Kicking it ADB

Gruber got trolled

2009-10-19T18:22:00.000-07:00

And we all got another secret out of it.

Adobe is Bending

2009-10-05T15:18:00.000-07:00

So, Flash still can't run on the iPhone, but a Flash-->App converter of some sort will allow Flash objects to become native apps. Apple gets 100% of the benefit of Flash without yielding a scintilla of control. Nice.

New iMacs Practically Guaranteed

2009-10-02T18:40:00.001-07:00

Rumors today of a Mighty Mouse redesign, complete with FCC docs, means consequential iMac revisions are a certainty.

At this point, laptops dominate consumer sales, and peripherals are not in-box. The Mac Pro does have input devices included, but it sells in miniscule quantities, and to people who already have mice and keyboards they like. That leaves the iMac as Apple's only volume seller that needs to impress with its input devices.

As usual, some of the iMac rumors are fanciful. I do not really expect an iMac Bravia replacement, but the thoroughness of the (apparent) coming overhaul does point to some possible "one more thing"-worthy features. BluRay and no more chin? Not enough. Maybe the world will get that quad-core iMac with a real desktop CPU and GPU that every disappointed and frustrated Mac Pro owner (read: old PowerMac creative user) on earth really wanted.

Third Wave Crashes: The End of AT&T lock-in

2009-09-26T23:40:00.000-07:00

(Part I and II here.)

The Third Wave of iPods makes them true pods, multi-use "containers" for each of our growing digital "i"s. Apple's proven skill integrating software and hardware for "the rest of us" will turn the Nano from a music player into the equivalent of the "feature phone" of portable media players. A blessedly simple digital companion, without the risk and complexity of internet connectivity and 3rd party developer support, that is never a poor value (if also never "cheap.") a strategic wedge Apple can use to enter any relevant market that arises. Portable projectors are just one that come to mind.

Apple has proven they want the Touch to be a volume product on the low end, and on the cutting edge of processing and graphical power at the high end, at the risk of lowering profit margins. With the iMac rumored to shift markets to the high end, Apple has constructed a beautiful synergy. The Touch, in this generation or the next, becomes the ultimate companion to the Mac.

An obscure feature called Home on iPod, dropped from Panther development and buried in Apple's patent portfolio, sheds light on Apple's product strategy. The digital hub paradigm has ended, as consumer taste in computers has demonstrated a desire for ubiquitous computing, internet connectivity and media consumption, over fixed (or partially mobile) computing. As the iMac evolves, the television/home theater is the most similar product set still in demand. The evolved Touch most closely matches the "netbook", but cannot offer (for most) the still-necessary functionality of a full laptop.

So why do AT&T or Big Cable care?

If a user's Home folder becomes independent of a single Mac, the "computer room" disappears, as does the "family computer", and the combination of a Touch, iMac-TV, and the iTunes Store become the competition for a hodge-podge of Windows laptops, smartphones, cable boxes, and netbooks out there. Wherever one has a Touch, they have their entire computer, in a limited state. Add a Mac, and gaming, media, and "my desktop" act just like they do at home. (A rumored "tablet" would help make the Mobile Home a compelling replacement for any portable computer in the house.)

Finally, with the advent of 3G to WiFi bridges (like the MiFi), any Touch becomes ubiquitously connected, just like the iPhone. With a choice of "networks", like Skype, higher data capacity, and a far thinner case, why buy an iPhone? Watch for a mass abandonment of any device with "phone" in the title in the longer term, as a general purpose computer is much more useful. Phone calls will come with them.

Thus, the Third Wave of iPods has begun, and the creative destruction of the home theater, with the logic of OS X replacing the brainless flat-panel, is happening at the same time. Apple is ideally, perhaps uniquely, positioning itself to capitalize.

iMac Rumors and the Digital Hub (Part II)

2009-09-26T23:20:00.001-07:00

(Part I is here)

The upcoming iMac is rumored to change dramatically. Instead of a laptop Core 2 Duo CPU, it may offer desktop (or even server) quad core processors. If Apple adds such substantial power, the GPU will probably come along. Snow Leopard leverages cores better, and offloads computation to compatible GPUs, so the rumored component choices are realistic projections.

In user-facing changes, the iMac will likely gain an SD slot and better remote, and, possibly, BluRay media playback. All of these changes point to home theater integration and improved "30 foot" usage, though not at the expense of the traditional method of "keyboard and mouse" desktop computing. It is not hard to envision the functionality of Apple TV becoming software, bundled with a range of 30-50in iMacs that replace the traditional television.

What of the "digital hub", never mind traditional and internet-based personal computing like word processing or social networking. E-mail is not something most people want friends or family to gather around on the couch. No one wants to spend computer money on a TV, and still not have a personal computer.

In the final article of the series, the Third Wave iPod meets the new iMac.

Entering The Third Wave of iPods

2009-09-26T02:14:00.000-07:00

Understanding the iPod in 2009

2001-2007 History

The iPod began in 2001 as a $400 Mac-only novel package of software and hardware, expertly designed to play digital music on the go. At the time, few portable digital players sold, despite advantages like skipless playback and equal or greater song capacity. Start-ups and experienced companies alike were unable to properly explain the complicated innovation at hand. A higher-quality example, like the Diamond Rio PMP 300, was inscrutable and clumsy to link to one's computer. Consumers were mystified by the software that moved songs from the computer to the device, and and once they got outside, the simplicity of a Discman beat fiddling with inscrutable buttons every time.

Bringing technology to the "rest of us" by integrating rarified hardware with intuitive software is Apple's ultimate strength. Compared to the Mac, an MP3 player that "just works" was a simple mandate. The iTunes/Scroll Wheel tandem is well known, and once Apple took the iPod cross-platform, wisely abandoning what looked like a strategy to sell Macs, they dominated. Attempts to win back the market, even with much cheaper, but less elegant players, or more "fully featured" devices, failed. (The iTunes Store also contributed to "lock in", though that effect was vastly overrated, given how thoroughly the volume of pirated music dwarfs legal online music distribution.)

Over time, the iPod split into a range of differently sized and priced players, adding video playback and a handful of games, but the design and main goal of the product, to make consumption of portable music effortless, never changed. Even years-long requests for an FM radio were ignored.

2007 Revisions - The Start of Something Different

Apple did not deviate from their plan until 2007, which brought a new type of iPod, the Touch. It looked and acted nothing like any past iPod, offering a range of abilities wrapped in new hardware and software interfaces. Instead of purity of purpose, the Touch offered partial solutions to many problems.

Even in 2001, rumormongers speculated about the meaning of the name "iPod." A pod is a container that could hold anything. People associate the word with aliens or peas, maybe, but not music. Apple being arguably the most exacting, consistent, and effective corporation at marketing, surely meant a variety of "objects."As the screens and chips powering the iPod improved, adding photo browsing and video playback seemed a natural way to fill out the baggy moniker, without adding complexity. By the time the Touch arrived, classic and "nano" iPods could manage both.

The Touch was a true pod, but it shed all of the conventions and assumptions about the iPod. Instead of a scroll wheel, there was a touch screen and single button. "Music" was just one of ten possible choices. In a first, the most expensive iPod would offer less space for music than cheaper line-mates, deemphasizing that core use. The new king of iPods could not even play the simple games its predecessors had years earlier. Apple was warping the most successful consumer electronics brand line ever.

The Touch also sowed confusion, as it looked and acted just like another new product, the iPhone. Both had a best-in-class web browser, Safari, and various data-driven applications (Weather, Stocks, Currency Conversion, etc.), but only the iPhone was connected to the internet via the cellular network. To make these programs useful, the Touch used WiFi, something unavailable to most people unless they are at home, where they own a computer anyway. The Touch seemed an even more irrational product when Apple announced that new applications for the Touch/iPhone would be delivered only through Safari, and therefore become inaccessible outside of the range of WiFi.

2008 Revisions - Plans Drag On

This misshapen iPod line soldiered into 2008, now selling well but not growing as a business. What had been a high-end electronics product in an untapped sector had become a routine offering in a mostly saturated marketplace. Also problematic, in the eight years since releasing the original 5GB iPod, flash memory and hard disks had doubled in capacity five times over.

A music lover who once needed a top of the line player could use even the cheapest screenless Shuffle to carry hundreds of songs. The most devoted listener would be hard pressed to need the 160GB of space now offered in the top non-Touch iPod. The Nano was double the cost of the Shuffle, and its tiny screen made video playback mostly useless.

A card up Apple's sleeve, as we all know, was the Touch itself. Some of the reasons for the sudden appeal of the once incongruous iPod are obvious. Most importantly, the release of the iPhone OS 2.0 allowed developers to write full-fledged applications for the iPhone and Touch. (I won't repeat the App Store story here.) The Touch also got much thinner and more refined (somewhat the opposite of the clumsy iPhone 3G redesign.)

Apple did not publicize two other crucial changes, but both represent below-grade work for the Third Wave* of iPods. The Touch was given the option of adding a microphone and accepting audio in, not just playing songs. Now, an App that could transmit voice over WiFi could offer iPhone-ish telephony, though only near a hot spot. The processor of the second generation Touch was also silently increased in speed to 532Mhz, up from the 412Mhz found in the iPhone, iPhone 3G, and Touch 1.0, a tip off that Apple did not consider the Touch a hobbled iPhone or fancy iPod. The speed bumped 2G Touch is noticeably quicker in menu screens, and delivers higher frame rates in gameplay. Apple surely noticed a trend towards game purchases by Touch owners, and decided to help the "Funnest iPod Ever" campaign really resonate. After all, more speed doesn't hurt user opinion, especially if it's free and isn't advertised to existing customers.

2009 - The Third Wave and a Return to Growth

Early in the year, the Shuffle was redesigned. To the discontent of many, the early-2009 revision Shuffle went buttonless, and so could only be controlled with headphones that carry a chip licensed by Apple. Moreover, added capacity for the same price sounds purely positive, but it is a double-edged sword when you can't see it. With a large price gap between the mediocre 2008 Nano and the newly-hobbled Shuffle, the line had an uncharacteristic weakness, and it was self-inflicted. Why?

The 2G Shuffle was the true atypical iPod, an Apple product planning mistake. Easier to control in one's pocket than the Nano, and capable of holding plenty of music for an average outing, the tiny, durable Shuffle was too good. The supposed "fatal flaw", a screenless design, was, with a little iTunes wrangling and a relatively small number of songs to remember, unproblematic. I suspect the 2G Shuffle was cannibalizing Nano sales. To satisfy Apple's ambition for late 2009, the high-margin, high-ASP sales of the Nano could not wane.

Late year iPod revisions usually have Apple lowering prices and adding capacity to the traditional iPod, maintaining the business. Instead, 2009 brought the culmination of Apple's work to restart the iPod as a growing business, and make the product live up to its name. The changes to the Nano are here, and the revisions to the Touch here.

The shift from focused simplicity is most obvious in the Nano. The added features expand the iPod Nano into a multitude of new businesses. Consumer camcorder manufacturers, pedometer manufacturers, and portable media player manufacturers that made FM radio capability a selling point are all disrupted or ruined.

The stand-alone pedometer is hardly big game, but diluting the focus of the player even slightly is a signal event. Truly heretical is a new FM radio that allows time-shifting. Apple spent the best part of a decade refusing to add the function, and losing sales to less dogmatic companies. (In 2001, it was almost farcical to offer a $400 portable music player that didn't even have a radio.)

Taking on the fast growing "consumer video sharing" segment is Apple's true statement of purpose. Flip, the leader in "consumer video", dismissed the lower-quality Nano's camera. However, it was simplicity of video sharing, on the internet and in person, that was Flip Video's bread and butter. The traditional camcorder business model, to provide high-quality optics and recording, then use complex software to edit the result, was blown apart by Flip. The Nano is one tenth the volume of the Flip, Apple's software and hardware are of legendary quality, and the video quality deficiency will be solved by the same exponential improvements in transistors that originally made the single-use music player a relic. The protestations of Flip executives seem hypocritical or nonsensical, and the burgeoning "consumer video" market is Apple's to lose.

The Late 2009 Touch revision was also a Third Wave initiator. The low-end model is now $199, a price point no competitor can match. Sure, the oft-noted volume purchasing discounts on flash memory and shared iPhone compenentry lead to savings, but the Touch also faces no OS licensing charges, and the services of world-class software, user interface, and industrial design departments.

Volume sales of the Touch on the order of a classic iPod would be a massive growth engine for Apple. The company will have proven it can re-make the iPod from a declining business with shrinking margins into another major top-line contributor. Add on the less significant, but still worth mentioning, benefits of a rapid expansion of the iTunes Store (App, Video, Music, etc.) installed base.

More important, the higher-end Touch gained the internal hardware of the 3Gs iPhone, but remained the same price. These changes are lost on consumers, but adding power and sophistication not found outside flagship smartphones threatens countless businesses. Apple also subtly initiated the process of fragmenting their App Market.

The "iPod Touch 3Gs" sprawls into countless business sectors. Pure gaming portables like the PSP must reach for extremely high end components if they remain single-purpose devices and want to command premium prices. Adopting an nVidia or Intel solution, or a custom PS3/Cell derivative, could be a decisive edge, but at a fraction of the sales volume of an iPod, component costs would necessitate taking a loss upfront and recouping profit on games for some time. It is unclear if Sony can build such a device, or afford to subsidize two lines of hardware. Nintendo need not compete on graphics, but a touch screen or other novel control surface is no longer unique to the DSi.

The Touch 3Gs is so powerful and capacious, it could perform the work of an Apple TV, which should intimidate Netflix, Roku, XBox 360, and cable box DVRs. An inevitable camera will add video recording capability, increasing pressure on Flip. Note that none of the non-Flip devices are portable. Imagine bringing everything in your home media center with you besides the TV. Just a threadbare studio with bunny ears becomes a gaming and media suite with a single dock cable.

What of needing WiFi? Read on in my next article to find out how Apple plans to surf their Third Wave.

*The First Wave iPod was the initial two FireWire/"Deck of Cards" line, the dock connector began the Second Wave.

Why the iPhone Doesn't Allow "Multitasking"

2009-08-26T15:08:00.001-07:00

iPhone dislikers everywhere claim the ability of a RIM or Palm device to "multitask" is a clear advantage. iPhone users know that the platform allows for background processes, but only when explicitly approved by Apple. The iPod, Phone, SMS, and Mail apps have some background ability, and Push Notification-capable apps sidestep the limitation somewhat.

The pitfalls of allowing apps to command system resources without being foregrounded are numerous, but perhaps the best example of why this is a problem can be found at the Blackberry App World. The THIRD most popular PAID application is Aerize Optimizer, a program specifically designed to de-gunk the memory of a Blackberry.

I think it a positive that iPhone users never have to run such a program, or even know what it would do. It is a huge hit with RIM fans though.

Achilles in Cupertino: Eric Schmidt's tenure on Apple's Board of Directors

2009-08-04T19:38:00.000-07:00

Gizmodo "rant" on Schmidt lingering too long.

Eric Schmidt's Wikipedia page

When Apple appointed Eric Schmidt to its board in 2006, the news met with some skepticism, but also praise. Mostly, it sparked fervent speculation.

At the time, the move brought many positives. Schmidt was a good guy to have on your side simply because Google is a good company to have on your side. Apple and Google did not compete directly in any core business. Some relatively minor operations were actually complementary. Apple sells high-end computers, so the traffic sent to Google via contextual menu and Safari "search field" placement was not just market share, but a long row of luxury cars. The internet marketplace was much more competitive then, too, and Google wanted share badly.

More arcane or speculative positives were divined at the time, too. Perhaps Apple would leave .Mac and other online efforts behind, and link the Mac intimately with Google's world-leading back end of servers? Maybe the companies were feeling out a merger?

Yet, Eric Schmidt was at the helm of a rising giant, sprawling disruptively into business after business. The optimism about today's Google is enormous, but tempered compared to the messianic speculation about space elevators, Google Linux, and so on of that era. Google was entangling itself with so many different entities and sectors that having its CEO on any Board of Directors did feel somehow imprudent.

The appointment was problematic at a more basic level as well. Google is a company trying to change the paradigm of personal computing in a way that would alter, and possibly cripple, Apple. It is old hat now, and it was even then, but the obvious result of the rise of browser-delivered "services" that mimic "classically delivered" executables means almost no one needs a specific operating system and powerful computer to do what they want anymore. Apple's core business is selling the best way of these two last items, so, the conflict is obvious.

(As an aside, Google's innocuous corporate mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" is a clever sleight, as the company considers anything information, like the way you use your mouse, or the fact that you read this.)

Concerns and plaudits aside, the job of Apple Director is amorphous enough to accommodate Al Gore, Bill Campbell, and Andrea Jung, so no one really makes perfect sense. (Indeed, Campbell's Intuit corporation has remarkably poor, oft-delayed Mac offerings.) The legal system and federal government make collusive additions to corporate boards a thorny road to travel, but Schmidt circa 2006 did not cross any clear boundary. A shareholder challenge of the addition of a director to a board is both difficult and esoteric, and, the controversy simply was not there.

By now, though, the conflicts are so obvious Gizmodo is right to rant about how long the Schmidt resignation took. I will not belabor the many overlapping agendas of both companies, but ask instead, why, really, did Schmidt stay as long as he did. Media-savvy and lawyer-stuffed, the company allowed the issue to raise antitrust issues that entangle a longtime director, Arthur Levinson. Apple is renown for secrecy, but it opened the books, unfolded the roadmap, and chatted about it with the CEO of a competitor for this long? It simply does not make sense.

I believe Apple and Schmidt are both blinded by rage, a seething anger at a shared enemy that has dealt both many blows over two decades: Microsoft. The Apple/Microsoft battles are well known even outside of technology and business. Steve Jobs was forced from Apple and spent time essentially in exile. The IBM PC/Wintel product was a horrid evolution of Jobs' original, and the world mired itself in it happily as NeXT bombed and Apple deteriorated.

Less well-known is that Schmidt's shares Apple and Jobs' arch-nemesis. Before Google, Schmidt led Novell, starting in 1997. While he did well for Novell, Microsoft was years into a massive attack on its main business that proved unstoppable. Novell's Netware was the dominant enterprise computing solution, and it ran on non-Wintel hardware. Microsoft leveraged Office and Windows to push adoption of its solution, Windows NT, and it was too late before Schmidt even started.

Before that slog, Schmidt already had good reason to hate Microsoft. Not only was he a long-time employee of rival Sun Microsystems, he was an early champion of Java, its main proponent in the company, setting corporate strategy around it as Chief Technology Officer. Microsoft was not yet a convicted monopolist, and used some of its most aggressive tactics in successfully thwarting Java. Netscape suffered less, really. If Sun had delivered a product twice as good, it would not have mattered, the field of play was not uneven, it was bought by the town, locked up, and guarded. Schmidt's baby was, like Quicktime, "knifed"

Just as Achilles went berserk with rage (metis) in The Iliad, or the soldiers of Vietnam became unhinged and went on rampages, reason was completely trumped by anger. While soldiers or heroes may lose control over minutes, seconds, or maybe hours, Schmidt, Apple and Jobs were gripped for months, perhaps years. The re-intrusion of reason, I predict, had nothing to do with any of those parties. The only participant who suffered and could see clearly, Google, probably forced the arrangement to end.

As an ending note, I am happy Schmidt is gone. His decades-long desire to put the application in the browser, and make the network the computer, or make a "web OS", is the resume of an enemy of Apple, too.

Buried in a press release?

2009-07-23T22:55:00.000-07:00

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/07/23fcs.html

Apple cut the price on Final Cut Studio, and added a lot of stuff. Once upon a time, this kind of thing was MacWorld/Seybold fodder. It sold high-end Macs, and made Apple a player in the margin stuffed software business. (I'm looking at Adobe with both eyes.) Now, it is buried in a press release.

Even odder, Final Cut Server only moved to version 1.5. The initial product was a black eye for Apple, delayed and buggy, so you think they would want to move away from it more dramatically. (Don't give me that "version numbers only change on file format shifts" dogma either, that hasn't been true for years.)

These Final Cut Studio/Server upgrades smack of Snow Leopard-style "clear and hold" development. While there are new features, the sensible back-end improvements seem to have been done. Apple never mentions Grand Central outside of its 10.6 preview site, but releasing a new suite of pro applications that took no advantage of post-Leopard advances is so stupid as to be unimaginable. Or, is this release really a -.x-equivalent dud the company is trying to hide?

Tests of FCP6 and 7 on 10.5 and 10.6 will reveal the truth whenever Apple lets their new OS slip.

Really Joe?

2009-05-18T14:58:00.000-07:00

Really? They will always win? Where were you ten years ago, besides holding a shovel full of dirt to throw on the Apple coffin?

The article

The Bondi Blue iMac didn't even have Firewire! That wonderful product had to be restarted with a paper clip, and was basically a PowerBook G3 with a tube monitor. Don't revise history. It was a striking design and a big seller, but it hardly represented the successful strategy of today's Apple. Garish designs trumping functionality? Not anymore. The iPhone is a featureless slab. The unibody laptops are all-function, no "book covers" or color choices, or handles.

The iPod is indeed a good product, you are right.

Microsoft bucking convention? Those four points you cite are indeed unconventional maneuvers, but for a partnering ("embrace and extend") company to succeed, it must necessarily set the status quo. David can't bring 99% people around to the slingshot until it's proven, and everyone's doing it. Apple tactics don't preclude succeeding with 10% of the market, while Microsoft would be hard pressed without 80%.

Then you go into the MSFT vs. AAPL argument. Well, it is important to remember that the former company paid a dividend and bought back shares, while Apple has been full-tilt the other direction. I'm not arguing for anything different from either company, but the comparison is asinine.

Stupid article!

I was wrong I guess, Apple's tablet is coming?

2009-05-04T19:48:00.000-07:00

The likelihood of an Apple Tablet release has risen in the past few weeks. Development of the device has been "confirmed" by reputable Mac rumor sites, and reinforced by mainstream magazine and newspaper coverage. Apple Insider and Mac Rumors both issued reports describing hardware specifications, and BusinessWeek and the NY Times echoed those reports, adding that Apple was courting Verizon as a partner for the launch.

Until recently, I doubted that any "large iPhone"/sub-MacBook device with touch input was going to be released in any form. I thought the rumor was one of those too-juicy possibilities that seem never to come true, or go away. Now that outlets I trust are on the record predicting such a thing, I am willing to reconsider my position. I now ask, if a "tablet" is on the way, what should we expect from it, and is it likely to succeed?

The current consensus is that Apple is set to release an iPhone-alike, multi-touch input based device with a roughly 10in screen, priced to compete in the fast-growing "netbook" market. The product would be aimed at consumers who want portable access to internet services, like GOPHER, Friendster, Telnet, etc., without the cost or complexity of a traditional laptop. What exactly Apple will do to satisfy this segment is unknown.

Apple could be re-using the strategy that reinvigorated the Macintosh. The company has the same competitive advantages in industrial design and operating system software building a netbook as it did creating the MacBook. Using netbook industry standard components like the Intel Atom does not terminally limit Apple. An innovative form factor like a touch tablet, combined with a modified Mac OS X, would differentiate the product, rather than hardware specs, which would just match top-end Windows or Linux netbooks.

If Apple has such a thing in the works, I don't think it will be widely adopted. For general computing, the tablet form factor has never caught on. Using a computer that lies flat on a desk, or must be held with one hand and operated with the other, just doesn't work that well. Sure, Apple's multitouch solution could be great, and beat the styli of the past, but it must also be equal to a mouse and keyboard.

Or, the tablet could be more like Apple's consumer electronics products. Instead of Intel and AMD motherboard platforms, Apple could competitively source components, and tie them together with a more heavily modified build of OS X. The ARM CPU and third-party graphics processor in the iPhone would be a place to start, as OS X is ported already, and developers are on board. The resulting product would be, essentially, a scaled-up iPod Touch.

My concerns for such a product are numerous. It might still be too big to use comfortably and be another failed attempt to build a successful tablet. Assuming it is wonderful to use, like the iPhone, other problems emerge. The netbook is successful because it is cheap, and prices are so low because the hardware is commodified. The ARM/iPhone OS X tablet as imagined is being asked to do a lot more than the iPod Touch can manage for not much more money.

If Apple is planning to tie the tablet to a wireless provider and subsidize the upfront cost, it will substantially limit sales. A two-year contract is a much larger investment, and a barrier for minors and impulse buyers. Moreover, unlike a phone, the device is primarily intended for home use, where wi-fi is typically available and preferable. Making a significant monthly investment in a cellular internet option for a living room tablet will not make sense for much of the market.

The acquisition of PA Semi, and leaks about executive hirings (Mark Papermaster, Bob Drebin, Richard Teversham), all point to Apple developing the tablet in this manner, perhaps even designing a custom main GPU or CPU. Any further specialization of the hardware would exaggerate the benefits and downsides of the process, though. A speed or size advantage is useless if it is only developed and implemented at huge cost in a market so focused on cost.

So, I am past doubting that an Apple Tablet exists. I am more concerned now that it will be a bust.

Apple's Stock Considered

2009-04-14T08:08:00.000-07:00

AAPL shares are currently on the rise, reaching the 120s after a market-tracking tumble to the 70s. Apple's valuation is still significantly below its 2007 peak of 202 and 2008 high in the 190s. Even after rising, it is still valued too pessimistically.

As is typical, earlier highs occurred before MacWorld San Francisco, when product improvement expectations are highest but facts are hard to come by. The most feverish hype was for the iPhone, of course, despite it being costly to develop, and so damaging to earnings, and facing a decent chance it would not succeed. Generally, the stock is prone to irrational pricing when investors are being prodded with press, which is almost always about non-Mac hardware debuts. This focus is misplaced. The core Macintosh personal computing business, OS and hardware both, are the real measure of the company's meaningful potential for growth.

While the market slid, Apple followed, and then some. Without price-pumping, press-fueling announcements, nothing could scatter the clouds of generalized negativity. As shares crossed "milestones" in price models, program trades and sales by quantitative investors served to pressure shares even lower. Never mind the wild speculation about "shorts" manipulating things, something that always seemed marginal to me.

Instead of stoking the fire of speculators who lust for new consumer non-core business scope expanding widgets, Apple has released a stream of Mac revisions, an iPhone OS X revision preview, and belatedly fixed the dates for WWDC. All of these moves are vital indicators, and all have gone barely noticed.

Most important, Apple has finally routinized Mac hardware development. Until very recently, almost every new Mac Apple announced would struggle out the door. Delays, sometimes lasting months, were routine. Constrained supplies of parts, or late-breaking design issues, were something Mac buyers planned for. Promised machines even dropped in speed before shipping (the G4 PowerMac), and sometimes simply never materialized (the "3.0Ghz G5.") When hardware shipped on time, it usually meant the Mac was stagnant technologically, an equally problematic situation for Apple (the anemic last generations of PowerBook G4.)

Today's Apple can revise an entire product segment, most recently the Mac Pro, iMac and Mac Mini desktop line, simultaneously, and deliver the products as promised. Even the most exotic top-end Macs are in production and available when released, once unheard of. (The XServe was revised and ready just weeks later as well.) I waited three months longer than promised for a Dual 800 Quicksilver G4, two months for a Sawtooth G4, and six weeks after a promised date with a Dual 2.0 G5. The problems were not entirely CPU supplier related, as the ship date of the first Intel MacBook Pro slid a month and a half, too.

Ignoring the smoothness of the Nehalem Mac Pro release is a mistake. Apple's software and hardware competence is on display and most strenuously challenged by the project of turning an eight core UNIX workstation into an intuitive tool for content creation. The latest hardware makes a G3->G4-sized transition, to new bus, core and memory architectures. What once felt like watching a trapeze artist work without a net, and was hyped to match, is now as undramatic as an AirPort firmware release.

Also under-considered was Apple's preview of iPhone OS 3.0. While iPhone hardware sends bloggers into orbit, software is somehow less compelling. The requisite "copy and paste hooray, and why did it take so long" articles hit the web, but little mention was made of most of the OS advances. Besides adding 1000 new APIs, Spotlight, Push Notifications, and other features, Apple revealed that the dock connector would be a functional interface for third party hardware.

This is huge news. The iPod "ecosystem" of hardware, speakers and so on that served the narrow mandates of the simple player, thoroughly cemented the dominance of the iPod. The fees from licensing and "Made for iPod" certification gave Apple more profit-heavy, reliable revenue streams. The iPhone has a similar, but much larger, opportunity, as it is able to run complex, custom software in tandem with external hardware. Seemingly on purpose, the glucose monitor demo Apple used to demonstrate this feature was fatally boring. Game pads, keyboards, printers, etc., a huge variety of devices across countless industries (retail, medical, logistics, etc.) have the potential to add to the iPhone-only feature list and give the platform even more momentum. Include 30% of all revenue derived from the apps required to drive this hardware, and the upside is even larger.

Apple also ended the uncertainty surrounding the development of OS X 10.6 by setting the dates for WWDC. The company did this later than usual. In the weeks after an announcement was expected, many Apple watchers posited that the operating system was meeting delays, and would slide to August or later, along with the conference. That has not come to pass, and June 8 is now the expected release date.

(I have previously written but reiterate here how vital OS X, particularly 10.6, is to Apple. The brains of the iPhone and Mac are Apple's most valuable asset. This release is particularly important as the future of computing lies in massively parallel multi-core hardware, and new technology in OS X.6 will unlock a far greater proportion of the power these chips offer. Already-shipped dual, quad and octo-core Macs are supposed to see meaningful to significant speed improvements without hardware changes.)

The market slide hit all securities, but Apple's drop was truly immense. The company has cash piled to the ceiling to use in the absence of operating credit markets, no leverage or debt, and evidently invested wisely enough through the Braeburn Capital fund the company set up to manage its money to avoid taking material losses. It has fixed the Mac business and is setting OS X up for the next decade of work inside the iPhone and Mac.

Concerns about consumer demand for "luxury" Macs are legitimate, but the Mac business as a whole has so many avenues for growth besides the home market. It is still miniscule by volume in the world, and below 10% of the US market. With Windows languishing, still not up to even older OS X standards, Apple has a clear field to continue to grow Mac sales. Daring Fireball had an apt analogy equating Wintel PCs to American cars in the 1970s; inferior and doomed to cede market share to Japanese models beyond the wildest nightmares of anyone in industry. Apple's stock takes none of that potential into account.

More thoughts on the Apple Tablet

2009-04-14T02:40:00.001-07:00

Forget for a moment that the Apple Tablet is unlikely to be released. If all the rumors are true, what is the implied "lay of the land", and what product is expected to arrive?

Apple has said OS 10.6 will be a maintenance release of sorts. Unlike past feature-oriented releases, Snow Leopard should be viewed as the fortification of past advances, and the improvement of the infrastructure gluing those features together. The most radical change rumored is a UI revision called Marble, implying Apple views Aqua as infrastructure worth upgrading, instead of a stable end feature in itself.

A tablet release implies Apple has created an OS X variant that bridges the gap between the Mac and iPhone for users, and targets a unique hardware set. No tablet buyer would accept the access and sync limitations of the iPhone. File system manipulation is a must, as is a proper PIM, from Apple or a 3rd party. To provide this, the OS X Tablet would have to blend the interfaces of both Mac and iPhone, too. After the monumental work involved, this variant would have to be coded to run on a new processor, or, at least, a very different set of chips than any other Apple.

It seems unlikely that Apple could create an OS X Tablet variant while doing the work of Snow Leopard. Making a new OS X that also incorporates the work of 10.6 would mean rebuilding a jet while it flies, without blueprints for the new jet, or a fixed destination. If Apple pulled it off, then they accomplished something truly stupendous.

The Apple Tablet has also been rumored to be like a 7in or 10in iPhone.

If the tablet is very Mac-like, even 10in of screen would be a challenge to enjoy. No Mac ships with less than a 13in screen, and Jobs and Apple have been resistant to anything smaller. (The 12in PowerBook was never replaced, despite being quite popular.) Customer expectations, driven by scrupulous Apple brand management, mean a Mac must do certain things. For example, there has been strenuous advertising of HD content consumption and creation on Macs, and the rumored size of the Tablet precludes it from participating in either. No consumer Mac will be a go-to Final Cut Pro box, but a PC isn't a Mac if it can't make iMovies.

If the tablet is more like an iPhone, it will face more daunting challenges. Changing screen size and resolution means breaking or distorting all current iPhone apps. A clever trick would be to double the current screen exactly, and split apps into HD and SD versions. The latter would be upsampled iPhone apps, with the former providing sharper UI on the tablet and greater functionality. Such a solution still fragments the App Store market, and isn't too great a way to showcase what will be a massive amount of un-optimized application content.

If a tablet of any kind is released, it would arrive at a price point few are honestly considering. With iPhones at $200, and plan-less iPod Touch models at $300-$400, any Tablet would have to start at least $500, and even that is a very low estimate. Apple cannot afford to make the iPod Touch a bad deal, nor can it introduce a telephony platform that cannibalizes the sales of AT&T plans. Pricing must go higher than the $400 of the top-end iPod Touch.

At the introduction of a radically new device, custom and cutting edge parts are ordered in small quantities, driving up even something as likely to sell in quantity as the iPhone, which was released at $600. Precedent points to a tablet that cannot cost less than $600, then, as rumors have it being as different from earlier hardware as the iPhone was the iPod. Surely the hardware and development costs necessitate an iPhone 1.0-or-greater retail MSRP.

At $600 to $800, the mythical Apple Tablet begins to match Mac Mini and educational iMac pricing, but would represent a discount from the MacBook. Shifting sales away from an established but critically growth-dependent Mac platform is risky. That each move from Mac to Tablet/OS X results in less revenue at a lower margin with fewer upsell opportunities, and then requires more intensive, educational customer support, is problematic. If the Tablet is hobbled

to prevent this dynamic, it will flounder around, an overpriced gimmick.

If the tablet is made to exceed $1000, it would have to accommodate very broad, Mac-alike usage, and be compelling enough to operate as a stand-alone computer. The cheap netbooks of the past year have proven that consumers are adaptable creatures, and willing to sacrifice and learn for the sake of a compelling enough new form factor. If Apple has a tablet so capable it matches a MacBook Air, fits into a much smaller space, and can be delivered for $2000, I would be surprised. If such a device output to just a 10in screen, it would be truly misconceived. Any larger, and the Tablet becomes as cumbersome as a laptop, but without the functionality of a keyboard or speakers, and packaged so as to make it uncomfortable to sit at or use for long periods of time.

Sadly, the Apple Tablet strikes me as unlikely. Even if the company had the development capacity to create a 10.6 "signed-content touch Mac" variant of OS X, and 10.6 at the same time, the pricing and packaging of any Tablet device cannot be made attractive. Either Apple is offering giant iPods at a small premium, or crippled, barely-profitable Macs. Even the miracle scenario of a 7in tablet with USB and video out, App Store compatibility, non-iTunes PDA-alike data management software, all for $600, results in a niche product.

The Apple of today isn't trying to cover every base with esoteric hardware offerings. A new platform that can't deliver millions of sales is not worth pursuing. The Apple TV competes in, broadly considered, the set top box market, a realm worth billions. Just having a "hobby" there drives hundreds of thousands of sales. Moreover, developing for the living room has the benefit of educating Apple and preparing it for the long-anticipated, platform-defining battle to deliver all television content.

In contrast, tablets have been available for a decade or more in various forms, but have never sold in significant quantities. Indeed, it is not possible to learn the market for tablets, because there has never really been one. Creating a market is something the Apple II and Mac did, and both suffered for doing so. Second-wave Jobs products, like the iPod and iPhone, find markets that are poorly served and then do better. Only accessories risk first-mover status, and the last to be so bold was probably the first Airport card/WAP combo.

If someone can specify a plausible tablet price point, and describe a marketplace of at least 1m total, eventual customers, it would go a long way towards convincing me this rumor isn't utter noise.

Jobs Behind the Curtain

2009-04-12T14:15:00.000-07:00

The mythical Apple Multitouch Tablet took another step towards existing this week, gaining Apple Insider's "could be true" imprimatur.

I have a long history with AI, having first read it as MacNN Reality. It has changed hands and domains a few times since then, but the rumormongering has been relatively well informed regardless of who is at the helm. Any site making accurate predictions on the Mac Web is getting dirt from someone. A few years of quality means that someone is not leaving a trail, and AI has a proven reserve of not-fired insiders now, by my estimation.

I have long doubted the "Apple Tablet" rumor, and I continue to think it is off base. Now that AI is on record endorsing it, I must dig deeper.

As rumors go, the "Apple has a tablet in the labs coming soon" line has been around in one form or another for more than ten years. It persists because it has all the tropes that home-based die-hard rainbow-tattooed "Guy Kawasaki" pre-Copland ADB-using Mac zealots love. Its newest revival was inevitable.

The tablet is a form-factor no one has managed to sell in decades of trying, so the classic Apple "hardware and software integration" strengths should thrill upon arrival, featuring unprecedented innovations. Unlike, say, figuring out how to sell digital music, these are the works that inspire passion in Mac devotees.

The most electrifying part of the hardware rumors for longtime Mac devotees is the possibility of a new, exotic, and custom main processor. The best Apple products, and the most thrilling keynotes, have always centered on radical leaps in computing power wrung from Skunk Works-like research and development. Software is fun, and perhaps new user interface technology can move an Apple zealot's needle, but the moment a new paradigm is revealed is near-religious. The original Mac leapt past the PC and Apple II with 3.5in floppies and a screaming 680x0, the PowerPC crushed the Pentium, and the G4 with Velocity Engine brought "supercomputing to the masses." The PA Semi acquisition, and Intel-era loss of Mac CPU differentiation, have given the rejuvenated Apple Tablet rumor a sky-high interest quotient.

That arch-enemy Microsoft has spent billions to get nowhere to the drama. The iPhone 2 reveal will be huge, but the fragmented, juvenile smartphone market offers only iterative, sleepy Research In Motion as a foil. When Apple faces down an industry leader, Mac zealots lust for philosophical war. The GUI versus the command line, single-vendor hardware/software packaging versus the IBM PC/Wintel model, the new from the Other against the status quo from the hegemon.

Finally, "Steve Jobs is personally involved." While on hiatus, Jobs is contributing an unknown amount to Apple's strategic and operational plans, but he is of course obsessed with the Tablet. In the received lore of the Mac Web, the story of an Apple product team being taken over by Jobs and pushed to epic, era-defining works is cherished. That the Tablet is being developed this way is a certainty only in the hearts of the rumor obsessed, but that is all it takes.

But what do we really know? Jobs is hard to track down for the Wall Street Journal, so it is hard to believe anyone knows the specifics of his work on a single secret project. Tablet dimensions are only guesses. The parts of the iPhone told its tale, especially leaks about what became a German-sourced, highly innovative capacitive screen. A tablet would require an extraordinary version of such, and nothing has leaked of any substance. That DigiTimes says the production line is running does not count.

OS X for iPhone 3.0 was just revealed, and while it does a lot for the iPhone, only some Plist text describing "iProd X,Y" point to any development outside of the smartphone arena. Meanwhile, Tablet rumors hinge on an entire all-new "wing" of the OS coded to accommodate Mac-level usage, targeted at a wholly new CPU/hardware architecture, and ready soon. Difficult to believe, especially since the delta in quality between betas 1 and 2 of the OS is infinitesimal, not composed of the leaps found in past OS development.

Thus, I believe Apple Tablet expectations are off-base. The company would be foolish not to experiment with the idea, but the product as imminent, and meaning to compete with netbooks in price, sales volume and usage profile, represents the remotest of possibilities.

10.6 is the new OS 8

2009-03-25T23:56:00.000-07:00

As I wrote earlier, the most important Apple product in the near-term pipeline is OS X 10.6. Speculation is ramping up about the look and feel, capabilities, and changes coming soon.

The release of Mac and iPhone variants of the OS is set for WWDC in June, according to the best guesses of Mac Rumors and Apple Insider. I see no reason to doubt that, though Apple is now late in announcing the exact date of the developer conference. It may be that progress is uneven, and the company is waiting to set a deadline (only speculation.) OS development is so complicated that a delay of a few months is almost assured. The "polish and enhance" mandate of Snow Leopard might make it especially susceptible to long slogs through legacy code, though the predicted end of PowerPC support lifts the burden of targeting that platform. All told, Apple may be planning on a WWDC preview, with a month-or-so-later ship date.

The last major OS revision and Mac platform shift was, of course, OS X. The move to the UNIX-based OS is without a doubt the most significant change in Mac software history. Snow Leopard is no such leap. The most similar past update to the Mac is the shipped Mac OS 8 (not Copland of course.) When that revision arrived, it represented a significant rework of the internals of System 7, came clad in a new but not-unfamiliar UI, and ended support for 680x0 (non PowerPC) Macs.

OS 8 was probably the relative peak of the original Macintosh, as XP compared far more favorably to OS 9 than Windows ME did to the earlier Mac OS. The same may hold true for Snow Leopard, shipped at the tail end of a disastrous Windows release cycle, with future OS X releases coming after Windows 7 (in theory.) Indeed, OS X has been shipping for almost ten years now. Is it becoming as dated as its predecessor? What comes after OS X?

Another possibility is that this revamp represents the start of a new, even better era, as MultiFinder and System 6.0.8 (or 7.something, when that OS finally worked) were the start of a sort-of second generation of the Mac. In this scenario, the OS is "rebuilt in flight", giving Apple a few more years to plan the next complete overhaul, but possibly leading the OS into a spiral of senescence from which it is unable to recover. Apple pushed Classic about as far as possible, and it would be best to avoid being in that risky and desperate a position.

Dumbest article ever?

2009-03-25T01:38:00.000-07:00

This article breaks new ground for stupid Apple commentary. I am trying my hardest to lower the bar for pundits with this blog, but I doubt I'll ever hit these lows.

That an Apple tablet is coming is far from a foregone conclusion. If it does exist, we don't know what it looks like or costs, or even if it would be marketed as a Mac or an iPod-something. That's not a problem for Mr. Moritz, though, who calls this non-existent product a failure already.

I have no inside information, but my predictions are as follows. Apple will never release anything like a tablet, because the form factor is designed for stylii, and Apple is pushing touch. Any non-iPhone-sized touch device is unlikely. Furthermore, the Mac will never be sold as a laptop for less than $700. No netbook Mac is coming! The "consumer hit" Moritz describes is only replacing sales of laptops, not generating new sales itself, so it is useless, or worse, to Apple.

The state of the Wintel consumer laptop today is a direct consequence of the failings of Vista. If a PC laptop running Vista was a compelling product, it would sell for $1000+ like a real laptop. Such a thing cannot be built, as nobody wants Vista, especially in the low-end, hobbled incarnation found on low-end PCs. Don't believe the Linux hype either, as the standard netbook purchase is not the $200 generic option, but the $400 model from a name brand running XP. By dint of age that OS runs on what is now very cheap hardware.

Fixing the OS won't fix the problem, because expectations have been forever shifted. The "digital hub" vision of a muscular computer (almost a server, really) powering one's ever-more-computationally-intense "lifestyle", was the (very profitable) holy grail for Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and the entire industry. Now, only Apple continues to compete for the many-cycle user. Indeed, who would have thought any popular computer in 2009 would struggle with video editing?

Quarterly Mac sales numbers are irrelevant

2009-03-24T23:06:00.000-07:00

The recession has Mac pundits frantically calculating the impact of a down economy on Apple's sales. Many project static or declining Mac sales, with cheap netbooks gaining market share quickly. Surely Apple's Waterloo has arrived? Hardly.

The technology industry is almost entirely divided into two types of company, those that make standards, and those that have to follow them. Typically, leaders risk only market share with poor implementation, while followers face an existential threat if they fail to conform.

The pre-"Jobs 2" Apple was the rarest breed, a company that knew it was too small to dictate terms to the industry, but was determined not to try to adhere to the acknowledged industry standard. To survive at all it was thought the Mac had to hold on to standard-bearer status, or relevance, in niches (graphics, publishing, education) and build consumer and corporate market share from a beachhead.

The strategy was impossible to execute. Apple had uniquely expensive R&D overhead (OS, hardware, Claris), and, with less sales volume, could not get equal component pricing. The Mac had a flawed cost structure that no technical edge could overcome. Every quarter of decline represented a trend towards Wintel standardization, and every lost sale pushed the Mac farther from price parity. A recession in this scenario would indeed be dangerous, speeding up market share losses as buyers focused on cost, making the Mac even pricier, and eventually killing it and Apple. (Cool looking Windows PCs coming from Cupertino with Apple badges may have persisted. Yuck.)

The Apple of today faces a far different market. Partial standardization (on Intel) has allowed Apple to direct still-costly R&D towards moving the user-facing platform forward, driving improvements in OS X. That is far different from the old mandate that Apple spend richly to match the competition, or else face a cataclysmic shortfall. The risk that a single misstep in hardware would lower sales and threaten the relevance of the platform has also been lifted. Software availability is no longer completely contingent on rising Mac market share.

So, while sales of "luxury" items may decline, and Mac sales numbers might even fall year-over-year, the consequences are no longer existentially dire should that occur. It is the idea that a Mac works a certain way, not structural costs, keeping Apple out of the netbook market.

Considering the Shuffle 3.0

2009-03-15T04:40:00.000-07:00

Apple's new iPod Shuffle is the most controversial iPod since CmdrTaco preferred the Nomad Jukebox. The reviews are not mixed, either, but downright negative.

The recipe for a thumbs-down is the same every time, too. Nobody minds when electronics get smaller, but this shrink of the Shuffle has cost too much usability, say pundits. Moving the buttons off the player and onto the headphone cord is bad, because you cannot use anything besides the included Apple earbuds. The new controls are hard to use unless you're standing still, but the device is designed for every situation besides that.

Outside of the Great Headphone Debacle, reviewers note that the player is way easy to lose, the "colors" are boring, the clip is not as strong as before, and the old dock was preferable to the new headphone-to-USB cord.

Pluses are hard to come by, but increased capacity always plays well, and VoiceOver liberates the Shuffle from its old single-playlist cap in a cool way.

But these reviews miss the broader intent of the Shuffle 3. Like all Shuffles before it, the hardware was not designed to meet Apple's typical brief. The Macintosh, the iPod and iPod Mini/Nano have prosumer market positioning. If you pay a premium, Apple's best-in-class hardware and software interface will deliver the best available listening/computing experience.

The Shuffle 1 was a defensive product. Apple's desire to own digital music distribution to all consumers meant AAC/FairPlay hardware had to address the entire market, or risk losing the battle over DRM standards to Microsoft. Though the true goal, profit, lay in high-end sales, the 50% market share of flash players meant the segment could not be ignored. Also, disk-based iPods crash when they are used during exercise, which was beginning to weigh on the perceived reliability of the iPod. The Shuffle was therefore only an ideal second MP3 player. All of the reviews at the time considered it in isolation, though, and thought it was dead-on-arrival for lacking a screen.

The Shuffle 3 is also defensive, but a more subtle maneuver.

The recession has accelerated the decline of the stand-alone MP3 player. The mass-market for these players seems to be around a thousand songs to choose from between syncs, especially with the Genius and other features making it easier to sync "the right 1000" each time. Since even the 8GB Nano allows for 2000 songs, that base is covered. The Nano is so small, though, that non-music features, like gaming, notes, or calendaring, are hard to implement well. Since the music industry has given up on DRM, the Music Store is also no longer a value-adding feature, either.

Thus, the trend towards multipurpose devices like the iPhone makes the Nano a Cadillac in a world of sidecars. The Shuffle 2 does everything the Nano does except require you to look at it, an act reserved for the iPhone these days, so naturally customers opted for the low-margin Shuffle when they went looking for a music player.

This is a rather destructive trend for Apple's profit margins. The Shuffle 3 takes away the universal headphone compatibility, no-look controls, and panache of the Shuffle 2, once again restricting those features to the Nano.

So what do you get? Nothing less than a new Apple interface, here in beta. VoiceOver is a big shift, and Apple is using the new Shuffle as a testbed for mainstream user interaction with spoken interfaces. The iPod Touch with a two-way spoken interface is Apple's end goal, so they never have to put a volume control on it. As a nice bonus, the Shuffle pushes the sophistication and technological edge of the Mac, too, installing "smooth human" in all languages when synced with a Mac, instead of the "clunky Scandinavian-inflected robot" gone AWOL from the depths of Windows.

Hegemony and verve

2009-03-10T12:59:00.000-07:00

People who reading this blog probably agree with the following few statements:

* Microsoft dominated consumer and business computing from 1995-2005. They set standards and had first crack at any given media or software market. If something was not Windows-only, it was at least compatible with the relevant Microsoft offering.

Apple was marginalized in that time period, and often had to adjust its offerings to accommodate de facto standards in the wider market. Mac support was an afterthought for most companies, and keeping the Mac viable was Apple's burden.

* Microsoft is large and complacent, and attained dominance through imitation, relentless bullying, and business acumen.

* Apple made it in thin times by being fundamentally innovative and differentiated, and succeeds today, on a huge scale, for the same reasons.

* Microsoft is seen as uncool, a version behind, and so oriented to corporate needs they necessarily are not "the new."

* Apple is perceived as a hip alternative to the status quo.

Apple started its comeback with either the iMac or iPod. Certainly, the dot-com crash took the wind out of the Bondi-colored recovery, so start with the latter. Apple initially played defense, releasing a player and media store Mac-first, and for some while, Mac-only. This guaranteed Mac compatibility with a music player, and the projected (and eventual) standard in DRM. (Both areas were contended [poorly] by Microsoft, too.)

The iPhone was Apple on offense. Smartphones were a business-driven niche. Limited Mac-compatible options did not damage the platform all that much. Apple's offering was not Mac-related, but instead a move to compete in a new market. That it would be innovative was taken for granted. Apple delivered a product that met expectations, and has become a hegemon.

With the recent media attention focused on the Palm Pre, Apple may be in danger of losing its pole position. All that is required to push Apple from alternative to mediocre mainstream would be such a loss. Palm is a tiny company that may pack a gigantic mindshare punch. Apple should eliminate them any way they can.

iPod Touch Tablet or Netbook?

2009-03-10T11:12:00.000-07:00

The Mac web is being flooded with "Apple is building a netbook" rumors on a daily basis. Some claim a MacBook Cheap is coming, others a tablet-sized iPhone/iPod Touch variant. Neither makes much sense.

A "MacNetBook" isn't coming. A super-cheap OS X laptop is detrimental for too many reasons. Cannibalization of profitable, full-freight Mac Mini and MacBook sales seems inevitable, and Apple hates that. The netbook price point means a MacNetBook would have a mediocre screen, no GPU, and a dated or sub-notebook class CPU. It would be a cruddy computing experience, sullying a Mac brand Apple has intentionally positioned as the opposite. Finally, creating a slow, cheap general purpose computer means supporting it with software and OS updates, and Apple hardly needs another platform worth of development work.

The iPod Tablet isn't coming either. Such a device dodges cannibalization, Mac brand confusion, and "new platform" issues, but adds a host of other problems. The iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPod Touch 1 and 2 have all had the same screen size, touch keyboard layout, and input hardware design. Making a "giant iPod Touch" splits Apple's carefully-tended, homogenous offering in a number of ways.

All of the user learning that has made the touch keyboard a successful alternative to hard keys is gone, as all Tablet users would learn a larger, different soft keyboard. Switching between iPhone thumb input and whatever the tablet requires is as drastic as switching from any other platform, even if both are now OS X-based. A tablet with a hard keyboard is the alternative, but can anyone imagine an Apple OS X Kindle-alike formfactor being released?

App development would be complicated by a new form factor, and the simplicity of the "it works if you can see the App Store" model would be lost. Never mind that users will not tolerate a "more expensive iPod" that has fewer available Apps, certainly at first if not forever, as the market for such a device is way smaller than the multi-million per quarter Touch venue.

Finally, a tablet with the strictures of the iPhone/Touch offering is not as palatable for those who see the openness of other offerings in the price range. It is one thing to trade a Razr for the iPhone with App Store. A netbook switcher confronted with no USB, no disk drive, and the constraints of the rest of the iPhone OS X scheme would have some reason to complain.

So why the rumors? Apple is working on a true iPhone/iPod Touch 2, such a thing is a certainty, and that work is probably generating a lot of speculation. Along with future Mac development, this work is likely coalescing around the most important Apple product right now, OS X 10.6. Once 10.6 is out, Apple will have their next base platform in place, with all the right accommodations for a range of cross-compatible iPhone 2 offerings, and a range of (GPU-heavy) Macs. A Tablet sprung from the last days of the PPC/Intel/Classic mishmash of Leopard is massively unlikely.

Tip for Google: How to destroy Twitter

2009-03-05T02:26:00.000-08:00

When visitors are logged in, pop up a "say" button next to the search field. Send relevant gMail/chat notifications when people say "@google_user".

Overnight Twitter will be second-place in tweet volume.

Radical proposal / The quieted "Quadra"

2009-03-05T00:39:00.000-08:00

Apple should use a tiny fraction of its cash to buy Palm. For just under $800m (of a reported $35b), Palm is extremely cheap. What to do after a purchase is also a quandary.

Acquiring Palm makes sense for a number of reasons. Patents are great to have, and Palm is one of the earliest movers in the handheld computer industry. Lawsuits are already flying over the Pre's iPhone-alike gestures after all, surely Palm's intellectual property hoard is being undervalued. Not relevant to handheld IP, but remember that Palm bought Be Inc. a while back too, representing another relevant pile of research and patents. On a potentially sappy note, reuniting Apple with Jon Rubenstein, who managed to get shambling, desiccated Palm to produce the Treo Pro and Pre, would be a positive, if he is amenable to a return. Finally, taking over Palm eliminates any possibility of the wily competitor producing a really unpleasant surprise.

Apple could go a few different ways with Palm post-acquisition.

They could invest in Palm but leave it separate, producing phones for non-AT&T networks. (Is that eventuality is covered in the exclusivity agreement?) This is obviously unlikely. In some ways a sustaining infusion of cash, and perhaps software (OS X iPhone "licensing" allows for platform diversification without hurting the brand or lessening platform control) mirrors Microsoft's earlier move when Jobs returned, though on a grander scale.

Apple could shut Palm down, unwind its operations, and absorb the best parts of its personnel and technology.

Apple could allow Palm to operate independently for the most part, like FileMaker, and when it went bankrupt as it is on track to do, unwind it in court.

---

(Jobs is still angry about being under 3Ghz all these years and paradigm shifts later.)

The quieted Quadra

All new Mac desktops

revamped in secret, revealed

in silence by release

The days of Quadras

or the fx blowing the

doors off are long gone.

Where is my midrange

quad-core desktop? You know which...

fit under the screen

Who is Ralph de la Vega?

2009-02-22T02:24:00.000-08:00

And why does he want to destroy his own company's competitive advantage? (See pullquote in red on left.)

What is Apple?

2009-02-18T00:03:00.000-08:00

Some facts:

Last quarter:

Apple Retail same-store sales were down 17% year-over-year, with foot traffic overall down 1.8%

Apple sold 71% of Macs as laptops, the highest ratio ever.

Mac sales were the second-highest ever, and only barely not tops. The Mac traditionally isn't strongest in this quarter, so it is a definite net positive.

In general:

Apple controls the world's largest music store, bigger than Wal-Mart, and can ensure the digital music market operates as-needed by the iPod. It is top-three in the mutating "video market", though that is harder to quantify. The DVD sales/rental market is huge, but Apple has purchasable and rentable movies and TV for television, computer or mobile consumption selling in significant quantity. The Apple [on] TV is a "hobby", but also a statement of interest, alongside Mac and iPod/iPhone media distribution.

Apple has a larger Leopard Mac installed base than any console manufacturer, outside of perhaps the Nintendo DS. Apple's consumer home installed base is smaller than the total Leopard number, but surely rivals any console manufacturer. Apple's Mac "consoles" are far higher-margin, and are likely to be internet-connected, buying, creating, and running media and applications.

Much as iPhone application and internet use dwarfs other smartphones, making each iPhone a more valuable target for developers, Mac connectivity, power, and interoperability gives Apple home productivity and entertainment footholds as yet undetected by competitors. The PlayStation 3 is a comical island, the XBox 360 the proprietary G5 Apple used to ship running a tragicomic OS, and the Wii a clever use of limited resources meeting genuine success, but not a competitor to a netbook, let alone a Mac, as a personal computer.

Apple has the largest "Application store", again a huge platform for developers, and all other smartphone platforms are rushing to catch up. Apple's advantage here may be more reminiscent of Microsoft's early moves in the personal computing industry to own the platform with the broadest hardware and software compatibility. Market forces crushed anyone else, including the Apple of the era. Owning that layer, here the function of OS X iPhone combined with the App Store, may mean no other platform gains developer momentum. Hardware, like a keyboard or a given niche feature, will differentiate marginal competitors, but the main personal mobile device and platform could become Apple's.

So Apple is what sort of company? They own and operate methods of distributing paid and free content to every consumer entertainment venue besides movie theaters. They are therefore like a multinational radio station, music store, television channel, and 2nd run movie studio, agnostic about (and uninvested in creating) what it is playing. Apple is also a high technology company building electronics and operating systems that serve as the venues for consumer consumption of distributed digital content. (When the content includes signed code, like the App Store, Apple plays the same roles but constrains the types of content to protect its control.)

So Apple is a multinational media conglomerate without a creative or production department, a major mobile consumer electronics and telecommunications player, and the owner of the world's most sophisticated, best selling, industry-defining "convergence platform."

The Mac playing iTunes from the Music Store is performing a computation and presentation of digital media, in this case for entertainment, for one or many, but that same Mac allowing for the creation of a Pages document is doing the same fundamental operation. The iPhone Apps are games, notepads, or even a musical instrument. The iPhone "Contents" are videos and music licensed from someone. Play the Ocarina or an Ocarina.mp3 out of the speakers and the rigid conceptual barrier between "living room" and "office" on the Mac dissolves into "iPhone."

Apple Store Decor: Revelator and Reifier of Unarticulated Corporate Strategy

2009-02-12T22:55:00.000-08:00

The Apple Store is about to get a major redesign. Already, iPhone and iPod Touch sales real estate has shifted. The takeaway is that the emphasis has become software. This on the heels of reported Apple Store anti-loitering efforts.

The net effect of the conjecture about pushing higher throughput, and the merchandise redesign, point to Apple's next annus mirabilis.

The iPod was a music player that became an ecosystem. Hardware was what could be sold around Apple's brilliant, focused design. The dock connector, and Pixo's OS, gave peripheral makers a broad canvas to work from, and sales volume took care of the rest. The limitations of the software meant iPod Games were a hobby.

The iPhone began life as smartphone but will become a platform. Hardware ecosystem compatibility largely intact, as it shares (all but the FireWire charging pin of) the iPod line, it is software that will drive the iPhone (and iPod Touch) to palm-space dominance. Become the Windows, the lingua franca, of the new personal computing device space, and hardware becomes less deterministic of purchase choice.

People fell for the Mac-only iPod 1.0 because Mac users had few options, and are self-nominating aesthetes of personal technology. FireWire, compact design, and a cutting-edge hard disk gave that market what it wanted. Once the 3G iPod with Dock Connector arrived for all computing platforms, Apple was picked as a dying breed, the "vertical integrator" in an infant market about to be stampeded by a rush of horizontal device makers coalescing around a platform. As with the Macintosh and the WinTel PC, hardware would necessarily emerge that met any and every market demand, and do so most efficiently.

But music players are not PCs. They are very simple devices, and early volume sales drove Apple into the catbird seat when purchasing components. Apple also had hardware design prowess among the best (Sony?) in the category. The market demands everyone was trying to meet were better matched by the iPod maker at lower cost. A software platform cannot dissolve the hold of a vertical integrator in even commodity technology segments without price or feature superiority.

(Aside: The content of the personal music/media player industry simultaneously collapsed in price and mushroomed in availability, guaranteeing that all platforms, inferior or superior, could not leverage themselves with exclusive "walled garden" material. The role of the iTunes Music Store in cementing iPod dominance is overstated. While a non-iPod-compatible dominant form of content in tandem with the end of "piracy" could drive Apple out, the iTMS did not keep Apple dominant.)

The iPhone is Apple's combination of the Mac, WinTel and iPod strategies. Apple offered the iPhone 1.0 as a "new paradigm" cellular/smartphone. iPhone OS X was a leap beyond Symbian and other "environments" as large as the Mac was from DOS. The hardware was also a generational advance, featuring few buttons, minimal branding, and matte tones where the opposite had been the norm. Like the early iPod, the Lisa, the Mac 128k, and many other Apple first stabs, the iPhone sold moderately, and was a useful educational experience for Apple.

The iPhone 3G/OS 2.0 marked a strategy shift. To expand the iPhone beyond the Mac-alike initial market of Apple and smartphone early-adopters, Apple repeated the maneuvers of the once-triumphant PC cloners, as well as its own past work with the iPod.

To match the inevitable cloners, Apple dropped iPhone pricing to commodity levels by sharing components with the iPod line, and negotiating a carrier subsidy from AT&T. "Smartphone" segment profit margins thus came under pressure, where they had been relatively fat before. High-end vertical phone/software integrations like the Treo and BlackBerry no longer merited high-end prices. Cloning an iPhone would not yield a lower price, if it were possible. Horizontal integrators, with hardware designed to run Microsoft or "Symbian" software, also faced price pressure, and the difficulty of matching the polish of an integrated solution from any of the vertical players.

The iPhone market position at this juncture is "the best smartphone in the largest selling price category for such phones, with the most capable and varied software." The redesign of Apple's retail stores represent a move to shift the iPhone/iPod Touch from a best in class device into a definitional consumer electronics reference platform, something far more valuable. This is the Wintel portion of Apple's hybrid strategy.

The Apple Stores mean first-party product offerings can be sold at retail in lockstep with corporate strategy, surrounded by unilaterally controlled third party offerings. Contrast this with a typical retail/manufacturer arrangement, in which one works to produce its best attempt at what will sell, and the other tries to create a venue that sells most efficiently.

The first iteration pushed Apple's hardware/software integration panache, with iMovie or Final Cut on kitted-out demo Pro machines, or colorful iHardware for kids and adults alike to experience in the flesh. Unremarked, but an obvious goal was to offer a haven for the "round pegs in the square holes." Long-time Mac users otherwise unable to browse software and hardware peripherals (i.e. POS material pushing 5 PDAs, 5 digital cameras, shelves of software and books, etc.) with any consistency in a Windows-dominated consumer electronics world had their new home. These customers happened to be wealthier than average, most in professions, where an expensive computer, either emphasizing digital media or print document workflow, was advantageous.

Apple even streamed Jobs' keynotes into "theaters" at the back of many stores. Cambridgeside Apple Store did not advertise, but provided seating for thirty or so people each time I went. I arrived an hour early and had a chair, but the store was eventually standing-room only and packed with cheering Mac zealots. (These broadcasts were predated by the satellite downlinks and pizza parties offered with even less promotion by Apple corporate offices.) The move of the event from an obscure corporate setting to mall retail mirrors Apple's corporate strategic shift in that time.

Store 2.0 heralded the addition of the iPod as a major product category. The "rollout night" for the 4-button 3G iPod, featuring then-unusual entryway placard announcements, is a useful milestone. The shift of Apple Retail from Mac torchbearer to consumer electronics platform showroom was partway finished.

Post-1.0 stores have iMacs, PowerBooks, and iBooks running on capacious tables. Each is a vertical solution to the question of how best to accommodate consumer usage of computers. The past division of retail by machine function (music, movies, games) was almost entirely replaced.

OS X, now the default operating system on all Macs, was sold unobtrusively. Marketing highlighted "UNIX foundations", with plenty of plumbing for complex functions, regular updates, and good security, all made "lickable" and easy to use by Apple's inherent design savvy.

Depending on the user's needs, the PowerBook, iMac, or iBook might be appropriate, but all were Macs. The PowerMac became a halo product of sorts, demonstrating the high-end media software and peripherals a Mac could theoretically handle, but in a fairly small section. Costly, then unusual and impressive 23in, then 30in, then two of the latter flat panels, sold in tiny numbers, cemented PowerMac cachet and Mac functional credibility.

Hardware and design differentiated Apple products in all classes of product, but none more so than the iMac, MacBook and MBPro, and iPod, and those products dominated the floor.

Mac computer accessories and software, already made easier to shop for by a burgeoning internet, were minimized to allow the iPod ecosystem habitat in its optimal environment. The iPod was positioned as a music player with a minimalist feature set. Color, photo browsing, contacts, on-the-go playlists, and other requested features were added, but Apple carefully kept Mac functions (i.e. word processing, even of a short note) out. Notably, even the music sold by Apple required computer-based iTunes software as an intermediary between content and iPod.

Accessories like boomboxes, Mac input devices, printers and scanners, software, and laptop cases were all given less prominent space than primary Mac or iPod hardware, and iTunes promotional material. Thus, Apple Store 2.0 made the Mac and iPod a platform for digital media sales and the personal application of consumer-patterned computing features. The iPhone, introduced midway into the era of Store 2.0, was positioned as a media consumption device tied to the Mac for such operations, like an iPod, but also a participant in the most common communications functions, like email, web browsing, telephony, and SMS messaging.

The rumored Apple Store 3 is Apple's move to make the iPod/Mac divide inconsequential, replaced by a focus on OS X (as application vector) as the Apple differentiator. The iPhone tables that focus on applications are meant to do what the 2.0 "Mac table" did. Push technical details and rigid usage to the background, and present the product as a platform supporting user whims and desires. The iPod Touch and Mac will be presented as a unified environment divided by form factor. Where iPod hardware was a category-defending ecosystem, software will be the flora and fauna that lures new phone and palm-space hardware buyers as well as converts to the Mac. Apple wants "OS X users" computing on all its form factors so as to cement OS X as the de facto standard, the Windows, of today. The network is not the computer, as Sun wished, but rather the "back office" server and managed computers. The userland operating system "is the computer" for most, and Apple's stores are moving to reflect the strategic aim of seamless OS X across end user devices.

My life in the bush of ghosts

2009-02-11T03:16:00.000-08:00

Discordant, unpredictable, arrhythmic. The market is all of these and more. Fits of lunacy, groupthink, input from reality-divorced quantitative analyses, the whims of the rich and powerful, the competing interests of hundreds of banks and institutions, thousands of brokers, and thousands upon thousands of retail bankers, stock analysts, and automatic trading, all add up to the morass known as the public stock market.

A banker friend of mine explained that stock markets occupy perhaps 1% of global capital, and the rest is bonds and other market vehicles. The Dow average, not alone among popular indicies but easy to cite here, is the product of thirty companies, each buffeted by millions of forces every day. Some events are cut and dried. Say a meteor hits Wal-Mart headquarters and eliminates the entire executive suite, among hundreds of others of managers. The reaction is simple: sell. This hypothetical is pure bad news for the top-down retailer, given that it just lost the entire top of the company. Wal-Mart plunges accordingly, say, and its market cap dives proportionally.

Rarely, of course, is bad news so obvious or so one-sided. Perhaps Wal-Mart loses a dispute with Colgate, and is forced to split its shelves between Crest and the upstart, instead of retaining monopsonic control over the toothpaste market. Such a development is not so obviously deleterious, and some could argue that abandoning the monopsony-as-price-cudgel strategy might even lead to greater sales. More toothpaste choice, albeit at worse margins, could go against forecasts and lead to a spike in high-end paste choices among otherwise low-margin, once Crest-loyal customers who now enjoy a greater selection at reasonably similar prices. Wal-Mart shares might go down a bit as some sell, seeing the slipping control of sales layout as a profit-destroying anti-Wal-Mart nightmare. When profit numbers come in and toothpaste is a bright spot, the stock might adjust accordingly. Indeed, shares may go up seemingly against type, ahead of earnings, as savvier investors see the silver lining of variety where the pro-Crest faction saw only less control over Crest prices.

But what to think of the current public stock market. That 1% of capital sloshing around seemingly without reason.

Apple computer is massively undervalued by any measure besides the "stockpile your food and guns, the US is going primitive" extreme. Apple trades at a forward P/E closer to commodity producers, and is growing faster than any startup by revenue or year-over-year (besides Google), including a laundry list of tiny companies dwarfed by Apple. Apple is "growing like a startup" with revenue like a major industrial player. While luxury goods are going to drop in sales in a recession, small business, education, and a number of other Apple markets are primed to grow. Add in a mature, 20m+ iPod/quarter sellthrough to guarantee low prices on bulk memory deals, and the iPhone 3G, and the stock seems positively staid. Never mind the rumors of $99 iPhones and an iPod-alike iPhone line that hits every reasonable price point.

I may look stupid in three months, or even one month, but I am iterating/reiterating a strong buy on Apple. 100 is not high from 80, it's low from $225, my price target.

Regarding the Kindle and "Did Apple Blow It?"

2009-02-10T15:44:00.000-08:00

No. Apple, and even in some headlines, "Steve Jobs", did not "blow it" by failing to enter the hardware eBook space.

The sales fire stoked by the Kindle is a small controlled burn by consumer electronics standards. Sales of 500,000 are excellent, but not for an Apple device. Even 500,000 sales in one weekend would be "disappointing" for "analysts", so Apple probably didn't want to get stung by what would be spun as witheringly weak sales reports no matter how much eBook share they grabbed. Why couldn't Apple sell 1m eBook readers if they did a great job? Sure, they could, eventually. The industry now is too young, younger than the pre-iPod MP3 player market, for sure, and definitely younger than the pre-iPhone smartphone market, to deliver those numbers.

Also, the Kindle comes with 3G service included. Apple's entangling alliances in that field are well known, but I will say it anyway: an Apple eBook content network driven over Sprint's network would not play well with AT&T, on whom Apple relies for its, er, "other" 3G project. Why not bundle 3G with the iPhone or iPod Touch, or even our mythical reader? Even if such a move were obviously rational, Apple hasn't shown any desire to go in that direction, preferring the subsidy/carrier model. They don't seem to want to switch. An iPod Touch or MacBook Air with 3G is the most radical I can see Apple getting. Certainly, a new paradigm of connectivity ("it's included!") is not best rolled out as part of a new paradigm of product, at least, for Apple. Amazon seems OK with offering a doubly unusual package, and seeing how it sells.

The Kindle also does one thing really well - process and display free and not-free text. It does a good job negotiating DRM issues with the latter, via Amazon.com. What the Kindle isn't is a software platform. It doesn't run an OS with anything like the chops of OS X. Who knows what is hacked up to operate it, but it isn't able to go beyond "what it takes to make the Amazon Kindle tick", end of story. Apple has far greater aspirations for its hardware and software. The "Classics" app, which comes with public domain books and allows for dressy reading on the iPhone, encompasses the Kindle's mission and then some, and the device also makes phone calls, plays music, and offers a few hundred thousand other applications or features. Apple's target market is that which is encompassed by a palm-sized OS X machine constrained to signed applications and a branded network. The putative Apple Kindle-sized device with physical keyboard, and iPod shuffle-sized "page" buttons, takes a once-elegant, pocketable iPod/iPhone device, and makes it far less interesting to most of the market. Yes, a small segment of the market may buy the Apple device instead of a Kindle to accompany their smartphone, but Apple's current offering captures most of those customers, and does not sacrifice dozens of other markets.

So, to all of those who wish Apple was out front in eBooks, please turn to the Nomad Jukebox for a good representation of the last pre-iPod stab at mobile music, and then envision the best Kindle 3 you can. Both were or are, respectively, cannon fodder for the palm platform of universals, not vertical niches, that Apple is building. Will we someday see an iPhone with a bigger screen and a narrower market target? Sure. It certainly won't be sold as an eBook reader first, and everything else later, no matter how many Kindles Amazon sells.

Does Apple spend too much on ads?

2009-02-04T13:40:00.001-08:00

That is the question posed, and affirmed, here. The reasoning is that Vista "dug its own grave", and Apple is piling on advertising OS X on Macs, and doing so for the sake of ego.

Does anyone remember when Windows ME "dug its own grave"...to crushing dominance, or Windows 3.1 turning people away from the more-advanced Mac OS because "it's what everyone is buying"? There were other reasons for the Mac's slide, but Apple's ads then were not effective in the least. Bewildering Performa variants and a muddled message, and the mainstream consumer forgot the product. PCs were it. The I'm a PC ads, the Seinfeld ads, even the Zune, is convincing when fatted with a marketing department as rich as Microsoft's. A deafening silence in response would be cataclysmic, on the iPod/iPhone front a seeming retreat, and for the Mac a sign of "another luxury good losing momentum", not the platform resurgent it is now.

Jobs wanted 10% of the market when he returned to Apple, and he said so explicitly in the Think Different era ("if we can convince 5 more people out of a hundred", when Mac share was less 5% than 2%.) Apple is there by certain measures, sure, but Jobs wanted to use the perquisites of 10% share, not achieve it and slide back.

Still Misunderstanding Apple

2009-02-03T23:59:00.000-08:00

A recent hosanna slung Apple's way by the NY Times demonstrates how badly most understand Apple's current relevance.

Apple is a leader and innovator in its various markets, but not because, as the Times says in its final paragraph, "Apple is...willing to draw colorful juxtapositions with its rivals." It got to where it is by being, by living, its strategy devoutly. The Mac was a colorful juxtaposition to the IBM PC when it was released, and though the dominant company has changed, it remains exactly what it was when released. It is an operating environment unique to its hardware with an emphasis on graphics running only on proprietary hardware in an especially thoughtful and elegant physical enclosure. (Please spare me the Hackintosh, it is irrelevant at the very least to Apple's marketing.)

The iPod is not a colorful juxtaposition, and it has never been sold as such. The iPhone is a unique offering, and really a "hardware and software" proposition like the Mac, but it is portrayed as the first incarnation of what will be the dominant offering, like the iPod in the beginning. The Mac, though, was always an "alternative", though I suspect Apple hemmed the message in at first to spare the Apple II, and then stuck with it when the Mac was not "the iPod" of personal computers. Apple has assumed a brash, anti-establishment image with people older than the iPod because it primarily sold the Mac in a period of corporate and market decline, but it is wrong to assume that it wants or still adopts that mantle.

Already?

2009-02-03T20:42:00.000-08:00

The Mac is more pleasurable to surf with than Linux, as verified by the computer literate community. All of the surveyed must be real computer nerds to run the boxes they do, and the boxes are all generalized PC hardware configurations. Win2k still beating Linux is one thing, but a newer, closed, actively hostile OS? A consumer condemnation, even in the face of the "netbook phenomenon." I use quotes because the disposable, under-capable computer is no place to look for the future, let alone phenomena.

Newspaper wholly inefficient

2009-02-01T02:48:00.001-08:00

Neat.

Ditch the Product Reform of Jobs II - Think Sim City for Jobs III

2009-01-31T16:15:00.000-08:00

I think iMacs are going to get evolved up to spec for another six months. Upon Jobs' return, he will bring with him a one hundred twenty foot scroll detailing all necessary hardware changes for four years going forward.

The product scheme started in 1997 (and continued to this day), is ill-fitting. The famous de-Performafying of Apple, into a seller of a four-part grid of products, no longer works. The idea of computer market segments (desktops and laptops) addressed with call-and-response models (MacBook and iMac, [Air and Mini], 17in and Mac Pro) and consumer products called i-something, with some networking gear and random peripherals, is outmoded.

Think like Maxis for the restoration of Jobs. A new split: industrial, commercial and residential.

The remaining iProducts are all Residential. This includes iWork, iLife, iMovie, i-everything, and the MacBook. The Airport Express and Time Capsule, too. And Bento for fun.

The commercial products. The MacBook Pro/Air, Mac Pro, the 24in LED and 30in display, and the Airport Extreme. Final Cut Studio, FileMaker, iWork Pro [think of a Mac Write Pro Pages that drops the pretense of competing with InDesign, but really takes on Word.]

The industrial products are Xanything and server-anything. XServe, XSAN, etc. Final Cut Server, etc.

A focus on these three going forward yields livingroom iMac 42s that look like TVs with dock connectors, a fusion of i-hub stuff that keeps all the media and files in a home cloud, and makes the iMac the ONLY Mac. It is Mac, and it is the center of the hub, and it is Residential.

The Mac Pro can split into a many-model range that can take 100% of the over-1200 market, and has the virtualization and management hooks (in hardware and software) that let Apple into the business market, without getting confusing, or even making people think of them as "Macs." Mac Pros are OS X Workstations, with different performance emphasised, and cost profiles that need not step around any residential-model price/performance comparisons, because the other hardware differences (6 USB ports? quad cores? redundant power supply?) set them apart prima facie.

Industrial products are kept current to assist the commercial market drive. I have little to say, though I know the Mac Mini is used like an Apple blade these days, 4 up in 1U. The demand for a real industrial push is there. Even Cisco is doing it.

On the Meaning of Application and "App"

2009-01-31T14:43:00.000-08:00

In judging the latest crop of laptops from Apple, specifically the 17in/8 hour MacBook Pro, there are mostly the same complaints and compliments. The design is great, a considered evolution of aesthetic and revolution of structure. There aren't BluRay drives, and the batteries are only removable from some of the models. Glossy screens are irritating to some, as they always have been, and will be, for eternity. The GPU is nice, could be better, or is more than adequate, pick your poison, and all are waiting for 10.6 to see how dual cores and dual GPUs can be made to work. End review.

Consider the iPhone. It runs OS X. Many have called it an Apple laptop for your hand. The App Store has given it something new, "signed software multi-functionality", but not "applications", at least not as the Mac (and wider) computing community has come to define the term. Bound up in "applications" when in context with "OS X" or "Apple", are implied functions that are simply not there in our App Store iPhone.

"Applications" include versatile options for user transport of the result of running this code and performing, or applying, its function. Consider not Palm Desktop or some complex app that has conduits and pipelines for all sorts of proprietary data from other applications. Rather, look at the "output" of iTunes. A session with iTunes alone increments play counts, destroys and creates anew lists it keeps of user play order desire, moves files around main storage, interacts and alters hardware both peripheral and integral to it per user wishes implicit and explicit.

Some clarifications. "As per user wishes" or more simply "a session with", are both phrases with implied meaning. The user may want to purchase a song and put it on an iPod. They don't have to explicitly do the store hosting, song encoding, or iTunes to computer-speaker work. They don't do the nuts and bolts of the HD to iPod move beyond a GUI dragging action. User wishes are something user sessions try to accomplish, with varying accuracy. Examples of inaccuracy with output abound; an MP3 CD burned in iTunes that does not work in the old boom box run off the car power in the tour van.

"Application" as the term of art exegesized here has other latent implications. A program which instantiates a computing function in the set of functions superfluous to the operating system, such that it runs alongside the operating system. The advent of multitasking, or even time-sharing cooperative-tasking, meant "application" implied operating as one among many in userspace. Whether the computer juggled things to make applications seem to be working all at once, or they "actually were" as today on multi-core systems, is irrelevant. Expectations of, and popular use of, "application" as term has come to mean be there and useful, but not to the exclusion of other computing.

So, the App Store vends not a single "application", only lots of "App" code that can be used on the iPhone under OS X. Some Apple bundled App work approaches conforming to the meaning of "application", but only through "push notifications." Even the wildest-eyed anticipator of the Push Notifications SDK release does not hope for something that yields applications.

User output after a session with an App is universally trivial. An On the Go playlist yields just that, and visible only on the iPhone, or in one row as an entry on Desktop iTunes. User output with an App like Notes is determined before the user pens a single word, save for the user's creativity.

Apps are not applications. The absence of Copy and Paste, filesystem access, dialog boxes, user access to user session output outside of the session originating program, the dearest aspects of our applications, are not part of the App as we have received it from Apple.

A Mac OS X-model for true iPhone applications would mean an ecosystem explosion, like the iPod had, not diktats reporting high App Store acceptance. iPhone external monitors? iPhone external keyboards? iPhone apps that take the output of all the chat protocols (Facebook to AIM) and agglomerate as formatted Note? I have to restrain myself lest I get too excited.

I only do work to break out App from application here.

Via DJ

2009-01-31T12:02:00.000-08:00

I don't know what hand-wringing is.

I think he can read the WSJ for h-w, or crap, about him now, too.

Thinking positive thoughts

2009-01-29T10:02:00.000-08:00

This heartwarming link was brought to my attention by Daring Fireball. The era of Apple and the wild concept was an exciting one. The infamous Knowledge Navigator. Leather-wrapped Nautilus PowerBook and Newton concepts. Impossible dreams but "startlingly" prescient in the mode of a science fiction author happening upon the idea of a communications satellite. The literal currency exchanger, from greenback to pound or yen, I forget, is a seminal moment in demo history.

This was also the era of the Advanced Technology Group, smalltalk Squeak, which persisted until just now, being murdered, I mean cut, from the OLPC 2. Squeak is a totem of Apple (and Disney, only-now oddly linked entities) creativity and vitality.

Steve Jobs is vital for infinite reasons. We should send him only the best wishes. However, it was Jobs who taught the industry to dare not once, with the consumer oriented Apple II, but twice with the Mac, putting the "dent in the world", and left Apple, mismanaged but at its root brilliant. Pink, Taligent, PowerTalk, Copland, all the failed work was not for nothing, and the people numbering thousands at Apple still kept the original fervor alive.

Jobs returned to shake the dormant Apple from its laconic slumber, has pushed it to heroic heights, and has possibly now taught it to always push, and execute. He won't be replaced (I think he'll be back), but the lessons of his return are as valuable as any known succession plan.

I should note Squeak is still available at squeak.org for those inclined to see the future of tomorrow from yesterday, today.

Braeburned

2009-01-29T03:26:00.001-08:00

I, uneducated and maybe wrong here, see a dark spot in Apple's reports of late. Their hush-hush hived-off money arm, Braeburn Capital, was for years the vehicle for investing Apple's ever-rising cash position. Their guesses must have been as bad as everyone else's in 2008, because here it is clear that over $8bn was lost in the year, and $8.6bn in the last quarter. This compares with a 2bn gain in 2007.

I am not panicking, but, it does go to show that "hidden" deferred iPhone revenue isn't the only money, good or bad, sloshing around the nether regions of Apple Inc. filings. Did Apple have exposure to bad banks? Bad homebuilders? Chinese or clean-energy ETFs? Madoff? What led to a 10 million dollar a day evaporation?

Don't forget the point of all this

2009-01-29T02:11:00.000-08:00

What is lost and drowned out by the daily thrashing, over technology in finance, ranging wide and shallow on energy, pumping fears of you-name-it imminent, say, Apple-ocalypse, to rumorology about the latest incoming, storm-churning gadgets, but everything?

Entertainment is video and audio on a screen. It has been since the dawn of radio, television, cable, and computers, and people still want more choice in more ways.

The desire for interpersonal communication, from telegraph to twitter, for business, pleasure, or custom, is accepted and exploited any way it can be.

In both cases, mass acceptance of a methodology dictates methodological victory. Near-consensus by the consumer generates dominant uptake rates, and forges standards from the trial balloons of all associated companies. The cognoscenti are all too quick to forget the buzzing confusion of competing techniques once a pick is made.

Let us never lose sight of the point. Epic clashes over cloud apps, home disc standards, web browser markets share, operating system uptake, and more are simple news. The point is to deliver that which people have been proven to crave for a century, more options for entertainment and the least resistant method available to access them, and a similar formulation for interpersonal communication.

(As an aside, communication technologies are preserved past their point of optimal uptake and market leadership as custom accumulates around them. Note the thank you card, or even home phone. The VHS tape was defeated by DVD, the iPod did the same to the Discman. We shall never be rid of voicemail. )

Recession or controversy or market shift or not, it is those companies which satisfy communicative, entertainment/information consumption needs that will prosper. Few companies can do this today. No one buyer cares about the technology, they want more of the same as before, better and easier.

Apple, Microsoft, and Sony are the only communication/home media platform providers. Microsoft stretches higher into corporate and HPC realms, but on the consumer side all three provide personal computers, broad and muscular vectors for entertainment, and portability.

Sony had a chance to own the space, but its PS3 is not providing the uptake necessary to begin setting standards. BluRay is evolutionary and consumers are phasing in acceptance, not hammering on doors. Sony PS3 Online, in Home and Store iterations, does nothing for integration of media and communication between console, computer, and mobile product. Indeed, neither are preferable methods for delivery of communication or media, and will be adopted by fiat in isolated cases. Sony's cloud holds only the little data its users wish to awkwardly thumb into their PS3 via controller. Conversation is virtually impossible.

Microsoft too has an axis, one that covers communication and information/entertainment from the network news desk to the palm of one's hand. Indeed, the company has too many axes. Windows Mobiles are not Zunes, and they don't talk to each other, but both extend Windows into the subway. The WinMo phones allow for communication, and talk with adequate personal business computers, while XBoxes and media centers speak other tongues. The cloud Sony can't begin to conjure offers an opportunity for an Esperanto-alike synthesis of disparate languages. Proper integration would mean Surface touch tables collaborating with a user's Outlook data because of the HTC they carry.

Microsoft will someday shoehorn a .PSD onto a Zune that can also talk to Dell Inspiron Mini 10s in the necessary language, that of human names, faces, and conduits for communication. The point is not to make Windows Mobile read Zune album art. No, it is to provide the user with their desired media, and the very best interoperation triggers come hell or high water, rather than relying on dozens of fragile Rube Goldberg interactions as it does today.

HP, Dell, et. al. are working to sculpt these discombobulated jousts as best they can, but their lack of core competencies binds them to Microsoft's best effort. Cisco, Sun, and others face a similar dilemma, even if their hardware and virtual metal is top notch. In the end, the point is never met esoterica like Thumper, Niagara, Solaris, and IOS. These are ocean fiber cables, not what hits the street in the "last mile."

The scenario that facilitates communication and media consumption most effectively, where the iPod, iMac, MacBook, and attendant cloud cohere to most closely meet our aged desires, is found with Apple. The desire to relate, view, play, and consume, the point, is met by the iPhone, Mac, iPod, and associated software. What Apple lacks is credibility in the minds of its consumers. Original or early Mac users had the future of capitalist interaction in their homes, desktop publishing, HTML authoring, the GUI itself!, almost a decade before Windows made the benefits of computing spread among "the rest of us" stick. Apple is an untrustworthy owner of the zeitgeist, for its past mismanagement, and its current uncertain leadership.

Aside:

Google lacks a platform despite its best work to use web services and lightweight software to seep into the transit network. The Search Appliance was not a lark, it should have been seen as the point. I wonder if ad and media companies, even ones as super-cool-yeah! as Google, can play in the platform game. The game to own the devices and services that people touch, use, and want is more Sony's, by dint of the PSP, than Google's via the G1. Sony beating Google in a race to own a tiny niche...not a positive sign.

Who has the strength to weather the recession? Who delivers on the promises of the mythical digital hub (really, the dream of Leave it to Beaver in the family station wagon reincarnated) most aptly? Apple by leagues, now.

Learning from Las Vegas

2009-01-28T19:33:00.000-08:00

Whatever people say about the economy, our country is frothy enough to make the check-in line at Ceasars on a Sunday a twenty minute affair.

Certain things are cut back, like the hours of the Diamond Club, and games dip into the $10 prices, but people are still there. Vegas in the winter was shoulder to shoulder urban on the strip, unlike any part of Columbus, Ohio, say, downtown.

10¢ apples aren't for sale anywhere that's for sure. There's an Apple Store in Caesar's Forum Shops though. It was actually the least trafficked store I have witnessed. In a sea of completely hedonist luxury gifts and games, buying a computer to do work, even among other things, doesn't make sense.

That said, it was abuzz with e-mail-checkers, and iPod Touch/iPhone toddlers, flubbing out some perfunctory text in an early stumble around the eventually-ingenious keyboard. (I can touch type on my iPhone now, a dubious achievement.)

Vegas is truly a cataclysmic nightmare outgrowth of culture in its loosest definition, but the experience of being under the mathematical gun. Dodging fate alone hitting on 16, but tabled and roomed and fed together, sharing a common goal with easily stoked fervor. Elevators, slots, tables, triple-split hands that all hit 18 when a dealer hits 19, all performative acts of the set of the "tourist."

And nothing besides employee and player can be found, rendering only residents outsiders, outnumbered, bored with the neon cancer bauble called the Strip. Imagine New York with every tourist attraction, from Tad's Steakhouse to the Empire State Building, the Bronx Zoo with all of museum mile and a short walk to the NY Aquarium, stretched along the shuttle to Grand Central. Then make planes land on 86th st. instead of at the rims of outer boroughs. Finally, ensure those who visit New York are unaware of anything beyond this impossibly unwalkable, train-laced district. Nothing would be, besides New Yorkers and adequate civil services, so go for it.

Poker tourneys are hard. Blackjack is not as hard. I had my mind blown when someone tipped a dealer a $1000 chip.

Short Garmin and Tom Tom

2009-01-28T17:35:00.000-08:00

Cell phone GPS with real voice synthesis and electric car integration opportunities, along with OS improvement on the smartphone front, mean no more silly GPS boxes and mounts. Remember "car phones" and curly pig-tail antennae?

Lost in Cairo

2009-01-22T07:43:00.000-08:00

Vista was bad, and XP is the walking dead, so there's been nothing to give Leopard a run for its money. Until now. A beta of Windows 7 has the fervent Microsoft media crew ecstatic. I find that Gizmodo is usually a half sane outlet. It is no bastion of journalistic ethics, but the stories it carries are either self-aware fanboy excess, or composed with some reality coming into the picture.

Well, forget that, because Giz, and countless others, are ready to start slinging the hosannas around. The media has reached the conclusion that Windows 7 has a better "dock" than OS X. Remember that Windows 7 isn't shipping, and Microsoft has never shipped on time. Then, include Apple's upcoming OS release, and the comparison is truly moot. No beta of Snow Leopard has been made to strut around as Windows 7 has, because Apple doesn't work that way.

I am going to respectfully decline all Windows 7 related articles until Microsoft has GC1 shipped for duplication. OS X and Windows comparisons are always subjective, but Windows 7 is not even a fixed target.

2009-01-21T20:55:00.001-08:00

With: Apple TV Commentary as my leaping-off point, I am delighted to be able to consider the Apple TV with some fresh sales data for once (3x growth year over year!)

Apple's "hobby" is a mutt of a product, with a bit of Mac Mini, though carefully shortened and made monolithic (drive-slot-less) as an 802.11n AirPort Base Station or Time Capsule looks. Thus Apple TV straddles the gap between Apple's Macintosh products, and Apple's "Appliance" products. Or, it did so when it was new, and the OS X on other-Intel move was a game-changer. Now, the product has languished, and the relic of a bygone creative impulse is Apple's barely adequate iTunes-injecting TV hangaround.

Apple TV prices have not changed as the hardware has aged. The tech specs on Apple TV are very unkind, as it has not been updated since release. It began life as a compromise of sorts, with a bowdlerized Intel Pentium M. Apple TV is not the iPhone/iPod Touch platform, which has already seen a speed jump without breaking compatibility, and represented the cutting edge through 2009. No, the Apple TV is a slick home theater PC from a bygone era, at this point.

Hey, OS X on iPhone runs apps compiled for it on two iterations of the platform and preserves compatibility. (Eventually, original iPhones will strain under the newest games for technical reasons.) At some point, Apple can bifurcate the market with a "iPhone OS 3.0" that leaves the original model out, ala non-Dock connector iPod models, which is required to run the new, complex apps that are too taxing for the rev. A hardware. It seems future cross-compatible iterations of the iPhone OS X platform will coexist. The phone may always be a graphical step behind, but as the beneficiary of pro-equivalent features (like phone calling and SMS) that the Touch will never get, the trade-off is "reasonable."

So what of Apple TV? I have posited a switch from Apple TV to ATV.app for the Mac Mini/a future living room Mac, with everything Apple TV delivers in a Front Row-replacing App. Why not, right? But, Apple is a hardware company...the last project to make the leap from hardware widget to coded app was the GeoPort modem. Maybe there are others, but that came to mind, and sometimes it's nice to get back to the roots.

My point is, Apple usually doesn't lead with hardware, then try to transition to software. They love to make the whole device, and I don't see that changing. A Mac Mini with Apple TV is a Mac with a bolt-on. Apple TV is a pure expression of iTunes on TV. While downplayed, Apple would be unlikely to retreat to Front Row after doing so many "Take"s on their v1.0 living room curiosity. And it will remain that, unless Apple truly cannot build a competitive box without co-opting the price expectations the Mac Mini brand carries, and is forced to merge the lines. That seems unlikely, as $249 to $700 is a leap few would make for a hobbled Mac HTPC. The hardware diversity on the low end of the market, with the Atom, ULV Core chips, and AMD hanging around, has mushroomed. A $249 device with contemporary specs is the new purest expression of an iTunes and TV-centric hardware platform.

As a final prediction, I see Apple TV getting a lot smaller, and inheriting the best of the AirPort stations. Perhaps an antenna port, and certainly an AirTunes/VideoTunes (please?) transport. Perhaps it will gain DisplayPort, too, ensuring that, with enough adapters, it will work with any TV. I think the Atom and Intel Integrated graphics are not going to cut it, and the ATV will continue to ship with Mac-class processors. Apple's move into gaming would be reinforced by a contemporary nVidia/Apple TV, as such a platform begins to crossover into console territory.

So what happens when our posited Apple TV 2.0 lands. Time Capsule functionality (narrowly implemented to ensure your iTunes content is especially safe. I foresee entertainment Macs that backup the agglomerated media of all local computers, and sort and organize it by Apple TV standards.) and, Apple TV is finally able to provide the appliance-style performance of AirPort as well. Display Port, wireless tunes and video, and a Core 2 Duo processor with nVidia graphics that hits the high end-laptop parts bin. Then, Apple's got an iTunes appliance solution (no DVDs, BluRays or CDs; monolithic, driveless, eschewing physical media like the Air), positioned at the very crossroads of content. No keyboard, just the current remote-driven media browsing/buying, Bonjour streaming stuff, and perhaps a mode where a docked iPod Touch or iPhone can act as a game controller or interface device. (Why leave the Wii off of the hit list?)

Ah, flights of fancy. But I mean to say, Apple TV is a hobby like Dreamcast was a hobby for the Windows CE team. Microsoft was learning every step of the way on that dry run before bringing out XBox. Apple TV is a fact finding mission in the wilds of the varied species of digital hubs, each uniquely pruned and tended, a complex market.

Apple TV is a few revisions, probably a small one and then the total redo, away from a revamp that will push it into the middle of the digital media livingroom. At WWDC 2009 I see seminars on porting Touch apps to Apple TV, with the Touch acting as input device.

The Gates/Jobs vision of 2001 supposed a desktop behemoth at the core of the digital hub, providing the logic and the pixel-pushing 'umpf for a galaxy of rather less capable "digital hub" accessories, like digital cameras, DVRs, or video cameras. Indeed, the centralized computational point, the set top box of legend and lore, was sacrosanct to more than Apple and WebTV/Microsoft. No, Vudu, Boxee, and others treat the honing of the perfect hub as the transcendent goal. Meanwhile, media want users, traffic and ads, and they better be measurable. The computer industry agenda is to forge a system in the kiln of company R&D, then obliterate every other box in a battle to set standards. Television is waiting for the squabble to be over. I hope Apple joins the battle, and with a real TV Appliance Mac as described.

The Airport portion of Apple's product line has to get serious about wireless video soon.

AAPL 30,000

2009-01-21T15:25:00.000-08:00

Apple Inc. stock has taken a steep drop from a bubbly peak. This is not unlike all companies on Earth, who have seen orders fall by half overnight, or are faced with high rates and crippling, excessive demands for collateral. Intel is at $13, Microsoft at $18, and Google at $309. AMD and ATI merged, and promptly sunk to the single digits, then sub-$5, and now a dreadful 2.35.

What is different about Apple is it's business trajectory. Sales are rising, all product lines increased sales volume, and margins faced no deterioration. The quarter was the best in Apple's history. Ever, and in spite of a deferral of income due to conscription accounting that meant a billion or so dollars fit under the radar.

The classic problem with the "Mac silo", is that it is impossible to measure the market value of say, owning the home and small business database market, Windows and Mac, with FileMaker, or any other of these examples.

Think of Apple's old race to own digital video. The medium had a computational-needs profile that meshed with Motorola/sorta-IBM AltiVec acceleration, and was in the service of content creation. Desktop video sold Apple hardware just as desktop publishing sold Macs and LaserWriters. Now, it is a fillip in Apple's hat, a nice tie-in point for Pixar/Disney or whoever else uses Macs for movies, and the death of Avid's high-end editing station cash cow.

What halo does a working MobileMe cast on the Mac? Is the Google Mail/Docs/Chat/Images/Videos Cloud in action, Mac only, something that anyone cares about? It is either a seminal integration of web services and forever alters the personal computing product proposition, or perhaps no one ever cares, or, worse, it never works. iWork and iLife are difficult to evaluate competitive advantages.

Apple owns the iLife, and Adobe is pushed hard to keep its pro customers against Aperture, too. Microsoft, and Open Office all offer desktop app competence, and Google Docs are effective for lightweight use. Apple has both ends covered and is now saying the packages are part of the "Mac Box Experience" bundle. Either no one will care and Office will continue to dominate, with a slowly growing Google Docs share. The goal is to make it so cool that you get a Mac just to be able to use iWork Online and do sophisticated collaboration in an Apple-forged, Jobs-ordained, vertically integrated environment.

But many will be forced to sell panache and convenience down the river for compatibility. As long as iWork.app remains siloed, it is a Mac-only way to blow MS Word out of the water for fun and career advancement, and is a hard thing to value. A Mac-only set of consumer multimedia applications has no value to anyone besides Apple. Apple brings everything in its arsenal to bear on iL/iW09, an investment no one else could make, and one which may make the whole software line a net financial loss, even if it is a great, impossible to account for "halo."

Never mind iTunes Music Store paid-download domination, even OS X itself. Snow Leopard is going to reset the bar, and Apple has paid for it already. Now they need only wait for the revenue to flow in whenever it is ready for release. I hope we don't get a WWDC final beta, as it needs to be out and getting tested for real before Back To School and Christmas '09. If Apple releases Snow Leopard into either of those key buying seasons, there better be a quick 10.6.1 when the inevitable deal-killer problems are uncovered in the first few weeks.

So what is Apple worth? They have a nascent cell phone handset business and application platform, a mature desktop computing platform, one of only two or three, depending on how you count, in wide use, and a blockbuster music player platform. They own media delivery and creation from the upper levels of the high end all the way to MacBooks with iMovie. The iPod Touch is in gaming, as well as adding real estate for App Store developers.

All of Apple's various trajectories point up. The horrendous Christmas buying season seems to have done little damage to Apple. I think it is time to revisit valuations of $150 or $180 within a year.

Palm Pre reconsidered

2009-01-14T05:12:00.000-08:00

The Palm Pre is good enough to keep Palm users (those that are left, that is) in the fold. The Pre is evidence of intellect and creativity at Palm. Few companies are capable of creating a vertically integrated, cutting-edge smartphone. RIM does, though it relies on Exchange and Microsoft in a symbiotic relationship. Apple is capable of it. Nokia is unreliably able to produce; the e71 is great, the N-Gage terrible.

The lack of an SDK is a stick in the spokes for any application market on the Palm. Historically, Palm has been as open as Microsoft regarding apps. Run anything anytime. Maybe that will come with an update. For now, web widgets is all there is to see.

A touch keyboard is vital, too. Having to flip the phone and open the keyboard for every entry field will become deeply annoying.

Symbol PALM

2009-01-09T08:17:00.000-08:00

In an earlier note I discussed the state of Palm Inc. If they could hit it out of the park with hardware and shelve the archaic Palm OS, then they would once again be a serious rival. With Rubenstein around, Palm has not only made a hardware gem, but seem to have done a great job on the OS side, too.

Look for Palm to pick up share quickly, as Treo devotees ditch their aging hardware all at once.

On the Palm Pre

2009-01-08T22:20:00.000-08:00

The Palm Pre introduction at CES '09 today both impressed and informed my understanding of the handset industry.

Palm has put together an impressive, differentiated product.

They use the latest OMAP CPUs from TI, model number 3430. The chip is part of TIs "High Performance" segment. The OMAP CPU is really a "System on a Chip" (SoC.) It has multiple cores. The OMAP looks like this:

Apple's iPhone chip is harder to find info about, but it is best understood to be the ARM 1176JZ(F)-S. Look here for more on that. Both chips feature the ARM CPUs. The 3430 has the newest "Cortex" CPU, which is a newer iteration of the ARM11 family CPU core featured in the iPhone. The 3430 is a 600 Mhz part, though Apple and other hardware makers seem to clock the chips down in practice. Nokia also uses the OMAP SoC line, so I assume they will get a crack at the 3430 soon. Nokia outsells Palm by multiple digits after all. The OMAP is certainly competitive.

I am less able to assemble a report on the other cores. The vagaries of OpenWhatever X.X this, "streams", and the difference between OS X and Palm WebOS GPU implementations means it comes down to gut. Apple has more experience here, and has proven games shipping that are competing with the PSP graphically. I give Palm second place, but a knowledgeable reader might know and have real facts to back it up.

Palm has built WebOS to compete in the software realm, and it is impressive as well.

The aim is clearly to give users the best of all worlds. Desktop-style application architecture, broad interoperability with other OSes and relevant web services, and a slick, non-ideological interface.

Palm Cards is Spaces done right for iPhones. No spatiality, rather, something like an "all windows Expose" of multiple concurrent Finder sessions, organized in a Vista-ish stack view. (Palm doesn't moronically overlap them, though. Microsoft renders the metaphor literally and makes the second page mostly covered by the first, as it would be in a stack.) On a PD-, ahem, smartphone, the sessions are simple enough to be nearly iconic even at a small size. That is not true for desktops, and I am not suggesting this beats "desktop Spaces", but it does beat the almost Classical Mac dogma of single-tasking, pre MultiFinder (prescient name) reigning over the iPhone.

WebOS applications are akin to pre-SDK iPhone web apps, but more liberal with the hardware. Or, that was my interpretation. Palm may introduce signed apps or something like the app store and shift directions. Palm is small enough that a WinMobile-alike model with independent software houses building businesses on shipping free or paid applications makes more sense. It is also the model that Palm has used in the past. Newton, too, really. Perhaps Sprint will muscle a share of the overall application revenue stream, something AT&T would dearly like to have done. Apple gets a spiff from AT&T for signing up iPhone customers, and then Apple gets all the money for the programs shipped across the network. Surely Sprint will not allow wireless app delivery without exacting some tariff.

So the software is good, at least in demo form, and the hardware appears performance-competitive. The industrial design is solid, but relatively uninteresting, besides the cool inductive charger, and make-or-break (for some) hardware keyboard. Hopefully it is reliable. I have little doubt it will be a solid piece of hardware, at the least competent, and perhaps excellent, given Palm's culture and history.

The Palm V was sublime. It is next to the iPod Nano in my mind as most transcendent, paradigm-forming iteration of handheld technology. Palm Pilots were impressive hardware, sized for the hand, unlike the relatively-enormous Newton. The Palm V seemed an impossible feat, it surely couldn't exist given its features and size. In the hand, it was perfectly sized for use, and felt extremely solid. The design was visually appealing, with a well-executed metal finish.

[The iPod and iPod Mini were great MP3 players, the latter a logical extension of the flagship player. The Nano was a "whoa they can fit the iPod Photo into the battery of the iPod Mini" moment, and doomed hard disk MP3 players forever. The iPod was already second place in sales behind the Mini, though mostly because the iPod was still prohibitively expensive, and the Mini offered cheaper entry to the already-dominant iPod/iTunes ecosystem. The nano made the disk iPods (and especially the Rokr) seem quaint, solving the problem of carrying lots of music, sure, but not addressing how best to listen to music. From then on, the iPod was classic(al)...]

Jon Rubenstein is also on the scene, and he seems to have been given enough leeway to shape Palm up. The Treo x00s of the last few years were stagnant. The industrial design was cutesy 90s blobby pablum, and Palm screens were sunken and small. The Treo Pro demonstrated that Rubenstein could make the company move, advancing the form more in one shot than Palm had in many generations. The software, though not Rubenstein's avocation at Apple, has also made a Radical leap forward that is not simply a coincidence. If Palm dies, it will not be the former Apple executive's fault. The Pre is the result of real management chops.

Hardware, software, OS, all a go. But what about price? Palm seems unable to get it below the cost of an iPhone, and their network partner is not advantageous, let alone better enough to justify a large price premium. I bet the Palm hardware in a tear-down would be a bit over the cost of the iPhone, but not by enough to explain the retail price disadvantage.

People forget, though, that Apple orders parts by the million, and has a specifically advantageous position when buying flash memory. Apple has every advantage in this market. Moreover, their OS development is funded by app sales, and addresses a far broader range of markets than does Palm's WebOS hardware lineup of one. The XServe and iPhone are both improved when Apple iterates Mac OS X. Expecting the Pre to equal the iPhone is like asking for a PowerMac at the price of a Dell in 1998.

The Pre will do a lot to make Palm competitive again, which is to say make it attractive to future large-scale investors like their current main squeeze, Elevation. I also think it will get Sprint some buzz, and buzz that resonates and snowballs. The G1 and, to a lesser extent, the RIM Storm, got buzz, but only a burst of noise that withered with real-world usage reports. The Pre could be good enough to get people talking about switching cell carriers for it. Friends will tell friends, the product experience will be different, good, and rare/low-volume enough to give the Pre some cachet.

These competitors are the ones that Apple should fear. They don't need to "knife the baby" Palm, but it is a left-field, well done, differentiated product that will make the iPhone shine begin to fade. Nothing is better now, but once the Pre ships mobile users will have a choice that is damn close.

FileMaker is the new Pixar

2009-01-06T09:44:00.000-08:00

What Apple subsidiary released a significant update to their flagship software package today, before MacWorld? FileMaker!

They do make a really fun product called Bento that is something for the modern mac prosumer. If they never made a new version again, then people would lament it as they do HyperCard and Emailer maybe. Bento is at v2.0 and on most display Macs at last check. No one reading this needs to gin up much of a reason to visit their local Apple Store I suspect, but that's a new one to use anyway.

Steve Jobs seems to be leaving FileMaker well enough alone, to the point where they have had the same retail box design for multiple X.0 versions. Shocking for an Apple product, but then again, it had huge marketshare when Jobs came back. Might as well leave it alone, I suppose.

Google Mobile on iPhone means Apple will merge with Google

2009-01-03T19:39:00.000-08:00

How did this happen?

Maybe Apple is killing Safari and partnering to make one true WebKit browser with Google. Or maybe they are merging corporate operations? The wilder rumors get press, but the fact that Chrome is on the iPhone means the very oddest things could be true about what is, upon consideration, a closer relationship than Apple has with any other corporation. Eric Schmidt is on Apple's board is all you have to say to prove that. Maybe Jobs will cram Apple and Google together, and take a Pixar-Disney-alike role in the background of what would be a trillion dollar steamroller (if one gives both corporations an A right now and assume they'll keep that up, as I do.)

Apple's Hardware Roadmap 2009

2009-01-01T04:58:00.001-08:00

No Blu-Ray - Steve Jobs once said BluRay should never be put into PCs. At the time, people assumed it was for fear of the super-quality content getting freed from its DRM shackles. Now it seems he wants to emphasize downloads over physical media, and it will be some time until iTunes serves up anything approaching disc-delivered quality. iDVD was truly a classic Apple masterwork, in the sense that authoring decent-quality DVDs with menus went from really arcane to dead simple overnight. Forget that the program had bugs, they all do, DVDs were Apple's flagship home media push, even before CD burning and the iPod. Indeed, Jobs said in his first iTunes reveal event that Apple had dropped the ball on CDs while hitting DVD out of the park. I do not believe BluRay will ever be offered by Apple, and it won't be trumpeted when it is.

Desktops -

The Mac Pro will continue to be a high end PC-alike Intel chipset machine, with much the same case design. The Intel transition has made Apple's high-end desktop into a bundle of foregone conclusions, where it used to be the most fun hardware to anticipate and Apple's most radical Wintel-alternative package. It was the G-series, and before that the 60x or even 680x0, where Apple would trumpet its advantage over the Wintel commodity box of the day.

What will be interesting is which graphics card supplier Apple chooses to make the default option, as OpenCL and Snow Leopard will make the GPU pick a true performance differentiator. If nVidia is way slower than ATI for "GP"GPU, Apple may have to offend its laptop chipset supplier and CPU supplier in a stroke, and pick AMD ATI. I do not see that happening, so look for Mac Pros with Intel's latest chips and chipsets, and nVidia GPUs released as Intel's roadmap dictates.

iMac - Apple may make the iMac 24in-only (except for the 20in school model), and try to push almost everyone to a MacBook/Pro with display arrangement. A single quad-core iMac may make an appearance at the high end. The likelihood of that depends on three factors. If a quad iMac is so fast it makes the Mac Pro necessary only for extreme, rarified computing, then Apple won't risk cannibalizing high-margin tower sales. On the other hand, if the quad-core chip finds its way into a Mac Book Pro, then the iMac would almost certainly also have it as an option. Finally, there is the outside chance of an anniversary Mac this year, and that would be a good place to do something wacky with the iMac, GPGPU, and four cores.

Mac Mini - Boring hardware updates aside, including "gee whiz" Intel integrated graphics iterations and DisplayPort, the Mini is only worth discussing if it gets melded with the Apple TV. Perhaps the ATV becomes an application that runs best on a Mini near a TV? Maybe Apple makes the Mini $350, kills the Apple TV, and splits the difference of its two brushed metal round-rect offerings? An iPhone-style locked down Apple TV with the hardware of a revised Mac Mini is a potent living room "console", especially if it has accelerometer-ified input hardware shipped in-box. I put the odds of this happening at a billion in one, but it's fun to think about.

Laptops

You're looking at them already, except the 17 will finally come along for the ride.

Jobs Health Not Relevant to Macworld Exit

2008-12-20T09:59:00.001-08:00

Apple is pulling out of MacWorld after this one, and Mr. Jobs isn't even going to show up for a keynote. Cue the horde to speculate that Steve is sick, or surely he would give his customary speech?

Jobs' health problems, which lead to some missed press events and keynotes in the past, is being remembered, and now conflated, with what is a long-standing hot war between the parties that run the expo, and Apple/Jobs. Macworld NY was moved (back) to Boston over Steve Jobs' objections. Doing that was dumb, and lead to the death of the East Coast Macworld.

Jobs has wanted to exit his west coast stage for years. Now that the Apple Stores are rolled out, and Apple is a consumer company who targets product ship cycles for Christmas and "Back to School", Jobs can safely knife the MWSF baby. Yes, it hurts to us Mac "prosumers" and evangelists. but Apple cannot reveal new product on someone else's schedule, simply because they used to and it's cool to go for some (myself included.)

I will miss the keynotes, but when Jobs put up the "Apple Stores = X MacWorlds per day" of foot traffic stat on a slide many years ago, the writing was on the wall (pardon the pun.)

Also, WWDC seems safe and burgeoning, so we will get Jobsian spoken word in long form once a year, I believe.

New narrative from CNET

2008-11-21T11:21:00.000-08:00

Is Apple Afraid of RIM?

Here is a new idea. Apple is afraid of RIM, and issuing defensive OS updates to steal the spotlight away from the newest RIM device. I don't get it. The Storm has been gathering for eons now. It would have been early-2.1-era had it hit the street on time. Apple may have held 2.2 for a day or two to see when RIM decided the Storm had Broken, but that's just smart!

Perhaps Apple sees the value in shining it's OS and App store advantage to glint in the sun before asking consumers to pick between the devices? Or, it could be that of the many supposed advantages RIM has, none besides its clicky screen are not capable of being innovated in software. Tethering, cut-and-paste, etc. are "been there, done that", and something that Apple has successfully managed to enable or disable seemingly according to AT&Ts wishes.

In many ways, the "missing iPhone features" are issues to be worked out in the legalese/as the network bandwidth can sustain them. Do you think the higher cost of the RIM is a result of lower carrier subsidies, or more expensive base hardware? Perhaps AT&T wants a larger chunk of money up-front to pay for all that tethering people will be doing?

It is certainly odd that Apple's mobile gaming and high-cost high-end Prada-alike CPU moonshot of a "personal mobile device" is, less than two years in, cheaper than the flagship consumer BlackBerry on the market. RIMs only get more expensive or have less features from this point forward.

Since it is so easy to figure out how to tether, surely all the people talking about tethering online aren't focusing on the iPhone (search Google for 'tethering mobile users'...).

Finally, the Mac is RIMs ugly stepchild, and that doesn't cut it in a world where the crossover between high value mobile users and high-value personal computer users are identical, save for the CxO suite and Girl Talk (who "is a PC"...?)

I encourage everyone who has a Storm to respond to this post using only the default vertical keyboard. Death by a billion cuts is more painful than the pain of retyping one or another paragraphs pastes on the iPhone.

The Browser is not an OS. MYTH EXPOSED!!!!

2008-11-17T18:14:00.000-08:00

The browser is not an operating system. It is a user-friendly way to use a network of resources. Users like graphical interfaces, hence the OS and browser do whatever they can to hide commands and code from customers. The OS has a tough job of things, and the browser somewhat easier, as hiding HTML was its brief.

Smart people in technology know this, and have not taken their eyes off of the OS ball. OS X is belle now, with Vista the underwhelming, insubstanial celebutante. Linux and XP play wallflowers, one about to graduate into distant, unsupported irrelevance, the other a transfer student with an ill-fitting suit.

The Acid3 tests, browser battles, and so on, get so much more attention than the war for OS supremacy. Windows 7 is going to be sold into a fragmented market for personal computing platforms, very different than the tee-ball Microsoft could have played to get its XP people onto Vista three years ago. Once IE doesn't run on a majority of network users' machines, then the browser gets more interesting again. For now, it is a spendy and theoretical strategic "space race" between Mozilla, Opera, WebKit and Microsoft.

If you go back through that exhaustive list, you'll note there is only one vertically integrated player who owns the OS and the browser.

Being an ex-standard, Microsoft can't see the forest for the trees, and will fruitlessly jab at the "browser market" or "search market" with its OS/IE stick, and it might get lucky and keep half of the market. That would be the commoditized, shrinking, "business" or ex-WinTel market, but it counts anyway. I am not saying that it isn't worth keeping, either. One can drive a lot of business from that pedestal.

If Microsoft would smarten up and buy itself a real cellphone competitor (like, say, RIM and Sprint/Nextel) I might get worried. Instead, they want Yahoo? They don't need a bigger piece of some puzzle, they need to start using Windows like a club, like they used to. Blackberry and Win7 exclusivity would be more like it.

Google has no OS, and for all the posturing about browsers, you still need one. Apple has an OS, and has let the browser go into the wild world of open source. Google picked them so I'm going to give this pair the best shot at "winning." Winning what I am not sure, but at least the internet is harder to tackle into proprietary-dom when at least one major player does best on an open web. So Google and Apple, even if they eventually get in a tiff, are well-positioned.

Opera and Mozilla have browsers but no OS. I dearly love both, especially the latter, for all they did when I was a Mac user on OS 9, and the windows of opportunity for my poor, poor Apple were all but closed up. Now things have changed, and I am not sure that being an application vendor in a space where the app went free/subsidized a decade ago is a good position. I am even less sure I would want to fight Apple/Google and Microsoft. Could a non-profit justify itself as an open browser alternative? Sure.

Wasting time with Papermaster

2008-11-14T19:04:00.001-08:00

The news about poaching a smart IBM chip tech is so thoroughly overkill it angers me to see so much time incinerated over nothing.

IBM had non-competes for up to a year. Jobs wants the guy to handle the PA Semi on-ramp into the Restricted/Signed/App Store Only OS X that the iPhone, Touch, and TV will eventually run. It is a clear case of interpreting a contract, and it will progress in so bland and mechanical a way that the endless articles about it are already running out of breathlessness.

My advice to all Apple rumorologists, customers, prosumers, professionals, zealots, addicts, and anyone else is to forget the guy exists. It is interesting to spin fantasy Hyper-Newton scenarios, and 3D renders alongside are always fun, but Avie Tevanian left and they didn't skip a beat. Ditto their general council (among others) under fire from backdating issues.

Shut up about Papermaster!

To Dot.App or Make Mac?

2008-11-13T23:05:00.000-08:00

The Apple TV continues to occupy my thoughts.

In an earlier post on the aluminum MacBook and new MacBook Pro, I postulated that the Apple TV as a hardware product may be getting the Old Yeller treatment, but live on as software. The Apple TV.app is our awkward Front Row all grown up. You run it from your Mac, which when adapted to a TV, has AirTunes and fingers-crossed AirVideo from all of the Macs in the house. Of course, this is not much different than today's situation, it just liberates Apple from the burden of another hardware line.

The life trajectory of the plucky Apple Remote is a microcosm for the theorized virtual Apple TV. This long-lamented half-effort, a virtually useless silly magnetized plastic IR fob (to steal a line from another plaice) that went from being a keynote feature, stuck to the side of an iMac G5, to a separate, punishingly costly accessory. (At least, I do not believe it still comes with any of the computers. I could be wrong.) WiFi and/or Bluetooth provide omnidirectional range, and the iPod Touch and iPhone run a great Remote.app. The Apple Remote is dead, long live Apple Remote.app.

[By the way, it is criminal that Sony TVs do not come with Bluetooth remotes, simply to prove the point that their vertical integration actually means something. What are these people thinking shipping a custom supercomputer to play games next to a TV that is still not better at wireless transmission than a 1990s Mac TV with IRda?]

But I don't think the Apple TV is going to merge with iTunes. iTunes itself is getting a shade unwieldy. I get video playing when I hit shuffle in my library and I don't like it. Pulling back on Apple TV also carries the whiff of defeat in a space where absolutely every relevant company is making an overt, fierce push. The Wii, XBox 360, PS3, and the endless cable box DVR/On Demand purveyors, including Scientific Atlanta, better known as Cisco, cannot be allowed to continue to wall content off from the Macintosh.

Whining about FairPlay "languishing" unlicensed is loud, constant, and gets me fed up. I don't see TimeWarner letting me pull a show onto my iPhone and take it with me. FiOS is hyped for its "multi-room DVR." I call that "Safari and the computers in my house", except for some reason when I do it that way, I get sued.

Yes, the space on the TV is the most valuable real estate, and mighty empires are jousting to grasp it. A real Apple TV effort would have a "first iPod" effect if it is the right product. Piracy of video has not motivated the content providers to yield, either, so the hardware has to be spectacular.

First, instantiate a physical platform that lasts for generations of improvements, and inaugurates a formidable marketplace in all virtual visual goods. The iPod killed the CD, and the iTunes Store sells the most music anywhere into a fierce piratical headwind. The device that shifts user consumption away from physical media in three generations? Apple TV 2.0 and 3.0, as Miniature Macs.

Varying universes of content are already exposed to hardware devices, but this was the case with MP3 players as well. An MP3 player losing out to backpack of CDs and a Discman is baffling to recall, but it was a result of inscrutable players and glacially transmitted content. Today's insistence on satellite or special-subscription wire services may seem similarly quaint, in the face of a four year old Not Hobby Apple TV.

Maybe the Mini Mac (and iMac and Mac Pro, what the hell) will get a games marketplace with stunning graphics? New X2, Crossfire, or SLI cards with a room full of Apple software and hardware people could probably yield a killer-app game for "Apple TV-enabled" Macs. After all, Bungie is free again! Frog blast the vent core / we are owed Marathon 4. I'd trade a full-fledged Mac Mini for a Super Apple TV. Apple certainly is using the "funnest" thing as a differentiating club with which to beat other only-phones and only-consoles.

An Apple TV-enabled Mac Mini is Apple TV 2.0, especially if you hack off the USB, Firewire, and ethernet ports. Sacrilege I know, but your Mini Apple TV is going to have TV outs, and wireless computer inputs. Time Capsule, Bluetooth, HDMI, DisplayPort, and maybe component if it fits. WASD and rhapsodize on e-mail (or OMG and LOL on IM) all you want, but printing and scanning and movie editing are for other rooms with other Macs. Indeed, they are done in other mental spaces, something which few electronics companies heed whatsoever, with Apple mediocre but in the lead.

The CD market is eroding at a ten or twenty percent rate, ceding something in the high single digit percentages to downloads, and that was before the economy took a dive. The time slots of your life that Apple is given the opportunity to program will soon equal that percentage of your old "TV" time. It is the ease of jumping into the video stream that people miss. An editorial hand in a video "channel" is appreciated. Perhaps it will take Apple selling "iTunes Essentials"-alike bundles of concept shows, such as Cooking Essentials or NFL Sunday Access or whatever?

All this is speculation. I would not be surprised to see a PA Semi-driven OS X box with iPhone-alike app signing, tied to a store with an emphasis on "TV" content and console-style gaming where Apple drops one must-have game hit and the content, console, mobile and home computer war is ended for a generation.

Cisco, Oracle, Salesforce, Dell, HP, IBM and others can have corporate sales, a drearily low-margin quagmire, and maybe Google, Sun, or some of the other truly differentiated companies (Sony 6-1, Microsoft 100-1) can put those differences to work as well as Apple seems to someday.

Freighted Silence

2008-11-13T14:55:00.000-08:00

The death of the Mac Mini is much exaggerated. So says Lazarus himself, in a short e-mail to an interested fan. Steve Jobs' communiques are always accurate, of course, and always sent to some lucky sjobs@apple.com writer. Someone whose questions are plangent, rare, and not-from-the-press enough, perhaps? It is unclear.

The "no updates through Christmas" press release is atypical, and so worthy of examination. If the iMac and Mac Mini are being "let ride" through the holidays, and the Mac Mini isn't dead, there must be something in the works for MacWorld SF. Even a quiet, Display Port/Core i7 update would be probably worth touting with a bit of a mention at a keynote.

That, or the Mini is to languish through the now-apostate "Festival of MacWorld Tokyo" period, and even until the spurned, but perhaps still meaningful, Time Of Apple Expo. I doubt it would merit a full media event as-is. Still, a quiet bump for a product that needs a total overhaul, and merits both a Jobs missive and eventual media event.

The outcry about the utter stagnation of the Apple TV as a hardware product must be muted, because we haven't heard anything about it.

I can't help but notice the similarity of the Mini and the TV. Apple's new chipset agnosticism gives them much more flexibility in the Mini/TV form factor, and so perhaps their hobby is slated to become a career. The PA Semi and Papermaster rumors fan the flames of wholly-custom OS X hardware to fill the niche. Remember, the first XBox was a PIII, and even Microsoft had to get away from their duopolist friend to make the G5-based XBox 360 competitive. (Sort of.)

MWSF seems primed to provide something in the monitor-less small Mac form factor. The need to defend the high-low end (pardon the construction) from ever-slipping Win/Tuxtel prices might yield a vastly different non-Intel chipset Mac Mini. Something with real graphics, the ever-elusive BluRay (it is MWSF, after all), and HDMI. Does this make the Apple TV a Mac TV, and a hobby no more?

And whither the Apple TV? What is the point? It will be on ice, like the Cube. It is premature, given the recentness of Apple's PA Semi/Papermaster it is too much to ask for a Super Apple TV running OS X on ARM already. But you can bet the iPhone grows legs and evolves off the hands of users and onto their televisions once the newest StrongARM is ready.

The Mac Web in 2008

2008-11-11T00:49:00.000-08:00

The "mac web", is the group of websites that cover Apple goings on, product expectations, review products, and so on. It was originally modeled on the MacWeek model of short, up-to-date reviews, coverage of predicted Apple moves ("rumors"), and a healthy dose of righteousness to keep the dwindling, passionate Mac users around. The old Mac Web introduced styles and silos of coverage that persist to this day, though thriving on a larger scale.

Old Mac sites were close to blogs, before people made that term up. The PowerPage, MacOSRumors, MacNN Reality, and others focused on putting together the most accurate possible picture of a given upcoming Apple product. (For the discussion, pretend the WWW was it for networked info sharing. User groups and BBSes were esoteric to say the least. Certainly, miniscule and niche in reach compared to today's Wired Cult of Mac ) Information sites included MacInTouch, xlr8yourmac, MacCentral, I, Cringely, MacKiDo, Apple Recon and sometimes Mac Addict and TidBITS.

The earliest Mac sites lacked contextual monetization options from Google, and so ran display ads that, though targeted well given the narrowness of the readership, did not pay the bills. Mostly, for readers, the sites competed on scoops. The site with the best news the most often would get hits. News could be outlandish mockups, crazy skill-set assertions, and so on.

The best rumor dish was on Reality, a weekly-ish rumor roundup, with new wrinkles debuted and the stories of the week given some flesh and momentum. Reality became Apple Insider, which was shut down and "reopened under new management." I believe this means the Reality writers do not participate in the Mac Web anymore, but I do not know. The new Apple Insider is very active and good, but rarely breaks the very newest information anymore.

MacOSRumors was, in my time, the oldest of the sites, and it had a tidbit 1 in 5 posts. The rest were lies, but the elaborated info was often dead on. Its founder, Ryan Meader, was trying to start a network of in-the-know issue-oriented blogs, but something (ineptitude, demotivation, legal concerns) got in the way. The Calacanis empire, just on dialup with no pre-configured blogging software. (Meader eventually hosted, then ticked off, Slashdot, and prompted them to get a new back end. You might have heard of them. Whoops.) MacOSRumors is no longer a good source or really the same people.

The all-time best first wave Mac Web site was Apple Recon, which was published by a Robert Morgan. He claimed to be ex-black ops, and wrote a for-pay stock newsletter about technology, with a focus on Apple. Some public Apple content was found at Recon on the site, and it was fantastic. Apple Recon was obsessed with the market-making status-quo-flipping disjunction of "convergence." Though about seven years too early to properly implement, Morgan was a "pound the table" bull on Apple throughout the days of the Pippin and Newton. Preposterous at the time, but the most accurate prediction for Apple I have read thus far.

Information sites, like MacInTouch, Xl8ryourmac, and MacKiDo, were clearing houses for Mac user tips, tricks and evangelism. The former two sites focused on implementation of Mac systems and troubleshooting, and MacKiDo ran opinion pieces on the intricacies of Apple and ASIC, CPU, and product design processes.

In general, times were dark for Apple, and the constantly rumored operating system overhauls and revolutionary new PowerPCs from Motorola/IBM (even Exponential) made the rumor/web an exciting place to read, but also lent a fatalism to the proceedings when all that was solid seemed to melt into air. The return of Steve Jobs would change all of that.

The Jobsian recovery of Apple, coinciding with Google monetization of search result clicks, has generated countless "Mac Web" sites and built them an echo chamber. Countless sites claim to have inside dirt, spew stock analysis, and fail to recall the Apple of 1977 or 1985. True core Mac Web sites, and second-wavers from the post-iMac period, like MacRumors, or MacSurfer, get it right most of the time and give a broad set of views. Think Secret had sources, but it meant pumping office noise into a dorm room and getting sued for blatant (but valiant, in the Bothan sense) misappropriation of trade secrets.

The amplification of nonsense these days is easily more problematic than ever, though, among the inexperienced, the over-read, over-linked, and over-stimulated third-wave Mac "mirrors." One offhand comment about WebKit from Steve Ballmer and suddenly Apple is co-doing a Windows compatibility layer in AJAX. IE going WebKit would involve massive complexities I don't understand. Windows Avalon is to IE as Quartz/CoreImage/CoreWhatever is to OS X. WebKit wouldn't let IE be a "browser with a new engine." I think, but do not know, if it would entail a Windows brain transplant. I neither condemn nor praise that model of browser tie-in, but my point is it isn't happening, no matter how many times people are able to cut, paste, and list something in your RSS feed.

Indeed, a $799 notebook is a certainty according to the parrots, but Jobs shocks with a new display, and raises prices! No one paid any attention to "new iMac housing" rumors that screamed "display update" to the trained eye and came from the same reliable Chinese manufacturing sources that nailed both MacBook types. Some mystical iPhonEEE is going to come out of Steve's watch pocket though, just you wait.

I encourage those who use the Mac Web to make decisions on a daily basis to trust some oldies and clearing houses, but ignore the fluff on sites with meager Mac-historical roles, or those that are more into AAPL than Apple. Rare exceptions can be found, such as www.daringfireball.net, which is almost a MacKiDo for today's Apple. In extremis whoever stays up on a swamped keynote day is another opportunity to separate the wheat from the chaff.

New "iBook/PowerBook" Commentary

2008-10-18T13:52:00.000-07:00

I think dropping FireWire from the MacBook is foolish, but the endless pictures of the motherboard going around (at AppleInsider and other places) prove something had to budge. There is no room for additional ports if the logic board is constrained to one quarter of the device. On the Pro, there was room, and a market necessity, so they kept it. Incidentally, Mini DisplayPort is Apple-created, so full-size or Mini/Micro DVI, and indeed, er, Big/Standard DisplayPort, were dropped for size, not because Apple is making moves to artificially differentiate its products (i.e. no new iCal event creation on the Touch, something they quickly reversed.) For once, the 2in (13/15) screen difference, the physical constraints, seem to have actually caused a split in the line.

The 17 is still old-style, probably because it is hard to mill like its smaller cousins. Or maybe because the Air and 17 (and tablet) will be separated off into some sort of low-volume Apple Oddballs laptop section, with Mac Pro R&D spending, and iPod Classic-alike marketing. "It's here if you want it." At least Apple can afford to indulge in some flights of fancy these days, unlike when its Cube nearly killed it, or it had to bench the fan-favorite 12in PowerBook (indeed, Apple addressing the subnote market means times are fat. Remember the MightyCat and the Duo [particularly the 2300c? PPC model. Decadence.])

In that vein, the new 24in LED Cinema Display is marketed as a MacBook/Pro party booster. It represents the end of the iMac, really. It is about as distant from the actual death as the CRT was from going when the iMac G4 killed it.

The Apple LED TV rumors were not far-fetched, here we have the TV but come by way of desktop computer, not the other way around. A MacBook makes a killer Apple TV. I wouldn't be surprised to see the LED Cinema Displays get bigger and input-y-er, and for the Apple TV to be renamed "Apple TV.app" and shot in the head as a hardware product. There is your Apple TV.

If only they'd make a laser printer or digital camera again. Those products suck in the same way cell phones and music players did.

Steve Jobs is dead, long live Steve Jobs!

2008-10-03T10:42:00.000-07:00

How can analysts have any credibility left making predictions like this:

http://www.247wallst.com/2008/09/early-bird-an-4.html

Before product reveals like this:

http://9to5mac.com/macbook-brick-riddle

Analysts are made to rate companies on a schedule that does not best inform their decisions. Apple reveals key laptops after iPods now, for Christmas and not explicitly for back-to-school. The only refresh that analyst ratings take into account is the iMac/Mac Mini desktop speed bump, which is less important than it used to be in the PowerPC era. It would be akin to giving a price target and assessment of 1950s GM just weeks before that year's Detroit Car Show.

iTunes Store RIP?

2008-10-02T02:59:00.000-07:00

Apple iTunes to become necessarily unprofitable pending Copyright Board decision:

http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/10/thursdays-copyr.html

Apple claims to be running the iTunes Music Store to make money. Jobs has said in the past that it "breaks even", and was intended to drive iPod sales.

The actual reason Apple created the iTunes Music Store was to ensure that the nascent paid-download music industry did not become a plank in the platform of a non-iPod-compatible, costly, and likely Mac-hostile company. I am referring to Sony and Microsoft, of course, who both stated a desire to innovate "in the living room." If either wedged their DRM into the vast majority of homes, Apple, Mac OS X, and the iPod would be choked off and stifled.

Apple preternaturally understands this market, as evidenced by the iPod itself, and decided to own music downloads as a defensive stroke. If it becomes unprofitable, or infeasible at anything besides punitive or brand-sullying pricing, then Jobs will allow it to wither. It is no accident Apple has not played hardball with the non-EMI labels about their DRM-free stance on Amazon. A track from that store is not necessarily destined for a non-iPod, as a WMA or Zune DRM, or Sony Connect song, would be.

Old logic, new clothes

2008-10-01T22:27:00.000-07:00

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/the-long-term-questions-for-apple/

Bits asserts that Apple is heading into a down period, as weak consumer spending and business contraction will ding Mac sales. Worse, the iPhone is a high-end consumer product too, and the iPod is saturated. Bits sees major trouble in the lack of a sub-$1000 Apple laptop, and weak Mac Mini desktop offering.

The "iPod saturation" argument aside, these are old ideas in new clothes. A beleaguered Apple will lose to cut rate competitors, some of whom are "more openish", because they charge extra for what is a commodity. Why? Because they did in 1994, and now that Apple has re-ascended, they will surely re-collapse.

Not true. Apple lost in a walled garden era where acreage was all that mattered. Divisions were high between proprietary platforms, and control of formats set de facto standards and won the day. Business drove volume and volume buying drove prices down and sales up. The biggest seller won, and "everyone" who mattered sold Windows. Apple was run out of the industry after hitting a max of 10-15% Mac market penetration (perhaps higher with the Apple II.)

These days present a far different context, though, and Apple is not failing to compete in the high volume market, but choosing not to. They did in 1994 too, by hook and crook and failure, but now it is a completely voluntary aversion. And, in changed contexts, owning 35% of the dollar share of the PC market, but under 10% of sales, has proven to be a profitable niche. Apple sells a computer that is wholly compatible with Windows, and offers its own compelling alternatives in spades. It is perhaps a better PC than a traditional non-Mac, as an infected or broken Windows instance can be easily replaced from a Mac "hypervisor."

Really, Windows and Office are luxuries, like Photoshop and Final Cut Pro. The base PC, whether it is $700 or $1000, is no longer seen as the only operative cost going forward.

The iPhone will also have its legs taken out from under it by Android which will make smartphones/MIDs commodities, too, right? Just as desktop Linux has taken eons to evolve, Google Android/iPhone OS X parity is a long way off. Windows Mobile parity perhaps not, but the goalposts have moved.

Apple, as always, is selling a different product than the mainstream. Even in a recession they have a clear field of hidebound smartphone OS competitors and a crippled Vista-based PC industry the web continues to wedge open. Even in a recession, Apple is a very strong company, and will continue to break sales records going forward.

Apple blocks ad-hoc distribution

2008-09-25T05:21:00.000-07:00

So they want the iPod to be for games and doodads. I guess I am happy, because it means the Mac is more likely to stay open.

Mind-boggling

2008-09-25T03:56:00.000-07:00

Get this:

The "Google Android phone", or T-Mobile G1/HTC "Dream" is out! Hooray! The supposed first shot in a war between the iPhone, RIM's BlackBerry, Google's OS and hardware partners, and maybe Palm, Microsoft, or Symbian, I just don't see it. Why?

The phone doesn't have a headphone jack!

Are the people who design these things absolutely brain dead? How could a modern smartphone lack that. It doesn't even have a micro jack, like the Treo. No, it has a weird USB out. Of course, it comes with a proprietary-shape-USB-to-headphone dongle, but come on.

Competition is good news, but this isn't it.

iPhone app troubles

2008-09-22T01:41:00.001-07:00

The Mac Web was ever vigilant and focused oh these many days, while the rest of the media busily told the public to fork out for private industry or else while they silently moved their 401k into Yuan. No, the worst of it all came when Apple "capriciously" (NYT.com bits blog) rejected iPhone App Store programs that infringed on a realm of functionality of unknown extent which Apple seeks to control.

Possibly, Apple is wholly hamfisted. They built an App Store and are now prone to adding programs to it without due consideration, and then, after a few days, deciding to take them down, but capriciously and suddenly, without much actual deep thought, and then staying quiet after being "caught" (for the tenth time.) This same Apple has thoughtlessly allowed an NDA binding iPhone developers to remain in effect, squelching online discussion. They simply forgot to remove it, and now unthinkingly leave it in place.

I reject these conclusions, though countless sites, many of which are held in high regard among the Mac cognoscenti, paint Apple in these outlines. No, let's look at what Apple intends to do to remain "on a roll", or, making hit products into brands that last through iteration after iteration, like the iPod, iPhone, and Mac.

Apple's App Store decisions are not random or unstructured, but rather they follow a predictable pattern.

Thus far, Apple has blocked applications of a certain niche. Those apps which intend to move users away from any conduit for information with pre-existing 1st party analogs (albeit of varying quality.) Podcasts, or GMail e-mail, for example, are "Apple territory", even if all the desired user functionality is not part of Apple's package. If someone wrote an MP3 playing application that used the information in iPod.app (or iTunes mobile?), but presented it to different functional effect, you would be trespassing, so to speak. Indeed, the Mozilla Foundation claimed it was impossible to get Firefox working on Mobile OS X. I believe Firefox was dropped for iPhone because it would not have been promulgated via App Store, and Apple told them so.

Applications that provide wholly-contained entertainment, like a game, or information Apple does not mediate "out of the box" are left alone.

It is no coincidence that Apple's NDA issue is the same one that daunt so many Nintendo DS and Sony PSP software developers just getting started on a better version of the boot OS, but works so well to create siloed, non-background-process-demanding games. Apple, in their marketing and store policies, clearly emphasize a portable computing platform devoted to 1st and Apple-avoiding 3rd party productivity and media/information processing applications, and third party web applications and games.

In watching the crisis unfold, it struck me how often an App was removed after it was initially posted for some time. Moreover, by registering the app hash, and not precluding it from installation/execution via Ad Hoc (samizdat carbon paper copies of source code fed through the dock cable no jailbreak needed...) Apple has tacitly endorsed these apps continued viability. Indeed, by adding them to the App Store at all, and/or banning so few so "capriciously", Apple publicized them. Apple bans them only to keep their realm of the user experience homogeneous, in the face of intense power user criticism. Of course, it is just these users who will Ad Hoc around the issue easily. Hmm.

Finally, only Apple among the console makers has an additional open-discussion general purpose computing platform it does not protect with similar restrictions. The Mac is a national forest. Mobile OS X is a kids playground, and the adults are making decisions many can't understand. (I don't think Photoshop is coming out for Linux on PS3 anytime soon you Net Yaroze refugees.)

Eco-architecture portends a return to heteronomy!

2008-09-15T21:18:00.000-07:00

U herd it hear first:

http://vincent.callebaut.org/planche-lilypad_pl30.html

It's also a return to fun!

un

2008-09-10T15:54:00.000-07:00

Jobs is thin, effortlessly thin, it seems, as he has no present health issues, and is simply a beanpole by nature. Other people are like this; Obama, for example, or, at the extreme end of the spectrum, Manute Bol. He is really, really thin (I saw him in Penn Station), and he somehow managed to play NBA basketball.

In America, even the genetically-predisposed cannot swim against the tide of sedentary jobs and unnatural food, though, and journalists are no different. Everyone is fat. Many journalists are probably jealous, on a deep level, of Jobs' lean yet un-muscular, and now-uncommon, look.

His unknown level of adherence to pescetarianism, or veganism, or a vegetarian diet (avoiding meat doesn't get an ism around here), the strain of cancer and recovery, and his natural thinness (compare him with Wozniak in every photo from 1977 until now) make Jobs unusual. Being different and hard to figure out, and then refusing to do publicity outside of product launches or corporate business, means most of America, happy to be serenaded by an iPod know little about Jobs, or even Apple.

In the media though, Jobs' thinness, admittedly a mostly unexplained and at times visibly jarring phenomenon, becomes a means of alienation. He gets to be thin without trying! Twists of logic are made to accommodate the strangeness of Jobs' physique. If he had cancer, which made him thinner, he must have it again, as he is still thin now. These observations take on a lot of added heft, pun intended, for most readers, who have ready-to-go psychological and cultural templates for Others like Jobs. Suddenly, a man who manages to remain thin must have cancer, or something wrong, to look so different.

Apple the company, which is the "reason this matters" and is "why we write about Jobs' health", is then swirled into the mix, an alien itself. Again, Jobs and Apple are somewhat to blame. A cultivated mystique surrounds the company and generates serious free marketing. Failing to comment for the press is un-corporate in America. Apple is difficult to cover, as it is an opaque operation appears choreographed press shows. The company, and thus Jobs, demand that each media outlet find an angle that differentiates them from a sea of identical coverage, and so reporters go searching.

Naturally, this has led them to Jobs and his health. Now that each outlet has reported and commented on the matter, and found no other as compelling to the market, it has become a staple after each event. The level of hysteria in the coverage is too high, though, for it to be a simple matter of readership. The higher each source ratchets the pressure within its walls to "figure out what makes this guy tick", and not cover what Apple is doing, is rewarded, because the audience shares the journalists' seeming alienation from Jobs, and thus the true workings of his company.

It is not that the truth cannot be found about either, because Jobs seems unwilling, but occasionally can be forced, to go on the record about his health. The company is actually relatively transparent these days, because of its size, and usage of commodity parts. The truth is actually something that the audience, of media and readers, necessarily cannot understand, given their alienation. Any story confirms itself because it simply must be true, or else

Now let's see how they run things.

2008-09-10T15:05:00.000-07:00

To make a point below an explicit one:

The high-paid (really highly, top 0.01) Analysts you read about who say yesterday was an evolution are idiots. The revolution was last year. Yesterday they beheaded the old king in the town square and everyone cheered, or whatever. The carriers have reached "peak control" of the wireless spectrum, and that little mic is it for them.

The "iPod market" is meaningless if you are including Touch, excluding iPhone, including iTunes Store, excluding App Store, etc.

As an aside, a flip-RIM just came out. Making proprietary hardware and software advantages commodities worked so well for Microsoft in the internet era!

Really hard to fit inside with armor and swords

2008-09-10T14:08:00.000-07:00

The iPod Touch gained an external speaker. Jobs described the speaker as really only for personal use in a quiet environment, and demonstrated that it failed to cut through noise well during his CNBC interview. This marks the first instance of a Jobs-led discussion of Apple products that talks down a hardware feature. (Software is his land for mea culpas and both dimensions are usually a hype-fest.) Truly, he seems to be right. I see literally no reason for the speaker to exist, save for accentuation of a gaming experience when one lacks headphones. Apple irons these vanishingly useful features out usually.

Why all the work, then, to get the speaker in?

Apple iPod Headphones with Remote (once known as "the ones with the iPhone that I wish worked on my iPod) now work with all iPods. Indeed, the mic-in even works, though Jobs only confirmed this for the Nano. He ignored the ability for the Touch, which can leverage the App Store and lots more control surfaces, to accept and store audio recordings. Attending to the Nano is one thing, but the sin of this omission is really striking, as Jobs usually only neglects to discuss features when he is asleep.

Why the studious ignorance?

Because, as Lil Wayne says, Wayne isn't Weezy, Weezy is Wayne. The iPod Mic Clicker is a hard trojan horse to cram into, but OS X Mobile isn't for iPhone.

What Apple Did

2008-09-09T21:54:00.000-07:00

The iPod event did what every September iPod event does. Makes Christmas a competition between last year's Apple hardware in a million guises, all just catching up, and something new from the company itself.

I do wish the spirit of experimental hardware was more vibrant at Apple. It doesn't make sense anymore, but a Nautilus Mac Book Air or some real tablet or PDA appliances would sell to me. It's all about volume, yes, but I am still waiting on a real Cube replacement.

More on Chrome

2008-09-09T21:44:00.000-07:00

Chrome is not yet out on the Mac or Linux, but it uses WebKit, according to Google, because the Android team suggested it. Apple Safari is the exemplar unified WebKitted browser, phone to desktop.

It seems, with the page-as-process, memory-intensive methodology behind Chrome, that Google has chosen a different route. Has Google made a browser, freighted with a V8, that cannot be ported from one desktop platform to another with ease?

Is this demonstrative of Google's inability to to compete with Apple, which performed the porting trick, across architectures, not APIs, with whole OSes? I know the Google OS lives on the web, so it is platform-independent. That phrase presupposes platforms. It is turtles all the way down otherwise. Google's Chrome elephant cannot stand on hardware alone.

iTunes 8

2008-09-09T01:27:00.000-07:00

iTunes 8 is something that I have less understanding of than its iPod partner.

Wireless sync is something that seems obvious to add, only because it is obvious, not because it is a good idea. It is bound to be extremely slow (Shuffles aren't getting wifi), slaughter the battery of the iPod requiring it to be, er, plugged in, add components, weight, and cost to a devicethat sheds them as often as possible, and be prone to user error.

More esoterically, a household of three or four people and iPods syncing will clog most consumer routers such that the internet slows. I know the iPods aren't going out over the net and taking "lanes on the highway", but lots of consumer wifi routers don't do well with more than a few simultaneous clients, and WiFi iPods are a significant addition.

iTunes 8 could get subscription plans in which a monthly fee gave one access to the iTunes library. I would definitely pay for such a thing. The Jobsian assertion that people like to own their music is less true than it was when the iTMS opened. The idea of being one's own radio station, but paying extra to take the tracks out of the booth, isn't nearly as alien to consumers as it was at the start of Apple's music project.

Not coincidentally, Apple has also sold millions of devices that could never hold all of the music that many people have come to own, one way or another, but would do a bang-up job of tuning into the "Jukebox in the Sky." If my Mobile Me is already in the cloud, the conceptual and technical work seems to be underway. Indeed, Eddy Cue was given control of the Mobile Me division ostensibly to "get it working right." I think that was done because interoperability with the iTMS (from presentation to billing) became vital.

Better smart playlists, UI tweaks, and a revisit of the "what do we do with this?" team to the left pane could also be in order The visualizer is supposed to get some killer new options, but SnoCap is still the best, and that is like forty years old so we'll see if I care.

New iPods

2008-09-09T00:31:00.001-07:00

Apple will introduce their new iPod line today.

The size and scope of the iPod ecosystem of late has led to reliable leaks of case prototypes and so on. The form factor of Nano v.3 looks to be like the original version, but with more screen and less plastic. It is predicted to be roughly the same thickness. Unless it doubles in thickness, this dimension is unlikely to be problematic.

Some are hoping for the end of the scroll wheel on the Nano. Case prototype leaks accommodate a wheel, and all in the same location, too, so such a change has a vanishingly small chance of occurring. An all-screen Nano is still some time away, my rational mind tells me.

My hope and speculation, though, is that a virtual scroll-wheel, enabled by a multi-touch motion, possibly only available in a certain area on the Nano, will allow for an all-screen device. I doubt this will happen. If it does, it will signal a line bifurcation, into Touch and Classic, just as the iPod was so cleaved

Apple cannot cede the commodity MP3 player market as it does in PCs. Apple is dominant in mobile music, and must compete in all volume markets. Apple may create markets, say for $300 full-screen Nano-sized devices, but it cannot neglect the $100-$250 market. Apple has said the Mini was and Nano is its largest seller. Besides the obvious advantage of selling a lot of profitable players, Apple must control this segment to give itself economies of scale, and defend walled iTunes kingdom.

The iPod Classic will probably get cheaper and thinner. The former is to differentiate it from a suddenly cheap iPhone, the latter just a guess because Apple does that kind of thing. The 80GB may even get the axe, replaced by a 160GB that fits into its case, and costs the same. I doubt will see a more capacious iPod. First off, it seems pointless, but that might just be me. I haven't read that any larger drives exist in 1.8in, either. Apple always gets first crack at the Toshiba ones, and also seems to be able to keep a lid on their PR, so who knows? More colors or a (Red) tie in have me uninterested.

The Touch might get really interesting, but I actually think nothing will be done to it tomorrow. The invitation to the event was definitively old-interface in style. Perhaps this was only to avoid spurious iPhone hype, but the Touch is so much an iPhone, that it simply incurs trickle-down from that product line. The Touch will get a price cut, sure. Maybe it will get some colors and a curve like the current iPhone, but I see Apple sticking with the mirrored back as a differentiator.

What would be a very effective move, politically, would be some Apple Accessory love, like a really good sheath that has a D-pad and some buttons. The company wants to make the iPhone/Touch a mobile gaming competitor. The industrial design of the hardware is not conducive to this. Every game company gives guidance to coders, and reliable operation, through their industrial design. Nintendo may have revolutionized mobile gaming with the DS, giving developers an incredible, unprecedented, canvas, but even they included hardware control interfaces. Apple cannot now add buttons, of course, but they could achieve a soft-standardization with a good sheath. "Fit this if you want, stay playable without it...", and all that.

If Steve Jobs looks unhealthy, I will be sad, for myself, as he is a living hero of mine, as well as for the world. Decades more of Steve Jobs influence on Earth can, I believe, be quite beneficial for the human race.

This week since Wednesday

2008-09-09T00:19:00.000-07:00

Seven people right now from various places who are musically linked to my roommate, Paul, are crashed here as I type. All nice.

My friends broke up, but the female half still wanted to throw her long-planned surprise party for her now-ex. I was asked to host, and did. It turned out to be an excellent party. Conversive, free and bounteous. Lab-tube jello shots were a highlight. I was left with a mess, of course. The tidying was simple, no one had "been a retard", in the words of my roommate, so cans and bottles, scraps of paper, balloons, and emptying the trash, pretty much did it. The birthday boy graciously came by to mop.

2008-09-03T11:01:00.000-07:00

I'll have more later. For now, this is a lot like Chrome, isn't it?

http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/20/prism/

What I think of "Google Chrome"

2008-09-03T10:08:00.000-07:00

The new Google browser has everyone atwitter, of course. Most sites give it a passing grade, welcome added competition, and believe Chrome is a good way for Google to get a foothold on the desktop.

The mainstream business press continues to misunderstand what is going on at Google. Forbes wonders if it will be a Google product that "finally sticks" and lives up to the "hype." The hype, of course, being non-existent. Google released the browser, and the world talked about it for them. Get over the fact that the internet lets it seem like something is being hyped when it is merely extant, and being discussed. Just because Google has bought less than ten pages of print advertising in its entire existence does not mean when people talk about it, they must be the ones getting paid, or why would they? Google is not your father's GM, and intensity of orchestration does not equal volume anymore.

I did click a Google text ad to get to Chrome, just for fun. When I searched Google for "chrome" and did not find their browser in the top ten results (at the time), the enclosed, yellow shaded paid slot at the top was bought by Google itself. It is nice to see the index is still doing no evil, even if the company and/or public have messily conflated that with the will of the corporation.

Other shreds of "hype" included an oddly-leaked comic book theoretically intended to explain Chrome "for everyone." Like all Google attempts at marketing, it was prosumer-ish. Too technical and long-winded (40 pages!), but effective as a framing device. For the people who fix the PCs Microsoft's "Knowledge Workers" use and read Slashdot, the dot-com 2.0 crowd, and other avid browsers, it was a compelling thought piece.

Of course the near-monopoly of Internet Explorer is detrimental to web app performance. Welcome to 1999, blogosphere. (Adobe and) Microsoft want to lock people into plugins, drive up hardware sales, and freeze out non-commercial web standards bodies. This has been true forever. (Flash and) IE were ubiquitous, I argue possibly even helpful, in an era of slower connections and processors, to popularize the internet with dynamic content. (I am a lifelong Mac user and truly shudder at the thought of that paradigm, don't get me wrong.)

As I said, I'm a Mac user, so I don't even have Chrome. I could run it in Parallels but I don't want to. It uses WebKit and has an anti-interface that defers to the content. I prefer a less obsequious browser, and Apple Safari, also WebKit-based, has a consistent user interface, and almost every feature of Chrome. The nightly build of Safari is often spectacularly fast.

I like two things about Chrome and only Chrome, though: V8, because Apple hasn't shipped their equivalent yet, and the full text search of the history. The latter is vaguely possible with Spotlight, but Google's version is better.

Sentimental stock picks from the dead

2008-08-21T06:09:00.000-07:00

Palm (PALM [PALM] {PALM}]) -

They hired Apple's hardware division head, Jon Rubenstein, and gave him broad latitude. The changes he is making seem substantive and likely to yield interesting, compelling products. He is pure upside. No one who ran the division that produced the iMac and iPod could be worse than the person who greenlighted the Foleo.

Unfortunately, the software side is abysmal or Windows Mobile. Yeesh. Android or a Symbian license would solve this problem, and in light of adopting Windows Mobile the next step is clear. Palm has the expertise to build the whole cabanza, so skipping what Android covers both frees up resources, and piggybacks on the media frenzy surrounding Google's project. Symbian has been around and ignored so long I doubt it is in the running.

Palm is like Psion, not HTC. They are (duh) in the palm computing market, not the tele-phoney space. The iPhone and BlackBerry have made that market huge, but incompletely serviced. An iPhone cannot be had with a keyboard, SD slot, etc. etc., and the BlackBerry is uncomfortable in its consumer high heels. Palm has plenty of people to sell a range of Android-Palms to.

If the Treo 900 has the game-changing design and feel of, say, the Palm V, and is also the best Android phone, then Palm goes from Foleolithic to iRIMtastic and the stock zooms. The company is off 90% from its high, and the media and market surrounding the type of device they could create is frothing at the mouth to hype something else that's actually good.

Transmeta (TMTA) -

As far as I understand, the technology that Transmeta developed (look up Crusoe or Transmeta in your local library) would benefit massively from a multi-core re-implementation, something that would have not been possible when the Crusoe was kicking around.

Indeed, the load on such a chip (taking in an instruction, transforming it, running it, transforming it, and sending it back) necessarily benefits from parallelism to a far greater extent than a design with fewer stages. Split 'em up yo!

Of course, if a stage is too costly (in the computational sense), or the technology somehow requires context that must come from a whole-state consideration, and not separated cores, my argument goes out the window. As I said, all of this is "as far as I understand."

NVidia licensed Transmeta's tech a few weeks back, and is now rumored to be "entering the x86 space." NV has no ability to sell x86 chips without AMD and Intel saying it's OK (according to the Register), so something has to give. If Transmeta is getting another shot at the big time, than it is undervalued.

If you look very long term (10 years plus), it is hard to imagine a company that employed Linus Torvalds among many luminaries, and actually executed on a rather audacious plan from a standing start, would not have an impressive patent portfolio. Their efforts are ahead of the trajectory of the industry, and they likely left land mines all over the place. When Intel and AMD march in, expect big-money licensing, settlements, or rulings.

Break the iPhone NDA

2008-08-15T18:07:00.000-07:00

Apple is clearly keeping this NDA going to cover itself for patents. Just go for breaking it and see what happens. I think it is an NDA in name only. If it isn't, then developers should find out already, stop complaining, and make a Usenet post or something and see who freaks. My guess is no one at Apple cares, as long as their inventions aren't technically being "published" (See daringfireball.)

iPhone 3G Radio Problem

2008-08-15T17:13:00.000-07:00

A quick scan of MacSurfer reveals that people in the mainstream press aren't used to Apple issuing software updates.

Either this radio thing is a recall-worthy unheard of issue, or iPhone OS 2 v1.1 needs another update. I'm betting on the latter.