That's too funny, Michael. Jerame just finished telling me about these and showed me the video on his computer. So you're a Mac geek too?

I am most definitely one of the Mac obsessed. If I can help it, I will never touch another PC again.

If Reese Witherspoon wants me to stop stalking her man Jake, she will have a Macbook Air shipped to me as soon as they are available.

I'm sorry but... it's not about being obsessed.

it is more than obsession.

the first time I touched an iPhone, I was dazed and amazed.

Mac's are a non-issue in our house. My wife is a composer. music-creativity= mac.

our children are being raised to scorn PC's as mindless necessities.

I was just upgraded to a MacBook Pro with the glossy screen.

oooooooo.

I'll give up outing jodie foster if she sends me one...

oh, great, my son just saw the ad as I was playing it.

you are getting that, right mom?

no no no...

I've used Macs before, i could never get use to the "do it our way or not at all" theme the mac US presents. Granted you have to know what sites to stay away from and get use to having an anti-virus program to update. However as Apple gains market share Apple is also gaining viruses and malware. Both systems are more or less secure these days.

These days sense both macs and PC's use the same hardware, it's ether about looks or gaming performance. Otherwise they preform more or less the same.

Take care
Sue

Sue?

you will go to PC hell for that comment.

with no fabulous graphics, sound design and lugging your giant PC laptop.

we'll wave. promise.

Sue,

I will pray that you see the Apple light.

Hi Sarah..

I have three computers two of them i built myself along with building my roommate's computer...
The big deal with PC's is choice....

I have to admit my computer is getting old...
I built this one in 2001 gave it a makeover (new case and water cooling) about 10 months ago.
The other computer i built just records TV programs for me. The one i didn't build handles all the networking for the house. (peace of junk E-Machines built in China.)

Take care
Sue

That is not likely to happen Michael...
I enjoy online gaming and the Good First Person
Shooters don't run very well on a mac sorry.

I can do video editing on my PC and when it breaks (it actually did once) i can fix it since i built it. :)

I laughed. I cried. I tried to figure out what or who I could sell in order to get one sooner.

Gaming performance on the Mac is hindered by one thing - DirectX. The fact that most games are coded for the PC and then ported to Macs with virtually no optimizations is the problem with performance, not Macs or the Mac OS. Hell, EA is now just wrapping their games with a stripped down version of Windows rather than actually write their games cross platform or port to Mac.

It's not the Mac's fault that gaming sucks. So many companies have invested in Direct X as the default game coding scheme that it's nearly impossible to find games NOT coded for Direct X. Since Direct X is only Windows, there is no way to easily port to Mac without rewriting the whole game.

The simple solution is to use OpenGL, which is cross platform and full supported on Mac. Problem is, Direct X has been around longer and has more coders familiar with it.

The truth is, if you run Windows on any Mac hardware (which is possible since the transition to Intel) it runs better. PC Magazine called the Apple MacBook Pro the fastest Windows laptop available. Now they just put out an 8 processor desktop that can handle two graphics processors and drive four 30-inch displays.

Can you seriously say that an 8 core Mac with 32GB of RAM and two top of the line ATI or NVIDIA cards isn't going to kick ass regardless of which OS it's using, well, I'm sorry that's just crazy nuts.

I've never met a Mac I can't fix. Funny thing is, they usually don't break as often as PCs. You won't find many laptops that are easily serviceable regardless of who makes them, so it's really a moot point in terms of the MacBook Air. However, the Mac Pro desktop is very very easy to service. Replacing anything on the Mac Pro requires no tools at all. All the internals are industry standard connections, so swapping out parts with ones bought off the shelf is pretty easy. The ONLY exception to that is graphics cards.

Choice isn't always better. You usually get what you pay for when you buy cheap PC components. Paying for comparably priced quality PC equipment, the Mac meets or beats them in price.

I deal with PCs every day in my job. Most of them are junk, people who use them hate them, and rarely do you find someone who enjoys their PC enough to declare it to others. Mac users tell others how great their computers are, how happy they are to have it, and usually some form of "you'll pry it from my cold dead hands".

I don't think this laptop is for me. I prefer power and speed over light weight and small size. I have a 17 inch MacBook Pro, so I'm used to lugging around 6 or 7 lbs. Doesn't bother usually. I think it looks like a decent mid-tier machine for Apple, but I'm not really stoked about it.

The multi-touch trackpad is nice - but I can't imagine it being a must have. I like the look of the keyboard, though. Nice touch with the black and backlit.

I'm much more excited about the new iPhone update. By far my favorite new feature is the rearrangeable home screen. The "wiggly" icons just makes me giggle every time I see them.

I'm also pretty happy that the Apple TV has come down to $229 and seems better. But I'm really pissed off about the new "Time Capsule" product. I bought the new 802.11n Airport because they promised it would work with Time Machine and an external hard drive. It doesn't. After nearly a year it still doesn't work and they have the audacity to come out with a new product rather than fix the one I bought on their word it would work.

Now I'm rambling. Thought it was a so-so Macworld overall.

You know, as soon as I saw the top of comment #11 and then noticed it took up the whole screen, I thought "That's my baby."

Yup. Jerame.

Ya'll thought you were obsessed. They have no idea, do they Bruce? LOL They've never met Jerame.

oooohhh.. the macbook air looks SO tasty. Jeez I wish Steve Jobs would wait long enough for me to save up money before the next goodie comes out. I can't keep up. You'll take my mac when you pry it from my cold dead...

Anyone want to buy my old, out-of-date MacBook??

Jerame, you are among friends.. I even have a mac sticker on my car.

Hi Jerame

Apple doesn't offer the high-end hardware needed for gaming.
YOU can’t get the high performance SLI video cards that have been available for PC’s for some time now.
Direct X is not the issue as most games that require the higher end hardware are also written to work with OpenGL.

Sadly most people do buy junk for PC's, this is an education issue one that can be solved with a 30-minute tutorial.

PC laptops are easy to work on these days for someone with a few years of experience working as an electronics tech.

Choice is always good we are better people when we are informed and can take advantage of that choice. Apple’s ideology has always been to limit choices and in exchange offer something that looks pleasing to the eye even if it is not the best toolset for the jobs at hand.

Junk is junk, we do need to remember Apple has built it's share of junk over the years The G-4 Cube for example.
Goes to show that a good-looking box is not necessarily engineered in a sound manner.

Thankfully I don't run Vista (and won't on any hardware i own) There are other operating systems for the PC platform XP is a mature, stable and secure operating system. Vista on the other hand is bloated and has large file handling issues.

You brought up the I-phone as a phone it requires complete attention to operate. A touch screen phone requires you to look at and focus on the phone in order to dial a new number. Sure it looks nice but with a touch screen and no revisable autocomplete in text mode it’s usefulness as a phone is limited to just so much bling and expensive bling at that. Not to mention Apple hits you with a $70.00 charge to replace what would be otherwise a user replaceable batter. I don’t need to look at a phone to dial it and I can replace a battery. The only reason to have an I-phone is to be seen with one, and I guess that is fine for some people.

I tunes that is another subject for another time……
I will just leave you with one word on that subject
Bloated and resource hungry.

Take Care
Sue

LMAO, Sue.

You sound like the typical PC hack who trashes on Macs, but doesn't really know what they're talking about. My original comment clearly said graphics cards were the exception. That's only a driver issue at this point, though. Not a hardware issue. Macs have all the latest and greatest buses PCI-e, etc. It has one of the fastest main bus speeds in the new Mac Pro of any desktop ever made. It could handle the SLI cards if someone would just write a driver for it. That's just a matter of time, though as ATI and NVidia want to sell those cards.

Laptops are still inherently more difficult to service. Try taking apart a Sony if you want to see over-engineered, impossibly complex internals.

The issue is STILL Direct X as most games are written in Direct X and not Open GL...The cards support it because they are just languages. Still, if no one writes games in OpenGL, the ports REQUIRE a rewrite or a wrapper to map to OpenGL. Either way, you don't get the optimizations and you don't get a game that's designed FOR OpenGL. It's pretty simple to figure out really. Direct X is the 800 lb gorilla in PC gaming. OpenGL is a bit player. MS won't license Direct X to Apple. You do the math.

The G4 Cube's high service rate was mostly the acrylic cracking and not actual hardware failure. I agree it was a flop and that Apple has put out plenty of flops. I think this MacBook Air will be a dud in the end, but that doesn't mean that Apple doesn't generally build quality machines.

Vista is crap, for sure, but saying XP is secure is laughable. XP will never be secure as it is by nature an insecure OS. Until they change it to REQUIRE a password for all accounts, it will never be secure. And that's just the most glaringly obvious flaw with XP.

As for the iPhone, clearly you've never used one and have no clue what the policy for battery replacement is. Yeah, it's $70 for a battery, but it's a FREE install. The ONLY downside is having to send it off for service. I admit, that's a bummer, but I said the same about the Air. They don't hit you with a service charge and there are 3rd party vendors who will be selling replacement batteries and even doing the work for you if you want. Same thing happened with every iPod - there is a thriving aftermarket batter and upgrade market for iPods.

iTunes for Windows is certainly crap, but on a Mac it runs great. There isn't nearly the overhead, but iTunes is designed for Macs. Doesn't it suck when an app is designed and optimized for one platform and then gets ported to the other without the optimizations and such it gets on its home OS? Sounds just like the problem with the game industry only in reverse.

Sue, you seem to always have an opinion that is quite ill-advised. Maybe you should look into things more before you start running off about them in comment threads.

I couldn't resist adding to this thread about Macs.

I've been a Mac user since the first Macintosh 128k computer was introduced in the early '80s. I luckily avoided MSDOS by pure chance in 1981 when I went down to IBN's offices, then in the Hyatt building downtown, and they told me the IBM desktop computers (PC's, or personal computers) which they'd been advertising were not going to be available for a week more. I was 30 years old and wanted a computer for my business and didn't want to wait, so I bought a Tandy running TRSDOS. Ultimately Tandy came out with their Xenix OS which allowed us to have dumb terminals throughout our offices, which was big deal back in the early '80s. We got rid of the expensive IBM typewriters and all the hassles of carbon paper forms -- seems like only yesterday. I'm an excellent typist and was able to become very efficient with TRSDOS. But, line command computer operation was painful and, when I saw the first Mac, I fell in love immediately. Even though it was very slow, underpowered and had almost no RAM or HD space, it was a huge breakthrough in productivity. By the end of the '80s I'd switched all our computers to the then more powerful Macs, and only used the Xenix OS on the Tandy to run our custom databases. (By 1989 I'd given all our Tandy computers to a gay newspaper in Southern California -- and the owner gave me a timeshare in Cancun. :0) -- and moved all our computing to the Macintosh.)

Over the years I've owned nearly every computer model Apple has sold. For twenty years or more I attended every Mac convention in San Francisco (and Boston for a few years) where I'd visit vendors of hardware and software for the Mac. It was more exciting for me than the CES in Vegas.

I've run several successful businesses using only Macs, including an award-winning LGBT newspaper (the most broadly distributed LGBT paper in the Midwest, ever, and the only LGBT newspaper in the country to ever be cited by members of Congress), along with various manufacturing and distribution companies. We ran Pagemaker in those days for the design and layout of the paper, and MS Office, which was long the standard for word processing and spreadsheet software, so we were fully compatible with the Windoze community. But we were substantially more productive than the Windoze platform-users, and where they spent much money on training and IT support, and had to deal with viruses and constant crashes, we paid for little or no IT support, rarely had a crash, and were never threatened with viruses. But the best part was the substantial productivity advantages we enjoyed with Macs. The only Windoze computers I had in any business were needed to run an engineering program when I owned a machinery manufacturing company for about 15 years, and then again over the past couple of years to run UPS software. But, since last year when we bought our first Intel Macs, we've been running Windoze XP (Vista doesn't work with UPS, and it's very clunky) on our Macs. I use Windoze on my personal Macs just to be able to see and listen through remote security cameras at a couple of buildings; I can access the cams with my browser, but if I want to listen to what's going on, I have to have Active X, which is only on Windoze (Sorry for the use of "doze", but anyone who has ever used a Mac knows the sheer exhilaration of the productivity of a Mac, vs using a clunky Windoze program.)

Until the iPod came along a few years ago, I'd always get either laughs or 'know-it-all' comments about how Macs are "only good for graphic design". But once the iPod became the fastest selling MP3 player in the world, people began coming to Apple Stores, or going to their website, where they were exposed to the Macs. As a result, the Macintosh has been the fastest selling computer brand in the world lately, and their market share has been steadily growing. Once people switch, they become evangelists to their Windoze-using friends.

And, of course, since the iPhone came out on June 29th, and became the fastest selling cell phone in history, even more people have become Mac fans. BTW, the iPhone truly does change people's lives. I was just in Santiago, Buenos Aires, Ushuaia, Iguazu and on an expedition ship in the Antarctic (which ran into a glacier, and which btw had more Macs on board than PC's) -- and everywhere I went, when I pulled out my iPhone, heads would turn. A customs official in Uruguay even stopped me as my phone passed through the scanner and delayed me to talk to me about my iPhone, asking to see how it worked and to be allowed to hold it and play with it himself. People I've encountered who were iPhone-users almost universally use the term "changed my life", which is what happened to me from the moment I bought it at the Apple Store at Keystone at the Xing on June 29th. And, Michael, I just updated iTunes when I got home from Buneos Aires this morning, and downloaded the new iPhone software. If you haven't done it yet, I urge you to go for it. VERY cool new features! Plus, Apple has seeded some heavy software folks with the new SDK for the iPhone -- get ready for some hot new iPhone software. (Check out the new ability to locate yourself on Google maps, and then to quickly get directions to/from anywhere else! And the new ability to add custom buttons to the home page on the iPhone, and to add additional pages -- you can add Bilerico's blog as a custom button. VERY hot!)

BTW, iTunes is the most installed software on PC's, other than the Windoze platform itself -- and it does not require Windoze to run.

Of course, now, with the new Mac Air, an almost lighter-than-air Mac laptop -- people will flock to the stores or to their site to get their hands on one. I'll be at the front of the line, along with Michael Crawford!