The announcement of the iPad has done a lot of things: it’s stoked up excitement in the Mac using community, it’s got a bunch of developers feverishly coding exciting new stuff, and it’s got retailers and cell phone companies the world over drooling over the money they can make from it.
And it’s also somewhat upset my plans for buying a new Mac.
There aren’t many games on the iPhone platform that can match games on the big 64-bit boxes for production value — but Electronic Arts Mobile‘s Madden NFL 10 can, and does, fantastically. Unfortunately, it also has one gaping hole.
We close the week featuring two hardware and one software deal. Several MacBooks are being offered, starting at $749 for a 2.13GHz white model. Also, a Mac mini (2.53GHz Core 2) with 4GB of RAM and two 500GB drives for $985. The App Store has a new batch of freebies, including “Paradise Monkeys,” a version of the classic whack-a-mole game.
As always, you can get details on these and many other bargains at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
Magazine and news publishers are collectively hoping that e-readers and tablet computers will save their businesses, and Apple’s eager to get them on board in developing high-quality animated versions of their publications to help get an iPad into each newspaper and magazine reader’s home, so it’s no surprise that Steve Jobs met with fifty top executives of the New York Times yesterday.
What was surprising, though, was Jobs’ attire: a magical top hat, of the sort championed by Mr. William Wonka and Miss Marlene Dietrich.
According to New York Mag, “When Apple recently booked the cellar dining room at Pranna for a talk with 50 top executives from the New York Times, even restaurant higher-ups didn’t know who their VIP guest would be. But last night, Jobs came strolling in wearing what our source calls “a very funny hat — a big top hat kind of thing.”
Like the hat, most details of the meeting are anecdotal. Jobs apparently admitted he likes to hold the Sunday edition of the New York Times in his hands, ordered a mango lassi and penne for dinner (neither of which were on the menu) and otherwise just showed off Apple’s new device to executives while answering questions.
Overall, it seems like the NYT executives present were interested in the iPad, but unwilling to lock themselves into a single delivery platform. Business as usual, in other words. Still, who knew that the man who hasn’t once been seen in the five years wearing anything besides blue jeans and a black turtleneck was such a secret dandy?
Just days after Apple asked an iPhone app developer to remove references to Google’s Android Marketplace, the Cupertino, Calif. company is advising location-aware applications can’t simply help Google’s AdMob serve location-based advertising.
“If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store,” Apple warns.
The New York Times has a fascinating piece by ex-Microsoftie Dick Brass on how interdepartmental fighting is causing the company to fail. Microsoft has turned into an anti-innovation company, he says.
Internecine warfare among Microsoft’s divisions has created a “dysfunctional” corporate culture that thwarts creativity instead of nurturing it. “The company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers,” he writes.
We begin with another deal from Apple on its Mac Pro Xeon workstations, starting at $2,149 for a 2.66GHz model. Next up is Philips docking cradle for the iPod, just $19. We wrap up our top list of deals with the ever-popular streaming-radio Squeezebox radio from Logitech.
Along the way, we check out several software packages, including new App Store price drops, a physics application and Assemble, a mapping and social networking tool.
As always, for details on these and many other items, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page, which starts right after the jump.
Amazon obviously has a lot to fear from the iPad, and they seem to know it, if their latest acquisition is anything to go by: they have just purchased Touchco, a small company that makes very cheap multitouch displays. Oh, and they are merging it into their Kindle division. Duh.
Touchco’s touchscreen technology is pretty cool: not only is it cheap, but it’s sensitive to pressure, and can detect an infinite number of simultaneous touches. It’s also totally transparent, which means it won’t mute the full color LCD screens for which it is designed like other touchscreens solution.
It’s pretty clear Amazon’s planning a truly impressive, full-color, multitouch update to the Kindle… but they need it sooner rather than later. The iPad’s not even out yet, and it looks like Apple’s won the battle. Better crack the whips on those Touchco engineers, Amazon.
H.264 is a very cool compression standard indeed, and intimately familiar to most Mac users as Apple’s own codec of choice for iTunes, Quicktime and the iPod. It’s also the codec driving YouTube and Vimeo, and the one used for streaming HTML5 video by both Google Chrome and Apple Safari.
The only problem? H.264 is neither free nor open-source. If you’re Apple and you want to use H.264 to serve HTML5 video in your browser, you need to pay MPEG LA, the owners of the codec, a $5 million licensing free. This has raised some eyebrows by the likes of Mozilla Firefox, who want HTML5’s video compression standard to be the free, open-source Ogg Theora. Their argument, summarized, is it’s foolish to build the next decade’s internet video standards upon the back of a licensed codec when there’s a free alternative that works nearly as well.
Today, MPEG LA confused the debate a bit by announcing that H.264 will stay royalty-free for free Internet Video until 2016…. but while it probably ends the Internet Video codec battle, it’s not a development that ends the debate.
There seems to be a slight crack in the rather monolithic analyst pronouncements of support for the iPad. Needham has scaled back its endorsement of the new Apple device, telling investors it forecasts 2 million tablets sold in the year after the iPad launches, down from a previous 4 million.
The reversal came in a note entitled “Seeing is Believing” and follows its previous “Apple has Another Winner” analysis. Although the firm still believes “sales of the iPad will be substantial even in its first iteration,” the thumbs-up is labelled “cautiously optimistic.”
