The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Last week was a busy week in the computing world. The two largest trade shows of the year, CES and Macworld are both just over. Last year on January 20th I wrote a column about these same two annual events. Looking back to read what I had written last year, I see that in the past year, no company has really made a huge breakthrough or advancement in computing. CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, takes place annually in Las Vegas. This massive trade show attracts between 120,000 Ð 140,000 people over its three days to see what's new and coming up. Amid all of the hype and glitz, little new actually emerged. As with last year, the three main themes were making things bigger, making things smaller, and making things talk to each other. High definition TVs up to 102 inches were on display, as well as hard drives down to the size of a pack of gum. Home networking continues to be a large theme driving this show, but few companies have actually found ways to make our fridge talk to our stereo. A few more years of product research is needed before this technology really hits the mainstream. The neat product award had to go to several companies who have designed couches which hook into your gaming system allowing the bass from the speakers to flow through you while you get the bad guys. The embarrassing moment of the conference came when Bill Gates crashed his computer as well as an X-Box onstage during his keynote presentation. The Blue Screen of Death before hundreds of people at his biggest speech of the year; now he knows how the rest of us feel. Macworld this year was a much bigger event in terms of new products. Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, is riding a growing wave of success from the iPod music player and the iTunes online music store. The last quarter of 2004 and the Christmas season were Apple's most successful ever and they are trying to capitalize on that. Jobs announced that the iPod digital music player now accounts for over 65 per cent of the total of all music players sold. At Macworld they extended this product line by offering the iPod Shuffle, a Flash memory based player now being sold for less then $150. The iPod line now extends from this low end player all the way up to the iPod Photo for around $800. The larger announcement at Macworld was the small Mac Mini. A lot of people who like their iPods have had their first positive contact with an Apple product. A lot of these people are also sick of maintaining their Windows-based PCs and are tired of being worried about spyware and viruses. And for years a lot of people have said they would consider moving over to Apple if the machines didn't cost so much. Well, now they don't. The Mac Mini is a sub $600 machine that is six inches square and less then three inches high. It doesn't come with a monitor, a mouse or a keyboard. This machine is the beginning of a drastic change for Apple's business plan. For years they haven't been concerned about building machines that everyone wants. They were a high-end retailer designing machines for those involved heavily with digital music, photos, movies, or graphics. Now that this definition matches more people as we download music, make our own movies, and fill our hard drives from our digital cameras, Steve Jobs has decided the time is right to place a cheaper machine on the market. So while nothing is completely new this year, the year will be an interesting one. ([email protected])
