Kenny Hemphill
Apple may have once ‘ignited the personal computer revolution’ but it has now grown up and that means evolution rather than revolution.
Apple used to describe itself as having ‘ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh’.
These days, however, it’s more about evolution than revolution. And the new Apple TV and iTunes 10 are two very good examples of this. Back in 2006 when Apple first launched the Apple TV, it was clear that there would be, at some point, a growing market for media streaming devices that enabled you to watch movies, view photos and listen to music stored on your computer.
The problem at that time was that no one knew just what form that market would take and what kind of device would be successful. Microsoft had launched Windows Media Center in an attempt to persuade us that what we really wanted was a PC under the telly in our living room. Others launched devices that were little more than network adaptors with video and audio outputs, including Apple with the AirPort Express.
The vision of the living room of the future was further complicated by the battle between Blu-ray and HD DVD and by the gradual adoption of HDTV. I argued in this column at the time that Apple was very well placed to capitalise on this market because in iTunes and QuickTime it already had many of the pieces in place to stream media over the Internet straight to our living rooms.
The first Apple TV, however, was an unusual mis-step for the company. It didn’t know whether it wanted to be the kind of device that allowed you to copy media to it, so you could watch it when your Mac was shut down, or a device that allowed you to stream content over a network or the Internet.
In the years since 2006, the market has become more easily definable. HD DVD lost, largely thanks to Sony’s inclusion of Blu-ray in the PlayStation 3. And as our broadband connections have become faster and more reliable, the idea of streaming content over the Internet has become much more feasible. Moreover, companies such as Sonos with its audio system and Western Digital with WDTV Live have shown that not only do you not need a computer to stream audio or video, but also that many of us would prefer to keep the computer out of the equation altogether.
That was a problem and an opportunity for Apple. While the original Apple TV was dependent on a Mac or PC running iTunes to provide it with free content, Apple also has one of the world’s biggest online media repositories in the form of the iTunes Store. The answer? To break the link between iTunes on a Mac or PC and Apple TV, and allow it to stream media over the Internet or from a local network storage device, such as, say, a Time Capsule. And, of course, in the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, it has the perfect remote control for an entertainment system.
The new Apple TV is almost the perfect product for the market, with one caveat: it’s still dependent on iTunes on a PC or Mac (or an iPad or iPhone) for free content. The next step, surely, is to break that link to allow music, video, and photos stored on a local network storage device, perhaps running a licensed version of Apple’s new AirPlay software, or even an iDisk, to be streamed to Apple TV. The first step has already been taken – Apple has licensed the receiver part of AirPlay so third parties can connect their media players to iTunes wirelessly. Now it needs to license the server, so that, for example, I could sit in my living room with an iPad and select a playlist from music stored on a Nas in the office to be played on an Apple TV, while at the same time select a different playlist, stored on the same Nas, to be played on an iPod speaker dock in the kitchen.
In iTunes’ case, the evolution is in Ping, its social networking tool. Many have been quick to point out that Last.FM has had these features for years and that Spotify now has them, too. But then, lots of people made MP3 players before the iPod, smartphones before the iPhone and tablet computers before the iPad.
Ping’s features aren’t new, but they do represent an evolution of iTunes from the personal to the social. And given iTunes’ market share and Apple’s apparent influence among the musicians of the world, it’s an evolution that will quickly prove popular. It’s also one that we should have seen coming. Apple tends to move in fairly slow, methodical steps these days and by looking at the added features in its other iLife apps, such as Flickr and Facebook uploading in iPhoto, it’s clear that social networking is where its head is at.
Revolutions are for startups and outsiders. And while Apple may have been born in a garage and been the product of 1960s counter-culture, it has very much grown up. Corporate America much prefers steady evolutionary steps and Apple, these days, is only too pleased to keep it happy.
