Tomorrow is MacWorld and time for another Steve Jobs Keynote. I will be on a plane during the actual keynote, so I will miss out from the constant refreshing of five different rumor sites, the Twitter dialog and the endless post-keynote wrap ups and excitement. While I’m excited to see what gets announced but have fairly low expectations. Last years announcement of the iPhone was pretty damn big and will be hard to top. And having been present at the last big keynote, I tell you, it is hard to go back to being excited about refreshing a web page. The big rumor this year is an ultra-portable laptop. Wired chimed in with the rendering above and it seems pretty clear that a new ultra-portable will be named MacBook Air based on new domain acquisitions. I’m pretty confident that the ultra-portable will be announced tomorrow, or very soon. I actually heard about an ultra-portable laptop being in the works back in October when a (non-Apple) friend of mine supposedly sighted one on the Apple campus. If true, it is bound to create some controversy. A laptop without an optical drive, opting for flash memory instead of a hard drive and no ethernet port, is bound to cause many to über geeks to complain about what you get for the price tag. But I won’t be surprised if Apple is able to reinvent the ultra-portable in some way or another. While we can’t imagine it now, but in less than 12 hours I’m sure we will know of features that will make us ponder how we got through life without it. Whatever it is, I will want one. I need to have a laptop, but after three years of having my laptop be my primary computer I’ve come the realization that laptops make poor replacements for desktops. I’ve had three in as many years and each time I’ve had to constantly manage my hard drive space, hit performance walls and seem to have added more clutter in my life (more burned backup DVD’s, more USB cables then I know what to do with, external drives, keyboards, mice, etc). Not to mention that each one of them got beat up pretty quickly. Dropping some serious coin on beautiful technology only to have it scratched, cracked and worn isn’t very much fun. So my new philosophy is invest as little into a laptop as possible. Keep it super portable, something mostly aimed at travel and being able to work a little while from the office. But keep the heavy lifting for the desktops, which are ridiculously cheap, pack a ton of power and can take the beating of constant use for years. But like all Stevenotes, we will see what happens tomorrow. They never cease to amaze.

Tomorrow is MacWorld and time for another Steve Jobs Keynote. I will be on a plane during the actual keynote, so I will miss out from the constant refreshing of five different rumor sites, the Twitter dialog and the endless post-keynote wrap ups and excitement. While I’m excited to see what gets announced but have fairly low expectations. Last years announcement of the iPhone was pretty damn big and will be hard to top. And having been present at the last big keynote, I tell you, it is hard to go back to being excited about refreshing a web page.

The big rumor this year is an ultra-portable laptop. Wired chimed in with the rendering above and it seems pretty clear that a new ultra-portable will be named MacBook Air based on new domain acquisitions. I’m pretty confident that the ultra-portable will be announced tomorrow, or very soon. I actually heard about an ultra-portable laptop being in the works back in October when a (non-Apple) friend of mine supposedly sighted one on the Apple campus.

If true, it is bound to create some controversy. A laptop without an optical drive, opting for flash memory instead of a hard drive and no ethernet port, is bound to cause many to über geeks to complain about what you get for the price tag. But I won’t be surprised if Apple is able to reinvent the ultra-portable in some way or another. While we can’t imagine it now, but in less than 12 hours I’m sure we will know of features that will make us ponder how we got through life without it.

Whatever it is, I will want one. I need to have a laptop, but after three years of having my laptop be my primary computer I’ve come the realization that laptops make poor replacements for desktops. I’ve had three in as many years and each time I’ve had to constantly manage my hard drive space, hit performance walls and seem to have added more clutter in my life (more burned backup DVD’s, more USB cables then I know what to do with, external drives, keyboards, mice, etc). Not to mention that each one of them got beat up pretty quickly. Dropping some serious coin on beautiful technology only to have it scratched, cracked and worn isn’t very much fun.

So my new philosophy is invest as little into a laptop as possible. Keep it super portable, something mostly aimed at travel and being able to work a little while from the office. But keep the heavy lifting for the desktops, which are ridiculously cheap, pack a ton of power and can take the beating of constant use for years.

But like all Stevenotes, we will see what happens tomorrow. They never cease to amaze.

Notes

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