Wil Shipley, current Chief Monster of Delicious Monster and founder of Omni Group, is not pleased with Apple’s ringtone strategy on the iPhone.

Scratch that. He’s furious:

Not that, uh, we have to pay attention to what the record companies think is Not Allowed, because we have already licensed the song for playback on any device if we bought a CD — we are allowed to play it on our iPhone already. Just not in response to someone calling us. The record companies have MADE UP some new, retroactive copyright and Apple is enforcing it for them. The result is, a million customers don’t get to do something cool with their iPhones.

Because of greed.

Honestly, I can see Apple saying, “Well, you see, the record companies would have been upset with us if we hadn’t charged anything for ringtones.” Yah, well, that’s the price you get for engaging. The price for owning the distribution of the content and the hardware and the software is that you end up making compromises in the hardware and software in order to protect the content.

Yow. There’s a lot more through the link, so read on. This is some harsh language from a NeXT true believer, and it’s essential reading. I’ve been pretty upset about the iPhone ringtone system, but Shipley nails what’s wrong with it. Fantastic stuff.

Woz’s apparent girlfriend, Kathy Griffin, recently went on Larry King Live to talk about controversial remarks she made at the smaller awards ceremony that precede the main Primetime Emmy Awards. In the clip pasted above, she talks about her relationship with Woz, and the couple’s appearance on the red carpet is shown. Check it out.

By Appointment to Her Majesty The Queen, the Carphone Warehouse has a page up about the Royal iPhone.

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Following reports of Apple’s cutthroat tactics with potential UK wireless carriers, Steve Jobs said a great quote about corporate partnerships.

“Partnerships take a lot of work – you want to go out on a few dates before you get married. Yes, we dated a few people but didn’t get married… and so there were a few unhappy girlfriends out there.”

Link.

Photo from John Griffiths

As expected, Steve Jobs at a press conference in London this morning announced the UK iPhone will launch November 9th, use the O2 network, cost £269 and £35 a month for an unlimited data plan. The phone will be available at the Carphone Warehouse, at about 1,300 outlets.

The iPhone will be more expensive, £269= $537, and there’s no 3G — which is common in Europe. Jobs said it’s to save battery power. 3G chips would reduce battery life to just a couple of hours:

According to the Guardian’s liveblog:

“It’s pretty simple, says Jobs. “The chipsets work well apart from power. They’re real power hogs. Most phones now have battery lives of 2-3 hours and that’s due to these very power-hungry 3G chipsets. Our phone has 8 hours of talktime life. That’s really important when you start to use the internet and want to use the phone to listen to music. We’ve got to see the battery lives for 3G get back up into the 5+ hour range. Hopefully we’ll see that late next year. Rather than cut the battery life, we’ve included Wi-Fi and sandwiched 3G between Edge and a more efficient Wi-Fi.”

No announcement about other European countries, though it’s widely rumored it’ll be Orange in France and T-Mobile in Germany. Said Jobs: “We’ll be in a few countries in Europe in the next quarter.”

The European version of the iPhone looks like it’ll be available only in the UK and Germany at first, leaving iPhonophiles in other EU countries looking at unlocked iPhones as their best bet of getting their hands on a multitouch phone.

My friend Roger Aberg, who runs the MacFeber site, already has an unlocked iPhone he uses in Sweden. He has no problems with the device, he says, but he’s hoping the European iPhone will be upgraded to HSPDA — a super fast 3G standard that’s common in Europe.

Writes Roger in email: “People are a bit skeptic about the non-3G-part. I hope for a HSDPA-version (or turbo 3G) that is plenty faster and is pretty common here. Its 3.6 mbit (regular 3G is 0.3 mbit) and would be sweet on the iPhone! That would make me upgrade.”

However, some analysts don’t expect a 3G version of the iPhone until 2008 at the earliest, when Apple will introduce the iPhone to Asia.

If Apple delays the 3G iPhone, Europeans outside the UK or Germany looking for an unlocked iPhone might be best off shopping for one in the U.S. Thanks to the weakness of the dollar, and local European sales tax (or VAT, which can run to 25 percent in some European countries), Yankee iPhones will likely be cheaper — about $35 according to Roger.

O iPhoneless brethren, I feel your pain. None of us can afford the glorious device, despite our love for Apple. Fortunately, Paul Waite has created an amazing DIY music-playing PDA for the rest of us. All you need is a stack of index cards and an iPod shuffle. He calls it the Hipster PDA Shuffle, and the video introducing it is amazing. AMAZING.

(If you never saw the original, hysterical Hipster PDA article, get thee to 43 Folders!)

Interesting Apple analysis in the Sunday Times this week from the always-provocative Randall Stross. His thesis: That Apple has an unprecedented opportunity to gain on Windows while Vista is stinking up the joint — and they’re blowing it.

If you’re the owner of a Windows PC who is looking for a replacement computer, the choices are grim. You can step into the world of hurt that is Vista, the latest version of Microsoft Windows that was released in January. Or you can seek out a new machine that still comes loaded with the comparatively ancient Windows XP.

Maybe, you might say, the moment has arrived to take a look at the Mac. You can easily order one online, of course. But if you’d like to take a test-drive before you commit, odds are that you’ll have to look far and wide for a store that sells it. The Mac’s presence in the retail world remains limited, a shame given the rare opportunity for Apple to gain market share that opened up when Vista arrived.

In a lot of ways, this is a golden era to be a Mac owner and for Apple. With 185 fantastic retail stores worldwide, we can just walk in the door and see every product and service for Mac, iPod and iPhone in one place. But on the other hand, if you walk into any computer store in America, you’re way more likely to see HP, Sony, Toshiba, Lenovo and Acer machines on displays than anything from Apple other than the iPod. Mac sales are up right now — considerably so — but Macs are still niche and seem poised to remain there. It’s a terribly tricky problem, though. Part of Apple’s problems in the mid-’90s happened because of the company’s prominent place in mainstream stores — and thoroughly mediocre product and sales methods to match.

Is there an answer here that makes the Mac mainstream? I can’t see it. What say you?

Now that YouTube has set the tone for how short video clips should operate on the Internet, the race is on to define what the future of broadcasting might look like. The makers of Miro, a free, open-source Mac video player that’s near release-candidate readiness, suggest that it looks a lot like podcasting in iTunes.

The application, which is in universal binary, essentially aggregates channels of free TV that are open to the Internet, including public TV from all over the world. It can play virtually any video format, and it can also be fed BitTorrents and RSS feeds of TV shows from tvRSS. Basically, you can see anything ever when you want to, and download multiple streams from thousands of channels in the background. And it’s free. Some of it’s illegal, but a lot of it’s legit. In other words, it hints at what Internet-enabled TV should be like in the future. Any other Miro fans out there?

There’s a video that shows how it all works — it’s pretty incredible.

Thanks, Andrew!

Though no photos have surfaced yet, Entertainment Weekly reports that Emmys host Ryan Seacrest interviewed Kathy Griffin on the red carpet tonight, and a certain burly, bearded founder of Apple named Woz a few minutes ago. This is contrary to several denials of the relationship between Woz and Griffin.

Apparently, Seacrest had no idea who Woz was and suddenly opened his eyes after being informed through his ear piece. The clip should air on the west coast around 7 p.m., so keep your eyes peeled for it. I’ll post the red carpet clip as soon as it makes it to the Internet. In the mean time, enjoy a video of Woz explaining Griffin to a fan.

Other than Steve Jobs himself, now single figure has defined Apple’s resurgence since 1997 more than Jonathan Ive, the company’s senior vice-president of industrial design.

It’s a constant worry among watchers of Apple (especially those who own stock) that the company won’t be able to sustain its growth if Steve Jobs retires, quits, or gets hit by a bus on his way to work some time.

So my friend Jess McMullin postulates over at bplusd, why not line up the designer-in-chief as Apple’s next CEO? Ive makes beautiful, functional, intuitive objects, and is better than anyone in the business at getting others to do the same.

He’s a designer who taps into the wells of unmet consumer need that fuel Apple’s ongoing growth. With the exception of Steve himself, he’s tuned to the zeitgeist that determines winners more than anyone else at Apple. Moreover, he’s able to articulate that vision with consistent grace and precise execution. He’s got a track record of hitting home runs. If you want to keep the innovation leadership that makes Apple, well, Apple, then you’ve got to have the driver’s seat firmly bolted to the flow of trend, meaning, and consequence. That’s the domain of Design, and Jonathan Ive is your Designer.

Now, I don’t entirely agree with Jess on this one. Jony Ive is a brilliant designer. That doesn’t mean he would be a great CEO — he certainly doesn’t have the sales flair that defines an Apple product introduction. Still, an interesting and provocative reminder of the need to figure out what comes after Steve. What say you, Mac-heads?

True to its word, Apple has now opened the door for people who bought iPhones at full price prior to August 22 to received a $100 store credit for use at the online Apple Store or in the company’s physical retail facilities.

All you have to do is go to this web site, enter your phone number and serial number (on the back of the iPhone), and submit. A text message from Apple with an access code pops back, and you’re good to go — $100 for anything carried by Apple, including third-party products.

Steve Jobs shocked many by dropping the 8 gigabyte iPhone’s price from $600 to $400 at a media event last week, just 66 days after the product was first introduced. He shocked still more by offering the $100 credit for those who would be ineligible for fair price-matching, which Apple only offers within two weeks of purchase.

The same day that a friendly Mac-head uploaded some unboxing pictures of his new iPod Touch, he also got the notion to shoot video of the iPhone-without-a-phone. It’s kind of what you would expect: A lot of swooping icons, scrolling on touch, video playing, the accelerometer not detecting an orientation shift…

It’s absolutely beautiful, though. If someone figures out Skype for this thing, it could be the greatest telecom network-free communication device ever built. It’s interesting to note that the iTunes Store Mobile didn’t finish loading in the video. Since this is over WiFi, I can only cringe to imagine an iPhone trying to download a song over EDGE…

Anybody out there already got a Touch? Do you ever leave the house now?

Via Engadget

It’s still arcane and command-line driven, but the hackers at iPhone Dev Team have created an unlock application that’s free to the world. The iPhone can head to T-Mobile, Europe and the rest of the world…now.

All the details are here, but the rest of us might still want to wait for the GUI version. This is not simple stuff, and many report that YouTube gets broken. Still, I’d love to see this become so prevalent that Apple starts selling the iPhone unlocked out of the box. And while I’m at it, I would like American cell carriers not to suck, so I guess I can dream on…

Via Engadget.

Earlier this year, a bunch of people wrote automatic scripts that video-recorded people using Macs they weren’t supposed to. A commercial version of such programs (combined with network logging and screenshots), Undercover, was recently used to bust a crook who took 4 brand new MacBooks from an elementary school in April. At least according to software-maker Orbicule:

Fortunately, it did not take the thief long to come online as he had no idea that the computers he stole were running Undercover. Within 9 hours of the computers being stolen, our recovery center was sending Mr. Kenneth Burman the screen shots of the web sites and programmes a totally clueless thief was going through as well as the snapshots of the thief himself. Later, Mr. Kenneth Burman delivered this information to the local police office. Real samples of the screenshots and iSight pictures taken by Undercover can be seen below. Some details are blurred in order to protect everyone’s privacy.

Although we have all been exposed to the MacBook thief’s moustache, which is almost too perfect to believe.

More than 25 years later, Steve Wozniak has returned to the scene of his greatest triumph, re-making his enthusiastic endorsement of the Nissan (and then-Datsun) Z car. The new version promotes the 350Z, which he was selling off for charity to benefit his alma mater, UC Berkeley. And it. is. AWESOME.

Via Macenstein 

God bless Andy Ihnatko. He’s America’s finest geek humorist.

Via Daring Fireball 

From a current advertising circular. But the proximity of the “i” and the “Phone” must be a coincidence, right? Right?

Don’t buy them all at once, now. Plenty of Ralph’s “iPhones” to go around.

Thanks for the tip, SBI!

UPDATE: Another online back-up solution to consider is Mozy, which gives out 2 gigs for free and charges for any additional storage. You can check them out here.

Backup remains the most elusive and under-appreciated form of computer technology. Though everyone knows we should, no one actually backs up other than the most diligent among us. I have a huge external hard drive, but I manage to put things on it maybe once every few months, if that. Good thing I did that at all, of course, as my hard drive just died on my Powerbook.

Anyway, until Apple unleashes Time Machine in Leopard to change back up forever, there are other things to try. One such as Carbonite, an online backup service that’s got some decent buzz on the PC side and now has a Mac client in beta. I haven’t given it a shot myself yet (will report back soon), but hey, free software!

If you’d like to get in on the beta, send a note over to [email protected] and mention Cult of Mac. The old high school friend who tipped me off claims that’s all there is to it. Let me know how it goes — he’ll hear about it if there are any troubles.

As you’ve no doubt seen by now, Apple announced the sale of its 1 millionth iPhone Monday morning, just five days after Steve Jobs cut the multimedia communicator’s price by $200. No one can seem to agree whether this is a successful launch or not. Some folks even predicted that Apple would sell 1 million iPhones would sell in the first weekend.

So it might make sense to look back at the historical data. How long did it take to sell 1 million iPods? According to official sales data, Apple didn’t pass the psychological barrier until July 2003, almost 21 months after the company first put 1,000 songs in our pockets. It took eight times as long, and for a device that was cheaper, didn’t require a subscription and was going after a completely unclaimed market, whereas the iPhone is aiming for the strengths of the mobile handset market.

Now, the first iPod was only available for Macs, but even the first quarter of the 3G iPod that finally got Apple over the one million hump only included 304,000 iPods sold, despite being designed for Windows. No matter how you slice it, the iPhone has been a break-out hit from day one. And with the price finally in line with the competition, the future’s only looking better.

We’ve known the new iPods for just a week, but they’re already getting a bit too familiar. The guys over at iFixit performed strip searches of both the iPod classic and the new “fatty” iPod nano and posted the evidence. I’ve got shot of the nano in the raw after the jump, then head over to the full gallery.

Way back in January, when the iPhone was young, readers uniformly predicted that unlocked iPhones would hit the streets moments after Apple released the device. I was rather conservative in saying it would take 24 hours — some readers said unlocked iPhones would be common on eBay a week before the street date.

And yet, it’s really taken until…uh, NOW, for widely available iPhone unlocking to arrive. iPhoneSIMFree is a $99 application that makes the iPhone work on any GSM carrier worldwide, including T-Mobile, where I’m stuck for the time-being. Visual Voicemail is broken off of AT&T, but everything else is just fine and dandy. Anyone ready to take the plunge now that the price is down and AT&T isn’t an absolute requirement?

Most of the furor over the big iPhone price cut is over-blown. I’m still frankly amazed that Apple has offered $100 store credit to every iPhone owner who isn’t benefiting from the $200 price drop. It’s unprecedented and creates a dangerous expectation that the same will happen the next time Apple cuts a product’s price.

But at least the people who have complained most loudly about Apple’s decision to me OWN iPhones. I can’t say the same for Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, who claims he would be “iRate” about the price cut. If only he owned one.

This time, though, he has failed to live up to one clause in his implied contract with iPhone buyers. The sky-high price was supposed to guarantee a decent period of exclusivity. For a time, if you bought an iPhone, you were supposed to be the envy of your friends. The ability to show off all the neat things it could do was your compensation for the fact that the iPhone didn’t really change your life.

Hmm. Yes. Other than that, it’s a pretty standard “What’s wrong with the world today?”-type column (Did you know that technology doesn’t actually solve all of life’s problems? Or that people are getting stabbed with knives and forks? And calling each other names like dork?). But he had to change direction at some point — it’s hard to lead the charge of a cause when you’re not actually part of it.

Via Daring Fireball.

Though Apple’s big iPod announcements last week promise to make video playback the new status quo in digital media players, one minor detail got lost amid the excitement. Though the new video nanos, iPod classics, iPod Touches and iPhones are capable of 480p output via a new Component video connection kit, they won’t be capable of working with third-party video accessories released over the last two years, such as those cool portable DVD player lookalikes that were all the rage a few months ago.

According to b, the new iPods’ TV-out feature requires an authentication chip found almost exclusively in Apple accessories, such as the (now-dead) iPod HiFi and the Universal Dock. Otherwise, the menu item is locked out. There is no apparent technical reason for this, just a monetary one. Pretty skeevy of Apple. anyone feeling burned right now?

Boffo scuttlebutt out of Lalaland: Fruit-tech tells the Nets to chop epi-bucks in half! Socko! Peacock.

(Non-Variety translation: Rumor has it that Apple wants to change the price of iTunes TV downloads to 99 cents.)

I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about why Apple would want to force the networks to make less money per download on TV shows, and the best answer I’ve heard comes from my fiancee: Apple believes cheaper downloads will lead to more sampling, and therefore greater popularity for newer shows.

Think about it. You’ve heard great things about “How I Met Your Mother,” but you don’t want to spend the time or money to get the first DVD on NetFlix. The whole series isn’t available through On-Demand cable, and you’re definitely not sold enough to buy the box. With a full iTunes archive, you could try out the pilot for a buck. At $2, it feels too much like you’re over-paying for a set you might want later, as sets average out to about $2 per episode. At a dollar, it’s a product sample. For $2, you’ve already invested.

The real competition for iTunes downloads isn’t DVD box sets — it’s cable On Demand service. That’s what hasn’t clicked until now. The TV networks, because many of them also own record companies, can only view their product compared to song prices. But it’s an artificial comparison. Which will you play more times: A hot song you love or an hour-long episode of Heroes? If anything, songs should cost more than TV shows.

For myself, I would buy a lot more shows on iTunes if the price goes down — especially for series I don’t watch or from channels I don’t subscribe to. The more I think about it, the more I like it. It’s incredibly consumer-focused, but also focused on growing the audiences of series with niche followings. It means more revenue than On-Demand for the networks, as well as possible boosts for DVD season box sets.

What do you think, how would your iTunes habits change if the TV prices drop?

Via Buzzsugar.