[Tim Wilson]

I always loved that spot. 🙂

It begs the question I raised in the Apple Event thread — do we in fact need another Mac from Apple? Why? Sure, faster, but no matter what they do, somebody’s ALWAYS want faster.

Of course, nobody who cares about peak performance is using a Mac anyway, and Apple hasn’t even pretended to aspire to peak status since those hilarious Super Computer ads, where the whole concept was played for a (very clever) joke. Talk about a classic punchline!

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If anything, the lesson that Apple appears to be trying to teach is to get out of the habit of thinking we need something new or different.

“If we thought you needed it, we’d give it to you. Ergo, if we don’t give it to you, you don’t need it.”

[Tim Wilson]

[Michael Gissing] “Blackmagic haven’t done it for the big hardware Resolve Linux turnkeys yet.”

I hadn’t taken that adequately into account with my earlier reply. Software-only, yes, I’d bet strongly in its favor. As Walter noted, I’d previously have guessed that eyeon Fusion would have taken considerably more effort than it turns out to have. Not that BMD didn’t labor, but I think that that entire team’s raison d’etre is to defy expectations.

One of the questions we asked Grant when they acquired DaVinci was about the control surface, and whether it would see the crazy price reductions that some other products had, and he said (paraphrasing), nah, a lot of companies make their money in margins that we don’t need or want, but this one costs about what it costs. We can’t get it lower without compromising its quality and performance, which we’re not willing to do.

I know that we’re not talking about price in this thread, but I wonder if the same thing mightn’t reply. The commendably conservative intent of the Fairlight team to date is ultimately irrelevant. “Commendably conservative” is pretty much the opposite of why Blackmagic does anything, but the question is going to be, can it work on Mac and still work “like a Fairlight”. The answer isn’t “no” until Grant says it’s “no”, and I’m not sure that Grant will often concede anything more than “not yet”.

[Tim Wilson]

[Bill Davis] “it appears that none of them seem to be “waterproof” in a common colloquial sense.”

Quite so!!! NONE of them (Sammy included) use the word waterproof AT ALL. Also, none of them mention 30 minutes. It’s all about dunking or spills, and in the scheme of things, that’s all I need. Save me from dropping it in the toilet, man.

Well, and this, which I do every night before Sabbath falls because I don’t know about you, but I think this counts as work.

https://youtu.be/L0be5fBgLoA

[Bill Davis] “at some point or pressure, the water wins”

LOL Words to live by, my friend. Words to live by.

[Tim Wilson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I wonder, and I was alluding to this in the last post, if you miss Steve Jobs. I know, it’s a well worn meme at this point, but I wonder if Tim Cook’s ‘Think Friendlier’ campaign isn’t as compelling for us battle tested cynics? Steve Jobs had some edge, you knew he was probably a pretty smart guy because he kinda told you so, Tim Cook is much the opposite and the press preys on this friendly attitude and says that Apple is somehow falling behind itself. But is that true or does it just feel true?”

You raise a number of very interesting issues that I’ve been thinking a lot about this week.

I wish he wasn’t dead, but no, I don’t miss Steve at all.

By way of disclosure, I’ve written elsewhere that he was something of a family friend. I never met him, but my father worked closely with him from 1979-1985, as Apple’s first director of sales and distribution. I think I mentioned upthread that he invented the Apple store, but he was responsible for lots of other key stuff. He was sitting next to Steve when Steve got ambushed at the famous board meeting where a new org chart got posted without Steve on it.

I got him to write a few words about Steve for the COW here. Also, my brother-in-law was a direct report to Steve for the first few years after Steve’s return (you can thank my boy for the Mac going from six slots to three), and my mother thought of Steve like a son. She loved him dearly, and spoke of him often.

Me, none of the above. LOL

I wrote here regularly while he was alive that he should have been smart enough to step aside, or the board bold enough to make him. I said that Tim Cook would make a better CEO, and I think he has.

I don’t think that “friendlier Tim Cook” is trivial. My favorite data point is that during the rash of Foxcon suicides, Steve sent Tim to China during the putting up of nets up to catch the men who were jumping. Tim went back to China after Steve passed to see what Apple and Foxcon could do together to make people working for them not want to kill themselves. Guess what? Nobody has since then. The nets are down.

THAT’S HUGE.

I could go on at length about how strongly I feel about Tim C’s accomplishments in reforming the gleefully cruel, gleefully criminal regime of the “visionary” that preceded him, while also managing to double sales and triple profit in his first couple of years on the job. It’s a better company.

So I (obviously) think that the whole “Steve = Everything Good About Apple/ Everything Not Good About Apple = Not Steve” meme is nonsense. After all, Steve was the guy who realized, correctly, that the one thing Apple was never very good at was selling Macs. Mac never achieved even half the market share of Apple II, and up until iTunes was released for Windows so that iPods could become truly universal in 2004, Apple’s stock had spent a year mired in the single digits. People had been talking about Apple on the brink of tanking since the mid-90s, and Steve had yet to turn the crank on a turnaround.

Until he did, by shifting Apple’s emphasis away from computers in the biggest way possible short of stopping making them altogether.

The current state seems a compromise. Make ’em, but instead of updating every year-ish, update every, what? You tell me. I don’t what it’s been since the trashcan shipped. Announced in June 2013, so maybe 36 months since shipping, give or take? And certainly not like plenty of folks around here aren’t preferring a computer that’s even older.

This flies in the face of everything we’d ever thought about computers and innovation, or even general progress. Nobody predicted that even a few years ago.

(I say until Robin finds 8 links to correct me.)

Anyway, I’m remembering Steve recruiting John Sculley away from Pepsi with the pitch, paraphrasing, “Do you want to keep selling sugared water, or do you want to change the world?”

You know what? In the real world, where ambition and aggression lead to criminality, and disregard for the value of human lives and livelihoods, there’s a lot to be said for not aspiring to change the world. It’s okay to settle for making cool stuff, just cool, nothing more, and being a little happier, spreading a little less cruelty and misery.

I don’t THINK it’s an either/or, but we don’t really have any way of knowing that yet. Who has managed to be nice, ethical, AND revolutionary at the same time? Maybe Bill Gates came close? Maybe? I dunno. Steve never tried to be in the ballpark of balancing all three, and while Tim Cook is obviously nice and ethical, I don’t know how highly he prioritizes revolution. If he does, I don’t think his score is all that high.

I’m following a baseball metaphor here, so there’s no clock, and it’s not implausible that Apple is only a couple of swings of the bat from taking the lead again. Or is it? What’s the recent historical data that suggests they even want to be?

In the scheme of things, this has all pretty well established that we can go about our business without as much new stuff as we’d gotten in the habit of buying. We didn’t really really get off the hamster wheel until Apple blew it up, but that’s actually a pretty big contribution right there.

I still also have to believe that, even being nice and ethical, you can do better than new ear/music interfaces and almost-but-not-quite-industry-standard water resistance as your top-line stories at your biggest annual device event.

[Tim Wilson]

[Chris Harlan] “Courage, Tim. Courage.”

Haha! Awesome!

In mentioning my dismay with Apple, I didn’t talk at ALL about how happy I am using non-Apple stuff. I see no value in pissing on Apple’s stuff — and I’m not actually pissing on Apple at all — but I never stopped using their stuff out of dismay. They never broke my workflow or discontinued something irreplaceable. I just found cooler stuff that made me far happier.

So I LOVE my tech life. I’m thrilled, using stuff that has made me the happiest in my many years as a device-o-phile…although I’m aware as I pass Steve’s final age that it’s also not that many f-ing years AT ALL.

But I still imagine a world where Apple raises everyone else’s game, even when they show up late. It’s not a fantasy. As of today, though, it is in fact history.

Next year? All I’m gonna say is that everybody who predicts Apple’s future is wrong most of the time, so I’ll just let ‘er ride.

[Tim Wilson]

[Peter Gruden] “I hope BM will bring Fairlight to the Mac OS.”

Sure seems likely based on what else they’ve done!

[Tim Wilson]

[Bill Davis] “Just to be clear, I doubt that there’s a “more waterproof metric” out there – since that’s kinda oxymoronic.
“

There actually IS a metric, and people have been talking about it in the posts above yours.

I know that not everyone here is nerdistically inclined, so I’ll provide some background. The metric is called Ingress Protection Marking*, published by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).

*Ironically for a standard, the name isn’t exactly standard. Some folks refer to it as International Protection Marking. Either way, the rating is listed in the unit “IP.”

In various contexts, it might represent the extent to which fingers could fit in electrical sockets (ie, such and such a device is probably fine unless you TRY to stick your finger in it, vs. you can’t stick your finger in it even if you try) , or dust make its way into an enclosure (rating for size of particles allowed, amount, etc), and a variety of other measures of things might tend to intrude where they shouldn’t when it comes to electric devices and interfaces.

In the case of water intrusion, the iPhone rates IP67, which is 3.3 feet for half an hour. Samsung phones are IP68, which is five feet for half an hour.

Big deal? No. Neither phone is rated for swimming. They’re so that if you drop it in a (hopefully clean) toilet, you won’t need to buy a new one. (Assuming again that the toilet was clean.)

But it is another, scientifically valid, Apple-published data point to illustrate Apple arriving with a feature 2 years late, and not only NOT set a new benchmark, but choose not to meet the current one.

My larger points are two-fold, that, a) YES, there IS a metric , it has a name, and Apple has chosen to fall short of parity, and b) this “showing up late AND short of the standard” is a NEW pattern for Apple. Well, new-ish.

I’ll acknowledge again that even though I ONLY use my phone with 3.5mm-attached headphones, I’m 100% onboard with getting rid of that jack. Progress happens. Connections go away. If this is what forward momentum looks like, carry on lads! Get rid of more stuff!

Howeverrrrrr…..let’s say that every industry using a 3.5mm jack drops it and flocks to this new thing: recent history makes me wonder if Apple will even bother to keep up with the standard as it evolves. See: Thunderbolt 3.

Anyway, the International Electrotechnical Commission is on the case, I assure you, documenting the extent to which you can stick your fingers in stuff, and how long your phone will survive in a toilet of specified depth.

[Tim Wilson]

Not defending it per se, but just making the observation that there are local companies who make bad-taste commercials the foundation of their brand.

Used car dealers are the obvious examples, but I have in fact known a number of furniture stores to do the same along the way. Seinfeld did a whole episode about this kind of thing — the King? What was he king of? I forget….

There were a couple of realtors in South Florida in the early 90s, when I was also doing real estate video. They were a pair of little people/dwarf twins — my apologies for any archaically offensive language there, not at all intended — but man oh man, they completely embraced it. One indelible image was one of them describing roomy drawers in the kitchen, sliding one open — and there was his brother asleep inside it, wearing an old fashioned sleeping cap and gown. “Hey, I’m sleeping in here!” The other one turned toward the camera, deadpanned Jack Benny style, and slid the drawer closed, as if to say, “See what I have to put up with?” This went on for 30 minutes a week. You better believe that people remembered it. Keyes Real Estate. I’m never going to forget, I guarantee.

Obviously not the same thing as having twin towers of mattresses falling over, but it’s 20 years after those brothers, building on Beavis & Buttthead, Howard Stern, the whole Sunday night line-up for Fox cartoons, Jackass, the Comedy Central roasts, on and on — intentional offensiveness is the order of the day. This isn’t in the top 10 worst things I’ve seen or heard this week. Probably not in the top 20.

I guarantee that they showed this to a lot of people who laughed as hard as they did when they were making it, and that there are plenty of folks laughing even harder at the outrage over it than they are over the commercial.

All of which begs your original question of course. ARE people who intentionally aim for bad taste and offensiveness in their right mind?

And not to suggest that you’re wrong to be appalled by the tastelessness. I’m just saying that they knew it was tasteless, they knew that people were going to be horrified, and they went for it wholeheartedly.

I’m also thinking of the 60s and 70s when people made movies, songs, etc. HOPING to be banned, to get the free publicity. We’ve just now moved to the point where people can reasonably expect to have it both ways — an endless cycle of outrage and mockery, leading to a pile of publicity that they could never have paid for in their wildest dreams. They’re gonna be laughing all the way to the bank.

I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m happy about this. I’m just not surprised, either.

[Tim Wilson]

[Brian Seegmiller] “If Apple has lost you as a customer why do you care?”

Because I was a 100% die hard, full-time, death to everyone else Apple partisan from 1979 to 2003. Not only before some of you were born, but a span about as long as some of you have been alive.

Along the way, I ran Mac user groups. I served on boards. I taught classes in Apple stores.

My father invented the Apple store, btw, back in 1984. When he first pitched the idea of selling Apple logo gear, they thought he was nuts. The only thing they’d allow him to try was socks. Can you imagine? Socks and socks only. But he did it.

Anyway, it was a long transition out. I was dual platform starting in 2002, had a few years where I felt there were ADVANTAGES to both….then felt, wow, advantages are cancelling each other out, but I’ve come to a point at which I PREFER exactly nothing about Macs.

I still used iPhones and iPad (iPod always struck me as pathetic), even after I stopped Macs…but by maybe 2011, I came to the end of the road.

So that’s just over THIRTY TWO YEARS of paying Apple hundreds, if not thousands of dollars EVERY SINGLE YEAR.

Have that kind of brand loyalty to anything for 32 years yet?

I still want Apple to blow my mind every time they step up the mic. I want them to shake the pillars of heaven. They used to make the entire industry better — every industry they touched — and now, they just don’t. I wish they would.

But also, I love the game. I LOVE IT. I love tech, I love music, I love cameras, I love every kind of device. I haven’t edited professionally since 2000, but I STARTED editing in 1978, and I’m always going to love it with all my heart. I’m always going to think of myself as an editor.

Apple’s in all those games. How could I NOT care about Apple’s every move?

As a result, though, I care about everyone else’s moves. I want to know about tech I don’t use because it’s fun. How’m I gonna find the next great thing if I don’t know all the things?

It’s like, I also like knowing about TV shows I don’t watch too. I read reviews of movies I know I won’t go see. I know what story trends are moving through the world. I know the grosses. I have (I think) a pretty clear picture of the moving pieces, and have at least an eye on the pulse of where storytelling is going. It’s FUN.

Going in another direction — I do what I can to avoid sports metaphors, but the fact is that I know almost as much about the Yankees roster as I do the Red Sox roster BECAUSE I hate the Yankees almost as much as I love the Red Sox. LOL My contempt for the Yankees is more fulfilling because I know how weak their farm system is. LOL

But I don’t hate Apple. I certainly never EVER expected them to care about me as much as I cared about them. That way madness lies.

But as long as Apple is in any game I care about, I’m going to pay close attention, and I’m going to have an informed opinion about them. It’s FUN.

It’d be more fun if Apple was too, though.

[Tim Wilson]

[Robin S. Kurz] “Hmmm…”

Robin Robin Robin, what sweet relief you bring me. LOL

This has been a long, painful month (months, actually, hence me disappearing again), but here my day began: barely awake, looking at my phone to check the forum with one, half-opened eye, discovering that I’m wrong and thoroughly corrected before my day even begins. You make me feel loved and beautiful. LOL Things are coming back to normal, and maybe it will all be okay again soon.