Steve Jobs made an interesting disclosure to the NY Times yesterday while talking about the remarkable Grand Central technology in Mac OS X Snow Leopard that will allow programmers to get more power out of multicore computers and also to use GPUs for additional performance. In the midst of such talk, he announced for the very first time the reason that Apple purchased processor-maker PA Semiconductor in April.
“PA Semi is going to do system-on-chips for iPhones and iPods,” he said.
Many had speculated that future iPhones could run on Intel silicon, or that PA Semi had been purchased just to recruit some of its talented engineers. Steve says otherwise. Apple’s getting into the mobile processor game. Two years from now, all our iPods and iPhones might be running on their hardware. And if PA’s stuff is as good as everyone says, such exclusive hardware could maintain the competitive advantage that software already offers the iPhone.
Now the dust has settled, and the excitement has waned, it’s possible to calmly reflect on yesterday’s iPhone announcements. Only the excitement hasn’t really waned, and the only reason the dust has settled is because I can’t run to the nearest O2 shop and grab an iPhone 3G yet.
Ultimately, Apple delivered. Most of the rumor bridge went away satisfied, with the revamp being lighter, more efficient, and including both 3G and GPS support. Yes, the camera is still rubbish, and the lack of a front-facing camera still irks some, but most people are happy with the upgrade. (Well, apart from the idiots web-wide who are rattling on about HOW UNFAIR it is that Apple had the audacity to release a new iPhone when they bought one JUST LAST WEEK, and how APPLE IS EVIL, and so on.)
Also, the pricing rumor turned out to be pretty much spot-on. The iPhone’s going to ship with a price-tag of just $199 (for the 8GB model—the 16GB model is an extra hundred bucks), and so even with the still fairly hefty monthly contract, it’s now a lot more affordable. Clearly, Apple is gunning for market share (its estimate of 10 million iPhones sold by the end of 2008 now looks remarkably achievable), to get its platform ingrained in people’s minds as the obvious choice for anyone after a smartphone.
From a British standpoint, things are looking even more rosy. I recently bitched about Apple’s over-the-odds charging in Europe, and it seems someone was listening. Not only is the new iPhone priced in a straight US dollar-to-Sterling conversion (I was expecting $199 to become £139, truth be told, not £99), but also Brits retain existing tariff pricing (reports suggest AT&T’s raising its prices), and get a new tariff at the £30 mark (even if its minutes and texts allocations are both utterly miserly). Handily, existing iPhone owners forking out £45 or £75 per month also get the new iPhone as a free upgrade.
The only disappointing thing is that I now need something else to complain about. Ideas on a postcard…
UPDATE: Confirmation about AT&T’s price-hike suggests that there’s still something to complain about, at least if you’re in the US. Despite the hardware price-drop, the overall contract cost for the 8GB phone is now an extra $40 over two years. If anything, this makes the pricing in the UK even more surprising. Still, perhaps Apple will actually be able to sell some iPhones in Britain now.
It’s iPhone upgrade season. With the deluge of iPhone 3G rumors convincing just about everyone that now might be a good time to dump the old phone, in anticipation of getting one of the new models, here’s a tutorial to help you sell your iPhone safely, and get the best price.
UPDATE: RE: the comments below. I Photoshopped the image above for illustrative purposes. It’s not a spy shot. Also, my tipster said the iPhone will be subsidized, but he didn’t specify whether the subsidy will come from Apple, AT&T, overseas carriers, or all of the above. I can only guess that Apple will sell the iPhone 2 at a loss — to customers and carriers — and recoup the cost from monthly subscriber charges.
I just got a hot tip from a programmer at a major software publisher who claims to have seen the specs for the iPhone 2. This is unconfirmed, but according to the tipster, the iPhone 2 will be announced by Steve Jobs at Apple’s WWDC on June 9, and will much offer more for much less — and be thinner to boot. The iPhone 2 will have:
3G
GPS
2 x memory (16GB and 32GB)
22 percent thinner
Better battery life
The tipster says Apple will subsidize the iPhone’s price to better compete with RIM’s Blackberry. The London Times is reporting the same thing — that the iPhone will cost about $200 in the UK when it goes on sale in July.
Dennis Liu, creator of the clever OS X-themed music video that went viral last week, is looking for help with his next Apple-themed video.
On May 9, Dennis posted a music video he’d made for indie band The Bird & The Bee featuring his OS X desktop and dozens of applications. The video, featured below, has been viewed more than 600,000 times and written up on scores of blogs and websites.
Eleven days later, the video has earned Dennis several job offers and offers of work from Yahoo, Microsoft and HBO, he says. According to Dennis, the highlights of his “crazy” week are:
– Ranked #1 viral video at www.viralvideochart.com for 1 week.- Head nods from several known Hollywood producers and directors.- Talks to getting a manager/agent at a major talent representation agency- NYU, USC, and Berkeley requesting the video to show their film/new media students.- E-mails from major corporations, including marketing directors and employees of Yahoo, Microsoft, HBO, Pixar, Disney, and of course Apple.- Invited to screen at film festivals world wide, from the UK to Australia- Bird & the Bee enjoyed the video, going to their NYC concert in June 2nd.- An apple store manager in IL showed all her employees the video as an example to artfully show the power of the macs to customers.- The author of “Stickies” wrote to congratulate, as well as a lead developer of OSX. https://mooseyard.com/Jens/2008/05/stickies-makes-its-music-video-debut/- Many, many, many start-ups/unknown musicians looking for a director to shoot their next video/ad.
Dennis works at the NY ad agency BBDO, and used to work out of Saatchi & Saatchi NY shooting viral videos. More about Dennis here.
Next on the horizon, Dennis says he’s looking for help shooting another Apple-related viral. He writes:
“I have another really cool idea, very different from this one – but still with enormous viral potential for Apple. Would take probably twice as long to make, but could be very cool. But am trying to decide whether it’s worth the amount of work… especially when it’s all by myself. If there is a next time, I could appreciate a hand….”
Okay so I’m breaking my own rule about not writing about the iPhone…
John Gruber’s article here, where he details the relative power of the iPhone as a computing platform, got me wondering how the god-phone’s specs lined up against my favorite portable device of all time, the Sony PlayStation Portable. Right now, the PSP is the premier portable gaming and entertainment platform, but once you check the specs of the two devices, it’s pretty clear that this is likely to change.
From a pure specs perspective, the iPhone just slams the PSP. Of course, there is no telling how games will actually play, as they will have to compete for resources with all of the other things the iPhone does (like being a phone), but all in all it ought to be pretty respectable, and this is just iPhone v1. Expect the next generation of iPhone to have even more impressive specifications.
What, no er… uh… buttons you say?
Uh… yeah. That will tend to impact our ability to play any kind of action games on it. But that’s not a hard problem to overcome, one need only look towards the Wii, and all the innovative ways they’ve used motion on that platform, to get a glimpse at how a creative bunch of developers might use multi-touch. Additionally, a gaming controller that the iPhone just snaps into and connects via iPod dock or Bluetooth, would be so easy to engineer, that someone has probably designed one in the time it took you to read this sentence.
Being the last guy on the planet not to own one of these, I’m actually pretty excited about the possibilities. I live by one simple rule when it comes to gaming platforms, if you can play GTA on it, I’ll buy it. Are you listening, Rockstar?
Macworld has some interesting, contrarian advice about buying a Mac these days.
A couple of years ago, pro users would never consider a low-end iMac or MacBook portable for work: it just wouldn’t be powerful enough.
But because Apple is using powerful dual-core Intel chips across its entire line, the difference between machines is blurring.
After running a battery of tests, MacWorld concludes that for most people, a new iMac or MacBook Pro is good enough — pro, power users included. The savings add up to $1,000 or more.
… for most mainstay applications, the high-end iMac and MacBook Pro models are plenty fast (the 3.06GHz build-to-order iMac even beat the Mac Pro in some of our tests). Even Adobe Photoshop, a heavy-duty program that conventional wisdom has long argued should be run only on a high-end system, works acceptably well on just about any Mac (unless you’re editing gigantic files).
A new limited-edition, Europe-only R2-D2 DVD Projector now has an integrated iPod dock for projecting the Star Wars saga onto your living room wall. Earlier versions of the Artoo didn’t have an iPod dock. The projector is limited to 4,000 units, and costs € 2799 — about $4,300.The dock is compatible with the 1G and 2G iPod nano,* and 5G iPod with video.*(Facts corrected, thanks to reader Mario Panighetti)Link.
Isamu Sanada, the Japanese photographer who makes Mac mockups, has created a new design for a tablet Mac that blends the iPhone with the MacBook Air subnotebook. He calls it the Mac Air.
According to a rough translation of his site, the Mac Air also doubles as a desktop.
It hooks to a wireless keyboard and uses a wireless Time Capsule-like docking station as a hard drive. The dock includes a SuperDrive for playing and burning Cds/DVDs.
It boots into the iPhone operating system when a tablet, and OS X when used as a desktop.
It’s a great idea, but will Apple ever make such a device? Maybe. Sanada has once or twice correctly predicted Apple’s products in the past. As previously reported:
Isamu Sanada is a photographer by trade, but an Apple designer by calling.
Sanada is an amateur designer of fantasy Macintoshes. His Applele website is a popular showcase for dozens of speculative designs for future Apple machines.
In fact, Sanada is so adept at mimicking Apple’s look, he created a design for a new laptop that predicted Apple’s distinctive Titanium PowerBook G4 months before it came out.
Pete’s post below got me thinking. Apple’s star is rising, and they absolutely are eroding the market-share of Windows. Every quarter this thing of ours becomes more and more mainstream, and it’s not impossible to imagine a time when the Mac will at least have a significant degree of parity with Windows. This raises a bigger question: would we ever want Apple to eclipse Microsoft?
The first thing they teach you in strategic planning is to perform the following assessment:
“What are the benefits of a course of action, versus, what are the negatives of following the same. What are the possible unintended consequences”.
Now certainly we are all excited about Apple’s continued rise, but there may also be come cause for concern. In the rest of this article we’re going to play the “Unintended Consequences Game”.
Apple earned 6.6 percent of the PC market in Q1 2008, and saw 32.5 percent year-on-year growth in unit shipments, Gartner said. Overall, the PC market grew 3 percent year-on-year, Gartner said.
Apple trails Dell (31.4 percent market share), Hewlett-Packard (25 percent) and Acer (9.1 percent). While Dell grew 15 percent year-on-year during the quarter, Acer slipped 18.3 percent, Gartner said.
Acer is only 2.5 percentage points ahead of Apple, and Apple is positioned to regain the number-three slot, which it hasn’t held since the mid-nineties.
Worldwide, Apple failed to make the top 5 (HP, Dell, Acer, Lenovo, Toshiba).
A Santa Cruz woman is using Leopard’s Back to My Mac remote control software to track a thief who stole her laptop.
The woman, named Joey, had her MacBook and iPhone stolen from her truck. The thief didn’t wipe the MacBook, and Joey was able to log on remotely every time the crook connected to the internet using Back To My Mac. Built-into OS X, Back To My Mac allows administrators to take full control of machines over the Net.
Joey was able to remove sensitive data; copy and delete files; and then spy on the thief using the MacBook’s built-in iSight camera.
The crook spends a lot of time in cafes using free WiFi to search file sharing networks for software, music and movies.
As the crook surfed the Net, Joey was able to compile a full profile for police, including his Gmail account, home IP address, mother’s maiden name, and even snap clear pictures showing the detail of his tattoos.
Santa Cruz police are reportedly issuing a warrant to arrest the thief.
Joey was documenting the entire process on a LiveJournal account, which has been taken offline, likely to prevent the crook from getting wind of his impending arrest.
A PC-versus-Mac shootout by Popular Mechanics scores the Mac way ahead in both price and performance. PopMech compared desktops and laptops, and not only did the Macs run rings around their Windows counterparts, they were cheaper to boot. The conclusion:
Our biggest surprise, however, was that PCs were not the relative bargains we expected them to be. The Asus M51sr costs the same as a MacBook, while the Gateway One actually costs $300 more than an iMac. That means for the price of the Gateway you could buy an iMac, boost its hard drive to match the Gateway’s, purchase a copy of Vista to boot–and still save $100.
My, how times have changed. A few years ago, the conventional wisdom was the opposite: PCs were cheaper and faster.
Somehow though, I don’t think conventional wisdom will change. Macs will always be regarded as premium computers — thanks to their fab design and quality fit and finish — even if that’s not actually true.
What Arthur found – or rather didn’t find — is extremely suspicious. No one answers the phone, and before this week, the company has left zero record of itself on the Web — Zero. No customer testimonials, no press releases, news stories or posts and comments on forums.
Also, the company changed it’s address on Tuesday while Arthur was writing his post. It moved from what looks like a suburban location to a more industrial one.
Writes Arthur: “But forgive me for being a bit sceptical, but isn’t it far, far more important whether the company has been around, has a reputation, and is going to deliver a machine? Isn’t it?”
Psystar says it has ported OS X to run on a $400 machine called the OpenMac — in violation of the OS X’s shrinkwrap license, which restricts the software from being installed on any non-Apple branded machine.
“What if Microsoft said you could only install Windows on Dell computers?” said the spokesman, identified only as Robert.
He continued: “What if Honda said that, after you buy their car, you could only drive it on the roads they said you could?”
But the spokesman seems to be confusing monopoly with abuse of monopoly. Having a monopoly is not illegal — abusing that monopoly is.
And although there’s no definitive court ruling on the enforceability of shrinkwrap EULA licenses (End-User License Agreements), Apple will likely sue under the more sweeping Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which criminalizes the circumvention of copyright controls.
Apple has encrypted core segments of OS X — including portions of the Finder and Dock — in an overt anti-piracy effort, according to eWeek. Security researcher Bruce Schneier, said companies are using the DMCA as an anti-piracy measure, but also to prevent reverse engineering. Any attempt to break the encrypted code is in violation of the DMCA.
Psystar’s OpenMac claims to be a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo machine with 2GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive, integrated Intel graphics, a DVD burner and four USB Ports. Most of the components can be upgraded.
Here’s a great story from the Consumerist about Dell’s hairy customer service. Guy sends his Dell laptop to Texas for replacement, the new machines comes back with pubes in the keyboard!
When I opened up the new laptop, I saw the screen was scratched and dirty, and the keyboard was covered in debris. Wait, not debris….what is that? HAIRS!? Not just any hairs – these could only be described as pubes. I hate to be so crude, but pubes are pubes. Not the incidental curly hair, but rather mini-tufts between the keys. My only guess is that Ron Jeremy was the previous owner.
The amazing piece of engineer has a glowing blue logo that flashes yellow when the disk is busy. Heck even made his own keys for the board, laser-etching each key.
It seems like it must be in danger of bursting into flames at any moment, but Heck says it puts off no more heat than a pocket calculator.
Released in September 1986, the IIGS was a powerful computer for its time, with advanced color graphics and stereo sound — the GS standing for “Graphics” and Sound.”
Heck says the hack was requested by an unnamed party. My money’s on Woz.
A company called Psystar is advertising a $399 pseudo-Mac called the “OpenMac,” which it claims is made from standard PC parts and is compatible with OS X Leopard.
Based in Miami, Florida, Psystar is courting a legal smackdown from Apple, which ended its official “clone” program in 1997 after Steve Jobs returned to run the company. Intended to grow the Mac platform, the clones instead took market share from Apple, seriously impacting its botttom-line.
Which is why Apple will likely pounce on Psystar: the Mac is Apple’s most profitable line, and the last thing Apple wants is a company producing low-cost knockoffs.
Apple will likely center on the use of Leopard: The operating system’s software license forbids it being installed on non-Apple hardware.
Psystar’s butt-ugly OpenMac claims to be a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo machine with 2GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive, integrated Intel graphics, a DVD burner and four USB Ports. Most of the components can be upgraded with better graphics or bigger hard drives. Psystar says:
What I’m going to say will likely disturb some folks, particularly in light of the fact that iTunes just became the #1 music retailer in the world this month. But work with me a little.
The online music revolution has not occurred, yet.
That’s it. No wild speculation, or tin-foil hat accusations, (and yet your characteristic sensationalism remains –ed)
That is the whole of the thing. While other industries have seen often dramatic effects on their business as a result of the internet, the music business is much like it was when my dad had a music store 20 years ago. Consumers still shop, they buy records, or singles they’re interested in. In short, online music has not been changed by the internet (save for the piracy aspect), it remains the same “Buy and Consume” metaphor it has always been.
In the spirit of disrupting future software patents by publishing prior art, after the break we’ll discuss in detail exactly how Apple could change all that.
In his new book, Inside Steve’s Brain (Portfolio, 2008), however, Leander Kahney attempts to go beyond the obvious by offering a detailed, concept-oriented, blow-by-blow look at Apple CEO and what makes him tick–his history, his ideas, his ideals, his reasoning, his behavior, his relationships, even his footwear choices.
Kahney’s the right person for the job, too: He has an extensive history covering Apple and Steve Jobs since the early 1990’s, has written two previous books on the company, and has been running Wired’s Cult of Mac blog for ages.
Macworld is a tough audience, so I’m especially glad they liked it. The book is out next week.
Charlie Miller, the same man who hacked the iPhone in 2007 has successfully hacked a MacBook Air running OSX 10.5.2. He won a free Air and $10,000. Competitors were unable to hack the system on day one, as organizers allowed only attacks over a network. Day two allowed organizers to visit web pages or open messages in e-mail clients. Apple is working on the problem.
