Nilay Patel at Engadget has a fascinating post about Apple’s $20 charge for Mail, Maps and a few other apps on the iPod touch, allegedly because doing otherwise would run Apple afoul of Sarbanes-Oxley Act accounting requirements. Essentially, the argument goes, Apple is required to charge for any “major” features that aren’t enabled upon shipment for any product that doesn’t have its cost spread across a recurring subscription business model, as the iPhone and AppleTV are.

Which sounds plausible, until you realize that Apple has enabled such features as podcasts, search games and others for the iPod without charging for it. Not to mention which, iTunes is perpetually upgraded for free, no matter what you’re installing it on, whether you even own an iPod or not. Patel puts it well:

iPod name or no, the iPod touch is essentially a little computer, and the whole purpose of software is to enable “significant unadvertised new features” on a computer. For Apple (or anyone) to say that a mail app is a “significant new feature” for a computer is pushing the line just a bit far, and it makes us wonder how the company accounts for new versions of iTunes, QuickTime, and Safari, each of which add new features to already-sold Macs — and how things are going to play out when the iPhone / iPod touch SDK is released next month.

Seriously. Something stinks in Cupertino. Why the heck should a consumer have to care whether the device they buy gets reported as subscription revenue or not? That’s a company’s problem, and it’s goofy to discriminate between products on an arbitrary basis. Just sounds like a way to get some extra bucks out of touch owners to me.

Via Engadget.

I love new technology, especially when it’s enhanced by really old technology. And that’s why I endorse Nanoscope, a bizarre mod of an early 1970s slide viewer that Mark Irwin dremeled down to make it an ideal iPod nano video expander. Pop it in, and you get a huge, beautiful picture — that just happens to be a little warped at the corners.

I’m in. Who else wants one?

YouTube – Introducing Nanoscope
Via Gizmodo

Tags: hack, hardware, nano, ipod

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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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!

Radiohead’s “In Rainbows,” released early this morning over the Internet just nine days after the band announced its completion, is out and completely brilliant. It’s also not for sale through any existing music distribution channel. It’s DRM-free, you can name your own price (no, really), and not one penny goes to the record companies. My thoughts on what that means are over here at my other blog.

What bothers me is that this is exactly the sort of consumer-friendly, content-creator friendly business Apple should be encouraging. Instead, they’re acting in the best interest of record companies, movie studios and TV networks. Kind of disappointing. Either way, the songs still play on my iPod, so away I go!

It’s remarkable how rapidly Apple is upping the sophistication of its marketing for the iPhone. The initial ads stressed the coolness of multitouch and whipping the phone around, appealing to the slavering Early Adopters who ran out to pay $600 on the first pressing. Now that the iPhone has dropped to $400, though, Apple has created a new ad campaign that focuses on the way people use it in the real world — the crazy interface barely even shows up.

The three new ads were shot against black back-drops in New York. Some enterprising blogs have already tracked down the locations of the shoots, but I’m more fascinated by the overall messages Apple is sending by letting people tell their stories. Take “Mankind,” told by Doug and shown above. In the spot, he talks about Visual Voicemail and nothing else, how it lets you see the length and sender of all messages and ignore the ones you hate. The picture he paints is rich, complaining about the guy who owes you money and leaves a four-minute message — it’s obviously a bunch of excuses, and he’s not going to pay you. Skip it!

Perhaps the most effective piece for me stars Stephano. It’s called “One Thing.” In it, he mentions that he used to carry an iPod, a camera, a regular cell phone and a cell phone for texting and e-mail. Now he has just one thing. Exactly. Apple is showing how this thing fits into people’s lives. It’s really pretty compelling.

What iPhone story would you tell the world?

(Screencap from TUAW)

If you follow Apple for long enough, you’ll see a million toothless iTunes and iPod killers, overhyped services and products destined for obscurity or the remainder table. But though Amazon’s new mp3 downloading service seems like another in this chain, I firmly believe this time is different. Amazon can actually deliver a superior digital music experience. Apple has its first legitimate challenger since the iTunes Store first launched. To hear why, click through.

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?

Gather ’round, children. And let me tell you of a time before the consumer Internet. Before the iPod. And, if you can believe it, even before the iPhone. Yes, I speak of 1984. When the original Mac was the state of the art, and my favorite TV show was Sesame Street (not that this has changed).

I recently managed to acquire the very first issue of MacWorld magazine, published in February 1984. Though it sells on eBay for up to $100 a copy, I’ll be bringing you hilarious content from Mac fandom past for free. It features many wonders, including an art gallery of MacPaint creations, an interview with Bill Gates where he calls the Mac a classic, and even a feature on the incredible WYSIWIG technology that will allow print-outs on the Apple ImageWriter to look just like the screen output (you must see that one to believe it).

But before I start to dive too far into the issue (which will show up over the course of several days and posts), I will start with the most horrifying ad in MacIntosh history. Click through — if you dare!

Technorati Tags: ad, humor, macworld

It’s a minor triumph of Apple’s that all AT&T plans for the iPhone include unlimited data services. After all, Blackberries and Treos alike have spendy access plans that dramatically increase their cost of use.

But as Justine Ezarik (a designer based in Pittsburgh known as iJustine who is also a “lifecaster” on Justin.tv) learned recently, AT&T still has a very old-world view of billing for data services. The company broke out as a line item every data transfer her iPhone made, including 30,000 texts, most of which come up as a huge series of $0.00 transactions. The total heft to the package? 300 pages. And it shipped in a box, which can’t have been cheap, even leaving aside the environmental impact of a few hundred thousand folks getting extra-big bills printed on paper.

In response, Justine has put up a marvelous iPhone ad parody that you can view above via YouTube. The message is clear: Get eBilling, and someone talk to AT&T about the way they manage billing for data!

Via Apple 2.0