Early January brings many things.  Thousands of people head to the gym (if only briefly) to once and for all lose the weight.  Award shows take a look back at the prior year’s best shows, movies and music while quipping about the state of affairs (well maybe not this year).

But in the tech world, there are two very important events: CES and Macworld.  CES is a grand display, but I, personally, was anxiously waiting for Macworld and Steve Jobs’ keynote speech.  Afterall, if it was anything close to the iPhone introduction last year, it would probably have a bigger impact on me and the consumer market than CES this year.   

As I followed a live blog of the event, two things kept popping in my head.  One is the “wow” factor that oozes from every Apple announcement, but that was quickly followed by the lack of certain features or options in Apple products.  The iPhone got an amazing firmware update that includes such “wow” features as GPS triangulation in Google Maps and customizable home screens (in preparation for third-party native apps), but it also took 200 days (as Steve Jobs so adamantly quoted) for the iPhone to receive functionality allowing it to send a text message to multiple contacts.  Some people paid $600 for a smartphone missing a feature found on handsets cell carriers give away, and the iPhone still does not support multimedia messaging? 

Sure I could send a photo via email, but not everyone has a cellphone that supports email.  The worst part is receiving multimedia messages from friends and not being able to see them until I get home.  What’s the point? 

Don’t get me wrong.  I absolutely love my iPhone and can’t imagine returning to a conventional handset.  Even the text messaging interface with the conversational setup is fantastic, albeit limited.  Recently, I detailed these pros and cons to a friend who recently got a Voyager, and his first response to the text messaging omissions was, “Man, your phone sucks,” which he blurted (jealously, I might add) while mesmerized as he “flicked” through my albums in Cover Flow.  He then asked, “Does my phone do that?”

It seems a staple of Apple products to produce consumer-friendly products that forget to fulfill certain basic consumer needs and it doesn’t just end at the iPhone’s doorstep.  How long has the iPod dominated without keeping up with the times?  The players keep getting smaller and sleeker, but they still don’t have an FM tuner, voice recorder, more flexible file support or stereo bluetooth (also missing from the iPhone).  My old Nano can’t even shuffle a playlist without the help of iTunes.  How does Apple overlook, or worse, purposely avoid including features that are, in the omnipresent words of the retail world, “must-haves”? 

The latest exclusion came at the end of Mr. Jobs’ keynote with the big announcement.

Behold the MacBook Air.  This is an ultraportable laptop that lacks an optical drive (common in the category), but thankfully you can purchase a small, very sleek Superdrive add-on optical drive that plugs into the lone USB port.  If you want to import a CD you own into iTunes, then put it on your iPod or iPhone, you must plug the add-on drive in to rip the CD, then switch USB cables to your iPod for uploading.  And I hope you didn’t want to use a USB mouse to perform these actions because you’d be out of luck.  In today’s peripheral-happy society, there are never enough USB ports for adding devices and to only have one is simply careless. 

Of course, once I saw the envelope commercial and the features of this laptop, I was hooked anyway because it combines a form with a select group of features that are beyond anything I could have imagined.  That said, I won’t buy one because of the massive inconveniences resulting from the poor connectivity options.

And it’s in this very area that Apple has room for improvement — where the visions of sleek, consumer-friendly devices “that just work” actually intersect with the features consumers need for flexibility.  Had I known the frustrations that my Nano and iPhone would give me, I would have probably bought a more feature packed option. But now that I have them, I don’t regret either purchase. 

Maybe I should on principle, but the “wow” continually exceeds what’s missing.  I just wish Apple wasn’t always so willing to sacrifice substance for shine.