| Tuesday, January 15, 2008 |
13:31 - Upstaged
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So I'm not wowed by the MacBook Air. I mean, what I'm hearing is that the selling point for this thing pretty much begins and ends with "image". How much people will drool when you whip it out on the plane; how much bragging rights it will afford you in the thinness wars; and so on. Nobody's talking about usefulness, just how "cool" it is.
Which is fine; I mean, nobody's denying that that's what's driving a lot of iPod/iPhone/Mac sales lately. But to build a whole product around coolness rather than usefulness? I dunno, man.
(The most surprising thing, to me, about the MBA is that it is not the spiritual descendant of the 12" PowerBook G4 that everyone has been pining after since it left the market. For all its thinness, the MBA has a larger screen, keyboard, and footprint than the 12"PB did, and at twice to three times the price. What people wanted, I think, was something in the MacBook Pro range that came in at the $1700 price point with "Pro" features, yet with a screen and footprint smaller than the MacBook. Thinness does not trump rectangle dimensions for portability, especially if you have to pay out the nose for it and give up a ton of core features. I think that even with the MBA, there's still ample room in the lineup for that elusive, hard-drive-frying, power-socket-breaking, 12-inch will-o-the-wisp of yore.)
But that doesn't mean I think today's announcements in general are a wash. For me, the big winner is the new Apple TV—or, should I say, the new software back-end for the old Apple TV, because all the new stuff that pretty squarely answers all of my gripes about the Apple TV I already have at home is going to be showing up in a free software update in a couple of weeks. Bitchin'.
The demos are brief, but they speak for themselves. YouTube is no longer the only community Web service that can be accessed from your couch; now there's Flickr too, as well as the .Mac Web Gallery feature introduced in the latest iPhoto, and new browseable podcasts. Movies can be rented (from all the major studios, in regular or HD, for $3 or $4 respectively, or $4 and $5 for new releases, which gives you 30 days to start watching and then 24 hours to complete it—more generous terms than Microsoft's by a good margin), TV shows can be bought—though TV shows can't be rented or movies bought—right from the Apple TV interface. Music can also be bought. And crucially, everything you buy gets synced directly back to your iTunes library, which is what I was just thinking last night would be a critical component. It's a no-brainer: wherever you buy your media from, whether your computer, your iPhone/iPod touch, or your Apple TV, it all goes into the same data store and gets synced across the whole media universe in your household. Which means that the hard drive size is really pretty much immaterial, which is great—it means the new entry-level price of $229 (down from $299) will be the prime calculus. It now comes in comfortably lower than the Xbox 360, and with a better value proposition for what it does (well, aside from the whole "games" thing). I wouldn't want to buy a whole new box for this, but—glory be—I don't have to! I call this one a big fat win for Apple, and I'll be renting movies left and right as soon as I've got the thing upgraded. Netflix might lose a lot of customers to this model. Especially since it's Mac/PC agnostic.
One question I have is: whither movie purchases? Granted, I've spent a lot of time grousing about how renting is actually a more appropriate model for movies than buying, and how the to-date preferred purchase-to-own deal in iTunes is less compelling and probably a lot less lucrative than if they were to bend on the "we don't do rentals" mantra and allow it for movies if for no other kinds of media. But now that we have that... what about buying movies through the Apple TV? There doesn't seem to be a way. Yet I presume that the movies that have always been for sale in iTunes are still for sale there. So—am I reading this correctly?—you can buy but not rent movies through iTunes on your computer, whereas you can rent but not buy movies through the Apple TV. Is that the shape of it?
Ideally I'd like there to be a way to buy movies through the Apple TV and have them sync back into iTunes like the TV shows and music videos and songs you buy through the new couch conduit. Less important, but also nice, would be the ability to initiate a rental from the iTunes side, sending the data stream straight to the Apple TV. The usefulness of this is not clear to me, but the user-interface simplicity is: you ought to be able to expect that any movie Apple offers you can be had either as a $4 rental or a $15 purchase, and you ought to be able to do either one from any seat in the house.
That said, I'm not complaining. This development is friggin' sweet. And it's only going to get better. One thing that the keynote mentioned but that doesn't seem to be on any of the PR material is that Fox is so far on board with the new model that they'll be putting "iTunes-friendly" versions of their movies onto new Blu-Ray discs along with the regular for-direct-play streams. How cool is that? No doubt there will soon be more pleasant surprises where that came from.
Other interesting announcements include Time Capsule, which is Apple's answer to the freestanding NAS market—and a bloody fine one, as it incorporates not just seamless storage for Leopard users (and standard network storage for everyone else, including PCs), but also a Wi-Fi base station. This means that Apple's Wi-Fi offerings now comprise a genuine family of products—from the AirPort Express (wow, they're still selling that?) to the AirPort Extreme (with its new USB shared hard-drive deal) and now Time Capsule. Apple was first out the door with AirPort back in 1998 or whenever it was; it's good to see they're still keeping in the game after all this time.
Nice set of announcements. I suppose it's inevitable that they made the MacBook Air the headliner this time; but to me, it's pretty much everything else that makes it worth the wait.
UPDATE: Gruber has the details on movie movement as gleaned from the new updated TOS document in iTunes.
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Brian Tiemann
