andrew carter

I was surprised by what Apple, Inc. showed today. I expected digital life stuff but I didn’t think the Mac would be an afterthought. Ironic since this is MacWorld after all. Maybe MacWorld is headed more towards consumer electronics with WWDC covering the Mac. Or maybe it was just because Leopard is not shipping for a few months. I expect there will be a spring event where more Mac related stuff happens.

iPhone

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the iPhone will live up to the hype. Just reading the text of the keynote, I could tell it was big. I got a BlackBerry Pearl about 2 months ago. I thought it was as good as it gets for smartphones. Until now.

The iPhone is indeed a shift in mobile phones. The presentation is what I’m impressed with. It looks to me that the phone is OS X Dashboard on a handheld. Not a bad way to do it. I’m impressed with features like simple three way calling or how you use the address book. Or a full featured web browser. This should change expectations of smartphones.

There are numerous initial flaws that I see before it ships. First, the price is out of this world. It does do numerous things and that it is probably in line with the price of two different devices (phone and iPod nano). However, I think most people don’t want to pay for both.

The second even bigger flaw is limiting to one distributor. Cingular sucks. I had them for five years. My wife had them for seven. They were miserable. I signed up for a two year deal for my blackberry (probably not wise) with T-Mobile. Part of the reason I did it was that I liked T-Mobile’s service and felt like I would want to stay with them. I’m interested in the iPhone but Cingular would prevent me from jumping on board. I hope that the exclusive terms are for 6 months or less. Longer than that will hurt the market for the phone.

Apple TV

This is the device I have wanted for 4 years. I’ve tried just about every possible combination to get media from my computers to the TV. The last attempt was a cheap Mac Mini. It worked ok but it was annoying to have the full blown OS. Front Row worked well but you had to get it into that mode. That’s all I wanted it to do. Now the Mac Mini is headed to my mom and my order for an AppleTV has been placed.

I would sum up the Apple TV as a networked iPod. This isn’t exactly how I thought it would be designed but I like it. The only thing that wasn’t clear was whether streaming is push or pull. Hopefully, it is like FrontRow’s pull model. I was disappointed to not see an HD upgrade for iTunes.

Airport Extreme

I’ll admit that upgrading my wireless network wasn’t at the top of the list but the feature set of the Airport Extreme is excellent. The only flaw I see with it is the lack of a gigabit switch for the LAN ports. It isn’t that big a deal since you are feeding in a much slower speed connection from cable or DSL. Adding your own gigabit switch for your LAN is cheap and easy. I’ll use one LAN port to feed the upload of my gigabit network and not use the other two.

The networked disk option was a welcome surprise. I have several USB/FireWire hard drives. I like the idea of using them via a NAS-type device more than dedicating any machines to them. My MacBook Pro is so good, I’ve thought about getting rid of my G5 all together. Surprisingly, this device helps make that even more likely. I want to share data around the house and this could be a better way to do it.

I guess Apple will sucker me into buying two new devices. Luckily, it isn’t the most expensive one this time. I wanted more on the Mac. From that perspective, it was disappointing. But as the name change of the company shows, Apple is more and more about consumer electronics.