Apple v. Google: A Matter of Timing

When Steve Jobs held a mini Mac on his fingertips Tuesday, what did you see? A low-priced "crippled" version of its bigger brothers? A device designed to lure away budget-minded consumers from Windows machines?

Maybe. For now.

What I saw was the future of Apple Computer: A device that fits anywhere in the home and hooks up to any screen that can handle digital input.

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Lots of Windows-side executives are making big noise about producing machines for the living room. They call them "media centers." A few are on the market. Some get good reviews.

But Jobs is the first executive, in the view from here, to really give a carrot that will pull along the move to convert the living room to digits.

His first easy-to-use "media center" machine is the iPod Photo, released last fall. It, of course, is a handheld hard drive. It plugs directly into the back of a late-model TV, throwing up slide shows on big screens effortlessly, music track backgrounds and all. For the typical mother, father, teenager or child, this is a new form of digital entertainment, playing off the great and greatening storage capacity of computing technology and the existing economics and display capacities of analog electronics.

Get more out of your iPod: all the latest add-ons, hacks and reviews at Extreme iPod.

The Mac mini now becomes the platform that can slide directly under the TV, even if Jobs isnt saying so. As it surely adds storage capacity and memory capacity, it will soon be in position to replace the cable TV box, the stereo receiver box and the VCR/DVD player on the shelf under the big screen in the family fireplace room, the playroom or the basement.

Can the Mac mini gain enterprise traction? Click here to find out what analysts say.

Jobs does not leave much to the imagination to see how this will take place. Apple is also the only company in the digital industry to really begin to solve how all sorts of new forms of digital content will be organized, presented and easily retrieved by everyday users. This is no small matter, given the volume of online text, still images, audio and video that already exists and is doubling faster than any of us can comprehend.

In this case, the product, already delivered, is iLife, Apples pretty "seamless" software suite that allows the average person to manage huge digital playlists of music, create and sculpt large libraries of digital photos, develop and edit digital movies, and even build professional sounding songs from scratch.

So look at what iLife really is, sitting on a Mac mini under the TV. It is a digital content manager, connected to the kind of screen that is used outside the corporate and home office. Youd be a fool, were you Jobs and his cultural as well as product design accomplices at Apple, not to turn iLife in future incarnations into a channel switching and storage management system for the rest of our electronic lives. This can and should be the IPTV box as well as the device and software that helps everyday individuals get across the chasm from analog habits to digital entertainment capabilities.

Next page: Apple and Google clash.