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Apple’s Next Big Things at Macworld ’08
by Tony Reveaux
Computers are enormously helpful in creating forecasts and predictions, so where’s a national election algorithm now that we need it? But for sensing the digital winds of change in the media, take a short trip to a Macworld Expo for Next Big Thing announcements. Here in San Francisco recently, we heard and saw how Apple – far out of proportion to the company’s size and resources – has made continual technological innovations that are actually revolutionary globe-shifting technical concepts that forever changed the ways we work and entertain.
In the thick of it
In 1979 Steve Jobs and some of his engineers went to Xerox PARC laboratories in Palo Alto and looked over the research into their ‘WIMP’ graphic user interface. Apple caught on to its potential, developed the Lisa, then got it with the Macintosh. Compared to the easy-to-use point-and-click Mac, WIMP was like a garage door opener and a pool table.
Apple’s accomplished Mac GUI was unapologetically lifted by Microsoft to cobble Windows up from MS-DOS. The inspiration of a company in Cupertino with less than 4% market share has been multiplied to tens of millions of Windows machines worldwide by Redmond.
To serve the corporate hives of Tokyo in the 80s, Sony developed a 3.5” ‘microfloppy.’ Unlike the 8” and 5.25” diskettes, now workers could move and protect their files with a disk that fits in your shirt pocket. Who knew?
Apple “aha’d” it as a solution for a smaller drive-form factor that helped the 1984 Macintosh to wrap computer and display within one trim integrated unit. They also intuited that it was high time for a more compact floppy. Soon, just about every IBM PC hit the shelves with 3.5” drives. But with the fruitilicious egg-shaped iMac of 1998, Apple knew it was time to drop the floppy for optical media, an action followed religiously by the other manufacturers ever since.
Mac whirls
What was announced at last year’s Macworld? Nothing less than something called the iPhone. With an even-easier-to-use GUI of the multi-touch screen and virtual keyboard, this attractive device is emerging as the new user interface for the iPod touch (and other manufacturers’) communication devices.
Just as the iPod with iTunes revised and re-arranged the stumbling, crumbling music industry, the iPhone is stirring up the entrenched and intransigent carriers. In giving more power to developers, manufacturers and consumers, the iPhone is breaking down the wireless networks’ ‘walled garden’ of proprietary postures. The wi-nets are now getting on board, amid some kicking and screaming, as they discover that new products and services and market share are opening up to them.
Waves of motion
For those of us in the viz biz, the transition of traditional theatrical and broadcast media into an ever-morphing array of possibilities (digital storage, delivery and presentation methods) is like global warming; it keeps on coming whether you want it to or not. This year’s Macworld announced iTunes Movie Rentals – which can be seen either as another nail-in-the-coffin or leg-on-the-stool, depending upon your positioning.
It took the cat-herding talents of Jobs to make things happen by getting agreement to Apple’s Digital Rights Management from the majors (20th Century Fox, The Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros, Paramount, Universal Studios Home Entertainment, Sony Pictures Entertainment, MGM, Lionsgate and New Line Cinema).
Rentals come in at $2.99 for library titles and $3.99 for new releases, and high definition versions are just a buck more. The clock starts ticking with up to 30 days to start watching it, and once you start, you have 24 hours to finish it – or watch it multiple times. No Netflix eternal moment here. You can buy some titles like Mad Max for $9.99 or Renaissance for $14.99. But exhibitors find the portability of the property quite scary, since the portability represents all sorts of opportunities for piracy. Coming from iTunes, your rentals or purchases can be displayed on your computer, go through Apple TV to your home theater; your iPod can take sides in Body Snatchers, and your iPhone truly can be Lord of the Rings.
You won’t forget to Remember with Time Capsule
The pink elephant in the living room of personal computing is the backing up that most of us don’t do. Apple has addressed this fundamental fact of life with the elegantly engineered Time Machine, a backup application built into Mac OS X.5 Leopard. With a 3D stacked interface that looks like CGI from a scene in Matrix, you can shuffle back and forth through the desktops of your automatically saved moments.
Find and select that document, e-mail, photo or utility you had erased or lost. Click on Restore, and like a cruise missile it soars back from the past to install where it belongs on today’s desktop. You can reserve a save folder on your desktop, but Apple advises that you save to external or even remote storage for security.
With the announcement of Time Capsule, Apple has fulfilled a complete automatic backup system that will cherish all your yesterdays. Time Capsule combines a full-featured 802.11n Wi-Fi base station with a server grade hard disk, a 500 gigabyte model for $299 and a 1 terabyte model for $499. You can set up automatic wireless backup for every Mac in your facility and with wireless search and retrieval. The most astonishing thing about this lifesaving device is that it took so long to implement; after all, nothing is actually erased when you hit ‘delete’ – all the actual data is still there, but the internal address has been disconnected. Simplicity itself.
Think thin, then be thin as Air
The star of the show was the runway’s new anorexic diva, the new MacBook Air, the world’s slimmest notebook. I can attest that the Air, at less than three pounds and so razor-thin from the side it almost disappears, is a wonder – to hold as well as to behold. Its $1,799 price tag earns an almost-universal yearning: “It’s too expensive, and I want one.” How did they freeze-dry a laptop down to this size? Ponder away, keeping in mind that the Air is as much a stretched-out aluminum iPod touch as it is a fat-free MacBook Pro.
With its 13.3-inch LED-backlit glossy widescreen display, a full-size and backlit keyboard, and a built-in iSight video camera (all powered by a 1.6 GHz or 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4MB L2 cache, 2GB of memory, an 80GB 1.8-inch hard drive), this is no Newton. While not the computer for everyone, the Air redefines the reach of compactness without abandoning complete workability.
The Air is of the iPhone generation in its spacious trackpad with intuitive multi-touch gesture support, so you can pinch, rotate and swipe. And it’s even more iPhonish in what it doesn’t have. The iMac abandoned the floppy for optical, the Air floats without a DVD drive or FireWire or Ethernet ports. Nor does the iPhone have those. You can link to a USB external DVD drive or storage, but it’s really the 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 where the Air reaches out to a wireless world – enabling you to rent movies from iTunes, backup files with Time Capsule, and access the optical drives on remote PCs or Macs to install software applications. Much like the iPhone. Or, as Jobs always says before the end of every Macworld keynote, “Wait – there’s just one more thing.”
Tony Reveaux has been a Bay Area writer, editor, teacher and consultant since the ’70’s. Posted on Apr 01, 2008 - 07:28 PM
by Tony Reveaux
Computers are enormously helpful in creating forecasts and predictions, so where’s a national election algorithm now that we need it? But for sensing the digital winds of change in the media, take a short trip to a Macworld Expo for Next Big Thing announcements. Here in San Francisco recently, we heard and saw how Apple – far out of proportion to the company’s size and resources – has made continual technological innovations that are actually revolutionary globe-shifting technical concepts that forever changed the ways we work and entertain.
In the thick of it
In 1979 Steve Jobs and some of his engineers went to Xerox PARC laboratories in Palo Alto and looked over the research into their ‘WIMP’ graphic user interface. Apple caught on to its potential, developed the Lisa, then got it with the Macintosh. Compared to the easy-to-use point-and-click Mac, WIMP was like a garage door opener and a pool table.Apple’s accomplished Mac GUI was unapologetically lifted by Microsoft to cobble Windows up from MS-DOS. The inspiration of a company in Cupertino with less than 4% market share has been multiplied to tens of millions of Windows machines worldwide by Redmond.
To serve the corporate hives of Tokyo in the 80s, Sony developed a 3.5” ‘microfloppy.’ Unlike the 8” and 5.25” diskettes, now workers could move and protect their files with a disk that fits in your shirt pocket. Who knew?
Apple “aha’d” it as a solution for a smaller drive-form factor that helped the 1984 Macintosh to wrap computer and display within one trim integrated unit. They also intuited that it was high time for a more compact floppy. Soon, just about every IBM PC hit the shelves with 3.5” drives. But with the fruitilicious egg-shaped iMac of 1998, Apple knew it was time to drop the floppy for optical media, an action followed religiously by the other manufacturers ever since.
Mac whirls
What was announced at last year’s Macworld? Nothing less than something called the iPhone. With an even-easier-to-use GUI of the multi-touch screen and virtual keyboard, this attractive device is emerging as the new user interface for the iPod touch (and other manufacturers’) communication devices.
Just as the iPod with iTunes revised and re-arranged the stumbling, crumbling music industry, the iPhone is stirring up the entrenched and intransigent carriers. In giving more power to developers, manufacturers and consumers, the iPhone is breaking down the wireless networks’ ‘walled garden’ of proprietary postures. The wi-nets are now getting on board, amid some kicking and screaming, as they discover that new products and services and market share are opening up to them.
Waves of motion
For those of us in the viz biz, the transition of traditional theatrical and broadcast media into an ever-morphing array of possibilities (digital storage, delivery and presentation methods) is like global warming; it keeps on coming whether you want it to or not. This year’s Macworld announced iTunes Movie Rentals – which can be seen either as another nail-in-the-coffin or leg-on-the-stool, depending upon your positioning.
It took the cat-herding talents of Jobs to make things happen by getting agreement to Apple’s Digital Rights Management from the majors (20th Century Fox, The Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros, Paramount, Universal Studios Home Entertainment, Sony Pictures Entertainment, MGM, Lionsgate and New Line Cinema).
Rentals come in at $2.99 for library titles and $3.99 for new releases, and high definition versions are just a buck more. The clock starts ticking with up to 30 days to start watching it, and once you start, you have 24 hours to finish it – or watch it multiple times. No Netflix eternal moment here. You can buy some titles like Mad Max for $9.99 or Renaissance for $14.99. But exhibitors find the portability of the property quite scary, since the portability represents all sorts of opportunities for piracy. Coming from iTunes, your rentals or purchases can be displayed on your computer, go through Apple TV to your home theater; your iPod can take sides in Body Snatchers, and your iPhone truly can be Lord of the Rings.
You won’t forget to Remember with Time Capsule
The pink elephant in the living room of personal computing is the backing up that most of us don’t do. Apple has addressed this fundamental fact of life with the elegantly engineered Time Machine, a backup application built into Mac OS X.5 Leopard. With a 3D stacked interface that looks like CGI from a scene in Matrix, you can shuffle back and forth through the desktops of your automatically saved moments.Find and select that document, e-mail, photo or utility you had erased or lost. Click on Restore, and like a cruise missile it soars back from the past to install where it belongs on today’s desktop. You can reserve a save folder on your desktop, but Apple advises that you save to external or even remote storage for security.
With the announcement of Time Capsule, Apple has fulfilled a complete automatic backup system that will cherish all your yesterdays. Time Capsule combines a full-featured 802.11n Wi-Fi base station with a server grade hard disk, a 500 gigabyte model for $299 and a 1 terabyte model for $499. You can set up automatic wireless backup for every Mac in your facility and with wireless search and retrieval. The most astonishing thing about this lifesaving device is that it took so long to implement; after all, nothing is actually erased when you hit ‘delete’ – all the actual data is still there, but the internal address has been disconnected. Simplicity itself.
Think thin, then be thin as Air
The star of the show was the runway’s new anorexic diva, the new MacBook Air, the world’s slimmest notebook. I can attest that the Air, at less than three pounds and so razor-thin from the side it almost disappears, is a wonder – to hold as well as to behold. Its $1,799 price tag earns an almost-universal yearning: “It’s too expensive, and I want one.” How did they freeze-dry a laptop down to this size? Ponder away, keeping in mind that the Air is as much a stretched-out aluminum iPod touch as it is a fat-free MacBook Pro.
With its 13.3-inch LED-backlit glossy widescreen display, a full-size and backlit keyboard, and a built-in iSight video camera (all powered by a 1.6 GHz or 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4MB L2 cache, 2GB of memory, an 80GB 1.8-inch hard drive), this is no Newton. While not the computer for everyone, the Air redefines the reach of compactness without abandoning complete workability.
The Air is of the iPhone generation in its spacious trackpad with intuitive multi-touch gesture support, so you can pinch, rotate and swipe. And it’s even more iPhonish in what it doesn’t have. The iMac abandoned the floppy for optical, the Air floats without a DVD drive or FireWire or Ethernet ports. Nor does the iPhone have those. You can link to a USB external DVD drive or storage, but it’s really the 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 where the Air reaches out to a wireless world – enabling you to rent movies from iTunes, backup files with Time Capsule, and access the optical drives on remote PCs or Macs to install software applications. Much like the iPhone. Or, as Jobs always says before the end of every Macworld keynote, “Wait – there’s just one more thing.”
Tony Reveaux has been a Bay Area writer, editor, teacher and consultant since the ’70’s. Posted on Apr 01, 2008 - 07:28 PM
