bbones:

pls ;_;

I so very rarely reblog, but this tickles me in a good place. Reblogged from a reblogger who then reblogged, etc.

Horizon Variations, by Max Richter. This song crawls into my heart and pushes out on all sides at once.

American Analog Set, covered by Seafloor. Hauntingly beautiful.

Well, thanks, YCombinator, for taking the spotlight for the most obvious iPad speculation to date.

This, though, is a little more insightful:

“Many will never make a conscious decision to switch. They’ll get an iPad as well, then find they use their Windows machine less and less. When it dies they won’t replace it.”

I was in Portland over the weekend, twiddling away on my iPhone in our hotel room when I had my first conscious longing for an iPad, and it was then that it occurred to me that the device isn’t just for “average” users. It’s for everyone.

It’s the computer you slip into your bag at the last minute before you leave the house to go anywhere farther than the grocery store. It’s not like your laptop—you don’t have to consider whether you want to deal with the hassle and risk of a $2000 liability, and whether you really need the power versus the weight and bulk. It’s cheap enough to be replaceable, light enough to be unnoticeable, and thin enough to fit anywhere you’d otherwise drop a notebook or a couple of magazines.

Does carrying an iPhone and an iPad make you an over-endowed tech dork? In year one, probably. But three years ago, simply carrying an iPhone had the same net result. In two years, you won’t question the “necessity” of having two devices, one that fits in your pocket and one that fits in your day bag. And your trusty old desktop will sit at home, neglected for offering marginally more functionality at a fraction of the convenience of your portable devices.

“But what about the power users?” goes the old refrain. Have power users ever had a shortage of expensive, powerful options? The entire computer marketplace has been for power users, despite what a hundred competing marketing departments would have you believe. The choices range from affordable power to powerful power, but my mom can straighten all of the doubters out in a New York Minute about which market the current paradigm serves best. Apple just broke the seal on the era of technology that is truly for everyone, and gloriously, it doesn’t look like a TV in your refrigerator.

I love it when my careers coincide.

Interesting take from The Man Himself (No, not that man. Er, I mean that one.). I think Gruber’s idea that the Tablet ultimately becomes most people’s idea of the PC over the next few years is insightful. The MacBook ratchets up a notch in performance to become the mobile version of a Mac Pro, for power users. The Tablet becomes a computer for the rest of the world. I could see that happening in the next few years.

The point I failed to hammer down as securely as Gruber is that the Tablet won’t be an e-book reader or an iPod, but a general computing device. My own conviction is that it will be a media portal for the iTunes store (along with iPod Touch-like computing power) first, and a replacement for the PC second, in terms of how it is marketed. Stealing market share from Netflix is more lucrative than stealing market share from themselves. But when the time comes, I have no doubt that Apple will put a bullet in whatever the Tablet replaces without hesitation or remorse. Like any smart company should.

Here’s the missing feature that makes the iSlate the hot seller of 2010: iTunes subscription service. In validating the hardware, I lost track of the other half of the argument. The ultimate portable entertainment device is lost without service.

In the tablet/reader market, Amazon’s Kindle leads the pack for technology and service, now with B&N nipping at their heels with the Nook. The Kindle ships with always-on wireless service that provides a portal to Amazon’s e-book storefront, making the Kindle a library on demand instead of just a storage device. Killing the Kindle is relatively easy: add a comparable reading experience with rich data and multimedia features, top it off with Apple’s spit and polish, and bring the price below the value multiplier of the additional features and suddenly the Kindle and the Nook look overpriced niche-market dinosaurs. Amazon doesn’t have iTunes’ cachet with digital media, so their leg up just got broken. Besides, digital movies are faster sell and more established paradigm than e-books, so Apple can play the movie/music card first and spend the next two years catching up on literature.

In the movie rental industry, there’s but one player to discuss: Netflix. As their on-demand service quietly (or not so quietly. Thanks to relentless pop-under ads, Netflix is my least favorite favorite movie service) grows, Apple has been chipping out their own hold with downloadable movie rentals in the iTunes store. Up until now, Netflix has Apple beat: at $4 a pop, “renting” movies from iTunes with their inconvenient time limitations fails dismally compared to Netflix’s subscription and on-demand services. But, if Apple were to introduce a device with HD capability, always-on wireless access, a great screen with HDMI/projector connectivity, and a flat-fee portal to iTunes, they’ve addressed all the advantages of Netflix, plus one: you get the hardware to boot. Your DVD player just became obsolete, and your Tivo is starting to look a little bulky.

There’s no reason Apple can’t do this. In fact, Amazon blazed the trail by demonstrating that a “free” dedicated 3G portal to content is profitable, and that people will pay nearly $300 for a device that does little more than poorly imitate a book. (No offense to the Kindle, but paper is still better looking than e-paper.) As another of my brilliant friends pointed out, boarding a plane with an iPhone, a tablet and a laptop is a little cumbersome, but compared to carrying an iPhone, a laptop, three magazines and a book, it’s delightful. (He then goes on to add that the tablet should also run a limited range of desktop apps, like the iWork and iLife suites. Preferably apps that Apple controls, so they can manage the processor load until they can get the device fast enough to support the likes of Photoshop and your favorite games. I concur.)

While iTunes doesn’t yet offer books, newspapers or magazines, they do offer movies, music and applications, and with iTunes Apple managed to change the landscape of digital media. Why wouldn’t every print publisher rush to resurrect their fading profit stream through a well-proven media distribution service?

Now, can someone explain to me why Apple really put an SD card slot in their latest MacBooks?