(this is a piss-fueled rant and therefor has much naughty language… not that you care)

Okay, getting down to the point, WTF was that today?  After the unveiling of the Macbook Air, I thought Apple may have learned its lesson on how to avoid blotching a media event but how royally mistaken I was.  Today was an utter catastrophe.  A shit sandwich with semen mayonnaise and olives on fucking rye bread.  It all revolved around a new version of iTunes?  A bump in storage for the Touch line?  A fucking camera on the Nanos?!  Goddamn LPs with digital “swag”?  That’s it?! You’ve got to be kidding me.

With that all considered, here’s my list of great injustices involving today’s announcements (in no particular order):

1. Steve Jobs labeling the damned Touch as a “gaming machine” was a complete fuck-up.  I’m sorry, but when my fat fucking fingers have to cover a third of the screen just to play a damned game, THAT’S NOT A GAMING PLATFORM.  It’s a fucking interactive iPod shoe-horned into a gimmicky game player.  Boasting that it has over 20,000 “game and entertainment” applications is a bloated statement, even by Apple’s standards.  The ratio of quality games compared between the DS and the iPod speaks for itself.

2. Ringtones for $1.29.  What?  Waitaminute.  The full-length song costs that much.  You’re going to sell the two items for the same price side by side, but one is a mere fraction of the length of the other?!  Waitaminute… WHAT?

3. No camera on the iPod Touch.  Jesus-in-Santa-socks, what the hell happened there?  The Nano gets a motherfucking camera but the iPod Touch gets the shaft yet again?!  And don’t give me that technologically-unfeasable shit, Jobsy.  If you can cram that tiny ass piece of glass and sensor into that sliver of a MP3 player, then the Touch can more than accommodate it.  Oh what’s that Steve?  You didn’t include it because it’s a “GAMING MACHINE”!?  FUCK!  SO SAWWWWRRRWWYYY!! (that’s “sorry”)  I didn’t know a fucking gaming machine couldn’t have a fucking camera in it!  I guess that makes the DSi a goddamn unholy freak of nature!  Get back to the leper colony you piece of shit handheld!!!

4. Radio on the iPod.  Fucking fantastic!!  It’s about fucking time!! Wheeeee…... what?  Only on the Nano?  Huh?  And it’s just regular ghetto FM?  You’re shitting me, right?  There’s no HD radio here?  C’mon, you’re joking, it’s there, right?  Sure it is… right there… wait, there has to be a preference pane or some shit… DAMMIT.  What the… I’m getting tired of saying “what the fuck”!  That’s like ANCIENT technology!  THE GOD-DAMN-ZUNE has HD-FUCKING-RADIO-ON-IT!  And you REALLY couldn’t fit that transmitter into the Touch?!  Technologically unfeasible?  It’s a fucking videogame syst- oh, fuck it whatever…

5. No Beatles?!  I’ve decided this will never happen.  The copyright holder of their catalogue dies this summer, providing a perfect opportunity for the two Apple companies to bury the hatchet and make some more money for each other.  Not to mention it’s on the same day as the Beatles Rock Band game release.  But fuck no!  Not that I really give a shit, but the one band you’d think would be the crowning jewel of the iTunes music store is once again MIA… even after all the damn planet align for the occasion.

6. Last on the list… the LPs.  Who’s brainchild was this?  A digital LP?  Full of digital videos and digital photos and digital notes for my fucking digital music?  Is this what humans are evolving to?  Fucking intangible memorabilia?  I thought the whole purpose of an LP was to actually hold the fucking thing in your hand, look through all the cool shit that came with it.  Smell it!!!  Flip it around next to your ear!!  That’s what makes actual LPs and special CD releases so fucking special, because they still come with that shit you can hold in your hand, pin on your wall, rub in your friends’ faces.  But what I don’t need is more shit I’m never going to look at eating up even more space on my hard drive.  High-quality album art is bad enough, quit raping my free space!!

What Apple has always been good at is telling its customers what they want.  But, if today’s event was any indication, even the customers are going to start saying “huh? that doesn’t make much sense…”

If I missed anything, or want to contribute, please feel free…. I’m going to go cry in my pillow.

__________________/

I am listening to a Genius Mix right now and it is pretty cool

Raws - 10 September 2009 04:46 PM

I am listening to a Genius Mix right now and it is pretty cool

Well, YOUR might be, mine is almost even more schizophrenic than just playing pure random… putting neo metal in my reggae mix and whatnot.

Andy I read that whole thing and I applaud you sir.

Jesus-in-Santa-socks is the new “what the fuck”

Where the hell did you get my pre-school photo from?!

CCP - 10 September 2009 02:41 PM

__________________/

gorilla - 10 September 2009 05:41 AM

1. Steve Jobs labeling the damned Touch as a “gaming machine” was a complete fuck-up.  I’m sorry, but when my fat fucking fingers have to cover a third of the screen just to play a damned game, THAT’S NOT A GAMING PLATFORM.  It’s a fucking interactive iPod shoe-horned into a gimmicky game player.  Boasting that it has over 20,000 “game and entertainment” applications is a bloated statement, even by Apple’s standards.  The ratio of quality games compared between the DS and the iPod speaks for itself.

Like it or not, casual gamers is the new hardcore market. It’s the only one that withstands today’s rampant piracy, used games market and extreme development times. When it’s not guaranteed to make profit from having 150 man working full time for 3-4 years, with millions of dollars invested in hardware, software and housing to make a game that people pirate/buy used games at rates of 10:1 (so even if only one tenth of the pirated copies would have been a lost sale, sales would have doubled without it), few people are gonna attempt it. Larger games studios are closing down almost every month, including Ensemble Studios that Microsoft didn’t deem profitable enough despite the Age of series.

Anyhow, in the midst of all this, there’s a new model, a new way to make money on games. A single independent developer can make a small game, put it up extremely cheap on App Store, have everything about hosting and payment taken care of and get 70% of the sales right into his or hers pocket. This for a platform that’s several times larger than World of Warcraft. There’s little to no risk involved, most of the people have ordinary jobs, so any income made from the App Store is a bonus, and there’s a lot larger audience actually willing to pay small for a small game, than there’s people willing to pay big for a game with a development cost astronomically larger. PopCap games have a long time been one of the largest PC games developer in pure number of units sold, and it’s no surprise, because casual gaming is the largest market. It’s just how no matter what the connoisseurs (and dietitians) are saying, McDonalds is still the largest food chain in the western world, because more people are willing to pay for cheap crap than quality. It doesn’t get better when it’s also easy to steal quality games and experience them without paying for them… if you could do the same with food, there wouldn’t be a single quality restaurant left in the world.

So yeah, the iPhone might not be a gaming platform, but only in the same way that McDonalds isn’t a restaurant.

the iPhone/Touch is the shitty food of the video game market?  That makes sense.  Great analogy, Johan.

gorilla - 12 September 2009 04:40 AM

the iPhone/Touch is the shitty food of the video game market?  That makes sense.  Great analogy, Johan.

Leave it to a Borker to distill it to those words. I think we’ve got something here that could be sold to Microsoft’s advertising department for big bucks.