Its cold.

So I moved about 3 hours farther south then I was before, and also got off the largest freshwater lake in the world.  But its still cold as hell.  Check out the weather.com reading from tonight.

General Spyder

I just wanted to give a shout out and congratulations to Spyder 8 for making level 50 and General over the weekend.  It’s quite the accomplishment for even a seasoned veteran.

-DPollitt

Macbook Air

After counting down the days, hours, and minutes till Macworld 2008 it finally came with and gave little excitement to all.  Seriously though, who wasn’t hoping for a new all aluminum body Macbook for around $999?  Steve delivered the all new Macbook Air line, starting around $1,800 instead.  A disappointment for most, but I saw quite a few things that I think will make it an important move for Apple.

First of all, they somehow worked with Intel on an exclusive new processor design, compressing a Core 2 processor down to 60% of its original size.  It ends up being about the size of a Nickel, with a 1.6Ghz clock.  Pretty amazing new step for the entire portable industry, giving lower temps and power consumption to boot.  The second big step is to see a solid state drive as an option on the Macbook Air.  Sure, everyone is complaining about the $1,000 price tag, but this is actually a reasonable price in today’s market for SSD.  What is more important is that a company has brought a machine to production with great fanfare, and it included an option for a SSD.  Hopefully we will start to see these drives as an option sooner rather then later on more machines.
Another feature seen in the Macbook Air is the multi-touch trackpad.  It shares some similarities to the iTouch or iPhone capabilities for manipulating images and screens, but as far as I can tell does not have all the same options.  The Macbook line already has a few nice features that you won’t normally see on a standard PC touchpad, such as the ability to use two fingers to scroll pages vertically.

Some other more general features that I would like to see make their way into other models, include the fact that the Macbook Air features an Aluminum case, something lacking in the standard Macbook models.  The Macbook Air weighs in at an amazingly light 3lbs, and includes a 13.3 inch screen.  If Apple was able to get a 3lb computer to house a 13 inch screen, they have worked a small miracle in my book.

So my overall opinion is that at the current price, it is out of almost every persons budget.  If its not out of your budget you’ll probably be a little lacking without any optical drive included, firewire, user replaceable battery, or more then 1 USB port.  But, I do appreciate the innovation that went into this product, and am looking forward to seeing these technologies trickle down into other Apple products.

-DPollitt

Update

So It’s been a bit over a month since I updated any content here.  I’m sure all my loyal readers are on the edge of their seats waiting for new content to be posted, so I will deliver.

-DPollitt