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October 8, 2011 @ 9:58 pm

Did this forty year-old camera influence the iPod?

Steve Jobs, an inspi­ra­tion to artists and busi­ness lead­ers alike, had a hero of his own. Accord­ing to this arti­cle from the New York Times, Edwin Land, the cre­ator of Polar­iod was a role model for Jobs.  Land was also a col­lege dropout who devel­oped great prod­ucts, sim­ply and ele­gantly designed to appeal to an enor­mous mar­ket.   It’s an inter­est­ing read, as is the linked Fast­com­pany book review.

Like Jobs, Edwin Land had numer­ous tech­no­log­i­cal and com­mer­cial achieve­ments.  How­ever, the NYTimes arti­cle calls the Polaroid SX-70 fold­ing cam­era Edwin Land’s ‘supreme achievement’.

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I hap­pen to have a vin­tage Polaroid SX-70.  After read­ing the arti­cle, I pulled it off the shelf to take another look.   It’s a really beau­ti­ful piece of design.   It even came with this hand­some leather case.

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This cam­era was my father’s, and I’ve han­dled it hun­dreds of times since I was a child.  Today, pulling it out the case I was imme­di­ately struck with a question:

Why does a 40 year old cam­era have an Apple 30-pin con­nec­tor port on it?

 

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There is a port, just above the lens, that seems ready for any iPod acces­sory.  It’s not as obvi­ous when the cam­era is open, but the port to con­nect the old fash­ioned ‘flash bar’ is very obvi­ous when the cam­era is col­lapsed.  In fact, the col­lapsed SX-70 looks like a piece of con­sumer elec­tron­ics Steve Jobs would have cre­ated if he’d been born a gen­er­a­tion earlier.

The port is not just sim­i­lar.  It’s almost an exact match in dimen­sions.  You can even put the tip of a 30-pin con­nec­tor in the Polaroid and it’s a snug fit.  I know that this seems like Apple fan­boi wish­ful think­ing — that some­thing could be this specif­i­cally thought through.  After all, cor­re­la­tion does not equal cau­sa­tion. It could just be a coin­ci­dence that the ports are sim­i­lar.   So I tried other things that could be sim­i­lar in size.  An SD card.  Close, but it doesn’t fit.  You don’t get snug fit of the 30-pin connector.

Keep in mind that this is the only port on this device.  And it’s designed to allow the cam­era to inter­act with acces­sories.  And this isn’t just any device.  It’s the ‘supreme achieve­ment’ of  the man Steve Jobs called a ‘national trea­sure’.   Now, this port of nearly iden­ti­cal pro­por­tions is the com­mon denom­i­na­tor among three devices that could each, along with the orig­i­nal Mac­in­tosh, con­tend as Steve’s ‘supreme achieve­ment.’  And out of all of the sizes avail­able for periph­eral ports (micro-usb, etc), this is nearly an exact match, within microm­e­ters (if I had the appro­pri­ate tools, I’d mea­sure it for you).

Of course in terms of functionality,the inter­nals and tech­nol­ogy are com­pletely dif­fer­ent. But aes­thet­i­cally the sim­i­lar­ity is strik­ing.  And even my non-tech mother knows how Apple ago­nizes and obsesses over aes­thet­ics.  The size and look of this port were most cer­tainly debated at length dur­ing it’s development.

Per­haps there was never an explicit inten­tion to mimic the SX-70. Of course, if this sim­i­lar­ity is by design, I am sure some­one like Jony Ive would know.  The port could have been a result of team­work, but if Steve Jobs obsessed over Edwind Land’s cre­ations the way we obsess over his, there is a rea­son that this could have felt like the right size for an acces­sory port accord­ing to Steve’s aes­thetic sensibilities.

Edit: It occurred to me that some­one might cite this arti­cle as evi­dence that Sam­sung didn’t rip-off the acces­sory port from Apple. I’ll just say that I think there is a huge dif­fer­ence between Apple emu­lat­ing a prod­uct that had been off the mar­ket for decades, and Sam­sung try­ing to cre­ate con­fu­sion with a prod­uct it is directly com­pet­ing against.

I’ve never given much thought to the 30-pin con­nec­tor.  It wasn’t any more inter­est­ing to me than a USB port. But now,  I’d be very curi­ous to know the back­ground of the only phys­i­cal trait that lat­est iPhone shares with the early iPods… and with a forty year-old cam­era cre­ated by a man Steve Jobs idolized.

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June 25, 2011 @ 6:13 am

Final Cut X Debate: The Backstory

There is a rea­son that the crit­i­cism of Final Cut has caught fire.  The story plays into one of the old­est crit­i­cisms of Apple as a com­pany; that it doesn’t make prod­ucts suit­able for ‘seri­ous pro­fes­sion­als’. Apple adresses that charge in this tele­vi­sion com­mer­cial, which pre­dates the release of FCP X by a few years:

Well, in the case of the newly released Final Cut Pro X, the young employee in this ad wouldn’t be able to do any­thing with that disk.

Yes, with FCP X, Apple has released a prod­uct that lacks many of the capa­bil­i­ties that existed in the pre­vi­ous ver­sion.  How­ever, there is more to the story than miss­ing fea­tures. In order to under­stand the very heated emo­tions behind many of the bad reviews in the App Store, a bit of back­story is helpful.

In 1999, when Final Cut Pro was first released, it was in the same  sub-$1,000 price class as Adobe Pre­miere, but it its cumu­la­tive fea­ture set made it com­pet­i­tive with Avid’s Media Com­poser which, at the time, cost over $100,000.   That same year, Avid announced that they were aban­don­ing the Mac plat­form.   It prob­a­bly had lit­tle to do with Final Cut.   Pri­mar­ily they were angry about  the newly released ‘Blue and White’ G3. You see, they needed six PCI slots to accom­mo­date the abun­dance of hard­ware that the Avid soft­ware required.   Apple had released a desk­top box with only three slots and indi­cated that was the stan­dard going forward.¹  Avid own­ers would now have to buy PCI Expan­sion chas­sis, adding yet another costly ele­ment of poten­tial incom­pat­i­bil­ity to their already sprawl­ing hard­ware.  The were referred to in cer­tain cir­cles as ‘slot hogs’.

Avid was the Microsoft of the edit­ing world.

Sure, Apple was now sell­ing a sur­pris­ingly pow­er­ful edit­ing prod­uct that worked seam­lessly with the newly inte­grated firewire port, but it’s likely that Avid was like the old man in the com­mer­cial.  They looked at Final Cut as some­thing for ama­teurs, not a threat.

Ulti­mately, Avid relented, and they con­tin­ued to sup­port the Mac plat­form.  How­ever, they strug­gled for a decade as Final Cut chipped away at the lower end of the edit­ing soft­ware  mar­ket.  Their work­horse prod­uct, Media Com­poser, which sold for $100,000+ in 1999 is now less than $3,000  (and requires no PCI slots at all).

Avid still dom­i­nates in Hol­ly­wood which is a tiny mar­ket com­pared to the over­all user base of edit­ing pro­fes­sion­als.  Around town, there are many facil­i­ties using Final Cut, but on the twenty or so TV series I have edited on, only three used Final Cut, and only one of them was a lager scale show. Per­son­ally, I like cut­ting on Avid and Final Cut in dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions.  I liked Pre­miere the last time I used it as well.  But I def­i­nitely have an emo­tional invest­ment in Final Cut unlike the others.

Final Cut empow­ered many of us who could not oth­er­wise afford to access the pricey Avid sys­tems.  We felt like rebels and rene­gades, stick­ing it to ‘The Man.’  Often times we had to jus­tify or defend our choice of Final Cut to clients or Pro­duc­ers.  They wanted to edit on a real machine, an Avid.  But Final Cut could do the work.  Sure, it didn’t ini­tially have things like mul­ti­cam, and real-time ren­der­ing, but it was worth the extra effort to make it work.   Over time, Apple filled in many of these features.

I can rea­son­ably say that many of us became emo­tion­ally invested in the out­come of the com­pe­ti­tion between these two prod­ucts.  It impacted our aspir­ing careers and our liveli­hoods,   To this day there is a global com­mu­nity of Final Cut Pro users who are pas­sion­ate about the prod­uct.  if you are not famil­iar with these groups, think of them as the Mac fan base at the height (or depth) of the PC wars.  It’s a proud com­mu­nity of FCP evan­ge­lists who feel that, in part­ner­ship with Apple, they top­pled the monop­o­lis­tic Avid regime.

So Final Cut Pro users were part of two suc­cess­ful insur­gent tech­nol­ogy move­ments.  Apple, as an oper­at­ing sys­tem,  and Final Cut Pro, as an edit­ing plat­form, had each, in their own way,  out­per­formed pow­er­ful rivals over the past decade and were com­fort­ably bask­ing in their suc­cess.   Microsoft and Avid, while still pow­er­ful, do not enjoy the monop­o­lis­tic mar­ket share (and mind share) they did in the late nineties.

Then along comes FCP X.   Now, the rebels and rene­gades are estab­lished edi­tors and busi­ness own­ers and post pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties.  Apple has sur­prised their sup­port­ers the way they sur­prised Avid more than a decade ear­lier.   The reac­tions of the Final Cut com­mu­nity are, by now,  well known.  There are def­i­nitely  prac­ti­cal impli­ca­tions for peo­ple who’ve built a busi­ness around Final Cut.  But there is also a feel­ing of betrayal that is fuel­ing some of the most heated crit­i­cism.   I think some of that has to do with how Final Cut devel­oped into some­thing much larger than a soft­ware prod­uct.  For many peo­ple, Final Cut Pro is part of their cre­ative and pro­fes­sional iden­tity.  And, for now, they are not sure who they are, or who they will be a year from now.

I am cur­rently explor­ing the soft­ware and will write about my impres­sions soon.

 

¹ The 3 PCI slot stan­dard coin­cided with the end of the ‘cloned’ Mac era.  This turned the Mac 9600 into a col­lec­tors item for years to come because it was the last, most pow­er­ful Mac able to sup­port the PCI demands of the AVID hardware.