Notes on Notebooks
Overall, I think this was a great announcement. Like many, I am a little dismayed that the new MacBook does not include a FireWire port, but otherwise I am impressed. Glass screens don’t bother me in the least, and I haven’t used the button on a trackpad in a long time—I am apparently one of those rare people who doesn’t disable the trackpad-tap feature on his notebook; in fact, I rely on it, and miss I it on other machines whose owners have turned it off.
Products aside, the presentation itself had a few hiccups. Tim Cook’s presentation of the “State of the Mac” was fairly awkward. His introduction to the “Get a Mac” ad needed some work; it seemed very out of place. It did not help that the ad was nothing new; it was the “I banish you” ad (Throne), which is very funny, but everybody in the room had seen it before, probably multiple times, and must have been wondering why Tim was wasting their time. Tim’s hand off back to Steve was telling: “Good job,” says Steve. Grooming?
Jony Ive’s talk about the development of the new fabrication process was interesting enough, if a little slow and drawn out. It helps that his accent makes him easy to listen to, and he certainly appears to be earnest in his passion for his work and Apple’s products.
My biggest takeaway from the session—and I don’t think the Mac pundits are stressing this enough—was the fact that one in three dollars spent at retail on a computer is spent on a Mac. Now, it’s not actually clear to me if this includes online sales as well as brick and mortar, but my feeling was that it does. That is HUGE. That’s 68% retail revenue market share that is split up among all the other guys—Dell, HP, Sony, et al. Is Apple on top of that heap yet? I suppose if they were, that would have been on a Keynote slide. They’ve gotta be close, though.
Speaking of Keynote, I saw some pretty cool transitions in there I’ve never seen before. I am not a Keynote user, so I don’t keep up on what’s in production and what’s just in the special Steve Jobs version, but I can’t remember ever having seen that “crypto” transition, where the letters from phase A that are applicable rearrange themselves to their positions in phrase B. Like the opening credits of “Sneakers.”
I’ll finish with a little rant. There’s a Mac podcast I listen to, which I enjoy very much. I look forward to it every week. I’m not going to name it, because I aspire someday, if Telegraph has any kind of success, to get a mention on it. Hell, I’d love to be a guest someday, become a “Mac personality” as I call it. Right now I’m just me, with my day job and this little blog. Anyhoo, I listen to this thing, and as usual—I don’t know why I do this, look forward to the commentary by these people on Apple Special Events—as usual these guys don’t even appear to have watched the damn thing. Okay, so they started recording the podcast right after the even, so there wasn’t a stream they could have watched, but they don’t even seem to have followed any of the several very detailed play-by-play liveblogs. I like to use Ars Technica’s for these things; Jacqui and Chris do a good job. A lot of the confusion in the podcast on this feature or that feature would have been clear if they had just done some gumshoeing beforehand.
Often I am given to wonder whether the host of this particular show merely feigns ignorance for the sake of good radio (eliciting a discussion for the benefit of the audience), or he really doesn’t know. I am now leaning towards the latter.
Tags: Apple, Keynote, Mac, Steve Jobs