Saturday, January 08, 2005
What I'd like to see from MacWorld Expo
With all the hubbub about what will or won't be announced during the MacWorld Expo Keynote on Tuesday, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at some of the prospects and see how they would (or wouldn't) apply to my own situation as a Mac user. None of this is a reflection on whether I think it will or won't happen. I've just chosen some of the expected/rumored/proposed new Apple products, and slid them into my situation to see how they'd fit. And keep in mind that just because a certain product isn't right for me, doesn't necessarily mean that I don't think it would be right for anyone:
G5 PowerBook: Assuming I can milk my aging Titanium G4 PowerBook (667 Mhz) until the G5 PowerBook sees the light of day, then it'll certainly be my next Mac. If it's announced next week, then I won't be buying one straight-off because I haven't yet set aside the fundage to make it happen. But that would be fine, because (as I said late last year) I'll have no problem waiting until the first set of revisions to the G5 PowerBook line. But nonetheless I'd like to see it happen on Tuesday, because it will mean that as soon as I'm ready to buy a G5 PowerBook, it'll be right there waiting for me. And on a larger scale, I can think of a whole lot of Titanium owners who passed on the Aluminum PowerBook because it was a G4, who will snap the G5 model right up without hesitation. So for their sake at least, I hope it happens soon.
iWork 05: As much as I prefer AppleWorks 6 over Microsoft Word, it's not because I think AppleWorks 6 is perfect. It's old, a little slow, and it's not nearly enough of a MacOS X application. The fact that it functions nearly identically in MacOS 9 (with the exeption of Aqua windows) tells you all you need to know about its age. So if Apple launches a new word processing suite next week, I'll likely be the first one in line to buy it. The only thing that could kill it for me would be if Apple mistakenly gives us an overcomplicated, overbloated word processor that's modeled on Microsoft Word. I use AppleWorks because Word is an unusable product, so the last thing I would ever move to would be a Word clone, even if it did suck less than Word itself. Word processing is the simplest task you can do on a computer. I don't need nineteen different toolbars for that.
Keynote 2: It's been speculated that iWork 05 will include Keynote 2. And although iWork would be a consumer-level suite and Keynote is considered to be pro-level software, I would argue that Keynote is so easy to use that it wouldn't seem out of place bundled with software aimed at "regular" users. I have yet to find an individual, adult or child, who couldn't get Keynote to sing within minutes of first touching it. But regardless of whether Keynote 2 appears as part of a bundle or as a standalone app, I'll be gobbling it up just as fast as I can get my hands on it. Because you see, even though I don't make presentations more than occasionally, I use Keynote every day in a variety of ways in which I doubt it was ever intended. And if you guys are nice, I might even get into the details of all that before 2005 is over.
Five gigabyte iPod mini: Between my 350 CD collection and everything I've purchased from iTunes, I have about 18 gigabytes of music. It's why I bought the 30 GB iPod instead of the 15 GB iPod (back when these were the choices), it's why I passed on the U2 iPod and its 20 GB (I don't want to be 90% full from day one), and it's why the iPod mini never even reached my radar. If I'm going to own an iPod, then I want my entire music collection in my pocket, not a portion of it. If I owned a mini and constantly had to shuffle music on and off of it, then what again would be the point of having an iPod? Having said that, I like the iPod mini's size, and I like the looks of both the blue and silver models. I've always said that I'll buy an iPod mini the day it reaches 30 gigabytes, and I mean it.
iPhone: I've owned five cell phones in five years, and I haven't really been happy with any of them in terms of either range or ease of use. They're all designed with the geek notion that the more important and useful a feature, the more deeply it should be buried, and it's embarrassing that every time I want to change my ring tone I have to begin searching for the feature from scratch, because it's just that much of a logicless process. In my mindm, all phones suck, so I'd be the ideal candidate for a cell phone from Apple, right? I mean, who else could do a better job of taking something that's needlessly complicated and making it uber-simple? But the problem is that the impending iTunes-compatible phone from Motorola isn't going to be an "Apple cell phone" at all. It's simply going to be a cell phone (likely just as complicated and confounding as every other cell phone out there) that just happens to store music and play it through an iTunes-like interface. See the above paragraph as to why such a device would be of little use to me. Except in this case, I'd be carrying my entire music collection in my left pocket (iPod) as well as a portion of my music collection in my right pocket (iTunes phone). Just doesn't make sense. I'd love to see Apple design a cell phone from the ground up and I'd buy one in a heartbeat. But it's because cell phones are nasty devices in need of severe revision from someone who understands that the device is actually supposed to be used by people, and not because it would hold some of my music. I think there are plenty of buyers out there for an iTunes phone; I'm just not one of them. But on the other hand, if Apple could somehow build cell phone capability into an iPod, meaning that I would no longer need to carry a cell phone...well, I don't even want to get into that.
$599 redesigned eMac: Not for me. I'm a laptop guy through and through, as my current PowerBook has taught me. But I can think of a few people (including a couple of family members, any number of friends, and millions of potential Switchers) who would gobble up a less-expensive, slightly more stylish eMac in a hurry.
Headless iMac: No wait, I said I was only going to address products that have a chance of actually happening. Yeah, I just wanted to see if you were paying attention.
With all the hubbub about what will or won't be announced during the MacWorld Expo Keynote on Tuesday, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at some of the prospects and see how they would (or wouldn't) apply to my own situation as a Mac user. None of this is a reflection on whether I think it will or won't happen. I've just chosen some of the expected/rumored/proposed new Apple products, and slid them into my situation to see how they'd fit. And keep in mind that just because a certain product isn't right for me, doesn't necessarily mean that I don't think it would be right for anyone:
G5 PowerBook: Assuming I can milk my aging Titanium G4 PowerBook (667 Mhz) until the G5 PowerBook sees the light of day, then it'll certainly be my next Mac. If it's announced next week, then I won't be buying one straight-off because I haven't yet set aside the fundage to make it happen. But that would be fine, because (as I said late last year) I'll have no problem waiting until the first set of revisions to the G5 PowerBook line. But nonetheless I'd like to see it happen on Tuesday, because it will mean that as soon as I'm ready to buy a G5 PowerBook, it'll be right there waiting for me. And on a larger scale, I can think of a whole lot of Titanium owners who passed on the Aluminum PowerBook because it was a G4, who will snap the G5 model right up without hesitation. So for their sake at least, I hope it happens soon.
iWork 05: As much as I prefer AppleWorks 6 over Microsoft Word, it's not because I think AppleWorks 6 is perfect. It's old, a little slow, and it's not nearly enough of a MacOS X application. The fact that it functions nearly identically in MacOS 9 (with the exeption of Aqua windows) tells you all you need to know about its age. So if Apple launches a new word processing suite next week, I'll likely be the first one in line to buy it. The only thing that could kill it for me would be if Apple mistakenly gives us an overcomplicated, overbloated word processor that's modeled on Microsoft Word. I use AppleWorks because Word is an unusable product, so the last thing I would ever move to would be a Word clone, even if it did suck less than Word itself. Word processing is the simplest task you can do on a computer. I don't need nineteen different toolbars for that.
Keynote 2: It's been speculated that iWork 05 will include Keynote 2. And although iWork would be a consumer-level suite and Keynote is considered to be pro-level software, I would argue that Keynote is so easy to use that it wouldn't seem out of place bundled with software aimed at "regular" users. I have yet to find an individual, adult or child, who couldn't get Keynote to sing within minutes of first touching it. But regardless of whether Keynote 2 appears as part of a bundle or as a standalone app, I'll be gobbling it up just as fast as I can get my hands on it. Because you see, even though I don't make presentations more than occasionally, I use Keynote every day in a variety of ways in which I doubt it was ever intended. And if you guys are nice, I might even get into the details of all that before 2005 is over.
Five gigabyte iPod mini: Between my 350 CD collection and everything I've purchased from iTunes, I have about 18 gigabytes of music. It's why I bought the 30 GB iPod instead of the 15 GB iPod (back when these were the choices), it's why I passed on the U2 iPod and its 20 GB (I don't want to be 90% full from day one), and it's why the iPod mini never even reached my radar. If I'm going to own an iPod, then I want my entire music collection in my pocket, not a portion of it. If I owned a mini and constantly had to shuffle music on and off of it, then what again would be the point of having an iPod? Having said that, I like the iPod mini's size, and I like the looks of both the blue and silver models. I've always said that I'll buy an iPod mini the day it reaches 30 gigabytes, and I mean it.
iPhone: I've owned five cell phones in five years, and I haven't really been happy with any of them in terms of either range or ease of use. They're all designed with the geek notion that the more important and useful a feature, the more deeply it should be buried, and it's embarrassing that every time I want to change my ring tone I have to begin searching for the feature from scratch, because it's just that much of a logicless process. In my mindm, all phones suck, so I'd be the ideal candidate for a cell phone from Apple, right? I mean, who else could do a better job of taking something that's needlessly complicated and making it uber-simple? But the problem is that the impending iTunes-compatible phone from Motorola isn't going to be an "Apple cell phone" at all. It's simply going to be a cell phone (likely just as complicated and confounding as every other cell phone out there) that just happens to store music and play it through an iTunes-like interface. See the above paragraph as to why such a device would be of little use to me. Except in this case, I'd be carrying my entire music collection in my left pocket (iPod) as well as a portion of my music collection in my right pocket (iTunes phone). Just doesn't make sense. I'd love to see Apple design a cell phone from the ground up and I'd buy one in a heartbeat. But it's because cell phones are nasty devices in need of severe revision from someone who understands that the device is actually supposed to be used by people, and not because it would hold some of my music. I think there are plenty of buyers out there for an iTunes phone; I'm just not one of them. But on the other hand, if Apple could somehow build cell phone capability into an iPod, meaning that I would no longer need to carry a cell phone...well, I don't even want to get into that.
$599 redesigned eMac: Not for me. I'm a laptop guy through and through, as my current PowerBook has taught me. But I can think of a few people (including a couple of family members, any number of friends, and millions of potential Switchers) who would gobble up a less-expensive, slightly more stylish eMac in a hurry.
Headless iMac: No wait, I said I was only going to address products that have a chance of actually happening. Yeah, I just wanted to see if you were paying attention.
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