There’s no doubt that Apple manage to create a dramatic stir with product announcements, and it is always thrilling to watch the news articles roll in during a MacWorld Keynote. The MacBook Air was undoubtedly the most exciting announcement yesterday, with some expected features and some not so expected. The main question in my mind is who the laptop is aimed at, and who’s likely to buy it.

No optical drive?

At present, there are three ways to get music on your laptop - legal (downloading via iTunes), more or less legal (ripping from CD’s), and completely illegal (downloading from Bit-Torrent or elsewhere). Apple have more or less taken the middle ground out of the equation yesterday in the MacBook Air. People moving to Mac for the first time, planning on ripping their library of CD’s into iTunes to use on their iPod/Apple TV etc are going to be a bit stuck!

£1,199

That’s just ridiculous. Really. If Apple chose to equate the pricing to that of the USA, it should cost £900. That’s a perfect price point - smack between the MacBook and MacBook Pro. As it is, for £100 more than a MacBook Air you can get a base level MacBook Pro. For me, the decision would be a categorical no brainer. Whilst the thinness and weight of the MacBook Air is a huge bonus, it just doesn’t compare in any way to the power and features of one of their Pro laptops.

So, who will buy them?

First of all, I’m sure this laptop will be successful. Not on the scale of their existing notebooks, but certainly to some extent. I think the people who will fork over £1,200 will fall into two categories:

1) Business users, who need a second machine for traveling and working on the go. This is absolutely perfect, has great battery life, and will fit their needs to a tee.

2) People who just love style. Let’s face it, the laptop looks amazing. If you love being the centre of attention and crave others wanting to get their hands on your latest gadget this is perfect.

Much has been said about the recent “drama” around the iPhone price alterations. In case you are completely in the dark, Apple basically knocked $200 off the price of the iPhone, only a month or two after it was launched. This is certainly an unexpected move from Apple but something which isn’t all that unusual in the mobile phone market.

To me, it seems that Apple have found success well beyond what they anticipated in the iPhone. I’m sure they knew it would be a resounding success, but the sales figures must have been even greater than they predicted. They are now benefitting from much greater economies of scale, and are able to produce the phone at a cheaper price. Couple this with the introduction of the iPod Touch which will bring even greater economies of scale and Apple are looking at an excellent financial outlook for the life-cycle of these products.

The price drop will have come because Apple are simply in a position to do so. They’ll be producing the device cheaper than at the outset, and will have decided that it is worth the risk to reduce the price and aim for a higher market penetration with increased sales in the lead up to the Christmas period. This is an excellent business strategy, and is likely to pay off for them. I can see their market share increasing dramatically over the coming months, and no doubt Steve will be reporting as such at the next major Apple conference.

Now has never been a better time to look into buying an iPhone, and I really hope that these price reductions will spread across to Europe around the product launch. If it is introduced over here with a similarly excessive markup, we’ll need to make the difficult decision of whether to buy and be an early adopter, or wait for a similar price drop to the USA.

I’m very surprised at the decision of Apple to offer a $100 store voucher to all those who have purchased an iPhone so far, but feel that it’s a remarkably ethical move from the company. I feel that Sean Sperte summed this up well:

Consider the statement he made during the music event on Wednesday, that Apple is on track to sell their one-millionth IPhone this month. Now consider multiplying that number by 100. Let’s just say, for example, that Apple will be giving away 600,000 store credits in the amount of $100 each. That’s $60M worth of “sorry”, and plenty of “we owe you one”.

Think about that. What other company has ever come close to voluntarily giving that kind of money back to its customers? Apple truly is one of a kind.

They are indeed!

The Financial Times is reporting that O2 will be the carrier of the iPhone in the UK. It’s a debate which has been going on for an awfully long time now, and I would be very surprised if FT would go to press with something they weren’t more or less 100% certain about.

I’m fairly indifferent with O2 being awarded the contract. I’ve had both good and bad experiences with them as a customer, but spent some time doing work experience with them a year or two ago and was impressed with how the organisation is managed internally.

The main thing I’m keeping my fingers crossed for is a data and call package which relates to the one offered in the USA. A sentence which worries me is:

The contract, which was signed by three European mobile operators in recent days, requires that the operators hand over to Apple 10 per cent of the revenues made from calls and data transfers by customers over iPhones.

I hope that the revenue from data and calls originates from the contract, rather than any additional fees for data usage. I feel strongly that an iPhone without unlimited data included would be a serious time waster, and it may even put me off purchasing one.

Let’s hope O2 pull the stops out and set a new standard in carrier service with the iPhone!

When iWork first came out, I was quite excited and looked forward to having a play. Despite my best efforts and enthusiastic attempts to like the program, Pages was a disappointment. It was slow, bulky and just not up to scratch compared to Microsoft Word. I’ve always been a fan of Keynote and think that it runs circles around Powerpoint, but Pages really didn’t impress. I found tasks that were simple in Office took much longer to achieve and whilst documents always ended up looking much better, the additional time didn’t make it worthwhile.

I was a little skeptical about iWork 08 for the reasons above, but obviously thought it worth giving a try. Boy am I glad that I did. So many little improvements and enhancements have made this program run rings around its predecessor. Pages is completely re-worked and it a breeze to use. It’s faster, more logical and buttons are better laid out. But none of that compares to Numbers.

Microsoft Excel has been around for quite literally as long as I can remember. It does the job that it is designed to do, but I can’t put my finger on any real major improvements it has provided since Office 97. Nothing is fresh and new, nothing really makes it easier to use. Five minutes after opening Numbers I was pretty sure that Excel would never be needed again - far from the experience I had with the original Pages.

The way that sheets are laid out just makes so much more sense than Excel. The same can be said for formulas and formatting tools, charts and graphs. Everything is straight forward and easy, and the program seems to perform very well. The way that print previews can scale is revolutionary and will save Excel users such a headache. I haven’t tested it under heavy loads and huge spreadsheets (I have no need to), but for my purposes it’s a breath of fresh air for managing finances, shares and all my other information.

Microsoft Office is still a massive cash cow and is more popular than any other software package, but it’s being gradually chipped away. With continued improvements and advancements such as this one from Apple, it runs the risk of looking outdated in the very near future.

One of the reasons I have always held Apple in a high regard revolves around they have offered an international service, and rarely favoured US customers above those in Europe. Of course, there have always been price discrepancies between countries but that is an acceptable part of business and we have come to accept the increases in price in the UK. Whether that is to do with exchange rate, tax, or the fact that we are happy to lay down more cash - I don’t know.

Recently, however, it seems that this strength is deteriorating. One of the first announcement and services which completely bypassed us as Europeans was the iTunes Music Store. This was pretty disappointing at first, but it didn’t take too long for a UK version to be offered. This was followed by Apple introducing TV Shows and then Movies for sale through iTunes. This was back in 2005, and to this date it is still not possible to purchase any video in Europe at all from iTunes (aside from music videos). I can understand how Apple need to negotiate rights and all the legal issues surrounding video sales - but it does seem that if they really tried they could sort that out hastily enough. They managed to fine in the USA…

With all their new products (Apple TV, Video iPod, iPhone to name a few) focusing around video it is really quite staggering that they still don’t offer any video in Europe.

The latest product to hit the USA way before Europe is the massively anticipated iPhone. Apple went ahead and announced it in the US, placed all the promotional material on their website and even redesigned their site in the wake of that announcement. The European websites are still the same, and there is little or no mention of the iPhone. Apple haven’t announced a carrier, or given a specific release date at all for Europe.

I think that as a company, it really is time to start placing more value on their European customers. Come on Apple, start feeding us some information and keeping us in the loop! You can’t grow and expand without your customers across the pond.

For many people, iTunes has one major flaw - it’s only possible to organise and play TV shows which were purchased from the iTunes store. For people over in America that’s no problem, but TV shows haven’t made it to Europe yet and that means showing them on your iPod or Apple TV isn’t quite so straight forward. I had several TV shows in the form of DivX AVI files - Scrubs, Friends and Lost to name a few - which I wanted to be able to play on my new Apple TV. This is the process I go through to convert them to the appropriate format, and tag them with season information and artwork:

Step 1 - Convert the files

iTunes isn’t happy with handling DivX or AVI’s, so we need to convert that file to one that is compatible with iTunes - MP4. There are several ways to do this, one simple on is using Quicktime and exporing the file to Apple TV. However the best method I’ve found is a program called Visual Hub. It’s about £10 but really is well worth it for the quality files it produces. These are the settings I use:

These convert video at a good quality resolution with fairly high settings. For me, filesize isn’t really an issue - quality is more imporant - so these work well. It generally takes a little less time to convert the file than it would to actually play it, that’s on a Macbook with 2gb RAM, you may find the time varies.

Step 2 - Tag the files

Once you’ve got your nice MP4 file, we’re nearly there. At the moment, if you drop that into iTunes it will think that it’s a movie which is fine if it’s a movie you’ve converted, but if it is a TV show you need to alter it’s embedded data to give some information about the TV show name and series etc. A great program for doing this is called Lostify. This is completely free, and lets you tag a TV show with all the relevant information - it’s really easy to use. This is a shot of the interface:

Once you have run your files through this tool, just drag and drop them into iTunes. You’ll have a great collection of TV shows in no time, all of which stream to and look great on your Apple TV.