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back to article Mojo-free Jobs delivers Macworld goods

Is Steve Jobs losing his mojo? Almost speechless by the end of his Macworld keynote, the Apple chief executive's "to-do-list" left little by way of the surprises or thrills legions of Jobs-loving fanboys have come to expect. Especially as the two most eagerly awaited announcements there were pretty much public knowledge before …

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  1. Nexox Enigma

    Fun

    Seems like it'd be a lot easier to make a laptop that thin if you give it such a large screen. All of the other laptops that small are compressed into smaller footprints, thus thicker for the same componentry. No ethernet port? I guess people don't want to copy over their music collections (or parts of it) or movies or anything like that. And does it only have one USB port, or did they just specify that it had USB, not the quantity thereof? Interesting, though, that they gave this thing so much more processing power than most of the extremely small laptops... I imagine that OS X would drag pretty badly on a 1.2 ghz ULV Core 2 Duo. And no mention at all about the weight. If it isn't under 3 pounds then I really don't see the point, since you can get notebooks with optical drives and a full set of ports lighter than that.

    And who would be at all interested in a gigabit wan port on a gateway? All of those people out there with 100+mbit internet connections? And they're expected to use a cheap consumer gateway?

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  2. Ivan Headache

    and can be ordered online at Apple's web site.

    NOT pre-ordered.

    How many more times must I post that pre is totally irrelevant in front of order. Look at what the verb to Order means. look at what the prefix Pre means.

    How can you possibly modify a verb that already means to do something in advance or cause something to be done and then add a prefix that makes the verb be in advance of itself.

    Pre as a prefix (note) has many places where it is perfectly valid. In front of order is not one of them.

    I can't believe an "Editor-in-Chief" would actually be so slack to use it. (Mind you, it looks as though English is not his first language, and French is an arse-about-face language at the best of times.)

    My god, I'm beginning to get like phreaky (but at least my grammar's better).

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  3. Barry Rueger
    Thumb Down

    Kind of deficient for laptop

    No Ethernet. No Firewire. A piddly 80 gig hard drive? I'm all for smaller and lighter, but those seem like some pretty significant limitations. I wonder what else is missing.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Dead Vulture

    Give it a rest, why don't you?

    "There was, it seemed, not one more thing to be had."

    News flash: Apple is a technology company, not a religion. Steve Jobs isn't Jesus and he didn't turn water into wine at MacWorld. Get over it.

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  5. David Shaw

    Time Capsule

    I last week bought the excellent Airport Extreme Giga Base Station (802.11n draft) for 230 swiss francs (£108) and added a generic 500GB USB2 Airdisk for 79 euros (£59) total £167, and Apple.com/uk wish me to buy the Time Capsule for £199?

    that's not such a wildly different price from what I assembled, but to pay an extra £130 for another half-terabyte!!!, I could get my system up to 1TB for about £226 allowing me a whole hundred quid towards the flight to Boston to pick-up the new thin shiny toy.

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  6. Joey
    Jobs Halo

    No DVD drive?

    As far as I can see, there is a DVD drive - it is external and costs another $99 for those that can't do without them.

    I remember when Apple started leaving floppy disk drives off their machines hand were thrown up too.

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  7. Scott Mckenzie

    Interesting Specs

    From having looked at it, it's a very powerful ultra portable, or a not that great spec laptop.... being able to wirelessly share the optical drive from another PC or Mac is a genius idea, how well it works remains to be seen but still.

    I think it's a great bit of kit, it will perform well in terms of processing power, the spinning hard drive is a little slow and the SSD ludicrously expensive, wireless network is at least fast, the add on DVD-RW drive and Ethernet port aren't too pricey and despite being only 100Mb (1Gb NIC wouldn't work over USB2) it's an inexpensive addition at £19

    Apart from the weight/size thing it's a very similar spec to my Week 5 MBP, which performs brilliantly on any task i throw at it... many people will slate it i'm sure, but from my use of several mode complete spec (Toshiba R500) Windows Ultraportables, in reality their performance is poor, sure they have big hard drives, built in optical drives (how often do you genuinely use them these days?), built in ethernet etc but the ULV processor crumbles if you open more than 2 apps at once, given the spec of the Air, i think it'll manage just fine with a lot of apps open.

    Ultraportable redefined i think on this one....

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  8. TimBiller
    Thumb Down

    Movie rentals outside the USA ...

    ... are still not available.

    I upgraded to iTunes 7.6 (Windoze) last night and the UK Music Store still only has the same limited list of TV shows to choose from.

    There are no indications on apple.com about when this might change. Disappointing.

    Tim

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  9. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    @Scott

    "being able to wirelessly share the optical drive from another PC or Mac is a genius idea"

    Erm.. please correct me if I'm wrong, but I've been able to share my CD/DVD drive between machines in Windows for years. In fact, that's how we usually install stuff onto remote machines - put DVD in local machine, share drive to remote machine and install.

    Okay, it's very painful at even 100Mbps with large installs - but saves walking to the server room! ;)

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  10. alphaxion

    their share price

    took a kicking from the news too.. seems the jobs majick didn't rub off onto the wall street crowd (then again, they are a bit more concerned with their credit crisis to pay attention).

    Personally, apple are getting greedier and greedier in my eyes.

    The Air is $1,799 in the US, the UK market will be paying a stonking $2300/2400 for the same thing!

    That's still not to mention the detail that the uk 8gb touch is the same price as the us 16gb touch.

    Completely fed up of getting ripped off in this country!

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  11. Kyle

    Re: No DVD Drive?

    Well yes, but as of the release of Leopard, a DVD drive is an OS requirement for Apple machines. What happens when 10.6 hits? Oh, that's right, you get to use Remote Disc and piggy-back on someone else's optical drive (assuming you've got another Mac in the house), or you get to fork out $99 for the external drive...

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  12. JP
    Flame

    What about the numbers?

    I thought that the iPhone numbers were meant to be the "big announcement" at MacWorld??

    Is that tumbleweed blowing across?

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  13. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Horns

    @Give it a rest

    'Apple is a technology company, not a religion'

    ROTFLMAO

    Apple is NOT a technology company. They are a DESIGN company. Apple have not invented a single new product in yers, they just take what other people have done and dress it up so it looks shiny.

    Not a Religion?

    Tell that to the Church of Jobs crowd who hang on his every word and think Apple cannot do any wrong, never have problems, never release a shoddy product and flame anyone who tries to point out otherwise.

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  14. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    30 day viewing timeframe?

    "Customers have then up to 30 days to start watching it, and once a movie has been started you have just 24 hours to finish it. One would thought Jobs could have negotiated a friendlier deal."

    So we just keep a note of the film's download date and keep temporarily resetting the date on our computer/iPod/etc?

    Just like we currently do to run those 30-day-trial pieces of software that applications such as Cracklock can't fool the dates for?

    What's the betting that the Apple cybergeeks have thought of this and deliberately scuppered that possibility, on behalf of killjoys everywhere?

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  15. Joey

    Like for like please...

    alphaxion says "Personally, apple are getting greedier and greedier in my eyes.

    The Air is $1,799 in the US, the UK market will be paying a stonking $2300/2400 for the same thing!"

    When you make comparisons, get your facts right...

    The MacBook Air is £1,199 in the UK including 17.5% VAT and 12 months warranty. USA prices do not have VAT (which doesn't go to Apple) and only have 90 days warranty AFAIK.

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  16. Andy Davies

    Toshiba R100

    Was thinner and lighter...

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  17. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    @Joey - 12 months warranty in US

    http://store.apple.com/Catalog/US/Images/salespolicies.html#topic-18

    "All Apple hardware products, including clearance and refurbished products, carry a one-year Limited Warranty against defects in materials and workmanship."

    As for pricing...

    1.6GHz Air with HHD = $1,799. Add VAT = $2,133. Convert to £ = £1,079. In the UK it's selling for £1,199 a premium of £120 (over 11% extra)

    1.8GHz Air with SSD = $3,098. Add VAT = $3,640. Convert to £ = £1,860. In the UK it's selling for £2,028 a premium of £168 (9% extra).

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  18. Kebabster

    @JP and alphaxion

    JP: 4 million iPhones sounds big enough to me in 6 months sales or were you not listening?

    @alphaxion: I suggest you go complain to the EU and get them to drop VAT as that's the biggest cause of your skewed price perception. Otherwise it's the typical $1.8 / £1 ratio we've seen for years.

    However... where's the UK apple TV price drop? Sure it dropped to $229 in the US but Apple store is still showing £199 in the UK and we haven't even got the movie rentals yet - there's something to whinge about!

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  19. Bill Coleman

    the real news

    ...is what didn't happen. Where is the fabled iPhone/iPod Touch SDK? Perhaps that was the one more thing that never was...

    As for the laptops "missing bits" - I wouldn't miss ethernet, optical drive, multiple usb/firewire ports et al on a secondary system that is meant as an out-of-office tool. They call it the AirBook for a reason. I think Apple is ahead of the curve here. But I'm fucked if I'm going to shell out for a computer that is a sealed unit. Battery, HD and Memory all off limits? Give me a break!

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  20. jai

    re: the real news

    the SDK has always been slated for a February release since it was announced - no one was really expecting it to be released yesterday - although perhaps it would have been nice to see a preview

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