In Steve we trust — maybe

During my search through cyberspace to find the best live reports on Steve Jobs’s keynote speech at Macworld yesterday, I came across an ad that had the caption “In Steve we trust”. Very funny. See it on the Popular Mechanics website.

It’s entertaining writing about Apple and possibly even — dare one? — mentioning something negative about the company. The many folk who explicitly trust in Steve tend to get quite irate and often leave a heavy footprint in the sand of the blogosphere.

But back to yesterday’s Macworld happening. From a marketing perspective it is incredible how Apple does it. Who else can boast this kind of media attention at a product launch? The baying crowd that includes dealers, developers, customers, techie journalists and anybody else who manages to get a ticket is waiting with bated breath for a sales presentation. Huh?

So what was the main focus? Steve’s new baby? And it really looked as if he was presenting a new offspring the way he held the new thin laptop up for everybody to admire, sporting a very proud paternal smile.

It’s supposed to be the thinnest laptop in the world now. It probably is. But would one want to rush out and buy one of these at a nifty little price tag of £1 199 plus the cost of an external optical drive, which you’ll need as the Air doesn’t come with one installed? With additional extras, the price can move up to twice as much.

Besides its ridiculously and sexy thin look, it is also fairly light without losing anything to power and usability. I especially love the larger trackpad and could imagine that eventually becoming a much larger surface — along the lines of a keyboard morphing with a Wacom tablet. What an idea.

What does amuse me is how Apple, and in this case Steve Jobs, is able to present a product as the ultimate gadget and at the same time gloss over some fairly big issues. For me the lack of an optical drive is quite a big issue. But Jobs says that because one can take stuff off other computers so easily, or download off the internet, this isn’t an issue at all.

Well, one would have to have other computers around first or a decent broadband connection. That or an external drive. But then Apple also took away the floppy disk drive and gave the customer USB slots in the keyboard, way before the consumer was ready to part company with those disks! I can’t remember which machine that was, but I seem to remember it was the first iMac.

It also seems that the new Air doesn’t allow one to replace the battery. Most serious Mac users tend to carry a spare battery around with them for eventualities such as long flights, delays at airports, working on trains and so forth. That could be a major problem.

Of course the other news such as cheap movie rental was also welcome. It will, of course, depend on how quickly the movie downloads. For countries without decent broadband, the video store down the road will still be an important shop for home entertainment.

It must have been difficult to launch a new range of gadgets as well as additional features to old gadgets that could compete with the launch of the iPhone from the previous year. I’m not sure whether Steve Jobs managed to pull that one off with the new MacBook Air.

But then it doesn’t really matter. The annual Macworld keynote is always a welcome diversion. And to quote the journalist Glenn Derene, writing for Popular Mechanics during the presentation: “My friend next to me says that this is the closest thing tech journalists have to a fashion show.” Exactly.