The Sound of Silliness

Continued from 'Apple: Worst. Intro. Ever?'….

At this point, the presentation got real surreal. Jobs introduced $99 leather cases for the iPod nano and iPod (apparently they didn't justify their own press release….keep reading, then draw your own conclusion). For grins, I've subsequently collected RSS feeds on other vendors' leather cases for comparison purposes; when you've got $7.99 iPod nano and $9.99 iPod case alternatives, is having an Apple logo on your case really worth dropping 10x or 12x the cash on it?

Last but not least, Jobs unveiled the iPod Hi-Fi, a $350 'portable' (translation; it runs off both AC and batteries, and has carrying handles. Note its 16.7 lb with-batteries weight, and its 6.6×17x6.9 inch dimensions.) speaker system for various iPod models. It's gotten generally (but not universally) good reviews, although at the unveiling I couldn't help but note its cost-reducing omission of tweeters. I guess lossy-compressed audio's attenuation of high frequencies is good for something, huh?. But it was significantly overpriced compared to competitors' (up to that point, Apple's partners') offerings (the price tag is selectively, and temporarily, beginning to fall). So overpriced that it apparently prompted at least one vendor to deduce that anyone willing to drop $350 on a speaker system might also be persuaded to spend an additional $295 on a matching leather case.

The height of the iPod Hi-Fi promotion preposterousness occurred when Jobs suggested that the product sounded so good that he'd gotten rid of all of his expensive audiophile equipment in favour of it. His exact works, captured by Wired's Cult of Mac blog, were:

"I've been using one of these at home for the last month," he said at a special media event, which attracted a full house of journalists and TV crews. "I'm an audiophile," Jobs added. "I've had stereos that, well, I'm not saying it, that cost a lot. I'm getting rid of it. I'm using one of these."

C'mon, Steve, do you really think the Reality Distortion Field is that strong? PC Magazine's former editor in chief Bill Machrone couldn't resist tossing a tongue-in-cheek challenge at Apple, by converting a jambox into a truly portable iPod sound system at an incremental cost of $46, and dubbing it the iBoom Lo-Fi. And this functional spoof is also pretty funny (at least to me).

Even the traditional Apple faithful weren't impressed with the late-February Special Event; check out the before-and-after (and after-after) comic strips from The Joy of Tech, and this biting post-mortem from Cult of Mac. The whole pitch only took about a half hour and left me suspecting that some big planned announcement got yanked at the last minute because of a showstopper bug or production setback, the inability to wrap up a related business negotiation, etc. But of course, Apple's best press friend once again found a way to put a positive spin on what was perhaps Apple's silliest day.

I guess the reassuring bit of news in all of this is that even Steve Jobs has a bad day every once in a while, huh?

Followup: Guess the cases didn't sell very well. Nor did, apparently, the iPod Hi-Fi.