Apple’s slice of the web browsing pie sits restlessly at around ten percent, in the States when you take all of its platforms into account and is growing every day. It doesn’t quite have the same breadth of pie wedge in Europe, but as this chart from AT Internet auditing the visitors of their monitored websites makes clear, Apple’s operating systems are gobbling up more and more pageviews every day.
According to AT Internet, Apple’s marketshare is now sitting at around 6.8% in Europe, having grown 2.3 points since last November. iPhone OS is consuming about 1% of all European website views. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s own marketshare has gone down over the same period… with websites visited by Windows Mobile and Android devices are so insignificant that they can be comfortably lumped into “Other OS” category.
Former Apple retail employees have filed a class action suit in California over rest breaks and poor treatment.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of all people employed in non-exempt (hourly paid) “Genius” positions in San Francisco County Superior Court on September 15, 2009. A website gives more details on the suit.
“Apple has enjoyed an advantage over its competition and imposes a resultant disadvantage on its “Genius” employees by failing to authorize, permit and provide statutorily mandated rest breaks as required by law.”
Microsoft's James J Allard (seen here with Bill Gates) is leaving the company, largely because of failed attempts to match Apple's iPod, iPhone and iPad.
Two of Microsoft’s highest-profile executives are leaving, and Apple’s running rings around the company is partly seen as the reason.
Robbie Bach and James J Allard, leaders of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division, are both leaving and will not be replaced. It is Microsoft’s biggest management shakeup in years. The restructuring will put CEO Steve Ballmer in direct charge of Microsoft’s consumer-focused mobile businesses, which are getting a kicking from Google, Nintendo and especially Apple. This transition is reminiscent ofwhen Bill Gates left Microsoft, which signified a turning point for the company’s leadership and direction.
In fact, Venture Beat’s Dean Takahashi, who wrote a pair of books about the Entertainment & Devices Division (Opening the Xbox and The Xbox 360 Uncloaked), says the inability to compete with Apple is behind the shakeup:
Allard’s last project at Microsoft was Courier, which Ballmer canceled earlier this year. It was viewed as an attempt to take on the Apple iPad. While Bach’s division is profitable now, it may be remembered for its inability to take on Apple in the increasingly critical mobile business. And that may explain why, any day now, Apple’s market capitalization is going to become bigger than Microsoft’s.
UPDATE: Horace Dediu has a good guess why Bach was fired: he lost Hewlett Packard when the company bought Palm. “Bach lost a key account; in fact, he could be responsible for having lost the biggest account that Microsoft ever had. Ballmer is a sales guy and he knows the importance of these relationships. A customer like HP must be managed carefully and their strategy must be steered to fit with yours. If HP felt they needed to go somewhere else for their mobile OS, it’s a slap in the face, but if they buy the asset and IP and internalize a competing platform, then that is a dagger to the heart for Ballmer.”
With every new Apple product comes a new advertising campaign, so it’s no surprise that Cupertino’s already casting for a new campaign centered on the next iPhone. Now Engadget has confirmed it with their sources.
According to Engadget, the next iPhone commercial will be directed by American Beauty director (and mawkish paper bag enthusiast) Sam Mendes will be helming the commercials for the next iPhone, which is being referred to as Mammoth / N90 internally… presumably to keep the actual name of the next iPhone (the only aspect of the device not yet revealed by leaks) underwraps until WWDC.
The spots will apparently heavily promote the next iPhone’s videoconferencing abilities, and one will featureg a mother and daughter having a video iChat call with one another.
Engadget also spotted some Twitter status updates from young actors bragging about their forthcoming auditions…. although I’m guessing after their indiscretion has been picked up by the newsfeeds, their chances of actually landing the roles are pretty slim.
Forget the escalating Apple – Google rivalry for a moment, the latest chapter in the war against Apple unfolds in New York: Yankee Stadium has banned iPads. Apparently their existing security restrictions prohibiting laptop computers extend to the new Handheld Wonder, leaving multitasking attendees all atwitter.
Good opportunity here for my hometown team (and legendary Yankee rival) Boston Red Sox to encourage iPads at Fenway Park, and create a custom app for enhancing the game day experience. With the Express Written Permission of Major League Baseball, of course…
What would you want to have on your iPad while watching the game?
Having long hated Apple’s Get a Mac campaign, I was surprised to find myself getting sentimental as I watched this three-minute tribute to the whole Mac vs. PC saga, as put together by OneMoreThing. Minimize Justin Long’s lugubrious smarm and what you’re left with is the core strength of the campaign anyway: John Hodgman’s consistently winsome and hysterical performance as the PC. That core strength, though, always seemed directly opposed to the message: PCs suck. It’s just so hard to hate PCs when their avatar is this awesome. Either way, it’s nice to see Hodgman get one last hurrah: this is a man who earned his paycheck for the last five years. Hurrah!
It looks like the final curtain has closed on Apple’s award-winning “Get a Mac” campaign launched in 2006.
Apple has pulled the ads from the company site, the page now redirects visitors to “Why You’ll Love a Mac.” (Nostalgics can still find them on YouTube, though.)
The last ones, released in October 2009, were surprisingly clever but Mac man Justin Long speculated in an interview last month that the ads had run their course:
What’s the status on those Apple commercials?
JL: You know, I think they might be done. In fact, I heard from John, I think they’re going to move on. I can’t say definitively, which is sad, because not only am I going to miss doing them, but also working with John. I’ve become very close with him, and he’s one of my dearest, greatest friends. It was so much fun to go do that job, because there’s not a lot to it for me. A lot of it is just keeping myself entertained between takes, and there’s no one I’d rather do it with than John.
Are you sad or glad to see them go? Which one was your favorite?
Think you already know all the new iPhone 4G will do? A tip-o-the-hat to Cult of Mac reader Mario Baluci, who wrote to tell us about this short rendering of the upcoming iPhone (or what it may look like) that he created as a promo for his Make Coffee iPhone app. Silly, but the video is nicely done.
Perhaps rev2 will control one of the webcam coffee machines still dripping away on the internet…
Over at 9to5Mac, Jordan Golson put together this simple but illuminating pie chart illustrating Apple’s revenue breakdown by category for Q2 2010.
It really just makes everything immediately clear about Apple’s business, does’t it? The Mac and OS X are also-rans now: Apple’s present and future is the iPhone OS, which accounts for almost as much revenue as Apple’s Mac and iPod units combined. Cupertino’s moving to a mobile future, not one defined by thirty-year old, desktop-oriented expectations.
I can’t wait to see Q3’s numbers. My guess is it’s going to contradict what Apple has been saying in its advertisements all along: the iPad isn’t the future of computing. It’s the present.
RetroMacCast listener newtonpoetry imagines what Apple’s website might have been circa 1983 and circa 1993. Love that beige menubar and those blazing system speeds!
RetroMacCast is a (mostly) weekly podcast about Apple’s Olde Beige Stuffe (and newer shiny items), always some topics of interest for classic Mac geeks.
I am all for the Federal government funding and deploying a robust and relentless antitrust division. I don’t wish to go into detail or name examples here and now, but I believe the emasculation of antitrust and restraint of trade investigation and prosecution over the past 30 years has meant a great disservice to the public and to the economy. If that arm of the Justice Department gets revived under Obama it will be a good thing for the country and for the world.
With respect to antitrust claims against Apple related to either the iPhone Developer’s Agreement or the iAds program I don’t think Apple has a thing to worry about.
Apple has settled claims with state regulators who allege the company mishandled electronic waste. Photo: Thomas Dohmke
Federal antritrust regulators are taking a keen interest in changes Apple made to its iPhone developers agreement, the Wall Street Journal and Reuters are reporting.
Steve Jobs is at it again — emailing Apple customers with answers to their questions.
This one was sent to CultofMac.com by reader Paul Greenberg, who asked Jobs about a missing MobileMe feature that’s been bugging him for three years: the inability to sync notes via MobileMe.
Reversing their long-embraced policy of buying other companies rarely, Apple’s been on a shopping spree the past six months with the acquisition of Quattro Wireless, Lala, Intrinsity and Siri. What’s behind it?
Bloomberg has an interesting overview of Apple’s evolving acquisition strategy. What it comes down to, at the end of the day? Staying ahead of Google in the mobile space.
According to analyst Brian Marshall, Apple “learned a good lesson with AdMob.” Apple let the acquisition process linger too long, allowing Google to outbid them. Instead, they had to settle for “second-fiddle Quattro.”
I just noticed something about surfing the web on an iPad. Here’s a hint: look at the red circle in the New York Times screenshot above.
It was hard to spot because it’s actually noticing something that’s not there: the blue Legos where the Flash plugin should be.
In January, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, he wasn’t able to load the NYT‘s front-page videos (remember the Lego bricks visible during his debut event?) The absence of Flash seemed like a major problem. Video, games, rich-media — none of these would work, pundits said, and the iPad would be a crippled device.
But that hasn’t proven to be the case. Not at all. During the past month I’ve been using the iPad, I’ve rarely encountered problems with the lack of Flash. All the sites I visit regularly – the BBC, NYT and Wall Street Journal — all of them have quickly made video and rich-media available in iPad-friendly formats.
YouTube is especially iPad-friendly. I’ve yet to encounter a YouTube video the iPad wouldn’t play. And because so many sites use YouTube to embed video, it seems like a lot of the web is iPad-friendly.
The only problems is streaming music from MixRiot (which I use a lot but isn’t exactly mainstream) and playing Farmville and thousands of other Flash games. But given how much time I waste fertilizing my kids’ crops and sending them gifts, that’s actually a blessing.
And it’s only going to get worse for Flash. Look at the chart below from Encoding.com, which does a lot of video encoding for sites like MTV and MySpace. In the last four quarters, Flash video (represented by FLV and Flash VP6) dropped from 69 percent to only 26 percent of all videos. Meanwhile, the H.264 format went from 31 percent to 66 percent, and is now the most popular format by a long shot.
Here’s a couple of screenshots from the iPad’s YouTube app showing the dramatic difference in quality between Wi-Fi and 3G.
The screenshot above is from video streaming over WiFi. And below is the same YouTube video playing over 3G.
I paused the video before taking the screenshots and tried to take them at about the same point.
The difference is clear. Over Wi-Fi, video quality is near high-def. Over 3G, it looks like a bad QuickTime movie from the mid-1990s.
Of course, this isn’t new — it’s just much more noticeable on the iPad’s big beautiful screen. This has been the case on the iPhone for some time, but on the smaller screen, the difference in quality isn’t as dramatic.
UPDATE: As our friend Chris Foresman of Ars Technica fame points out in the comments, 3G tops out at a paltry 64Kbps. ” It looks like crap on the iPhone,” says Chris, “so it shouldn’t be a surprise that it looks like crap 4x as big?”
Foresman says the 64Kbps number isn’t generally known, but is reported in Apple’s developer docs. AT&T had said there would be a limit, but didn’t say what it was.
64Kbps is pathetic for 3G. According to the International Telecommunication Union standards body, 3G specifies a minimum data rate of 144Kbps in high-mobility (vehicular) applications, 384Kbps for pedestrian applications, and 2Mbps (that megabits per second) for indoor (stationary) applications.
The honeymoon is over. I’ve discovered my first major disappointment with the iPad 3G, and I’ve only just started playing with it. Video over 3G on the iPad totally and utterly sucks.
The picture is noticeably downgraded on a 3G connection. The built-in YouTube app delivers video that’s very low-res compared to the video it delivers on a Wi-Fi connection. It’s barely watcheable.
And apps like the ABC app and Netflix won’t work on 3G at all. They both The ABC app launches a pop up that says: “Please connect to a Wi-Fi network to use this application. Cellular networks are not supported at this time.”
It may be better to get a Wi-Fi only iPad and invest in a MiFi, which appears to work flawlessly for delivering high-def video, according to reader reports on iLounge.
UPDATE: My mistake. Netflix does work over 3G. The video quality is clearly lower resolution however.
Here’s a couple of screenshots showing the difference:
MuscleNerd used the “Spirit” jailbreak, an software tool that promises untethered unlocking of Apple’s recent devices (iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch 3G, and iPads). The Dev Team has promised to release Spirit to the public soon. In preparation, be sure to backup your SHSH Blobs. You can find a step-by-step guide from Redmond Pie here.
Here is MuscleNerd’s video showing Cydia running on an iPad 3G.
The first thing you’ll want to do on your brand new iPad 3G is sign up for a data plan. It’s pretty easy, and you can do it right on the iPad. It’s basically half-a-dozen finger taps (except for typing in your credit card number of course).
Cupertino’s already got a history of stepping down on app developers who use Apple’s own app icons in their software, so clearly they are protective of their assets, but now words comes that Apple has filed trademark motions on a number of its official app icons.
None of them are new, so there’s no forthcoming features of future devices to spy here. Each icon is marked by a description as well as a list of colors, and an image of each app icon has been submitted in the huge size of 1000×1000 pixels, which means that Apple shouldn’t have to re-render any of them for the next decade to come.
When Apple acquired music streaming service Lala year, almost everyone assumed that iTunes’ tenth iteration would find Apple’s music syncing software re-envisioned as a service which allowed users to stream their tunes from anywhere without actually having their musics locally stored.
That’s still a safe bet , especially as Apple phases out their older iPod models and shrinks down the footprint of 3G SIM cards to be installable in even the smallest chassis. But it did raise a question: would existing Lala customers be left high and dry by the Apple buyout?
No, as it turns out. While Lala has just announced that their service will be shutting down on May 31st for good, with no new users accepted. Lala’s going the extra mile by converting any money spent on streaming music into iTunes credit. That counts even if you have unused Lala credit. How generous.
It was a Brian J. Hogan, a 21-year-old resident of Redwood City, California, who found Apple’s iPhone in a bar, according to Wired.com.
He now regrets not trying harder to contact Apple, and sold the phone to Gizmodo because they told him “there was nothing wrong in sharing the phone with the tech press,” according to a statetment provided by his attorney to Wired.com.
Hogan has been interviewed by law enforcement investigators but has not been charged with a crime. His attorney says he is willing to cooperate with authorities…
… The person who found the phone “is very definitely one of the people who is being looked at as a suspect in theft,” San Mateo County Chief Deputy District Attorney Stephen Wagstaffe told Wired.com Wednesday. “Assuming there’s ultimately a crime here. That’s what we’re still gauging, is this a crime, is it a theft?”
… A friend of Hogan’s then offered to call Apple Care on Hogan’s behalf, according to Hogan’s lawyer. That apparently was the extent of Hogan’s efforts to return the phone.
Today, Patently Apple revealed a whole slew of new multi-touch gestures that Apple might introduce in new products and software updates, most of which are detailed in the image above… which, incidentally, looks like the pictogram instruction set for the secret high five that was in vogue my senior year in high school, and which I could never pull off without the tendons in my wrist rolling up like a window shade.
Patently Apple’s post also indicates a neat new iPod technology which is unrelated, but plenty cool: automatic adjustment of music tempo based on your performance. For example, if you’re flagging on the hill, the tempo increases, while if your heart is about to explode, it slows on down. Looks like a smart evolution of Apple’s current Nike partnership to me.
John Stewart on The Daily Show rips Apple a new one for going Big Brother on Gizmodo:
“Apple – you guys were the rebels, man, the underdogs. People believed in you. But now, are you becoming the man? Remember back in 1984, you had those awesome ads about overthrowing Big Brother? Look in the mirror, man! …It wasn’t supposed to be this way – Microsoft was supposed to be the evil one! But you guys are busting down doors in Palo Alto while Commandant Gates is ridding the world of mosquitoes! What the fuck is going on?!
…I know that it is slightly agitating that a blog dedicated to technology published all that stuff about your new phone. And you didn’t order the police to bust down the doors, right? I’d be pissed too, but you didn’t have to go all Minority Report on his ass! I mean, if you wanna break down someone’s door, why don’t you start with AT&T, for God sakes? They make your amazing phone unusable as a phone! I mean, seriously! How do you drop four calls in a one-mile stretch of the West Side Highway! There’re no buildings around! What, does the open space confuse AT&T’s signal?!
…Come on, Steve. Chill out with the paranoid corporate genius stuff. Don’t go all Howard Hughes on us.”
