Yesterday, Apple launched two new products: the 23-inch Cinema Display, and the 10GB iPod. If you're buying me presents, I want both.
It is an interesting coincidence that the two were launched together. They display two different sides of the old überbox dream of future media. The Cinema Display is the big, high-definition screen. A digital canvas for transparent immediacy in Bolter and Grusin's words. We want to look at large, brilliant visuals.
Visually, the iPod mp3 player slash FireWire hard disk can't compete. It's got five lines of text, that's all. The iPod is aural, and mobile. And in version 1.1 of the software, you can export your address book to it along with 2000 songs. Nice, but won't we immediately miss the calendar and the cell phone? The curse of convergence: as soon as a new technology gets miniaturised, we want it into the same box as all the others. Look at the commercials for the Nokia 5510 mp3 phone, or the Ericsson G3 films. If I buy the iPod, I will have addresses and numbers in my PowerBook, my desktop, my Palm, my Nokia phone, and my iPod. Hopefully, they will all sync one day.
The iPod won't be a PDA or a phone before it gets a better input source than the nifty little wheel. Why not speech? Voice control is awesome, and Apple's Speech technology already sort of works (I can't pronounce mail without an accent, so my e-mail is post to Speech. Guess Americans are better off). Better sound interfaces would be really cool, I think -- but then again, I used to work in radio.
In 1999, I attended a lecture by "Future Archaeologist" Bo Dahlbom. He sketched two different scenarios of the future. One where no one leaves the house. Everything is brought there, information to the wall-covering screen, atoms to the door by robots, ordered with the screen. Outside is dangerous, home is sweet. In the other scenario, home is irrelevant. Your life fits in your pocket, and society is like a medieval town square. Everyone walks around and talks to everyone through all kinds of gizmos.
Mobility, your data everywhere, is hard to combine with the wall-covering display. This problem is older than print: books come in many sizes, big and small. Small ones are easy to carry, big ones are nice to look at. I know the computer science guys are working on this. One day, my bits will be floating above me as a cloud, entering into any refridgerator, car or computer I pass by. Until that day, I think we are stuck with the rift between the iPod and the Cinema Display.
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