It’s beginning to look a lot like an iPad Mini Christmas. Credible reports say over-worked factory employees in China are already churning out small iTablets in large iQuantities, and that Apple will summon fawning journalists Wednesday to participate in an October 17 iPad Mini infomercial — I mean product launch.
I predict that the iPad Mini will dominate holiday sales, take over the education market and destroy three current products on the market.
Steve Jobs has changed the world four times, by my reckoning. One year after his death, is the world different? What is his legacy? Is it the company that he started, journeyed outward from in disgrace, and ultimately returned to in triumph? How about the devices he had an enthusiastic hand in bringing to market? The business of music and film? What is the world now that it would not have been without Steve Jobs?
It’s all of those things, of course. Jobs’ legacy is not something we can distill into a simple slogan or tagline. Steve Jobs worked for a world in which the design, manufacture, and marketing of consumer electronics enhances our lives in a very human way.
Let me explain.
According to a new report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, one in four adults in the United States owns a tablet of some kind. Two thirds of those adults have purchased them in the last year, according to the study, which was reported by The Economist. Further, the data doesn’t even include the new Google Nexus tablet, nor the new Kindle Fire HD from Amazon.
Is iPad in trouble? Is this a new era for Apple, one in which it must play catch up? The numbers of units do seem to tell that story.
I’m not buying it, though.
You’ve heard the collective judgement by the tech echo chamber: The new iPhone was just like the old iPhone, only taller.
The iPhone 5 is boring. Apple is too conservative. They didn’t really change the phone, but only made minor tweaks.
And that’s what’s wrong with the iPhone 5: It’s just not radical enough.
Here’s the problem: The echo chamber not only got this wrong, they got it backward.
The trouble with the iPhone 5 is that it’s too much, too soon.
Let me explain.
You never meant for this to happen. In your rush to dive into the ocean, you forgot to take your iPhone out of your pocket, and didn’t realize it till you came out of the water. It’s a disaster. You leave your drowned iPhone 4S in a bag of rice for three days, praying to God, Allah, Jehovah, Moses, Shiva, and Oprah Winfrey that some magical power will make it work again. It doesn’t. You blow-dry it. Nada. Every conceivable way to resurrect your iPhone is met with failure and a blank screen.
Because you know the iPhone 5 is coming out in three months you decide not to waste your money and upgrade eligibility. Once you get home you rummage through your desk and find the Galaxy Nexus Samsung sent you three months ago. You sit in your chair staring at it almost hesitant to turn it on. You run your hands along the contours of its plastic grey body, pop in your new SIM card, take a deep breath, and then you dive in. This is it – your new digital home and the beginning of a three month exile into Android.
If there were ever a time for Google to play “good guy” it would be now. Apple has simply been piling up the negative criticism with everything from its ridiculous legal attacks to its latest Mapsgate debacle. While Google has been going down the wrong path by setting itself up to bite back (see Motorola Mobility), I believe now to be the perfect time to turn the other cheek. Specifically with their Maps service.
Every once in a while, a company becomes so obsessed with a competitor that it loses focus on its own customers. They start designing and positioning their products more to hurt rivals than thrill users.
And I fear that now it’s happening to Apple.
Again.
We get nearly all our official information about Apple and its products through occasional announcements or developers conferences, such as the big announcement this week in San Francisco.
As we approach each event, there are things we know, things we don’t know.
During the event, there’s a reshuffling. Some questions are answered during the announcement. And some questions emerge from the announcement itself that remain unanswered.
Here are the 6 biggest questions that were either unanswered in the event, or which emerged from the event.
The iPhone 5 will probably be my first iPhone. Up until now, I have gotten by with a combination of dumb phones (and recently something even worse), an iPod Touch and an iPad. I have also tossed a camera into my bag more often than not upon leaving the house. Why? Because I almost never never make phone calls. Because I don’t want to sign a cellphone contract. And because my other gadgets do the job just fine. So why am I buying an iPhone now, after five years of holding out?
What did the fine folk on Google+ have to say about Apple’s iPhone 5 announcement? Well, you can see for yourselves by clicking HERE. Unfortunately our thumbnails don’t go beyond 640X400 on the site so I had to host it over on Google+ of course. As can be expected, initial impressions were not flattering, but then again, neither was Apple’s keynote *rimshot*. What about the rest of you, what are your impressions of Apple’s latest “innovation”?
Apple released the iPhone 5 today, and while it put the majority of us to sleep, we can’t help but think there HAS to be at least one feature of the iPhone 5 that you wish you had. Yes, I realize we already have over 90% of them already, but what about its PPI? There has to be something? I’ve put together a poll with a few of the possibilities, so put in your vote, and if there’s something else you can think of, throw it in the comments.
Man, oh man. At least now we know why Apple has been on such a legal crusade. They’ve got nothin’. I just finished watching the iPhone 5 unveiling and boy was it a bore fest. It’s as if Apple awoke from a cryogenic sleep and is finally embracing the year 2012. Almost nothing was innovating and the majority of new iPhone 5 features have been implemented in other mobile phones for years. Seriously Apple, is that it?
Apple’s new iPod Touch is slimmer, faster, better, yadda yadda yadda. That’s neat and all, but what really matters, and what might just spike its sales into the crazy numbers, is its new camera. It has 5MP, it has auto-focus, it has the iPhone 5’s new panorama feature, and it starts at just $300. Why the hell would anyone buy a regular point and shoot any more?
The wristwatch has fallen out of fashion. Sure, a few geezers still wear watches out of habit. Hipsters wear them ironically. Geeks wear them defiantly. And the fashionable wear them decoratively.
But these people are the minority. Bare wrists are the norm now.
People think the wristwatch is dead because our phones tell time, so they’re redundant. But that’s not why.
The reason most reject wristwatches is the same reason most rejected tablets until Apple shipped the iPad in 2010: The available selection is too bloated, clunky, expensive and poorly suited to how people really live and work.
In other words, the right kind of watch would get everyone wearing them again.
Apple mainstreamed tablets by re-imagining what a tablet is, by making it touch and with app and at low cost with a compelling user interface.
Will they do the same for the wristwatch? I think they will.
After nearly a decade, my iTunes library weighs in at almost ninety-four gigabytes. A lot of serious music nerds would sneeze derisively at that, but it still represents over 13,000 songs that would take me, from start to finish, a full 48 days to listen to back to back.
I’d be lying if I said most of these had been acquired legally. Most of these albums were acquired on Bittorrent in my twenties. Many more were ripped from CDs lent to me by friends and family, or slurped up from Usenet to satisfy my obscure yet surface-thin musical fixations. Some were purchased through iTunes or other sources online, but truthfully, if you stripped everything out of my iTunes library that I’d acquired legally, I’d probably have a digital music library that could fit on a first generation iPod.
Over the course of the last two years, though, something interesting has happened. I’ve grown a conscience. These days, all of the music I listen to is listened to legally. But iTunes not only has no part in it. In fact, for the past two years, my iTunes library has just been collecting dust: a graveyard to the music piracy of my youth.
I’m ashamed of it. I want to try to explain things. Both why I started pirating music, why I stopped, and how, in fits and starts, being a music pirate helped transform me into someone who cared enough about music to buy it.
Trip Chowdhry, the Managing Director of Equity Research at Global Equities Research, told a financial writer a few months ago that Apple’s biggest challenge without founder Steve Jobs is that Apple lacks a “unified force.” In order to become unified again, Apple would need a “supernatural person” overseeing things.
But according to Thai Buddhists, they may have exactly that — the reincarnated spirit of Steve Jobs himself, who they say is living in a “mystical glass palace hovering above his old office at Apple’s Cupertino, California headquarters,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
I’ll tell you in this post more about Jobs’ so-called reincarnation, and also about several ghosts caught haunting various Apple products. (And I’m not talking about problems with the MacBook Pro Retina screens.)
Here’s all the spooky stuff that’s going on.
Apple’s critics generously assign a variety of motives to Apple for filing lawsuits.
Apple sues because it wants to control the market, overcharge for its products, exclude competitors from the market or punish competitors for daring to not think different. It’s all part of Apple’s “quest for global tech domination.
But these aren’t actual motives. These are appeals to emotion. They’re legitimate perspectives, but expressed to negatively encapsulate spectacularly complex technical, legal and ethical issues into sound bites that make you want to agree with the author that Apple is bad and wrong.
Apple has only one motive for patent lawsuits, and I’m going to tell you what that motive is.
When Apple announced its Facetime two years ago, it looked like an appealing, easy-to-use feature that might finally make video chat mainstream and routine.
The best thing about Facetime has always been its seamless integration into Apple’s Phone and Contacts apps. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much the only good thing about it.
From the beginning, Facetime has been almost unusable because of limitations. Not small limitations, enormous ones. Here’s what I’m talking about.
I wrote a column last week saying that the “smoking gun” document Apple submitted into evidence in the Samsung patent infringement lawsuit does not constitute proof of infringement by itself.
Still, it’s a remarkable document that does prove something: Samsung is very impressed with Apple. In fact, it’s clear that Samsung is a huge Apple fanboy.
New evidence from inside Samsung appears to prove that Samsung copied Apple’s iPhone ideas and used them to design Samsung’s Android phones.
As damning as the “Relative Evaluation Report” appears to be, it does NOT constitute proof that Samsung copied Apple’s ideas or infringed on Apple’s patents, and for 3 reasons.
Apple is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. No, wait. That was Stalinist Russia.
Whatever. The two are nearly identical in their abilities to keep secrets.
As an Apple observer myself, I’m keenly aware of the iron curtain of secrecy that prevents anyone from knowing what Apple is working on, what they’re planning and what their processes are for developing new technologies.
Rumors and speculation are always so easy to come by; unannounced facts are rare — even facts about the past.
That’s one of the great things about Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. It gave rare insight into the inner workings of Apple, to some degree.
And that’s what’s so great about the current jury trial in Silicon Valley, where Apple is suing Samsung and Samsung is suing Apple. It’s forcing Apple to reveal countless facts and events that it doesn’t want to reveal.
The lawsuit appears to be far from over. But already, it’s clear that Samsung is “winning.” Why? Because it’s a contest between a company that cares deeply about its secrets — even small ones — and a company that doesn’t care as much. So the discovery and revelation is punishing Apple.
Here are the 8 secrets Apple has been forced to reveal in court in the past couple of weeks.
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Perhaps you’ve heard the “great” news about how Verizon has to dish out $1.25 million to the FCC for violating the FCC’s “C Block rules,” requiring licensees of C Block spectrum to allow customers to freely use the devices and applications of their choosing. If you’re just hearing about it, let me give you the gist of things and then you’ll get to hear me rant.
Apple announced its intention this week to buy AuthenTec for about $355 million.
If approved, the acquisition will bring several things to Apple, including the acceleration of its mobile wallet initiative; good technology for encrypting data and content, such as movies; and patent protection for several areas of mobile security.
The biggest thing Apple gets out of this is probably a strong play for using biometrics for identity in general — for online and brick-and-mortar purchases, for logging into web sites and even for digital signatures.
And it doesn’t hurt that taking AuthenTec out of the game as an independent company will be devastating to nearly all of Apple’s biggest competitors, including Google and its Android partners, and Microsoft and its OEM hardware partners.
It’s not often that a jaded veteran like me falls in love with an app. But it happened this week with a new app called Chirp. It’s based on one of those rare technologies like HTTP or XML that at first seems trifling, but ends up changing everything.
To oversimplify, Chirp uses sound to transmit words, pictures and URLs from one phone to another.
It’s called Chirp, because its data transmission sounds like a robotic bird.
First, I’ll tell you how Chirp works. Then I’ll tell you why I think this bird has wings and could change how we all share data.
Read the column and get the app here.
It must surely be a sign of the impending apocalypse that Microsoft’s operating systems have “more taste” than Apple’s.
I’m referring, of course, to Apple’s inexplicable use of skeuomorphic design in iOS and OS X apps, and contrasting that with Microsoft’s stark avoidance of such cheesy gimmickry in the Windows 8 and Windows Phone user interfaces.
A skeuomorphic design in software is one that “decorates” the interface with fake reality — say, analog knobs or torn paper.
The problem is worse than it sounds.
