Apple - page 66

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.

Via Boingboing.

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.

Via Daring Fireball

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.”

Picture by hansdorsch

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.

Brilliant iPhone Protest Video Rips Audio from “Think Different” Ad — It almost makes me misty for the time when Apple was actually thinking differently…

Apple Replaces General Counsel After 10 Months — Are Feds sniffing around Apple about options back-dating again?

Downgrading iPhones from 1.1.1 to 1.0.2 Can Re-activate and Re-unlock them — This will make a heck of a lot of people happy.

Genius Bar Does Not, Even a Little Bit, Support Hacked iPhones — Thank heaven for the reverse upgrade, eh?

iPhones with 1.1.1 Update Play Low-Quality Audio Over Bluetooth — Dear Apple: Please, please, please, implement A2DP Bluetooth support in OS X. Love, Pete.

Everyone who loves Apple’s products is fully aware that the company is innovative, always pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, democratizing breakthrough technologies in the process. How Apple does that, of course, is basically a secret these days. At best, we know that Steve Jobs decrees a product get made, and then it materializes.

The NY Times tries to capture this mystical sense in an article about process innovation published in the Sunday Business section. And I have to say, working in and around this dialogue, the article provides one of the more abstract explanations for the value of innovation I’ve ever seen. It talks about how sweet Intel, Apple and Google are but doesn’t say why they are able to innovate, and what that means to the rest of us. Unless innovation is tied to business growth, it’s an academic exercise. I practically expected a reference to Wikinomics here, the argument is so not grounded in concrete terms:

 Yet successful companies realize that maintaining competitive advantage depends heavily on sustaining process innovations. Great process innovators often support basic research in relevant fields, maintain complete control over the creation of every aspect of a product and refuse to rely on outside suppliers for important components. Certainly, there are exceptions to these patterns, but even companies like Apple that buy essential processes on the open market nevertheless invest in gaining a working knowledge of the technologies and an understanding of their future arc.

And that has what to do with process innovation? This is the golden goose so far as companies today are concerned. Apple and Procter & Gamble, for example do have very successful innovation strategies. But abstractly talking about an innovation process and actually realizing one are two different things. And this article provides no actions that can be taken to instill such processes back at our own companies. It’s just more fauning over Google, Apple and Intel. What a squandered opportunity.

Via Bruce. 

As has been reported widely, Apple’s iPhone Update 1.1.1 makes it again impossible to use an iPhone on any network other than AT&T and eliminates third-party applications installed through the so-called Jailbreak hack. The update, which introduces the WiFi iTunes Store to the iPhone, enables TV-out and some basic usability features, like double-tapping the home button to get to phone-call favorites.

On one level, I’m not that bugged by this behavior. After all, Apple issued a huge warning that installing the update could render unlocked phones inoperable and “might” stop third-party applications from functioning. I’m sure AT&T has been screaming at Apple to close down the unlock loophole since it hit a month ago, and Apple earns part of the revenue from iPhone service plans.

On the other hand, this is incredibly anti-consumer behavior. Most formerly unlocked iPhones now won’t even work on AT&T. They’re useless bricks (only unlocks from iPhoneSimFree can work again with AT&T). Why shouldn’t an iPhone be able to operate like an iPod Touch if, for some reason, the SIM card isn’t functioning? Why should it be a brick. People have paid good money for it. This is Apple bending over backward to please a partner notorious for ignoring consumer interests.

Worse still is the removal (they were scrubbed off of phones) of all third-party software. What possible reason does Apple have for this other than an insistence on total control? That’s as bad or worse than the mobile service carriers themselves.

Obviously, wait to upgrade if you’re unlocked to see if the hackers can stay ahead of Apple in the “cat and mouse” game that Steve Jobs described the other week. Does this bug everyone else as much as me?

Via Compiler 

Wil Shipley, current Chief Monster of Delicious Monster and founder of Omni Group, is not pleased with Apple’s ringtone strategy on the iPhone.

Scratch that. He’s furious:

Not that, uh, we have to pay attention to what the record companies think is Not Allowed, because we have already licensed the song for playback on any device if we bought a CD — we are allowed to play it on our iPhone already. Just not in response to someone calling us. The record companies have MADE UP some new, retroactive copyright and Apple is enforcing it for them. The result is, a million customers don’t get to do something cool with their iPhones.

Because of greed.

Honestly, I can see Apple saying, “Well, you see, the record companies would have been upset with us if we hadn’t charged anything for ringtones.” Yah, well, that’s the price you get for engaging. The price for owning the distribution of the content and the hardware and the software is that you end up making compromises in the hardware and software in order to protect the content.

Yow. There’s a lot more through the link, so read on. This is some harsh language from a NeXT true believer, and it’s essential reading. I’ve been pretty upset about the iPhone ringtone system, but Shipley nails what’s wrong with it. Fantastic stuff.

Photo from John Griffiths

As expected, Steve Jobs at a press conference in London this morning announced the UK iPhone will launch November 9th, use the O2 network, cost £269 and £35 a month for an unlimited data plan. The phone will be available at the Carphone Warehouse, at about 1,300 outlets.

The iPhone will be more expensive, £269= $537, and there’s no 3G — which is common in Europe. Jobs said it’s to save battery power. 3G chips would reduce battery life to just a couple of hours:

According to the Guardian’s liveblog:

“It’s pretty simple, says Jobs. “The chipsets work well apart from power. They’re real power hogs. Most phones now have battery lives of 2-3 hours and that’s due to these very power-hungry 3G chipsets. Our phone has 8 hours of talktime life. That’s really important when you start to use the internet and want to use the phone to listen to music. We’ve got to see the battery lives for 3G get back up into the 5+ hour range. Hopefully we’ll see that late next year. Rather than cut the battery life, we’ve included Wi-Fi and sandwiched 3G between Edge and a more efficient Wi-Fi.”

No announcement about other European countries, though it’s widely rumored it’ll be Orange in France and T-Mobile in Germany. Said Jobs: “We’ll be in a few countries in Europe in the next quarter.”

Boffo scuttlebutt out of Lalaland: Fruit-tech tells the Nets to chop epi-bucks in half! Socko! Peacock.

(Non-Variety translation: Rumor has it that Apple wants to change the price of iTunes TV downloads to 99 cents.)

I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about why Apple would want to force the networks to make less money per download on TV shows, and the best answer I’ve heard comes from my fiancee: Apple believes cheaper downloads will lead to more sampling, and therefore greater popularity for newer shows.

Think about it. You’ve heard great things about “How I Met Your Mother,” but you don’t want to spend the time or money to get the first DVD on NetFlix. The whole series isn’t available through On-Demand cable, and you’re definitely not sold enough to buy the box. With a full iTunes archive, you could try out the pilot for a buck. At $2, it feels too much like you’re over-paying for a set you might want later, as sets average out to about $2 per episode. At a dollar, it’s a product sample. For $2, you’ve already invested.

The real competition for iTunes downloads isn’t DVD box sets — it’s cable On Demand service. That’s what hasn’t clicked until now. The TV networks, because many of them also own record companies, can only view their product compared to song prices. But it’s an artificial comparison. Which will you play more times: A hot song you love or an hour-long episode of Heroes? If anything, songs should cost more than TV shows.

For myself, I would buy a lot more shows on iTunes if the price goes down — especially for series I don’t watch or from channels I don’t subscribe to. The more I think about it, the more I like it. It’s incredibly consumer-focused, but also focused on growing the audiences of series with niche followings. It means more revenue than On-Demand for the networks, as well as possible boosts for DVD season box sets.

What do you think, how would your iTunes habits change if the TV prices drop?

Via Buzzsugar.

The iPod will get three new features at Steve Jobs’ media extravaganza Sept. 5 according to the rumor mill: a touch-screen, Wi-Fi and digital radio. I think two of three are likely:

1. The touch-screen is a slam dunk. It’s the natural successor to the scroll wheel. Who’d buy a new, high-end iPod without it? Case closed.

2. Wi-Fi is unlikely. What’s it good for? Sharing tunes with other iPod users in public, ala the Zune? Maybe, but I think not. Copy protection and DRM is too problematic. How about using Wi-Fi to sync tunes with your computer? Maybe, but you’ll still need a cable to charge the device, so what’s the point? Maybe Wi-Fi could connect the iPod to a set of speakers via an Airport Express base station and AirTunes? Seems like a lot of trouble for a pretty minor feature. Wi-Fi is good for getting on the internet, so unless the iPod is also getting Safari and e-mail, I don’t see the point of adding it.

3. Digital radio is the real killer. It’s a feature that could spell real trouble for the satellite radio industry. With digital radio, the iPod could be a portable TiVo for music, automatically recording favorite shows, rewinding live broadcasts and purchasing songs over the air. Digital radio is so consumer-friendly, it’s completely transformed the UK radio market in a couple of years, and though U.S. broadcasters seem terrified of it, the success of satellite radio is spurring them into action. As Wired News reported in July:

“In the United Kingdom, more than 4.7 million digital radios have been sold since 1999. Listeners browse station listings in an electronic program guide, pause and rewind content as it’s broadcast, bookmark specific programs or songs, and record them using postage-stamp-size memory cards. And starting in May, they can buy songs as they hear them on the radio, downloading them to computers, digital receivers or cell phones.

… IBiquity says that the HD Digital Radio Alliance, a consortium of U.S. broadcasting chains, will commit nearly $250 million in air time to promote the format in 2007. And UBC Media’s Simon Cole says that satellite’s head start in the United States might actually be good news for HD Radio. “Satellite is softening up the market,” he says. “It’s waking U.S. consumers up to what digital can deliver.”