Running The Ladder is the company blog of Bainbridge Studios, a tiny runt of a design practice based in lovely Tacoma, WA.
So what's the deal with the fish?
Browse by Topic
Recommended Reading
Flickr at the Office
Latest via Twitter
RSS Feed
subscribe to the rss feed
2008 Macworld Keynote: The Small Business Perspective
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 | Tom Carmony
Yet another Steve Jobs Macworld keynote presentation is in the books and, as would be expected, the Apple faithful are all abuzz. As a major fan (and consumer) of Apple’s products, Jobs’ annual keynote is very much the equivalent of Christmas morning for (Mac) geeks. Present company included.
At the moment, most of the buzz coming out of this morning’s presentation is surrounding the new MacBook Air, Apple’s almost-but-not-quite-ultra-portable notebook computer. Weighing in at less than three pounds and barely 3/4″ inch, it’s clearly one sexy machine, and one that I’m sure will sell like crazy.
Sitting back and digesting this year’s event, I’m focusing on today’s announcements from the perspective of a small business owner; what did Steve Jobs unveil that we can really incorporate into our workflow to help us work better, faster and more efficiently for our clients?
For what it’s worth, the MacBook Air doesn’t really fit that bill for Bainbridge Studios. Would I love to have one sitting on my desk right now? Absolutely! Would it be the right fit for our technology needs at the moment? Not really. With it’s fixed amount of RAM (2GB, built into the Logic Board), small hard drive capacities (80 GB HDD or 64 GB SSD), it doesn’t have the horsepower to really serve as a workhorse or desktop replacement.
It would make a hell of a portable for traveling and for client pitches and presentations, no question. Heads will turn the moment you open one of those bad boys on the office conference table. Plus it light weight and svelte dimensions would make it easy to travel with. Definite selling points for the heavy duty business traveler, but at a starting price of $1,799, it just doesn’t offer the degree of power and functionality that would make it a good investment for our office.
So what did catch my eye during the Stevenote? Time Capsule. Time Capsule is essentially a new version of Apple’s Airport Extreme wireless base station with a built-in server-grade hard drive. It’s offered in two flavors (500 GB for $299 and 1 TB for $499) and is designed to work seemlessly with OS X Leopard’s Time Machine feature (Time Machine is an automated back-up program that incrementally backs up your Mac every hour to a network drive).
We will be picking up Time Capsule and configuring it as our primary backup here on our office network. Currently, we’ve got Time Machine functioning on our two primary machines, backing up regularly (when docked) to a Firewire 800 and USB 2 external drives. Time Machine works pretty seamlessly when you’re connected to your computer’s selected external drive, but (as of today) doesn’t offer wireless backup.
Just the ability to have incremental backups constantly done here in the office, for all machines, is a huge time-saver and a great safety net to have in place. Previously, we’ve gone through a number of backup utilities, including our previous favorite, SuperDuper!, but all of them required an additional degree of interactivity that Time Machine does not.
In the words of the great Ron Popeil, we hope to use Time Machine and Time Capsule to “set it and forget it.”