Is Wireless USB the "Air" in the MacBook Air?

I wouldn't usually be up at 3am when I need to be up bright and early to attend a Steve Jobs keynote later this morning, but I just got home from a quick trip to New York. And after reading this post at Wired, I'm wondering if a major part of tomorrow's (er, today's) news will be that one or more new Mac portables will support Wireless USB or some other flavor of Ultra WideBand connectivity.

That would be in keeping with the apparent "There's Something in the Air" theme at the show. And it's certainly more plausible than WiMax, which is just too far from prime time to be showing up in mainstream Apple products. (It's early for Wireless USB, too, but not that early, and Apple would have more control over implementing it than with WiMax.) Built-in Wireless USB would put Apple ahead of the curve on a technology that stands a good chance of eventually being everywhere--=which would certinly be a move in the Apple tradition.

I've been predicting until now that the MacBook Air (which I'm assuming for a moment does indeed exist, and will go by that moniker) won't use flash instead of a hard drive, and might have a built-in optical drive. I think I'm still likely to be right on the former, and possibly on the latter, too. But the Wired post's scuttlebutt about this laptop being astonishingly thin has me weakening a bit. If it's the Mac equivalent of the original iPod Nano--a product so thin it almost establishes a new category--Apple might be willing to make more compromises to make it happen.

Or maybe not. Seven hours or so from now, we'll know for sure...

Comments

gee, you get paid to report such half-baked stuff? obviously it'll have flash memory and no built-in optical drive. my gawsh, think a little harder next time.

corrible

January 15, 2008

3:53 AM PT

I was just hoping that they were going to address new security issues.

http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=515&doc_id=142628

As Winkler points out here, Apples gotten a bit arrogant about security even though there are increasing threats.

LBowler

January 15, 2008

7:35 AM PT