Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Things of beauty

Apple are known for making product launches into events - not events in the sense of "hiring the Rolling Stones and flying in journalists by helicopter gunship", but events as in major conference keynotes with Steve Jobs unveiling the new goodies in front of a crowd of the Apple faithful. This month there's a keynote coming up at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference which suggests a new product or two. In addition to this, Apple are holding a press event next Wednesday which is widely rumoured to be the European launch of the iTunes music store. With all this going on, it's unsurprising that the product launch that slipped out yesterday sort of caught a lot of people on the hop.

The product which slipped under the rumour mill's radar to emerge out of the blue yesterday was Airport Express. It's a wireless base station in the handy format of what Americans call a wall wart - a small plug-in mains adaptor, 94x75mm. That in itself is cool. It's even got a USB port for sharing a printer, just like the full-size Airport base station. But even more than that, which is why it's a Thing of Beauty -

it has an audio output that speaks standard analogue audio and optical S/PDIF.

What this means is that you can plug it into your stereo or your AV amplifier and play music through it from iTunes. No need to run cables - just plug it into the wall, plug it into the stereo's line in sockets and away you go. No need to listen to your music through the cruddy speakers on your Powerbook, no need to sit in front of your desktop machine to listen to music. The form factor makes the whole thing sufficiently portable that you can just throw it in your laptop bag and take it with you when you go away.

It's a beautiful piece of technology and a fine example of the kind of slightly out-of-the-box thinking which keeps Apple so far ahead of the rest of the world as far as building cool stuff is concerned. Add to that the fact that it's pretty good value at 99 quid in the UK ($99 in the States, of course) and they'll probably sell a bazillion. I need one, right? No, I need several. I'll just go and look at the Apple Store UK, no, really, I'm just looking there, I swear.

Posted by mpk at June 8, 2004 4:20 PM | TrackBack