Form and Function

Help, I think I have become addicted .... to Apple.

This weekend, while out with my wife (sans the kids), I made my SECOND trip in 2 days to the local Apple Retail Store. I left the store about $500 lighter after picking up a bright pink Nano for my wife and an Apple TV (at $229 how can you resist??) At this point I can just feel myself getting inexorably sucked into the vortex of quality, attention to detail, and desire that Apple has come to embody in most of its products. It started a couple of years ago with my MacBook purchase that was simply used to make it easier for me to test our website within safari. This was followed up a few months ago with an iPhone purchase, under the auspices of keeping up to speed on current UI and usability trends in the industry. Now my addiction to apple … I mean research … has me buying iPods like candy and buying devices I didn’t know I had a need for. Next up is replacing my aging P4 with a brand new Mac Pro 8-core with some serious memory (12GB should do.) After buying the iPhone I was truly hooked… there is something about the products Apple produces that creates this incredible emotional desire for “more of that” (at least for tech people like me.) I commented to my wife that the desire I have for Apple products is quite similar to what I witnessed in her when we walked into the Louis Vuitton store and my wife was ogling a pair of $1,200 shoes. It is really an admirable and amazing feat that Apple has pulled off, by focusing on quality and attention to detail at every level from product design, implementation, to even the jewel like packaging materials, they have created a desire for their products that I have not experienced with any other technology outside of the lust people feel for cars like BMW, etc. Apple doesn’t get it right all the time though. On OS X I still can’t understand their fascination with spawning windows like rabbits in heat, and on a much more trivial note the shopping bag that the Apple Genius put my purchase into required an instruction book to figure out how to carry. It was this weird contraption with two separate ropes going through a total of four riveted holes in the bag… I wasn’t sure if it wanted to be a knapsack, hammock, or some weird S&M device… Walking through the mall I constantly found myself trying to figure out how to hold the damn thing properly… I think they got a little too clever for themselves on that one.


Okay, back to my addiction…. Yesterday I plugged in the Apple TV to our widescreen HDTV in our bedroom, within 10 minutes I had our modest iTunes collection of about 3k songs and our photo library of about 2.5k pictures streaming from it. So last night my wife and I sat down to “rent” a movie, I was a little disheartened to see that once we started watching it we only had 24 hours to finish it… I wrongly assumed it was “ours” for 30 days. That issue aside, we never even got to the movie… We became so fascinated with watching the slideshow of our photos and listening to music. It was an amazing experience for me… we had about 7 years of photos from before our wedding, various trips to Tahiti, Hawaii, coast of California, the birth of our two sons, etc… It was just amazing to watch and recall. It gave me a whole new appreciation for taking photos, as I was completely engrossed and entertained. It gave my wife and I an opportunity to reminiscence and connect at a level that so far eclipsed just watching a movie together. After a couple of hours I ended up knocking off and going to sleep. This morning I found out my wife stayed up past midnight watching our slide show.. Now I am not sure how entertaining this experience would be after seeing these photos for the umpteenth time, but I can tell you it was a real eye opener for me in terms of its intrinsic entertainment value. When we finally get around to watching the movie we rented and delving into some of the other features of the Apple TV I will report back.


- Tom