chinnyhill10 wrote:
Nothing would surprise me any more which is yet another reason switching to Adobe makes sense as I can leap back to Windows at some future date if my prediction that Apple are only interested in the iThing market comes true.
I don't think that's entirely true. Apple's still innovating in the laptop space, and the MacBook Air is evidence of that. The high-end (Mac Pro) has certainly stalled though. (I wouldn't say the same of the iMac, purely because that machine seems really optimal, and so bar internal changes I can't really see how it can be improved on.)
But Jobs has stated that he considers PCs 'trucks' of the computing space, and that's where Apple's vision lies. It'll still create Macs for years, but they'll become increasingly niche as consumers move towards tablet devices (which will increase in scope and power—after all, look at some of the art and music apps for the iPad).
On the optical media front, the response on my Twitter feed has been really divisive. Some are insanely happy that Apple's nuked as many moving parts as possible from the MacBook Air, also reducing its weight. Most say they never use optical media at all anyway these days. Some are angry, but mostly they sound like the people who were bitching about Apple removing the floppy drive from the original iMac.
From my point of view, I'm a little torn, but I very rarely use my iMac's drive. I got a CD for my birthday, which I ripped, but I'd not used the drive before that in months. I used to back-up to DVDR, but am now considering just buying USB hard-drives to archive work on, because they're faster and more reliable. My conclusion is that Apple's early with ditching the drives, but not out of its tree. Also, it'll be at least a year before they're gone from MacBook Pros and iMacs, by which point the media climate will have moved on substantially again.
romanista wrote:
(didn't download lion yet though, can wait and have to back up first, as craign was reminding us all off constantly this week...
Heh. Well, that article in a couple of days has already got nearly as much traffic as the Rob Janoff interview I put up a while back, so it was worth doing. Writing for Mac publications, you see how often people lose data. Too often I hear about people's HDDs dying, and they're practically begging for help, because that drive contains their only copies of their kid's baby photos (or whatever); and techies aren't much better, because many of them don't back-up, under the misguided notion that they'd know if something's wrong. Absolute minimum people should be doing is Time Machine or a daily clone; but I rather like Christopher Phin's advice in the latest MacFormat, reducing risk with multiple layers of back-ups—Time Machine + SuperDuper! + off-site/online. For some, this is overkill, but if you rely on your data for work, it makes a lot of sense.