First-Person: Macworld 2008

The Macworld 2008 has now been opened, and already on its first day there are many interesting new releases.

Last year was a rather disappointing year, with only one big release - the iPhone. Apple has already released the new operating system Leopard for Macs, and with Macworld there are many new releases that are making headlines.

The most intriguing new release today was the super thin MacBook Air. This is the world's thinnest computer and is 1.93 cm wide on the thickest part. To compare I have a Toshiba Satellite that is almost five cm on the thickest part, and when looking at the specs for the MacBook Air it's definitely possible to get high quality computers with minimum measurements.

The MacBook Air is an attempt to catch up with other brands such as Sony, who have released super thin computers before. This computer has a Core 2 Duo processor on 1.6 GHz, and 2 GB ram. The screen is 13.3 inches, which makes the MacBook Air very comfortable to work with.

The MacBook Air also has certain functions which is taken from the iPhone and iPod Touch. The mouse pad has a so called multitouch-function which is far more advanced than what earlier computers have built in.

When you are working on your computer, and you want to enlarge or decrease the size of the images you can use two fingers on the mouse-pad, and pull your fingers together or spread them depending on if you want to zoom in our out. Another cool thing is that you can rotate your fingers and make images in iPhoto rotate.

Apple sacrificed CD/DVD ROMs for the size, and there is only one USB port to hook up external ROMs. For me this would be highly inconvenient, as I need multiple USB Ports to use my computer effectively. I would much rather have a thicker computer if I could get more USB Ports, but then again Apple did create the world's thinnest computer.

The battery has a life of five hours with every function turned on, and to change the battery you have to open the entire computer. This is highly unpractical, as every laptop battery is probably going to have to be replaced after a couple years.

To me it seems that Apple was time pressured into creating a new, world breaking product so they did not take the time to produce a full quality one. It doesn't matter if it's the worlds thinnest computer, I would still want the functions that I need on a day to day basis. The MacBook Air is an amazing computer nevertheless.

Apple also introduced a new wireless version of TimeMachine. This wireless base station has a hard drive of one Tb for backup copies of data. The TimeMachine takes backup copies every hour of documents that has been changed. This seems like an excellent product, and I can't wait to see it in the stores.

There are also several upgrades to the iPod, which makes it fairly identical to the iPhone without the ability to make phone calls. Mail software, weather, maps etc. can be bought from Apple.

This year's Macworld is indeed very interesting, and I cannot wait to see which other releases that will be announced in the coming days.