Overnighting in the Macworld registration line
Filed under: Humor, Found Footage Sure, the Macworld registration line was kind of long this morning, but overnighting outside Moscone? Uncalled for -- this ain't the iPhone launch. Despite the futility, Justine and friend decided to "spend the night" waiting for Macworld registration to open. I guess they didn't want to wait in line -- and interpretive dance is always in good taste.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
-
★ How Leander Kahney Got Everything Wrong by Being a Fucking Jackass
A decade ago, Wired was my favorite magazine. Today, they print mind-numbing tripe like Leander Kahney’s 3,500-word “How Apple Got Everything Right by Doing Everything Wrong”. Kahney’s central premise, insofar as there is a premise, is that Apple has succeeded either despite or because it operates in ways that are contrary to conventional wisdom. Kahney writes: Everybody is familiar with Google’s famous catchphrase, “Don’t be evil.” It has become a shorthand mission statement for Silicon Valley, encompassing a variety of ideals that — proponents say — are good for business and good for the world: Embrace open platforms. Trust decisions to the wisdom of crowds. Treat your employees like gods. What do any of these things have to do with “evil”? Who, prior to Leander Kahney here in this piece, has decided that this is what Google means by not being evil? These three things may well be apt descriptions of Google’s corporate strategies (although it’s debatable), but they’re unrelated to Google’s “Don’t be evil” mantra. Mediocre employee cafeterias are evil? It’s ironic, then, that one of the Valley’s most successful companies ignored all of these tenets. It’s particularly ironic given that Apple had been in business for two decades prior to Google’s existence. Google and Apple may have a friendly relationship — Google CEO Eric Schmidt sits on Apple’s board, after all — but by Google’s definition, Apple is irredeemably evil, behaving more like an old-fashioned industrial titan than a different-thinking business of the future. “Irredeemably evil”. Because they’re secretive and develop closed platforms. Think about that. What’s more, Google’s engineers have unprecedented autonomy; they choose which projects they work on and whom they work with. And they are encouraged to allot 20 percent of their work week to pursuing their own software ideas. The result? Products like Gmail and Google News, which began as personal endeavors. So Google employees just stroll into the office and work on whatever they want. Uh-huh. And there certainly aren’t any projects from Apple that started as side-projects by one inspired engineered. Nothing like, say, iMovie ’08. Jobs, by contrast, is a notorious micromanager. No product escapes Cupertino without meeting Jobs’ exacting standards, which are said to cover such esoteric details as the number of screws on the bottom of a laptop and the curve of a monitor’s corners. There’s certainly no one at Google who sweats the details and approves every change, no matter how minor, to the Google.com home page. No one like, say, Marissa Mayer. Kahney’s point seems to be that it’s somehow surprising that Apple has succeeded despite being different than Google, and but also that Google is somehow representative of a typical Silicon Valley company. The truth is obvious: Google and Apple are both very atypical companies. And in many ways, particularly the specific ways Kahney claims they’re so very different, they’re actually alike. With regard to “open platforms”, neither Google nor Apple are dogmatic either way. So, yes, it’s true that Apple’s strategy is not to be open by default out of the belief that “openness” is inherently good or inherently leads to success. But nor is it to be closed by default, either. Apple simply tries to do what’s best for Apple. In some cases that is closed (Mac OS X, iPhone OS), and in others it is open (WebKit, Darwin). The same goes for Google. They are a huge contributor and proponent of open source software, but last I checked, they haven’t released the source code for Gmail or their algorithms for web search and ad relevance. Apple’s WebKit is the perfect example: open source code implementing open web standards, and acting as the built-in web rendering engine for numerous mobile platforms that compete directly against the iPhone — including Google’s Android. The whole contrast-with-Google angle makes no sense, doesn’t hold up to the least amount of scrutiny, and serves no purpose other than to reach the punchy conclusion that Apple is “irredeemably evil”. By Kahney’s logic, any company that is different from Google — and clearly most companies are far more different from Google than Apple is — is evil. The simple, obvious truth is that both Apple and Google have atypical strategies and cultures, and both companies have achieved atypical results. Imagine that. Here’s Kahney’s analysis regarding Apple’s lack of internal openness: Apple’s secrecy may not seem out of place in Silicon Valley, land of the nondisclosure agreement, where algorithms are protected with the same zeal as missile launch codes. But in recent years, the tech industry has come to embrace candor. Microsoft — once the epitome of the faceless megalith — has softened its public image by encouraging employees to create no-holds-barred blogs, which share details of upcoming projects and even criticize the company. Facelessness is not secrecy. Microsoft has never been all that secretive as a company. In fact, they’re (in)famous for the opposite — leaking product details far in advance for competitive advantage. As for Google’s complete and utter lack of secrecy, ask them to tell you the details of their data centers. Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz has used his widely read blog to announce layoffs, explain strategy, and defend acquisitions. What with Sun’s stock price losing 97 percent of its value over the last seven years, it’s hard to believe any company wouldn’t model themselves after Sun. Layoffs are fun when the CEO blogs about them. Apple’s relationship with the press is dismissive at best, adversarial at worst; Jobs himself speaks only to a handpicked batch of reporters, and only when he deems it necessary. (He declined to talk to Wired for this article.) What kind of secretive crackpot wouldn’t want to speak to a writer working on a piece that labels your company “irredeemably evil” and whose best-known work is a book that literally brands your customers as cultists? What a jerk. Forget corporate blogs — Apple doesn’t seem to like anyone blogging about the company. Guess we’ll have to take Kahney’s word for that. And Apple appears to revel in obfuscation. For years, Jobs dismissed the idea of adding video capability to the iPod. “We want it to make toast,” he quipped sarcastically at a 2004 press conference. “We’re toying with refrigeration, too.” A year later, he unveiled the fifth-generation iPod, complete with video. The gall of the man, refusing to lay bare Apple’s competitive plans in public a year in advance. There’s an old poker adage: Look around the table, and if you can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you. One gets the feeling that if you see Leander Kahney at your table, you can stop looking. Here’s the best part of the piece though: Secrecy has also served Apple’s marketing efforts well, building up feverish anticipation for every announcement. In the weeks before Macworld Expo, Apple’s annual trade show, the tech media is filled with predictions about what product Jobs will unveil in his keynote address. Consumer-tech Web sites liveblog the speech as it happens, generating their biggest traffic of the year. And the next day, practically every media outlet covers the announcements. Harvard business professor David Yoffie has said that the introduction of the iPhone resulted in headlines worth $400 million in advertising. What makes this so great is that just seven paragraph prior, Kahney retraces the saga of Apple vs. Think Secret publisher Nick Ciarelli1 thusly: Most companies would pay millions of dollars for that kind of attention — an army of fans so eager to buy your stuff that they can’t wait for official announcements to learn about the newest products. But not Apple. Over the course of his run, Ciarelli received dozens of cease-and-desist letters from the object of his affection, charging him with everything from copyright infringement to disclosing trade secrets. In January 2005, Apple filed a lawsuit against Ciarelli, accusing him of illegally soliciting trade secrets from its employees. One can argue (as I would) that Apple’s product secrecy is worth tens of millions of dollars in publicity every year. Or, one can argue that Apple spitefully pissed away even more valuable publicity by shutting down Think Secret. (You’d be wrong, but you can reasonably argue that.) But Kahney, in the course of seven paragraphs in a single article, argues both. It boggles the mind. Kahney’s own source claims the secrecy surrounding the iPhone introduction alone was worth $400 million dollars in publicity. Even if that’s off by an entire order of magnitude, that’s a lot of dough. And yet in the very same article Kahney presents it as a mystery for the ages why Apple would take an adversarial position against Think Secret, a for-profit enterprise dedicated to spoiling exactly that sort of surprise product introduction. Does anyone at Wired even read this shit before publishing it? As part of the can you believe what these heartless bastards did this poor kid setup, Kahney writes, “At heart, though, Think Secret wasn’t a financial enterprise but a personal obsession.” I wonder if Ciarelli tried that line on the IRS. ↩
-
★ The Unsatisfying State of Twitter Web Clients for the iPhone
Twitter and the iPhone seem, at a glance, a perfect match: bite-sized micro-content paired with the world’s best mobile web reader. But here’s the thing: there’s not yet a single good iPhone Twitter client. The main things I want in a Twitter interface on my iPhone, roughly in order: A readable, attractive list of tweets, with the ability to page back to previous tweets so I can catch up if I haven’t looked at Twitter in a while. A good text input field for posting, including a live character count and responsive typing speed. The ability to mark tweets as favorites. An easy way to create @username replies. A way to view a list of replies directed at me. There’s not a single available Twitter client for the iPhone that offers all of the above. And the single biggest problem is out of the hands of third-party developers: paging. The API only returns the 20 most recent tweets, and the optional parameter to request previous pages (20 tweets at a time) has been marked “Temporarily Disabled” for over six months. This means when you use a third-party Twitter client, you see the 20 most recent tweets in your stream, and that’s it. It’s a deal-breaking limitation for third-party clients, because when you read your stream via the Twitter.com web site, paging works just fine. It’s unclear what the rationale behind this API limitation is — I can find no public explanation for it from anyone at Twitter. If it’s to prevent API clients from overwhelming Twitter’s servers by paging back through the entire history of users’ timelines (say, for the purpose of building a database for a Twitter search engine), this could be solved by allowing paging, but limiting the results to the most recent N pages, where N is a relatively low number like 10. That would suffice for common case of someone wanting to catch up on the last few dozen tweets from the people they follow. This limitation isn’t just a problem for Twitter web clients. Unless Twitter re-opens this ability in the API, it’ll impose a serious limitation on the coming-soon-to-the-iTunes-App-Store native iPhone application Twitter clients as well. Given that third-party iPhone applications won’t run in the background, each time you launch such a client you’ll see the 20 most recent tweets and no more. Twitter.com You don’t need a “client” to use Twitter, of course. You can just use the regular Twitter.com web site, which renders fine in Mobile Safari. It’s not, however, optimized for display on the iPhone. At its default size, it’s far too small to be readable: You can use the double-tap trick to zoom in on the content column, but you sort of have to double-tap at just the right spot near the top to get the entire column (including icons) sized perfectly. Once you’re zoomed in it’s a pretty good iPhone Twitter display: it looks pretty good, includes user icons, and displays 20 tweets per page. It also includes “Newer” and “Older” buttons at the bottom of the list for paging. At the end of each tweet are two buttons: a star for marking favorites and an arrow for creating an @username reply. However, at just 18 × 18 px, these buttons are far too small to be usable on an iPhone’s touch screen. Apple, in the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines for Web Applications, recommends that controls have a tappable area at least 44 px high.1 (For example, the back/forward/etc. toolbar at the bottom of the screen in Mobile Safari is 44 pixels high.) In terms of area, an 18 × 18 px button is just 16 percent the size of a 44 × 44 px button. But what really kills the usability of these buttons in Mobile Safari is that you’re typically viewing them scaled down. Twitter.com’s tweet list, not including the user icons, is 470 px wide; the iPhone screen in portrait mode is just 320 px wide. When zoomed to the width pictured above, these buttons are just 10 or 11 px wide. You’ve got to zoom significantly to use these buttons on the iPhone. For posting, the Twitter.com interface is a disaster on the iPhone. It works, but the size is all wrong. When you tap in the field to begin writing, Mobile Safari zooms the view to a width that cuts off half the field. If you zoom back out to a scale where the entire field is visible, the text is ludicrously small. Worse, typing in the field is dreadfully slow. The JavaScript Twitter.com uses to display the live character count works just fine in a desktop browser, but it’s way too slow for the iPhone. Worse, you can’t even see the character count while typing because it’s off the screen if you’re zoomed in close enough to make the text in the field legible. In short, Twitter.com is a perfect example of a web page that renders and works correctly in Mobile Safari, but which provides a user experience far inferior to what could be done with an iPhone-optimized web site. It seems weird that sites like Facebook and Amazon, which do so much more than Twitter, have iPhone-optimized interfaces, but Twitter does not. m.Twitter.com Twitter also provides a “mobile web” interface — a web interface for phones with rudimentary browsers. It used to be that to access this interface, you used a different URL: m.twitter.com. That was good. A few weeks ago they changed this, however, and Twitter is now using user-agent sniffing to automatically serve the mobile web interface to Mobile Safari, even when you go to the regular twitter.com domain. This is bad. You can change which version you’re getting in the footer at the bottom of the page. (Even if you don’t have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can try out the mobile interface by using Safari’s Develop menu to set your user agent to Mobile Safari.) This setting is remembered with a cookie, but it doesn’t take long for the cookie to be forgotten. With the old scheme, where the standard and mobile web interfaces were specified by different URLs, you could (and I did) bookmark both separately, for use in different situations. The key appeal of Twitter’s mobile web interface is that it is very fast to load. One obvious reason is that doesn’t display user icons. Another is that the entire page is almost self-contained — the CSS is inline, it doesn’t use any JavaScript, and the only image is the small Twitter logo. It also only loads 10 tweets at a time. There’s no need for zooming, and typographically the display is spot-on — perfect use of Helvetica for the iPhone. (Unless you rotate the screen to landscape: if you do, the font blows up to giant size and stays there even if you rotate back to portrait.) There’s no way to mark favorites or create @username replies. The editing interface for the mobile version stinks. Most obviously, the field is way too small: it’s just one line high and doesn’t even extend to the full width of the iPhone screen. Typing performance is good, but that’s because it doesn’t use JavaScript at all, which means it doesn’t provide a character count. It does stop you from typing any additional characters once you hit the 140 mark, though. (It’s just a text field with the maxlength attribute set to 140.) A notable omission from the mobile interface is a way to view your @yourname replies. In the standard web interface you just tap the Replies tab, and all the third-party Twitter web clients support this as well. The 10-tweet display is a bit limiting, but like the standard Twitter web interface, the mobile interface supports paging. Better to have just 10 tweets at a time but with paging than 20 tweets at a time and no paging (as with third-party clients). EDGE network performance ranges from “kind of slow” to “really damn slow”; when tending toward the latter, the difference in loading Twitter’s mobile interface and standard interface is dramatic. That’s why it stinks that it’s set with cookie rather than the URL: if you’re currently set to use the standard interface (because, say, you were on Wi-Fi) but now wish to use the mobile interface (because you’re now on EDGE), you have to wait for the entire standard web interface to load, scroll to the bottom, zoom in, and click “Mobile”. With the old way, (a) they were bookmarkable, and (b) you could keep them open in two separate tabs at the same time — making it easy to use the standard Twitter interface most of the time, while switching to the mobile web interface with just two quick taps for use on EDGE. Hahlo Dean Robinson’s Hahlo is my favorite third-party Twitter web client. If it weren’t for the no-paging limitation in the Twitter API, I’d use it as my primary iPhone interface to Twitter. My biggest complaint about Hahlo itself is that its initial screen is a list of menu items, not a list of tweets. Perhaps this seems like a ticky-tacky thing to complain about, but the main thing you want to see when loading Twitter are the tweets. Waiting for the page with the menu to load before you then wait for the page with the tweets to load is annoying. (There’s a workaround for this, though, which I’ll get to in a moment.) Plus, the menu commands are a bit oddly named: “My Timeline” is a list of your own tweets. Twitter’s own parlance for this is “Archive”. Hahlo’s second menu item, “My Friends Timeline”, is what you want: a list of the 20 most recent tweets from the people you follow. But because Hahlo is entirely Ajax-driven, the URL doesn’t change from http://hahlo.com/, which means you can’t bookmark the tweets page you see after tapping “My Friends Timeline” on the main menu. However, you can get a bookmarkable list of tweets from Hahlo by loading this URL: http://hahlo.com/friends_timeline. Most users will never realize this is possible, because there doesn’t seem to be a way to navigate to that URL from within the Hahlo UI. Once you do see Hahlo’s tweet list, it looks nice. Good size, good spacing, good use of Helvetica. It includes user icons and has reasonably-sized buttons for marking tweets as favorites and for creating replies and direct messages to the author of a tweet. Editing is where Hahlo is a Viking. Typing speed is acceptable — not great, but good enough — and the best of any Twitter web client with a live character count. In most other iPhone clients with a live character count, typing feels dreadfully sluggish. Hahlo’s character count is mostly accurate — which means it’s best-of-breed for iPhone Twitter web clients.2 iTweet Colby Palmer’s iTweet is very much comparable to Hahlo. The most notable difference is the reversed light-on-dark color scheme. (I like it.) Like Hahlo, it offers a very nice tweet display, replete with nicely-sized per-tweet buttons for marking favorites and creating replies. iTweet’s UI is more sensibly laid-out and named than Hahlo’s. At the top of the tweet list are three buttons: Menu, Refresh, and Post. (Hahlo uses the word Update instead of Post, which is ambiguous: Update could just as easily be used to mean Refresh, in the sense of “Update this list of tweets.” You shouldn’t have to press a button to figure out what it does.) iTweet’s editing field looks good. Appearance-wise, it’s my favorite of any client — the text is eminently readable, slightly bigger and bold. iTweet also provides a live character count, but unlike with Hahlo’s, iTweet’s JavaScript hooks result in terribly sluggish typing speed. It doesn’t even come close to keeping up with my two-thumb typing speed, which is rather slow to start with. It doesn’t lose keystrokes, but the UI feedback for each keystroke is delayed by a fraction of a second, completely ruining the feedback that makes the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard tolerable. PocketTweets Justin Williams and Bobby Andersen’s PocketTweets uses more gradients than any other iPhone Twitter client. The icons look good, as one might expected from Mr. Andersen, but the text is too small throughout the entire UI. PocketTweets correctly defaults to showing you a list of tweets rather than a menu, and like iTweet, offers buttons for marking favorites and replying. However, once you mark a tweet as a favorite, PocketTweets doesn’t seem to allow you to unmark it. Also, the vertical Favorite/Reply button layout is worse than the horizontal layout in Hahlo and iTweet — I find myself inadvertently invoking Reply when I mean to tap Favorite. Another annoyance is that PocketTweets doesn’t create links from @username instances in the text of a tweet. In other clients you can tap on @username to display a list of that user’s tweets — useful for picking up the context of a reply. PocketTweets’s editing UI is also too small; it feels unnecessarily cramped. Typing speed is acceptable (on part with Hahlo), and it provides a character count. Unlike Hahlo and iTweet, PocketTweets doesn’t enforce the 140-character limit in the field. With Hahlo and iTweet, once you hit the 140-character mark, you can’t enter additional characters in the field. PocketTweets lets you run long, trusting you to notice the greater-than-140 character count. I like this design — it allows you to finish your sentence and then go back and edit the message to get under the limit. Sort of like writing an article with a word count — you wouldn’t want your word processor to stop accepting input once you’ve reached the limit. One last, truly minor niggle: the name “PocketTweets” is too long to fit as a web clip name on the iPhone home screen. It gets truncated as “Pocke…eets”. PocketTweets pre-dates the iPhone web clip feature, but it goes to show that iPhone app names need to be short and sweet. Thincloud Last and least is [Thincloud], from New Leaders. For reading, Thincloud’s font is too small, the text wraps back underneath the user icon on long-ish tweets, and there’s no way to mark a tweet as a favorite or automate a reply. For posting, there’s no live character count or enforced limit — Thincloud will let you blow past the 140-character mark with nary a warning, and you won’t notice until you see your truncated tweet in the list. (On the other hand, it’s the JavaScript for the character counting that seems to slow the other clients down; typing speed in Thincloud’s editing field is the fastest of the bunch.) SMS Twitter was conceived from the outset as a service for mobile phone users, even those with ridiculous old-timey pre-2007 phones without web browsers, using SMS. Twitter’s 140-character limit on status updates is a result of the 160-character limit of SMS. For reading tweets, Twitter might work OK via SMS if you only follow a very small handful of relatively quiet friends. But if you follow even just a few dozen people, I can’t even imagine how annoying it would be to have an SMS alert jingle your phone every time someone updates. To post status updates via SMS, you associate you mobile phone number with your Twitter profile (on your Twitter.com account settings page), and then send messages to the short code 40404. Typing speed is excellent in the iPhone SMS app, but, of course, you don’t get a character count. One technical advantage to posting tweets via SMS is that it works well even with sketchy signal strength or when Twitter’s web servers are under duress. Via SMS, I was able to post live updates from the hall in Moscone West during the Macworld Expo keynote in January. (Given that Twitter’s web servers were mostly down during the keynote, however, it’s questionable whether anyone was able to read them until afterward.) So If ever there was a web app that could be — should be — better on the iPhone than on a desktop browser, Twitter is it. But it isn’t. Twitter.com is the best site for reading tweets, even though it’s not iPhone-optimized at all, simply because it allows for paging. But it’s the worst site for posting. Hahlo and PocketTweets are the best for posting, but because the Twitter API doesn’t allow for paging, no third-party client is good for reading. The result is completely unsatisfying. Using one Twitter client for reading and another for posting is like getting your sandwich at Burger King and your fries from McDonald’s — convenience is the whole point. In landscape mode, Mobile Safari’s toolbar shrinks to 32 pixels high — a reasonable compromise for an orientation where vertical screen space is at a premium. ↩ In every character counting feature I’ve tested on the iPhone, the count gets thrown off when you delete characters. Something seems broken regarding JavaScript keystroke event hooks in MobileSafari, at least with the Delete key. ↩
-
Macworld 2008 Line Report
Filed under: Macworld, Cult of MacIf you're like me and you love all things Apple, you might be in San Francisco waiting in line for the Steve Jobs keynote. I know I am. At the moment the line to get in is long and getting longer by the minute.However, people are in good spirits and, according to Mark, my new friend and fellow Apple enthusiast from New Zealand in line with me: "really looking forward to a great show." Sadly, there is no free wifi to be had and in anticipation of needing my precious Macbook Pro battery for inside, I'm writing this on my iPhone using AT&T's EDGE network. Even though progress is a bit slow, being able to bring you these thoughts like this is one of the major reasons people will line up early in the morning with a big smile on their face ready to experience the next great innovation from Jobs and company. What will they think of next? Stay tuned for more from us live at the Macworld 2008 keynote.Gallery: Macworld 2008 Line photosPermalink | Email this | Comments
-
Forbes' Fake Steve Jobs Is Also Fake On Apple
Daniel Eran DilgerDaniel Lyons is the author of the Fake Steve Jobs blog and a columnist at Forbes. After developing a reputation for attacking bloggers, open source, and any alternatives to Microsoft, Lyons has shed his skin to escape from one scandal while at the same time squirming into position to choke the truth out of his next victim: Apple.Reader Marc Elson sent in a link to Lyons' “Snowed by SCO,� an article Lyons wrote to both apologize for and marginalize his years of articles in Forbes that misrepresented the issues in the SCO Groups' attack on Linux. He blamed his reporting on bad information he'd been fed by SCO. It's easy to backtrack now that SCO is toast; in fact it's rather impossible not to. However, neither Lyons nor Forbes can erase the years of false information and misleading spin they published, which not only idealized SCO but also lambasted any individuals critical of the company. He described anyone supporting Linux as religious folk "convinced of their own righteousness."While fighting for SCO, Lyons also attacked “bloggers� in a front page article in Forbes that screamed, “they destroy brands and wreck lives. Is there any way to fight back?� as if everyone who writes on the Internet operates as a class that can be summarily judged and dismissed at once. [Snowed By SCO - Forbes]Daniel In the Lyons Den Again.Lyons' lack of hesitation in throwing out poorly conceived attacks is getting him into trouble again. He seems to be working frantically to spin together a bizarre new tale of how Apple is going to simultaneously be torn apart by the can-do-no-wrong Microsoft while also turning into a shadow of the evil monopolist itself, threatening us with its fearsome dominance.Lyons resurrected the identical, wholly illogical conundrum of a paradox posited last year by Windows Enthusiasts, principally Paul Thurrott, who spoke in fear of a threatening monopoly position achieved by Apple's iTunes while--puzzlingly--also describing Apple's music business as a pitiful failure that could never withstand the market dominance of Microsoft. Is it part of a new Forbes campaign? Lyons' new work echos other regular articles from Forbes writers, all attacking Apple and reality in the same breath:Presenting Apple TV a supposed flop, despite its profitably outselling the TiVo this year without incurring the tens of millions in losses TiVo has suffered in the last quarter and in every one of the last several years.
Promoting MusicNet Digital's failed Microsoft partnership in selling music against iTunes and describing the Zune as something other than a spectacular failure. Even the most giddy Zune fan sites are appalled by Microsoft's lack of support in providing updates and fixes for the Zune's major failures. How is Forbes framing it as some kind of sleeper hit?[The iTunes Monopoly/Failure Myth][Scott Woolley Attacks Apple TV in Forbes, Gets the Facts Wrong][Forbes Prints Insanely Self Serving Attack on iTunes by MediaNet CEO Alan McGlade]When Cost Is No Object: Microsoft Media Center.Reader Robert de Bie forwarded a link to Lyons' breathless accolades over Microsoft's Media Center software, which opened with the line, “Guess who's got the slickest software for handling TV, movies and music? Not Apple.�Lyons compared using a Mac and Apple TV with a PC running Vista Ultimate with Media Center features and an Xbox 360 to relay content to a TV. He raved that the Microsoft solution “can do things with digital media that even Apple can't match.� That's true, as Media Center is principally a DVR, a software version of the TiVo; Apple doesn't sell anything the works like a TiVo to record TV. However, Lyons only noted in passing that “Microsoft charges $400 for Vista Ultimate--$300 too much,� failing to add up that a Mac comes with free Front Row features. Apple TV hardware costs $300; it supplies ultra fast 802.11n wireless and, at a minimum, a 40 GB hard drive.In contrast, an Xbox 360 with a 20 GB hard drive costs $350, and another $100 for slower 802.11b/g wireless. So as a wireless media extender, the Xbox 360 costs $450 (50% more), but gives you half the disk capacity and slower networking.Additionally, the required Media Center software that costs another $400 in Vista Ultimate doesn't magically provide you with a TV tuner, so you still have to buy one.In other words, all the money you throw at Microsoft only gives you software that is otherwise free. Without having to pay for all that software licensing, you can go buy whatever TiVo-like TV tuner for the Mac fits your needs, and solve the problem for hundreds of dollars less.Of course, what Apple wants you to do is go without a TV tuner and an expensive cable subscription and simply buy the TV and movies you want to watch from iTunes. Of course, that's not necessary to use Apple TV; you can also rip your own DVDs or even use it to manage your home movies and free podcasts, something Media Center isn't really designed to do because there's no money in it. Don’t forget that there are more fees involved with Xbox Live services, and that TV downloads are more expensive. You’ll also need to pre-purchase Microsoft’s points, converting your cash into Microsoft Live currency that’s subject to change. And once you buy Xbox Live TV shows, don’t expect them to play on your Zune or Windows Mobile phone the way iTunes content plays on Apple’s iPods and iPhone.Of course, when Microsoft sends writers all this equipment to try out for free, then it’s easy to gush over how great it all works and report, "No crashes, no reboots, no blue screen of death. Stunning," as Lyons did. Had he actually been forced to pay the $840 premium to actually use Microsoft’s system, perhaps he’d sing another tune.While Lyons is certainly entitled to his opinion, he should at least present the facts correctly. Outlining any Microsoft product without a consideration of its true cost is always a mistake, because the true cost is almost always hidden. Lyons also wrote “Microsoft's system supports high-definition video; Apple TV does not,� a line that isn't true. Content from iTunes isn't yet available in HD, but the Apple TV does support HD video from other sources and comes equipped with support HDMI, which only the newest Xbox consoles have. Considering that Microsoft has barely sold any new Xbox 360 units this year, fewer than 20% of installed Xbox users even have HDMI outputs. [Windows XP Media Center Edition vs Apple TV][Forrester Research: Epic Terror of iTunes and Apple TV]Big Brother Says: Apple is the New Microsoft.Since publishing that “Media By Microsoft� article a couple weeks ago, Lyons has ramped up his attack on Apple into a web of false information that approaches his SCO shilling. He even exploits his popular Fake Steve Jobs blog for dramatic effect.Lyons starts his newspeak reporting, ironically enough, in an article titled “Big Brother,� with a comical juxtaposition of Apple's 1984 Macintosh ad and a modern screenshot of Jobs presenting the new 3G iPod Nano against a huge video screen of his own image. Lyons had earlier published the images on his Fake Steve Jobs blog after a reader had submitted them.This is funny stuff, because in both images, there's a greying white man with glasses on a huge TV screen talking. But in 1984, the man is talking about universal ideology to a numb audience, while in the modern scene, Jobs was talking about changing the market for mobile video with a 6.5mm device, and the crowds were enthusiastically applauding.There was one other amusing similarly however: shortly before eating the hammer thrown by the Macintosh girl in orange hotpants, the 1984 Big Brother screen says, “Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!�In 2007, Jobs has said some similar things about Microsoft, but the Macintosh hammer is actually being thrown at Vista. So while it’s not exactly the same thing, it is a funny coincidence. Along those lines, Lyons provided some examples of how, as an enemy of Apple, he can talk himself to death and be buried in his own confusion.[Big Brother - Forbes]Here's What You Believe.So far, we've just covered the photos on the article. Once Lyons started writing, it was like SCO all over again. He says early iPhone buyers “were threatening to take to the streets again--only this time with pitchforks and torches. They were furious because Apple Chief Steve Jobs slashed the phone's price to $400 from $600, making early adopters look like suckers.�If Lyons really wants to make up garbage and rewrite history, he should confine himself to Wikipedia where he can't do any damage. The people complaining about getting what they paid for were a whiney minority amplified by a desperate press trying to find something wrong with the most successful electronics product launch in history.Anyone who thinks buyers who paid $600 for the iPhone to get the hottest new device available--and who ended up with a phone that cost less overall than even the $99 Motorola Q, and further got a $100 refund credit--are “suckers� needs to reevaluate what being a sucker might mean. Perhaps paying Microsoft $850 for the equivalent of a $300 Apple TV with less storage and a slower network, and then still needing to buy a TV tuner is a better example of being a “sucker.�The only difference is that Lyons didn't get a free iPhone from Apple, but did get a bunch of Microsoft Media Center stuff to try out without having to pay for any of it as the rest of us would have to do, were we inclined to let Microsoft control our TVs.[Ten Fake Apple Scandals: 1 - Phony Rage About iPhone Price and Profits]The SCO Shill Lines Up Behind Microsoft, AT&T, and the RIAA.It might not be a surprise that a writer who identified SCO as safe to cheerlead for because of its seemingly legitimate corporate position would similarly jump at the opportunity to weep crocodile tears for some of the other most reviled companies doing business on the planet. Lyons is apparently not very smart about picking corporate favorites.“It looks like an anti-Apple backlash has begun,� Lyons wrote, noting that NBC Universal pulled out of iTunes to partner with Microsoft's Windows Media DRM-based Amazon UnBoxed store. He didn't mention that NBC also partnered with Fox in setting up a joint Microsoft store, and then went solo on its own website trying to offer ad-encrusted, Microsoft DRM-ed, exploding content. No doubt all of those efforts are going to work out well for NBC.Lyons also said “Vivendi's Universal Music Group also reportedly won't renew its contract with Apple,� without clarifying that only refers to its long term contract; Universal music hasn't budged from iTunes. He also cites unhappy noises from Hollywood about Apple's desire to lower prices to make content more desirable to consumers, who can already obtain movies and TV programming free over the air or via unauthorized downloads.Omitted from Lyon's one-sided overview of the iTunes Store is CBS executives' comments that they are very happy with its deals with Apple, and that both CBS and Fox are offering free season premieres through iTunes.And what about Viacom billionaire Sumner Redstone, who was recently cited by BU reporter Jessica Ullian as saying that “iTunes has 'resurrected the music industry' by creating a legal, affordable, instantly gratifying purchasing system for fans. The challenge now is for the film industry to catch up, he said, and for competing companies to work together to establish new standards and practices.�[CBS and Fox offer free TV through iTunes US - iPod/iTunes - Macworld UK][How iTunes Saved the Music Industry - BU Today]Pity the Poor AT&T.Lyons wrote that “Jobs isn't known for treating partners well,� noting that the iPhone doesn't sell AT&T's worthless media services or overpriced ringtones. That's really an example of Jobs treating the customer well, and the Fake Steve Jobs should know that. Why repeat the “Apple can’t partner myth?� AT&T is making a major turnaround, funded by record numbers of headlines fawning over the iPhone. Apple has propelled Cingular from a middle of the road brand into its new AT&T name, which the company purposely rolled out in conjunction with the iPhone to benefit from the excitement surrounding it. Should we be aghast that Apple declined AT&T's own overpriced MEdia Net TV clips and ringtones? Is AT&T even worried about it?The service provider reported that the iPhone has outsold any phone it has ever introduced. Does that make Apple a bad partner? Would it be better if Apple really was the New Microsoft, extending its support and then yanking it back in a PlaysForSure/Zune style move? Does Lyons really have the extra credibility to burn in making such ridiculous comments? [How AT&T Picked Up the iPhone: A Brief History of Mobiles]More of the New Microsoft Meme.After noting some of Apple's recent successes, Lyons wrote, “the flip side of Apple's success is that Apple has started to seem scary.� Scary, uncertain, and doubtful! “No longer is Apple the plucky underdog out to save the world,� Lyons fears. Oh really? Has evil been vanquished? Is there not still the inky black bile of Windows Media DRM dripping from every alternative store in the universe? Does not Microsoft still have the remains of that $50 billion it took in last year from its monopolies--real monopolies, not the imagined fantasy kind pinned on iTunes by the media? You know, the monopoly in PC desktop operating systems held by Windows, the monopoly in servers, and the monopoly in desktop Office software? The monopolies that earn Microsoft overall profit margins as high as 81% on products that are over a half decade old? From that perspective, Apple could really turn evil over the next twenty years and still not compare to the wrongs we've suffered from Microsoft. Even so, Apple really isn't doing wrong by its consumers. If the best Lyons can do is to suggest that some RIAA labels and Hollywood executives are miffed by Apple's push for low prices, he'd better scramble to find something more problematic than that. I like low prices in content. I don't long for access to AT&T's expensive ringtones.iPhone Price Problems.Apple's iPhone was a better deal at $600 than Microsoft's Windows Mobile Motorola Q at $99, because Apple twisted AT&T's arm to provide lower priced service, making the iPhone around $200 cheaper across two years of use. Apple then dropped the iPhone's price by another $200, making it now almost $400 cheaper than the nearly free phones on the market.Is this wrong? Did Apple harm those of us who recognized value in the iPhone back in June? Did Apple defraud a million people who bought the iPhone at a good price when it lowered the price afterward? [Apple's iPhone Price Cut Unleashes Complaints]Apple TV Only A Flop For Forbes' Frauds.Lyons repeats in passing--without any factual backup--that the Apple TV is a flop. Oh really? Is that because it profitably sold a quarter of a million units with little advertising? Incidentally, that's nearly double the number of new customers TiVo signed up, as reader Timothy Bandy pointed out. He noted that “TiVo-owned subscriptions totaled 1.71 million, up 136,000 on an annual basis compared to the year ago-period.�If Apple sold 250,000 units of the Apple TV, “it's already doubled the amount of new customers Tivo made last year,� Bandy wrote, “or to put it another way, they already have 1/7th of Tivos' customer base without hardly trying. And as you pointed out, I doubt they've lost several million bucks in the process.�TiVo lost $19 million in the last quarter, and $50 million last year. Apple sells the Apple TV at a profit, although not much of one. That's because the company is working to sell content that works on the Mac, and Apple TV only serves as a contributing part of that strategy. Apple is working to expand the market for fair priced Internet downloads, in opposition to high-DRM, high-priced alternatives.Microsoft has lost billions in its consumer electronics products, including the Xbox 360 that Windows Enthusiasts like to compare against the Apple TV. Microsoft also stomped on efforts by Linux users to recycle the old Xbox as a media playback system. Where's the outrage? Where's the “suckers� blubbering? Where's the reporting that “Microsoft regularly betrays its partners?� It's certainly not in the pages of Forbes. [Brent Schlender's Apple TV: Fortune Dud or Fortune FUD?]It's all Downhill From Here.Lyons then complained that iPhone sales must be fading because Apple dropped the price, neglecting to account for the fact that Apple met its million unit sales goal three weeks early. “The next version of OS X, called Leopard, has suffered delays,� Lyons wrote, again failing to compare its 6 month delay to the six year delay of Vista. I guess Apple isn't the New Microsoft after all.Lyons begged for forgiveness after beating on Linux users for years and glorifying a bunch of greedy SCO investors trying to exploit intellectual property rights the company didn't even own. In describing his partnership with Rob Enderle, I downplayed his SCO role after he pleaded for evenhanded coverage of his past, noting that he did publish some correct information after the writing was on the wall for SCO.However, for his shameless attempts to present the same kind of one-sided, half-truth, negative-spin that praises the worst corporations on Earth while reviling the only company that seems to share any interests and values in common with its customers, Lyons has lost the bits of credibility he begged to retain. Shame on him, and Zoon on Daniel Lyons' head. [Daniel Lyons: Fake Steve Jobs and the SCO Shill Who Hated Linux]Thanks to John Schmidt for the “Big Brother� link.What do you think? I really like to hear from readers. Comment 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! Submit to Reddit or Slashdot, or consider making a small donation supporting this site. Thanks!
-
UK iPhone users to see better value service plans
Filed under: iPhoneAmongst a general re-shuffling of contract pricing, O2 has announced that iPhone customers are going to be getting a better deal on their contracts. The UK contracts were, at launch, notably slim on both calls and texts when compared to other O2 packages. Whilst the higher price was due in part to the inclusion of the Cloud WiFi and unlimited data, there was speculation that the prices were higher to pay for Apple's take of the monthly revenue on the service plans.Thankfully, that's all about to change in February, as O2 has brought its iPhone tariffs in line with regular O2 deals. For those on the cheapest £35-per-month package (such as yours truly), minutes get tripled to 600 and texts to 500 per month, and the £45-per-month package gets bumped to 1200 minutes and 500 texts (previously costing £55). O2 has decided to remove the £55 option of the past, and will reduce their future bills to £45, or allow them to move to the £75, 3,000 minute / 500 SMS package. If you have your iPhone on O2, you'll want to check out this page for the complete low-down.[Via twitter / Macworld and thanks to all those who sent this in!]Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
-
iPhone 1.2.3 update: Google Maps first impressions
Filed under: Macworld, iPhoneThis particular post won't be near as in-depth as one Erica might do (she knows way more about the iPhone than I) but I just wanted to share my first impressions of the new Google Maps functionality on the iPhone after today's 1.1.3 software update. Granted, some would call me crazy for updating such a critical piece of equipment as my iPhone during a busy time like Macworld. But hey, let's live on the edge, shall we?Throwing caution to the wind I made the leap and charged ahead with the update. Before I go on let me mention that I have the most vanilla iPhone out there with no hacks or custom anything (not even ringtones) so the update was a smooth process for me. In and out in under five minutes. Once done and restarted I began to explore what had changed. One of the first things I really wanted to try out was the new maps functionality. Fortunately, an opportunity put the new Google Maps through its paces presented itself immediately; I had to join my fellow TUAW crew at a Macworld party, but all I had was the address with no idea how to get there. Which direction should I go, and how far? Fortunately, these questions were no match for the iPhone's new maps functionality. To do this I first clicked on the Google Maps tool on the iPhone and then on the brand new button in the lower left corner of the screen (looks somewhat like a target crosshair) and waited a few moments while my iPhone triangulated my position using nearby cell towers. Impressively, it located my position almost exactly, and displayed it on the screen. Next, I pressed the directions button and in the new window I saw that next to "Start" was "Current Location" -- obviously where I was at the moment -- and below that I entered the address of where I wanted to go.Once done I pressed the 'Route" button and in about five seconds was presented with a detailed route to my destination complete with a purple line on the map to follow. I admit when I first heard about this feature in the 1.1.3 update I was a bit skeptical about how well it would work. I'm happy to report that, at least in this first-impressions situation, it performed exactly as advertised. Although, I guess I should have expected that from an Apple product. They do seem to pretty much always turn out well.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
-
The Keynote Line
Filed under: Macworld After just over 2 hours in line, we're pleased to bring you the latest photos from the keynote queue line. Already around the block of the Moscone Centre's West Hall, there's a huge number of Apple fans waiting patiently both for Steve Jobs' keynote, and their Starbucks.Stay tuned as we progress further towards the keynote.Gallery: 2008 Keynote LineRead | Permalink | Email this | Comments
-
WaterRoof firewall manager
Filed under: OS, Freeware, Internet Tools, UNIX / BSDLots of people know that OS X has a very powerful stateful packet inspection firewall (ipfw) under the shiny hood of the Sharing Preference Pane thanks to its UNIX underpinnings, but actually understanding and controlling that power is something else entirely. Perhaps a bit lost in the rush to Christmas Macworld published a nice guide to configuring the Leopard firewall that's definitely helpful in getting a bit clearer about what's going on. But if you really want to dig into the options you've got to go deeper, and if you don't have the command line chops to set it up yourself, you'll want to check out the open-source WaterRoof from hanynet.com.Basically, WaterRoof is the graphical front end to ipfw that Apple left out. As the developer notes, its features "include dynamic rules, bandwidth management, NAT configuration and port redirection, pre-defined rule sets and a wizard for easy configuration." Particularly if you're trying to use a Mac as a gateway or router and need more sophistication than the built-in Internet Sharing provides, WaterRoof can really simplify matters.WaterRoof is a free download (donations requested) with separate versions for Tiger and Leopard. The same developer also has a simplified version with many fewer features called NoobProof.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
-
Refurb Mac Pros back on the Apple Store
Filed under: Mac Pro, DealsDealmac reports this morning that the Mac Pro towers have returned to Apple's refurb clearance stock, with the Octocore model available for $3399, a full $600 below new retail. The rest of the line shows up as well (scroll down through the refurb page for all the choices); shipping is also free, which is a big help for those heavy, heavy machines.It may be a smidge late to pick up a tower for Christmas, but the good news is that if you were planning to pick up a hefty Mac before Macworld Expo in January -- since laptops are more likely to see revisions than the big iron -- you can now pick up a pre-owned model for less.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
-
Kindling
When I started writing this column in the spring of 1997 Apple was on the skids. It was the era of Gil Amelio, still several months before the return of Steve Jobs. Apple's products were a confused mish-mash, with product planning coming more from CompUSA than from Cupertino. There was no long-term vision and the company was clearly for sale with no buyers. Sun had taken a look and passed on the deal, simply seeing nothing worth the couple of billion it would have cost to buy the company. In terms of market cap that was more than $160 billion ago, as Apple has gone up by more than 80X since the return of Steve Jobs in the summer of 1997. Jobs and Apple are now on top of the personal computing and consumer electronics worlds, "firing on all cylinders" as Wall Street analysts like to put it. That means it is time for a more nuanced look at the company and where it is headed. Is it really that valuable? Yes. Apple is used to setting styles and inventing platforms, but at the risk of undercutting next month's 2008 predictions column, let's first look at where the product line could use some help. If there are obvious gaps (there are) then they probably need filling, and soon. 1) A new form factor for the Mac Pro towers. 2) Better LCD displays. Apple's are big but expensive and the specs are no longer better than the competition -- or even close. Where are the HDMI ports and the built-in iSight cameras? 3) Blu-ray or, for that matter ANY HD optical storage. This was promised years ago. 4) H.264 hardware support. 5) Black or dark gray MacBook Pros. 6) And of course the now-leaked-by-AT&T 3G iPhone. One product I believe WON'T be coming soon from Apple is a Flash plug-in for the iPhone. Though this was at one time promised, it is hard to say how real that promise ever was because of the strategic importance of Apple's WebKit -- the basis of the Safari browser on Mac, Windows, and now the iPhone and iPod Touch. WebKit, an open source web browser engine (not a web browser in its own right but all the parts you'd need to build a web browser), is key to Apple's vision for devices like the iPhone and the iPod Touch that live somewhere between computers and phones and define where Apple is headed with its mobile strategy. Not much is said about WebKit and this is a surprise to me since it is such a big hit. WebKit has been officially adopted by both the KDE and GTK+ projects, and Google's Open Handset Alliance Android smartphone software platform uses WebKit as its web-rendering engine. The point of WebKit for Apple was to define an open source standard for rendering web pages on all sorts of Internet-enabled devices. This also explains why Apple used KHTML instead of Gecko or its own web engine for Safari -- even though KHTML was terrible at rendering web pages that were optimized for Internet Explorer. KHTML is the only rendering engine that can pass the Acid2 web-rendering test, and following a standard was more important to Apple than correctly rendering poorly written web pages. Which brings us back to the lack of a Flash player or plug-in for the iPhone, which is the single greatest reason why we do not yet see true third-party iPhone applications. Had Apple allowed a Flash player on the iPhone, it risked having Flash -- rather than the Apple-preferred Ajax -- become the dominant iPhone web application development environment. Apple sees much of its future in Internet-enabled consumer appliances. It's the third or fourth rebirth of the whole Network Appliance concept, only this time mobility and media are added and the mix may finally be right. But this strategy won't work as well if Apple has to depend on a third party to bless its platform. These days the options are to embrace Microsoft (.NET and Silverlight), Sun (Java), or Adobe (Flash), but Apple wants to control its own destiny, zigging and zagging as it likes to crush competitors, hence WebKit. It's a huge success for Apple that people just aren't talking about. I'm not saying that a Flash player or plug-in won't eventually appear, but Apple won't allow it to happen until Cupertino feels the WebKit/iPhone/iPod Touch platform is established well enough to stand on its own. The next logical WebKit product for Apple, it seems to me, is a much larger version of the iPod Touch. It would be Apple's first tablet computer and, while they'll still claim it runs OS X, Apple WON'T call it a Mac. I'm not the only person thinking like this. Here's more from an old friend who is much smarter than me. He sees an Apple tablet coming in January for five simple reasons: 1) Because MacWorld in January is when Apple stuns the world with improvements and innovations. A well-designed tablet could be a great innovation. An SDK for February 2008, not for just iPhone but for multi-touch devices in general, including a newly available iTablet-- that would be stunning. 2) Because a multi-touch tablet would provide a patent-protected interface for a new class of communication and computer device that Microsoft and its hardware partners would be hard-pressed to clone. The question now is does one get a Mac or a PC? There would be no PC analog to a well-designed Mac tablet, so if an iTablet is compelling, the question then becomes more like, when can I get one? 3) Because a nice form-factor tablet could be a significant addition to a video-viewing ecosystem. Apple's success in music is not just about well-designed music players, but the way iPods work with iTunes, and the fact that people could easily move their CD collections over and play them on these new portable devices. A nice iTablet could be great for viewing videos. It's not clear that Apple can build in DVD ripping ala Handbrake, but if they did (on the legal grounds that people can make a copy of what they already own, like a CD), then that would be another significant video ecosystem factor. Add good video-storage options on local disks, home networks, and "the cloud," sprinkle in the option for HD viewing, and then mix all that with being able to view videos on iPods and iPhones, Macs and PCs, big screens via Apple TV, and then sleek, portable iTablets... Well, then we'll watch the major studios start to provide their video libraries, all but Disney kicking, screaming, wringing hands, and gnashing teeth. 4) Because an iTablet with a camera built in could potentially have the power and bandwidth to enable portable video communication. Video communication is another ecosystem for which I believe Apple is laying the groundwork. 5) The fact that an iTablet could be a great e-book reader, too, is not a driving reason for such a device, I don't believe. But it's a nice capability. Read the book and watch the movie. Then watch Amazon's new Kindle go up in flames. To this I might add a sixth reason for an iTablet intro, which is because AT&T last week stole the thunder from an Apple 3G iPhone announcement. Jobs sorely needs something even better to announce. Frankly, I wasn't fully convinced until reaching point five. Killing the Kindle and deflating Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos -- now that's something worthy of Jobs and Apple.