So I missed the Stevenote

Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs gave his annual keynote presentation in San Francisco today.
I was planning on watching it, but I thought  it was tomorrow.

He announced some really cool products.
There was the MacBook Air, which is an ultra portable notebook (but not the touch screen all the blogs were predicting), the new Apple TV (which wasn’t surprising), Time Capsule – which is basically just an AirPort Extreme Base Station with a hard drive stuck in it for Time Machine purposes (which is cool, I might consider it in the future, if it gets good reviews), updates to the iPhone and iPod Touch, and iTunes movie rentals.
The things I’m most interested in are the updates to the iPod Touch and the iTunes movie rentals.

I’ve wanted an iPod Touch for a while now, and this update pushed it a bit closer to being justifiable. Being able to do mail and call reports without carrying around my 17″ MacBook Pro would be sweet. They screwed the pooch a bit on that though. The iPhone got all the same updates for free, and all iPod Touches that you buy after today will come loaded with the updates, but if you already own an iTouch you’ll have to pay $20 for the updated software. My opinion is they should have given it away. The thing I think it would be most useful for me for is doing call reports on the run. I think some of my co-workers would really appreciate that too. I don’t even have to travel much for my job, and I understand how that would be extremely useful.

iTunes movie rentals are looking pretty sweet too. I don’t often watch a movie more than once, so being able to rent it is a good option. I think the pricing is reasonable. I might even be able to get my parents into something like that. The generally only watch movies if they can get them for free at the public library because like me, they generally only watch them once. But I think the convenience of not having to leave the house to get them, and not having to return them is pretty amazing. iTunes really pretty much just makes things simple. I think even my parents could handle renting a movie.

And then like I said, a Time Capsule might be an interesting option down the road if it gets good reviews. I already have an AirPort Extreme Base Station, but it’s the older non-gigabit version. Also not having to plug in and unplug my Western Digial MyBook all the time to do backups would be nice. I’d like to convert that completely to just unimportant file storage and then wirelessly backup. Again, I could already do this with the AirPort I already have (using it’s built-in USB port) – but that feels slow to me, and I’m thinking an internal hard drive would be faster. It’s not something I’m going to go buy tomorrow, but something I will look into for the future.