One Canadian’s Comments On Life Lucien W. Dupont’s weblog

Thinking about MacWorld…

The keynote has come and gone, and really for me, the best thing announced was the new iPhone features.

I’m most impressed with the location feature in Maps. We live out on the edge of Beaverton at the urban growth boundary, so my AT&T coverage here is, well, spotty at best.

When I have WiFi turned off, here’s what I see:

When I turn on WiFi, you’ll see that my location gets dramatically more defined. Which means that the WiFi mapping that is being used is really accurate:

Yes, my home is right in the center of that circle. I’m hoping tomorrow when I suck it up and go to work that it will be as accurate as it is at home.

The other announcements didn’t particularly interest me enough to pull out a credit card to pre order anything. The MacBook Air looks cool, I look forward to checking it out at the local Apple store.

I still don’t get the Apple TV. Someone please explain to me what I’m missing? Is it because I have a TiVo Series 3?

Time Capsule has the most potential “buy now” for me. I have a backup hard drive that I use with SuperDuper! and it would be nice to have a Time Machine backup as well. I am going to wait to read some reviews though, as I’m worried about the speed of the hard drive over the network. I have an Airport Extreme base station and performance was very poor for heavy disk use. Hopefully someone at Macworld will figure out how the internal ’server grade’ hard drive is connected.

In SF I’ve had some issues getting pinpoint accuracy. I think it may have to do with EDGE being absolutely killed by all the Macworld people tho.

I bet that’s the case…. maybe it’ll settle down later on in the week.. maybe..

AppleTV means I might be able to get rid of Netflix. I’ve been a Netflix member since they were founded, but I’m not a big movie watcher. I’m probably their favorite customer because I send them $20/month to watch maybe one movie a month. There are times I go months without watching any.

TiVo is great for recording movies from cable, but you’re stuck with the cable schedule. Although I admit I’ve not used the Amazon Unbox feature, so maybe I’m missing something good? But does that work if you’re away from home, stuck in a hotel, or visiting friends or family?

iTunes opens up the possibility (admittedly may take months or even years to build up the inventory) of watching any movie whenever you want and have the time to download it.

And it’s cool ’cause it’s from Apple!

Very good point.. and I’m happy you still read my weblog, particularly on my birthday too!!