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For years, Microsoft and others have attempted without much success to shake Apple’s tight grip on the digital music scene. From subscription services to the Zune, companies have searched for the winning alternative to the iTunes, iPod bundle. Analysts now believe Finland’s Nokia may have a good shot of chipping away at Apple’s dominance.

More than 80 percent of people would pay for Nokia’s ‘Comes with Music’ service – particularly when it feels like they are getting tunes for free. Nokia says it will launch the handsets Oct. 17 in Britain.

Strategy Analytics said cost and selection trump brand – even ones so tightly woven as Apple, iPod and iTunes.

“Nokia Comes With Music effectively bundles a year’s subscription of music downloads (PC and mobile) into the price of a handset,” analyst Pitesh Patel told Cult of Mac.

Patel said Nokia – the largest handset maker – could overwhelm Apple’s iPhone.

“Nokia’s strong distribution and handset marketshare means that it currently sells more music playing devices than Apple,” the Strategy Analytics wireless analyst said.

However, we are not likely to see a head-to-head battle between the two companies in the United States. Nokia instead will challenge the iPhone in Europe and Asia – areas where Apple’s name awareness gives way to the handset maker.

The key point in this dust-up is that digital music fans care little about the name on their music player.

“It turns out that brand is irrelevant,” said Patel.

Much is made of the Apple ‘halo’ which helps sell products based just on brand. However, brand consultants Interbrand Thursday put a value on the halo: $13.7 billion.

Although Microsoft again beat Apple in most valuable brand ($59 billion), the Cupertino, Calif. company had a 24 percent jump in brand value — second only to Internet giant Google.

Apple’s position rose to 24th place compared to 33rd in 2007, according to the ranking of global brands.

“The latest iPods, iPhone and MacBook Air strike the perfect balance between coolness and mass appeal,” Interbrand said in its report.

The consultancy cites Steve Jobs coming aboard as CEO as another reason for the brand’s rise in value.

Software giant Microsoft may have reasons to look over its shoulder. Although its brand value is steady, its ratings are falling.

The Redmond, Wash. company ranked in third place this year, down from its second-place showing in 2007. Rival Google, on the other hand, turned in the largest gain in brand value, leaping from to 10th position from 20th last year.

Admit it: you’ve always wanted an office like this, haven’t you? Your dual-monitor setup looks a bit pathetic now, doesn’t it?

This is the massive eight-monitor workspace of Mitch Haile, and when we saw it on Flickr we knew we had to share it. You can see the original pics of his iMac and his Mac Pro, as well as many more photos of his office space. But why on earth does he need so many monitors? We asked him. Over to you, Mitch:

“I am working at a stealth mode start-up in San Jose, where I used to live. I commute from Boston. Part-time I do some consulting and oversee back-end software architecture for a new DVD cataloging service, www.take11.com.

“The iMac is for email and mundane tasks like bug triage,
documentation, etc–stuff that doesn’t require 6 monitors.
The MacBook Pro is obviously for travel. Both of these machines have 4GB of RAM each.

“The six monitors are connected to the Mac Pro. Main apps are X11, Eclipse, Terminal, BBedit, gvim, VMware. The Linux box next to the Mac Pro also is a VMware-oriented system and I run xterms and another Eclipse application on that box, using X11 forwarding to display it on the Mac. NFS all over the place. The Mac Pro has about 4TB of storage, the Linux box 1TB.

“The main reason for the 6 monitors is to see multiple debuggers concurrently. The 95” or so of width is about
the physical maximum I can take in at once; it’s not really
enough room but I don’t want to kill my neck.

“The boxes in the closet are more testing infrastructure. More RAM, more VMware on the towers. The small shuttles were cheap (about $200 each) and perform small little tasks that are important but need isolation from the rest of the environment.

“I have been running multi-monitors for about 9 years now. I think I upgraded to 4 monitors in 2004; as LCDs have gotten cheaper, it’s been more practical. Three 21″ CRTs would
kill a desk, but 6 LCDs weighs a lot less.”

Thanks to Mitch for the guided tour and permission to re-use the pics. Image smushing was done with DoubleTake.

The more I watch Microsoft’s new ad for Windows, the more I like it.

The ad, which debuted on Thursday night, successfully counters the idea promoted by Apple that PCs are bumbling buffoons personified by prematurely middle-aged businessmen.

Instead, the ad convincingly portrays the PC as part of global culture, unpretentious and down-to-earth.

The ad starts with a John Hodgman-alike Microsoft engineer, who proudly declares: “I’m a PC, and I am not alone.” It then swings through Europe, Africa, America and back again, showing people of all nations declaring simply one after the other: “I’m a PC.”

It ends with author Deepak Chopra, who says: “We are all a PC, inseparably one.”

Watch it carefully. The people and locations of the ad clearly reflect Bill Gates’ concerns about the world: disease, poverty, education and opportunity. Bill Gates makes a appearance (a welcome one. I admire him giving away his money), and there’s quite a few people from developing countries in this ad: something I’ve never seen in Apple’s marketing.

They’re real people, with accents and bad teeth (like me). I find it a refreshing antidote to the fake youthfulness of Apple’s iPod silhouettes and the insufferable, elitist hipster who personifies the Mac on TV.

I like Microsoft’s new ad because it portrays the PC through the very ordinary people that use these machines every day — and some extraordinary ones. It’s the opposite of Apple’s phony lifestyle advertising. It’s refreshingly egalitarian. It’s like “The Wire” versus “Law and Order.” Plus, there’s no sign of Jerry Seinfeld.

UPDATE: Two more new ads after the jump.

If you enjoy running a Windows game alongside your usual Mac applications, you aren’t alone. New numbers indicate U.S. sales of virtualization software is up 50 percent this year.

The sales increase would be even greater than the 41 percent jump in Mac hardware sales Apple recently reported.

Between $15 million and $20 million of Mac virtualization software has been sold so far in 2008, according to NPD Group analyst Michael Redmond.

Redmond, talking to Computerworld, credited Apple’s move to Intel processors for “encouraging more users to experiment with virtualization.”

Differing from Apple’s Boot Camp, which lets Mac users reboot into a Windows environment, virtualization software permits Intel Apple’s to run Windows applications within OSX. The most frequent uses of Mac virtualization is to play a Windows game that has yet to be released for the Apple platform or for developers to test software designed for Windows users.

Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion are the two leading virtualization software packages for the Mac. Parallels, introduced in 2006, has sold a million copies while Fusion (now Fusion 2) sold a quarter million copies since coming on the Mac VM scene in 2007.

(Photo: Jimmy Joe)

By day, Damian Ward operates Macs for a printing company in darkest Buckinghamshire, a county just to the north west of London. He’s been doing this for 15 years or so.

By night, Damian hunts for batches of unwanted, unloved old Macs. He hunts down 512k machines, Classics, SEs and SE30s, and early iMacs. He takes them in — from colleagues, friends, Freecycle, eBay, junk sales, anywhere — and tinkers with them. He has quite an impressive collection.

“You bring them home and you think they’ll be beyond repair, and that you’ll only be able to use them for parts,” he says.

“Then you discover they’re working fine, and then you can’t get rid of them can you? You have to keep them.” That’s right. You have to.

Microsoft’s $300 million Vista ad campaign has ditched comedian Jerry Seinfeld in favor of a John Hodgman-alike Microsoft engineer who says: “Hello, I’m a PC, and I’ve been made into a stereotype.”

Microsoft on Thursday is set to air several new ads, according to the New York Times, including one starring a lookalike of the bumbling but lovable PC character in Apple’s Get a Mac ads, played by Daily Show correspondent and author John Hodgman.

The Times says the ad is an “audacious embrace” of Apple’s Windows-baiting, and typical of MS’s new agency, Crispin Porter & Bogusky, which has a history of turning negative perceptions into advertising counterstrikes.

Apple has been “using a lot of their money to de-position our brand and tell people what we stand for,” Microsoft brand marketer David Webster told the Times. “They’ve made a caricature out of the PC.”

Other ads in the series will include musician Pharrell Williams, actress Eva Longoria and author Deepak Chopra, the Times says.

Guess which one is Steve? Clue: The only one thinner than Sir Mick.

Steve Jobs is hobnobbing with Sir Mick Jagger in Brussels, according to the EC press service.

Jobs met with Sir Mick at an online commerce roundtable to discuss “opportunities and barriers” to online retailing in Europe, the EC says. Other bigwigs included EC competition commissioner Neelie Kroes and the heads of LVMH, Alcatel, eBAy, Fiat and EMI, and others.

The business leaders met on Wednesday.

Jobs may be in Europe to attend Apple Expo in Paris, which just opened, although Apple doesn’t have a booth at the show.

The annual Apple Expo trade show is the biggest Apple-oriented show in Europe. Until 2003, Jobs has delivered a keynote speech there. But as Apple has expanded its chain of stores around the world, it has been pulling out of more and more conferences: Macworld in New York, NAB in Las Vegas and Apple Expo in France.

“Apple is participating in fewer trade shows every year, because often there are better ways for us to reach our customers,” an Apple spokesman told Macworld.

More details and pictures after the jump.

Apple increased its share of notebook computers sold in North America during the second quarter to 10.6 percent, moving it into fourth spot and posting the largest jump among top computer makers, researchers said Wednesday.

The numbers compare to the 6.6 percent market share registered during the same three-month period in 2007, according to DisplaySearch. The four-point jump is the largest of the top five PC makers. Dell led the market with 21.9 percent of North American notebook sales.

After the jump, read how the Apple ‘halo’ effect is boosting business interest in Mac notebooks.

Behold! The i-men. Gareth White of New Future Graphic made them using Photo Booth, some props and a pile of imagination.

Every high school and junior high student in the Ballinger school district near San Angelo has been given a brand new MacBook. Lucky them.

Let’s assume that most of these youngsters have not owned a Mac before. What advice should we give them? What tips would make their computing life a happy one?

Here’s my list, which in some respects is similar to Alex Payne’s, linked above:

• don’t let your Mac automatically log you in. Pick a good system password and make sure you have to enter it to gain access
• back your stuff up. If your computer is going to die, the chances are good that it’ll die the day before you have to hand in that important assignment
• don’t overload your Applications folder with stuff you don’t need
• use a text editor to write. Only use a word processor for final formatting, if it’s necessary; even then, TextEdit or Bean are just fine for most of the basics
• learn about properly quitting apps (not just closing their windows); about using disk images and installing software from them; about grabbing screenshots with Command+Shift+3 and Command+Shift+4; about Expose and Spaces and Quick Look

Just a few tips off the top of my head. If you were in that school hall while those MacBooks were handed out, what advice would you have been giving the kids?

Image via Gearlog

Emulating Apple’s propensity for using media “events” to unveil new technology, T-Mobile sent an “invitation” to technology press Tuesday, encouraging attendance at a New York City event on September 23rd that will mark the debut of Google’s Android smartphone and the software it’s powered by.

The event sets up the first public challenge to Apple’s domination of the touch-screen smartphone market, with the thoroughly-leaked and publicly previewed phone, once known as the HTC Dream but now called the G1. Reportedly tricked-out with features including a slide-out display that exposes a full keyboard, as well as a BlackBerry-like trackball, the phone has been rumored to be the launch device for T-Mobile’s nationwide 3G network and may also boast GPS navigation, a tilt sensor and Wi-Fi connectivity.

We hope that Wi-Fi rumor proves true if the G1 hopes to go toe-to-toe with iPhone.

Via AppleInsider

Image via Flickr by sasurau

The market for Apple’s iPhone may turn out to be less than half the size once expected in Japan, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. With worldwide sales of the 3G model approaching 6 million units since its July 11 launch, and at least one analyst predicting total 2008 sales to reach 7 – 8 million units, Japanese consumers may snap up fewer than half a million out of a previously predicted 1 million, writes Journal reporter Yukari Iwatani Kane.

“The iPhone is a difficult phone to use for the Japanese market because there are so many features it doesn’t have,” says Eimei Yokota, an analyst with MM Research. More than 10 domestic handset manufacturers compete for a slice of Japan’s cellphone market, one of the world’s largest with annual sales of 50 million phones. Nokia Corp., the industry leader in global shipments, has less than 1% share in Japan. Instead, Sharp Corp. leads the Japanese market, with about 25% of shipments. Models currently sold by Japanese cellphone makers typically contain a high-end color display, digital TV-viewing capability, satellite navigation service, music player and digital camera. Many models also include chips that let owners use their phones as debit cards or train passes.

While Softbank, Apple’s cellular phone partner in Japan with 19.5 million wireless subscribers, says the iPhone continues to be popular, Yokota, the MM Research analyst, says one small but must-have feature often cited as a deficiency in the iPhone is the lack of “emoji,” clip art that can be inserted in sentences to jazz up emails.

Takuro Hiraoka, an analyst for GfK Marketing Services Japan Ltd., says the problem could be a lack of education. “Japanese users don’t know what to do with an iPhone,” he said. “Sales could grow if Apple provides specific examples of how it can be used.”

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.

The summer holidays are barely over and the children only back at school for a week, but already the Christmas tat has started appearing in the shops and the media is casting its collective eyes over the events of the last few months to put together some “thing of the year” contests.

And first on the radar is the UK’s Stuff Magazine, best known for the scantily clad ladies who adorn its front cover (usually clutching some gadget or other in their manicured paws).

In the Reader’s gadget of the year category, the iPhone 3G is up against Nintendo’s Wii Fit, the Asus Eee, game consoles the PS3 and XBox 360 60GB, and the B&W Zeppelin speaker system.

That’s not all though. The MacBook Air crops up in the Design of the year category, against the Zeppelin (again) and a bunch of other things that, in my opinion, don’t even come close.

But wait, there’s more. Apple is also nominated in Retailer of the year.

So does the iPhone deserve Gadget of the Year status? I’d say it does, yes. I’ve not seen anything else — except perhaps Mario Kart on the Wii — make people smile so much. Everyone who picks up an iPhone, whether they’re playing with a friend’s or toying with one of the demo models in a shop, smiles. You watch, it’s true. They pick the thing up for the first time, they start tapping on it, and they smile.

Microsoft has maintained a publicly announced schedule for releasing Windows 7 in early 2010, but its internal calendar has June 3, 2009 as the planned release date, according to a report by InternetNews.com.

Stung, perhaps by the relentless ribbing its Vista operating system has taken at the hands of Apple advertising, along with countless jibes from pundits on the Internet, Microsoft plans to release a beta version of the new system at its Professional Developers Conference next month.

Inside sources confirm that internal builds of the redesigned platform have already been made available to partners for hardware and software certification. Windows 7 is not a whole new OS but an evolution of Vista, and will reuse the old kernel and device driver model. That means it would use the kernel in its newer state, when Microsoft updated it with Vista’s first service pack. It also means existing device drivers for Vista will work on Windows 7.

Good luck with that, guys.

A film that looks at the evolution and culture surrounding the Macintosh has been selected to the shortlist of the 2008 Naperville Independent Film Festival which takes place next week.

This is the first time the film, a documentary called, ‘Welcome to Machintosh’, has been screened in the US since new interview footage with original Apple co-founder Ron Wayne was added to the movie. Click here to watch the trailer on YouTube.

That exclusive interview was added just before the movie’s European premiere at the Globians Documentary Film Festival in August. The documentary mixes history, criticism and Apple idolatory into an exploration of the early years of Apple as seen through the eyes of Apple employees, engineers, resellers and supporters.

• 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.) #

One common problem I’ve noticed is that recent switchers from Windows to OS X don’t expect to encounter problems. At all. In many cases, they’ve heard so much good stuff about OS X that they expect it to be good stuff all the way through.

I make a point, these days, of saying to potential switchers: “Macs can break, you know. They do break. They can drive you crazy.” And the potential switchers look at me like I’m mad and say: “So why switch then?” And I reply: “Because it will happen far less frequently than it does with Windows, and most of the time recovery will be quicker and easier.” Note that: most of the time.

Anyway, Asraf Sani has a disappointed tone in his voice when he writes about the artistically interesting graphics failure that hit his iMac running Leopard last Friday. The colourful light show made it unusable, but at least the screenshot controls were still working, enabling Asraf to grab a few snaps for his Flickr stream.

Should we celebrate graphic failures on our Macs? I think we should. Every cloud, silver lining, all that.

Picture used with Asraf’s permission

Ex-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld break bread with a stereotypical American family in a second ad that attempts to rejuvenate the Windows maker’s image.

When Microsoft’s in a bind, this is the kind of advertising it comes up with. Something really risky and new.

My inability to do a simple task, like call up the international character palette, or even remember its (mostly) system-wide shortcut, is well documented.

That’s why I love something like Copy Paste Char; I’m so much better at remembering URLs. This simple web page will save me whole seconds every year.

I shall now paste in some celebratory glyphs, because I can: (Squiggles omitted — Ed)

(Whether or not they’ll show up properly in your browser, having been mangled in turn by TextMate, WordPress and the browser itself, is a whole nother question entirely.)

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.

I was immediately intrigued by the new headphones announced at Tuesday’s “big event” in San Francisco. Initially, I was excited by the prospect of the new “in-ear” style that will retail for $79 when they begin shipping next month. I have always found the ear buds on Apple headphones quite uncomfortable, especially for wearing an extended amount of time. The new “in-ear” style seems promising, since they will feature separate woofer and tweeter drivers, which should make for a higher-fidelity listening experience than is available with the standard headphones.

The remote play/pause/skip and volume control available on these new optional accessories (a lower-fidelity version with standard ear buds, available now, sells for $29) is another handy feature, but possibly the most interesting development, which Steve Jobs and many analysts either glossed over or failed to mention entirely, lies in their built-in microphone. At yesterday’s keynote Jobs mentioned in passing that the headset mic will enable voice note recording with the new iPod Nano, which is certainly a value add to that device. But a check of the headphones’ specs on the Apple website indicates they are supported by the iPod Touch and the new 120GB iPod Classic as well.

When I got my first iPod 5 years ago, I longed for a mic/line in so I could record directly to the device and wondered why in the world Apple had passed up the opportunity to produce a cool digital recording device when it was sitting right in front of the design team from the very beginning. Has it finally come to pass?

As usual, the answer is unclear. Comments in a MacRumors forum thread suggest great interest among iPod Touch and iPhone users for the utility of an external microphone, both for the VoIP applications it could enable, as well as for the music recording possibilities (GarageBand Lite, anyone?) it creates. The company makes no claim these new headphones are supported by the iPhone, although it says that iPhone headsets (which also include an external mic) work with iPods.

Stay tuned: when the new high-end headsets become available I’ll be getting a pair to see if my dream of an Apple digital recorder has indeed come true.

The cult of Mac is growing as Apple emerges as the key computer for US consumers, amongst which it is now the fourth-ranked computer manufacturer, according to new research from MetaFacts.

Brand loyalty, the report claims, is at an all-time high with Apple’s chain of retail stores pulling customers through the doors – and selling Macs, MacBooks, MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros in particular, the researchers claim in their latest Apple Profile Report 2008.

It gets better, “Like the camel slipping its nose under the tent, Apple is reaching into American households as the second or third Home PC,” said Dan Ness, Principal Analyst at MetaFacts. “Where Apple shines is
as the third PC, ranking fifth with 8 per cent of third Home PCs, and ranking fourth in notebook PCs, also at 8 per cent of the installed base.”

And whether that Mac is a first, second or third home computer, what households do with their machine is very different. They’re used to make websites, create graphics and “personal activities”, the report explains – probably while the Windows box gets used for checking email, playing games, and cranking up peoples scores in MMORPG games online. Or something.

Mac users are public, too, this report explains. Seems 21 per cent of Macs are used in public – double the public usage of your WIndows machine – and potentially marking Apple’s ascendancy as a laptop maker.

“If you look around at a Starbucks or cybercafé, you might think the whole world’s gone to Apple,”  said Ness, “Mac users are very active and use their notebooks in more locations than Windows notebook users.”

Wait, there’s more – brand loyalty, “More than four in five (81%) of households with  Apple as their primary Home PC plan to buy the same brand – Apple – for their next Home PC,” said Ness.

All this action in the consumer market, is it any surprise that the long tail effect Apple executives hoped for four or five years ago when they began visualising it has now begun taking place?

The company gets put down a lot for not focusing sufficient attention on the enterprise markets. Perhaps it didn’t – once – but for the last few years of Apple market expansion, the company’s executives have known that consumer demand would eventually become an enterprise market driver.

Think about it – do you recall when you moved jobs and were once excited about the technology you got to use because it would be better than what you could afford at home? Nowadays when you start a new job its not uncommon to live in abject fear (OK, slight trepidation) of the dated system you’ll end up working with…it’s not at all uncommon for workplace technology to be less advanced than the tech company workers have at home.

And as Apple’s consumer market share grows, so too does the demand made on enterprises to offer workers the equipment they are already familiar with.

And that’s the long tail Apple execs set in motion with the iMac in 1998.

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