Dec 6, 2008 Dec 8, 2008 Sunday December 7, 2008
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iharmonix debuts with five stereo earphones
Posted by Dennis SellersParamount Wireless, a Los Angeles-based wireless accessory company, has entered into the MP3 audio space by launching a new division called iharmonix. The company, has announced its first product launches with the introduction of its flagship Platinum Series and Style FX Series.
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Macsimum iPhone Video: An interview with Steve Wozniak
Posted by Dave MertenToday's Macsimum iPhone video features a very interesting 2-part 12-minute BBC Click interview with Apple co-founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak. Steve elaborates on the beginning of Apple, his insight into Steve Jobs, his relationship with Jobs today and hacking an iPhone.
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MacUpdate Holiday Bundle offers $450 worth of software for $49.99
MacUpdate recently posted their latest bundle of Mac software. Included among the $450 worth of software in the MacUpdate Holiday Bundle are must-haves like Drive Genius 2, DefaultFolder X 4, LittleSnitch 2 and WhatSize 4. If it included only those four items, it would still be a savings of $126.90...but it also includes 6 other apps. Here's the full list: Drive Genius 2 ($99): Currently the highest-rated disk utility on the market and used by Mac Geniuses at Apple Stores, Drive Genius diagnoses and repairs problems with your hard drive, optimizes your system, and much more. Buyers will receive a link to download a bootable DVD image of the software to burn, which can be used to boot and fix any Mac that can run Mac OS X 10.5, including Apple's newest laptops. DefaultFolder X 4 ($34.95): Fly through Open & Save dialog boxes at lightning speed. VirusBarrier X 10.5 ($69.95): Fast, simple, and non-intrusive anti-virus software for your Mac and iPhone RapidWeaver 4 ($79): Create powerful, professional-looking Web sites quickly and easily. MacGourmet Deluxe ($44.95): Like iTunes for food, track recipes, plan meals, manage wines, and more. LittleSnitch 2 ($29.95): Monitors your network connection to make sure your Mac only sends out what you want it to. KeyCue 4 ($27): Displays full keyboard shortcuts for all your applications; learn them and work faster. MacPilot 3 ($19.95): Access hundreds of hidden features to customize and improve your Mac OS X experience. WhatSize 4 ($12.99): Effortlessly identify files that are hogging disk space and that you don't need anymore.e iVolume 3 ($29.95): Ensures all your iTunes tracks play back at the same level, so you never have to adjust the volume individually. My only reluctance in buying these bundles lately has been that I already have licenses for so many of the applications already. I'm sure you have the same problem if you've bought a few MacUpdate bundles or MacHeist bundles in the past.
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Steve Jobs isn't interested in Netbooks - just ask him
Analyst Ezra Gottheil from Technology Business Research (TBR) needs to find another job. If you can make it through this very long winded article on Apple Insider, what you'll find is that Gottheil is certain that Apple is going to release a $599 netbook sometime in the first half of next year. He bases this on the fact that “It is too much to ask consumers to pay more than twice as much for a PC in these times,” In other words, he's pulling it out of his ass. If he'd been on the last quarter conference call, he would have heard Jobs speak very clearly about not only netbooks, but also about low-end computers. Steve Jobs was very clear. He's not interested. He's not interested in making a low-end Mac. He went so far as to say that there are certain markets that Apple is simply not interested in participating in. He downplayed the netbooks, and commented that they had some ideas but that he needed to see it actually become a viable market first. Jobs even pointed out that the iPhone fulfills many of those netbook needs. The fact that Jobs was even talking about netbooks is a clear indication that there won't be a netbook from Apple anytime soon. We all know the man is notoriously secretive about that kind of thing, and we've seen no indication that his habits have changed. Don't hold your breath for anything resembling the current netbooks to ever come out of Apple. If Jobs and co. did produce anything in this range, it would most likely be modeled more after the 12 inch Powerbook…and I doubt it will ever be anywhere close to $599. $799…maybe…but not $599. Now, granted, I'm pulling that out of my ass too - but at least I'm telling you that upfront - and not telling you to expect to see it early next year. While we're all pulling things out of various places - what do you think? Is a netbook going to happen? If so, what will it be like? If not - why not?
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Does it matter if Obama uses an iPod or Zune?
Sometimes I look at the things that blow up on the Internet and I just hang my head in disbelief. We're currently in one of the worst economic states this country has ever been in. The entire world is looking a recession, and after handing our banks oodles and gobs of cash, our automotive industry is flying down to Washington in private jets to beg for their piece. Our leaders have some very serious stuff to be spending their time on. Yet here is Yahoo, Slashdot, PC World, The Wallstreet Journal, and Wired - all taking about “ZuneGate”. For those of you that are lucky enough to not know what “ZuneGate” is yet, it turns out that a blogger at a Philadelphia newspaper wrote about Obama being in the gym next to him. The “reporter” commented on the fact that he was using a Zune to listen to music while he worked out. This sparked Zune blog posts to announce that Obama was one of them. Apple fans began to flame the stories, and the issue was eventually cleared up by Obama's spokesman who said “Not true, the President-Elect uses and iPod,” Now I have to ask. Does this matter in the slightest? I don't know about you, but I'm just glad to have a President-elect that understands what a computer and digital music ARE…I could care less if he's using a Zune or an iPod. I wouldn't care if he was running Vista, Windows XP, or Windows ME - as long as the guy knew what a computer was, and how it worked. I'm sure some people are just having fun with this - and that's fine. I can't for the life of me, however, understand why we're wasting time at press conferences actually asking the President-elect's spokespeople about this nonsense.
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Cowon's S9 Curve PMP delayed for US? (Updated: official date, price, pics)
We've received no official word either way on this, but all the signs are currently pointing to a delay for the US launch of Cowon's S9 Curve. The undoubtedly sexy PMP is still set to launch in South Korea this month, but unspecified "production problems" are reportedly responsible for pushing the Stateside shipment back. So, when can we Americans expect to have a US version in our palms? We figuring (and hoping) it'll hit sometime around January at the latest -- any longer than that and we might have to cash in these frequent flier miles for a round-trip jaunt to Seoul.Update: Cowon just issued a press release with date, pricing, and more pictures of the UI and hardware. Starting December 16th, the S9 will be available in Korea in 4GB / 8GB / 16GB capacities for 219,000 won ($150), 259,000 won ($178), and 309,000 won ($212), respectively. Still no word on rest of world releases.Gallery: Cowon S9[Via Anything but iPod, thanks Waroxy F.]Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable VideoCowon's S9 Curve PMP delayed for US? (Updated: official date, price, pics) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 07 Dec 2008 23:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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Not My Gorilla
Developer Jamis Buck, on why he’s longer concerned about Windows compatibility for Capistrano, his remote server automation tool: Something has to give. In this case (and among other things), it’s Windows. Microsoft may be an 800 lb. gorilla, but it’s not my gorilla, and it’s not in my room. If you need to appease the gorilla, that is (with all due respect) not my problem. This was in response to message that concluded with, “I am no fan of Microsoft, but, like it or not, they are the 800 lb. gorilla in the room.” Similarly, I no longer concern myself with how Daring Fireball renders in Internet Explorer. It’s easier for me to ignore IE because the DF audience predominantly uses Safari, Firefox, and MobileSafari (roughly 53, 25, and 8 percent, respectively, with IE coming in around 4 percent). I have no idea whether the DF Paraphernalia store is even legible under IE, because I didn’t even bother to check. It almost certainly doesn’t look “right”. I crafted the CSS using Safari, then checked it in Firefox, and I called it done. There are a lot of people who’d be a lot happier if they stopped worrying about other people’s 800 pound gorillas. ★
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Turning the iPod Touch into a phone
The MP3 player can be transformed into a mobile phone with the help of a free app that harnesses a Wi-Fi connection to route calls over the Internet.
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Multitouch Trackpad vs. Touch Screen Computing
I have some friends (mac-using friends) who are gaga over some of the new commercials they've seen of touch screen Windows-capable machines — namely the HP TouchSmart PCs. On one level I understand — that stuff looks cool! But I quickly come back and think, realistically how useful is this? When I pointed this out to my lovely wife, her retort was along the lines of, “Don't you still dream about having that computer from Minority Report?” Touche. But in the real world (as opposed to what Hollywood likes to portray) as computers and monitors exist now, is this really what we want? Appease me while I argue a skosh. (Feel free to get involved in the comments!) I'm one of those, along with many I know, that prefer people to keep their fingers off my screen when pointing to or talking about something on my computer. I hate smears. Multiply this times n when a glossy screen is present — which of course is always now with the new MacBook lineup. (Has anyone else noticed that the glossy coating on the new MacBooks is even more of a magnet for smudges than the old?!) (more…) Concentric Hosted IT Solutions and Web Hosting Click here to save cost on your IT demands
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Microsoft's Office for the Web Will be Ready No Time Soon
It looks like it may take longer than expected for anyone to start trying out the Web versions of Microsoft Office. Wait. Here's another way to say it: It looks like Google (GOOG) and Zoho will have more time to convince Office users to switch to their online suites. Microsoft had originally said it would launch a “technology preview” of Web-based Office apps before the end of this year, with a beta launch in 2009. Now, it appears that the preview of which the company spoke is defined as about 1,000 Microsoft employees. And that testing won't be done until sometime in Q1 2009, according to a CNET report.
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Insanely Great
Looking for improved business models for the personal computer business, Apple CEO Steve Jobs often used to cite automobile makers, though never American car companies. The examples were invariably German. Whether it was the design aesthetic of his Mercedes sedan or Porsche's success at selling high-margin cars as entertainment devices, Jobs could always point to farfegnugen as a way to sell a good car for a great price. So since he thinks about these things anyway, and because the U.S. automobile industry is on the skids and begging for help this week, I find myself wondering what would happen if Steve Jobs were put in charge of any of the Big Three car companies? It wouldn't be boring, that's for sure, and I'm fairly certain Steve could do a better job than the Detroit executives currently in charge. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the computer company was in worse shape than some of these car companies. Apple's share price was in the toilet, it had poorly conceived products it couldn't sell, the company was losing money, market share was dismal, and CEOs from John Sculley on had tried without success to find ANY company that would buy Apple. Steve himself had such low expectations for Apple under Gil Amelio that he sold all his new Apple shares shortly after Apple bought his NeXT Computer. What a difference a decade makes. Today Apple and Jobs are at the top of their game, taking market share from other computer companies while at the same time establishing game-changing new product concepts like the iPod and iPhone. Apple is America's largest music seller (who could have seen that one coming back in '97? Nobody), has no debt, and $22+ billion in the bank. Even at its currently depressed stock price, Apple is worth more than any of the car companies and for good reason: Apple has a future. What did Jobs do to make Apple such a business success and how would he translate these techniques to a car company? It's not really that hard to imagine. Back in 1997 Apple had a huge list of products it made or sold, many of them not for a profit. Here is a partial list of Apple products from 1997 courtesy of my friend Orrin, who brought this idea to my attention: PowerBook Quadra Performa Power Macintosh Workgroup and network servers LaserWriter laser printers StyleWriter inkjet printers Newton PDAs Displays External disk drives Modems Scanners Lots of software And don't forget the Mac clones. Jobs killed the clones, dropped the Newton, and streamlined the Mac product line into what today are four ranges of computers -- personal and professional, desktop and portable. Yes, there are the Mac Mini and the xServe, I know, but nearly all Apple computer sales lie with the MacBooks, MacBook Pros, iMacs and Mac Pros. Apple quit the printer business entirely and, over time, got out of the business of manufacturing its own computers at all. The decisions Steve Jobs made in 1997 were that Apple's core competence was in making computers and its future then lay with graphics and desktop publishing professionals who loved the products. While these conclusions may seem obvious, they weren't reflected in the Apple product line at the time. Steve knew the value he had in his product development team, too, which was a clear difference between he and Sculley, Spindler, and Amelio, all of whom had come in varying degrees under the sway of the diabolical product development chief Jean-Louis Gassee. One advantage of my having written about this industry since dinosaurs roamed the earth is that there are columns about Apple in my archive dating from 1997 that give a sense of what the company, its products and lack of leadership were like at the time. Read them: they are in this week's links. They give a sobering look at how bad things were and show an eery resemblance to the positions of the automakers today. Look at the American car companies with their many brands that often compete with each other within a single company. It's bad enough competing with Chrysler and GM, but why should Ford be competing with itself? There has been some streamlining over the years (goodbye Plymouth and Oldsmobile) but not enough. There are simply too many models chasing too few buyers. So long Mercury. The first lesson Jobs learned was that he couldn't build a successful company selling products at a loss. While we can argue that Apple prices are higher than they might be, nobody can argue with Apple's quality or its success at selling those products. So the first thing Jobs would do as head of a U.S. car company would be to eliminate the lines that are showing -- and have long shown -- little or no profit, which today generally means the biggest and the smallest cars. Goodbye Hummer. Honda is an archetype for this sort of marketing, having a limited line of cars with nothing down at the bottom fighting it out with Kia and Hyundai. A Honda Fit may be inexpensive but it isn't cheap. There is a lot of conventional wisdom at work in the car business and some of it is completely outmoded. Why, for example, is it so important to have a complete line of cars for every customer age and financial circumstance? That made good sense at a time when America was being introduced to car ownership and a brand could grow with its customers as their financial circumstances and taste in cars changed over time. But the car market is beyond mature today and doing things primarily because it made sense to do so in the era of Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan, well that makes no sense at all. The business press loves to differentiate between two types of auto executives -- the financial types typified by GM CEO Rick Wagoner and the "car guys" personified by GM vice chairman Bob Lutz (who also did stints at Chrysler and Ford). When the companies periodically lose their way, it's attributed to too much finance and not enough car. But Steve Jobs is something in-between. No large American company in any industry has tighter financial controls than Apple, yet the strength of Apple is supposed to be its design. All this proves is that the finance-versus-car-guy scenario loved by Fortune and Forbes is simply bogus. It's not that there aren't smart executives at these car companies, but they are shackled with several bad ideas and exist in an unrealistic corporate environment. Their main delusion is the myth of the complete car line. Apple in 1997 had a tremendous advantage in being clearly a minority player. There was no hope that the Mac OS would topple Windows, but that made chipping away at Windows a tactical effort where significant advances could be made by Apple just concentrating on niche markets. The U.S. automobile makers can't (or won't) do that because again they think they have to make every type of car for every type of buyer. Yet each company IS a minority player; they just pretend that this condition is temporary, but it isn't. This corporate delusion of majority status has meant that it simply wasn't possible for any of the car companies to take truly radical actions. They can't take big risks on new technology because the downside is perceived as being too big. Yet the effect of this over time has been to virtually guarantee that downside as the companies die from inaction or, more properly, UNDER action. That's where Steve Jobs' second strength comes into play -- identifying important new technologies. He'd look at the car market and conclude a number of things: 1) it's a no-brainer to embrace dramatic design (no boring cars); 2) performance sells, and; 3) safety and fuel economy are co-equal secondary goals. So Steve's goal for his car company would be to make a limited line of vehicles that were dramatically styled with visibly different technologies from the competitors and were uniformly 20+ percent safer and 20+ percent more fuel-efficient. That's not so hard to do, either, as I showed last week with my DA-2A example. Or look at XP Vehicles, the company that will sell you an inflatable car that arrives at your house in a box. But embracing these ideas requires the companies do something else that Jobs came to embrace with Apple's products - stop building most of their own cars. There are two aspects to this possible outsourcing issue. First is the whole concept of car companies as manufacturing their own products. There is plenty of outsourcing of car components. Most companies don't make their own brakes, for example. Yamaha makes whole engines for Ford. Entire model lines are bought and rebadged from one maker to another. But nobody does it for everything, yet that's what Steve Jobs would do. All the U.S. car companies are closing plants, for example, and all are doing so because of overcapacity. But what would happen if just one of those companies -- say Chrysler -- decided that two years from now it would no longer actually assemble ANY of its own vehicles? Instead they'd put out an RFQ to every company in the world for 300,000 Chrysler Town & Country minivans as an example. Now THAT would be a dramatic move. And a good one, frankly, because with a single pen stroke most of the overcapacity would be removed from the U.S. car market. Chrysler would have to shut down all those plants and lay off all those people, true, but doing it all the way all at once would change the nature of the company's labor agreements such that there wouldn't be a whimper. When you are eliminating 8 percent of capacity the tussle is over WHICH 8 percent. When you are eliminating ALL capacity, there is no tussle. So Chrysler reaches out to contract manufacturers in this scenario and you know those manufacturers would fight for the work and probably give Chrysler a heck of a deal. For current models, for example, Chrysler could probably sell the tooling and maybe even the entire assembly plant for a lot more than they'd get from the real estate alone. But that particular advantage, I'd say, would be unique to the first big player to throw in the production towel. In this scenario, Chrysler becomes a design, marketing, sales, and service organization. What's wrong with that? They can change products more often and more completely because of their dramatically lower investment in production capital. They can pit their various suppliers against each other more effectively than could a surviving car manufacturer. It's what Steve would do. And Steve would also embrace one dramatic new technology, whether it is electric, hydrogen, natural gas, whatever, but he'd do it in a very Steveian fashion, which is to say exactly the way he did the iPod and iTunes. That is, he'd sell you the car and then sell you whatever is required to fill up the car. This has always been a barrier for the car companies because they couldn't imagine themselves in the business of running electric/hydrogen/LPG stations, while Steve would imagine his company MAKING A PROFIT running just those stations. Steve would take an existing operation that already had an ideal geographic distribution like McDonald's restaurants. He buy McDonald's or seduce the company into a deal. Then he'd embrace a propulsion technology like advanced electric capacitors -- batteries that could be recharged in less than a minute -- and put charging stations on the drive-through lanes. By the time the electric models were ready for sale he'd have 12,000 charging stations in place to serve them. Would you like fries with that charge? Is it too late for the Big Three? Ford is the strongest company from what I've seen, but I believe there may be some creative juices in GM, too. Their prototype car the Volt takes hybrid cars to the next level, I just wish they were selling them now because Toyota or Honda will probably beat them to the market with something similar. Another thing Apple does well is product introductions. They very rarely show their hand before they are ready to send you home with one. GM announced the Volt in January of 2007 yet it is still slated for sale by 2011. Stupid.
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2009 Will Be a Painful Year for Mobile Device Vendors
I'm still bemused by the assertions of many people that 2009 will be a banner year for mobile devices. Pointing to the uptake of the Apple (AAPL) iPhone, many observers are imagining a sudden glorious transition of the population to "superphones", especially in the U.S.I've seen breathless commentary about the entry of a new "manufacturer" of Android phones, the Australian company Kogan. "Kogan simply designed a device, had it manufactured in China, and loaded Android onto it". Hmm, a small company importing LCD TVs and other electronics "designed" a device? They did interoperability testing against all the HSPA network hardware variants? They designed the antenna? Given their own price went up by Aus$100 over initial expectations because of currency movements, who'd want to guess their margins a year out?
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Broadband nation
I've been offline in a UK castle with wi-fi only in the basement (but I suppose that's a miracle) and then in a Holiday Inn (what a fall) with gawdawful and gawdawfully expensive so-called broadband so I'll take this opportunity while sitting in the Apple store (bless it) to just join in the chorus of celebration that Barack Obama pledged to fix our gawdawful broadband status in America. Now let's speculate about just how ambitious we can be. At the conference I just attended (a few posts on that later, when I can be online for more than two minutes) there was talk of trying to tax broadband providers here to subsidize (or some would say compensate) content creators. I think that's bassackwards. If we wanted subsidy, there could be none better than assuring that the entire nation is on broadband. Then all consumers, all content, all advertisers could meet there. It would fast-forward the inevitable. It would spark innovation and jobs and trade and education. To hell with public-service broadcasting. How about public-service connectivity?
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Can Apple Beat Sony and Nintendo at Their Own Game?
Did Apple know what the future held when CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone during his Macworld Expo keynote in January 2007? They probably had some sense of it, but they likely had no idea that games would become such a big part of the platform, especially considering the outsider status of gaming on the Mac. The company is clearly ready to take full advantage of the current situation, however, as evidenced by the recent iPod touch ad that focuses solely on games.