Why Apple keeps me coming back like an addict

By Ben Munson

Apple came out with a few new goodies today. My reactions can be summed up in a few short blurbs:

- A new remote control for a Media-Center-like experience? Sounds good. It even sticks to the side of the Mac magnetically when not in use. And it appears to be a bluetooth remote, since it works with Macs which have no IR port. Very, very, very cool. IR is so 1970s. I just hope “Front Row” (their new Media Center shell) is available for older Macs.

- While I like the addition of the iSight to the new iMac, I do have to wonder what will happen when the camera gets iBroken. Computers are best when everything is interchangeable and nothing is integrated to a ridiculous degree (Speaking as a man who owns a computer which is *completely* integrated, I pray that this principle holds only in the breach, and not in every circumstance).

- While I doubt the efficacy of a video iPod*, I do think that Apple is definitely going to make them all as feature-packed, slim, and long-lived as possible. So what if this current rev drops any support for Firewire whatsoever?** They sure do look neat.***

- iTunes 6 (didn’t they release v5 like, a month ago? That must be the shortest lifetime for a major release of any product, anywhere) adds support for a Videos section of your “music library” (which, since it’s no longer purely music, should just be called a “Library,” to my mind.

Of course, that makes the whole “iTunes” name a bit of a misnomer, even moreso when you consider that iTunes is also used to sync photographs on the iPod, which makes it all a bit of a mishmash in execution.

Either every separate app for every separate media type should manage its own type of content on the iPod, or there should be one big “Library” application (which would hopefully work along the same lines as Delicious Library - hell, Apple’s copied worse products before), rather than this currently-illogical situation) which you can use to sync movies onto your new iPod, as well as organize content you currently have on your computer.

It seems limited to QuickTime-readable formats (there’s a new micro-point release of QuickTime in Software Update as well), so things you’d play with, say, VLC are right out. I doubted it could handle my 1GB Battlestar Galactica files anyway, since it stuttered and choked at times playing the episode of Desperate Housewives I downloaded as a test case. Watching that episode, I thought two things:

>>It is super-convenient to be able to download the show, have it show up in iTunes, and be able to play it (albeit in a very odd fashion, by default it shows up in the little segment of the main window reserved for album artwork, rather than in a separate window, although you can make it do so) instantly. That’s a very compelling thing, and something which will drive adoption of the new iPod and new iTunes Movies. I wonder when Apple will be offering new release videos over this thing, rather than just music videos and select Pixar and ABC/Disney shows. It is interesting to see the old U2 and Madonna videos on there, though. For those who are fans of such things, being able to own them at $2 a pop, rather than having to shell out their shekels for the “Greatest Video Hits” DVDs of their favorite artists (which you know always have some crap on them) is going to be a great treat. And since the rest of the market goes as Apple goes (at least in the digital-media-delivery business), it’ll be very interesting to see the video-delivery wave really get going.

>>Holy crap, it looks like crap. I mean, it’s 320×240 (1/2 of native TV resolution), DRMed video. I could probably download these episodes off the internet illegally with better resolution. Or, better yet, go buy the DVD - if I’m willing to wait 2 days, it only costs $4 (+shipping) more to get the entire season from Amazon.com even at the discounted full-season-buy rate iTunes offers, in which case I’ll get bonus features as well as far-superior DVD-quality audio and video. I mean, I don’t need to see every delicious pore on Eva Longoria’s body, but ….. was I saying something?

Of course, then the great RIAA copyright machine will stop me from transcoding it to my computer, where I can then use it as I wish. So, apparently I can either have digital media of sub-par quality, or I can have locked-format material. Can’t have both. According to the big-money-media-machine, anyway. Not to sound like a Slashdot poster, but if Apple would offer a $4.99 HD version (even though that would probably run 1GB an episode; even the down-sampled version of a 43:39 minute TV show I bought was 204.7 MB) I think they would attract a lot of people for whom the low quality of their current offering would be a turnoff. Oh, and allow people to burn those high-quality versions to DVD, within the restrictions of the Apple DRM. I mean, it works for music, why not video?

*Semantically, the name “iPod” really is just a perfect one, both in terms of branding and in terms of meaning. a “Pod” can have anything placed within it, really. It need not conform to any particular use, the way, say, an “iTuner” would. And while the “i” at the front may be a remnant of the naming of the original “i for internet”-Mac, it is such a lock on the populace that nothing will change it for a long, long time. Don’t expect a “vPod” renaming until Jobs is in the cold, cold ground.

**I fear for Firewire sometimes. It still holds ground in video-editing and other high-bandwidth activities, but on the really high end it’s losing out to coax, gigabit Ethernet and fibre-channel technologies, while on the low end USB 2 and Bluetooth (not to mention WiFi) are eating away. Will Apple protect its baby (they developed it, after all) or will an increasingly hardware-agnostic Apple throw it to the Intel lions?

***I have to admit, if I were taking the train I’d slap on some headphones and watch a video podcast. There, I said it.