Thursday, August 07, 2008
Transition to MacBook Air
The MacBook Air is quite a beautiful work of Apple engineering. You really cannot appreciate its Air moniker until you hold one in your hand. Yes, only one hand is enough to easily carry and move this ultrathin laptop.But as many reviews have indicated, the thinness comes at a price: No optical drive (external device available), and only one USB port, one audio-out, and a micro-DVI port. Even the MagSafe power adapter is modified to connect at a 90-degree angle. That's right, no Ethernet (adapter available) and no FireWire.
The lack of optical drive spurn another Apple innovation: Remote Disc. It allows the Air to share the optical drive of another Windows or Mac. Sounds pretty cool, but it's kind of a pain in the rear. Fair enough, I don't really use the DVD drive in normal use, but now that I'm trying to migrate from an old MacBook to the Air and the procedure is to insert the Installation Disc then run Disk Utility, it got kind of annoying. Remote Disc has to work over Wi-Fi -- not the most effective method for installing or restoring gigabytes of data.
I ended up using my iPhone to help with the transition. I made sure iTunes works as usual, hooked it up to the Air, then hit sync. This was by far the most painless method...
Labels: iPhone, iTunes, MacBook Air, remote disc
posted by Eugene at 8:23 PM
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Friday, January 18, 2008
MWSF Notes
So my Macworld 08 trip is officially over now. I stood in line since 3:00 am, waited for 6 hours, and finally was shuffled into the reality distortion field of Steve Jobs' keynote. I didn't bother doing any live blogging, as most people out there were probably following the keynote coverage from Engadget, Gizmodo, or any other number of blogs.And by now, you know the Jobs announced a new Time Capsule, AppleTV, updates to iPhone, and the new MacBook Air. A good amount of people were expecting even more, and were kind of disappointed about the announcements. Considering the growing popularity of Apple, and huge amount of hype and media coverage, I would say Steve jobs has done an excellent job with the keynote.
I think Time Capsule, although not very glamorous, is a great device. Combined with Time Machine, this little device basically fulfills most if not all the needs of a small business and definitely the average user. It covers networking, file and printer sharing, and backups. I believe this is basically the Mini-XServe. Perhaps the only thing missing is VPN access, however the Back2MyMac service provided by a .Mac account does address this somewhat.
As expected, and possible purposely leaked, iTunes movie rentals was released. Apple TV was also upgraded to offer more of what users want to do on their monster HDTVs. These things were expected and needed. The surprise was that Jobs was able to sign up ALL the major studios. Finally, the big studios are 'getting it'. There's no point in fighting advances in technology, instead of spending millions and millions of dollars fighting the inevitable and suing THEIR customers they should have been embracing the new technologies.
iPhone got it's slew of updates. Most significant I think was geo location without GPS. The technology has been around for a while, so it wasn't too exciting of an announcement. Plus, Google announced the technology for Google Maps Mobile late last year already. Other continued software updates to iPhone, while not very exciting, is confirms Apple's commitment to continue improving the iPhone over the years. It is actually quite encouraging for new users to know that their $399 is well spent, and their phone won't be worthless right away.
And then there's the MacBook Air. This is pretty much everything I wanted. Super light weight laptop, with good performance and a long battery life. It is pricey, but not that out of line with other ultra portables. Nowadays most people just need to be online and run a few office applications. I think it will be a big seller, and I'm sure the technology will soon migrate to the rest of the MacBook line.
Overall, it was a good start for Apple this year.
Labels: Apple TV, iPhone, MacBook Air, MWSF
posted by Edward at 4:23 PM
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