Wednesday, January 12, 2005 |
22:48 - Hee hee hee, haw haw haw
http://stream.apple.akadns.net/
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Don't forget to watch the Stevenote—particularly those of you who are toying, like naughty children, with the idea of jumping into the Cult of Mac by picking up a Mac mini in the near future.
You'll see why we love Steve: even when he's being glib or transparently sycophantic to all things French, as he does throughout the demos for Dashboard and iChat, the stuff he's showing off is just so damn cool (and he believes in it so honestly) that you can't help but grin ear to ear and give him a pass.
"Okay—nobody's outbidding me on Ebay, it's still raining in San Francisco, the dollar still sucks... okay, let's go back! Boom!" as he dismisses the Dashboard layer. You just can't help but laugh along. Especially when you see something so warpingly insane as the Dashboard widget-appearing effect or the slideshow with its "suck into iPhoto" and Exposé-like layout effects. Even when the system freezes and Steve swaps over to a backup machine, the audience dissolves into enthusiastic applause, not jeers, just because the presentation is so slick anyway—even the recovery seems scripted and rehearsed.
And not that we can benefit from it here at home, but the projection was all in HD this time. Damn, that must have been worth the price of admission.
I've still got 75% of it left to watch (it's about two hours long). Lots more fun to come, I'm sure...
UPDATE: Especially be sure to watch the section on the iPod shuffle, at the end: it's Jobs' famed Reality Distortion Field at its most distilled strength. The very concept of the device is a hard sell—he's having to explain why an iPod without a screen is inherently superior to all the existing competition that has screens, why the solution to the prevailing "tortured user interface" is to have no visual interface at all, and why playing up the "shuffle" angle is a revolutionary new thing that will take the world by storm. You can sense the doubt in the air when he's just getting going... but by the end, as he starts introducing the line of accessories and mentions that he's heard there just might be some at the Apple Store a few blocks away, he's got everybody hovering about an inch above their seats. You'll never see a more quintessentially Jobsian performance than this one, I do believe. Love it or hate it, this is the genuine article.
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