Jim Barraud

iPhone 3G
Very nice. I really dig the white variant. 3G speeds are obviously a good thing. The suits will love the Enterprise Exchange integration and will probably prove to be the killer app of this iPhone. The addition of GPS is huge. This will fuel a slew of awesome location based services. The price drop is very welcome, but still won’t get me to by one since it’s still chained to AT&T.

iPhone 2.0 Software
This is what I was really waiting for since I’m an iPod Touch owner. I was expecting more in the way of new features, but I’m sure the addition of the SDK and App Store will more than make up for it. I’ll be plunking down my $9.95 nominal payment come early July. Oh, and three words. SUPER MONKEY BALL.

MobileMe
.Mac rebranded. The angle this time is “Exchange for everyone”. Which is odd because if by “everyone” they mean people not in an office environment who don’t use exchange, that may be an issue. Because office workers are the only ones who would really know what “Exchange” is. Sure, there’s small business and non-microsoft shops. But they more than likely have their own solutions (Google Apps?). Essentially MobileMe is a glorified way to sync your Address Book, Email & Calendar with your PC, Mac, and iTouch device. I’d call this a minor improvement over the current .Mac and that it falls short of it’s potential.

I have to admit this years Macworld keynote was pretty lackluster. There wasn’t that sense of “Apple’s done it again!”. It was more “Oh, that’s nice”. Anyway, here’s may take on what was announced.

Apple TV Take 2
The new Apple TV looks pretty sweet. With the ability to download content directly to it, sync it with my mac and rent feature films this could easily replace countless stacks of DVD’s in my house as well as move out some media equipment. That is if it would work on my TV. I’m not in the High Def age yet so that leaves me out in the cold. But when the time comes to buy that new TV, an Apple TV will also be in the shopping cart. Out of all the announcements Apple made today, I believe this to be the most significant and exciting.

Time Capsule
This is a fabulous idea and I totally want one. But oh wait, I purchased an Airport Extreme that has the ability to hook up and share a USB hard drive. And before Apple released Leopard, the ability to sync time machine with this connected hard drive was a touted feature. Then when Leopard was released to the wild, the feature was dropped. Awesome, 50% of the reason I purchased the Airport Extreme was dropped. Thanks Apple. The optimistic side of me is hoping that a 10.5.2 update will resurrect this feature and that it wasn’t dropped in order to make selling this product more viable.

iPhone & iPod Touch updates
I don’t have either of these so I really don’t have much of an opinion. But I think charging iPod Touch owners $20 for a software update that provides additional apps that already exist on the iPhone while providing a software update that offers significant new features to iPhone users for free isn’t right. And the fact that all new iPod Touch owners get this update for free doubles that. If I was an iPod Touch owner I’d be pretty pissed.

Macbook Air
It’s a gorgeous machine. Beautifully designed and I love the simplicity of it. But it’s not a sub-notebook. It’s a notebook, just a lot thinner with less features. I think having it as thin as it is with the footprint of the 12” Powerbook would have made this a killer product.

10.5.2 Update
It wasn’t announced or released and it’s the only thing I really wanted. There are a slew of stupid annoying bugs in Leopard and I’m praying it will fix most of them. The most significant of which would be fixing iCal.

My submission for this fascinating Flickr group.