Very Creative:
Shopping at Mac
My thinkpad took a dive the other day… literally. It was dropped off the table and broke not only the monitor connectors off, but now something is rattling around inside. It was time to take that thing to the grave anyway… Of course this just gives me the excuse to look at new laptops for my own Christmas gift. I’m partial to the Thinkpad for the resolution, feel, look, stability, and I love the trackball…
In my research and conversations with Scott I’m starting to drool over the new Intel dual core MacBook Pros. 2.33GHz, 200GB HD, DVD-R SuperDrive and a sweet look and feel. My previous hesitation to picking up a Mac was that I’ve invested in quite a bit of Windows software and I don’t want to pick it all up again on the Mac. A solution has come with the dual core and it’s called Boot Camp and Parallels.
So I’m walking home late Sunday night from watching some football (I think it’s 11 pm) and I stop into my local Mac store. They have a chick dj spinning a mix of jungle, house, hip hop and whatever else is on her iPod. The SoHo Mac store is open 24 hrs through the Christmas holiday and it’s crowded more with red shirt mac employees than shoppers or free internet whores.
I step up to the biggest baddest MacBook Pro there and start playing around. Launching all the programs, Logic, Powerpoint, internet and Quicktime etc… I even start up the iSight and Photo Booth; playing around with the photo shots in the store I took this and emailed it to myself for upload…
Ahh well, I still have some sober research to do and will find out soon when I can invest in an upgrade…
TV is dead
Well, maybe not that extreme… but the TV as we know it is certainly dying out. Just look at the options for viewers now: OnDemand to request your content from your TV provider when you want to watch it, DVR/Tivo to watch content when ever you want, pause live tv and skip the commercials, Netflix which offers movies to your home (either by mail and now over the internet on demand) with out having to leave the house and now Sling Box so viewers can watch content at anytime of the day, in any location.
The media is changing and as more content is provided online, provided users can view this with appropriate bandwidth speeds, viewership through traditional cable providers will continue to change and dwindle. This story points this out via a survey of online video watchers and their corresponding TV habits, and shows that boob tube watching is on the decline among those that are watching videos on line.
From personal experience, it’s the networks that will kill themselves and not any underlining technology or company that will “better” the viewing experience on line. HDTV has come along at the right time to resurrect some confidence in viewing television, however, if the networks continue to produce lame and boring content, they will implode on themselves as views find new sources for entertainment.
When internet streaming video can be viewed in HD on large screen monitors, THEN we’ll see TV networks get closer to that flatline____________________________