Automation Adventures

I has planned this for March 6th, but unfortunately my tardiness caused me to be just in time in Washington DC to pick up my mom from the airport (no, not the Airport Express, the actual Dulles International Airport), and no time to waste by visiting the Apple Store in Tyson’s Corner.

However, when I dropped her off at the airport on the 16th, I thought I’d have plenty of time. And I would have had, if I’d know my way around Tyson’s Corner a bit better. As it turns out, I had just enough time to drop in, play with a couple of devices, and head out. And so I did.

First on the list was the MacBook Air. That thing is really surprisingly thin and light. And the finish is beautiful. To demonstrate how light it is, there was a customer watching a movie while balancing the Air on one hand. Wow.

Next was the iMac. That was actually a bit thicker than I expected it to be. Plus the bevel below the screen is larger than it looks on the website or the advertisements. The keyboard however is beautiful. The Mighty Mouse wasn’t as intuitive as I had hoped it would be, but after a while I think I figured it out.

I skipped the Mac Pro and the other two MacBooks, because they had a small pavilion set up with educational software. The kids were playing with the software, and completely ignoring the machine. It may be that this happens with educational software on PCs as well, but I never noticed that payed any attention to that. It must have something to do with being a new daddy…

I browsed the software and accessories isles a bit before I zeroed in on the next target: Apple TV 2.0. Looks good, nice remote, too bad it seemed to be running in some kind of demo mode. But it’s going on my wish list. Especially if the rumors about DVR capabilities being built in turn out to be true.

My last stop was the table with the iTouch and the iPhone. The iTouch was alarmingly light – I suspected it was a mock-up, but no, it was a fully functional 16GB music, video, and Internet device. Really cool. The iPhone was much heavier than the iTouch – much heavier than any phone I had I think. Same interface, but the addition of GPS makes Google maps fully functional, and it is amazing to see your location with satellite maps. It makes you think that you could zoom in and see yourself standing.

And then it was time to leave. I think I could have stayed until they closed the store – I had the same feeling as back in 1978 when I was playing with the TRS-80 at a Radio Shack store. And as at a trade show a couple of years later when they had an Apple Lisa set up to play with. It’s the kid-in-a-candystore feeling, that was lacking from the Gateway store I visited, and certainly lacks from Walmart or Best Buy. I will be back Apple Store – either in person or on the web.

Technorati Tags: apple, store, imac, macbook, air, iphone, itouch, appletv

A hectic schedule at work and at home has prevented me from reporting on the MacWord announcements Steve Jobs made in his keynote. A quick round-up:

• Office 2008 native on Intel
• Time Capsule, an external hard drive companion to Time Machine, with a built-in Airport Extreme base station. Two versions, 500GB ($299) and 1TB ($499), ships in February.
• iPhone update: SDK in late February, now maps with locations, SMS to multiple people, webclips
• iPod Touch has upgrade to get all this. Existing users have to pay $20 to upgrade.
• iTunes movie rentals. Regular $2.99 for library titles, $3.99 for new releases. HD costs a dollar more.
• AppleTV take 2 – no computer required, but can sync to one. HD movie rentals. Integration with Flickr and YouTube. Price dropped to $229.
• World’s thinnest notebook – the Apple MacBook Air. 13.3 inch widescreen, 3 pounds, 0.76 to 0.16 inches thick, iSight camera, full size LED backlit keyboard, large trackpad with multi touch gestures (like on the iPhone and iPod Touch), 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth, 5 hours battery life, 1.8″ harddrive 80GB standard, 64GB SSD optional, 1.6GHz Core Duo. No optical drive – need to have it as USB connected drive, or borrow one from a PC or a Mac. Priced at $1799, and ships in two weeks.

Nice announcements, on top of the Mac Pro with 8 cores announced last week. The Apple Air is sexy and sharp, looks like you can cut someone with it. Time Capsule’s saving grace is the wireless base station, otherwise it’s just a high-priced USB drive. AppleTV v.2 might be just what AppleTV needed to take off, combined with the movie rentals. It sucks to have to pay $20 for an iPod touch upgrade, but it beats having your device obsoleted a couple of weeks after you purchase it.

Unfortunately, nothing earth shattering. Which seems to be reflected in the AAPL stock price: hovering around $177 beginning of this week, it now dipped down to about $163. That’s only a little higher than their three-month low of mid-November. I wonder what will Apple come up with around May (gut feeling they have “one more thing” up their sleeve)?

Tags: air, apple, appletv, iphone, ipod touch, itunes, mac, macbook, office 2008

Apple’s Summer Press Conference reveals a set of new products:

New iMac

A new iMac, in aluminum and glass. Much like the mock-ups that were floating around the Internet. 2 screen sizes: 20 and 24 inch displays. Also, new keyboard: 2 USB ports, 1/3 of an inch high, wireless? Bluetooth 2.0. Not sure, but the mouse is probably new and wireless as well.
20″ model comes with 2.0GHz or 2.4GHz Core 2 Extreme processor, 24″ with 2.4GHz Core 2 Extreme. ATI Radeon HD graphics card (ouch), 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.0, up to 4GB memory, up to 1TB of hard drive. 20″ 2.0GHz for $1199, 20″ 2.4GHz $1499, and 24″ 2.4GHz $1799.

UPDATE: There is a 4th model listed on the iMac product page, a 24″ 2.8GHz with 2GB memory and a 500GB harddisk for $2299.

UPDATE 2: the wireless keyboard and mouse are options, $30 (extra) for the keyboard, $20 for the mouse.

iLife ’08

iLife ’08 consists of iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb, iDVD and GarageBand.

• iPhoto
  iPhoto has a new option, “Events”. This groups albums, so it minimizes the number of albums you’ll have to browse through. Options to hide photos and see only the ones you like, “smart” albums (e.g. 3 stars and above).
• .Mac
  .Mac will be integrated with iPhoto, producing .Mac Web Gallery. Also, the iPhone has added “Send to Web Gallery”. Basically the same idea as iPhoto ’08, integrating the iPhone with .Mac. It’s easy for others to be able to submit photo’s to your .Mac Web Gallery, and these submissions will be auto downloaded to your iPhone. Also increased the storage capacity from 1GB to 10GB, priced at $99.95 a year.
• iMovie
  iMovie ’08 is a complete rewrite. The idea is to make the creation of movies really, really fast. The idea of a video library with the same scrolling as the photo albums. Very easy editing and building of movies. Plus, it’s simple to make a version for iTunes, put it on your iPod, iPhone or Apple TV. Options to encode your movies in multiple resolutions.
• iWeb
  Integration with other web services: Google Maps, Google AdSense. Media index feature, where the photos of your site are easily indexed. Support for personal domains, and new themes.
• iDVD
  For those people who don’t want to send a huge file across the Internet, there’s the option to make DVDs. New themes have been added and pro encoding for higher quality.
• GarageBand
  Two versions included, GarageBand for regular multi-take recording, and Magic GarageBand for playing with a virtual band.

iWork ’08

iWork ’08 consists of Keynote, Pages, and the newcomer, Numbers.

• Keynote
  Keynote ’08 includes new text effects and new transitions. Also new is Instant Alpha: grab a photo, take out the background, keep the part that you want, and include it in your presentation. Smart Builds lets you automatically generate animations from pictures that you drag into it.
• Pages
  Pages ’08 adds a new mode: apart from the page layout mode, there’s now a new word processing mode. There is built-in change tracking, and it’s compatible with Word. Pages ’08 comes with 140 built-in templates.
• Numbers
  New in iWorks ’08 is Numbers, “a spreadsheet for the rest of us”. Done in the style of Pages, your spreadsheets are basically layed-out on the page. It includes intelligent tables, readable formulas, simple sorting and reformatting without affecting other parts of your spreadsheets. It can also import from or export to Excel.

Q&A session

There is a Q&A session with Steve Jobs, Tim Cook (COO) and Phil Schiller (EVP Product Marketing). During this Q&A the following nuggets are revealed:

• The new iMacs are noticeably thinner, not just the keyboard, but also the computer.
• The Mac Mini gets a refresher today as well.
• There is Apple TV news coming, just not today (today is a Mac day).

Thanks to Engadget for the live feed.

The reason the Apple store was down for maintenance? New MacBooks. Or, more accurately, the same MacBooks, but with a new processor.

Update: there’s a press release, describing the changes in more detail:

1. Faster Intel Core Duo processors (2.0GHz or 2.16GHz)
2. 1GB of memory
3. Larger hard drives (80, 120 or 160 GB)

Prices start at $1099 for the smallest model, and go up to $1499 for the (black) top-of-the-line model.

When I was browsing around the Apple site, and wanted to find out what the price for an 8GB iPod Nano was, I was presented with the “We’ll be back soon” page.

Apparently Apple is updating the store for a new product?

“We are busy updating the store for you and will be back shortly.”

Mid-may, too early for the iPhone, OS X doesn’t have an update due… I’m curious!