Lots has already been written about Macbook Air so I'll point you to a number of the reviews and photo galleries elsewhere. I'd only focus in on three items that are of interest in this laptop for me with regards to the future direction of Apple technology:
- Integration of additional gestures in a Multi-Touch Track Pad. No shock here following the success of the iPhone and iPod Touch expect to see hardware manufacturers seek to include multi-touch technology. Overall the state of advances in the PC market in terms of new user interface has been pathetic at best over the past decade with limited progress. Multi-touch represents a positive step towards improving usability and I'd think we're just at the beginning.
- An optional Solid State Hard Drive (SSD). While it's still very early days for SSDs as a replacement for traditional magnetic media the future is clear. Yes, there is still a massive price gap that needs to be narrowed but I'd expect that we're now on a clear trajectory toward seeing SSDs go mainstream over the next three to four years.
- The exclusion of an onboard optical drive. Apple is helping to lead once again if we think back they made early moves in helping to initially drive 3.5" floppies mainstream in the early 1980s, helped kill floppies off a decade later and now the exclusion of the optical drive on a Macbook Air points the way to the next wave. While we're still years away from seeing the disappearance of CDs and DVDs its clear wireless downloads are the wave of the future.
TimeCapsule - actually represents another great addition to the product line and while the pricing is a little high it is does not represent the usual excessive Apple tax that exists on other Apple products. Given that we now have TimeMachine built into Leopard and it offers a very capable way to ensure timely protection of your files this is the next step to help ensure you don't lose data. At the moment laptops are finally overtaking desktops and we're seeing Apple innovate to alleviate some of the hassles that exist when you use a laptop as your primary machine. For example, you are forever connecting and disconnecting the Firewire or USB connection to an external hard drive to enable Time Machine to function. TimeCapsule removes that hassle by enabling wireless backup of your data through a combined Airport Express and high capacity hard drive offering home users simple and relatively affordable network attached storage (NAS) to protect the data on all your Macs. The big question for me will be the speed of back-up and any performance issues but clearly wireless backup and central home data storage is the way things are heading over the next five years.
Overall, a successful MacWorld in 2008 but not the blow-out that we experienced in 2007 with the launch of the iPhone. I still expect that 2008 will be a busy year for Apple and Mac users - expect updates to the iPhone with a 3G version or major announcement around the 3GSM Conference being a solid bet, updates to the Mac product line most likely with the MacbookPro and Macbook - presumably getting speed bumps, and later in the year a revision to the iPod lineup with capacity increases for the iPod Touch being a given.
