contemplativeThe Giants won Super Bowl XLII. How about that?
And Apple just came out with a computer that I keep unknowingly calling “Apple Air,” because I like the two capital As. I got the news from PvP.
The way things stand right now, not having an optical drive is going to cause some people problems. I suppressed a cynical laugh when Steve Jobs said that nowadays people can rent movies wirelessly from Apple; but why pay for that when you can get them from the library for free, in a higher definition, and with all the special features and doodads that downloaded movies lack? Also, people do still listen to music CDs – not everyone has mini-plug inputs in their cars to accommodate an MP3 player, and that’s just for starters.
All that said, I made similar pronouncements when the original iMac was released a decade ago. It lacked a floppy drive, and at that time I was using floppies every day. Scratch that, I mean hourly. I did everything on 3.5-inch “floppies,” and with online e-mail being what it was at the time and USB keys being unknown (and the ports for them being scarce), floppies were the only reliable way for me to move data. (I can even remembering spanning ZIP files to carry multi-megabyte files over multiple discs. I’m glad those days are over.)
“Oh, but it had an optical drive!” you say. Oh sure, it did – but how were you going to get stuff off of that computer? The first recordable drive for the model, a CD-RW, came out in 2001. By then you could e-mail stuff to yourself reliably, and the iMac itself was being overshadowed by the PowerMac G4 and a bunch of other stuff in the pipeline, and a G4 iMac came out in 2002, presumably with a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive at the entry level.
Still, this Apple Air, sans optical drive, is the kind of computer that I’ll probably need to get someday, in conjunction with a home server for storing photos and working with video. I’ll forget about storing large files on the Air, because I’ll definitely be getting one with a 64GB solid-state drive… a few years from now when doing so doesn’t add $1,024 to the price! (And if you really need an optical drive, a slim and elegant USB-powered unit is available for just $99.)
Maybe I’ll just send myself back to university instead and continue buying electronic items on the soap scum that’s left over after the bathtub of tuition has been drained.