Apple’s new stuff today includes a subnotebook called the MacBook Air which is thin enought to fit in a manilla envelope and weighs 3 pounds. Cool stuff includes a multi-touch mousepad and an optional solid-state hard drive. Bad stuff includes only 1 USB port, no firewire, and no optical drive. Also released Time Capsule, which is just the Airport Extreme 802.11n wireless base with a 500GB or 1TB hard drive. And there’s a new AppleTV with a new UI and the iTunes store now has movie rentals including rentals in HD. I wonder how long those will take to download?
Biggest dumbass release is a software upgrade for the iPod touch which costs $20. No joke. I can’t believe they’d actually do that. It’ll piss way too many people off. Here’s the list of features. The iPhone got the same add-ons plus some cool stuff like auto map-location from cell-tower triangulation and sms to multiple people.
Apple also struck an interesting business deal with Fox which will now ship DVDs with copies of the movies already encoded for use on your iPod and for no extra charge.
Other interesting info, Apple has sold 4 million iPhones to date and 5 million copies of Leopard in 3 months. Considering there’s only 25 million OSX clients in the world, that ain’t bad.
I’m pretty annoyed with the $20 update fee, although I plan on sucking it up and getting it. Having email functionality on the touch makes life far simpler.
I really like the business deal with Fox, but this begs the following question: Can we legally rip our existing dvd’s to a format suitable for use with the ipod? If I own the dvd, do I have the “right” to its content for personal use, ie uploading to an ipod?
Is there a good piece of all-in-one software to facilitate the “rip” and conversion?
I think the $20 fee is similar to what they had to do when they shipped the 802.11n wireless upgrade…supposedly accounting related.
i don’t know the exact legalities of ripping DVDs but I use Handbrake for DVD to mpeg-4 ipod-compatible video.
i think there’s also some software that’s included with the new macbook package which allows the laptop to take control of another computer’s optical drive if they’re on the same network. i have nothing to back that up, but i read it somewhere.
i rarely, rarely use my optical drive on my imac.