Eugene Shimalsky

While the best of us are busy scrutinizing Apple’s Event invitation for cabalistic symbols and hints on the nature of iPad 3, I’m more interested in what will become of aTV and what can happen if Apple gets serious about its hobby.

Steve Jobs legacy is undeniable - both in innovative products and a company that thinks differently. Apart from thinking, Apple is also good at selling  - it’s already the world biggest computer and smartphone manufacturer, and the company is growing quickly. What kind of innovation does it have to bring now to sustain such growth? 

The living room.

 When we’re not sleeping, we’re usually in front of our computer - both for work and leisure, and most modern PCs work well for this. After staring at laptop’s screen all day, people would put it on the kitchen table for the evening and then take it to bed..

 When I got an iPad, I thought I would be mostly carrying it around, while relying on my MacBook at home. Instead, the vast amount of time with my iPad is spent in the kitchen watching tv series, or on the couch, reading articles and surfing. It’s just so much more comfortable for those tasks.

It’s ideal for leisure, and even works as a psychological divide for some - work while you’re at your computer, rest with an iPad.

It’s probable that Apple  decides to make iPad into a mega remote control for the new aTV and let live television be the main selling point for the new device, but what if didn’t end there? 

The aTV connected to a bigger screen, with or without an iPad or iPhone, can be an ultimate entertainment system, should apple want to make it into one.

Autonomy.

Such device should be able to work on its own, and be a possible “first product”, just like  iPad or a mac is today.  AppStore should enable it to run a range of apps, storing apps’ data on its own memory.

Media management.

This is a huge opportunity, and Apple clearly sees it, but the tools they offer now are far from being ideal. Photostream does not live up to the expectations and only works on a mac with iPhoto or Aperture, videos still have to be imported using a cable, etc.

“iBox” (it clearly wouldn’t be a TV) could read the photos and videos from memory cards or usb, and suck the rest from the cloud, always in sync and with non-desctructive edits.

Music and video content.

AppStore on device would enable it to run pandora, spotify, hulu, or whatever other streaming service you can think of. iTunes Store video content, including iTunes University, could remember playing position across all devices.

 

Remote control and voice input.

Maybe shouting commands across the room would be strange, but what if iPhone could tell the iBox what to do? You could ask Siri to play your favorite song on large speakers, or switch the movie to a bigger screen.

One could argue that you can achieve almost all of it by slapping boxee software on a mac mini, but that’s not so. Controlled user experience has always been Apple’s strength, and managing media centers with full-size keyboard and torrent downloaders is not elegant, and not something you can easily control.

Live TV, all your media, and AppStore on an easy to use living room device could be another thing Steve Jobs finally “cracked”, and I would be the first to buy one.

Image (c) Monty Python.

A lot of developers watching the yesterday’s WWDC felt their chair being knocked  out from under them  - and for a good reason. The newest release of iOS is no slouch, and incorporates a wealth of features that have been long provided by the third-party apps: twitter, instant messages, saving pages for reading later, todo lists.

It so happens that we run a service that’s called www.pushme.to, which partly replicates the iMessage functionality, but since I don’t depend on it financially, I can still talk about iOS5 without tears blemishing my eyes :)

I’ve been waiting for an Apple-branded integrated communication suite for a long time now, the iChat hasn’t been updated since it appeared with Snow Leopard, and FaceTime on mac is a joke. The iMessages, an internet-based instant messaging service,  could be is a first step towards it. Only that it probably won’t.

Under belt blow to the operators, you say? Not quite. If Apple really wanted to break up with operators, it would have offered one communication solution for VoIP, video, and messages - all over the Internet and free. Remembering the crystalline audio in FaceTime, they obviously have the tech, and now probably the infrastructure too.

Such a communication suite, starting from 200 million iOS devices and millions of macs, could land a serious blow to all communication platforms - Skype, Google Talk  among them. 

The biggest caveat, however, is that Apple’s stronghold - the ability to build a closed ecosystem, putting excellent hardware and software together, plays against it when it comes to communication.

If you have an iPhone, it’s highly probable that at least one of your friends will have some unresolved teen issues or just too little money and thus own an Android device. And another one will have a BlackBerry, or, God forbid, Nokia phone.  It’s  very unlikely that we shall see iMessages on these platforms, and that certainly creates a niche for other players.

When iOS device will be updated to iOS5, all of us who have crossed its way with some features will have to pivot. Yet Apple can be sure that we will build up on its weaknesses, multi platform and web access being one of them.

Walt: “How does the consumer understand the distinction between web apps and Android apps?”

Eric: “The consumer doesn’t understand anything you just said.” Boom!

Спросил у любымых shizuokatea про дальнейшую их судьбу. Впрочем, а что говорить на их месте?

Dear Eugene

Thank you for your kind words.  We had record sales in March and they are

quite normal this month.  We have a good supply of tea in the US and Japan

packaged before 3/11.

Going forward, tea from Shizuoka will be completely safe to consume.  Please

visit our Facebook page for the evidence to support my claim.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/ShizuokaGreenTea/180110557750?ref=ts

Thank you

Kent

Dear Kent,

let me express my belated but sincere condolences for what happened 

and continues to happen in Japan. I’m a ShizuokaTea customer for 2+ 

years,  and would want to know has does the radiation hazard impact 

the sales?

Do you have an amount of tea stored in US? Will you continue to sell 

disregarding the fact that it can be potentially contaminated?

На endgadget комментарии к статье про Nokia E7: If you remove your apps, what can you do with your iPhone? not much. Remove your internet connection, what can you do now?

Напомнило “Ростропович, Ростропович, отбери у него виолончель - дурак дураком.

Apple has a great history of computer design, and these two words - computer and design, together with innovation and user experience obsession, are what made Apple and Steve Jobs what they are today. 

However, in Apple’s world of perfect user experience, there’s always been one major problem - the user. The stupid thing would constantly alter it - either installing “useful” crap from all over the internet, or just opening too many apps and calling tech support because their computer is suddenly slow.

The perfect user experience has to be one for everybody and controlled from the opening of the box to the moment you turn off your computer and go to sleep.  In the recent and extensive John Sculley interview on Steve Jobs, he voices more than once what was the main concern:

“Steve believed that if you opened the system up, people would start to make little changes and those changes would be compromises in the experience.”

This is hard to match with the “think different” spirit and Orwell inspired ads, but let me be clear on this - Apple is not telling you to be the same as everyone in everything you do, they just think there are better than you in what they do. And they are probably right.

I think that iOS for iPhone and now iPad was a major step towards consolidation of user experience, and limiting the negative impact of users’ stupidity.

It turned out, that on mobile, less powerful device with a smaller screen estate, user experience matters even more.  On the go, people care more about performing standard tasks quickly, not customizing the environment for their activities.

The iPad, with its large screen and touch-based interface instead of the older input methods, was a perfect sandbox for the testing of “directed” user  experience. The gestures, clipboard management, “multitasking”, common UI elements - these are the reasons why the learning curve for the device is so short, and people who are otherwise computer illiterate, seem to be able to use it comfortably.

On the latest “Back to Mac” event Steve Jobs took the stage to talk about MacOS X Lion, the next big desktop cat, that will jump on our computers next year, and one of the major features announced was  Mac AppStore - a controlled environment for the software distribution and updates.

I’m pretty sure the Mac AppStore will be a hit,  especially if Apple will settle on a more modest share than 30% for bigger developers,  but what impact will this have on the mac computers in general? 

Together with numerous iPad interface metaphors they’re adopting in Lion, the OS will be one more step further from the computer interfaces as we know them today.

Let’s try to imagine it in a couple of years. File system will probably become inaccessible for the user, just like on the iPad today, the whole device will have a single “sign on”, enabling features and connecting to the cloud services. App switching and external notifications will be standardized, memory and HDD space management will become even more automatic. App Store will be the only official source for mac applications.

There will be a myriad of devices, for which the word “computer” will become an  anachronism, since even if they do compute, that’s completely irrelevant for the user, that only sees the result - touch, play, listen.

I’m not sure what will become extinct before, desktop computers as we know them, or users that remember what a command line is, but there’s a huge  ideology and user experience shift around the corner, and like Jobs said himself, “many people are not gonna be comfortable with it”