by Michael Gartenberg | November 25, 2010 | 1 Comment
This morning I’m thinking about how more then three hundred years ago, a small band of pilgrims united in faith and seeking liberty came to a new world. A place where they could worship according to their own beliefs. Today, in the United States, we celebrate a national day of thanksgiving. How cool is that?
Wherever you are, I wish you and your family a Happy Thanksgiving and best wishes for the holiday season. See you next week.
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Michael Gartenberg | November 22, 2010 | Comments Off
The future of the Macintosh and Mac OS is the topic of my latest Macworld column.
The bottom line? The Mac is back and in a big way. The app store will transform the Mac user—especially the new Mac users Apple keeps selling Macs to in its retail stores—into a much more application-savvy consumer. While new hardware designs will help make the Mac a much more appliance-like experience, don’t expect the hardware or software platform to converge anytime soon. It’s about a holistic experience that’s true to the context, and that’s one of the ways Apple makes its product lines about personal experiences with products, not bits or atoms.
Comments Off
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Michael Gartenberg | November 22, 2010 | 2 Comments
Over the years, I’ve done extensive consumer surveys about consumers and their digital media habits. One activity has come up over and over again as aspirational, the ability to move content from device to device and screen to screen, typically from a computer to a TV. There have been a lot of different solutions for this over the years but most of them are just too hard to make work for the average consumer. Anyone who’s tried to use the DLNA implementation that’s popular on many devices knows exactly what I mean. That’s why iOS 4.2 is so important. Apple has taken two fairly complex tasks and made them “appliance” simple to use.
I’ve been using iOS 4.2 on an iPad and Apple TV for the last few days and I’m impressed. AirPrint does away with the need to install printer drivers, configure shared printers access or any of the other annoying things we’ve come to expect to get printed output. Updated applications simply have a print item in the menu bar that shows the any AirPrint printers on your network. It just works. Likewise, AirPlay lets you send audio from iTunes or your 4.2 iOs device to Apple TV or any speaker/dock systems that are AirPlay enabled. Video and photo output is limited at the moment to iTunes and Apple’s apps on iOS to Apple TV. (While the audio component of AirPlay is available to developers to add to their apps, the video component isn’t just yet.) Bringing up a movie on my iPad and routing it to Apple TV was as simple as one click. No configuration, no network IP addresses, no nothing. It just worked, the first time. Even more amazing was that I could run video while using the iPad for other tasks as it runs as background activity.
The home network remains the Achilles heel of the digital home. The “ITization” of the consumer makes seamless content flow a difficult or near-impossible task making the features such as sharing useless for many users. While Apple’s implementation does require specific hardware, such as an Apple TV or a specific AirPrint enabled printer (for now) it does show the power of the end to end experience and what happens when features are implemented in a way that mere mortals can use.
iOS 4.2 raises the bar for how devices and home networks interact. It will be interesting to see how Apple evolves this over time (AirPrint in MacOS would be quite nice) and also raises the bar for competitors looking to offer similar integrated experiences.
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
