g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Thursday, October 28, 2004
11:19 - I can see clearly now

(top) link
The iPod Photo has lots of treats for us even if we never use its photo-displaying capabilities:



Color screen with higher definition than the standard iPod screen—and every last bit of the interface has been revamped to take advantage of color. So you get to see album art along with your track info. Calendars are color-coded just like in iCal. The games are now in full color, as are the various icons for charging, connecting, star rating, and everything else. And the progress bar for when you're listening to a song is now Aqua-fied, tying the platform-neutral iPod's interface to the Mac with more certainty than anything since the Chicago font and the Column View-style navigation.

Is it smart to keep stubbornly making the iPod feel more at home on a Mac than on a PC? Hell yes. If they believe in the UI concepts of Mac OS X, then Windows users should feel right at home using the iPod's interface whether it looks like Windows or not. Besides, can you imagine a Windows-look iPod interface? Gray screen backgrounds? "Tree"-style navigation? Progress bars made up of those chunky blue rectangles?

Anyway, then there's all the photo stuff which I'd love to play with one of these days: the new iPod Dock comes with an S-Video out port as well as composite audio/video, and you can create slide shows with background music just like in iPhoto—though it may be that you're supposed to simply play music of your choice manually in the background once you've begun a photo slide show. I wanna see how this works.

However, those people who think this development prefigures an inevitable iPod Movie with video playback capability (and attendant iTunes-style video store) will probably be disappointed by this interview published the day before the iPod Photo was announced:

While Milunovich is quick to note that a photo iPod "makes sense" and that Apple executives he spoke with did not reject the idea of such a device, he doesn't expect Apple will release such a device until the first-half of next year. While Think Secret stands by our original photo iPod report from three weeks ago, the possibility always remains--as with any product in production--that production-snags may cause the device to miss its intended holiday season roll-out.

Milunovich dismisses the notion that a video iPod may follow after a photo iPod, echoing previous sentiments from Apple executives. "In our discussions with management about usage patterns, it is clear that a Video iPod (for playing movies) gets the thumbs down," he writes. Apple simply doesn't see a strong a device that would require users to view a movie on a small screen for an extended period of time.

Maybe that's just Apple hedging... but it doesn't sound like it. Apple has a way of holding back on products that they don't feel are marketable; it's why they never sold a Tablet PC or a PDA, even though both classes of product have been repeatedly sighted in Apple's R&D labs over the past five to ten years. In the case of the Tablet PC, considering how slowly they're catching on, one can hardly say Apple missed the boat. They tend to have a pretty good ear for gauging how well the public will respond to some new class of product; remember how skeptical all the pundits were that the iPod would ever sell? Remember how everyone was poised to mock it as the next Newton?

So while it seems like a no-brainer for Apple to move next into video sales and playback in the iTunes idiom, I just don't see it. They've clearly explored the idea and found it wanting. People just don't interact with video the way they do with music; remember, music is a passive form of entertainment, something you can just sort of push aside and treat as a soundtrack as you concentrate on getting your work done. How do you do that with video? You have to stare constantly at a screen for video to make any sense. It requires all your attention. Are you really going to stare into a two-inch screen to watch a video you've paid real money for? I suppose at that resolution it might actually be feasible to download feature-length movies through an iTunes-like storefront, but if they want to compete with DVD sales/rentals and the broadcast and cable media, the customers will demand hi-fi video, something they can stream out to the HDTV through the Dock connector. That ain't happening in the iPod paradigm, not when the technology is converging onto other devices like on-demand satellite service and HD TiVo. The iPod won't be a player here.

So I think looking excitedly beyond photos to something even more revolutionary is a little too optimistic; photo capability will have to do for now. And really, that's fine; this is a pretty impressive product for that functionality alone. And there's already plenty more in the way of goodies for us to play with.


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© Brian Tiemann