I got it bad
Technolust. Very, very severely. In fact I can't remember the last time I had such a desperate longing for a bit of kit. It was probably the Apple //gs about 21y ago. Or maybe the Mk 1 Amiga, or the Archimedes. (And eventually, I got one of those - when it was still Dead Cool. For a teenage geek, anyway.)
What for?
The iPhone. (No, not that one. Bleah. Who cares?)
It looks gorgeous. As I kinda expected, it redefines what a cellphone is and does. I expect it will cause a considerable shakeup in the market when it finally ships. I also expect the conventional phone/mobile/PC analysts not to Get It at all, to dismiss it as an expensive toy, and to be taken aback when it sells very well. And I don't expect the makers of conventional featurephones and smartphones will understand why it's good at what it does or why it's successful, and as a result, at least at first, it'll have relatively little impact on mainstream phone design - apart from they'll go black with colourful icons, in an attempt to look like an Apple phone.
Alas the keynote stream sputtered and died, even at 3am, so I'll have to try again later. Bah!
OK, so, v1 has no 3G (who cares? It barely works anyway, IME, and it does have Wifi), no card slot for expansion, and I bet the battery life is optimistic, but it's still a work of art. After a couple of generations of refinement, it should completely change users' expectations of what they can do in a pocket-sized device.
Although I'd still prefer a keypad - down the sides would do fine - but if anyone can make fingers accurate enough to use on a touchscreen, it's Apple.
Also, somewhere down the line, someone is being at least a bit economical with the truth when they say it runs OS X. I can just barely credit a dramatically cut-down version, but on x86? Surely not. The last x86 smartphone was the Nokia 9110 and that does not really compare. ISTM it'd be easier to build a lightweight OS up from scratch than to cut down some big desktop system like OS X, but hey, I have no inside info. Interesting that they call it just "OS X" and not "Mac OS X". That could be telling.
The AppleTV, OTOH, I don't entirely get. A 40GB HD? In 2007? Yerwot? I'd expect 10x that. And it's not a PVR, is it? AFAICS. It basically seems to be just a viewer. Kinda like a Slingbox or something, a sort of TV Squeezebox. I'm rather mystified and somewhat unimpressed. mr_tom's suggestion of an XBox Media Centre is frankly much more appealing - and about a 10th of the price.
But apart from my continuing Friends obsession, I am not much of a TV viewer. I'm only just now starting to get into downloading movies from Bittorrent, although I must admit that it would be awfully pleasant to watch them from the Comfy Chair and not from my computer desk. I guess I am not the target market for this gadget but it seems more of the same rather than something radical. I feel sure I must be missing something here. Just plain old ease of use, I guess.
What for?
The iPhone. (No, not that one. Bleah. Who cares?)
It looks gorgeous. As I kinda expected, it redefines what a cellphone is and does. I expect it will cause a considerable shakeup in the market when it finally ships. I also expect the conventional phone/mobile/PC analysts not to Get It at all, to dismiss it as an expensive toy, and to be taken aback when it sells very well. And I don't expect the makers of conventional featurephones and smartphones will understand why it's good at what it does or why it's successful, and as a result, at least at first, it'll have relatively little impact on mainstream phone design - apart from they'll go black with colourful icons, in an attempt to look like an Apple phone.
Alas the keynote stream sputtered and died, even at 3am, so I'll have to try again later. Bah!
OK, so, v1 has no 3G (who cares? It barely works anyway, IME, and it does have Wifi), no card slot for expansion, and I bet the battery life is optimistic, but it's still a work of art. After a couple of generations of refinement, it should completely change users' expectations of what they can do in a pocket-sized device.
Although I'd still prefer a keypad - down the sides would do fine - but if anyone can make fingers accurate enough to use on a touchscreen, it's Apple.
Also, somewhere down the line, someone is being at least a bit economical with the truth when they say it runs OS X. I can just barely credit a dramatically cut-down version, but on x86? Surely not. The last x86 smartphone was the Nokia 9110 and that does not really compare. ISTM it'd be easier to build a lightweight OS up from scratch than to cut down some big desktop system like OS X, but hey, I have no inside info. Interesting that they call it just "OS X" and not "Mac OS X". That could be telling.
The AppleTV, OTOH, I don't entirely get. A 40GB HD? In 2007? Yerwot? I'd expect 10x that. And it's not a PVR, is it? AFAICS. It basically seems to be just a viewer. Kinda like a Slingbox or something, a sort of TV Squeezebox. I'm rather mystified and somewhat unimpressed. mr_tom's suggestion of an XBox Media Centre is frankly much more appealing - and about a 10th of the price.
But apart from my continuing Friends obsession, I am not much of a TV viewer. I'm only just now starting to get into downloading movies from Bittorrent, although I must admit that it would be awfully pleasant to watch them from the Comfy Chair and not from my computer desk. I guess I am not the target market for this gadget but it seems more of the same rather than something radical. I feel sure I must be missing something here. Just plain old ease of use, I guess.