Floating on Air 💨⛵
A MacBook in iPad clothes💻 and what the newest reveals tell us about the future of console gaming 🕹️💽
Hi everyone! Last week you had to be Apple, Disney or a company launching a product that has a 7-year lifecycle to penetrate the coronabarrage of news. Nevertheless, tech must go on…
I remember the launch of the first-generation iPad and also when I first used one, the two experiences were very different. While during the keynote the company gave the impression that this new device will be a replacement for a laptop computer —and to a certain degree it really was, you don’t see any netbooks around today— after a few minutes of using it became clear that it was a lot closer to a much bigger, much heavier, less portable iPhone. As the design became sleeker over the years combined with the launch of iPadOS last year and now the Magic Keyboard accessory, Apple is starting to fulfill the promise it made its users almost a decade ago. The new trackpad and mouse support will do well in those edge cases you always encounter when surfing the web or inside Excel files with those hard-to-grab auto-fill handles.
Every year at the Consumer Electronics Show you see journalists showcasing the features of price-competitive laptops and then, without fault, compare it to some MacBook model; if the competition has a touchscreen they then proceed in pointing out how the Apple-made product has no such feature and that you should stay away from it. I have a feeling this narrative will come to an end pretty soon. These latest developments in the iPad lineup coupled with the rumors that its CPU will also come to next-gen Macs will make it easier, almost trivial, for more developers to port the same version of their software across all Apple products.
The purchasing decision will now shift towards attributes like weight and/or performance, with the minority of power users going for the laptop form factor while the rest will prefer the touch-first iPad, leaving the MacBook Air lost at sea and with its sales about to be cannibalized to a great extent.
The transition between old and new is proving difficult for many consumers, not because of the complicated UI—ok, maybe the UI is overcomplicated in some places—, but because we’re just so used to how things work on desktop computers. This predisposition will more than likely disappear as the new generation comes up through the ranks.
Almost as important as the device itself was the herculean task of announcing a device in the current status quo. While other companies are struggling to get on top of the COVID-19 headlines in past weeks after all major conferences have been canceled for the foreseeable future, the power of the Apple brand is lending the company PR powers that border on the supernatural with the current zeitgeist. Look on the bright side, at least now we can skate freely.
Oh yeah, the new iPad also has LIDAR🚨
You don’t need a keen eye to notice the drastic changes in announcing gaming consoles even since the last generation seven years ago. The industrial design characteristics of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 were closely guarded secrets up until a few weeks before launch while the complete tech specs were only revealed on launch day. After the CGI fly-by revealing basically all the components on the motherboard at the beginning of the year, Microsoft has last week given various YouTube hardware-focused channels direct access to their broken-down console components. Sony appeared to have been caught off-guard by Microsoft’s barrage of information and felt pressed to release the PS5’s specs last week in an effort to stay in the mind of consumers.
The main takeaways from all the techspeak are these. The Xbox Series X has around 15% more raw graphical power and 175GB more storage than the PS5 while the Japanese machine wins out on VR capabilities, maximum data throughput double that of the Xbox and the option to add expandable storage options from third parties. In an effort to get in front of consumers, both companies will continue to push their own strong points whilst hiding the weak ones over the months to come, but I have a feeling even first-time buyers will come to notice the vast advantage Sony has in terms of exclusive games available at launch.
Even if we disregard the price point —which is bound to be larger for the Xbox considering the more expensive individual components—, the PS5 looks to be ahead at this point due to their top-of-class development studio roster and with the raw device performance this close, it’s up to these developers to come up with better experiences in the years to come. The hardware allows for better visual quality, real-time cinematic effects, bigger worlds, and better-looking hair but all this makes up for just a small part of what we understand to be a quality gaming experience, necessary but not sufficient.
With the noticeable speed increase as a result of the SSD now confirmed to be the only revolutionary addition to this upcoming generation of game consoles, it’s becoming obvious that these types of products are getting ever-closer to the peak of the innovation S-curve and incidentally becoming more open to disruption. The exact direction of innovation is usually hard or impossible to anticipate in any field and so are the effects on the market and consumers, but this time around the path is slightly clearer.
It’s not often you see industrial design companies throwing caution to the wind like the people at Formafantasma do when they explain how a lot of modern objects are ill-fitted to serve out needs and have a negative impact on our environment in the long term. Apart from the video on planned obsolescence linked above they also have other interesting videos on their Vimeo channel on things like the use of rare metals, eWaste, the importance of recycling and how we can better design things in the future in order to benefit everyone. If I could choose an easy to understand, high-quality visual representations of the thoughts I offered for my 20-year forecast article these videos would be top of the list.
The article on how streaming will influence game creators, gamers and future console design is now up on Medium, you can read some of my thoughts on the short and medium-term effects and what the logical reactions would be from existing big platform owners going into this uncertain future 👾📈🕹️
Disney released Frozen 2 on their streaming service earlier than expected last week and you can either see it as unethical or just a service to the people who have kids who are climbing up the wall at this point. We’ve also seen a lot of movies getting their launch delayed in past weeks so it will be interesting to see if any of these movies will maybe skip their launch and we’ll see ‘Direct-to-DVD’ turn into ‘Direct-to-Streaming’. I wouldn’t want to be a cinema owner right now or a TV network owner, since pretty much all sports are now canceled. Video killed the radio star, let’s see if streaming and a global pandemic are strong enough to finish off traditional TV networks🧊📽️🧊💀
Another way to look at the move above is survival, as Disney announced they want to raise cash through debt after losing 30% of its value over the past month. The closed parks, cruises suspended, delayed releases and the creation of new products grinding to a halt could hurt the company badly in the months needed for developing a vaccine. With a valuation of $155B and dropping, cash-poor stockholders are sure to become increasingly trigger happy as time goes by and Apple did say they have something over $200B in cash last quarter. Just three weeks ago being CEO of Disney sounded like a breeze, now I wouldn’t be surprised if the ex-CEO stayed on board beyond 2021🍏💵
Verizon’s been tracking the increase in internet use in the US and it looks like people aren’t exactly ‘working’ from home. The notoriously flimsy network infrastructure in the country is prepared for peak activity since it’s been experiencing it for years, but is it prepared for something like a 75% increase in gaming usage and 30% in news?📡🕹️
TikTok’s spend this year on Snapchat is larger than Coca-Cola’s and twice the size of Disney’s so it will be very interesting to see what happens when TikTok is large enough and doesn’t need to advertise on Snapchat anymore. I say ‘interesting’, I mean ‘devastating’ for Snapchat unless they can come up with something fast🙏💣💣
Tesla really missed a beat when they didn’t make those Superchargers into drive-in movie theaters 🚗➕📽️=💖
These s̶t̶a̶n̶d̶-̶u̶p̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶e̶d̶i̶a̶n̶s Italian mayors are, understandably, at the end of their wits🤬🤬
If you have a free monitor in your ‘work from home’ setup, this is a good way to fill it🥺…
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