Macworld 2008 Summary

Now that I’m done with Macworld 2008, here are my reactions.

• Apple’s announcements were pretty much snoreville.
  • The MacBook Air is an interesting device for some, but for me, it is lacking. I need a machine that is faster than my current 2.16 GHz MacBook Pro (Core Duo) and has a significantly larger hard drive (I have a 7200 RPM 100 GB drive). I only have one main machine, so I’m looking at a 2.8 GHz MacBook Pro with a 200 GB 7200 RPM drive. I’m going to wait as my machine is quite adequate for now (it does have a nice dent in the corner when I dropped it a few months ago when trying to put luggage on a cart; it works fine, but has a dent in the corner near the power connector).
  • The AppleTV announcement was pretty much a given based on the rumors. I’m excited to have the free software update, but will have to wait until someone hacks it so I can install the SlimServer software back on it.
  • The iPhone/iPod Touch updates aren’t of much use to me, as far as I can tell. I did try out the GPS-like stuff in Google maps and it worked adequately.
  • Time Capsule – not a whole lot of use to me as I use a local Time Machine backup and use SuperDuper! to backup daily
• There was still a lot of iPod/iPhone stuff on the floor, but less than previous years. I could do without this. How many iPod/iPhone cases can you use?
• Nothing really new in the hardware front. A few new scanners, more junk from Canon, HP, and EPSON.
• No new software that I didn’t already know about. I think that BusySync is an interesting competitor to Spanning Sync (I’ve know the folks behind BusySync for years as they used to do Palm software.)
• On the positive side, I’m excited about ReceiptWallet as I got some real good ideas for enhancements. However, I don’t have enough time to implement them!