macbook air.

This article also appeared on Josh Spear

It’s Apple’s world. We just live in it. Right when you think they might chill for a bit, they start dropping innovations as if it’s just another day. Which, for them, it sorta is.

The new MacBook Air is so thin it slides inside an envelope. Weighing only 3 pounds, it’s a mere .76 inches at its thickest point and at it’s thinnest is a shocking .16 inches. Innovations in the screen and keyboard, the two areas that cause the bulk in most laptops, allowed them to slim it down so much. A 13.3 inch wide LED display saves room and battery life, while the full-size backlit keyboard’s ambient light sensor alters the keyboard’s brightness depending on how dark your environment is. Like when surfing porn…

The enlarged trackpad has built in the ease-of-use innovations from the iPhone and iPod Touch: pinch and drag with two fingers to automatically zoom in and out and use the good ol’ finger-swipe technique to scroll through websites in Safari. Their new port hatch fits into the smooth design and clicks open when you need headphones or the USB. Then shut it when you don’t.

In order to ditch the optical drive, they’ve created Remote Disc so you can wirelessly download CD or DVD software from other Macs in the vicinity. Basically, you jack their drive for a while so that you don’t have to carry around your own. If you want to backup your files, the new Time Capsule uses OS X Leopard’s Time Machine to not only automatically but also wirelessly send your stuff to an external drive. You can forget about the FireWire, too. When you open up your new Air the Setup Assistant helps you wirelessly download iTunes, iPhoto, and all your other treasures from your old Mac. Long story short: no wires. Ever.

australia: ipods will kill you.

In a recently launched print campaign, created for the New South Wales Police by DDB Sydney, the message is clear: your iPod will kill you.

These ads are clearly ridiculous. If anyone offered me an iPod with headphone cords long enough to wrap a chalk line around someone, I’d save them the trauma of the accident and just murder them for it. A little sensationalism never hurts when promoting public safety, I suppose, but I combed the NSWP site and couldn’t find any hard data or stats that backed up their claim that iPod-caused road deaths have reached the “epidemic proportions” they claim.

What I find most interesting about these ads are that they have an obvious iPod lying next to the corpse. I’m don’t know what Apple’s official feelings might be, but the online fan-geeks are already up in arms over the slandering of the beloved music player. Let’s face it: an iPod is now as necessary as a mobile phone. Since your mobile phone’s will give you brain cancer and now your iPod will get your hit by a bus, it’s a surprise there are still so many mobile-phone chatting iPod-listening young people still walking around. We should really all be dead by now.