The App Store is just a retail catalog. Do you think Target.com would let you mention your product was a Wal-Mart best-seller in your product description? Are geeks that out of touch with business fundamentals that this is surprising? Don't forget: The developer is free to say anything they want on their website. Apple just is cagey about what you can say to the eyeballs they're providing you.
Is this type of advertising hurting Apple? Not in the least. In fact, I'd argue that it's doing the exact opposite. With the rejection of an app because it said "Android" in it, it makes me wonder if there's any commitment on their part to support device interoperability (even if just on the app level)... And that question COULD hurt them on the business end (and the power users who are on the fence)...
Ask Palm how Apple feels about device interoperability. Luckily, app interoperability is really up to the app developers.
You can argue that two gens ago, the PS1 was slower than the N64, although that's less certain.
That is actually very certain. The N64 cpu was a 64-bit 93MHz processor with a 66MHz coprocessor to handle 3d geometry transformations and sound processing. Plus it had separate drawing hardware (developed by SGI) and a high-speed (for the time) 500 MHz rambus interface to 4MBs of main memory.
By contrast the PS1 cpu was a 32-bit 33.8MHz chip, without the dsp and a single coprocessor handled both geometry transforms and drawing. It had some other goodies like a dedicated audio coprocessor, but nothing nearly as flexible as a full dsp and the whole system was severely crippled by 2MBs of main memory.
The PS1 blew the N64 out of the water for several reasons: 1) Sony had a very lax approval system for developers and basically let developers create and publish anything. (This was really possible because the costs of CD publishing were so much lower than chips in cartridges.) 2) The N64 cartridge format severely limited the data capacity of a game. So all that fast hardware never had much to chew on.
So software won again, but in this case mostly because of quantity instead of quality.
And if Palm would grow a few braincells then they would write their own damn software...
I'm willing to bet they have been writing their own software from the start and when they realized they weren't going to have it ready for launch, iTunes became a stop gap measure. Now they're using it as an opportunity to make Apple look bad (you decide if rightly so), gain press exposure and they have a great excuse if their media manager turns out not to be that great. ("We tried to offer iTunes support!")
I work in the business and I saw a casting notice for this go out yesterday. Right now (if you're a member) you can see the notice on a site called Actor's Access here and the sides are up on Showfax.
Casting notices for shows like this almost never appear on a site like that (it's a step above Craigslist), so my best guess this is a negotiation tactic to convince the cast to accept contracts that pay less, in line with the reduced budget for the show.
Just playing devil's advocate: All the posts here seem to be trying to figure out what's wrong with ZFS to cause Apple to yank it out, but what if ZFS is fine and there's some big feature they're working on for HFS+ that they couldn't duplicate in ZFS?
I admit it's much more likely they just don't want to maintain full support for multiple filesystems, which is what they'd have to do because there's no way they're putting ZFS on iPhones and iPod Touches anytime soon.
Either way, the really telling thing is they aren't talking about ZFS in Mac OS X Server. If they had any plan for a ZFS future, it would start there much like the way HFS+ Journaling was initially a Mac OS X Server feature. (Introduced in OS X Server 10.2.2 and rolled out to non-server OS X in 10.3.)
I think this is a great idea, but it raises a lot of questions. Like... if it takes Apple a week to make sure a calculator app is safe enough for the iPhone, how is Sun going to review desktop-size apps in any reasonable amount of time?
This smacks of Verizon using vaporware to kill the hype around iPhone OS 3.0 (as suggested by Roughly Drafted), someone trying to give Verizon's stock a bump with an Apple rumpr (a tactic that previously hasn't been very well hidden) or perhaps Apple trying to gain some leverage in its negotiations with ATT.
Danny Boyle wasn't a bankable name, or, indeed, a successful director.
He directed Trainspotting, The Beach and 28 Days Later..., all of which were commercial and critical successes, with some other moderately successful movies in between.
Note also that he had an Indian co-director who's had absolutely no credit whatsoever.
A movie has a director who is responsible for every phase of production from casting actors, to picking shots, to picking music, to directing actors and directing editing. Just because there was an assistant director on set in India to communicate what the director was saying to actors in their native language, does not mean there was a "co-director". That's just not how movies are made. There are multiple assistant directors on every movie. (Even when there's no language barrier.)
No. In this case it's the producer who got it its success-- multi-millionaire Paul Smith, realty TV hack, and expert publicist.
So basically you're saying that once someone has made money from putting out crap, if they create something good we should call it crap too, right? Does that make any artistic sense?
I may be missing something, but how is it that difficult to do sound for an animated film?
First of "do sound" could mean mixing or editing. Editing includes sound design which means creating sound effects from scratch. I would argue that sound design for an animated film is more difficult because you have no recorded track from set to use as any kind of reference for what things should sound like. Especially in a movie like Wall-E where you have to create believable sounds that a non-human character communicates with.
That said, Slumdog Millionaire won for sound mixing which is closer to what you are talking about: Making the recorded sound from set coherent and flow smoothly as if it were recorded live on set in a single take. The Dark Knight won for sound editing because they created sounds for any number of things and situations that never existed in real life, but were totally believeable when heard.
Some of the scenes in slumdog were shot on handicams in crowded slums by comparison; how many times can you redo a take with thousands of extras and still achieve some sort of continuity?
The type of camera used has virtually no impact on sound recording. It's difficult to get clean vocal tracks in a crowd, but you can always go in a studio and rerecord the dialogue later if it's that bad. Of course in the shots of kids running through slums, most likely none of the sound you heard was recorded on set. (Except the occasional kid's squeal.) Remember: They don't mic door slams and footsteps. What you heard probably wasn't even recorded in India.
Apple is most likely not going to pursue Palm unless their hand is forced.
Forced as in... Palm releases a phone with multi-touch? Steve Jobs said in reference to multi-touch at the initial iPhone unveiling "And boy have we patented it!", which sounds a lot like, "Don't expect to see this on anyone else's phone" to me.
Besides, I fail to see how their patent can stifle innovation.
No one else can create a multi-touch phone, so Apple doesn't have to keep up its pace of innovation. The Palm Pre received so much press, because it could potentially push past what the iPhone is capable of. If it isn't released a stagnant current version of the iPhone could remain king.
They were awarded the pantent for doing something innovative in the first place.
Actually they just bought the company, FingerWorks, that Wayne Westerman and cohorts founded.
I like Apple. I hate the US patent system. Let's do something.
As these techniques improve and become more popular, it makes me wonder what music produced twenty or fifty years from now will sound like, and how much authenticity will be left.
Music will be more diverse than ever.
There are still people who make their own drums and play them around a fire, there are still people that tune pianos and there are still people that sing accapella for their family and friends. A new form of music doesn't eradicate the old. Now what's popular on TV by then may be computer synthesized crap, but you may be shocked to learn that TV programming is selected by monetary, not artistic, value.
Authenticity isn't an issue. Authenticity is requirement for great art but it isn't a requirement for great entertainment. If you're worried about authentic, ask yourself how many pop stars you think are singing songs about their own life experiences...
So... if I keep the music I purchased for private use private, I have no privacy violation? Right?
Also, despite the summary's between the lines implication that Apple is hiding the info from ID3 tag editors, the audio files are MPEG4. This means they don't contain ID3 tags. Since MPEG4 is based on QuickTime, a QuickTime atom editor will happily show you the tags and let you remove them.
You could also have guessed the purchaser info was in these files based on the fact that iTunes shows it to you if you get info on a song.
From everything I've read (the slashdot summary excluded) this isn't really a virus -- it's a straight trojan. That means you would have to be trying to download a serial key generator in order to get it on your system. (ie. It doesn't spread to you from other people's machines.)
I'm all against nefarious software creeping onto my system, but this is like complaining that the guy you tried to buy drugs from turned out to be a cop.
This reminds me of a military image recognition system that was developed with a neural network that had to be trained. After feeding it hundreds of images of tanks it seemed to be accurately picking out the tanks, but as soon as they took it to a field with real tanks for testing, it was spotting false positives everywhere. It turned out it had learned to recognize "tank-like shadows" instead of tanks because the source images had all be shot on a day with strong sunlight.
Putting actors or people told to "act suspicious" through to build this system is going to create a system that spots cartoonish "evil doer" behavior. Anyone who twists their mustache in an airport is going to get a body cavity search, while people with actual bad intentions will pass through with a smile.
The problem this system really solves is the unpleasant perception that a government worker has picked you to get patted down. The screener can now point to the machine and say, "I didn't want to pat you down, but the machine says I have to." It's a machine so its results will be deemed "impartial" but its selection process will be opaque, which helps the TSA eliminate the nagging problems of accountability and transparency.
The only explanation I can see for Apple's recent surge in popularity is their marketing, which is absolutely top notch.
So in the past 10 years, the switch to a unix based operating system with modern object oriented apis, the switch to intel hardware that made an easier transition for windows developers, the acquisition and development of technologies like multi-touch, the negotiating with record labels to break out of the subscription model, the adoption of open source for many parts of the operating system (from Darwin to WebKit) and so on had nothing to do with it?
Yeah, it's silly that they haven't lifted the NDA yet, but it's not like developers have gotten excited about their platform because of brightly colored commercials.
Apple is perpetually slightly behind with GPUs because ATi and Nvidia generally release cards with "mostly working" DirectX drivers before they even have a partly working Mac OS X driver.
This is compounded by the lack of Mac OS X games (since games generally need optimized working drivers), and the small number of systems Apple ships that have an upgradeable GPU. Right now their cheapest machine you can pop a new graphics card in is $2800.00.
Mac clones could potentially change the balance here by selling more machines that can be upgraded, but I wouldn't bet on it. Until people have a reason (ie. games) they still probably wouldn't buy new graphics cards.
then why arent they releasing it for the wii which has a larger install base world wide then both the ps3 and xbox360 combined?
The Wii is a different enough system that a port probably wouldn't be possible. They'd not only have to rewrite the engine, but they'd have to rework all the graphics, models and sound. (Mostly to fit into smaller memory and bandwidth requirements.)
Since a lot of Wii owners also have a PS3 or Xbox360 (and those that don't are likely casual gamers), the cost of a rewrite wouldn't be justified by the additional potential audience.
Square isn't ignoring the Wii though... "Final Fantasy: My Life as a King" was a debut downloadable WiiWare game and "Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon" was just released.
As far as I'm concerned, if the copy is good enough that it can't be told from the original without doing a detailed analysis with fancy equipment, it's just as good as the real thing.
I know this is slashdot, but that's an awfully narrow view of what art is and what it represents. That's like saying the same model watch is just as good as your father's watch when you paid to have the one your father wore.
To use the Long Now Foundation's terminology, ignoring the historical context and provenance of art is "faster/cheaper" thinking.
Regardless, as far as you're concerned, cheating people out of large amounts of money is okay apparently.
Back in November 2006 when a reporter asked Palm CEO Ed Colligan what he thought of the threat of a phone from Apple he famously said: "PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in."
At the time I assumed it was a Ballmer-like move to try and stop the press from focusing on a competitor. Unfortunately for Palm, it looks like he actually believed it. Both with the original PDAs and with the Treos, Palm seemed to think they could get away with incremental upgrades forever.
Since the timing is only 2 weeks away from WWDC, I think this is going to be used as filler material for the Keynote. "We just released 10.5.3 and it, like Leopard, have been doing phenomenally well......". Timing seems a bit too convenient. Yes, I know they've been working on this for several months. Still.
I agree about the timing, but I disagree about it being filler. I'm guessing that there are features built into the new OS that are required by the presumed new iPhone to be announced. Google syncing being one of the obvious ones. By releasing the update now, people won't need to do 200 and 400MB downloads when the phone is released.
One thing that supports this theory is the new iPhone SDK Beta released today requires 10.5.3 to install. I don't think this is arbitrary. The iPhone SDK has done a lot to destabilize my system and I suspect it needed OS support and fixes to work out the kinks.
It could also be bandwidth planning. After all regardless of a new phone, the iPhone App Store is coming in June and that's going to bring the inevitable iTunes update that will be downloaded by millions of people =P
The term "delta updates" is being confused here...
Apple refers to "delta updates" meaning a system update that only works on the previous release of the system. For ex: You can download a delta update that updates 10.5.1 to 10.5.2, but will not update 10.5.0, because it only has the files that changed from 10.5.1 to 10.5.2. The full updater (which Apple usually calls a "Combo" update.) can take any version of the major release it was made for to the new version. So 10.5.0 or 10.5.1 could be updated to 10.5.2. These updaters are bigger because they have to include every file that has changed since the first version of the major release.
The previous post was talking about "delta updates" meaning a download that includes a list of changes to files instead of complete files. Apple doesn't do these kinds of delta updates. Their updates almost always include the full files. I don't think this is a bad thing, but plenty of people would debate it.
Personally, I've not felt that 10.5 is that big of a change from 10.4, which has always made it extra strange that it is that buggy.
The biggest improvements and changes in Leopard are all under the hood which lead to the marketing problem of "How do we sell it?" Time Machine was the answer, but it's hardly the best new feature.
Beneath the skin you have real 64-bit support and resolution independence in the system libraries, plus actual POSIX compliance. These are huge things that obviously took a lot of work and the kinks are still being ironed out.
Unfortunately, the benefits of all this forward looking support won't be realized until developers write applications to take advantage of it. Leopard was a necessary step to get us to a not too distant future of 32GBs of memory and 300 DPI monitors on the desktop and in our laptops.
If you read the article carefully, this is not about allowing unfettered P2P on their networks at all. They are deliberately obfuscating the issue. They leave the door open for blocking, filtering and "shaping" (ie. TCP resetting) any protocols they want. This is kind of like Verizon Wireless proudly announcing "We are radio phone call friendly" when the issue is whether to support GSM or CDMA.
Verizon's senior technologist talks about "working with P2P companies", which is radically different than allowing anyone to write a P2P networking app that does (fill in the blank.) Then goes on to say that work needs to be done on P2P DRM.
All in all, the tone of the article seems to confirm that the fight for network neutrality is far from over.
Here in the USA, I think they are also banking on the end analog tv transmissions to spur HDTV sales. Once people have the TV, they'll be more willing to spend money on replacing their DVD player with a Blu-ray one.
The big question I have is: Most people believe there will have to be a sub-$200 player for Blu-ray to really take off... so maybe they are planning one in time for the holidays? Or maybe the PS3 will be dropping in price? I wouldn't be surprised if they had already planned a super-cheap player back before it was obvious HD-DVD was going to lose.
Slashdot Mirror
The App Store is just a retail catalog. Do you think Target.com would let you mention your product was a Wal-Mart best-seller in your product description? Are geeks that out of touch with business fundamentals that this is surprising? Don't forget: The developer is free to say anything they want on their website. Apple just is cagey about what you can say to the eyeballs they're providing you.
Ask Palm how Apple feels about device interoperability. Luckily, app interoperability is really up to the app developers.
You can argue that two gens ago, the PS1 was slower than the N64, although that's less certain.
That is actually very certain. The N64 cpu was a 64-bit 93MHz processor with a 66MHz coprocessor to handle 3d geometry transformations and sound processing. Plus it had separate drawing hardware (developed by SGI) and a high-speed (for the time) 500 MHz rambus interface to 4MBs of main memory.
By contrast the PS1 cpu was a 32-bit 33.8MHz chip, without the dsp and a single coprocessor handled both geometry transforms and drawing. It had some other goodies like a dedicated audio coprocessor, but nothing nearly as flexible as a full dsp and the whole system was severely crippled by 2MBs of main memory.
The PS1 blew the N64 out of the water for several reasons: 1) Sony had a very lax approval system for developers and basically let developers create and publish anything. (This was really possible because the costs of CD publishing were so much lower than chips in cartridges.) 2) The N64 cartridge format severely limited the data capacity of a game. So all that fast hardware never had much to chew on.
So software won again, but in this case mostly because of quantity instead of quality.
I'm willing to bet they have been writing their own software from the start and when they realized they weren't going to have it ready for launch, iTunes became a stop gap measure. Now they're using it as an opportunity to make Apple look bad (you decide if rightly so), gain press exposure and they have a great excuse if their media manager turns out not to be that great. ("We tried to offer iTunes support!")
That or iTunes really has become an OS for media.
I work in the business and I saw a casting notice for this go out yesterday. Right now (if you're a member) you can see the notice on a site called Actor's Access here and the sides are up on Showfax.
Casting notices for shows like this almost never appear on a site like that (it's a step above Craigslist), so my best guess this is a negotiation tactic to convince the cast to accept contracts that pay less, in line with the reduced budget for the show.
I never thought I'd be a moon doubter, but if you watch the newly released footage carefully it does seem fishy.
Just playing devil's advocate: All the posts here seem to be trying to figure out what's wrong with ZFS to cause Apple to yank it out, but what if ZFS is fine and there's some big feature they're working on for HFS+ that they couldn't duplicate in ZFS?
I admit it's much more likely they just don't want to maintain full support for multiple filesystems, which is what they'd have to do because there's no way they're putting ZFS on iPhones and iPod Touches anytime soon.
Either way, the really telling thing is they aren't talking about ZFS in Mac OS X Server. If they had any plan for a ZFS future, it would start there much like the way HFS+ Journaling was initially a Mac OS X Server feature. (Introduced in OS X Server 10.2.2 and rolled out to non-server OS X in 10.3.)
I think this is a great idea, but it raises a lot of questions. Like... if it takes Apple a week to make sure a calculator app is safe enough for the iPhone, how is Sun going to review desktop-size apps in any reasonable amount of time?
This smacks of Verizon using vaporware to kill the hype around iPhone OS 3.0 (as suggested by Roughly Drafted), someone trying to give Verizon's stock a bump with an Apple rumpr (a tactic that previously hasn't been very well hidden) or perhaps Apple trying to gain some leverage in its negotiations with ATT.
He directed Trainspotting, The Beach and 28 Days Later..., all of which were commercial and critical successes, with some other moderately successful movies in between.
A movie has a director who is responsible for every phase of production from casting actors, to picking shots, to picking music, to directing actors and directing editing. Just because there was an assistant director on set in India to communicate what the director was saying to actors in their native language, does not mean there was a "co-director". That's just not how movies are made. There are multiple assistant directors on every movie. (Even when there's no language barrier.)
So basically you're saying that once someone has made money from putting out crap, if they create something good we should call it crap too, right? Does that make any artistic sense?
First of "do sound" could mean mixing or editing. Editing includes sound design which means creating sound effects from scratch. I would argue that sound design for an animated film is more difficult because you have no recorded track from set to use as any kind of reference for what things should sound like. Especially in a movie like Wall-E where you have to create believable sounds that a non-human character communicates with.
That said, Slumdog Millionaire won for sound mixing which is closer to what you are talking about: Making the recorded sound from set coherent and flow smoothly as if it were recorded live on set in a single take. The Dark Knight won for sound editing because they created sounds for any number of things and situations that never existed in real life, but were totally believeable when heard.
The type of camera used has virtually no impact on sound recording. It's difficult to get clean vocal tracks in a crowd, but you can always go in a studio and rerecord the dialogue later if it's that bad. Of course in the shots of kids running through slums, most likely none of the sound you heard was recorded on set. (Except the occasional kid's squeal.) Remember: They don't mic door slams and footsteps. What you heard probably wasn't even recorded in India.
Forced as in... Palm releases a phone with multi-touch? Steve Jobs said in reference to multi-touch at the initial iPhone unveiling "And boy have we patented it!", which sounds a lot like, "Don't expect to see this on anyone else's phone" to me.
No one else can create a multi-touch phone, so Apple doesn't have to keep up its pace of innovation. The Palm Pre received so much press, because it could potentially push past what the iPhone is capable of. If it isn't released a stagnant current version of the iPhone could remain king.
Actually they just bought the company, FingerWorks, that Wayne Westerman and cohorts founded.
I like Apple. I hate the US patent system. Let's do something.
Music will be more diverse than ever.
There are still people who make their own drums and play them around a fire, there are still people that tune pianos and there are still people that sing accapella for their family and friends. A new form of music doesn't eradicate the old. Now what's popular on TV by then may be computer synthesized crap, but you may be shocked to learn that TV programming is selected by monetary, not artistic, value.
Authenticity isn't an issue. Authenticity is requirement for great art but it isn't a requirement for great entertainment. If you're worried about authentic, ask yourself how many pop stars you think are singing songs about their own life experiences...
So... if I keep the music I purchased for private use private, I have no privacy violation? Right?
Also, despite the summary's between the lines implication that Apple is hiding the info from ID3 tag editors, the audio files are MPEG4. This means they don't contain ID3 tags. Since MPEG4 is based on QuickTime, a QuickTime atom editor will happily show you the tags and let you remove them.
You could also have guessed the purchaser info was in these files based on the fact that iTunes shows it to you if you get info on a song.
From everything I've read (the slashdot summary excluded) this isn't really a virus -- it's a straight trojan. That means you would have to be trying to download a serial key generator in order to get it on your system. (ie. It doesn't spread to you from other people's machines.)
I'm all against nefarious software creeping onto my system, but this is like complaining that the guy you tried to buy drugs from turned out to be a cop.
This reminds me of a military image recognition system that was developed with a neural network that had to be trained. After feeding it hundreds of images of tanks it seemed to be accurately picking out the tanks, but as soon as they took it to a field with real tanks for testing, it was spotting false positives everywhere. It turned out it had learned to recognize "tank-like shadows" instead of tanks because the source images had all be shot on a day with strong sunlight.
Putting actors or people told to "act suspicious" through to build this system is going to create a system that spots cartoonish "evil doer" behavior. Anyone who twists their mustache in an airport is going to get a body cavity search, while people with actual bad intentions will pass through with a smile.
The problem this system really solves is the unpleasant perception that a government worker has picked you to get patted down. The screener can now point to the machine and say, "I didn't want to pat you down, but the machine says I have to." It's a machine so its results will be deemed "impartial" but its selection process will be opaque, which helps the TSA eliminate the nagging problems of accountability and transparency.
The only explanation I can see for Apple's recent surge in popularity is their marketing, which is absolutely top notch.
So in the past 10 years, the switch to a unix based operating system with modern object oriented apis, the switch to intel hardware that made an easier transition for windows developers, the acquisition and development of technologies like multi-touch, the negotiating with record labels to break out of the subscription model, the adoption of open source for many parts of the operating system (from Darwin to WebKit) and so on had nothing to do with it?
Yeah, it's silly that they haven't lifted the NDA yet, but it's not like developers have gotten excited about their platform because of brightly colored commercials.
Apple is perpetually slightly behind with GPUs because ATi and Nvidia generally release cards with "mostly working" DirectX drivers before they even have a partly working Mac OS X driver.
This is compounded by the lack of Mac OS X games (since games generally need optimized working drivers), and the small number of systems Apple ships that have an upgradeable GPU. Right now their cheapest machine you can pop a new graphics card in is $2800.00.
Mac clones could potentially change the balance here by selling more machines that can be upgraded, but I wouldn't bet on it. Until people have a reason (ie. games) they still probably wouldn't buy new graphics cards.
then why arent they releasing it for the wii which has a larger install base world wide then both the ps3 and xbox360 combined?
The Wii is a different enough system that a port probably wouldn't be possible. They'd not only have to rewrite the engine, but they'd have to rework all the graphics, models and sound. (Mostly to fit into smaller memory and bandwidth requirements.)
Since a lot of Wii owners also have a PS3 or Xbox360 (and those that don't are likely casual gamers), the cost of a rewrite wouldn't be justified by the additional potential audience.
Square isn't ignoring the Wii though... "Final Fantasy: My Life as a King" was a debut downloadable WiiWare game and "Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon" was just released.
I know this is slashdot, but that's an awfully narrow view of what art is and what it represents. That's like saying the same model watch is just as good as your father's watch when you paid to have the one your father wore.
To use the Long Now Foundation's terminology, ignoring the historical context and provenance of art is "faster/cheaper" thinking.
Regardless, as far as you're concerned, cheating people out of large amounts of money is okay apparently.
Back in November 2006 when a reporter asked Palm CEO Ed Colligan what he thought of the threat of a phone from Apple he famously said: "PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in."
At the time I assumed it was a Ballmer-like move to try and stop the press from focusing on a competitor. Unfortunately for Palm, it looks like he actually believed it. Both with the original PDAs and with the Treos, Palm seemed to think they could get away with incremental upgrades forever.
I agree about the timing, but I disagree about it being filler. I'm guessing that there are features built into the new OS that are required by the presumed new iPhone to be announced. Google syncing being one of the obvious ones. By releasing the update now, people won't need to do 200 and 400MB downloads when the phone is released.
One thing that supports this theory is the new iPhone SDK Beta released today requires 10.5.3 to install. I don't think this is arbitrary. The iPhone SDK has done a lot to destabilize my system and I suspect it needed OS support and fixes to work out the kinks.
It could also be bandwidth planning. After all regardless of a new phone, the iPhone App Store is coming in June and that's going to bring the inevitable iTunes update that will be downloaded by millions of people =P
The term "delta updates" is being confused here...
Apple refers to "delta updates" meaning a system update that only works on the previous release of the system. For ex: You can download a delta update that updates 10.5.1 to 10.5.2, but will not update 10.5.0, because it only has the files that changed from 10.5.1 to 10.5.2. The full updater (which Apple usually calls a "Combo" update.) can take any version of the major release it was made for to the new version. So 10.5.0 or 10.5.1 could be updated to 10.5.2. These updaters are bigger because they have to include every file that has changed since the first version of the major release.
The previous post was talking about "delta updates" meaning a download that includes a list of changes to files instead of complete files. Apple doesn't do these kinds of delta updates. Their updates almost always include the full files. I don't think this is a bad thing, but plenty of people would debate it.
The biggest improvements and changes in Leopard are all under the hood which lead to the marketing problem of "How do we sell it?" Time Machine was the answer, but it's hardly the best new feature.
Beneath the skin you have real 64-bit support and resolution independence in the system libraries, plus actual POSIX compliance. These are huge things that obviously took a lot of work and the kinks are still being ironed out.
Unfortunately, the benefits of all this forward looking support won't be realized until developers write applications to take advantage of it. Leopard was a necessary step to get us to a not too distant future of 32GBs of memory and 300 DPI monitors on the desktop and in our laptops.
If you read the article carefully, this is not about allowing unfettered P2P on their networks at all. They are deliberately obfuscating the issue. They leave the door open for blocking, filtering and "shaping" (ie. TCP resetting) any protocols they want. This is kind of like Verizon Wireless proudly announcing "We are radio phone call friendly" when the issue is whether to support GSM or CDMA.
Verizon's senior technologist talks about "working with P2P companies", which is radically different than allowing anyone to write a P2P networking app that does (fill in the blank.) Then goes on to say that work needs to be done on P2P DRM.
All in all, the tone of the article seems to confirm that the fight for network neutrality is far from over.
Here in the USA, I think they are also banking on the end analog tv transmissions to spur HDTV sales. Once people have the TV, they'll be more willing to spend money on replacing their DVD player with a Blu-ray one.
The big question I have is: Most people believe there will have to be a sub-$200 player for Blu-ray to really take off... so maybe they are planning one in time for the holidays? Or maybe the PS3 will be dropping in price? I wouldn't be surprised if they had already planned a super-cheap player back before it was obvious HD-DVD was going to lose.