Yesterday’s Apple Announcements
March 4th, 2009, 8:05pm by MikeYesterday, Apple announced all sorts of new gear, including updates to the Mac mini, iMac, Mac Pro, and MacBook Pro 15″, as well as perhaps less exciting stuff like their Airport Extreme and Time Capsule. The computers were mainly speed bumps and price changes (except the Mac Pro). In my opinion, the Airport update was the best example of “Apple Being Apple.” Not terribly exciting, but shows that they’re still thinking and innovating in spaces that seem innovation-free.
Check out the new features of the Airport Extreme:
- Simultaneous Dual Band. Until now, on every router I know of from any company, it wasn’t possible to use 5GHz 802.11n on the same network as legacy 2.5 GHz 802.11b/g devices. You had to choose. If I had an 802.11n router, I couldn’t use the n speed without losing my AppleTV and Airport Express, which have g and b cards, respectively. But with the new Airport Extreme, I could. Everything chooses the highest-speed band automatically. Not sure exactly how this works in practice (do you see two networks with the same SSID if you have an 802.11n card in your laptop?), but it’s a great idea that I’m sure will be in every router very soon. Bravo Apple on doing what should have been obvious, but making it work right (I’m assuming).
- Guest access. Basically, a firewall so that you can wall off your local network from the internet, so you can give internet access to people without exposing machines on your local network. This is one of the main reasons we don’t just open up our network, and I could see that this would be a great thing for people running coffee shops.
- Hard drive sharing over MobileMe. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a MobileMe fan — I think it’s overpriced and seems flaky from what I read. But access to all the files on your home computer, this easily, is nice. Not like you couldn’t figure this out before, or use other NAS’s that similar features, but still, nice that it’s so easy.
Anybody see anything else that looked good yesterday? I thought it was basically all pretty ho-hum, which I guess is why they didn’t have a big event. What’s coming on the 24th?
March 4th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
I really want a new desktop, but the Minis are too weak for heavy photo editing, I don’t like having an integrated monitor (like in the iMac), and the Power macs are WAY expensive. I’ll probably break down this summer and buy a new Mac after Snow Leopard is released, and I’m hoping that the Mac Pros come don in price. Otherwise, the 24″ iMac looks like a good value, even if it doesn’t have th drop-dead killer performance I’d like for photo editing.
March 4th, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Oh, what’s up with the 24th?
March 5th, 2009 at 8:51 am
There were rumors of an event at which Apple was going to debut new hardware — all of which was announced this week. If the event is still going on, it’ll be something different — or, it may not happen, or, it may never actually have been planned to happen…
March 9th, 2009 at 11:00 am
So what do you think of the rumor that Apple will release a touch-screen netbook in the 2nd half of the year? If they did, would you buy it?
March 9th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Not sure whether (a) the rumors are true (though they’re definitely widely reported today), or (b) whether I’d want a big touchscreen Mac to go with my little touchscreen OS X-based phone.
The thing that pisses me off about the rumor (if true) is that what I really want is a basic Mac laptop that’s small and costs less than $500. That’s it! Three characteristics:
Adding a touchscreen may jack up the price, which isn’t all that appealing. I can already go out and buy a non-netbook Mac for lots of money.
March 9th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Lucas would want one! I’m thinking of getting him an iPod Touch, but he wouldn’t be able to get to all his flash-based content. Touchscreen doesn’t HAVE to add a lot of cost– the multitouch HP Tx2 (successor to my laptop) can be had for $800, which is about the same as any comparable laptop. It was sighted on this weeks’ Dollhouse, by the way!
I think Mike’s right though– it doesn’t seem like Apple to introduce a technology that a lot of people want (Cocoa Touch) on the low end. More likely, they revise the MBA to include touch and a flipable screen. Or they make a super-sized iPod Touch, which might have some appeal, but doesn’t actually address the netbook market.
March 12th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
The rumored event for the 24th is apparently now the 17th, and will likely feature a preview of iPhone OS 3.0, according to multiple sources like this one.
Mark my words, it’ll be roundly criticized as a complete failure on Apple’s part when they don’t announce copy-and-paste. Or even if they do.