Apple on how to replace an original iPhone with a new 3G iPhone

Filed under: iPhoneApple has posted a Support Document that explains exactly how to replace your original iPhone with a new 3G iPhone. Basically there are two tracks: 1) In the US you don't need your original SIM as your original "account information will be transferred to iPhone 3G's included SIM when you purchase iPhone 3G." 2) Outside the US, "you can use your original iPhone's SIM with iPhone 3G." Once that's done it's just a matter of backing up your original iPhone to iTunes 7.7 and...

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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.�↩
Upgrade to 16GB iPhone without changing contract

Filed under: iPhoneiLounge is reporting that some people have received incorrect information when contacting AT&T about upgrading their 4GB or 8GB iPhones to the new 16GB iPhone. In a recent thread on the Apple Discussions, an Apple employee "Nathan C." said that you can just replace the SIM with your current iPhone's SIM. He later updated his post saying, "My apologies these steps may not work. You may need to activate it with the new SIM choosing the option to "replace" an existing phone on your account."Mark Siegel who is the Executive Director of Media and Analyst Relations with AT&T emailed iLounge to tell them that if you choose to upgrade your iPhone from 4 or 8GB to the new 16GB, your contract will be backdated to the starting point of your original iPhone's activation date. He went on to say that iPhone customers should use the SIM that came with their iPhone. [via iLounge]Read�|�Permalink�|�Email this�|�Comments
The Big Picture

Up or down? That's what this week's Macworld show came down to for most news organizations. Would the new Apple products make the company's shares go up or down? They went down. Macworld was a bust, we were told repeatedly, as if it really mattered. I don't own Apple stock so I couldn't care less whether it goes up or down, nor could most customers. Apple was supposed to introduce another iPod or iPhone, or iSomething that would sell four million or 10 million copies in the next 200 days, driving share prices higher. But it didn't happen. Apple introduced some cool stuff, but nothing that would sell four million units this year, hence the letdown. Hogwash. A bunch of day traders that used to making a quick 10 percent on their money during Macworld week didn't make that 10 percent this year, so they were disappointed. A bunch of reporters eager to write about those day traders making their 10 percent were disappointed, too. Meanwhile, the rest of us who don't care about day traders were left without much perspective on what any of these announcements actually mean. So I'll do the heavy lifting here and gratefully get back to something non-Apple next week. First let's look at the MacBook Air, which is a cool product with a bad name, though I guess it worked well for Michael Jordan, so what the heck. It is very doubtful that Apple will sell a million Airs in the next year. It is doubtful Apple will sell even half a million Airs and Steve Jobs knows this. What's important here is not the subnotebook computer but the bits of it that will likely make their way into much more interesting Apple products to come. Take that specially packaged Intel CPU, how did that come about? Steve Jobs didn't beat the heck out of Intel CEO Paul Otellini to get a little CPU that would go into fewer than half a million boxes. Steve did what he always does. He beat the heck out of Paul Otellini with the promise that this little CPU -- for which we can expect Apple will hold some exclusive for the next six months -- will end up in millions and millions of Apple products, nearly all of them costing a lot less than a MacBook Air. Apple is very important to Intel. Though nobody says it out loud, Apple is the last of the major computer companies that uses 100 percent Intel processors. And Apple's ability to do more with less has to be a continual inspiration to its competitors. As Apple slides further and further into the consumer electronics and networking markets, Intel will be right there, too. I still expect we'll see an Apple tablet this year, for example, and it will use this same Intel CPU. How about that new trackpad with the multi-touch interface? Could that be the first look at that mouse replacement I predicted would be coming from Apple this year? Maybe. You can be sure we'll see a lot more of that baby. What about the Air's lack of an optical drive? It's hard to find a place for an optical drive in such a thin computer, but isn't Steve Jobs the guy who when he returned to Apple railed against notebooks without removable media, like the PowerBook 100 and 2400 and the various PowerBook Duos? Why did Steve change his mind now? Because Steve wants to replace optical drives of any sort with bits provided over the network, preferably from iTunes. That's also why we didn't see an Apple Blu-ray announcement this week and -- if Jobs has his way -- we'll never see one. Let's turn now to the second-generation Apple TV and the question I seem to be the only one asking: why did they drop the price to $229? Had they dropped the price to $99 I'd say, "Okay, they've decided to lose money on this thing to grow the rental market." But why $229? Did some focus group tell Apple there was price resistance to the Apple TV above $230? It's a set-top box! People don't want to pay anything for a set-top box and if they do pay something they sure don't want to pay $299 OR $229. The entire Apple TV category is a minefield for Steve Jobs. It's a tiny Macintosh, remember, though with its innate Macness carefully hidden. Steve COULD HAVE blown the doors off Macworld if he had simply allowed the Apple TV to BE a Mac, albeit limited to HDMI displays. If you could buy a Mac that attaches to your HDTV for web surfing as well as all the other Apple TV functions, even at the original $299 price, it would have been a HUGE hit. But it might also have hurt Mac Mini and iMac sales, so Steve couldn't bring himself to do it. In the long run I think the whole Apple TV product category will be subsumed into the television, itself. Here, too, is another minefield because people replace their computers a lot more often than they replace their televisions, so Apple going into the TV business (like Dell and HP have) might help sales at first but later hurt. The more likely move for Apple, therefore, is to eventually create the Apple TV Nano, which is an Apple TV built into a CableCard. This is technically feasible right now and 18 months from now it will be a no-brainer. The big HDTV vendors would jump on that one like crazy since it would drive CableCard-equipped HDTV sales, which have been less than stellar. Apple's movie rental service offers a lot to talk about, too, though the part I find most interesting is simply the likely impact on broadband ISPs. It's not just Apple, but also Amazon, Netflix, and others that will drive this impact, though those competing efforts are accelerating right now because of Apple. The broadband ISPs are already jostling for advantage, talking about limiting throughput and making people pay $30 for the bandwidth to download an HD movie. They simply don't want to pay for the additional backbone capacity required to support this level of traffic. But the even bigger reason why the ISPs are moving right now is they perceive a perfect storm that will allow them to RAISE PRICES. Whether we are talking about a cable company or a phone company, these ISPs make more profit from selling broadband than they do from selling their original service, whether it is phone or TV. Cable prices keep going up, true, but nearly all of that goes for increasing costs for content. Internet content costs an ISP nothing, but that doesn't mean they won't try to charge us more if they can. What's crazy about this is that most of the HD content we're getting upset about is static. It is perfectly reasonable to put every movie ever made on a server and put just such a server in every cable company or DSL machine room and never have to touch the Internet backbone for that content, which is exactly what I've explained the big ISPs are already starting to do through IP multicast. But now they'll want to be paid for it. The dark horse here is Google, which has spent a couple years positioning itself to offer to handle this service on behalf of ISPs and consumers alike in exchange for us watching some commercials. If it is up to consumers, Google will succeed. And Steve Jobs knows this, because with their interlocking boards, Apple and Google have to know precisely what the other is up to. So Macworld was just another step in a very measured plan to establish global media dominance for Apple and probably for Google, too. But it's a plan that requires patience, which the press can't -- or doesn't want to -- understand. So it is up to us as individuals to decide whether this is good or bad. I'd say the jury is still out on that one.
★ 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.�↩
September 9th Predictions

Filed under: Other Events, One More ThingWith the September 9th "Let's Rock" event confirmed at Yerba Buena, TUAW readers seem confident that we're about to see a new iPod debut. 70% of you agreed on that point. Rumors point to a revamped nano, with a longer silhouette. This new shape makes the nano easier to hold onto without dropping, especially when running.. An updated Nike kit appears likely. Nike support is long overdue for the iPod touch and, especially, the iPhone 3G with its built-in GPS system. Rumors suggest that the update will include more biometric logging and feedback for the stats-obsessed athlete in you. Since Nike makes their money from the shoe sales, I doubt that the kit will rely entirely on iPod-based sensors though. Any update needs to retain Nike's sales interests. Maybe we'll see heart rate monitoring as well as pace feedback. If rumors hold true, Apple may also respond to Nokia's "Come With Music" promotion by introducing iTunes Unlimited. "Comes with Music" offers unlimited access to a large library of music -- plus you get to keep any music you download after the year is done. I suspect that you're limited to the music that fits onto the device at any one time, otherwise -- woo! -- people will be downloading music for 365 days straight. The iTunes Unlimited rumor refers to a standard subscription model, like the Microsoft/Zune deal. Full access to the iTunes library (except for stuff that you *really* want like Album-only extras) plus you can buy tracks to keep. We were tipped about this possibility several weeks back. The thought still appeals to me and others who prefer to sample lots of music rather than to commit to specific albums. The September event seems like the perfect time and place to add a new revenue-generated opportunity to iTunes. What says "Merry Christmas" better than a brand new iPod nano that comes pre-loaded with, pretty much, every song in the iTunes library? By offering a 15-month initial trial (yes, I'm pulling this out of nowhere), Apple could get customers hooked on re-loading subscriptions around Christmas each year, a time when people are feeling especially generous towards their families. Of course, they could also push: "Send your kids to school with iPods so they don't have to call home from jail when the RIAA gets them for pirating." iPod as "get out of jail free card" could appeal strongly to parents. A music subscription package could be that mystery "low-profit" feature that Apple hinted at at the last quarter financial projections. Apple might not make a lot of profit off each subscription but it could really sell a lot more new iPods. The iPod touch has been out for a year and could use refreshing. July 11th came and went without any touch updates. This event may bring some nice features like enhanced onboard memory and maybe built-in speakers and microphones. I'd certainly love to see the touch pick up more iPhone premium features as it deserves respect in and of itself as a great platform. (ilounge just posted some specs). Rumor has it that we're about to see at least part of the next stage of the iPhone firmware story. Firmware 2.1 should drop (current firmware is 2.0.2) offering greater stability but without some of the features that Apple discussed this summer, namely push notification. Push notification is Apple's way of providing a work-around for its no-background-processes policy. Developers put any continuous processes on their own servers. This provides a way to create live data feeds, rather than taxing the iPhone's limited resources. This works great for Mail, less great for IM, and pretty badly for any data that originates on the iPhone (such as your current location). It's reminiscent of that "sweet solution" of the iPhone's original webapp-only policy: well intended but misses the point. Along with any updated firmware, iTunes 7.8 8.0 (thanks readers) may appear as well, possibly to support any new rental/subscription features. Of course, I'd really love to see (but have near zero expectations of actually getting) the iPod Air. I've never quite given up hope that Apple would recognize how brilliant its touch platform could be when enlarged and transformed into a tablet device. Lecturers shouldn't have to stare into an audience of Apple logos on the backs of computer screens instead of meeting student's eyes. An iPod Air could merge the wins of the MacBook Air and iPod touch into a really portable yet seriously usable platform that puts computing back onto the table and away from erecting barriers between people. So what are your predictions? What do you think that Let's Rock will introduce on Tuesday? Let us know in the comments. Thanks, �ivind Kjelln�Read�|�Permalink�|�Email this�|�Comments
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!
Jean-Louis Gassée Returns from Obscurity… to Talk About MobileMe

Daniel Eran Dilger MobileMe has attracted more vulture critics than Apple TV, the last product Apple launched without immediately earning billions of dollars from it. Joining the frothing dogpile of critics who can't get in enough edgewise on the bumpy rollout of MobileMe is none other than Jean-Louis Gassée. Who? Oh yes, him. The Infamous JLG. In the early 80s, Gassée was the manager of Apple France. John Sculley brought him to Cupertino to replace Steve Jobs in 1985 after wrestling away control of the company that Jobs had founded with Steve Wozniak a decade earlier in 1976. Sculley and Gassée then took the phenomenally successful Apple empire of the mid 80s, crafted from the idealistic, early 20-something visions of Jobs the marketer and Wozniak the technical genius, and pointed it toward the ground, sending the company into a frightful trajectory that nearly resulted in its complete destruction within the next ten years. While much of Apple's early 90s failure can be pinned on “I Was A Terrible Manager” Sculley, Gassée contributed his own fingerprints of disaster. It was Gassée who ridiculed Jobs' strategy for marketing “the Macintosh Office” to businesses, referring to it as “the Mac orifice.” Gassée also refused to license Apple's technology or to partner with vendors to expand the Mac experience outside of Apple's niche markets. The Gassée Way: High Prices, Low Innovation. Following Sculley's leadership of tacking a $500 marketing tax on top of the $1995 price of the original Macintosh, which had been set as low as possible by Jobs and his engineers, Gassée replaced Jobs' vision for bringing “insanely great” technologies to the mainstream with an effort to idly profiteer from the intellectual property Apple already held. Between 1986 and 1990, while Jobs' independent NeXT developed and delivered a high performance, UNIX-based workstation with advanced development frameworks and innovative hardware features that pushed the state of the art, Apple's Macintosh group under the direction of Gassée only made incremental updates to the same old technology, and then sold its machines at prices higher than NeXT was charging! By the time Gassée bailed from Apple in 1990 to start his own company as Jobs had done, Apple's only affordable Mac was the Mac Classic, a pathetically recycled version of the five year old Mac Plus. The Mac IIfx was being sold as its $12,000 high end workstation, but it was still running the same crippled classic Mac OS from the early 80s and used an 030 processor. By that time, NeXT was already selling an 040 in the NeXTcube for less, which also offered the option of an Intel i860-powered NeXTdimension board for handling futuristic 32-bit PostScript color and video sampling. NeXT didn't have a low cost model because Sculley's Apple had sued the company to prevent it from entering the consumer market in competition with Apple. Platform Crisis: The Lazy Dinosaur 4 1990-1995: NeXT, Be, and the Mac PC Newton Rising: Is the Next iPhone Device a G3 MessagePad? Byte's original NeXT review Gassée's Plan Be. After slashing Apple's tendons and leaving it to slowly bleed to death, Gassée left to start Be, Inc. The company developed a nice looking interface for a hobbyist system running oddball hardware. It then copied Apple's PowerPC architecture before moving to a platform based on Intel-standard PCs. However, between 1991 and 1996, Be was unable to reach beyond offering an early developer preview of its new operating system. It demonstrated some new ideas, but lacked even a basic printing architecture and had no provision for a multiuser security model. NeXT had developed a far superior operating system and set of development frameworks in a much shorter period of time, and had matched the transition to PowerPC (and several other architectures) and then Intel. By that time however, the Sculley-Gassée mutilation of Apple in the late 80s had resulted in the rise of an opportunistic, malignant boil on the computing landscape. Just like Australia's rabbit plague or Jim Henson's fatal 'flesh eating bacteria' strep infection, the wild landscape and creative potential of personal computing was overrun and destroyed by the scourge of Microsoft's soulless Windows PC. There was apparently no longer any room for innovation in the PC world, thanks to Sculley's opening of Pandora's Box (by handing Microsoft a free license to most of Apple's Mac-related intellectual property) and Gassée's efforts to make sure that Apple didn't open its own. It was Gassée who pulled the plug on Apple's partnership with Apollo to create Unix workstations with the Mac OS interface, and it was his decision to rebuff AT&T's advances toward licensing the Mac human interface for its systems. Microsoft didn't earn the Windows monopoly; it was simply handed it by the incompetence of Sculley and Gassée after the duo ignored Bill Gates' suggestions on how to promote the platform. Steve Jobs and 20 Years of Apple Servers Undoing the Sculley-Gassée Crisis. In its last gasps of breath in 1996, the old Apple briefly considered buying Gassée's BeOS before realizing that Jobs' NeXT operating system was vastly superior, already proven in the enterprise market, and could easily run on existing PowerPC Mac OS systems because of its inherent portability. After acquiring NeXT, it took Apple another six years to commercially rerelease it as a mainstream operating system in Mac OS X, and it has taken nearly another six years for the media to recognize the new significance of a Mac platform based on NeXT's technology. Apple's Macs are now profitably selling with a regular 40% growth year over year, despite the overall PC industry barely finding 4% growth and while many PC makers are losing money. Apple has since parleyed it technology into Apple TV as a set top box and the iPhone and iPod touch as a new mobile platform. Gassée's own Be, Inc. was bought out by Palm and went nowhere. He now serves as a partner at venture capital firm Allegis Capital. Having poked the computing industry in the eye, Gassée might be expected to live out his term quietly. Instead, he has resurfaced to squawk about MobileMe, and actually makes some interesting points amid his long winded, “white man in a suit” corporate-speak (and apparently ghost written) blog entry. Can Apple Take Microsoft in the Battle for the Desktop? SCO, Linux, and Microsoft in the History of OS: 1990s Cocoa and the Death of Yellow Box and Rhapsody Patting the Back Once Stabbed. Gassée's blog entry on MobileMe makes mine look short and to the point. He starts off by musing, “doubts linger: Is Apple able to run a worldwide wireless data synchronization service for tens of millions of users?” After weary paragraphs that drag on for seemingly hours about nothing, Gassée observes: “Apple 'pushes' somewhere between 100 and 200 megabytes of [Mac OS X Software] updates per month to each Mac user. Last week, the iPhone 2.0.1 update was announced, I connected two iPhones within minutes, the 200Mb files were downloaded and installed without a hitch and I haven’t heard any blogosphere complaints on the matter. iTunes has sold billions of songs, serves tens of millions of customers everyday and everything works with very few exceptions. In other words, some very large scale Apple systems do work.” Gassée then noted, “last week, parts of the Gmail service were down for 15 hours or so. Last month, Amazon’s respected Web Services went down. And, last year, RIM’s servers went down for about half a day in the Western Hemisphere, freaking out Wall Street investment bankers and management consultants. Even the best players must endure their share of false notes.” “Back to MobileMe today: if you ask subscribers who’ve never experienced a Blackberry’s smooth delivery of sync, they love MobileMe. It works, it’s easy to set up and in the simple (most frequent) case of a PC/Mac with an iPhone, it does the wireless (OTA, Off The Air) sync job as now advertised. We’ll see how this scales once iPhones are sold in 21 more countries, 43 total starting August 22nd.” Gassée's final three paragraphs are remarkably relevant and astute. It's too bad he didn't just publish them alone, as most readers probably couldn't make it down the page that far to ever see them. Launchpad Chicken: MobileMe and Sync Trouble | Monday Note Faith in Jobs Means Forgiving JLG. Now that Apple is back in its leadership position thanks to Jobs' miraculous powers of corporate resurrection, we can forget about the whole “who-killed-what and left us with Windows.” It's too bad that the last fifteen years were tainted by a dominant third rate platform that introduced malware, viruses, spyware, and adware and undid much of the work that early Apple engineers did to usher in a classy, consistent and attractive user interface, but that's all in the past now. JLG, you may have forced me into a pitiful career arc that involved supporting Windows through most of my youth, but the sweetness of the current Apple world is even easier to appreciate after having experienced the pestilent famine of a lack innovation and class in the Windows heyday that you kicked off while illegitimately standing in Jobs' shoes. I can't exactly thank you for that, but consider your sins forgiven. I might occasionally write them up again here and there however, but only for the purposes of historical interest. It's nothing personal. 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!
IT Wars

Last week's column on Gartner Inc. and the thin underbelly of IT was a hit, it seems, with very few readers rising to the defense of Gartner or the IT power structure in general. To be fair I probably should have said that Gartner isn't totally worthless, but I think their specialists should be more specialized and they shouldn't promote technologies or products without being darned familiar with them -- a lot more familiar than they seem to be at present. But the bigger question is why IT even has to work this way at all? I don't think it has to. Most of the problems of IT start and end with bad management. I speak fairly often to technical audiences and one question I like to ask is simple: If you were hit by a bus tomorrow, could your boss do your job? The answer is almost always "no." By "almost always" I mean 97-99 percent of the time. It's a question I have been asking for 15 years and the answer hasn't changed in that time. It would appear bosses aren't becoming more accomplished, at least not yet. The implications of this answer are profound. It either means that IT managers aren't being promoted from within or, if they are being promoted from the ranks, they lose their technical skills almost immediately. If we drill down a bit further some real truths start to emerge. Whether IT managers are promoted from within or brought from outside it is clear that they usually aren't hired for their technical prowess, but rather for their ability to get along with THEIR bosses, who are almost inevitably not technical. For every John Reed, who rose from IT to run CitiCorp (and ultimately failed), there are a thousand CEOs who want nothing to do with computers. It might be easy to say that IT, as a staff -- rather than a line -- job simply isn't seen as critical to the success of the organization, but that's crazy. IT touches every employee and customer every day. Most of what's accomplished in business these days is ordered, fulfilled, paid for, and analyzed through the use of IT. We can't eliminate it because now government expects -- even demands -- that it be there. If something is so important, then, why do the big bosses understand it so little? For the most part they are kept in the dark. Since the early mainframe days there has been a priesthood of sorts in corporate computing -- a level of executives who felt that their power would be enhanced by keeping technology mysterious. "It's much too hard for you to understand, Mr. CEO, even if you started out long ago as an electrical engineer. Electrons are different now you know." "It's complex and mysterious, this IT stuff, and dependent on people who don't think like you or I do," the CEO is told and he/she believes it because the alternative is laboriously becoming an expert in an area they don't like or thought that they had outgrown. This leaves IT in a bit of a vacuum but it is a vacuum with some power. And in most organizations power ultimately manifests itself in head count, so IT organizations grow like crazy, becoming ever less efficient in the process. The typical power structure of corporate (which includes government) IT tends to discourage efficiency while encouraging factionalization. Except in the rare instance where the IT director rises from the ranks of super-users, there is a prideful disconnect between the IT culture and the user culture. It's the AV kids from school versus the "normal" kids. IT organizations often disrespect users and users often disrespect IT. This is not good for either group. One of the real miracles of the PC revolution was that it often was led by super-users -- enthusiasts who had a PC at home before they had one at work and who led their co-workers as much through example as skill. Well those days of the 1970s and '80s are long gone and IT is today as entrenched and isolated as it was during the mainframe era of the 1960s. In time this will end through the expedient of a generational change. Old IT and old users will go away to be replaced by new IT and new users, each coming from a new place. This is the same challenging effect I wrote about a few weeks ago for education. A generational change will completely alter our cultural approach to information technology. And it can't happen soon enough for me. An analogy we used to make years ago was comparing the PC industry to the early U.S. auto industry. There were hundreds of companies in both businesses at one time (in the 1920s for cars and the 1980s for computers), but each eventually consolidated into a dozen or so major brands and a few hot rods. Our problem using the auto analogy today is that we haven't let it evolve. Where IT may have once been like the 1920s auto industry, now it is becoming more like that same industry in the 1980s. This transition goes far beyond simple brand consolidation. When was the last time you worked on your own car? You could change your oil, probably, but you don't, right? And you haven't done so since the late 1970s or early 1980s. Same for IT today, where the do-it-yourself attitude of the 1970s has given way to a do-it-for-me attitude. I'm not saying this is bad. Indeed, I think it was inevitable as the market broadened from just PC enthusiasts until it today encompasses everyone. Al Mandel, who helped market the original LaserWriter at Apple and later had several high-level positions at AOL, used to say that the step after ubiquity was invisibility, and that's where we are headed today with IT, which has become so pervasive that everyone uses it to the point where NOT using it is no longer even an option. The problem is our management of IT hasn't evolved as quickly as our assimilation of it. We'll probably still be fighting over who owns IT long after the IT resources, themselves, become effectively no longer ownable, except in our corporate minds. I'm writing this column on an iPhone, for example. It isn't the easiest or best writing environment but, as Adam Osborne used to say, it is good enough. It offers the input, output, networking, and storage I need and almost nothing I don't need. I'm not saying the iPhone or smartphones like it are the absolute future of personal computing, but I AM saying the desktop PC is its absolute past. We're in an era of transitioning business models. IT is shrinking in traditional terms and will continue to shrink as cheaper mobile devices replace more expensive desktops for some workers. Software will change from being a product to a service. And because the incumbent players in the software biz are especially uncomfortable as service organizations, we'll inevitably see some changes in that pecking order. Microsoft will go down and Apple, for example, will probably rise. Users will be changed forever as new paradigms emerge, but for a few more years at least, corporate IT won't notice, being too darned busy fighting its own internecine wars.
★ Hacking the iPhone Notes App for the Admittedly Nit-Picky Purpose of Changing the Text Font to Helvetica

Lots of good reader feedback regarding last weeks’s “An Important Public Service Announcement Regarding Marker Felt on the iPhone”, the gist of which piece was that if you poked around your iPhone’s file system (after installing, say, an SSH server on the iPhone) and deleted the Marker Felt font files from /System/Library/Fonts/, the Notes app would use Arial instead. That’s good. But, far from ideal, because everyone knows Arial is an inferior knock-off of Helvetica. One suggestion offered by many readers was to simply make copies of the Helvetica font files, rename them to match the Marker Felt font files, and replace Marker Felt with the Helvetica-with-a-different-file-name files. That doesn’t work, because font names are metadata contained within the files themselves; they don’t come from the file names. (Sort of like with music files in iTunes — the name of the MP3 or AAC file itself doesn’t matter, what matters for determining song, album, and artist names is the metadata.) But so while simply renaming the font files won’t work, you could use font editing software to manipulate the font metadata itself, either by taking a copy of Helvetica and replacing the internal metadata to match Marker Felt’s, or, by taking a copy of Marker Felt and replacing all the glyphs with copies of the glyphs from Helvetica. A few readers even said this worked. The two font editing tools most-frequently recommended by readers: FontForge, an open source X11 application that, while ugly and ungraceful in the way that all X11 apps are, is useful and free; and TypeTool, a cross-platform $99 font editor from FontLab. That seemed like overkill to me, though. I just wanted Notes to use Helvetica. So, rather than hacking the fonts, why not hack the Notes app? This turned out to be rather easy. It ends up the CSS rules specifying the styles used for the Notes editing view are hard-coded in the application binary. The Notes application bundle is at /Applications/MobileNotes.app/; inside the bundle, among other files, is a file named MobileNotes. That’s the application binary itself — the program file generated by the compiler from Apple’s Objective-C source code for the app. I can’t recommend doing this. Binary files are fragile; make a mistake while editing and it’s likely, very likely, the application will no longer work properly. Plus, any changes you make to MobileNotes today are going to be overwritten before the end of the week, as Apple has already indicated that the next iPhone software update is imminent. On the other hand, if you have the urge to hack around on your iPhone, you might as well do so now, as I strongly suspect that this week’s imminent iPhone software update is going to render inoperable the existing ways of hacking/jailbreaking the iPhone. Notice how no one’s yet figured out how to install or modify the software on the iPod Touch? Whatever Apple’s doing on the Touch in this regard, I expect them to begin doing on the iPhone this week. (I’d love to be proven wrong.) So, anyway, how to hack your MobileNotes binary to use Helvetica: Transfer a copy of the MobileNotes app binary from your iPhone to your Mac and open it with HexFiend, or whatever your favorite hex editor is. (But if your favorite hex editor isn’t HexFiend, there might be something wrong with you. And if you don’t know how to transfer a copy of the binary to your Mac, you shouldn’t be attempting this hack in the first place.) Search for “Marker Felt”. You should find a sequence of bytes that look like this: font-family: Marker Felt; Change that to: font-family: Helvetica ; Essential: You must type two spaces after “Helvetica”, so that the font name occupies the exact same number of bytes as “Marker Felt” (where each character, including spaces, is one byte). It’s regular CSS, so it’s perfectly valid to have spaces between the font name and the rule-ending semicolon. This hack wouldn’t work if Helvetica’s name were longer than Marker Felt’s. Save the file, then copy it back to your iPhone, overwriting the original MobileNotes binary. Restart your iPhone, and there you go, Helvetica in Notes:
Faster iPhone faster! Kill!! Kill!!

My challenge here is to write the one zillionth iPhone story (and MY third) without repeating too much what has been written before or failing to include at least a couple new items which -- trust me -- you'll find below. This column is mainly about how to properly manage the introduction of a disruptive technology, which is harder than most people would guess. It's also about how Apple plans to make this an iPhone Christmas. Being better is not enough, as Steve Jobs learned at least twice before with the introduction of the original Macintosh computer and later with his own NeXT computer. Both of those products had spectacular introductions, rave reviews, and boffo initial sales, which shortly thereafter fell off a cliff. That's the way it is with many new technologies: you can't rely on early adopters alone. There are some people who will buy almost anything that is new, but there aren't enough of those people to help most companies bridge the sales gap that follows a fantastic introduction after all the true believers have bought and the rest of us haven't yet made up our minds. It hurt the original Mac, but then Apple had Apple II sales to rely on. It darned near killed NeXT. It HAS killed many a start-up. Steve Jobs has learned a lot about product introductions in the years since NeXT and nearly all of it comes into play in the way he has managed the iPhone introduction. Here are the rules, if you are keeping score: Set expectations. The iPhone was announced months before it shipped. This was not only because FCC filings would have outed the phone anyway, 90-120 days before it shipped, but also because you have to get people in the mood to buy something that costs $500-600. Months of anticipation helped the hype and helped the sales. Deliver on those expectations. Early reviews are generally pretty positive for the iPhone. It's not enough for the thing to be pretty; it also has to work. Follow up on any problems. The fact that Apple sees the iPhone as a hugely important platform for the future can be seen in the company's decision to give a top-of-the-line iPhone to every Apple employee, even part-timers. This is frigging brilliant. EVERY Apple employee becomes an iPhone evangelist. EVERY Apple employee participates in ongoing stress testing and customer feedback. You can bet that every technical problem will be addressed quickly, simply because the entire company will be experiencing these problems. Have no shortages. Apple is a big company that makes millions and millions of gizmos. The success of the iPod has made Apple the Big Kahuna with Chinese manufacturers, which shows in the complete lack of product shortages despite the success of this rollout. The expected gray market pretty much didn't happen for exactly this reason. Have an upgrade plan for the future, which is to say Christmas. Yeah, what about Christmas? Apple couldn't risk introducing the iPhone at Christmas. They had to get all the bugs out before Christmas in order for the iPhone to be a risk-free gift. Knowing that the phones work, and work well, people can get used to the idea of giving them as gifts. That's one reason why it is easy to predict that iPhone sales for Christmas will be robust. Only for Steve Jobs "robust" is not enough. He wants iPhone Christmas sales to EXPLODE. How do you make that happen? Well, you could lower the price, but don't expect that. Apple WON'T lower iPhone prices before (or probably even after) Christmas. I would expect AT&T to eventually come up with some sort of two-year iPhone subscription deal that effectively lowers the price, but even that won't happen until after the holidays. Incentives don't happen until incentives are needed and with the iPhone they aren't needed yet. The trick to spurring even greater holiday sales is to make a good thing better. It would be nice if Apple and AT&T could come up with some little extra boost for Christmas sales like, for example, a software upgrade. That was pretty much inevitable, don't you think? The idea that the iPhone could go even three months without a significant firmware upgrade would be ignoring the reality of modern consumer electronics. Apple or AT&T will have got a few things wrong that will require a firmware upgrade to fix. And while they are at it, I'm sure the companies will add a feature or two, like TRUE 3G DATA SERVICE. It is my understanding that Apple and AT&T are planning a fall rollout for full 3G iPhone service, with technical trials already underway in certain AT&T markets. AT&T's (formerly Cingular's) 3G uses a technology called HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access), which is a combination of GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) and EDGE (Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution). It provides average mobile data download connections between 400 kilobits per second (kbps) and 700 kbps. Not as fast as any of us would like, of course, but the new service will be 3-5 times faster than the current EDGE network alone, making your iPhone suddenly 3-5 times faster than it was before, right? I think so. The question here is whether 3G is already built into the iPhones shipping now or whether it will require a new model? Given that it is coming so soon after the iPhone introduction, I can't believe that even Steve would make us buy new phones. It is very likely that a firmware upgrade will awaken the 3G within all you iPhone owners. And there's that bump needed to make Christmas iPhone sales explode. Nobody likes the slow performance on the EDGE network, so jacking up the speed by 3 to 5 times will give people something more to talk about as well as making it even easier to give an iPhone to those you love. We'll get excited all over again. Actually, AT&T really has no choice but to move to 3G with the iPhone, given the problems iPhones are creating for the EDGE network (see this week's links for more). And what we're getting excited about is much more than a phone or a media player, it is a whole new computing platform. Talk to anyone with iPhone experience and they'll tell you it feels more like a computer than an iPod or a phone. This is Apple's platform for the 21st century that I am sure we'll see revved and augmented in a variety of ways carefully over time. It won't replace desktop or even notebook computers, but this iPhone platform, properly augmented and with the help of Moore's Law, has a chance to do some major market-share grabbing from old Apple partners/competitors, notably Microsoft. Take THAT, Bill.

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★ Hacking the iPhone Notes App for the Admittedly Nit-Picky Purpose of Changing the Text Font to Helvetica

Faster iPhone faster! Kill!! Kill!!

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