MacWorld 2008

Steve’s much-anticipated keynote for MacWorld 2008 has come and gone. It’s almost always a good show, and it didn’t disappoint me today, although the market didn’t much care for it, with AAPL down 5.45% on the day, and down another 3.57% in after-hours trading of 2.2 million shares.

I’m very happy with the new movie rental capability now in iTunes and AppleTV, although my AppleTV software update hasn’t come through yet. I’ve had an AppleTV since they first came out and I really enjoy it. In fact, I cancelled my Dish Network subscription back in November, 2006. The one thing I didn’t much care for was having to purchase movies that I wouldn’t usually want to keep anyway, plus (ok, so two things) the abysmal selection of movies (Air Buddies?). Today’s announcement has solved both those problems, with rentals and every major film studio, and lots of smaller ones, on board.

The second item I’m looking forward to is Time Capsule, which is a combination Airport Base Station and hard-drive backup. I haven’t totally committed to this one yet, but it seems like a great idea. In addition to upgrading my current 802.11g base station to an 802.11n, it will allow me to easily backup both of my systems, one of which is a laptop and currently never gets backed up.

Why the decline in the stock price? Almost certainly because many people wanted to see Steve announce a tablet computer. Instead, they got MacBook Air. Which seems well-engineered, and it is amazingly thin, and probably has decent market potential, but it’s not a tablet. Personally, I don’t understand the big appeal of a tablet, nor am I excited about the MacBook Air. Nice, but not really for me.

One thing I was hoping for which was not announced was a new rev of the Cinema Display line. They don’t need an updated look, but I’d really like to see them with a built-in iSight camera. The don’t even sell the original iSight cameras any longer. And the iMacs have iSight built-in. So why not the cinema displays?

But as Steve said, we’re only two weeks into 2008. Let’s see what the next 50 bring us.