Candy Apple : taste is getting a little dull
by kurisu
To paraphrase Slashdot’s Taco, and hammer on the rumors that were flying about prior to this announcement of the iPod mini :
“no bluetooth. no color screen. no more firewire or AC adapter. lame.”
Only nice thing : 18 hours of battery life.
Am I the only one to think that recently, Apple has much less sex-appeal than say, last year ? Nothing really new, even considering the Mac mini.
Last few updates are yawning at most, they focus their resources on milking the online music biz, they communicate less and less about Mac OS X, heck, there are no truely interesting Apple-related articles, or even rumors ever since last September.
I am pretty certain that they will try to introduce Tiger in big fanfare, but it won’t be as big as it could have been.
Apple seems to be enjoying the ride and quite frankly I think some heads over at Cupertino are so inflated that they can’t go through some of the doors.
They won’t fail, and I am pretty sure that things look ok for the foreseeable future, but if they don’t regain their pizzaz, Apple’s star will once again loose its shine and go into deep hibernation for a few years.
Sure, you can’t possibly come up with cool, mind blowing stuff all the time, but to me it looks like Apple’s relationship with the market is like bad sex : zip-zap, do your thing and go to sleep until next time.
I’m not asking them to blow me (away) every single time, but they should know that :
1. Foreplay is extremely important (don’t completely kill rumors)
2. Pleasing your partner is as important as pleasing yourself (make your customers know that you have some cool stuff coming up)
3. You don’t HAVE to make your partner come every time, but it is important that your partner always feels satisfied (updates vs. new products)
4. Routine kills romance (surprise your partner and keep the flame burning.)
I sincerely hope that things in the next months will revive my flame for Apple, coz right now it feels like we only do it every 6 months, in the dark, and that it gets boring after 5 minutes.
Oh, and yeah, I really need to get over my ex-girlfriend.
February 24th, 2005 at 06:18 CET
Well, the lack of sex-appeal is prolly compensated by a surge in rest-appeal… that is appealing to the “rest of them”… let’s face it, say firewire tob a PC user and she will go “Uh?” or at best reminds that weirdly named IEEE1394 thingy that comes with these tiny plugs on the laptops, but that’s only a video thing (a colleague of mine thought the firewire plug meant his laptop had a video capture board….). I understand Apple is not going to sell TWO versions of each iPod, one with USB2 cable and the other with FW cable… and let’s remember that Apple DID make USB popular. As far as the iPod is concerned, USB2 or FW is not really important, but I’d hate to see Apple phasing out FW, since it still rulez for data transfer (ahhh, editing DV video on an external FW800 drive…).
That said, it’s fun to see all the Mac community complaining when Apple starts making sense on a business level: they do what everyone asked them to do: USE INDUSTRY STANDARDS.
And going the PC way: if you can’t make your products cheaper, make them LOOK cheaper. Ship them with the bare minimun in accessories. Videogame console manufacturer understood this ages ago (like buy a Playstation or any other console and it doesn’t ship with a memory card… which you have to buy for a HUGE price). So Apple sells Macs without display/keyboarb/mouse and they call it BYOKDM to make it sexy. So they sell iPods without FW and without an AC adapter and they call it cheaper.
Well, I might not like it like many other people, but Apple is a COMPANY and a company’s prime and unique goal is to make money, or rather make money for the shareholders.
So, the iPod is now mainstream and Apple is selling it like any other mainstream product: to make the most profit out of it…
February 24th, 2005 at 16:32 CET
while I understand Moose point of view regarding Apple starting to make sense on a business level; I agree with Kurisu, that this revision is lacking the stars and little details which is making everything different, or let say was making Apple different.
I consider dropping FireWire cable as acknowledging that Mac users can buy it if they want… so acknowledging that PC users are most of the current iPod buyers. fine with me, except FireWire rules anyway, and one can always use an iPod as a external drive…but from today USB2.0 only, except if you have a spare FireWire cable iPod compatible, or if you are willing to invest for such a wire.
this revision is not really exciting, beside iPod mini 4GB getting relatively cheap compared to competition and even to iPod shuffle.
Of course iPod and iPod Photo reorganization makes sense. iPod Photo will be used more and more in the future due to the explosion of digital camera, and trust me with a Nikon D70, you need to transfer your photo from Compact flash memory to a computer or a larger HD-based device quite frequently. So the iPod Photo is nice, except that I will prefer having a CF reader incorporated to it, instead of a Camera connector supposed to be available in 2 month…
iPod music will in the future become more Special Edition-oriented, making the already fashioned iPod device a collection-dedicated object.
marketing-wise it really makes sense; but longtime Mac users might think that the yesterday update was missing real innovation; something we have been used to with Apple in the last 2 years for every hardware update.
February 24th, 2005 at 17:42 CET
I’m not used to seeing Apple get as much press as they have been getting lately. Maybe that’s because Apple hasn’t been clearly dominating a market in so long that their every move is documented by the industry press. The announcements yesterday didn’t make me run around my office annoying everyone with smug comments about how Apple was going to blow the competition out of the water with their new line of digital music gizmos. In fact, I just kinda shrugged and felt disappointment because I (along with many others) wanted to see Bluetooth - color screens everywhere - etc.
Later that night, I looked a bit closer though and realized that if I just stopped thinking about what wasn’t announced and really looked at what they did announce, I felt a bit better. Longer battery life - this is a pretty standard complaint I’ve heard about the iPods. Apple has now addressed it. I no longer will hear the cry of “8 hours?! You have got to be kidding?! What a weak excuse for a power supply!”
I also won’t hear, “4 Gigs?! That’s hardly enough space. There are 6 gig models out there already.”
Nor will I hear, “Sure, I’d love to buy and iPod, but I think I can spend the money on something better - like a down payment on a house” (That’s my witty way of saying that people complain about how expensive they are.)
This was clearly an update of the iPod line to address market concerns; not to announce new products and features. I think the rumor mills were all hoping for something bigger, and with all the articles being put out about Apple at the moment, the appetite for something new each time is pretty powerful. But keep in mind, it was just two months ago that Apple announced the Mac Mini and the Shuffle. Both of these products are still rather tough to find. I’m pretty sure Apple doesn’t want to serve up a second course of gadgets before the public is done with the first.
February 24th, 2005 at 19:19 CET
Geez, we’re just barely a month after Macworld Expo and the rollout of the Mac Mini, the iPod Shuffle, the new iWorks, and the updated iLife, and people are already complaining about things getting dull? And that’s not counting the other low-profile rollouts Apple’s done in the interim, such as the Powerbook upgrades. And it’s only February…
File this article away somewhere and look back at it in November 2005. I have no idea what else Apple has up its sleeve, but I’m sure they’ll make the iPod’s incremental upgrade (and that’s all it’s meant to be, honest) look minor by comparison.
–R.J.
February 25th, 2005 at 22:23 CET
correct robert, except that in your list of new products from Apple, only the Mac mini is really a new hardware, the rest is either software or peripherals (iPod shuffle). So yes, I think kurisu is right that the last real hardware announcement beside the Mac mini was the iMacG5, which was anyway announced indirected by Apple in July 2004.
I reallt hope that apple is going to release new hardware products soon
September 7th, 2008 at 18:14 CEST
get a car insurance quote…
reign specializes ultrasonic Bella exchanged:adjudged!…