After the Ball

OK, it’s Monday night after MacWorld. Other people who were there are writing about their thoughts on what they saw and heard. Me, I have to start off with my Upper Respiratory Tract Infection. See, you go hang out with thousands of people at close quarters Tuesday and Wednesday in January, you have a significant risk of showing up on Thursday with The Virus That’s Going Around. I did, for one.

It started eating on the back of my throat on the train to San Francisco, Thursday. It was getting worse, so I bailed out and went home again around 3:00. And that was the end of my MacWorld. Bleagh. Friday, Saturday and Sunday are just a blur of drugs and snot to me now. I thought I was gonna fall through my own backside and disappear.

But now it’s Monday night, and I’ve begun to feel approximately human again, so I can share a few thoughts.

………..

I’m on record in various venues as not believing the rumors of the Cheap Headless Mac and the Cheap Flash iPod. As my old man said, that’s why they put erasers on pencils.

I think Apple adjusted all the dials on the Mac Mini very, very carefully. It has enough good things — tiny size, cool running temperature, decent performance, nice price — to make it a real contender.

And it has just enough disadvantages — stingy memory, no user serviceability, modest performance — to keep it from cannibalizing the iMac sales. The rest is marketing, and if Apple does that well enough, I think they have a winner.

Why didn’t I believe the rumors? Well, I thought it was not in Apple’s DNA. I was wrong. Let’s move on.

I didn’t believe the flash iPod rumors because I was sure they couldn’t include a display at the price point they were aiming at, and the only theory I saw was a text-to-speech interface. I knew that would never fly.

So did Apple. Instead, they chopped through the Gordian Knot of “how do you select a song” by saying “You don’t have to!” It’s a stunning insight. If you only have a couple hundred songs, well hell, just play them all. In sequence, or shuffled.

Yeah, to make sense, the songs all have to be appropriate for what you’re doing when you start listening. So that means you have to set up the Shuffle for the next time you’re going to use it, using iTunes. I’m gonna work out, load the Shuffle. I’m gonna drive on a trip, load the Shuffle with something else. My wife would never do it, she hates to “spend time running iTunes.” My daughter won’t do it either, she wants to pick songs one at a time.

Me, I’ll have fun doing it. And I think there are a million other potential Shuffle users just like me.

But you know what really convinced me?

I was sure the price would have to be $149, and I didn’t think low level user would pay that much. When I watched the Stevenote and saw $99 on the big screen, I gasped. That’s the Magic Number. That’s Under A Hundred Bucks! For Eight Hours of Music Without Recharging the Battery!!!

Slam dunk.