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Apple to Rule the Digital Home by 2013?
Stony Stevenson writes to tell us that a new study from Forrester Research is taking a crack at what seems to have become a hobby for so many, predicting Apple's market strategy. Specifically, Forrester is predicting that Apple will become the 'hub of the digital home by 2013.' "Forrester predicts that Apple will offer eight key products and services to connect PCs and digital content to the TV-stereo infrastructure in consumers' homes. A 're-engineered' Apple Store will expand into in-home installation services to deliver what Forrester describes as a 'fully integrated digital experience.'"
Maybe I'm just hungover but to me the article seems to be nothing but: "Blah blah blah Apple. Blah blah Apple Blah Apple Blah."
The massive success of Apple TV sure put them on the right track.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
It'll be either one of the console vendors Microsoft, Nintendo, or Sony (Probably Microsoft if they can get their heads out their asses on the matter of DRM. The XBox 360/Windows Media stuff works pretty well already and is simple to set up) or a set-top box vendor (again if they can come up with a DRM strategy).
Apple doesn't make anything that hooks to a TV that has any critical mass.
Because nobody would ever need more than 1 button on a mouse, nobody would ever need more than 1 button on a TV remote.
How they get people to pay thousands of dollars for this "research" is amazing. Can anyone ever remember someone saying "Damn! Forrester totally called it!"
The 4 new products they predict are:
* AppleSound universal music controller
what, for the times when you are out of earshot of itunes, ipod or apple tv? or so you can sync them? I don't see the market here.
* Network-enabled gadgets
like a chumby? or an ambient orb?
* In-home installation services
apple geek squad? Ok, this may be true, but really... yawn...
* Apple home server product
This is the only one that MAY be interesting, but that's probably just because they don't say much about it. isn't this what the mini is? or mini+drobo?
Now know this, you newly minted Mac users - if you use Apple equipment for any length of time, you wind up with the same hobby: predicting Apple's market strategy.
It's fun and easy to do, and you soon learn that you can do just as good a job as Forrester or Gartner or Cringley, and do a lot better than Metcalf, Michael Dell or Dvorak (not the keyboard layout, as even a keyboard layout can provide better market analysis than that guy).
Bold predictions! You can make bold predictions -
"Steve Jobs will buy Adobe!"
"Steve Wozniak will mary a famous comedienne!"
"iPhone will be the first earth technology bough by alien visitors as it's superior to their own!"
"Apple will shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders!"
- Ok, I admit that it's unlikely Woz will marry a famous comedienne, but other than that, as long as it's outlandish and over-the-top, there's a one-in-a-million chance it might come true, and as Terry Pratchett readers, we know one-in-a-million chances crop up nine times out of ten.
Articles like this are just the encouragement newly fledged Apple pundits need to start rolling their own... and it's a small step from speculation to rumor-mongering! That's where the action's really at.
(And, you didn't hear it from me, but the next rev of iTunes will knock your socks clean off, employing bayesian fuzzy-logic heuristic inference engines to predict with 89% accuracy what you want to hear before you hear it, or so I heard from a little bird who's working on "Project BHA-II")
Does this mean I'll have to send my "digital home" off to a service center three months after I buy it to?
Or if they do they're insane. Product tie-in is why people ran to Apple in the first place, to get away from the Microsoft lock-in. Now Apple is doing it. I recently dumped everything I had Apple and moved to FOSS for exactly this reason. It kills competition and locks you into inferior products all for the sack of compatibility.
I like that I can have different components from different manufacturers. It means I can shop around for the best deals. As soon as one company ties it all in you can look forward to the death of standards like HDMI. Anyone remember ADC? The Apple Display Connector? Don't think for a second Apple wont start doing this to lock you in.
It boggles the mind why people get so excited about vendor lock-in like this. Suddenly it's a good thing? Did we learn nothing from the 90's and the Microsoft/Intel/Cisco empire?
Providing in-home installation services would not be forward progress. Eliminating the need for in-home installation services would be.
Cabling for home entertainment systems needs to be simplified drastically. Current large-screen TVs have far too many connectors. The home entertainment industry has been unable to make all the boxes talk to each other and self-configure. The display vendors, the cable box vendors, the media player vendors, and the "amplifier" vendors each want to be in charge. The game console people don't worry about integration much. So we don't have idiot-resistant plug and play, even though that's technically possible. (It is getting better, though; if you're all HDMI, things do interoperate better. Aspect ratio, for example, is handled automatically.)
Apple probably isn't in a position to make that happen, though. Apple may sell a "media center" box, but they won't be the only one.
It makes Guitar Hero much easier.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
I suppose Apple as we knew it in 1996 is dead, but how many people really miss that Apple? By January 2001 Apple was on the rebound, 3 years after introducing the iMac and about to release Mac OS X 10.0.
I don't think that's what Forrester had in mind, though. I'll take any such company-specific predictions with a grain of salt.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Not as long as free alternatives exist, at least for those who know.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I'm going to get modded down for this, but as it's common knowledge that the world is set to end in 2012, it seems that claim's of Apple's universal dominance are a bit premature.
It's kind of hard to rule the digital home if there aren't any.
Who knew the Mayan's hated Apple fanboys?
That's what this article is lol. I think pretty much forever, Apple's customers will only be rich, showey people who don't know computers very well and douchbags (and some professional media editors for God only knows why cuz Adobe CS3 and Premiere and some Ulead products run on the PC). So unless we all become image obsessed douchebags in the future, I don't think Apple's taking over anything. Linux however is about to kick Microsoft's ass and I'll put money on that one. Get your wikipedia edits about Microsoft going bankrupt written in advance lol.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Hey APPLE, please do not make it dependent on damn ITUNES.
That's where they make their money. And making money by locking in users matters to Apple just as much as to Microsoft.
Bittorrent? What's that? Isn't that something that pirates and terrorists use to exploit poor starving artists?
iTunes and the iPod have been successful because of the public perception that they just work - now, you can debate how true that is if you like, but that's the line. Part of that ease of use is exactly because they force you to use iTunes (the software*) - which annoys slashdotters who want to mount their mp3 player under Debian and copy .ogg files to it, but is a matter of sheer indifference to the mass market, who like the seamlessness that comes from the monolithic approach.
As for the AppleTV: at the moment, whereas the iTunes store is there to sell iPods, the AppleTV is there to sell iTunes video, and to "tick a box" so that people buying video for their iPods know there's an Apple-branded solution to show them on the big screen. Once the online video market has "come of age" (which will also need a bit of a revolution in broadband availability & capacity) Apple might get serious about the AppleTV.
(*Of course, iTunes the software doesn't force you to buy your media from iTunes, the store - it will happily rip audio CDs, accept MP3s and unprotected AACs from any source - legal or otherwise - and a google for "rip DVD to iTunes" produces a heap of solutions: if you know Bittorrent you probably know Google)
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.