Entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, the dog loving, Tesla driving, indefatigable self-promoter, is forsaking Apple products in his fury at some of the company’s recent actions, like banning the Google Voice app — The Case Against Apple-in Five Parts.
While he has a couple of points, he’s wrong about the rest. In fact, the things that Calacanis rags on are the things that make Apple and the iPhone great, and he’s misguided not to embrace them. Here’s why:
New rumors this weekend suggest that Blu-Ray may finally be coming to the Mac. But while Blu-Ray is high on many people’s wish list, the rumors just don’t make sense.
Citing a “pretty reliable source,” Boy Genius Report says Blu-Ray is coming to iTunes 9, maybe as soon as September. The rumor jibes with a particularly vague story on AppleInsider suggesting that new iMacs will get new features (yeah, it’s almost sounds like self-parody), possibly Blu-Ray.
But although Blu-Ray format is gaining popularity, it’s unlikely to come to the Mac, ever. Here’s why:
Apple’s upcoming iTablet will be a hit and run the iPhone operating system, according to new report out of Wall Street.
Analysts at Piper Jaffray say the upcoming iTablet will be released in 2010, will cost about $600, and will shift about 2 million units in its first year.
“Last week we spoke with an Asian component supplier that has received orders from Apple for a touch-screen device to be fulfilled by late CY09,” the report says. “This data point underscores our thesis that a tablet will likely launch in early CY10.”
The tablet will also run the iPhone/iPod Touch OS — not OS X, the report predicts. CoM believes the tablet will run OS X, which will be the “killer app” that cements the tablet’s success. Apple appears to be prepping Snow Leopard, the next version of OS X, for touchscreen devices.
“Apple could choose to simply run the current App Store apps on the larger device, with enough usable space for multiple apps to run (multi-tasking),” says the investment firm.
The report continues: “Key apps, like Safari and Mail, could be made larger to make use of the larger screen resolution, making Apple’s tablet appealing for more extended use, and the company could continue to leverage its primary asset in mobile computing, the App Store, in this scenario. We believe this is the most likely scenario given the success of the multi-touch platform and the App Store ecosystem, which could be accelerated with a tablet device.”
The analysis says Apple will reap extra revenue from the tablet that hasn’t been included in most forecast models.
“While at first glance this may appear to address a niche market, we believe the addressable market is larger than that of the Apple TV, of which Apple sold about 1.2m in its first year,” the report says.
Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller took the time to craft a lengthy, detailed statement of the company’s position with respect to criticism leveled Wednesday by this site and others, over the App Store review process Matchstick Software’s Ninjawords application endured on its way to appearing as a 17+ rated selection on the iTunes App Store in mid-July.
As it had been initially reported on Tuesday evening at Daring Fireball, Apple “required” Ninjawords — an iPhone dictionary app that delivers Wiktionary.org content to iPhone and iPod Touch users — to censor certain vulgar content in order to gain approval as a title in the App Store, and yet the company still gave the app a 17+ rating, which requires purchasers to provide proof of age before they can purchase apps so rated.
In a response published Thursday to Daring Fireball author John Gruber, Schiller clarified certain facts and the chain of events that led up to Ninjawords finally appearing on the App Store after having first been rejected by Apple review staff. As Gruber acknowledged Thursday, in actuality, Apple reviewers merely suggested that Matchstick Software developers wait to re-submit their application until Apple had in place Parental Controls (ie: 17+ ratings) on the App Store and in no way suggested that content on the app had to be censored in order to gain Apple’s approval for sale.
Because Parental Controls were not yet available at the time Matchstick wanted to take its product to market, the developers acted of their own accord to censor the app’s content, hoping it would thereby pass Apple’s review process.
As Gruber wrote, “it really came down to bad timing around the launch of parental controls.”
Matchstick spokesman Phil Crosby told Gruber via email, “17+ ratings were not available when we launched, which means at that time, it was simply not possible for our dictionary to be on the App Store without being censored. Given the options of censoring or sitting on the side lines while our competitors ate our lunch, we chose to launch.”
All in all, one can take it as a good sign that Apple cares enough about public perception of the App Store and its often-criticized review policies for Schiller to explain the company’s position so clearly as he did to Gruber.
It’s even better to know that Apple finds — as Schiller put it — “Wiktionary.org is an open, ever-changing resource and filtering the content does not seem reasonable or necessary.”
If you’re running Leopard, hit Command + Shift + 4 and then the space bar, and you’ll see an icon of a camera that harks back to Steve Jobs’s days at NeXT.
The decades-old icon is one of the last visible vestiges of NeXTStep, the old operating system that laid the foundation for OS X in the late ’90s.
The camera icon looks dated, but it’s pretty good by today’s standards. Look at some of the Windows icons from the same period.
The NeXTStep camera can be found in the Resources of the Grab tool (in the Utilities folder) and comes in several different versions with eyes, stopwatches and camera flashes.
Other holdovers from NeXT in Leopard include various system sounds, including Basso, Frog, Funk, Ping, Pop, and Tink, as one commenter notes at Robojamie.net, which first pointed out the camera icon.
And as another commenter says, there’s another old icon in: /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Resources/NSMultipleFiles.tiff
It doesn’t seem to be used anywhere though.
Steve Jobs founded NeXT in 1985 after he was booted from Apple. He had the company build advanced workstations, hoping to drive Apple out of business. But its black magnesium NeXT Cubes were too expensive except for select clients in academia and the CIA. NeXT eventualy dropped the hardware to concentrate on the its state-of-the-art software and operating system, which Apple bought in 1996 as the foundation for the Mac OS.
Apple got a lot from NeXT: Jobs came on as an adviser, and eventually took on the CEO role. A lot of Apple’s top executives came from NeXT and so did lot of its technology. As well as basing OS X on NeXTStep, Apple has built a lot of its online offerings on NeXT’s WebObjects, including its first online store, the iTunes Music Store, its DotMac website and the iPhone App Store.
Just one day after earning congratulations for pulling the developer’s license of a prolific producer of useless (and possibly copyright-infringing) applications, propriety demands Apple receive a major Bronx cheer for the way the company treated Matchstick software and their Ninjawords iPhone Dictionary application.
The degree of censorship and hassle Apple forced Matchstick developers to endure in order to get their nifty $2 app listed on the App Store, as reported Tuesday at Daring Fireball, is simply unconscionable.
In recent weeks, Cult of Mac has reported a number of stories showing many holes in the tattered shroud of respectability with which Apple attempts to proclaim the innocence and purity of all things that might ever appear on the iPhone. The tale behind Ninjawords’ (iTunes link) tribulations would seem to set Apple’s high-water mark for institutional hypocrisy to date.
As Daring Fireball author John Gruber put it so well: Apple requires you to be 17 years or older to purchase a censored dictionary that omits half the words Steve Jobs uses every day.
For Shame.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt
Apple’s board of directors is a bit light these days. In addition to recently resigned/forced out/exiled Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who is the eye of a hurricane about the notorious Google Voice/App Store rejection/AT&T imbroglio, the company has an internal seat it has kept vacant since the resignation/dismissal/ejection of former Chief Financial Officer Fred Anderson in the wake of the backdating/did Steve or didn’t he/stock options fiasco.
In other words, Apple could add as many as two board members to its strange leadership team, which currently stands as Jobs, Al Gore, Genentech Chairman Arthur Levinson, Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell and the CEOs of both Avon and J. Crew. The ghost of Andy Warhol, despite rumors, does not actually sit on the board.
So who should join this squad? Fake Steve’s had his say, and it’s high time we had ours as well. As BusinessWeek’s Arik Hesseldahl points out, temporary CEO/COO-extraordinaire Tim Cook seems like an obvious addition, especially given his position on Nike’s board, and his value to the company is at this point proven and prominent. He seems like a gimme, particularly if Apple wants him to become the real CEO at some point.
From an external perspective, however, things get much more interesting. At this point, Apple’s board is very light on tech folks. Besides Steve, only Campbell is directly involved in computers, and he’s only on the consumer and small and medium business markets constituted by Quicken and QuickBooks. That said, Apple is running out of friends in technology — virtually everyone is in competition with them in some form or another, which is partially what led to the awkward situation with Schmidt.
Tenuous as their relationship has been in the past (particularly over use of the term iPhone), I would love to see John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, on the board. He’s an incredibly bright guy, a brilliant manager, and he really gets tech and telecommunications without being an Apple competitor in any meaningful sense. Additionally, he has a reputation for remarkable ethics, both personally and across his organization — Cisco was one of the only organizations in Silicon Valley that didn’t have stock backdating issues a few years back. He also gets business customers in a big way.
Chambers is my pick. What say you?
Apple has revoked the iPhone developer’s license of one prolific mobile app developer, according to a report at MobileCrunch, but the company is still taking heat for inconsistencies in its App Store approval policies.
Kahlid Shaikh and his team of 26 engineers working under the name Perfect Acumen had over 900 apps approved and selling in the iTunes App Store until July 24, when Apple terminated Shaikh’s iPhone Developer Program License due to concerns over “numerous third party intellectual property complaints concerning over 100 of [his] Applications.”
The majority of Shaikh’s apps merely aggregated content found on the web and delivered it to iPhone users under titles such as “US Army News”, “Skin Care Updates” and “Economical Crisis Updates”, as well as other questionable content under titles such as “Top Sexy Ladies” and “Top Sexy Men”.
Shaikh admitted he is not concerned about creating particularly valuable apps, according to the MobileCrunch report. Instead, he said, he’s going for “less product value” and “more monetization.” Many of his apps had been sold for $4.99, generating revenue in the range of thousands of dollars per day for Perfect Acumen, according to the report.
Despite having finally grown exasperated with fielding copyright and intellectual property claims against Shaikh, and having acted to remove what some believe was a raft of useless apps from the App Store, Apple is taken to task by the author of the MobileCrunch report for inconsistencies in its App Store review process. The entire brouhaha here is seen as evidence that “Clearly, Apple doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing.”
It appears, in the eyes of some, Apple cannot win for losing, no matter what the company does with the App Store. Either its review process is too open or it’s too restrictive; the store has too many useless apps, bans products users want, or acts to cull sketchy apps — and the end result is “Apple Sucks” no matter what they do.
Apple’s is a difficult position for a company to be in. The company created an entirely new distribution model for an industry that didn’t even exist two years ago. It created opportunity and economic activity that has amounted to one of the few glimmering beacons of hope in what has been roundly described as one of the worst economic downturns in nearly a century. And yet some people seem unable to accept the fact that every single decision made at every step of the way has not resulted in clear skies, smooth sailing and endless joy for one and all.
Make no mistake: Apple is a huge company that can and will act with caprice to get and maintain whatever economic advantage it can in a ruthless marketplace. The FCC appears increasingly interested in the operational nuances among Apple, Google and AT&T, as the formerly moribund antitrust watchdogs of the federal government are starting to prick up their ears under the Obama administration.
However, when Apple acts to shed the likes of Shaikh and his questionable work product from the App Store the company ought to be praised for finally — if belatedly — doing the right thing.
Fake Steve has a hilarious series of posts about Eric “Squirrel Boy” Schmidt’s resignation from Apple’s board. Much better than the real news and boring analysis. Starts with Squirrel Down! and continues:
“Eric, let me tell you something. After what you pulled here at Apple, no one will ever trust you again. You’re a dead man. Okay? You are the herpes of the tech industry. You lame-ass spy. You backstabbing, flack-fucking thief. You sat in our meetings and learned all of our secrets. You listened to our product development plans. Then you went off and copied our products and now you’re trying to fuck me in the ear with my own ideas.”
Then he goes on to detail the hilarious phone calls Steve has taken from wannabes looking to fill Schmidt’s empty seat, including Woz, Kara Swisher, Jon Shirley, Guy Kawasaki, Robert Scoble and Chris Anderson.
Worth reading in order to appreciate how the joke builds (I made the mistake of reading them backwards). Highlights are the Kawasaki and Anderson posts.
Link.
Apple’s tablet, which may be on sale as soon as November, will be the best computer you ever bought. It will be better even than the beloved iPhone.
It will be an entirely new kind of computer that will usher in a new kind of computing.
It will be a horizontal iMac: a touch-screen computer that you use horizontally, in your lap or lying on the couch.
It will be a complete rethink of the computer for play, not work, and it use the original pointing device — your finger.
It will be really easy to use — a pleasure in fact, because it will be magical.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has resigned from Apple’s board of directors, Apple announced Monday.
“Eric has been an excellent Board member for Apple, investing his valuable time, talent, passion and wisdom to help make Apple successful,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple’s core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric’s effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest. Therefore, we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign his position on Apple’s Board.”
Some believed Schmidt’s presence on Apple’s board gained early favoritism for Google’s voice-search app in the App Store and much speculation in recent months centered around Schmidt’s continued effectiveness on the board — for many of the reasons Jobs referred to in this morning’s announcement.
Some began to question the relationship between the two companies even more seriously with Apple’s recent rejection of Google’s Voice application for the iPhone, but at least now, with ties between the two companies severed at the directors’ level, their status as competitors has a more legitimate public face.
Apple on Friday afternoon released a firmware patch for the iPhone to fix a dangerous SMS security hole.
The 3.0.1 firmware update is available now through iTunes. The 300MB update is available for the iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS. It doesn’t appear to contain any other features or bug fixes except for the SMS patch, according to Apple’s security advisory.
As previously reported, noted security experts Charlie Miller and Collin Mulliner revealed a major security exploit in the iPhone’s SMS system on Thursday at the 2009 Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas.
The exploit takes advantage of memory hole in the SMS system, allowing hackers root access to the device. Programs could theoretically be sent to any iPhone, through multiple SMS messages if necessary, and take over all functions, including the camera, phone and microphone. The only indication of the hack would be a SMS message containing a single square character.
Miller and Mulliner reportedly chose to reveal the exploit, which is applicable to all mobile platforms including iPhone OS, Android and Windows Mobile, at Black Hat after Apple had been unresponsive in the wake of their showing it to company officials earlier in July.
Looks like Apple woke up fast. The patch was issued in about 24 hours.
UPDATE: Google also patched its Android system on Friday, and Microsoft says it is investigating, according to BusinessWeek. To be fair, Microsoft was just informed of the vulnerability, while Apple was warned weeks ago, which may explain the speed of its patch.
I just visited Apple’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue for the first time — you know, the subterranean one with the glass cube on top that was co-designed by Steve Jobs.
While the architecture is fabulous, the most notable thing was the huge crowd in there at 6.30 PM in the evening on a weeknight. The stores in San Francisco and Los Angeles are often crowded, but the 5th Ave store was heaving. I don’t mean just crowded; it was literally packed, wall to wall.
There were lines for the Genius Bar (OK, expected); there were lines for the checkouts (also expected); there were lines for the iPhone 3GS (not expected); and there were lines for the new MacBooks (set up at a special stand. Also not expected).
There were lines for all the machines in the store. People were hanging about the tables for a chance to use the demo iMacs, MacBooks and iPhones.
It was hard to look at anything on the shelves without asking someone to get out of the way. It was almost impossible to move down some of the aisles because of the crowds.
It more resembled a hip NYC nightclub than a premium consumer electronics manufacturer in the midst of an economic downturn.
Color me genuinely surprised.
BTW: The Fifth Ave locale is one of the five Apple stores to see before you die.
Chinese regulators have approved a modified iPhone for the giant Chinese market, which uses the speedy GSM/WCDMA chipset but has no WiFi.
Why no WiFi? Hit the jump for an explanation (It’s partly business, partly snooping).
The long-standing tiff between Apple and the iPhone jailbreaking community reached new heights of absurdity in a recent filing Apple made with the US Copyright office, in which the company all but claimed granting iPhone jailbreakers an exemption from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act would invite terrorist attacks on the nation’s wireless network infrastructure.
In a written response (PDF) to questions from the Copyright Office, Apple claimed that jailbroken iPhones could be used by drug dealers to avoid authorities, by hackers to skirt carrier-enforced limitations or even by attackers to crash the software at cell phone towers. “Technological protection measures were designed into the iPhone precisely to prevent these kinds of pernicious activities,” said the Apple statement, which added, “if granted, the jailbreaking exemption would open the door to them — to potentially catastrophic effect.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), representing consumer interests and arguing in the case for the jailbreaking exemption, dismissed Apple’s claims. “This is all just a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt,” said Fred von Lohmann, an EFF senior staff attorney and the organization’s expert in intellectual property law.
Von Lohmann called Apple’s claims that jailbroken iPhones could bring down a carrier’s network a hypothetical game. “None of this has ever happened [with jailbroken iPhones],” he said. “You don’t see the independent iPhone stores filled with malicious software tools. Instead, they’re filled with the software that Apple has refused to offer in its App Store.”
The Copyright Office is expected to make its final ruling in the case by October.
[via PCWorld]
The celebrity website TMZ has bagged the first photograph of Steve Jobs back at work on Apple’s campus. Appropriately, the picture was taken with an iPhone.
“It’s the first time we’ve seen Jobs back in action since January, when he took a leave of absence for a liver transplant,” says TMZ. “Jobs has reportedly been back at work for about a month.”
The picture was taken at 3PM on Wednesday at Apple’s campus in Cupertino. Jobs looks very thin — but, hey, he’s back at work!
Jobs is crossing the road that loops around the campus — Infinite Loop. He’s walking towards one of the car parks that surround the buildings. The photo was taken from inside a vehicle as Jobs crossed in front of it.
The person walking in front of Jobs is likely a bodyguard, but one that looks remarkably like Jonathan Ive, Apple’s head designer. Jobs is reportedly guarded these days, and is driven around in a big black SUV.
The bodyguard is pretty burly, so he’s not the best person to be photographed with if you’ve lost a lot of weight.
Apple took one more step toward fully integrating the iPhone platform into MobileMe Wednesday, making a free MobileMe iDisk application available for download on the iTunes App Store.
Members of Apple’s $99 per year cloud computing service will be able to use the iDisk app on their iPhone or iPod Touch to view files stored on an iDisk; access Public folders; easily share files from an iPhone using integrated email links; quickly access recently viewed files and view iPhone-supported file types-including iWork, Office, PDF, QuickTime and more. Files larger than 20MB may not be viewable.
Apple will release its fabled touchscreen tablet as early as September, the Taiwanese paper Apple Daily claims. If true, the announcement is likely just weeks away. Apple will have to put the device on store shelves by the fall in time for the crucial holiday shopping season.
In a direct rebuttal of AppleInsider, whose sources say the tablet will be launched early next year, Apple Daily pegs a September release date for the device.
The paper details Apple’s suppliers: Wintek is providing the tablet’s touch-sensitive screen. Dynapack International Technology Corp. is supplying the batteries; and the whole device is being assembled by Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. (Hon Hai’s Foxconn unit made headlines after a worker allegedly committed suicide after losing an iPhone prototype.)
The Apple Daily report jibes with Monday’s report from the Financial Times that Apple is working on a new, revolutionary kind of “digital album” codenamed “Cocktail” to accompany the tablet, which the FT also says will be launched this fall.
New pictures from a Chinese case manufacturer suggest that the next-gen iPod Touch and iPod Nano will get video recording.
For the second time in less than a week, news has leaked that Apple has rejected a Google app for the iPhone. First was the location-awareness tool Google Latitude (which is fun but just as good in a browser), and today came word that the official app for Google Voice has been turned down. Worse, two prior client apps for Google Voice, GV Mobile and Voice Central, have both been withdrawn from the App Store (though it appears Apple hasn’t deleted them from users’ phones; yet).
All of this is incredibly puzzling. Nothing has happened suddenly today that suggests in any way that Apple suddenly discovered new information that disqualified GV Mobile (which was approved personally by Phil Schiller) and Voice Central from sale. And this antagonism toward Google in general is deeply troubling. Yes, the official Google Voice app includes a dialer, as do the other apps, which technically replicates functionality on the iPhone. But so does Skype, and it’s still on sale. Apple also cited duplicate functionality as reason to reject Latitude, but no one sophisticated enough to use Latitude could possibly confuse it with the built-in Maps program.
And it’s all fairly pointless, anyway, because all of the functionality Apple might be obstructing by holding these apps back is available through Mobile Safari right now. Latitude is currently functional through a custom web app, and the Google Voice website can place calls and send free texts from the iPhone. It could use a new interface, but the full capability of the technology is there — I called my wife with it, and it works perfectly. Screenshot’s from my phone.
No, something else is going on here. And as I see it, it’s one of two possibilities. The first is that Apple is finally starting to feel some heat from Android (I know it’s ridiculous, but hear me out) and wants to prevent Google from dominating two mobile platforms. Actually, I’ll just reject this one. If Apple wants to stay ahead of Android, there’s no better tactic than to get great Google apps on the iPhone.
So that leaves the other alternative, spelled AT&T. We know, with some certainly that Ma Bell is the reason that SlingPlayer only works over WiFi on the iPhone, and we know that it, not Apple, wanted Skype kept off of 3G. Worse, we know that AT&T’s battered 3G network is struggling to keep up with the incredible data traffic generated by iPhones. Now, Google Voice isn’t data intensive, but it does allow you to send free text messages (AT&T charges 20 cents a pop) and insanely cheap international calling (India is 7 cents a minute, a full two cents cheaper than Skype). When your network is in trouble, you might as well make sure people don’t find ways to get around your punitive fees, right?
Now, if this were AT&T’s app store, I wouldn’t have a problem with the carrier dictating which apps were approved and which weren’t. But this is supposed to be Apple’s show. Worse, other phones on the AT&T network are allowed to get Google Voice, full SlingPlayer and other functionality that is being held off the iPhone for fear of the traffic burden. If AT&T is behind this, I understand it, but I’m incredibly frustrated. If Apple’s hand is on the switch, I have serious doubts about the company’s ability to hold onto a developer community much longer.
TechCrunch: Apple is Growing Rotten to the Core
Apple has officially declared the iconic “Luxo lamp” iMac as an “obsolete” computer.
Several models of the iconic machine, which won as many enemies as fans for its unusual lamp-like design, will be declared obsolete on September 15, according to HardMac.com.
The obsolete designation means that Apple service centers will no longer stock parts for the machines –and will no longer repair them — though third-party repair shops likely will.
The Luxo-lamp iMac caused a huge stir when it was introduced in 2002. It made the cover of Time magazine and is now exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.
The machine was the first iMac to feature a flat-panel display, which floated above its CPU, housed in a white plastic dome. The screen was attached by a double-jointed chrome arm, which realigned the screen with the slightest touch of a fingertip, but then kept it in place — no mean feat of design.
The machine was a bear to design, according to Apple’s head designer, Jonathan Ive. At first Ive tried to glom the guts of the computer onto the back of a flat panel display, but the early prototypes were inelegant. Then, during a walk in Steve Jobs’s back garden, Jobs told Ive that each element had to be “true to itself,” which led the designer to look at sunflowers as inspiration, and seperate the screen from the body.
A few years later, Ive was able to marry the guts to the screen, and newer iMacs are much closer to Ive’s original conception, but the freaky-looking Luxo-lamp iMac remains a firm favorite of many.
The family of the Foxconn employee who reportedly committed suicide over a lost iPhone prototype has been compensated for his death, even though the company suspects him of industrial espionage, the New York Times reports.
The family of Sun Danyong, 25, received 300,000 renminbi, or more than $44,000, and his girlfriend got a new Apple laptop.
However, Foxconn, which makes iPods and iPhones under contract to Apple, says the employee had a history of suspiciously “losing” products, suggesting he might be involved in industrial espionage.
“The case also underscores the challenges that global companies face in trying to safeguard their designs and intellectual property in the hotly contested smartphone market, particularly here in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, an electronics manufacturing center known for piracy and counterfeiting,” the Times says.
Apple is designing an entirely new entertainment experience designed specifically for its upcoming tablet, the Financial Times claims today in an interesting but rather vague story.
Apple’s fabled touchscreen tablet will have a 10-inch screen and will be more like an oversized iPod Touch than a full-fledged tablet computer (a key question is what OS it will run).
Contrary to previous rumors, the tablet hit stores in time for the holidays, the FT says, citing record label sources out of New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
To accompany it, Apple is working on a new entertainment package to rival the album experience in days of yore, when the release of a new album was a cultural and social event.
“It’s all about re-creating the heyday of the album when you would sit around with your friends looking at the artwork, while you listened to the music,” one executive told the FT.
Codenamed “Cocktail,” the entertainment bundle would resemble an “interactive book,” but be more than a bunch of hotlinked PDFs, the FT says.
Apple is reportedly working on Cocktail with the big four record labels, who describe the project as “revolutionary” and are hoping it will offset declining album sales. When consumers buy music online, they biuy low-margin singles, not profitable albums.
Unfortunately the FT doesn’t have many details of this intriguing idea. Reminds me of the hype surrounding “multi-media CDs” in the late ’90s when CDs with music and video were supposed to provide a similar revolution in entertainment and education. There was talk about amazing immersive encyclopedias, but instead we got unreadable digital books with tiny embedded QuickTime movies.
Its also hard to imagine friends sitting around an Apple tablet reading band biographies while listening to music.
Much easier to imagine a couple of kids on the couch sharing the device to watch episodes of Spongebob.
Indeed, one record exec told the FT: “It’s going to be fabulous for watching movies.”
The FT says Apple is also in talks with book publishers who are “optimistic about their services being offered with the new computer.”
Apple is introducing dozens of arty new desktop backgrounds in Snow Leopard, the new version of OS X due in the fall.
There are 40 new desktops in the latest test seed delivered to developers this weekend, including reproductions of famous paintings from artists like Edward Hopper, Van Gogh and Monet.
The new desktops include:
* Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Monet’s Lilies, Hopper’s Nighthawks, Degas’ Ballet Dancers on the Stage, and Katsushika Hokusai’s Tsunami.
* Three graffiti desktops that will make your computer look like a New York subway car circa 1978.
* Several high-res shots of snow leopards, including the one above.
The art is classic, but the themes struck me at odds with Apple’s optimistic image: madness, loneliness, alienation and death. I don;t know if I want my files hanging out with Hopper’s lonely souls.
All 40 Snow Leopard desktops after the jump.
Steve Jobs is fond of the saying “good artists copy, great artists steal,” which would put Microsoft in the great artist category.
Apple’s rival is planning to open retail stores this fall that are a direct ripoff of Apple’s super successful shops.
In a presentation leaked to Gizmodo, Microsoft is planning stores that are “light and airy,” divided into solution areas, and feature a “guru bar.” Sound familiar?
But here’s one idea that’s not ripped off from Apple.
The Microsoft Store will host birthday parties!