Last 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…

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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Windows Vista has a new feature called User Account Control (UAC). The premise is that if you are running as a local administrator of the machine (which is very common) you could have your system compromized by software running under your user context.

Since you’re running as an administrator, then malicious software can completely take control of your systems. Not a good thing.

Unix admins have known for many years that you would have to be crazy to run your day to day user tasks as a local admin (called “root” in Unix-speak). Unix admins always make sure that they run their day to day tasks on a separate user account with diminished priviledges. If they need to do something where they need admin rights, then they simply temporarily elevate their security level, do the admin task, and then revert to their normal lower priviledge account.

This is a standard practice for all Unix admins everywhere.

Windows admins and users almost never do the above though, partly because doing so was not only impractical but also almost technically impossible….at least with Windows versions up to Windows XP.
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