AppleCare Conspiracy

Everyone is going nuts over the newly released Mac Mini. Can’t say that I blame them, heck I want one just because it looks so astoundingly cool, and I already own three Macs! With the brilliant design noted of he Mac mini noted let me take this moment to eat a fairly large size portion of crow. I was dead wrong when I wrote: Why You Won’t Be Seeing a Headless iMac. Mac mini coolness and crow out of the way I think people are largely overlooking the iMovie update. This particular revamp is a huge one and not for the most obvious reason.

The most obvious new thing about iMovie is that it now supports High Definition video. To this addition I give a hearty: so what. Sure Hi Def is the all the rage at the moment (at least according to the cable guy who came by to hook my TV up) and the picture is fantastic but I doubt it something very many iMovie users will take advantage of any time soon. The big reason people won’t be jumping on the Hi Def bandwagon is mainly an issue of price. The Sony Steve was waving around will set you back a cool $3500 and the cheapest JVC Hi Def camcorder is roughly two grand (and that camera is just barely high definition). If you are dropping that kind of money on a camcorder I’d wager that iMovie won’t be your editing program of choice. The whole Hi def thing is also of questionable utility. If the movie is destined for the web or a standard TV (NTSC) the Hi Def stuff is worthless. The addition of HD to iMovie may not be completely wasted, perhaps it will prod camcorder manufacturers to offer a more modestly priced HD camcorder and that will be nice for the video amateurs like myself.

The most exciting thing to me about iMovie HD is the 16 by 9 aspect ratio. I’ve had a Canon GL2 for a few years now and if I wanted to make use of the camera’s 16 by 9 aspect ration it was a quick trip to Final Cut Express. Which was fine, FCE is a powerful program but a program that overwhelmed everybody else who tried to use my computer for video editing. Now everyone who shoots on the GL2 will be able to get that movie feel and I’ll be able to fill the widescreen TV sitting in the living room. Now that surely seems a little too personalized for the general populace, after all how many people have a camcorder capable of filming in the 16 by 9 aspect ratio and how many people actually own a widescreen TV? The camcorder is actually the biggest hurdle, widescreen televisions are growing in popularity and if you have an Apple branded LCD display you’ve got an ideal outlet for all your widescreen projects.

The biggest question mark in this release of iMovie has got to be Movie Magic. This promises to edit the video for you, all you do is plug in the camcorder. Personally this feature would seem to ruin the inherent fun of using iMovie but I know plenty of folks who hate the editing part of making videos. Somehow I doubt that Movie Magic will churn out decent flicks with out a fair amount of user adjustment. My guess is that unless people plan the filming very carefully they’ll find that they spend about the same amount of time editing the video as they did before the introduction of Movie Magic. On the other hand if the Movie Magic feature gets more people actually generating videos then it is a great addition.

iMovie HD also addresses the biggest holes in iMovie. First the undos are now practically unlimited. (You can get the same ability with earlier versions of iMovie by copying all the clips in the clips pane and working off of the copies, surprisingly your project won’t use any extra hard drive space). Unlimited undos may not seem like a big deal but any heavy iMovie user will tell you they’ve been faced with the unpleasantness of re-importing video when the change they made eleven steps ago just didn’t work out the way they hoped it would. Even better than unlimited undos is the ability to drag and drop files (pictures, music, film clips) directly into your movie. While dragging and dropping is a Macintosh staple seemingly forever for some reason iMovie lacked this ability. Sure you could always navigate via the file menu and grab the digital goodness you wanted for your project but dragging a dropping is just more Macish. Also making the program more like the Mac you’ve come to know and love is the ability to copy and paste clips between different iMovie projects, just the way a Mac user would intuitively expect. Those are three pretty great additions to the already fantastic iMovie.

So while everyone is raving about the Mac mini, the iPod Shuffle and iWork and discussing the various positives and negatives of each offering I’ll be waiting for the latest version of iLife to hit the shelves of the local CompUSA (note to Apple: Knoxville Tennessee needs an Apple Store). Sure the other announcements may be bigger and have a much larger impact on the market but Apple has hit a very quiet home run with Movie HD.

Take one slightly malfunctioning iBook, one fifteen month old child, and firewire target disk mode… That’s a recipe for data loss disaster. Which is no big deal. While many of you actually back up your computer, I prefer the tactic of not saving anything important.

In any event after the encounter the iBook refused to boot, period. Perhaps the purchase and subsequent install of panther… No joy, it’s time to call 1-800-SOS-APPLE. Long story short, they’re sending a box.
First off let me say that I’ve never had a problem with Apple’s support. By the time I can’t fix a Mac usually needs something more than software. Well, that’s entirely wrong, it always needs more than software.

So I play the phone game:
“Have you tried to reseat the ram?” Apple Guy
“No, gosh, why didn’t I think of that. Hold on a sec” Flip channels, iBook is across the room. “Looks Good”
“How about the airport card?” replies the Apple guy
“It’s okay, last time I stuck it in with gorilla glue” say I. Then I check out some bowl games
“Have you reset the power manager?”
“Reset the power manager? Hell I fired the power manager and promoted the assistant power manager” I reply, flip more channels
“Okay, boot it up and tell me what it says” the Apple guy implores
“It doesn’t say anything when it boots up, it’s a computer. The screen reads ‘this bastard has tried everything, it’s been killing him for a week. Unless you know where a secret switch is that says work-don’t work tell him to send the computer in” I relate while watching Monster Garage.
So the computer heads to the shop. It’s not Apple’s fault that most folks are idiots and I don’t blame them for running me through the drill though it is tedious.
But this time a strange thing happened. Before you can get to an actual person you get the phone music. I gotta admit the phone music rocked, heard some Edie Brickell and other tunes that seemed perfectly attuned to my musical needs. Every time the automated voice came on saying my question would be avoided by the next available person I was pissed cause the song that was interrupted was so good.
Okay, I’m thirty five, I like muzak and eating paste. I am comfortable with my lameness except the phone music played a song by a guy named Israel. A song a I heard a snippet of on a long drive to Missouri whereupon I thought “I’d like to buy it” I did buy the song via iTunes after it was reinforced by Applecare but the process left me wondering if NPR and Apple had a secret co promotional agreement worked out.