Tac is gonna have a kid any day now, his wife’s severely preggo and could be in babymake mode as you read this. And besides recent new father Jonny Raglin of Absinthe Bar fame, I can’t think of any child wanting for a cooler, kinder daddy.
Which, unfortunately, means his kid will turned out to be a rebellious pain in the ass. I’m pretty sure Tac’s aware of that certainty because yesterday he dropped a hardcopy of this indie piece on my desk:
May the Force be with you, Big Poppa.
I finally got around to watching the video of Steve Job’s keynote speech from this year’s Macworld San Francisco during which he introduces the two products that unmistakebly announce Apple’s complete and utter world domination.
AppleTV is a $300 box that let’s you stream anything from your computer or iPod onto your widescreen HDTV…wirelessly. Or from someone else’s computer or iPod, for that matter. It’s also a media storage device for saving up to 50 hours of video. Which is pretty cool. And pretty pretty to boot, just like everything else Apple designs.
But it’s not about their typically slick repacking of already available technology that’s noteworthy here. The real coup here is the partnerships AppleTV in combination with the popularity of the Apple Store is forcing the movie & television giants to enter into with Apple, and the influence Jobs is having on swaying them from their hopeless fantasy that Internet-delivered media will stop growing in popularity so they can go back to raping us in CD, DVD and movie ticket sales. AppleTV is a relationship and industry paradigm play first and foremost. There is no longer any question that Apple is firmly on the road to completely and permanently changing the way everyone on the planet acquires, consumes and shares video & audio media…not just rich folks, the upper middle class and the geeks. AppleTV is cheap, simple enough for the masses to use and will be everywhere soon. The implications AppleTV will have on the everyday consumers buying habits just pushed the already dying market of hardcopy enterainment purchases a few feet deeper into its grave.
The iPhone, scheduled to be unleashed on the world this summer, is another piece of sweet altogether. The iPhone is a phone, audio/video player, photo viewer, chat client and wireless Internet browsing appliance wrapped into a single device with a touch screen interface. And it runs OS X.
No further hyperbole required here. The above description pretty much says it all. The iPhone meets every requirement anyone’s ever had for a mobile device. You wanna call someone? Sure. You wanna text ‘em? Sure. You wanna browse websites just like they look on your laptop? Okay. You wanna download entertainment on demand? Alrighty. How about desktop-class games & applications? Yea, they’re planning that stuff too. And there’s no real buttons. No real pieces to look ugly and useless later. Just a touchscreen accessed graphical user interface they can make prettier and add more stuff to as they come up with it.
It’s the best of every sci-fi movie gadget you’ve ever wanted, elegantly smashed into one handheld unit.
It should now be dead obvious to the entire Internet, mobile and enterainment media industry…including Google, Yahoo & Cingular, who are all explicitly or implicitly partnering with Apple on the iPhone initiative…that the decades long race to develop the first true ‘killer device’ is now over, and Apple is clearly the victor.
Or at least a close second to Vince Vaughn.
But not by much.
Wesley Autrey is the bad man. Bad enough to wear the U.S. Navy uniform back when it meant something more than a cliched pride parade costume. Bad enough to still be rocking it as a New York City construction worked at the age of 50. And now, bad enough to have Samuel L. Jackson banging down his agent’s door to play Wesley in the blockbuster movie soon to be made about his life. Why? Because Wesley Autrey jumped in front of a speeding train to save another man’s life.
Read all about Wesley Autrey.
