“Steve Jobs is a genius. An absolute genius. Not for introducing the world to the iPod, iTunes and the iMac, but for his astonishing ability to make people desire gadgets that they have absolutely no use for,” David Derbyshire blogs for The Telegraph.
“Last night he was at it again. At a press event hosted simultaneously in San Francisco and London, he unveiled a new, small, gorgeous looking entertainment box for the sitting room,” Derbyshire writes.
“Designed to plug into an ordinary television, it connects wirelessly to any computer in the home, allowing the owner to watch video and pictures stored on the computer in the study (or ‘den’ as five year olds and Americans call it),” Derbyshire writes. “The announcement caused the predicted whooping and a-hollering from the American half of the press conference and a more muted snigger in London.”
“Not because it’s a terrible idea, but because of the name chosen by Apple for the prototype. According to Steve Jobs the bright, shiny future of television, the thing that will revolutionise the way the world watches television is called iTV,” Derbyshire writes. “Hopefully they’ll ask the advice of their British colleagues next time.”
MacDailyNews Take: “iTV” is a code name, not a final product name. This fact was made extremely clear by Steve Jobs during his preview of the device both verbally and in large text on his Keynote slides and in the iTunes 7 press release: iTV is the project’s internal code name and will not be the final product name. As a seeing and/or hearing human being, and certainly as a journalist, Mr. Derbyshire should easily have known this information before writing his piece, but then that wouldn’t have allowed him to take yet another unfounded, baseless swipe at Apple.
Derbyshire continues, “I’m always impressed by the ability of businessmen to sell us things we don’t need or want. You know the sort of stuff: shampoo so mild you can use it every day is one. Pre-moistened toilet paper. Or half strength coffee. Or lettuce knives. Basically what Apple have come up with is a box that will cost a couple of hundred quid that allows us to watch movies and television programmes on our television. And we’ll all want one. As I said, genius, sheer gneuis [sic].”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: First The Observer this past Sunday, then The Guardian earlier today, and now this bloody bugger from The Telegraph. What’s gotten into the Brits lately? Did Steve Jobs hop the pond in his Gulfstream and take piss on Big Ben last week or something?
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