Thanks for this conversation kb and WorLord. KB, I think you have a good understanding of the consumer, I really do. It's not an easy distinction to be able to look at a buying block and say, "they are not all me." I've seen CEO's make the mistake of doing otherwise. There is an opportunity cost to complex products, they take time. The payoff may be greater in the end, but there is an investment in learning the product. Most people, myself included, will pay $ to not have to "figure a product out" if it's not in their desired specialty/hobby bucket. If it is music related, Ill read the manuel and figure that sucker out, otherwise I'll pay my $7. Heck, this is the same reason people hire plumbers. I know that if I took the time to learn about plumbing, I could fix the leak I just don't have the time. The best products make things easy and at the same time make you feel like you are using a "cutting edge" product. Roku is a good examples of this. While people want ease of use, nobody wants to feel like they're using the "idiot" version of something. When people stop saying "what's Roku?" it may lose some of it's appeal to this demographic.
It really comes down to how you spend your leisure time. The early adopters of television were those who were interested in spending their leisure time tuning a television so that the rest of the family could watch programming. The early adopters of computers were those who were interested in spending their leisure time coding a program so that they could demonstrate its tricks. That's why the Aibo failed - there just aren't that many nerds walking the earth who would rather program a dog than play fetch with a dog. iPods were not better MP3 players than the rest of the market. They were more expensive, they didn't play a lot of files, they had limited battery life, they had no removable media. But they had a UI that anybody could figure out. Same with iPhones. Same with iPads. i-anything is basically someone else's product stripped down to the bare essentials and made useful for people who hate tech. This is why the original Apple TV was loved by nerds and hated by everyone else - it was a castrated Mac Mini running a slimmed version of OS X. The new Apple TV, on the other hand, is loved by everyone else and hated by nerds - the shit you can't do with that thing is offensive. But you take it out of the box and it works.