Open Monologue
Just because I'm making it up as I go along doesn't mean I don't know what I'm doing

My greatest disappointment about MacWorld this year was the lack of an announcement about the Beatles music on iTunes Music Store. I could just delete that post from the blog, but I leave it there as a reminder of my lack of prescience. If you haven’t yet seen the Steve Jobs keynote from MacWorld 2008, you can watch the whole thing or just this highly condensed version. I know that I’m in a minority, but after a couple of days for the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field to wear off, the MacBook Air really isn’t looking that impressive. Yes, it is pretty. Yes, it is thin. But other than being thin, this really isn’t that terrific of a deal. Here’s the breakdown on what you get in the baseline MacBook Air (the hard drive version – the flash drive version is even less of a deal):

• 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
• 2 GB RAM
• 80 GB Hard Drive
• No built in optical drive. I don’t use it for installs very often, but I rip a lot CDs
• Price: $1799 (Cdn)

Let us compare this to a slightly pimped up black MacBook (and I know that the white one is a better deal, but it’s just not black):

• 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
• 1 GB of RAM, but let’s pimp it up to 2 GB 
• 160 GB Hard Drive, but let’s go up to 250 GB
• Optical drive! Hooray!
• Price: $1799

So for the same money I can get a better processor, bigger hard drive and an optical drive, but not as much thin. Hmmm …. On the other hand, I am really excited about s Time Capsule, which is essentially an airport extreme base station with an included hard drive. Why? Wireless backups using Time Machine. I spend most of my time working from the kitchen table and I’ve been backing up by dragging myself down to the basement and plugging in the external drive while I work. The inconvenience means that I am not constantly backing up (luckily the one time I needed it I had backed up the previous night). Time Capsule is the perfect solution and the Apple markup seems reasonable. If I haven’t picked one up by November, it will be going on my wish list.But where was the big announcement that everyone was hoping to hear? What happened to the mythical Mac tablet? It just so happens I picked one up in Edmonton last Friday.  
Yeah, I got yer Mac tablet right here, mister, and it’s name is iPod touch. Honestly, it has a web browser, it shows YouTube videos and with the recent software upgrade (which I bought and installed within a minute of hearing about it), I also have a Mail client, Weather, a note pad and widgets (kind of like web clippings in Safari 3 on Leopard). I can also move the order of the icons around. Email and browsing the web covers about 90% of what I do online, and many sites are adding the CSS necessary to make their sites work in a small form window. The big drawback to it is being able to edit Google Docs – I can view them, but not edit. Blogging also seems to be a bit of a problem – the browser really does not like iframes. Other than that, it’s good. It can even do google chat (thanks to Beejive) and twitter. Google Reader is very nicely designed for the mobile browser so I’ve found I can easily sit around the house going through my Reader deciding if I want to star (for later reading) or share. Don’t sit around waiting for the Mac Table, folks, it’s already here.