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Steve Jobs' Macworld keynote announces Win-compatible products but snubs Microsoft

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

By John Rizzo

At his keynote address at Macworld San Francisco this morning, Steve Jobs announced products and updates that can by used or shared by Windows and Mac users. But he gave little time to a major product launch from Microsoft, just barely mentioning today's rollout of Office 2008 for Mac.

While Jobs spent much of the keynote on consumer products (updates to iPhone and Apple TV, and the launch of iTunes movie rentals), he did announce a couple of Mac hardware products. Most notable is the MacBook Air, Apple's first ultraportable notebook.

The thinnest notebook on the market, and without an optical drive, the MacBook Air includes software that can wirelessly access the optical drive in a Windows PC or a Mac. Users can install Mac software onto the MacBook Air by inserting the installer disc into a Windows PC's drive. Apparently, Windows does not need to run the software on the disc, since the MacBook Air can access and control the PC's drive directly.

(Apple also announced MacBook Air SuperDrive, a $99 external optical drive.)

Jobs also demonstrated a Time Capsule, a combination wireless backup hard drive and WiFi base station that works with both Mac OS X and Windows. Apple said the device was designed to work with Leopard's Time Capsule backup software, but also supports Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Windows XP, and Windows Vista. In these operating systems, Time Capsule appears as an external hard drive that can be mounted or mapped. Apple said that multiple computers can access Time Capsule, so it can be used for file sharing as well.

Apple will ship Time Capsule in February for US $299 for the 500 GB model and US $499 for a 1 TB model.

Near the beginning of his keynote, Jobs briefly mentioned that Microsoft shipped Office 2008 has shipped today, noting that it was the last major application to port to Intel Macs. However, Jobs did not describe or demonstrate it. And while Jobs brought Intel CEO Paul Otellini top the stage to describe the processor in the MacBook Air, no one from Microsoft made an appearance.

The absence of Microsoft participation in the keynote is in contrast to past years, Microsoft support of Apple's latest technology was seen as vital to Apple's survival. In contrast, the Intel Mac platform has been doing well for the past two years even without a native port of Microsoft Office. (The older Office 2004 runs on Intel Macs in Mac OS X's Rosetta, a PowerPC emulation mode.)

One difference today is that Apple and Microsoft are rivals in more than just operating systems, dueling it out in the consumer products that Jobs spent much of the keynote describing.