So me and Hayley (well, it was me) came up with the idea of guest-posting on eachother’s blog; mine being located at the “it means nothing, honest” foshiznik.com.
Once this was agreed and WordPress account set up, the problems begin: what to write about? Should it be my take on something on Ceriselle – shoes, maybe, or Bristol – or something common to my site instead?
How about a link to both. Me and Hayley are both Apple geeks. She has, as I am sure you know, an iPhone, and iMac, a Hackintosh or two. I’ve got a MacBook, two old G3 iMacs, a just-about-retro 2nd gen iPod Nano, and a hankering for the rather pointless big-iPhone-without-a-phone iPad.
So. iPods. And progress. Recently, Google introduced us to Google Wave, and Google Buzz (“Twitter but Shitter”). Neither of these have taken off brilliantly fast, especially in the case of Wave, and I point the finger of blame firmly at progressing too fast.
Think about it. Things need to come in stages so we get used to them. Look at Facebook. Every time it has changed to “the new Facebook” it has introduced a few changes that they could have done all at the same time, but didn’t. You may think this is because they hadn’t developed it that far, or hadn’t had this or that idea yet. But if they have, they still would have had to do it step by step, because too much progress in one go scares the fuck out of us.
Back to the iPod. Remember when iTunes store didn’t exist? And when it did they added each function one at a time and told us “soon you can do this, but not yet.” It’s because Apple know that if they had bombarded us with the full functionality straight away, we would have mostly been baffled by it and it would have failed.
If, when you got your first AOL account back in 1997, you could have had 20meg broadband you would have thought “I don’t need this”. If YouTube and Facebook and iChat and Twitter had all been launched on the same day, with all their current full functionalities, we would have balked at it – remember that at this time, AIM was “well futuristic”.
So they like you to think that each innovation is a natural progression. This is where we round off nicely with iPods again. I’ve noticed recently that my 4 year old Nano has developed an alarming propensity to know exactly what tune to play, when. On the way to my brothers it played Dragonforce; when I arrived at his Dragonforce was on in the house. I have a bit of lady-related grief and it plays all the songs we both love. I lit a fag just before exiting the Grafton Centre the other day and was treated to Eminem telling me he’s a criminal. I met my uncle so he could give me a birthday present and as he drove away, his iPod shuffled to the number one from the day I was born.
Where am I, and indeed Apple, going with this? It’s pacing and mirroring, basically. iPods are learning to react to us. And eventually they will start controlling us, little bit by little bit.
Then, Steve Jobs will be able to put an Apple logo on an actual brick and sell it to us for £349.99. And we’ll love it. It’s going to happen. Mark my words.
