More, Later: The Feeling of the Other Shoe Dropping
This is the followup to my earlier post on the Stevenote. In that post, I wrote:
My fear is that Apple is positioning their consumer-grade products to be digital download appliances that integrate with their growing digital download business…. their focus is going to be on portable appliances. Black boxes for their download store.
That was the heart of the piece, for me. That issue what I want to address here. The issue of the digital download black box.
I’ve watched the video of the keynote and one thing that caught my attention was the discussion of the lack of an optical drive on the MacBook Air (MBA).
“What do we normally do with optical drives? We play movies, we install software, we make backups, and we burn music CDs sometimes (for our cars, usually).”
But guess what? We have a much better way to get movies onto our computers now. We can wirelessly rent them — from iTunes Movie Rentals, right on our MacBook Air. We have a much better way than burning CDs for our car — most of us have iPods in our cars now. For making backups, we now have Time Machine and Time Capsule — to wirelessly back up our notebooks.” (from 1:07:20 - 1:08:00 of the keynote)
I understand that this segment about the MBA is partially intended to emphasize some of the other announcements from the keynote, like movie rentals and Time Capsule. But it also indicates the exact fear that I have about where Apple is going with its hardware: you buy in to a constellation of relatively inflexible devices and configurations when you buy a MBA. One simple example: the USB Superdrive works only with the MacBook Air because of its boosted power over USB requirements.
But the bigger issue here, and the “feeling of the other shoe dropping” that I’m referring to in the title, is the set of assumptions about who you are as a Mac user:
- We don’t watch movies on DVD because we will just wirelessly rent movie downloads now.
- We don’t listen to CDs in our cars because we all have iPod adapters in our cars now.
- We don’t need to burn backups to CD because we all have Time Machine (and Leopard to run it) and Time Capsule.
In other words, the MacBook Air is a black box for their download store, for use with their newest software release and their newest entertainment (iPod) and system (Time Capsule) appliances.
Well, I’m still watching movies on DVD. I may have watched downloads on my computer but I haven’t purchased many of them and I’ve never used any pay-per-view/rent-on-demand/rental download service. I don’t even use Netflix for DVD rentals.
Furthermore, I don’t have a TV, or cable, or a stand-alone DVD/VCR, or a set-top box. The AppleTV is right out for me. The DVR is the most interesting TV-based entertainment device that I’ve heard of, but since I’m not much interested in a subscription service, I’ve avoided Tivo and haven’t investigated the other devices available, since I don’t have a TV anyway.
As for cars and CDs, ever since my truck was stolen, I don’t even have a car stereo. And even when I did, it had a tape player and I used a portable CD player with one of those tape-adapters. Further, I’m in the ultra-tiny minority of Americans who don’t drive to work everyday: I bike or ride the bus. Since music and biking is a good way to reduce one’s life expectancy, the only time I listen to music on the go is either car trips with my girlfriend or while riding the bus. And while riding the bus, I use a first-generation iPod shuffle from about 3 years ago. (It’s only my second Apple device from the modern Apple era.
Backups are nice, and Time Capsule sounds cool, but I don’t have Leopard or Time Machine (though in any event I’ll be using it soon, since today we just got our first new iMac at work, complete with OS X 10.5). Time Capsule was actually the most intriguing announcement of the 2008 keynote for me, since it’s a wireless base station and gigabit ethernet hub, as well as a network-attached storage (NAS) device. I have been looking for a central backup and media device that’s network accessible for a while now. But it has to be fully usable as a general purpose NAS for use with Windows and Linux. At least one early report from TUAW was mixed on whether it supports this ability or not, and although Apple specifically mentions that “because it mounts as a wireless hard drive, Tiger and Windows users simply access Time Capsule directly from the wireless network for exchanging and storing files,” their tech specs page doesn’t mention any file server protocols (AFP, SMB, NFS, etc.). The TUAW report linked above claims that partitioning the drive won’t be possible. This suggests that it will be a near-zero-configuration device that’s set up via an OS X preference pane. “Zero configuration” is another way of saying “zero options for the choosy.”
To get back on track with my larger point about assumptions: All these things Jobs mentions about why you don’t need an optical drive are things I don’t or can’t or probably won’t do. It means the MBAs — and Apple’s product strategies — are not general purpose enough unless you fit into the exact demographic/market that Steve has described: an early-adopter, gadget-loving, high-end group of people — a group that I’ve only got half a foot in anyway.
I don’t think these new technologies represent a truly user-friendly approach to information system or information appliance design. Of course, I’m not alone in this (and neither was Mark Pilgrim), but over time I think it’s becoming more and more true that Apple, Macs, and OS X are more about Apple’s business model than a broad definition of user friendliness. A broad definition that includes flexibility of options and depth of features.
I’m the first to admit (or it could be the first to brag) that I’m far from an early adopter. I’m kind of a tech geek luddite, slow to adopt new things until I’m sure that I want or need them and that I can afford them comfortably. Time Capsule was attractive because it filled this position of being something I think I need (NAS, gigabit, and wireless base station) and would be willing to pay a little extra for an easy to use, all-in-one unit, but then Apple has to go and call it a “backup appliance” and make me suspicious that it’s not really the fully-featured NAS that I’m looking for.
It’s that kind of suspicion that’s been growing in me ever since the introduction of the iPhone and Leopard. What I referred to as the “black box” issue. I may want a DVR or a home media server. I may want a wireless base station and a gigabit NAS. I may want an easy-to-use music player and music player + library software. But I don’t want ringtones, music store accounts, or downloadable movie rentals.
In his response to Mark Pilgrim’s switch, John Gruber says:
I’m deeply suspicious of Mac users who claim to be perfectly happy with Mac OS X. Real Mac users, to me, are people with much higher standards, impossibly high standards, and who use Macs not because they’re great, but because they suck less than everything else.
By that definition, I’m a “real Mac user” for the “high standards” my skepticism implies. And I still agree that Macs (and OS X) sucks less than anything else out there. But I’m also concerned that Apple is moving away from making computers and devices for “real Mac users” and moving towards making something else, and that at some point, I may find something that sucks even less, which would be disappointing.
