Over the Edge

Steve Jobs's keynote at Macworld is a lot like the president's State of the Union, only with better security. That's why it's so remarkable that there's been a possible leak on Wikipedia.

What makes it almost credible is the a) degree of detail and b) the modesty and probability of the products presented. No flying cars; just stuff like a thinner aluminum Macbook and a preview of the iPhone SDK.

Is it genuine? We won't know until noon ET tomorrow (Tuesday). In the meantime, what fun to speculate!

Update: Computerworld debunks this and other show rumors. Maybe....

From the Middle Eastern Times:

I was blown up last Tuesday. Luckily I can write about it. Many others who've shared the experience can't. They're dead, or their bodies and brains are so messed up by shrapnel or concussion they can't remember the details.

It takes a special kind of person to be a war correspondent. I know three: Jon Landay of McClatchy, Marie Colvin of The Times of London, and Robert W. Worth of the NYTimes. I'm glad I know them -- and proud to have worked with the first two early in my career -- but I'm even gladder I'm not one of them.

But if you're going to cover the war in Iraq, and Lord knows we need good coverage, this is a hell of a way to do it.

So the "leaked" keynote was wrong on pretty much every count. What we got was a vastly improved Apple TV, interesting flexible video rental options, a neat network attached storage device, and the sexiest damned laptop I've ever heard about.

The MacBook Air will get a lot of ink for being so thin and so light, but the revolutionary thing about it is that it's the first notebook from a big manufacturer that's got just two moving parts: the keyboard and the hinge. Instead of a hard drive, the top-line MBA has 64GB of solid-state memory. It can't crash, it can't get jarred in a crash, it can't wear out and die (well, it can, but it's way more rugged than a spinning disk).

No one will use the thing as a desktop replacement, but if you've got the $3000 for a travel machine (hey -- memory's not that cheap), this one looks like a real sweetie. It ships in about two to three weeks, and expect a lot of people to line up and try the thing at the Apple Store.