Brian's Brain

I don't gamble when I'm in Las Vegas, but after my recent run of good luck, maybe I should have. Granted, my Steve Jobs keynote prognostications weren't 100% spot-on:

• No iPhone SDK release. In retrospect, WWDC is a much more appropriate forum for such an event, thought the SDK is in private beta right now and I suspect we'll see a public beta release before WWDC.
• No Macs with Blu-ray support. But again, in retrospect, from a playback standpoint this would have strategically conflicted with Internet high-def video delivery via Apple TV, which was the primary focus yesterday. And regarding Blu-ray drives with media write capability, mark my words: they'll be in Mac Pros and MacBook Pros no later than NAB.
• No Penryn upgrades elsewhere in the Mac line (which, you'll note, I labeled as a 'possibility', not a 'high probability')
• No new standalone displays (another 'possibility')
• No higher-capacity iPhone or iPod touch (another 'possibility')
• No formal OS 10.5.2 release (another 'possibility'...plus it's in private beta right now, so it's only a matter of time...and the company released a blizzard of Quicktime and standalone app updates instead)
• No WiMAX support (another 'possibility', this one my biggest roll of the dice in the list)

However, look at what I got right:

• An ultra-thin laptop, with 1.8" HDD and (significantly more expensive, along with density-deficient) SSD options, an LED-backlit LCD and no built-in optical drive (or, for that matter, RJ45 Ethernet jack, FireWire port or more than one USB2 connector!).
• A new iPhone firmware release (along with a $20 upgrade to the iPod touch)
• Movie rentals, both standard- and high-def (the latter at incremental cost), direct-delivered to (among other things)...
• A firmware-upgraded Apple TV with no hardware design changes
• iPod-tailored movie versions on DVD
• No 3G iPhone
• One 'boom' from El Jobso, and
• 'One More Thing'...although...Randy Newman???

I'm feeling pretty smug about my prediction skills this morning, I must confess. Head here if you want to watch a keynote replay. My thoughts on some of the stuff Jobs unveiled yesterday follow:

The MacBook Air

Yep, it's sexy, especially for a thin-and-light subcompact guy like me. And no, I don't think the lack of built-in optical drive is a big deal; I can probably count using the fingers of one hand the number of times I've used the SuperDrive in my MacBook over the past six months. Apple was one of the first companies to ditch the floppy, and now it's taking a leadership role in eliminating another rotating-media removable mass storage format from the core platform. Some folks will be able to get by on a read-only basis with a LAN tether to an optical drive on another system; for the rest (including those who want to burn their own CDs and DVDs), I'm sure Apple will be happy to sell them a USB2-tethered external Superdrive upgrade.

But, as I said on Monday morning:

The thin-and-light segment of the notebook PC business is quite small in size...Given Apple's sub-10% share of the overall computer business (which is disproportionally higher, admittedly, in the notebook PC segment) an ultra-thin system would represent a fiscal and resource gamble for Apple. On the other hand, Apple is known for taking calculated risks, and an ultra-thin system would be right in line with Apple's historical focus on design elegance and uniqueness.

Now look at the system price tags:

1.6GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 2GBytes RAM, 80GByte HDD: $1,799.99
1.8GHz CPU, 2GBytes RAM, 80GByte HDD: $2,099.99
1.6GHz CPU, 2GBytes RAM, 64GByte SSD: $2,798.99
1.8GHz CPU, 2GBytes RAM, 64GByte SSD: $3,098.99

That's no Eee PC, folks. It's also no Dell XPS M1330.

It's not remotely clear to me how many of these things Apple's going to end up selling. Then again, Chevrolet doesn't sell many Corvettes, either. If MacBook Air's primary function ends up being that it gets lots of feet into Apple stores and lots of mouse cursors onto Apple's website which end up buying lots of MacBooks, then perhaps it's still served its purpose. Its role as a technology proving ground for mainstream Apple systems to come also can't be understated (again, the Corvette analogy applies).

Other thoughts:

1. The inability to user-upgrade the installed RAM or HDD, along with the lack of factory-installed capacity options in either case, is curious. Granted, 2 GBytes of RAM is probably more than adequate for most OS 10.5-plus-app suites, and it should even be enough to speedily run Windows Vista. But to that point, an 80 GByte HDD will be a particularly tight squeeze for someone (like me) who might want to run a multi-partition Boot Camp configuration.
2. The lack of a user-replaceable battery is also a head-scratcher. What about long airplane flights or train rides, or long days at trade shows, or any other significant amount of time that you're away from your AC adapter (or an available AC plug)? And what happens as the battery ages and the purported 'five hours' of operating life consequently diminishes? Yes, Apple will offer factory-installed replacements, but that scenario will still involve round-trip shipments and days' worth of user downtime while the system's being worked on. Then again, I've long been resistant to this particular design decision.

p.s...if you want to win a fully-loaded one for yourself, head to DealMac.

Movie rentals and the Apple TV upgrade

As I mentioned on Saturday, I didn't attend the keynote in person. Since the keynote also wasn't streamed live over the Internet, I relied on MacRumours' and Macworld magazine's website postings (along with frequent use of the F5 browser refresh key) to keep me up-to-date on the San Francisco goings-on. As you'll see from the Macworld Magazine transcript, Jobs waited till the very end of the Apple TV pitch to reveal that (as I'd suggested on Saturday was possible) all of the added capabilities would be delivered via a firmware upgrade to the existing hardware. Of course, they wouldn't have had to bother with an upgrade at all if they'd just listened to me a year and a month ago...;-)

Up to that point, I was getting steamed. There's a long and sordid history in the consumer electronics industry of early adopters getting "screwed"; look, for example, at how folks who bought early HDTVs without digital video inputs would have been resolution-neutered by thankfully-on-hiatus but not-yet-dead analog hole plugs such as ATSC's Broadcast Flag and Blu-ray and HD DVD's Image Constraint Token. And speaking of Blu-ray, at least Andy Parson's upfront when he admits that player early adopters won't be able to enjoy future profiles' feature enhancements.

As it turns out, though, Apple TV early hardware adopters won't get locked out of the Apple TV Take 2 refresh, though they won't be able to exploit yesterday's price cut (is an iPhone-reminiscent lawsuit en route, do you think?). Kudos to the company for resisting the temptation to force a fiscally tempting hardware re-purchase. And speaking of price cuts, 40 GByte HDD-based refurbs are now $199. Yup, I bought one.

Speaking of 40 GByte HDDs, I'm still waiting for Apple to unlock the unit's USB port. Hackers have figured out how to enable external HDD-based upgrades, but only on older firmware releases. Will Apple eventually enable 40 GByte purchasers like me to up-tick their units' capacities via USB tethers, or will they artificially force folks who are running out of space to re-buy units with bigger drives?

And speaking of hardware lock-outs, the (presumably studio-insisted) terms and conditions of the rental program are also interesting. Movies won't be available for rent through iTunes until 30 days after they appear on DVD; gotta keep the optical disc cash cow alive, huh? High-def rentals can only go to Apple TV, and can't subsequently be moved from there to (for an example) a computer running iTunes. Gotta keep that high-def content away from the hackers as much as possible, huh? Also, it's not possible to purchase HD versions of movies (Engadget has a consise summary of the do's-and-dont's).

Final comment on this topic: it's still not possible to rent TV show episodes. Sigh....

Time Capsule

Frankly, Apple's HDD-inclusive Airport Extreme router isn't revolutionary by any means. D-Link pitched the concept to me many years ago. And multi-function LAN devices such as Toshiba's Magnia SG Internet Appliance series implemented the feature. Granted, given my extensive NAS coverage over the years, I understand the value of network-based storage extensions, especially for inherently non-tethered laptops, and double-especially in conjunction with OS 10.5's Time Machine auto-backup feature.

The reason why I decide to not publicly predict Time Capsule, although I'd considered it, was because Apple already had Time Capsule. The Airport Extreme Base Station offers USB ports with which you can tether an external HDD in order to implement NAS functionality, a feature that Apple brands as AirPort Disk. Early revisions of Airport Express documentation touted the ability to use AirPort Disk in conjunction with Time Machine, but mention of this particular NAS wrinkle later got abruptly and mysteriously yanked.

Apple's formal position, as Ars Technica points out, is that the deletion was temporary and is due to a to-be-fixed implementation bug. Label me cynical, but I suspect that 'bug' will never get fixed. Instead, I bet Apple's hoping that Time Machine-tapping laptop users who've already dropped $200 on an Airport Extreme router will eventually give up waiting and drop an incremental $299 or $499 on a HDD-inclusive version of the hardware they already own.

Apple, please prove me wrong. And excuse me for not being thrilled with the 'server-class HDDs' you're supposedly stuffing inside Time Capsule, considering the lack of credible MTTF differential between 'consumer' and 'enterprise' HDDs under real-life usage conditions.

Followup: Wonderful satire, Gizmodo!