Surprises¶
951 words
This year starts with loads of surprises. For example it is the beginning of January – also known as the middle of winter around here – and we are having double digit positive temperatures, Celsius temperatures:
While it was a non-surprise that VAT in Germany rose to 19% to celebrate the new year, it was interesting to see my amazon notepad shopping basket which usually informs me of any price changes when opening it. It appears that those price changes are computed using the pre-tax price rather than the real price – as amusingly the price of one CD was lowered
from €13,97 to €13,99, while that of another one was lowered
from €17,97 to €17,97.
But of course the biggest surprises were to be had with Apple at the Macworld Expo Stevenote. Everybody expected stuff like updates to iLife, iWork and perhaps some of the computers. But this was supposed to be big, so we got completely different stuff altogether:
Airport
Some new Airport base station to begin with – yawn. A due update I guess, but essentially boring. Being able to attach a printer, a drive or wired machines is nice, but that’s about it. Many people get routers with similar features with their DSL connection these days (unfortunately ours is one generation too old to be able to host a USB drive – grrrr).
TV
Haha, funny, not iTV but AppleTV it is! Or rather TV
if your computer displays U+F8FF (down at the very end of the Private Use Area) as an Apple symbol – which probably only Macs will do out of the box. [I really wonder what made them use a name that nobody can write properly – I mean the average ‘journalist’ these days can’t even get comparatively simple words like iMac right…] I can see how this can be considered a neat-o addition to the home entertainment hardware. But that’s about it. In a household that sports a telly from the 1980s and with a computer that can be hooked up to it in less than a minute, I can find many better ways to spend 300 monetary units (particularly as the TV doesn’t even connect to such an old telly if I read the specs correctly).
From what I’ve read I am not entirely convinced that this AppleTV thing is an all-great and revolutionary thing. I guess we’ll have to wait until people actually use it to tell whether Apple really managed to pull of something cool here or whether it’s just OK. And does anyone else think that Mr. Jobs is a bit too fond of calling music and films ‘content’ and that he sounds a bit like a trash-electronics salesman when going on about ‘widescreen TV’?
iPhone
But the big news has of course be the iPhone. It’s still pretty much vapourware at this time, but certainly interesting vapourware. Personally I was surprised to see this happen. And while I’m not a mobile phone user, I think this is very interesting! Not because I feel the urgent need to drop a big bundle of cash with Apple as soon as possible to get one. But because it really looks like they did something different, something new, something simple, something reasonably stylish, something technically advanced.
Of course it’s too early to say whether the device is any good. Will the motion and proximity sensing really work as well as it looks in the videos? The whole finger gestures look brilliant (just the two finger scrolling on the current portables is excellent) but will the finger sensing work reasonably well for everything? And will it be really be good enough to compensate for the complete lack of tactile feedback? (I still think my 3G iPod’s usability sucks because you never feel when you pressed a button.) Will the iPhone scratch as easily as an iPod? (Mobile phones usually seem to survive 1-2 years in people’s pockets next to keys and coins before they start looking broken – as compared to 1-2 minutes for an iPod.) These questions can probably only be answered once the device is seeing actual use. Those are small details that will make the difference between brilliance and frustration.
And of course there are minor question as well: How well will it sync with my Mac? And with the computers of the big share of the market? How does it handle the entry of accented letters? Why exactly did they call the phone’s software OS X? (Not Mac OS X, right?) Could battery life just be a tiny bit too short to get people actually using the device to the best of its capabilites through a full day? Does the wireless access rock? And let you do library sharing? (I mean, come on, they must feel compelled to add that to the phone just to make laughing stock of some other portable music player). And so on.
However these will turn out, I think it’s great to see that Apple are trying new things and thinking big while doing that. I can easily ‘wait’ some more months for updates to iLife, a new Spreadsheet or a zillion-core computer I won’t buy for that. A more concrete timeline on X.5 and its ‘secrets’ would have been good, though.
What wasn’t surprising but still makes me sad is that Apple is still firm on its route of forcing their own stuff, and their own stuff only, down your throat. What about playing non-QuickTime content on their video player? AVI files? External subtitles? Any subtitles? (I mean this can be done in QuickTime but Apple never seem to have bothered to give us a good UI for it or to distribute subtitled video).
