Month: September 2014

I’m a huge Apple fan. My wife and I both have an Apple iPhone 5s and both own MacBook Pros as our primary computers. We have 5 Apple TVs connected to the 5 TVs in our home. We have Mac minis in the kitchen and in the home office.

I’ve pretty much purchased just about every iPhone ever sold. I waited in line overnight for the very first iPhone down in Palo Alto.

So, as you can imagine, I was looking forward to this morning’s livecast of Apple’s new announcement.

Like millions of other Americans, however, the livecast took place at 10am on a Tuesday morning when I was at work. This is prime time as far as product announcements go. It doesn’t get any more prime time than Tuesdays at 10am.

I tried to watch the livecast at apple.com this morning from work. Unfortunately for me, however, the Apple livecast was only available on Apple products. That’s right, in order to watch this morning’s Apple livecast you had to stream the video from Safari, an Apple browser. So anyone on a PC could not watch.

Even though I’ve spent thousands of dollars buying Apple products for my home and for myself personally, like millions of other Americans, my work computer is a PC and that effectively locked me out of the Apple livecast. Why Apple can’t stream to Google Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer in 2014 boggles my mind, but for some reason this morning they could not.

This left me having to try and watch the livecast on my iPhone. Here I tried watching for about 30 minutes and then finally just gave up. The first 10 minutes or so it just gave me the weird Flint screen at the top of this post. After that it sort of connected, but it was hard to follow because the livecast was overdubbed with an annoying translator translating everything live into Chinese. I kept trying to relaunch the livecast and it would hang, or wouldn’t work, and after about a half hour I just gave up.

I was watching CNBC and trying to follow the announcement on TV, but even there when they pulled to a clip of Tim Cook talking about the new product it was with the annoying Chinese overdubbed translator on it.

Personally speaking I don’t think I’ll get an Apple Watch or an iPhone 6 — but Apple lost a great opportunity to try to sell me and millions of other people one by botching up their livecast so badly.

As far as the watch goes, I’m just not sure why I’d want one. I asked my 13 year old son what he thought of the Apple watch and he told me he thought it was stupid. Why would you want a watch when it already shows the time on your phone, he asked. I guess I sort of feel the same way. I don’t know what the Apple Watch would do for me that would make me want to have an uncomfortable thing strapped to my wrist.

As far as the iPhone 6 goes, the best I can tell is that it’s bigger and bigger is supposed to be, well, bigger? I don’t need bigger on my phone. The size is fine as it is. There was also something about payments in today’s livecast I think, but I’m not sure why I would want to use my iPhone to pay for things. These days I mostly use credit cards because I try to maximize my points/miles I get on purchases. I suppose it would be cool if my phone stored my reward credit cards, but that’s not really something that would make me buy a new phone.

For future presentations, Apple should consider hiring a more reliable company to do the livecast for them or maybe just stream it to YouTube, Google seems to do better at that sort of thing. They should also be aware that if they are going to announce a new product at 10am on a Tuesday morning, that many of their potential customers will be at work and on PCs and they should consider allowing you to stream the livecast from your PC. It’s really not that difficult to stream video to a PC these days, certainly a technology company with Apple’s mad skillz can figure that out.

More of a technical analysis on why the livecast was so badly botched this morning here. (Thanks Buzz!)

More from the Verge.