I'm the sort of “early adopter” who watches the yearly Macworld keynote with my finger on the “buy” button. I love Apple products, and I love new gear. It's more exciting to me than the Oscars, and it won't be stopped by the writers strike.
This year's nominees:
“Time Capsule” wireless network hub and printer sharing and hard drive sharing (“It's a floor wax and a dessert topping!”) – it's cool to be able to do automated backups; you could do this already with the “Airport Extreme” – just plug in a USB hard drive, or share a hard drive from any computer on the network (which may or may not work with Leopard's “Time Machine”). Although it is nice to be able to cram 1TB “server grade” hard drive into a tiny box. This is solving a problem I have today, which is how to back up two computers and also how to share files between them.
The iTouch “upgrade”. For $20 you get OS 1.1.3 and weather, stocks, notes, email – all the standard iPhone apps. Sounds great – but I've already got those, as well as a Unix terminal and access to dozens of homegrown applications, thanks to Jailbreak. The situation may change next month when the iPhone SDK comes out. I don't really mind paying to get those apps (and any future ones) legitimately – but how can I give up running Apache on my iTouch (even though I don't use it for anything)?
Our final canditate is the Macbook Air. All over the net there are people griping about missing ports, missing optical drive, etc. People don't seem to understand – smaller, lighter, sexier costs more. A Porsche costs more than a Chevy Pickup. Yes, it's too expensive for me (so is a Porsche) but I don't think it's too expensive compared to the other name-brand thin laptops it's competing against – Sony and HP and Dell. I do think it's too bad they don't have a firewire port – maybe they're giving up on that? – or some sort of high speed docking port. Or even an ethernet port. But this is a laptop for hardcore business “road warriors”. It's basically the modern portable version of the cube – limited appeal, high price.
And the winner this year is: my bank account! Because for the moment I'm not buying any of them. If they release a tablet PC next month, maybe I'll hover over the buy button again…