• The extended downtime, delays at stores, temporary bricking (in many cases during all working hours of today) that seemed to affect the .mac → Mobile Me transition, the iPhone and iPod touch 2.0 firmware release, the iPhone 3G first day of sale at stores and the launch of the App Store altogether have made for negative press. The flak frankly seems deserved to me. Whether they ran into unexpected issues late in the development process, didn’t expect as much demand, or failed to deliver for some other reason, it simply sheds a terrible light on this launch day. Wasn’t one of the three major improvements summarized as “Enterprise support”? Don’t Enterprise™s typically want to, say, actually use their products?

  They could have launched Mobile Me next week, or the week before that. Could have launched the App Store some other time. Could have said “hey, we’re just not ready; let’s delay this just a little bit as to make for a smoother initial run”.

  This boils down to human error, and other companies would have suffered the same. But maybe they wouldn’t have applied the false pride of doing too many things at once.

• I reject the idea that the App Store should serve as a cream-of-the-crop selection of iPhone/iPod touch applications. How, then, would I retrieve applications Apple deems unworthy or subpar? Short of jailbreaking (and special, limited enterprise and ad hoc options), the App Store is the only source of apps, and it is censored enough as it is. It is thus that tweets demanding that Apple be the arbiter of quality not only annoy me; they concern me.

  I can sort-of accept the limitations Apple is imposing; they did provide a rationale, more or less (however, why make the DRM mandatory, rather than letting developers choose on their own?). I also hold that Apple tends to have rather good taste in their decisions, and this may very well translate to a rather good selection of third-party applications. But already, the arbitrariness of ‘arbiter’ is showing. Good app? Bad app? You don’t decide. The reviews don’t decide. Apple does, and some people outside the company actually seem to like it that way. Disturbing.

• To end this on a positive note: while I don’t have a chance to test them (and let’s not even start about how trials and beta tests are pretty much impossible in the App Store), I hear there are, indeed, some excellent apps out there already. This tempts me greatly to buy an iPhone, even when I have my doubts I’d actually use it to its full potential.

The browser download URLs, from 37signals’s announcement “Phasing out support for IE 6″:

1. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/ie/getitnow.mspx?wt_svl=10005WDH_OS_Other1&mg_id=10005WDHb1
2. http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
3. http://www.apple.com/safari/download/

As Denis says, you can pretty much type apple.com/<productname> and expect it to either work or at least redirect. Firefox’s URL isn’t too bad; Microsoft’s could use a lot of work. In fact, anything past the /ie/ is or should be completely redundant.

This isn’t just a minor nitpick. For one, it really shows which company’s culture emphasizes simplicity more. And, you can be sure which of the three is least likely to change after a re-design…

Erik rightly complains about the lack of a does-it-all AirPort base station from Apple.

Inexplicably, the AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule don’t offer AirTunes. This might make you think AirTunes as an idea has been quietly canned, but Apple recently added it to the Apple TV.

The AirPort Express isn’t 802.11n yet.

The Apple TV offers no bridging. Speaking of which, neither does a regular Mac OS X client. Windows XP Professional, on the other hand, did this just fine six years ago.

Given that AirTunes (not astonishingly) requires some form of audio-out port (ideally an analog and digital one, like on the AirPort Express), this isn’t a feature that could be added in software to the AirPort Extreme, nor to the Time Capsule. Why, though, has this not been added long ago, such as part of the switch to 802.11n and new design, over a year ago?

Similarly, adding 802.11n to the AirPort Express requires different hardware — fair enough.

But!

Allow the AppleTV to bridge via its ethernet port. [..] This should just be a software thing, right?

Exactly. Much like they’ve added AirTunes, they should add bridging.

Of course, just as I’m about to post this, Jesper has already put it more succinctly.

It’s out!

Erik posts his first impressions, as does Fraser.

Me?

Let’s review the wishlist.

Improved performance.

You betcha.

RAW import API.

No. And while RAW support keeps improving, Apple’s pace of updates still leaves much to be desired.

Adjustments API.

Yes! Bring on third-party noise reduction plug-ins.

Local editing.

Sooorta. There’s a “local contrast” feature I haven’t played around with yet, and the Retouch Brush (which looks quite powerful in the demo; haven’t tried) falls in the same category. It isn’t quite what I was hoping for, however.

HDRI.

Nope.

Customizable full-screen toolbar.

Nuh-uh.

A metadata HUD for full-screen mode.

Thanks to the new all-in-one HUD, yes!

Much better keyboard-based toggling between metadata input and UI keyboard shortcuts.

Much as I can tell, this hasn’t really improved. If anything, it’s gotten worse. With the Retouch HUD open, using two-finger scroll anywhere on the full-sized image won’t pan it — it’ll drag one of the HUD’s sliders instead. This makes for some really strange results.

Much more background processing, such as of exports.

Yes!

Admittedly, I haven’t actually played around with it much. I don’t have too many halfway recent photos to test it on anyway, and I also lack time — both to take them and to edit them. That said, many of my wishlist items were fulfilled, and the worry of quite a few people that Aperture was effectively dead has, as of today, been proven unfounded. The competition between Photoshop Lightroom and Aperture continues to be exciting to watch — even more so with the price having dropped again, from $499 to $299 to now $199.

And so, I look forward to the day I can go on a trip and take tons and tons meaningful photos, come home and import, organize, post-process and publish them.

First things first: no, I won’t be buying one. No, I certainly won’t be buying one this very hour either. It’s true that – like many, I might add – follow news about Apple very closely and in an almost addictive fashion, but I’ve never let that get in the way of actual purchase decisions; every product I’ve bought has been considered for several months. And as it is, right now, the MacBook Air isn’t even worth considering.

But the MBA¹ does have me intrigued. It represents a bit of a glimpse at the future; in that regard, it may very well be a little bit ahead of its time. And thus, the changes it represents as compared to a regular MacBook or MacBook Pro fall into four categories:

1. First, like so many things Apple, the function-follows-form one, where they let looks get too much in the way of functional design.

   E.g., the thing is so thin that, like an iPod and iPhone, it doesn’t have a replaceable battery any more. I can live with that; indeed, I’ve never once bought a secondary battery for any of the plenty of laptops I’ve owned or used for personal or business purposes. And when I have had to replace it, it was always a case of warranty that Apple (or the respective manufacturer) covered either way, so why should I care?

2. Second, the ones where their radicalness went just about far enough: no more optical drive. I don’t ever need it. Each time I buy a laptop, I find myself regretting the existence of an optical drive within, for it is easily the least-used component. Install software? Most stuff gets downloaded; the rest is on images on an external drive. Look at media from friends? Most stuff is on USB sticks or comes via e-mail; the rest I can do without.

3. Third, where they went a little bit too far, maybe: no more Ethernet. I love WiFi. But when I do have it, the routers are often flaky (not everyone has a Cisco, an Apple AirPort, or anything more worthy than D-Link), and when I don’t have it, the MBA would provide me with zero alternatives. Apple’s USB dongle? Nah. They need to provide WiMAX instead, and/or 3G (UMTS/HSDPA). Which brings us to:

4. Finally, where they didn’t quite go far enough, mostly for lack of opportunity. Solid-state storage is available as an option, but have you seen the BTO pricing? Seriously, have you had a look? Take a look again. That’s, literally, nine-hundred ninety nine dollars more for 64 GB of flash storage compared to an 80 GB hard drive instead. Oh, it’ll be fast. And dependable. And did I mention fast? But boy, is this technology ever not ready for mainstream yet.

And this, all together, is just great. I don’t mean that in a sarcastic sense; I am in fact quite serious: I’m not actually in the market for a laptop right now. I typically buy a new primary machine every three and a half to four years, which would put my hypothetical MacBook Air purchase around summer 2010, which gives Apple plenty of time to address some of my issues with it.

As much as I like FireWire’s design, I hardly use the technology in practice – the only type of device with it that I regularly do use, external hard drives, would benefit far more from eSATA instead, if only for added benefit of S.M.A.R.T. The same goes for other features that they cut: I don’t in fact use the optical audio. I don’t need a second USB port. And I never did buy something to insert into the ExpressCard slot. Conversely, what the MBA does have, I would use: having fallen in love with the two-finger gestures for scrolling, zooming and secondary clicking of my trackpad, I can’t wait to have a trackpad with even more advanced ones such as pinching.

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Once the solid-state drive is significantly more affordable, once it ships with WiMAX or 3G – preferably both – , and once other parameters have been improved upon as well (the resolution should be at least 1440×900; ideally a lot more), this will be a real winner. But right now, and I don’t think Apple intended it any other way, the MacBook Air is destined as an early-adopter product – much in the same way the initial iPod and iPhone were.

1. With apologies to Blake Seely. ↩