1. MacBook Air It sure is purdy, the ‘Remote Disc’ feature is brilliant, and so is the multitouch trackpad. I’m not bothered by the fact that it has hardly any ports, or that you have to send it back when the battery dies, either. But in all the fuss about its pretty, skinny ways, no one seems to have noticed that it’s still really quite big, bigger than a MacBook in terms of its footprint, in fact. So while it’s more portable by virtue of its low weight, it’s still an unwieldy great thing (unlike a certain dinky little computer of which I am not unfond). Oh, and it’s preposterously expensive. Will doubtless sell like meth in a trailer park.

2. iPhone 1.1.3 Showing off the exciting new capability to send texts to multiple recipients is fucking embarrassing, no? Still, with the iPhone taking such spectacular strides towards actually working as a proper ‘phone, and the SDK coming next month, I’m edging closer to maybe thinking about considering buying one when my current contract runs out. (Can you tell I’ve never had a proper go on one?)

3. Movie Rentals/Apple TV Upgrade I couldn’t even muster the energy to stifle a yawn during this announcement.

4. Time Capsule To awkwardly paraphrase Prince, it’s the dream we all dream of, computers plus device in the World Series of wireless backups! Sod a laptop that’s a bit thinner than other laptops, this is the real deal: hugely useful and reasonably priced. I’d be pre-ordering one right now if I hadn’t bought a 1TB external drive the day Leopard came out, due to getting all giddy about Time Machine. It could do with some clever .Mac integration though, for your really important files—those slickly automated backups wont be much use if your Time Capsule melts in a house fire.

In summary: Time Capsule is as exciting as backup solutions get; everything else, rather less so.

Can we have a cheap and tiny sub-notebook next year, Steve?

So far, it’s set up to:

1. Work as a sort of Airport Extreme-equivalent, serving up my iTunes Library from an external drive.
2. Run Azureus, which is slurping down telly programmes as they appear in various RSS feeds, or controlled manually with this handy Dashboard widget.
3. Work as storage for automatic backups of important stuff on my new computer using rsyncx.

This is all rather boring and easy to achieve, but I can’t think of anything exciting and difficult to have a go at, which seems a waste of what is still a pretty powerful wee computer.

Any ideas?