I am, admittedly, a gearhead.
I am probably not a gearhead's gearhead. For that, I'd need to collect junk and try to convert it into something. I'm not quite Jessie James. Nor am I a playboy gearhead. I can't just buy any and everything that is cool for the moment. Alas, I never owned a Newton.
But I did buy a first generation PowerMac 7100 and a huge NEC monitor instead of putting a down payment on a condo. I have come to regret that decision, but I've done more foolish things than that, although many of them happened at that same point in my life, now that I think of it. But since about 1996 when I finally mothballed that Mac, I've had basically nothing but emnity and contempt for Apple products and philosophy. Part of that was that I actually believed in Pink. Silly me. See, I thought of myself as a thinking gearhead. Yes I absolutely had to have the best gear, but I put some serious neuron time into my decisions.
I've always had a skeptical eye towards Apple, which is to be expected from any self-respecting Xeroid of the 80s. But I have always given them props on what they did well. They had the first truly functional networked email and calendaring system. That thing which grew to be what Exchange has become first worked on Apple token rings. They did multimedia first and better, and half of the magazines in America would be still looking fairly primitive without Apple's graphical contributions. And, to tell you the truth, Hypercard was pretty cool. I wish I had a hypercard memex program myself right about now, and no One Note doesn't cut it.
On the other hand, nobody knows less about database technology than Apple. And of all the things a computer can possibly do in the universe of interesting things, database is the most interesting thing. That is because it is precisely the thing, next to numerical calculation, that human beings suck worst at doing with their brains. Database becomes more interesting over time, because more things are digital than ever before, and getting your library culled and maintained out of the digital universe is the most interesting thing to you. Apple may present it well, but...
What Apple does best? Eye candy. Or maybe I should say, UI candy. They have never forgotten product design love. Apple boxen are sleek, cute, delicious, smooth, and at times even elegant and evocative. I happened to be in an Apple store the other day and priced myself a new G6 PowerMac. Mine cost 18,000 bucks, and I wasn't even finished. So I got an iPod Touch instead.
This year was my kids' ipod Christmas and I actually didn't even light much of a Kwanzaa candle. I have no excuses. We went very commercial this year. I've been a Treo guy since the 650 broke, and for a number of reasons, I've never fallen for the iPod charms. So when I got the kids 3G Nanos, I didn't expect to have any gearhead longings of my own. Then of course I had to explain how all of those things worked when they went occasionally haywire, which meant that I had to touch and use them. Hmmm.
I do have about 70 measly GB of music on my own Windows based iTunes. I broke my final non-Seagate hard drive in December of 06 and lost half of my collection. I've yet to re-rip the remainder, but I do OK. Seeing the integration work between the kids' little iPods and their little music collections made me think twice. Maybe I'd like to try it out. I finally ran into my buddy who has an iPod Touch. He didn't even tell me - he's a Treo Traitor. See, as a Treo guy, I poo poo on the iPhone. Yes I've touched it and evaluated it and all that, but in the end I only envied one tiny thing about the iPhone. That was the fact that it has random access email, downloaded and stored on the phone itself. That's cool. Everything else, especially Google Maps, I had covered. But it was true that I was getting a little tired of just one GB of music I had downloaded onto the Treo, and it was awfully tiring just to bet that one song I wanted to hear to play.
Now that I have the Touch, I completely don't mind carrying the extra brick. I actually bought a messenger bag (I'm too old for a backpack). In fact, I'm fairly certain that I will be getting the next gen iPhone.
I have discovered a completely new line of complaint against Microsoft which is the result of some fairly intense time and study on them in the past six months. The gripe is essentially this, Microsoft is not a product company, it is a technology company. It explains a great deal of the antipathy between them and the Linux folks, because they work functionally identically. Here's a bit of code that we throw into a big huge package, voila. Actually, voici is more accurate. The whole is less than the sum of the parts, and that is because there is no artistry. Nobody is responsible, in the Microsoft or Linux worlds, for the integrated gestalt of the technology. Microsoft is Costco, Apple is The Apple Store.
Apple's organic unity is frustrating for people who want to have the latest and greatest, which for the majority of computing purposes would be me. That's primarily because computing has not evolved its roast beef into a satisfying Reuben sandwich. Not everywhere. But in certain parts, what's done is mostly done. I mean we don't worry about monitors and refresh rates and card compatibility. It's done, it's commodified, and it's all good. So is the case with graphics, digital photography, word processing and several other areas of compute stuff. Now it's time to make neato burrito products with subsets of the perfected technology. Such is the bite that the iPod Touch has taken out of the general purpose home computer and mobile pda.
Going forward, what remains fascinating to me is the next generation of Business Intelligence. You know and I know that the killer app is going to be the 42 inch LED touchscreen EIS. First suite that does that wins billions. I'm trying to find the engineer of that train, and I'm getting the hell on board. Let's face it. The fundamental technology and presentation of BI has not changed in 8 years. That's two and a half lifetimes in tech years.
Now is Apple going to be a player in this market? At this point, I see no reason why they could not be. It would just take a little wheeler-dealing and vision. For me, that vision is clear and becoming perfected as time progresses. I now have a little piece of the future in my hands, and I'm feeling design unity love. If Apple only knew databases, a future full of magic could happen. In the meantime, there's something very interesting to be said about the iTunes distribution model. Hmmm.
