Jag har precis läst två artiklar från John Siracusa och Khoi Vinh med välformulerad kritik mot att Apple för att de inte försöker på allvar ta tag i den sorgliga röra som vardagsrummet är idag.
Grundbudskapet från båda två är att Apple inte försöker ta sig an uppgiften att faktiskt göra en produkt som ersätter allt annat i vardagsrummet utan istället blundar inför de behov och tekniker som redan är etablerade i vardagsrummet och tror att Apples smala väg är tillräcklig.
Först ut John Siracusa för Ars Technica:
The landscape in the living room is very different. It's not a green field where Apple can plant its digital seeds and grow them into a beautiful walled garden. It is, to use Steve Jobs's own word, "balkanized." Even before Apple dipped its toe in the water with the first Apple TV in 2006, the living room was a battlefield scorched by decades of competition between broadcast networks, cable and satellite providers, and a whole raft of consumer electronics makers.
Apple's failure to recognize this reality has been and continues to be the root cause of Apple TV's woes. Pulling an iTunes—creating a "flagship" experience that comes to define the entire market—is nearly impossible to do in such a crowded, well-established market, but Apple seems determined to keep banging its head against this wall.
[...]
Cable TV is just the tip of this iceberg. Repeat this situation for all of the other existing sources of video content—satellite, the Web, Netflix, Amazon, home video from camcorders, and yes, even illegal downloads of content that no one is yet willing to sell to you in a timely manner. Consumers are drowning in complexity; we need help!
The solution is a device that is unabashedly omnivorous. Yes, in traditional Apple fashion, it must provide a simple, elegant, user interface. But behind the scenes, it must be willing and able to accept content from as many sources as possible. This is what makes the device valuable and desirable: dealing with and hiding all this complexity!
Is this show on cable? Satellite? Downloaded from the Web? Streamed from Netflix? Is it on my Mac? My iPhone? Does it need to be transcoded? Upscaled or downscaled? These are the things geeks deal with manually right now, and regular people have little chance of figuring out. People will pay for a device that will handle all of this for them. It might take a while, but word would get around about the new device that actually makes your living room less complex, for a change. One box to rule them all.
Läs hela: Apple's trouble with TV
Därefter Khoi Vinh
As a consumer experience, the living room is something of a disaster: a sprawling, schizophrenic mess of rat king wires hanging off the back of inscrutable devices sending cryptic signals to one another under the auspices of an alphabet-soup of initialisms and branded nomenclature — HDMI, DVI, component video, Blu-Ray, progressive and interlaced resolutions, Dolby, DTS, etc. — and that’s not even mentioning the terminology that intersects with personal computing.
No one I know thinks this ecosystem is elegant, and only a few people I know really understand how to navigate it. It’s complex and bewildering, and the only way to become acclimated is to throw yourself into the thicket of technical manuals, message boards, customer service calls and afternoons spent in trial-and-error fiddling.
[...]
The problem is that every company out there that’s addressing this opportunity, from Sony to Samsung to even Apple, is actually trying to solve the wrong problem. None of them are really asking how they can fix the living room problem. Rather, they’re focusing on establishing their brand in the living room, positing completely unrealistic scenarios in which a consumer buys only, say, Samsung-branded components (e.g., its absurdly useless WiseLink protocol) without acknowledging the reality that the components of most home theaters make for a decidedly heterogeneous world.
Läs hela: Subtraction.com: Apple Blinks in the Living Room
