NBC and Apple had a falling-out earlier this year. Apple wanted to keep selling NBC shows like they had for more than a year, NBC wanted Apple to hand over billions in iPod sales for reasons only Jeff Zucker can fathom. In the fall-out, NBC pulled its content from iTunes, promising to roll out their own downloadable video application, offering full episodes of TV shows just as good as iTunes. They call it NBC Direct, and it came out today. So, is it an NBC-only iTunes killer? Um…no. Not even close.

But first, let’s pause for a commercial. Do you like pasta? Do you like NBC? Well, you’re in luck, because Bertolli Pasta is delicious — and all over this application. Now, back to your previously scheduled post.

First, the good news: It totally plays NBC shows. Yep, it plays the like nobody’s business. All day long, and interrupted frequently by advertisements for Bertolli Frozen Pasta Dinners. The picture quality is quite decent, at least on par with current iTunes downloads. Bertolli.

Now, the bad news. How much time do you have? There are a lot of deficiencies right now, some of which NBC claims they will fix real soon, and a lot of which are deliberate cripplings. I’ll use bullets, because there’s a lot, most after the jump.

• NBC Direct is actually a shell on top of Windows Media Player. Yep, not actually its own application. It’s built on OpenCASE, Extend Media’s super-locked down video platform. Slogan: “Automation, Ingestion, Encryption.” Yep, that’s how consumers think about video, all right.
• NBC Direct has no support for Macs — but NBC recommends Boot Camp. How thoughtful! I have a PC from work, though, so I put it through its paces.
• Bertolli pasta is just like real, homemade pasta — only frozen, and on NBC Direct! Yum-o-licious.
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Several handset-makers, including LG, HTC, Palm, and Nokia, have launched new “iPhone-killers” in the last couple of weeks, hoping to prove that the phone guys understand something that Apple doesn’t. And according to David Pogue, one such effort, the T-Mobile Shadow does a great job of making that point. Until you start using Windows Mobile 6, which is a blight on phone-dom. The review is a riot:

When you’re assigning a contact to one of the five “My Faves” slots, a T-Mobile calling plan that gives you unlimited calls to your five favorite numbers, three confirmation screens is two too many.

If it takes four presses on the More button just to see everything in the Start menu and you provide no direct way to get to the first page from the last you need to redesign.

And that’s the big difference, for me. Until someone comes out with an interface half as intuitive as the iPhone’s, I can’t be swayed. I guess we’ll see what Google’s got when it rolls out the Android SDK today, but it looks like Apple’s lead is insurmountable.

Technorati Tags: iphone, shadow

In case you don’t speak Geeky Acronym, the gibberish above means that someone (in this case, Ryan Block of Engadget) has dropped a 64-gigabyte solid-state drive into a MacBook Pro. The incredible drives, which are still extremely expensive compared to conventional hard drives, use flash, not platters for storage, and as a result, have no noticeably moving parts. They’re virtually silent, and they’ve been claimed to up battery life to unheard of levels (I’ve heard 11 hours on a Toshiba subnotebook). Block hasn’t provided a battery life figure yet, but I’m kind of drooling. In two years, virtually all laptops will have moved in this direction…

Via Digg.

Technorati Tags: macbookpro, ssd

The narrative is pretty simple at this point: Apple launches the iPhone, screaming crowds camp out for days in advance. Right?

Not so fast, says UK phone blog Dialaphone. Based on an informal survey of outlets for the iPhone in England on Friday, he found many, many stores where no lines existed at all. Even the Apple Stores, which were busiest, didn’t have enough people to fill up its entire security section.

I especially like this photo of the forlorn-looking shop-keeper wondering when, precisely, he would be mobbed with iPhone shoppers.

When you couple this with news that T-Mobile sold 10,000 iPhones in Germany (that’s good news? Really?), the message seems to be that Europe is less comfortable with Apple’s locked-down iPhone attitude (and dinosaur data technology) than we Americans. Any Euro readers in the audience take the plunge? Anyone holding out for the next rev?

Via Digg.

Technorati Tags: hype, launch, iphone

Apple just refreshed its third concurrent ad campaign today with three new “Get a Mac” ads, a few of which aired during NFL action on Sunday. Two of the ads, “Podium” (seen above) and “PR Lady” make a particular point of ripping on the fact that many people have downgraded their computers from Vista to XP because they’re so frustrated with it. I enjoy “Podium” a lot, but my favorite is still “PR Lady,” which features a PR liaison who steps in to make PC’s self-defeating comments sound positive:

PC: I hired a PR person, you know, to smooth things over that whole Vista problem.
PR Lady: By “problem,” he means, “Some early adopters have faced some MINOR challenges.”

It’s really cute.

Few ad campaigns inspired as much mockery as “Dude, You’re Getting a Dell!?!” which plagued the airwaves for years in the late ’90s and earlier part of this decade. Essentially, an annoying looking guy, played by Ben Curtis, would yell out the stupid catchphrase, and then people would pretend to be excited that they were receiving a cut-rate PC with all the classy styling of a kitchen wastebasket. But times change, and stars get fired for marijuana possession, and Curtis has now turned up as a waiter at Tortilla Flats in New York. My friends over at New York Magazine have the exclusive interview.

What’s the most extreme reaction you’ve gotten?
There was a group of women in their early forties, one of whom was bawling. I walk over and they said, “Our friend just passed away. We thought you might be able to cheer [us] up, we know who you are and you’re an incredible human and you’ve been through a lot and you’re an incredible actor. We’re all DEA agents, and we think you should smoke as much pot as you want to. And we love you.”

Well, you would have to, to get excited about about a Dell.

Via Engadget.

Technorati Tags: dell, dufus, karma

Few people, other than Michael Scott on “The Office,” like Applebee’s. Recognizing this, the company just redid its logo, and, well, it kind of looks like Apple’s logo.

Applebee’s Old Logo:

Applebee’s New Logo:


Apple’s logo. The main similarity I see is in the font. A bit too close for comfort. Thoughts, Apple legal?

Applebee’s images via BrandCurve.
Apple logo courtesy Pycomall

While iPhone shoppers waiting at Apple’s Regent Street store for the iPhone launch on Friday were well behaved, women in line for a fashion launch at a New York H&M were not.

Female fashionistas at the launch of a new Robert Cavalli collection at H&M reportedly trampled each other, fought over dresses and stripped the mannequins.

Naughty:

Photos by Vogue.co.uk

Nice:

Photo by mbites

Via Portfolio

As assumed, Google announced yesterday that they have no interest in entering the mobile hardware game. There is no gPhone. Instead, the company took the wraps off of the Open Handset Alliance, a 30+ company coalition featuring software companies, handset makers, network operators, and web companies that claim to be committed to a genuinely open mobile phone platform.

That platform is Android, a linux-based operating system and software stack originally developed by a start-up of the same name that Google absorbed in 2005. Basically, if you license Android, you can power a cell phone. It’s everything except the phone itself.

It’s exactly what I hoped for. T-Mobile, Samsung, HTC, Motorola and others are on board, and this time next year, there could be dozens of Android phones on the market, each set up for total openness of software and all other features. It could be the iPhone without Steve Jobs trying to control everything about it. It could be high-end, low-end, mid-end, side-end.

On the other hand, this is a year off. We’ll see the SDK next Monday. Then it will move from vaporware to reality. Can’t wait.

AppleTell grabbed this snapshot off of the Apple Canada website, which seems to announce that the iPhone is finally coming to Canada. Normally, I’d take that as a sure sign that Apple has a product announcement coming tomorrow — Apple loves Tuesdays, after all. But since the MacBook update showed up on a Thursday, I’ll shoot for the end of the week.

Via Digg.

Buying an Apple product on the first day it’s available is a recipe for disaster. This universal truth was reiterated today as Macintouch reported a nasty bug in Leopard where if you move a file to an external drive and then unplug the drive before it finishes copying, it will delete the file from the source and the destination drive.

In our test, we used Command-drag to move several large folders from a MacBook internal drive to an attached FireWire 800 external drive. While the folders were being moved, we disconnected the FireWire cable. The folders disappeared from both drives!

Yikes. Not an incredibly common flaw, but definitely easy enough to do that it should never show up in a shipping product — especially because it was present in OS X 10.1, and not inTiger. That’s a step in the wrong direction.

Thanks, Andrew!
Image via SadMac.org

Our pals over at Wired’s Gadget Lab have gathered together 15 of the most foul-smelling Apple forecasts ever, including a number of hits from the ever-prescient Rob Enderle. This is my all-time favorite:

Hewlett Packard iPod To Be a Winner

“The expectation on the iPod is that HP’s version will probably outsell Apple’s version relatively quickly.” Rob Enderle, quoted in MacObserver in August 2004.

The whole list is hilarious. It still doesn’t include my favorite of all time, delivered by (among many others) Cliff Joseph, which was that in 1998 Apple was ready to move into the Internet Set-Top Box game with a sub-$1000 product called “Columbus.” This was a done deal. As you might recall, Columbus was the iMac.

Check the list and report back. Any you think they missed?

I’ll be in and out this week, as I’m at the Designing User Experience Conference in Chicago through Wednesday. It kicks off tomorrow evening at 4:15 p.m. Central. Not sure what will be of Mac interest (some will, I’m sure), but you can see my live run of it at https://www.twitter.com/cultofmac

Say hi if you’re in the hood!

My brother brought something very interesting to my attention recently. Although Dell offers a 15.4″ Inspiron starting at $499, to make it even roughly comparable in performance to a MacBook, you need to make it cost more than the Apple. No, seriously:

Once you start “customizing” the machine to be anything capable of running a modern OS, a category in which we are forced to include Vista, the total more than doubles. The default shipping OS for the $499 machine is Vista. The laptop, as configured initially, has 512MB of RAM, or a quarter of the recommended amount for Vista. The processor is a single-core running at 2GHz, and the drive capacity is a scanty 60GB, of which between a fifth and a sixth will be consumed by the OS, and somewhat more by preinstalled third-party software.

So, starting from the base price of $499, I added:

Dual core 2GHz CPU: $150
Windows XP Pro: $129 (Yep, you have to pay the price of Leopard to upgrade from XP Home to XP Pro)
1 GB RAM installed: $50
80 GB drive: $25
85 W/Hr battery: $50
802.11n wifi card: $100
McAfee AV software: $99
MS Office: $149
3-year warranty: $240

Dell grand total: $1501

And what of the Mac? Well, aside from costing slightly less, it’s also much less of a hassle to custom build.

At the Apple Store site, I configured a low-end MacBook for purchase.
Stock configuration: 2GHz Core2Duo, 1GB RAM, 80GB disk, 802.11n,
Leopard installed. To this I added:

3-year AppleCare: $249
MS Office: $150 (Or only $79, if you go the iWork route)

Apple grand total: $1498

Checkmate, Dell. I would really like to commend Apple for how easy it is to use their online store compared to Dell’s. The Apple experience is a single page, loaded only with relevant tools to install. Meanwhile, the Dell site is loaded with multiple versions of the same piece of software, or bizarre configuration options most people could not possibly give a crap about. I mean, really. Can you explain off the top of your head why an 85 Wh battery is better than a 60? Or what a 9-cell versus 6-cell battey is? More importantly, do you think anyone you know would? I mean, come on. Just give people what they need. This is absurd and ugly. Shopping at Dell’s site is like buying a used car from a guy named Moe off of Craig’s List (trust me, I have). There continue to be hidden costs you couldn’t have imagined, and it just keeps getting worse.

At this point, is there any reason to stick with Dell? There’s Parallels if you really need it, and MS Office, Quicken, QuickBooks, and most of the other staples have already migrated. Heck, Apple Mail even has built in Exchange support — which Windows doesn’t, unless you buy Office Pro with Outlook. How do you like them Apples, Redmond?

Thanks Andrew!

I didn’t keep up on the Apple-related halloween costumes as well as I like to, but I did see one that I thought you guys just had to see. It’s Bobby Hartman and Reko Rivera as a pair of iPhones with functioning displays. According to the page about their costumes (weighing in at 60 pounds and using LCD-TVs hooked up to Video iPods for their feeds), Reko is a DJ, so this is all old hat to him.

The clip is killer.

Thanks, Scott!

I love the NBC and Apple feud so much. Sometimes, the companies overtly bash each other. For every other moment, there’s fun speculation. Take for instance, the latest volley, which likely has nothing to do with the epic rumble between Jeff Zucker and Steve Jobs, but it’s fun to pretend otherwise. Here’s the set-up: NBC’s Saturday Night Live had a sketch featuring an iPhone that Gizmodo believes to have the illicit installer app that graces all jailbroken iPhones — and then, today, Apple issues iPhone firmware 1.1.2 on UK iPhones, which closes the exploit that enables the current group of jailbreaks. Coincidence? Or distant shots in a hundred-years war?

(No further word on features for 1.1.2. Best not to install for now.)

Via digg.

Time Machine, the automated back-up system built into Mac OS X Leopard, has been justly celebrated for making the least-fun of all computer practices easy. At the touch of a button, you can find every revision of every single one of your files on hand at the time of its installation. Unfortunately, as Steven Fisher recently discovered, this comes with an ugly side effect: Even executable code can get run from Time Machine. Cool as that might sound, the consequences could be grim:

Let me give you a simple example: You find out Adium (for example) has an available exploit that the developers haven’t patched yet. You remove Adium, but it continues to exist in your backup. You visit a web page that activates the Adium bug, and Adium is launched from your backup. That you can launch Adium from your backup is not a bug. That Mac OS X will do so automatically without confirmation is a bug. The backup should be considered a vault for the user, not Launch Services.

Yikes.  Rogue code is bad. Rogue code that you have to go out of
your way to re-delete from your archives? Really nasty. Apple, let’s get a fix going.

Via Daring Fireball

As reported earlier this week, Apple has pulled out a final hardware revision for the holiday season, pushing out new MacBooks that gain a 200 Mhz speed bump and new integrated graphics hardware replacing the much-maligned GMA 950 with Intel’s GMA x3100. The line starts at $1,099 for a 2 Ghz Core2Duo with a Combo Drive and an 80 Gig Hard Drive, Ranging up to $1,499 for the BlacBook with 2.2 Ghz Core2, 160 Gig drive and super drive.

Quite wonderfully, the entire line standardizes with 1 Gig of Memory on-board, which should make Leopard perform well on these boxes regardless of configuration. Apple also now allows custom builds of MacBook Pros up to 2.6 Ghz Core2 for an extra $250 over its base configurations.

I’ve done some quick research into the performance of the GMA x3100, and this isn’t the consumer mobile gaming chipset we might hope for to make the MacBook a peer to the iMac as a gaming platform. Here’s a very positive review from Tech.co.uk of the GMA x3100 running Windows.

The GMA X3100 also continues the philosophy of Intel’s previous graphics solutions (going back as far as its discrete i740 line), and that is one of compatibility. While there’s rarely been the power available to run games at anything more than PowerPoint slideshow speeds, being able to render those images correctly means that you’ll often put up with poor frame rates as long as everything looks right.

In testing, the improvement this new engine offers over the older solutions isn’t massive – 3DMark06, the industry benchmark for ascertaining the capabilities of graphics engines in general, returned a score of 416. While this result is twice that from the previous generation of integrated graphics, it still proves that integrated graphics aren’t for next-generation titles. Top-end cards score around 8,000, with even cheaper cards managing scores around the 4,000 mark.

In real-world performance terms, the low throughput of this engine shows when trying to play Doom 3 back at the high-quality setting at 800 x 600 – less than 10fps isn’t playable. Half-Life 2 fared a little better at 18fps, but surprisingly this score is bettered by its last-generation graphics, which were 5fps smoother. Despite the presence of hardware T&L, the lack of fill rate is clearly a limiting factor.

Yeeeahh. MacBook Pro is still the only credible gaming portable from Apple. Actual video performance is surprisingly good, but 3D is seriously lagging. Any fence-sitters moved to make a purchase now with this announcement?

Mac Rumors: Apple Updates MacBooks to Santa Rosa, GMA X3100; 2.6GHz MacBook Pro

Tags: macbook, hardware, apple, product, announcement

Illusionist Andrew Mayne is using a special filter in iChat to make it look like he’s bored to death or his soul is being ripped out.

It’s pretty effective.

Check his page for video of the effects in action.

Instructions for using the quartz filter called “HoloGit” is here on MacRumors.

Pic: A lab at the school’s library with a sea of new iMacs. At front is the display of a Mac mini running Windows.

To “diversify” its technology, the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University in Dallas is switching to Macs from PCs.

By switching to Macs, the school can now offer students Mac OS X as well as Windows XP — the machines are all dual boot.

Cox joins several schools switching to the Mac, including Wilkes University Wilkes-Barr in PA, and St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. A few years ago, it was the opposite story. Schools were abandoning the Mac in droves, including long-time, all-Mac schools like Dartmouth.

At Cox, the school has installed about 100 iMacs in labs, and there’s dual-boot Mac minis (OS X and XP) at the head of about 30 classrooms.
“We’re enhancing and diversifying our computer platforms by keeping Windows XP while adding OS X,” said Allen Gwinn, the school’s technical director, in a statement. “Upgrading to Apple platforms is the only way to do this.”

Update: As noted in the comments, I bungled the headline, transposing PCs and Macs. But there’s no strikethrough in heds, so I just corrected it. Thanks for the heads up.

Updated: Ah, John Siracusa. Is anyone else capable of such sublime operating system reviews? His Leopard manifesto (17 action-packed pages) is sublime:

That’s the Downloads folder on the left, and the disk image file on the right. It’s slightly bigger.

If you are not shaking your head, uttering something profane, or taking some deity’s name in vain right about now, congratulations, Apple may have a position for you in their user interface design group.

He’s complimentary where Apple got it right, mean where it got it wrong, and always insightful and funny.

Attention, media company CEOs: You never come out looking good when you bash Apple for not sharing iPod revenue looking with you. Do makers of CD drives pay you royalties? Does my broken SPORTS Walkman owe you cash because it wouldn’t play music with out your content. The latest victim of this fallacy is NBC President Jeff Zucker, best known for taking the channel from No. 1 to No. 4 while head of programming. Variety reports his absurd comments at Syracuse University yesterday.

“Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content, and made a lot of money,” Zucker said. “They did not want to share in what they were making off the hardware or allow us to adjust pricing.”

How awful for you! I’m so sad that Apple didn’t want to provide you with revenue that you didn’t earn! Not to mention which, there is no one on the planet who bought an iPod just to watch videos on it, let alone just to watch NBC TV shows. And the vast majority of music gets sold through non-iTunes channels. The iTunes Store has contributed to iPod growth, but then again, “The Office” found an audience largely because of iTunes. Good luck with Hulu, Jeff.

Does anyone have sympathy for comments like these?

Zucker says Apple deal rotten – Entertainment News, Technology News, Media – Variety
Thanks, Buzz!

Tags: nbc, itunes, lame

Now that the iPhone and iPod Touch have been cracked wide-open again, my friend and colleague at Wired, Michael Calore asks the most important question: Is there a killer app on either device?

Thanks to new breakthroughs made this past weekend by a disparate team of hackers, Jailbreaking your iPhone or iPod Touch is easier than ever. But just because you have the freedom to hack the phone’s software and run your own third-party applications, should you? And should you do it now, rather than waiting until February? Is there already an application available which makes the risk of bricking your device worthwhile?

Head over to vote. It’s a fun little poll, and the it’s anybody’s game right now.

Things really couldn’t be better for Apple right now. Its phone and music businesses are soaring, Mac market share is growing at a voracious rate, and Leopard is another critical and commercial success in the midst of Vista’s flop. Oh, and the stock is so high that a share from 19967 that cost $8 then is now worth more than $43,000 A lot of money (misremembered the number of AAPL splits. The stock did drop down to $8 in 1997, though).

But things were not always so rosy. Travel back to the spring of 1997, a land of rap-rock and bridges to the 21st century. A time before Lewinski. Apple was a shambles. Gil Amelio ruled as CEO. Steve Jobs was half-in, half-out of the fold. Apple owned NeXT, but the company was three years from a shipping version of Mac OS X. The iMac hadn’t even been announced, for crying out loud.

Ever-vigilant, Wired put out 101 theories for how Apple could be saved in the June 1997 issue. Looking back, some of them are eerily prescient (15. Dump or outsource the Newton and other sidelights, 34. Port the OS to Intel) and some are hilariously off the mark (1. Get out of the hardware game, 35. Clone the Powerbook).

As a nostalgia-fest, I’ve decided to highlight the ten best and ten worst of the list. That all follows after the jump, as is a link to the full story.

PC World: In Pictures: The Most Notable Notebooks of 2007

The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year is a Mac. Try that again: The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year–or for that matter, ever–is a Mac. Not a Dell, not a Toshiba, not even an Alienware. The $2419 (plus the price of a copy of Windows Vista, of course) MacBook Pro’s PC WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 88 beats Gateway’s E-265M by a single point, but the MacBook’s score is far more impressive simply because Apple couldn’t care less whether you run Windows.

Via Daring Fireball