Apple’s ad firm, Chiat\Day, does its job admirably well: the featured song in the above ad, by Swedish popstress Miss Li, is firmly stuck in my brain, as are the color-coordinated dancers and their camera-equipped iPods. Mission accomplished. If I were in the market for an MP3 player, I don’t doubt my final decision would have been influenced by this spot.
The ad gets even better when you go listen to the original song:
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It’s a fairly standard take on alienation from suburban materialism, an irresistible sugary blast of angst and frustration with our consumerist lives.
Talking shit about the neighbor wife But when she comes, you put on a big smile I’d like to throw up in her Gucci bag She’s coming here to brag … A house, and a boat, and a gray shiny car Things just to prove you’ve gone far Soda streamer, watching tv, cute little dog Perfect in your shallow bourgeois Shangri-La
Chiat\Day’s edits to the song deftly avoid any of these inconvenient sentiments, making it sound like the soundtrack for an ad for a travel agency (“I gotta get away”) for disaffected hipsters (“I’ve got a feeling that I don’t belong”). Mention of “bourgeois Shangri-La” does make it in towards the end of the edit, but by that point it sounds like a great place to be, maybe even the place these colorful hipsters are trying to get away to. Apple’s iPod nano, which should by all measures be the emblem of the senseless consumerism Miss Li is singing about, is presented by the ad as the very passport to some sort of glorious paradise where we’re free to be ourselves.
Anne Applebaum notes that Sarah Palin breaks the Hillary mold of the powerful woman politician, but not just in the narrow ideological sense:
In the end, though, it is not just Palin’s large family and important job which have made her the topic of the day at every school pick-up queue in America. It is also the fact that she breaks the Hillary Clinton mould, not only in personality and lifestyle but in ideology as well. By this, I don’t mean merely that she’s a conservative, that she’s an evangelical Christian, or that she opposes abortion.
More interesting are the ways in which she shatters all of the stereotypes altogether: Left/Right, Democrat/Republican, liberal/conservative. In practice, it isn’t even easy to say on which side of America’s increasingly confusing culture wars she stands. Is it “Right-wing” to go back to work two days after having a baby, as she did while governor? It is “feminist” to support one’s unwed daughter’s decision to have her baby? Is it liberal or conservative for women to play sports or drive snowmobiles?
Or is it the case that, especially where women are concerned, none of these categories were [ever] as rigid as politicians have sometimes made them seem? While I wouldn’t say that women like Palin are a dime a dozen, in real life there are plenty of conservative women with full-time jobs and post-feminist lifestyles, just as there are plenty of liberal or Left-wing women who decide to stay home with their children.
And this is only part of the reason I would have loved to have waited until 2012 to back Sarah Palin for President.
Apple pushed its new version of the Safari web browser onto Windows iTunes users today even if they never downloaded Safari in the first place. People are crying foul, but the Mac faithful are pushing back:
Second, bitching that anyone is a “bad” Windows citizen is the rhetorical equivalent of arguing that one turd in a sea of shit is particularly stinky. *Microsoft* is a bad Windows citizen.
Why aren’t CIOs really worried about security? Every email message sent to or from a RIM device, goes through a NOC up in Canada. Now, that provides a single point of failure, but it also provides a very interesting security situation. Where someone working up at that NOC could potentially be having a look at your email. Nobody seems to be focused on that. We certainly are.
That’s meant to be a talking point for any IT professional trying to sell their boss on adopting iPhones in the enterprise. Nice work.
I had several reservations about the stunning Macbook Air when it was announced a few weeks ago. “An incomparable design, but a compromised machine,” I said to several friends.
All laptops are compromises to some extent, but the Macbook Air really pushed the boundaries of what is for me an acceptable trade-off. Nerds across the internet griped about the lack of CD drive or the lack of expansion ports. Those didn’t bother me as much as the lack of speed in the processor and the horrifically slow hard drive in the base model. Unless you opted for the $3000 version with the small but zippy SSD, the Macbook Air was likely to be the prettiest pig ever produced.
ArsTechnica released their preliminary review of the machine this weekend and my worst suspicions have been confirmed.
Turns out the slow base model hard drive is a severe impediment:
Put simply, the Air slows to a halfway-unusable crawl anytime there’s a large amount of disk activity—running a browser that reads and writes a lot to the drive (*cough* Firefox), transferring files over the network in the background, anything. The cruel and unusual 4200rpm drive began burning me on my first evening using the Air, and has continued to burn me every evening since.
That’s real ugly. OS X is wonderful when it operates smoothly—it almost disappears into the background, letting you get on with whatever it is you’re doing. It’s sad to hear that it’s unable to do so when it’s sitting in Apple’s most stunning enclosure to date.
But wait, there’s more:
I’ll cut to the chase here: the MacBook Air’s battery life sucks. A lot. I found it to be a pretty big disappointment, holding it to my admittedly-high standards. I ran down the battery from full charge four times and came out with an average of two hours and 33 minutes.
Consider me officially uninterested.
Ars promised a follow-up with a review of the SSD-enabled model tomorrow. This should definitely improve the abominable hard drive performance, and might even help the battery last a bit longer. But then again, for $3000 this svelte beauty had better be doing all that and making me scrambled eggs in the morning too.
“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
Is this classic Jobsian downplay of an idea before Apple unleashes its own competitor?1 Methinks yes, because even if people don’t read books any more, they at least do read the scads of content on the internet. Add to that persistent rumors of Apple working on some sort of tablet device, and I’m thinking we might be seeing some sort of Kindle-killer in the next 12 months.
My guess is that Apple will forego e-Ink in favor of a high DPI LCD, like the one in the iPhone but much bigger. It won’t be as legible as e-Ink and will eat batteries more quickly, but it will be in color and won’t have the dreadful refresh problems that e-Ink suffers from. It’ll have to have some sort of unlimited cellular data plan as well as Wi-Fi, allowing you to access internet content wherever you are. And it’ll support eBooks if you choose to read them.
Predicting Apple’s moves is a wretched Kremlinology, but I feel fairly confident that Steve Jobs will surprise us all with a game-changer in this general space.
He poo-poo’d the importance of phones for a long time before revealing the iPhone. ↩
You can bind five or six devices to a single account, and share books you’ve purchased to those accounts. There’s no simultaneous reading lock, so if you and your significant other are on the same Amazon account you can both read the same book at the same time on your Kindles.
It’s just like iTunes in that regard. It seems that Amazon went out of their way to ape Apple’s model in every way feasible.
I agree with John that it would be very smart if they opened the unit up to non-Amazon e-books, and if they’d drop the silly $0.10 fee per document that they charge to convert your PDFs, DOCs and JPGs into Kindle-compatible files.
Unlike John, I hope they correct these few small things and succeed in a big way. All the pieces are there, they just have to put them in place.
For those of you less enamored of the idea of Kindle, here’s some grist for your mill: the always thoughtful John Gruber.
John’s got some good points, though they largely hinge on one’s faith (or lack thereof) in Amazon’s commitment to the Kindle platform. The fact that Amazon will keep the purchased books online for you in a virtual library to some extent sets my mind at ease about their intentions. I think they’re in this for the long haul.
His paranoia over lockdown is a bit overblown too. I’ve bought songs and albums through iTunes that I’ve already owned, and I have very rarely if ever backed up my proprietary AACs to CD, even though that avenue is open to me. And though I can still buy CDs, I buy most of my music through iTunes.1 I happily embrace Apple’s DRM because I find the convenience of their service to be worth the tradeoff in freedom of use. When I look at Kindle, I see a similar thing.
Nevertheless, the future of e-books might very well be the subscription model: you pay your monthly fee to have access to hundreds of thousands of books, all at your fingertips all the time. Perhaps these will be based around large public libraries, and you’ll access them from the device of your choosing. That sounds appealing as well.
Regardless, these are exciting times. I’m glad to be alive.
I also use E-Music, but mainly because it’s cheaper per track and features obscure bands. DRM doesn’t prominently figure in my decision. ↩
Engadget has some photos of Google’s new Android user interface for mobile phones. Yes, it’s too early to judge it. Yes, the whole thing is Open Source, and therefore infinitely customizable by the unwashed masses. Yes, the thing has potential. And yes, I’m interested in seeing where this will all go.
But in the meantime, it looks to me like Apple can let out a small sigh of relief. Unless they seriously screw up the release of their own programming API, they don’t have that much to worry about: they’re light-years ahead in UI design, which is in the end the most important feature of a gadget.
