iPhone and Apple TV for Enterprise Mac readers

This story has already been posted in InfoWorld's Tech Watch (News) section. A colleague from Apple told me that in this blog, the last thing I had to say about iPhone was the potential downsides of the device.

I didn't mean to let that stand. Here's the full text of the Macworld Expo roundup story I submitted to News, which was cut way back for publication. My apologies to Apple and others who missed it.

Apple's got the urge to converge

Tom Yager

Steve Jobs delivered this year’s Macworld Expo keynote to an over-capacity crowd. He boasted that the Mac’s PowerPC-to-Intel transition had been completed in seven months, grinned about having sold half of new Macs to newcomers to the platform, and then he said "let’s move on."

Brother, has Apple moved on. Apple has dropped "computer" from its corporate name and is taking the sharp turn toward services, mobile and consumer electronics that Jobs emotionally identified as his two and a half-year dream. It's evident from the packed exhibit floor that the Mac is still very much in ascension. But for Jobs, who thrives on the new as much as Apple observers do, Mac is, for now, a fait accompli. Now it's convergence time.

The first of Apple's two market-shaking new products is Apple TV, the first credible entry into set-top TV over broadband. Apple TV is a receiver, digital content store and wireless LAN broadcaster for Apple's iTunes. The tiny box is neither a Mac nor a digital video recorder. The USB port is reserved for "service and diagnostics," not human interface devices, and all of Apple TV’s audio and video ports are outputs. Apple TV syncs content only from Macs and PCs within Ethernet or wireless (802.11 a/b/g/n) shouting distance that are running iTunes desktop software, and it can also reach out directly to Apple’s iTunes service with a touch of its gumstick remote. Apple TV will stream content, live or recorded, to as many as five additional PCs and Macs, each of which can watch or listen to anything on Apple TV's 40 GB hard drive. In other words, Apple TV turns every PC and Mac in your home or office into a tunable wireless digital television, but every channel has iTunes on it. It is possible, if a bit fiddly, to encode personal digital media, and even DVDs, and import them into the proprietary iTunes Library. Even with its peculiarities, at $299, Apple TV will become a popular home theatre component, a playground for hackers and the enabler for a future Apple venture into live and pay per view television.

Apple’s new iPhone is the penultimate converged mobile device, bringing together a mobile phone, a widescreen iPod and an Internet communicator in a a sub-12mm thin handheld that places iPhone users at three times the normal risk of plowing into oncoming traffic. iPhone has no physical keyboard; one pops up on-screen when you need it. Likewise, there is no scrollwheel, escape button, call start/end button or any tactile buttons at all except one that returns you to the application launch menu.