"I Finally Cracked It."
That’s what Steve Jobs revealed to Walter Isaacson in an interview for his forthcoming biography.
What was he talking about? The often rumored (and just as often dismissed) Apple television. Not the Apple TV, the current product, a full fledged television.
Six months ago, I laid out why I thought an Apple television was actually coming despite (and perhaps because of) the current conventional wisdom that it’s a low-margin business that Apple won’t bother with. My original thesis holds: the current television experience is shit from a user perspective. It’s popular despite being severely hamstrung by the powers that be (mainly the cable companies).
If Apple can do to this market what they did to the phone market — the sky is very much the limit. The convergence of computing and the living room will finally be realized.
Jobs’ quote above is key. He didn’t just reveal that Apple was thinking about the Apple television, but that he “cracked it”. That’s very exciting. It reminds me of Alan Bradley’s quote from Tron: Legacy. Talking about the missing Kevin Flynn:
Sam, two nights before he disappeared, he came to my house. “I’ve cracked it!” He kept saying.
Saw this Nielsen graph on engadget the other day and what really surprised me was how even the age breakdown was among people who owned these types of phones. Maybe age doesn’t really change people’s tastes and preferences as much as I thought. You either have an Android, Windows, iPhone or BB type of personality and always will. Considering over the past 4 years I’ve gone from being decidedly in Microsoft’s camp to Google and now firmly with Apple—I have a hard time believing that. Although I have a hard time imaging I’ll ever get another phone but an iPhone for a long, long time. So maybe it is true?
Really, though, it’s probably more due to the fact of the influence of family members on one another and being tied together on a family plan. Someone in the family probably feels passionate about their brand and will push everyone else from Grandma Jill to Baby Jack to get the same type. The more you’re around your family showing off the cool smartphone that you have, the greater chance you’ll have to brainwash them to be like you.
The other day I heard this news report about one thousand birds falling from the sky. It was a mystery what caused their deaths. Disease? Nature? Humans? Aliens? A few days later, and 5,000 dead birds found, all scientists have figured out is that the cause was some physical trauma and not a disease. But I already knew that. From the moment I heard the story, I couldn’t help but think that the birds were knocked out of the sky by the blast of a sonic wave gun with the trauma of the fall as the cause of their death!
See, just a day before, I listened to a smart guy named Steve Gibson tell a story about himself as a high school kid in the 70’s and the sonic wave blaster gun he built which could knock seagulls out o’ the sky. After hearing the news report my mind went straight to this story. Time may tell if I made a semi-genius connection between these two reports, or if I just fell victim to the bias of overvaluing the importance of events fresh in the mind. Either way Steve’s story is quite entertaining, so you should give it a listen above!
(Source: grc.com)
New Year’s Resolutions, or 11 for ‘11
Alright friends, here’s my list of resolutions for 2011. Let’s see if I can at least get 6 done. Please share/link to your New Year’s Resolutions in the comments.
- Be more productive: track time spent on work / doing anything
- Build an iPhone app (no matter how terrible it is)
- Get super fit: 15 lbs fat loss, >10 lbs muscle gain
- Maintain diary entries*
- Become fluent at Spanish (practice >=30min at least every other day)
- Try to read in Arabic (practice >=30min at least every other day)
- Track/monitor finances better
- Create a five track EP using GarageBand
- Get involved in some service / volunteer project (recruit me if you have something in mind, I don’t).
- Get together with friends more often
- Social network involvement — more tweeting (@johnmfoley), being online in chat apps and blogging**
* I don’t want to seem like a little girl here :) I got the idea from Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller. There’s a video where Penn explains how he keeps a journal and how everyday he reads an entry from 20 years ago, 10 years ago and 5 years ago to compare where he was in his life and the problems he faced then to compared to today. I think that’s an interesting idea and would like to try it out. Also, I bought MacUpdate’s bundle of Mac apps which came with a program called Chronories. Chronories is really cool diary/life tracking application that makes writing a breeze. Check out this demo video. Plus, there are many well-known diarists, so says Wikipedia. So I rest my case, that #4 is a fine resolution and that I don’t need to read this book or this one…
** I took the wrong approach all the other times I false-started blogging (no laughing at me Ryan). I actually had several very LONG essays mostly written. However, I always wanted to do more perfecting and research—throwing in references to obscure studies and all that jazz. They were so long, that I didn’t even feel like re-reading and proofing them. So, starting in 2011 I’m going to start this blog format:
->1 awesomely concise paragraph, and
->1 explanatory picture/graph/poll/video/song/etc.
And I’ll set a goal of let’s say… 1 post per 1.5 weeks? Hopefully, that will work.
Happy New Year!
