Originally posted by: TonyPearson

This week was the 2008 MacWorld conference. I thought I would reflect on some of the storage related aspects of the products mentioned by Steve Jobsin his Keynote address.Many were updated version of products introduced last year's MacWorld. (In case you forgot whatthose were, here ismy post that covered [MacWorld 2007]).

(Disclaimer: IBM has a strong working relationship with Apple, and manufacturers technology used in someof Apple's products. I own both an Apple iPod as well as an Apple G4 Mac Mini. IBM supports its employees usingApple laptops instead of Windows-based ones for work, and IBM has developed software that runs on Apple's OS X.Apple is kind enough to extend its "employee discount prices" to IBM employees.)

[Apple OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system]

In the first 90 days of its release, Apple sold 5 million copies, representing 19 percent of Mac users. I am stillone of the 81 percent still using 10.4 Tiger, the previous level. My Mac Mini is based on G4 POWER processor, and upgrading is on my [Someday/Maybe] list. I am not taking sides in the [OS X vs. Windows vs. Linux religious debate]; I use all three.

The key storage-related feature of Leopard is their backup software Time Machine, and Steve Jobs announceda companion product called Time Capsule that would serve as the external backup disk wirelessly, over 802.1nWi-Fi. For many households, backup is either never done, or done rarely, so any help to simplify and relieve theburden is welcome.

Time Capsule comes in 500GB and 1TB SATA disk capacities, which Steve Jobs called "server-grade". What about a 750GB model? Looks like Apple followed EMC'sexample and went straight to 1TB instead. After EMC failed to deliver 750GB drives in 2007 that they [promised back in July], EMC blogger Chuck Hollis explains in his post[Enterprise Storage Strikes Back!]:

So there's something in the EMC goodie bag as well for you -- the availability of the new 1TB disk drives you've been hearing about. We skipped the 750GB drive and went right to the 1TB drive.

Apple iPhone and iPod Touch

In the first 200 days, Apple has sold 4 million phones, and has garnered nearly 20 percent of the smart phone market share. New features include a GPS-like location feature that uses [triangulation] with cell phone towers and Wi-Fi hotspotsto determine where you are located.

I covered last year's introduction of the iPhone in my post on [Convergence].All of the features he presented were software updates to the existing 8GB and 16GB models. No new modelswith larger storage were introduced.

I am a T-mobile customer, so am out of luck until either (a) Apple unlocks their phones from the AT&T network, or(b) Apple signs an agreement with T-mobile in the USA. I reviewed the various hacks to unlock iPhones last year, but was not interested in losing official warranty or future software support.

The iPod Touch is an interesting alternative. It is basically an iPhone with the cell-phone features disabled, whichgives you Wi-Fi over the Safari browser, music, videos, and so on. Steve Jobs mentioned enhanced software updates for this as well. The iPod Touch comes in the same 8GB and 16GB sizes as the iPhone.

AppleTV and iTunes

Steve Jobs indicated that they have sold over 4 billion songs over iTunes, 125 million TV shows, and 7 million movies.He announced that now iTunes would allow for movie rentals, with the option to see them within 30 days, but once you started watching a movie, you have 24 hours to finish. I found it interesting that he said rentals were to reduce space on your hard drive, versus outright purchase of movie content.

In a rare concession, Steve admitted that the original AppleTV misunderstood the marketplace. The original AppleTV allowed you to view pictures and listen to music through your television, but people wanted to view movies. Thesoftware upgrade would allow this, using the iTunes rental model above, as well as watch video podcasts and over 50 million videos posted on YouTube.

Some television-related stats from [z/Journal] were quite timely. The older non-digital TVs could be usedwith the AppleTV and gaming systems like Nintendo Wii.

• 33 percent of U.S. households do not know what to do with (their older) TVs after digital switch (Feb 2009)
• 69 percent of Americans think PCs are more entertaining than TV

Rather than try to fight peer-to-peer website piracy, Apple cleverly decided to compete head-to-head against it. This iswell summarized in Matt Mason's 6-minute video [The Pirate's Dilemma]. Eleven major movie studios are on board with Apple's movie rental plans, making thousands of movietitles available for this, with hundreds in High Definition (HD).

I personally have a Tivo, connected wirelessly to a regular non-HD television, as well as my PC, Mac and internet hub, and this allows me to view my photos, listen to my iTunes collection of music and internet radio stations from [Live365], as well as rent movies and TV shows from Amazon Unbox, with prices ranging from free to four dollars.

MacBook Air

The theme of this week was "Something is in the Air", an obvious reference to this product, billed as the world's thinnest laptop.John Windsor on his YouBlog writes[Making it Memorable] aboutthe use of a standard office envelope to demonstrate how thin this new MacBook Air laptop is. It is 0.16 inchesat one end, and 0.76 inches as the other end. Unlike other "ultra-thin" laptops, this has a full-size back-lit keyboardand full-size 13.3 inch widescreen. The touchpad supports multi-touch gestures similar to the iPhone and iPod Touch.Intel managed to shrink down their Core 2 Duo processor chip by 60 percent to fit inside this machine. Thebattery is reported to last five hours.

This laptop was designed for wireless access, with 802.1n and BlueTooth enabled. No RJ-45 connection for traditionalLAN ethernet connection, but I guess you can use a USB-to-RJ45 converter.

Storage-wise, you can choose between the 1.8-inch 80GB HDD or a pricey-but-faster 64GB Flash Solid-State Disk (SSD).In a move similar to [getting rid of the 3.5-inch floppy disk in 1998's iMac G3], the MacBook Air got rid of the CD/DVDdrive. While they offer a USB-attachable SuperDrive as an optional peripheral, Steve Jobs gave alternative methods:

Before	After
Watching movies on DVD	Rent or Buy from iTunes instead
Burning music CDs for your car stereo	Attach your iPod to your car stereo
Taking backups to CD or DVD	Use Time Machine and Time Capsule instead
Installing Software from CD	Wirelessly connect to a "Remote Optical Disc" on a Mac or PC, running special Apple-provided software that allows you to make this connection

Here's a list to the 90-minute[keynote address video]. If you arenot a fan of recycling, saving the environment, free speech or democracy, you can safely skip the last 15 minutes when musical artist Randy Newman performs.For alternative viewpoints on the keynote, see posts from [John Gruber] and [Tara MacKay].

technorati tags: Apple, MacWorld, IBM, OS X, Leopard, Tiger, iPod, Mac Mini, G4, Time Machine, Time Capsule, 500GB, 1TB, SATA, EMC, Chuck Hollis, 750GB, 802.1n, Wi-Fi, iPhone, iPod Touch, T-mobile, unlock, AppleTV, iTunes, movie rentals, Tivo, Amazon, Unbox, Live365, John Windsor, YouBlog, MacBook Air, Flash, SSD, BlueTooth, Remote Disc, CD/DVD drive, iMac, G3, John Gruber, Randy Newman, Tara MacKay, recycling, environment, free speech, democracy, HD, piracy, Matt Mason