Digital Trends
The iPhone comes as close as you can get to a universal, do-everything device. It’s as much a personal media player, translator, Internet tablet, notepad, alarm clock and a dozen other things as it is a cell phone. But with the introduction of the very first turn-by-turn GPS apps from companies like TomTom and Navigon, I think we’re finally seeing the miracle device stretched a little thin.
When Microsoft and Apple first started competing, Apple was differentiated by having a few products that did a comparatively few things very well. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple (which had clearly drifted from those roots in the 90s) he took the company back to having a few products that did fewer things but all of them very well and, particularly for the iPod, this made the market for them.
Apple’s flagship laptop, the MacBook Air, is a beauty. Very thin, very light, it is a piece of art. There have been three attempts so far to build a product that would outdo the Air: the HP Voodoo Envy, the Lenovo ThinkPad X300, and most recently, the Dell Adamo. Let’s talk about each, and end with the 9.99 design concept, the only product I’ve recently seen that could make us forget the MacBook Air.
MacBook Air
This week I’m at IFA, which is the European equivalent of CES. It is just getting off the ground as I’m writing this, and we’ve already had the first set of product announcements. Sony is making a rather large and impressive statement at this show, and it intends to lead again in TVs, eBooks, and even has a potential Macbook Air product coming. But I saw a number of other cool things at the Showstoppers event the first night, and at the press briefings, and we’ll talk about them this week.
Sony: We’re Back and We’re Pissed
With sales sharply down this year for all gaming consoles, even the surprisingly successful Wii, I’m starting to wonder if the market for consoles is fundamentally changing again, and whether folks are, like they did about a decade and a half ago, simply shifting their interests elsewhere.
One of the ways to restore excitement in a hardware market is to refresh the hardware and come up with something new and sexy. But game consoles aren’t like traditional hardware. They historically exist in a razor-blade-thin segment where the software (games) subsidizes most of the hardware. The Wii was the exception, in that it actually wasn’t a loss leader. Even at its aggressive retail price, it actually made money for Nintendo, which appeared to generate more profit than Sony and Microsoft combined. This really makes me wonder if the old model is dead.
Toshiba just embraced the Blu-ray standard. I’ve often been accused of being an agent for Toshiba, even though I’ve never had any financial connection to the side of Toshiba that made the drives, and initially supported Blu-ray. (I switched to HD-DVD when I saw how much the Blu-ray technology cost, and how it destroyed the price structure of the PS3). Sony bought the market, and if you look at their financials you can likely see why that still looks, in hindsight, like it was a really bad idea. The current rumor is they’re rushing the PlayStation 4 to market because the PS3 did so badly.
Over the last two weeks, the discussions surrounding Apple and Google have me wondering whether both companies have completely lost their collective minds. The US government now has a series of investigations surrounding both firms, ranging from collusion between them, to Apple pulling Google Voice off the iPhone. To be clear, this is like trying to find out if the companies were working together closely as criminals, or whether Google is Apple’s kick toy.
At Black Hat, one of the large security conferences where Microsoft is typically the whipping boy, Apple was front and center, with stories of potentially catastrophic problems on every product but the low-end iPods. Apple’s response to these, apparently, was not to return calls.
It may seem like a funny question to ask in the age of nanotechnology, but here it goes anyway: Can a gadget be too small?
Most of you are probably saying “no, the smaller the better” reflexively – and I can’t say I rightly blame you, given that in most cases, it’s the wisest default answer. But I’m getting a little fed up with the notion that, as a rule of thumb, smaller is always better in the technology industry. It’s a trend that seems to be widely accepted, but in many cases requires sacrificing functionality for looks and portability. Don’t get me wrong: I love that you can now buy computers with multiple terabyte hard drives or 50+ inch televisions that are light enough to hang on the wall, but some gadgets simply take things too far. And, ironically, the types of products that would do best to stray from this trend are the ones we interact with the most, including cell phones, MP3 players and portable PCs.
On smartphones, Apple was late to the market, but if there is another vendor doing a better job of currently defining what a smartphone is, I don’t know who they are. With smartbooks, a new class of product based on smartphone technology that looks like a netbook computer, the market hasn’t even really launched, and already Apple appears to be moving to define it.
Word is they are rushing to try to have a product into the market in the fourth quarter. Were this anyone else, I’d say they had a snowball’s chance in hell of making it, but this is Apple, which likely has a patent on hell snowballs, so let’s chat about the Apple iPad this week.
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