Consumer desire for cool computing does exist. Most technology users in the home are no longer contented with a beefy tech spec in a beige box. Now they’re looking for good looks to go with it as well, not least to complement the contours of their living rooms.
While Packard Bell has had great success in the retail sector with its stylish systems, Apple started the ball rolling in 1998 with its translucent ‘bondai blue’ iMac. In integrating a monitor with a mini-tower and getting rid of the mini-tower altogether, it pushed the boundaries of aesthetic technology.
Apple has retained the cool concept ever since: it went through each of the Tellytubby colours and then blueberry for its desktop iMacs. And now it’s ended up with translucent snow for its latest G3 and G4 notebook offerings. The company has also chosen to colour-co-ordinate its revolutionary new portable music player, the iPod, with its computer range.
A bit of bad news to begin with: As a journalist I use a Mac, just as is fairly common practice among publishing houses. My particular model of choice is a Powerbook G3 laptop and although it comes with a SCSI adapter, it doesn’t support FireWire. FireWire is, unfortunately, the only file transfer connection on the iPod. It begs the question why Apple didn’t include a USB option?
Staunch Mac fans will say that it was a question of speed and that the iPod came too soon for USB 2.0.
In the end, I was lucky. Our production team use Macs with FireWire so I was able to put the iPod to the test.
Grammy
It’s little wonder Apple won a Grammy for technical achievement this year: The iPod is the embodiment of good design. A turntable-style dials controls movement from playlist to single and volume control too. Left to right navigation buttons are present as a fundamental design feature, while a central circular button activates each function with one touch.
By now, I’ve played around with quite a few of these MP3 players including the Diamond Rio and the Archos Jukebox. However, the iPod was the first to say to me that this could really work for ordinary consumers. They would certainly be impressed if you said to them that they could hold up to 1000 songs on a device no bigger and certainly as light as a sardine tin. They might even be willing to pay the €555 it costs to buy one of these players if Apple could develop one for a Windows PC!
An unsung hero in this iPod affair is iTunes. For the benefit of those who have been using Musicmatch Jukebox or Winamp on a PC for their entire music manipulation careers, iTunes is Apple’s free MP3 software application current in version 2.03, adding the support necessary for transferring files to the portable player.
iTunes 2 now offers a 10-band graphic equaliser with 22 presets for rock, hip hop, classical and everything in between. You can move each slider individually and save the results as your own presets. A Sound Enhancer helps to add some of the warmth stripped from music singles when you compress them to a tenth of their size in the MP3 format.
Blazing transfer rate
Before you transfer music files at a rip-roaring speed of 400Mbit/s over the FireWire connection to the player, you can choose to download the music in either MP3, WAV or CD AIFF format for top quality. Of course you can only hold a hundred music files on the player in AIFF but at least, iTunes gives you easy access to all of these options.
And then if you’re not really into music at all, you can still get some value from the Swiss pen knife that is the iPod. Connect this player to a Mac and it becomes a FireWire hard disk that can hold up to 5Gbyte of computer data. There are other less savoury and highly illegal uses for the iPod and we don’t recommend that you try any of these at home. For one of them, we’ll leave the last word with the online tech news service Wired (www.wired.com) which reported on February 28th last that one iPod owner in Dallas walked into a local CompUSA store, plugged it into a display Mac and downloaded the entire 200Mbyte Microsoft Office v.X productivity suite to the player. Thankfully for Apple and Microsoft, he was intercepted before he left the shop.
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