My two favorite tech news sites — Gizmodo and Ars Technica — are hosting a pre-keynote party in San Francisco on Monday night (the 14th) at Harlot, 46 Minna Street. 8-11.30pm.
Giz editor Brian Lam is promising to buy everyone a beer, and there’s schwag (likely shite) for early birds. I’ll be there, and so apparently will Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve.
Here’s a handy map to the bar.
UPDATE: I just discovered that the free schwag are copies of my books. Ooops.
Gizmodo has a fairly long interview with departing Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates in the wake of his final CES keynote. There’s a clip of interest, where Gates defines what he believes the difference between Microsoft and Apple to be. An interesting perspective, up to a point, though I think he continues to underestimate Apple’s strength if he believes it’s all in “usability.” Apple has excelled in introducing new kinds of interfaces to the world, which is a very different kind of strength.
Still, I thought this still image was mildly humorous. Your name in lights if you come up with the best caption! Post them in the comments thread.
John Siracusa posted his essential Apple Keynote Bingo Card yesterday. This year, it’s modeled on a Newton MessagePad, which is just a lovely ironic tweak of the nose for the very anti-Newtown Steve Jobs. Remember, you need to print yours out and actually call bingo! at the actual keynote, so head over to Ars to get your PDF copy and decode the various squares.
I have to say, column 2, row three strikes me as the most likely of the card. Maybe even more than the free square.
Design by John McCoy
Image via Sydney Morning Herald
BusinessWeek reports that sources claim Apple has a deal with Fox, Warner Bros., Paramount, and Lionsgate to allow sales, rentals or both through iTunes. If so, this could prove a huge boon for Apple. At last year’s All Things D conference, CEO Steve Jobs referred to its digital television device business as “a hobby.” Though promising an iPod for the living room, the AppleTV has been quite slow to catch on by Apple’s recent standards. That’s according to sales estimates from analysts and also anecdotal evidence: I’ve been to a lot of geeks’ houses in San Francisco and never seen a single AppleTV in the living room.
At this point, I’m ready to admit that Apple’s assumptions for the movie market were flat-out wrong — barely anyone wants to own movies in download format alone. I haven’t bought a single film myself, but there have been plenty of times when I would gladly rent a movie download — it’s faster than NetFlix and easier than walking down the street to Blockbuster. At the same time, for the movies I love, I want a tangible artifact to hold onto. I want to explore their special features and revisit favorite scenes. At the moment, Apple’s downloads are worse than what I can get at the store. But a rental? Heck, if it means staying on the coach, I’m in. Especially if it’s less than $3.
Image copyright Andre Gunther
As another year in the Apple-watching game comes to an end, I wanted to take a quick moment to look back on the year that was and search for themes. Given how much Apple got done in 2007, there were a lot to choose from, but one really stands out: Golden Convergence Strikes Back.
For those who weren’t closely watching the moves of Apple closely during the mid-’90s, this might be a new term for you, but it’s a long-time idea in Mac circles. Variously credited to Bahamut of MacEdition and Robert Morgan of Recon for Investors, Golden Convergence speaks to the idea of taking a lot of seemingly divergent technologies and suddenly integrating them into a superior and seamless whole. Originally tagged to the rumored launch of the Apple Media Player in early 1998 (never happened), Golden Convergence has shown up dramatically throughout the second coming of Steve Jobs, from the standardization of USB and FireWire down to the wide use of Mac OS X despite initial resistance by the installed base.
But 2007 was when it really blossomed. We saw Apple take dozens technologies and roll them out to multiple platforms. OS X mutated and got optimized for the AppleTV, iPhone and, later, the iPod Touch. CoverFlow, initially created for iTunes 7, showed up first on the AppleTV, then the iPhone, then the iPod Classic, Nano and Touch before becoming the centerpiece of the Leopard UI. Front Row moved from the AppleTV to virtually every Mac on the market. Flexibility bred new uses, new interactions, new consistency. Everything Apple worked on had a tighter link than ever to another Apple product.
And nowhere is this more evident than the iPhone, the most flexible platform Apple has created since the original Mac. For now, it’s officially impossible to install third-party software on it, but that will change in early 2008 with the release of the iPhone and iPod touch Software Developer’s Kit. The reason that the iPhone is great is that nothing about it makes it a phone only. Its form is built for maximum flexibility. Few hardware buttons. Multi-touch creating hardware controls where and as they are needed. It can be an Internet browsing tablet, an iPod and an e-mail reader. Nothing about its hardware design precludes any future uses. If you build it, this thing will come along.
And that right there is the essence of Apple’s new spin on Golden Convergence. Don’t design anything in hardware that locks you into a current use or goal. Instead, build an interface flexible enough to accommodate all kinds of future uses or even new businesses. The iPhone could become a very powerful gaming platform is Apple decided to steer it in that direction. It could be slightly modified into a point of purchase device. The next version, upgraded with 3G and a GPS chip, could easily become a navigation device to challenge Garmin’s product line. Get a decent CCD into it with a better lens and a flash, and it’s a decent consumer digital camera.
It’s brilliant design, and it flips on its head the way that Apple approached new technologies in the 1990s. Back then, Apple wanted to make everything: printers, digital cameras, scanners, PDAs, stereos, game consoles — everything. Now, Apple still wants to play in all kinds of product categories, but they’re setting themselves up to do that with a single device. Don’t sell everything. Sell everyone iPhones. You’ll reduce your number of SKUs while also locking people into a product that generates monthly revenue long after its purchase price has been swallowed. Every year, build in faster chips and add a few features that are locked into hardware. Do everything else via software.
Apple already started this process in 2007, and I expect to see it increase dramatically over the next five years. After all, would you rather by an Apple TV or just get a high-capacity next-gen iPhone that can wirelessly stream video to your TV? It’s the safest way to innovate, and Apple nailed it. Happy New Year, everyone!
UPDATE: I just got off the phone with Nick Ciarelli, Think Secret’s publisher, and wrote it up for my day job over at Wired: Apple Kills Think Secret: Publisher Nick Ciarelli Talks
Apple rumor reporter extraordinaire Nick Ciarelli is shuttering his Think Secret website after settling a trade secrets lawsuit with Apple, Ciarelli writes on his website.
Apple had sued Ciarelli, who is studying at Harvard, after he published details of an unreleased music breakout box codenamed “Asteroid.” Apple sought the identity of whoever leaked the product details.
The settlement of the suit is confidential Ciarelli says, but doesn’t involve the identity of the leaker. But it does include closing his site.
“I’m pleased to have reached this amicable settlement, and will now be able to move forward with my college studies and broader journalistic pursuits,” Ciarelli said in a statement.
I’ve already sent Nick an email asking if he’ll contribute to Wired News.
Foto: Markus Aarstad/www.ps.no
Heres’ the first picture of Steve Jobs in a suit and tie for at least a decade, maybe longer. Jobs wore the monkey suit to the Nobel Prize ceremony, in support of Al Gore, environmental activist and Apple board member.
Link.
The revamped Spaceship Earth ride at Disney’s Epcot Center has a special “Steve Jobs section,” according to the lifthill blog, which tracks news about rides and roller coasters, and was invited to a special preview.
But once at the Steve Jobs area, which is supposed to depict the birth of Apple computer in a garage, the lifthill blogger noticed that the lone figure in the garage looked a lot more like Wozniak than Jobs.
The figure is facing the wrong way, so it’s hard to tell, but it’s wearing the same shirt as Wozniak in a famous early photograph copied below, and has similar hair and beard. Conspriacy theorists note that Jobs is the single largest shareholder in Disney– but I can’t believe he cares that a section of Epcot bears his name or likeness (or not).
Anyway, there’s no second figure in sight, so one of them is slighted. And so too is the third Apple-founder, Ron Wayne, but no one cares about that.
But what is that thing the dummy Woz/Jobs is sitting in front of? It ain’t no Apple I or II — the first and only machines Woz created more or less single-handed. It looks like a big wooden Mac, but none of the Mac prototypes looked like that — they were much more finished.
Higher-res pictures at lifthill.
Gary Allen has some great pictures of the winding glass staircase at the new Apple Store in Manhattan’s Meatpacking district.
Allen, who lives in Berkeley, flew out for the grand opening of the 14th Street store on Friday the 7th at 6 p.m. He’ll no doubt be waiting in line soon to be first inside the store. Allen is a dedicated grand opening camper, and will likely be blogging at IFOAppleStore.
The store will be giving out commemorative t-shirts to the first several hundred inside, and some unspecified “special surprises,” according to the 14th Street Store’s webpage.
The store is one of Apple’s biggest. It’s three stories tall, and one whole floor is given over to service. Unlike its sister store on Fifth Avenue, it will be open 9 a.m. to midnight, not 24 hours.
Well, Apple legal has cleared another hurdle for the stock option back-dating scandal that rocked the computer industry last year. A judge in San Jose dismissed a major lawsuit against the company because the suit was not brought within a three-year window of the incidents. Of course, since the back-dating was only disclosed last year but stopped in 2002, it would have been pretty hard to do that in the first place. Actually, it’s absurd that our laws are written in such a way that they need to be prosecuted very quickly after commission. I understand the purpose of a statute of limitations, but why wouldn’t it be within three years of discovery? Only seems fair.
Picture via Fake Steve
Apple just refreshed its third concurrent ad campaign today with three new “Get a Mac” ads, a few of which aired during NFL action on Sunday. Two of the ads, “Podium” (seen above) and “PR Lady” make a particular point of ripping on the fact that many people have downgraded their computers from Vista to XP because they’re so frustrated with it. I enjoy “Podium” a lot, but my favorite is still “PR Lady,” which features a PR liaison who steps in to make PC’s self-defeating comments sound positive:
PC: I hired a PR person, you know, to smooth things over that whole Vista problem.
PR Lady: By “problem,” he means, “Some early adopters have faced some MINOR challenges.”
It’s really cute.
AppleTell grabbed this snapshot off of the Apple Canada website, which seems to announce that the iPhone is finally coming to Canada. Normally, I’d take that as a sure sign that Apple has a product announcement coming tomorrow — Apple loves Tuesdays, after all. But since the MacBook update showed up on a Thursday, I’ll shoot for the end of the week.
Via Digg.
Pic: A lab at the school’s library with a sea of new iMacs. At front is the display of a Mac mini running Windows.
To “diversify” its technology, the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University in Dallas is switching to Macs from PCs.
By switching to Macs, the school can now offer students Mac OS X as well as Windows XP — the machines are all dual boot.
Cox joins several schools switching to the Mac, including Wilkes University Wilkes-Barr in PA, and St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. A few years ago, it was the opposite story. Schools were abandoning the Mac in droves, including long-time, all-Mac schools like Dartmouth.
At Cox, the school has installed about 100 iMacs in labs, and there’s dual-boot Mac minis (OS X and XP) at the head of about 30 classrooms.
“We’re enhancing and diversifying our computer platforms by keeping Windows XP while adding OS X,” said Allen Gwinn, the school’s technical director, in a statement. “Upgrading to Apple platforms is the only way to do this.”
Update: As noted in the comments, I bungled the headline, transposing PCs and Macs. But there’s no strikethrough in heds, so I just corrected it. Thanks for the heads up.
Things really couldn’t be better for Apple right now. Its phone and music businesses are soaring, Mac market share is growing at a voracious rate, and Leopard is another critical and commercial success in the midst of Vista’s flop. Oh, and the stock is so high that a share from 19967 that cost $8 then is now worth more than $43,000 A lot of money (misremembered the number of AAPL splits. The stock did drop down to $8 in 1997, though).
But things were not always so rosy. Travel back to the spring of 1997, a land of rap-rock and bridges to the 21st century. A time before Lewinski. Apple was a shambles. Gil Amelio ruled as CEO. Steve Jobs was half-in, half-out of the fold. Apple owned NeXT, but the company was three years from a shipping version of Mac OS X. The iMac hadn’t even been announced, for crying out loud.
Ever-vigilant, Wired put out 101 theories for how Apple could be saved in the June 1997 issue. Looking back, some of them are eerily prescient (15. Dump or outsource the Newton and other sidelights, 34. Port the OS to Intel) and some are hilariously off the mark (1. Get out of the hardware game, 35. Clone the Powerbook).
As a nostalgia-fest, I’ve decided to highlight the ten best and ten worst of the list. That all follows after the jump, as is a link to the full story.
PC World: In Pictures: The Most Notable Notebooks of 2007
The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year is a Mac. Try that again: The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year–or for that matter, ever–is a Mac. Not a Dell, not a Toshiba, not even an Alienware. The $2419 (plus the price of a copy of Windows Vista, of course) MacBook Pro’s PC WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 88 beats Gateway’s E-265M by a single point, but the MacBook’s score is far more impressive simply because Apple couldn’t care less whether you run Windows.
This Mac thing really is here to stay. Yesterday, Apple announced that it sold 2.16 million Macs in the quarter ending Sept. 30, 400,000 more than its previous best. Much of the growth can likely be attributed to a strong portable line and the launch of a new line of iMacs.
In case anyone was still worried that the iPhone wasn’t as big a hit as expected, worry no more. Apple sold more than 1.1 million of the devices from July 1 to Sept. 30, bringing the sales total to 1.4 million since its late June launch, the company announced at its quarterly earnings call. It was a booming set of months, all told. Apple pulled in revenues $6.22 billion in Q4, with $904 million in profit. The profit increase represents bottom-line growth of more than 67 percent from the year before.
Less rosy, at least in terms of Apple’s relationship with its customers and its business partners, is that COO Tim Cook estimates that up to 250,000 of those iPhones were purchased with the intent to unlock and use on other networks. That can’t please AT&T, and we all know how customers feel about bricked phones.
All in all, an unbelievable quarter for Apple — and they’re forecasting $9.2 billion for the December holiday period. Insane. I still can’t believe my parents decided not to get in on AAPL stock in 1996 when it was under $10 a share…
Anyone who has followed Apple for long has seen activists from Greenpeace or other environmental groups bash the company’s use of toxic or difficult to recycle materials in its products. The company recently trashed Apple’s iPhone for what it claimed were extraordinarily high levels of toxic chemicals the company had pledged to stop using. Of course, Apple only promised to stop using them by the end of 2008, so…
Those clever troublemakers over at Gizmodo cited an industry group that challenged Greenpeace’s methods for determining the contents of the iPhone — they only detected Bromine, not which compounds were present. This led to a lot of furor from Greenpeace, as you can imagine. The rebuttal is quite long, but the last quote from its spokesperson is worth the reading:
If you think we just protest against Apple then look out for soon a report covering a wide range of manufacturers as we have done in 2006. While it might not make as many headlines as the iPhone it doesn’t mean that we are not focusing on all manufacturers to remove toxic chemicals from their products.
That sounds like an admission to me… Apple is moving out ahead of its competitors here. Maybe it would help the cause to admit that, guys…
Via Slashdot
I spent most of this last week at the Connecting ’07 conference in Nob Hill, San Francisco. It’s the biggest industrial design gathering in the entire world, and one thing really stuck out to me: HP’s really starting to develop some design game, and Apple’s once-market leading Mac designs are really starting to look creaky.
(Disclosure: Jump Associates works with HP, but not on the physical design of its products. We had nothing minimal involvement with the products I’m writing about here)
The Palo Alto giant’s design booth had some impressive hardware, from the giant Blackbird 002 Gaming PC down to the tiniest new iPaq handhelds (not a patch on the iPhone, but gaining ground on BlackBerry and Palm). Sticking out to me most, however, were HP’s current line of laptops. The Entertainment Notebooks with the imprint designs are what they are. I like them OK, and the new designs seem less fingerprint-intensive. But the new tablets out in the world are incredibly hot.
None more so that than the Compaq 2710, a 12.1-inch convertible laptop/tablet combination. It’s got a gorgeous brushed-metal finish, it’s 3.7 lbs, and it’s just an inch thick. The swivel action on the screen to tablet is smooth, and a magnet pulls the latch down. It basically works exactly like I want the rumored MacBook Thin to work — except that it requires a stylus and that it runs Windows.
This all points up a major consequence of Apple’s tremendous focus on the iPhone and the iPod family — the entire Mac line-up is looking dull. The iMac has a new look, but the overall form is unchanged from the version introduced in 2004. Other than the built-in iSight, the MacBook Pro line looks identical to the Aluminum PowerBooks brought out in 2003. The Mac Pro is virtually unchanged from the Power Mac G5 look introduced in 2003. The MacBook, beyond the addition of black as a color option and the widescreen, is very similar to the second-gen iBooks brought out in 2001. The Mac mini is literally unchanged since its introduction in 2005.
Steve Jobs made it clear years ago that Apple has locked in the computer models it wants to sell, refreshing them continually: Consumer Desktop, Consumer Notebook, Professional Desktop, Professional Notebook, and Mac mini. That doesn’t mean that Apple should focus its innovation efforts in other markets. Apple has never had a more powerful opportunity to carve out additional terrain in the executive notebook market. And Apple has nothing for executives who just want a small, light device good for e-mail, the web and presentation creation. The MacBook isn’t prefessional enough. The MacBook Pro is too big.
Worst of all, Apple has the best touch interface in the world on the iPhone and the iPod touch. Why on earth hasn’t it shown up in a computer yet. A mouse-replacement USB pad for the desktops and a multi-touch enabled convertible MacBook Touch tablet would kill and grow Apple’s markets. Throw in an SSD drive, and it would be the best travel computer ever.
Meanwhile, HP is gaining on Apple’s design lead and charting its own path. Anyone else tired of Apple products in just brushed-aluminum and white plastic? The iPod and iPhone lines are leading the way in their markets. Every Mac looks like it’s been around forever.
Thanks to Apple’s just-announced iPhone software developers kit, VOIP will likely be coming to the iPhone, according to Alex Schaefer lead programmer of Apollo, a web-based iPhone instant messaging application.
“VoIP is next, and I’m preparing to start a new project working exclusively on that,” he tells Wired News’ software blog.
Schaefer is just one of many Mac developers itching to develop for the iPhone. There’s more reaction from developers in this other Wired News story: Developers on iPhone SDK: OMG! ABFT!
Here’s two more data points supporting the rumor that Apple will allow Dashboard Widgets to run on the iPhone. (See earlier post)
Apple Evangelist Matt Drance is due to speak at next week’s Widget Summit in San Francsico. Matt is “actively involved in helping 3rd parties develop for iPhone,” says his bio on the Summit website. (However, it’s doubtful Drance will announce anything about the iPhone on Tuesday. It looks like he’ll be talking about Widgets in Dashboard.)
And reader Andrew Mayne notes that Apple’s new webapps page uses widget-sized icons to show all the apps for the iPhone.
“Last I checked, the normal OS X (non-widget apps) didn’t have as many button shaped icons,” writes Andrew in email. “The convenient button shaping could be a coincidence… but a rather convenient one.”
I heard a rumor today that Apple is shortly going to allow third-party applications on the iPhone. They won’t be full applications, however: they’ll be Desktop Widgets.
You will soon be able to drag any Dashboard Widget into iTunes, and they’ll sync with the iPhone, the source said.
To run on the iPhone and provide interactivity, they’ll require JavaScript, which means the iPhone will shortly get a Java update. When? The source didn’t say.
But the source did say that Apple hasn’t released iPhone widgets yet because Java has proven to be a major draw on battery power. Presumably, Apple has figured out how to tackle this problem. How? Again, the source didn’t say.
In OS X, Widgets are like mini web pages that run in Dashboard instead of a web browser. According to Apple’s Developer website, they’re a mix of HTML, JavaScript and CSS.
Unfortunately, this is all I know. I promised not to reveal the source of the rumor, but they’re well-placed. This is coming from just one source, via a third-person, so I’m only 70 percent confident it’s true. When I worked at MacWeek, we’d never publish rumors as news until it had been confirmed by at least three separate sources.
However, the redoubtable Glenn Fleischman reports for TidBits that Apple is getting near to making third-party applications available for the iPhone. Glenn has no details, but suggests the release is imminent.
UPDATE: As readers kindly point out, I’m confusing Java with JavaScriot: two separate technologies that share a name. The iPhone already has JavaScript, but not Java, so nothing would need to be added for Dashboard Widgets to work. Thanks for the feedback.
One of Apple’s messiest business dealings in recent years is the disintegration of its relationship with NBC. Though Steve Jobs routinely showed clips from “The Office” during his keynotes — and many think the iTunes Store saved the series — NBC pulled out of the iTunes universe in a snit this summer. And now a major NBC series that used to have a big tie-up with iTunes, “Heroes,” features a plot with a disappearing shipment of iPods. A subtle slap at Apple?
More curious, however, is the plotline involving Peter Petrelli (Milo Ventimiglia) and a missing shipment of iPods. Considering NBC Universal’s decision last month to pull its programs from iTunes over pricing issues, this struck us as more like product diss-ment. (Indeed, Heroes was among the most popular downloads at iTunes.)
Pure coincidence, said a Universal Media Studios representative. The episode was shot last June.
Broadcasting & Cable calls it “Product Displacement” and says it’s happening with Nissan, too. What do you think? Bizarre coincidence or subtle slap-back by NBC?
Thanks, Buzz!
A guide to what’s new in the Mac OS X Leopard Finder (AppleInsider, pictured)
Man Files Class-Action Lawsuit Over iPhone Bricking (ArsTechnica)
Other Man Claims iPod nano Set His Pants on Fire (NetworkWorld)
Apple Stock Hits $167 a Share — For No Reason (Daring Fireball)
Why I Won’t Buy an iPhone (BusinessWeek)
Apple Classifies Windows a Virus (Flickr)
Leopard Could Add $240 Million in Revenue in Q4 (Fortune)
Anti-Caps Lock Feature in new Apple Keyboards is Hardware-Based (Rentzsch)
Has it only been 10 years since Michael Dell made himself public enemy No. 1 to all lovers of Apple? As Apple 2.0 reminds us, the Dell Computer founder painted the bullseye on his forehead at ITxpo97:
“What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
Visionary! Because as Apple 2.0 also points out, Apple’s market capitalization, $140.4 billion, is no more than twice Dell’s, $62.27 billion. Is it time to give the money back to shareholders in Austin, Mikey?
It’s so nice to see how different things can be a decade later. Steve Jobs wasn’t even iCEO yet back then. Less than a year later, the iMac dropped, and Apple hasn’t stopped turning out the hits since. The mid-’90s were a scary time for the Mac. Things are so much more on track these days that it isn’t even funny.
Let’s face it: There are Mac cultists — folks like you and me — and then there are Mac cult leaders. Take James Savage, a man who has more than 100 Macs in his house. The picture above doesn’t quite do justice. You must read the Gizmodo interview and see the gallery…
Jesus Diaz: The first time I saw your photo I couldn’t believe anyone could have as many Apple computers as you do, at least not outside of a museum. How many do you actually have?
James Savage: About 100 Macs and Apple computers (one NeXT) are in Macca [the spare room], with another 25 or so Macs in our home office and the rest of the Macs are in use throughout the house.
Yikes.
Via Digg.
