01.11.07
iRrational Excitement
I suppose, really, that the fact that I’m really not all that excited about the announced iTV and iPhone is a good sign. Despite the initial reaction of “oooh, shiny” (which– admit it– everyone had), both products simply aren’t in a niche I have a need to fill. Technically, I already have an iTV– my Mac mini, purchased back in ‘05. It had gravitated towards a media center machine kind of slowly once I’d done my upgrading of my gaming rig, so I have no need for a dedicated media box. And paying $500 to get locked into a two-year contract with a different cell provider for a phone that has just over a tenth of the capacity of my current iPod is not worth it to me, no matter how absolutely spiffy the “smart phone” features are. (Though, if I could make the jump with a little less cost– or, more specifically, if the phone were available for Sprint– I would so be all over it.)
Now that’s not to say that Apple has done some bad things here. I like the products, even if they’re not for me. By getting more higher-function capabilities into a consumer-oriented mobile phone, it could (stress: could) kick-start a new generation of cell phone competition, which always results in the consumers winning. If, and this is a big if, the major manufacturers got together and built a solid and interoperable platform for advanced-level programs to run on their hardware, they could seriously get US-based cell technology caught up to the rest of the world. Apple would lose, of course– which isn’t quite blasphemous– but it would be beneficial for everyone involved. Especially the consumers.
Why would Apple lose? After all, the iPod has most of the same problems that the iPhone would face– lock-in, somewhat inferior technology hiding behind the ‘cool’ factor (I will be the first to admit that encoding your own movies onto the iPod is a pain in the ass that is done MUCH better on other devices), and an almost prohibitively-high price point. The iPhone has a couple advantages over the iPod, however; it runs on OS X, so coding for it could hypothetically be opened up (but don’t hold your breath), and out of the box it offers a bit more over the Blackberry and its ilk (at least, more to my estimation; the last I’ve touched a Blackberry was in May of ‘06, and that was a lower-end model). The iPod has been a great success and nobody can really deny that; but the biggest credit to its success was the relative novelty of the device. When it was introduced, MP3/music players were relatively new ground. Since that time, each continual iteration of the iPod has been an evolutionary alteration, increasing bit-by-bit the capabilities of the machine. A completely “new” iPod simply won’t sell if it were introduced today; people already have theirs. The only reasons I would ever buy another iPod are if this current one broke, or if the new one added significant features without removing features I enjoyed from the existing one.
That’s the big problem I have with the iPhone. Granted, you don’t want a hard-drive-based cell phone. That’s just ASKING for trouble. But 8GB capacity?! When your primary iPods start at 30GB? When you are trying to sell movies that routinely consume upwards of 2GB of space each? Let’s go ahead and overlook the read/write degradation of flash-based drives for a moment. Regardless of whether or not it’s widescreen, no iPod with less than 30GB of space can be called “the true video iPod”. I think that’s what a lot of Appleologists were looking for when they heard about the iPhone’s wide screen. It’s just not going to happen.
I would personally love a “convergence” device. I would love to graft a high-capacity iPod onto a palm-top OS X computer. If it had a comparable capacity to my existing iPod, then I wouldn’t be wavering over this decision; I’d be scanning my pre-order receipt for you folks and updating everyone with my new phone number. As it stands, the iPhone is simply not what I’m looking for in a “convergence” device. Ask me again in two years– if the iPhone lasts that long, or if a better device isn’t available.
Now, the iTV. In principle, I like the device. A set-top box that can play stored or streaming media, with a 40GB hard drive that can connect directly to any iTunes-capable computer and makes theater-style display of iTunes Store content easy will always be a good idea in my book. The biggest problem I have is that it’s basically the same as a set of AirPort Speakers, only with an HDMI output port and some component outputs. Now don’t get me wrong. If I did not have the Mac mini (which I can expand endlessly by virtue of external hard drives), I would again be all over this. My mini does have some problems– it refuses to output a widescreen signal to my HDTV’s PC port– but it works. I do not feel a need to lay out $300 for a device whose functions I already am capable of in a machine that I purchased for other purposes.
There is one very big glaring thing that, in the interests of playing nice with certain parties who know who they are, I can’t come out and say is something that the mini can do that the iTV can’t. Of course, if I happen to drop that the iTV won’t let me play World of Warcraft on a monitor twice as big as my PC monitor, then you might get the idea. But sssssh. We’re trying to be subtle about this.
It kind of comes down to this: I want both of the things that Apple announced, but I by no means need either of them. And apparently, I’m not the only one of that opinion.