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Just an observation
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Personally, I’m waiting on the release of the iRock. No, not a branded iPod, a boomerang of the Pet Rock, from back in the day. If you know what that is, you’re definitely one of the curmudgeon set.
Marvin Holdman
Production Manager
Tourist Network
8317 Front Beach Rd, Suite 23
Panama City Beach, Fl
phone 850-234-2773 ext. 128
cell 850-585-9667
skype username – vidmarv -
Of course I remember it, Marvin. I bought one! But of course now you’ll have to have a shiny iDock for your iRock, and a silicon iSkin to protect it from bumps, and an upgrade if you want a higher resolution iRock. The iRock Cinema….
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Don’t know about you, but I’m already planning on being in line at the iStore for the release. I’m tingly!
Marvin Holdman
Production Manager
Tourist Network
8317 Front Beach Rd, Suite 23
Panama City Beach, Fl
phone 850-234-2773 ext. 128
cell 850-585-9667
skype username – vidmarv -
i i Marvin –
But I’ve heard rumors that the iRock won’t import previous projects from the iPebble, running on the Igneous OS. Is that true?
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
[Joseph W. Bourke] “It seems, that Apple is quite successfully in the business of selling whatever sells, and has proven it in the market. Good product…bad product…is it selling? OK. At this point in time, they could put a lightup Apple logo on a turd and sell millions of them.”
Please name some of these “bad products” that have been highly successful because of Apple’s magical marketing.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Chris Kenny] “Please name some of these “bad products” that have been highly successful because of Apple’s magical marketing.”
You mean besides Final Cut Pro?
Kidding.
Rather than spout another opinion, I’ll let Apple take the floor.
Apple TV – may not be a bad product, but maybe barely a product at all yet. It was introduced in 2006 as “a work in progress.” Its relaunch as Take Two implied something that Steve made explicit: “Apple TV was designed to be an accessory for iTunes and your computer. It was not what people wanted.”
As late as 2009, Tim Cook said in Apple’s Q2 earnings call, “In fact unit sales were up over 3 times vs the year-ago quarter. However let me be clear, we still consider this a hobby.”
They “only” sold an estimated 6.6 million up until then, at least another 2 million since then (820,000 in Q2 11 alone! Don’t have the Q3 number yet)…but not bad for a product that people have been told repeatedly isn’t that important yet.
It doesn’t do any less than they say it does, but buying a product in this state is kinda like paying to be a beta tester. Any other companies you’ve ever paid a hundred dollars…or two…or three…to test a product that wasn’t exactly on the front burner?
I said any OTHER companies. 🙂
Fortune recently told the tale of what happened soon after the launch of MobileMe.
According to a participant in the meeting, Jobs walked in, clad in his trademark black mock turtleneck and blue jeans, clasped his hands together, and asked a simple question:
“Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continued, “So why the f^ck doesn’t it do that?”For the next half-hour Jobs berated the group. “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,” he told them. “You should hate each other for having let each other down.”
(I included the link for that one, but the other quotes are easy to find if you want to look ’em up.)
I love that Steve takes failure so seriously. Even personally. I also appreciate that Apple never claimed that Apple TV was anything more than it was. But Apple continued to sell at least one product that they said was incomplete, and one that the CEO considered pathetic. If iCloud wasn’t ready yet, my guess is that they’d still be selling MobileMe.
I’m not always inclined to a let a company’s opinion of their products stand as the last word, but here, I will. I’m not saying that they’re evil or cynical. They’re not. They’re just a company. As the thread says, just another observation.
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[Tim Wilson] “…let Apple take the floor.”
Hi
That’s a good call.
Assess what Steve Jobs and Apple have actually told us, rather than the clamour round here. 😉Just for the record I think Steve Jobs’ issue with MobileMe was the rollout – people losing their .mac email archives etc – rather than the actual service.
[Tim Wilson] “Apple TV – may not be a bad product, but maybe barely a product at all yet… As late as 2009, Tim Cook said… let me be clear, we still consider this a hobby.”
They “only” sold… 820,000 in Q2 11 alone! Don’t have the Q3 number yet)…but not bad for a product that people have been told repeatedly isn’t that important yet. “What is it that Apple is leading up to with Apple TV?
Last night I was reading the Colorsync thread in this forum, and Philip Hodgett’s blog:“I think it’s pretty clear that Apple’s solution for monitoring is on a computer monitor that has been calibrated with ColorSync. I’m saying that there is no architectural provision for video out. Period. FCP X is the way it was conceived and will continue.
A colorsync calibrated monitor – calibrated to Rec 709 – is Apple’s solution I believe. The comment from Matrox I believe is definitive. There is no broadcast output, (and there never will be) because there’s no need when you can calibrate the monitor you’re working on to whatever colorspace/colorsync profile you want to work in. If the calibration is accurate, it’s as accurate as a calibrated external broadcast monitor.”Reading that I had an insight 🙂 not Apple TV, but Apple Television.
The small black box but within a much bigger one.If FCP X is the start of the feeding chain (Apple don’t make video cameras) and if FCP X only works at ‘video’ frame sizes (NOT any old web or YouTube sizes) and as Apple aren’t in the least bit interested in the old HD-SDI/FSI monitoring workflow….
…then once the Cloud is up there empowering iTunes then a fully-fledged Apple branded Television might make sense. Fully calibrated, with colorsync built-in, and optical flow scaling and frame-rate optimisation so anything from the iTunes video store (or anything from YouTube or Vimeo – TVs have ethernet) will look absolutely (you guessed it!) ‘awesome’….
[branding] “Television as you’ve never seen it before!” [/branding] (OK I’ll never be an ad copy writer 🙁 )Steve Jobs (in 2008):
“Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. It’s great to watch the movies, but the licensing of the tech is so complex, we’re waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace.” Phil chimed in with “We have the best HD movie and TV options in iTunes.”Its not just Blu-Ray licensing – adding the DRM to the core of the OS kernal – that is so complex. The whole process of licensing ‘content’ for iTunes seems to be an ongoing ‘bag of hurt’.
Steve Jobs (WWDC 2011 ) “The truth is in the cloud!”
One of the functions of iCloud may well be as a aggregator of content for distrubution (=monetising) by iTunes. Content from enthusiasts, semi-professionals and professionals – individuals and production businesses. Well enough made for people to want to watch…
Steve Jobs (2008}:
“Apple’s Pro business is thriving and it is not for sale. Period. Steve.”
Final Cut, and Logic (or its successor) are crucial to this independent content-production channel, one that maybe can lessen Apple’s ‘bag-of-hurt’ dependency on existing souces of high-fascination entertainment for iTunes.Steve Jobs (2005):
“No one wants to die… Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new…. someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.…time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Apple’s path has diverged from the FCP 1-7 vector, Diverged from being aligned to high-end post-production needs.
Apple (in a FAQ page, several days after 21/6/2011):
“Can I import projects from Final Cut Pro 7 into Final Cut Pro X? etc etc etc.”Unless Apple mention things specifically in this page I don’t think it will happen.
This page is I suspect ‘the whole truth’.
Multicam will come in a new version, and the other listed developments, but for the rest?When Philip Hodgetts writes:
“FCP X is the way it was conceived and will continue… I’m saying that there is no architectural provision for…
he’s reporting what he has found, and what he has been told by those who know who he’s communicated with.From the blog:
Eric St-Martin: “I think that all third party hardware will be abstracted by AVFoundations. Thus, FCP would never have drivers to address specific output cards, AVFoundation would take care of that. It would make sense to do it that way since it would make the I/O card available to any application. Then FCP or other app would only have to open a stream to AVFoundations to output…
Reply by Philip:
While that’s possible, it would require the application to write the hooks for AV Foundation to hook into. It appears they are simply not there, so no matter what AV Foundation might want to do, Final Cut Pro X isn’t going to cooperate…”So while there will be things that third parties WILL be able to do – write Motion templates to give FCP X functionality for instance – there will be lots of stuff that FCP X will never do – “dogma… to be cleared away” – that broadcast post-production workflows need today.
Apple is headed in a different direction.
That makes some sense to me.
Myself, these days, I view much more on the BBC’s iPlayer (Catchup for other channels) and YouTube/Vimeo than I watch on sit-down-and-watch TV./[Just an obsevation.]
12/4/2011-21/6/2011 marketingwise Apple ‘blew it’ 🙁 -
In short, Apple is setting a new course.
Randy Ubilos said this is the next 10 years.
Personally I think they’ll be right in the long run. It will be painful in the short run.
Some people keep thinking Apple has become a “consumer” company.
I think Apple has become a media company. They are all about content creation and distribution . . . as a means to sell hardware. -
Thing is…Apple TV was great! Talking about the original. I use one for client previews and expos and it is perfect. The public wasn’t ready…Apple was ahead of it’s time. MobileMe…again, GREAT. I use it every day. I’m PO’d about the EOL of that. My clients download finished projects from my iDisk and even upload material to me when I need it using my public fielder and a login. I even deliver for broadcast using iDisk! My website is hosted through MobileMe using iWeb. Yea, it doesn’t suck.
My 2 cents.
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Apple TV and MobileMe sort of demonstrate my point. They haven’t been very large successes (by the standards of a company Apple’s size), and Apple itself seems to have a realistic view of these products. This runs contrary to the theory that Apple can ship bad products and make them hugely successful via marketing. The current Apple TV isn’t even all that bad, it’s just sort of “meh”… and it has sales to match.
Apple’s really big successes are driven by outstanding products. Apple’s marketing, while effective, isn’t mind control, and in fact most of Apple’s marketing material just explains/shows how the products work — if that marketing is so effective, it’s because of the products, not because of some trickery.
It is also true that Apple is a fairly “hip” brand these days, but they got there by valuing design in a way that was alien to the rest of the industry (think back to 1998, when the first iMac shipped; prior to that the big new design trend in computing was that you could now buy a tower in black rather than beige), not running ads telling people they were hip.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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