MacStansbury

As I sat at my desk today, eating my healthy, nutritious breakfast of Corn Pops, I realized I’m not like everybody else. Not everybody likes their children’s cereal in a cup, with far too much milk. But that’s one of the things that make me special, different, and so darn lovable.

While I’ve thought about the Apple TV and its appearance at Macworld, the wizbang new features and HD content seem like they sidestep…something. This device seems like it’s fulfilling some need, but I can’t really see what it is. My own cognitive biases seem to making a bigger deal out of this than it should be: I should just ooh and ah as Steve Job’s Reality Distortion Field (RDF) take effect.

But it doesn’t take effect. I’m not affected. There’s got to be a reason, of course, and it took me a few days to reason it out. The bottom line is this: there’s a reason nobody’s succeeded at building that set–top box — the idea just doesn’t work.

The last time I saw a presentation like this year’s keynote was in 2001. That was when the one more thing was iDVD. After the thrilling introduction, amazing walkthrough highlighting the application’s many features, and the trademark polished performance, attendees left the keynote wanting to empty their credit cards…for some reason…

It took me a week after I’d watched the presentation to realize, I just don’t need to author a bunch of DVDs like this. Until 2007, I hadn’t even used iDVD for any reason. Sure, it was nice to have, but it just isn’t something I would use.

Not that I’m unique in this respect, of course. And not that I’m in the majority. You see, there’s that cognitive bias again, making me think I should have a need for iDVD, but never really needing it.

There was a thing that itched in my craw during this year’s Stevenote, but I couldn’t explain it. While looking at the lovely images rotating on the screen, it dawned on me that I was just looking at a souped–up version of iTunes. It was like a computer running iTunes, but without any of the functionality of useful applications. It’s an idiot box, made solely for us to consume.

That’s the business model of the thing, actually. Subscription–based purchasing and whatnot. Apple TV is the same vehicle iTunes is: a content box that begs you to buy. The strongest selling point of the iPod is its connection with iTunes, and the music store. That’s also its biggest weakness.

If I held to the axiom, “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,” I’d have little to say about iTunes. I fear this irrational hatred of the application taints my opinion of the Apple TV, except I keep seeing how the Apple TV is built to be as similar an experience to iTunes as possible. While I won’t go as far as saying this is a point of failure, I definitely don’t think this is a positive.

Back when Apple brought the lead developer of SoundjamMP in to create Apple’s new music app, I thought, along with everybody else, that iTunes was the greatest invention of all times. Or something like that, since it was free, and we could now rip our CDs and listen to hours of music without having to change a disk every hour. As iTunes became more of all things to all people, the features increased in directly inverse proportion to the use of said features.

The iTunes era marked a bizarre change in Apple, and in me. As the iPod rolled out in 2001, it captured the attention of the world, and became the leader in its market segment. The iPod became such a huge part of the Apple business model, that it got its own tab on the Apple home page. Later, Apple would realign itself into two divisions; the Macintosh division and the iPod division.

Since the iPod hit the market, and the subsequent addition of the iTunes Music Store (now just ‘iTunes Store’ — a name that makes little sense these days), and now the re–release of the Apple TV, it is clear that Apple has fully embraced the Sony lifestyle. That is, they’re creating hardware to make money, and they’ll bend over backwards to get into your house with as many ways to sell you stuff as possible.

I should point out, I expect Apple to sell a metric ton of these things. Just, not to people like me. Then again, since 2004, I’ve spent a grand total of around $8 US dollars in the iTunes Store, so I’m not really their target market. But for people who buy television shows (I’ve never understood that) and movies, this is a reliable, convenient way to do it.

I just think it’s dumb. Not just the buying of television shows, but the buying of movies — people rarely want to see a television show or movie more than once. Apple has it right when they say that what people really want is to rent movies. They end up buying them because — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — they have this cognitive bias that tells them that they are going to watch that movie over and over. When they never watch a movie twice, they think nothing of it.

Out of my movie collection, I’ve watched only two movies more than once: Gladiator and 28 Days. The others sit there, collecting dust, as I’m watching either new television shows (with varying degrees of quality), or creating stuff on the internet (again, with the varying degrees of quality). In fact, I’ve got two movies and one season of a TV show that I’ve never watched, and I’m not sure when I’ll carve out the time to watch it. That’s why I’m not a good Apple TV customer.

All my silly talk of cognitive biasses aside, I don’t think I’m alone. Regardless of how this thing sells, I don’t think Apple’s got a strong product here. I would say, though, that they’ve got the best product yet. But it’s still not good enough for people like me.