set IP. (Which doesn’t preclude a co-branded version, but I see that as something incredibly unlikely and un-Apple.)

Update 2: Time Capsule is an AirPort Extreme that’s also a hard disk. It’s not just a wireless hard disk. Interpret this one however you want, but I’m probably wrong in the end.

Joy!