The Naked Bikers, a global protest vehicle for raising oil dependency awareness, rode through London on a sunny day in June. Photographer Peter Payne’s arresting image at panoramas.dk shows the stunning visual capabilities of QTVR, Apple’s 360-degree and CubicVR photo viewing technology.
Brits (and Canadians) finally got to join the iTunes movie party this week, with Apple unleashing movie rentals and purchasing for the two territories. I’d actually been mulling over grabbing an Apple TV for a while (what with my ten-year-old DVD player starting to make strange buzzing and wheezing noises), but decided against it. Instead, I bought a cheap replacement DVD player and an iPod dock, and so I was initially feeling a little irked.
And then I looked at the prices and felt much better. In the UK, rental pricing initially doesn’t seem too awful at £2.49 for old stuff and £3.49 for shiny new films, which is mostly on a par with high-street rental outlets such as Blockbuster and DVD-by-mail companies. However, this is the realm of digital, and so there aren’t as many barriers to business regarding upkeep, location, shipping, and so on. A swift comparison with the US store sees that Apple’s making an extra $2 on library titles and $3 on new releases (the price of which almost doubles during a film’s trip across the Atlantic). Take into account taxes, and the extra profit is reduced, but still pretty hefty. On the plus side, you do at least get a 48-hour window to watch, which is a small added bonus.
However, it’s the purchase price-tags that really have me confused. They come in at £6.99 for library titles and £10.99 for new releases (the latter of which is $14.99—about £7.50—in the US). Even when you add on British taxes, this doesn’t look like a great deal, and with the usual raft of cheap outlets available (HMV, Play.com, Amazon UK), I fail to see how Apple will make a dent in the market with this pricing model.
Commentators are already saying this pricing has nothing to do with Apple (“Blame the movie studios!” “Apple is innocent!” “I wuv Apple and will GET YOU if you write bad things about Stevie!”), and how it’s more expensive to do business in the UK (blah, blah, blah), but this just reminds me of Adobe doubling CS3’s pricing when it goes across the Atlantic and offering a toothy grin in return.
With hardware, there’s now very little difference when taxes are taken into account, and I’m happy for Apple to mark things up a little in case Sterling tanks or the US Dollar rallies. In software, pricing is generally getting better (if you pretend CS3—something of an exception—doesn’t exist), and Apple again is gradually taking the piss less and less with each new release.
So why does the difference in pricing remain in media, when there’s no shipping, no printed artwork, and no shelf-space required? Apple always makes a point about thinking different, but in this case, it looks like the company’s done a quick price-check of its rivals and is thinking exactly the same.
Though Apple’s Swiss online store retracted the announcement of an updated version of Apple’s venerable Airport Express basestation, the mother ship in Cupertino today unleashed the $99 gadget, now with speedy 802.11n data, on the rest of the world. I’m a big proponent of the Express for home use, particularly given its music sharing capabilities. It’s Apple’s best device for making iTunes more than just a support system for iPods and iPhones – even more so than the AppleTV — when it comes to music.
Philip Barnes has uploaded a handful of vintage Apple print ads from the late 1970s and early ’80s. He’s got the “Welcome, IBM. Seriously.” spot, as well as the amazing commercial above, which makes the argument that A is for Apple, and therefore, you should use one. Sink your teeth into finances! Do you see that 16-color bar chart on that TV! It’s dope!
MacWorld was oddly devoid of non-MacBook Air, AppleTV software and Time Capsule product announcements this year. No new MacBooks, iMacs, or MacBook Pros, and no new iPods or iPhones. Apple remedied the latter this Tuesday with double-capacity iPod touch and iPhones, but other new hardware or the iPhone and touch SDK were nowhere to be seen.
TUAW claims to have a tip that the company that typically broadcasts Apple events, MIRA Mobile, is looking to hire people for an unannounced Apple event at the end of the month. My top priority is a new MacBook Pro, but my old iPod just conked out, so the SDK for the touch would be pretty compelling, too…
Steve Jobs’ much-ballyhooed movie rental service looks all fine and dandy, but the question in my mind is: “How long will it be before the service offers a single decent movie to rent?”
At present, the movies on offer are even shittier than the local video store, or those available on-demand from my cable providor, Comcast, which utterly stinks.
It’d be depressing if all Apple offered was popcorn garbage. Surely the service is serving the wrong demographic. Early adopters, the kind that run out to buy an AppleTV box, are surely more interested in less mainstream fare. How long will it be before there’s some independent movies, classics, artsy fartsy foreign stuff, and genre titles?
BusinessWeek reports that sources claim Apple has a deal with Fox, Warner Bros., Paramount, and Lionsgate to allow sales, rentals or both through iTunes. If so, this could prove a huge boon for Apple. At last year’s All Things D conference, CEO Steve Jobs referred to its digital television device business as “a hobby.” Though promising an iPod for the living room, the AppleTV has been quite slow to catch on by Apple’s recent standards. That’s according to sales estimates from analysts and also anecdotal evidence: I’ve been to a lot of geeks’ houses in San Francisco and never seen a single AppleTV in the living room.
At this point, I’m ready to admit that Apple’s assumptions for the movie market were flat-out wrong — barely anyone wants to own movies in download format alone. I haven’t bought a single film myself, but there have been plenty of times when I would gladly rent a movie download — it’s faster than NetFlix and easier than walking down the street to Blockbuster. At the same time, for the movies I love, I want a tangible artifact to hold onto. I want to explore their special features and revisit favorite scenes. At the moment, Apple’s downloads are worse than what I can get at the store. But a rental? Heck, if it means staying on the coach, I’m in. Especially if it’s less than $3.
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?
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.
