Macworld a Macdud

By Doug Barney

Every year the Mac faithful crowd into a San Francisco ballroom to hear what their hero, one Steve Jobs, has to say. Last year was pretty darn good, as the iPhone was shown off, and went on to live up to its lofty expectations.

This year rumor had it that Jobs would release a line of solidstate notebooks. While not exactly an engineers’ dream (Apple Inc.’s smallest notebooks don’t have discrete graphics so resolution and graphics performance aren’t exactly inspiring), a nice, small laptop could give Apple more market share, leading to more overall IT support.

Nevertheless, I was excited, and thinking about buying one myself if the price was right, as were my two sons, both devoted Macophiles.

So MacWorld arrived, and what did we get? New software for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Apple TV, and new ways to rent movies. And then there was the coup de grace: an ultra-thin notebook computer weighing a scant pound. Yeah, it is fairly sweet, but here are my concerns. While thinner than Kate Moss, its 13.3-in. screen makes the machine too wide. The base model only has 2GB of RAM and an 80GB drive. And there’s no CD or DVD drive built in. The worst affront, you get to pay $1,800 for this meagerly powered gem.

And what of the much ballyhooed solid-state drive? You can get a 64GB solid-state drive for an extra grand or so!

Mr. Jobs, what are you thinking? While MIT has the one laptop per child program, you seem to have a one laptop per upper middleclass, dual income, yuppie household approach.

In fact, the only IT announcement came a week before Macworld when Apple launched and shipped its highest end server ever, an Xserve 1U unit with up to two Intel quad-core processors, and 3TB of storage. I guess Apple didn’t want to confuse all the iPhone and iPod junkies with talk of a server.

In related news, SWsoft of Renton, WA, (which is changing its name to Parallels, also the name of its flagship virtualization tool) this month announced that Parallels will run on Apple, Inc. Macintosh servers. The new tool, now in beta, can run multiple copies of MacOS. Find out more here.