Get Happy — the 2005 High Tech Holiday Season Will be Amazing!
by Mitch Stone, the Accidental Expert
This is the time of year when the technology industry begins looking forward to the upcoming holiday season, and we consumers begin to look forward to $4 gasoline. No matter — we should always be in good cheer as Christmas grows near.
In any given year, the number of new consumer electronics products cued up for release during the holiday rush can be bewildering. But this year, you’ll have a little help sifting through the usual mass of mass-market confusion. Your humble technology servant has spent literally minutes scouring the Internet for the most interesting new high technology items looming on the immediate horizon.
So here are just a few of the amazing and innovative products you can expect to arrive on the market during the last quarter of 2005.
The CryPod. The user interface on this new digital music player is so excruciating complex, the controls so frustratingly tiny and fragile, that trying to play music on one could make John Wayne weep.
Windows Blister. This latest operating system update from Microsoft will be shipped in a plastic blister-pack so tough that it can’t be opened without completely destroying its contents. This will instantly make Windows Blister the most useful upgrade the company has ever produced.
PieTunes. Everybody wants to get into the online music download act these days, and this innovative new service will soon be offered by Marie Callender’s. Comes in flaky or crumbly, with or without a side of vanilla ice cream.
MacOS XXXX. Addressing customer concerns that the nomenclature they’ve adopted for naming their unrelenting series of operating system updates requires a Ph.D to comprehend, beginning early next year, Apple Computer will name all future releases of the Macintosh operating system after the annual SuperBowl game. Cross-promotions with the National Football League are widely anticipated.
The DrecksBox 360. This new game console is specially optimized to play only the most revoltingly violent video games ever produced. It will ship with a free copy of the eagerly anticipated, ultra-realistic splatterfest “Grand Theft Auto: The End of Civilization.”
But if simulated first-person cinema-quality mayhem in 5.1 Dolby Surround Sound seems too good to be true, keep in mind that this holiday season, this product will complete with another new offering, rumored to be the most awesomely powerful gaming console ever developed, the Sony CrayStation. This bad-boy supercomputer will be installed in a dedicated clean-room in your home by specially-trained technicians flown in from Japan. The required electrical and air conditioning systems won’t be included, but second mortgage financing will be available.
But there’s more. Later this year, chip-maker Advanced Micro Devices is expected to replace its aging Athlon, Sempron and Opteron microprocessors lines with a brand new chip called the Bathyscaphe — a silly word which can actually be found in the dictionary. Not to be outdone, chip-making giant Intel is thought to be considering renaming its venerable Pentium, Celeron and Itanium microprocessors as, respectively, the Astro, Impala and Suburban.
Isn’t that just too exciting? So for just a little while, we can forget about the prospect of four buck gas this coming holiday season, because once again, the high tech consumer electronics industry is riding to our rescue. They have a feeling, and so do I, that a brand new CryPod will be just the ticket.
5 Sept 2005 |
|
