the random thoughts of a programmer

This years MacWorld was in a way a little disappointing and in a way exciting… I would give say almost 50/50. Perhaps my expectations where too high going into it but I was hoping for more focus on the iPod and OSX than their other multimedia stuff.

iPhone… whoop doo… while it is a pretty innovative little product and I am likely to get one some day I must say that my response to this one was less than enthusiastic. The first reason is that cell phones suck (more on that some other time). The other reason is that its only 8GB. I like the interface in concept and seeing it in action was pretty neat but the deal breaker for me at this point is that I have almost 20GB of music so what good does an 8GB iPhone really do for me? Overall I think iPhone is perhaps the wave of the future in cell phones but I’ll pass on this one for now until its a little more practical.

Apple TV… now that is pretty neat. Finally an interface to iTunes designed for your living room. The only major design flaw that I see here is that it doesn’t work with digital cable. My ideal box would be something that plays my digital media, DVDs and works as a cable box/DVR. Perhaps I ask too much… heck I would even be willing to take DVD player off the list of required features, what I really want is to have a “all in wonder” box sitting on top of my TV, not the 4 boxes I have now. So Apple TV, a step in the right direction. I will keep my eyes on this one to see what Apple does with it.

Not released at MacWorld per-say was the new Airport Extreme. That is one little box I’m going to be buying very soon. The killer feature… the USB port. I have a completely useless USB printer plugged into my video editing station collecting dust. The reason it’s useless is because I’m always on a laptop and I don’t leave the editing computer turned on all the time for power saving reasons. Having the printer plugged into my wireless base station would be a great thing.

And for the record I’m pissed that Tiger was not released at MacWorld. Seriously Apple, how long is it going to take you to get this in my hands? It looks so cool, it promises so much, please don’t pull a Vista on us (when you talked about it last year at WWDC you tipped your hand and made us all wait… bad move).

So to sum it all up… MacWorld was less than stellar performance for Apple but does introduce some neat new products that are worth watching and one that is pretty neat. We shall see how the year goes for Apple and (as usual) spend the rest of the year wondering what they are going to release at WWDC.