Apple - page 67

Apple just slapped NBC down hard. Responding to reports NBC was pulling out of the iTunes Store, Apple announced that it was prematurely canceling their partnership — Because NBC wanted $5 per episode of its shows!

Apple® today announced that it will not be selling NBC television shows for the upcoming television season on its online iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com). The move follows NBC’s decision to not renew its agreement with iTunes after Apple declined to pay more than double the wholesale price for each NBC TV episode, which would have resulted in the retail price to consumers increasing to $4.99 per episode from the current $1.99. ABC, CBS, FOX and The CW, along with more than 50 cable networks, are signed up to sell TV shows from their upcoming season on iTunes at $1.99 per episode.

Incredible. NBC has benefited from iTunes more than anyone else, and they’re throwing out crazy price increases. I mean, that would have made Friday Night Lights Season 1 cost $110! NBC is selling the DVD for less than $20 brand-new with more special features! If this is any indication of Hulu’s pricing scheme, it’s screwed out of the gate.

Via Daring Fireball.

Rick James pic from CBC.

A lot of mystery remains about Apple’s big iPod event next week. Will we see widescreen touch iPods (what were known as “true” video iPods before the iPhone showed up)? Nanos with video? A shuffle that can scramble your brain?

What is certain is that, for once, Steve Jobs won’t demonstrate a new iPod video with a clip from “The Office,” as NBC Universal has announced its withdrawal from the iTunes Music Store as of December, according to the New York Times. While it’s possible that existing content will remain or that NBC will offer new content on an as-chosen basis like Universal Music has, it’s more likely that NBC is packing up its toys for Hulu.com, the bizarre commercial video service that NBC and News Corp. promise to launch “real soon now.”

This is a huge blow — NBC makes up 40 percent of all video sales, and I can’t think of a recent iTunes event that didn’t feature an NBC show, which really says something, given Steve Jobs’s close ties to Disney and ABC. Not a sign of doom, but a clear sign that Apple isn’t as secure in video as it has been in music.

Via Apple 2.0.

Unafraid of Apple’s lawyers, Think Secret has a gallery of gorgeous screenshots and icons from the latest build of Leopard (9A527), which was released to software developers last week.

Above is the large version of the new Network Utility icon. According to Think Secret, almost all the icons in Leopard are now bigger, better and brighter.

And just as the icons are getting bigger, so too are the applications. According to Think Secret, Address Book has grown from 25.2MB in Tiger to 47.7MB in Leopard; Safari has grown from 6.5MB to 51.9MB; and Mail has grown from 49MB to 279.7MB.

Apple just sent out invites to a special media event at San Francisco’s Moscone West convention center on September 5 at 10AM — and music is clearly the theme.
There’s been lots of speculation that new iPods are on tap, including stubby, ugly iPod nanos and a touchscreen iPod Touch.

Photographer Frasier Spiers spotted this chappie with an Apple ‘do at the weekend grand opening of Glasgow’s new Apple store.

The rest of Fraser’s pictures in this Flickr set capture the character of Glaswegians better than any other the other pictures I’ve seen from the grand opening.

One of the things I thought strange about the other picture sets was the absence of drunks. If you’re out all night in Glasgow, you’re certain to encounter a few. Well, Fraser captured one. Fraser says this young man was extremely drunk, and boasted about his sexual prowess to the waiting line for hours.

I thought this guy was a drunken thug, but he’s nerd from GlasMUG cheering people on.

And here’s a kid who queued for hours in a Che Guevara shirt. Fraser writes: “The irony of wearing a Che Guevera (SIC) hoodie whilst queueing for hours to attend a retail store opening is beyond parody. “I wanted an iPod Shuffle for Christmas, but my mommy says that Apple exploits the workers! I got a packet of seeds and a sickle instead”¦.”

(Thanks Oleg for noting Fraser’s pictures in the comments).

The latest build of Leopard (build 9A527) has a default desktop that looks like some kind of Star Trek supernova in outer space, according to a leaked screenshot.

Here’s what it looks like in use. The outer space theme is used at least twice in Leopard: the Time Machine backup app also has a spacey UI.

As Phil Ryu notes, with the cosmic backdrop, Leopards’ interface looks like the control deck of a futuristic spaceship looking out into void.

Could Apple be trying to imply that Leopard is so advanced it’s positively science fiction?

Two Apple geniuses from Apple’s new store in Glasgow, which celebrated its grand opening this weekend. Photo by Setteb.it.
Gary Allen of IFOAppleStore, who travelled to Scotland from Berkeley to attend the grand opening, noted that the doorway smelled of urine. Scots are notorious drunken urinators in shop doorways. Link.

The time has arrived. All of us cheapskates who’ve been holding out for cheaper iPhones have been thrown a frickin’ bone. At Apple’s online store, we can now purchase factory refurbished iPhones for a full $100 below retail price. Which makes it just an arm and a bit of a leg instead of the whole limb.

I am surprised to see the refurb discount be so deep — this suggests that Apple has had to replace a lot of iPhones here in the early going. Who’s sent theirs back? Go ahead, you can tell us. No need to be shy.

Via Gizmodo 

Great (and totally horrifying) story of customer service gone awry up at SFist yesterday. The writer in question had a PowerBook completely melt down and went to the San Francisco Apple Store only to be awarded a free MacBook Pro — which was shipped to CompUSA. No, really.

Yet, somehow we knew there would be at least one more hurdle before our computer woes had been resolved. Thank you, Fed Ex, for mistaking the number 760 Market (our s.o.’s office building — stalkers take note) for 750 Market, which happens to be CompUSA. Luckily, we were able to track down the package and obtain it from Scott, the sales manager at CompUSA, who not-so-subtly scolded us for not buying the computer through CompUSA.

Wow. That totally puts my worst Genius Bar story to shame, which was getting a free hard drive replacement in a PowerBook, but then having the video cable get crimped in the process, leading to spontaneous black-outs — and then losing the computer temporarily.

Anyone else had bad experiences with Apple Customer Care to balance all the good ones we’ve all had?

Everyone who joking referred to the keynote Steve Jobs gave in January as the critical moment of the iPhoneWorld conference just got a lot more ammunition, as a large number of Mac-related expected announcements that never surfaced back then just dropped together: Sexy aluminum, thin, iMacs; a new version of iLife; a new version of iWork; and some new features for .Mac. A random August product launch is the new MacWorld.

Many of the rumor-mongers were right on the money about the iMacs. They’re thin as could be, they use the exact keyboard that leaked to the web the other week, and their fronts recall almost exactly the back face of the iPhone. It’s a clever design move, extending the iMac as big brother of the iPod metaphor to a new iMac as big brother to the iPhone. That said, it’s hard to describe these as being a radical leap forward. They’re virtually the same design as the last generation, only thinner, hotter, faster. The desktop market is ripe for disruption.

The additions to iLife are similarly unexciting. As excited as I am that iPhoto now has event-organized cataloging, and the Magic GarageBand feature that can turn music played on a guitar into a trumpet or otherwise. But the new Web Gallery features on .Mac aren’t that different from what came before — they’re just much more appealing and creative than what came before. Definitely not a big enough shift.

iWork has finally been fleshed out into a real office suite, offering Numbers, a spreadsheet program that has been rumored at least since Columbus landed in the Caribbean. It looks very appealing, and I think I’m finally going to invest in it. I love Keynote, and Pages looks improved (hey, Apple realized that people want to write, not just lay out text!).

The “leaked” pics of a new iMac making the rounds are clearly a Photoshop fake made from images of Apple’s Cinema Displays taken from Apple’s website. See below.
The color also screams fake.

A new iMac is rumored to be introduced by Steve Jobs at a special event at Apple HQ on Tuesday — and everyone is hoping for a redesign. But Apple’s consumer machines do not come with metallic finishes. That’s reserved for the “pro” level machines. If the iMac has a new case, it will be made of plastic and will come in black, white or maybe other fruity colors.

The Fake:

From Apple’s website:

.

With all the hubbub surrounding the release of the iPhone (can you believe it’s been more than a month already?), Apple’s introduction of miniature Apple Stores inside of Best Buys kind of flew under the radar. Which is kind of odd, because the Best Buy mini-stores represent Apple’s resurgence more than almost anything else that’s happened in Steve Jobs’s tenure.

After all, in the 1990s, Best Buy did such a terrible job selling Macs that Apple pulled is products out of the entire chain, focusing on CompUSA and Internet sales. Now, almost 10 years later, Apple returns on its own terms.

I checked out the Apple mini-store in the Best Buy in Santa Rosa, California on Saturday night, where I took a couple of photos. It’s an interesting set-up, all-in-all. Very consumer-focused, which makes sense, but I was surprised that Apple isn’t selling any Mac Pros at Best Buy at all. It’s MacBooks (and Pros), iMacs, and nothing else. The entire display centers on computers — not on iPods, let alone iPhones, which aren’t stocked at Best Buy at all. A very interesting positioning all around — given that it’s the iPod and its accessories that brought Apple back into most retail stores.

Macs star, and it’s about time. Click through the jump for another image from the store.

Columnist John Dvorak at an Apple Store. Pic by Steve Rhodes.

Columnist John Dvorak, who is perhaps the most hated pundit by Mac users because of his constant (and quote deliberate) Mac bashing, is now a Mac user himself — and he likes it.

In his latest PC Magazine Column, Dvorak confesses that he has been using an iMac at work for a couple of months, and it’s “not half bad.” After heaping on more weak praise, he says he has no plans to buy a Mac for personal use at home, but he increasingly finds himslef recommending the Mac to friends and neighbors who ask him what to buy! He writes:

“I can see why the Mac is gaining market share, because the rationale for using one is simple. Do you want to deal with the agony of antivirus, firewall, antispyware, and other touchy software subsystems, many of which do not work well? Or do you want to boot Microsoft Word and write a document and be done with it?

As someone who does recommend gear to people, I have to think to myself, “Should I recommend something that will come back to haunt me, or recommend a Mac with its higher price but lower hassle factor?” The answer is simple. I hate the idea of having to do customer service for people who cannot keep their systems clean, and that’s most people.”

Chart: MarketWatch.

Apple’s Q3 was the company’s best ever. It raked in $5.41 billion in sales, posting a $818 million in profit. Gross margins — the amount of revenue that is profit — is up to a whopping 36 percent. This surely is the highest in the industry. By contrast, Dell reported Q2 2007 margins of just 4.3 percent, earning $605 million profit on revenues of $14.1 billion.
Apple also reported 10 million iPods sold — up 21 percent on the year before; and 1.76 million Macs, up 33 percent year-on-year.

Apple’s stock is rebounding on the news: it’s up 6 percent after taking a hammering yesterday on AT&T’s iPhone numbers.

Picture by Ed Dame.

Apple sold 270,000 iPhones on the opening weekend, according to Apple’s Q3 results.

See the data PDF here.

AT&T’s quarterly results said only 146,000 were activated in the first two days — so it looks like 124,000 people either waited a few days to activate their phones, or had trouble activating them, as was widely reported.

We now have definitive proof that a business world built on the quarterly earnings report is destined for self-destruction: Apple’s stock fell almost $9 because its partner AT&T “only” managed to activate 146,000 iPhones in its first day and a half on sale. Not that the activation figure directly reflects the number of iPhones sold.

Yes, I’m serious, and I’m totally bewildered. Analysts and investors are pretending that the second quarter, which closed June 30, would be the one that reflects the impact of the iPhone. Which is nice, except that the iPhone went on sale at 6 p.m. on June 29, and AT&T had serious network issues that prevented people from activating their phones until well into the next week. Which means that anyone who couldn’t or chose not to activate their iPhone until after midnight on June 30 got left out of this report.

Which is obviously a clear sign that it’s time to sell all of your shares in AAPL. Obviously. You know how, in movies, we’ve gotten to the point where people talk about the highest opening 5.5-day gross ever by a film released on a Tuesday in a month with a full moon that falls on a Saturday? This is the opposite. This is the smallest 1.5-day activation ever for an incredibly successful product. They chopped off Sunday, for heaven’s sake!

But this is the world that exists. It’s all about the quarterlies. And maybe that means that Apple did AT&T a disservice by not launching a week sooner. It shouldn’t have any impact on the long-term health of either firm. But it’s idiotic. Especially since AT&T experienced — wait for it — 61 percent total revenue growth!

Grrrr. Anyway, don’t read too much into these numbers. Apple will release its sales numbers soon, which are a clearer indication of how well the iPhone did in its first day and a half. Not that a day and a half of sales matters. It’s stupid. Can we talk about this in October?

Image via TechDigest

Scott Walker, the assistant managing editor of the Birmingham (Ala.) News, has made a hack for the ages. Taking an old newspaper vending machine, as a base, he fitted a 17″ LCD screen to the front of the box and then rigged a Mac mini running PhotoPresenter to constantly stream the front pages of newspapers from the Newseum. As well as anything from his iTunes library.

It’s a wonder to behold. And all of this on deadline, too!
Via TUAW

BusinessWeek recently put together an interesting run-down of prominent Apple Design alumni and what they’re up to these days. It’s a good list, but far from comprehensive, as is required in any such piece. I did want to highlight a couple of people who didn’t make the cut.

It’s literally two. I promise.

Think I really blew it with some key part of the Apple Product Roadmap? Here’s your chance to do it one better.

I have uploaded the file I created to SlideShare (unfortunately, they convert to PowerPoint, but I did it and brought it back to Keynote and it looks right). Feel free to take it, add images, remove some, add commentary and just generally get creative with it. Then, when you’re finished, upload your finished file as a PDF to scribd and send me the link – I’ll provide links to the coolest stuff you come up with.

Get the file! 

Too often, we dissect minute details of a company’s everyday actions looking for signs of health or strategy. Unfortunately, quarterly reports and individual actions can be totally misleading. That’s why I’ve created the above map, which charts, near as I can tell, the evolution of Apple’s entire product family from the Apple I to the iPhone. I was inspired to do it by this chronological sort done by Edwin Tofslie that Fake Steve linked to last night. The images involved are of every major design revision, not necessarily model revision, that Apple has made in its 30 year history. So I decided to chart how various products superceded others in Apple’s history, and start to think about new implications.

I’m tired, I haven’t done much thinking, other than to notice that Apple’s four product lines really came together perfectly in 2001, just in time to launch the iPod from a position of strength. The above image is tiny, so head to Scribd to see it in full, especially as a PDF download. There’s a lot to take in, but I’m dying to know what you think. Do my connections make sense? Does a pattern emerge that implies where Apple will go next?

See the full map!

Christopher Null has created a special drink to loosen your wallet before buying an iPhone.

Any doubts about laying out thousands for the iPhone will magically melt away after three stiff Appletinis.

2 oz. Vodka
1/2 oz. Apple Pucker Schnapps
1/2 oz. Goldschlager
1/4 oz. Cointreau (or Triple Sec)

Photo of Greg Packer, first in line at Apple’s 5th Ave. store, from Wikipedia.

People think Apple users are all black-turtleneck wearing graphic artists who wear poncy designer glasses, but look at the mixed bunch lining up in NYC for an iPhone.

There’s a Air Force vet, a hair stylist, and a guard at the UN, according to a list drawn up by one of the waiters:

1. Greg Packer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Packer)
2. David Clayman (Future Inforte – CHICAGO SAP Consultant)
3. Jessica Rodriguez (Whipsmart woman with wicked soundbites
4. Rebecca Boorsma (Hair stylist)
5. Anthony Cardozo (Air Force Vet, Arabic Speaker, Purple Heart)
6. Kai Pauli (Security Guard at UN, German Speaker)
7. Benjamin Sherman (Unknown)
8. Vincent Nguyen (Entrepreneur, myitablet.com)
9. Damian Charles (High school student)
10. Mark Conn (Watch him wink!)

At Apple’s town hall meeting today, an employees asked Steve Jobs why the iPhone is being released at 6PM on Friday?

Jobs said Apple didn’t want people to have to take off from work, so they scheduled the launch after hours.

More on the all-staff meeting at Ars Technica.

An enterprising New Yorker has a small office for rent right above an AT&T store on 34th Street. The lease is very short. It expires on Friday, the day the iPhone goes on sale. It’s being offered as the perfect place to camp out for an iPhone.

The ad reads:

“small office space available. short term rental next week. directly above att 34th street store in manhattan. if you are camping out for the Iphone this is the place to hang out. limited number of spots available. bathroom and coffee. spots wont last! directly above main door to att. one flight up!”

Craigslist ad.

Been wondering just who is actually camping out to buy the iPhone when it gets released? Wonder no longer. Gizmodo has an interview with the lucky guy out front of the Apple Store in New York, and, let’s just say I don’t think they would hire him to dance in an iPod commercial.

Still, he’s going to have an iPhone on Friday, and I’m not. What’s dignity worth, anyway?

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