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CES and Macworld: done, finally

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 - 10:27PM

Not that we’re out of the woods just quite yet, but there’s a certain sense of relief when everyone gets to go home, recover and tend to their wounds, and officially say we’ve made it over the CES / Macworld hump — by far the hardest two weeks of the year.

Of course, it wasn’t all grins of pride. Despite a stellar CES performance and an equally stellar Macworld run-up, we had some major hiccups on the site today. Post-mortem on that coming ASAP — don’t worry, it’ll be the detailed-as-I-can-give kind which I’ll try not to vet with our lawyers first. It’s still nice to know that even despite having major outages throughout the busiest two hours of the entire year, we could best our closest competition on the order of millions of pages. (Not that pages are really any metric to go by anymore, but you know.)

Thanks again to everyone who stuck by us during the insanity today, and for dealing with our overly-obsessive wall to wall coverage over the past couple of weeks in general. But more than anything, I again have to thank the team, who make and re-make Engadget every single day of the week, rain or shine, uptime or downtime, without fail. Everything good about Engadget I owe to them, as does every reader of the site.

P.S. -Just for further blog-record-keeping of this crap, keep an eye out for appearances on TWiT, CNN.com, Xbox Insider (on the 360 Dashboard), G4, and Irish Newstalk Radio. (Am I missing any?)

Back from CES, at Macworld tomorrow!

Monday, January 14th, 2008 - 2:44PM

What a crazy fun couple of weeks. Back from CES with the same illness I had before shipping out (isn’t that always the way?); the team was a sight to behold, absolutely a well-oiled machine. I really can’t thank this crew enough for making Engadget possible. Such amazing people, unbelievable.

Be sure to check us all in action tomorrow with our live coverage tomorrow from the Stevenote — not to be missed!

Ten Macworld 2008 predictions

Tuesday, January 1st, 2008 - 4:14PM

Apple logoI can always tell the holidays are closing in when it becomes such that a day doesn’t goes by I’m not asked at least a few times what inside dope I’ve got on what Apple’s introducing at Macworld. My stock response is (and always will be), “Everything I know is published on Engadget.” Now, I’m also not usually one to grasp at predictions (just not my thing), but what the hell. If you’re curious as to what I THINK — and not necessarily know — will go down at MW08, here’s the shortlist. In order of most likely to least likely:

  1. iPhone SDK / firmware update - duh.
  2. Ultraportable MacBook Pro - These kinds of rumors don’t stay alive for so many years when they’re untrue.
  3. Movie rentals (with direct download / rental on Apple TV) - Pretty much already confirmed.
  4. iPhone 2.0 / 3G - We know it’s coming, and Steve will want to stand on stage triumphantly one year later and introduce the next version.
  5. 16GB iPhone 1.0 - Has to happen eventually. The Osborne effect sure is a bitch, so the 8GB 1.0 will get even cheaper (maybe by $50 or $75).
  6. Nothing much about 10.6 (that’ll be at WWDC), but there will be mention of the next updates to 10.5.
  7. LED-backlit 17-inch MBP - Also an eventuality.
  8. Mac mini gets left alone. Probably no mention at all. Same with the iMacs and MacBooks.
  9. New monitors with webcams - These things need a refresh like crazy. If Apple’s smart, they’ll put DisplayPort in ‘em.
  10. All laptops move from DVI to DisplayPort to match those new monitors. And why not? DisplayPort to DVI adapters should be easy enough for legacy gear.