Apple PR pulled out the big guns this week and invited, nay “encouraged” tech and entertainment media luminaries to pack the Yerba Buena Center for Steve Jobs’ “Let’s Rock” in San Francisco on September 9th.
The now-familiar rumors and speculation, with “leaked” photos and drawings that precede these Apple “events” have been flying back and forth for weeks, and soon enough we’ll see how all the pieces fit together. Join us on Tuesday as we twitter the proceedings.
We invite you to follow along with us as the morning unfolds, using the keynote bingo card below to keep track of both likely and rumored items that could appear during the presentation.
Amazon.com is now offering what it calls “instant ad-free movies and TV shows” on Macs, PCs and Sony BRAVIA TV sets at the newly re-branded “Amazon Video On Demand” website.
A few months ago, consumers greeted the giant webertainment service’s “Unbox” partnership with TiVo with a collective yawn, due mainly to complaints about the lack of on-demand streaming options, according to the director of Amazon Video On Demand, Roy Price, who says “the ability to watch content instantly without downloading first was among the most requested features of our customers, and now it’s live–customers can instantly watch the ad-free title of their choice “¦”
Some promotional videos are free and you can preview the first 2 minutes of any offering. Episodes of TV shows cost $1.99 and movies are $14.99. Movies can also be ‘rented’ for 24 hours for $3.99. Purchasing allows download to two machines and unlimited viewing online. The service claims to stock over 14 thousand movies and 1,200 TV shows including pre-purchase-able rights to upcoming seasons.
Amazon claims to be the only digital video service in the US offering the choice of streaming as well as downloading webertainment content.
Shouldn’t the Dems be on the Left and the Repubs on the Right?
Just in case you didn’t get enough of the Democratic and Republican conventions from the mainstream media during the past fortnight, Apple has kindly made the speeches from both conventions available for free on iTunes. The collections include audio files for almost every speaker as well as audio and video for the more prominent ones.
Given how often politicians are known to be for something before they are against it, these could come in handy someday.
I just caught the “Pizza Box” Get a Mac spot during the Top Design premiere, and it struck me. Not because it’s particularly brilliant — it hits the same mark exactly that all the other college-related Apple ads have lately — but because I realized it was the first time I had actually paid attention to a Get a Mac ad in almost three months.
Nor have I talked about one with anybody in more than a year. People don’t even get upset about it or make parody ads anymore. PC and Mac have been up there so long that I’m expecting them to introduce their children at any minute. Worse than being annoying or controversial, Apple’s core Mac marketing campaign has become the one thing the Cupertino Collective can never allow itself to be: boring.
Apple’s been here before. Switch had its (rather desperate) day. Think Different saved Apple during its darkest times. But each of them eventually outlived its usefulness based on where Apple was as an organization.
Today, Apple has become a powerhouse in media and a top-three computer maker. The iPhone is poised to become as ubiquitous as the iPod. And Get a Mac‘s playful jabs are starting to make Apple look small. “Able to run Microsoft Office” isn’t news to anyone who could be swayed by a TV ad. What’s the next narrative? How does Apple start its next growth curve, whether through marketing or design?
If you’ve accumulated any amount of gadgetry in the past several years you may consider from time to time the carbon footprint you lay down charging their batteries up every day and overnight.
Well, if designer Vivien Muller ever gets production funding for her concept solar charger, you’ll be able to rest easy and get visitors talking about your impeccable taste in futuristic decor.
Update: Lonnie’s interview with TalkingHeadTV below.
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.
Photographer Pat St. Clair has a couple more panoramic images from Thursday’s big night for the Democratic Party at Invesco field in Denver.
Above is a still shot from his vantage point near the Jumbotron behind the media pavillions. St. Clair made it from three fisheye images stitched and interpreted usung PTGui Pro 7.8 on a McBook Pro. The original size image is here.
Go here for a dynamic four-image shot that captures the enormity of that historic evening.
Unlike St. Clair, I was in Denver without the benefit of a Press Pass or professional photographic equipment and struggled to capture my own memories with the rudimentary camera in my iPhone.
Judge for yourself the quality of the iPhone’s camera by clicking on the gallery thumbnails. Large pics and descriptions after the jump.
Photographer Pat St. Clair shot a super-cool QuickTime panoramic photo from last night’s historic session of the Democratic Party’s convention at the Pepsi Center in Denver, CO.
Working on assignment for LightSpeed Media, St. Clair shot the DNC image using a new Canon XSi with a Sigma 8mm f3.5 circular fisheye lens. It was four shots around on a custom rig, with the camera set to ISO 1600 and aperture priority metering.
He shot RAW files, used Photoshop Camera Raw to render them to tiffs, stitched the panorama in PTGui Pro 7.8. and authored the final pan in Cubic Converter, all on a MacBook Pro.
Apple wants to know what you’re thinking about your new iPhone 3G and has been sending out email surveys asking questions such as where you’ve gone for iPhone help, whether you’ve returned your handset to your carrier for repair or replacement, whether you primarily use Windows or Mac, whether you primarily use your iPhone for work or play, whether it’s your first Apple product, and general demographic info.
The company promises not to use your responses to sell you products or services.
Pre-release testing of the Blackberry Bold 3G smartphone appears to show the new handset may suffer from connection problems similar to those that have plagued the iPhone 3G. Citigroup investment research analyst Jim Suva reported occasional 3G signal dropping troubles at some locations, “especially on high-rise building streets on our 34th floor… which may be why AT&T has yet to launch the product,” according to AppleInsider.
Because the Blackberry uses a component of its Marvell processor as its 3G modem, where iPhone 3G uses a different Infineon chipset, previous speculation about problems with Apple’s hardware appears less likely to be the cause of iPhone 3G connection instability.
3G network performance varies greatly among different 3G carriers throughout the world, according to survey released this week on the Wired blog. Users in Europe, which has some of the most mature 3G networks, reported the fastest overall results, while US-based iPhone owners suffer the largest number of failed data speed tests, particularly in dense urban areas, according to the Wired survey.
Citibank’s Suva speculates that the Bold won’t be released in the United States until AT&T rectifies its 3G network issues.
Apple is on track to sell just shy of 3 million Macs and close to 11 million iPods in the September quarter, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster. If Apple manages to hit the high end of Munster’s estimate of betweeen 2.7 million and 2.9 million Macs sold from July through September, it will be the first time Apple will have sold 10 million Macs in any fiscal year in its history.
Munster based his estimates on July sales data from NPD Group, which also suggested the possibility of sales of 4.1 million iPhones and a gross margin of 32 percent. Munster estimates Apple’s earnings per share at $1.19 on revenue of $8.5 billion. Wall Street consensus estimates put the numbers at $1.11 on $8.08 billion, while Apple’s previous guidance calls for $1.00 on $7.8 billion.
Munster affirmed his Buy rating on Apple, Inc. (AAPL) shares, with a price target of $250. The stock closed today at $172.55 in New York trading.
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.
Steve Wozniak spoke to Intel developers in San Francisco yesterday, telling them maintaining a vision without compromise, is “the right way of going through life.”
In a wide-ranging on-stage interview at the annual Intel Developer Forum, Wozniak also said being poor helps inspire creativity. As a computer designer, “I would do any trick I could think of to try to save money,” he said. “Not having any money helps.”
In the end, the man who began work on the first Apple computer as an engineer working at Hewlett-Packard (and offered his invention to that company five times before accepting rejection and taking it on himself with Steve Jobs), waxed philosophical about technology’s impact on our lives.
“Technology is always supposed to improve our lives,” he said. “I don’t know. Are we happier than we were 100 years ago? Are we happier than we were 1,000 years ago? Do we smile more?”
An Alabama iPhone 3G owner filed suit in Federal court yesterday, seeking class action status in a complaint against Apple’s ‘twice as fast at half the price’ marketing blitz.
The petition claims “[Apple] expressly warranted that the Defective iPhone 3G would be ‘twice as fast’ and would otherwise perform adequately on the 3G standard or protocol.” The plaintiff claims she and a class of “thousands, perhaps tens of thousands” of consumers were duped by the company’s marketing into buying a product that does not perform as it was advertised and asked the court to force Apple to repair or replace the iPhone 3G, and award an unspecified amount of money in damages.
Apple has yet to issue a statement or response to the suit.
UPDATE: The original reference to Chiat\Day as creators of the campaign referred to in this post was incorrect. We regret the error and any confusion it may have caused.
Microsoft is launching a $300 million advertising campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld to try and slow the juggernaut that has seen Apple take increasingly big bites out of the Windows maker’s dominant share of the personal computer market.
Seinfeld, a known Apple/Mac fan, will reportedly take $10 million to look the other way and come up with one-liners to help transform Microsoft’s stodgy and serious image in the public mind.
The campaign, created by Chiat/Day, the agency responsible for Apple’s legendary 1984 commercial, MDC Partners’ Crispin Porter + Bogusky in Miami, will also feature comedians Chris Rock and Will Ferrell (who starred in a Mac “switch” ad years ago). Apparently up in Redmond they don’t think Apple’s recent success is funny at all.
Apple has doubled its share of the mobile web browser market since launching iPhone 3G six weeks ago, according to Pacific Crest technology analyst Andy Hargreaves. Still quite a small pebble in a large pond, at 0.31% of the total mobile browser market, iPhone’s “accelerating web usage highlights…key long-term advantages” for Apple and the company’s investors, Hargreaves says. Coupled with the recent announcement that iPhones will be carried at Best Buy outlets beginning in September, he predicts Apple will easily sell more than the 3.5 million iPhones Wall Street expects in its third quarter.
Despite some continuing worry about the health of the general economy, Hargreaves and other analysts see the iPhone as very bullish for the price of Apple, Inc. shares. Consensus targets are in the $200 – $225 per share range; the stock closed today at $173.53.
Apple, Inc. ranks first in customer satisfaction among its PC industry peers for the fifth year in a row, posting the highest score ever recorded in the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Apple’s 85 score is a full ten points higher than runner-up Dell, which joined Apple as the only computer companies in the University of Michigan survey to record increases over their 2007 scores.
Claes Fornell, a professor at the university and head of the ACSI, said, “we have never seen a gap between the leader and the rest of the pack this big,” but acknowledged Apple’s lead was likely affected by widespread disappointment with Windows Vista among HP-Compaq, Dell and Gateway consumers.
Apple’s score also does not reflect the customer service turmoil the company has tried to weather since launching iPhone 3G and MobileMe in July, problems Fornell expects will cause Apple’s score to level off in next year’s survey.
For those of you following along at home, we’re counting down the greatest Mac Moments of the past 25 years. This week’s is sure to be controversial.
We’ve got no idea what the 25th Anniversary of the Macintosh will bring, but we certainly know what we’d like it NOT to be. The 20th Anniversary Mac was a trifecta of bad, underpowered, overpriced, And while it was a beautiful machine, it looked like it was designed Bose instead of Apple.
For more thoughts on the topic, Craig’s interview with TalkingHeadtv.com is below.
The New York Times reports that today, just down the road from Apple’s headquarters, two Georgian men will present what they claim to be incontrovertible DNA and photographic evidence of Bigfoot.
Even more startling, is that one of the gun-happy rednecks in question appears to be holding the Fabled Mac Tablet. Sasquatch’s next of kin were unable to confirm or deny that he was a beta tester for the tablet due to “NDA issues”.
SAN FRANCISCO — Multiple Bay Area news outlets report that an Apple research and development facility located at 20605 Valley Green Drive in Cupertino was set ablaze late Tuesday night, with NBC affiliate KTVU blaming a malfunctioning air conditioning unit.
Given that this was an Apple R&D facility, it’s naturally operated nearly 24 hours a day, and at least 100 Apple employees were forced to evacuate the building in the three-alarm fire. Also given that this is Apple we’re talking about, no one has any idea what these folks were working on. As of 12:30 a.m. Pacific Wednesday morning, Santa Clara County firefighters report that they expected another hour before they could put out the blaze completely.
See the Jump for a map of the fire relative to Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino (basically, it was across the street).
As if Apple’s MobileMe users haven’t enough cause for concern these days, an email-based phishing scam has turned up, tempting users to click on an embedded link to resolve unspecified billing problems.
Reported yesterday by Macworld, the email purports to be from Apple and asks users to “confirm” personal information at a web page that is not affiliated with the company.
Click after the jump for a look at the email and be careful out there.
