This is the first Apple keynote in awhile that frankly leaves me a little disappointed. It's not the whiz-bang kind of things I was hoping for exactly, and the big one is priced all wrong.
The first thing was the Time Capsule, which is just an Airport Extreme with a built-in hard drive. The intention is to turn on support for Time Machine to the remote drive. If they'd simply turn that on for existing Airports (which can act as a host for USB drives), that would be adequate.
The iPhone upgrade is very much an evolutionary thing. Neat features for sure, but man, I still wish they'd do MMS. I found it odd that they're charging $20 for iPod Touch owners to upgrade with the apps we already have on the phone.
Online movie rentals are long overdue, and I have to wonder if that was the original intention for the Apple TV. My guess is that the R&D on Apple TV was done, and they were like, oh shit, we haven't roped in any movies studios to do this yet. $5 for an HD rental I can have right now is, frankly, worth the convenience and not that much more expensive than Netflix considering my average use of it. It's cool that you can use the rental on your iPod, iPhone, computer or whatever. Thank God the software update for Apple TV is free. And $229 for the one with the smaller hard drive is a pretty good deal.
The MacBook Air is the big announcement, and at $1800, I think that's a fairly reasonable price. If I traveled more and did less development work on my laptop, I'd probably buy it in a heartbeat. However, the two things that suck are the the two natural upgrades and their prices. To go from a 1.6 GHz to 1.8 GHz CPU is $300. If you want to go to the solid state drive instead of the mechanical one, they want an extra grand! That puts the ideal configuration at $3,100, and that's insane. I'll have to wait to see one in real life, but I can't imagine those little iPod hard drives are going to be very fast on a laptop.
I'm still hoping for a refresh of the MacBook Pros, and perhaps some improvement to the Cinema Displays, but I suppose those aren't in the cards for now. For now I get the free software updates for the phone and for the Apple TV.
Apple has to charge money for upgrades on their iPod Touch because of some new law. Since the iPod Touch is not bound to a subscription service like the iPhone is to AT&T they have to charge. I don't know why it has to be so much though, they could have just made it 5 dollars or so.
The highest priced version is $3100. As much as I use a drive, it really isn't necessary when you can use a friends drive.
What doesn't impress me about the Air is the size. Shaving the thickness is impressive but doesn't help in the grand scheme. They should have went back to something similar to the old Powerbooks with a 12" screen.