For a long time now Apple has been perceived as the “cool” computer company and Microsoft has been the “bad guy”. Apple is to Microsoft what Churchill was to Hitler, with Linux being Charles de Gaulle. But after all the announcements last week at Macworld, is Apple starting to get a little smudge under it’s nose?

Last week was a big week for Apple, the MacBook Air was a big coup in the notebook world with it’s tiny size, Time Capsule looks set to ease wireless backups the world over and iPod Touch owners got one step closer to feel equal to their iPhone owning brethren. But all is not what it seems.

Take the MacBook Air for instance, sure it may be thin and weigh virtually nothing but for your $1800 what do you actually get? Well if you were to pay $700 less you would get a “fat” low-end MacBook with a faster processor, an extra USB port, a FireWire port, an ethernet port, an audio in port and the thing that most of the people Apple thinks will buy the Air need, an optical drive.

The “road warriors” that Apple thinks are going to orgasm over the Air need an optical drive and Apple’s solution of either buying an external drive and carrying it around or carrying around a CD with the drivers to install “Remote Disk” to use another computers drive doesn’t match up with their own marketing for the Air.

They want this thing to be wireless and easy to carry around, but forget your disk and you’re screwed because you then can’t install anything that comes on a CD. Oh and of course there’s the other major problem for the road warrior, what happens if your battery runs out while you’re working on a long distance flight? Being a road warrior you’d have a back up right? Just switch them over and away you go.

Not on the Air, no for that you’d have to pay Apple $100+ to change it for you and that’s only when it’s completely dead. You also can’t upgrade your RAM so when your lovely new notebook starts feeling sluggish in a couple years, just grin and remind everyone that you can fit it in an envelope.

But it’s ok, Time Capsule is at least a brilliant idea. Well it was anyway, back when it was first introduced last year at WWDC when Steve Jobs said that Leopard users would be able to use Time Machine to back up wirelessly to an external hard drive attached to an Airport Extreme router. Boy, I bet Steveo wished he really did have a Time Machine to go back and unsay that.

Except not saying it wouldn’t matter because Apple’s engineers had also put the feature into early builds of Leopard, obviously until someone thought “hey we can make money from this!” and removed the code. Apple may or may not allow this feature to be “unlocked” in a forthcoming update of Leopard but judging by Apple’s recent history I’m not seeing any evidence to make me hope for this.

And last but not least there’s the iPod Touch and it’s debacle. This one is the creme de la creme of Apple’s imitation of Microsoft. Charging iPod Touch users $20 to get the same applications as the iPhone has, yet including them for free on new iPod Touch’s which are selling at the same price.

I don’t know what this is all about but it’s bullshit and I think Apple is going to lose out on it, especially when you consider how easy it is to jailbreak an iPod Touch and load all these programs on there yourself. The Apple TV got all it’s lovely new features put on it for free so why not the Touch?

Did Apple realise that the Apple TV is doing so badly that current owners, all five of them, wouldn’t pay to get new features and so didn’t even attempt to gouge them? Are iPod users so blindly devoted that they’ll pay for anything? Who knows. I certainly wouldn’t pay for them, but then again Apple has already stopped sending out updates for my just over a year old Nano.

Add all this to the iPhone price drop sham and you can understand why lots of Apple faithfuls are feeling rather aggravated at all the recent “ideas” to come out of Apple HQ. Lets hope Apple doesn’t have too many more or it may find itself back where it was 10 years ago.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,