Apple MacWorld 2008 announcements

by ron on January 16, 2008

MacWorld 2008Last year the iPhone was launched at MacWorld 2007. That resulted in massive success for Apple.

Everyone was wondering what Steve Jobs had under his sleeve for this years launch.

So in case you were wondering what was new this year, here’s the summary:

1) a new Mac notebook called Macbook Air; it’s the thinnest notebook in the world….very sexy, although a bit pricey (starts at $1800). (I love TechCrunch’s quote saying “Air: The Only Thing Left In Your Wallet After You Buy Apple’s New Laptop”)

2) iTunes will have over 1000 movie rentals as of the end of Feb for either $3 (older release) or $4 (new release). After you download the movie, you have 30 days to watch it. After you start watching the movie, you have 24 hours to finish it off, before it spontaneously combusts. iTunes can now be used to sync with your: PC, iPod, iPhone, iMac, Macbook, and AppleTV (see below). Pretty damn good…

Introducing movie rentals from the iTunes Store.

3) a new version of Apple TV; Apple obviously want to leverage the combination of now being able to easily leverage the new movie rental feature of iTunes via their Apple TV appliance. Smart. Mind you, they are up against some decent competition in the USA with the fact that Tivo can now hook in to movie rentals via Amazon Unbox.

4) a combo Airport and hard drive, called Time Capsule. It supports 802.11n and comes with either a 500GB or 1TB drive. With the success of Time Machine on Leopard, Apple saw that many people were rushing out to purchase large USB hard drives in order to be able to back up content via Time Machine. They were very smart to not miss out on getting their hands on this extra revenue which people were already purchasing, by releasing a combo device that has a large hard drive built in. Very smart move, Steve.

5) a bunch of new iPhone and iPod Touch features (apparently you should be able to download the new firmware already)

And if you want to see Steve Job’s keynote yourself, here’s the full keynote. Otherwise, if you don’t have the time, then watch the 60 second summary.

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