MGM flicks arrive on Apple’s iTunes Store By AppleInsider Staff Published: 09:00 AM EST Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (MGM) and Apple announced Wednesday that MGM is now offering titles from its catalog of feature films for purchase and download on the iTunes Store.
Apple TV Commercial Follow-Up by Erica Sadun, The Unofficial Apple Weblog Eagle-eyed TUAW reader Klemens noticed that the Apple TV in the commercial had only a power-cord and no connections to a TV. Here are a few other things you may (or may not) have noticed.
So Apple’s had one HELL of a first quarter, haven’t they? With tax day nearly upon us, I thought it might be a good idea to look back at how well Apple is answering the issues that I thought were important late in December of last year, especially now that the AppleTV is out in the market and the iPhone has set the world on fire with its hype flames. Or something. So click through — we’ll laugh, we’ll cry, and we’ll learn something about forecasting. Here, again, are the 10 Questions Apple Must Answer in 2007 — and how well they’re responding.
Anyone check out the new AppleTV ad yet? It’s narrated by none other than John Krasinski, better known as Jim “Fat” Halpert on NBC’s “The Office.” Interestingly enough, HP has a huge promotional concern on the series, and its displays are everywhere on the show. Apple always wins, don’t they?
AppleTV just got one step closer to being a full-fledged replacement for a stand-alone Web-browsing device thanks to AppleTV RSS Plugin from twenty08 software. The fun little app adds a new channel to Apple’s hackable box, and then you can make it display your favorite RSS feed. <cough>US, for example.</cough>
The little application will soon support ATOM feeds and video RSS. Can’t wait. This is all nice, but it still can’t compete with what’s officially supported on the Nintendo Wii, which has a headline news reader, weather and even a complete browser. Isn’t that crazy?
Via Digg.
We’re entering a new phase of iPhone speculation. Last fall was Phase I: Ludicrous predictions from people who have never seen one. January until now has been Phase II: Potshots and Idol Worship. And now on to Phase III: Summaries of the obvious.
I submit as the beachhead indicator of Phase III these comments from UBS Specialist Tony Andersson, who concludes that, brace yourself, iPhone sales could have a negative impact on iPod sales. Phew! Are you breathing again yet?
Everyone is loving the story of the iPod that allegedly saved the life of U.S. Infantryman Kevin Garrad in Tikrit (read more at Gadget Lab). Though it seems like the perfect story, there is actually more to this tale than you might assume. First of all, the iPod didn’t save his life. His body armor did. And it isn’t even an Apple model. Click through for the rest of the story.
The true focus of a new European Union complaint alleging unfair online-sales practices by Apple Inc. isn’t the company’s iTunes Store, but the recording industry, an EU spokesman said. The European Commission on Friday sent Apple and four record companies “statements of objections,” accusing them of harming consumers in the United Kingdom and Denmark by charging them more to download songs than residents in other parts of the 27-nation bloc. Regulators want Europeans to be able to shop for better prices and obtain a more varied selection by going to iTunes Web sites outside their home country. (Paid subscription required)
Feel the love, people! MaxGizmo, a band based in Toronto (where I happen to be right now — and I’m a little drunk), has just released a fairly awesome song about the glories of the Mac 512k, the first Mac that was capable of, well, doing stuff. It loses points for casual use of a slur, but the beat’s catchy enough. Dig it!
So, I might or might not be interviewed by On the Media soon regarding my thoughts about the Apple/EMI deal that will soon bring us DRM-free iTunes music downloads. It’ll basically depend on if they can find me a studio in Toronto or not — I’ll keep you posted. In collecting these thoughts, the following thing occurred to me: I have no idea if it’s a good thing or not. After giving it some more thought, it’s definitely good, bad and ugly…I mean, unclear. This is the most theoretical I’ve gotten in awhile, so definitely click through to see what it’s all about.
There’s an ulimited supply
And there is no reason why
I tell you it was all a frame
They only did it cos the fame!
Who?
E.M.I.
Too many people had the suss
Too many people support us
An unlimited amount
Too many outlets in and out
Who?
E.M.I.
And sir and friends are crucified
A day they wish that we had died
We are an addition
We are ruled by none
Never ever neverrrrrraaa
And you thought that we were faking
That we were all just money making
You do not believe we’re for real
Or you would lose your cheap appeal ?
Don’t judge a book by the cover
Unless you cover just another
And blind acceptance is a sign
Of stupid fools who stand in line
Like
E.M.I.
Unlimited edition with an unlimited supply
That was the only reason we all had to say goodbye !
Unlimited supply
There is no reason why
I tell you it was all a frame
They only did it cos the fame !
I do not need the pressure
I can’t stand the useless fools !
Unlimited supply
Hallo E.M.I.
Goodbye A & M
The European Union has launched a price probe into Apple’s iTunes.
European regulators are investigating prices Apple charges for tunes in different countries and is accusing it of restricting choice.
European regulators say Apple and the record companies are violating rules that allow EU citizens to buy goods and services in other memeber countries without restriction. The iTunes store uses credit card details to check country of residence, which is used to determine prices and what music catalog is offered.
“Consumers can only buy music from the iTunes online stores in their country of residence and are therefore restricted in their choice of where to buy music,” EU competition spokesman Jonathan Todd told BBC News.
Apple said it had always wanted to offer a fully pan-European service, but was restricted by the demands of its music partners.
“We were advised by the music labels and publishers that there were certain legal limits to the rights they could grant us,” it said in a statement.
Fake Steve Jobs is a hero. While the real Steve is locked away running Apple and guiding breakthroughs like the iPhone, Fake Steve, who invented the friggin’ iPod, is giving revealing interviews to media organizations.
I was really into NeXT, whatever happened with that?
Well, we had some issues around pricing. Like, we figured out what the product should cost, and then we multiplied that by four and set our prices that way. Turns out we were over-overpricing. When I returned to Apple we figured out how to overprice correctly. About 50% more than the reasonable price is about what people are wiling to pay to get a product that makes them cooler than everyone else. So now instedad of over-overpricing, we’re just overpricing. And as our results indicate, it’s working.
It used to be that three things in life were inevitable: Death, taxes, and paying full Price at retail Apple Stores. Not anymore – scratch the last one off the list. Yes, Virginia – Apple does sell things at clearance prices sometimes.
I ducked into the Union Square Apple Store in San Francisco on Sunday afternoon and stumbled upon two big, clear plastic bins full of cut-rate merchandise – some of it Apple’s, including a Mighty Mouse for $10 off, Magsafe Power Adapters at almost 50 percent off, previous gen Mac minis for $70 off and, my personal favorite, the wretched official Apple iPod leather case for half price. If you’re in need of some gear, definitely check your local Apple Store to see if they’ve got something similar going.
I only got the one picture on my camera-phone – Apple employees were milling about, and I wasn’t in the mood to have my phone seized. Anyone else spotted a sale at an Apple Store?
“Apple Unveils Higher Quality DRM-Free Music on the iTunes Store: DRM-Free Songs from EMI Available on iTunes for $1.29 in May” Apple
“We are going to give iTunes customers a choice–the current versions of our songs for the same 99 cent price, or new DRM-free versions of the same songs with even higher audio quality and the security of interoperability for just 30 cents more,’ said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. ‘We think our customers are going to love this, and we expect to offer more than half of the songs on iTunes in DRM-free versions by the end of this year.”
The Wall Street Journal says Jobs is joining EMI to announce the company is completely abondoning DRM copy protection, just as Steve Jobs urged in an open letter in February.
Garry Allen of IFOApplestore has the first pictures of the fabulous glass entrance to Apple’s new store on Fifth Avenue. He snapped the picture after workers removed protective cladding in the wee hours of the morning.
Allen also reports that the obligatory line of visitors has already started forming. Stormy Shippy from Texas — who was first inside Apple’s London store when it opened in 2004 — arrived just after midnight on Thursday and is camping out to be the first inside when the store opens on Friday.
The store is below ground. Visitors enter the glass cube and descend via a cylindrical glass elevator that Allen describes as a “giant syringe.” There’s also one of Apple’s signature glass staircases, which curves down around the elevator.
Allen reports:
“… the cube has another interesting feature — it’s all open to the lower floor. That is, you can walk up to the outside glass of the cube, look through and see right down into the store itself. Anyone who sees the cube, notices the Apple logo, and who then comes over to the outside of the cube to investigate will see the store and activity below, and be drawn right into the door and down the stairs. It’s another innovative and guaranteed crowd attractor.”
CNet’s Silicon.com is reporting that Apple Korea’s website was defaced, but the story doesn’t contain much information, so I did some digging around myself.
It appears Apple Korea’s mail subdomain was defaced with the phrase, “All Your Base Belong To Us” by a h4x0r called DaViDu. There’s a mirror of the defacement at Zone-H.
DaViDu claims to be a member of the D.O.M Team, or Dark OwneD Mafia, whose website is predominantly in Spanish and appears to be based in San Diego, CA, according to the Whois database.
The Zone-H site lists several other website defacements by DaViDu. Most are pretty obscure sites, and there’s several Dutch ones.
Nothing significant to conclude here — just filling in some basic information no one else seems bothered to track down.
If you asked Apple’s legion armchair CEOs the one number one thing they’d do if they ran the company, the top priority is always the same: develop a series of adverts that spell out the Mac’s best features compared to PCs.
Well, Apple’s real CEO has finally done just that. After a decade of wishy-washy lifestyle ads like the “Think Different” campaign, Steve Jobs is finally taking the competition head on with a new set of TV spots trumpeting the benefits of the Mac over the PC.
Apple’s new Get a Mac campaign centers around six TV spots touting the Mac’s security, stability and ease of use.
Featuring the author John Hodgman as a nerdy PC and another younger, sexier actor as the Mac, the ads make gentle fun of PCs focusing on viruses, unexpected freezes and the iLife software package.
There’s also a spot about compatibility, the Mac’s lifestyle focus and finally, one that quotes from the Wall Street Journal’s review of the iMac naming it the best desktop computer on the market.
There’s no info about who made the ads, but they look like the work of documentary maker Errol Morris, who shot Apple’s previous Switch campaign. The new ads use a similar setup — the characters address the camera head on against a white backdrop.
The Switch spots were generally judged annoying and ineffective (except for the Ellen Feiss ad), and I can’t say I like the new ads much better.
They’re somewhat insipid and maybe a little smug. I like Hodgman, but I’d prefer something more visceral, like footage of that cubicle guy going apeshit on his malfunctioning PC. I say get some real human emotion in the ads — that’d get the Mac message across.
An International Herald Tribune op-ed piece weighs in on France’s legislative attempts to protect music consumers from Apple’s iPod/iTMS tie in:
“If Apple succeeds in hooking millions of consumers to the iPod and retains them, then it can be the gatekeeper of global culture.
That’s what irks the French. Apple could take the wind out of the French sails and permit others to encode music with their digital rights management. That may become inevitable, but Apple would like to delay it.”
Bumbling around the Web, I just stumbled on Smay’s blog, where he’s written a good description of his “Mac Lust.”
“I want one of the new MacBook Pros. I have a couple of computers at work; a year-old Dell here at home; a perfectly good ThinkPad. I do not need another computer. But I want one. I have never used a Mac. Don’t look forward to having to learn a new operating system or move back and forth between Mac and PC.
I want a Mac because they are cool. And all the cool kids have them. They are sexy. There is no logic or reason at work here. This is happening in the lizard part of my brain. I’ve thought about sneaking over to St. Louis to the Apple store and putting my hands on one of the new MacBooks. But that’s like saying I’ll just lie down on the bed next to the super-model, but we won’t “do anything.” If I walk in that store, I’ll walk out $2,500 poorer. So I’m holding on. Like a junkie trying to survive the shakes and chills and maybe in the morning I won’t want that fix.”
A BusinessWeek poll about the Microsoft Vista delay yielded an interesting result.
BusinessWeek asked: “Will Microsoft’s decision to delay the next version of the Windows operating system change your PC purchase plans?”
The biggest response by a huge margin — more than 65 perccent — said, “I do intend to buy a new computer — an Apple.”
The results aren’t at all scientific, but it is interesting. Polls always skew toward the negative, but the Apple shift is huge. I’m guessing the poll must have been noted on a pro-Apple site somewhere and Apple fans responded en masse.
I guess Steve Jobs is chuckling to himself having fooled everyone today.
At Macworld in January, Jobs suggested Apple might do something special on April 1 – its 30th birthday.
Knowing that announcements of announcements stoke the fires of speculation, Jobs got everyone expecting something special from Apple — but the April Fool’s joke is to do nothing at all.
I know I’ve just spent the last three hours surfing the web for a special surpise announcement, like a new $666 Apple Uno (a kit-built computer), or a lightning “everything must got for one dollar” sale at the local Apple store.
Joy of Tech has another great cartoon about Mac fans and Apple’s upcoming 30th anniversary on April 1. This one made me laugh out loud. Click the pic for the punchline:
