Nontrivial Exercises

More Thoughts on the SteveNote

Macworld Expo 2007 Keynote by wahaha_wu

A few more thoughts from the Apple Keynote today as I’ve thought through it more.

First, I agree with Om Malik that Apple’s name change from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. is indeed significant. I disagree, though that it signifies the end of the PC era. I wouldn’t go that far, but I am confident that it formalizes the true beginning of the intelligent device era - beyond smart phones (as Steve noted) but intelligent devices that not only can do a lot of things, but do them well and interact with you well. I’m sure we’ll see more imitations of intelligent design consumer devices soon, but I believe the iPhone is the game-changing device in this market. Score one more for Apple.

Next, Robert Scoble is right that only 720p resolution on the Apple TV definitely is a disappointment, at least at first glance. This thought occurred to me as I watched (the macrumors transcript of) the presentation, and I wondered the same thing after Apple Showtime event last fall when they announced high(er) resolution movie downloads.

As I think through it, though, the overwhelming majority of movies available today are only in 720p, with HD-DVD/Blueray offering a limited supply of 1080p content. And, I don’t believe there are any broadcast or cable tv shows in 1080p today.

But MacBreak is in 1080p and is quite nice. Surely there will be only an increasing amount of 1080p content available over the next several months. No, 1080p support wouldn’t really be anything anyone would use right now, but it would have been fun to be able to say that Apple TV supported it.

Then, ZDNet’s Larry Dignan has an interesting analysis of the winners and losers in the wake of all things Apple today. I completely disagree, though, that Sprint will be one of the big losers. In stead, it’s Verizon, who has been creeping up to within a few million subscribers of Cingular’s approximately 56 million customers, to battle for the “#1 operator” tag in the U.S.

Verizon has surprisingly taken a walled garden approach to it’s mobile media content, e.g. the Chocolate phone tied to Verizon’s own music store. Cingular will get the enviable and very exclusive prize of being co-branded with Apple. They’ll get more mindshare than Verizon over the next 5 months and I can’t see how people will rush out to buy any more Chocolate phones.

Finally, I was a bit disappointed that we didn’t see any of the other possible software products that are nearing release. I thought a surprise availability of Leopard would be a nice way to charge everyone up - obviously this would only have been a distraction from the iPhone. But it is somewhat strange that the only new thing you can go out and buy today that you couldn’t yesterday is the Apple TV. I was expecting to see more things that everyone could actually purchase today.

Overall, I believe today’s MacWorld keynote will be seen as one of the three or four most significant milestones that usher in a new era of technology. The introduction of the Mac was one, the iPod was another, and I think that although we’re all left empty-handed today, we’ll look back one day and see that the iPhone forever changed the mobile device market.