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It’s all a bit much

Some pretty big things have been announced over the years at the annual MacWorld Expo, like the iPod, the iPhone, iLife, the switch to Intel chips, the flat screen iMacs, and more.

Some pretty big things have been announced over the years at the annual MacWorld Expo, like the iPod, the iPhone, iLife, the switch to Intel chips, the flat screen iMacs, and more.

The cult of Mac (I’m merely a fan) awaits these new announcements breathlessly then proceeds to freak out about whatever it is that Apple CEO Steve Jobs has to say.

For my part, the 2008 MacWorld Expo left me feeling somewhat underwhelmed, as the biggest announcement of the day was the MacBook Air laptop. Big deal. So what if it’s the thinnest laptop on the market — who does that benefit exactly? People with already overloaded briefcases might appreciate the slight difference and thickness and weight, if only so they can stuff in more papers, but is it really worth the extra $650 to get a computer that’s all of 0.8 cm thinner and about a kilo lighter than a regular MacBook?

Keep in mind that the Air is also lighter on the performance side, with slightly slower processors and less hard drive capacity than Apple’s entry-level laptop. You can upgrade to a version with a faster processor and a flash memory hard drive, but that brings the price to $3,250 — well out of the ballpark for most of us.

Battery life is slightly improved, giving you about an extra hour of roaming time, but is that worth another $600?

The Air is also missing an optical drive, which means you’ll most likely have to shell out an extra $100 for an external drive to read or write CDs and DVDs. No word on how thin or thick that particular attachment will be, but it looks thicker than the laptop and probably adds back most of the weight that was carved out of the laptop.

I know what the cultists would tell me at this point — “But it’s so thin, it’s the thinnest laptop in the world! Apple has done it again!” — but I really have a hard time seeing why any of this matters.

Neither did the shareholders, as Apple stock dropped about five per cent after Steve Jobs’ keynote speech. No doubt investors were expecting something as revolutionary and marketable as the iPod to come along, and came away from MacWorld feeling slightly disappointed. That’s gratitude for you — people who invested money in Apple five years ago have seen their investment increase by about 2,000 per cent since then, but when the 2008 lineup is on the bland side the investors jump ship. That’s the problem with the stock market — it’s far too emotional. Apple still has a lot of great products, a growing share of the home and office computer market, and a virtual stranglehold on the portable music market.

Not that the MacBook Air is all that was announced at MacWorld this year. It appears that Apple has updated its Apple TV home entertainment PC to allow you to access the iTunes store for movies and television shows directly instead of through your home computer. There were also a few other tweaks that let you access the internet for photos, podcasts, and other content, and the price was kept quite low.

Apple also added four new software programs to the iTouch and iPhone which will be free for new purchasers and $20 for people who already bought — a bit of a slap in the face for some early adopters, but also a good example of why it usually pays to wait.

One of the more useful technologies released at Macworld was their Time Capsule external hard drive. A new feature in their Leopard operating system called Time Machine lets you go back in time to find files, recreate desktops, and restore information that you might have misfiled or lost entirely. The one drawback is that you needed a second hard drive or an external hard drive to properly back up files. The Time Capsule hard drive offers 500 GB to 1TB of storage that you can connect to wirelessly.

Again, nothing really earth-shattering, but that’s the problem with having these kinds of expos — companies are under so much pressure to reinvent the wheel every year that they’re bound to come up a little short from time to time.

At lot of the same kind of disappointment was tangible at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, which was heavy on tweaks but introduced very little that was new or exciting. Some of the best received products were new screens — a laser light rear projection television, super high-definition televisions that are three metres from corner to corner, a new curved screen computer monitor by Alienware, and a low power high definition Eco TV from Philips. Cnet (www.cnet.com) delved deeper into the products on display than most review sites, and it’s Best of 2008 list is almost entirely comprised of upgrades to existing products.

The one technology I found most interesting, and potentially useful, is the Squeezebox Duet from Logitech (www.logitech.com). The Squeezebox is a wireless receiver and remote that lets you play audio files from your personal computer through your surround sound system, as well as tune in to thousands of internet radio stations and connect to online music archive services like Pandora and Rhapsody. You don’t even need a computer to do the radio and internet thing.

It may have been a slow start to the year for technology, but in a way it’s a relief for me and my wallet.