Jobs delivers hot Air and more
Well, the reaction will be rolling in for the rest of the day, but it sounds like the Mac faithful are coming away from Steve Jobs’ keynote generally satisfied with a four-course meal of new goods and services. I’ll let the Merc’s Troy Wolverton and Dean Takahashi take care of the details and just hit the high points.
* Taking the drool-worthy honors was the new MacBook Air, a notebook so thin you have to wear gloves to avoid cutting yourself. Remember when Jobs introduced the iPod Nano by holding it edgewise next to a pencil? Today he again turned to the office supply cabinet for an effective image, sliding the Air out of an interoffice mail envelope. The little lovely is a scant 3 pounds; its wedge shape is three-quarters of an inch at the thickest and just 0.16 inch on the edge you shave with. One caveat, depending on your needs: It’s not intended for future upgrading, and the battery is not user-replaceable.
* Apple’s taking another stab at establishing a digital foothold in your living room with a revamped Apple TV and an impressively broad deal bringing movie rentals to iTunes. The box will now let you download rented movies directly through the device, without requiring a computer in the middle, and will display both standard definition and high definition content. The rental service opens up with all the major studios on board, which is no small feat. “Staggering,” says analyst Tim Bajarin. “What Steve did today is show he is the master broker.”
* The iPod Touch gets a new set of applications — Mail, Maps, Stocks, Notes, and Weather — making it pretty much the equivalent of an iPhone without the phone. And you can even impress people from a distance by pretending to talk into it. The iPhone gets a refresh itself.
* The Time Machine backup-and-restore utility in Mac OS X Leopard now has some hardware to play with — a wireless storage device called Time Capsule. Which is nice.
* Oh, and one more thing — we learned that we cannot always depend on Steve Jobs having one more thing. The assembled masses trickled out to the dulcet tones of Randy Newman.
