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“He fixed an old design blunder by popping buttons back onto the iPod Shuffle,” Pullen writes. “He completely revamped the Nano, not only making it smaller but more functional. He finally introduced an iPod Touch that’s a true iPhone without the phone, helping a crippled product live up to its full potential. He also pulled an entire social network out of thin air, with 160 million built-in users all raring and ready to LOL.”
“To be sure, it was an amazing display of Apple’s hardware and software engineering might,” Pullen writes. “But in his last at-bat, with the announcement of a revamped Apple TV, Jobs swung for the fences again, this time falling short.”
Pullen writes, “It’s possible, notes Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, that future updates to iOS could extend the new Airplay features to apps such as MLB At Bat, allowing iPads and iPhones to stream video other than iTunes media through Apple TV onto HDTVs. But there’s a good reason those iDevices go blank when Airplay starts slinging their movies up onto a connected television: latency. It doesn’t matter how smart Apple programmers are or how good your wireless connection is — there will be a delay between what’s on your handheld and what’s showing on your big screen, which means this isn’t a suitable workaround for playing Tap Tap Revenge at a mind-blowing 52 inches.”
MacDailyNews Take: Just as Apple TV’s USB port did, the new Apple TV’s micro USB (which Apple reserves for “service and support”) is intriguing. Could Apple have plans for it be used for something beyond “service and support” in the future? The thing does run iOS and it is powered by an A4 chip…
Pullen writes, “Without a hard drive, Apple TV is nothing more than a rental box, which is exactly what Rokus, TiVos, Vudus, and many other console devices already are… Without storage capacity and the ability to add functionality — either through Apple or by other means — the new Apple TV is likely to fall short, too. Yet at $99, it may yet be a hit. But hits are only enough to keep you in the game.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Surely Apple thought about the value of allowing, say, a weather app or the MLB app or umpteen other apps to run on Apple TV, right? It’s so glaringly obvious that there must be something else that we’re not seeing or haven’t considered yet. Anyone have any ideas?
