Proving itself to be The Little Engine That Could of an otherwise dismal economy, Apple’s iTunes AppStore has reached an inventory of over 15,000 applications (some of which do not exist to reproduce the sound of flatulence) and has entertained more than 500 million downloads since its debut six months ago.
It took just 5 weeks for the AppStore to deliver more than 200 million downloads, whereas it took 6 weeks to go from 200 million to 300 million. So, the volume of interest in applications for iPhone and iPod Touch is increasing impressively, although the most recent bump is likely a result of Apple’s mobile gadgets having been popular gifts this past holiday season.
A couple of the larger media egos on the Apple beat got into a public spat on CNBC Wednesday, in the wake of Steve Jobs’ sudden decision to step aside from day-to-day operations in Cupertino.
Newsweek columnist Dan Lyons, who outed himself as the man behind the formerly wildly popular blog Fake Steve Jobs told CNBC’s Silicon Valley bureau chief, Jim Goldman, he’d been “played” and “punked” by his sources at Apple.
Goldman had previously reported, in the wake of Jobs’ decision to forgo the keynote address at Macworld 2009, that his sources had assured him the Apple CEO was fine and healthy and that the company’s decisions around Macworld had more to do with its long-term market strategy, and had not been guided by any concerns about Jobs’ health.
The clip is a bit of Kabuki theater that reminds one of nothing so much as children squabbling over a dying parent. It devolves, as so many of these things do, into a tempest of shouting and mewling. The conversation’s moderator sums it up nicely at the end, saying, “nobody can hear anything you guys are saying because you’re talking all over one another, and we’re out of time.”
Apple has begun approving the first wave of browser products to compete with Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPod Touch, signaling the company may not be the great curmudgeon of handheld computing after all.
The apparent shift in Apple’s previous policy of denying AppStore certification to software products that “duplicate the functionality” of its own applications that ship with the devices, a handful of browser apps have begun showing up in recent days on the iTunes store.
Incognito, from developer Dan Park, promises completely anonymous browsing, with all history cleared simply by closing the application.
Edge Browser is a free app that opens up valuable screen real estate, but forces the address and navigation tools into the Settings menu, which doesn’t seem too promising a design feature to me.
WebMate is a 99¢ solution to tabbed browsing on the iPhone, that works by queuing up all the links you click on, then allowing you to view them one by one when you’re ready.
Apple sweetened the pot a bit on its new productivity suite Tuesday, with a “Try it Free for 30 days” offer on iWork ’09. The enhanced spreadsheet, desktop publishing and presentation software package must not be flying off the shelves since its introduction last week at Macworld.
I was aiming to get around to it at some point because I’ve come to really like Pages, especially since I got used to its decidedly-different-than-Word workflow.
I’m also interested in checking out Numbers, Apple’s spreadsheet software that was not part of the copy of iWork ’06 I’ve been hobbling along with. I hope not to be involved again too soon in any venture that requires a lot of work with spreadsheets, but if Numbers is a reasonably robust solution it will be nice to know it’s in the file system.
Of course – and I hate to keep going on about this – Keynote is, to me, the star of the iWork show, a truly full-featured, sophisticated piece of presentation software that puts Powerpoint to shame. I’m looking forward to playing with its new bells and whistles and this little free teaser may be just the thing to get me off my duff to check it out.
Psystar has raised another desperate, if novel claim in its ongoing legal battle with Apple, arguing before a federal judge that since the Mac clone-maker legally purchased its copies of Mac OS X from Apple and resellers, it has the right to do basically whatever it wants with that software under the first-sale doctrine.
In court filings described by Computerworld, Psystar told the court: “Once a copyright owner consents to the sale of particular copies of a work, the owner may not thereafter exercise distribution rights with respect to those copies. See, e.g., Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus, 210 U.S. 339, 350-51 (1908) (recognizing more than 100 years ago the concept of first sale and the limitations imposed upon a copyright owner in light thereof). Psystar acquired lawful copies of the Mac OS from Apple; those copies were lawfully acquired from authorized distributors including some directly from Apple; Psystar paid good and valuable consideration for those copies; Psystar disposed of those lawfully acquired copies to third-parties.”
Unfortunately for Psystar, courts have rarely held the first sale doctrine applies to software, considering it a product that is licensed, not sold, and can therefore be distributed with restrictions on further distribution. Psystar’s thin hopes likely hang on the precedent of a case involving Adobe, in which a court upheld the first sale doctrine’s application to software.
Apple’s Board of Directors is opposing a shareholder initiative to require the company to produce a Corporate Responsibility Report (CSR) detailing Apple’s approach to greenhouse gases, toxins, recycling, and more, according to a report at Environmental Leader.
A shareholder group called “As You Sow,” co-sponsored by the Green Century Equity Fund, reasons that many of Apple’s direct competitors, including Dell, IBM, and HP, already publish CSR reports, as do over 2,700 other public companies. Apple’s board, however, has issued a proxy filing asking shareholders to vote against the resolution, saying publication would be an unnecessary expense and would “produce little added value.”
Apple publishes a Supplier Responsibility report and environmental policies on its website, in spite of which As You Sow and a number of less organized parties have pressured Apple to do more official reporting.
My other blog has gone Apple this week as we close in on the launch of our book Wired to Care. I’ve just gone live on the Empath-o-Meter with a poll to rate how widespread empathy is at Apple. By empathy, I mean the ability of people inside the company to understand the needs of the folks out in the world that they’re trying to serve. As a Macophile, I obviously feel very well-served by Apple, but I have trouble knowing whether it’s because the folks inside the company really get where I’m coming from — or just that Steve Jobs has an amazing intuition for what’s going to connect with people like me.
Check it out — I’m anxious to see your votes and your comments!
Among the more interesting things I’ve come across so far at Macworld is an innovative calling application from Freedom Voice, called Newber. Somewhat similar, but with a couple of key differences to Grand Central, Newber lets you route every phone call made to you though a single number and, using GPS location awareness, lets you take the call on any phone that happens to be nearby.
If you’re in the office at your desk, Newber will send calls to your work phone. At home it can ring the house phone. On the road Newber will ring your iPhone, the phone extension in your hotel room, even the payphone at the gas station in the middle of nowhere where you’re getting a flat fixed – if that’s where you want it to ring. Your callers have one number for you and you can receive their calls anywhere.
I saw the app in a demo at a press event on Monday night and spoke further yesterday with David Gerzof, president of Bigfish Communications, the PR firm representing Newber, about the difficulty Freedom Voice has had getting the Newber app approved for distribution in the AppStore. “Newber was submitted in October and Apple authorized the product manager to contact them by phone, which he does every day,” Gerzof told me. “They haven’t said it will be approved or that it won’t be approved, in fact we can’t see from our activity logs where they have even begun testing it. It’s very frustrating.”
As a result, despite having already put several hundred thousand dollars into developing the platform for iPhone, Gerzof and Newber aren’t putting all their eggs in Apple’s basket. A Demo application for Blackberry is already operating and the company is also working on one for Android. “We love Apple and began work first with the iPhone SDK because we wanted it to be the launch platform, but if they aren’t interested, we have to move forward with the others,” Gerzof says.
Today’s was the first MacWorld keynote I’ve missed in three years, and I have to say, I really didn’t miss anything. But then again, it was quite clear Apple was making a half-hearted showing as it was, revealing none of the products people are most excited about <cough>Mac mini</cough> and announcing several products that are either predictable, uninspiring, or just plain obnoxious toward consumers. Is anyone excited about variable iTunes song pricing who doesn’t work for a record label? Anyone? Or how about the “Indiana Jones” effect for iMovie 09 so you can have a fake plane fly over a fake globe to represent travel? This was worth gathering the world’s technology media?
It’s probably for the best that Steve Jobs didn’t show.
But all of the above was apparent to anyone watching. What was left implicit, though it was communicated loud and clear, is the fact that Apple now has to put its money where its mouth is, having dismissed MacWorld’s trade show atmosphere, and put together some truly special product launch events very quickly. The biggest advantage to not making the first Tuesday of January the holy grail of Apple announcements is that Apple can announce products when they’re ready and as it suits them, instead of forcing stuff to be ready ahead of time for MacWorld (and to beat out the CES news cycle). In other words, Apple should let the rest of the month pass, and then make a major hardware introduction on every Tuesday in February, culminating in a press event on the last Tuesday of the month to unveil the much-anticipated new Mac mini (and with the 32-gig iPhone coming somewhere beforehand).
At the end of the day, Apple is probably logically right that MacWorld doesn’t make sense for them anymore. I think it’s ungrateful, given how much the enthusiast community saved Apple during the mid-’90s, but it probably is the right thing from a business standpoint. But it also feels like they deliberately left a lot out of today’s announcements, as if to emphasize their rejection of the trade show model. It just felt cheap, you know?
The media and the public trickled onto the Macworld exhibit floor in the wake of Phil Schiller’s Keynote speech Tuesday in San Francisco with a collective yawn, casting a sad and listless pall over Apple’s final year at the seminal trade show dedicated to Mac and Macintosh innovation. Gone was the excitement generated in recent years by the introduction of revolutionary new products such as iPod and iPhone. Gone was the sense that Steve Jobs contagious’ enthusiasm and obsessive secrecy could somehow reward us with ever more new, beautiful, elegantly designed products that would change our relationship to technology and with each other.
Instead, Schiller left the Apple community pondering battery life and notebook aftermarket resale values, wondering how a little face paint and eye shadow applied to iWork and iLife is going to drive increasing revenue to One Infinite Loop between the end of Macworld on Thursday and the next Cupertino Town Hall event sometime later this year.
One the surface of things, a mood that I might liken to one in a household where the divorce has been agreed to but not yet finalized, is curiously appropriate to the uncertain economic horizon each and every one of the hundreds of Macworld exhibitors – as well as, of course, the show’s anchor tenant – is facing.
Sure it would have been exhilarating for Phil Schiller to have whipped out a thoroughbred upgrade to the Mac mini today, or a revamped Apple TV that might challenge the assumptions of what an interface between the office and the living room could look like. But I talked to several long time Mac addicts on the floor this afternoon, who confided they were relieved not to be tempted by any groundbreaking hardware innovations from Apple – because big ticket expenditures of every stripe are on hold until further notice.
In its way, then, Apple proved it still has the pulse of its audience well in hand – why offer revolutionary new products that would require hundreds or thousands of dollars in new investment (not to mention the huge investment in manufacturing required to roll out new hardware) when the company can let its legions of loyal consumers who have already bought Macs and iMacs over the years try on new software outfits at $50 – $80 a pop? Lean times may be coming for everyone but by golly you can spend your downtime learning how to play guitar with John Fogarty and marvel at the face recognition amazements of new iPhoto software.
Some of the busier booths on the exhibit floor this afternoon were ones hawking accessory items costing well under $100. Big gear manufacturers with shiny new products costing in the hundreds and thousands of dollars, not so much. And the reps of a couple of those exhibitors told me some of the newest stuff they have at the show are just prototypes, with no big production commitments coming into place until the economy and consumer spending shows signs of taking an upturn.
Compared to recent years, Day 1 attendance was significantly lower, something I could tell in the sparse lines at the concession stands and in the reliability of the WiFi connections available throughout the hall. But fewer people were here today because Steve Jobs was not here today. Tomorrow, when you’d expect the attendees interested in Macworld regardless of Steve Jobs’ presence, we’ll get a better idea of just how deflated the Mac community is over Apple’s final Macworld appearance and a sense of how much air has gone out of what was until pretty recently a high-flying market for computer technology.
The big hardware news from Macworld 2009 was not a new Mac mini, but rather an update to the 17″ MacBook Pro featuring the same precision aluminum unibody enclosure introduced on the MacBook and MacBook Pros unveiled in October. This new notebook features a built-in battery that Apple claims will deliver up to eight hours of use and up to 1,000 recharges, for more than three times the lifespan of conventional notebook batteries. This design innovation is sure to have people lining up in short order on either side of the Apple is Awesome / Apple is Evil divide.
The new 17-inch MacBook Pro has a high resolution LED-backlit display and the same large glass Multi-Touch trackpad introduced with the new MacBook family in October. In addition, the new 17-inch MacBook Pro includes state of the art NVIDIA graphics and the latest generation Intel Core 2 Duo mobile processors.
As part of what the company calls “the industry’s greenest notebook family”, the new 17-inch MacBook Pro is made of highly recyclable materials, meets stringent energy efficiency standards and is made without many of the harmful toxins found in other computers.
Follow the jump for availability, pricing and full feature information on the new 17″ MacBook Pro.
Apple announced several changes to the iTunes Store today. All four major music labels–Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group and EMI, along with thousands of independent labels, now offer their music in iTunes Plus, Apple’s DRM-free format with higher-quality 256 kbps AAC encoding for audio quality, which the cmpany claims is virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings.
iTunes customers can also choose to download their favorite songs from what it calls the world’s largest music catalog directly onto their iPhone 3G over the 3G network just as they do with Wi-Fi today, for the same price as downloading to their computer.
And beginning in April, based on what the music labels charge Apple, songs on iTunes will be available at one of three price points: 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29, with most albums still priced at $9.99.
None of this is earthshattering or unexpected, in fact, these changes have been rumored to be in the works for months. Still, it’s always good to see movement onward and upward.
Who says Apple has to roll out groundbreaking new hardware products to keep life interesting? Though the tweaks to its 17″ MacBook Pro (described in a post above) are noteworthy, upgrades to iLife, iWork and iTunes may end up having more relevance for more Mac users than any hardware introduction could.
Well, at least until we finally get that Mac Tablet, but that’s a story for another day.
Follow after the jump for details on the software upgrades rolled out today.
In the meantime, a few companies have already produced products intended to ease the need for iPhone users in the northern latitudes to actually go inside to use their Jesus Phones during the winter. Click on images in the gallery below to see the Apple patent illustration and few solutions on the market today. And let us know in comments how you manage to fulfill your iPhone jones in places where chilly winds blow.
7″ Screen, 1.6GHz Atom, 1GB of RAM, 32 GB of flash storage, Wifi, bluetooth, modified iPhone OS (Snow Leopard)
Flickr user tacojohn has a vision of the much-rumored Mac Tablet Apple has been said to be working on since at least September 2007.
Ahead of Macworld next week in San Francisco, the Apple rumor mill has been busy ginning up interest to counter the let-down of Steve Jobs’ decision to skip Apple’s final appearance at the popular trade show, and Tuesday a TechCrunch report cited a trio of three independent sources close to Apple who say to “expect a large screen iPod touch device to be released in the Fall of ’09, with a 7 or 9 inch screen.”
“Prototypes have been seen and handled by one of our sources,” according to the report, and “Apple is talking to OEMs in Asia now about mass production,” the publication said. It added there were some early concerns among Apple managers over the potential market for such a device, but implied those fears have been quelled by the blistering success of the App Store:
“The difference now is the iTunes app store, which has thousands of games and other applications that are perfect for a touch screen device with an accelerometer.”
More Apple oriented websites felt obligated to post the news on Monday that casemaker Vaja has added an iPhone Nano category to its offerings of cases for Apple phone products. Coming on the heels of last week’s news that XSNS had done the same, the pre-Macworld rumor mill seems to indicate a strong likelihood that Apple will introduce a mini-me version of its popular mobile phone next week in San Francisco.
Is this what we’ve come to? Roughly 10 million people have bought iPhones this year. AT&T is selling refurbished iPhones for $99 and now you can buy them new at Walmart, too. Who, exactly is dying for an iPhone Nano?
I have to go on record as saying I’ll be disappointed to see Apple cave in to the mobile handset market’s mystifying tradition of churning out 1001 minutely varied executions on a theme, for the sake of what? Surely not functionality.
Prior to the iPhone you had relatively similar smartphones made by a few companies (Palm, RIM, Nokia) and hundreds of other devices that were just, phones, made by dozens and dozens of manufacturers. Even within the smartphone realm, my eyes glazed over at the number of “different ” Blackberries, for example.
The iPhone came along and changed everything. And in perfect Apple fashion there were basically two choices, a perfectly fine device and another one for those whose device must, under any circumstance be perceived as “bigger.” Hey, fine. There’s nothing wrong with a Corvette…
But now, a Nano? Something smaller? Less functional than its big brother? Less touchscreen real estate? A virtual keyboard for really tiny fingers?
Knock yourself out, Apple. I would think there are greater heights to scale.
Competition in the cell phone industry is legendarily cut-throat. The major carriers will do whatever they can to retain and induce people to sign long-term contracts ad buy new phones. This often includes ludicrous stunts and special offers that ultimately deliver little value.
That’s especially true with a wonderful little deal AT&T is offering right now with the purchase of an iPhone 3G. With your two-year contract and at-least-$200 investment, you’ll receive this handsome (?) car charger for Steve’s Amazing New Device worth almost $10!
Except you won’t. It’s only compatible with the original iPhone. (a Consumerist informant claims this is an inventory-clearing tactic) This is especially funny, because I can’t imagine someone deciding to take the iPhone plunge because of a crummy car adapter. The iPhone has broken most of the rules of the cell phone upgrade cycle, mainly by making OS upgrades and the addition of new applications a mandatory part of owning a cell phone.
What’s not a part of owning a phone anymore? Crappy plastic add-ons used as inducements to the purchase of an over-priced and under-delivering phone from Motorola.
There’s really nothing like Christmas for a Mac cultist (except for Halloween, that is). This delectable Old School Mac is the awesome work from Flickr user MinorBug. Click through to see the full collection of pictures.
Apple may be adding useful swipe gesturing functionality to the virtual keyboard on the company’s mobile devices, according to a report at MacRumors.
Blogger Arnold Kim describes two potentially effective additions to Apple’s touch interface contained in a patent application filed yesterday with the US Patent and Trademark Office.
Aside from the single finger swipes depicted in the diagrams below, multi-touch gestures (two and three fingers) could invoke other special functions. If a single finger left-swipe might delete a letter, a two finger left-swipe could delete a whole word, and a three finger left-swipe could delete a line. Similarly, a single finger right-swipe could add a space, while a two finger right-swipe could add a period. Up swipes and down swipes could also invoke different functions based on the number of fingers used.
As with Apple’s evolving multi-touch notebook trackpads, these optional functions could provide iPhone and iPod Touch users with useful and welcome shortcuts.
The kind Apple fanatics at iPhone Savior have done the great public service of creating Apple and Steve Jobs-themed Christmas eCard templates and posted them over at Flickr for anyone who still has a few last minute greetings to get out.
You can use a pre-made card like the one above, or choose from two styles of hi-res blank cards and add your own graphical text message to express your holiday sentiments and your love for all things Apple in the same vehicle.
As they put it over at iPhone Savior, “Sincerely wishing everyone an iPhone 3G for Christmas and some sweet dreams of Steve.”
Is there any social dynamic the iPhone cannot be leveraged to transform somehow?
Here’s a six minute video from digitalJournal TV detailing a “social taxi service” that San Francisco-based Avego Shared Transport hopes will one day expand the public transit system by enabling every private vehicle to operate as a public transport vehicle.
This free iPhone app has the potential to dramatically reduce wasted seat capacity in cars, reduce the costs of commuting and expand commuting options for riders and drivers alike. This is definitely not your father’s hitchhiking experience.
Using the iPhone 3G’s GPS capabilities and web services, Avego seeks to enable a cross between carpooling, public transport and eBay, by matching a driver’s wasted seat capacity – those seats which are unoccupied – to passengers, reducing commute costs for all participants. Avego automatically apportions the cost of the commute, providing a financial incentive to commuters frustrated by high gasoline prices.
The company is quick to point out that the arrangements it facilitates clearly fall under “carpooling” laws that exist in nearly every jurisdiction in the US since the oil shock of the 1970s, and financial transactions are carefully limited so that participating drivers only recover the expenses associated with providing transport and do not cross the line into making them commericial transport operators.
For the nitty gritty on how Avego works, see the further information page on Avego’s website, but definitely take time to watch the video here and marvel at yet one more example of how Apple technology is changing the ways people interact with each other and with the world around them.
What would an impending Apple-oriented convention be without some rumor-mongering to pique the interest of the faithful and get tongues a wagging? Ahead of Macworld 2009, slated for January 5 – 9 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, one of the more persistent rumors has involved the supposed announcement of a smaller form-factor iPhone, dubbed the iPhone Nano.
TUAW reported an interesting escalation of the iPhone Nano rumor Monday, showing evidence of an iPhone Nano case being marketed by XSKN, a company that began selling iPhone 3G cases in mid-May of 2008, almost 2 months prior to Apple’s release of the phone. In early September, XSKN was showing off new 4th Generation iPod nano cases, prior to the Let’s Rock event where they were officially unveiled.
As you can see from the screen shot I captured tonight from the XSKN website, the company is taking orders for cases for a product called iPhone Nano.
If that’s not enough to whet your whistle, how about the photo, below, which someone submitted late Monday on the down-low to MacRumors.
Wonder if Phil Schiller will use the traditional “one more thing” phrase on this item or if perhaps Apple has something else up its sleeve.
When it comes to competition, the one between Apple and Dell often breaks out beyond traditional metrics such as revenue, profits, market share and units sold.
Many years ago, before Apple reinvented itself under the return stewardship of Steve Jobs, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell was famously quoted as saying the best thing a new commander could do with the Apple ship would be to shut the company, sell its assets and give the proceeds to the shareholders.
This fall, around the time of Apple’s most recent quarterly earnings call, when Jobs took a rarely exercised opportunity to bask in glory of his company’s recent success in a lighthearted, congenial chat with analysts, many technology writers were quick to point out that Apple had more than enough cash on-hand to buy Dell outright, should the Board choose to do so.
In a recent blog post, Bob Pearson, Dell vice president of communications and conversations, sought to extend the competition between the companies to a battlefield on which many will be made and broken in the next decade – the environment.
Apple is all talk and no walk, to paraphrase Pearson’s criticism. He is apparently unappreciative of new Apple advertising touting Mac notebooks as “The World’s Greenest Family of Noteboks.” Pearson goes on to list some specific measures Dell has taken to reduce its carbon footprint and describes interactions with suppliers that will reduce Dell’s responsibility for millions of pounds of unnecessary shipping and packaging waste. Apple’s advertising is dismissed as “wild claims” and mere “rhetoric.”
Fighting words, perhaps, to some. Edible Apple has a nice critique of Pearson’s post – much ado about nothing, in short – though I can speak to one suggestion Pearson has for Apple that they might consider at One Infinite Loop. Pearson says “be part of the conversation,” and goes on to whine about Apple employees not being permitted to write blogs, which seems an off-the-mark complaint.
But I have been working on a story for a green designs publication for over a month, trying to get someone at Apple to speak with me about the very things the company advertises in its “greenest family” spots – and I’ve run into a brick wall. There are over two dozen Public Relations Vice Presidents on my list of Apple contacts, and from what I can tell none of those people seems interested in speaking to journalists – even to those of us who are nominally interested in helping Apple tell its story to a wider audience.
Politics, not platelets, are why Steve Jobs is turning over the Keynote responsibility to Phil Schiller at next month’s Macworld Conference & Expo, according to CNBC correspondent Jim Goldman.
Citing “sources inside the company,” Goldman writes that Jobs’ demurral from the Keynote address for Apple’s last appearance at the venerable trade show in San Francisco is assuredly not a product of any inability on his part to perform for health reasons, but is rather a result of the company’s “trying to separate itself from Macworld for some time.” Amid the growing trend of big companies scaling back participation in traditional trade shows world wide, Apple has also in recent years taken the lead in producing its own product release events, such as the ones that introduced the company’s new iPods this summer and new notebook computers in the fall.
Apple also directly reaches millions of visitors who come weekly to its growing chain of world-wide retail stores, and millions more who receive the company’s carefully designed and controlled messaging through visits to the company’s iTunes stores.
Knowing how the Apple-interested universe’s collective pulse begins to race with every inkling of Jobs’ mortality, it’s no surprise to see Monday’s announcement generate lots of speculation and extra volatility in the movement of the company’s stock price. As Goldman writes, however, the party to be concerned about is not Jobs, and not Apple, but Macworld. For some time now it’s been fashionable to imagine scenarios about Apple in the inevitable post-Jobs era. But will there even be a Macworld in the post-Apple era?
