Archive for the 'Apple' Category
September 5th, 2007 by matt
I watched Gizmodo’s live coverage of the Apple Media Event / Stevenote extravaganza this afternoon during lunch and conference calls. Of the 3 sites I watched - Gizmodo, Engadget and Macworld - Gizmodo was by far the best coverage. They updated the fastest, had the best photos and the blog post was organized with the most recent updates on top. This made it faster to see the latest info as I didn’t have to wait for the rest of the page to load and all the adservers to dish out their content.
First, for the second most surprising announcement: the iPhone Fatboy, er, uh Nano. The leaked pictures were amazingly accurate - it’s an iPod nano that’s suddenly become vertically challenged and horizontally endowed. It looks a bit weird, but I must say that the thinness of it redeems the overall design and isn’t half bad. I’d like to reserve final judgement until I see one in person.
Next, we had the iPod Classic, which proudly shows off the latest in micro-hard drive technology, sporting an 80G and 160G offering in the more traditional iPod form factor. Interesting, but it seems more like a way to fulfill a big contract with Hitachi (or whoever they buy their hard drives from) and find a way to use some left over hard drives. This will make a very nice portable storage device that also plays music, however.
Then, the least surprising announcement of the day is the iPod Touch - essentially the iPhone without the phone, a bit thinner and with some extra flash memory. There is an 8G and a 16G model and both have WiFi. I surely saw this one coming, as I’m sure most people did. The 8mm depth and extra memory compared to the iPhone are nice extras.
That brings us to the third biggest surprise of the day - the mobile iTunes Music Store. While not as unthinkable - to me, at least - as the iPod Fatboy coming true, I didn’t see it coming today. I don’t think I need to espouse the coolness of being able to buy music right from your music device, but no one else can do this (see Zune).
And, to add to my boring enumeration of surprises, I’ll say the fourth biggest surprise of the Stevenote was that Steve wants one to pay another $0.99 just to make a 30 second ringtone from a song we’ve already paid $0.99 for. Forget that.
The Starbucks integration and FREE access to a STORE (insightful comment originally made by Jason Chen on Gizmodo’s coverage) when in Starbucks is very interesting and I think very innovative. It’s a sign of Apple’s interest in partnering with others, in a very controlled, Apple-beneficial way, but still partnering. Returning to my strange rankings, I’ll put this as the most interesting and innovative announcement of the day.
Which now brings me to the #1 most surprising announcement of the day: iPhones for $400. 33% price reduction after 68 days on the market where demand has been almost unfulfillable. Simply amazing, especially for Apple.
I’m guessing they are feeling some of the upcoming pressure from competitors, e.g. Helio Ocean, Nokia, new HTC models and other yet-to-be-revealed knock-offs. There will be a much smaller gap between the iPhone and other wanna-be’s compared with the distance between the iPod and other also-rans. Maybe putting 16G in the iPod Touch made the 4G iPhone simply unmarketable and the 8G seem a little bit flash-challenged compared to the 8G and 16G iPod Touch.
The big question in my mind is did the Apple Master have this up his black turtle-necked sleeve from the beginning or was this a sudden change in pricing strategy? His Jobsness doesn’t do much on a whim, especially when it involves eating into his extremely rotund profit margins, but it certainly feels a little strange and early to slash the price on your flagship of innovation.
Whatever the reason, I’m just about as close to getting my hands on an iPhone now as I am to eating another one of those Almond M&M’s sitting innocently in my pantry. Both will cost me (I’ve efficiently downed my weekly - perhaps monthly - allotment of 45 of these goodies this morning while on my endless stream of conference calls) but both are now within reach.
I’ve been very disappointed that my budget hasn’t yet supported an iPhone, and now I’m extremely excited that’s it’s actually within my reach now.
Beans and rice for lunch through the end of the year? Well, after today, I’ll be able to eat Subway again by Thanksgiving!
Technorati Tags:
apple, I want an iPhone, iPhone, Steve Jobs, iPod, iPod Touch, iPod Nano, keynote, SteveJobs
August 21st, 2007 by matt
My cost of entry just went down by $100, but it’s still $500 more than I have in the budget right now. Hmmmm.
Technorati Tags:
apple, iPhone, I want an iPhone
April 1st, 2007 by matt
Power Tool Hosted on
ZooomrAfter seeing the MacBook Pro introduced over a year ago at the 2006 MacWorld, I knew right away that I wanted one. The cost was prohibitive for me, though. At the end of May, 2006, I was finally able to get a MacBook and then officially took the ranks of a Mac Switcher.
Going from a PC to a Mac was a quantum leap of effectiveness and productivity for me. It gave me an entirely new perspective on how I use a computer. Though I had been interested in photography for several years, it was after I began using a Mac that I was inspired to do more and get more serious about it.
Was it just because I was using a Mac? Not entirely, but the creative aura that surrounds the whole Mac experience really kind of got to me. I thought “I have a tool that a lot of creative professionals use” (or at least a tool related to the pro tools - the MacBook skimps on the video card and screen size) and so why couldn’t I try to do some of the same things? It was as if I had joined a creative community and therefore was inspired to be more creative myself.
I soon discovered, though, that the MacBook’s anemic video card, the Intel GMA 950 with its 64M of video RAM, just caved under the demands of image editing in Aperture. Adjusting colors, cropping, showing the loupe, adjusting levels would send both cores to 100% and I would get the spinning beach ball while it did its work. Aperture moves a lot of the processing to the GPU to offload the CPU, so it accentuates the shortcomings of any video card even more.
The 13 inch screen, while making the form factor of the laptop very nice for carrying around, limits the amount of stuff you can put on the screen at any one time.
It had gotten to a point that I was really slowed down in editing my photos and doing anything with them. It also just soured the entire Mac experience of power and elegance by having to wait so much for anything to work.
So, after more than a year of waiting, after making the switch to a Mac on a MacBook, I’ve taken the next quantum leap and upgraded to a MacBook Pro. I did a lot of watching the market on eBay, Craigslist and some other locations for used MacBook Pro’s - this took a lot of time and really distracted me from writing or doing much photographically over the past 3 weeks.
I finally found what I consider a good deal on a 15 inch, 2.16 GHz core duo with 256M of VRAM great condition MacBook Pro. I’m writing this on it now as my first post from it and I’m ecstatic.
Today I worked just a little bit with Aperture - importing images from my camera, searching for photos via metadata search, scrolling through photos in the just the browser and with the viewer visible. Wow, it just sings. It’s like I just got in a sports car after driving a 1993 Corolla around town - on strictly the graphics performance anyway. Overall the entire experience on the MacBook Pro seems smoother, faster, more responsive, but the main difference is on graphics-intensive items.
And, the backlit keyboard is very cool!
As a side note, I used the Migration Assistant for the first time in transferring my info from my MacBook to my new MacBook Pro - that is a sleek utility. It transfers everything - every setting, every preference, browser history, all items in the Library, every application, etc. I don’t think switching data between 2 computers could be any easier! Score another one for Apple and usability.
January 17th, 2007 by matt
Yes, it’s fun to write about the iPhone - how can you not? If you have a lawyer, it’s also fun to sue Apple over the iPhone, but I’ll stick to writing for now.
The initial excitement of the iPhone announcement is beginning to wane and now that we have some time to think and digest what we all went through last week, we can consider some of the true implications of this device.
Steve Jobs claims that Apple had reinvented the cellphone with the iPhone. Upon hearing this, I was actually convinced it was true, despite it being such a broad and self-serving assertion. I mean, how can you look at that device and not say “wow” - it offers an experience unlike any other cellphone / smartphone / handheld device available today.
But did Apple really reinvent the cellphone, or did they reinvent something else? Seth Godin has a fantastic perspective of why Apple didn’t fundamentally change anything about the cellphone or fundamental cellphone experience. It still rings when someone calls you, it can still interrupt you, you still put someone on hold when another call is coming in, etc.
Seth then offers some compelling ideas for how you really could reinvent the cellphone experience. Here are a couple:
Let me initiate conference calls with groups of people with just one directory entry.
Let me call friends based on where they are at a given moment.
Let me queue up people who want to talk with me and work my way through the list in a way that works for both of us.
Now that would be reinventing the cellphone!
The problem is, that Apple can’t affect some of those things by themselves. It requires an interaction with the network switching infrastructure that can’t be controlled by just a device. Perhaps the coming IMS technology will be able to provide a way to do some of these things.
No, what Apple reinvented was not the cellphone, but the cellphone user interface. The 3.5 inch screen, the single front button, the multi-touch animated figure-out-what-you’re-typing UI is what makes us all say “wow”. And rightly so - no other handheld device works with you - as opposed to against you - as much as the iPhone does, in my opinion.
Let’s give the ample credit where it’s due, but let’s remember that while the iPhone can reinvent the way you interact with your cellphone / PDA / mobile internet, there are some fundamentals of the cellphone experience that won’t change.
January 11th, 2007 by matt
Robert Scoble points to a blog post written yesterday by Mark Chandler, Cisco’s SVP and General Counsel, explaining why Cisco has now filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Apple, Inc., for the use of iPhone. It’s really a very amazing post and shows how leaders of companies are really using blogging to communicate with stake-holders.
I tend to believe Cisco that they had been negotiating with Apple in good faith over the trademark, but I wonder if they became a little impatient with all the hype Apple, Inc. has been getting in the past 48 hours. I don’t know if Apple officially responded to them Tuesday as Cisco said they expected, or if they officially didn’t respond, indicating they wanted to fight rather than play together.
Cisco’s Chandler notes that the remaining issue in the negotiations has been working out an agreement to allow the two companies to collaborate on the iPhone device or iPhone apps or iPhone networking.
I’m not sure exactly what Apple and Cisco had discussed in the area of collaboration, but it doesn’t sound like there are too many areas that having Cisco participate with Apple could really benefit Apple.
Perhaps Apple is really playing hardball and is going to try to wrest the iPhone trademark away from Cisco, or perhaps Cisco is a bit envious of all the glory Apple is getting and wants a piece of the action as well. Maybe a little of both.
It looks like we’re in for some wrangling, though, over the next 5 months before the Apple Inc. iPhone is set to be available.
January 10th, 2007 by matt
David Pogue of the New York Times had the enviable opportunity yesterday to spend about an hour talking with Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller, and to actually play with the real iPhone and write about his experience. He has a chance to investigate some of the more practical matters of how the device works - how it feels, how the touch/hover screen works, does it get greasy / smudged easily, etc.
One practical matter I had questions about was with regard to the qwerty keyboard and how efficient it could be as touch / hover keys on the screen. An excerpt from David’s article says that it’s not quite up to the Blackberry thumb-key speed:
Typing is difficult. The letter keys are just pictures on the glass screen, so of course there’s no tactile feedback.
Software helps a lot. You can afford to make a lot of typos as you muddle through a word, because the software analyzes which keys you *might* have meant and figures out the word you wanted. Its best guess appears just under what you’ve typed; if it’s correct, you tap the Space bar to accept it and continue. I typed a couple of e-mail messages with lots of typos but eventually 100 percent accuracy, thanks to this auto-correct feature. (My testing didn’t involve proper names, however.)
Bottom line: Heavy BlackBerry addicts may not want to jump ship just yet.
David stresses that the device is still not complete and will likely see some enhancements before its true availability in June. All in all the experience sounds very positive and I’m glad Apple let at least a couple of influential journalists play with it.
Also, note that Gizmodo got to spend 15 minutes with it as well.
January 9th, 2007 by matt
Macworld Expo 2007 Keynote by wahaha_wu
A few more thoughts from the Apple Keynote today as I’ve thought through it more.
First, I agree with Om Malik that Apple’s name change from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. is indeed significant. I disagree, though that it signifies the end of the PC era. I wouldn’t go that far, but I am confident that it formalizes the true beginning of the intelligent device era - beyond smart phones (as Steve noted) but intelligent devices that not only can do a lot of things, but do them well and interact with you well. I’m sure we’ll see more imitations of intelligent design consumer devices soon, but I believe the iPhone is the game-changing device in this market. Score one more for Apple.
Next, Robert Scoble is right that only 720p resolution on the Apple TV definitely is a disappointment, at least at first glance. This thought occurred to me as I watched (the macrumors transcript of) the presentation, and I wondered the same thing after Apple Showtime event last fall when they announced high(er) resolution movie downloads.
As I think through it, though, the overwhelming majority of movies available today are only in 720p, with HD-DVD/Blueray offering a limited supply of 1080p content. And, I don’t believe there are any broadcast or cable tv shows in 1080p today.
But MacBreak is in 1080p and is quite nice. Surely there will be only an increasing amount of 1080p content available over the next several months. No, 1080p support wouldn’t really be anything anyone would use right now, but it would have been fun to be able to say that Apple TV supported it.
Then, ZDNet’s Larry Dignan has an interesting analysis of the winners and losers in the wake of all things Apple today. I completely disagree, though, that Sprint will be one of the big losers. In stead, it’s Verizon, who has been creeping up to within a few million subscribers of Cingular’s approximately 56 million customers, to battle for the “#1 operator” tag in the U.S.
Verizon has surprisingly taken a walled garden approach to it’s mobile media content, e.g. the Chocolate phone tied to Verizon’s own music store. Cingular will get the enviable and very exclusive prize of being co-branded with Apple. They’ll get more mindshare than Verizon over the next 5 months and I can’t see how people will rush out to buy any more Chocolate phones.
Finally, I was a bit disappointed that we didn’t see any of the other possible software products that are nearing release. I thought a surprise availability of Leopard would be a nice way to charge everyone up - obviously this would only have been a distraction from the iPhone. But it is somewhat strange that the only new thing you can go out and buy today that you couldn’t yesterday is the Apple TV. I was expecting to see more things that everyone could actually purchase today.
Overall, I believe today’s MacWorld keynote will be seen as one of the three or four most significant milestones that usher in a new era of technology. The introduction of the Mac was one, the iPod was another, and I think that although we’re all left empty-handed today, we’ll look back one day and see that the iPhone forever changed the mobile device market.
January 9th, 2007 by matt
I wondered earlier today how Apple could use the name iPhone after we just saw Linksys announce their iPhone and we all discovered that Linksys/Cisco owned the iPhone trademark.
ZDNet’s Larry Dignan writes how Tom Krazit of News.com reports that Cisco and Apple were in discussions about the trademark for the past “several years” but were actually still in the negotiating phase today. Reportedly Cisco sent Apple some updated documents last night and expected an agreement from Apple today.
More evidence to support my wonderment at the secrecy / PR campaign master that Steve Jobs is. He doesn’t finalize any deal with Cisco before the Keynote because that would surely become public.
I’m sure some good money will change hands there, but I’m also sure it will be worth it for Apple, inc.
January 9th, 2007 by matt
Apple new iPhone by mac-tomster
Just watched the SteveNote this morning and was wowed, awed, excited, suprised by the iPhone! I didn’t think it would be here, and it isn’t, exactly - has to pass FCC approval and target ship date is June.
Here are my first impressions:
- how can Apple call it an iPhone? I thought Linksys had that name?
- absolutely a true innovation with the UI - touch / hover sensitivity, only 1 button!, no stylus
- running some version of OS X with core animation and presumably some way to open real docs (e.g. email attachments) is brilliant
- true multi-tasking lets you download email while doing other stuff, e.g. surfing (on Safari)
- WiFi was a must-have
- I’m very interested to see how the touch / hover keyboard really works - will it be as fast as the Blackberry thumb keyboard?
- Cingular did the deal with Apple without seeing the product! That is absolutely incredible and shows the respect and trust (and power) that Steve Jobs has
- Steve flexed that trust / power muscle a bit by having Eric Schmidt of Google and Jerry Chan of Yahoo almost close enough to touch each other as they came up on stage in succession to make their appearance and congratulate Steve
- the fact that no rumor site got the iPhone exactly right - or even close - shows how amazing Steve is at running an organization and keeping secrets; if not even the CEO of Cingular had seen the iPhone before, then who else could have? This confirms my view that Steve should run the NSA (or at least work with them to show them how to keep secrets)
I must admit that until about a week ago I wasn’t excited about a new phone at all. I am now, but the wait and the price are both a bit much for me. It will definitely be interesting to see how things develop over the next 5 months.
