I’d gone a while without ogling Apple products. So they came out today with some new products.
This is a neat idea. It’s their “Airport Extreme” wireless AP (with N-capability), but with a neat addition–a 500 or 1TB disk for wireless backups. Sure, the real geeks already have their Linux server in the basement with a RAID array of 500GB disks accessible over NFS and rsync, but Apple brings something cool into a nice little box, makes it work pretty seamlessly, and, get this–sells it at a fairly cheap price. $500 for an 802.11N AP with an integrated 1TB backup fileserver?
Of course, I’d need a Mac machine to sync to it. But I’m already carrying so much stuff to class, I want something light! I guess I’d need the world’s thinnest laptop, the Apple MacBook Air. Not only is it ridiculously small, but it takes the awesome MultiTouch technology from their iPod Touch / iPhone and applies it to the trackpad. 2GB standard, and if you don’t like the sound of your hard drive spinning, you could always opt for the 64GB solid state one. (Apparently at a cost of $1,000, though… But that’s what you pay for 64GB SSD drives right now.)
And they relaunched the AppleTV, without the suck this time. You can also do the much-rumoured movie rentals through iTunes.
Darn you, Apple! Today was supposed to be the day that I caught up on all the work I need to do!
I’m not sold on the Air. But maybe it’s just because I hate Apple (with a vengeance, and perhaps irrationally). It’s thin, sure, but it’s still somewhat large in the other dimensions: 13″. Plus it’s internal battery is not removable — hope you didn’t want to cheat and double that (admittedly pretty long) 5 hour runtime. And if you want the really cool options (SSD, faster CPU, etc.), it gets expensive fast.
Personally, I’d rather go for an older Lifebook (10″, 5+ hours battery life, etc. for about $300-$400 on eBay), or pick up 5 Eees for the same price. :-p
The Air has only one USB port, no Ethernet port, no Firewire, no Express card slot and a pretty slow hard drive. That’s probably one of the ways they keep the power utilization down.
Have you seen this – http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=663&Itemid=59 – It’s pretty funny really.