Great Expotations
It's another January, another Macworld San Francisco, a kind of exhibition cum conference in which people gather in an earthquake zone and think that it is somehow not embarrassing to describe products as "cool" in a whiny nasal voice.
Apple reserves January for Big Announcements, usually of consumer products. Last year it was the iPod mini, which - before you get excited about this year's announcements - finally reached UK dealerships halfway through July. That's right: every American who wants one has to get it first.
Anyway, enough of my moaning. As usual, rumour and speculation will probably outstrip interest in the final product. There's a kind of inverse equation, but as with tsunamis and weather systems, I'm not proposing to do the maths. It's all part of the long-established Apple Product Cycle. Recent innovations to this cycle of hype include the necessity for Apple to sue or threaten to sue those who are "leaking secrets". As with Hollywood and bootlegged DVDs, the real culprit is always someone who works for Apple, which you'd think they'd be able to sort out if they paid people enough, but in the end you have to conclude that the legal action is just part of the pre-publicity, because it's guaranteed to be reported by the people most under threat.
Anyway, this year's rumours have included some kind of el-cheapo computer, which will possibly be pitched as a home media centre. So, imagine (!), just as with today's Macs, you will be able to keep your music, photo, and iMovie collection on it. Possibly, it will plug into your telly and allow you internet access as well as the above; if it allows you to tape programmes, so much the better for the average teenager's bedroom.
I do wonder about the TV tuner issue. Big media will panic about people recording and keeping stuff, burning it onto their own DVDs, and you have to be concerned about the TV tuner element. If it has a tuner, will it be analogue, or digital? What kind of quality?
I've always been massively sceptical about so-called convergence. It's a bit like the marketing obsession with the internet. On-line marketing is all very well, but there is nothing quite like a proper printed catalogue, something you can carry from desk to desk to show people, flick through quick as lightning and even read on the loo. For me, listening to music and watching TV are completely separate activities that take place in different locations and at different times. On the one hand, we're all fat fucks who need to exercise more and diet; and yet on the other the tech pundits are encouraging us to sit on our arses in one place and do everything. Bollocks to that.
The other rumour, more of a dead cert, is a flash-based iPod thing. A modern car key-sized music player that will hold 250-ish songs encoded at 128 kbps, but offer no control as to which track plays when (no built-in display). "Life is random," goes the catchphrase. The marketing geniuses have identified that people are too lazy (see above) to organise their 10,000 iPod songs into playlists, and instead hit random play and listen to their entire collection. The joy of this is in discovering forgotten gems from among unloved albums. On the other hand, 240 songs is the kind of quantity you'd carefully choose yourself, so the joy of randomness is somewhat lost.
My opinion, a computer's idea of "random" is never really "random," as any half-educated programmer knows. You have to program the computer to appear to be random, but it is not, not in the way that humans are.
Finally, the iLife suite of software is due an update, and the once-wonderful now-slightly-crap AppleWorks is long overdue a revamp. You know, I wrote my PhD thesis in AppleWorks, with the help of the excellent EndNote software, and it surely did everything I needed it to do. But that was version 5. Version 6, the OS X version, is a bit of a dog: ugly, slow, clunky, made up to look like a toy. More than anything else Apple might do, my fingers are crossed that they sort this sick puppy out. In the meantime I've resorted to TextEdit, and even MS Word, because even that isn't as horrible as AppleWorks became.
I've also got another set of fingers crossed that they don't over-egg the iMovie pudding. Version 2 was ace, version 3 was a dog, version 4 is more useable but still not as good as version 2. You see a pattern here?
Apple reserves January for Big Announcements, usually of consumer products. Last year it was the iPod mini, which - before you get excited about this year's announcements - finally reached UK dealerships halfway through July. That's right: every American who wants one has to get it first.
Anyway, enough of my moaning. As usual, rumour and speculation will probably outstrip interest in the final product. There's a kind of inverse equation, but as with tsunamis and weather systems, I'm not proposing to do the maths. It's all part of the long-established Apple Product Cycle. Recent innovations to this cycle of hype include the necessity for Apple to sue or threaten to sue those who are "leaking secrets". As with Hollywood and bootlegged DVDs, the real culprit is always someone who works for Apple, which you'd think they'd be able to sort out if they paid people enough, but in the end you have to conclude that the legal action is just part of the pre-publicity, because it's guaranteed to be reported by the people most under threat.
Anyway, this year's rumours have included some kind of el-cheapo computer, which will possibly be pitched as a home media centre. So, imagine (!), just as with today's Macs, you will be able to keep your music, photo, and iMovie collection on it. Possibly, it will plug into your telly and allow you internet access as well as the above; if it allows you to tape programmes, so much the better for the average teenager's bedroom.
I do wonder about the TV tuner issue. Big media will panic about people recording and keeping stuff, burning it onto their own DVDs, and you have to be concerned about the TV tuner element. If it has a tuner, will it be analogue, or digital? What kind of quality?
I've always been massively sceptical about so-called convergence. It's a bit like the marketing obsession with the internet. On-line marketing is all very well, but there is nothing quite like a proper printed catalogue, something you can carry from desk to desk to show people, flick through quick as lightning and even read on the loo. For me, listening to music and watching TV are completely separate activities that take place in different locations and at different times. On the one hand, we're all fat fucks who need to exercise more and diet; and yet on the other the tech pundits are encouraging us to sit on our arses in one place and do everything. Bollocks to that.
The other rumour, more of a dead cert, is a flash-based iPod thing. A modern car key-sized music player that will hold 250-ish songs encoded at 128 kbps, but offer no control as to which track plays when (no built-in display). "Life is random," goes the catchphrase. The marketing geniuses have identified that people are too lazy (see above) to organise their 10,000 iPod songs into playlists, and instead hit random play and listen to their entire collection. The joy of this is in discovering forgotten gems from among unloved albums. On the other hand, 240 songs is the kind of quantity you'd carefully choose yourself, so the joy of randomness is somewhat lost.
My opinion, a computer's idea of "random" is never really "random," as any half-educated programmer knows. You have to program the computer to appear to be random, but it is not, not in the way that humans are.
Finally, the iLife suite of software is due an update, and the once-wonderful now-slightly-crap AppleWorks is long overdue a revamp. You know, I wrote my PhD thesis in AppleWorks, with the help of the excellent EndNote software, and it surely did everything I needed it to do. But that was version 5. Version 6, the OS X version, is a bit of a dog: ugly, slow, clunky, made up to look like a toy. More than anything else Apple might do, my fingers are crossed that they sort this sick puppy out. In the meantime I've resorted to TextEdit, and even MS Word, because even that isn't as horrible as AppleWorks became.
I've also got another set of fingers crossed that they don't over-egg the iMovie pudding. Version 2 was ace, version 3 was a dog, version 4 is more useable but still not as good as version 2. You see a pattern here?
posted by Anonymous at
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
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