So the keynote has come and gone. My pre­dic­tion like many oth­ers didn’t pan out as expected. The Mac­Book Air is yet one of Apple’s many love-it-or-hate-it prod­ucts. It appeals to some but cer­tainly not all. I think the biggest prob­lem Apple made is in the pric­ing. The price just isn’t in line with the raw specs. The gen­eral con­sumer isn’t going to care or even nec­es­sar­ily under­stand that a hard drive with a smaller form fac­tor is more expen­sive than a larger one with the same capac­ity. (e.g. The Mac­Book Air packs a 1.8″ hard drive and not a typ­i­cal 2.5″ one.) Espe­cially con­sid­er­ing their own base Mac­Book is 67% faster with 20% more bat­tery life (user-replaceable) for 39% less money and only for 67% more weight (not that 5 lbs is really all that heavy to begin with). Would it really have been that hard for Apple to iMac-ify their entire note­book prod­uct line, upgrade the touch­pads to use the new mul­ti­touch fea­tures, put LED back­lights across the prod­uct line, apply some of the Mac­Book Air design ideas like drop­ping the super-drive? That would prob­a­bly shed a pound off the base Mac­Book in which case it’s 4 lbs ver­sus MBA’s 3 lbs in the same foot­print if not the same vol­ume. Per­haps like the New­ton, the Mac­Book Air is ahead of its time. Then again it may be so off the mark it’ll die a slow death unlike the Palm Folio. Judg­ing from the com­ments at var­i­ous sites and forums, I wasn’t the only one hop­ing for a Mac­Book redesign which is arguably long over­due. Con­sumers weren’t the only ones who were dis­ap­pointed. Wall Street saw a drop in the stock price which I’m sure will be made up sooner or later. On a good note, the Apple TV is more appeal­ing, but I would still rather get a Mac Mini and turn it into a MythTV fron­tend. So much more ver­sa­tile. But before that hap­pens I need to fin­ish out­fit­ting my MythTV server.

Tomor­row is the infa­mous Mac­world keynote. More than likely a new Mac will be intro­duced. As the date slowly approaches, the rumor mill has been buzzing about a poten­tial prod­uct name called Air—Mac­book Air, AirBook, what have you. Of note, is that there was con­fir­ma­tion that Apple had ordered a bunch of 13″ screens. Now, 13″ screens are cer­tainly on the large side when it comes to screen real estate even if a note­book comes in under 4 lbs. Per­son­ally I think it needs to have small dimen­sions, not just be light­weight to be con­sid­ered an ultra­portable. You can’t exactly slip a 13″ note­book as eas­ily as a eeePC into your (man) purse. There’s also the fact that the stan­dard Mac­Book looks so out of place with its brethren right now, even if it got a token hard­ware refresh a few months ago. Per­son­ally, I’m hedg­ing my bets that the new Mac­book will most likely be just a redesigned Mac­book and will be a step­ping stone for design queues to move up into the Pro line. I’m not the only one who thinks this. (Oth­ers spec­u­late that it may turn out to be an iTouch-esque tablet.) It’ll cer­tainly be lighter, faster, and every inch as beau­ti­ful as the other alu­minum SKUs, but cer­tainly no eeePC matchup. Imag­ine Apple putting out a $500–600 sub­note­book. Would that can­ni­bal­ize Mini sales? Prob­a­bly not. As the eeePC has shown, niche mar­kets can work. But still, would Apple even shoot for that price point? And if you can’t wait for Apple to come out with a sub­note­book (assum­ing one isn’t announced tomor­row), you could always hack your eeePC to run Mac OS X.

Did you restyle your embed­ded Google Cal­en­dar using MyGoogle­Cal? Maybe you’ve restyled Google Cal­en­dar Gad­get by fol­low­ing my instruc­tions to mod­ify the XML con­fig­u­ra­tion? Do you want to show off how you inte­grated your cal­en­dar into your site? Just leave a URL com­ment with a link to your web site.

Like many chil­dren inspired dur­ing the height of the NASA shut­tle pro­gram, I once wanted to be an astro­naut. Also hav­ing grown up with the likes of E.T., the Trans­form­ers, Robot­ech, and a mul­ti­tude of other scifi sto­ries and ques­tion­able news­casts about UFO sight­ings, I was fas­ci­nated with the idea of extrater­res­trial life. Now given the vast­ness of this uni­verse, I don’t have the hubris to believe that we’re the only life con­tained within it. After read­ing The Undis­cov­ered Planet, it turns out we can’t even call our­selves the dom­i­nant form of life on this planet, even if we judge our­selves as the most intelligent—which is cer­tainly debat­able. The honor of the most dom­i­nant life form on this planet goes to micro­bial life. The arti­cle even pos­tu­lates that should life exist else­where it will most likely be micro­bial. So it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to hypoth­e­size that the most dom­i­nant life form in the uni­verse is micro­bial. Now this shouldn’t put a damper on SETI’s efforts which looks for extrater­res­trial intel­li­gent life. Even if the major­ity life in the uni­verse is micro­bial, Drake’s equa­tion by con­ser­v­a­tive esti­mates puts the num­ber of intel­li­gent civ­i­liza­tions in a galaxy as non-zero. Plus sen­si­tiv­ity of com­mu­ni­ca­tion sen­sors con­tin­u­ally improve. Yet it will prob­a­bly be a long time before we get sen­sors so sen­si­tive that can detect life on a micro­scopic scale over stel­lar dis­tances if such a feat is phys­i­cally pos­si­ble. Which prob­a­bly means that we’ll most likely encounter this micro­bial life first-hand as either human explor­ers or more likely by proxy via robotic probes. It’s funny; space viruses may not be sci­ence fic­tion after all.