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Amid all of the MacBook Air hullabaloo, you might have forgotten about the Apple announcement that Fox would begin providing "free" iTunes versions of programs via DVD. The first release was Family Guy Presents: Blue Harvest, a Star Wars parody. Being the brave product testers that we are, we tried it out. It was, well, kinda weird.
It happened again: According to not a few people, we had the fastest and most reliable liveblog around. From what I was told, we had roughly 5 minute lead on our closest competitors on images with publish times at about 10 seconds from snap, and for text, we were neck and neck with the always fast Macrumors. And we never went down. Thanks to the tech teams at Gawker and Wordpress, the flying fingers of Giz's editorial staff, and of course, all you readers who stayed fixated on the Jobsnote via the Giz.
We got the Justin.tv cam ready to go and we're going to walk you through the latest offerings at Macworld 2008 between 11 A.M. 12 P.M. PST. In depth looks at the MacBook Air, Time Capsule, Apple TV Take 2 and the new iPhone firmware can all be expected. Stay tuned.
On the floor of Macworld today, we scored some hands-on time with Axiotron's Modbook—the tablet Mac pieced from the the carcass of a MacBook. While the system already made a splash at Macworld 2007, we had the opportunity to test the final shipping model. Our 3-second verdict: it's an absolute joy to use. Here are our full impressions:
Updated with battery life stats, by popular demand. We can all agree that the MacBook Air is a slick-looking little laptop. It's so thin! You can't argue with that! But if you're in the market for a small, high-performance laptop, is it the best option? I pored over specs for four similarly positioned and more-or-less similarly priced laptops to see if you'll get your $2,500 worth out of the Air. Let's go to the chart, shall we?
MACWORLD SAN FRANCISCO—January 16, 2008—Apple® today unveiled Manila® Case®, the world's thinnest case for the world's thinnest laptop, the MacBook Air. When empty, Manila Case measures an unprecedented 0.07-inches at its thinnest point, but its dynamically adaptable height goes up to a maximum of 6.9-inches, adapting perfectly to the MacBook Air shape as well as to a standard* Reuben sandwich, made with pastrami, sauerkraut, swiss cheese and russian dressing on rye bread.
A lot of you have complained about Steve's "Booms" in the past. Old. Tired, you say, especially in our cartoons. Well, judging by yesterday's keynote, the Apple head man thinks the same. Compare and contrast yesterday's miserly tally of one "Boom!" to last year's bumper crop of 15 B-words. So, what word should El Jobso start repeating like a Tourettes-addled teenager now?
If the MacBook Air is the mother of all slimline notebooks, then these two must be her offspring: you may have to ferry them around a lot if you watch DVDs or use wired surfing while you're on the road. While the Superdrive is a slot-loading 8x number in an aluminium jacket, and weighing just over a pound, the ethernet adapter looks to be a standard Apple white, and gives you that RJ-45 connector for 10/100BASE-T support that everyone's talking about. Combined together they take up around 25 cubic inches we think, showing just how skinny the Air itself actually is at 52 cubic inches:
Alright, so I was fairly impressed with the Macworld keynote. Lots of neat little bits, and the MacBook Air is a pretty amazing sliver of a machine. But it's not what many of us had hoped for. All I really wanted for Macworld was a 13-inch MacBook Pro. A serious but compact workhorse, not a sexy will-o-the-wisp. And now I'm too scared to even buy the current 15-inch MacBook Pro. Why?
The Gadget: iV iPhone case and battery, which adds 4x as much battery time to the iPhone while not adding too much more bulk.
The Verdict: The rubberised plastic feels nice, the LED flash/flashlight on the back is good for finding your keys or taking low-light pictures, and it clips neatly onto your belt if you're one of those belt dudes. There's also a USB port on the back for charging another device while your iPhone is being charged/docked. $US79. [Fastmac]
