Its been a few days and it seems the fog of Macbook Air hype has started to clear:

The biggest problem with the MacBook Air is that once you scratch away the sex appeal of an aluminum clad ultra-mobile, you start to see the compromises that Apple had to make to bring this product to market.

Full story.

The sheer lack of key features from the new Apple device is a worry when you look at the quite unreasonable price.

In short, the Macbook is a strange device. More a fashion accessory than a real, usable device.

Its too large and overpriced to be classed as a modern ‘subnotebook’ and its too featureless to compete with other laptops in the range. A standard Macbook would be a more usable and sensible buy.

Subing

In contrast the new range of linux-fed subnotebook PCs are a real revolution. For £200 you can get a seriously small device which would fill the requirements of most on-the-move users.

The EEE PC and Cloud. A revolution in notbook design.

I look to the EEE PC, Cloud and even the OLPC Project as the frist step in a new line of small, affordable and utterly cool devices.

In contrast, the Air is simply a downgrade of the current Macbook range which although thin is neither light nor small.

Downfall is a great movie. A movie which has been hacked and slashed into comedic form many times.

Not many are better than this parody which depicts the recent HD-DVD/Blu-ray format news:

Enjoy!

Rick Stein’s Jack Russell ‘Chalky’ has died at the grand old age of 17 (via BBC News)

I always watched Rick Stein’s shows, not mostly for the cooking but almost certainly to see Chalky in action.

He always reminded me of my own dog Patch (pictured left) who, coincidentally (and quite sadly), died 2 years ago this week (January 4th 2006).

Turns out him and Chalky were about the same age.

For more photos of Patch see my Picasa Public Photo Stream.

PS3 users should be very happy this week as it will almost definitely be remembered as the week when Blu-ray beat HD-DVD into a bloody, half-dead pulp.

With all the decent movie studios now jumping ship (see Engadget) the only thing HD-DVD has in its favour is the cheaper hardware and Xbox 360 ad-on.

I’m surprised its come to this as HD-DVD had everything going for it. It had the DVD name, it had some top backing from Toshiba, Microsoft and Samsung, it was cheaper and it currently has the largest catalogue of titles available.

The Movie Race

So why did Blu-ray win?

I suppose as a ‘pure’ movie format Blu-ray does indeed make sense. You can fit more data onto a Blu-ray than a HD-DVD disk meaning that future HD formats could quite easily be adapted to use this extra space.

For example. Recent HD movies which I have seen can be compressed to between 7 and 12 gigabytes (Although I recently saw Spiderman III in 1080p which weighed in at 13gb). At this size the movies still retain a level of quality which no-one would complain about.

Blu-ray can hold 50gb meaning studios could have higher resolutions, even more special features and longer movies on a single disk.

Blu-ray seems, from an industry point of view, not only ‘futureproof’ but also a more valuable final product which could entice users to replace there current DVD collection with the promise of even more gimmicks.

I don’t agree with these reasons and believe that the war could have gone either way. In fact, I have a particular disdain for Blu-ray as it has been forced onto the market by Sony via the PS3. A medium where it is neither required nor wanted.

Sony could have quite easily used standard dual-layer DVD technology for their new nex-gen games console and saved games a lot of money and hassle along the way.

Optical Death

So the HD format war is almost over. A clear winner will surface but what of the future?

Will downloads and on-demand services replace our current addition to optical media?

I hope so. I currently own around 20 DVDs and its already too many. I never watch them and they spend their life cluttering up a drawer next to my TV. Read the rest of this entry…