The iOS Fetish

September 2nd, 2010, by The Angry Drunk

Like I wrote yes­ter­day, I’m not par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in doing any sort of roundup of the announce­ments from Apple’s yearly Music Event held yes­ter­day, September 1st. However, there are a few things that popped out at me that I’d like to explore. Initially I was going to do some claim chow­dah analy­sis and break down exactly how wrong Engadget was about the sup­posed iTV, but there really isn’t any­thing new to be said there. Anyway, Joel Topolsky is already spin­ning the announce­ments to say that Apple is so totally going to make those changes, but things changed at the last minute. Whatever douche, keep spinning.

What is inter­est­ing to me, and touches on the idiocy around the AppleTV, is the way that iOS was almost fetishized by the tech press dur­ing the announcement.

What I’m talk­ing about is the fact that, at least amongst the pun­dits and ana­lysts that I fol­low on Twitter, every prod­uct announce­ment, with the obvi­ous excep­tion of the iPod Touch, was met with a sin­gle ques­tion, “does it run iOS?” To which I reply, “who cares?”

It seems to me that the tech pun­dit­sphere has imbued the iOS with some sort of mythic splen­dor, mainly revolv­ing around equally-mythical “apps.” When Steve Jobs debuted the new iPod Nano, with its mul­ti­touch screen, the cries began. “Does it run iOS? Does it have apps?” Things became even more fevered when Steve demon­strated the iPod Nano in the newly coined “jig­gle mode.” “Oh my Lord,” the techies breath­lessly exclaimed, “it is iOS! Huzzah, cal­loo and callay!” The intro­duc­tion of the new AppleTV (not iTV you lack­wits) was met with a sim­i­lar refrain. “Is it run­ning iOS? It doesn’t look like it’s run­ning iOS? OMG are there APPS!!!”

The hilar­ity in all this was the fact that most pun­dits were bas­ing their deter­mi­na­tions of iOSos­ity on noth­ing more than the user inter­face being demoed. The iPod Nano looks like it’s run­ning iOS, and it very well may be, but it also may be run­ning a vari­ant of the same pro­pri­etary oper­at­ing sys­tem that all non-Touch iPods have run. The AppleTV may well be run­ning iOS, in fact I pro­pose that it should be run­ning iOS given the proven ben­e­fits for low power devices that that OS brings to the table, but the inter­face was essen­tially the same as that of the pre­vi­ous iteration’s Tiger based OS. The bot­tom line is that the inter­face for these prod­ucts has pre­cious lit­tle to do with the under­ly­ing OS. A fact that con­stantly escapes the technorati.

Which brings us to the “app” ques­tion. It’s obvi­ous that a good deal of the fetishiza­tion of iOS is because of the immense wealth of appli­ca­tions avail­able for it. But name one app cur­rently in the iPhone/iPad app store that would trans­late to either the iPod Nano or the AppleTV. I’m not say­ing that there isn’t a poten­tial for appli­ca­tions on either plat­form. There are many tal­ented devel­op­ers out there who can imag­ine lots of things that I can’t. But as it stands right now “apps” for either device make no sense.

Given that, other than as a tech­ni­cal curios­ity, what does it mat­ter if the iPod Nano or AppleTV are run­ning iOS, MacOS, or some­thing utterly dif­fer­ent? The answer is that it doesn’t mat­ter. As long as the OS meets the needs of the device, who cares.

16 comments - (Comments closed)
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  • http://twitter.com/andreionut andreionut

    There is one app for the iPhone that can trans­late beau­ti­fully for the AppleTV. It’s called AirVideo and it streams videos from fold­ers or iTunes playlists. Apple TV only streams from your iTunes library.

    For the iPod nano, thou­sands of fart apps will do the trick.

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    Actually, dur­ing the event I opined on Twitter that Apple should have bought AirVideo and made that into “AirPlay”.

  • http://www.curiousrat.com Harry Marks

    “But name one app cur­rently in the iPhone/iPad app store that would trans­late to either the iPod Nano or the AppleTV.”

    Dead. On. Punditards seem to for­get that tele­vi­sions come in vary­ing res­o­lu­tions and sizes. An app that was designed to scale for a 42″ TV isn’t going to scale well for a 61″ TV and no devel­oper in his right mind is going to try to make some­thing to please every­one. It’s impossible.

    While the thought of iPhone/iPad apps on Apple TV is nice and all, I think Apple will prob­a­bly update it with spe­cial Apple TV-designed appli­ca­tions from major dev houses over the years. I.e. the Apple TV imple­men­ta­tion of Netflix looks fuck­tons bet­ter than what’s offered on the iPad.

  • http://twitter.com/Xof Christophe

    Wouldn’t the new Apple TV be a nice gam­ing plat­form, though? That’s a class of app I can eas­ily see for it. And at $99, plus con­trollers, and the abil­ity to be a real media cen­ter, Nintendo might be feel­ing a bit of a draft…

    I think for devel­op­ers, the “does it run iOS ques­tion?” is code for “Is this going to be another gold-rush plat­form?” Of course, it will then become a “Why does Steve hate kit­tens so much that he keeps this plat­form CLOSED just like the MACINTOSH which means APPLE IS DOOMED” whine. I would like to be spared those, yes.

  • http://twitter.com/Xof Christophe

    An app that was designed to scale for a 42″ TV isn’t going to scale well for a 61″ TV and no devel­oper in his right mind is going to try to make some­thing to please every­one. It’s impossible.

    Consoles seem to make it work.

  • http://www.curiousrat.com Harry Marks

    True — and games tend to ren­der bet­ter from iPhone to iPad, but try doing any­thing text-based. Try run­ning a Twitter app designed for the iPhone on the iPad. It scales hor­ri­bly — text is jagged and icons don’t scale well.

    I think if Apple opened it up at some point to inter­face with Game Center with cer­tain games, then it could work, but I don’t see that hap­pen­ing any time soon.

    Apple TV has an express pur­pose — play­ing con­tent from iTunes, Netflix and your Mac on your TV. A lack of stor­age means a lack of apps, so unless Apple revamped it again next year with built-in stor­age, I don’t think we’ll be see­ing apps for a long time (if ever).

  • Anonymous

    This piece of shit entry needs more god­damn curs­ing. Fuck, most of the recent ones have. For starters, stop say­ing “lack­wit,” and use the uni­ver­sally accepted “fuckwit.”

    I can’t fuck­ing believe I have to explain this shit to you.

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    Sure. I think you hit on an genre of apps that the AppleTV would absolutely excel at. I’m sure that there are oth­ers. My com­plaint is with the chumps who assume that cur­rent iOS apps would run well on and AppleTV. The chal­lenges involved in port­ing say a Twitter app to work to Apple’s expec­ta­tions on a tele­vi­sion screen are orders of mag­ni­tude more than what is involved in port­ing an iPhone app to the iPad for example.

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    I think that Angry Mac Bastards has fun­neled away most of my rage these days.

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    One thing that we some­times for­get is that Apple tends to be extremely focused with new prod­ucts. The orig­i­nal iPod did noth­ing but play music, but it did that extremely well. The orig­i­nal iPhone had no 3rd party apps. I think that Apple wants to get the AppleTV to a point where it’s actu­ally good at its pri­mary job (obtain­ing and play­ing video) before they do the work to make it 3rd party app friendly. Unfortunately for Apple, a big part of that is in the con­tent pro­duc­ers’ hands.

  • Anonymous

    Has-been.

  • http://dmunsie.wordpress.com/ Dennis Munsie

    I count myself as one who was curi­ous if Apple was using iOS or not, but more out of tech­ni­cal inter­est. My own hope is that the more eggs Apple puts into the iOS bas­ket, the more time Apple can focus on adding great new fea­tures rather than spend­ing time re-implementing the jig­gle effect (for exam­ple) on what­ever embed­ded OS that is pow­er­ing that device. Apps are a nice to have, but cer­tainly not Apple’s pri­mary focus at the moment — no mat­ter what the fan­boys and media hacks might insist upon.

    Most users won’t and shouldn’t care about the OS run­ning on “insert device here”. It’s just not an impor­tant detail that should effect their life one way or the other. The fact that it is or isn’t run­ning iOS shouldn’t have an impact on how many mil­lions of these devices Apple sells this year.

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    Sure, as a tech­ni­cal point, and as a sign of Apple’s com­mit­ment to iOS it’s a nice thing to know. The prob­lem are idiots like the rubes at Engadget and Kevin Rose who take “runs iOS” and hyper­bol­i­cally trans­form that into “will cre­ate an entire new ecosys­tem of apps and WILL CHANGE THE CONTENT DELIVERY GAME”

  • Anonymous

    Scaling (for size) is not such an issue; peo­ple who care about their TV expe­ri­ence (ie, peo­ple with 60″ sets) sit far­ther back. The visual size should be roughly identical.

    And since the ATV only puts out 720p (and we can dis­count peo­ple with non-HD sets are Not The Market), we don’t really have to worry about res­o­lu­tion so much. 720p -> 1080p upscal­ing is a pretty well-solved prob­lem; I’ve never been able to even tell on my set whether the incom­ing source was 720 or 1080.

    The real issue with TV screens for iOS is the dif­fer­ent aspect ratio — iOS’s 1.5:1 is not HD’s 16:9.

    Either you need to box it (effec­tive but waste­ful), crop it (bad for movies, worse than use­less for apps), or scale it (ugly as sin).

    However, the biggest “apps” issue on an Apple TV is the inter­face — every­thing for iOS is touch-based. TVs aren’t touch­screens, so no mat­ter what you do (even with, say, a Wii-style remote), you have a level of indi­rec­tion. Which changes things, a lot.

    If (big if) there ever are “apps for Apple TV” they’ll be sep­a­rate from the oth­ers — I don’t see any way around it.

  • http://twitter.com/Xof Christophe

    My com­plaint is with the chumps who assume that cur­rent iOS apps would run well on and AppleTV.

    Well, of course, Apple has never in its his­tory shipped a suc­cess­ful device that did not have an SDK ready for it on day one. The Ministry of Truth would like to assure you that the iPhone has always had third-party apps.

    Sigh. Pundits. Anyway, so, yes, agreed.

    I sus­pect (purely on the basis of noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar) that Apple will watch how the AppleTV goes, and if it is a hit, they’ll com­mit the non-trivial resources required to pro­duce an SDK for it.

  • http://twitter.com/Xof Christophe

    A lack of stor­age means a lack of apps, so unless Apple revamped it again next year with built-in stor­age, I don’t think we’ll be see­ing apps for a long time (if ever).

    Yeah, I really have no idea. People act like prepar­ing an SDK and related infra­struc­ture is some­thing you can throw at a cou­ple of interns for a sum­mer project, but it is a huge invest­ment in time and resources. Obviously, that’s paid off for the iPhone and iPad, but Apple’s not going to screw around with it for the AppleTV unless they think it will be an enor­mous profit center.