Mac News Weekly: Mac News Weekly - #17

Macworld was this week, but we’re most interested in the Steve Jobs keynote. For anyone that wants to come to Macworld next year, it will be January 5-9 2009. Steve started off with some good news for investors. 5 million copies of Leopard were sold. In fact, 19% of Mac users upgraded, which is unprecedented. The first product Steve announced was Time Capsule. It combines Apple’s Airport Extreme with either a 500 GB or 1 TB hard drive. Time Capsule also supports Time Machine backups. The 500 GB version costs $299 and the 1 TB version costs $499. Time Capsule will come out in February, but is available for pre-order now. In the 200 days since iPhone went on sale, Apple has sold 4 million iPhones. In just six months, Apple has picked up 19.5% of all U.S. Smart Phone sales, putting it in second place. The iPhone SDK is still slated for a late February release, but until then iPhone and iPod Touch users can make do with update 1.1.3, which adds a bunch of great functionality. For $20, iPod Touch users can buy Mail, Maps, Stocks, and Notes – five apps that were once iPhone exclusive. iTunes movie rentals were, as expected, introduced. Apple has the participation of every major studio. Library titles will rent for $2.99 and new releases will rent for $3.99. Apple TV also gets a new software update that improves the user interface and adds photo streaming from sites such as Flickr. For $4.99, Apple TV users will be able to get their movies in HD. Finally, MacBook Air. This impossibly thin notebook lacks an optical drive, but it’s 0.16 inches at its thinnest point, 0.76 at its thickest. Apple has managed to pack a 13.3-inch screen, 802.11n networking, and Bluetooth into a 3-pound notebook. For $1799, you’ll get a MacBook Air with a 1.6 GHz hard drive and an 80 GB hard drive. For $3,098, you can get 1.8 GHz with a 64 GB SSD, which is very expensive, but also very fast. We had so much to report on

Mevio | January 20, 2008

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