New MacBooks, Work, iPhone Apps, and Soap Box Derby

Lots of stuff going on lately. Work has been really busy and awesome, this week has been really successful and a lot of cool stuff going on. Awesome times!!

I watched the Apple Keynote last night and it was pretty great as usual, and interesting to hear a lot from the designers as well about the new machining process to create the Laptops. So cool!! So that was awesome. I think lots of people were speculating that there would be a cheap option (eg $800) but the older MacBook went down to $999 (with a few upgrades) and the new MacBooks start at $1299. They do have a lot of glorious features that are fantastic, and of course you get the Hardware and Software solution in the same package - since you're getting all the great Mac software and OSX with the machine. So although the price tag is pretty high still compared to what you can get from Dell, there are a lot of less "on the surface" benefits that you get like, well, the ability to develop for iPhone that you can't do on any other system. :) So that's pretty cool. The price though, unfortunately, is going to be prohibitive (at least for me, and at the moment), since I need to replace my current system with a new Desktop first. This is a pretty important part of my setup at home here, and presuming I'd buy the cheaper (but new) MacBook at $1299... I can get a really sick Desktop for the same price. That's usually the case with notebooks, but my Desktop may even be cheaper (more like $1100) and with Dual 20" monitors, 750Gb drive, 4 Gb RAM, it's gonna be hard to compare it to anything in portable form.

The problem is that I'd really like to get the ball rolling on some iPhone Dev ideas, and it's gonna be slow if just Matt and I are programming together on his machine only. So I guess I'll still hold off anyway, and we'll just see how it goes and if we enjoy it before I invest in a new Laptop too. The other option is a Mac Mini, but I think if I'm getting something from Apple I may as well get one of these sweeeeeet laptops, and for travel etc it makes sense to get a Laptop for the extra $500 or so more than the Mac Mini would be.

Anyhoo, exciting stuff.

Also I'm thinking of going to the Red Bull Soap Box Derby on Saturday, it looks pretty nuts. If I go there I might go check out Tartine and Bi-Rite Creamery, two of the places that were in those restaurant reviews that I posted last week.