Apple - page 33

Why is there no Adobe Flash on the iPad? Adobe says it’s not because it’s buggy, as an Apple source claimed this afternoon to CultofMac.com.

It’s because Apple is protecting revenue streams derived from content like movies and games. If users could watch free TV shows on Hulu, they wouldn’t buy them through iTunes.

“It’s pretty clear if you connect the dots: the issue is about revenue,” says Adrian Ludwig, an Adobe group product manager for Flash, during a telephone interview on Friday afternoon.

UPDATE: Adobe says Flash is not buggy and that Apple is protecting revenue streams from content like movies and games.

Flash will not be coming to the iPad — not now, not ever — says a source inside Apple who is part of the iPad development team.

Instead, Apple will rely on HTML 5 and CSS to play rich media, such as YouTube videos, on the web.

“Flash is too buggy and will crash the whole device,” says the Apple source. “Apple’s done no deal with Adobe.”

Adobe is so bothered by Apple excluding Flash from the iPad, it put porn up on its blog to prove the point.

Abobe’s official Flash Blog has a post entitled “The iPad provides the ultimate browsing experience?” which shows how several popular websites would look without Flash content. Right at the top is a screenshot of Bang Bros HD, a hardcore porn site.

As you can see, an iPad without Flash is going to be pretty much useless for HD porn.

“Millions of websites use Flash,” the blog post says. “Get used to the blue Legos.”

UPDATE: We checked, and there’s an MP4-based version of Bang Bros, which works fine on the iPad as is. So even Adobe’s most desperate tactic isn’t true.

Guest commentary by David Barnard, owner of App Cubby, publisher of the popular Gas Cubby and Trip Cubby apps.

Much has been written about all the iPad surprises, disappointments, features, missing features, hype, expectations, future, etc. adnauseam. But not much has been written about what the iPad says about Apple. I’m excited about the iPad because of the many ways it demonstrates that Apple just gets it.

Palm almost gets it, Microsoft may be on it’s way to getting it with the Zune platform, Blackberry doesn’t have to get it, and Google just doesn’t get it.

What’s this “it” I’m referring to? Humans.

“Stop, hey, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.”

— For What It’s Worth, Stephen Stills

That sound, the one emanating Wednesday from the stage at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and reverberating throughout the blogosphere and interwebs, the one heard in literally millions of conversations at lunch counters and water coolers and dinner tables across the globe, was the sound of another ding in the universe.

Once all the snickering about feminine hygiene finally dies down, once Apple finally puts the iPad into the retail chain that saw 50,000,000 people walk through the doors in the most recent fiscal quarter, once people — aside from jaded technology journalists and geekazoids — get the iPad in their hands, Apple’s description of it as a “magical and revolutionary” product will begin to come into focus.

Why?

Who knew Hitler was such a geek?

Apple has posted video of Steve Jobs unveiling the iPad. It’s available in QuickTime and MPEG-4 formats — Low, Medium, or High.

The presentation is also available as a podcast through iTunes. Here’s the iTunes link.

The backlash against the iPad was inevitable and predictable. The lack of a hard keyboard was enough to send most geeks into a fit. But the backlash against the iPad is particularly vicious and visceral.

The word “iTampon” is the #2 worldwide trending topic on Twitter right now.

“This thing sucks. Anyone who buys it is a moron,” says one commenter at Engadget.

Some sites, particularly Gizmodo, are going the extra mile in iPad-bashing.

“My god, am I underwhelmed by the iPad,” says Gizmodo’s Adam Frucci. “This is as inessential a product as I’ve ever seen, but beyond that, it has some absolutely backbreaking failures that will make me judge anyone who buys one.”

But similar reactions greeted the iPhone, the iPod and the original iMac (no keypad, closed system, no floppy), and look what happened to them. They’re just the most popular smartphone, MP3 player and single model of a PC ever built.

Thing is, the last people to ask about the iPad are geeks. This isn’t a product built for them. They’re WAY too in the weeds. They can’t get over the lack of camera, multasking or Flash. But ask my wife about the iPad and Flash and she’ll look at you like you’re speaking in tongues.

As we predicted, the iPad is Steve Jobs’ “computer for the rest of us.” It’s a natural successor to the original Mac, which introduced the GUI to PCs – and was derided by geeks as a “toy.” But look around, the GUI kinda caught on.

The iPad is not for geeks. It’s for ordinary people who want a lightweight computer and are sick of computer headaches. This is a machine you’d buy for your grandmother and not have to worry about tech-support.

Yeah, you relinquish some control — which is something PC fans have always hated about Macs — but most ordinary people are grateful not to think about file systems, software installers and virus definitions.

The iPad is the first computer for people who are completely computer illiterate — and there’s millions of them.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGiUoXB6IV4&feature=player_embedded

Jonny Ive is on top form in this iPad introductory video from Apple.

“It’s true,” he starts the video by saying. “When something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical. And that’s exactly what the iPad is.”

BTW: There’s a higher res version on Apple’s homepage, but it’s taking a while to load.

A lot of people following the Steve Jobs iPad keynote this morning weren’t convinced about the device until he mentioned the price: $499.

All of sudden, people wanted to buy three of them.

The price is the big news here. Everyone was expecting it to cost $700 to $1,000 — Apple makes pricey products, right?

But there’s no “Apple tax” on the iPad. This thing is priced to move, and they’re going to sell boatloads of them. And not just to Apple fans — the iPad will attract scores of Windows switchers.

Go to any Apple store and you’ll see heaving throngs of shoppers checking out Apple’s goods. A lot of them are Windows users shopping for a new home machine to replace an aging Windows box. They’re sick of the headaches and want an alternative.

The iPad is that alternative. It’s not an extra gadget, a luxury for someone who already has an iPhone and a laptop. It’s a replacement for that laptop — a true alternative.

And at $499, it’s also an alternative to the Kindle, cheapo netbooks and even Apple’s own MacBooks.

The iPad+ keyboard dock = cheap MacBook. It’s half the price of Apple’s cheapest MacBook, and a third of the MacBook Air.

Steve Jobs is a ballsy guy. He’s probably the ballsiest CEO in the U.S. right now. Who else would undercut their own laptop line — which are Apple’s most popular and most profitable computers — with a brand new device that costs half the price?

But this is how Jobs rolls. He killed the popular iPod Mini and replaced it with the iPod Nano. He’s undercutting the entire iPod line with the iPod Touch. He’s a forward-looking guy, and the iPad is a forward-looking computer.

[polldaddy poll=”2603845″]

Prices for the new device: 32GB for $599 and 64GB for $699 (Wi-Fi only version),
Shell out an extra $130 for 3G-capable models — so $629, $729 and $829.

Is the price right? Is the iPad a must-have or wait-and-see device?

Apple introduced a whole new category of mobile device today with the iPad and in so doing has opened new vistas for software development that could eclipse the iPhone App Store’s 140 thousand titles in short order.

Not suprisingly, Apple VP Scott Forstall waxed giddily about the fact that iPhone apps will run on the iPad straight away, saying, “We built the iPad to run virtually every one of these apps unmodified right out of the box. We can do that in two ways — do it with pixel for pixel accuracy in a black box, or we can pixel-double and run them in full-screen. This is really cool.”

But the presentation also showed how developers have a new palette with the iPad’s display that broadens the development horizons quite a bit.

“If the developer takes the time, they can also take full advantage of the large touchscreen display in the iPad. We did that with our own internal apps, and we expect developers will want to do that too,” Forstall noted.

The new SDK is available today and includes all the tools developers need to create custom apps for the iPad.

It’s been 50 minutes into the event and There’s no sign of multi-tasking. To switch between apps, all they are doing is simply closing the current and opening a new – no ProSwitcher like card management. This is definitely going to be a deal breaker for the most who are planning to trade their netbook for this device.

Also, the screen’s got some good real-estate, seems like 2x the resolution of the iPhone. However,

Of all the people in the world, you’d think Cultofmac.com readers would go bonkers for the iPad. But judging from Twitter reactions, they’re not sold — and Steve hasn’t even mentioned the price yet!

Here’s some of the feedback tweets we’re getting:

@cultofmac Just a big iPhone, nothing special just yet.

@cultofmac i’m not sold. I mean why get this if you have an iphone or mac or both????

@cultofmac: It has huge borders!!! and i hoped to see usb conectors for the #ipad

Steve Jobs just took the stage at Apple’s special media event.

“We want to kick off 2010 by introducing a truly magical and revolutionary new product,” he said.

Jobs looks pretty thin but his voice is a lot stronger than October, when he last appeared in public. He looks a lot better, in fact.

Engadget has just published another picture of the tablet prototype, which clearly shows a forward-facing camera. Earlier rumors, which weren’t very plausible, said the tablet wouldn’t have a camera.

The latest spy shot (if it’s real) also clearly shows the size. That’s an iPhone in the corner, and by the looks of it, the tablet’s screen is larger than 10-inches. (The iPhone may also be a prototype: it has a black bezel, like the tablet).

The tablet’s bezel looks pretty deep. Not one of the myriad mockups floating around the internet envisioned such a beefy bezel.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JXRy8hO8g0&feature=player_embedded

One of the things that’s easy to forget before every big Apple event is that even the vast majority of Apple employees, including people organizing the event, don’t know what Steve Jobs is going to unveil.

This Bloomberg interview with former Apple Senior Systems Engineer Edward Eigerman describes exactly what it’s like to go to an Apple event as an employee without having any more clue than the rest of us what the company has planned.

It’s definitely an interesting watch: Eigerman describes his own experience being a senior executive at Apple and literally having no knowledge of what the iPod would be like up to ninety minutes before it was announced. He says that internally, Apple employees are just as excited about product launches as the rest of us, and follow all the same rumor sites.

But there’s a more negative side to the internal secrecy: Eigerman claims that paranoia is common within Apple, since people worry they might “know too much” about products they aren’t meant to know about.

Eigerman’s an interesting mouth piece for this, since by his own admission, he was fired by Apple for accidentally giving an Apple client a piece of software a week before release. “If Apple finds out” you’re violating their intellectual property policies, intentionally or not, Eigerman says “there’s no turning back.”

[via 9to5Mac]

Everyone’s getting very excited by these Engadget pictures, which purport to show a prototype of Apple’s tablet. Says Engadget:

“It’s big — really big — and it’s running what clearly looks like an iPhone app, although we’ve never seen an iPhone app with that interface or at that resolution before. We also see a WiFi icon and a cell service indicator, although tragically there’s no carrier listed.”

But color us skeptical. The pictures appear to have been sent in anonymously (“Okay, we obviously can’t confirm this…” the post starts). And trying to explain the bolts around the edge, Engadget suggests it has been bolted to the table. Bolted to the table? WTF? Why would it be bolted to a table?

And what’s going on in the picture below, in the bottom left corner of the screen? It looks like the screen is transparent, and its showing a support of some kind underneath. Or is it a reflection? Perhaps it is an Apple prototype, but a tabletop system, like Microsoft’s Surface table?

In the picture below, at the bottom of the screen, is the reflection of what looks like a utility pole (with transmission wires running left to right) and the image of the photographer, who has been whited out.

So the picture was taken outside (in the U.S. Virgin Islands perhaps?), while the picture above looks like an indoor shot. The tablet seems to be sitting on a tabletop, with white wires running underneath — perhaps the AC charger and headphones. Note the Home button sitting right in the middle of the shortest edge, plus the recessed screen. It looks to be the same size and shape as a tea tray.

The bolts around the edge are reminiscent of the bolts used in the stairs at Apple’s stores, and the pivot arm of the old G4 iMac. However, it seems unlikely that Steve Jobs and Jonny Ive would leave bolts exposed in the final design.

Still, after being initially highly skeptical of these pictures, they’re now starting to look more real. What are the blacked out labels though?

Publishing mogul Terry MrGraw of McGraw-Hill says Apple’s tablet is based on the iPhone OS, not OS X as many fans are hoping.

In an interview with CNBC, McGraw-Hill’s CEO said his company has been working with Apple for “quite a while” and has prepped 95% of its textbooks for the tablet, which will be a hit in the higher education market.

When asked about by the anchor about the Apple tablet, McGraw said:

“Yeah, Very exciting. Yes, they’ll make their announcement tomorrow on this one. We have worked with Apple for quite a while, and the tablet is going to be based on the iPhone operating system and so it will be transferable… We have a consortium of e-books. And we have 95% of all our materials that are in e-book format. So now with the tablet you’re going to open up the higher education market, the professional market. The tablet is going to be just really terrific.”

Frrm his tone, it sounds like McGraw has seen the tablet — or a prototype. Watch the video above: he sounds very confident about the operating system. As previously reported, the iPhone OS is the logical choice for the tablet.

Via MacRumors.

Although Guy Day is, as pictured, about as far away from the har- boozing, womanizing, red-meat-eating Don Draper type as a 70s-style pompadour will get you, he was one of the country’s quintessential ad men for decades.

Everyone reading this blog knows his work: as the president of the acclaimed Chiat / Day advertising agency, Day was responsible for bringing together the team that created the hyper-Orwellian 1984 Super Bowl Macintosh ad.

Sadly, the Los Angeles Times is reporting that Day on Saturday, died in his sleep of natural causes. The timing is particularly depressing: a self-described “life-long agency ad man” who revolutionized Apple’s advertising strategies, Day, of all people, would be delighted by the marketing possibilities of the forthcoming Tablet.

Rest in peace, Mr. Day. You’ll always be remembered by this Mac fan for your art and for your work.

Our old friend Farhad Manjoo has an insightful piece on Slate explaining why he hopes Apple’s tablet will be like a toaster.

Farhad hopes the tablet will have an iPhone-like operating system (as we’ve mentioned here before) that offers a somewhat restricted, locked down computing experience like the iPhone. That is, he hopes Apple has removed all the complexity of using and maintaining a traditional personal computer.

“The most revolutionary thing about Apple’s phone wasn’t its sleek case or the multitouch gestures, but the artful way in which it hid nearly every bit of complexity behind a display of easy-to-understand icons. The iPhone contains no visible “directory structure.” Your music is not in a particular place on your phone; it’s just on your phone, and you get to it by launching the music player. Other than charging it, the iPhone requires no maintenance. Backups and OS upgrades occur automatically, and because all programs are approved by Apple (and because even third-party programmers aren’t given deep access to the phone), you never have to worry about malware. And look how easy it is to install a program: Choose one from the store, press “Install,” and type in your password to authorize the purchase—and that’s it. The iPhone doesn’t ask you where you want to put the new program, or how you’d like to launch it, and whether you’d like it to be the default program for doing a particular kind of task. It just puts up a little icon on the screen. To run the program, click the icon. To do something else, hit the home button.”

I think Farhad has put his finger on the most important feature of the tablet. It’s not designed for nerds, like traditional PCs (even the Mac) but for ordinary consumers who have no interest whatsoever in learning how to use a computer.

If you can get your noodle around it, it’s an astonishing thought. Steve Jobs is attempting to reinvent computing again, but to do it right this time.

The tablet will usher in a new era of consumer-level computing that will be utterly different to computing in the past. Instead of mice and keyboards, there’ll be a new generation of software designed for fingers and voice. It’ll be a lot easier to use (see all those videos of toddlers using iPhones), and a lot easier to maintain. Thanks to Apple’s controls over app installation, it’ll be largely free of the viruses, driver issues and tech-support headaches of traditional PCs. Of course, we’ll sacrifice some freedom to tinker for all this — but who cares? (Our own Leigh McMullen for one. See his “My Tablet Won’t be Running any Silly Phone OS.”)

No wonder Steve Jobs is so excited about the tablet. All the way back to the Apple II in the late 1970s, his earliest ambition was always to make computers accessible to mere mortals — to make the computers “for the rest of us.” It’s the realization of his earliest dreams.

Here’s some pictures I snapped of Apple’s preparations for the iSlablet press event.

The event starts at 10AM on Wednesday January 27th at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The Yerba Buena Center is near the Moscone Center –the location for many years of the annual Macworld Expo — and is Steve Jobs’ preferred venue for major product launches.

When I went down there at about 4PM, crews were finishing hanging a large banner over the front of the Arts Center. The banner reflects the splattered paint motif of invites Apple sent out last week inviting journalists to check out the company’s “latest creation.”

The latest creation is, of course, expected to be a new multitouch tablet.

Fantastic interview by Doug Evans and Alan Pottasch with Steve Jobs from 1993 about Paul Rand, widely regarded as one of the greatest corporate identity designers ever (think IBM, UPS, ABC). Rand designed the logo for NeXT (below), which very quickly helped to build the company’s brand without a massive ad campaign.

Seeing Jobs talk about someone more self-driven and fanatical about excellence than himself is always fun. And it includes an amazing quote: “I’ll solve your problem. You pay me.”

Via Darren Geraghty