Have you ever thought your existing computer display was too heavy and bulky? Check out this new invention, active-matrix e-paper, which you can fold in your hands, like real paper.

A lot more development is needed in this process, so widespread availability is expected around 2015.

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It looks pretty cool, and the $199 price is definitely going to make a lot of people happy. App-happy folks probably want the 16GB for $299, but that's still one heck of a price cut.

The 3G connections, where available, are very close in speed to WiFi.

I was hoping for an improved camera and GPS. It looks like the camera is unchanged but GPS is official and looks very nice.

No word on changes in AT&T's plans, or whether the $199 price is available to current and previous iPhone customers or just new ones.

Engadget's coverage is at the link.

D

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Just a quick celebration - Microsoft has given up on its takeover offer for Yahoo.

I am relieved. I always thought that was about the stupidest idea ever, and it appears that even Ballmer may have figured it out.

Some are saying that they are just waiting for the price to go down to pounce again ... so we shall see.

Oddly enough, I expected the Yahoo stock to tank, but it's still up for the day. I wonder what this means, since Yahoo is already at about the price of the last offer Microsoft made for it. So why isn't it crashing?

D

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A response to Daniel Eran's excellent essay over at RoughlyDrafted.

Here are a couple of things you might have missed:

I think you understate how poisonous the atmosphere at Microhoo would be, as Microsoft asks Yahoo folk to take down their life's work and replace it with Windows junk. Knowing Ballmer, I realize that would be exactly what would happen. Yahoo would become an demoralized, empty shell, with no technical employees worth talking about and a humiliating surrender to their worst enemy. When that happens, you know anyone with any ability at all is going to take the money from the takeover, and walk right next door to Google, who, by their own admission, has a major shortage of employees. You touched on this but I don't think you covered the emotional punch in the face this is to anyone working at Yahoo!

I don't even work there and I understand this.

I find it surprising that you are so skeptical that it's impossible to drive traffic to another portal/search engine if it can be made to improve on Google. Sure, Google has a huge head start and super-competent employees. But people do like to have at least a couple of alternatives, and from a technical standpoint barriers to entry are pretty low. Google came from nowhere, and although that's harder now, it's not impossible.

I wonder if antitrust concerns could stop this merger. There is so much duplication here, as you observe, that makes me think it's going to cause an undeniable reduction in customer choice. If you think of it in ecological terms, you are destroying an entire ecosystem with all of its species (customers). Fortunately the customers will not become extinct, but as you say I don't think they are likely to stay with Microsoft.

There is a lot of emotion behind this and I think you understate it. There are a lot of people, including Googlers, who don't want to see Yahoo! go down the tubes like this.

As you so rightly pointed out, most mergers don't work. I can only imagine how a takeover would work where virtually every employee of one company loathes the other.

How could anyone even dream of paying $45 billion for that?

D

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The more I travel the web, reading the reviews and commentary on Macbook Air, the more amused I am.

It seems that almost nobody likes the machine, and yet everyone wants to tell you why they won't buy it. The lack of external DVD drive. The inability to expand RAM. The slug-like processors. The lack of Ethernet. And so much more!

Thing is, I think they are already charmed by the thing and want to figure out excuses not to buy it. That's fine; I suspect I will buy a MacBook Pro instead, when the new model finally comes out. But the Air is still a brilliant engineering achievement, and I could see all sorts of reasons to use it and times when I might really enjoy having such a machine.

In particular, that solid state memory system handles like a giant iPhone, waking up from sleep literally instantly. I could get addicted to that.

Maybe they can come up with a MacBook Pro featuring a SSID operating system disk.

In the mean time, I would not be surprised to see a few of those people who will not ever, under any circumstances, buy one sneaking around the city with manila envelopes and a pocket bulge looking suspiciously like a battery charger ...

You can't fool me!

D

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I'm in the Apple Store checking out the new MacBook Air. In fact, I'm writing this review on it while in the store.

It's certainly a lot lighter than its evil competition, here in the store. Everything else feels like it weighs a ton after lifting the Air.

Both the SSID and the hard drive version wake up from sleep very quickly, but the SSID wakes up about a second faster. It feels significantly snappier than the hard drive version, and I've grown to really like it a lot. I think a lot of people will buy it, even as they curse Apple for not coming up with a 128mb SSID at an even more exorbitant price.

The full-sized keyboard and screen are great. I'd certainly much rather run this than a computer with a smaller keyboard that's harder to type on.

It feels flimsy at first just because everything is so light. The display pushes back with a fingertip touch. But you can tell the thing's solid as a rock. Try to bend or flex any part of it - you can't.

The new trackpad gesture system is nice for the pinch gesture but the rotate gesture is a lot slower than keyboard shortcuts, so I doubt it will catch on.

For anyone who flies a lot or spends a lot of time in coffee houses, and wants a really light machine that you can get a lot of work done on, this looks ideal. I think they will sell a boatload of them.

D

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It's difficult to imagine a Microsoft takeover of Yahoo.

Yahoo is a creature of the Internet, born of the Unix-based technologies that most Internet people started with. The crusty Unix guys Yahoo hires will not take well to the Windows interlopers coming in and insisting they use Visual Studio instead of Python.

At this very moment I am picturing these wizards cleaning out their desks, polishing their resumes and calling up their favorite headhunters. Fortunately, from what I understand the Valley still has a serious talent shortage, so they will no doubt vanish quickly, leaving Yahoo's technical departments as an empty shell.

Takeovers rarely if ever accomplish what they are supposed to. Daimler-Benz swallowed Chrysler only to regurgitate it a few years later, and that's just the latest of thousands of takeovers gone wrong. For a takeover to have any reasonable chance of success, you have to have compatible corporate cultures. Internet people managing Internet people, Unix people managing Unix people, that can work. Packaged software people managing Internet people, Windows people managing Unix people, that's extremely unlikely to come out well.

You heard it here: If this merger happens, it will destroy Yahoo and all the value it contains. And this is probably the intent - it will cause Yahoo to disappear as a competitor, and anyone who wants to avoid Google will turn to MSN.

But then there will be a lot of Yahoo engineers out there looking for something to do ... don't be surprised if this means a new Yahoo will appear from the ashes, and Microsoft will have blown $45 billion on ... precisely nothing.

What are your thoughts?

D

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I read this article over at The Small Wave, and its complaint about the nature of reviews really hit home.

So I thought about how I might review the MacBook Air if someone handed one to me. Here are some realistic tests I would run to determine what I thought of the design.

The Airport Dash. You are late for your plane. Put MacBook Air in an attache case and run to the gate as fast as you can. Then repeat with a MacBook and a MacBook Pro. I cannot tell you the results but I'm going to take a wild guess and assume MacBook Air wins by miles.

Flexibility. Is the MacBook Air's ability to fit into a manila envelope advantageous? Do you like being able to use a standard attache case, which often looks lovely, instead of computer bags, which are aesthetic disasters for the most part? This is really a subjective matter, but I think you see where the result points. I've seen wonderful attache cases that I would have loved to buy if my computer only fit into them along with some books and papers.

Coffeeshop Crunch. How long does it take for you to remove your computer from its case, plug it in and start working? Is MacBook Air's performance superior in this regard? Does the long battery life make plugging it in less of an issue?

Fun Factor. Does someone come up to you and ask if this is MacBook Air? Do people ooh and aah over it like they do iPhone? This is not logical or realistic or anything but it's a genuine selling point nonetheless.

Word Processing Wobble. Take a typical document. Do searches through it. Write. Is it any different at all from the experience with other computers? Now try the same with an EEE PC or other ultra-light laptop. Odds are, MacBook Air wins.

Programmer's Paradise. Take a programmer who's used to a 23" Cinema Display. Give him a MacBook Air. Can he still work productively on it? Since most programmers like the big screens he will probably run screaming back to his MacBook Pro, but we don't know until we do the test. Suggest he try out Spaces. Does that help balance out the need for the big screen? I'm going to predict a MacBook Air loss here, but since that would only be expected it's OK.

On the beach. We have a spiffy OLED display. How good is it when you want to go out on your patio with the sun glaring everywhere, or on the beach? Ten out of ten for style by trying, but can you really work there? Does the glossy display reflect too much? Is it bright enough so you can still read it? I really don't know what the results of this test would be. I think it's worth a try.

Note how few of those real-world tests reflect any need for an optical drive, more memory or a faster processor. It wasn't too long ago that a machine with almost identical computing power to MacBook Air was a mainstream video editing system. I don't think I'd edit anything but the most minimal projects on it - that 4200 rpm disk drive is bound to hurt - but for anything but video I don't think anyone would notice performance deficits between this and another system.

In short, it really seems that those obsessive over performance are barking up the wrong tree when it comes to this machine. There are times when I would truly love to have such a thing, and if I was in the proper demographic for the machine, it costs about the same as one tourist class ticket to Asia -- not bad at all.

D

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It's not exactly what I wanted, but I think a lot of people will really love the MacBook Air. It's the perfect computer for all those people who miss the old 12" PowerBook, and at a very similar price point.

It has a similar keyboard, a much better screen, and is much thinner and lighter.

I liked the feature that lets you use one of your other computers to read CDs/DVDs instead of having to buy a separate CD/DVD drive exclusively for the Air.

This was an interesting keynote in that it was low key compared to last year's but had products that are genuinely useful, just not flashy. I'm really looking forward to seeing the Time Capsule WiFi router/hard drive combination. I think that would work very well for me next time I want to set up a new wireless network, and the price of the 1TB version is only about $100 more than a 1TB external drive. That's pretty aggressive pricing for Apple.

On the rare occasions when I view movies, I like to spread out viewing over a few days. I think they should have had true 30 day movie rentals; that would have been interesting to me. The "keep for 30 days but must view within 24 hours once started" seems expensive and a bad idea overall.

I'm glad I own an iPhone and not an iPod Touch. And that's all I'll say about that $20 iPod Touch update :-(.

D

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I have been thinking about the new device that may be introduced at Macworld. Let's try to bring a few strands of thought together.

First, when browsing with my laptop, I often want to pinch or unpinch something to make it bigger, as though I was using my iPhone. This means that technology is pretty powerful and appealing, and I'm sure Steve is very aware of this. Accordingly, the new device needs to have some kind of touch screen ability.

At the same time, the onscreeen keyboard is definitely iPhone's weak link. The main reason we might want a bigger device is so we can type. And yet all tablet designs I have seen that feature keyboards are incredibly awkward with their requirement that you flip the screen and hide the keyboard to use the tablet. When I used a Toshiba tablet, I felt that mechanism was flimsy and felt bad. I know that's something Steve would not tolerate.

Many people have asked why the new Bluetooth keyboard is so small. It's the size of a laptop keyboard and has a very compromised layout for a computer keyboard. Perhaps this keyboard has been designed as an accessory for a keyboardless tablet (and maybe even an iPhone). The new Apple tablet, then, would be a pure tablet with Bluetooth, and it would be designed to fit together with the Bluetooth keyboard.

This would enable a tablet that looked like a giant iPhone, and so would be completely optimized as a tablet. You could then optionally use the keyboard with it for heavy typing, or use an iPhone-style onscreen keyboard if you didn't want to drag the keyboard along with you.

Sometimes you want to do heavy keyboarding and then it would be nice to have the display at an angle. I think Apple or third parties could design a stand that would do this. You could then use the bluetooth keyboard and mouse on a table.

So what about use on an airplane? First, with the limited space you have in a tourist class cabin, it might be better to just use the device as a tablet most of the time. Whenever I try to use my PowerBook on a plane, it's difficult to do whenever the seat in front of me is reclined. If I could put my Bluetooth keyboard on my lap, have a small stand that tilted the tablet towards me, and used the tablet itself as a mouse, that might actually be a much better form factor for planes than our existing laptop designs.

This is the kind of design that I think Apple could come up with that would be radical enough to be revolutionary and practical enough to work in everyday life.

We'll know whether I'm right in about a day as I write this ...

D

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