New Apple Toys

I still have to watch the MacWorld keynote ("Due to exceptional demand your request could not be completed at this time. Please try again at a later time". I'm sorry, I'd like to try again at an earlier time.) but here are some thoughts on the new Apple products.

iPhone

The big one is the new iPhone. It's freakin' amazing. I'm really impressed with the new interface and that they had the balls to not have a click wheel. It looks like a great phone, the interface for voicemail alone is worth it. The music interface seems closer to iTunes (with cover scroll) than it does to an iPod. The browser looks great, particularly with maps and widgets.

So the other neat thing about the phone is that runs some version of OSX, and the subtle thing is that it's 320x480 screen is at 160dpi when every mac is at 100dpi. That probably means the resolution independence of Leopard is in use here. So I'm also guessing that Leopard will make more use of transparency in its interface as is done here.

Here's a comparison chart. There are good points that this phone is locked to a particular vender, and can it be unlocked. EDGE is kinda current data technology but there are 3G phones and by June I'd expect many more. I see a calendar widget in the display but I don't know about a real calendar application and I wonder if 3rd party apps can run on it (I'd guess that widgets made in Dashcode will).

This is just amazing, but also expensive and I don't even know anyone that uses Cingular. $599 for the device plus monthly fees and who knows what the EDGE service will cost. I could probably get away with a 450 minute phone plan for $40/month but would need an unlimited data plan for those google maps and stuff. That will be about $45/month (that's what their Data Connect Plan is but they have unlimited smartphone for $20 and unlimited laptop for $60 or $80). So I'm guessin about $90/month in service fees. Well it's not available till June and my current Verizon contract runs till january '08, so perhaps that's enough time to wait for the bugs to be worked out.

AppleTV

The new AppleTV lets you stream iTunes video to your big TV. This makes sense if you buy videos from iTunes but I haven't really done that with the shiny new HDTiVo I have. But the way to think of this device is as an iPod connected to your TV and stereo. It's got a 40GB drive and syncs with ITunes like your iPod does. You can stream from up to 5 devices, sounds like iTunes doesn't it? But a 40GB drive?!? iPods come in 30 and 80GB! Great that I could use this as a music server but I have over 30GB of music in iTunes and videos take up a lot of room, let alone my iPhoto library. Apple says 50 hours of movies but that's at 480p (regular DVD) not HD. And the HD is only 720p, that's fine for what I have now, but my next TV will do 1080i native and most fanboys today want 1080p.

And I think it only works with iTunes videos, like the Airport Express does. Why can't I stream any audio to my Airport Express? There's a 3rd party app to do this but Apple doesn't give you the ability. Seems to be the same with the AppleTV. Why can't I stream a YouTube video to it, or some other downloaded video file?

The AppleTV might make sense for a lot of people, but not for me. There's certainly room for the second release to improve it, a bigger hard disk and at least 1080i support. And really, DVR support would be nice. Now if only I could copy video from my HDTiVo to my Mac.

Airport Extreme

I have a Linksys wireless router because the Apple AirPort Extreme basestation was $200, (originally I had a D-Link which was only $20). I still want to connect my (now unused) PC to network via a wire, there should be one machine wired in case you have wireless problems.

Apple also announced a new Airport Extreme and it's still overpriced ($179) and still doesn't look like something I'd want. Ok, so it's faster but the 802.11n standard isn't done yet, so it's not clear this would be compatible with stuff that supports the final standard. It won't speed up my surfing because the bottleneck is the broadband (3MBit) not the wifi (now 54Mbit). The faster speed would be used between devices at home.

What devices would those be? Well a laptop, but I'd have to add a compatible (remember the standard isn't final) network card, since my two year old Powerbook doesn't do 11n. Though Apple was sneaky and several Macs support 11n today with a software enabler. There's also the new AppleTV to connect but as I said, I'm not interested in that either.

Then there are devices you could connect to the basestation with a wire. You can connect a printer, but I do that with my AirPort Express now, and that also lets me connect my stereo so I can stream iTunes to it, this doesn't. I could connect my PC and make it available, but the ethernet ports are only 100Mbit, not Gigabit like all the Macs. So the ~250Mbit I get from the 802.11n (slower if I have one 802.11g device connected, like oh my AirPort Express or say an iPhone) is at most going to be 100Mbit to my PC. This does let me connect a hard drive and make it available on the wifi which would completely rock for live wireless Time Machine backups, but there's only one USB 2.0 port so it's either a printer or a hardrive, seems a little weak for $179 box.

Conclusions

So new things announced, but nothing for me to spend money on, at least for a while. Still the new iPhone is an amazing device, everyone else will be playing catch up for a while.