Forget the Processor - Feel the Width
Posted on January 12, 2007
Filed Under What's New |
What normally grips computer geeks is raw computing power but at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and as Apple presented the iPhone in San Francisco, this week they became unusually focused on the visual impact of machines. The computing industry is gracefully converging with the consumer electronics industry (Apple is no longer a computer company and Microsoft’s XBox rocks) and the immediate result of that is a new preoccupation with aesthetics rather than processors.
The iPhone is the latest in Apple’s storming achievements in design. In fact most commentators now agree that with this generation of products, compared with those of the 1980s, Apple has led the way in beautiful, and that’s a large part of its success. Long before the company even woke up to the fact, Apple had long had ceased being a computing power.
The convergence of computing and consumer electronics is forcing Apple’s competitors to reassess their approach to aesthetics and their presence in multiple consumer markets. But of far more interest is what it says about the grey box years that are now slipping into our recent past. PC manufacturers have visited upon us two and a half decades of banal visuals, millions of work hours of staring at projection screens bearing tedious lists from PowerPoint presentations and generally has forced us to inhabit the underdeveloped world of limited technology but worse, the geek’s limited workplace imagination.
When you look at the iPhone, and God bless Apple for producing it, or at the iPod of the old G series of Macs let your memory drift to those awful old Apple Mac buckets they used to call computers, the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser window, the pre-Vista desktop, and of course PowerPoint, and let out one big sigh of relief. Your time in the grip of the computer hardware and software giants is at long last ending. Back to the visual pleasures of a real life.
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Hey Haydn,
Have a look at the article in my blog- where I’ve touched upon your views on cash not content being everything and also referred to another guy’s blog which reviewed the iPhone.
-GB