125 = microsoft and day 2
126 = palm pre and day 3 (pre)
127 = last day wrap up, hungover
macworld must have been boring because I can't even muster the energy it would take to look up the correct spelling of phil shiller. honestly, the most interesting thing about apple is steve jobs. sure, there was an entire company behind the man, but so what? it's steve jobs who was credited with awesome comments such as,
"Bill Gates'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger." - The New York Times January1997
"We don't get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we've all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it." -Fortune March 2008
AND he had something to do with the creation of Breakout, one of the best atari games ever. anyway, there is banter that makes the rehashing of macworld much more interesting than it would have otherwise been. can you imagine sitting through the boredom of listening to people retell tales of looking at 17" macbook pros? I don't care how unremovable a battery is. to me, that's just not news. josh had one great quote where he was talking about the lack of buttons on the macbook pro's trackpad, "I don't find the lack of buttons to be more useful. Do you know what I find to be a really useful tool for getting work done on a computer - and it has lot's of buttons? The keyboard, that's what."
I think that it was during 124 that nilay mentioned the gizmondo ceo who "chose" to crash his ferrari. I looked that up, and it was ugly. but the funny thing is that the car crash probably wasn't the worst disaster in this guy's life.
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| enzo into a tree? where's the tree? |
the gizmondo itself is the punchline. it was apparently a bonafide clunker. here's an excerpt from the wikipedia article about the gadget:
"With fewer than 25,000 units sold, the Gizmondo was named by GamePro as the worst selling handheld console in history. By February 2006, the company discontinued the device and was forced into bankruptcy. In 2008, founder and CEO Carl Freer announced that he had reached an agreement with the liquidators, and planned to re-launch Gizmondo as Gizmondo 2."
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| the gizmondo, via gizmodo |
at the end of the podcast, josh gets all loopy and predicts that the microsoft ceo, steve ballmer, will execute a karate kick onstage, pump his fist in the air, and introduce a zune phone by having someone call him on it while he's on stage so that he can pull it out of his pocket while saying, "woa, I can't even answer the phone because I'm jamming to so much music."
oh one more thing - it was during this macworld that apple announced it would use a tiered pricing scheme for its itunes store. 69cents for "bargain basement" songs, 99cents for a "regular" song, and $1.29 for a "premium" song. I'm sorry, I know that I'm particularly scrimpy when it comes to media purchases (I've never paid for anything in itunes, nor have I ever purchased an application for my iphone), but I would NOT pay $1.29 for a song! I looked, though, and most of what I'd want from the itunes store is 99cents. I had to search around for $1.29 songs, and luckily, I'm not into the bieber. paul miller thinks that yacht rock is a prime example of bargain basement. maybe some of it, but I don't know, I'd say bargain basement is more like ratt or deo.
I think paul got one thing right though; he predicted that subscription services would become the big thing for music. spotify is seriously ruling my world (the free one, of course - thank you again, dj reef!). I mean, it has changed my life. I can't imagine buying another record or cd again. well, I take that back. of course I can, because a lot of what I'd like to listen to isn't on spotify (drag city), but then, so much is there that I really don't care about what I can't hear on it. right now I'm digging some john phillips.
125 is the microsoft day of ces. there is no zune phone. there is no fist pumping (in the air). there is no karate kick. but despite all those unrealized predictions, the retelling of the keynote is pretty hilarious. microsoft had some "ladies" demonstrate a few things, and one was named, janet galore. they also had a child demo a software called, kodu. josh and paul thought that maybe the kid's name was willow, "or one of those names." it was actually sparrow. microsoft billed sparrow as an "actual 12 year old girl."
sparrow demonstrated a really cool software called, kodu. kodu is a programming environment that allows a user to code by going through menus of icons, rather than typing in a language. paul said that had he known about this in his youth, he'd likely not be able to put a sentence together, but he would probably have made some pretty kickass games. for the record, paul accused willow/sparrow of doing some autistic-like mumbling chatter while flying through the kodu menus. someone said that steve ballmer made phil shiller (sp?) "look like a baby." most likely it was josh.
the guys make fun of thin tvs, which apparently, are all over the place. nilay sneaks around on the floor of the show, while paul and josh are on the press junket. there's a lot of security around an lg phone watch, which gets much airtime on the podcast due to the fact that they're making fun of it, except for paul, who thinks that it's pretty cool. when pressed for a reason by josh, he says, "because it's a phone that you wear on your wrist. that's cool."
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| feel like talking to your wrist? not quite spy-worthy. via cnet.com |
episode 126? funny you should ask. it's about day three at ces. while they do mention the sony vaio p (nilay really really really wants one), they (ok, mostly josh, a little nilay) absolutely gush over the palm pre. I can feel josh smiling giddily through the speakers as he's talking to me from over two years ago. scroll forward, however, and what do we find? this is what we find, and it's sad. I wonder if josh ever got a turbografix 16 emulator for his pre.
it's interesting to find out that the pre is named for precognition. nilay mentions that the phone is said by palm to "know what the user wants before the user itself knows." josh responds, "like precognition," but no one is having it. nilay wants it to be like preview, and paul doesn't have an opinion. I'm surprised that there's no mention of phillip k. dick. in dick's books, precogs are humans that can tell the future.
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| if you haven't read this book, do so immediately. |
it's apparently during this ces that wireless charging (inductive?) is introduced as a truly viable alternative to plugging devices in to charge. nilay mentions that there is a wireless charging alliance. this is the second alliance I've learned of while listening to the podcast. the first was the open handset alliance. at work, we have signs up that discuss hand-washing. the signs have been designed by the soap and detergent association, which is a part of the clean hands coalition. I guess there's a group for everybody.
in 127, everyone sounds hungover. nilay sounds like he's been yelling and smoking all night long. ryan block is in on the action, and for some reason, I'm not remembering all that much about the podcast itself. I was wiped out after listening to so much CES talk. I can't even imagine what it's like to cover the event. I think that there was talk of Dell and its Adamo, but mainly what I remember from that was that they rented out a bunch of rooms for their announcement and that it sounded like a weird scene. oh wait, you know what? there was a bit of talk about some chips. maybe I can't remember the podcast that well because the pre talk blurs the episodes, and who cares about chips? I mean, sure we all do, but really, most of us don't.
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| aww, but he's so cute! |
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