Apple Mac’s and i* devices have the tendencies to pull their sibling products into our house. I am using an iMac with a second Thunderbolt display to do my work. I can produce content as well as work at interface design and it does the server part too, although I still have to have Linux servers for scale reasons.
Using an iMac it was an obvious choice to get a MacPro to continue working while traveling.
Our infrastructure had been linked together by Netgear wireless routers but when the iPhone came along it would not release its IP address while sleeping hence the router would assign it twice and crash. Out went the Netgear and in came the Airport Extreme with is easy configuration utility.
The next question was what tablet computer to use. It wasn’t really a question since I mainly use it for reading and our offspring watches movies and plays games on it. iTunes and AppStore makes it possible to share content across all devices – cool.
Getting the Apple TV basically was a no-brainer at this point although I am not super impressed by its current incantation. The last step came when I needed a better backup solution and again the obvious choice became Apples Time Capsule with its integrated Time Machine experience and gone was the backup server.
Where I am going with this is that Apple gets it – devices are not only beautifully designed and come packaged to make you feel good – they integrate well right out of the box.
I can control the home network using the AirPort Utility on PC/Laptop/tablet, I can share my Browser reading list across all devices using iCloud, all movies and music tracks are available on all devices including the audio system, and I can switch from PC to tablet to phone and can access most of my stuff.
Not all is perfect in the Apple sphere through and more complicated scenarios require fiddling. Connect your iPad or iPhone to iTunes and a backup / restore / sync / ”whatever process” starts that runs forever – I still haven’t figured out how to change it. It is my fault for not learning the environment but why has it to be so complex and take so long.
Try to find music and movies in iTunes – I still get lost in different libraries and have to explore drop down menus. And why is there a different AppStore – of which I like the experience versus iTunes. Apps, movies, music are content and Netflix has shown how a content discovery experience should looks like.
If Apple cracks the TV by merging programmed content, on-demand content and games with an ecosystem for app developers I could see some very interesting application scenarios. Google, Microsoft or Samsung are candidates for such an innovation too but I doubt that they can create an app developer ecosystem like Apple.