Steve Jobs' MacWorld 2008 Keynote

Macworld 2008: MacBook Air announced

(This is a little diary I'm keeping while watching the liveblogging of the MacWorld keynote on several sites. It's liveblogging the liveblogging! This isn't an objective word-for-word transcript, it's littered with my own initial reactions. Apologies also if anything gets lost or mangled in this game of Chinese whispers.)

People are taking their places and the eagerly awaited keynote is about to start.

There are several sites liveblogging the event. Among them:

iJustine was streaming live video and audio from the event before they went in but her stream's gone dead.

Also, Fake Steve Jobs has his own live blog. His first entry, at 8:56 am, reads: "My God I am tingling like a little girl."

I'm trying to follow all of them and remembering how cool it was last year when I was watching the keynote first hand. Speaking at MacWorld was a very cool experience!

Apparently Steve's taken the stage now and revealed that there will be four things he will be talking about today.

Twitter is down

Twitter, predictably, has buckled under the extra stress of people twittering about MacWorld and Fake Steve Jobs' live blog is looking quite dead.

The first thing is Leapard, so I'm not entirely excited. (Don't talk to me about Leopard. I haven't been happier since I downgraded to Tiger!) Apparently they've sold a lot of copies (5m). Good for you Apple, now fix the darn thing already! :)

(TUAW is also buckling under the traffic. Gizmodo seems to be doing well.)

Time Capsule is interesting. Jason Chen from Gizmodo writes:

Leopard works great with a desktop machine, but it doesn’t work well with laptops because you have to keep plugging and unplugging a USB drive. Now he’s introducing a new backup station with 802.11n and server-grade backup station. It’s an AirPort Extreme station with ports in the back, allowing you to back up your macs wirelessly

I was wondering if they would introduce dual hard-drive MacBook Pros for the very same reason. This is good but the backups won't work if you're away from home. I'd still like a dual hard-drive MacBook Pro, please. And could you make one of those drives removable? khtxbai

(The Fake Steve Jobs' keynote page has also buckled under the traffic. He was using an app called coveritlive, which, when it was up kept warning me to use the latest version of Firefox when I already am!)

I guess you can always get two Time Capsules and take one on the road with you...

If I upgrade again to Leopard with the upcoming 10.5.2 release, I'll definitely be getting one of those babies. 1TB of storage for $499 by itself sounds like a good deal, forgetting all the other functionality! (Man, who'd have thought, back when Bill Gates was proclaiming that no one would need more than 640 kilobytes of memory and when hard drives were unheard of that we'd actually have 1TB drives in our homes one day.)

On to the iPhone, then:

You can now SMS more than one person at once. About time! How can a device that feels so futuristic in my hands be so stone-age in some respects. I know my N95 lets me do more but I just can't go back to it and I put up with the limitations of the iPhone for the lovely interface... why??? (I mean, I can surf the web with my laptop from anywhere at 3G speeds, SMS as many people as like, heck MMS even -- not that I have more than maybe three times in my whole life -- with my N95!)

(And what about copy and paste? Video capture?)

Webclips -- adding web apps to the iPhone's home screen -- sounds good.

The SDK at the end of Feb is going to be great.

The other apps, etc., are all good but, all in all, there doesn't seem to be any really exciting news about the iPhone. No 3G, for one thing! :(

Wow, and they're actually charging existing users $20 for the new apps that they're adding to the iPod touch! That's interesting.

And iTunes is to get movie rentals. (Will we see this in the UK this century? Update: "International later this year." Thanks, Steve! Again, we wait!)

Ah, finally, you can rent movies directly on the AppleTV. (Does this work for music, etc., too? Is iTunes essentially running on the Apple TV? And is this a software update for current AppleTV owners like me?)

Oooh, a new interface too. OK, I will be seriously bummed if current AppleTVs can't be upgraded to this...

Yes, it's a free software upgrade! So, sometime "later this year", I may actually start getting some use out of my AppleTV in the UK.

(And that makes perfect sense. They're going to make a lot of money with this rental system so why cut out their existing customer base by requiring new hardware. Especially since their first try was nothing to write home about.)

I'm still wondering what the big announcement is going to be. So far, the keynote has been quite tame.

Woot, the MacBook Air! "It's the world's thinnest notebook".

Damn, it's thinner than the Sony TZ series! (It goes from 0.76 inches to 0.16 inches.)

Full-size, back-lit keyboard and multi-touch track-pad!.. Rock on! :)

So we know what all the coolest kids will be carrying with them to the conferences this year!

So is there a "one more thing"..?

Photo by Ngo Quang Minh.

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