iTunes 8 will launch next Tuesday at Apple’s “big” media event in San Francisco, according to Digg founder Kevin Rose. Rose was the first to report rumors of a September 9 Apple event back on August 23rd, which the company confirmed with media invitations issued yesterday.
Among the new features in iTunes 8 is something called Genius, which makes playlists from songs in your library that go great together, according to the “tipster” Rose cites in his blog posting. Genius also includes Genius sidebar, which recommends from the iTunes Store music you don’t already have.
Other goodies supposedly will allow you to browse your library’s artists and albums visually with a new Grid view; download your favorite TV shows in HD quality from the iTunes Store; sync your media with iPod nano (4th generation), iPod classic (2nd generation), and iPod touch (2nd generation); and enjoy a stunning new music visualizer.
Apparent dimensional drawings for both the fourth-generation iPod nano and second-generation iPod touch have appeared, suggesting the devices will have familiar measurements but with interesting new shapes and features, according to a report at iLounge.
With all eyes looking toward Apple’s “Big Event” scheduled for next Tuesday in San Francisco, rumors of what might be announced are sure to come fast and furious over the next several days.
Steve Jobs will host Tuesday’s “Let’s Rock” media event at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco
Apple PR is pulling out the stops to get media in SF next week, saying the announcement on the 9th is a “big deal.”
One East Coast journalist, who writes for a big news weekly, said Apple PR called and urged him to fly to San Francisco next week for the press event.
“Apple just told me it’s a big deal and I should try to be there,” said the journalist, who asked to remain anonymous.
The call is unusual for Apple’s PR department, which rarely gives clues to the import of its press events.
The event is scheduled for 10am, September 9th at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and is widely expected to showcase updates to the iPod product line, with some hoping for new Mac notebooks and even possible indications of a touch-screen Mac tablet.
Apple has scheduled a “special event” for September 9th at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The event is presumably to announce long awaited, much-rumored updates to the iPod product line and, who knows what else?
Update: Lonnie’s interview with TalkingHeadTV below.
Although not a Mac itself, iPhone instigated a major shift in the personal computing market not unlike the original Mac, and its arrival has propelled Apple’s remarkable turnaround onward–the one started by the Bondi Blue iMac, itself something of a successor to the original Mac. Therefore, at the very least, iPhone deserves to be on this list, because its success means a healthier Apple, which in turn means healthier Macs. However, it also has to be on this list, because iPhone undoubtedly provides a glimpse of what the future of the Mac will be.
Craig Grannell:
Of our list of 25 Mac moments, this is one of the most contentious for me. The iPhone is not a Mac. Its operating system is OS X, rather than Mac OS X. And the only obvious relationship it has with a Mac is that a typical iPhone user is somewhat likely to plug their iPhone into one at some point.
However, some commentators argue that the iPhone is effectively the next-generation of the Mac, and even if that isn’t the case, it’s pretty clear Apple’s smartphone is in one sense a sounding board for the future of its company, and that technology from the device will eventually trickle down to future Macs. And for that reason, iPhone justifies its place in our top 25 Mac moments.
Pete Mortensen: As an audience member when Jobs took the wraps off the iPhone, the biggest impact that it left on me was this: that Apple’s business plan was not just a pattern of steady upgrades across an established product portfolio. This was a company prepared to not just make the best media players and computers in the world, but one that was prepared to bring about world-changing innovations that are years ahead of the competition. It was confirmation, once and for all, that the iPod was never a fluke, but a signal that Apple could do something far more than what it was doing today.
In short, the iPhone made it exciting to think about where Apple is capable of going in the next five years.
Leigh McMullen: See now, I absolutely believe that iPhone is a Macintosh. It’s more powerful than all but the top of the line Macs from the 2002-2003 era. As we move more towards “cloud computing” processing power “in hand” becomes less important than connectivity and functionality. iPhone may just be a phone / ipod / camera / blender today, but it is also very much the future of both Apple and Macintosh.
Sitting for my 12th straight hour in a hospital waiting for the wife to download the latest tricycle motor, my mind started to wander and the solution to Psystar’s counter suit just occurred to me: Give Away Mac OS X.
This isn’t an argument for any open-source / open-license nonsense, just that Apple ought to effectively “shelve” Mac OS X as a product folks paid for, and make Mac OS X upgrades akin to firmware updates, completely proprietary to the machine.
By offering customers free upgrades to Mac OS X (presumably your initial copy came free with your purchase of an Apple computer), Apple would completely eliminate the “consumer harm” predicate of the anti-trust suit as one can’t be a “consumer” of a product you didn’t buy.
The revenue hit would be trivial as Mac OS X isn’t a profit center for the company, and the increase in customer loyalty and positive experience would likely offset any losses. Also as an additional carrot for Windows switchers it might prove to be an irresistible temptation. I can see the ads now:
Get the world’s best operating system with free upgrades for life with the purchase of an Apple computer.
Third party iPhone application developers have taken to paying each other $1 in order to get around communication restrictions in the iPhone developrs’ NDA, according to a story in the LA Times.
By making themselves “subcontractors” to one another, they can discuss issues related to programming for the iPhone, communications Apple has sought to restrict through the Software Development Kit’s Non-Disclosure Agreement. Developers have bristled at the company’s refusal to let the NDA expire now that the iPhone is available on the commercial market, with many feeling Apple’s continued restrictions are stifling innovation.
Though everything Apple gets covered with fanatical precision, life inside One Infinite Loop these days is something of a black box for non-Appleites. Steve Jobs has made secrecy job one. Which just makes Jon Phillips’s article for MacLife about dining in the Apple corporate food court that much more fun. This is a must-read:
“Oh. My. GOD. My first impression was that I had somehow found my way into the Prepared Foods Department of Whole Foods. Station upon station upon station offered a mind-boggling variety of international cuisine. There were kiosks for burritos, pizza, pasta, sushi, hot entrées, burgers, sandwiches, salads, smoothies, frozen yogurt. They even had a gelato bar.
Then there were the kiosks for Spanish tapas and paellas. For British bangers and mushy peas. For Ethiopian wat and injera bread. And for traditional Inuit preparations of caribou, walrus and seal. Amazing.
OK, truth be told, I didn’t see any kiosks for food from Spain, England, Ethiopia or the Canadian Arctic. But because the Caffe Mac food selection was so incredibly plentiful and varied, I couldn’t help but imagine such exotic cuisines. And, in fact, because this new world order of lunch possibilities was so overwhelming, I found myself paralyzed with indecision. Pizza or pasta? A sandwich or sushi? Or maybe a bold trifecta of blended and/or frozen delights?”
In what can only be considered a turn of logic from an alternative “evil twin” universe, Hackintosh maker Psystar answered Apple’s cease and desist lawsuit of July 3th with their own alleging restraint of trade and antitrust violations.
It’s been long anticipated that Psystar would play the “Antitrust Card” in defense of its illegal activities. The only thing is, it’s not illegal to have a monopoly. The key predicate to an antitrust suit is that the consumer must in some way be harmed by the monopolistic behavior of the defendant. Rudy Pedraza, Psystar’s president summed up their consumer harm argument by saying: “It’s not that people don’t want to use Mac OS X, but they’re not open spending an exorbitant amount of money for something that’s essentially generic hardware.”
So that’s it, ‘the Apple’s hardware is too expensive’ argument we’ve heard time and time again, and have time and time again refuted. On a direct feature for feature comparison with Sony, HP or IBM, Apple hardware is no more expensive than the competition.
Our industry is FULL of monopolies that no one seems to disagree with, examples follow:
Tivo has a monopoly on the Tivo OS, in that it too can only be employed on Tivo or licensed 3rd party hardware.
Sony has a monopoly on the PlayStation, PS2, PS3 and PSP operating systems and regulates very closely the hardware they’re allowed to run on
IBM has a monopoly on mainframes and the mainframe Z-OS
even Microsoft has a monopoly on XBox OS and limits the hardware it can run on
While I can understand that free spirited hackers take unbrage at being locked out, there is nothing inherently wrong or illegal with Apple’s strategy of controlling the whole widget. Monopoly “sounds” bad on it’s own, but in Apple’s case they’re not abusing their power.
It’s been evident to anyone paying attention (even those of us who have been jonesing for new MacBook Pros since early June) that Apple would hold off on any product launches throughout the summer to put maximum focus on the iPhone 3G. Apple just wasn’t going to do anything to distract from that, nor were they going to launch major product in the doldrums of late August.
So it was obvious Apple would wait until after Labor Day to take care of much-needed updates to the iPod and MacBook Pro product lines. According to rumormongers, it might be just a week after Labor Day that such welcome udpates arrive — eight days to be exact, with an as-yet-unannounced Sept. 9 launch event. Kevin Rose is leading this charge, claiming new, non-stubby widescreen iPod nanos, but I think most people care more about cheaper iPod touches and MacBook Pros with Montevina than anything else.
I think an actual Town Hall event would be a bad move. These are going to be evolutionary updates, and they don’t deserve the fanfare of the iPhone 3G or AppStore launch. My prognostication is that Apple will unveil new product on just about every Tuesday in September. First new iPods, then new MacBook Pros, then new MacBooks, than new Mac minis and AppleTVs. Just keep it coming and pour it on…
Apple is on track to sell just shy of 3 million Macs and close to 11 million iPods in the September quarter, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster. If Apple manages to hit the high end of Munster’s estimate of betweeen 2.7 million and 2.9 million Macs sold from July through September, it will be the first time Apple will have sold 10 million Macs in any fiscal year in its history.
Munster based his estimates on July sales data from NPD Group, which also suggested the possibility of sales of 4.1 million iPhones and a gross margin of 32 percent. Munster estimates Apple’s earnings per share at $1.19 on revenue of $8.5 billion. Wall Street consensus estimates put the numbers at $1.11 on $8.08 billion, while Apple’s previous guidance calls for $1.00 on $7.8 billion.
Munster affirmed his Buy rating on Apple, Inc. (AAPL) shares, with a price target of $250. The stock closed today at $172.55 in New York trading.
When I was researching material for a long article about third party development programs for the iPhone back in March, one of the most common complaints I heard from users and skeptics alike was leveled at the lack of cut and paste functionality on Apple’s groundbreaking mobile device. In July, Apple spokesman Greg Jowsiak basically said cut and paste was a low priority as far as the company was concerned.
No surprise then, that third party workarounds for the missing tool began to emerge, with one fashioned by student developer Zac White among the more promising. Unfortunately, Apple has placed new roadblocks in the path toward letting you cut and paste text on your iPhone, according to White.
No word yet from Apple on whether cut and paste has been re-prioritized in-house.
Using testing equipment similar to that used by the FCC and mobile phone manufacturers to make sure phones are able to properly send and receive signals without interfering with other devices, engineers in Sweden pronounced the iPhone 3G’s capabilities “completely normal,” according to a report at Engadget.
Much speculation and not a little complaint registered in the wake of Apple’s 2.0.2 firmware upgrade last week, calling the iPhone’s 3G capabilities into question. One woman in Alabama filed suit in federal court seeking a class action to hold Apple liable for selling a “defective” product. But engineers at Bluetest in Gothenburg, Sweden, tested the iPhone 3G against a Nokia N73 and a Sony Ericsson P1 and found the difference between these two popular 3G phones and the iPhone 3G was negligible.
The picture above is burning up Digg right now. It supposedly shows the redesign of the MacBook Pro, which is expected to be refreshed any day now.
The new machine looks gorgeous. With smooth, rounded contours, it resemble the MacBook Air, and there appears to be the magnetic hinge borrowed from entry-level MacBook, which would be a big improvement on the Pro’s current latch/hook design.
Members of a SoHo neighborhood group lodged a lengthy formal complaint against the Apple Store at Prince & Green in Manhattan yesterday, calling the retail outlet “the worst neighbor in SoHo.”
An Alabama iPhone 3G owner filed suit in Federal court yesterday, seeking class action status in a complaint against Apple’s ‘twice as fast at half the price’ marketing blitz.
The petition claims “[Apple] expressly warranted that the Defective iPhone 3G would be ‘twice as fast’ and would otherwise perform adequately on the 3G standard or protocol.” The plaintiff claims she and a class of “thousands, perhaps tens of thousands” of consumers were duped by the company’s marketing into buying a product that does not perform as it was advertised and asked the court to force Apple to repair or replace the iPhone 3G, and award an unspecified amount of money in damages.
Apple has yet to issue a statement or response to the suit.
UPDATE: The original reference to Chiat\Day as creators of the campaign referred to in this post was incorrect. We regret the error and any confusion it may have caused.
Microsoft is launching a $300 million advertising campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld to try and slow the juggernaut that has seen Apple take increasingly big bites out of the Windows maker’s dominant share of the personal computer market.
Seinfeld, a known Apple/Mac fan, will reportedly take $10 million to look the other way and come up with one-liners to help transform Microsoft’s stodgy and serious image in the public mind.
The campaign, created by Chiat/Day, the agency responsible for Apple’s legendary 1984 commercial, MDC Partners’ Crispin Porter + Bogusky in Miami, will also feature comedians Chris Rock and Will Ferrell (who starred in a Mac “switch” ad years ago). Apparently up in Redmond they don’t think Apple’s recent success is funny at all.
iPhone speed tests conducted through TestMyiPhone initially appeared to confirm our report earlier today suspecting the upgrade to 2.0.2 firmware may have had a negative effect on 3G connectivity, according to a site administrator. Closer looks at the data in response to a Cult of Mac request leave the question of causation unresolved, however.
“[We] did make a new file to get the average upload/download for both 3G and EDGE,” reports the admin, adding, “this is much more accurate and based off just the last 24hrs.” And there does appear to be a decrease in comparison with historical data comprising the over 175,000 3G and EDGE tests done on the site.
But closer inspection of 3G and EDGE test trends over the past week show no correlation related to the 2.0.2 release on Monday.
In response, then, to the question that has the internet buzzing over 2.0.2’s effect on 3G connectivity, whether it fixes bugs that have been widely reported, if only by anecdote, or whether it has actually made things worse for some users, we can fall back on the old quote attributed to Mark Twain. The one about there being three kinds of lies in this life: lies, dammned lies, and statistics.
China has apparently shut off access to iTunes after discovering some Olympic athletes downloaded and have been playing Songs for Tibet, an album produced by The Art of Peace Foundation to raise funds to support “peace-related projects that are dear to the Dalai Lama”, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader whom China regards as subversive.
The group made the album available as a free download just prior to the start of the Olympics in Beijing on August 8 and encouraged Olympic athletes to download and play it on their iPods as a subtle protest during the games.
First generation iPod nano customers who have experienced their battery overheating should contact AppleCare for a replacement, the company said today, after scattered reports of some devices with battery problems that cause them to give off smoke or sparks.
Apple’s statement put the number of affected units at less than 0.001 percent of the devices, which were first released in September 2005. The problem units have been traced back to a single battery supplier. There have been no reports of serious injuries or property damage, and no reports of incidents for any other iPod nano model.
Apple has doubled its share of the mobile web browser market since launching iPhone 3G six weeks ago, according to Pacific Crest technology analyst Andy Hargreaves. Still quite a small pebble in a large pond, at 0.31% of the total mobile browser market, iPhone’s “accelerating web usage highlights…key long-term advantages” for Apple and the company’s investors, Hargreaves says. Coupled with the recent announcement that iPhones will be carried at Best Buy outlets beginning in September, he predicts Apple will easily sell more than the 3.5 million iPhones Wall Street expects in its third quarter.
Despite some continuing worry about the health of the general economy, Hargreaves and other analysts see the iPhone as very bullish for the price of Apple, Inc. shares. Consensus targets are in the $200 – $225 per share range; the stock closed today at $173.53.
Apple Magsafe power adapters have apparently failed at high enough rates the company is now offering to replace them free of charge, whether your MacBook (13-inch Late 2006), MacBook (13-inch), MacBook Pro (15-inch Glossy) or MacBook Pro (17-inch) is out-of-warranty or not.
First generation units of Apple’s mini music player, iPod nano continue to pose a risk of catching fire while charging, according to these pictures provided by a reader at Consumerist over the weekend.
Apple, Inc. ranks first in customer satisfaction among its PC industry peers for the fifth year in a row, posting the highest score ever recorded in the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Apple’s 85 score is a full ten points higher than runner-up Dell, which joined Apple as the only computer companies in the University of Michigan survey to record increases over their 2007 scores.
Claes Fornell, a professor at the university and head of the ACSI, said, “we have never seen a gap between the leader and the rest of the pack this big,” but acknowledged Apple’s lead was likely affected by widespread disappointment with Windows Vista among HP-Compaq, Dell and Gateway consumers.
Apple’s score also does not reflect the customer service turmoil the company has tried to weather since launching iPhone 3G and MobileMe in July, problems Fornell expects will cause Apple’s score to level off in next year’s survey.
UPDATE: I just downloaded the 2.0.2 update myself, and overall, it does seem an improvement. Backup is now much quicker — less than a minute with my 16-Gbyte iPhone 3G (which has about a dozen third-party apps installed). Apps seem snappier. The Contacts app, which was annoyingly slow, now loads instantly and scrolls smoothly with no lags. Keyboard also seems much better. It used to hangup occassionally, especially in Mail, but so far no lags at all (however, many people report that the lag gets progressively worse until a hard reset). It’s too early to tell if 3G reception problems are fixed — but then I’ve not had consistent problems. It’s always been unpredictably spotty.
With widespread complaints of iPhone 3G reception issues, you’d think Apple would say whether the latest iPhone software update — version 2.0.2, released Monday afternoon — addresses connectivity problems.
But no. In inimitable Apple style, the release note for the 2.0.2 update says simply that it includes ‘bug fixes.” Nothing more. Thanks Apple. So helpful.
“I was getting none-to-2 bars on 3G here in my home, stationary position,” reports commenter Jettergear. “After the 2.0.2 I am getting nothing but a solid NO SERVICE.”
However, it’s not all bad. Others say that the painful lags with the onscreen keyboard and scrolling are much improved.
“The phone is A LOT snappier now,” reports commenter alangsam. “Contacts works much snappier. Email is much snappier – almost instant. SMS is almost instant. Overall BIG improvement.”
