Pete Mortensen - page 29

I’m genuinely puzzled by AppleInsider’s melodramatic post pronouncing the death of the Mac mini. The article recounts Apple’s many slights of its lowest-end platform and then proceeds to show know evidence that the line will soon be killed off.

It has seen just four updates since inception, one of which was so insignificant in Apple’s own eyes that the company didn’t even bother to draft a press release. Even now, the current minis’ 1.66GHz and 1.83GHz Core Duo processors are a far cry from the silicon offered in the rest of Apple’s PC offerings.

Well, that’s actually to be expected. And I would say that hardware is significantly better than a lot of low-end PCs from other manufacturers. But that’s neither here nor there. Apple needs the Mac mini just to get people looking for a cheap Mac in the door. The AppleTV might be incredibly popular as a hackable Mac substitute, but that’s not what it is out of the box. Apple still needs a low-end entry, and the Mac mini costs very little to develop and revise. I don’t see Apple just walking away.

And this quote says it all:

Whether Apple will squeeze another revision from the mini, and how long it plans to allow existing models to linger, are both unclear.

Oh, so at some point in the future, possibly after Apple releases new Mac minis, Apple will stop selling the Mac mini. Yep, dead as a doornail. What?

AppleInsider | Closing the book on Apple’s Mac mini

Technorati Tags: mac mini, puppy, puppy

Well, that’s the missing link resolved. The above video depicts an AppleTV running MythTV, an open-source PVR program. If the AppleTV hard drive were a little bit bigger, it would officially be a real TiVo challenger. Will Apple ever release official PVR support?

YouTube – MythTV On AppleTV
Via Digg.

Technorati Tags: appleTV, mythtv

Remember that video years ago of the “transparent” Powerbook screen? Someone has compiled a gallery of photos demonstrating the same principle. There’s an odd beauty here. Check it out.
Fun 4 Amdavadi Gujarati

Via Digg.

Technorati Tags: powerbook

I think we have a nominee for ugliest — or prettiest? — iPod ever, courtesy of a bizarre promotion that Procter & Gamble is running to benefit the people of New Orleans. If you buy an ugly Tide t-shirt for $10, you can win an iTunes gift certificate or a bright orange, Tide-branded iPod. A nano, from the looks of it. No word on whether they’ll also brand you forehead with Tide.
Vintage T-shirts from Tide.com
Via Digg.

Technorati Tags: ipod, tide

MacRumors founder Arnold Kim makes a very interesting point regarding the rumored new MacBook Pros and iMacs that Piper Jaffrey analyst Gene Munster unleashed on an unwitting public yesterday. Like many others, I was fairly impressed that Munster took the trouble to determine the average life cycle of both iMac and MacBook Pro generations.

Well, as it turns out, Munster might not have calculated the numbers himself:

These numbers correlate exactly to the [MacRumors] Buyer’s Guide averages. Some have asked couldn’t he have come up with these numbers on his own? It’s possible, but exceedingly unlikely as he would have had to choose the same releases (2002 PowerBook, 2003 iMac) to start counting in order to achieve the exact same averages.

Kim also implies that Munster’s assumption that Apple will release new Macs at WWDC might be directly drawn from an earlier ThinkSecret report, which makes the reliability of tech analysts’ reports about Macs questionable. Which they absolutely are.

Apple is the rare computer company that won’t play nice and let analysts see their stuff earlier than the general public. There’s no question that most reports or based on assumptions and reading rumor sites. I do question a commenter’s conclusion that any of this is new. From what I can tell, the Mac rumor sites have been ahead of the analysts since the day Steve came back.

Technorati Tags: analysts, rumor

Analyst Gene Munster (not to be confused with Herman) today predicted that Apple will roll out new MacBook Pros and iMacs at the Worldwide Developer Conference in June. That’s not the world’s edgiest guess, given that it’s been almost nine months since either product line was updated. What is rather shocking is Munster’s baffling logic for the update:

Munster added that he “expects” new MacBook Pros (1, 2) to make a
showing at the developer conference and that it’s “also possible” that
Apple will introduce a redesigned iMac. He notes that on average, the
Cupertino-based company has updated its professional notebooks every
182 days, with the most recent generation having launched 209 days ago
(data presumably gathered via help from the MacRumors buyer’s guide).
Similarly, he said, iMacs have traditionally seen updates every 168
days but the current generation is now a whopping 257 days old.

Wow, and I thought it was just that Intel had new processors on the market and Apple’s just about last to roll out hardware sporting the chips. I am mildly interested in the rumor that the iMac would actually be redesigned and not just refreshed. Looking back at it, the timing might be right. The iMac G4 was on the market for about 30 months, and we’re now at 33 months for the iMac G5 enclosure. I think Apple is more than due for a real new design statement on its computers, so this will be one to watch.

Image via Wikipedia
Via Engadget

Interesting article in the New York Times today about the resurgence of the world “Hello” as an ad tagline. Apple has a long tradition of using the word dating to the original Mac, so it’s only fitting that they’ve revived it for the iPhone, but this is a bigger trend, as reflected in the creepy “Hello, Delicious” ads for Level Vodka:

“Advertising being an annoying, interruptive medium, ‘Hello’ is kind of
a nice salutation, a friendly way of introducing yourself,” said Lee
Clow, chairman and chief creative officer at the TBWA Worldwide unit of
the Omnicom Group who has long worked for Apple.

That’s one way to view it. You know what I think it is? It’s Thursday, that’s what it is.

Silicon Valley raconteur Om Malik is always keeping his eyes peeled for something to surpass Apple’s killer iPod+iTunes combo, and after endorsing Real Rhapsody the other day, he’s now generally supporting the idea that a new generation of DRM-free music will fuel a surge in digital music sales.

While online music downloads have grown rapidly, DRM (regardless of the
flavor) has added more friction than security to the process, often
slowing total sales, especially amongst the non-techie music fans.

I still don’t buy it. Most people are willing to put up with minor DRM headaches for convenience. Most other people that really want to own their music are using services like eMusic or buying CDs. I don’t think we’re at a point where a lack of DRM-free Greatest Hits of the Eagles downloads is the bottleneck. Granted, Om thinks Apple stands to benefit here, but he also implies that the Sonos hardware that connects to Pandora could be the wave of the future. Which it isn’t. I’m sorry, but radio, however evolved, doesn’t hold the same long-term value as buying what you want. Pandora’s a fun trick right now, but it’s a long way from the music-brain I never realized I needed.

If you’ve ever wondered exactly what I mean when I talk about innovation, feel free to take a gander at my other two blogs, both of which pertain to the subject. This stuff has a huge influence on my thinking about Apple, so it might help you understand where I’m coming from a bit more.

The first blog, Better than New, is one I run with a friend. It’s basically like what we do here, but as it pertains to design, innovation, cultural needs, stuff like that. It’s newer but way more frequently updated.

The second, Pattern Linguist, is a misguided attempt to blog the complete history of the field of innovation as we know it today. It takes a long time to research, and I tend to be thoughtful instead of snarky here. Still, there’s ample fodder at both. Check ’em out!

About 95 percent of quality in a computer is subjective When a machine runs well, people aren’t likely to become concerned about the specification of its memory controllers or the speed of its hard disk. But when things are bad, it doesn’t matter if the machine is tricked out with the best components in the entire world — it’s a pile of junk.

This is all relevant to the current tempest in a teapot that goes by day as a lawsuit against Apple for “deceptively” using 6-bit LCD screens instead of 8-bit color on its MacBooks and MacBooks Pro. What this essentially means is that Apple advertises its computers as displaying millions of colors (presumably a full 16,777,216) but that they instead show only several hundred thousand (262,244). I am outraged! OUTRAGED!*

Never one to pull a punch, Steve Jobs recently told Time Magazine that Al Gore can win the 2008 presidential election if the pro-environmental Apple board member wants to:

“If he ran, there’s no question in my mind
that he would be elected,” said Jobs, referring to Gore. “But I think
there’s a question in his mind, perhaps because the pain of the last
election runs a lot deeper than he lets most of us see.”

I have to assume that last sentence is humor. No one has ever seen Al Gore express emotion about the election, ever. Any pain at all would be the first anyone has seen. What do you think — is the world ready for America’s first iPresident?

Via MacNN.

Just in case anyone still had doubts about Apple’s commitment to AT&T as the exclusive carrier of the iPhone, wonder no longer: USA Today reported that Apple will be married to AT&T for FIVE YEARS. FIVE YEARS! To put that in perspective, that’s the same amount of time between the introduction of the original iPod and the release of the clip-on model of the Shuffle.

And while this announcement is thoroughly irritating to me (I use T-Mobile…grumble, grumble), it might prove strategic for Apple. Click through to read why.

Artist Lee Stoetzel has a show of unique scale replicas of iconic products. The best, by far, is the Mac shown above. From what I can tell, even though it’s non-operable, it’s actually more powerful than the original 128k Mac. Especially is you drop it on your foot.
Wood Mac | The Apple Core
Via Digg.

Technorati Tags: mac, wood

Future Cruxy blogger Nat Freitas has been at this tech thing for a long time. In the above video, he talks about the Apple II in glowing terms on a local cable access show. It rocks.>

7 year old kid (me) talking about Apple IIs back in ’82 from natdefreitas on Vimeo

Via Digg.

Technorati Tags: retro, Video

Maker Faire is an amazing event held annually in San Mateo, Calif. where people from all over the place come together to show off the crazy hardware hacks and contraptions they’ve cobbled together. As you might expect, it’s not actually a Mac-heavy location. If you aren’t building your computer from spare parts you found in the neighbor’s trash, you’re sort of a second-class citizen.

Anyway, I went on Saturday, and met up with Tod Kurt, author of Hacking Roomba and the Todbot blog, who was showing off the latest and greatest in mods to make your robot vacuum cleaner do things it was never designed to, like play a sad sort of vacuum music or even act as a giant spirograph doodler (pic after the jump). Best of all, Tod and his boothmate, from the company he runs, ThingM, were an all-Mac shop. Hacking Roombas is great. Doing it with Macs is even better. It’s all very easy over Bluetooth, apparently.

Technorati Tags: makerfaire, roomba

I snapped this photo walking home through Union Square the other night. It was a huge Volkswagen outdoor advertisement on a pillar, and someone decided to let the German carmaker know who runs San Francisco. It can only be Apple.

Technorati Tags: apple, vw, sticker

General confusion and ambivalence about the continued value of stand-alone have gone mainstream as of…now. That’s because German developer Gernot Poetsch has released an alpha of a new RSS reader he calls Readomatic. What’s so weird about this app? Well, it’s a standalone application of Google Reader, which is itself a replacement for a standalone RSS reader. Google Reader’s great advantage is that it isn’t standalone — you can use it on any computer connected to the Internet and still have it keep up with all your readings.

We’re now in the age of applications that take the limited functionality and GUI of a web app and give it the restricted, non-portable feature set of a standalone app. We’re through the looking glass here, people. Still, it looks kinda hot. I’m not going to stop using Vienna, though.
Announcing Readomatic [poetsch.org]
Via digg.

Technorati Tags: rss, software

Our long, national nightmare is over: The FCC has approved the iPhone, which means that nothing is holding back the miracle device’s release other than software issues so titanic that people got pulled off of Leopard development to fix it. Yep, all hurdles cleared.

At the product’s intro, Steve Jobs said he was taking the unusual stance of announcing the iPhone early so that the FCC wouldn’t do it for him. So mark this day — in an alternate universe where Steve doesn’t believe in early announcements, even if it means screwing over the FCC, this would be the day that news of the iPhone broke. Can you even imagine how different 2007 would have been without all our wildest iPhone rumors confirmed.
News Flash: Apple iPhone receives FCC approval [AppleInsider]
Via Digg.

Technorati Tags: innovation, iphone

In case you missed it, the full story of how Engadget came to post a fake Apple internal memo announcing delays of the iPhone to October and Leopard to January is now up at the site. It’s pretty a long and pretty involved tale, but the most interesting piece is this: Someone with access to Apple’s internal e-mail systems sent the original memo. Apple sent a second e-mail denying that the first message was real, but it all feels fishy.

After all, we know Apple has started fake rumors in the past just to flush out leakers. Could the Steve now be applying this logic to his own employees?
Regarding yesterday’s Apple news [Engadget]

Technorati Tags: memo, rumor

Microsoft, kings of irony, moved to the new Office Open XML document format with its new Office 2007 for Windows. It’s ironic, because the format, well, won’t really open on Mac OS X. Fortunately the Macintosh Business Unit inside MS is fighting the good fight, and in between latte-fueled coding runs on Office 2008, they put together a nifty little beta of a program designed to make Open XML more, well, open.

It’s got an amazing name, as well: the Microsoft Open Office XML File Format Converter for Mac. I would have added “2007 Home Edition” to the end to really make it an MS, but it’s a beta, so all in good time. The little program changes any .docx file into a charming and useful .rtf, OS X’s lingua franca. Nice work, folks.

Thanks, Tammy!

Technorati Tags: microsoft, Unpacking, vista

Everyone on the planet is buzzing about Apple’s next round of laptop upgrades since the company announced it would switch from LCD screens to LED screens in the very near future. Here we are less than a month later, and Apple has upgraded its consumer MacBook line to include — features roughly equivalent to the existing MacBook line!

I know, I know, contain your excitement if you can. Why, instead of a base configuration of 512 megs of RAM, now every MacBook will ship with a full gig of RAM at the same price a year later! And instead of featuring either a 1.83 Ghz or 2.0 Ghz processor, now the ‘Books ship with either a 2.0 or 2.16 Ghz part! It’s almost like Moore’s Law is in effect or something!

I’ve got the full specs behind the jump. The new MacBooks also have 802.11n now, which is a very nice feature, and it means that these are very good, very mature pieces of hardware. It also means they’re about to get blown out of the water by Santa Rosa-based, LED-wearing MacBooks Pro. Sign me up for one of those instead, please.

Technorati Tags: macbook, puppy

John Mayer never ceases to irritate. Much as I love Steve Jobs and Apple, their insistence on putting the soft-rock crooner on the stage whenever they roll out a new product always grates. At this January’s iPhone introduction, the rumor was that Paul and Ringo would take the stage to kick off Beatles music on the iTunes Store, but we got John Mayer yet again.

And now, to what purports to be his own blog, Mayer has allegedly announced that he has an advance copy of RIM’s BlackBerry Curve, a direct iPhone competitor with a similar feature set, if implemented in a less-exciting way. In Benedict Arnold’s own words:

Just got an advance of the Blackberry Curve… I guess you could say I’m ahead of the… Nevermind.

lights will guide you home…

But never back to Cupertino. Who’s with me? No more Steve-notes for Mr. Mayer?

Technorati Tags: iphone, blackberry

Confirming long-standing rumors from…earlier this week, Paul McCartney has confirmed to Billboard that his new solo album “Memory Almost Full,” will be distributed via the ITunes Store through Starbucks’s Hear Music label. Of much greater interest to everyone but five of Paul’s most loyal fans is that the Beatles might soon be ready to pull the trigger on a deal for digital distribution.

McCartney also has told Billboard that a deal to finally make the Beatles catalog available for sale online is “virtually settled.”

McCartney added, “I don’t want to pre-empt anything, but we’re well on the way to something happening there, which is very exciting.”

Keep your fingers crossed. If all goes well, there will finally be a way to find the music of the Beatles on the Internet! You’ll be able to visit “Penny Lane,” and “Strawberry Fie…” What’s that? Unauthorized copying? Never heard of it.

McCartney’s “Memory” goes digital – Yahoo! News
Via Digg.

Technorati Tags: beatles, paul mccartney

Cingular/AT&T Wireless CEO Stan Sigman’s 5 minutes of flop sweat hit the lowest point of the otherwise stunningly executed iPhone launch. Amid smooth presentations by the best of Silicon Valley, Sigman did his best to kill the mood with the utterly uninteresting announcement that Cingular had become AT&T’s mom or something. It was kind of hard to follow. I wasn’t paying close attention.

And just as Sigman caused the thunder to fizzle out during the iPhone launch, he’s done it again, becoming the first person to publicly gift the iPhone. He’s apparently a graduate of West Texas A&M University, and he gave the commencement lecture this year, lamely pulling out an iPhone as a gift for the university’s president, Dr. O’Brien.

Man. At this pace, Sigman’s going to start pre-announcing Apple products. You’d best give him the talk, Steve.

Stan Sigman gifts iPhone at West Texas A&M [YouTube]
Via TUAW

Technorati Tags: iphone, stan sigman

Image by Mina Ramzy
His Steveness was in prime form during last week’s Apple Shareholders meeting, and AppleInsider’s got the goods. The iCEO dissed Microsoft, acknowledged interest in 3rd-party iPhone apps and mocked the people of the developing world. He’s so predictable that way:

“I wish developing great products was as easy as writing a check,” he said. “If that were the case, then Microsoft would have great products.”

…

When asked about the iPhone’s closed development platform and whether the company recognized the need of large institutions to build their own applications for the handset, Jobs replied that Apple was “wrestling” to balance the requirements for security and stability with the desire for custom application development.

…

During the shareholders meeting, Jobs also entertained the suggestion that Apple could mimic Microsoft’s strategy of offering developing nations Windows Starter Edition — a low cost version of Windows XP as an alternative to the much more expensive Windows Vista. “Do you think we should offer Mac OS 9?” Jobs quipped in response.

“I think Apple could sell the developing world Tiger while selling Leopard here,” the attendee replied. Jobs paused for a moment and said that could be an option.

Nice one, Steve! You just looked like a big ol’ jerk. We’re keenly aware that you’re not interested in being perceived as a major philanthropist, but you could at least pretend some times… There’s much more at the AI story.
Apple’s Jobs addresses critics, new product directions [AppleInsider]

Technorati Tags: iphone, OS 9, Steve Jobs

Technorati Tags: iphone, OS 9, Steve Jobs