[Note from Rob] I know this is a few days old, but still it’s fun

At this years MacWorld Expo, Apple announced a plethora of new products dealing with all of their lines.

MacBook Air

Apple’s “Ultra Portable” laptop. Touted as the thinnest notebook. 13.3 inch LED display, 802.11n wireless networking, 1.6GHz or 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of memory, 80GB hard drive (or a far more expensive 64GB Solid State, Flash based hard disk), and much more.

[Rob's Opinion] I am not to sure what to make of this system. The price range is far above what most casual or even professional users would spend on a laptop. The cheaper, $1799 model has an 80GB drive, but it runs at 4200RPMs. Going for the solid state drive lowers the storage capacity, but also decreases the energy usage and increases the access time. It may find it’s place in the market over time, but this is not the laptop for me.

Time Capsule

A wireless NAS (network attached storage) device made specifically for use with MacOS 10.5’s “Time Machine” feature. For those that do not know what Time Machine is, basically it is an incremental backup, saving a snapshot of your system on an external hard drive, and saving whatever changes are made over time. Currently my copy of Leopard and Time Machine show me changes I have made to my system going back to the beginning of December 2007. The distance you can travel in the past of your system is based on how much storage the external drive has. With Time Capsule, you have your choice of 500GB or 1TB of backup storage, and you can sync multiple computers to this box.

[Rob's Opinion]: Unlike the MacBook Air, I think this box would have a home with me. However, I would need to upgrade everything I have to wireless N, or I would have to wire everything together. Maybe not a this year purchase for me, however.

iTunes Movie Rentals

$2.99 for movie rentals on iTunes, $3.99 for new releases and add $1 on top for the HD version. As an example of file sizes, the standard def version of Live Free or Die Hard was about 1.5GBs. You have 30 days after you download it to START watching it, and once you begin you have 24 hours to finish the movie, after which time (30 days or 24 hours), the video is removed from your iTunes library.

[Rob's Opinion] So far I have rented Live Free or Die Hard, watched it and enjoyed it. Its quicker than Netflix for sure, but not something I would do every day.