iPad Comments

I have viewed the Keynote and the iPad design video and even without seeing the device, I think it will be a hit. The key is the personal interation. Apple tried to run this home by having Steve Jobs sit on an easy chair and use the iPad. It is amazing at all the bad reviews it has been getting. All the complaints of no camera, small storage space, no hard drive, yada yada yada. If you put everything in the device then you either have to use low quality parts or price it through the roof. The iPad is not meant to be used to take pictures, be used for heavy workload work, or do video editing. It is to use casually as a personal media viewer. Look at pictures, video, eBooks, eMail, and surf the web. Yes you can do games too, and it does have iWork too. But I think these are misplaced. Are you going to edit your presentation on an iPad, or write a paper on an iPad? It does have the capability to be developed into whatever developers can imagine. The interactive painting program is a perfect example of a good fit with the iPad. The creative process does not work well sitting at a desk. An iPad gives you freedom to move whereever inspiration can be found. Apple stock tanked after the iPad announcement but I think Apple always gets backlash whenever they try to define a new paradigm. By leaving things out of the design, Apple has allowed for the inclusion of better components and a polished device at a reasonable price. I am amazed how much tunnel vision so many of these tech writers have. Everything is compared to what currently exists. In this environment, Apple will always get the short end of the stick. Many people cannot handle devices on the cutting edge. It is too bad, but they eventually come around and later say that they knew this device was good from the start. Ha.

The iPad Revealed!

Well, Stitch, I think this is the most significant announcement from Apple since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. Like many people, what took me by surprise was the pricing of the device and the 3G pricing that comes with it. At these prices, it's enough to entice a tightwad like myself to buy!

I had mentioned before it's possible Apple was distinguishing itself on this product by including its proprietary chip (since it bought PA Semi) in the device. I would think this is one of the reasons they thought that this device wouldn't be as easy to copy as the iPhone. The performance and battery life appear to be outstanding on first glance, and that apparently is due to the chip!

A4 Chip

At these prices, and with the ability to run all these applications that are already written, it seems like a home run. What do you think?

The iPad!

Stitch, we will finally be introduced to Apple's new creation:

iPad

The word is it will possibly use ATandT or Verizon's network, which is really something! Should have e-reader capability as well, and if rumors are to be believed, has been in development for some time. Jobs wanted this to be right! I am very optimistic. How about you!

iPod Dominance

Stitch, you may have read the Macworld article by Christopher Breen about CES:

Consumer Electronics Show

He attended the CES and found that MP3 players were not much on display. A PR person said that they still sell Mp3 players, but really no one can compete with the iPod. He found almost no major competitors trying to display their MP3 players. When you think about it, and the more I read online, it seems future devices may be more geared toward accepting streams of music rather than downloaded tracks. I read another article which basically said the future will have music in the 'cloud' and all of us paying to have access to anything in the cloud. That may be true for many people, but I think I may be too old for living in a cloud!

When is the Tablet Coming?

Stitch, we have been hearing reports in cyberspace regarding the impending release of the mythical tablet or iSlate from Apple. I heard it would be an iPhone on steroids! Supposedly the multitouch gestures will be expanded to a new level. I also heard the processor originates from the chip company PA Semi Apple acquired a couple of years ago. Everyone wondered what Apple would use the technology for. I'm going out on a limb to speculate that Apple has mentioned that it will release something its competitors can't copy, and the capabilities resulting from a proprietary chip might be just that! What do you think of my conjecture, Stitch? Truth, or fluff?

Google Android developers dropping like flies

I read an article that said that many of the developers for the Google Android mobile phone are deciding it may not be worth the investment. It said that the market size for the Android makes it difficult to justify too much development time into making software applications for the Android system. Another concern was that there is no standard format for input since Android runs on a variety of different phones. Screen sizes can vary, input modes may vary. This adds cost to support the wide array of possible combinations. It's almost as if Apple is in the same situation with it's iPhone as Microsoft is with desktop computers. Once you dominate a market, it is hard to be displaced. But in this case Apple even makes the best product too so it is a one/two punch. I think Android will end up being a nitch market like Linux. Interesting but a little too open, so there is too much differences in the way they work. Look at all the different "flavors" of Linux. Hackers love a system like this but I don't think the general public will.

Titanium still Rocks!

I thought I would mention that I still use my Titanium Powerbook for mobile computing purposes. But for the first time, I find there is beginning to be a speed lag that I notice. I am now using the latest version of Numbers on the Powerbook, and I admit it is a little sluggish. The only reason I did it is that my current Numbers files won't work on the version that was on the Powerbook. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered.

These Apples never die, Stitch!

New Airport Express

Well, it has been a couple of weeks since I bought and integrated an Airport Express into our home network. I must say, there is something liberating about streaming music from the computer to our new stereo system. I use my iPod Touch and the free Remote app to control and browse iTunes. It has worked magnificently, and it really allows a new and far more effective way of playing my iTunes music through a stereo. Since I ripped most of my music in Lossless format, the sound quality is outstanding.

The one issue I have is that for some reason I have not successfully moved the Express to another room and hooked up to it. I am not sure if I'm doing something wrong or not. Right now I have the Express hooked up via ethernet cable to our cable modem, and I was hoping to de-tether it if I wanted to listen to music from our other stereo. I will keep you informed.

The latest in Apple land is Apple's acquisition of LaLa, prompting everyone to think Apple is going towards the "stream any music you want from the cloud" paradigm. Sometimes I wonder if I'm too old to go to that. How do you feel about it, Stitch?

Imitation the Sincerest form of flattery?

Stitch, this is a Window 7 partner saying basically they copied OSX's graphical look and feel. My brother in law mentioned that Windows is now just like OSX. My God, can Microsoft do anything original? I know, I know - they have done original things. But this just annoys me. What's your take?

Copy Kat

iTunes with subscription TV?

Did you hear the rumor that Apple is trying to get networks to have their content sent via iTunes for a $30/month subscription fee. I have wondered why this has taken so long to develop. I am thinking it was the networks who didn't want to jump in to this model since it might disrupt the whole TV universe of distribution. With cable and advertisers screaming foul. Hopefully this time Apple can make the deal.

Link to article

This article talks about the whole thing coming together by the beginning of next year. Another article I read even went a step further saying that they would integrate the whole thing into the rumored tablet computer. But I don't really get why this would be a breakthrough. Who wants to hold the screen to watch TV? Anyway it would obviously be linked to play on your computer, and iPod/iTouch/iPhone, and AppleTV. Depending on how much they can swing with the networks. Up to this point no one has been able to convince the networks to go this route. Trying to develop Hulu on their own. But I don't think that Hulu is that big of a success. They are rumored to be developing a paid service too. But it would still lock you to viewing from your computer. Which I think is a small market, most people want a seemless way to view on their TV. Will AppleTV need to be beefed up for this? Given how well movies flow, I don't think it would necessarily. This will help to keep the cost down too. It does sound like an exciting posibillity. Especially if you would be able to pick "a la cart" style which networks you wanted. Time will tell.

Apple is the Target

With all of the recent sucess of the iPhone, once again Apple is the target of the competition namecalling. Nokia is suing Apple for copyright infringements with the iPhone. Verizon is attacking the iPhone with "we got a map for that" for the larger coverage over AT&T. And now Verizon has teamed up with Motorola and disses all of the "negative" features that the iPhone doesn't have or do with their latest Dune ads. When I first saw these ads, I didn't even know what it was for. The ending was like an ad for a horror flick.
Apple will survive all this. Just like the iPod attacks. The Nokia copyright suit I am sure is a minor one. Maybe Apple will need to pay some minor royalties to Nokia for some menu system etc. Seems a bit late for that kind of lawsuit. The iPhone has been out for quite some time. Maybe it was because of Nokia's poor earnings report.
One surprising thing is that the exlusive AT&T agreement may end mid 2010. Verizon keeps posturing to sell the iPhone, but they don't want to give up everything like AT&T did. With the Apple Apps store instead of their own, Vcast store. It's a big chess game about who makes how much profit in the big deal. Who has more to gain from each other. I am sure Apple will be able to work out a deal, unless Verizon becomes too stuborn again and wants all the chips for themselves. Personally, I would like to see Apple start their own network, or buy one. Seems like Sprint and T-mobile are the only ones left. AllTel got bought by Verizon. They probably have the cash. They could start a new paradime about cell phones are sold. I don't know if the numbers add up, but with Apple profits going like gangbusters, and Verizon's profits slipping I think Apple has the upper hand.

Mad Money loves Apple

I recently watched an episode of Mad Money. Its that investing show with Jim Cramer, who acts like a crazy radio disc jockey playing all sorts of sound effects and lots of crazy sight gags. He is actually a former high end investment broker. Well on this last show he was wearing a large Apple make of cardboard, and taking bites out of apples from a large bushel basket of them. His point, was that many investors think that with Apple's latest great earnings report this past quarter that they should jump ship because Apple is as high as they can go. He says wrong, "Apple is the only company who has said what he has dying to hear, Apple cannot keep up with demand". In a recession, and consumer spending way down, Apple can't keep up with demand. And it is not just the iPhone either, according to Cramer it is there whole product line. He said "This may be the biggest technology company of all time, including Google, and Microsoft". Pretty amazing words. He points out that they only have 3% of the cell phone market and about 4% of the computer market, so there is huge growth potential. And he makes the comment, "Have you ever heard of someone who has switch to an Apple product regret it?, No, once an Apple customer always an Apple customer." I know he always throws in a bunch of showmanship but I think he believes his picks and then spins a wild presentation around it. You can see the episode on iTunes as a podcast. I think it was 10/20 and it is the first topic he covers. Go Apple the technology marvel.

Apple quits the US Chamber of Commerce

Did you hear this story about Apple quitting the US Chamber of Commerce? I guess it goes back to a statement that the USCOC made pretty much denying global warming and giving a position against any measures to counter it. Apple thought that this position was denying reality and quit in protest. A few other large companies have also quit the USCOC for the same reason including Nike and a few others. I don't think this made big news. I wonder how much a company pays in dues each year.

Family Macnight?

Stitch, I emailed you at your SabreJim address, and I'm not sure you received it. I proposed a family Macnight for Friday October 2. The following day we will be visiting my grandmother for her birthday, so it would be nice to get together if possible. I know it's late notice, and my apologies! Let me know when you get a chance!

Macnight cluster maps

Have you noticed the Cluster Maps link at the bottom of the Macnight blog web page? It shows a map of where in the world the most hits to our blog come from. I found it odd that we seem to get a pretty good spread of people from around the world. Some from the southeast Asia, some from Europe, and North America. But one thing absent is South America. No hits? Don't they sell Macs in South America? Aren't there other Mac fanatics there? I am puzzled. Even if people randomly found our site you would expect a few hits from South America too.

iTunes 9.0 A big upgrade

I would have to say that after downloading iTunes 9.0 that it is a serious upgrade. My favorite new feature is the new layout of the iTunes Store. It is much easier to navigate. And it has a more modern look to it. One area I would like to see an improvement is the rating system. I believe the rating system is overly inflated by teenagers or young college students. Almost everything has a 4 or 5 star rating. Too many times the review say that "the video is the best of all time". Everything cannot be the best of all time. One rating system I found that worked well was on the Fandango.com web site. This is the movie theatre web site for tickets, previews and showtimes. It lets you filter the ratings by different criteria of the rater. Such as by age group, if you have kids, and others. It is interesting how the reviews change with the filtering.

Maybe Apple could put a rater on hold for a while if they give too many high ratings. The other extreme is the one star of death rating where people are irritated about something with the iTunes store or Apple and they use the review as a complaint forum.

Anyways, back to iTunes9. The home sharing feature is good if you have a bunch of libraries as in teens in the same household. I wish they made backup of the system a bit better. Where everything is stored and not breaking the setup is too complex. Having an auto backup feature built into iTunes and archiving to another network hard drive would be the best. iTunes is so big now that a hard drive crash can wipe out a significant investment. Auto backup should be a key feature of iTunes. I know Time machine does this, but this is not available on Windows and older Macs. Plus I don't really want access to every version of every file I have ever created on my computer. I found a program written by a computer science student that lets you auto archive selected directories in the same tree structure as it is on your main drive. Simple, automatic, no compression, encryption, it just works. Should be part of iTunes too.

Another requested feature would be to have different user settings for the same library. It would be like multiple accounts on the same computer. The library is the same but each users settings are stored in their seperate area. Each person could do their own customization. I know Christina does not like a bunch of the songs on my library and we share libraries for easy backup. My worst iTunes experience was trying to merge two libraries which had some duplicate songs and some unique songs. I had to go by hand and find all of the duplicates. iTunes will list them. But you need to delete them one by one clicking visually. Sad.
iTunes is getting better each time but I wish Apple would allow for user input for requested features. Maybe they don't because of potential lawsuits if they use your idea.

What do you think about the new Nano?

Any thoughts about the new Nano? It seems that Apple needed to do some major feature enhancement to keep the Nano a tempting option in the MP3 player market. Especially with all the new features of the iTouch. This gives people with a smaller budget a reason to buy the Nano. The demographics is probably younger teens or people who want a device to exercise with that is very small but still has a screen.

I read some reviews of the new Nano and many of them gloss over the ability to pause live radio. After owning a DVR for so long and getting used to being able to pause or rewind video, I find myself assuming I have this ability in my car radio. If you miss something that is said, you assume you can just rewind it and hear it again. Yes I am conditioned. I guess for radio it is not as big of a deal unless you are listening to a talk show or something like that. Rewinding a song to hear again may not be that great. I wonder how long the recording goes for and if it is still there next time you power up. The key marketing feature with this is the iTunes taging which allows you to tag you hear on the radio for iTunes. Then when you sync with iTunes you can download the song from the iTunes Store. HD radio advertises having this feature too. It has been driven into my skull with the HD radio ads I hear 5 times a day.

The camera/video feature could be good if the pictures are better than the crappy cameras typically on cell phones. That lens looks pretty small. My cell phone touts a Megapixel camera but the pictures are almost always grainy and blurry unless under very bright sunlight.

I still think the "shake to shuffle" feature introduced in the last update is pure genious and will greatly appeal to the younger crowd. My son opted to get a PSP (Sony handheld gaming device) instead of an iPod Nano for about the same price. To him, games are more important than music right now. And the iTouch was quite a bit more expensive.

Problems with AppleTV

Stitch, this article seems like it was written by you!

Apple TV Problems

He makes an observation that the media companies are probably just not playing ball with Apple. THe result is that the AppleTV will be a crippled device for the foreseeable future.

Squash the serious AppleTV features upgrade

Stitch, check out the link:

No AppleTV Upgrade

I know that you can't always rely on analysts' reports, but it seems they met with the Apple CFO for their information. Now there may be an AppleTV refresh coming soon, but I don't think it will be tomorrow. I know I've heard in the past that Apple is working on it. Hopefully it will be soon enough for them to be competitive.

AppleTV needs a serious upgrade

I have noticed that there is starting to be a lot of competition developing on the AppleTV market. Netflix has Roxio which allows you to view a limited selection of their videos on demand as part of your regular subscription. The reviews have been good and the simple device starts at $50. Then there are more and more PVR's which are like Tivo. Where you can digitally record TV/cable/dish programming to a hard drive for later viewing. Tivo has sued most of the competitors out of the market so this is more the build it yourself market. If Apple can expand their movie database to be on par with Netflix and offer a PVR built in this would be a big advance. The killer app would be something like a cable/dish package which has a minimal fee and loads of ad supported TV. I think the pay per show model for TV is a bust and is only a nitch market.