opinion - page 2

Yesterday, reports hit that Tim Cook and Beats CEO Jimmy Iovine had met to talk about ‘Project Daisy,’ Beats’ secret project that, in some form or another, seems to involve music discovery.

No one’s quite sure what Project Daisy actually is, but Cook seems interested in it. It could be a music discovery engine, à la The Echo Next. It could be a streaming service like Rhapsody or Spotify. No one except Iovine and Cook know for sure.

The story about Apple and Beats’ CEOs meeting made me wonder. Apple has been a major player in the digital music business for 12 years now… yet they have never once delivered a pair of premium headphones the likes of which Beats has become known for. Why not?

With Tuesday’s’s announcement of a 128GB iPad 4, Apple is clearly signaling that the iPad is not only suitable for serious work, but that it can be the primary machine for many users. Most commenters have fixated on fitting extra movies and other consumables into the extra 64GB of space, but they’re forgetting about work.

In fact, I’d say that the iPad With Retina Display, as Apple now insists on calling it, is the new desktop machine, and the iPad mini is the new laptop. Why? Let me explain:

NEWSFLASH: Teens don’t want the iPhone! Parents beware! The Microsoft Surface and Samsung Galaxy phones are the new “it” things! Apple has lost its cool factor!!!

That’s what the Buzz Marketing Group, an organization that seeks to provide  “lifestyle and buzz marketing services for brands seeking to attract teen audiences,” wants you to think. You may have recently seen some headlines from big sites saying that teens think Apple is uncool now.

As my British boss Leander Kahney would say, that’s absolute bollocks.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – Here’s a question for you: it’s CES, the world’s largest electronics trade show. So where the hell are all the Lightning accessories?

The iNotebook from Targus is yet another attempt to solve the old problem of hand-writing on your iPad. This one comes in the form of a folio with a pad of paper, a special pen and a sensor up top to record your ink strokes in digital format.

The trouble is, it looks like another “faster horse and carriage” solution.

Earlier today, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that, starting in 2013, Apple would start investing over $100 million in local business to build Macs in the United States.

Even more intriguing, he said one model of Mac would be made exclusively in the U.S. But which one?

Tim Cook wouldn’t say, but when you think about it, there’s one obvious contender: the Mac Pro. Here’s why.

Last month, Apple failed to make its own self-imposed deadline to release iTunes 11 by the end of October.

iTunes 11 is a radical overhaul of Apple’s media management, shopping and syncing software for the Mac and PC that seemingly addresses the numerous complaints of bloat and convolutedness that have been leveled at the app over the years. It also has a much more attractive and modern design.

Consequently, numerous Apple fans — including ourselves — were disappointed when Cupertino quietly announced they were pushing back iTunes 11’s release by a month, into November. But when in November?

We have no inside information on when, exactly, iTunes 11 will be released, but we think there’s an excellent chance that it will be released by no later than the end of next week, and most likely next Wednesday. Here’s why.

Now that Google has unveiled its Trifecta of Nexus devices, I can’t help but feel underwhelmed. I can’t exactly pin-point why I feel this way, but alas, I do. Perhaps my perception of what a Nexus device should represent has become misguided. I’m not sure when I began to expect more than just a Vanilla experience, but the latest batch of Nexus devices has knocked me back to the reality that “Nexus” means nothing more than having an untainted Android OS with certain end-user freedoms and timely updates.

The iPad mini is a totally new product for Apple. It represents a beautiful juxtaposition of the iPhone’s 4-inch display and the Retina iPad’s larger 10-inch canvas. While the rest of the industry has already shifted its focus to 7-inch tablets, Apple entered uncharted territory for itself today.

Based on what we’ve seen, the iPad mini looks like a very compelling device. I’m sure Apple will sell bazillions. What I don’t understand is Apple’s pitch for the iPad mini. What purpose does it serve, and what kind of customer is it intended for? There’s no denying that Apple unveiled a great product today, but the purpose of the iPad mini was muddled by a confusing pitch.

A few days after the iPhone 5 was released to the public – just a few weeks ago – people started commenting on how thin and light it was. “You really have to pick it up and feel it in your hands,” was a common thread of these comments. Sure, it looked amazing: but it felt amazing too.

Today’s announcements are a direct continuation of the theme that began with the iPhone 5, and set the tone for the next generation of Apple hardware. From now on, Apple’s message is clear: “No-one does thin like we do.”

When Steve Jobs passed away a little over year ago, he left Apple — the company he started in his parents’ garage back in 1976 — in the hands of Tim Cook, its former Chief Operating Officer.

The question on everyone’s lips at the time was how well Apple would fare without its co-founder at the helm. Jobs was unique. He was an innovator and a visionary, and he had this incredible ability to see into the future.

Jobs knew what we wanted — and what we didn’t — long before we did. He devised exciting new products that have changed our lives and sold in their millions, and he left rival companies playing catch-up. He revolutionized not just one, but a number of different industries.

He really did make a dent in the universe.

So naturally, when Jobs passed away, it was hard to imagine Apple without him. He had spent time away from Apple in the mid-eighties when John Sculley was CEO, and when he returned in 1996, his company was on the brink of bankruptcy.

Some feared that the same thing would happen again — that Apple would lose its way and struggle to maintain its edge without Jobs steering the ship in the right direction. But 12 months on, the company’s in a better position now than it’s ever been in.

So, was Steve Jobs really irreplaceable?

Steve Jobs has changed the world four times, by my reckoning. One year after his death, is the world different? What is his legacy? Is it the company that he started, journeyed outward from in disgrace, and ultimately returned to in triumph? How about the devices he had an enthusiastic hand in bringing to market? The business of music and film? What is the world now that it would not have been without Steve Jobs?

It’s all of those things, of course. Jobs’ legacy is not something we can distill into a simple slogan or tagline. Steve Jobs worked for a world in which the design, manufacture, and marketing of consumer electronics enhances our lives in a very human way.

Let me explain.

The iPhone 5 will probably be my first iPhone. Up until now, I have gotten by with a combination of dumb phones (and recently something even worse), an iPod Touch and an iPad. I have also tossed a camera into my bag more often than not upon leaving the house. Why? Because I almost never never make phone calls. Because I don’t want to sign a cellphone contract. And because my other gadgets do the job just fine. So why am I buying an iPhone now, after five years of holding out?

Oh, Apple. Wasn’t it enough that you subjected us to John Mayer and Coldplay for years? I mean, yeah sure, I guess both of those artists were kind of cool for about 15 minutes, but they weren’t “cool” or “hip” when they played at an Apple keynote, and now instead of making progress with keynote live performances you give us the Foo Fighters?

Don’t get me wrong, I love Dave Grohl. The feisty Nirvana Dave Grohl, who talked shit to Axl Rose and had a wild and unruly nature about him. He was awesome back then. Apple-esque even, in that rebellious sort of way that, even though they’re the biggest tech company in the world, Apple still likes to cast themselves as the rebel going against the mainstream. But having the Foo Fighters play at an Apple event now seems contradictory to Apple’s entire hip and cool image that makes people lust after iPhones and iPads.

Apple’s new iPod Touch is slimmer, faster, better, yadda yadda yadda. That’s neat and all, but what really matters, and what might just spike its sales into the crazy numbers, is its new camera. It has 5MP, it has auto-focus, it has the iPhone 5’s new panorama feature, and it starts at just $300. Why the hell would anyone buy a regular point and shoot any more?

We thought we’d had it all figured out.

When Apple bucked the trend of numerically naming the iPad by calling the Retina iPad the “new iPad” instead of the iPad 3, we thought it was a sure thing that they’d do the same thing for the next iPhone. The next iPhone, then, would be “the new iPhone” or the “2012 iPhone”, not the iPhone 5.

It made total sense, in a way: Apple doesn’t add a numeral to the end of its other products, like the MacBook Pro or the iPod Classic. They don’t even do it for the iPod touch, which is basically the most current iPod with all the phone guts stripped out. Why continue setting apart the iPhone as a sequel to the handsets that have come before when you can position it, not as an incremental update, but a timeless product in its own right: the Mercedes of smartphones?

That’s the way Apple handles the rest of its products, but with the invitation for today’s, and now Apple accidentally spilling the official name of the next iPhone on their website, it now seems clear that Apple is going to call the sixth-generation iPhone the ‘iPhone 5’ after all. Why would they do that?

The big story of yesterday evening was a somewhat cryptic report by The Wall Street Journal that Apple wants to build its own streaming music service, a la Pandora. Once you step back from the “hey, wouldn’t that be cool”-edness of it all, it’s a weird report. But it may not be totally bonkers. In fact, it probably makes a lot of sense.

For months rumors have been saying that Apple is getting ready to launch two major, new products this fall: the iPhone 5 and iPad mini. Both of these names are placeholders for what will be the sixth-generation iPhone and a 7-inch version of the current iPad. Everyone pretty much agrees that the new iPhone will be announced on September 12th, but opinions are split on the possibility of Apple also announcing the iPad mini during the same event. While it’s nearly 100% confirmed that a unibody iPhone 5 will be announced on the 12th and then ship on the 21st, specific dates have not surfaced for the elusive iPad mini—we haven’t even seen so much as an incriminating part leak.

While some think that Apple will announce both the new iPhone and iPad mini at its September event, it actually makes more sense for Apple to hold two separate media events this fall for each product. Here’s why.

I’ve been jailbreaking my iOS devices for a couple of years now, and to be perfectly honest, I’ve thought about going back to the stock version of iOS many times. Sometimes I’ll ask myself if it’s really worth jailbreaking my iPhone. iOS 5 brought a lot of features that were only available for jailbreakers previously, and iOS 6 is adding several more.

Before the jailbreak for iOS 5.1.1 came out, I was considering abandoning Cydia, the jailbreak’s App Store equivalent, for good. I didn’t think I needed to jailbreak anymore.

And in most cases, you don’t really need to jailbreak ever. But since the iOS 5.1.1 jailbreak, I’ve fallen in love with my jailbroken iPhone 4S all over again. Here’s why.

There’s a whole new class of app these days centered around lending out cars, bikes, and even homes via iPhone apps like AirBnB, Relay Rides, Getaround, and others. They allow people looking for a short term rental car or living space to connect with other people who have spare space or vehicles and pay a fair yet small fee for doing so. It seems like a good idea, on the surface.

A new app, called SideCar Passenger, takes it up a notch. The app not only connects you with a spare car, but with a spare driver as well. Think of it as peer-to-peer taxi cab and you’ll be close. Users download SideCar, register and account, and then either search for rides or offer their own services up.

Does this strike anyone else as potentially creepy?

Maybe you were exploring the nether reaches of a Venezuelan jungle yesterday and missed the news that Microsoft announced that they’re making a cool looking tablet called the Microsoft Surface for Windows RT.

Despite some huge holes in the announcement, some people like Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz have gone on to claim that Microsoft’s Surface just made the iPad and MacBook Air obsolete.

We’re actually kind of excited about the Surface and think it looks like an intriguing product, but saying that it’s better than the iPad and MacBook Air at this point is absolutely absurd.

It’s hard to believe, but there was a time when Apple’s computers were accused of being strictly last generation.

Their computers were made with clunky Power PC processors, and Windows PC owners smirked at the wheezing Mac platform. Michael Dell even famously said the whole company was so behind the times that if it were up to him, he’d euthanize it.

How things change.

While the rest of the industry was counting Apple out, a Steve Jobs newly returned to Apple spent the early part of the last decade quietly assembling a time machine. Following the iPad, iPhone and MacBook Air before it, the retina-display MacBook Pro announced Monday at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco is just the latest time traveler Apple has sent back to us from the future.

It’s a machine so shiny, so shimmering, so futuristic, so unlike anything else out there that it will take the PC-making competition at least a year to release a truly competing product. How did this even happen? How did Apple assemble its time machine, and why can’t the likes of Sony, HP, Dell, Acer and Lenovo seem to catch up?

Read more at CNN

I’m still sitting at my desk wiping the froth from my mouth dreaming of how much better my life is going to become once I get Apple’s new MacBook Pro with Retina display. It’s totally the most beautiful laptop computer I’ve ever seen, and I haven’t even really seen it in real life, but I know I want it. All my friends want it too, so of course after the keynote we talked about who’s going to get it, who’s not, and why not.

And then we all realized that there’s really no reason for any of us to buy it, and there might not be any reason for you to get it either. Here’s why:

In case you haven’t heard, Instapaper quietly snuck its way into the Google Play Store today. I’m going to tell you a little bit about Instapaper, its significance to Android, and why this Android user won’t be buying it. Instapaper is a popular service for saving web pages for reading later. It not only saves pages for reading later, but also strips them down to a clean text-only format for easy reading.

It’s a nice concept, which when released back in 2008 for iOS, was original and extremely useful. But over the course of the last four years, Instapaper’s developer Marco Arment has spent most of his free time insulting Android and its fans… and now he wants us to give him money? Let’s take a brief look at the Instapaper app and its history to show just how insulting this is.

Google sent out invites to certain publications this morning for a mysterious Maps event that will be taking place on Wednesday, June 6th. With the plea to come see the “next dimension of Google Maps,” the company plans to show a “sneak peek” at upcoming features for its mapping technology.

Sure, the event sounds interesting, but the fact that Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is taking place 5 days later really adds fuel to the fire.