Om Malik has a great post up digesting today’s news that Nokia is going all in on Symbian Limited, saying there’s three players now in mobile phones — and Google ain’t one of them.
Noting that today anyone can make mobile phones using off-the-shelf components and factories in Asia, Malik argues the future of mobile computing and communications will focus almost entirely on design, user experience and software. He likens the mobile phone business to the PC business – which Microsoft dominates with its Windows platform – and says the winners in the handset market will depend a lot on the software developers creating apps for mobile platforms.
According to Malik, “In this platform game, the winner is going to be the one that can attract the most developers,” and the problem, for Nokia and some of the Symbian Fondation’s other members (among them, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone) is they are backing a confusing array of platforms, including Linux.
Apple has long been a poster child for the wisdom of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. With active trade in some of its discontinued products, such as the iSight camera (which regularly sells on auction sites such as eBay for more than the original purchase price), and high-resale values for “previously owned” and “refurbished” models of its computers, the reality has been that the cost of owning an Apple over the years has not been nearly so high as its reputation for premium pricing might indicate.
The iPhone is providing additional confirmation that, despite complaints about the company’s obsessive desire to control the user experience, they must be doing something right at 1 Infinite Loop.
iPhone Atlas reported recently on the high prices still being fetched at resale by the original model phones, indicating concern over the ability to unlock and/or jailbreak the upcoming model, combined with significant demand in countries where the iPhone 3G will not initially be on sale, including Russia and China.
While the current value of first-generation iPhones may be high, with reports of the bid on 16GB phones near $600, some believe the market for the phones will stay active with prices coming down as the availability of 3G models gets closer. Michael Johnston at iPhone Alley suggests the window for high prices may be closing soon and Dennis Sellers writes for Macsimum News that active trade in the post-3G launch market for first-gen iPhones could see prices come down under $100.
With Apple and AT&T seeming to have foiled the unlocking/jailbreaking movement that flourished in the wake of iPhone’s initial release, Stateside customers who must have the speed and features of the 3G model but still have, or want, service with a carrier other than AT&T, will either have to wait and see if the new models can be jailboken or look to Apple’s deals with a different carrier in almost every country overseas, where the phones will go on sale next month. Across both ponds Apple has had to agree to a wide range of prices and options for selling the iPhone 3G, making it likely that in quite a few countries outside of the U.S., you’ll be able to buy an iPhone without a contractual agreement.
Kevin McLaughlin writes for Channel Web, an IT Channel News source, Microsoft’s biggest hiring spree in eleven years has been looking to fill spots in its Mac Business Unit.
In a recent post to the Office for Mac Team blog, Craig Eisler, general manager of the Mac Business Unit, announced the hiring campaign and highlighted the unique place the group occupies within the Microsoft galaxy. “We are the brightest, coolest, and most interesting business unit at Microsoftif we do say so ourselves,” Eisler said in the blog post.
Office 2008 for Mac has been selling “really well” since its launch in January, according to Sonny Tohan, CEO of Mac Business Solutions, an Apple specialist based in Gaithersburg, Md.
“Microsoft finally started taking advantage of some of the core technologies and user interface features in OS X,” Tohan said, and Apple partners worldwide see the changing landscape in Redmond as evidence of the robust health and continued emergence of their preferred platform.
The addition of support for Exchange in the iPhone and the coming proliferation of 3rd party iPhone apps should keep Microsoft’s Mac Business unit busy for the foreseeable future. “Microsoft needs to compete in a space of growth since the PC market is in a state of decline, and I’m sure they’re looking at writing applications for the iPhone,” according to George Swords, marketing manager at PowerMacPac, an Apple solution provider in Portland, Ore.
In the blizzard of numbers being tossed around concerning the much-anticipated debut of iPhone 3G, the most significant one could be the price of the phone itself. As Pacific Crest consumer electronics analyst Andy Hargreaves notes, sales of both Apple’s iPod and Sony’s PS2 gamestation saw exponential gains in the wake of being offered below $200.
Aidan Malley reports for AppleInsider on the explosive growth anticipated for new phone sales in the coming year. “The relationship [between price and sales] is shockingly consistent,” Hargreaves says. “At average prices above $200, Apple never sold more than [6 million] units in a rolling four-quarter period. At prices below $200, Apple never sold fewer than [8 million].”
Should Apple fulfill even industry analysts’ most modest sales expectations, savvy decision-making in the company’s sourcing and supply-chain business units could translate into much higher margins on the 3G models than those seen with the original iPhone, all of which adds up to very good news for Apple investors and shareholders.
Cory Bohon at The Unofficial Apple Weblog reports on skuttlebutt concerning the next update to OS X. 10.5.4 is said to have no known issues. Beta testers were asked to focus on AirPort, networking with Windows, Spaces and other frequently used (and often problematic) aspects of OS X.
The update is likely to also include support for Apple’s new Mobile Me service, which will replace .Mac and incorporate web services designed for the iPhone 3G. Perhaps as a consequence of these preparations, the company’s .Mac service experienced some downtime yesterday.
Thus far, Apple has been using very low-key terms to describe the improvements to OS X 10.5 set to hit with the release of “Snow Leopard” next spring. Despite the company’s insistence the software update promises no more than an overall improvement in how Mac OS X works under the hood, Roughly Drafted has uncovered at least ten improvements it deems worthy of a pat on the back for Apple’s code optimizers.
Some of those improvements, while significant, may in fact be transparent or unnoticed by many users. Additions such as SproutCore, the LLVM Compiler, the CUPS printing engine, native exchange support, and self-contained Web apps can rightly be said to reside “under the hood.”
But as Apple Insider details, others, such as a new multi-touch framework, file size reductions, text-processing features, auto activation of fonts, and full ZFS support may prove quite noticeable, indeed.
Steve Jobs saw fit to ballyhoo the price reduction for the iPhone 3G when he announced it at WWDC earlier this month, calling his newest release “twice as fast at half the price.” On the surface of it, $199 for the 8GB and $299 for the 16GB versions seems a grand gesture from the company that charged the phone’s earliest adopters $599 for the 8GB model.
It wasn’t long before plenty of people had figured out that, when the true costs of not only buying the phone but putting it into service with AT&T were factored in, the 3G model is actually a bit more expensive than iPhones purchased after the initial price reduction to $399 for the 8GB model last September.
Proving themselves every bit as susceptible to consumer hype as their American counterparts, thousands of Apple fans attended the grand opening of Apple’s first retail store in Sydney last week, with several hundred having queued up as long as 31 hours prior to the opening hour.
Accommodated by agreeable weather, the large crowd helped continue Apple’s success in rolling out its innovative retail concept, which makes the stores themselves almost as much of a draw as the products inside.
Ford & Lincoln / Mercury cars are now shipping with a voice activated technology they call “SYNC”, which proudly proclaims “Powered by Microsoft” on all the adds they’re running. My first thought was: ‘Now what the heck would anyone willingly admit that?‘
My second thought was: ‘Why isn’t Apple just OWNING this space?‘ Click through, and we’ll chat about this after the jump.
Confident now that it’s got a winning product, Apple is set to release the iPhone 3G simultaneously in 22 countries on July 11. And unlike the limited distribution model in the US, where consumers may only purchase phones from the company or from AT&T, overseas customers will be able to find the new phone in plenty of places.
Apple Insider reports that Deutch Telekom, T-Mobile’s German parent signed a first deal which will let Gravis sell iPhones attached to a T-Mobile service plan, allowing customers there to pick up a phone without visiting a T-Mobile retail outlet.
Dutch and Italian consumers will also have a variety of outlets to choose from, according to an item in Macworld. The high-street-availability distribution model appears to derive from the success Apple and UK carrier O2 had in bringing Carphone Warehouse on board to maximize availability of the product.
If you were hoping Adobe’s new interfaces were going to quietly disappear into the ether, like a bad smell after eating too many beans, think again. MacRumors reports that that, yes, Photoshop–the leading light in Adobe’s application suite (and a rather good application in CS3, despite the Windows-oriented palette widgets)–is also being clad in the digital equivalent of a $1 suit. With a hole in the knee. That’s been sprayed with manure. That reduces grown men to tears in mere seconds.
Suggestions are that we can ‘look forward’ to a fall release. (That’s autumn, Brit-chums.) If so, we have four months to brace ourselves for Photoshop’s head-on crash with a brick wall. Buckle up, everyone!
For years, one of the more compelling arguments in the debate between PC and Mac users held that Macs are more secure. With hackers worldwide dreaming up viruses and Trojan horse programs designed to crash hard drives and compromise personal data, Microsoft and security software manufacturers struggled to keep PC users safe by constantly releasing software updates and security patches for Windows operating systems.
Mac users surfed happily along the Internet’s boundless realms, content in the knowledge that Apple’s tiny OS market share was little incentive for hackers and malicious social engineers. As the universe of Mac users continues to grow, however, that sense of security may begin to prove false.
The newer, faster iPhone 3G, set for release on July 11, promises to chart new frontiers in mobile pornography, according to Time magazine.
The $13 billion adult entertainment industry sees the new Apple phone as a key in the shift from physical distribution (IE. DVDs) to a business model based on downloaded and streaming smut.
The iPhone is “by far the porn-friendliest phone” on the market, says Devan Cypher, spokesman for San Francisco-based porn producer Sin City Entertainment.
The porn industry may have problems with Apple, however. An Apple spokeswoman told Time it does not condone porn on the iPhone and promises to ban adult content from applications being built by third party developers for distribution by the company’s AppStore.
Following on the heels of competitor BMW’s optional iPod dock, Steve Jobs’ preferred German automaker Mercedes Benz announced a custom cradle for the iPhone available as an option on nine classes of its vehicles. The interface will allow seamless integration between the iPhone’s music and telephone functions and the vehicle’s systems, Mercedes says.
Placed in the Mercedes’ onboard cradle, the iPhone’s music and phone functions can be controlled with the help of multifunction steering wheel controls, while the vehicle’s display indicates phone status, music functions, etc. The cradle features automatic recharging as well as increased reception with the help of the vehicle’s antenna.
AT&T may be subsidizing up to $425 of the cost of each new iPhone it activates for service when the 2.0 3G models launch next month, Barron’s reports.
According to Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner, AT&T will cover an additional $125 premium over the carrier’s typical $200 smartphone subsidy because the company thinks the iPhone will increase subscribers and average revenue per user. Apple will receive an additional $100 bounty for every new AT&T customer who signs for service at an Apple Store.
The early book on the new phone is very bullish, with Reiner calling for 15 million units to be sold in 2008 and another 33 million in 2009.
Everyone is concerned about Steve Jobs’ health, prompting the obvious question about succession plans at Apple. The company seems doomed without him. Who has the vision and drive?
But Apple will be fine without Jobs, although it won’t be the same.
Some strange things are going to happen to this website over the next few hours as the design is amended. Apologies for the inconvenience.
UPDATE: And we’re done. We hope you like the shiny new design. If you come across any problems with it (as in, “IT’S ALL GONE WRONG!”, not “I wanted it to be blue!”), leave a note in the comments. Also, if you’ve any general feedback about the design, or any ideas about what you’d like to see in future revisions, please let us know.
I’m a fan of both Firefox and Safari and regularly use both on my Macs. I like Firefox because it lacks some of Safari’s “Squirrely-ness” with some websites –particularly those using scripting, and I like Safari for private browsing, and because it is so fast. So after a day of use, am I prepared to drop Safari forever for the Fox? Click through, and lets discuss.
Mac users seem split on whether Mac OS X’s Dashboard is the Best Thing Ever or a mildly irritating component that’s accidentally accessed when fingers stray on to a function key. Opinion appears to be drifting towards the latter option, but there are a few Dashboard widgets that are staggeringly useful.
For some, the Dashboard mechanism itself is the main barrier to working with widgets. Although Vista didn’t win fans by grabbing a chunk of desktop space for its Dashboard wannabe, having the option for widgets to remain on-screen would doubtless be handy for many Mac users, and it’s this functionality that shareware application Amnesty Singles provides.
The interface is pretty much idiot-proof. You drag a widget from Finder to the whopping great arrow in its sole window, decide whether you want to create a standalone bundle or an application with a dependency on the original widget (as in, nuke the original and your Amnesty application won’t work), and click ‘Build’. Once Amnesty Singles does its thing, your app will be sitting wherever you saved it, ready for use.
When the application is launched, it should work like the original widget, but free from Dashboard. (Quick caveat: not every widget we tried worked and a few simply aren’t suited to being outside Dashboard; most, however, work fine.) Using your new application’s menus, you can force it to desktop or ‘on top’ level, along with defining a refresh rate. With some widgets being more akin to mini-applications, chances are you’ll get more use from them in this form than if they were hidden behind F12 (or F4 if you’ve a shiny new Apple keyboard).
Mac OS X ninjas will no doubt start bellyaching that Amnesty Singles doesn’t really offer anything you can’t do yourself. And, yes, if you’re keen to muck about with Terminal, you can toggle Dashboard’s dev mode and detach widgets from Dashboard. However, you don’t get the flexibility that Amnesty offers, nor the ability to hide and quit widgets like regular apps, nor the ease of use.
If you can’t figure out how Amnesty Singles works, there’s really no hope for you.
Amnesty applications can be created as standalones or by loading the widget from disk.
By the time this message posts, I might have already put in an order for a brand-new MacBook Pro. And, like any good Machead, the prospect of new hardware makes me miserable. After all, my old PowerBook G4 is incredibly obsolete, and I’m used to its idiosyncrasies. But I can’t deal with the idea of something spendy, flashy and new that’s behind the curve. I’d rather be way behind the times than just a few minutes off the mark.
This is the tremendous irony of loving Apple. The company’s computers are more elegant and functional than any other devices on the market, even without OS X. Unfortunately, Apple does such an amazing job adding features over time, that even a three month-old Mac can look a little long in the tooth. Now, I know this is meaningless quibbling. There will always be a great reason not to upgrade. New software, new I/O, new GPU, new processing architectures. But that’s particularly unlikely these days. The current MacBook Pros have multi-touch, very strong graphic processors, high-end Core 2 Duo chips, 802.11n, ExpressCard, MagSafe, and Mac OS X Leopard. That’s a set-up that will rock for years to come.
On the other hand, the following technologies should become relatively ubiquitous and economical in the next two years: SSD, mobile quad cores, WiMax, USB 3.0, ExpressCard 2.0, eSATA, DDR3 RAM, LTE, Blu-Ray, DisplayPort, ray-tracing graphic acceleration. I’m sure I could come up with others if I tried hard enough.Intel is supposed to release a few new Core 2 Duos for mobile with the launch of its Centrino 2 platform on July 14, and the most promising aspect is lower power consumption with a faster front side bus. Which doesn’t mean Apple will have new hardware on the 14th — Steve usually waits a few weeks.
The point being, I’m terrified of Apple taking the wraps off a new set of MacBooks and MacBook Pros the second that I invest, and I’ve lost the ability to accurately predict when the company will jump. Everyone knows the anxiety of the Apple early adopter – what on earth can be done for the agony of the late adopter? Anyone else dealing with the same pain?
BusinessWeek has an interesting but slightly over-the-top story about the misery the iPhone 3G will inflict on the rest of the wireless industry. It’s quite maudlin in its focus on the needs of the establishment wireless service providers. It even seems to mourn threats to the dominance of the existing wireless carriers. Perhaps the only news to glean in between the forecasts of doom is that Palm, once the dominant player in Smart Phones is now too niche to merit a mention in a round-up story like this. Apparently, the hole Palm needs to climb out of is so deep that the iPhone 3G’s coming ubiquity doesn’t even make things worse.
For a Steve Jobs Keynote, the kick-off to last week’s Worldwide Developer Conference was surprisingly, well, surprise-free. Apple rumor-mongers nailed the specs on the iPhone 3G, the pricing, the slipping ship date, and even the launch of Mobile Me, a major redesign of Apple’s .Mac service that focuses on Push technology for the rest of us. For subscribers of Mobile Me, all you have to do is make a change to your calendar on one platform, whether Mac, PC or iPhone, and the change instantly occurs on your other machines. Apple was going to become the Push company.
Phil Schiller demoed the applications involved, from photos to e-mail to address book for almost a half-hour, repeating the phrase “desktop-quality applications” roughly 900 times. As promised, the apps instantly updated across platforms. The Push technology really works, as well as, or, Apple hopes, even better than Microsoft Exchange for corporations. In every respect, it looked like a winning platform. For $99, anyone can have world-leading syncing of their entire digital lives. There’s just one problem: you have to use Apple’s Web applications to do that. No GMail, no Flickr, no GCal, no Facebook. Rather than delivering on the promise of automating the process of keeping every aspect of your life up to date, Apple requires you to leave behind your existing digital life to build a new one. Unless you’re an existing .Mac user, you need a new e-mail address, a new online photo gallery, a new calendar, a new form of online storage. And I, like a lot of people, am not going to make that change. I love Google Apps, Flickr, and Facebook. They’re where I keep my stuff. And that isn’t going to change any time soon. Rather than Mobile Me, Apple seems to have created Mobile Steve. To see the implications of this decision, click through.
AT&T announced to its shareholders that it’s iPhone agreement with Apple underwent some substantial changes with the release of the iPhone 3G. AT&T’s press release reads:
“The new agreement between Apple and AT&T eliminates the revenue-sharing model under which AT&T shared a portion of monthly service revenue with Apple. Under the revised agreement, which is consistent with traditional equipment manufacturer-carrier arrangements, there is no revenue sharing and both iPhone 3G models will be offered at attractive prices to broaden the market potential and accelerate subscriber volumes.”
Now of course this substantive change in agreement between Apple and AT&T has the net all a twitter with the possibility that Apple will begin marketing the iPhone 3G on other networks. Even AT&T’s statement that their relationship with Apple is now “consistent with traditional equipment manufacturer-carrier arrangements…” would seem to imply that Apple’s side of the arrangement is also “typical”, meaning that after a predetermined period of exclusivity, they can market their handsets to other carriers.
There are articles at CNET and MacWorld that arrive at this conclusion, and speculate that Apple soon will market the iPhone 3G on other carriers in the US.
The only difficultly is, that it ain’t gonna happen, not right now or anytime we’d call “soon”.
That’s because there’s only one other national GSM carrier and T-Mobile’s 3G network is Voice Only.
That tends to suggest that there isn’t what we call a “Business Opportunity” for iPhone 3G on T-Mobile’s network right now. Of course original iPhones running software 2.0 would be great to have, except Apple seems to have stopped making them.
(note: there are technical details in the comments that are too boring to include in the post)
Steve Jobs made an interesting disclosure to the NY Times yesterday while talking about the remarkable Grand Central technology in Mac OS X Snow Leopard that will allow programmers to get more power out of multicore computers and also to use GPUs for additional performance. In the midst of such talk, he announced for the very first time the reason that Apple purchased processor-maker PA Semiconductor in April.
“PA Semi is going to do system-on-chips for iPhones and iPods,” he said.
Many had speculated that future iPhones could run on Intel silicon, or that PA Semi had been purchased just to recruit some of its talented engineers. Steve says otherwise. Apple’s getting into the mobile processor game. Two years from now, all our iPods and iPhones might be running on their hardware. And if PA’s stuff is as good as everyone says, such exclusive hardware could maintain the competitive advantage that software already offers the iPhone.
Now the dust has settled, and the excitement has waned, it’s possible to calmly reflect on yesterday’s iPhone announcements. Only the excitement hasn’t really waned, and the only reason the dust has settled is because I can’t run to the nearest O2 shop and grab an iPhone 3G yet.
Ultimately, Apple delivered. Most of the rumor bridge went away satisfied, with the revamp being lighter, more efficient, and including both 3G and GPS support. Yes, the camera is still rubbish, and the lack of a front-facing camera still irks some, but most people are happy with the upgrade. (Well, apart from the idiots web-wide who are rattling on about HOW UNFAIR it is that Apple had the audacity to release a new iPhone when they bought one JUST LAST WEEK, and how APPLE IS EVIL, and so on.)
Also, the pricing rumor turned out to be pretty much spot-on. The iPhone’s going to ship with a price-tag of just $199 (for the 8GB model—the 16GB model is an extra hundred bucks), and so even with the still fairly hefty monthly contract, it’s now a lot more affordable. Clearly, Apple is gunning for market share (its estimate of 10 million iPhones sold by the end of 2008 now looks remarkably achievable), to get its platform ingrained in people’s minds as the obvious choice for anyone after a smartphone.
From a British standpoint, things are looking even more rosy. I recently bitched about Apple’s over-the-odds charging in Europe, and it seems someone was listening. Not only is the new iPhone priced in a straight US dollar-to-Sterling conversion (I was expecting $199 to become £139, truth be told, not £99), but also Brits retain existing tariff pricing (reports suggest AT&T’s raising its prices), and get a new tariff at the £30 mark (even if its minutes and texts allocations are both utterly miserly). Handily, existing iPhone owners forking out £45 or £75 per month also get the new iPhone as a free upgrade.
The only disappointing thing is that I now need something else to complain about. Ideas on a postcard…
UPDATE: Confirmation about AT&T’s price-hike suggests that there’s still something to complain about, at least if you’re in the US. Despite the hardware price-drop, the overall contract cost for the 8GB phone is now an extra $40 over two years. If anything, this makes the pricing in the UK even more surprising. Still, perhaps Apple will actually be able to sell some iPhones in Britain now.
