I finally made it back* from the MacWorld 2008 Expo, and I figured I would share my thoughts on a couple items. First off, the $20 upgrade to the firmware for the iPod touch. Like Johnny Mac once said, “You can’t be serious!” There’s no question that Apple makes great products, but charging for a firmware upgrade seems arrogant to me. Especially considering the fact that the upgrade is free for iPhone owners. Is it that much more expensive to upgrade the iPod as compared to the iPhone? Just another way to squeeze a couple bucks out of the Apple faithful.
Next on the chopping block. The MacBook Air. I love the idea of a sub-compact Apple notebook, but this one is lacking a little. First the good. It’s beautiful, but we’ve come to expect that from Apple products. At 3lbs and 3/4 of an inch at its thickest, I love it. My current notebook is more than twice that. You can get a paltry 80 gig PATA drive or a 64 gig SSD. The solid-state drive comes at a premium price, but that’s to be expected since the drives are so new. There isn’t an optical drive included. In true Apple fashion you can pay an additional $90 for an external drive though. You can also use the optical drives on other machines, but you’re limited to 802.11N speed since there isn’t an integrated Ethernet port. To me, it looks like the MacBook Air would make an awesome second machine. There isn’t enough disk space and it’s missing some things required of my main computer. The real issue is that it isn’t priced like a second machine. Pricing starts at $1799. I don’t know about you, but that’s too much for what wouldn’t make a good primary machine. Put the price point in the $1200 neighborhood, and I’m sold. With the price pushing 2 large, I just don’t think it’s a deal.
* By making it back from MacWorld, I mean that in between work and new baby preparations I’ve caught up on the goings on at the big show in San Fran.
Leave a Reply