What's with Apple punishing their early adopters? They are Apple's most ardent supporters, lining up hours if not days before a product release, paying full price and at times creating the artificial demand (iPhone) which garners even more free publicity for Apple. Yet they are treated like crap, e.g., the iPhone price-drop fiasco and now the $20 software upgrade demanded by Apple for the iPod Touch. Did Apple really need to make another $20 off each of their Touch early adapters?

Followed Jobs' keynote earlier today via MacRumorsLive and came away a bit disappointed. I'm glad I didn't fly out there to attend it in person. I had my MacWorld tickets all ready since last fall, thankfully my employer would've never given me the vacation time. Saved me the round trip airfare. I'm not a big Apple fan, the only Apple product I own is the Shuffle, but the rumors about a tablet caught my interest. I've been diligently following every Mac site since then and was totally let down today. At the end after Randy Newman's performance, Chewy and I were hoping Jobs would do his "and one more thing" bit, hopefully for the tablet... but nope.

The MacBook Air is a bit disappointing. Jobs boasted about the size. My Toshiba Portege 2000 from 2002 had similar dimensions. In fact, I think the thickest section of the Portege 2000 is still thinner than the thickest section of the new MacBook Air. In addition, the Portege had a ton more ports. Progress? Sure the Air has the LED back lit display, nice full keyboard that automatically illuminates, the integrated iSight and the multi-touch touchpad (still with one damn button), but what it doesn't have is the wow factor that is expected of Apple's products.

Now let's talk some design. Gizmodo has a great write up comparing Dieter Rams/Braun with Jonathan Ive/Apple. An impressive post given that it's not a design-driven site. Another sign that times are changing, design permeates through everything!

The MacBook Air has lines that remind me of the first generation iBook that came out in 1999. I had to use one at times during my D.A. shifts at Carnegie Mellon and they weren't pleasant experiences. I would have preferred that they kept the clean blocky lines with smooth corners from the existing MacBook lines, but they had to taper in the bottom half of the case to make it look thinner. It looks like a flying saucer.The mock up that circulated the web showed a screen that went right up to the edges, obviously that didn't come through. The MacBook Pros have screens that go almost up to the edge, leaving a small bezel, I'm assuming they couldn't get away with that because of the thickness of the screen here.

Leaving the optical drive out and including an option for the SSD drive, it's obvious Apple wants to move forward, but it's sort of doing so without really doing anything revolutionary. Snore. Let's hope the tablet PC is still in development and rather than dressing things up, it better be truly revolutionary. Still out of the Apple camp for now.

Labels: branding, design