Apple TV and iPhone.

"Crowd goes wild." Just read through MacRumorsLive.com's coverage of Steve Jobs's Macworld keynote and watched a few demos at Apple's site. And I'm trying to maintain perspective and refrain from going wild myself - but it's very, very hard.

Jason Kottke's absorbing it all, too, and has so far only yelped "WHOA!" once.

Updated through 1/13.

Reviews from gearheads, once they get their hands on these things, may bring us back down to earth soon enough, but for now, this feels like a quick hyperspatial zip forward towards a future we knew was coming eventually: a bridge between the computer and the TV; and a nifty little pocket-sized slate that does everything.

Updates: The NYT's David Pogue on the iPhone: "Prepare for a replay of the iPod lifecycle: other cellphone companies will rush out phones that match the iPhone's feature list, but will fail to appreciate the importance of elegant, effortless, magical-feeling software." Also: John Markoff's initial overview.

The Hollywood Reporter's Steve Bryant on Apple TV: "The good news is that Apple TV looks like a great solution for those who have a large video library on their computers. And given that Apple is increasingly signing more content to iTunes, it looks like a convenient way to view movies. The bad news is that Microsoft's Xbox also offers great movie content, is already hooked to your TV, and offers HD content in 1080i."

Chuck Olsen: "This is the biggest Apple 'Holy Shit!' day in recent memory."

Nikki Finke: "Paramount Pictures just announced the debut of its movies for $9.99 purchasing and downloading on the iTunes Store. My analysis? Shrewd move."

Updates, 1/10: Farhad Manjoo in Salon: "[M]aybe tomorrow, when we all come back to earth, Apple's keenest watchers will cast a cold eye on the true chances of the iPhone. At the moment, though, from afar, the thing certainly does look completely revolutionary. When Jobs says that Apple has 'reinvented' the phone, you believe him."

Jerry Lentz: "I can now download feature films for $9.99 to my phone and watch it! If I get two iPhones and hold one up to each eye, it'll be in 3D!"

"As with so many of Apple's offerings, it's all about the little details." Jason Morehead takes a close look at the iPhone. Virtually, of course.

"Okay, the iPhone is cool... but the product that will send waves through the online-video business is the newly-announced Apple TV." Matt Dentler gets it: "The implications of Apple TV are greater than the video iPod, because Apple TV has two, before-unreliable components: social networking and the utility of common household appliances."

"Jeez, I've never seen Hollywood so orgasmic as today's simultaneous climaxing in Beverly Hills, Burbank and Century City offices over the sexy new iPhone," writes Nikki Finke at her Deadline Hollywood Daily. "You feel the horniness in your gut: this is finally the Perfect 10 of New Media too cool for the room platforms that the public has been aching for.... The problem right now, to use the VCR analogy, is that this is VHS and everything else is just Beta. The money is there for the taking at a time when the DVD market has fizzled since iTunes is now the largest online video store in the world with over 1.3 million full-length films and 50 million TV episodes sold to date." But: "I'm way less impressed with the retail version of the previously announced and decidedly unsexy iTV streaming media device now called Apple TV."

Nikki, Ian and Wiley: Your points are all well-taken, but the key terms here are: plug-n-play, intuitive (and familiar) interface, trusted brand. What's more, this is simply a first-generation, ground-staking rollout. The basics are there: this is the long-sought-after box that consumers and media companies are most likely to agree on.

"We have always been a Mac shop." Peter Becker gives us yet another reason to love Criterion. "This is a company that is not following anyone. They are asking really basic questions and not assuming that all the good answers have already been found. They are making things that are beautiful because they make sense. I can't think of another company that is so true to its mission, and in the end, that's what makes them so good."

Meanwhile, the Zoom In team has been following all this from the point of view of the tech-savvy filmmakers they are.

The NYT's David Pogue gets his hand on an iPhone. Also: A funny story.

Update, 1/11: "The place of fun and leisure in the history of technology is underrated," writes David Edgerton, author of The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. For the Independent, he offers a little perspective:

We tend to think of technology as deadly serious and useful. Radios are for communicating and educating, cars for transport. Yet from the beginning new, often expensive, consumer technologies sold because they were fun. Pornography helped sales of home cinema equipment, helped launch the video, and the internet. Radios sold much faster than washing machines, and televisions faster than freezers.

[...]

Steve Jobs could never be a Henry Ford, but the futurist rhetoric he uses is wonderfully antiquated. There are new things under the sun, and the world is changing radically, but this way of selling technology is not among them.

[...]

Even if the iPhone were to take over all the mobile phones, we would still be living in a world where coal was mined, with more cars, aeroplanes, wooden furniture and cotton textiles than ever.... Given that our world is a combination of old and new so intertwined that it hardly makes sense to distinguish between them, it is appropriate that present visions of the future display a startling, unselfconscious lack of originality.

[...]

New technologies have promised to emancipate the downtrodden. The class system would wither under the meritocracy demanded by new technology; racial minorities would gain new opportunities - as chauffeurs, pilots and computer experts. Women were to be liberated by new domestic technologies. The differences between nations would evaporate as technology overcame borders. Political systems, too, would converge as technology, inevitably, became the same everywhere.

To be at all convincing these arguments have had to deny their own history, and they have done so to a remarkable extent. The obliteration of even recent history has been continuous and systematic.

Paul Boutin at Slate: "If you're not one of the jilted tech journalists stuck on the ground in Las Vegas or San Francisco, it's easy enough to roll CES and Macworld into one big trade show. The unofficial theme of this year's presentations is the Internetification of consumer electronics. TVs and phones are becoming nodes on the network, just like your PC."

Michael Sippey clears out four thoughts.

"Apple's new iPhone appears to be the clearest statement yet of what Steve Jobs's impact has been on consumer electronics," writes the NYT's John Markoff. "It is not that he invents new technologies. He refines existing ones." And: David Pogue's "Ultimate" iPhone FAQ.

"Just as we have failed to pass - somehow, imperceptibly - 'beyond' modernity, so too have the media forms of modernity failed to transcend themselves." From Matthew Clayfield's "'The Shock of the Old: Eyes, Lies & Illusions', in my mind the best thing I've written."

And then there's Jason Kottke's big fat "iPhone round-up."

Update, 1/12: The Los Angeles Times calls for the studios to let "people use the movies and songs they buy on as many devices in their home as possible. Otherwise, they'll be looking for movies and music that don't play by Hollywood's rules."

Updates, 1/13: An online viewing tip. From Late Night with Conan O'Brien and via TickleBooth, iPhone: It's Everything You Want it to Be.

Booksquare argues it could be a boost to the publishing industry, too. Yes, theoretically, you could read books on your iPhone. Via Jason Kottke.

Posted by dwhudson at January 9, 2007 12:17 PM