My desk at home is a gigantic wraparound IKEA special. I work partly from home, so it's decked out with a 20" iMac, the 24" Cinema Display that I connect my MacBook Pro to, an Officejet, 3 PCs yoked together using a KVM, various chargers, an older Asus EEE 901, my radios, paperwork, and docks for the iPad and iPhone.
Amongst all that high-techery are a batch of diecast race cars, a Newton MessagePad 2100, and a black restored rotary phone. It's in perfect condition, and has been retrofitted with a modular jack. I don't dial it often (obviously), but I answer all my calls on it because it just sounds so much better than any cordless or cell phone that I've ever used.
Whenever I turn on the Newton, I remind myself of how awesome that could be on modern hardware. It's still a great mobile OS.
The Thunderbolt port is physically identical to the Mini DisplayPort interface. Uses the same connector. The cable is a little bit thicker than the MDP connector on an Apple Cinema Display, but by fractions. It does extend out a little ways to make room for the transceiver.
It's actually perfect for the Air more than anything else in the lineup, really. Mac laptops have no docking connector, so with the Air the only things you had previously were a pair of USB 2.0 ports, with enough power to drive the removable DVD burner they sell for it. With Thunderbolt (since it's basically a PCIe interface broken out) someone will soon be selling a docking station for Mac laptops that'll support storage, DisplayPort out, Ethernet, and whatever else makes sense to add.
For the same reason, Thunderbolt has the potential to get rid of proprietary Wintel vendor docking systems.
It's a safe assumption that Thunderbolt will make it into everything Apple sells within the next month or so - in other words, adding the mini, MacBook Air, and Mac Pro. Those are the systems that are due refreshes and by all accounts are waiting in the wings for Lion to go GM.
Apple obviously was thinking ahead to Thunderbolt when they axed the Xserve, but as it stands they probably should have kept the Xserve around a few more months and tried to push either the Mac Pro or mini refresh ahead a couple of months in order to avoid a lot of the flak they took over the Xserve. The kind of folks who bought Xserves would have been a lot less pissed off - and though Apple doesn't explicitly cater to the server crowd, they're still good folks to have on your side.
USB 2 will remain the standard for lower-speed devices, printers, scanners, and casual storage (flash drives, pocket drives, etc.). Thunderbolt will likely compete well with USB 3.0 and also take the role of ExpressCard, FireWire, eSATA, and proprietary expansion docks for laptops.
For starters, iWeb can still develop sites that will work fine and FTP upload to your web host of choice. Next issue - MobileMe hosting isn't offline yet, and won't be until at least next June. That assumes, of course, that Apple doesn't come up with any migration path to iCloud-based hosting (or preserve MobileMe hosting as an option).
The only things we know for sure right now are that all the traditional MobileMe services (mail, contacts, calendars, file sync) will be provided by iCloud this fall. Other details are yet to be known. Apple has a habit in recent years of pre-announcing the doom of a product (see Xserve) before there's a public replacement announced, which drives us all nuts but usually works out OK in the end.
If you go away from iWeb, though, there are some good editors with similar feature sets and long histories out there in the Mac world. Freeway, Sandvox, and RapidWeaver are all supported products at fairly low prices. But if I was a betting man, I'd bet that MobileMe hosting will ultimately be preserved in some form.
You missed something. Since _yesterday_, the Mac OS now has daily checking for malware signatures. So the signature that was already in there with the initial install of the security update is bypassed. Point being, if it's not blocked tomorrow, then we can gripe. Right now it may well be fine with tomorrow's update. If the OS can block would-be exploits within a day of their hitting the wild, that's pretty good response.
Still to do for Apple, though:
- Turn off the default for Safari to execute files upon download - Increase default security on the Applications folder - Build more security checks into the Installer (in particular, I think it should tell people where it will place files)
Right now, Apple users are seeing multiple variations of a single attack that, on Windows systems, is a bloody nuisance to rip out and usually drops a rootkit behind. On the Mac, it relies on social engineering to get you to install an application into user space and takes about 5 minutes or less to get rid of.
Not that Macs are 100% safe (or ever were), but there's a fundamental difference here. When this Mac Defender starts getting dropped in with a kernel extension that I can't find because it patches an existing.kext and is installed silently in the background via a PDF exploit using JavaScript, then I'll worry a lot more about Macs.
Anybody who has an iPhone in the first place is probably not enough of a Free Software purist to want to sue Apple about not having the source!
More seriously, Apple has been the driver behind Webkit in general, and they've published everything else. 4.3 was initially published in early March. It's been almost exactly two months, with 3 point releases in that time and a mini-scandal about Location Services. Apple's had other priorities than making sure the source was on the site immediately, and now the point is moot because the sources were published today. Typical Free Software tempest in a teapot.
If Apple announced they were closing the iOS source entirely, then it would be a worthy fuss. This, not so much.
Not really - Thunderbolt uses the same plug and is electrically compatible with mini DisplayPort. They've just added more functionality to the connector. And mini DisplayPort has been the spec for a few years now in Apple gear, so it should last a while to come now that it's also used by Thunderbolt.
Other than that, the Mac mini supports HDMI out as well as mini DisplayPort. Until a couple of years ago, things were kind of in transition as the world moved away from VGA and into digital video out. Now things are more stable.
That rule was incorporated into the Constitution to prevent the European practice of importing new royal families on a somewhat regular basis. The current British royal family, for instance was brought in from Germany. The idea was to keep American independence.
Of course, this was from an era when few people traveled between nations often (citizens were rarely born overseas) and before international adoption became frequent. Times have changed since then, and the constitutional requirement effectively excludes a large group of citizens from serving.
Fortunately, we've still got a pretty big pool to choose from...
Android, the platform has sold a bunch more than iPhone, the phone. Because Android isn't one company's phone, it's the default free OS that phone vendors besides Apple and RIM adopted en masse. Why? Because by getting on board with Android, phone vendors don't have to pay the license fees, and can cut development costs. Plus they can get some pre-built apps for the phone without having to cultivate their own app market.
As far as phones themselves? iPhone sells far in far higher volume than any one Android phone - it just doesn't outsell the whole Android ecosystem. And won't anymore at this point. But the key metric is really how large, robust, and lucrative the platform app markets are. iOS' App Store dramatically outsells the Android Market right now and probably will for the reasonable future. Why? I think part of the reason is the nature of Android itself, and the phones it goes on. Outside of the passionate few, Android mainly is the generic OS you get when you get that phone that's a step up from the old feature phone you had, and there's no iPhone available as an option (or you don't really care one way or another, you just want the phone that's cheapest on a contract and has a web browser and e-mail).
I think the tablet market is a little different, at least to date. First of all, the iPad came to market as really the first fully-formed vision of a viable tablet. And right now just as the competition starts to catch up, Apple does something to jump ahead again. iPad 2 isn't much better (if at all) technically than the Xoom, but they have design in their favor, roughly identical specs, and Apple has a much more mature app ecosystem and about a year's head start.
It'll take a few years for the competition to even out. And meantime, these newer platforms don't really lend themselves to the old Windows ecosystem model where one company dominates and everyone else fights for scraps. Apple sells millions of iOS devices each quarter (over 20 million last quarter), and all those users reinforce each other, buying upgraded devices eventually and also buying apps. Developers make lots of money writing iOS apps. That isn't going away. At least 2, maybe even 3 platforms will likely survive and thrive for a long time to come. Apple's advantage now is that they are building devices for consumers, not so much for engineers. That's part of their DNA and why Android won't ever "win" outright.
In and around Boston AT&T service is usually pretty good, and has been for the last couple of years (they built out a lot of capacity here when 3g rolled out). Dropped calls are rare, data works well and fast, and I've got pretty much nothing to whine about except maybe the lack of any AT&T service north of the NH Lakes region.
Plus I was in NYC earlier this week, and though AT&T is legendary for bad service I had no problems at all there. Granted, I was only traveling between Grand Central, Times Square, and Central Park (played tourist with my kid for the day), but I would think congestion problems would be at their worst in midtown. I won't say AT&T is awesome, but I really don't see the hate they get. Before the iPhone, I was on Verizon with a Treo 700p, and the experience was horrible. Partly the phone, and partly the network. When I first got the iPhone the AT&T network was thoroughly meh, but as I said before the last couple of years have been pretty good for my usage. YMMV.
There is one key difference between this bubble and the first tech bubble - most of the companies in the current bubble are profitable, or at worst running around break-even. In Bubble 1.0, most of the newly public companies were losing scads of money, but were hoping to be the ones sitting when the music stopped.
Netflix, Facebook, and the like are making money now, even if it's lower than what their valuation would suggest. The biggest risk now that the 2.0 companies face is that a lot of them are tied to someone else's fortunes or assume that the competition will remain clueless. Zynga's tied to Facebook's fortunes, Netflix assumes Blockbuster will die (correct so far) and that studios will keep bending over for them.
Should Facebook become the next MySpace, or if another engine takes the momentum from Google, things could change. But that's a risk factor that should be accounted for in valuation. Profitability, though, is something we didn't have back then.
My point is basically that Netgear isn't involved in any of these markets that their CEO speaks of. They make perfectly decent products in their space (cheap-ass routers, switches, home NAS boxes, and, admittedly, a few home theater devices as well). They compete well in that space. But Netgear lives in a market where price is king. Recessions hit companies like Netgear hard because they sell devices that Linksys/Cisco, D-Link, Belkin, and a whole host of other companies compete with mainly on price. And if your Netgear router fails, there's no reason why you can't replace it with a Belkin. No lock-in. Apple products, for better or worse, aren't interchangeable with their competition. Once you're in the Apple ecosystem, you tend to stay there and get more and more items in it.
Netgear got its start as the spinoff from Bay Networks/Nortel, but they've been a commodity consumer product company for 15 years. And that's the mindset they look at things from.
My market expertise is limited, but I get it from 1000+ posts on Slashdot over a decade plus, and over 20 years in the IT business, with 7 years of owning a consultancy with multiple employees and a lot of mixed-platform business clients. It's not the background some have (and a lot of folks know more than me), but I've been around a pretty long time and have seen plenty. Plus I bought Apple at $16 (though not that much of it, sadly)!
Check me if I'm missing something here - but wasn't the economy from late 2007 through early last year bad to epic proportions, and pretty much on a global level?
(not that it's exactly roaring right now)
Apple posted record sales growth quarter upon quarter for all that time, becoming one of the largest corporations in the world. I don't think a bad economy is exactly slowing them down. They've discovered an economic trend, and are exploiting the heck out of it:
- The fiercest competition and the lowest profits are at the lowest end of the market in any given area. If you add features and function over time and keep prices roughly the same, you make more money than if you sell the same stuff for less each year. Plus you get a constant stream of upgraders over time as well.
Apple figured that out, and finally got an ecosystem built to support it (iTunes and the App Store). They're now bringing that functionality to the main platform as well. If all your content and apps are keyed to one platform, you can't realistically leave that platform. It worked for Microsoft on PCs for decades - only the rise of mobility and Apple's shift to Intel as a chip platform have allowed a dent to be made in the MS market share in the last few years. Android will be a dominant platform overall - but they're replacing the low-end featurephones and extreme geek phones more than they hurt the iPhone platform. Google wants to give away Android to make money on search advertising - their core business. Phone vendors want Android because they don't have to pay for it and can set it up however the carrier wants. Carriers want Android phones because they can customize them to lock in their users to buy content from the carrier.
Users either want iPhones, Blackberries, or whatever they get for free (or really cheap) from their carrier. And they don't care about swappable batteries, either.
As for Netgear - they make cheap-ass routers, switches, and home NAS boxes. Where are they getting this market expertise?
There's a difference between owning/doing business as an S Corp like he does (and I do, as do a lot of independent professionals) and being the CEO of a conventional C Corp. As CEO of a C Corp, you're not the owner, you work for the company. Steve Jobs and other people who get $1 in compensation get paid primarily in stock grants. If the stock rises, they cash it in and get money out when they want to. If the company doesn't do well, worst case is they get nothing - for practical purposes most boards will re-price or reissue options so they get some pay out of it. Lower level execs are usually paid with a combination of more cash pay and fewer options, but current thinking seems to be that a CEO is most directly tied to stock value.
Also, in many cases with "rock star" CEOs like the ones in tech, they have som much stock from taking the company public in the first place that they don't need much cash compensation, and it doesn't look as cool if they take it.
In the S Corp world, I think most of us do it for the liability protection. At least at mine, I pay myself a pretty good salary. I take out occasional payments that I pay taxes on - it's usually easier to do it as a bonus in my payroll and have taxes dealt with, especially because I pay bonuses to my employees. The flip side is that owning an S Corp does let you expense things that ordinarily might not be deductible as a regular company employee, like cars and at least part of your housing (as a previous poster mentioned). I keep things very above board - pretty much the only things that the company expenses in my life are my car and its related costs, my cell phone, and any tech I buy that isn't specifically for the house. I could push more stuff on the company if I wanted to be really aggressive, but it's not worth the potential hassle to me.
The one place where I get hit in return as an S Corp owner is in health insurance - I don't get as much of a tax benefit for my own insurance as I do for that of my employees.
What this CPA did was pay himself a token paycheck and then push a lot more off as profits. Had he paid himself a higher base - say, $50-$60k he likely wouldn't have had a problem with it and still would have had a nice profit distribution.
This isn't really about desktop browsers. It's all about mobility. Not a coincidence that Google announced this right when Apple announced that iPhone was coming to Verizon (Android's biggest US sales generator).
Simply put, Safari in iOS doesn't allow plugins and relies on the HTML5 Video tag to play H.264 video (which is supported natively by frameworks in iOS and MacOS). Until Android 2.2, it was the same thing in Android. Now Android supports Flash, and Google also built their own special version of Flash into desktop Chrome. So this is pretty much just a naked attempt to kill the HTML5 video tag and by extension harm iOS and help Android.
On the desktop, Chrome exists mainly to keep Microsoft reasonably honest. On Android, it's everything. Google wants to do everything it can to blunt iOS and boost Android - and trying to break iOS's video experience may be a dirty trick but all's fair in OS wars. If it were just about boosting WebM then Google would start pushing WebM, helping with video acceleration efforts, helping to produce authoring tools, and such while not changing a thing about their already built H.264 support. But they are actively removing H.264 support from the browser.
Don't be evil, my ass. Apple may not be the paragon of Free Software that most Slashdot readers want them to be, but they are supporting a standards-based tag that uses a popular, documented video standard that is prevalent in multiple media forms and well-supported by browsers and tools.
When the Chromium dev build with H.264 support removed is pushed to my computer is when I remove Chrome from my computer. Microsoft and Apple are doing the right thing here for once - at least Firefox's stance is political in nature. Google's is just about trying to kill iPhones. When Apple changes the default search engine in iOS and Safari to Bing, this'll be why they did it.
While he's at it, let's get technology to prevent all conversation between the driver and passengers. Because after all, a driver talking to other people is distracted.
Then we can take out all car radios. Listening to music or talk is distracting to drivers, so it should be banned.
For an obvious follow-up, we can ban all road signs and billboards. People can get distracted looking at them. (wait, I don't hate the billboard thing so much)
Or maybe we can do this instead. Simply ban all handheld phone use without a handsfree device. Make Bluetooth and/or a aux jack a standard part of all car radios going forward, instead of part of a big-dollar premium upgrade with your nav system. Mandate handsfree technology be used by all drivers. And ban texting/email by drivers, period. That I can get behind. The rest of it's just ridiculous.
Besides that, Apple also has no control over pricing - the developer decides anything to do with price and can change it at any time. Apple gets 30% (on a free app they get squat).
Basically, my interpretation of this kerfuffle is simple: Apple provides a common repository that developers who pay the $99/year fee can use for their app distribution. Paying the fee also gets you access to prerelease code and to developer support. Developers can sell their software using any license or pricing they want. VLC is GPL'd software, and so the developer is in compliance with the license by distributing their source code through their own website.
As of right now, I don't see a source download link there, or any notice that the software changes are all merged back to the main VLC trunk. So by that measure the developer is likely infringing. And it should be corrected.
But the FSF - this is another case of pissing off end users to make a political point. The GPL is a wonderful tool that has made sure a lot of useful computer code has remained free for developers to use as needed. It's helped an entire OS get traction. But the FSF's jihad against anything that doesn't meet their purity standard is just silly at this point. Work with the software author to get the app compliant. People can download the app code and play with it all they want - the dev tools themselves are free (as in beer). Yeesh.
I was on the old Cingular network when I first went into business. My first smartphone was a Treo 650. It sucked. Switched to a Treo 700p on Verizon a couple of years later when it came out. Network was a little better, phone sucked worse. Far worse.
After debating it with myself for a while, I bought the first iPhone when it came out in 2007. I still wasn't impressed by the AT&T network, but the phone worked so well I didn't care. When 3G came to pass I was unimpressed enough that if Verizon had an equivalent phone then that could have done simultaneous voice and data I might have switched.
Starting in late 2008, the AT&T network in my area's gotten a lot better. Good enough that I'm not tempted to switch anymore. I upgraded to the iPhone 4 last month, and antenna problems or not it improves reception even more for me - drop spots I had with older AT&T phones (going back to my Treo 650) are not a problem anymore. 3G speeds are excellent. When my VZ contract expires for the data card I have with them next month I will cancel it and just use tethering on my iPhone to save more money.
Basically, I pay less than I used to, have a better phone, and next to no network issues anywhere I go regularly. On the rare occasion I've had to call customer service they've been helpful and easy to reach. More than once they've called me back to follow up and make sure I'm happy. Bottom line for me - I'm happy with AT&T, and I see no reason to change. And I'm a happy iPhone user as well. As long as they don't screw it up, I'll stick with AT&T.
I think freezing the market only works when you're not in the space already and you have a product that is a radical departure from the competition. The original iPhone met that measure - the newer models since then have not. The iPad met it as well, but even then it was out just over 2 months later.
Preannouncements don't really hold up too well outside of that because the market changes too fast and you've got two real possibilities when you announce 6 months ahead of time:
- Other competitors have used your announced specs to meet or exceed what you're doing, and they were out quicker
- You fail to meet or exceed the product spec yourself and look bad.
If the rest of the market was sitting still, it'd be a no-risk play for Cisco. After all, they are new to the tablet space. But Apple has a huge lead and enough time for more product iterations and another OS rev, other Android tablet vendors could match or blow away what Cisco has announced, or a host of other things could derail them.
Yeah, but this is the Osborne Effect applied back to them. Why wait for a device that may or may not ship in half a year when you can start deploying a known platform now?
The iPad isn't perfect, of course, but it's here now, there's a robust OS on it today with a big software library available, a known development path, methods for controlled deployment (businesses can set up their own App Store path), and we also know what's coming in the platform OS this year for it (everything that's in iOS 4, with some additional features that'll be announced as the beta cycle kicks in).
I don't have anything against Android as such, and I also don't think all tablets except iPad are inherently doomed. I just see the strategy of announcing things so far ahead as a Bad Idea, especially when you are shipping a "me too" device. The only reason it worked for Apple once is because there was no iPhone before to cannibalize, and because it was a pretty radical change from what was already in the marketplace.
Now Apple announces new iPhones a couple of weeks before they go on sale. The next iPad won't be announced in July for January delivery. It'll be announced less than a month before you can walk into a store and buy it. And until then, it won't exist outside of the supply chain rumor mills.
No, Apple doesn't need Verizon. They need millions of people who are locked into the App Store ecosystem, and between the tens of millions of iPhones sold, the millions of iPod Touches, and the millions of iPads - they've got all that and more.
And because of the App Store, virtually all of those users will stay yoked to their device and its upgrade path forever.
Verizon's 92 million subscribers are tempting, and if all 92 million of them were going to get iPhones it would be compelling. But they aren't. Maybe a few million would over the remaining life of the EVDO network, but meanwhile Apple would have to build an iPhone that couldn't do simultaneous voice and data, didn't use a SIM, and probably couldn't easily be activated at home. Until LTE I just don't see any good reason for Apple to do it.
Apple's darned happy to make a huge profit on their relatively small portion of the overall cellphone market. Android is ultimately going to sell more phones, because Google gives it away to all comers and it's now the standard OS for pretty much anything other than Windows, RIM, and Apple phones. But Android won't make anyone a lot of money - it'll reduce costs for cellphone makers because there's no royalties, and it'll make Google some extra money on search. That isn't going to overthrow Apple or RIM anytime soon.
If any of these companies learned anything at all from Apple, they wouldn't be announcing tablets to ship next year. They'd be announcing finished products that will be out this month. You can't build a product and aim at a moving target.
HP Slate with Windows 7? Dead, and HP bought Palm to recover. Lenovo Ideapad? Announced at CES, still not out, supposedly a new OS is coming. Cisco Cius? Looks cool, not out until next year.
iPad? Over 3 million of them shipped so far, they were in users' hands 10 weeks after they were announced, and by the time most of these competitors ship (if they do at all), Apple will have a second release of the shipping OS and may well have a second generation of the hardware out as well.
The only thing Apple's preannounced several months ahead of time in recent years was the original iPhone. For a reason - that froze the smartphone market for almost six months until the first one shipped.
Word to future iPad wannabes: Tell us about it when you're ready to ship. You're not going to freeze the market by announcing 6 months early. People aren't going to say "screw Apple, let's wait for the Cius to make tablets legitimate". You'll only look stupid when you don't ship the same product you announced 6 months ago.
Ultimately the codebases will pretty much merge - but there is a _lot_ of stuff in desktop MacOS that isn't in iOS, and vice-versa. There's also a need basis behind a lot of it. Desktop operating systems are suited to large systems with higher power consumption, multicore multi-GHz processors, gigabytes of RAM, and massive storage. iOS (and mobile systems in general) are suited to a much more constrained environment.
What pretty much happened in Apple-land is that Leopard forked to provide the basis of what is now iOS - as the platform matures further a lot of that will backport into the core OS. The iOS team picked what they needed and can now give some of it back. I don't think you'll ever get away from a freely downloadable and installable option in the desktop OS. A do think that eventually the App Store will be available for the desktop platform as a distribution option, and all the vendors who now use Escellerate and Kagi (and all the other online distributors) will all jump en masse to the App Store for Mac. Good for developers, good for users, lousy for distributors.
I also think the criteria for App Store for Mac will not be nearly as strict as it is for the iOS version. But it won't matter too much. Distribution choices for the desktop will be like this:
- Direct distribution: Available to anyone, handle sales and fulfillment yourself - whether electronic or physical.
- 3rd party: Still available, but increasingly irrelevant (most will opt for the App Store).
- App Store: The store handles installation and updates for you in exchange for a cut.
Yeah, there is word on when it'll run on iPad
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iOS 4 Releases Today
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"In the fall". (at least, that's what Jobs said at the OS 4.0 announcement in April)
More to the point, 3.2 was for iPad-only. 4.0 is initially just for iPhone/iPod Touch (basically the same device), and 4.1 (that will likely be the version number) will be a unified release supporting all iOS devices and adding some additional functionality. I'm anticipating basic printing support and some form of access to remote/server files as the major additions.
It will probably be out in the October timeframe in time for the fall generation of iPod devices.
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My desk at home is a gigantic wraparound IKEA special. I work partly from home, so it's decked out with a 20" iMac, the 24" Cinema Display that I connect my MacBook Pro to, an Officejet, 3 PCs yoked together using a KVM, various chargers, an older Asus EEE 901, my radios, paperwork, and docks for the iPad and iPhone.
Amongst all that high-techery are a batch of diecast race cars, a Newton MessagePad 2100, and a black restored rotary phone. It's in perfect condition, and has been retrofitted with a modular jack. I don't dial it often (obviously), but I answer all my calls on it because it just sounds so much better than any cordless or cell phone that I've ever used.
Whenever I turn on the Newton, I remind myself of how awesome that could be on modern hardware. It's still a great mobile OS.
The Thunderbolt port is physically identical to the Mini DisplayPort interface. Uses the same connector. The cable is a little bit thicker than the MDP connector on an Apple Cinema Display, but by fractions. It does extend out a little ways to make room for the transceiver.
It's actually perfect for the Air more than anything else in the lineup, really. Mac laptops have no docking connector, so with the Air the only things you had previously were a pair of USB 2.0 ports, with enough power to drive the removable DVD burner they sell for it. With Thunderbolt (since it's basically a PCIe interface broken out) someone will soon be selling a docking station for Mac laptops that'll support storage, DisplayPort out, Ethernet, and whatever else makes sense to add.
For the same reason, Thunderbolt has the potential to get rid of proprietary Wintel vendor docking systems.
It's a safe assumption that Thunderbolt will make it into everything Apple sells within the next month or so - in other words, adding the mini, MacBook Air, and Mac Pro. Those are the systems that are due refreshes and by all accounts are waiting in the wings for Lion to go GM.
Apple obviously was thinking ahead to Thunderbolt when they axed the Xserve, but as it stands they probably should have kept the Xserve around a few more months and tried to push either the Mac Pro or mini refresh ahead a couple of months in order to avoid a lot of the flak they took over the Xserve. The kind of folks who bought Xserves would have been a lot less pissed off - and though Apple doesn't explicitly cater to the server crowd, they're still good folks to have on your side.
USB 2 will remain the standard for lower-speed devices, printers, scanners, and casual storage (flash drives, pocket drives, etc.). Thunderbolt will likely compete well with USB 3.0 and also take the role of ExpressCard, FireWire, eSATA, and proprietary expansion docks for laptops.
For starters, iWeb can still develop sites that will work fine and FTP upload to your web host of choice. Next issue - MobileMe hosting isn't offline yet, and won't be until at least next June. That assumes, of course, that Apple doesn't come up with any migration path to iCloud-based hosting (or preserve MobileMe hosting as an option).
The only things we know for sure right now are that all the traditional MobileMe services (mail, contacts, calendars, file sync) will be provided by iCloud this fall. Other details are yet to be known. Apple has a habit in recent years of pre-announcing the doom of a product (see Xserve) before there's a public replacement announced, which drives us all nuts but usually works out OK in the end.
If you go away from iWeb, though, there are some good editors with similar feature sets and long histories out there in the Mac world. Freeway, Sandvox, and RapidWeaver are all supported products at fairly low prices. But if I was a betting man, I'd bet that MobileMe hosting will ultimately be preserved in some form.
You missed something. Since _yesterday_, the Mac OS now has daily checking for malware signatures. So the signature that was already in there with the initial install of the security update is bypassed. Point being, if it's not blocked tomorrow, then we can gripe. Right now it may well be fine with tomorrow's update. If the OS can block would-be exploits within a day of their hitting the wild, that's pretty good response.
Still to do for Apple, though:
- Turn off the default for Safari to execute files upon download
- Increase default security on the Applications folder
- Build more security checks into the Installer (in particular, I think it should tell people where it will place files)
Right now, Apple users are seeing multiple variations of a single attack that, on Windows systems, is a bloody nuisance to rip out and usually drops a rootkit behind. On the Mac, it relies on social engineering to get you to install an application into user space and takes about 5 minutes or less to get rid of.
Not that Macs are 100% safe (or ever were), but there's a fundamental difference here. When this Mac Defender starts getting dropped in with a kernel extension that I can't find because it patches an existing .kext and is installed silently in the background via a PDF exploit using JavaScript, then I'll worry a lot more about Macs.
Anybody who has an iPhone in the first place is probably not enough of a Free Software purist to want to sue Apple about not having the source!
More seriously, Apple has been the driver behind Webkit in general, and they've published everything else. 4.3 was initially published in early March. It's been almost exactly two months, with 3 point releases in that time and a mini-scandal about Location Services. Apple's had other priorities than making sure the source was on the site immediately, and now the point is moot because the sources were published today. Typical Free Software tempest in a teapot.
If Apple announced they were closing the iOS source entirely, then it would be a worthy fuss. This, not so much.
Not really - Thunderbolt uses the same plug and is electrically compatible with mini DisplayPort. They've just added more functionality to the connector. And mini DisplayPort has been the spec for a few years now in Apple gear, so it should last a while to come now that it's also used by Thunderbolt.
Other than that, the Mac mini supports HDMI out as well as mini DisplayPort. Until a couple of years ago, things were kind of in transition as the world moved away from VGA and into digital video out. Now things are more stable.
That rule was incorporated into the Constitution to prevent the European practice of importing new royal families on a somewhat regular basis. The current British royal family, for instance was brought in from Germany. The idea was to keep American independence.
Of course, this was from an era when few people traveled between nations often (citizens were rarely born overseas) and before international adoption became frequent. Times have changed since then, and the constitutional requirement effectively excludes a large group of citizens from serving.
Fortunately, we've still got a pretty big pool to choose from...
Android, the platform has sold a bunch more than iPhone, the phone. Because Android isn't one company's phone, it's the default free OS that phone vendors besides Apple and RIM adopted en masse. Why? Because by getting on board with Android, phone vendors don't have to pay the license fees, and can cut development costs. Plus they can get some pre-built apps for the phone without having to cultivate their own app market.
As far as phones themselves? iPhone sells far in far higher volume than any one Android phone - it just doesn't outsell the whole Android ecosystem. And won't anymore at this point. But the key metric is really how large, robust, and lucrative the platform app markets are. iOS' App Store dramatically outsells the Android Market right now and probably will for the reasonable future. Why? I think part of the reason is the nature of Android itself, and the phones it goes on. Outside of the passionate few, Android mainly is the generic OS you get when you get that phone that's a step up from the old feature phone you had, and there's no iPhone available as an option (or you don't really care one way or another, you just want the phone that's cheapest on a contract and has a web browser and e-mail).
I think the tablet market is a little different, at least to date. First of all, the iPad came to market as really the first fully-formed vision of a viable tablet. And right now just as the competition starts to catch up, Apple does something to jump ahead again. iPad 2 isn't much better (if at all) technically than the Xoom, but they have design in their favor, roughly identical specs, and Apple has a much more mature app ecosystem and about a year's head start.
It'll take a few years for the competition to even out. And meantime, these newer platforms don't really lend themselves to the old Windows ecosystem model where one company dominates and everyone else fights for scraps. Apple sells millions of iOS devices each quarter (over 20 million last quarter), and all those users reinforce each other, buying upgraded devices eventually and also buying apps. Developers make lots of money writing iOS apps. That isn't going away. At least 2, maybe even 3 platforms will likely survive and thrive for a long time to come. Apple's advantage now is that they are building devices for consumers, not so much for engineers. That's part of their DNA and why Android won't ever "win" outright.
In and around Boston AT&T service is usually pretty good, and has been for the last couple of years (they built out a lot of capacity here when 3g rolled out). Dropped calls are rare, data works well and fast, and I've got pretty much nothing to whine about except maybe the lack of any AT&T service north of the NH Lakes region.
Plus I was in NYC earlier this week, and though AT&T is legendary for bad service I had no problems at all there. Granted, I was only traveling between Grand Central, Times Square, and Central Park (played tourist with my kid for the day), but I would think congestion problems would be at their worst in midtown. I won't say AT&T is awesome, but I really don't see the hate they get. Before the iPhone, I was on Verizon with a Treo 700p, and the experience was horrible. Partly the phone, and partly the network. When I first got the iPhone the AT&T network was thoroughly meh, but as I said before the last couple of years have been pretty good for my usage. YMMV.
There is one key difference between this bubble and the first tech bubble - most of the companies in the current bubble are profitable, or at worst running around break-even. In Bubble 1.0, most of the newly public companies were losing scads of money, but were hoping to be the ones sitting when the music stopped.
Netflix, Facebook, and the like are making money now, even if it's lower than what their valuation would suggest. The biggest risk now that the 2.0 companies face is that a lot of them are tied to someone else's fortunes or assume that the competition will remain clueless. Zynga's tied to Facebook's fortunes, Netflix assumes Blockbuster will die (correct so far) and that studios will keep bending over for them.
Should Facebook become the next MySpace, or if another engine takes the momentum from Google, things could change. But that's a risk factor that should be accounted for in valuation. Profitability, though, is something we didn't have back then.
My point is basically that Netgear isn't involved in any of these markets that their CEO speaks of. They make perfectly decent products in their space (cheap-ass routers, switches, home NAS boxes, and, admittedly, a few home theater devices as well). They compete well in that space. But Netgear lives in a market where price is king. Recessions hit companies like Netgear hard because they sell devices that Linksys/Cisco, D-Link, Belkin, and a whole host of other companies compete with mainly on price. And if your Netgear router fails, there's no reason why you can't replace it with a Belkin. No lock-in. Apple products, for better or worse, aren't interchangeable with their competition. Once you're in the Apple ecosystem, you tend to stay there and get more and more items in it.
Netgear got its start as the spinoff from Bay Networks/Nortel, but they've been a commodity consumer product company for 15 years. And that's the mindset they look at things from.
My market expertise is limited, but I get it from 1000+ posts on Slashdot over a decade plus, and over 20 years in the IT business, with 7 years of owning a consultancy with multiple employees and a lot of mixed-platform business clients. It's not the background some have (and a lot of folks know more than me), but I've been around a pretty long time and have seen plenty. Plus I bought Apple at $16 (though not that much of it, sadly)!
Check me if I'm missing something here - but wasn't the economy from late 2007 through early last year bad to epic proportions, and pretty much on a global level?
(not that it's exactly roaring right now)
Apple posted record sales growth quarter upon quarter for all that time, becoming one of the largest corporations in the world. I don't think a bad economy is exactly slowing them down. They've discovered an economic trend, and are exploiting the heck out of it:
- The fiercest competition and the lowest profits are at the lowest end of the market in any given area. If you add features and function over time and keep prices roughly the same, you make more money than if you sell the same stuff for less each year. Plus you get a constant stream of upgraders over time as well.
Apple figured that out, and finally got an ecosystem built to support it (iTunes and the App Store). They're now bringing that functionality to the main platform as well. If all your content and apps are keyed to one platform, you can't realistically leave that platform. It worked for Microsoft on PCs for decades - only the rise of mobility and Apple's shift to Intel as a chip platform have allowed a dent to be made in the MS market share in the last few years. Android will be a dominant platform overall - but they're replacing the low-end featurephones and extreme geek phones more than they hurt the iPhone platform. Google wants to give away Android to make money on search advertising - their core business. Phone vendors want Android because they don't have to pay for it and can set it up however the carrier wants. Carriers want Android phones because they can customize them to lock in their users to buy content from the carrier.
Users either want iPhones, Blackberries, or whatever they get for free (or really cheap) from their carrier. And they don't care about swappable batteries, either.
As for Netgear - they make cheap-ass routers, switches, and home NAS boxes. Where are they getting this market expertise?
There's a difference between owning/doing business as an S Corp like he does (and I do, as do a lot of independent professionals) and being the CEO of a conventional C Corp. As CEO of a C Corp, you're not the owner, you work for the company. Steve Jobs and other people who get $1 in compensation get paid primarily in stock grants. If the stock rises, they cash it in and get money out when they want to. If the company doesn't do well, worst case is they get nothing - for practical purposes most boards will re-price or reissue options so they get some pay out of it. Lower level execs are usually paid with a combination of more cash pay and fewer options, but current thinking seems to be that a CEO is most directly tied to stock value.
Also, in many cases with "rock star" CEOs like the ones in tech, they have som much stock from taking the company public in the first place that they don't need much cash compensation, and it doesn't look as cool if they take it.
In the S Corp world, I think most of us do it for the liability protection. At least at mine, I pay myself a pretty good salary. I take out occasional payments that I pay taxes on - it's usually easier to do it as a bonus in my payroll and have taxes dealt with, especially because I pay bonuses to my employees. The flip side is that owning an S Corp does let you expense things that ordinarily might not be deductible as a regular company employee, like cars and at least part of your housing (as a previous poster mentioned). I keep things very above board - pretty much the only things that the company expenses in my life are my car and its related costs, my cell phone, and any tech I buy that isn't specifically for the house. I could push more stuff on the company if I wanted to be really aggressive, but it's not worth the potential hassle to me.
The one place where I get hit in return as an S Corp owner is in health insurance - I don't get as much of a tax benefit for my own insurance as I do for that of my employees.
What this CPA did was pay himself a token paycheck and then push a lot more off as profits. Had he paid himself a higher base - say, $50-$60k he likely wouldn't have had a problem with it and still would have had a nice profit distribution.
This isn't really about desktop browsers. It's all about mobility. Not a coincidence that Google announced this right when Apple announced that iPhone was coming to Verizon (Android's biggest US sales generator).
Simply put, Safari in iOS doesn't allow plugins and relies on the HTML5 Video tag to play H.264 video (which is supported natively by frameworks in iOS and MacOS). Until Android 2.2, it was the same thing in Android. Now Android supports Flash, and Google also built their own special version of Flash into desktop Chrome. So this is pretty much just a naked attempt to kill the HTML5 video tag and by extension harm iOS and help Android.
On the desktop, Chrome exists mainly to keep Microsoft reasonably honest. On Android, it's everything. Google wants to do everything it can to blunt iOS and boost Android - and trying to break iOS's video experience may be a dirty trick but all's fair in OS wars. If it were just about boosting WebM then Google would start pushing WebM, helping with video acceleration efforts, helping to produce authoring tools, and such while not changing a thing about their already built H.264 support. But they are actively removing H.264 support from the browser.
Don't be evil, my ass. Apple may not be the paragon of Free Software that most Slashdot readers want them to be, but they are supporting a standards-based tag that uses a popular, documented video standard that is prevalent in multiple media forms and well-supported by browsers and tools.
When the Chromium dev build with H.264 support removed is pushed to my computer is when I remove Chrome from my computer. Microsoft and Apple are doing the right thing here for once - at least Firefox's stance is political in nature. Google's is just about trying to kill iPhones. When Apple changes the default search engine in iOS and Safari to Bing, this'll be why they did it.
While he's at it, let's get technology to prevent all conversation between the driver and passengers. Because after all, a driver talking to other people is distracted.
Then we can take out all car radios. Listening to music or talk is distracting to drivers, so it should be banned.
For an obvious follow-up, we can ban all road signs and billboards. People can get distracted looking at them. (wait, I don't hate the billboard thing so much)
Or maybe we can do this instead. Simply ban all handheld phone use without a handsfree device. Make Bluetooth and/or a aux jack a standard part of all car radios going forward, instead of part of a big-dollar premium upgrade with your nav system. Mandate handsfree technology be used by all drivers. And ban texting/email by drivers, period. That I can get behind. The rest of it's just ridiculous.
Besides that, Apple also has no control over pricing - the developer decides anything to do with price and can change it at any time. Apple gets 30% (on a free app they get squat).
Basically, my interpretation of this kerfuffle is simple: Apple provides a common repository that developers who pay the $99/year fee can use for their app distribution. Paying the fee also gets you access to prerelease code and to developer support. Developers can sell their software using any license or pricing they want. VLC is GPL'd software, and so the developer is in compliance with the license by distributing their source code through their own website.
As of right now, I don't see a source download link there, or any notice that the software changes are all merged back to the main VLC trunk. So by that measure the developer is likely infringing. And it should be corrected.
But the FSF - this is another case of pissing off end users to make a political point. The GPL is a wonderful tool that has made sure a lot of useful computer code has remained free for developers to use as needed. It's helped an entire OS get traction. But the FSF's jihad against anything that doesn't meet their purity standard is just silly at this point. Work with the software author to get the app compliant. People can download the app code and play with it all they want - the dev tools themselves are free (as in beer). Yeesh.
I was on the old Cingular network when I first went into business. My first smartphone was a Treo 650. It sucked. Switched to a Treo 700p on Verizon a couple of years later when it came out. Network was a little better, phone sucked worse. Far worse.
After debating it with myself for a while, I bought the first iPhone when it came out in 2007. I still wasn't impressed by the AT&T network, but the phone worked so well I didn't care. When 3G came to pass I was unimpressed enough that if Verizon had an equivalent phone then that could have done simultaneous voice and data I might have switched.
Starting in late 2008, the AT&T network in my area's gotten a lot better. Good enough that I'm not tempted to switch anymore. I upgraded to the iPhone 4 last month, and antenna problems or not it improves reception even more for me - drop spots I had with older AT&T phones (going back to my Treo 650) are not a problem anymore. 3G speeds are excellent. When my VZ contract expires for the data card I have with them next month I will cancel it and just use tethering on my iPhone to save more money.
Basically, I pay less than I used to, have a better phone, and next to no network issues anywhere I go regularly. On the rare occasion I've had to call customer service they've been helpful and easy to reach. More than once they've called me back to follow up and make sure I'm happy. Bottom line for me - I'm happy with AT&T, and I see no reason to change. And I'm a happy iPhone user as well. As long as they don't screw it up, I'll stick with AT&T.
I'd mod that as funny if I had any points right now. In fact, even Chris Hansen would mod that as funny.
Then he'd show up at your house with a camera crew.
I think freezing the market only works when you're not in the space already and you have a product that is a radical departure from the competition. The original iPhone met that measure - the newer models since then have not. The iPad met it as well, but even then it was out just over 2 months later.
Preannouncements don't really hold up too well outside of that because the market changes too fast and you've got two real possibilities when you announce 6 months ahead of time:
- Other competitors have used your announced specs to meet or exceed what you're doing, and they were out quicker
- You fail to meet or exceed the product spec yourself and look bad.
If the rest of the market was sitting still, it'd be a no-risk play for Cisco. After all, they are new to the tablet space. But Apple has a huge lead and enough time for more product iterations and another OS rev, other Android tablet vendors could match or blow away what Cisco has announced, or a host of other things could derail them.
Yeah, but this is the Osborne Effect applied back to them. Why wait for a device that may or may not ship in half a year when you can start deploying a known platform now?
The iPad isn't perfect, of course, but it's here now, there's a robust OS on it today with a big software library available, a known development path, methods for controlled deployment (businesses can set up their own App Store path), and we also know what's coming in the platform OS this year for it (everything that's in iOS 4, with some additional features that'll be announced as the beta cycle kicks in).
I don't have anything against Android as such, and I also don't think all tablets except iPad are inherently doomed. I just see the strategy of announcing things so far ahead as a Bad Idea, especially when you are shipping a "me too" device. The only reason it worked for Apple once is because there was no iPhone before to cannibalize, and because it was a pretty radical change from what was already in the marketplace.
Now Apple announces new iPhones a couple of weeks before they go on sale. The next iPad won't be announced in July for January delivery. It'll be announced less than a month before you can walk into a store and buy it. And until then, it won't exist outside of the supply chain rumor mills.
No, Apple doesn't need Verizon. They need millions of people who are locked into the App Store ecosystem, and between the tens of millions of iPhones sold, the millions of iPod Touches, and the millions of iPads - they've got all that and more.
And because of the App Store, virtually all of those users will stay yoked to their device and its upgrade path forever.
Verizon's 92 million subscribers are tempting, and if all 92 million of them were going to get iPhones it would be compelling. But they aren't. Maybe a few million would over the remaining life of the EVDO network, but meanwhile Apple would have to build an iPhone that couldn't do simultaneous voice and data, didn't use a SIM, and probably couldn't easily be activated at home. Until LTE I just don't see any good reason for Apple to do it.
Apple's darned happy to make a huge profit on their relatively small portion of the overall cellphone market. Android is ultimately going to sell more phones, because Google gives it away to all comers and it's now the standard OS for pretty much anything other than Windows, RIM, and Apple phones. But Android won't make anyone a lot of money - it'll reduce costs for cellphone makers because there's no royalties, and it'll make Google some extra money on search. That isn't going to overthrow Apple or RIM anytime soon.
If any of these companies learned anything at all from Apple, they wouldn't be announcing tablets to ship next year. They'd be announcing finished products that will be out this month. You can't build a product and aim at a moving target.
HP Slate with Windows 7? Dead, and HP bought Palm to recover. Lenovo Ideapad? Announced at CES, still not out, supposedly a new OS is coming. Cisco Cius? Looks cool, not out until next year.
iPad? Over 3 million of them shipped so far, they were in users' hands 10 weeks after they were announced, and by the time most of these competitors ship (if they do at all), Apple will have a second release of the shipping OS and may well have a second generation of the hardware out as well.
The only thing Apple's preannounced several months ahead of time in recent years was the original iPhone. For a reason - that froze the smartphone market for almost six months until the first one shipped.
Word to future iPad wannabes: Tell us about it when you're ready to ship. You're not going to freeze the market by announcing 6 months early. People aren't going to say "screw Apple, let's wait for the Cius to make tablets legitimate". You'll only look stupid when you don't ship the same product you announced 6 months ago.
Ultimately the codebases will pretty much merge - but there is a _lot_ of stuff in desktop MacOS that isn't in iOS, and vice-versa. There's also a need basis behind a lot of it. Desktop operating systems are suited to large systems with higher power consumption, multicore multi-GHz processors, gigabytes of RAM, and massive storage. iOS (and mobile systems in general) are suited to a much more constrained environment.
What pretty much happened in Apple-land is that Leopard forked to provide the basis of what is now iOS - as the platform matures further a lot of that will backport into the core OS. The iOS team picked what they needed and can now give some of it back. I don't think you'll ever get away from a freely downloadable and installable option in the desktop OS. A do think that eventually the App Store will be available for the desktop platform as a distribution option, and all the vendors who now use Escellerate and Kagi (and all the other online distributors) will all jump en masse to the App Store for Mac. Good for developers, good for users, lousy for distributors.
I also think the criteria for App Store for Mac will not be nearly as strict as it is for the iOS version. But it won't matter too much. Distribution choices for the desktop will be like this:
- Direct distribution: Available to anyone, handle sales and fulfillment yourself - whether electronic or physical.
- 3rd party: Still available, but increasingly irrelevant (most will opt for the App Store).
- App Store: The store handles installation and updates for you in exchange for a cut.
"In the fall". (at least, that's what Jobs said at the OS 4.0 announcement in April)
More to the point, 3.2 was for iPad-only. 4.0 is initially just for iPhone/iPod Touch (basically the same device), and 4.1 (that will likely be the version number) will be a unified release supporting all iOS devices and adding some additional functionality. I'm anticipating basic printing support and some form of access to remote/server files as the major additions.
It will probably be out in the October timeframe in time for the fall generation of iPod devices.