MacBook Air
apple.com
apple.com
Also, I purchased a MacBook when they first came out, and had numerous problems with the battery and power supply. Thus, the lack of replaceable battery makes me nervous.
[edit]: oh gocha.
There was nothing new for MacBook Pros or MacBooks, and the Mac Pro upgrade was made a couple of weeks before MacWorld. That makes me think that Apple dropping "Computer" from their company name was a telling sign.
For example, designing the "Remote Disc" feature was great; telling the world with a straight face that "you can just wireless rent movies from Apple instead of playing DVDs" was just lame.
I'm hoping with Apple TV I can skip BluRay alltogether, but I haven't seen the HD specs from the iTunes store yet.
That said, highly compressed 720p is still going to be an upgrade to a lot of people over a standard DVD. Perhaps only obsessives like me will care.
The claim that this is "highly compressed" is baseless.
The only other thing I can say on the matter is that I was at Macworld today, and they were demoing Apple TV playing an HD movie on a giant screen (probably 50 feet across) and it looked excellent.
The facts on blue-ray: "Discs encoded in MPEG-2 video typically limit content producers to around two hours of high-definition content on a single-layer (25 GB) BD-ROM. The more advanced video codecs (VC-1 and H.264) typically achieve a video runtime twice that of MPEG-2, with comparable quality."
In all likelihood, iTunes is using H.264, or their newest variant. The same as blue-ray. So, in reality, the choice of codec matters a great deal, blue-ray is not uncompressed video (thus, 25GB holds a 2 hour compressed movie), and yes, 1080p is better than 720p.
And it's also worth noting that digital cable, and as far as I know every other on demand HD video service, is also "highly compressed" 720p.
Then you said that "blue-ray is not uncompressed video (thus, 25GB holds a 2 hour compressed movie)" By your own math they would only take up 12.5ish gb if compressed.
I actually am curious what digital cable uses. It's definitely 720p in my area, and probably compressed, but not highly.
What I said is, Blu-ray movies take up on average 25GB with MPEG2 compression. In other words, your original estimate of the size of things was wrong, as was your implication that blu-ray was uncompressed.
The issue of compression is a bit more hard to answer, since all these formats all use the same codec. I have no idea what parameters you can tweak to make the same resolution video smaller.
I think it's great Apple have 'got it' as regards the future. In 5 years people are unlikely to be shoving discs into things.
As tempting as it is, I won't get baited into that particular discussion. My point was that the idea of eschewing viewing the DVDs I already own in favor of renting from Apple is preposterous. As they say in Propaganda, Jobs was "passing from the acceptable to the dubious" with product placement thinly veiled as cool minimalism.
Software might come on USB sticks for a while in the future, I think, but eventually even that will be delivered digitally. Valve has done this insanely well with Steam.
Far better to handbrake it and them just watch the files with VLC.
No configurator option for more, and wording about RAM "onboard" and tight design makes me wonder if more is even possible.
Seriously, I think I liked the whole "Something's in the air" thing when FSJ suggested it was a reference to Woz's flatulance back in the garage days. "You could barely work with the guy."
Ha. That's the first I'd heard of that. To each their own, I suppose. Maybe she'll feel rich enough to not do comedy.
Oh horrid thought. What if she uses the Woz's cash to make more reality tv?!