What an exciting Keynote. The MacBook Air is drool-worthy, (though I think the price is high,) and we finally have real HD content for the AppleTV, in the form of the legendary movie rentals. And Time Capsule’s a cool product that will save Mac users, as well as Mac support, many headaches. The iPhone update’s a good start, and makes me almost want an iPhone, but I’m not quite there yet.

But what’s notable after a Stevenote is often not what was introduced, but rather what wasn’t. Let’s round up a few of the rumors we’ve been hearing and see if we can figure out where we went wrong.

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I’m honestly too scared to upgrade to 1.1.3 and I don’t want an AT&T account so we’re all going to have to live with other update liveblogs until the proper jailbreak comes out. Erica at TUAW just gave it a go and found that she almost – but not quite – saw her iPhone in iPhuc, a browsing tool.

1.1.3 iPhone Update Liveblog [TUAW]

Peter and I wish you could be here, we really do. We’d planned on serving you live audio of the Keynote, but Apple’s spies (Apple has spies?) caught wind and told us to back it off. Fair enough, it’s their show, so we did. But just to make it up to you, CrunchGear’s users, they’ve given us first access to the video archive of the Keynote, for you to watch streaming in lovely, crystal clear Quicktime.

So while getting set to unveil the new MacBook Air, Steve-o made a rough comparison to the Sony VAIO TZ series of notebook computers. Let’s take a look at the cheapest model, the VGN-TZ150N/B and see how it and the new MacBook Air really stack up.

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MacWorld Keynote Update

We would like to apologize to all of our users and their readers for the service outage that happened mid-day on January 15. CoveritLive was specifically designed to handle small and very VERY large live blog events like the Steve Jobs Keynote at MacWorld. Our issue appears to have been a very minor technical one on our end that was amplified dramatically by the extremely heavy traffic from around the world as many new users and hundreds of thousands of first time readers visited our customers who were hosting live blogs. We do not need to make any structural changes to handle this type of load in the future but we do need to make sure our Quality Assurance process is tighter. This was a case of one loose screw taking us down.

We very much appreciate your patience and understand any frustration you experienced. To our new users, we hope you see the benefit in our software and will give it another try. To our existing users, most of you have given us great feedback in the past and we have been very responsive. Please stick with us and have faith that we will adjust quickly to stop this kind of thing happening again.

Thank you,
Keith McSpurren
President, CoveritLive

For your viewing pleasure, live from MacWorld 2008 (more on the way):

On behalf of the CG crew, we apologize for the mix-ups during the keynote. Keynotes are hard to cover and we experienced a perfect storm of site failures, database errors, and “No, you can’t stream live audio” directly from folks at Apple, all in the matter of two minutes. Hopefully some of you enjoyed our reduced HTML page and were able to see some great images. Next time we do this, we’re not going fancy. We promise. Full audio of the presentation will be up shortly.

Unadulterated feed of the entire keynote. Thanks for tuning in.
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I’ve never liked the idea of Time Machine – I back up the things that are important to me on my own schedule, and I know where it all is and how it works. Time Machine strikes me as a black box that utilizes my CPU and hard drive in a mysterious and inefficient way. Furthermore, laptops are basically left out of the party. Time Capsule is a great solution and while I still won’t be updating to Leopard, I have to hand it to Apple that an integrated 1TB hard drive in an Airport hub is a fantastic idea. Of course, they could have just made it easy for you to homebrew something like this in the first place, but why not make a few extra bucks with their own version?

The hub is a natural place for low-intensity, high-volume data storage: it’s out of the way, it’s connected, and it’s not going to be used for anything else. There’s no chance of losing it, after all it’s attached to the wall. I’ve always had a fear of partitions (due to an early trauma) so a dedicated backup server is a good solution for me, and also for the people who don’t want cables and mixed external HDs laying around the place. Not to mention those who are simply responsible and prescient enough to back up their important things regularly and as such find Time Machine superfluous and wasteful. As for the price, well you know the line: if you can afford an Apple computer, you can afford a $500 network hub to back up all your bad photos and amateur Buffy novelization drafts.

If Uncle Walt is here, then something AMAZING will happen.

Peter and Matt are fine and in line and they’re sending images slowly but surely over the air. Hickey just sent one entitled “Welcome to San Francisco.” Ha! Soy!

With MacWorld fast approaching, let’s look over what we currently know about iPhone firmware 1.1.3 and what it will mean for us lost souls who are running jailbroken iPhones. We’ll discuss the leaked version of the software and what I’ve gleaned from talking to Andru and Nate True of iBrickr fame and from the rumor and innuendo surrounding today’s keynote.
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These are just renderings

Wired seems to think they have the scoop on the ultraportable that’s being announced tomorrow from a third party vendor. Said device is made from aluminum and glass and apparently takes the shape of a teardrop when closed. It’s also being widely speculated that it’s going to be completely wireless in terms of connectivity, which would be sweet, but Wired seems to believe their source, who says it will be an ultraportable with a physical keyboard and multi-touch screen. Yeah, I don’t know. That sounds pretty damn hot and if it’s true then I’m buying one immediately.

Breaking: Apple Insider Leaks Ultra-Portable Details [Gadget Lab]

We’ve been talking quite a bit about this new MacBook Air, or whatever Steve’s going to call it (I like MacBook Shuffle™), and we’ve seen many mock-ups, but this is my favorite so far. I have a feeling that if we do see a teeny-tiny MacBook, it’ll definitely look something like this, borrowing design cues from the latest iMacs.

Now we know this is a Photoshop job, mostly because the next post done is a For Dummy’s book on getting stuff posted on TechCrunch. Well, we hope this is close enough for ya, Web Squirrel! Feel free to link to your favorite fakes of the new MacBook, or create your own. We’ll see who gets close enough, and we’ll get then an internship with Ives. (Not really.)

Welcome to Macworld 2008 [WebSquirrel]

We’re liveblogging tomorrow morning’s Keynote. Gizmodo’s liveblogging it. GeekBrief is liveblogging it. Everyone is, really. And that makes me think that the Macworld 2008 Keynote by Steve Jobs might just be the single more liveblogged thing in history so far. Just how geeky have we become?

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With The Keynote (that Keynote) at 9:00 tomorrow morning, we’re not sure who exactly would buy into a Macworld Keynote Drinking Game other than college students, but it’s an exercise in foolishness any way you look at it, so I had to indulge.

Drinking games are meant to be carried out early on weekend evenings with groups of close friends, or, more likely, soon-to-be-close strangers. So you can use this with the archive of the Keynote which we’ll have up hopefully later tomorrow night.

But enough about what it is, let’s get it going. You’re going to want to make sure you’ve got a good shooting booze. Some shoot beer, but what’s the point in that? The Keynote usually lasts about 2 hours, at the end of which you’ll want to have trouble standing, in true drinking game fashion, so find something a little harder. We recommend Jager or Maker’s.

Round one reflects the start of the Keynote. We’ll have live audio, and we’ll be liveblogging, so you’ll be cued as to when you need to knock one back.

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Every few Keynotes we get emails from case manufacturers encouraging us to keep an eye open for new case designs. For example, one designer told us today that they would be ready to ship on Friday “if Steve Jobs announces a new laptop.” While we know this is more conjecture and making-up-stuff-ure, looks like the first folks to be hit by a hardware refresh — case manufacturers — are getting pretty proactive. Is the Air for reals?

Looks like someone has gone to a lot of trouble to create a keynote outline and pass it off as real. Our take? Fakity Fake. There’s no mention of the MacBook “Air” and I feel like some of the features and hardware upgrades don’t jive, but what do I know? Click below or view the rest of this post to get the raw data and decide for yourself.

Steve Jobs’ Macworld Expo spiel spied on web? [Reg Hardware]
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Alright, Macbois, get your Mac hats out and fire up your Duos because this is going to be a red hot one. What will it be? The Air? The WiBook? The ZunePod? We don’t know and neither does anyone else. But all we know is that Hickey and Peter Ha will be in place tomorrow at 9am Pacific/Noon Eastern for some redhot livebloggin’ and sassy audio streamin’. Oh, and there’s also a conference they’ll be attending, but it’s the keynote we’re all interested in, right?

If you’re looking for our live feed, click here