Bobbie may well leap in here later, but the Stevenote is over and Apple has indeed unveiled the MacBook Air ( 60 80GB spinning hard drive or 64GB Flash drive, 1.6GHz or 1.8GHz 45nm Core Duo, 13-inch screen, 3lbs; slogan: "Thinnovation") and Time Capsule (wireless-enabled network drive, can be used as a wireless backup in OS X Leopard's Time Machine; slogan, "A leap forward for backup"), and though he announced film rentals via an updated Apple TV in the US, the press releases we've seen don't seem to suggest that we'll get those in the UK.
So if memory serves this suggests to me that Chuq von Rospach was pretty much on the money with his predictions for what was coming up in last week's article. And how did you all do?
And, more or less importantly, will you stump up £1,200 or, e-yow, £2,030 for a MacBook Air (the latter price being the Flash drive version)?
As far as rentals etc goes, all we get in the UK is something called "iTunes Digital Edition", where if you buy a 20th Century Fox DVD then you can get a free version of the same thing, digitally, on iTunes.
The interesting thing is that what Apple's clearly doing in the US (which is half its market) is trying to get underneath the TV. If iPod sales growth begins to slow - even while the iTunes Store has passed 4 billion songs - then it needs to be doing other things that are in the face of consumers. Netflix and Amazon Unbox already do movie rentals in the US (Netflix having 7m subscribers) and Apple badly needs to get some of that action. The advantage it does have is that it can sell the "whole widget" - particularly Apple TV, which disappointed in its first incarnation because it needed a separate computer. No longer.
Michael Gartenberg's of Jupiter Research offers his take on rentals, saying it's going to change things; his colleague David Card disagrees; and a third Jupiterite, Mark Mulligan, offers "what Apple should announce":
it is time for Apple to innovate in the face of intensifying competition from Amazon, Nokia, imeem etc etc. iTunes Music Store is not about to be knocked of its throne, but Apple has stayed on top of the portable media player space by creating the iPod killer before the competition does. Now it needs to apply the same thinking to its music store so that it can reclaim its throne as leading market innovator and put in preemptive strikes to any would-be-usurpers to its position as market leading digital music offering.
