January 6, 2006

| Now This Is a Promising Piece of Equipment >>

Nick Carr on Bill Gates’ CES presentation (which I am embarrassed to say I watched online):

So what does Gates talk about? The “digital lifestyle” with “software at its center.” Maybe robots want digital lifestyles, but human beings don’t. Human beings want lives.

It’s true. Somehow Apple’s competitors still don’t get that the iPod’s brilliance is its interfacelessness. It is about as close to a hammer as you can get with a music player. It doesn’t really have “features” (or at least it doesn’t feel like it); it just does its thing. And lets you do yours.

I suspect Apple’s new PVR is going to be the same way, and make Microsoft’s system look awfully gangly by comparison.