Once I got past the coal,

the toys in the stocking weren't so bad.

Wilson's report from MacWorld—

MacWorld certainly has a vibe. I'll tell tales with photos after I download the pics from my camera.

I am just out of the KeyNote and will either take in a lecture/conference or head down to the exhibits. Right now, baby needs some coffee.

Here's my first report.

Other folks live blogged and you can read that online. All the new toys and such are also live at Apple.com. I pretty much "live blogged" by texting back and forth with James, which was perhaps more entertaining than the keynote.

I must first thank Bryan for making it all possible.

And say it wasn't his fault that the Stevenote experience was rather annoying. The guy next to me kept answering his phone during the presentation and talking loudly in a foreign language. There was a kid with a media badge, like 10 years old, who sat in front of me and stood up and took flash photos, in a very dark room, every few seconds, and of every slide, for the entire presentation. My eyes kept having to adjust back and forth from the flash to the darkness. The level of obstruction and distraction was painfully annoying. And no fault of the producers or Apple. But the 20-something guy who brought the little kid to the show should have exerted some behavioral control. At least turned off the flash, which was useless in this setting.

However, Steve's "first thing I want to talk about" pissed me off so much I was seething in bile for the first half hour. And then some. I'm still pretty pissed off.

Last year at this thing Steve announced Airport Extreme, the new N-standard wireless router with USB ports for wireless printing and shared access to wireless hard drives (AirDisk)— Steve also announced Time Machine (in Leopard) which would back up wireless laptops to AirDisks mounted on the AirPort Extreme.

I really needed this backup feature, and when the time came to replace my wireless router, I dutifully bought the expensive new AirPort Extreme and a new external drive for backing up. AirDisk worked great, and then I waited for Leopard and Time Machine to appear— which were delayed six months so they could get the iPhone out (also delayed).

Then Leopard and Time Machine were released and I upgraded. Not only do AirDisks no longer automatically appear on the desktop (as designed under the previous OS version), but all mention of using Time Machine with an AirDisk were redacted from the Apple web pages.

User discussion and the support areas of Apple are full of many pissed off people. Apple informally promises to fix this glitch. Sometime. Don't call us we'll call you.

Many users have found work-arounds, but the discussion boards all agree that these work-arounds are unstable and can screw up pretty badly. I spent over half an hour on this very topic last night with LittleBigChris, who has the same setup I do and wants to backup using Time Machine to an external drive attached to the AirPort Extreme. Luckily for Chris, he is working on a desktop machine and can directly connect if if absolutely has to. (Which he does.)

Steve Jobs opened the keynote with this very issue. "How great is Time Machine?!" "It works great! It is so simple!" "You just connect an external drive to your computer and that's it. But what about laptop users? You really want to get rid of that cord don't you?"

Uh, yes. That's what you advertised last year. Are you announcing a fix? Will it work now? This is a great update to the software that they finally got this bug fixed.

Steve: "Well, now you can!"

Me: "Yay!"

Steve: With the new product: Time Capsule: it's an AirPort Extreme base station with a hard drive built-in!"

Me: "Are you fucking shitting me?! "

Steve: "No, I'm not shitting you (just shitting on you). Even though all of you have already shelled out the cash for the AirPort Extreme and external drives we were hawking all of last year, and because we couldn't get that to work like we told you it would, we are selling you yet another product for several hundred dollars that will do what we sold you those other items to do in the first place. Not only are the two expensive machines we sold you last year never going to work together as promised, but you have to buy a replacement machine making what you already invested in useless. Isn't that great?"*

Audience: reluctant applause.

Steve: "Isn't that great?!" (translation: C'mon, I'm your God. Adore me and applause already.)

Audience: "Yay! Now where's that kool aid?"*

*(Items with an asterisk are paraphrased.)

Next Jobs went onto "the second thing I want to talk about." Cue the screen to a big numeral 2. Cue my head to say "you are already gave me a big pile of number two."

Jobs launches into the iPhone improvements of which he is so proud. These are all things already out there for the iPhone but made by other people who have cracked their phones against the will of Jobs. I am the opposite of impressed, as are the iPhone users in the audience. This is a large percentage, and all those I have talked to have cracked theirs. "Why?" Another guy asked. iPhone user: "To make it a real iPhone. Now it's useful."

Then he beams about making the same upgrades (sounding a lot like taking credit for other people's work as Apple has just mimicked or copied the popular illicit third-party apps) for the iPod Touch as for the iPhone (which is just an iPhone without the phone part). The audience is underwhelmed. Most critics and users were annoyed with the intentionally crippled iPod Touch in the first place. Now users are finally getting what they expected. Updates will be available for both the iPhone and the iPod Touch I think today. iPhone users get a free upgrade. iPod Touch users have to pay $20. The audience was not pleased about the $20 fee.

Then number three: no news here if you've been paying attention. Movie rentals on iTunes and AppleTV. Three to four bucks for 24 hours worth of viewing within 30 days of download. So easy to move it to the iPod to watch on the plane—except for that large percentage of iPods we sold that won't work on planes and we won't replace because never claimed they would work above 10,000 feet. iPods like mine.

The AppleTV updates were actually kind of a surprise. I've enjoyed mine, except for the inexplicable inability to play music videos in a row. I like having my entire iTunes library in my stereo. Other stuff is gravy. Now the AppleTV has been redesigned to focus on "movies, movies, movies" and doesn't even need to be paired with a computer. It's all built in, and one can rent movies or buy music directly over the internet from the AppleTV. Another added cool feature: access to Flickr. That'll be cool.

Steve finally redeemed himself and my vinegar over the Time Capsule abated when he announced that existing AppleTV users would be let in on the upgrades as a software update. I'm hoping they also fixed that music video issue.

And of course, the fourth thing is the new MacBook Air. Which is just insanely great and makes total sense for a variety of users. And so wafer thin, it is thinner at its thickest than the thinnest part of the previous smallest notebook on the market. It's bright, fast, full sized screen and keyboard with paper thin design— he pulled the thing out of a standard manila envelope. Gone is the optical drive, and if you ever need one (to install software or rip something), it comes with software to allow you to access the optical drive of any other computer (Mac or PC) wirelessly across the network. That's pretty cool. And only two ports: USB and video out, which is really all a laptop needs. That and a headphone jack, which it has.

Surprisingly, I don't really want one. Mostly because I don't need one, and my major issue these days is drive space as I have filled everything up with music, movies, and photos. The MacBook Air has a necessarily small drive (80GB iPod drive, or alternate 64 GB flash drive).

But damn, it is a beautiful engineering marvel.

And the perfect portable for work or video conferencing— yeah, iSight built in.

I'm still bitter about the Time Capsule solution to their not getting the AirDisk/Time Machine to work the first time, but I am hoping some free crap from the expo floor will be palliative.