Apple - page 35

Computing legend and former Apple Fellow Alan Kay has kindly written a detailed note explaining a comment he made at CES, facetiously reported here. Looking for a newsy nugget from Kay’s complex talk, I was trying to make a joke about something profound being revealed at the CES gadget orgy. (“We all thought it was pretty funny too,” said Kay in a separate email).

Kay’s note explains a comment he made about the logical expression NOT BOTH underlying all human thinking.

“What I said was that all human symbol/logical REPRESENTATION systems and all computers past present and future can be made from NOT BOTH,” Kay says.

Kay’s full, fascinating email after the jump.

As equally tenuous a confirmation of last week’s Wall Street Journal report that the Apple Tablet’s enclosure would be made of a very Mac-conventional material indeed, this Reuters report, which says that the Apple Tablet will be a brushed aluminum unibody affair, and ship in Q2 of 2010.

I don’t even know where to begin on this one. Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, the former Apple hardware SVP who oversaw the creation of the iMac and generations worth of iPods (and, it goes without saying, dozens of early prototypes of the iPhone, given that he left Apple only a year before its release), claimed during an interview at CES that he has “never even used an iPhone.”

Now, whether or not this was a true statement (interviewer Kara Swisher didn’t believe him, and I’m mostly in her camp), it’s certainly not a terribly smart one. If he’s telling the truth, it means he’s never used the top-selling phone in the U.S. market, a device that has turned the global mobile market on its head and dramatically threatened traditional powers like Motorola and Nokia and, well, Palm. It’s kind of hard to beat what you’ve never tried.

If Rubinstein is lying, it’s almost worse, a passive-aggressive attempt at point-scoring that belies a grudge with his former employer that could get in the way of beating them. All in all, it’s just one of those moments that really makes you appreciate how effortlessly Steve Jobs belittles competitor products — he can actually make you believe he would never use anything but Apple because they’re that much better. When Rubinstein tries to be as dismissive in the other direction, he just sounds bitter.

Once the most bitter opponents of Cupertino’s allegedly wasteful and polluting ways, environmental advocacy group Greenpeace has awarded Cupertino a four-star rating in their latest environmental survey.

Still, it doesn’t seem like Apple has done all that much to earn the applause. In fact, Apple only gained 0.2 points from its previous 4.9 environmental rating. That said, most of the other companies surveyed by Greenpeace, including Samsung, Sharp and Sony, fell in their rankings this month, automatically elevating Apple to the number five spot.

Greenpeace isn’t entirely happy with Apple: though they applaud Cupertino for eliminating hazardous substances in their product line while other companies make empty promises, they feel that Apple’s re-designed environmental section of their website is actually less informative than it used to be.

Still, it’s nice to see one of Apple’s most vocal and implacable critics recognize the great work Apple has done over the last couple of years in making their products as environmentally friendly as possible.

LAS VEGAS — Peter Sisson is the CEO of Toktumi, a San Francisco company with a cool app that adds a second phone number to your iPhone. He kinda looks like Roger Sterling, the silver-haired, hard-drinking, hard smoking character from Mad Men.

Except Peter isn’t smoking, and he isn’t drinking. But he’s certainly got the same moxie. Sisson borrowed someone’s badge to gain entrance to an exclusive, invite-only CES event so that he could pitch a new version of his iPhone app to some of the hundreds of press in attendance. I’m glad he did, because it’s a doozie.

UPDATE: My apologies, this story is incorrect. I followed up with Buffalo Technologies, who now say Apple had only an advisory role in the inclusion of Firewire. The decision was not an Apple mandate, and not all portable drives sold in the Apple Store have Firewire as well as USB, as readers have noted. In an email, Buffalo’s Brian Verenkoff says:

“Apple never insisted we do anything, nor can they force any company to do something they don’t want to. Obviously given the nature of this product, we designed it for the iPod/iPhone user base and did have ongoing dialog with Apple to make sure we developed a product that was compatible with their store and their customers. At the end of the day, every decision was made by Buffalo as to the product features.”

LAS VEGAS – Here’s something I bet you didn’t know. Every portable hard drive sold in Apple’s retail stores must include a Firewire port.

I found this out while getting a demo of Buffalo Technology’s Dualie, a combination iPhone/iPod dock and 500-Gbyte dockable hard drive.

Here’s a good idea for virally marketing apps that Apple should think about — wirelessly beaming apps to other iPhones like the Zune’s music sharing feature.

Microsoft’s Zune is mostly a me-too product, but it’s one great feature is being able to lend music to friends Zune-to-Zune via Wi-Fi. Shared tracks can be played three times, after which they must be purchased from the Zune marketplace. It’s a great idea but tragically underused because there are so few Zunes out there.

LAS VEGAS — It was too early for most hungover CES attendees, but the brilliant computer scientist and former Apple Fellow Alan Kay explained the basis of all knowledge at a 9AM keynote speech here.

Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer offered a very brief glimpse of Hewlett-Packard’s upcoming tablet during his pre-CES keynote on Wednesday night. An appearance by the HP tablet was the most-anticipated part of his keynote because the device will likely go head-to-head with Apple’s upcoming slate, if and when it is released.

Although it was on stage at the Las Vegas Hilton for only a couple of minutes, the HP Tablet looks thin and polished — hardware wise anyway. Ballmer showed it running Windows 7 and Amazon’s Kindle for the PC software.

“You can flip through pages with your finger,” he said, flipping through pages with his finger. “And you can buy content from Amazon right within the app.”

He then proceeded to show a video running on the tablet, but was briefly frustrated when he couldn’t hit the tiny buttons on screen with his fingers. “Ooops,” he said after trying a couple of times. He eventually got it to play. Microsoft hasn’t yet optimized the tablet’s UI for big chubby fingers.

He didn’t mention the tablet’s name, pricing or ship date. He simply said, “It’s a beautiful little product” and it will be shipping “later this year.”

It appears to have a 10-inch screen and is very thin. It has no visible buttons on the top surface. The HP tablet will be one of the major products from a big-name manufacturer to compete with Apple’s device, which will likely be unveiled at a special media event in San Francisco on January 27.

While it probably won’t encompass a 3D interface, there’s been enough background murmurings about the method users will employ to interact with Apple’s forthcoming tablet to expect something new. What that “new” is? Only Apple knows… but if our tipster is right, whatever the Tablet’s UI is, it’s going to be different enough from OS X or the iPhone OS to require a significant learning curve.

According to reader Tom: “I just heard [to] be ready for a steep learning curve regarding the “new” Apple product about to be released [and its] interface. This person is an employee of Apple and had just had a meeting regarding some of the new things coming. He/She would not go into details, but did say that he/she hoped we liked learning.”

LAS VEGAS — The first piece of hardware to take advantage of the iPhone 3.0 OS’s much-heralded hardware interface has finally surfaced at CES. And of all things, it’s a speaker clock from Sharper Image.

LAS VEGAS — Ed Curran is a reporter for WBBM-TV in Chicago, and he’s shooting CES using an iPhone.

LAS VEGAS — The biggest electronics show in America —  the Consumer Electronics Show (or CES for short) — opens later this week in Las Vegas, but several companies paid big bucks to preview their new wares to the hundreds of journalists at a special preview event on Tuesday evening.

And there, in the middle of the room, was this bright-red Apple TV. Yeah, a high-def, flat-panel TV shaped like an Apple. The question is, what idiot would buy a TV shaped like an Apple?

“It’s unique, it’s fun, it’s apples,” said the flak unhelpfully.

Made by an unknown-to-me Chinese company, Hannspree, perhaps someone thought it might be mistaken for a real Apple TV, made by, you know, Apple? It has a remarkably Apple-like logo on the front (see the pic after the jump). And it does remind you of the old toilet-seat iBooks of old; the transluscent plastic ones with the carrying handle.

But the company was also displaying TVs covered in fur that looked like Polar and Panda bears, so who knows?

According to Kara Swisher of All Things D, Apple is on the cusp of buying mobile ad company Quattro for $275 million.

No surprise here: Apple was just outbid on mobile ad company Admob by Google for $750 million. Apple is obviously interested in entering the mobile advertising space.

Optimistically, that’s because they recognize that owning the ad network that power all of their App Store apps would make them a killing… although given how poorly the App Store is maintained, one wonders if Apple has the customer service chops to run their own advertising network.

Pessimistically? Apple’s been flirting with some alarming patents for mandatory advertising within OS X. It’s hard to believe they’d go that route, but just the existence of such patents is enough to cause you to arch your eyebrow when Cupertino drops $300 million for an advertising company.

Apple’s January 27th surprise product announcement will see the introduction of the tablet, the iPhone OS 4.0 and an associated Software Development Kit for programmers, the French site Mac4Ever reports.

According to the Mac4Ever (Google translation), the SDK will include a tablet “simulator” to help developers port their iPhone/iPt apps to the tablet’s larger screen.

Several of our sources give us two pieces of information concerning the famous Apple tablet: In late January, in addition to its tablet, Cupertino should have a beta of iPhone OS 4, accompanied by an SDK. Our informants also tell us of a “simulator” specifically adapted for the tablet. Evidently, the major novelty of the SDK therefore concerns the interface, making it easier for developers to adapt to different screen resolutions. The new iPhone could also benefit from a higher pixel density.

Mac4Ever notes that the information should be taken with a grain of salt. But the site recently nailed details of Apple’s new iMac models and Mighty Mouse weeks before they were released.

Mac4Ever also recently claimed that the tablet will be “far different” than most internet mockups, a tantalizing tidbit bolstered by a NYT report that we will be “very surprised how you interact with the new tablet.”

Confirming the rumors, Apple will make a “major” product announcement on Wednesday Jan. 27, reports John Paczkowski of All Things Digital website.

Paczkowski says “it’s going to be a big deal.”

Sources in a position to know tell me Apple (AAPL) is indeed planning a media event later this month at which it will announce a major new product. The gathering is to be held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, a space Apple often uses for media events like these. According to other sources, it will occur on Wednesday Jan. 27, not Tuesday Jan. 26, as had been rumored.

No definitive word on what that product is, but I think we all have a pretty good idea of what to expect.”

As previously noted, the Yerba Buena gardens has no events booked for Jan 25, 26 or 27. Holding a product announcement on a Wednesday is unusual for Apple. The company usually prefers Tuesdays for announcements.

Major Apple Product Announcement Set for Weds. Jan. 27.

With more and more consumers consumers cleaving themselves from the fetid macro-organism of biomassed holiday shopping flesh and doing all of their Christmas shopping online, online customers satisfaction polls are more important than ever. No surprise, though, at the latest polls, courtesy of ForeSee Results: Apple’s simple, pleasant and spartan store did well in consumer’s lists of the best online shopping experience of 2009.

Surveying more than 10,000 visitors to the top forty retail web sites, Apple ranked 82% in customer satisfaction, which is four percentage points higher than their 2008 ranking. Following in Apple’s wake was Newegg.com (8!5), TigerDirect.com (80%), Dell.com (78%), HP (79%) and Circuit City (73%).

That’s not to say that Apple totally destroyed the competition, though. Amazon.com, which is still about the best online shopping experience around, rubbed Apple’s nose in its mess with an astonishing 87% customer satisfaction rating. The reliably stalwart Netflx also did well at 86%, although not being a home television shopper myself, I’m a bit mystified by QVC.com’s impressive 83% rating.

[via ComputerWorld]

Having wrapped up the fairly well-thought-out and fairly grounded predictions for 2010, we thought it would be a good idea to try to take a look further in to the future of Apple. Now, before you proceed, you should be aware that looking beyond a one-year outlook is notoriously difficult. After all, at this point 10 years ago, Apple was more than a year away from shipping iTunes software, let alone making iPods and disrupting the mobile phone industry. So you should be aware that I refuse to stand by any of these five predictions over the long haul and expect to be wrong. With that, let’s take a look into the far future. All the way past the year 2000.

In the Year 2012, Apple Will Buy Both Yahoo! and TBWA/Chiat Day, Simultaneous Entering Both the Internet Services and Ad Industries at the Same Time. I actually don’t think this one’s insane. Yahoo! continues to struggle against Google, the ad industry is in need of grounds-up reinvention, and Apple has more cash on hand than pretty much anyone else. At this point, Steve Jobs is running out of challenges in both Apple’s existing and immediately adjacent businesses. To cement his reputation as the best CEO of the next decade, he should create a juggernaut capable of challenging Google.

Apple has a ridiculously good run over the past ten years. But in true Apple fashion, I’m not here to rest on the laurels of the past but to look into the future. So sit back, relax, and take a daring look all the way into the year 2010. Here are the five things that Apple must do to thrive in 2010.

Many — if not most — people await the future, some with great anticipation, others with more anxiety. But designers are a breed apart. Designers create the future today.

Yanko Design’s brilliant 2009 design retrospective showcases the web magazine’s passion for modern industrial design and original ideas. The feature highlights a number of talented, undiscovered designers, a few of whom chose Apple products and other computer technology ideas as jumping off points for products we’d not be surprised to see in production one day soon.

Check out our gallery selection of Yanko Design’s best thought provoking tech and transportation ideas for 2009, along with a couple creepy borg-like innovations we’d just as soon see remain on the drawing board.

When it rains, it pours — and it’s pouring tablet rumors. The latest is from the NY Times, which says Steve Jobs is “extremely happy” with the upcoming tablet, and that it will have a “surprising” UI.

In a report that’s basically a rehash of tablet rumors, the Times adds a couple of tantalizing morsels.

According to the Times, a senior Apple employee said: “I can’t really say anything, but, let’s just say Steve is extremely happy with the new tablet.”

And another recently-departed Apple staffer added: “You will be very surprised how you interact with the new tablet.”

What this surprising UI is, the Times doesn’t say, unfortunately. It doesn’t even hazard a guess. Gestures? The iPhone’s already there. Voice? Same — and it doesn’t even work that well. Handwriting recognition? Remember the Newton.

What else is there? A little rubbery red button like an old ThinkPad? A virtual scroll wheel?

Link.

“Apple has something big up its sleeve for next month,” says the venerable Financial Times of London.

The company has rented a stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco for several days in late January, according to people familiar with the plans.

Apple is expected to use the venue to make a major product announcement on Tuesday, January 26th.

The prospect of a three-day event is tantalizing, but why would Apple need three days to announce a new product — like the long-rumored the tablet, say? My guess is the company needs a day to set up and another to break down. The 26th is a Tuesday: Apple’s favorite day for new product announcements.

Note, neither Apple nor YBCA would comment to the FT, but the center’s online calendar says the venue is free on January 25, 26 and 27. IE. there are no artsy events scheduled for those three days on a calendar that is otherwise full.

Having pulled out of Macworld, these days the YBCA stage is Apple’s favorite venue for product announcements. With CES in January, and the Apple-less Macworld in February, a January 26 event would be sandwiched right between.

The rumor comes on the back of reports that Apple is wooing TV studios for a new online TV service, which conjures the Apple TV to mind, but perhaps a new TV service would be tablet-centric? In addition,  the company is reportedly talking to magazine publishers about repurposing content for the upcoming tablet. Earlier this year, iLounge predicted the tablet would be announced in mid-January with a May or June sell date to build iPhone-like hype.

Via 9to5Mac.

At this point, it’s not really surprising that the iPhone 3Gs’ graphics are capable of pumping out the polygons needed to bring a sophisticated 3D engine to the handset, but it’s still wonderful to watch Epic Games’ Mark Rein play Unreal Tournament deathmatch on his third generation iPod Touch. You can see a video of it in action after the jump.

If you’re looking for that last minute gift, an Apple Store is a fine destination. But if, like my hirsute Uncle Bob, your wrapping skills max out at wadding a clump of disintegrating newspaper around your gift and entombing it in an impenetrable, inch-thick layer of duct tape upon which you’ve written your season’s greeting in bold, permanent marker, the Apple Store might also have you covered: select Apple Stores are now offering free wrapping.

The way Apple is handling wrapping is smart. Instead of buying your iPod or MacBook Pro and then thrusting it at some beleaguered wrapper temp, already light-headed from papercut induced blood loss, Apple has set up an express line which sells exclusively pre-wrapped gifts.

Good news for last-minute shoppers via Dealnews: The Apple Store offers free shipping via next-day delivery with no minimum purchase required. That’s Apple’s best shipping discount this year. Sales tax is added where applicable. Customized items and gift cards are excluded. Orders of in-stock, non-custom configuration items placed by 1 pm ET on December 23 will arrive in time for Christmas.