Apple's senior vice president for worldwide product marketing was replacing the recuperating Steve Jobs. He mentioned that the founder and chief executive would be back in September, and that "September cannot come soon enough." If he checked a calendar he'd find that, in fact, September came the next day. The company seems to have lost track of time, and it showed with the G5 iMac.
Schiller, wearing an ill-fitting 1950s-style blue shirt buttoned high, began by raving about how great Paris was and then how "amazing" the iPod (a digital music player) was and also how great was the iPod mini.
It went from there to showing iPod ads. Ugh. These are the ads with black silhouettes spastically gyrating against colored backgrounds. "I don't know about you, but I wish I could dance like that," Schiller said. (OK, Phil, now the girls know never to go dancing with you.)
This iPod lovefest went on and on. What's more, Schiller added, the iPod is an "ecosystem!" It's hard to stomach all this nonsense.
Finally, after some other things are rolled out, including a search feature for the Mac, some graphics initiatives and other trivia, we find the new G5 iMac. Following the thread that Apple seems to have lost track of time, the machine comes in one old-fashioned color: 1988 platinum white. The design is hardly inspirational. In fact, if you put two headlamps on it and a metal sun visor over its "windshield," it would be reminiscent of a 1954 DeSoto.
The architecture is risky. First of all, they jammed the entire computer into the screen, making the idea of changing "monitors" or screens impractical.
Observers on the Net are seeing this design as a precursor to an Apple (AAPL: news, chart, profile) notepad computer. To date, the notepad revolution, as predicted by Bill Gates, has been as successful as Blue Pepsi.
The Apple design team was obviously held to this design by edict, since the result is hardly jazzy or interesting. What's worse, the engineering required that all of the USB, audio, Ethernet and modem connectors (10 of them, not including the power line) are awkwardly and inconveniently placed on the back of the bulky monitor-computer. With all these wires running off the back of this top-heavy machine, there's a good possibility that one will get tripped over. I suspect the iMac will go flying. This lash-up just does not look stable.
Even if I'm wrong, I'd still like to know what happened to all those fancy colors Apple was promoting. This unit is so white that when you visit the Apple Web site, you can barely see the computer as it disappears into the background of the site itself.
The fancy colors are now relegated to the iPod, which now seems to be Apple's primary focus. Schiller spent a lot of time bragging about Apple's 59 percent market share in the MP3 player market. Is this something to be proud of? Where does this market head? Almost anything with a small amount of memory can be turned into an MP3 player nowadays; you just need a headphone jack.
Of course, the iPod is more than any old MP3 player. It's quite expensive, costing as much as $400. But as Schiller mentioned, it can hold 10,000 songs that "you can have with you all the time." What maniac needs to have 10,000 songs with them all the time?
The fact is that Apple is starting to believe its own publicity and has gone iPod jack-wacky. Moving from computers to consumer electronics is dangerous for Apple. It's especially dangerous if the company thinks that MP3 players and its variants are the future.
Perhaps if the company took the plunge and followed the path of Sony with branded cameras, headphones, amplifiers and home theaters in a box it would be more interesting. But milking this one pricey and faddish device is going to ruin the company if it is going to be the center of attention, which it now seems to be.
