Craig Grannell - page 6

New laptops weren’t the only thing Jobs unveiled today—Apple’s also finally provided a new external display. And it’s a strange one.

More information’s available at Apple’s website, but the gist of it is this: the 24″ display is super-thin, uses advanced LED technology, has integrated power with easy connectivity, and includes an iSight, microphone and speakers. All this for the same price as the existing, aging 23″ Cinema Display.

That sounds great until you dig and think a little more. $899 is hardly great value for a 24″ display these days. The display is gloss-only, which will make pros flee. And those that won’t had better have laptops, since unless I’m very much mistaken, this display requires one of Apple’s new laptops to work—it needs a machine with a Mini DisplayPort. So you guys who just dropped $2799 on a new Mac Pro had better look elsewhere.

Apple’s a great company, an innovator that goes where few others dare to tread. But flashes of the old sneak through now and again, and only Apple would dare release a nine-hundred dollar MacBook accessory in the middle of global economic turmoil.

With Apple’s announcements still ringing in the ears of the Mac faithful, it looks like I wasn’t far off the mark a month ago when I asked “Is Apple going to ditch the ‘Pro’ from MacBook Pro and streamline its laptop range, leaving just a ‘standard’ MacBook (with different screen sizes and minor tinkering possibilities under the hood), and the Air for people who happily set fire to 50-dollar bills?”

The revamped line offers a new (and much prettier) MacBook Pro, with a precision-engineered, environmentally friendly case, advanced NVIDIA graphics, and a no-button multi-touch trackpad (which, given Apple’s penchant for incrementing the number of fingers required for gestures will by the next revision also require toes).

It looks like a triumph of engineering, and although the enforced move to glossy displays irks, it’s hard to see how Apple could have improved on today’s announcements, especially when you consider the MacBook also gets to play with the new toys. In fact, bar the different screen sizes and minor tinkering possibilities under the hood (more powerful graphics for the Pro, a lack of FireWire for the MacBook), these machines are more twins than distant cousins.

The one major glitch for me is that it’s so painfully obvious that Apple’s laptop range is now in the middle of a transition. The white MacBook clings on as a much-needed (relatively) low-cost option, but sticks out like a sore thumb, screaming “I’m the cheap Mac–DON’T LOOK AT ME!” while hiding its face behind its pale hands. And in Pro land, the 17″ model looks like its smaller cousin has rapidly beaten it with an ugly stick. However, I suspect this now slightly confused line is a temporary aberration, something somewhat confirmed by Apple’s new Which MacBook are you? page that ignores the old MacBook and MacBook Pro entirely.

• Jason Snell of Macworld on Apple potentially driving iPhone devs away: https://tinyurl.com/4ky4hr #

I got absurdly excited when the new Apple keyboard was demonstrated, and immediately put in my order blind. I’d been looking for a decent laptop-like keyboard, and this seemed to fit the bill. In use, I haven’t been disappointed with it.

However, my glee was initially two-fold, partly driven by what was actually printed on the keys, and this is the area that’s led to some disappointment. Find out why after the jump.

PC user in “I’ve got a beard” shocker!

Leander already wrote about the new Microsoft ads, noting that they convincingly portray “the PC as part of global culture, unpretentious and down-to-earth”.

But, really, they say very little. Instead of finding these adverts a refreshing antidote to the brash and somewhat tiresome arrogance of Apple’s ads, they just come across as a feeble and overly defensive response, like a weedy geek whimpering “stop picking on me, dammit!” Microsoft should have blazed on to the scene, proving its worth and reasoning why it’s better than Apple, or at least hammered home its point with a little humor.

Instead, we get dry, by-the-numbers, designed-by-committee adverts that are borderline nauseating. Little more than a self-congratulatory pat on the back, they tell us what we already know: lots of people use PCs, and PCs can be used for diverse things. Thrilling. They don’t say lives can be made better by using PCs, nor do they provide any compelling reason whatsoever to check out Microsoft’s output over the competition. (Possible exception: beard lovers.) They’re also dull, unimaginative and unoriginal, riffing weakly off of Apple’s ideas, rather than Microsoft coming up with its own. While that might make them very relevant to Microsoft, that doesn’t make them good adverts.

Apple’s gains on Microsoft haven’t been down to advertising—in fact, one might argue that Apple’s advertisements actually put many people off the brand. Instead, they’ve been down to user experience, and rallying against complacency. Until Microsoft can offer similarly persuasive arguments, I can’t see its adverts convincing anyone to stick with ‘PC’, let alone switch to it.

The US back to school promotion’s done, but its equivalent has now fired up in the UK. Brits can now grab Apple laptops or iMacs, an iPod nano or iPod touch, and then get a rebate of up to £95 (which doesn’t actually cover the cost of even the cheapest iPod on offer, but still).

The most interesting part about this is the offer’s closing date: the spooktastic October 31. It’s pretty rare for Apple to start shipping new Macs when this kind of promotion is still running (although it does sometimes happen), so does this mean we now won’t be seeing new Mac laptops and iMacs until November? Or are British students just getting ‘encouraged’ to clear Apple’s UK inventory, readying the company for its autumn/fall assult?

Update: other European Apple Stores are also running similar offers—this isn’t just specific to the UK.

In July, Apple noted that an upcoming ‘product transition’ would affect future profit margins, prompting speculation. For once, such speculation has started to fade, but now rumors regarding the new MacBook are beginning to surface: an aluminium case, LED backlit display, multi-touch. Does that sound like anything to you?

Is Apple going to ditch the ‘Pro’ from MacBook Pro and streamline its laptop range, leaving just a ‘standard’ MacBook (with different screen sizes and minor tinkering possibilities under the hood), and the Air for people who happily set fire to 50-dollar bills? (Clearly, they would once have lit their cigars with said bills, but you’re not allowed to smoke anywhere in the free world these days.)

Obviously, this is idle speculation, but such streamlining would make sense. Run SuperDrives across the new MacBook range, and position the low-end model at an aggressive price-point, but with roughly the grunt of today’s mid-range MacBook (albeit with some extra toys), and then beef up the mid- and top-ends with larger screens and a graphics card, but slice their price-tags, too.

According to resellers we’ve spoken to, laptops are the Apple hardware that continues to outperform the market and expectations, and so if Apple really does want to make a play for market-share, this could be the way to do it.

Update: As Gruber just pointed out, Apple was likely referring to the new iPods introduced last week and the guidance was for the quarter about to end. But what the hell—I still have an inkling that the laptop line-up is going to change rather dramatically over the coming months. So there.

• Devon Kelly and friends literally make a song and dance about Mac OS X’s spinning rainbow of doom: https://bit.ly/1LZ8oZ #
• Apple rejects Podcaster from the App Store for, er, no discernible sensible reason – https://bit.ly/3a66nC (Hat tip: Daring Fireball.) #

UPDATE: One year on, and my view of the platform for gaming has changed somewhat—read Why Apple is Right to Pitch iPod touch as a Games Console to Beat the DSi and PSP Go.

The iPod touch segment of Let’s Rock was particularly notable for Apple’s attempts to position the device as a major gaming platform. “It’s the best portable device for playing games,” claimed Jobs. Apple’s website now calls iPod touch the ‘funnest iPod ever’, and talks about its ‘hundreds of games’. This emphasis on gaming, along with the demonstrations we’ve seen from various developers, appears to be positioning iPod touch alongside Sony’s PSP and Nintendo’s DS, rather than talking about mobile gaming as though iPod touch has any relationship whatsoever to a certain smartphone and cell-phone gaming in general.

There are arguments in favor of this belief. Games have proved phenomenally popular on the App Store. They’re also cheap, relatively plentiful, and simple to get on to your iPhone or iPod touch. Also, crucially, Apple’s solution betters Sony’s and Nintendo’s by allowing updates to games—something owners of the abhorrent DS port of The Settlers no doubt wish were true of their platform.

The problem is, iPod touch is only ever going to be a niche concern in the gaming space. Find out why after the break…

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you can’t have failed to notice that iTunes 8 arrived to some fanfare earlier this week. I’ve been putting it through its paces, figuring out whether the new features are any good, and scoring them using our patented* rockometer.

More after the break…

* Not patented.

• CG: Genius sidebar could not find matches for your specific selection, but here are the Top Songs and Albums in the iTunes Store. *sigh* #

After yesterday’s announcements from Apple, there followed the usual flurry of reactions from various analysts and journalists. This was swiftly followed by a reaction to the reaction, with some parties suggesting that negative grumbling regarding Let’s Rock was somehow unfair on Apple, and that expectations had once again been driven by a hype machine and rumor mill on overdrive.

Some of the negative vibes yesterday no doubt arrived from the much-reported ‘fact’ that Apple actively urged journos to cover the event, claiming it would be a “big deal”. Clearly, there’s some truth in the possibility said ‘fact’ might be a big fat fib. However, does that make the cynical, dismissive and unenthusiastic response to Apple’s event null and void? Put simply, are we, as writers and commentators on Apple and its output, being too hard on Steve and co.?

‘No’ and ‘no’ are my answers to those questions, and for three reasons. First and foremost, Apple is an innovator. And while the company clearly isn’t going to reveal an iPhone at every event, that doesn’t mean we should ever expect run-of-the-mill. The day that happens, Apple is doomed and may as well sell to Dell.

Secondly, iPod has been the line that’s made Apple the powerhouse it is today. As Pete noted,  indication that Apple’s fed-up with the media player business or unable to innovate means others are going to start playing catch-up. I can’t have been the only person to see the new nano and think ‘Zune’, and that’s a dangerous position for Apple to be in.

Thirdly, we have to remember that Apple is the one that, to some extent, drives the hype. There were the huge posters, in-your-face security, and ubiqutious secrecy. For relatively minor updates to its product line, Apple could have put out some press releases. Instead, it invited the world to watch and listen while Steve Jobs paraded his company’s products on stage to much fanfare. So, sure, the rumor mill might be a snowball gathering speed down a shockingly steep hill (before it hits us squarely in the face with a wet splat), but remember that Apple’s the one that starts the ball rolling.

One thing stuck out about the build-up to Let’s Rock. It wasn’t the hype, nor people expecting the absurd (such as an all-powerful unlocked 128 GB iPhone for about $5), but Apple actively encouraging the media to attend. The event, we were told, would be a ‘big deal’. As it turns out, even fairly modest expectations were barely met, and I think it’s pretty safe to say most people left distinctly underwhelmed.

iTunes was first up, with Jobs routinely talking shop (lots of songs, lost of podcasts, and lots of NBC, who came crawling back to a distinct lack of rapturous applause). The app itself is now at version 8, but with seemingly few major changes: there’s a grid view, a Genius playlist that makes me think Apple’s been getting all jealous of last.fm, and iPhoto-style scrubbing over artists, but that’s about it.

The iPod classic’s clearly loved about as much as the Mac mini. This icon of Apple’s resurgence over recent years was pretty much dismissed, and the line knifed to a single model, 120 GB. 30,000 tracks fit on it, apparently, but that’s 10,000 fewer than on the 160 GB version that’s now like the dodo.

Things were better in the realm of the nano, even if the rumor mill had revealed most of the details. The new model resembles the second-gen model, but has a raft of new features, including voice recording, an accelerometer, and the amusing ‘shake to shuffle’ feature. The rainbow colors are arresting and presumably caught rivals out, who’ve largely been following Apple into muted-color-land.

As for the iPod touch, it got the predicted price-drop, weight-loss, volume control and speaker, along with a tag-line to make English teachers wince (“The funnest iPod ever”). New games were also on show, with Real Soccer 2009 rather depressingly dumping a D-pad and buttons on the screen, cunningly making it so players obscure the screen while playing. Woo. (How I wish the Belkin rumor hadn’t turned out to be a hoax…)

So, yeah, I’m rather wishing I’d spent the past hour doing something a little more productive and exciting, like fashioning a lint ball from my office’s windowsill that really needs dusting.

I know, I know—I’m usually the first to complain about people getting all pissed with Apple events letting them down. However, this time Apple was the one telling us we were going to see something big, when all we got were skinny things we already knew about anyway.

Via our Twitter stream, we ran ongoing commentary on Apple’s Let’s Rock shenanigans. Below is a (somewhat) edited tweet-style stream-of-consciousness from the event.

iTunes store

• 8.5m+ songs, 125k+ podcasts, 30k+ TV shows, 3000+ apps
• New today: HD TV shows, and NBC has returned
• SD shows: $1.99. HD: $2.99

iTunes 8

• Grid view, as per the rumors. Can set by artist and scrub across them like a photo album in iPhoto
• Genius “Automatically makes playlists from songs in your library that go great together—with just one click”.
• Genius information sent anonymously. Click a button to get a playlist. Restrict by track number.
• Available today

iPod sales and iPod classic

• Zzzzingg! Jobs dissed everyone else’s player market share. iPod: 73.4%. Microsoft: 2.6%.
• iPod Classic: 80 GB upped to 120 GB. 160 GB discontinued.

New iPod nano

• Form factor as per rumors: skinny, tall, like the gen-2 nano, really thin.
• Push-hold center button for Genius playlist creation.
• Voice recording from attached mics.
• New UI.
• Photos/vids in landscape mode.
• Accelerometer. Rotate 90 degrees to get Cover Flow, like with the iPhone.
• Shake to shuffle.
• Battery: 24 hours for music and four hours for video.
• $199 for 16 GB, $149 for 8GB. Bright rainbow colors in addition to aluminium.

Accessories

• New accessories: headphones and armbands, a mic for voice recording, and in-ear headphones.

iPod touch revamp, iPhone and App Store

• Thinner, with integrated volume control and speaker.
• Genius playlist creation.
• Built-in Nike+iPod – just add a shoe transmitter.
• App Store: 100 million downloads in 60 days. Available in 62 countries.
• Spore Origins, Real Soccer 2009 and Need For Speed: Undercover demoed.
• iPod touch battery life: 36 hours for music, six for video.
• New prices: 8 GB: $229, 16 GB: $299, 32GB: $399.
• New firmware, free to 2.0 owners.
• “Funnest iPod ever” strapline for the new ad.
• iPhone owners to get 2.1 bug-fix—better battery life, less crashing, fewer gremlins, speedier back-ups. Free on Friday.

It’s the grudge-match of the century (well, of the month… at least if you’re a web designer and are sick of iPod coverage): BBEdit 9, the old warhorse that’s been around for 17 years, versus the young pup from Panic Software, Coda 1.5. I’ve been using both over the past week, and my first impressions are below. Over the next 60, I’ll be using both apps for my web-design workflow (not programming nor copywriting) to see how the new versions measure up in that space and how much they can reduce my reliance on other software. In the meantime, here’s a brief overview, in brand-new, patented “yay” and “yuck” categories…

BBEdit 9

Yay: Non-modal windows for search finally don’t suck( ® etc.), speeding up find and replace massively. Being able to directly edit in results windows is great. Code-folding is now much easier to deal with using the keyboard. Projects work fairly well, providing a rapid way of caning through loads of files when editing. Document stats (live word count, line count and character count) are really good.

Yuck: Text completion just feels wrong: although it’s beneficial to writers as well as coders (due to including words rather than just code), it feels awkward, sluggish and not particularly accurate—it just doesn’t seem to ‘get’ what I want to input. The interface, while better than it was a few versions back, is starting to feel old. The preferences make me want to cry. Speed differences with large files don’t appear pronounced (or, frankly, in existence).

Coda 1.5

Yay: It’s like someone stuck a rocket up Coda’s bottom—the app feels so much faster than version 1.0, which I found borderline unusable. Coda’s speed bump has suddenly made its auto-complete very lovely indeed. The Clips window’s been sorted out, and you can now group clips; with tab triggers, you can easily add huge chunks of code or single elements. Multi-file search and replace is lovely.

Yuck: Still no custom shortcuts for invoking Clips from the keyboard. (C’mon, Panic! This is one area everyone else—even Dreamweaver—runs rings round you.) No code-folding. CSSEdit’s CSS tools still make Coda’s look a bit rubbish.

Overall

I’d rather like someone to smush these two apps together. Either that or improve BBEdit’s text-completion, workflow, and interface, or add to Coda code-folding, and keyboard shortcuts to its clips. Still, here’s to the next two months, where I’ll figure out which one’s really worth your time, web designer chums.

O2 finally announced today its pricing for pay as you go iPhones in the UK. The 8 GB model will cost £349.99 and the 16 GB model will be an extra 50 quid. Bundled in is a year’s unlimited browsing and Wi-Fi, which then costs a tenner a month, although you can unsubscribe prior to that if you feel the need.

The all-important date: September 16. The all-important caveat: no visual voicemail (bizarrely) and call-merging on Pay & Go. Still, for those iPhone-loving Brits who think mobile phone contracts are the work of the evil one, this is clearly great news.

Images: Touch Arcade

Update: Belkin has now confirmed that this story is a hoax.

This past weekend saw the rumor mill go into overdrive regarding iPhone games controllers. While the chaps at iControlPad valiantly soldier on with their home-grown iPhone games controller that relies on jailbroken iPhones, Touch Arcade provided images of a rival (shown above)—supposedly from Belkin—that will have official App Store support.

The two-piece device would slide on to your iPhone, providing a joystick and six face buttons, akin to the configuration on the Nintendo DS. This means games developers wouldn’t have to rely on the iPhone touch-screen and tilting mechanism, instead being able to offer more standard control methods for iPhone games.

Predictably, some screamed “fake” once these images appeared, and others merely screamed, barely coherently ranting something about how AWFUL it would be to have a controller like this, because it’s the iPhone’s bizarre-o-controls that make it what it is regarding games.

Yeah, yeah, whatever. I love innovation, and I love people doing different stuff with iPhone gaming. However, I’m old, and I’d rather like to have a copy of Pac-Man on my iPhone that can actually be controlled via a non-stupid (sorry, non-innovative) method, as I hinted at a couple of months back. (Mind you, I’m probably not going to be totally happy until someone finds a way to run C64 games on iPhone and also plug in a Competition Pro…)

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.

Quick Look. Two words that brilliantly sum up one of the most important and yet least celebrated additions to the Mac experience. When stripped down to basics, Quick Look is merely a document preview. But what a preview! Using it, you can preview the majority of documents on your Mac by selecting them and hitting space, without opening the documents’ parent applications. Quick Look showcases the best of Apple and the Mac, highlighting how it’s sometimes the most obvious things that can be used as the basis for innovation and making the computing experience better.

Craig Grannell:
People use a whole lot of files, and Quick Look has the potential to save Mac users a lot of time every single day, by providing a full and simple preview to a selected file that doesn’t take ages to render, doesn’t require parent apps to open, and is often actually preferable to using apps at all. (I certainly rarely use Office now, preferring to read Word and Excel documents in Quick Look.) It shows how much Quick Look has become ingrained in me that I spent a good ten seconds dumbly hammering space on my iBook yesterday before realizing that, no, it doesn’t actually have Leopard installed.

For me, Quick Look shows what the best thing is about the Mac experience: it’s not about bells and whistles, and it’s not about flashy, showy gimmicks–it’s about doing something in the simplest, most efficient and intuitive fashion, in order to improve the experience for the user. And even though each use of Quick Look may save only a few seconds, it’s often the little things in the Mac user experience that leave the biggest impressions.

Leigh McMullen:
It’s hard to image that a simple OS feature could be considered one of the top Mac moments of the past 25 years. Nevertheless, Quicklook is truely a game changing feature, all the more so for its incredible subtlety. The implementation is so Apple. Take a feature (document preview) and make its implementation so seemless that it disappears. It’s like two-finger scrolling on Macbook Pro trackpads, you don’t even notice you’re doing it.

If you work with a lot of documents and doubt this feature’s importance, take the Tiger challenge: try using 10.4 for a day. You’ll be banging on that space-bar with so much  frustration your colleagues will think you’re playing Quake.

• Daring Fireball reports that OpenClip will fail once iPhone OS 2.1 ships: https://tinyurl.com/69lntu #

• TapeDeck 1.1 – 1.0 reviewed here: https://tinyurl.com/646hba – has added MP3 import/export and YouTube support: https://tapedeckapp.com/ #
• Simple WindowSets 2.1 – 2.0 reviewed https://tinyurl.com/5oyyle – has added modifier key commands: https://tinyurl.com/5b97uo #
• CG: I love I Love Stars, a menu-bar-based iTunes ratings app. If only someone would combine it with iTunesMenu… https://tinyurl.com/5pfegt #

We all read PC World. It’s our gateway to millions of articles, thousands of reviews, that killer red masthead banner, and a terrific selection of opinions on various techie things. Without it, our lives would be empty, lonely and sad.

But, oh, does PC Word drive us crazy sometimes. It lacks obvious research, hobbles truth, and says things that are just plain dumb. In some cases, PC World’s writers are to blame, not PC World itself, but the latter is the conduit through which those bad articles trickle.

We’ve rounded up 2 of these annoyances, all of which PC World could fix in about five minutes. In the meantime, we’ve listed workarounds for them—because, let’s face it, much as we hate PC World sometimes, we’re stuck with it.

1. Lazy-assed reporting regarding DRM
#2 on PC World’s list of 11 Things They Hate About iTunes is ‘DRM (Boo!)’, where writer Rick Broida moans “why does the iTunes Store still employ digital rights management (DRM) for the majority of songs in its library?” and claims that “Blaming the record labels no longer holds water”, citing that “AmazonMP3 and Rhapsody are among a growing number of services selling DRM-free MP3s from all the major labels, not just EMI”.

Presumably, it escaped Broida’s notice that this is hardly Apple’s decision. In fact, Jobs wrote an open letter entitled ‘Thoughts on Music’, stating that he wanted to ditch DRM entirely (from music alone, obviously—the chances of Jobs saying the same about movies are roughly on par with Arnie appearing in a hardcore sequel to Brokeback Mountain). To be fair to Broida and PC World, this letter was only published in February 2007, and so they might not have gotten around to reading it yet.

The answer to Broida’s question “why hasn’t Apple given DRM the heave-ho once and for all?” is, EMI aside, that the majors remain sh*t-scared of iTunes and are trying to give it a good kicking by cosying up to everyone else, in the hope of reducing Apple’s share of the market (and therefore, by association, their reliance on Apple as a retail channel). The fact that to do this said record labels are helping the likes of Amazon and Wal-Mart (not exactly teeny-tiny companies that care for the labels any more than Apple) merely shows how confused, deluded and insane they are, rather than highlighting any of Apple’s shortcomings.

Workaround moment! Stop reporting total bollocks about Apple and DRM. (And for readers: buy your stuff from Amazon, if you hate DRM, or buy shiny disc-shaped music receptacles from independent music retailers. And tut extremely loudly upon reading the PC World article.)

2. Lazy-assed reporting regarding NBC shows
#8 on PC World’s list of 11 Things They Hate About iTunes is ‘NBC Shows­ — Bring Them Back!’. This item notes that new seasons of NBC shows are just around the corner, and suggests that Apple and NBC were fighting over money, leading to the NBC shows being dropped.

“Swallow your pride and get NBC back on board in time for September,” suggests Broida. “We’ve got money for ‘Office’ burning a hole in our pockets.” I’m not sure what Apple would be swallowing if acquiescing to NBC’s absurd demands, but it wouldn’t be pride. After all, it’d have to do something drastic in order to pay for all the things NBC wanted. At least NBC’s real reason for divorcing the iTunes Store wasn’t, like the record labels, an attempt to wrest total control of its content from Apple, and take its ball home in a huff, right? Oh.

Workaround moment! Stop reporting total bollocks regarding Apple and NBC. (And for readers: watch TV on an actual TV, or buy DVDs/Blu-ray discs if you want to watch content at home, rather than spending money on crappy low-resolution versions for your portable players. And tut extremely loudly upon reading the PC World article.)

Coming soon to PC World: 11 Things We Hate About Apple, with #6 no doubt being that Apple stole the Mac OS from Xerox…

• PM: Best article on Apple product design I’ve ever read: https://tinyurl.com/6j4awv #
• @jamessime Thank god that Whedon didn’t do the Batman films… #

• Apple going to blend ARM and PA Semi tech? https://tinyurl.com/5bjxda #

Although once famously proud of annihilating its R&D budget, it appears Dell is now in some cases reading from the Book of Apple, in taking existing ideas and–at least in some ways–improving them. In recent weeks, we’ve seen the Dell Dock, taking the UI device from OS X that’s loved and loathed in equal measure and adding handy auto-categorization. (And, yes, I’m well aware Apple didn’t invent docks, but if you’ve been paying attention, that’s kind of my point.)

However, while the Dell Dock is an interesting curiosity, the Studio Hybrid (depicted) is a rather more ballsy production, not only taking on the Mac mini and AppleTV, but exposing some of the shortcomings in Apple’s range of highly consumer-oriented desktop machines.

In terms of hardware, the Studio Hybrid is nothing new: Dell has shoe-horned a laptop’s guts into a small and fairly contemporary form factor. But when it comes to options, Apple’s machine is trumped in some key areas. Dell offers Blu-ray as an option (albeit with a $250 price-tag), HDMI video out, a card reader, and also pushes adding a TV tuner. (Amusingly, you can also add a bamboo shell for $130, which almost makes Apple’s black MacBook price-tag look sensible.)

Sure, there are compromises, not least the Dell lacking Mac OS X, the bizarre omission of wireless in the stock model, and the fact that on Dell’s online store, you have to click ‘Go to Next Component’ about 56 billion times to configure your unit (versus the streamlined and efficient approach taken on the Apple Store). But, to some extent, it does highlight the manner in which Apple is almost dropping the ball when it comes to living-room computing.

AppleTV shows promise, and the future of media is undoubtedly going to be centered around downloads. However, we’re not there yet, and people have too much investment in optical media. Therefore, AppleTV becomes an additional unit to homes already suffering from clutter under their televisions. And the mini, despite offering loads of potential, seems to have been practically shunned by Apple, banished to the corner like an unloved and unwanted child.

Rumors always abound regarding future Apple kit, with pie-in-the-sky wishes dashed by the brutal hand of reality upon an Expo or WWDC keynote. My wishes are rather simpler, though: a Mac mini that genuniely makes a play for the living room. Take a leaf out of Dell’s book, Apple, and bundle in that card reader, so people can more easily bung photos on their TV screen. Add that Blu-ray option for people who want to own media rather than rent downloads. And add HDMI video out by default, so people can connect their mini to a new TV without faffing about with additional leads.

Don’t worry about the bamboo option, though.