MacBook Air is in the building...

Less than 24 hours from ordering to doorstep delivery! Many thanks to Leon Walsh from GBM Digital in Manchester for the personal service. Yes, the MacBook Air has arrived and I've created the ceremonial unboxing photo set if you're that way inclined :-) You can check out the photos here: MacBook Air Unboxing Gallery Initial thoughts:

• Damm, Apple really know how to package something
• Yes, it's light, really, really light
• It feels very solid

What, you want me to switch it on? OK I'll probably not be able to post a full report until Monday, probably Tuesday due to some family commitments over the weekend. So check back or even better, subscribe to the RSS feed.

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Resistance is Futile....

Ever since Macworld, I've started to harbour a strange desire for a MacBook Air.

It's taken a while and it wasn't the immediate knee jerk reaction that sometimes occurs when Apple release a new product. No, I thought it was a great machine, but a little bit too expensive for me. I was in the mind set to upgrade my 1st Gen MacBook Pro but knew that the new MacBook Pros would be along soon. So I waited..... Then I started to re-evaluate what I needed my existing MacBookPro for. It's a 17" and the original thought process was that the beast would be my portable Video editing machine. I needed that huge screen for FCP and some raw horsepower to encode that video when on the road. In the two years I've had the machine, I must have done this, ooh. let me see... a total of three times! So I need a 17" MacBook Pro for working when not tied to my desk. You know, such processor intensive tasks such as answering emails in front of the TV, answering emails when in hotel rooms, browsing the web, reading RSS feeds, writing blog posts...... Hmm, not really very processor intensive stuff really. And then there's the weight and the heat! It's impossible to use the MacBook Pro as a proper laptop as I need some thermal protection between it and my lap. Plus it's very unwieldy, it's a great desktop replacement but not very portable really. Then I started to read some blog posts and see repetitive twitter posts.. After consistent MacBook Air usage since it shipped, I now feel comfortable calling it the best notebook I have ever owned. - Dan Pourhadi - Twitter I agree, and I've owned everything back to the old Mac Portable (which wasn't). The MBA is one sweet machine Steve Sande Twitter The MacBook Air: What a Laptop Should Be - Kirk McElhearn Blog Everyone I meet who has a MacBook Air loves them Scoble Blog MacBook Air Haters: S**k My D**k (Ahem!) Wil Shipley Blog MacBook Air: Rambling First Impressions (PG!) Wil Shipley Blog MacBook Air early review: GAME CHANGING! Jason Calacanis Blog Need I go on...There's plenty more rave reviews if you need them! And so the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros were released this week and although good in every way, nothing really that caused me to whip out the credit card and replace my existing beast. I toyed with the idea of selling the 17" MacBook Pro and getting a new 15" MacBook Pro for portability but you know....... I really want a MacBook Air and it would fit the bill of portability, lightness, coolness (in heat terms!) and plenty enough horsepower to do what I need to do with a laptop - just basic computing. So with that m'lud, I rest my case and complete the self-justification for the fool-hardy action of ordering a new MacBook Air this afternoon. I'll keep you posted on my findings! PS In case you think I've recently won the lottery or something as I've only just got my Mac Pro, well no! They're both business expenses and investments for the future of ScreenCastsOnline (or something like that!) I fully expect these machines to pay for themselves over the next few years - mind you, the Mac Pro feels like it's paid for itself already with the time I've saved in encoding - magic!

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No Macbook Air but.....

Back from Macworld Expo 2008 and still feeling the effects of the jet lag. Good to be home! As your probably aware if you've been following my blog, I've been waiting and waiting for Apple to release an update to the Mac Pro as my existing dual G5 system just wasn't cutting it for me. With the show, I do a lot of HD resolution video editing and video encoding and frequently get bogged down in post production work. So I've been planning to upgrade my production kit to at least a quad Intel machine. With the advent of the new 8 core machines, it was a done deal! But then of course, the new machines were released the week before Macworld! So I had to wait until after Macworld to take the plunge....just in case! Luckily, the updates to the Apple TV and the iPhone didn't cost me any cash and although the Macbook Air is a lovely machine, it's priced just out of what I would expect to pay for such a machine - and when you add the UK premium it's weighing in at £1200 GBP or $2338 USD. So with the decks cleared, the day after the keynote, I fired up the laptop and placed an online order for a new Mac Pro. For those that are interested, this is the spec I went for:

• Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
• 2GB (2x1GB)
• 2xATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB
• 500GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb
• One 16x SuperDrive
• AIRPORT EXTREME-INT
• APPLE MIGHTY MOUSE
• WIRELESS KEYBD/ OS X-GBR.
• Applecare

Rather than pay Apples rather high price for memory and disks, I also ordered an extra 8GB RAM from OWC and another 3x500GB drives from eBuyer. Thanks to Apples Developer Connection, whereby members get a hardware discount to help pay for development kit, the cost of the base unit was extremely reasonable. So I placed the order and was given an estimated delivery time of 27th January. Much to my delight, the Mac Pro has arrived a week early and I'm in the process of configuring everything (except for the extra RAM which hasn't shown up yet). The obligatory un-boxing photos are here if you're that way inclined! Initial experiences are amazing with the machine feeling super responsive in virtually everything I do! I've created a three disk RAID 0 volume giving me 1.36TB of drive space and the throughput is 290MB per second! I'll get more of a feel as I start to install more applications and put it through its paces when video encoding. But suffice to say, I'm pleased as punch and looking forward to generating more content, more quickly with this beast of a machine. The only problem is after using it for less than half a day, I can't really see myself using the Macbook Pro very much now. I wonder how much I'd get for it on eBay and then perhaps that Macbook Air..........

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The big news at CES.....

erm.... Did I miss something? Some monitors (mind you that curved one looks nice!), some iPod speakers, some TV's, some more TV's, some projectors, some PCs, some more TV's, some digital picture frames, some laptops, some more TV's..... Streuth!

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FON Update

You may remember I did a post a couple of weeks ago about the FON wi-fi sharing scheme. The FON router has arrived but I've not had much chance to play with it yet. It looks like it has piqued Apples interest too (I wonder if he reads this blog ;-)) and MacWorld are reporting that Steve Jobs has had a meeting with the FON top man. I wonder if we'll see FON functionality built into the Airport Extreme anytime soon!

Technorati Tags: Apple, FON, Steve Jobs

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