A similar thing happened with the personal computer market. The concept was championed by Apple when it launched Apple II, the world’s first personal computer, in 1977, and the first Macintosh in 1984, but other players now lead the market.
er…something similar happened to Apple 25 years ago. (that’s it ?)
And this on the same day that the iPhone wins top prize in the JD Power poll beating the competition in *every* category but one (battery life).
God knows why a paper like the Guardian needs to stoop to this kind of bullshit.
Yesterday’s Macbook announcement didn’t go down well with some folks.
Although it probably won’t matter in the short-term, alienating key usergroups, like musicians and film makers could certainly have long term consequences to the ‘Mac as default creative tool’ image Apple has been trading on for years. Roll into that an uncertain economic situation and you start to wonder if the decision making process at Apple needs to be recalibrated to take better account of it’s customer’s needs rather than the unquestioned self-confidence of old.
And most of all, I think the mood of the world right now is that we’ll buy new tech when it’s ready for us, when we don’t have to throw out gear we care about just to make the case a little thinner, and when we can pay in cash.
Apple is in danger of missing the subtle but discernable change in season and being left selling form and luxury when the prevailing mood is one of functionality, austerity and looking for savings not reasons to upgrade.
It’s been a crazy few days for anyone with a passing interest in the iphone. Indeed with one million sold over the weekend (and 10 million apps) it seems like the revolution which started last year has broken into the mainstream.
There is a fair amount of general apple cynicism in various quarters, not least the amongst certain sections of the PC brigade who can’t see what all the fuss is with Apple and are quick to see ‘Apple-hype’ and generally ‘Mac cult-ishness’ at the root of the massive amount of media attention garnered on these sort of occasions. What amazes me is the lack of Apple generated hype behind last weekend’s launch, and the fact that it’s actually primarily customer generated. Think about that for a second. Apple had a $200 million (?) opening weekend and I’ve hardly seen a poster or an ad.
It’s obvious that price and/or 3G was the deal breaker for some, but it’s really the Apps that are the important thing to watch here. How many times have you ever said ‘check this out’ and showed someone something amazing on your phone ? I’d say before the iphone perhaps 3 or 4 times-now it’s an almost dailyoccurrence-and that’s before we’ve really got into apps.
It’s been perhaps 3 months since the majority of programmers got their hands on the SDK, so it’s very early days and already incredible programs like intua’s SICK lookingBeatmaker are starting to appear. The video above is Moocowmusic’s stand alone Drummer, Art Gillespie (the guy behind Idrum)has a drum machine coming out next week (i-idrum?) and we’ve yet to hear from any of the traditional big boys of music software (iphone reason or iphone ableton anyone?). Beat making on the tube has just gone mainstream!! Imagine how many people I’m going bugging with iphone related ‘wow’ moments now. I’m going to become a walking apple viral campaign (as are 10 million other people). A friend who works for a very forward looking marketing company told me recently that his company’s philosophy now is to tell clients to spend their massive marketing budgets on making better products. Chat rooms and forums, blogs and amazon product ratings arejust way too effective at cutting through PR bullshit-it’s just wasted money.
It’s been said before, people underestimate Apple’s brand dominance within the 15-35 demographic (been to an Apple store recently?) this is going to have an exponential affect within that market. As deejay, I’m waiting for the Technics Ideck or the Serato IScratch to become the new default deejay tool -and there are million niche professions that the right bit of software could just completely open up. It has the hardware and now it has the software, (the Core Location side of which is still to be even vaguely explored) and as the political world knows only too well, more than anything else ‘It’s all about the Mo’. Apple has that momentum now and as long as they don’t go out of their way to screw it up-the world is theirs for the taking. Nintendo seem to be the main competitors in this field, depending on what they decide to do with the DS-Nokia/RIM/Google must be absolutely terrified that this is a race they have already lost.
***Update*** CDM has an interview with Intua, the makers of Beatmaker and a demo here- I downloaded it last night and I’m impressed. It’s very much like an MPC for the iphone-can’t wait to load it up with my own sounds and see where this goes. Go take a look!
My mind has been flitting between ma-ho-sively different things. On Tuesday I (quite willingly) got caught up in the maelstrom of hype that surrounded the iphone launch. It was almost funny seeing the photos of people trampling over each other desperate to get seat for Steve Job’s presentation and pumping their hands in the air and screaming at every announcement. It’s not as if I can claim to be any kind of bemused, detached observer either. I had engadget and macrumours frantically auto-refreshing every ten seconds in a state of minor rapture as tiny pieces of the future leaked out line by line.
It was like the geek world cup final-I felt like everyone in the office should be allowed to take the afternoon off. We could all crowd around a plasma, drinking beer and high fiving each other when one of our favourite rumours was finally revealed.
Funny thing is, it doesn’t even make me feel good. It’s not a positive thing, it’s like a mania, like there is this disease that I’ve picked up somewhere and I see people around who have it worse than me and it’s not attractive. But I do it anyway.
So I had to leave my auto-refresh-athon early cause I had to go see this guy, Scott Harrison, at (of all places) the Apple Store on Regent st. I arrived, half expecting to see hordes of rabid fans descending on the place to bow down in worship, and sat down to listen to his talk. It was quite a harrowing hour really, the photos he shows are hard to look at, just the most horrendous things that poverty can do to people. All the time, just behind me, a hundred imacs are glowing with the freshly updated apple website and yet the more I listened the less it mattered. All this other stuff, reality, pain and suffering, the amazing work of people like Scott, it’s an antidote to all the junk we fill our lives with. It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with apple or cool new stuff or brands in general, it’s just how hard it can be trying to keep things in their place, trying to maintain a balance. Everything in moderation (except moderation itself) as my mother used to tell me.
As for the iphone-I love it, but I think it seems a bit rushed somehow, like they weren’t quite where they wanted to be but have announced it anyway. It’s something beautiful, but it’s not for me right now-in a couple of revisions they will have made it something ubiquitous and perfect and I, like everyone else, will need and treasure them. But more importantly it’s just an object I can use to communicate with people I love (and I can do that, imperfectly, already)
isn’t it funny how quickly we not only adapt to technology but come to embrace it wholeheartedly?my copy of the new j.tillman album, minor works, finally arrived from out of la france and i’ve been indulging myself on my ride to and from work by listening to it. i mean i’ve been listening to the whole album. In the right order. One track after the other. That’s pretty much unprecidented. the funny thing is, listening to it as an album made me feel sort of cerebral.
a bit old school.
very muso.
see, i spend my life on shuffle, and not just my music listening but my reading habits, my working day, my friends and family, my modes of transport, my meal choices. taking a little bit here, a little bit there. and i could blame mtv for the fact that my attention span sees me doing several things at once and none of them particularly well, except i gave up watching tv in 2006. i just like to shuffle.
take last saturday morning; autumn sun streaming in the living room window, newspapers spreadout over the floor, coffee, orange juice and big fat breakfast bagel all within reach, music on the stereo, phone nearby, internet switched on, i started half reading an article in the guardian about the science of shuffle. and sure it suckered me in with the whole ipod thing and by having Steely Dan in the title but dammit if it didn’t turn out to be about maths.
It addressed that oft discussed pub topic: the apparent unrandomness of the shuffle function on itunes, meat for many a cod philosophical muser and online conspiricist. Despite the fact that i probably wouldn’t have read it if i’d have thought it was going to bring quantum disintegration spinning into my idyllic saturday morning veg out, it made the pertinant point, namely that… “our brains aren’t wired to understand randomness“.
and really, it makes perfect sense. much as I shuffle my way through my days, apparently unable to commit to one style of dress, or music or a singular political viewpoint - enjoying the lifestyle equivalent of fusion cuisine - its just here that i end up seeing startling links between things.finding sweeping emotional continuity in the tracklisting of my intrinsic ipod dj, marvelling at how not only am i sat in a row of 6 women on the tube but we’re all wearing grey shoes like some gloriously styled advert for multicultural London. I’ll spot an unusually high number of crows on the way to the office, or hear the word haranguing used three times over in the space of an hour. Tiny seemingly inconsequential things but they’re like the threads which knit my life together. And they might seem like a big tangly mess of apparently random things that make me laugh out loud, make me cross, make me think or make me cry but its in the midst of the shuffling that I get to see and be reminded of a singular truth. that God is right there in the detail as well as the expanse. we can’t deal with the notion of randomness because that leaves us floating and subject to absolute whim, it leaves us without rhyme or reason. randomness reduces the universe to a pile of matter likely at any point to disintegrate into a mound of grey pixels at the bottom of our monitors.and another flip side to all this cultural and social cherrypicking is when you take the time to do something properly. to put on an album from start to finish. to read a book in silence. to switch off your phone and devote attention to one singular thing it feels pretty great.
here’s a j tillman track for a lazy autumn saturday playlist
I feel it necessary to say that upfront because it’s the third macpost in as many days and in the scheme of things the focus of horse lats it is only really an aside.
Despite my best intentions I was refreshing like a mofo desperately trying to get on engadget to see the ‘one more thing’ during ’showtime’ and ever it was initially a bit disappointing. Having had a day or two to allow as Jason Kottkejohn gruber time to tell me what I think the dust to settle- it is starting to become a little clearer.
Ok, I’m also posting this from a slightly clunky G4 ibook.
And yeah, I have an ipod, and yeah my memory stick’s actually a 1st gen 512mb shuffle and my music platform’s itunes (despite its obvious short comings) and yes, ok, i did pre order those sennheiser in-ear headphones in white so i’d have them when they hit the streets and they’d match my mp3(4) player.
So why, when i’ve given up smoking, actually enjoy eating pulses and green vegetables and all sorts of other responsible, adult stuff - am I too to be found camping out (albeit nonchalantly) on macrumours to salivating over whatever tasty, ergonomic, intuitive, white and brushed titanium morcel Steve Jobs’ll toss me this quarter? (see Showtime at the Apple-O below)
It seems to me that the vitruvian triangle of form/function/delight in equal measure which meets in many of apple’s products has been squared by ‘covetability’…
Much as I would like to consider myself way too savvy to be caught up in the infinite loop of Apple hype, it doesn’t take much (24″ inches baby!!!) to get this poor sap wondering golem-like through the Apple store, pointing at stuff and whispering ‘me wants it’ to random passers by. Today is ‘Showtime’(or simply ‘the announcement’ as it is being called around here), and while we wait, hoping not to be disappointed by some lame-ass ugly stereo, it is worth reflecting on how serious all this is.
At the weekend The Observer was foolish enough to question the longevity of the ipod brand-Infidels!!!-Macdailynews got medival on them posting a 1000 word rebuttal including chart showing the last five years of ipod sales quarter by quarter and printing the writer’s address/email/phone number-Take that you Gates loving bitch!!!. Sure the article was a bit rubbish; short on facts, long on under informed/over opinionated ‘media analysts’ but it doesn’t really matter does it?
