Apple Pie

Watch the Apple streaming press conference yesterday?  No?  As a post-dinner dessert during the extended working day I caught most of the thing, and largely enjoyed basking in the warmth of my Apple fandom, although was still standing strong at the end of it.  iPad iOS looks exactly as you expect it should look, which is ‘a good thing’; the iPods have changed, for the better, probably, until  next time around it turns out it wasn’t for the better and we need to buy a new one which is for the better; they’re going to fix the iPhone 4 which isn’t actually all that broken in my experience, but it’s nice to know they’re going to fix it anyway; AirPlay is the streaming solution I’ve wanted for an age and is genuinely exciting, and Thor, their match-making service is obviously very, very interesting.  Of all the announcements, however, Apple TV got me in a big way.  Honestly brothers and sisters, time to get excited.  It’s not that it’s now a 1/4 of the size of the old box, or has HDMI and optical out; it’s not that it’s black and silent, and inconspicuous, like a Ninja, not a ginger; it’s not even the fact that by getting rid of the HDD to make it exclusively a streaming portal it’s now only £99 (or the same in $); it’s certainly not the online content access which has a way to go yet, although with NetFlix coming to the UK soon things are probably going to get a lot better, very quickly.  None of this good stuff.  It’s the fact that at last, with AirPlay and Apple TV, they’ve brought my media world together.  If you buy into the rhetoric, I can finally pump the stuff around base station with a £99 black box and all the software, pads, phones and computers I already own.  All I’m going to need is an Arcam rDAC to make it all sound nice like, and we’re cooking.  Happy days.  Happy days indeed.  Ok doubters, so most of this was possible with some inventive juggling in any case, but Apple have responded to the consumers lengthening pockets by making things cheaper, more accessible, and more integrated than they ever have before.  We can now download movies on our iPad vanity device while sat on the morning throne, walk into the salon, and with a gesture pump it onto that nice LED you’ve just hung like a Renoir.  We’ll still pay the premium for the silvery hardware, but the content and the connective tissue suddenly got a lot, lot more affordable, accessible and, well, cool.  Bold, intelligent, and subversive, I’m in Steve, but then, I always was, wasn’t I……

Tagged as: Airplay, Apple, Apple TV, Arcam, Blog, Thor