Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Why I hate Apple announcements

Now, before all you Apple fans out there start flaming, just hear me out. This post is not based on the announcements as such, but just some bad luck on my part.

Apple announcements invariably take place at 10:00 AM United States Pacific time. This unfortunately means for me that it is invariably at midnight. On the dot. Every time there is an Apple announcement, I have the option of staying up past the time I normally would to see the announcement live.

But it's not just that. I think that Apple hates me. Their last two major announcements (the iPad and iPhone OS 4) have been at times that are very inconvenient for me, and the next coming one will be even worse. When they announced the iPad, it was right in the middle of my mock exams. I got up and checked my Twitter the next morning to find out that it was called the iPad, but it wasn't until a few days later that I could finally watch the video of it. There was certainly no option of reading a meta-live blog of any sort.

Later, when they announced iPhone OS 4, it was perhaps less of a nuisance, but still quite inconvenient. I was away from home on holiday, and I should have been in bed (had to get up fairly early the next day). The hotel I was in had very dodgy WiFi (although I was very glad to have any at all), and it didn't work on the old family laptop. So I was forced to read a meta-live blog on my iPod Touch. Not too bad, all in all, but far from ideal. Whether it was because of the iPod or the WiFi, I don't know, but I frequently had to manually refresh the page, and a lot of the images didn't quite work correctly. But still, I got the general gist of it, and when I could later watch the video there wasn't anything super new to me.

The upcoming announcement — whatever it may be — as I said above, will be the worst. It begins at midnight on Tuesday 7th June. That's the same day that I have my final IGCSE Additional Maths exam. It's probably one of the toughest subjects I'm taking this year, and so there is NO way I am going to be able to stay up late to find out about it live. Unlike in the past, however, this time I am determined to keep a media blackout until I am able to watch the video Apple releases on their iTunes podcast. I am even going to the extent of unfollowing anyone on Twitter that I think it likely to be talking about this. I've got a .txt file on my desktop listing all these people, so I can follow them again afterwards.

More after the break

Now, don't get me wrong. Don't mistake the title of this for me saying I don't like watching Apple announcements. I love them. I think Steve Jobs is one of the greatest public speakers and advertisers there is. His presentations are always extremely convincing, and even when logic tells you it's not really quite as good as he's saying, you can't help but believe when he calls his device "magical". But unfortunately for me, in the past they've been timed very badly, and I think it's likely to stay like this for some time to come.

So what about you? What do you think about Stevenotes, and what about their timing? I realise that it makes more sense in different time zones. So how has that turned out for you?

4 comments:

  1. They have always been nice for me however I have to work tonight to miss it! Starts 6pm here which I think is even nicer than the 10am start

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  2. I agree, 6pm is definitely a great time for it.
    With just 2 and a quarter hours to go, it feels like I should be able to make it, but with such an important exam, it's really unfortunate that I will miss it.

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  3. BTW you can follow comments by email by clicking the subscribe via email button just below the text box and next to the submit post button

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  4. I'm afraid I don't see it. A ctrl+f for email on your latest post shows only the word email in my comment, and subscribe to the email newsletter.
    "Get email updates on the latest posts!"

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