The REAL star of MacWorld (and it’s not MacBook Air)
It is always a good idea to wait about a week or so before committing to an opinion after one of Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynotes, just to give the Reality Distortion Field time to dissipate.
It’s easy to get totally sucked in, and come away thinking that a computer shaped like a cube is going to be The Next Big Thing, or, if you’re trying to overcompensate, to come out and say that Apple thinking they can play with big boys in the cell phone market is lunacy of the highest order.
The big deal this time was the MacBook Air. Jobs pulled it out of a manila envelope, and everyone, including me, oohed and ahhed with envy. It is a glorious, sexy, machine. Reviewers have gushed over it, while others have pointed its lack of optical drive, ports, user replaceable battery, and high price tag. I think both sides make valid points, and the official Geekfoolery prediction is that Apple is going to sell every one they make, and people who buy them will make every effort to be seen using them in coffee shops. Expect more than a few people to carry them around in manila envelopes just so they can feel like Steve.
But as cool as the MacBook Air is, it’s really just another laptop. In one or two more laptop generations, you’ll be able to get nearly all the same features in the laptop of your choice, but apart from saving a little shoulder strain, there’s nothing in the Macbook Air that will fundamentally change what you do with your computer.
The revolution will come instead from the newly revised Apple TV. The new Apple TV lets you watch movies, listen to music and podcasts, and view pictures from Flickr.com on your living room TV instead of your computer. The biggest innovation over the previous version of the Apple TV is that you can use every feature of the new Apple TV without ever connecting it to your primary computer. With a wireless connection to the Internet, you can rent movies using Apple’s new iTunes Movie Rentals, you can buy TV shows, and download music. You’re not strictly limited to viewing and listening that you have to pay for, either. You also have free run of all the podcasts available in iTunes as well, the vast majority of which are free, and many of which are video and even in HD quality. You can also view all the photos online in Flickr.com.
All of this without a computer–just a $229 Apple TV.
The dominant revolution in home video right now is TiVo, of course, and Apple TV isn’t going to unseat TiVo just yet. But the reason TiVo needs to be careful is that the function of a TiVo is a device designed to intercept what is being broadcast on cable. It’s a fairly intelligent machine in the way it goes out and finds the bits of the broadcast stream that you’ve told it to get and then it stores them for playback later. TiVo users say they no longer know or care what channel their favorite show is on, or what time–it’s just there on their TiVo.
But what TiVo can’t do is go back and get something that wasn’t broadcast, or that you didn’t realize you wanted to watch until after it was on. What Apple TV does is prepare us for the day when broadcast is no longer the preferred way to deliver video content. This is already happening with music and audio–who listens to radio stations anymore? XM and Sirius are stopgaps, and even iPods are just audio TiVos that are bridging technology from where we are now to the time when you’ll able to listen to anything, anytime, anywhere, over the Internet.
So Apple TV is here at the start of the revolution. You probably don’t even notice it happening. But just like we joke now with kids about how when we were kids, there were only 4 channels, and if something came on and you missed it, you were out of luck until they ran the Grinch again next year. Our kids won’t even be able to explain what a channel even is.
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