★ Notes and Observations Regarding Yesterday’s ‘Let’s Rock’ Apple Special Event

Overall Scope The overall takeaway from yesterday’s news is that Apple’s music and iPod business is right on track. There was nothing exceptional or particularly surprising, but the incremental improvements and changes were significant. A solid year’s worth of progress. One thing that wasn’t mentioned, though, and which has figured prominently in past music-related special events, was growth. In past events, the overview of iPod sales has included charts showing tremendous year-over-year sales growth. Not yesterday. Instead, the charts emphasized only market share and total unit sales since 2001. The news there is good — Apple has sold a grand total of 160 million iPods since 2001 and today commands 73.4 percent of the U.S. retail market (followed by Sandisk at 8.6 percent and Microsoft at 2.6) — but the lack of any braggadocio regarding growth indicates that the market is saturated. That’s not to say unit sales are decreasing, only that they’re no longer accelerating. Of course, one reason iPod sales growth has slowed is that iPhones aren’t included in the tally. (There was no mention during the event of how many iPhone 3Gs Apple has sold so far, however.) Growth can only come where there’s room to grow, which is why even Mac sales are growing faster than iPod sales. Speaking of Macs, contrary to speculation, there were no announcements regarding new Mac notebooks. Such speculation was misguided; Apple has held an iPod/music special event in September or October every year since 2001, and, to my knowledge, has never once used such events to announce new Mac hardware. Those of you holding out for a new lineup of MacBooks will have to wait until October 14, according to sources who, as they say, are familiar with Apple’s hardware plans. iTunes 8 The high-level new features in iTunes 8.0 are the new “Genius” recommendation engine, a revamped iPhoto-like grid view, a new visualizer, and improved accessibility on both Mac OS X and Windows.1 The Genius feature is exposed in two ways. First, you can create a new on-the-fly “genius playlists” by selecting any one song and clicking the Genius button at the bottom of the window. This creates a 25–100 song playlist based on songs in your library that the genius algorithm determines goes well with the song you started with. (The button is disabled if you select multiple songs, so you can’t start with, say, two songs and ask for a genius playlist of tracks that go well with both.) Second, there’s a new Genius Sidebar on the right side of the iTunes window. After opting in to the Genius system, the sidebar contains recommendations from the iTunes Store based on the first song in the current selection. (If you have more than one song selected, the Genius Sidebar only shows recommendations based on the first song in the selection.) The recommendation engine seems pretty damn smart. The genius playlists are a clever idea, like the shuffle feature but with a hint. After a few hours, I like the results better than either my own manual playlists or purely random shuffles. The store recommendations in the sidebar seem equally good, but imperfect, in that it sometimes recommends songs which I already have in my library, ripped from CDs. At first I thought the problem might be with the Genius engine not recognizing songs that weren’t purchased from the iTunes Store, but that’s not quite it, since it does correctly recognize most of the ripped-from-CD tracks in my library. For example, the Genius Sidebar’s recommendations based on The Beastie Boys’s “Sabotage” included “Intergalactic”, a song I already had in my library. The problem seems to be with track metadata; if, say, the album name on the track in your library doesn’t exactly match with the album name in iTunes, it doesn’t recognize it as the same song. If I select “Sabotage” and click the Genius playlist button, I get this error: Invoking the “Update Genius” command in the Store menu, as prescribed in the dialog, had no effect. The album name on my version of the track, ripped from CD and filled in by iTunes using the CDDB database, is “The Sounds of Science (Disc 2)”. The version from the iTunes Store has the album name “Beastie Boys Anthology - The Sounds of Science (Box Set)”. Changing my copy’s album name to match the iTunes Store’s made no difference either — iTunes still claims “Genius is unavailable for the song ‘Sabotage’.” The new visualizer is stunning. The old one remains available (View → Visualizer → iTunes Classic Visualizer) but it’s hard to see how anyone wouldn’t prefer the new one. In the details, iTunes 8 introduces a few noteworthy changes. The Preferences dialog has been simplified. Podcast settings are finally adjustable on a per-podcast level. Visually, in the new grid view, Apple has introduced yet another new scrollbar flavor — black ProKit-esque buttons with a dark gray background. But the scrollbar thumb itself is the same as iTunes’s regular slate-blue scrollbar thumbs (which don’t look like system-standard thumbs) — except when the window is not frontmost, at which point the scrollbar thumb changes to dark gray, rather than light gray. New grid-mode scrollbar, active. New scrollbar, inactive. And speaking of background windows, the main iTunes window now supports click-through for a small number of elements, including everything in the toolbar (e.g. the playback controls) and scrollbars. iTunes 7.7 did not support click-through for these elements. NBC and HD TV Shows NBC withdrew its TV programming from the iTunes Store last year. As of yesterday, it’s back. It’s hard to see that NBC gained much of anything in the form of concessions from Apple. NBC executives stated publicly that they wanted Apple “to take concrete steps to protect content from piracy, since it is estimated that the typical iPod contains a significant amount of illegally downloaded material.” I.e. they wanted Apple to somehow magically prevent iPods and iTunes from playing NBC content obtained from sources other than the iTunes Store. That didn’t happen. NBC also wanted variable pricing for its shows. They sort of got that, in that library content — old shows like “The A-Team” — are available for just $1 per episode. But NBC also wanted to raise prices for episodes of popular new shows, and that did not happen. Standard-def episodes of all new shows on iTunes remain at $2. High-def shows are $3, but that’s not variable pricing — it’s the same for all HD shows, not just NBC’s, and as far as I can see all HD TV shows in the iTunes Store are also available in SD. There are no shows which are only available in HD. It’s a win for everyone — Apple, NBC, and customers — that NBC shows are back, but there’s nothing NBC has today that they wouldn’t have had if they’d never pulled their shows from iTunes a year ago — except for millions of dollars in lost revenue. New iPods The hard-drive-based iPod Classic continues to fade toward irrelevance. Last year it was available in two capacities, 80 and 160 GB. The bad news is that it’s now down to a single capacity, 120 GB. The good news is that it’s in the same slimmer form factor as last year’s 80 GB model, and at the same $249 price. To my recollection, this is the first time that the size of the highest-capacity iPod has gone down year over year. Jobs stated during the event that the 80 GB model out-sold the 160 GB model, but for those people who value maximum storage capacity above all else, a 40 GB drop is significant. The design effort regarding traditional click-wheel iPods all went toward the new Nanos. On the outside, they’ve returned to the long-and-narrow form factor, abandoning last year’s “fat Nano” design. And they’re now available in a full spectrum of vibrant colors: all six colors of the original Apple logo, plus pink, silver, and black. In a change from previous years, all colors are available in both capacities — 8 GB for $149; 16 GB for $199. On the inside, Apple added an accelerometer, which allows the display to rotate when you rotate the iPod. Video plays horizontally, and when you rotate the iPod to horizontal while playing music, it switches to Cover Flow mode, just like with the iPhone and iPod Touch. You can create “genius” playlists directly on the Nano. It even has a voice recorder, which works if you connect a microphone. Even the iPhone doesn’t ship with a voice recorder app.2 The iPod Classic gets none of these new features other than genius playlists. The new iPod Touch gets closer to being a thinner iPhone sans phone. The original iPod Touch lacked hardware volume controls and an external speaker; the new Touch has both. Significant price reductions bring the prices closer to the selling prices of the subsidized iPhones: 8 GB for $229, 16 GB for $299, and 32 GB for $399. (I strongly suspect these new prices for the Touch are the margin-reducing “product transition” Apple alluded to in its quarterly finance call in July.) The portable gaming angle was promoted heavily during the event, and is the crux of the “Funnest iPod ever” slogan. Apple is clearly positioning the iPod Touch as a competitor to handheld gaming devices from Nintendo and Sony. Discussing the 2.1 release of the iPhone OS (available as an update for iPod Touches now; slated for release for iPhones this Friday), Jobs was brutal regarding the quality of the 2.0 release, saying: “2.1 software update is a big update. It fixes lots of bugs. You’ll get fewer call drops. You will get significantly improved battery life, for most customers. We have fixed a lot of bugs where if you have a lot of apps on the phone, you’re not going to get some of the crashes and other things that we’ve seen. Backing up to iTunes is dramatically faster. And so just a lot of bugs have been fixed.” His tone wasn’t so much apologetic as it was scornful.3 One gets the feeling Steve Jobs was about as happy with the problems in the 2.0 iPhone OS as the rest of us. Even if you’re not hearing or vision impaired, you may well benefit from these accessibility improvements. Better support for Mac OS X’s Accessibility APIs directly correlates to improved UI scriptability of the app itself. These two tweets from Nicholas Riley show one example — using AppleScript to determine whether iTunes is talking to AirPort Express. That wasn’t possible until iTunes 8.0.�↩ There are numerous voice recorder apps available in the App Store, of course.�↩ In the video stream from the event, this bit starts around the 48:35 mark.�↩

• Daring Fireball on September 10, 2008
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★ Macworld Expo Predictions

Predictions and advance commentary for tomorrow’s Macworld keynote, some based on consensus rumors, some based on no more than wishful thinking on the part of yours truly. This is all conjecture and tea-leaf-reading (well, mostly), so, please, no wagering. I keep two questions in mind when evaluating Apple product ideas: Would people run out to stand in line to buy this immediately? If not, is there a long-term strategic reason for Apple to start selling this now? If the answer to both questions is “no”, then Apple isn’t going to do it. The iPhone is a perfect example of a #1; the Apple TV is a #2. New Sub-Notebook MacBook: Yes Apple hasn’t had a small notebook in its lineup since the 12-inch PowerBook G4, which I still see in wide use. If you’re using a portable as a portable, smaller size and lighter weight make a tremendous difference. The demand for a good notebook smaller and lighter than standard MacBooks is strong; I think it’s a sure thing that Apple is set to announce one. (Of course, I said so before last year’s Macworld, too.) I say the consensus rumors are right: super-thin, no built-in optical drive, widescreen 12-inch display. It will use a hard drive, not flash memory, for storage. (Look no further than the iPod Classic to see how hard drives don’t keep a device from being super-thin). Rumors are already running strong that it’ll be called MacBook Air. (I like it, not sure though if Nike would.) Newton-y Tablet Thing: No I am nearly convinced that this product exists, at least as a project in development. My hunch is that AppleInsider has it spot-on: it’s in development, but not yet ready to launch, and, perhaps, never will if Apple can’t get it right. (Recall Steve Jobs’s statement to Walter Mossberg that he’s as proud of some of the products Apple decided not to ship as he is of the ones they did.) Like the iPhone, it runs “OS X” but not Mac OS X, does not run Mac apps, and will not be called a “Mac”. The big problem with a “tablet” computer of any sort is that 15 years of industry history indicate that people do not want to buy tablet computers. But the iPhone, arguably, is a tablet computer — a sub-tablet, if you will. The key mistake with failed efforts like Microsoft’s Tablet PC (and even Apple’s own Newton) was that these devices attempt to do too much. It’s seen as a feature that Tablet PCs run the full version of Windows. But why force software UI’s designed for traditional hardware form factors upon a totally different device? A successful tablet-like device from Apple, I think, would clearly be designed as a secondary computing device — a satellite attached and synched to a Mac or PC (probably, of course, through iTunes). There’s still the “what would I use it for?” factor. It seems to me it would need to be something more than just an iPod Touch with a larger screen — if that’s all it is, then what’s the point of buying one instead of a smaller, poctetable, iPod Touch or iPhone? I simply lack the cleverness to imagine what that hook might be — but I can’t imagine Apple releasing such a product without an obvious “Oh I gotta buy that” hook. Anyway: I do think something like this is in the works, but I don’t think it’s coming out now. I’d love to be wrong. Ubiquitous Wireless Networking for MacBooks: Please After using my iPhone for a few months, it started feeling weird that my PowerBook doesn’t have ubiquitous wireless networking: Wi-Fi when available, and seamless, instant switchover to something else when it isn’t. Just what that “something else” is, I don’t know. EVDO? WiMax? A Bluetooth connection to share an iPhone’s EDGE connection? I don’t care. But I’d pay for it. Ubiquitous networking is certainly the most intriguing thing about Amazon’s Kindle. It just feels crippled that I can’t get a network connection — even a slow one — once I’m outside the range of Wi-Fi. Wireless Time Machine Backups: Yes Time Machine is very cool; the first backup that qualifies as “you don’t have to do anything, it just works”. But currently it only works using a storage device connected via USB or FireWire. Tethered backups are irritating with notebooks — and MacBooks are the fastest-growing segment of Apple’s Mac hardware sales. The problem is that when you want to use your portable away from your desk, it’s a pain to disconnect mounted USB and FireWire drives. You can’t just pulled the plugs — you’ve got to unmount them in the Finder first. And, once you do so, to get Time Machine backups running again, you’ve got to re-tether your storage drive. Leopard developer seeds all supported network backups to USB drives connected to an AirPort base station. The feature was also demoed at WWDC. It was removed (or, better said, disabled) very late in Leopard’s development, supposedly because of a security problem that was discovered, but I expect the feature to return, perhaps in 10.5.2. It’s a terrific idea, perfect for multi-Mac homes and small offices. But so why not sell a device as a dedicated product — a big 500 GB or larger hard drive (or array of them) with built-in AirPort networking. No need to attach it to a separate AirPort base station, no temptation to use the device for anything other than one purpose: backing up via Time Machine. Just plug it into a power outlet, run through a simply configuration tool a la AirPort Utility, and it’s ready. When it first appears on your network, your (Leopard-running) Mac could prompt to ask if you’d like to use it for Time Machine, the same way it prompts when you first plug in a new USB or FireWire drive. iTunes Movie Rentals: Yes This one seems like such a done deal that it barely qualifies as a rumor. It seems obvious: Unlike with music, there’s been a strong market for movie rentals for as long as there’s been a home video market. Most movies aren’t worth watching more than once. Reports (based on leaks from studio executives) indicate rentals will cost $3-5, and will expire after 24 hours. If true, presumably that means they’ll expire 24 hours after you beginning playing them, not 24 hours after downloading. It’d be nice if the terms were a bit more flexible than that. One of the best things about Netflix, and something which makes it far more appealing than traditional brick-and-mortar Blockbuster-style rentals, is that you can watch movies on your own terms. A Netflix-style iTunes movie subscription service that lets you keep a certain number of unlocked movies open at the same time would be killer. Apple TV 2.0: Yes Jobs has called Apple TV a “hobby” for Apple. I think they have high hopes for it, but calling it a hobby is a practical way to buy time for it. What Apple did with the iPod was start as small and simple as they could — one device, in one configuration, only for the Mac, and all it did was play recorded audio — and then build the platform slowly from there. Things like Windows support, color screens, video playback, and expanding to a range of form factors all came incrementally. I think that’s the plan with Apple TV. Start simple and humble, and build from there, year after year. One obvious improvement (albeit contingent upon another rumor) would be to allow us to buy (or rent) movies and TV shows directly from the iTunes Store, right from the Apple TV. If the iPhone can do it, the Apple TV should too. I still think it’d be good business for Apple to sell their own HDTV sets with Apple TV built-in — more money for Apple, one fewer device spewing cables behind the display. DRM-Free iTunes Plus Music From the Other Major Music Labels: No I think Apple would love to have this, but it seems pretty clear that the major labels — other than EMI, of course — are convinced that it’s in their interest to withhold DRM-free music from Apple, in the hopes of helping Amazon gain market share. It actually agree that it’s in the music labels’ interest for Amazon’s music store to succeed. I’m not sure, though, that withholding DRM-free music from Apple is spiting anyone other than iTunes customers. I suspect the vast majority — an overwhelming majority — of iTunes music purchases are made by people who have at best only a vague inkling of what “DRM” is. If there’s any actual logic to it, it’s PR — withholding DRM-free music from Apple makes it easier to paint Apple as a company bent on using iTunes as a competitive cudgel to lock customers in to iPod hardware. Only a hack reporter would buy into that line, given Steve Jobs’s unequivocol “Thoughts on Music” open letter last year. One thing that would dispel any negative stories on the state of the iTunes empire, of course, would be the long-awaited debut of The Beatles catalog, exclusively at iTunes, perhaps with an on-stage visit from Paul McCartney. New iPhone Hardware: No, With a Minor Exception Apple announced the original iPhone a year ago, but they didn’t ship it until six months ago. They’re not going to announce new iPhones six months in advance again. (It was to their advantage last year to cause people to postpone phone purchases until the iPhone appeared; that’s not the case now that the iPhone is on the market.) If anything, I don’t expect new iPhones to appear until next fall, at the yearly iPod/iTunes pre-holiday season special event, leaving the original iPhone on the market for over a year. Why revise hardware for a product that, by all accounts, is selling remarkably well as-is? The only exception I could see would be a 16 GB iPhone that’s otherwise unchanged from the current 8 GB model. iPhone SDK News: No I can see the upcoming iPhone SDK getting a mention from Jobs on stage, a reminder that it’s coming and that’s it’s going to be great, but Macworld isn’t WWDC, and SDKs don’t make for splashy presentations. If I’m wrong, it’ll be because they have a demo queued up from a third-party developer with early access to the SDK. Actual third-party software (written against the actual official SDK) is demoable. Games, perhaps? The apparently-leaked 1.1.3 firmware might make for a good demo, what with the jiggly icons and whatnot. Cinema Displays With Better Resolution, Brighter Screens, and Built-In Cameras: Yes If I keep predicting it, eventually I’ll be right.

• Daring Fireball on January 14, 2008
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★ The Fear

The NDA is dead, yes, and good riddance, but there remain serious problems with the way Apple is managing the App Store. It boggles my mind that there remain so many people who don’t see this. This piece by Dan Kimerling at TechCrunch is one example; various of the reader comments on Jason Snell’s piece for Macworld last week are another.1 One factor, perhaps, is the tendency to see everything in terms of extremes. Black or white, good or bad. But this debate is not about wanting Apple to make radical changes, such as, say, changing the iPhone from a closed platform to a more open platform a la Android. There are reasonable arguments to be made that a more open iPhone platform would be good not just for iPhone developers, but for Apple and its shareholders. But those arguments aren’t what this debate is about. This debate is about wanting Apple to make minor changes — a slight but very significant course correction. Put another way, this is not about the big picture scope of what kind of hypothetical App Store (or Stores, plural) Apple should have created. That train left the station long ago. This is about the specific details of the App Store that actually exists, and the rules that govern it. I believe that a closed, controlled App Store can work, but by definition that requires developers to place trust in Apple. The problem is that Apple is managing the App Store in certain untrustworthy ways. And I mean trust more in the sense of stability than honesty — like in the way you need to trust a ladder before you’ll climb it. Here is a complete list of what Apple must do to increase developers’ trust in the App Store system: State the rules. Follow the rules. That’s it. This is so clear that even those who are arguing the other side — that Apple’s App Store stewardship is just fine as it stands today — have jumped through hoops in an attempt to argue that Apple’s exclusion of Podcaster was in fact in accordance with the iPhone SDK Guidelines. Kimerling, in his “Stop Complaining About Apple and the App Store” piece, writes: When you create the platform, you set the rules. If Apple wants to restrict iPhone applications to those that do not compete with features built into the iPhone, well, they can go right ahead and do so. It is right in the SDK’s user agreement. That’s just not true. The iPhone SDK Agreement, at least by the standards of legal contracts, is written in clear, straightforward English. (Apple’s lawyers, in the opinion of yours truly at least, are good writers.) The rules it lays down are clear. And Podcaster doesn’t break any of them. Given any set of rules, there will always be edge cases. Judgment must be rendered, and, inevitably, some will feel edge cases were judged the wrong way. But the reason iPhone developers (and prospective iPhone developers) are appalled by Apple’s rejection of Podcaster and MailWrangler is that neither app was near any edge defined in the SDK guidelines. Podcaster was rejected for duplicating the podcast features in iTunes and the iPhone “iPod” app. MailWrangler was rejected on the following grounds: Your application duplicates the functionality of the built-in iPhone application Mail without providing sufficient differentiation or added functionality, which will lead to user confusion. The word “duplicate”, in any conjugation, does not appear in the iPhone SDK Agreement. Not a word about it. And there is clearly no general rule about third-party apps duplicating the functionality of the iPhone’s built-in apps. PCalc, along with a handful of other calculator apps, duplicates every single feature of the built-in Calculator app. There are dozens of note-taking apps that compete with Notes; MagicPad goes so far as to use the same icon as Apple’s Notes app, just with different colors. There is an entirely category in the App Store — an entire category — for weather apps, several of which “duplicate” the entire functionality of the built-in Weather app. So, not only judging by the rules set forth in the iPhone SDK Agreement, but also by the existence proof of hundreds of apps currently published in the App Store that duplicate (which is really to say compete with) built-in iPhone apps, no reasonable person would have expected Podcaster or MailWrangler to be rejected. So their rejection is problematic on three fronts. First, the submission process is such that an app rejected at the conceptual level — one that cannot be tweaked or fixed to gain entry upon resubmission, but whose fundamental premise is rejected by Apple — such an app is only rejected after it has been written. The developer does all of the work to produce the app and only then finds out it was all for naught. Second, there are clearly rules which are not listed in the SDK guidelines. Third, in its explanations for the rejections, Apple is not stating what these actual unpublished rules are, and is instead offering as the reason this “it duplicates a built-in app” rule which, given all the aforementioned counterexamples that have been accepted into the App Store, isn’t actually a rule at all. The explanation is clearly false. Taken together, these three factors lead to The Fear, which is that developers cannot trust the App Store process. You can spend all of the time and effort it takes to build an app, follow every known rule, and still get rejected. From Apple’s perspective, especially, say, in upper management, it may be all too easy to look at what’s going on with the store — thousands of published apps, a ton of money changing hands — and not see the problem. In the big picture, from both a technical and marketing perspective, the App Store is a grand success. The problem is that the apps that are the most interesting, the most important, are the ones that take the most work to create. And the apps that take the most work to create are the ones that are most likely not even to be made in this environment, because the risk is greater. The more work it takes to create an app, the more you lose if Apple rejects it. Going back to the ladder analogy, the higher you’re trying to climb, the more you need to trust the ladder before you start. It’s not about a handful of developers who’ve had their apps rejected. It’s about all the other developers who are now spooked, and that the ones who are the most spooked are the ones who harbor the grandest, boldest, most innovative ideas. Interpolation Regarding a Theory on Which Apps Apple Won’t Allow Developers to Compete With In the absence of revised iPhone SDK Agreement from Apple, we can attempt to guess what the unpublished rules are. With Podcaster, for example, the “follow the money” rule of thumb leads to the conclusion that Apple will not allow any competition with iTunes, because iTunes is a profit source. This is why MailWrangler’s rejection is the one that puts The Fear in my heart. As unjust as the Podcaster rejection appears, if Apple really wants to prohibit competition with iTunes, even anti-competitively, you can at least see the thinking behind the decision. It’s foolish and unnecessary — the fact that iTunes is wide open to total competition on both Mac OS X and Windows hasn’t hurt it at all — and it also quite possibly invites some sort of legal challenge, but at least there is a logical idea behind it. But Mail? Why on earth should Apple care if some third-party email client for the iPhone becomes wildly popular? It makes no sense. iPhone users who use the built-in Mail app don’t pay extra to do so. Mail doesn’t tie users to Apple’s own MobileMe service. In fact, Mail offers specific setup help to work with Gmail, the service MailWrangler is optimized for. If you can make a replacement for Notes and Weather and Calendar, why not Mail? I have a theory. It is more, well, emotional than logical. But it’s the only theory I can think of that makes any sense at all and fits the available evidence. The theory is that there is an unpublished rule that Apple — and in this case, where by “Apple” I really mean “Steven P. Jobs” — will not publish third-party apps that compete with or replace any of the four apps in the iPhone’s default “dock”: Phone, Mail, Safari, and iPod. Go back to Jobs’s original iPhone introduction at Macworld Expo 2007. It was a masterful presentation. Carmine Gallo, writing for BusinessWeek, calls it Jobs’s greatest presentation; I agree. Gallo describes the moment it was unveiled: After laying the groundwork, Jobs builds up to the new device by teasing the audience: “Today, we are introducing three revolutionary products. The first is a wide-screen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary new mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.” Jobs continues to build tension. He repeats the three devices several times then says, “Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device … today Apple is going to reinvent the phone!” The crowd goes wild. This “three revolutionary products” pitch was inordinately effective. For one thing, live, in the hall, Jobs completely fooled the crowd, yours truly included. But then as he repeated the three product ideas over and over, while icons representing the three products rotated behind him on screen, faster and faster, it started dawning on us how we’d been tricked. By the time Jobs came out and said that it was just one device that encompassed all three products, everyone in Moscone West had come to that conclusion on their own — a nifty little way of making the crowd feel clever, as though we’d figured out a riddle. But this pitch also worked because it was true. All three of those products sound good on their own. All three in one device sounds insanely great. Jobs was introducing the iPhone simply by describing precisely what it was. A phone, a widescreen video iPod, and a breakthrough Internet communicator. The icons in the iPhone’s default dock represent the core functionality of the device. Phone, Email, Web, iPod. With nothing other than those four apps, the iPhone still would have been a hit. Not as great, but, still, great. Everything else the iPhone’s built-in apps do could be done, to some extent, through Safari: notes, calendars, weather, maps, stocks. There are a few minor exceptions. SMS is one example, but that’s really just an adjunct to the Phone app. Anything that relates to the phone network — voice or SMS — is unavailable through the third-party iPhone SDK anyway. You couldn’t write your own SMS app even if you wanted to. (Apple clearly has no problem with competing chat apps — there are several IM clients available in the App Store. That’s the same basic concept as SMS, but using IP networking.) And so my guess is that while there may not be any logic, there’s at least a notion, if only in Jobs’s mind, that these four apps are sacrosanct because they define the iPhone. Everything else, both from Apple and from App Store developers, is piffle, secondary to those four apps. Harry McCracken’s recent iPhone user survey indicates that iPhone users agree that those four apps comprise the most-used features of the iPhone. But the least essential of the four is Mail. You cannot place phone calls or play music and video from your personal iTunes library using a web browser, but can read and send email through it.2 Millions of people do just that every day, including, I’m sure, many of you reading this essay. And Google’s iPhone-optimized version of Gmail shows just how well it can be done. It’s not just good for web-based mail, it’s just good, period. And so this idea that Apple seems to have that Mail is particularly special is misguided. The Phone and iPod apps are special, because at a fundamental level they perform tasks that cannot be duplicated in a web app. But there’s nothing any more special about Mail than there is about, say, Calendar. Calendar, if anything, is more closely tied to Apple’s proprietary and commercial MobileMe service — Mail works great with any IMAP server, including Gmail, but Calendar only works for online syncing with MobileMe or Exchange. But Apple doesn’t seem to have any problem allowing Calendar competitors into the App Store. Notes Calendar is a $3 Lotus Notes calendaring client. Exchange Remote Calendar is a $10 is a $10 calendaring client for Exchange. If these are OK, why not a dedicated Gmail email client? The only explanation is that Mail is deemed untouchable and Calendar is not. The real test would be for someone to write a dedicated Google Calendar iPhone app — but given what happened to MailWrangler, it might be hard to find someone willing to try it. In short, my theory is that Mail is on the do-not-compete list not because there’s any strategic reason for Apple to do so, but simply because of a vague notion that Mail is one of the iPhone’s defining apps. This notion is wrong. Mail is important, but there’s nothing about it that needs to be protected from competition. End of Interpolation, Back to the Three Problems, Which, Due to the Grotesque Length of the Above Interpolation, I Will Remind You Are: (1) App Ideas Are Rejected Only After the Apps Are Actually Built; (2) There Exist Secret Unpublished Rules Regarding What Is Allowed; and (3) When Apps Are Rejected for Violating the Unpublished Rules, Apple Refuses to State Just What These Rules Are One thing that would make a difference would be a submission process whereby developers could submit their application ideas to Apple in advance, to find out if they’re OK. That’s how it works on game platforms from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft — developers submit a detailed proposal and wait until they get the green light before actually building the game. That sounds good, but there are problems with the idea. For developers, it would require an additional level of trust in Apple. Ideas are less valuable than actual implementations, but the more original an idea is, the less comfortable you are to share it. And for Apple, it would require significantly more work. They’d still need to examine and approve the actual shipping applications, but now they’d also have to examine and consider application proposals. The world’s hard drives are littered with abandoned unfinished software projects — there would surely be far more proposals submitted for consideration than there are actual iPhone applications. As it stands today, Apple is already struggling mightily to keep up with the work of approving new and updated application submissions — the typical turnaround time is between one to two weeks. Perhaps Apple could offer this as a service limited to ADC Select ($499) or even Premier ($3,499) members. The service is needed most by the developers who are considering the biggest apps, most of whom either are already paid ADC members or wouldn’t bat an eyelash at the cost of joining. It wouldn’t be democratic, but it might make it feasible. Platforms like Wii and Xbox ship maybe a few dozen titles a month, tops. The App Store has published 3,500 titles in just three months. (And it costs far more to join the developer programs for gaming consoles than the $100 iPhone SDK fee.) More important, though, is for Apple to address problems 2 and 3, by publishing in the iPhone SDK Agreement all of the rules they’re using to evaluate applications. If we’re not allowed to write email or podcast clients, say so. If something unforeseen comes up, Apple should make a decision, and then publish the new rule. Rules you disagree with are frustrating. Rules you don’t know about are scary. I will also note that, to my knowledge, not a single published iPhone developer has spoken out in favor of the App Store’s current rejection policies. Those developers who have spoken are against it. Those who see no problem are not themselves iPhone developers.�↩ Even if Apple were to come to its senses and allow third-party developers to write competing email clients, the built-in Mail app would hold one significant technical advantage, which is that it runs in the background. In fact, background processing is the one factor that unites the four dock apps. Phone, Mail, Safari, and iPod all continue running the background; no other apps, including those from Apple, do.�↩

• Daring Fireball on October 2, 2008
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★ Macworld Expo 2009 Predictions

As required by the FCC, all Mac-related web sites must publish pre-Macworld Expo predictions regarding what Apple may announce at the show. Remember: these are predictions based on little more than my own speculation and tea-leaf reading, so hold your applause until the end, and, please, no wagering. New 17-Inch MacBook Pro — Seems like a sure thing. The lack of new 17-inch hardware was a glaring omission from October’s new MacBook line-up. Expect something that looks pretty much exactly like a bigger version of the new 15-inch MacBook Pro. Last-minute rumors claim that the new 17-inch MacBook Pro will have a sealed (non-user-replaceable) battery. Sounds odd, and if true, will surely generate complaints that it’s stupid move on Apple’s part, but given Apple’s recent penchant for sealed batteries, it wouldn’t surprise me. New Mac Mini — Yes. The current Mac Mini lineup is unchanged since August 2007, almost a year and a half ago. Overdue for an update, to say the least. I don’t think there’s any great enthusiasm for the Mac Mini at Apple, but it’s a strong seller. New 30-Inch Cinema Display — Yes. Much like with the 17-inch MacBook Pro, the existing 30-inch Cinema Display just looks old next to the new 24-inch model. As for a 20-inch model, I’m going to say no. 20-inch displays are the new 17-inch displays: too small. Speed Bump iMac Revisions — I’m not sure where the rumors started about there being significant changes to the iMac, but I expect what we’ll actually see will look the same as the current iMacs but offer slightly faster processors, slightly bigger hard drives, etc. Speed bump revisions don’t make for good demos, so while I expect updated iMacs this week, I don’t expect them to be announced during the keynote itself. iLife and iWork ’09 — Yes, nearly a sure thing. These suites are both profitable and popular, and the current ’08 suites were released in August 2007. They’re both due for updates, and they both make for good keynote demo material. At the top of my personal wish list: improvements to iMovie and Pages. I see the logic behind Apple’s decision to scrap the old iMovie and start over from the ground up with iMovie ’08. But I find iMovie ’08 downright confusing. The difference between “events” and “projects” seems muddled, and it’s a clumsy tool when it comes to actually editing clips together to make a movie. As for Pages, I would love to see it gain additional professional-caliber typographic controls (including better support for OpenType fonts). Snow Leopard — I expect a demo, and maybe a loose release date (like, say, “first half of 2009”). As Apple emphasized when Snow Leopard was announced at WWDC last year, Snow Leopard is mainly about low-level under-the-hood improvements and optimizations to Mac OS X, not about new user-visible features. But the new Exchange integration for Mail and iCal is certainly demo-able. What I expect is for Apple to make old features look new, by updating the system-wide appearance theme. I’ve made this prediction several times in the past and been wrong, but eventually I’ll be right: it’s time for the last vestiges of the original Mac OS X 10.0 “Aqua” theme to go. Scrollbars and push buttons, for example, remain largely unchanged since the Mac OS X public beta in 2000. My bet says iTunes-style scrollbars everywhere, darker window chrome, and a light-text-on-dark-background menu bar. (The name I’ve heard for the new theme: Marble. Make of that what you will.) Updated Apple TV — Yes. I expect new hardware, but probably nothing radically new other than increased storage space. But it’ll be in the keynote as a signal that Apple is serious about this market. There’s been a lot of supposedly expert speculation that Apple is going to abandon Apple TV because it’s not a hit. But while it’s not a hit, it’s not a failure, either, and, more importantly, there is no dominant player in this field, where by “this field” I mean that for consumer-level digital media management for the living room. I’m not going to say that Blu-ray is dead because it isn’t. But if DVD isn’t the last mainstream physical medium for home movie distribution, Blu-ray will be. The future, obviously and inevitably, is in downloads. I’m already there, and you, dear DF reader, probably are too, but for the mass market, downloadable movies for the living room remain in the future. The iPhone was an instant hit, but the iPod wasn’t. Apple grew the iPod from a Mac-only peripheral into a cultural sensation slowly but steadily over three or four years. I think they have a similar long-term plan for Apple TV. And in large part Apple — along with every other hardware maker — is hobbled by the limitations of what content the movie studios will allow them to distribute. The iTunes Store’s movie library has grown significantly over the past year, but it’s still far smaller than what your neighborhood video store has to offer. And while iTunes has high definition movies available to rent, the only movies you can buy are in standard definition. That’s a studio-imposed limitation, and it’s one that works in Blu-ray’s favor, and against Apple TV’s. (Wishful thinking on my part: I’d love for Apple to announce some Boxee-like features built-in as standard Apple TV features. The TV networks seem more willing to play ball with digital distribution than the movie studios, so, maybe.) There are rumors that Apple might release software that allows any Mac to serve as an Apple TV. I know nothing about such software, but if you think of it more as the unification of Front Row and Apple TV, it makes perfect sense. But I don’t expect Apple to abandon selling dedicated Apple TV hardware soon — even the cheapest Mac Mini costs a few hundred bucks more than an Apple TV. iPhone Nano — No. Frankly, I just don’t get these rumors. The only way this makes sense is if it’s a replacement for the iPhone 3G — i.e. a slightly smaller form factor for the existing iPhone 3G’s features. But why now, just six months after iPhone 3G debuted? The pattern seems to be for Apple to release new iPhone hardware every summer, much like who they’ve usually released new iPod hardware in the fall. (And why “nano” rather than “mini” for something that, according to the purported third-party case designs that the rumor is founded upon, is only a little bit smaller? With iPods, “nano” is used for models that are way smaller and thinner.) iPhone Tethering — No, but I would love to be wrong. The longer I use my iPhone, the more frustrating it feels that my MacBook doesn’t have the same sort of nearly-ubiquitous network access. I’m one of the lucky few to have scored a copy of NetShare during its brief availability on the App Store, and there are other solutions for jailbroken iPhones, but I want Apple-style integration. I can’t see any way that this could happen without having to pay an extra monthly fee to AT&T, but if the price is even just semi-reasonable, I’d pay it in a heartbeat. iPhone OS 3.0 Demo — My wildcard prediction, which, I will reiterate, is based on nothing more than my own speculation and wishful thinking. One thing I’m nearly certain of is that the next iPhone OS release will be 3.0, not 2.3, if for no other reason than that there have been no developer betas since the release of version 2.2. To my nose, that smells like a major release with significant new features is in the oven. I fully expect iPhone OS 3.0 to be announced and demoed at least a few months before it is released. Third-party developers need to time to adapt to any changes, add support for new features, and to bang away on beta releases to shake out the bugs. But assuming there will be significant new features, Apple will want to unveil them at a high-profile event. If I had to wager, I’d bet on a special event around March, much like last year’s event to unveil the iPhone SDK. But if it’s going to be ready for developer betas sooner than later, it’d be a nice surprise to see Phil Schiller call Scott Forstall on stage to demo it now. As for what might appear in iPhone OS 3.0, here’s my wish list. First, a new home screen app (a.k.a. SpringBoard), designed from the ground up for a system where users have a few dozen or more extra apps installed. Managing dozens of apps on the iPhone today is simply a pain in the ass. Second, maybe an answer to the question of where the background notification API is — you know, the one we were told at WWDC to expect a few months ago, but which we haven’t heard a word about since. And maybe — pretty please, Mr. Forstall, with sugar on top — copy and paste.

• Daring Fireball on January 5, 2009
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★ BlackBerry vs. iPhone

1: Wherein Neither ‘RIM’ Nor ‘BlackBerry’ Are Even Mentioned, but Rather the Stage Is Set for Showing Why They Might Be Seriously Screwed Along the lines of can’t-really-be-answered-but-gosh-they’re-fun-to-ponder questions like, say, “Who’d win in a fight, Batman or Spider-Man?” or “Star Destroyer vs. U.S.S. Enterprise?”,1 here’s one regarding the iPhone: What historical Mac is a current iPhone most analogous to, spec-wise? I.e, complete this sentence: “An iPhone is like having a tiny ____ in your pocket?” Now of course the comparison can’t be precise. Different software, different use cases, different purposes. But there’s no denying that an iPhone is a computer. And unless you’re really young, it’s faster — a lot faster — than the computers you owned not so long ago. So, seriously, stop here for a moment and think about it. My first answer, pulled simply from recollection of how fast machines felt to use, was the original iMac. But that machine — announced 10 years ago this week — had a 233 MHz G3 and, by default, a paltry 32 MB of RAM. Apple has never officially released the CPU specs of the iPhone, but Craig Hockenberry poked around with undocumented system APIs which indicated the iPhone’s CPU runs at 400 MHz with a bus speed of 100 MHz, and that there’s 128 MB of RAM. As we all recall from the PowerPC era, MHz is not a precise metric for comparing the performance of CPUs across different architectures; I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to find out that a 400 MHz PowerPC G3 is a faster chip than the 400 MHz ARMwhatever that’s in the iPhone, if only because of the power constraints. But, still, it’s something. So, my answer to the question: the original “Pismo” G3 PowerBook. The numbers match up pretty closely: 400 MHz CPU, 100 MHz bus speed, 64 MB of RAM. (The higher-end Pismo had a 500 MHz CPU and 128 MB of RAM.) Even storage sizes are similar: hard drive options for the Pismo were 6, 12, or 18 GB. Another possible answer: the original blue-and-white Power Mac G3 — again, 400 MHz CPU, 100 MHz bus speed, 64-128 MB of RAM, and 6-12 GB hard drives. Think about that — in just nine years, the specs that then described Apple’s top-of-the-line desktop computer now describe their phone. One thing that makes this comparison hard is that there’s not much software in common. You can’t use most of the real-world tasks commonly used for ballpark benchmarking, like, say, Photoshop image processing or ripping MP3s from AIFFs, because the iPhone doesn’t do them. But there is one processor intensive task we can compare: web page rendering. In the early days of the web, it took a while for even moderately large web pages to render in a browser, even when you were loading them from HTML files right on your hard drive. If you were to plop yourself down in front of one of these vintage 1999-2000 Macs for an afternoon of web browsing, even with a decent Ethernet connection to the Internet you’d find the experience pretty damn slow by current standards. For all the incessant chatter about the demand for and purported certainty of 3G wireless networking in the next generation of iPhone hardware, the truth is that current iPhones are held back, web-surfing-wise, by more than just the speed of EDGE (which admittedly, is indeed pretty slow). Recall this video pitting a 3G Nokia E61i against an iPhone on EDGE — total rendering time was more or less the same, and in a few cases, the iPhone came out ahead. You can see that browsing speed — which is what matters — depends on more than just networking speed simply by comparing how long it takes to render a web page on the iPhone using Wi-Fi: a lot longer than it takes to load the same page in using Safari on a Mac. For example, it takes about two or three seconds for Safari to load the Daring Fireball home page on my new MacBook Pro. Using the same Wi-Fi network, it takes my iPhone about 15 seconds. (Using EDGE, it takes about 60 seconds to completely load, although you can start reading much sooner than that.) Point being that even if 3G wireless networking were as fast as Wi-Fi — which it’s not — browsing on an iPhone would still be pretty slow compared to browsing on a modern desktop or laptop. If you frequently use Wi-Fi on your iPhone, a faster processor in the next-generation hardware would make a bigger difference to the overall experience than faster phone-carrier networking. And so here’s the point I’m driving at. If a 2007 iPhone is loosely equivalent in terms of computing power to a 2000 PowerBook or 1999 Power Mac, that puts the spread at around seven or eight years. Extrapolate forward, and it’s therefore not at all unreasonable to think that a 2014 iPhone will pack the computing power of today’s MacBook Pro. Or, nearer term, that an iPhone introduced two years from now might pack the punch of a 2003 Aluminum PowerBook G4 — quite a difference from the Pismo. Even if your estimate of the iPhone’s equivalent-horsepower Mac is further back in time than mine, there’s no denying that Moore’s Law applies to handhelds, too. Eventually there will be a computer that fits in your pocket that is more powerful than today’s Mac Pros. But the path from here to there is riddled with difficult engineering problems — heat dissipation, battery life, and OS integration chief among them. There is marketing. There most certainly is design. But at the core of this market — by which I mean the market for handheld multitasking web-surfing networked-everywhere “phones” which are really computers — is engineering. Apple is the best handheld computer engineering company in the world today, hands down. They’re also the best handheld computer user experience design company. And they’re not sharing. 2: Why RIM Is Screwed When the iPhone was announced, I saw Apple as staking out ground far afield from the territory RIM occupies with the BlackBerry. Last year, I didn’t see Apple implementing Exchange support in the iPhone OS, and clearly that was, well, completely wrong. The “enterprise” features Apple has announced for the imminent 2.0 release of the iPhone OS — remote wipe, push email, automatic calendar and contact synching — pretty much encompass every single feature that’s been held up as a reason the iPhone wouldn’t sell to enterprise users. It remains to be seen how well these new iPhone features will actually work, but if the answer is “as well as promised”, and if the iPhone’s Mail app is improved in ways targeting people who receive a high number of messages, it’s hard to see a single software advantage in the BlackBerry’s favor. Which leaves hardware, which leaves the keyboard. Two Sundays ago, the New York Times ran a lengthy business-section piece by Brad Stone, titled “BlackBerry’s Quest: Fend Off the iPhone”. Regarding the upcoming BlackBerry 9000, the focus turned to the keyboard: Photographs of the device, leaked to gadget news sites, also indicate that the new BlackBerry will have elegant curves suggestive of the iPhone. It will also have a physical keyboard like previous R.I.M. devices, as opposed to the glass touch screen found on the iPhone. There’s a reason that R.I.M. is averse to the iPhone’s glass pad. “I couldn’t type on it and I still can’t type on it, and a lot of my friends can’t type on it,�? says Mike Lazaridis, R.I.M.’s co-chief executive and technological visionary. “It’s hard to type on a piece of glass.�? Mr. Lazaridis thinks that e-mail-dependent BlackBerry owners demand the reliability and tactile feedback of a keyboard. But, despite his critique of the iPhone, he does not dismiss the possibility that R.I.M. may itself one day sell a touch-screen phone, aimed specifically at consumers without the e-mail demands of BlackBerry’s core users. Translation: “We’ll emphasize the physical keyboard as a differentiating factor as long as it seems to work, at which point we’ll try a touch-screen keyboard too.” The only other angle RIM seems to be hanging its hat on is “security”: RIM is also betting on security, which hinges on the fact that its handsets and e-mail systems are relatively impervious to hackers. Mr. Lazaridis predicts that corporations will not give iPhones to their workers because they have already proved vulnerable to hackers eager to pry iPhones off AT&T’s system and make them work on other wireless networks. “It’s not that simple for an I.T. manager to give up security,�? he said. The idea that iPhone carrier unlocking is a “security problem” is a conflation between what an attacker can do to your phone, against your will and/or unbeknownst to you, versus what a phone’s owner can do to their own phone. It’s not like these “hackers” are attacking happy AT&T-subscribed iPhone owners and switching them over to Sprint against their will. To understand why Apple is making a concerted effort to appeal to BlackBerry users, consider an analogy to the board game Risk. RIM has a large army (read: users), but they’re all massed together in one spot on the map. They care about email, they care about exactly the sort of enterprise features Apple has announced for the iPhone, and they are known to be willing to pay several hundred dollars for a handset. A lucrative target that can be attacked all at once. And the BlackBerry is weakest where the iPhone is strongest: web browsing, music, and video. Compare and contrast with, say, a software platform like Windows Mobile, or a hardware maker like Nokia — their users are spread across a wide variety of phones and platforms. It was far easier to turn the iPhone into something almost every BlackBerry customer might at least consider than it would have been to make a lineup of iPhones that appeal to every Nokia customer. RIM doesn’t really have any lock-in other than user habits. The BlackBerry gimmick is that it works with the email system your company bought from Microsoft. Replace a BlackBerry with an iPhone (2.0) and the messages, contacts, and calendar events that sync over the network will be the same ones on the BlackBerry you just tossed into a desk drawer. In broad terms, BlackBerrys are optimized first for email; the iPhone for the web. What’s more important, an email client or a web browser? For most people, and perhaps even most current BlackBerry users, the answer is clearly the web. Many people in fact read their email entirely through the web. Unless you’re Richard Stallman, you probably don’t read the web through your email client. The iPhone would be a credible, useful device with just two apps: Phone and Safari. But it doesn’t just have those two apps. It has a slew, and they’re all better on the iPhone than the BlackBerry and the difference with regard to anything other than email is only going to get more stark once the iTunes App Store opens its doors. If nothing else, consider games, games, and games. As I wrote when the iPhone’s upcoming enterprise features were announced, the iPhone can do more BlackBerry-ish things than the BlackBerry can do iPhone-ish things. Apple doesn’t wait for someone else to knock one of their hit products off its throne or slowly run it into the ground (cf. the Motorola Razr) — they do it themselves. For six years pundits have been declaring that competitors would “soon” catch up to the iPod, but the iPod has never been a static target — over the same six years Apple has released significant new iPods every year. There are no signs that RIM has the engineering chops on either side of the ball — hardware or software — to compete with where the iPhone is now, let alone where it’s going to be. We know that Apple has an OS that can scale to take advantage of faster (and multi-core) processors, because OS X is doing that already. If a two-years-away 2010 iPhone might be like having a 2003 PowerBook G4 in your pocket, for RIM’s sake a 2010 BlackBerry had better be something more than a BlackBerry with a brighter screen. Correct answers: Batman, Star Destroyer.�↩

• Daring Fireball on May 9, 2008
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What's Next from Apple: New iPods Sept 22, iPhone OS 2.1, iTunes 8.0

Daniel Eran Dilger Kevin Rose has been trying his hand at making broad sweeping generalizations about the next generation of iPods, but sorry, no digg. Most of his predictions are not even original, and those that are are so vague that they're really just worthless. Here's what you can really expect. Rose likes to suggest what's next from Apple, but his guesses only approach reality when they're based on leaks that occur days prior to an announcement. His flat out guesswork tends to be yet far further removed from reality, indicating that he has no special inside track on things at Apple, nor much of an imagination tempered by realistic appraisal. A month before the iPhone was unveiled, Rose predicted it would be available from CDMA providers, have a pull out keyboard, and sport two batteries, one for music and one for the phone. Of course, splitting a battery in half is not really a brilliant solution to prevent music playback from running down your phone, but the simple fact that Rose didn't know about the exclusive deal with Cingular (come on, it was Apple's only mobile partner to date) and the unlikelihood of Apple tacking on an HTC-esque keyboard makes his guesswork easy to dismiss. I had imagineered the iPhone as a web browsing iPod (“based on Nokia’s mobile contributions to Safari”) with SMS messaging features, contacts, calendar, and a camera… six months earlier. And CDMA? I recommended Apple “leave Verizon alone and partner with Cingular, TMobile, and MetroPCS using GSM technology.” The difference between my ideas and those from Rose, apart from mine being six months earlier, is that I presented mine as only reasonable ideas with some rationale behind them; Rose insisted he had special knowledge from reliable sources. Generation 6 iPods An iPhone Worth Talking About The Real iPod touch Deets. Now he's predicting new iPods. The iPod touch is supposed to get “fairly large price drops to distance itself from the $199 iPhone.” Sorry, wrong. The iPhone is only $199 in the minds of consumers. It gets a subsidy from AT&T, which is why you can't just buy one for $199 and walk out the door without signing a phone contract. The iPhone's $2,000 service contract offers plenty of distance between it and the iPod touch. The iPod touch is not possibly going to get cheaper than the iPhone for a couple reasons. First, obviously, it costs nearly as much to make. The lack of a subsidy pretty much balances out its lack of mobile radio components. Second, Apple isn't desperately trying to sell the iPod touch. It exists as a product to sell to users who can't or won't buy an iPhone because they're tied to Verizon or don't want a phone. Rose worries that the iPhone is “cannibalizing sales of the iPod,” but there's nothing more Apple would like to do than to feed every iPod user an iPhone. Sure the bonehead analysts will have another field day complaining about how there's only minor growth among iPod sales while they ignore iPhone numbers, but these guys aren't easy to reach with basic facts. Apple has been giving away the $300 iPod touch to students buying a laptop; that looks like an effort to broaden the iPhone platform. Apple wants college kids playing iPhone games and interested in creating their own iPhone software. Left to their own devices, most kids would buy the old hard drive iPod Classic because they think they need to walk around with their entire torrent library of stolen music. (Get off my lawn!) In any case, we all knew the iPod refresh was coming. I'm pretty sure they're coming on September 22. I'm also pretty sure that the 8GB iPod touch is going away, making the 16GB model the new $199 version. That outrageous price drop, facilitated by today's cheaper Flash RAM, would kill the remaining market for the hard drive-based iPod Classic, converting Apple's entire lineup to Flash RAM. Additionally, it would migrate even more iPod buyers into the installed base of iPhone App Store users and hasten the cannibalization food chain that leads toward the iPhone. The 16GB iPod touch will be sold next to the existing 32GB model, which was just released earlier this year. For that reason, I don't see a larger capacity model being introduced now. I don't see tremendous demand for carrying 64GB of music from people who are also ready to pay for 64GB of Flash. Nano 4: Zune 2007? Rose says the Nano will get a redesign that makes it look like last year's Flash RAM Zune; iLounge already predicted this a month ago, although Rose embellished his version with the idea that “the actual plastic on the outside will be curved,” presumably like a TV from the 80s. How nostalgic! I miss having a wildly distorted tube picture, almost as much as a scratchable plastic iPod screen. Oh the good ol' days. Will Apple expend significant resources to make the Nano 4 into a widescreen tall/long player and define a new 4GB hardware model to fit into a niche that is only $50 less than the new 16GB $199 iPod touch? How much room for differentiation is there under $200? Seems more likely that Apple will instead only release a cheaper version of the existing 4GB Nano that's closer to $99, leaving room for a $149 8GB Nano in between. That will pull Shuffle buyers up into splurging on a full video Nano. If you want to watch video sideways, you can get an iPod touch for $199. What kind of widescreen cinematic experience can you get with a long/tall Nano/Zune? When I reviewed the Flash Zune, one of the complaints was that half (but only half) of the controls reconfigure when you hold it sideways. Plus, existing iPod Games wouldn't work in the widescreen orientation; both the display and the controls would be messed up. On top of that, regular video playback would be forced to play back wide, and/or look bad because its stretched. Microsoft has no qualms with playing video in an odd aspect radio, but the iPod is made by Apple, which has some aesthetic boundaries that constrain its behavior. Winter 2007 Buyer’s Guide: Microsoft Zune 8 vs iPod Nano iPhone 2.1 Rose says Apple will also release “iPod touch 2.1 software, iPhone to get update very soon after.” We already all knew the iPhone 2.1 update was coming, and that it's going to be significant, and that it is due for release around the same time as the new iPods. Whether the new iPod touch will ship with it in advance of the iPhone would depend on whether iPhone-only features in the release hold it up, but Rose doesn't suggest any special knowledge or rationale behind this claim. iPhone 2.1 is supposed to usher in new GPS features and the push Notification system, but the real demand for downloading it will be that it fixes a major problem that currently causes third party iPhone apps to crash on launch and randomly when running. Apple needs to get this out quick before it blows the reputation of iPhone software stability in the minds of users. That's reason to believe that iPhone 2.1 might ship even before the new iPods, rather than the other way around. Because software developed using the iPhone 2.1 SDK won't run on iPhone 2.0.x, expect everyone to need to update their software to download a new generation of 2.1-only apps. This will be free for iPhone users, but might incur a nominal fee for iPod touch users due to accounting rules. Myths of Snow Leopard 3: Mac Sidelined for iPhone Ten Big New Features in Mac OS X Snow Leopard iTunes 8.0 Rose says iTunes 8.0 “it's a big update with new features,” but doesn't say what they are. He also says it will be “a real point upgrade” deserving the 8.0 name. However, there is little rhyme or reason to Apple's iTunes version numbering, and no real correlation between the amount features introduced and the version number increment. iTunes 2.0 added iPod support after ten months of iTunes 1.0, but iTunes 3.0 only added minor features the next year. It was replaced by iTunes 4.0 a year later, which added the Music Store and AAC support. Two years later, iTunes 5 introduced some cosmetic changes and was immediately replaced with iTunes 6.0 only a month later, without any major new features. Another year later, iTunes 7.0 arrived with a new look, video game support, and Coverflow. It has since seen loads of new features, from support for Apple TV to the iPhone to new iPods and new movie rentals, all of which were only numbered as minor updates. We've had iTunes 7.x for two years now, so iTunes 8.0 is not really ballsy prediction at this point. Of course, Apple is just as likely to skip ahead and release iTunes X. And if iTunes X isn't ready, we can might even get iTunes 7.8 and 7.9 over the next couple years. Oh my sides. With the likelihood of entirely new iPod touch or Nano models being quite low (after all, the Zune isn't going to get a refresh until late next year, and Apple isn't facing any tough competition at the moment), Apple's iPod announcement might end up more about a new iTunes than the iPod. Rose doesn't make any iTunes 8.0 feature predictions, instead jumping ahead to suggest that Apple is working to make sure Mac OS X 10.5.6 will provide support for Sony's BluRay, the competition to iTunes that nobody cares about. Hmm. Steve Jobs has so little regard for optical discs that he basically shunned iDVD last year when showing off iLife 08, but now he's going to resurrect BluRay and excite customers by including it on the company's laptops, where any resolution advantage it offers over DVD would be nearly invisible? Oh ho ho my sides. iTunes Unlimited? The rumor mill is talking about subscription music in the next iTunes. Steve Jobs has opposed subscription music since iTunes got started. He worked for years to convince the labels to let go of the dream of billing users to essentially listen to the radio. Subscription music has always revolved around outrageous DRM that requires the (historically Microsoft PlaysForSure) player to sync up and check in every month or lose its music. I've written up lots of reasons why subscription music was an awful idea that wouldn't fly. I doubt Apple will actually float it as rumored (“iTunes Unlimited” for $129 sounds awful). However, enough has changed in the last two years to reconsider how subscription music could be delivered. For starters, the iPhone and iPod touch are now wireless, so they can both stream and verify exploding media DRM. Apple's iTunes, modern iPods, Apple TV, and the iPhone also now already handle exploding DRM for movie rentals, which blew over last year without any complaint, although it doesn't look like iTunes' movie rentals have had a massive impact on the world due to their relatively high price point. Offering movie rentals appeared to be a requisite concession leading up to convincing the movie studios to agree to movie sales in iTunes. Apple could sell access to subscription music directly from the iPhone and iPod touch that worked similar to movie rentals, and the labels might even allow users to freely copy rental tracks between computers linked to the same iTunes account. Such an arrangement hasn't found mainstream popularity elsewhere, but nobody else had been able to sell music prior to iTunes either. While the rumors suggest there could be a discount for MobileMe users, it would be a lot smarter to make it part of MobileMe instead. That would limit subscribers to Apple's loyal base, easing in the system rather than exposing a brand new subscription service to ten million handheld users and 150 million iTunes users and all but promising another meltdown. At least by making it part of MobileMe, Apple could add lots of subscribers and upgrade existing subscribers to a $99 “unlimited music” additional fee. Keep in mind that all this is highly speculative. I doubt “unlimited iTunes” will fly, as the idea was not leaked but rather simply invented. How Apple Could Deliver Workable iTunes Rentals The Online Music and Movie Rental Myth Rise of the iTunes Killers Myth As Long As We're Speculating… If Apple does convert its entire iPod line to Flash players, it would make sense to incorporate a new audio codec setting that maximized the amount of songs you could copy into an 8GB player. For years, Apple's major selling point on the iPod what that it offered massive hard drive storage capacity. Now it's migrating to Flash, which is more expensive but considerably more shock resistant and suitable for a handheld computer device like the iPod touch. Working to cram more music into tighter spaces would allow Apple to make the iPod touch and iPhone more competitive against a hard drive player. AAC is already optimized for low-bitrate playback. Apple also needs to add remote functionality for controlling Apple TV to iTunes, just as you can already do via the free iPhone app. And how about direct streaming of content between iTunes, Apple TV, and the iPhone, such as for movie rentals. Currently, to get a rented movie from an iPhone to Apple TV you have to do two syncs involving a middleman iTunes PC. iTunes also needs to expand on the options for syncing media to the iPod and iPhone. In addition to syncing specific playlists, it should be able to automatically sync over a smart “Party Shuffle” mix of music that fills a specific proportion of the device, such as 50% music, 10% podcasts, and then the specific movies, TV, and audio books the user selects. Then shuffle out the listened to tracks and add new music every time it's synced. Allow users to hide songs from iTunes just as you can hide photos from your iPhoto album to simplify the view without deleting anything. Add Time Machine support so you can go back to see earlier play counts and browse your media library as it appeared in the past. Add integrated support for viewing PDFs and other QuickView document types, so you could use iTunes as a metadata-rich document browser with search and playlist features. Or give Preview an iTunes metadata document database interface. More Music Deals. Add other corporate sponsors to the Starbucks deal, so you can discover their playing music and buy tunes over their WiFi link. And isn't it about time Apple and AT&T got together and hammered out that plan to open iPhones to AT&T's hotspots? I'd debit a 99 cent WiFi access fee from my iTunes account if it were necessary. What's the point of setting up $8 per hour WiFi services for the zero people who use them? And on that tangent, how about rolling out my Ubiquitous WiFi idea for allowing other mobile users to borrow your AirPort's WiFi signal? I'd also like to see Apple get AT&T to allow users to place calls over their WiFi link as a concession for not having a functional 3G network in place yet. I also think AT&T should sell or rent AirPort base stations to its millions of broadband users, with all of them open to WiFi sharing so that iPhone users could place a freaking call and access the web at faster than EDGE speeds between now and whenever AT&T actually gets 3G rolled out. Apple also really needs to deliver some sort of central media server, possibly tacked onto Apple TV. Just add a USB hard drive and have it serve up the contents as a Bonjour-discoverable iTunes library to your local network. This would allows users to dump all the media off their laptop. And then allow WiFi sync to optionally copy fresh media to the iPhone from the central media server library. There's plenty that could be tacked onto iTunes, but the biggest new thing in the iPod announcement actually might be something entirely different than last year's iPods for cheaper and a new rev to iTunes. I'll spill that in the next article. Ten Big Predictions for Apple in 2008 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!

• RoughlyDrafted Magazine on August 23, 2008
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The Power of Six

I wrote a few weeks ago about Google’s attempt to influence the rules for redeployment of the 700-MHz radio band in the U.S. for voice and data applications. Google said it would agree to pony up the $4.6 billion auction reserve price if only the FCC would first guarantee to force any eventual winner to keep the frequencies open in a variety of Google-defined ways — ways that were decidedly unpopular with incumbent U.S. mobile operators. It seemed to me to be lunacy for Google to deliberately po the mobile carriers if it wasn’t going to spend the big bucks to actually WIN the auction. But what if Google DOES plan to spend the big bucks and win the 700-MHz auction? What would they do with it? I now think I know. Google didn’t get what it asked for from the FCC, which opted for a different definition of “open,” promoted by the FCC commissioner. The commissioner’s definition of “open” was also opposed by the incumbent carriers and, in fact, Verizon is apparently taking the issue to court, but I think they doth protest too much. The carriers can probably live with the existing auction rules. Fighting them in court is intended as much to signal Verizon’s determination to win the auction as it is to actually overturn the auction rules. The last thing Verizon wants is for Google to enter the auction AT ALL, because doing so can have only two consequences, neither of them good from the perspective of the telcos: 1) Google might actually win the auction and impose the very rules it tried earlier to get with the FCC, and; 2) the mobile carriers might still win the auction but Google’s involvement would cause them to bid much more for the spectrum than they otherwise might. Google could make it VERY expensive to hold together the existing U.S. mobile phone oligarchy. Remember that none of the existing U.S. mobile phone companies is currently lacking in bandwidth. They would love to own the 700-MHz band if they can do so cheaply, but they don’t apparently have any real intention to USE it, which would mean building out a whole new infrastructure at the cost of several billion dollars. They just want to bank the spectrum and keep it away from Google. It seemed to me that the greatest impediment to Google actually spending the big bucks to win the auction (they could clearly afford it) is that the mobile phone and data businesses aren’t as profitable as Google’s own search and advertising businesses, which means making such a move would hurt Google’s earnings and be a drag on the price of its shares. This seemed to be the difference between Google posturing and Google actually doing something. But then this week Apple began to bluster about entering the 700-MHz auction, which makes even less sense. Could this have something to do with Google? Like a lot of other pundits, I keep facing the fact that Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on the Apple board and expecting that association to manifest itself eventually in some form of product or service alliance, but that has yet to happen. Could this finally be the time? Apple AND Google have together more money than anyone except God, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Could the two companies be intending a joint bid of such grand proportions as to guarantee a win? And if they did, what way could they find to use the spectrum that wouldn’t be a drag on Google’s earnings after all? So I thought and I thought and I came up with what you are about to read. As usual this is just guessing on my part, but I’m a pretty good guesser. To start, I don’t think Apple will actually bid with Google or even against Google in the 700-MHz auction. It would overcomplicate the five-year iPhone deal between Apple and AT&T - a deal that is already strained by the rise in third-party iPhone unlocking tools. (What was the chance Apple didn’t see those coming? Zero.) While it is possible that Apple would deliberately go against AT&T because Apple is, well, Apple and likes to stir things up, I think there are limitsto how much Hell Steve Jobs is willing to raise in the wireless space given the string of global iPhone deals he is still putting together. And Steve is cheap, too, meaning that he might not see this as a good use for Apple’s free cash. Besides, Apple has enough trouble on its hands with the new iPod classic, which doesn’t work very well at all and is going to shortly create some PR problems for Apple. Rather than actually being a legacy device as the name implies, the iPod classic uses new innards and the software is creating headaches for early users. The complaints I am hearing about the new iPods classics are (in no particular order): VERY Slow menu switching response Display of clock rather than song info when “Now Playing” Inability to use existing AUTHORIZED 3rd party dock products (including Apple-advertised) Audio skipping during operation Slow connection to Macs and PCs Inability to disable “split-screen” menus Lagging and unresponsive Click Wheel Camera connector not working Inability to use EQ settings without skipping and distortion This product was clearly shipped before it was ready, so we can expect a significant firmware upgrade Real Soon Now, especially since the iPod classic is now Apple’s ONLY solution for users who want to store more than 16 gigabytes worth of songs, pictures, TV shows, and movies. So Apple will have its corporate hands full between now and Christmas, which is yet another reason why I seriously doubt the company will be involved in 700-MHz auction action. Apple’s current rumblings about the 700-MHz band are more likely Jobs helping Schmidt. If the mobile carriers interested in the 700-MHz band think that it might cost them $16 billion rather than $6 billion to win the auction, they might not bid at all, allowing Google to get the property for less than it might have had to pay in a contested auction. At some price the deal becomes uneconomic for the mobile carriers and, given their small minds and squinty eyes, they’ll see it as uneconomic for Google, too. “Let Google take the fall,” they’ll think. But Google won’t be falling. The huge expense of buying the 700-MHz band and building out the infrastructure could be made a lot less huge if Google didn’t have to build out the infrastructure. No traditional mobile company could get away with this, but I think Google could. I have written about nearly all the individual parts of this before and even wrote a column putting it all together, though as my idea, not Google’s. Maybe they have been reading me after all. First let’s start by looking at the infrastructure Google has already built or committed to building — the largest fiber backbone in the world and the largest and most widely distributed data center build-out in the world. Both are FAR in excess of Google’s current or even future requirements UNLESS they are also intended to work with a massive 700-MHz wireless network. Imagine a hybrid wireless broadband mesh network using 700-MHz connections for backhaul and some truly mobile links and WiFi for local service. Google has enough experience with WiFi in Mountain View to know that it isn’t, by itself, a good solution for wide area networks. The key failing of metro WiFi networks is backhaul to the Internet backbone. But if Google used its 700 MHz band for that AND implemented it as a true mesh network, there would easily be enough capacity to serve almost any size network given a suitable number of backbone connections. You can find my old column about just such a network in this week’s links. Google has experience, too, with hybrid wireless networks. Every Google employee has the chance to take a company bus to work and every Google bus has an EVDO-to-WiFi bridge so Googlers can surf the net on their way to work. It would be really cool if this Google hybrid network was truly flat and could be maintained entirely within a single address space like, for example, the 76 billion billion billion IPv6 addresses Google already owns. The sudden existence of a massive IPv6 network would throw other ISPs into a tizzy and quickly drag the rest of the net into the 21st century, something else I could see as a Google ambition. Finally, what links all of this together is something else I wrote about long ago — the Google Cube. This is an access device that contains 700-MHz and WiFi radios, a tiny Linux or Linux-likeserver, and a few gigs of flash RAM memory cache. It’s these Google Cubes that will mesh together, acting as both WiFi access points and 700 MHz mesh backhaul devices. Throw in some local caching, video preloading, and truly local DNS service and suddenly you have a pretty substantial network infrastructure that is not only massive and self-healing, IT IS ENTIRELY PAID FOR BY CUSTOMERS. All Google needs to provide are several thousand points-of-presence (cell towers) to connect the local mesh to the Internet backbone. Google couldn’t do this with WiFi alone, but with 700-MHz meshing and backhaul they could make it work fairly easily and the entire network could be deployed in a couple months. For those who can’t think past search, imagine this also as Google’s key to dominating local- and location-based search. Forget about net neutrality and forget about making nice-nice with broadband ISPs OR phone companies. Google would overnight become the largest U.S. ISP with direct and very high-performance access to its customers, including those using the new Google Phone or any other phone that supports WiFi connections, like the iPhone and many others. Google becomes the biggest and lowest-cost ISP and potentially the biggest and lowest-cost mobile phone company in the bargain. Heck of a deal.

• I, Cringely . The Pulpit |... on September 14, 2007
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★ 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.�↩

• Daring Fireball on April 17, 2008
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★ Notes and Observations Regarding Apple’s Announcements From ‘The Beat Goes On’ Special Event, Which, Inexplicably, I Didn’t Bother to Publish Two Weeks Ago When They Were Relevant

iPod Shuffle Interesting that they didn’t change a thing other than the colors. No price cut, no additional storage. My interpretation is that competitors aren’t even putting pressure on Apple at the low end. iPod Nano The proportions on the new Nanos seem awkward to me. The old Nano form factor certainly wasn’t appropriate for video, but it was far more elegant than the new ones. The killer feature, form-factor-wise, is how thin they are. It’s more like a thick credit card than a thin gadget. They’re going to sell a zillion of these, but I can’t help but feel that the traditional fundamental iPod design — horizontal screen above a click wheel — is on its way out. Interesting that the Nano now has games available, but the iPhone and iPod Touch do not. iPod Classic For the first time since the iPod debuted, there’s no white model anywhere in the line-up. 160 GB is more storage than many personal computers offer. Fill it up with typical MP3 or AAC audio, and it would take three months to listen to it all. The appeal though, is that you can just sync your entire library every time you connect with iTunes, without worrying about specifying a certain subset to carry on your iPod. iPod Touch This is the “iPhone sans phone” iPod I expected Apple to announce. And until iPhone fever hit me in early June, the one I planned on waiting for in lieu of getting an iPhone. But having used an iPhone for nearly three months now, if I lost my iPhone today I’d buy another iPhone, not an iPod Touch, because I actually use and enjoy nearly-ubiquitous EDGE access to the Internet. There’s more missing from the iPod Touch compared to the iPhone than just the phone/SMS/EDGE — a lot more than I expected. Roughly in order of usefulness, none of the following apps are on the iPod Touch: Mail, Maps, Camera, Notes, Weather, Stocks. (Weather and Stocks are cool iPhone apps, but are easily replaced with web sites.) Not to mention the seemingly spiteful absence of event creation in the Calendar app on the iPod Touch. Clever bit of Jobs keynote jujitsu during the iPod Touch segment of the event: He does a whole big run-up to revealing that Safari is included, by emphasizing all the Wi-Fi networks that require a web page sign-in before letting you on. So the pitch is that you need Safari. It was a sleight of hand to draw attention away from the question of what do you do when there are no available Wi-Fi networks at all? What a browser needs is a network, but Jobs pitched it as the network needing the browser. It’s silly if you think about it: if it weren’t for Safari, the only thing you’d be able to do on the iPod Touch with Wi-Fi is watch YouTube and buy songs from iTunes. Plus, presenting the inclusion of Safari as a sort of “boy, isn’t it cool that we did this” feature draws attention away from the exclusion of Mail. There’s been a lot less bitching about the Touch not including Mail than I expected — I think that’s at least partly attributable to the way Jobs presented the inclusion of Safari. Curious that on the Touch, Apple moved Safari’s icon from the “dock” at the bottom of the home screen. On the iPhone, the four apps in the special spots at the bottom of the home screen are clearly the four most important apps: Phone, Mail, Safari, iPod. I see no reason why the Photos app on iPod Touch would be used more often than Safari. If anything, the Photos app is less useful on the iPod Touch than it is on the iPhone, because the iPod Touch doesn’t have a camera. It’s not like Safari is hidden up there in the top-left, but I think it deserved the spot in the bottom row occupied by Photos. Two rules of thumb: (1) it’s easier to lower prices than to raise them; (2) it’s easier to add features than to take existing features away. Apple got burned by #1 with the iPhone price cut, but, still, it’s the exception to see a major price cut treated as bad news. The point is, if they weren’t sure what the optimal initial price point was for the iPhone, they were better off guessing high than guessing low. As for the missing iPhone apps on the iPod Touch, clearly these decisions were made to firmly establish the iPhone as the superior device, the current king of the iPod hill. It would be easy far Apple to add some of these apps to the iPod Touch — like, say, Mail and Calendar editing — if they feel like the iPod Touch needs a shot in the arm, sales-wise. On the other hand, it would have proved disastrous if Apple had shipped the iPod Touch with more of the iPhone’s features, then decided it was too good compared to the iPhone, and then tried to take some of them away in a future software update. But in addition to the iPhone apps the iPod Touch is missing, it’s also not as good of an iPod as the iPhone. The killer feature of the iPhone-as-iPod is the clicker on the headphones. Hit play, lock the screen, put the iPhone in a pocket, and you’re set — just click the headphone button once for play/pause and double-click to advance to the next track. Without this, I just don’t see how the iPod Touch can be used while in a pocket. One last note regarding possible future feature upgrades for the Touch: Apple has stated as a matter of record that iPhone sales are being accounted for on a subscription basis over 24 months, so as to allow them to ship additional features in free software updates. Apple has made no such statement regarding the iPod Touch. If they’re not going to use subscription-based accounting for the iPod Touch, then I don’t think they plan on shipping new features in free software updates. I don’t think we’ll learn the answer to this until Apple’s next quarterly financial statement in October. Games for iPhone and iPod Touch It struck me as off-key in the immediate aftermath of the announcements that the new Nanos now get games, but the iPhone and iPod Touch don’t. Weird in that the iPhone and Touch have larger screens, touch-based interfaces, and Wi-Fi. Then it struck me that, if Apple does in fact plan to release games for the iPhone and iPod Touch, it’d be a sweet thing to unveil a few weeks from now. A nice way to generate new buzz without releasing new hardware. iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store Interesting that they put “Wi-Fi” right in the store name. It’s a big “fuck you” to the mobile network carriers, a way of emphasizi