Macworld 2007

From time to time I will share some computer/technology related items that I think will be of interest to more than just me. I’ll do my best to keep it to the important stuff that normal people might care about.

Today Apple announced some major new products including the iPhone and Apple TV. Here is my quick overview of what was announced.

iPhone
Just look at the site. The thing looks absolutely amazing. One button, touch screen, WiFi. Everything you could ever want, right? Just a few problems: $499 for 4gb, $599 for 8gb, it doesn’t come out until June, and most important to me and the reason I won’t spend that much on it … no 3G. When it comes out it will only be on AT&T. Still, its looks so sweet.

Apple TV
This one has been known about for a while, we just didn’t have the final details. I like the fact that it has HDMI, HD, Wireless-N, and a hard drive. My problems are that it interfaces with iTunes which I am not a fan of for managing video. If you are into getting shows or movies from the iTunes Store, then this is a great buy. $299 is not a bad price for it. If you want to stream music or pictures then its even better. For me I don’t have much use for streaming video and if I want to do music or pictures I’ll just pay the $20 for Connect360 and use my Xbox 360.

Paramount Movies on iTunes
I like the effort. Movies should be available in as many formats from as many different providers as possible. Still, I have no plans to buy movies from iTunes.

Airport Extreme
New Wireless Router featuring Wireless-N. (Wireless-N is faster and has better range than Wireless-G.) It also has a really cool feature that allows you to plug in a printer, hard drive, and maybe some other stuff via USB and that can be accessed by the computers on the network. Problems? $179 and the wired Ethernet ports are only 10/100. Why does Apple put Gigabit Ethernet is all its products if they are going to release a router without it?

What they didn’t talk about …
Leopard (the next version of the OS) – I wanted some more features and a release date.
iLife 07 – Not a huge deal. I’m not too disappointed. I’d like some new stuff in iPhoto and GarageBand. Now that I have Final Cut Express iMovie updates don’t mean as much as they used to.
iWork 07 – They are supposed to be adding a spreadsheet app to go along with Pages and Keynote. If that’s the case I would finally buy this since I really like Pages but thought that alone wasn’t worth it.

Summary
iPhone looks amazing, just the sort of phone I’d want, if it were 3G. I’m sure they will charge PDA prices for data (~$40/month for unlimited) and while the texting looking like iChat is cool, texting is expensive as well.
The move to Wireless-N. Even though the spec isn’t approved yet the connivence of wireless and the speeds to transmit video are needed now. They also admitted what everyone already knew, all the recent computer releases have had Wireless-N capable cards in them.
iTunes Rules All – Not my opinion, thats what its turning into. That’s great that if you buy it from iTunes you can access it all over. What if you want to use something else?