wigblog

The keynote at Macworld 2007 took place today and we had a little “breakfast party” at work to celebrate and watch the live MacRumors feed. Wanted to capture some of my thoughts about it here…

First… bring back the live webcast!!! I mean really… the technology is there (and owned by Apple), they are already partners with Akamai and/or Google who can provide geographic distribution of stream reflectors. This should be a no brainer. It’s better than nothing having a text feed of the goings on in the room (thank you MacRumors!), but the video was always just way cooler and more of a “being there” type experience. I had the privilege of attending the keynote in 2003 and it was such a blast. I hear now that VIPs alone take up more than 50% of the room so attendees kinda get screwed (maybe they have other rooms with a simulcast video feed for attendees, I don’t know). But for those of us who are stuck at work and can’t make it to the show, yet are still avid Apple supporters, we should be able to feel included.

While I’m on this negative toned rant…. let me start with what I am disappointed with about the keynote:

• No update on Leopard - This might be covered by sessions at the show, or released on the website at some point, but come on! Nothing about leopard? We’re getting close to release here (relatively speaking) and I would think there would be some news. What about those “top secret” features we were told about? I mean wouldn’t now be a good time to start talking and getting excited about those since Vista has been long RTM, has been released to business, and will be available to the general public starting January 30th? Ahhh…. maybe that’s the plan. Steal some of the thunder from Vista’s public release by announcing all the unknown features about Leopard closer to that date! Alright… if that happens, I suppose I’ll say it was a good move. I was still hoping for something at the keynote…. even a “look forward to more information about Leopard later this month” would have sufficed.
• No tower update - Hello quad core CPUs? They’ve been out for almost 2 months now and Intel released some new ones at CES this week. Why haven’t these found their way into the MacPro towers yet? This should have been a no brainer and could easily have fit into the time Steve had.

As for what was announced:

• AppleTV - I was really excited about this up to the keynote, but have cooled a bit on it now for a few reasons. Some new options came out this week at CES… something from Netgear in particular I think.
  • Output: the unit has both HDMI and component output which is great, but my TV only has a single component input. Granted, I haven’t spent any money on a TV since before I was married so this is really my problem. But in order to resolve it, I’m really going to have to buy a TV and a receiver with video routing so I can have both my Tivo/DVD player and the AppleTV hooked up and can switch between them easily. This means I’m likely to have to spend at least $2500 or so for that new Vizio 42″ 1080p set and a proper receiver before I’m really happy with the setup.
  • Rez - only 720p? Come on. I’d even buy it at $399 if it supported 1080p.
  • Library limitations - “Up to 50 hours” of video content? Huh? I should be able to navigate my entire library and choose anything in it from the device. And only 9,000 songs? My library is currently over 25K songs and I should be able to grab any of them. Now I think I know why these limitations are in place. You sync a subset of your library to the device and can then browse watch that content that’s been synced over. Lame…. I should be able to grab anything on any available storage on the network. Update: maybe I can… I guess it supports wireless video streaming of some type.
  • Video codec support - H.264 & MP4 seems pretty limited. What about Divx, Xvid, etc.? I’ve already encoded some movies as widescreen MP4 and now I guess it won’t play ‘em. Not that I can’t re-encode them as widescreen H.264… that just takes longer.
• iPhone - Freakin’ awesome. A little expensive (have to figure out how to talk Jess into letting me get it), but in general, I’m in love with it. I currently have a Treo 650 on Cingular, so hopefully I’ll be able to switch with little pain. I just don’t know how integration with my existing contract will work.

That’s it for now I think…