Always on the cutting edge, Apple has announced a bio-organic laptop.
Cook presented the bizarre, malformed new product to stunned silence during a media event at Apple headquarters, revealing a device that, while vaguely similar to a computer in certain respects, appeared to be encased in a thick, flesh-like coating that was visibly moist and engorged.
"Oh, my sweet God," Apple employee Kurt Starfeldt said after viewing the MacBook up close. "It appeared to be discharging some sort of mucus-type substance from the headphone jack and making these weird murmuring sounds. And then it started quivering at one point when Tim was demonstrating how to use the touch pad. It was quite upsetting, actually."
The photos reveal that it is definitely squamous. I want one. I want two so I can breed them.
Wait, damn, I just noticed that’s from the Onion. Hang on, I’m going to check up on the official apple.com site.
Hmm. I can watch HBO on apple devices now? Meh.
They’re selling a watch?
$350 for the low end?? Going up to ten freakin’ thousand gobslappin’ dollars?!!?!
Well, that’s disappointing. I want my oozing and engorged epithelial biocomputer — the laptop that will fuse with my lap and fulfill all of my Cronenbergian dreams. The overpriced watches are no substitute.
Damn, it got me, until I read the Onion part, I was on Google Images looking for a bloody pic of it !
it just NEEDED quoting.
It’s okay! You can get a much clearer picture of it in the movie, Existenz.
In the movie its a game playing device that looks every bit as disturbing as described, with slightly less ooze.
Nope. The high end one STARTS at $10K. I think it tops out at $17K.
You knew this had to be fake. If Apple made a bio organic laptop, it would either be apple shaped, or hipster shaped. The one described is obviously a Microsoft product.
Hey, tell me the truth. Are we still in the game?
A symbiotic relationship with your laptop? Cross contamination of viruses could be a problem! Imagine being infected by a dozen Trojans.
Then there’s the inevitable weight gain from all the cookies.
Acolyte of Sagan:
That’s why you keep them in the wrapper until you need to use them, people!
…cookies…
chocolate chips
Unfortunately, Steve Jobs is dead and can no longer tell Apple users that they don’t want wearable hardware to be reasonably priced.
@10, Azkyroth Drinked the Grammar Too :)
Okay, mini-rant: Why do anti-Apple people always get this backwards? Steve Jobs was actually the one who wanted stuff to be as cheap as possible (while still being whatever it was he wanted to sell). The “let’s mark it up and call it premium” people were the ones who kicked Jobs out in 1985. (First official decision of Michael Spindler as CEO was raising the price of the original Mac by $500.) Yeah, you can get a PC which will be cheaper than a Mac. It will be made of plastic, stuffed with adware, and designed to be obsolete in a year. You can get an Android device cheaper than an iOS one. It will have a lower-resolution screen, a cheap plastic shell, and a much, much slower CPU. If you try to build a product which is actually equivalent in quality to Apple’s offerings, you’ll end up spending about the same amount as you would to just buy from Apple in the first place.
If you think $10k is overpriced for a wrist watch, then you are obviously unfamiliar with the wrist watch market…
Imagine all the new infection vectors for the common cold once you can transmit it over the internet?
Apple doesn’t do planned obsolescence? .
^Bad HTML there. Was supposed to be a link to James Bond doing a cough bullshit.
My local Apple Store just replaced my iPad.
free
evil, that
They do, sure. But in general, their shit will keep on working for years after it’s been made obsolete. Not many other manufacturers can claim that their phones or PCs will still work well that long after their warranty has expired, in my experience.
“You can get a much clearer picture of it in the movie, Existenz.”
Shame on you for mentioning such a thing here! That was one of the crappiest movies I’ve seen in years, and I see a lot of crappy movies.
Uhuh. Have you been drinking the kool-aid again?
My guess is you either haven’t bought a PC in ages, or only look at the very bottom of the barrel (ie, Acer). I’ve owned plenty of brand PCs with pre-installed crap, but only crap as in unneeded and useless, such as trial versions of Norton antivirus, and OEM versions of DVD playback software. Adware? Never seen it. And guess what? All of them were made of stury metal frames and covers, with only a plastic front. And all still usable after a year. Even after 5 years.
Demonstrably and patently false. Certainly since Apple is little more than bogstandard Intel fare these days.
Oddly enough my experiences vastly differ from yours. I have a 10+ year old Toshiba Satellite laptop which still works without a hitch. The only thing wrong with it are the batteries (the big, bulky one and the CMOS one) being flat and totally worn out. Everything else works fine.
Same thing with my old Compaq Presario laptop. Still fires up without a hitch after 6+ years. Sadly it’s memory had already been maxed out, otherwise I’d still use it.
Then there’s 2 Compaq desktops and the first generation HP Proliant ML310 server. Pentium 4 era stuff, but still working without a hitch.
I have used both Apple and PCs extensively, and in my experience, for similar price points, performance is similar.
Even PCs that have paper-specs superior to the Apple alternative, if the prices are in the same range, the performance in actual benchmarks and in day to day experience is similar.
Apple’s desktops and laptops consistently rank among the top performers in their price ranges, and the best PCs in those price ranges are similar in performance as well. Apple simply doesn’t make the low-end crap-ware, so their stuff seems more expensive, but performance to performance, it actually isn’t.
Do your due diligence as a consumer to eliminate the obvious crap, and you end up getting what you pay for. What a concept.
and if you want you can by the parts and software you want and assemble A PC yourself and do so for a very reasonable price differential from one built by an OEM.
This argument over what is best is borrrrring.
We are still in the Sesame Street days of computers, this is not the federation era (TNG) yet they are all quirky and none intuitive and often completely opaque. all often require repair of some kind which you can do if you have a PC or take it in to a repair shop or just take it in if it is a Mac.
the one thing I can say for sure is that without a doubt I walked around much more before I had a computer then after i had one regardless of which kind I was using!
I do not like watches In fact I barely tolerate clocks specially just now!
uncle frogy
To suggest that Macs somehow have better hardware is as misleading as saying that they’re just stock intel hardware.
Sure, there may not be much difference when it comes to their hardware these days but the difference is in how it’s treated: Mac pay intel what I assume is a stupid amount of money to produce them a bunch of hardware to specification so that they can then optimize their software, from the ground up, to run on THAT hardware.
Personally I don’t think that the resulting limitations on software and tweaks is worth the additional stability that, allegedly, supplies. I say allegedly because my PC computers are stable and generally run just fine.
Another advantage of my desktop PC is that I can simply pay $300-$500 dollars (New Zealand Dollars that is) every three or so years to upgrade the graphics card and it will keep playing all the games I want and doing all the other work I put it to because I made sure I got good hardware that is more than sufficient for my personal computing needs.
It’s a fairly pointless debate since if what you’ve got works for you and you’re happy with it then yay!
Indeed. 10 grand is barely mid-range… Mind you, that’s for proper watches, not jumped-up digitals.
To be fair, the wrist watch manufacturers do that on purpose and won’t pretend otherwise. Those expensive wrist watches are designed and marketed as luxury items. As one company CEO described it in an article I read a while back, the watches are basically jewelry for men. In other words, something expensive, potentially decorative and otherwise pointless. To each their own, I suppose.
Smartwatches and the likes are unlikely to occupy the same niche and certainly won’t do that in the same way a Rolex or similarly expensive watch might. A quick look at the apple site seems to confirm my suspicion: A gold leaf watch and macbook may be a matter of taste. But I doubt anyone will like them once that finish peels off to reveal – I assume – hard plastic, scratchy and unattractive.
Mind you, I don’t get that obsession with gold anyway. The one thing that gold watch certainly cannot do is look classy. It still looks like a small box of electronics, just like every other small box of electronics on this planet. Worse even, it looks like it’s trying too hard. (Cue Admiral Ackbar) It’s a trap!
But the price tags at least deserve a healthy salute. I last saw 5-figure tags for ‘consumer hardware’ in old computer mags from the 90s, although we had a different currency back then which may have helped a little. Classic hardware has its fans. Maybe classic prices could, too.
In this day and age, watches are pretty much entirely jewellery. There’s really no need to have one to tell the time, and certainly not a mechanical one (as the all the high-end watches are). A cheap quartz movement is more accurate than even the most exactingly hand-crafted, multi-tourbillon mechanical movement. They’re an anachronism. A charming, fascinating, elegant, but ultimately pointless anachronism.
I quite like anachronisms. :)
That’s right: Apple’s evil geniuses just added planned obsolescence to the luxury watch industry. Je vous souhaite le bonjour, nous vivons une époque moderne, le progrès fait rage
hey!!! at least a watch, even as jewelry, #does# something, unlike those pieces of jewelry wimminz wear all the time, and force menz to give them. Those glittery baubles of crystals and metals that just look pretty but actually do nothing but bling the girl into glamorousness.
That expensive, complicated mechanical gadget on a man’s wrist not only looks cool, it actually does something: keeps track of earth’s rotational orientation, relative to that big ball of fire as the reference point. And the really expensive mechanical gizmos can do many additional functions, that horologists call “complications”, Like ‘day of the week’, ‘day of the month’, ‘year’, ‘elapsed time’, ‘countdown’, ‘alternate time zone’, ‘moon phase’, and some can even send out emergency radio rescue signals if bearer feels lost, as as many more possibilities.
aaarrrggghhh… … sorry. I seem to have let out that inner horologist I try so hard to keep bottled up inside me.
The point isn’t that Steve Jobs wanted things to be expensive, it’s that Apple in general and Jobs in particular became notorious for having the attitude that customers “shouldn’t want” their software or hardware to do things that Apple software or hardware didn’t already do. And the implications of the fact that they still had customers after going public with that attitude.
(See, for example, that idiotic “one button mouse” thing they clung to for two decades out of sheer petulance.)
#11 Vicar
Yeah, you can get a PC which will be cheaper than a Mac. It will be made of plastic, stuffed with adware, and designed to be obsolete in a year. [skipping the phone stuff since I still have a 2004 Nokia brick…] If you try to build a product which is actually equivalent in quality to Apple’s offerings, you’ll end up spending about the same amount as you would to just buy from Apple in the first place.
and
#20 Amphiox
Even PCs that have paper-specs superior to the Apple alternative, if the prices are in the same range, the performance in actual benchmarks and in day to day experience is similar.
Apple’s desktops and laptops consistently rank among the top performers in their price ranges, and the best PCs in those price ranges are similar in performance as well. Apple simply doesn’t make the low-end crap-ware, so their stuff seems more expensive, but performance to performance, it actually isn’t.
My current PC was purchased in late 2011, making it about 7 months older than the mid 2012 Mac Pro, and about 14 months newer than the 2010 release. I dug out the specs and receipts to directly compare every component of my PC to the contemporrary Mac Pro. I chose the 2012 edition for comparison as it was closer in time, while noting that as my PC was older, I would expect it to either have older technology, or similar technology for a higher price.
I expected the comparison to be fairly close despite the half-year gap, as I had spent plenty of time checking multiple stores at multiple price points before the purchase, but what I found was a fairly solid lead in favour of the PC. Not only was every internal component of the PC (with one exception) superior in performance to that which was included in the Mac, I also had more extras such as 3rd party CPU cooling, more spare cables and other minor paraphernalia. The one exception was the CPU, which was a tie.
My comparison continued to the next major component outside the case itself – the monitor – when I noticed something strange. The Apple shop didn’t list a monitor for that price tag. I had been assuming that the monitor was included all along, only to discover that the price I was looking at only included the case components; the monitor price was not yet added. Meaning, my entire PC – case and internals plus monitor, keyboard, mouse and all – were cheaper than just the Mac Pro case without all those other things; just the case with not even a mouse for company. And As I noted earlier, it had superior components at every level except the tied CPU, despite being the older purchase.
So yes, the common wisdom – that Apple desktops have a gargantuan markup – is entirely accurate in my view. The idea that PCs are only cheaper at the crazy low end ‘because plastic!’ is essentially down to the fact that Apple gone very heavily into marketing its stuff, while Windows… doesn’t really have marketing at all.
Leaving the pointless PC-vs-Mac debate for a moment, this story has a dark side as well. The watch was a flop and caused the Apple stock to drop, but it was present with an ad featuring Christy Turlington Burns – a celebrity woman(!), talking about maternity(!!) in Africa(!!!) and all the dudebro geek scum has crawled from under their rocks to blame her and her campaign for the flop.
You can find a small taste of that on Zero Hedge (and his commenters).
They’ve found their scape goats: If Apple succeeds it’s because of men like Jobs and Cok, and if it fails it’s because of women and Africans.
#24, komarov
An unusual amount of attention falls upon watches because there aren’t a whole lot of other ways in which men get to accessorize themselves, especially if they then go on to dress in typical western formal wear, for example. Its all gone down hill since the Regency. I was at a wedding the other day where the groom was a brit lieutenant in his dress uniform… he looked fabulous and certainly didn’t need a spangly watch to stand out.
@31: A bit early to label the watch a flop, since it hasn’t actually gone on sale yet. It just didn’t thrill Wall Street. Perhaps that’s a good thing.
I doubt Apple would release anything that bred true, it’s not good for business. You’d start with two gorgeous Macbooks, but you’d end up with a litter of quivering Newtons and a wheezing Macintosh Portable.
#32:
Yes, when I first posted I had to resist commenting on how those poor overly rich men can’t wear any of the, hm, conventional jewelry because their overly rich buddies might look down on them. There is eccentric rich and there is weird rich, and only one is perfectly acceptable.
But I’m fine with luxury watches. As for smartwatches, has anyone figured out a reasonable use for them yet? My engineering monthly talks about them fairly regularly but nobody seems to know, as yet, why you would need (or want) a smartwatch. Apparently it’s a more expensive (!!!) step counter which does all the same things regular step counters (or smartphones) can do for joggers and the likes. Apparently it can also talk to your smartphone and tell you when have new messages, which is what your smartphone would tell you anyway. Apparently it also needs to be recharged constantly, just like said smartphone, so by the end of it you have neither phone nor watch. I think I’ll stick to my cheap digital wristwatch and keep my money in a pile*, thank you very much.
*Should have asked for smaller bills.
#35:
I actually own a smartwatch right now, and I consider it to have been a worthwhile purchase. If you’re not the kind of person who has their phone out every moment of every day, then it works as a good way to check “why did my phone just try to alert me about something, and what do I want to do as a result” without actually pulling out and unlocking your phone. (Not to mention that a vibrating alert directly on your wrist is much less obtrusive than whatever notification sound you have set.) As far as the “need to charge” goes, I always took my watch off at night anyway when I wore a normal one, so as long as a full charge lasts the day (which mine does) I can’t get too worked up there.
In some ways, I find a smartwatch is comparable to having a second monitor for your computer. It’s not something that you might immediately grasp as “why is this helpful”, let alone something that’s strictly necessary. But once you’ve had one for a few days, the added convenience becomes pretty clear.
Mind you, there’s no fucking way I’d pay $350 for one. Hell, $250 was higher than I had hoped for, but I liked the aesthetics of that particular model enough that I was willing to pay the extra.
That’s not true: we clung to the one button mouse only because the zero-button trackpad wasn’t available yet.
I was trying to be charitable. :/
I think people are a little off the mark comparing the gold Apple Watch to expensive “heirloom” mechanical ones. They aren’t really going to be a substitute for them. The gold Apple Watch is for people who have lots of money, want the Apple Watch, but don’t want to be seen with the $350 version for fashion/status reasons. If someone wants to spend that much money on a status symbol treadmill, I’m not about to stop them. In fact, it’s a good way to distinguish those who want the device for what it can do for them from those who want the device to be seen with it.
For anything but the base “Sport” model, I would be a little concerned with future obsolescence (and perhaps even with that model), though. Is Apple committing to supporting the connection between this model of the Apple Watch with their phones into the next decade or so (since many people are tied to the cell carrier’s 2yr contract-upgrade cycle), and will the rechargeable battery hold up for that long?
Leo T. #36:
Thanks for sharing. I thought about not having to fish the phone out but that didn’t strike me personally as enough of a reason to invest any money. Fortunately for me I ignore my phone anyway and tend to leave it off – if there’s a call to be made I’m the one making it – so I have to do very little pocket-diving.
—
As for apple and smartwatches in general, I think today’s XKCD may have (once again) hit the nail on the head.
If you’re not the kind of person who has their phone out every moment of every day, then it works as a good way to check “why did my phone just try to alert me about something, and what do I want to do as a result” without actually pulling out and unlocking your phone.
You’re kidding, right? You bought one mobile device that tells you the time, but then you had to buy another device to do the same thing, for when you’re not willing to pull the first one out of your own pocket? Why not just buy a plain cheap ordinary wristwatch?
It’s not something that you might immediately grasp as “why is this helpful”, let alone something that’s strictly necessary. But once you’ve had one for a few days, the added convenience becomes pretty clear.
In other words, you didn’t need it, but you later decided it was necessary after wasting over $200 on it.
So who designed the bio-organic laptop? It looks like a collaboration between William Borroughs and David Lynch.
I wasn’t aware that there was so much overlap between “people who think you’re plebeian scum if your wrist ornament costs less than five figures” and “people who want tech stuff on their wrist”. But if Apple’s market research (and subsequent sales) show there is enough overlap to make the product viable, that says a lot more about how pervasive technology has become than it says about Apple.
That said, although I certainly don’t know much about how you sell to the super-rich, it doesn’t seem as if a public conference like the one Apple did is the right venue for it, especially since they were also announcing products for the hoi polloi in the same conference.
That’s easily explained. Now those loudmouthed plebs know about the ultra-expensive gadget and are sure to point it out if some fat cat shows up in public without one. Surely noone could bear that kind of embarrassment, could they? In ancient Rome they’d be throwing themselves on their swords en masse…
Brilliant marketing, I must say. And as a pleb I can’t loose.
#41: Why not just buy a plain cheap ordinary wristwatch? Because, again, it does more than an ordinary watch. There’s a reason I went with the “second monitor” analogy; having a smartwatch is, at this point, entirely a matter of convenience. I would by no means fault someone for not wanting one or not seeing an immediate use for one (although I probably would fault someone for spending $350 on one; even if you have an iPhone, something like the Pebble costs far less regardless of model), but neither would I want to switch back to an ordinary watch or not have one at all.
Android Wear watches also can be GPS-enabled and support bluetooth headphones. I’ve been eyeing the Sony Smartwatch 3 for a while, but my problem is its storage capacity. You can load music/podcasts, leave your phone in the car, go for a run and get it logged via any number of apps that are already working, and then have it sync when you come back.
You know who else hated one-button mice?
HitlerVox Day.