Transparent iPhone and MacBook Picture Effect

While trolling through Flickr, I found this great picture. In it, the photographer created an effect that made his iPhone and MacBook screens look transparent. Pretty cool.

While trolling through Flickr, I found this great picture. In it, the photographer created an effect that made his iPhone and MacBook screens look transparent. Pretty cool.

  • Microsoft's Mojave Attempts to Wet Vista's Desert

    Daniel Eran Dilger Nearly two years after Windows Vista was finally released, Microsoft has remained unable to shake off its reputation as being slow, incompatible with existing hardware and software, and generally a poor and overpriced product that nobody wants. Microsoft is now trying to reverse Vista's bad reputation by insisting that the software's problems are not technical but rather just the fault of ignorant customers duped in part by Apple's “Get a Mac” campaign. What's Vista's real problems, and will Microsoft's “Mojave Experiment” help solve them? Blame Apple! Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has joined Windows Enthusiast pundits in theorizing that Vista's image problems are primarily the result of Apple's advertisements that regularly poke fun at the problems in Vista. The company has now taken aim at shooting at the messenger with a $300 million ad campaign. In July, Brad Brooks, Microsoft's VP of Windows Vista consumer marketing, addressed the company's business partners at its Worldwide Partner Conference, saying, “We've got a pretty noisy competitor out there. You know it. I know it. It's caused some impact. We're going to start countering it. They tell us it's the iWay or the highway. We think that's a sad message.” Another sad message Brooks had to deliver was that Vista's problems aren't really the fault of Apple. “We broke a lot of things,” Brooks admitted. “We know that, and we know it caused you a lot of pain. It got customers thinking, hey, is Windows Vista a generation we want to get invested in?” Vista: Pay it Forward! Brooks also noted that “Windows Vista is an investment in the long term. When you make the investment into Windows Vista, it's going to pay it forward into the operating system we call Windows 7.” Pay it forward? Is Windows 7 going to be a free upgrade to Windows Vista users, in the same way Apple is expected to offer the next Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard release to existing users of 10.5 Leopard? That's highly unlikely, as Microsoft can't sustain its egregious profits collected through the Windows monopoly by giving away updates for free. Windows Vista raised the price of Windows, putting a new definition on the phrase “pay it forward.” Myths of Snow Leopard 7: Free?! Microsoft Admits Windows Vista Mistakes, Criticizes Apple Ads - InformationWeek Reality Impairment at Microsoft Talking out one's ass appears to be a job requirement for all Microsoft executives, starting at the top. A serious case of reality impairment has resulted in the paradox of the company both admitting that Vista is flawed and “broke a lot of things,” while at the same time maintaining that Vista's reputation is entirely the fault of stupid customers and a comically unflattering portrayal by its competitor. In the “Mojave Experiment,” Microsoft plans to dispel the notion that Windows Vista is problematic and incompatible by publishing a series of videotaped interviews with users who arrived with negative impressions of Vista and left excited about the new operating system. This was achieved by presenting the users with a demonstration of “Mojave,” a new operating system that Microsoft later revealed to be Vista, much to the surprise of the interviewed users who'd heard so many bad things about it. However, the Mojave Experiment is so full of false information and saccharine gloss that it couldn't possibly appeal to anyone smart enough to turn on a PC. Even setting aside the fact that the ad experiment basically seeks to blame users for being dumb, the attempt by Microsoft to paint over Vista's problems is transparent and flawed, for a number of reasons. What's wrong with Mojave. Microsoft can't seem to decide whether it wants to admit that Vista has problems or not, and its waffling back and forth just makes the company look increasingly disingenuous. Is Vista a poorly launched, flawed product that the company is working to fix as quickly as possible, or is it awesome and wildly successful and just the victim of bad press? Microsoft tries to tell both stories at once, which is purely dishonest. In contrast, Apple said from the start last year that its Apple TV product was a “hobby” attempting to break into a difficult market. Critics lambasted it for not immediately taking over the market like the iPod had or iPhone later did. Apple's more recent problems in launching MobileMe were quickly noted by the company along with the intent to address complaints about it rapidly. Microsoft isn't alone in being able to stumble, but its complete lack of candor makes it hard to understand if the company realizes that it even has problems to solve. With Vista, Microsoft has issued a flurry of giddy press releases claiming widespread adoption based on the number of licenses sold and naming it “the fastest selling operating system in Microsoft history,” ignoring the fact that Windows sales are increasing simply because they are tied to PC sales. Microsoft has no competition in the PC operating system market due to its monopoly position, so it could release Windows Wet Toast and still sell it faster than XP and ME and 98 Special Edition and every other version of Windows in the past that was tied to an increasingly younger and smaller hardware market. Vista Sales to Non-Users. Many of Vista's “sales” were free vouchers distributed with PCs sold in the holiday season prior to its launch. Even more than a year and a half later, PC makers continue to put Windows XP on their systems, even those sold with a Vista license, while corporate users almost always remove the default Vista to install an earlier version of Windows. There's also a busy third party industry developing around removing Vista for consumers. In late July APCMag cited Jane Bradburn, a manager for commercial notebook sales at HP, as saying, “From the 30th of June, we have no longer been able to ship a PC with a XP license. However, what we have been able to do with Microsoft is ship PCs with a Vista Business licence but with XP pre-loaded. That is still the majority of business computers we are selling today.” The arrangement is supposed to end by January 2009, but HP is trying to extend the deadline because customers simply don't want Vista installed. EWeek also noted that between April 2007 and May 2008, its survey of business users indicated that Vista climbed from 2% to 5%, but that Windows XP jumped from 74% to 83%, three times the adoption of Vista. That growth came from migration from older versions of Windows. Even in its wildest projections, EWeek says Vista will only reach 28% adoption in businesses by the end of 2010. CNET reported that a Jully 2008 survey by systems management appliance company KASE found that 60% of companies surveyed have no plans to deploy Windows Vista, a ten percent increase in disinterest from late 2007. A full 42% were actively exploring Vista alternatives, and 11% had already made the switch to Mac OS X or Linux. Microsoft is simply lying about the level of Vista excitement, and it's gotten too obvious for the company to continue to do so. XP still killing Vista in sales volume: HP 60 percent skipping Vista, so Ballmer looks to Apple | The Open Road The Truth Is… oh Look a Distraction! At the same time, Microsoft notes on its Vista website “we know a few of you were disappointed by your early encounter. Printers didn't work. Games felt sluggish. You told us—loudly at times—that the latest Windows wasn't always living up to your high expectations for a Microsoft product.” That's some brutal honesty for a company with a knack for spinning wild fantasies about fictitious product enthusiasm for a product never actually put to use in many cases. At the same time however, in trying to refute away Vista's real problems, Microsoft uses a variety of tactics that just return to blind fantasyland. Microsoft is a Marketing Company, not a Tech Company. The company plays its Mojave Experiment hand on a new website, incidentally designed using Adobe Flash rather than the company's own Silverlight. Despite the site's oddly designed, usability-impared interface, it's still possible to pull out lots of details from the experiment that say as much about Microsoft's crafty, misleading marketing as they do about its technical problems, underling the simple fact that Microsoft is first and foremost a marketing company that flogs third rate technology products. Mojave took 140 people and asked them to score Windows Vista. The average response was 4.4. After demonstrating Vista SP2 under the name “Mojave,” respondents ranked Vista at 8.5, a stunning improvement. But what were they ranking? Microsoft notes that “many said they would have rated it higher, but wanted more time to use it themselves.” That sounds good at first blush, but it really indicates that the responses were biased by hyped up enthusiasm rather than facts, and that participants realized it, reserving their final judgement until they could actually see more. The “Mojave Experiment” What does Mojave Prove? Mojave tries to represent that Vista's bad reputation is the fault of ignorant consumers who have heard bad things that aren't true about Vista, and have made up their mind without getting the facts. At the same time however, Microsoft also publicly admits that Vista “broke a lot of things” and that specifically, “Printers didn't work. Games felt sluggish.” Did Mojave clear up mistaken notions for participants, or did it just erect smoke and mirrors in a carefully controlled demonstration that skirted around Vista's real problems, including those Microsoft admits? That's a question that answers itself. Mojave didn't send uses home with Vista in a Mojave package and then ask them how well it worked with their existing peripherals and games, or how fast it was in comparison to their existing PC software. This is Not the Droid You're Running Vista On. Instead, Microsoft sat them down in front of a HP Pavillion DV 2000 with 2GB of RAM. That's what HP called its “entertainment powerhouse” laptop, although HP only shipped it with 1GB RAM. Microsoft maxed out the RAM for the purposes of the test, making the laptop a bit more expensive than its usual street price of around $1050. According to Windows enthusiast Joe Wilcox, PC laptops actually cost $700, “half as much” as Apple's laptops. At least that's the Average Selling Price for consumer retail PC laptops according to NPD's Stephen Baker, compared to Apple's $1500 ASP. Wilcox insisted that his spin on NPD's figures couldn't possibly be biased because he wrote his article on a MacBook Air running Leopard. However, his $2,700 laptop did help drive up Apple's stellar ASP for its laptops well above the entry price for Mac Books, discounting his theory that revolved around the assumption that every Mac buyer pays the average price of all the laptops Apple sells. Wilcox and Microsoft are both disingenuously dancing on both ends of the truth. Many consumers are actually buying cheap laptops at Target that can't run Vista ideally, while Microsoft demonstrates its Vista on a considerably better equipped system in the Mojave Experiment to suggest that Vista doesn't have the performance problems that users have heard about from the majority of their peers who bought cheap PCs and are seeing Vista run particularly sluggishly on them. Should You Pay Twice as Much for a Mac? I Did! You Get What You Pay For. The fact that Apple sells more high end laptops to pro users at retail, and that it does not sell anything in the range of the cheap junk being hawked at big box retailers like Wilcox' Target both result in Mac laptops fetching a higher ASP. That fact also means that Mac buyers will be happier with their purchase and have a more favorable impression of Mac OS X because they're running it on a better system. That's all obvious stuff. However, selling people cheap laptops that don't work well, and then demonstrating a fake “new operating system” that appears to work well when running on a faster machine full of RAM is simply a dishonest bait and switch scam. Wilcox does nearly admit that PC makers are already stretching their credibility as they attempt to sell cheap boxes based on price alone, citing Baker as saying, “We aren't seeing any particularly substantive moves down in price on the Windows side, either in desktops or notebooks.” PCs can't get cheaper because they're already unprofitable and consumers are already disgusted with their performance when running the increased overhead of Vista. Wilcox also sets up a tilted comparison between a Dell PC desktop with integrated graphics and an iMac with dedicated graphics and claims a price advantage for Dell, although noting that, while “Dell offers more for less than the iMac,” “that 'more' also means Windows Vista, which won't satisfy some shoppers.” Why Aren't Shoppers Satisfied with Vista? Like Microsoft, Wilcox and his Windows Enthusiast pundit friends can't seem to decide if Vista has any real problems or if it's all just an unfair taint suggested by Apple's Get a Mac ads. However, while Apple has taken shots at Vista's incompatibility with printers and other hardware and its scarce updates that have been few and far between over the last year and a half of its being on the market, Apple also notes in its Get a Mac ads that Macs can run Vista, and can run it faster than PCs. So Apple isn't inventing and publishing false reports on Vista, it's merely advertising its Mac hardware as superior to PCs. The Vista flaws Apple's ads have referenced are flaws Microsoft itself has admitted to its partners, so the Get a Mac umbrage frequently voiced by Windows Enthusiasts is both hypocritical and ridiculous. However, in the Mojave Experiment, Microsoft downplayed those well-known faults by only carefully demonstrating certain features on a high end machine, and without actually exposing Mojave/Vista users to 'a lot of things Vista broke,' 'printers that didn't work', or 'games that felt sluggish.' It Can't Even Print. In response to complaints that Vista doesn't work well with existing PC hardware, Microsoft's Mojave website says that “the Windows Vista Compatibility Center lists compatibility status for over 9,000 products (5,500 devices and 3,500 software programs).” It even notes 2,000 printers, 200 scanners, and 500 cameras specifically. That sounds good until you realize that Apple ships support for over 3,100 printers in Mac OS X Leopard, a product that is targeted primarily toward education and consumers and which is not expected by users to run on any old hardware that might be in use by PC users. Vista is supposed to run on 95% of the world's PCs, and yet it doesn't even match the printer drivers that ship with Leopard, a number which does not include all of the third party drivers available for the Mac. Oh, but there's more. Not only did Microsoft dance around the truth to feed its Mojave Experiment participants a carefully controlled stream of garbage, but it also inadvertently revealed more serious problems related to Vista, which I'll consider in the following article. Did you like this article? Let me know. Comment here, in the Forum, or email me with your ideas. Like reading RoughlyDrafted? 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  • Review - Mac OSX 10.5 - Leopard

    Apple's latest OS update is here. It's name is Leopard - but you probably already know that. The latest version of OSX features a number of upgrades and enhancements - the question is, are those updates and enhancements worth your $129. Hmm…let's take a look and see. Installation First things first, you have to install this puppy - so, how complicated is it? It really couldn't be simpler. You insert the install disk, click on the icon, and it goes to town. It restarts the computer, asks you what language you speak, finds your hard drive, and the update begins. On my Macbook Pro the upgrade took about 40 minutes (I skipped the disk check). On my 1st generation Mac Mini the upgrade took between and hour and an hour and a half (I skipped the disk check on this one too). There wasn't much pain involved in either upgrade process. Score: 5 out of 5 Installation of software doesn't get any easier than this. How does it run on a 2.16 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro with 2 Gigs of Ram? Pretty darn good. Everything feels snappy and opens quickly. It doesn't feel significantly faster, but thankfully it doesn't feel any slower. Score: 4 out of 5 How does it run on a 1.25 Ghz Power PC G4 with 512 Mbs of Ram? Now, these stats - while not QUITE the bottom of the barrel for Leopard minimum system requirements - are pretty close to the slowest system you can run it on…and I have to say, it runs pretty well here too. Obviously everything isn't what you would call “snappy”, but Cover Flow works well in the finder, even playing video previews, and applications open just as well as they did in Tiger on the machine. Although, I would still suggest to people that are on machines this old that it might be time to upgrade the hardware before spending the cash on Leopard. Score: 3 out of 5 Key Features The Desktop I have read lots of grumbles about the new Dock…but I don't agree with those grumbles. I like the new Dock. I love the 3D effect, and I even like the little cross walk looking separator. What I don't like, however, is the transparent menu bar, and I really, REALLY, wish I could turn that off and make it solid. The transparency ads nothing to it for me, and is actually a little distracting. I'm sure I'll get used to it - but I don't like it. Score: 3 out of 5 Finder The new Finder isn't perfect, but it's close. I love the iTunes like interface, and I have found Cover Flow to be extremely useful when searching for images. Also networking has been really simplified for Leopard, and I love the fact that my other Macs are just sitting right there in the Finder. The searches are nice, and immediate access to spotlight and Time Machine are great for finding things that you've lost, but there is one thing that REALLY wanted in the Finder that I didn't get…TABS. I hate having multiple Finder windows open, and while I feel this will be minimized by the new look and feel of Finder, I really wish their were tabs that would allow me multiple windows in one space. Score: 4 out of 5 Quick Look Quick Look is a fantastic time saver. It does exactly what it says it does. It allows you a quick look at just about anything you want to see. Being able to play video without having to launch an application is great. So is looking through PDF files. If I need a small piece of information from a document, I don't have to waste time opening it up. This is one of those “little” things that, after you have it, you can't live without it. I expect it to be in every operating system from now on. Scrore: 5 out of 5 Time Machine How the heck did backing up files become fun? I'll be one of the first to admit that Apple isn't being “revolutionary” by adding a back up utility to Leopard. It's been done before and there are dozens of third party applications that will do this as well. What Apple has done, however, is make it fun and super easy. If you have an external drive - even if half of it is full of all your “legal” video content you've been downloading off the web, you can simply select it, and Time Machine will go to work backing up your stuff. You can tell it to skip certain things, so your wife won't find that stuff you're hiding from her, and still never have to worry about losing an important file ever again. The interface is completely over the top, but in a good way. Score: 5 out of 5 iChat/Photobooth I mention Photobooth in the title as well because you can do all of the effects and background trickery that's in iChat 4.0 in Photobooth as well. In fact, I might even start messing around with this and video podcasting. It's fun. Screen sharing, iChat Theater and the new background effects all work really well. I'm not surprised that screen sharing and iChat Theater work as well as they do - but I am surprised that the background effects work. Now, you really do need to be sitting in front of a blank wall or screen, but it's a very cool live effect. Tabbed chat is now here, but I can't find a way to customize the color of the bubbles of people I'm chatting with - and that could be a problem. I don't want to get confused as to who I'm talking to. (If anyone knows a way to do this, leave it in the comments below, and I'll update this). iChat is filled with fun features - but most of it, has been available from other means for a long time. It is nice to see Apple catch up with some of the other 3rd party IM clients out there. Score: 3 out of 5 Spaces I don't like Spaces. They're just not for me. I've tried to get used to them, and use them for organizing my workflow (having all the podcasting related apps in one Space, and internet apps in another Space for example)…but I find them to be more trouble than their worth. I think the concept was executed well, but I just don't have a use for it. Score: 3 out of 5 Stacks As much as I don't care for Spaces, i DO care for Stacks. I find Stacks to be very helpful, and a feature that I'm going to be using constantly. Its another minor enhancement, that is really going to be a time saver. I'm a much bigger fan of the grid layout than the fanning, but both are very helpful. Score: 4 out of 5 I have had some minor problems with Leopard. For example, I cut out several web widgets to make Dashboard useful for me, and they worked great, until I left Dashboard, then returned to it. Now they're just big white squares, and I can't seem to get them to work. No operating system is going to be perfect right out of the gate, but I think Apple has done a great job with Leopard. We'll continue to talk about it here at Apple Gazette extensively over the next several weeks (and really, until 10.6 comes out). So if you're new here, you might want to grab the RSS Feed and stick around. All in all, I'm very happy with Leopard. It's not a revolutionary update. Most of the new features are excellent, though, and I truly think it's worth your $129. Final Leopard Score: 4 out of 5

  • ★ Yet Another in the Ongoing Series Wherein I Examine a Piece of Supposedly Serious Apple Analysis From a Major Media Outlet and Dissect Its Inaccuracies, Fabrications, and Exaggerations Point-by-Point, Despite the Fact That No Matter How Egregious the Inaccuracies / Fabrications / Exaggerations, Such Pieces Inevitably Lead to Accusations That I’m Some Sort of Knee-Jerk Shill Who Rails Against Anything ‘Anti-Apple’ Simply for the Sake of Defending Apple, and if I Love Apple So Much Why Don’t I Just Marry Them?

    From Adam L. Penenberg’s December cover story for Fast Company, “All Eyes on Apple: Will the gray light of January cool the world’s hottest company?”: Yet this is also a dangerous moment for Apple. In a way the company has never seen, the barbarians are massing at the gates. “Never” is a long time ago, but I’m sure that’s exactly the case and isn’t in the least bit an exaggeration just to frame the entire piece in epic terms. From hardware to software to services, major competitors with serious R&D and marketing budgets are laying siege to the House of Jobs. Calling Apple the “House of Jobs”, or some such, is like using verbs other than “said” when writing dialog. Just use “said”, and just call Apple “Apple”. A good rule of thumb, by the way, is that the more a writer attributes the actions of Apple, an enormous corporation with thousands of talented employees, to Steve Jobs, who is just one man and neither an engineer nor a designer, the more likely the writer is an idiot, a hack, or both. As Apple moves into new markets, it has made powerful new enemies, some working in concert. Nokia, for example, is banding with telecom companies to offer its own touch-screen hardware in an effort to sway subscribers from the iPhone and Apple’s exclusive partner, AT&T. (a) AT&T is only Apple’s iPhone partner in the U.S.; and (b) Nokia has been “banding with telecom companies” forever, because, uh, Nokia’s core business is “banding with telecom companies to sell new phones”, right? MP3 players from the likes of iRiver, Microsoft, SanDisk, and Toshiba are getting slicker all the time, targeting the iPod at a fraction of the cost. iRiver?; Microsoft’s Zune players costs exactly the same as corresponding iPods; SanDisk’s second-place success is not new and doesn’t seem to be hurting the iPod at all, but rather seems to be coming at the expense of all the various “other” player manufacturers; and, as for Toshiba, their top-selling MP3 player clocks in at #97 — ninety-fucking-seven — on Amazon’s current bestseller list. (Even Sony has better-selling players than Toshiba.) Empirical evidence indicates that Apple’s iPod franchise is doing better than ever. iPod sales growth can’t continue unabated — eventually, at this rate, they’ll run out of people who don’t already have one. That seems to me the biggest threat to the iPod — or at least to the iPod’s effect on Apple’s stock value — on the horizon: that Apple will saturate the entire potential market for handheld media players and growth will slow, even if profits remain strong. That’s a problem Apple is willing to accept, I’d say. It’s weeks before Christmas, and all through the house, there’s an iPhone, a touch screen, and no need for a mouse. But Jobs, the “brilliant,” “visionary” “genius” with a knack for creating “insanely great” consumer products, may well be wondering whether next year will be different. Merry Christmas, Steve. Enjoy it while it lasts. Those unattributed quotes lead me to suspect Penenberg is an “untalented” “hack” and that Fast Company’s “copy editing” amounts to little more than right-clicking the green squiggly grammar-checker underlines in Microsoft Word. Seriously, what’s up with the quotes? But none of that will stop a growing number of adversaries from doing all they can to pare Apple down. Nor does it dim­inish the fact that at $185 a share, its stock is far more vulnerable to a stall or even a fall than it was when it was $50 cheaper. That Apple’s stock price goes through seemingly irrational swings, both up and down, and is outside the control of the company’s executives, and is just how the market works. It’s also a far cry from this article’s premise, which seems to be that Apple’s products are set to suffer in 2008. It’s entirely possible that 2008 could be a better year for Apple’s sales and profits than 2007 and but that its stock price could fall; say, if the growth isn’t as fantastic as some investors anticipated, or if the entire economy goes into recession and investors panic. Jobs declined to speak with us for this story, but on the eve of the iPhone’s debut, he deployed a simple metaphor to chart Apple’s future: “We’ve got two strong legs on our chair today,” he told USA Today. “We have the Mac business, which is a $10 billion business, and music — our iPod and iTunes business — which is $10 billion. We hope the iPhone is the third leg on our chair, and maybe one day, Apple TV will be the fourth leg.” In essence, Jobs was describing a hermetically sealed system, the central premise of Apple’s business model: If a customer buys one Apple device, she’ll buy two, three, even four more — at a premium price — rather than dilute the experience with other brands. This isn’t what Jobs described at all. It doesn’t follow from the plain meaning of the words attributed to Jobs in the quote, and doesn’t make any economic sense. The entire key to the iPod’s success is that Apple has sold them by the boatload to Windows users who don’t own any other Apple products. And, for those customers who do purchase multiple Apple products — say, an iPhone, an Apple TV, and a Mac — it’s probably more because they work well together than “brand dilution”. In an age increasingly defined by interoperability and technical collaboration, Jobs still refuses to license Apple’s operating system. Because there are so many companies making so much money “licensing their operating system”, other than Microsoft. Worked out great for Apple the last time they tried it a decade ago, and it’s worked out great for Palm now, right? (Note also that all these decisions are, again, solely attributed to Jobs’s personal whim, rather than to Apple as a company.) He won’t allow music and videos downloaded from iTunes to be played on other MP3 players. Except for all those iTunes Plus tracks that have no DRM, and which Jobs has stated explicitly, in a widely-publicized open letter, he’d like to see the entire iTunes Store switch to, if the music labels would allow it. He won’t permit music downloaded from competing stores to play on the iPod. Except for all the music from any store that sells DRM-free music, like Amazon’s or eMusic’s. Otherwise what’s being argued here is that Apple should support Microsoft’s DRM platform, formerly known as PlaysForSure, recently renamed to “Certified for Windows Vista”, which Microsoft itself doesn’t support in its own Zune players. There’s a lot of stupid packed into the above 13-word sentence. And in enforcing his exclusive deal with AT&T for the iPhone, he went so far as to disable or “brick” the device of anyone who dared “jailbreak” it for use with another carrier, or who downloaded third-party applications for features Apple hadn’t built in. (a) Again with the “Jobs did it”; (b) only iPhones that were SIM-unlocked wound up bricked by the 1.1.1 update, not iPhones that were “jailbroken” to run third-party apps; and (c) there’s no proof that Apple deliberately bricked unlocked iPhones. Apple has thus far ridden this exclusionary strategy to riches, power, and glory. But what does Steve Jobs know that Albert Einstein didn’t? Einstein posited that a closed system would become stagnant over time. Well, if Einstein predicted Apple’s business is doomed, it must be so, because we can all agree Einstein was one smart dude. (Perhaps Nostradamus foresaw this as well?) As McCourt, the Morgan Keegan analyst, points out, “Each SanDisk generation of MP3 players is getting closer to iPods; the handset manufacturers are arguably making more impressive music-enabled handsets than the iPhone; and try out a new HP laptop with imbedded Altec Lansing speakers — it’s half the price of a MacBook, with a far better audio experience.” Wow, better speakers in an HP notebook? No wonder MacBook sales are tanking. Sell your Apple shares now. Samsung already sells a touch-screen phone. So does Motorola. Chevy already sells a sedan with a V8 engine. So does Ford. Sprint has a touch-screen phone that runs “thousands” of third-party applications And they’re all great. And the king of search [Google] has banded together with Apple foes such as Dell, HP, Microsoft, and Samsung to form the White Space Coalition to push the Federal Communications Commission to open up part of the broadcast spectrum. If successful, Americans would be able to use any Wi-Fi-enabled device to access the Web anytime, anywhere, and at zippy speeds — a direct threat to AT&T and Apple, which have a five-year exclusive contract. Because Apple doesn’t sell any other portable devices than the iPhone. There’s nothing like, say, an iPod that’s just like the iPhone but without the phone, and which would be a perfectly positioned product for some sort of ubiquitous wireless networking that comes from a provider other than the existing phone carriers. Apple is at a moment of choice: If it can stay hot and produce breakout couture hardware indefinitely, it can hold onto its closed model, elite pricing, and huge margins. In many ways, the world would be a prettier place if it did. But in an age of convergence and simplification, customers are ever more insistent that computers, phones, TV, and music systems work together. So (a) customers are “ever more insistent that computers, phones, TV, and music systems work together”, and (b) Apple’s entire product strategy in a nutshell is to produce computers, phones, TV, and music players that work really well together, and the conclusion Penenberg draws from this is that Apple is in trouble. Jiminy. Jobs may have to accept that Apple’s next wave of growth — or energy, as Einstein might have put it — depends on syncing up his products and platforms with those of his competitors. Sure would be swell if iTunes ran on Windows, and if iPods and iPhones could work with PCs, and if Macs could dual-boot into other PC operating systems now that they’re using Intel processors. Again, though, perhaps I’m overlooking something, given that Penenberg’s argument is backed up by a reference to Einstein. Yet there are risks, too, in tearing down this wall. If the company’s success has flowed from the trendy, gleaming exclusivity of its machines, then diluting that quality could erode the very foundation of the franchise. Unless, instead, Apple’s success has flowed from the fact that its products are simply better designed, easier to understand, and provide better experiences — i.e. that Apple products are popular because they’re good, rather than popular because they’re “trendy” — in which case the only serious problem the company faces is that it needs to keep making new products that people want to buy, and their success isn’t really precarious at all. Or, as Albert Einstein actually did put it, “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”

  • First Week With The 160 GB iPod Classic

    Here’s an unformatted collection of thoughts and experiences since picking up a 160 GB iPod Classic, the last one in stock at the Apple Store in Alpharetta GA, last weekend. This blog is going to be from the point-of-view from someone who’s jumping from a 2nd gen (click wheel) iPod to the 6th gen “classic” model. So some of this is new to me and won’t be new to those of you with more modern iPods. Though I’m not completely oblivious to iPod evolution: I have been borrowing a 2nd gen nano from my wife while my old one is in the shop (no, it’s not back and not refunded after more than two months; yes I have initiated a chargeback). I’ll Take the 160 Gig Classic, If You Have Them in Silver, Please Over the course of August, I set about re-ripping my entire CD collection, pictured below. I’d previously ripped probably about 200 CD’s at various bitrates, and with the advent of iTunes Plus re-setting my feelings about appropriate bitrates, plus a 300 GB second drive in the G5 still only half full, I decided to move the collection up to 192 kbps AAC for rock, 256 for jazz, classical, soundtracks and everything else. Rather than pick and choose what to rip, or try to figure out exactly which discs I’d already done, I figured it would be faster to just get everything. At the end of this process, I had a library that was about 60 GB. So when Steve announced the new iPods, I was kind of stumped. To their credit, Apple has rolled out an iPod product line that’s very clear in the appeal of each unit: ModelConcept ShuffleTiny, cheap, giftable NanoSmall, cheap, video, giftable ClassicEnormous storage TouchNovel, new functionality, widescreen video I’d been pining for an iPhone-like iPod, but the iPod Touch would only be able to hold a quarter of my music, and wouldn’t have much room for video. So given this chart, and with the size of my library fresh in my mind, the sensible choice for my needs was the Classic. Yeah, the widescreen would be great for video, but I just didn’t know how much video-watching I would really need (besides, if I’m traveling, I probably have my PowerBook and can watch DVD’s on that). Of course, some people are asking why there wasn’t an iPod Touch offered with an HDD. I suspect that would be too much a change of the form factor of the Touch, making it un-Steve-ishly bulky. So, given the choice between compromising the Touch and having more models out there than Apple would usually prefer, they chose the latter. But I wonder how long the Classic will really live on? 160 GB is crazy huge… maybe when Apple can get 32 GB of flash memory at a reasonable price, we’ll see the end of the HDD-based iPod. Initial Sync Copying 60 GB of music over USB 2.0 is no small task. I initially was just going to have iTunes sync my library to the pod, but then thought better of that and went back to manual mode. I selected all my tracks and dragged them over: I let that go for about two hours. When it was done, iTunes got slow and balky, and wouldn’t let me copy video to the iPod. Eventually, it just crashed. So, I ejected the iPod and found that rather than having 10,000 songs in my pocket, I had 0. Grrr. At this point, since I had little or no usable data on there other than my podcasts, I did a “restore”, and then started copying songs in smaller chunks, about a thousand at a time. Much better. Notes and Nonsense So, anyways, I finally had all my tunes, plus a few ripped DVD’s and a TV show I bought from iTunes. So how well does it actually work? Here are a few impressions: Notice how the screenshots show the menu set against part of an album cover? The cover art is randomly selected from your library, and moves with a sort of “Ken Burns effect”, changing every 8 seconds or so. Cover Flow is stupid. No, it’s inconsistent. iTunes knows to group together artists from a compliation like a soundtrack, either by use of the “compilation” flag, or by assigning an “album artist” (even if it’s just “various artists”). The iPod, on the other hand, repeats a cover over and over again, once for each artist on the album. Maybe iTunes is right and the iPod is wrong, maybe vice versa, but they really ought to both work the same way. Syncs take a shockingly long time. Shocking because it’s not clear that iTunes is really doing anything — before you get to the file-copying, you’ll spend as much as 30 seconds enjoying the Spinning Beachball of Doom. Ejecting the iPod Classic takes about 60 seconds, which seems ridiculously long. Memo to self: only plug it in to sync and charge, because waiting for the eject is damned annoying. Since we’re talking about the old-style iPod screen, and not the widescreen of the Touch, 4:3 video like TV makes a lot more sense than widescreen movies. To illustrate, the TV show Rumbling Hearts versus a DVD rip of the widescreen movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension: The cable connection is inconsistent: sometimes neither the Finder nor iTunes notices when I’ve plugged in the iPod. In a weird case earlier today, I plugged in the iPod and went on with some other business, not noticing that it hadn’t mounted. Later, an iCal alarm woke up the iPod and made it beep, and with that, it mounted in the Finder and appeared in iTunes. Weird. I forgot to take a picture of this, but kana characters look beautiful in the new GUI. If you’re into J-pop or J-rock or other content where the song titles are in Japanese or Chinese characters, you’ll find it’s crisp and clear to read on the screen. Hey, have you been using the enhanced podcast format (either with apps like Garage Band, or the Chapter Tool)? Well, you can stop now. The iPod Classic doesn’t show the images at the chapter stops. Come to think of it, it looks like the Chapter Tool has disappeared from Apple’s website too? Oh, and you know what? I’m thinking 160 GB might end up being more than I really need:

  • 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.

  • Macs helping behind the scenes at the DNC

    Filed under: Odds and ends, Macbook ProDoesn't matter if you're Obamapublican or a McCainocrat. One thing all Americans can agree on is that Macs rule when it comes to live media presentation. The Democratic national convention here in Denver is no exception. TUAW reader-on-the-spot YodaMac sent in these pictures live from the Pepsi Center. Gallery: DNC Macs They show this beautifully designed video backdrop being used at the convention, and better yet, the man-behind-the-curtain. YodaMac writes: "Here are a couple of pics I snapped on my iPhone at the Pepsi Center in Denver during the DNC. Just thought it was interesting that those giant screens being used seemed to be run by Macs! (see 2nd picture- behind the scenes) I don't know about "ALL" the screens, but those fellas were definitely changing the names that appeared on the big screens for different speakers as they took the podium." Cool stuff. And another vote for the Mac.Read|Permalink|Email this|Comments

  • Will Google's Android Play DOS to Apple's iPhone?

    Daniel Eran Dilger Today's broad array of smartphone operating system contenders are offering lots of potential answers to a problem that only requires one. It appears the market has two options ahead: either pool generic hardware makers behind a single operating system and deliver a smartphone marketplace that resembles the Windows PC market, or watch them fall to a dominant leader and have a smartphone market that resembles Apple's iPod ecosystem. This decision isn't going to be made by a class of intellectual elite, or by government mandate. it's going to be made by the market itself. Here are the factors that will influence the outcome, either marginalizing Apple's iPhone into a niche as the company has twice experienced previously at the hands of DOS in 1981 and Windows in 1991, or positioning it as the dominant leader as Apple has achieved for itself with the iPod since 2001. The third segment in this series looks at Google's Android and the Open Handset Alliance as a possible “DOS-attack” against Apple's iPhone. Subsequent segments will look at Nokia's newly opened Symbian and other mobile contenders challenging the iPhone. Will the iPhone Meet its Match from a Modern Day DOS? Will Windows Mobile Play DOS to Apple’s iPhone? Will Google's Android Play DOS to Apple's iPhone? Will Symbian Play DOS to Apple's iPhone? Google Acquires Android. In 2005, Google purchased a startup named Android, which had been in business for nearly two years. The secretive startup was known only to be working on software for mobile phones. It was being run by a who's who of mobile industry veterans, including Andy Rubin, the founder of Danger. Rubin had earlier worked at WebTV along with Chris White and Andy McFadden, both of whom had also joined Android. Richard Miner of Orange and Nick Sears of Tmobile also brought their mobile provider experience to Android. At the time of the acquisition, Google didn't announce any plans for Android and instead only told BusinessWeek, “We acquired Android because of the talented engineers and great technology. We're thrilled to have them here.” It appeared that Google was only going to be expanding its search services for mobile phone users, along the lines of the Google SMS answer system it had recently released. Google Buys Android for Its Mobile Arsenal - BusinessWeek Windows XP Media Center Edition vs Apple TV: The Fall of WebTV The GPhone Myth. As reports began to leak out about talks between Google and hardware makers throughout 2007, rumors began to fly about “the GPhone,” a competitive offering that was supposed to take on the iPhone. Some phone enthusiasts hoped Google would jump in to rescue the struggling OpenMoko project and turn it into a viable project that could attack Apple's new smartphone. In October 2007, I printed the Great Google GPhone Myth, taking apart the idea that Google would be directly competing against the iPhone, and describing that Google was really working on a free alternative to Windows Mobile as a conduit for getting its search and related services on a broader variety of mobiles. Google's services were already on the iPhone. In November, Google played its hand: it had organized a consortium of companies called the Open Handset Alliance to develop open standards for mobiles. The first product from the group would be Android, a mobile operating system built on the Linux kernel. Google wasn't getting into the phone handset business at all; it was only making sure that its mobile search products would not risk being marginalized by the threat of Windows Mobile on phones in the same way Microsoft had been working to leverage its PC monopoly to push Google search off the Windows desktop. The Great Google gPhone Myth Introducing Android: Leader of Linux. Two weeks later, Google released an early version of the Android software. On top of a Linux kernel, Android uses a specialized version of a Java Virtual Machine that takes Java language code and turns it into what Google calls “Dalvik bytecode” rather than Java bytecode as a standard JVM would. This allows Google to leverage existing and familiar Java language tools without paying Sun for a Java license. Like Mac OS X and its fraternal iPhone OS, Android includes a variety of open source libraries, including SQLite and WebKit. On top of that, Google developed a series of frameworks that handle the tasks Cocoa Touch does on the iPhone. Android also bundles a set of applications. While Apple adapted its existing Mac OS X to work in a mobile environment to create the iPhone OS, Android is more like a customized Java environment running on a specialized mobile Linux variant: elements of maturity in an otherwise experimental new platform. What is Android? -Google Android was by no means the first mobile OS using Linux. Both Palm and its amputated ACCESS software arm have Linux-based mobile platforms. Nokia has Maemo, which it uses in its Internet Tablets, and also recently acquired Trolltech and its Qtopia mobile Linux platform. Motorola has teamed up with MontaVista Software to use its Mobilinux. Intel created the Moblin project for mobile Linux, aimed at Internet devices. Google's OHA also isn't the first consortium to attempt to standardize a mobile Linux platform. The OSDL started the Mobile Linux Initiative to define requirements for hardware; the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) then worked to define various phone profiles aimed at the Japanese market; the Linux Phone Standard (LiPS) Forum tried to do the same thing in Europe. In 2007, LiPS was folded into the new LiMo Foundation, along with the OSDL. All of these committees have had some overlap and some complementary features. Several of Google's OHA partners are also LiMo members, including NTT DoCoMo, Wind River, and Motorola. So why didn't Google just join LiMo? “LiMo, very candidly, wasn't moving fast enough,” OHA board member John Bruggeman told CNET. Google hopes to herd the Linux cats into a progressive, structured platform that can battle against Symbian and Windows Mobile to succeed as the new DOS of smartphones. Will Google fracture or unify mobile Linux? The Presumption of the Necessity of DOS. The previous segment examining Windows Mobile pointed out how the PC industry as a whole assumed that Microsoft's desktop Windows monopoly would easily take over dominance in the MP3 player market, pushing Apple into a niche position. This was expected because DOS had pushed Apple's early computers into a reduced role starting in 1981, and Microsoft had repeated this again in 1991 when the DOS world migrated to Windows, effectively pruning Apple's Macintosh into a Bonsai platform. The inability of one company to dominate any product category has been frequently repeated by PC industry pundits as a given, despite the fact that history is full of examples of this happening. Sony dominated personal music players for two decades under the Walkman brand even while equally large competitors tried to push it from this position; Nintendo has similarly owned handheld gaming despite ill-fated efforts to grab a piece of its pie by products running a generic platform such as Microsoft's WinCE (Gizmondo), Linux (GP32), and Symbian (N-Gage). In fact, outside of the Windows/DOS PC, there are actually few examples of a generic platform taking over an industry. Nearly every other consumer-facing product uses proprietary platforms: car makers, stereo equipment, appliances and so on typically all use designs custom to their maker. The paradox of the Windows PC market has been that Microsoft's broadly licensed software supposedly saves hardware makers from investing in software development while ensuring compatibility, when in reality it adds significant costs to PC makers while limiting their ability to differentiate themselves. That explains why PC makers have been perpetually merging together and going out of business while Microosft has rolled in money over the last two decades. Parallel efforts to copy Microsoft in broadly licensing an operating system have regularly failed: IBM's OS/2, Apple's Mac OS, Palm's PDA OS, even Microsoft's own efforts to duplicate Windows dominance in other markets, from copy machines to PDAs to smartphones to SPOT watches to music players. The closest copy may be Symbian, but its customers are partners, not simply consumers of a generic third party's operating system as Windows licensees are. That indicates it is not necessary to duplicate the dominance exercised by Microsoft over the PC industry in the smartphone market. Google's Android and Symbian exist more as technology sharing pacts among manufacturers, but both aspire to take Microsoft's DOS role among smartphones. However, the idea that Apple's iPhone must be dethroned by a modern-day DOS, whether Windows Mobile, Android, or Symbian, is not just debatable, but does not sync with the reality of more recent events. Apple's recent history of the iPod further refutes the idea that a software analog to Microsoft is needed. The iPod Emergence: Apple & Pixo vs IBM & Microsoft. Apple's iPod in 2001 made no effort to clone the DOS business model; it actually did the opposite. When Apple entered the market, there were a number of existing MP3 devices using custom software, hardware designs, and DRM codecs. The iPod used off the shelf components to deliver a custom MP3 player using third party software, but Apple also added its own technologies: easy to use sync with iTunes, a fast Firewire interface that made uploading music far faster than the prevailing USB 1.0, and an attractive industrial design. With the iPod, Apple played the role of IBM in 1981, using Pixo's embedded operating system to enter the market quickly, just as IBM had used DOS. The difference was that Apple didn't direct any market attention toward Pixo and added a lot of value on top of that core embedded OS. A modern day Compaq couldn't simply clone the hardware and license Pixo to run on it in order to compete against the iPod, because the iPod was much more than just generic hardware running Pixo software. As the iPod developed, Pixo's role diminished and was eventually displaced. Just like IBM, Apple jumped into a new market just as demand was beginning to explode. Apple made MP3 players far more attractive to a general audience by delivering greater playback capacity than most entry level devices offered, along with an ease of use that encouraged buyers to jump in at the higher end of the market. That left Apple with not only the lion's share of the market, but also by far the most profitable segments of the market. Two decades prior, IBM badly fumbled its play with the early PC and ended up irrelevant in the PC world by the late 80s, sideswiped by Microsoft's DOS and the cloners who were licensing it in parallel, notably Compaq and later HP and Dell. Steve Jobs had witnessed that happen, and was determined to not let it happen again to Apple. Rather than being manipulated by a software middleware vendor as IBM had, Apple worked to incrementally develop the iPod market itself. After consuming the hard drive-based player market, Apple took on the Flash RAM-based market with a tiny hard drive system used in the iPod Mini, and followed up with Flash-based devices of its own in the Nano and Shuffle. This allowed Apple to progressively serve an increasingly wider market, incrementally growing upon an established foundation. With the iPod, Apple became, in effect, an IBM with its own internal Microsoft. Microsoft's Failure Despite Features. In contrast, Microsoft entered the music player market by promoting music player hardware reference designs around WinCE. However, it was unable to ship a finished design until the iPod had become firmly established around 2005. Later branded as PlaysForSure, the devices were sold by various hardware makers and all purported to support the same DRM and the same music subscription services while also offering a broader array of hardware that presented video before the iPod did, supported wireless before the iPod, and so on. Despite these unique features, all of those PFS designs still failed. Microsoft blamed the failure of PFS upon its music store and hardware partners and decided to take Apple on itself in 2006. It relaunched a Toshiba PFS player as its own device under the Zune brand, adding WiFi music sharing features and a larger display than the current Pods had. It failed dramatically as well. Did Microsoft's attempts to float a new DOS among music players fail because of Apple's success, or due to Microsoft's own problems? The failure of the Zune, which followed the iPod model rather than the DOS model, seems to suggest that Microsoft itself was to blame. Consider too that Microsoft's Windows Mobile phones, which use the same underlying operating system as its failed PlaysForSure music players and the Zune, had similarly flopped even before Apple could release a charismatic phone equivalent to the iPod. Of course, when the iPhone was released, it hit Windows Mobile hardest. The iPhone made Windows Mobile Smartphones look ridiculous and underpowered, and made Windows Mobile Pocket PC phones look clumsy and awkward, despite the fact that they both supported a variety of features the iPhone didn't, including the ability to edit documents, capture video, send MMS, and so on. Simply adding on features did not enable Microsoft to compete against Apple. The only conclusion that can be drawn from all this is that competing against Apple requires more than just having a feature arsenal. Microsoft's failures in themselves do not necessarily mean that Google's Android will fail in its attempts to float its own smartphone platform. Why Microsoft’s Zune is Still Failing Microsoft’s Zune, Vista, and Windows Mobile 7 Strategy vs the iPhone Will Google Succeed where Microsoft Failed? Microsoft's demonstrated inability to successfully enter consumer markets for MP3 players and smartphones has given observers little faith that the company will somehow turn things around in late 2009 when its next generation of devices are expected to be released. However, prior to that the first fruits of Google's efforts to build its own smartphone operating environment will arrive. Will Google's Android take over Microsoft's crown as the “DOS vendor” among smartphones? Supporters of Google's Android project point to some parallels between Android for smartphones and Windows on the PC: Android will allow hardware makers to differentiate in ways that can offer features Apple can't (or doesn't want to); it should allow software developers to offer features Apple does not allow on the iPhone; it embraces open, hobbyist experimentation in ways that Apple currently isn't; and it opens the potential for content providers that Apple is not interested in allowing. Openness is Android's key competitive feature. Will all this openness allow Google to unseat the iPhone to become the primary platform developers want to participate in, and subsequently soak up the market for third party hardware makers that Windows Mobile serves? While Google currently has no market share due to the fact that no Android phones have yet shipped, it does have broad vocal support from a variety of the same kinds of hardware manufacturers that supported DOS and Windows and helped to make those platforms successful in the desktop PC market. HTC and Android. The first Android phone is expected to be the HTC Dream; Taiwan's HTC (High Tech Computer) also manufactures Palm's Treo Pro phone as well as many of the most visible Windows Mobile devices. In addition to models produced under its own name, HTC also sells Windows Mobile devices under the Dopod brand, as well as no-name phones branded by providers, such as AT&T, Orange, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Vodafone, and others. HTC will also be building the XPERIA X1 Windows Mobile phone for Sony Ericsson. HTC was quick to throw its support behind Android despite its long term alliance with Windows Mobile. Why would it so enthusiastically support an unproven platform from a company that has no experience in consumer hardware platforms? One can only assume that HTC is not happy with the current state of Windows Mobile, and desperately wants another “DOS” to succeed where Microsoft's has so spectacularly failed. As an Original Design Manufacturer for Palm, HTC watched as Palm adopted Windows Mobile in place of the Palm OS and subsequently fell even deeper into crisis. Palm's only successful phone since has been its Palm OS-based Centro. HTC undoubtedly sees Android as its ticket to becoming the next Dell, but without a similar dependance upon Microsoft. Android for mobile phones is essentially playing the role of Linux for PCs, except that it has the backing of a major company behind it. Can Android Take on the iPhone with Openness as its Feature? As great as this sounds, it's important to consider that Linux on the desktop has made no significant progress in eating into Windows dominance after a decade of trying. Being open, free, flexible, and decentralized hasn't been enough of an advantage to get consumers to migrate from Windows to Linux in any fraction of significance. Similarly, in the music business, Linux-based MP3 players have had no impact on the iPod, despite offering more features, flexibility, support for additional codecs, and so on. In the mobile phone area, Linux enjoys a sizable portion of the smartphone market, but this is almost entirely due to phones sold by Motorola in China, where the advantages of Linux' openness are void. Motorola's Linux phones offer nothing to users in terms of openness or flexibility, and are really no different in terms of features than other appliance 'feature phones' based upon closed operating systems. And again, a key problem with assaulting Apple in a feature war is that neither the iPod nor the iPhone became popular by being “highly featured.” They both delivered perhaps 80% of the functionality found in all other devices in the market. Rather than trying to match every feature and cater to every niche as Microsoft had with Windows Mobile, Apple's devices did a few things very well at launch, and incrementally developed into full featured devices that still lack some of the more unique features of their competitors. Further, in terms of openness, the demographic that embraces Linux' characteristic freedoms is not the same as the demographic that buys smartphones in quantity and then pays for data service. This is a critical fact to consider because a big part of the iPhone's success stems from the fact that it is being pushed by mobile providers who want to capture the cream of the market willing to pay a premium for data services. The Frankenphone. Combining the fractured aesthetic of HTC's Windows Mobile phone hardware with Android's software, based upon Linux' perpetually unfinished DIY openness and Google's Java-like development platform, will not result in a product similar to the iPhone. Instead, it will look a lot like phones that have already failed in the market. Apple's advantage comes from slick hardware designs with a close attention to detail, combined with software that purposely does less so that it can do what it does better. Even Apple's own conservative attempts to broaden its software capabilities with iPhone 2.0 have resulted in instability problems that can be blamed upon both Apple's early releases of its phone operating system and software from inexperienced third party developers new to the platform. Would the current frustrations with iPhone 2.0 be somehow mitigated by additional openness that also embraced all kinds of variables from different hardware makers with less quality control than Apple, a loose committee of additional cooks working to serve up operating system features targeted at every possible conceived need, and a wider third party software group with fewer constraints on illegal behaviors? The Failure of Open. While it is politically unpopular to criticize the well meaning efforts of open source contributors, the failure of Linux on the desktop, the failure of the vaporware Indrema game console, and the failure of the OpenMoko project to deliver a workable phone within a year of its deadline all underline the serious problems open development faces in the world of consumer oriented devices. Open has simply failed to deliver on its promises in the world of consumer hardware. OpenMoko was supposed to release its first mobile phone to consumers for $250 several months in advance of the iPhone. When the iPhone shipped, the group then announced new plans to get its phone out by the end of 2007. Instead, this spring the group announced new plans to move to an entirely different development platform, and ship its phone mid year for $400 with limited functionality and incomplete software outside of basic GSM phone features. Linux's notable successes, from Motorola's Linux phones to the Tivo DVR to Linksys Routers, have often come without any associated openness or freedom, and were instead delivered simply to provide their manufacturer with a free kernel to build upon. This indicates that while Linux may find its way into an increasing number of smartphones, it will likely not be accompanied by the glorious freedom of an open development environment Google has said it would offer with Android. Apple iPhone vs the FIC Neo1973 OpenMoko Linux Smartphone Can Google Succeed Where Open Has Previously Failed? Despite “openness” being Android's strongest competitive feature compared to Apple's iPhone, Google recently revealed that its wide-open development model is intentionally gravitating towards a closed association of top tier partners due to practical considerations. In July, Google accidentally sent out a notice that revealed that it had been seeding private SDK updates to only a subset of its contributors, angering those who believed that Android would be as open as Linux on the desktop or the OpenMoko project. Further, Google has restricted initial development to higher level APIs just as Apple did, further indicating that Google itself realizes that being wildly open to impress a minority of hobbyists will not result in the commercial success of its new platform. That serves to neuter Android's primary advantage over the iPhone. Without delivering on the premise of being wide open, Android is really just a less mature set of Java libraries used to create a specialized binary that runs on a Linux foundation. Unlike Apple's iPhone, Android phones won't have a slick user interface developed by professional artists, nor the iPhone's legacy of mature software development frameworks crafted over the last thirty years, nor the iPhone's tightly integrated hardware with award winning industrial design, nor its marketing power tied into the iPod and Apple's retail stores. Android won't be an open iPhone, it will only be a Windows Mobile phone with a better kernel that runs specialized Java software instead of Win32 or .NET code. Don't expect consumers to be impressed by that. The Biggest Missing Feature. There is one remaining factor that strangles to death any last remaining hope that Android might assassinate the iPhone and assume the crown of the “DOS of smartphones.” That is: Android delivers zero price advantage to consumers. In 1981 and 1991, consumers who wanted Apple computers faced the sticker shock of a somewhat arrogant price tag. Apple sold its computers, as it still does, at the higher end of the market, but there was simply far more range in prices available. In 1981, that meant the Apple II was $2600 and the new Apple III was $3500, even before you added a monitor. On the low end, Commodore sold its far less powerful, but “still a computer” Vic-20 for $300, while IBM entered the market with the IBM PC at $3000. Over the next few years, Apple focused on delivering additional sophistication at the same price, releasing the $10,000 Lisa and then the $2,500 Macintosh. IBM continued selling PCs in the same $3,000 to $10,000 range, but other DOS PC vendors began selling machines at prices that ranged as low as $1500. That left Apple with a roughly $1000 price premium over low end PCs. The products weren't really comparable, but consumers only saw the huge price difference. In 1991, Apple was still selling moderate to high-end Macintoshes for $3,800 to $10,000; the crippled Mac LC was $2500, and obsolete-at-birth Mac Classic ranged from $999 to $1500. Windows allowed PC makers to ship a functional $1500 PC and claim a rough approximation to Apple's $2500 entry level system, maintaining that apparent $1000 price premium. Today, pundits are lucky to find a Dell or HP system that is even a couple hundred dollars less than a comparable Mac. However, in the smartphone business, the iPhone 3G is now the same price, if not less, than generic competing phones on the market. Even more significant is the fact that the price of the phone hardware is nearly nothing compared to the cost of the service plan. This fact simply eases any price premium that could cause buyers to flock to a smartphone running a generic operating system over buying the iPhone 3G, regardless of whether it runs Windows Mobile or Android. 1990-1995: Planting Software Seeds Android Partners Have Already Failed. That same pricing principle similarly prevented buyers from considering many of the alternatives to the iPod. While Apple's original iPod models were more expensive than many of the first MP3 players on the market, they were price competitive with models offering similar features. By 2004, it was Apple who was undercutting MP3 competitors on price. Microsoft offered zero price advantage when it began selling the Zune, a major factor in its failure, but Microsoft simply couldn't out-price the iPod; it was already losing money offering the Zune at the same price as the iPod. Apple now has tremendous market power in buying RAM and other components that will prevent any competitors from being able to offer a huge discount over the iPhone's $199 price tag. Even if competitors were to give their phones away, they would only offer a $200 discount to users who would then still need to pay the same mobile fees to use the phone. Android's other partners, including Samsung and LG, have already failed to capture any significant market share in the music player market. Are they going to maintain their position as smartphone makers now that they face similar competition from Apple, its iPod ecosystem, its iTunes Music and Apps Store, Apple's retail store experience, and other factors that are pushing the iPhone? If they can, it is not obvious how partnering with Android will help. Other Problems for Android. Android was announced in early November 2007 and was followed with an early preview SDK within a couple weeks, a month ahead of Apple's initial announcement of the iPhone 2.0 SDK. However, between March and July 2008, Apple delivered nine progressive releases of its SDK, opened its App Store, and sold 60 million apps, raising $30 million to support iPhone software development in just the first month. It has since released three more SDK updates to developers related to iPhone 2.1, which is expected next month. Android just published its first open SDK beta update earlier this week, warning developers that “applications developed with it may not quite be compatible with devices running the final Android 1.0.” Additionally, Android still has no phones available. By the time the HTC Dream is expected to launch, Apple will have an installed base of around ten million iPhone (and iPod touch) users supporting software development through iTunes. The business model for selling Android apps is no better than that for selling jailbreak iPhone apps: there is no iTunes Apps Store to promote them, so users will have to track them down on their own. Android developers also have no real freedom that jailbreak iPhone developers lack. The only difference is that there are ten million iPhones to sell jailbreak apps to, and currently zero Android phones. If selling a jailbreak iPhone app sounds like more trouble than its worth, imagine trying to sell Android apps to a non-existant audience. Now add the official iPhone App Store into the mix, where publicity, promotion and profits are booming. What platform is going to have the most applications? How many users will flock to a smartphone platform with no apps? The wisdom of releasing a desirable phone and achieving a significant installed base before releasing an SDK makes a lot more sense in retrospect. Additionally, while Apple has a decade of experience in shipping regular updates to Mac OS X and its Xcode developer tools, Google has only shipped a random assortment of web-oriented SDKs (a number of which have been abandoned) as a tangent to its core business of selling advertisements. When the Android SDK 1.0 is finished later this year, developers will not only lack an installed base to sell their apps to, but will also have no high profile market for selling their apps in, and subsequently no financial incentive to develop applications that add value to the Android platform, just like Linux on the PC desktop. Around the same time, possibly within the next month, Apple will be shipping its second major OS release: iPhone 2.1. Apple will also be upgrading its entire user base to the new software so that developers will have a cohesive platform to target. This mirrors the efforts Apple has taken to upgrade its Mac OS X users to the same reference release. Mobile developers will be seeing money pouring in via iTunes while crickets chirp in the Android section of various mobile online stores. Apple’s iPhone Vs. Other Mobile Hardware Makers: 5 Revenue Engines Same Same, But Different: DOS Model Problems. Android developers will also have a series of other problems to manage. Like Windows Mobile, Android is intended to support everything, from BlackBerry-style keypad phones with a small touchscreen to the simple Windows Mobile Smartphone form factor lacking a touch screen to iPhone-like full size touch screens. Also like Windows Mobile, Android phone makers will have the option to leave off Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS location services, graphics hardware acceleration, and so on. Each Android phone will also have unique camera hardware, support for different video and audio codecs, and varied support for other differentiating proprietary services demanded by mobile operators. This will force developers to to make complex decisions regarding the lowest common denominator they choose to support. So while the iPhone will have a cohesive feature set, a managed software environment, and a functional market, Android will be a loose federation of hardware makers selling the same random features found on Windows Mobile today, with a chaotic development environment that lacks any central market for users or developers. And it will be run as an experiment by a company with no experience in consumer hardware or platform development. The Missing Tap. One specific example of the “DOS model problem” is that Android currently does not support multitouch. It's not touched on in the API, and Google quietly tap dances around its omission. Why no multitouch? Because multitouch screens are expensive, and most OHA hardware members are more interested in making a profit in a competitive phone market rather than impressing consumers as Apple did with the iPhone. Most existing smartphones, even those trying to directly rival the iPhone, use a stylus driven, pressure sensitive tap screen or a simpler, cheaper touch technology that lacks support for sensing multitouch. The iPhone's screen can actually sense up to five fingers at once, but the primary feature multitouch offers on the iPhone is the two fingered tapping and the pinching effects everyone associates with it. Android could certainly support multitouch if there were a demand for it, but that's the point: Google knows that its hardware partners are cheap and unlikely to put out hardware that actually competes with the iPhone. Instead of using expensive technologies that deliver clever yet largely invisible functionality, OHA members, just like PC makers, are far more likely to add flashy, impractical gadgety fluff that's cheap to tack on, such as slide out keyboards, neon tubes, and scratch and sniff stickers. That's how you impress gullible nerds on the cheap. Google itself is blowing smoke and erecting mirrors to distract from the reality that it being a “DOS vendor” means supporting bargain basement hardware from penny pinching duplicators. Android has been demonstrating some “wow” features such as a Street Maps app that pans around based on an internal compass in the demonstration phone. The problem is that that kind of thing only makes for a fun demo. Nobody needs to twirl around their phone in the air to see a view of the other side of the street, but everyone who has used an iPhone will wonder why they can't pinch to zoom out. Even worse, most Android phones aren't going to have a compass built into them, so Google is demonstrating features most Android users won't be able to use. That Sounds Like Microsoft… Google's design decisions are beginning to look a lot like Windows Vista; rather than actually working to make laptops boot faster, Microsoft came up with the idea of adding a small screen to the back of Vista laptops so users could check their email without having to wake the system up. But this was a stupid idea for a number of reasons, the most obvious being that most users just want a laptop that boots up quickly. Few laptops got the mini screen, but every user who tries Vista on their laptop will wonder why it doesn't boot up as fast as Mac OS X Leopard. In the same way, Google is advertising features for Android that most users won't ever see in their actual phones while ignoring things people will expect based on their exposure to the iPhone. Android is simply selecting the wrong features. Android will offer the advantages of supporting MMS, recording video, and the list of other features Windows Mobile already supplies. Those features didn't stop Apple from firing past Microsoft in the smartphone arena however, just as the Zune's highly touted WiFi and screen didn't phase iPod buyers. Incidentally, just months after the Zune, Apple had not only demonstrated a larger display but a higher definition multitouch screen, and not only WiFi, but functional WiFi that could be used to browse the web or check email. This suggests that Apple, with its faster release schedule, won't stay behind any of the leading features potentially offered by Android for very long. Android partners, however, will find it as difficult to catch up with Apple's unique features, just as Microsoft has been stymied to keep up with Mac OS X, the iPod, and the iPhone. The underlying reason: both Google and Microosft are tasked with maintaing support for a huge variety of hardware options demanded by all their partners. Apple has the unique circumstances to do only what it needs to do itself. Android in Windows Mobile's Shoes. Like Windows Mobile, Android faces a difficult market. In the US, it competes against the popular BlackBerry in corporate markets and the iPhone among consumers. Worldwide, it competes against entrenched market leader Nokia. The difference is that Google, unlike Microsoft, has no in. Windows Mobile was adopted by Windows-bound IT shops despite its weaknesses. Nobody has any preexisting reason to try an Android phone apart from hobbyists and open software enthusiasts, a demographic that has done little to move Linux on the PC desktop. Google also lacks Microsoft's installed base; it's starting from zero. The smartphone industry initially doubted Apple's chances of making much progress with the iPhone, despite the company having the Mac platform, the iPod, retail stores, platform development experience, marketing savvy, industrial design prowess, and so on. Google doesn't have any of those things. Mobile Providers vs Android. Apple also started with an exclusive partnership with AT&T, a three legged race that demanded effort from both. Google is hoping that hardware makers handle the hardware details and that mobile providers will be excited to sell its Android phones. While hardware makers such as HTC clearly appreciate having found a free alternative to Windows Mobile, it's not obvious why providers would be excited about Android, as it promises an openness that most mobile providers strongly oppose. AT&T took a big risk in getting behind the iPhone, as the phone encouraged users to use email rather than fee-based SMS and MMS, it supported WiFi for data access, and it bypassed AT&T's MEdia Net services to plug into iTunes instead. Verizon refused to parter with Apple and grant it those kinds of concessions. Is AT&T going to take a similar risk to partner with a phone that is not exclusive to it, and is Verizon now going to open its arms to support phones that do not exclusively support BREW, VCast and its other proprietary services? While Android may well eat into Microsoft's Windows Mobile business by stealing away its hardware makers, it seems unlikely that Android will ever serve as more than free alternative to Windows Mobile in a market where Windows Mobile is increasingly irrelevant. Android may have the dubious distinction of swallowing Microsoft's mobile business the same way Microsoft ate up the Palm OS, but even if it accomplishes that goal, Google will likely find itself unsustainably hungry immediately afterward. It will also find itself swimming in a shark tank of hungry rivals, including Nokia's Symbian, RIM's BlackBerry, and Apple's iPhone. Symbian is the final generic platform vying for the opportunity to play DOS in the smartphone market. The next article will examine Nokia's chances in its bid to match Microsoft's PC dominance in the mobile market while setting out in a new venture to copy Android's open software model. Did you like this article? Let me know. Comment here, in the Forum, or email me with your ideas. Like reading RoughlyDrafted? Share articles with your friends, link from your blog, and subscribe to my podcast (oh wait, I have to fix that first). It's also cool to submit my articles to Digg, Reddit, or Slashdot where more people will see them. Consider making a small donation supporting this site. Thanks!

  • The Big Picture

    Up or down? That's what this week's Macworld show came down to for most news organizations. Would the new Apple products make the company's shares go up or down? They went down. Macworld was a bust, we were told repeatedly, as if it really mattered. I don't own Apple stock so I couldn't care less whether it goes up or down, nor could most customers. Apple was supposed to introduce another iPod or iPhone, or iSomething that would sell four million or 10 million copies in the next 200 days, driving share prices higher. But it didn't happen. Apple introduced some cool stuff, but nothing that would sell four million units this year, hence the letdown. Hogwash. A bunch of day traders that used to making a quick 10 percent on their money during Macworld week didn't make that 10 percent this year, so they were disappointed. A bunch of reporters eager to write about those day traders making their 10 percent were disappointed, too. Meanwhile, the rest of us who don't care about day traders were left without much perspective on what any of these announcements actually mean. So I'll do the heavy lifting here and gratefully get back to something non-Apple next week. First let's look at the MacBook Air, which is a cool product with a bad name, though I guess it worked well for Michael Jordan, so what the heck. It is very doubtful that Apple will sell a million Airs in the next year. It is doubtful Apple will sell even half a million Airs and Steve Jobs knows this. What's important here is not the subnotebook computer but the bits of it that will likely make their way into much more interesting Apple products to come. Take that specially packaged Intel CPU, how did that come about? Steve Jobs didn't beat the heck out of Intel CEO Paul Otellini to get a little CPU that would go into fewer than half a million boxes. Steve did what he always does. He beat the heck out of Paul Otellini with the promise that this little CPU -- for which we can expect Apple will hold some exclusive for the next six months -- will end up in millions and millions of Apple products, nearly all of them costing a lot less than a MacBook Air. Apple is very important to Intel. Though nobody says it out loud, Apple is the last of the major computer companies that uses 100 percent Intel processors. And Apple's ability to do more with less has to be a continual inspiration to its competitors. As Apple slides further and further into the consumer electronics and networking markets, Intel will be right there, too. I still expect we'll see an Apple tablet this year, for example, and it will use this same Intel CPU. How about that new trackpad with the multi-touch interface? Could that be the first look at that mouse replacement I predicted would be coming from Apple this year? Maybe. You can be sure we'll see a lot more of that baby. What about the Air's lack of an optical drive? It's hard to find a place for an optical drive in such a thin computer, but isn't Steve Jobs the guy who when he returned to Apple railed against notebooks without removable media, like the PowerBook 100 and 2400 and the various PowerBook Duos? Why did Steve change his mind now? Because Steve wants to replace optical drives of any sort with bits provided over the network, preferably from iTunes. That's also why we didn't see an Apple Blu-ray announcement this week and -- if Jobs has his way -- we'll never see one. Let's turn now to the second-generation Apple TV and the question I seem to be the only one asking: why did they drop the price to $229? Had they dropped the price to $99 I'd say, "Okay, they've decided to lose money on this thing to grow the rental market." But why $229? Did some focus group tell Apple there was price resistance to the Apple TV above $230? It's a set-top box! People don't want to pay anything for a set-top box and if they do pay something they sure don't want to pay $299 OR $229. The entire Apple TV category is a minefield for Steve Jobs. It's a tiny Macintosh, remember, though with its innate Macness carefully hidden. Steve COULD HAVE blown the doors off Macworld if he had simply allowed the Apple TV to BE a Mac, albeit limited to HDMI displays. If you could buy a Mac that attaches to your HDTV for web surfing as well as all the other Apple TV functions, even at the original $299 price, it would have been a HUGE hit. But it might also have hurt Mac Mini and iMac sales, so Steve couldn't bring himself to do it. In the long run I think the whole Apple TV product category will be subsumed into the television, itself. Here, too, is another minefield because people replace their computers a lot more often than they replace their televisions, so Apple going into the TV business (like Dell and HP have) might help sales at first but later hurt. The more likely move for Apple, therefore, is to eventually create the Apple TV Nano, which is an Apple TV built into a CableCard. This is technically feasible right now and 18 months from now it will be a no-brainer. The big HDTV vendors would jump on that one like crazy since it would drive CableCard-equipped HDTV sales, which have been less than stellar. Apple's movie rental service offers a lot to talk about, too, though the part I find most interesting is simply the likely impact on broadband ISPs. It's not just Apple, but also Amazon, Netflix, and others that will drive this impact, though those competing efforts are accelerating right now because of Apple. The broadband ISPs are already jostling for advantage, talking about limiting throughput and making people pay $30 for the bandwidth to download an HD movie. They simply don't want to pay for the additional backbone capacity required to support this level of traffic. But the even bigger reason why the ISPs are moving right now is they perceive a perfect storm that will allow them to RAISE PRICES. Whether we are talking about a cable company or a phone company, these ISPs make more profit from selling broadband than they do from selling their original service, whether it is phone or TV. Cable prices keep going up, true, but nearly all of that goes for increasing costs for content. Internet content costs an ISP nothing, but that doesn't mean they won't try to charge us more if they can. What's crazy about this is that most of the HD content we're getting upset about is static. It is perfectly reasonable to put every movie ever made on a server and put just such a server in every cable company or DSL machine room and never have to touch the Internet backbone for that content, which is exactly what I've explained the big ISPs are already starting to do through IP multicast. But now they'll want to be paid for it. The dark horse here is Google, which has spent a couple years positioning itself to offer to handle this service on behalf of ISPs and consumers alike in exchange for us watching some commercials. If it is up to consumers, Google will succeed. And Steve Jobs knows this, because with their interlocking boards, Apple and Google have to know precisely what the other is up to. So Macworld was just another step in a very measured plan to establish global media dominance for Apple and probably for Google, too. But it's a plan that requires patience, which the press can't -- or doesn't want to -- understand. So it is up to us as individuals to decide whether this is good or bad. I'd say the jury is still out on that one.

  • ★ Keynote Roundup

    Miscellaneous thoughts and observations from yesterday’s Macworld Expo keynote: Office 2008 I was interested to see whether Microsoft would get some demo time during the keynote to show Office 2008. The Mac BU hasn’t always gotten stage time, but, I think, they have always gotten stage time in keynotes when they have a brand-new major version of Office. Not this year. Jobs did mention the Office 2008 release, but there was no demo, and, in fact, much of what Jobs actually said about Office was negative — emphasizing that they were “finally” native for Intel, and that they were the last of the major developers to do so, even later than Adobe. Maybe it’s a result of competition in the office software space with Apple’s own iWork. Maybe it’s resentment over the time it took for Office to go Intel-native. Maybe it’s a sense, by Jobs, that Apple is no longer in a position where it needs to reassure the press and its own customers that Microsoft supports the Mac. I think it’s a little bit of all those things. ‘Four Things Today’ Jobs actually talked about more than four things; what he did, really, was break the keynote into four sections. The third “thing”, for example, included both iTunes movie rentals and the new Apple TV 2.0. I think the “four things” idea was a great framework for the keynote, though, and a subtle change from Jobs’s traditional keynote structure. Time Capsule I love the idea of Time Capsule, and, assuming it works as billed, it’s going to accomplish something awesome: it will save data that would otherwise have been lost, because there will now be more people backing up their data regularly. I think you can really make an argument that Time Machine is the most important feature Apple has added to Mac OS X in years, maybe ever, and support for doing it over the network makes it better. But, when I predicted something like this would be announced, I assumed it would coincide with the restoration of being able to back up to any USB hard drive attached to an AirPort base station. That capability was billed as a feature of Leopard and Time Machine right up until mid-October, and was present in developer seeds of Leopard. The word I heard was that very late in the beta testing of Leopard, Apple discovered some sort of bug or security problem with feature, and that while it was pulled from 10.5.0 (because it couldn’t be fixed in time), it was scheduled to come back in a future Leopard update. But so now Time Capsule is here, and there’s no word from Apple about backing up to hard drives attached to base stations. Which in turn is leading to the suspicion that perhaps the reason hard drive/base station Time Machine backups were pulled from Leopard was to make the feature exclusive to Apple’s own Time Capsule hardware. Check the comment thread on this article at Macworld to see some angry customers — people who bought hard drives and base stations in advance of Leopard specifically in anticipation of this feature. Again, I think Time Capsule is a great idea and a great product. But if Apple has pulled support for hard drive/base station backups to eliminate Time Capsule competition, that’s shitty, pure and simple. To be clear, though, it’s still an “if” at this point. 4 Million iPhones, 4 Billion Songs Those are big numbers. Assuming sales continue to grow, and that Apple will release new iPhones with lower prices for next year’s holiday season, their stated goal of selling 10 million phones in 2008 looks like a sure thing. As I expected, there was no word on DRM-free music from the other three major music labels. But I think Jobs’s aside that they sold 20 million songs on Christmas day alone was sort of a message that iTunes music sales are still growing strong. Even at just 10 or 15 cents profit per song, when you’re talking billions, that’s a lot of money. The $20 iPod Touch Update There were audible groans in the keynote hall when Jobs announced that the iPod Touch update costs $20. That’s an interesting difference between the Touch and the iPhone. One reason, I think, is that unlike with iPhones, Apple is not accounting for iPod Touches on a subscription bases — so they have to charge something to add features in order to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley. But they could charge something less than $20. I wonder how frequently Apple plans to offer $20 feature upgrades to Touch owners. But, on the other hand, if Apple is charging for the iPod Touch upgrade to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, why is the Apple TV upgrade free? As far as I know, they’re not accounting for Apple TV sales on a subscription basis. I’m left with the feeling that they’re charging $20 for the iPod Touch upgrade simply because they can. Cost aside, it’s an utterly compelling upgrade for the Touch; it’s hard to imagine any Touch owner not wanting it. But it seems weird to pay $20 for a bunch of apps that already existed. Apparently the apps are already there on the 1.1.3 Touch OS, because the upgrade itself weighs in at just 9 kilobytes. Apple TV 2.0 There’s an old saying about Microsoft that, historically, their products always have terrible 1.0 releases, better 2.0’s, and then finally succeed at 3.0. The idea being that they stick with a product idea for years and don’t give up after early failures. I think Apple is taking this sort of dogged, determined approach to Apple TV. The big problem Apple faces with Apple TV isn’t technical — it’s content. They’re constrained by what the TV networks and movie studios will allow them to do. The most obvious limitation is the way that they’re forbidden from ripping movies from DVDs the way iTunes rips music from CDs. The movie rentals at the iTunes Store should do as much to sell Apple TVs as any of the actual changes to Apple TV itself in the new software. But the software update is very nice — the UI is improved, and the Flickr photo integration (even though the demo crapped out on-stage during the keynote) is very nice. Cutting the price to $229 strikes me as a little strange for Apple. They usually stick to nice, round $50 price increments — most everything they sell has a price that ends in 99 or 49. My only guess is that they’ve cut the price as low as they can to help the product gain traction — that if Apple TV were selling better, the new price would be $249. Multi-Touch Gestures With MacBook Air Trackpad It’ll be interesting to see how useful this is in practice. The only apps that support it out of the box are Apple’s own — iPhoto and Preview for image zooming and rotation; Safari for text scaling. To take advantage of this, apps need to handle new event notifications. Something more or less like “the user is pinching at these coordinates”. No existing apps other than Apple’s handle these events yet. It’ll be interesting to see when (or if?) the other MacBooks get similar trackpads. The UI for the gesture-related settings in System Preferences is really quite clever: big QuickTime movies showing exactly how to perform the gestures and what effect they cause. I’ve never seen a prefs UI like that before, but I think it’s very appropriate — it’s a lot easier to explain them visually than with words. It’s a clever way to allow the UI to serve as documentation. Randy Newman Randy Newman’s keynote-capping scathing anti-Bush administration song was quite a thing. I loved it, and it seemed like everyone around me in the press section was enjoying it thoroughly. But, quite obviously, for humorless Bush supporters, it must have been infuriating. The song is chock full of “I can’t believe he just said that” lines. It’s certainly hard to imagine any other major corporation in the U.S. that would invite Randy Newman on stage to perform a song like that.

  • ★ iPhone-Likeness

    Anyone involved in Mac software development is familiar with arguments over whether a particular app is “Mac-like”. In the early days of the Mac — the first decade or so — the entire Mac community was largely in agreement about just what this meant. To be un-Mac-like was to be ignorant of the fundamental concepts and norms of the Mac OS. It was something you could spot in an instant — software designed by engineers who just did not get it. In the last decade, however, accusations of “un-Mac-likeness” have largely degenerated into meaningless hand-waving. You still occasionally see UI mistakes that are genuinely un-Mac-like — like, say, outright Windows-isms such as ordering dialog box buttons OK/Cancel rather than Cancel/OK — but in most cases, when someone complains “that’s not Mac-like”, what they really mean is “I don’t like that.”1 The overriding factor, I think, is that the overall scope of the Mac platform (and Windows, too, for that matter) has grown so large that it supports a wide variety of UI design philosophies and styles. iPhoto and Aperture have very different styles, both visually and functionally, but yet they’re both photo management apps made by Apple. There are still fundamental norms and conventions which all Mac software should adhere to, but there no longer exists a single, simple, overall design style or philosophy that defines Mac-likeness. The iPhone, on the other hand, is very much where the Mac was in the 1980s. It is new, innovative, and ambitiously stretches the bounds of what current hardware can support. Like, the Mac, the iPhone has established UI conventions that aren’t just different, but contrary to the conventions of what has preceded it. Apple has sketched out a remarkably clear picture of what it means for an app to be “iPhone-like”. And, just as many third-party Mac developers in the ’80s struggled to design Mac-like software because they couldn’t shake preconceptions forged in the “everything is just text” pre-Mac era, many third-party iPhone developers aren’t wholly getting the iPhone-like part. In many cases, I think, it’s because they can’t shake preconceptions forged designing Mac software. I’ll put forth one central, overriding guideline for iPhone UI design: Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience. I further suggest the following, more specific, guidelines: Each screen should display one thing at a time. That “thing” may be a list, but it should just be a list. Minimize the number of on-screen elements. Make UI elements large enough to be easy to tap; place them far enough apart that there is little risk of tapping the wrong target by mistake. Eschew preferences as much as possible, and assume that nearly all users will use the default settings. As you show more detail, conceptually you move from left to right — but it’s best to minimize how deep you can get while drilling down to the right. These guidelines describe nearly every iPhone app designed by Apple, and apply to the ones I like most from the App Store. Notes on Notes As a case study, consider the iPhone’s built-in Notes app. This app is an excellent example of what it means to be iPhone-like.2 There are only two screens in Notes. First, a list of all Notes. A row in the list shows the note’s title and the date on which it was last modified. The list is always and only sorted chronologically, most recent first. There are only two things you can do at this screen: open an existing note by tapping it, or create a new note by tapping the “+” button that is always visible at the top of the list. There are no folders. There are no other sorting options. When you create or edit a note, the toolbar at the top offers two buttons: “Notes”, which points back to the left and takes you to the list of notes, and “Done”, which ends the editing mode by putting the keyboard away and using the full screen to display the contents of the current note. There is no explicit “Save” button — changes are always saved automatically. There is no “Cancel” button when creating a new note; just hit “Done” or “Notes” before typing anything and no new note will be created. There is no separate title field. The first line of text in the note is used as the title. Change the first line of the note, and you change the name of the note. After opening an existing note, there is no “Edit” button — to switch to editing mode, simply tap the content area of the note itself and the keyboard will appear, with the insertion point at the position where you tapped in the note. In an interview with Kyle Baxter in July, Brent Simmons said this regarding his design for the iPhone version of NetNewsWire: “Clarity is more valuable than density.” The iPhone’s Notes app is clear and sparse — or, perhaps better put, clear because it is sparse. The only metadata displayed on the note screen is the modification date. The toolbar at the bottom of the note has just four buttons: A left arrow to move to the previous note. An envelope to send the note as an email message (without leaving the Notes app). A trash can to delete the note (with a two-button Delete Note/Cancel confirmation panel). A right arrow to move to the next note. The left/right buttons aren’t necessary functionally, but they are necessary in order to avoid annoyance. Without them, to scan through multiple notes, you’d need to do a “back to the list, tap the next note, back to the list, tap the next note” dance. This is the entirety of the Notes app. I’ve looked at several note-editing apps available in the App Store, and most of them seem to have been designed without any recognition of just how clever and well-designed Apple’s Notes app is. Notes exposes its core functionality clearly and obviously, launches very quickly, requires very few taps to use, and uses just two simple levels of hierarchy (the flat list of notes, and the notes themselves). After more than 16 months using the Notes app, I’ve found that having the list sorted chronologically is exactly what I want nearly all the time. That’s not to say Notes, as it stands today (which is to say, as it stood when the original iPhone debuted, since it hasn’t changed since then) cannot be improved. The biggest missing feature, clearly, is syncing. Email is currently the only way to export notes from Notes, and there is no way at all to import. There practically begs to be some way to transfer snippets of text from your computer to the Notes app on your iPhone, but there is none. This is a major feature, and, currently, the biggest opportunity for third-party note apps. A search feature would be nice. I imagine something along the lines of the search field Apple added to the Contacts list in iPhone OS 2.0, sitting at the top of the list of notes; type a search string and the list of notes would be filtered to display only those which match. Notes doesn’t rotate. It should, for the benefit for those who prefer typing on the horizontal keyboard. And that’s pretty much it for my Notes wish list — a pretty short list. I think the logic behind this goes something like this: I like the Mac UI overall; but I don’t like this specific UI design; therefore this specific UI design is not Mac-like.↩ No, I don’t like the Marker Felt font Notes uses. But that’s a subjective cosmetic niggle.↩

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