Less is More: Steve Jobs' Macworld 2008 Keynote Address
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The twenty dollar upgrade

That brings us to the new iPod touch. Even though it looks a lot like the iPhone, until now it has been positioned as a high end iPod. Starting now, it will become an iPhone without the phone. They've added Mail, Maps with Wifi location, Stocks, Notes, and Weather. You'll also be able to customize the home screen. In other words, the device you bought has been dramatically changed. You bought an iPod and for $20 you can turn it into a real Internet device.

"Twenty Dollars? Apple is going to charge twenty dollars? Apple should just give it to us for free."

Tell me Jobs doesn't want to just say "Shut up. Just shut up." But of course RSJ can't.

I was once backstage after a Wynton Marsalis concert and he asked one of the women I was with what she thought of the show. She looked at him and said, "you could have played longer."

He nodded thoughtfully and said, "yeah, I could have."

That's what it felt like this week in San Francisco. So many people running around saying "Apple could have just given us the upgrade."

Yeah, they probably could have. But listening to people holding a five dollar cup of coffee in one hand complain about spending twenty dollars to upgrade their iPod touch confuses me a bit.

Home entertainment

Steve Jobs tends to understand that people have different relationships with things that may seem very similar. So the screen in your living room and the screen on your computer may be technologically very similar but they are used very differently. People sit a foot or two from their monitor and ten feet or more away from their television.

In his keynote he argued that your relationship with movies and music is different. He thinks that for the most part people don't want to rent their music. They want to own it. But for movies, except for a few favorite titles or for enthusiasts, many people are happy just watching a movie once or twice. They are happy renting movies.

As expected, Jobs announced that you can now rent movies on iTunes. He rolled out the list of studios with classic Jobs theatre. He showed a list of five studios that had signed up to provide rentals. Paused and said "and these six too" and the slide flipped down to show the six major studios signed on as well. It's perhaps a little odd that the studios would be agreeing to rentals at a time when they're telling striking writers that there's no money on the table to divvy up.

The rental rules aren't viewer friendly. There is a 30-24 rule. You have thirty days from the time you rent a title to view it. But once you begin viewing a title you have only twenty-four hours to complete it. The most frequently cited use case that flies in the face of this rule is that you start watching a movie one night and either fall asleep or something comes up and want to finish it the next night. By the time you're ready to view it the 24 hours have expired. The hope is that 24 will become 27 or 36 or 48. You can move the movie from one device to another to complete the viewing. But a longer period would be nice. 20th Century Fox Chairman and CEO Jim Gianopulos also added news of a quieter announcement. His company is going to start shipping a digital version of their movies so that you can watch the movies you purchase on DVD on your Mac, iPod, or iPhone.

Meanwhile, Apple has updated Apple TV. You can now rent movies (regular or HD) directly from your television set without using your computer. The movies are $2.99 for library titles and $3.99 for new ones. You pay a dollar more for HD versions. You can browse Flickr as well as pictures and movies on .Mac. You can still view and listen to the media streamed from your computer, but Apple TV now works as a standalone device as well. The new Apple TV features are included in a new upgrade and the price for new Apple TVs has dropped to $229.

MacBook Air photographed at Macworld 08 Expo in San Francisco. Photo by Derrick Story.

The envelope please...

I don't know who first made the leap from Apple's banner that "There's something in the Air" to this laptop. Yes, we all now know that MacBook Air is Apple's new thin laptop. And, having touched it, it is really thin. When Jobs opened up the inter-office envelope and out slipped the new laptop he created an image that has already been spoofed and won't soon be forgotten. The envelope is aimed at people who look at the 8.94 x 12.8 inch footprint and say that that is too big to be easily ported. You see the envelope and nod "oh, ok, I carry around papers that size every day."

Analysts and investors may have missed this but last week Apple revised their top of the line desktop machine to include the latest chips from Intel. The eight core machine was the subject of a single slide at the very end of the keynote. But Intel also made a chip 60% smaller to work with the new Mac laptop.

Decreasing the size of the chip was one step in making the device smaller. Another was removing the optical drive and most of the ports. This may look like a laptop, but it almost has as much in common with the iPhone and iPod touch as it does with the other Mac laptops. There is a sealed case with a single battery inside. It tapers at one end to .016". At the thick end the MacBook Air is .76". This seems important so that Jobs could point out that the thick end of the Air is thinner than the thin end of the Sony.

There are a lot of "could haves" here. Apple could have shipped the computer with more memory, more power, more ports, ... but this feels like the right computer for a lot of people. The current convention is that the Air is a good second machine. I think for many people it could be their only machine. Jobs mentioned at the top of the keynote that Microsoft Office is now native on Intel with Office Mac 2008. For people who spend most of their time in Office, in email, on the web, and consuming media, this is an attractive machine. Couldn't they do that for a whole lot less money? Sure. But many of them won't want to - particularly after they touched the Air.

Unfortunately, this is not the computer for me. I spend too much of my time importing, editing, and exporting audio. When I spend my day in text, this machine would meet my needs. $1799 is an attractive price if I were in sales or a full time writer or editor or an executive or if I had someone else paying for it.

I think that that's a good thing. Apple has made it easier to identify which machine is for me. If it shared all of the MacBook features I would just be making a decision based on look and feel. Apple has built out the product line without returning to the early 90's confusion about which Mac is for which person. There are even features in the Air that the other Macs don't have. Multitouch works on the Air's new trackpad. Also, because the Air doesn't have an optical drive, it includes special software that allows you to install applications from other computer's optical drives - even from a Windows machine.

And so...

Jobs summed up the first two weeks of 2008. He pointed to the newly released 8 processor Mac Pro, Time Capsule, Software upgrades for iPhone and iPod touch, iTunes movie rentals, "reinvented Apple TV", movie rentals, and MacBook Air. Couple that with all of the announcements from 2007 and it's been quite a year since he last stood on this stage and gave us the annual state of the Mac.

I understand how disappointing all of this must be for investors. The flying iPod and the self-charging MacBook weren't released this year. There's always next year.