I like to watch these just for Steve Jobs presentation style.

You can see the stream here: Mac World 2008. Watch the Keynote

But as PC user you would be amazed how much Apple is becoming part of your digital life.

Things I liked this year..

The MacBook Air: this looks fantastic and I am a fan of really slim laptops. I used to be a Dell X300 owner and that was really thin and one of my favourite laptops.

So I am looking forward to reading some peer reviews because as nice as it looks there must be some pitfalls. Example 1 USB port sounds really limiting but I guess I am not thinking wireless enough.

Above is the Dell X300 I used a few years ago. I miss it, but hey now Dell can build the next generation super thin laptop now the shrunk down Core2Duo chip exists.

Digital Media

Charging iPod Touch users for applications doesn’t seem very cool or Apple like.

iTunes

Ok movie rental downloads have arrived in the iTunes music store.

In the US you can now rent and download movies via iTunes. You have 30 days to keep them on your computer but only 24 hours to watch them once you hit play.

Basically what is happening to digital music will probably happen for movies over time (10+ years). The one problem I have with the digital rental model is I like to own not rent. I wouldn’t consider renting digital music for example and I feel the same way about movies.

I want companies to stop telling me what I can and cant do with the digital content I pay for.

But no doubt the rental model is very convenient.

So I imagine in the future that a two tier model will exist.

1) The disposable digital rental.

2) The Disc based Full Hi-Def version 1080p

I can live with that.

Kudos to Apple for offering HD-Def content with Dolby Digital 5.1 but they lose the kudos for charging more for the privilege. Hi-Def Downloads are $1 more expensive. That would be the Hi-Def tax I keep talking about.

This is still a long way off and is complicated in Europe by how movie’s are marketed and sold via distributors.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Apple, Hi-Definition, Video - Others, iTunes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.