Macworld 2008 Steve Jobs' Keynote - The Results

Well my hope for a 3G iPhone has come to an end... Steve Jobs was giving a keynote presentation earlier today to announce some pretty important products, one of which, I really love. If you haven't seen the keynote in person (like me), you can stream it from the Apple website. Anyway, the first thing I saw was the introduction of the Time Capsule. It was a basically an AirPort Extreme router plus a huge hard drive that could either be 500GB or even 1TB. It seems to be great for laptops, like mine. However, it seems to work best with Macs, which I don't have.

The second thing I remember is the updates to the iPhone and iPod touch. These are major updates. Let's focus on the iPhone first. The iPhone first gets updates to its Google Maps client, and even includes a feature that lets you find your location on the map. The interesting thing is, is that the iPhone doesn't even use GPS. It finds your location by using cellular towers as well as wireless routers that can some how, when put together, they can pinpoint your approximate location on the Earth. Also, you can now have your bookmarks that you have in Safari show up on your home screen. During his presentation, Steve Jobs, demonstrated this feature by putting bookmarks to Google and the New York Times on the home screen. Steve Jobs also demonstrated the ability to move your icons around your home screen. You can also have up to 9 pages of icons on your home screen. These features have been available through third-party hacks, but now that the firmware now officially supports it, well, I think that it's awesome. The iPod touch had gotten a nice new software upgrade, if you cough up the $20US to get it. The iPod touch now includes applications that make the iPod touch a more compelling reason to get that compared to an iPhone. It comes for free with every new iPod, but costs $20US for all existing iPods. The audience was very silent, almost groaning, when they heard about this $20 early adopters fee. The good news is that now you can use these applications without jailbreaking your iPod. Also, the new features that come on the iPhone will be on the iPod touch.

On to AppleTV. It has been updated to handle iTunes store downloads and movie rentals. It can view photos on your .Mac or flickr account. It has signifcantly improved the user interface. You can even rent some movies in HD. On top of that, the price has been lowered to $229 US. Also, if you own an AppleTV, you can now upgrade the system software for free. So you will have all of these things for a very good price or for free, if you already own an AppleTV.

They also announced something amazing. It is called the Macbook Air. You have probably heard of it. It can fit into one of those inter-office envelopes and only looks like a small stack of paper. It does seem pretty pricey at $1799 US, but it is hard to put a price on beauty. It supports 802.11n and Bluetooth. It's also missing an optical drive, but you can purchase an add-on superdrive for $99 US. Or, if you already own another computer, wether its PC or Mac, you can install some software to make it shareable with the Macbook Air. That's pretty awesome. I wish I could get one... Maybe you can get it. Let's see how people like it as it ships.