I visited Macworld today. My immediate impression was that It was more crowded and larger than last year. Notably there were many companies selling storage solutions: clearly back up and media storage is now becoming mainstream in the Mac world.


This is a plastic missile launcher powered and controlled by USB. I was lucky enough to get the missile streaking out of the frame while the shutter was open.


Ever wanted to type with one hand? The FrogPad lets you do that. In the foreground are two pads, one for left-handed people and one for right-handed people. The common letters are on the keys and to get the less common letters you chord with another key. There is also a symbol and a shift lock key. It takes a little getting used to, but I was able to type a simple message without too much trouble.

These are relaxation pods. I didn't ask what went on inside them.


One use for an old iMac case: turn it into a trash can.


I got my hands on a MacBook Air after waiting in line for a while. It's very thin, very light, and it's a Mac. There's not much else to say about it. Performance seemed fine for the small amount of playing that I did with it. The case got warm, but definitely not hot. Since it is all aluminum and curved, it's much stiffer than you would think it would be. MacBook Pros look like huge ugly bricks next to this thing.

Apple was showing off very little this year. The only Macs apart from the MacBook Airs were Mac Pros with two big screens each. These were being used to show off some pro apps and also for general OS X demonstration to any interested parties. No sign of Aperture. No iMacs. No minis. There was a whole wall of Apple TVs and plenty of iPods and iPhones on display.


Eye-Fi was there with their orange wireless SD card. You plug it into your camera and it transmits your JPEG images via regular wifi to your computer. Their software then stores it or automatically uploads it to a photo sharing site.


I also saw people creating hideous creatures with Spore. The gaming area was small this year.


Need a cover for your laptop? I didn't think so.

Tags: Macworld, Fun, Apple TV, Apple, Dinosaurs, Interesting Stuff, iPhone, iPod

The MacBook Air is a dramatic departure for Apple: it's a narrowly-targeted hardware product. The geeks on the forums hate it because their rumor-fuelled dreams have been dashed and they will have to keep lugging their 12" PowerBooks around for a few more years. But then the geeks are not the target market for this product and they don't seem to understand that large, profitable markets for highly cost-controlled products exist outside of their domain.

Apple has plenty of narrowly-targeted software products (Final Cut Pro for instance) and these don't attract the same howls of derision. But then those products target markets by adding specialized features and charging appropriately. Taking features away, as Apple did with iMovie in iLife08, is bound to cause geek grief because the expectation exists that the monotonic march toward "better" is always along the "more" axis. Not so. So who will be buying the world's thinnest laptop?

A simple answer: anyone who values it highly enough.

That will include executives and sales people who travel, present, and are seen with their laptop in important business situations. They value low weight and looks above everything else. They already have a Mac at home, including maybe a MacBook of some sort, but they will still buy a MacBook Air because it gives them the things they cannot get otherwise. This is the Miata of the laptop world: a second or third purchase after the most critical needs have been fulfilled, only for those who have the juice to make what they want real.

MacBook Air is clearly a companion computer. Apple has stripped everything from it that is not necessary in order to save weight and space. What is left is an interesting set: wireless Ethernet, audio out, video out, and USB 2.0. Those cover what must be the four most numerous connections on the planet right now. And once you pair it with a companion Mac, you have everything you need for anything.

The breathtaking omission for many is that the battery is built-in. But why are batteries removable in the first place? Removable batteries represent a huge additional cost in every aspect of Apple's business: more design, more material, more safety concerns, more stock, more line items, more connectors, more testing; the list goes on and on. The overall product design gains enormously by building the battery in, as Apple has shown with the iPod and, more recently, the iPhone.

To me, the inclusion of a back-lit full-size keyboard cements the target market as that of highly mobile, highly responsible, highly visible individuals whose time and presence carries a high price. We'll be seeing lots of these in the real world, many of them in dim lighting and accompanied by the whirr of a projector fan.

Tags: MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Apple, Macworld, Drama, Lust

The big surprise at Macworld last year was that the keynote was pretty much about about one product: the iPhone. This year there seem to be many things that are already known: a slim laptop, an update to the iPhone, a new Apple TV and movie rentals. So none of these is probably the big thing. And the banners saying "There's something in the air" have everyone talking about wireless technologies.

[Update: Less then 100% wrong this year. Home storage yes, but not attached. In fact very unattached: Time Capsule. Apple is moving the world slowly to computer appliances. We did get the rambling CEO again]

Last year my predictions were 100% wrong. Throwing caution to the wind, I present my probably all wrong predictions for Macworld 2008:

A Home Storage System
I keep putting this one up, and one day I will be right. Nobody does home storage right, particularly for Mac users, so there is a big market opportunity there. I think it will not be a networked box (NAS), but instead will be locally attached for performance. If you want to make the storage available on the network, plug it into an Airport or a Mac. Software does the bridging.

Wireless Data Service In Every Laptop
WiMax is a little new to the market, so if Apple has built it into anything, they have been doing an awful lot of work with chip vendors and software in secret. It's quite possible that Apple is putting WiMax into everything portable, but more likely is the addition of 3G or EDGE into the laptops.

No Shows
This is not the venue for for a new release of Aperture. PMA is much more likely. There will also be no new iLife of iWork: we already got those last year. The no-show I am hoping for is the "other CEO" who comes in at about minute 35 and rambles with notes until the audience winces. I really think that Steve puts these in so we can deal with the calls of nature.

A New Mac
I think a new desktop Mac is quite likely. Something that fits between the high-end of the Mac Pro and the low end of the iMac. It would be bigger than a mini, with at least two hard drive bays and at least one open slot for a PCI card. This would keep many people happy who need some expansion and flexibility but don't have the wallet for a full-blown Mac Pro. What makes it possible now is the low-power Intel chips and the subsequent option to package the electronics compactly.

Multi-User Mac Software
This is a long shot, but I think it will come one day. The Macs are already multi-user, but not with with multiple simultaneous screens. This software will allow a number of people to plug mice, keyboards, and screens into one mac and all use that one machine as though it were their own machine. That makes things much cheaper for schools and other high-density applications.

A Recording Device
Except for building it into Macs, Apple has avoided making audio and video recording equipment of any kind. Even the iPhone and iPod can't record video or sound. So there is a product gap for some sort of device that does one or both. You sync it with your Mac or PC just like an iPod and iTunes tracks it in its library. What Apple can better the market with are ease of use, recording quality, and capacity. With iTunes, Garageband, iMovie, YouTube, all the infrastructure is in place for personal event recording, editing, and publishing. We just need the gadget.

Tags: Apple, Macworld, Wild Guesses, Server, Fun, MacPro, Wireless, iPhone, iMac, iMovie

I visited Macworld 2007 today. It was very busy all day. I took these pictures with my Canon S3 set to ISO 200 since the light was pretty low.

Many people sat to watch demonstrations of the features of Leopard, the iPhone, Apple TV, and others:

Here are some new Mail features:

Apple TV was on display:

Apple TV is much like Front Row but outputs to your TV instead of the computer screen. It can be synced like an iPod. So another way of thinking of it is as a high definition video iPod with wireless streaming added. The unit has a fat rubber base that does not slip and cannot scratch anything. It gets quite warm during use.

Aperture training was popular:

There were about thirty 24" iMacs set up for the attendees to play with and follow the demo. This is the same model that I use for Aperture. Lightroom was also popular.

The iPhone was displayed like the Hope diamond, with security and plexiglass:


Getting close up pictures was tricky, but possible:



It is smaller than you think it should be and very rounded:

The screen is extremely sharp and crisp. I could read the smallest text. At 160 pixels per inch it is about twice the linear resolution of a regular computer display.

Tags: Macworld, Photography, Canon, S3, Apple TV, iPhone, Aperture, Apple

For no particular reason, I have five packets of poppy seeds to give away at Macworld when I visit on Thursday. I'll be giving one packet to each of the first five people (or groups of people) who tell me that they read my blog.

The challenge -- and this is what makes it an even field -- is that none of you know what I look like.

[Update: I escaped without detection]

Tags: Macworld, Poppy Seeds, Crazy Ideas

I have two [Update: three] predictions for Macworld 2007: one hardware and one software [and one squishyware] . I haven't seen anything close to these, so I'm either uniquely right or just as wrong as everyone else. [Post-keynote update: I scored zero out of three. However I hope I may simply be premature rather than plain wrong. There are plenty more announcements still to come before June since the Keynote concentrated on only two products, and the Beatles' music was conspicuous. You can also see how I did on the iPhone here]

Storage That Works
The hardware surprise is that Apple will show a home storage and streaming appliance. Specifically it will:

• House up to six drives
• Take the exact same drive modules as the MacPro
• Have dual Gigabit Ethernet with Jumbo packet support and port trunking
• Have eSATA at 3Gbps, Firewire at 800 Mbps, and 802.11n wireless
• Support RAID and allow for incremental upgrades without downtime
• Have a built-in router
• Do back ups automatically in the background

Why? And who would want one?

The target market is the sub-SAN, sub-XServe content creation crowd, plus home power users. With six drives, the amount of storage is enormous and several RAID configurations are possible. It would be great with Aperture, Final Cut, or as a home streaming server for movies and music. The dual trunked Ethernet will allow direct connection to MacPros at maximum speed. With suitable switches it will work through a network as well. 802.11n wireless will let it stream to iTV with ease.

You can put it underneath the iTV and connect it with Ethernet, using the wireless to communicate with the rest of the world, or put it in a closet and use it wirelessly to the iTV, or put it next to a Mac and run it as a local storage box through Ethernet or eSATA or Firewire 800 and use it wirelessly at the same time. The built-in router allows you to wall off parts of the functionality among the network connections while still passing specific traffic.

Software That Sees
On the software side, the surprise will be Quicktime. Apple will show real-time facial recognition and object tracking and Steve Jobs will have even more fun showing it off than he did Photo Booth. It will let software treat scenes intelligently, allow iChat to know how many people are present, make games possible that use gestures, etc. You will have to wait for Leopard to get it though.

[Update: Final thoughts. I reckon that Paul McCartney and the remains of the Beatles will be there and will be providing some musical diversions]

What do you think? Any chance I am right?

Tags: Macworld, Apple, Server, Wild Guesses

Les Posen gives a personal account of the Macworld keynote given by Steve Jobs in 2003. After the anti-climax of 2002, the 2003 keynote was preceded with a teaser marketing campaign and showed us iLife, Safari, the 17" Powerbook, and more. You can see it on YouTube.

Tags: Macworld, Keynote