Stevenote Post-Mortem
So they announced a bunch of updates for Leopard, Time Machine/Time Capsule, the iPhone, the AppleTV, the iPod Touch, and iTunes downloads. None of which I have or use.
And then there’s the Macbook Air (MBA) — the super-thin, super-light. It’s impressive. It’s sexy. It’s even sorta eco-friendly. But…
It’s still kind of disappointing.
Don’t get me wrong, I get the sexy, I get the sleek. I get that it’s a design award waiting to happen.
But it’s kind of a black box, with limited physical ports. No ethernet, no firewire, no DVD drive. They’re doing with laptops now what they did with the original iMac. The original iMac came out in an era when every computer had a floppy drive — but the iMac didn’t. It was a statement that the floppy drive was dead, long live the CDROM. And now the MBA is making a similar statement for 2008: wires are dead, DVDs are dead, long live wireless.
The MBA is cool in that it will let you borrow a connection to another computer’s DVD drive across a wireless network. That’s a really nice touch. But I can see that feature going away in a few years, so you’re left with just downloading stuff from Apple directly.
My fear is that Apple is positioning their consumer-grade products to be digital download appliances that integrate with their growing digital download business.
They’ll still sell you the finest fully-capable laptops or desktops — for a price — but their focus is going to be on portable appliances. Black boxes for their download store.
All the new development will be in adding GPS to your iPhone and “multitouch” to your iPod. Not in providing the best computer experience for computer users and techies.
I predict that in the future more and more of their vaunted OS X features and usability will fall by the wayside as they focus on features to support their pay-to-play digital downloads and consumer entertainment devices. Already you see this happening with iTunes. Remember when it was primarily an easy-to-use music player? And it integrated well with the orignal iPods. Now it’s bundled with Quicktime. And it’s got TV Shows, and Movies, and Ringtones, and iPhone syncing, and iPod Games — none of which I use if I just want to play a CD or MP3.
More, later.
