Executive Vice President Tim Cook didn't say whether the new iPods will come at a press event Apple has scheduled for Wednesday morning. But during a conference call with analysts, he suggested that the iPod Nano won't be the last new iPod of the year.
"Over a year ago, we set out to create revolutionary updates to our core iPod lineup," Cook said. "Last quarter was the final quarter for the older products. We think we did rather well with the prior lineup and believe that we will do even better with the new lineup that we have for the holiday season, including the new iPod Nano and some very innovative new products that we have yet to introduce."
Um..... according to this story as it reads on Slashdot, " 'Apple Computer plans to introduce more iPods before the end of the year', a company executive said Tuesday," I challenge the poster to find where Cook said there will be more iPods before the end of the year.
OK, according to the rumour mill there will likely be a new iPod today, but let's get it straight here: Cook said Apple has some innovative new products up its sleeve, but did not mention whether those products are iPods.
If this story wasn't so misleading I wouldn't have even bothered to read the linked article. Please, Slashdot, be more careful... this is misinformation that wastes my valuable nerd time.
A Canadian lobby group similar to the RIAA unsuccessfully tried to impose a levy on iPod sales. This is clearly the wrong approach, because people who use them legally and fairly still get penalized.
Paying extra money to RIAA / artists / whatever when you buy your MP3 player is like having to buy your music twice.
Here's a statement made by XML-guy Tim Bray on the first page of the roundtable discussion that is put succinctly I just had to mention it:
I think there's big money to be made in online music, but not until someone has the cojones to route around the the record labels. To disintermediate, to focus on the artists and the listeners instead of the extremely-fat cats currently addicted to selling 25-cent plastic disks for $20 and doling out a few pennies to the musicians, and trying to protect that franchise by suing their customers.
Well put, Tim. Unfortunately for iTunes to sell big-name artists today, disintermediating is not an option. But it sure is a nice ideal.
Apple doesn't need to "test the waters" with an iPhone. In fact an iPhone would probably be another company's hardware platform / RF section combined with Apple software and a click wheel. Something like this may appear one day, but the ROKR will have had little to do with it.
As to how Apple is trying to shape the future of personal electronics technology by including a functionally limited iTunes inside a third-party cell phone, I'd like to offer a much simpler answer that people are somehow missing:
Currently there are a few phones with built-in MP3 players. Simply put, it is therefore necessary that Apple enter this market by introducing a cell phone capable of playing iTMS purchases.
This is absolutely essential for the iTMS to remain most attractive to record companies.
Music-playing phones aren't quite perfect yet, so the initial ROKR iTunes offering doesn't need to be anything great - the point is that Apple is now in that market, and no other music store can say "unlike iTunes, our music can be downloaded to cell phones, which is the future of personal music players".
iTunes on the ROKR is for no other purpose than to establish a position in the wireless phone market, and the 100-song limitation is to ensure nobody buys a ROKR if they want an iPod. In fact this could work to their advantage: "Hey, having all this music is really great, but I just wish I could carry more songs around with me. I guess now I need an iPod!"
iTunes has a separately stored "play count" which you can use, along with ratings, as criteria for your smart playlists. The field isn't shown in your listings by default, but I leave it showing because I think it's kinda cool.
Apple's move to Intel processors is great news for gamers, but bad news for gaming on Mac OS.
When I eventually own an Intel-based Mac I'm sure I'll install Windows on its own partition, just for gaming. After all, when I want to play a game I really don't care about the user experience my OS gives me. When I want to do anything else I'll boot into OS X.
Why would anybody bother to develop or port games for Mac when it will be so easy for Mac gamers to use Windows, and the future of Windows gaming is (sadly) DirectX? As soon as you launch a game the user experience of the OS is gone, and thus so are most of the advantages of OS X from the users' perspective.
Note: my comment about DirectX is not a troll, it is based on the following article from the same site that carries TFA:
Windows Vista does not like OpenGL - Yoc - 18:46:26
the OpenGL community is "boiling" since the release of the beta version of Windows Vista (ex-longhorn), and Microsoft statement regarding OpenGL support in MS future OS. It is known that Vista is rely on DirectX9 for all graphics, animations, etc...
With Windows XP, it is possible to run OpenGL-based application at full speed thanks to OpenGL drivers that have direct access to the hardware.
But it seems that Microsoft has decided to change this direct hardware access for OpenGL in Windows Vista.
Microsoft's current plan for OpenGL on Windows Vista is to layer OpenGL over Direct3D in order to use OpenGL with a composited desktop to obtain the Aeroglass experience. If an OpenGL ICD is run - the desktop compositor will switch off - significantly degrading the user experience.
Not only the OpenGL performance will be significantly reduced, but it will also become impossible tu run 2 applications simultaneously in the same display in frame-mode, one being DirectX-based , the other one being OpenGL-based.
So for the OpenGL community, it is quite clear that Microsoft has decided to force developers to use DirectX for all software if they wish to get full hardware power.
The bad thing for Mac users is of course that less OpenGL applications in PC world means less OpenGL applications ported to Mac.
Let's hope that the OpenGL community will be able to force Microsoft to change its mind...
The casing is not flexible. It's a hard shell. Whether you left- or right- click, the action is the same: the whole front of the mouse moves downward. It determines which side you clicked on using touch sensors.
Sony's seamless mouse has a microswitch under each side and a flexible case.
Imagine if the big phone companies were the only ISPs allowed on copper. That's exactly what's happenening here, except it's only the big cable companies who are allowed to be ISPs on coax. It is only bad news for the consumer.
That's an interesting thought, except that if this is a result of pressure from music and movie companies, then whatever they have up their sleeve - new music / video apps that rely on hardware-level DRM - will not be released for PPC.
In other words, you won't see universal binaries of apps that require that level of DRM. They'll be intel only.
Where do you get the ideao that Li-ion batteries have memory effect? In fact they exhibit memory effect even less than NiMH, and NiMH batteries must be much bigger to have the same amp-hour rating. This is why most major current-guzzling consumer electronic devices like laptops, wireless phones, video cameras and MP3 players use Li-Ion (or its more svelte cousin, Li-polymer).
LCDs keep getting better as their prices continue to plummet. The original poster needs a CRT for high-end medical stereoscopic imaging - as long as there is a demand for that type of thing it will remain available, but as the niche grows smaller the cost will of course rise.
Apple still has that gorgeous 30" Cinema HD display which to me is the ultimate monitor. I can't afford one of course, so the two 21" Sun CRT's on my desktop will suffice quite nicely until something goes wrong with them!
Continuing on the pro-LCD side of things, remember that a pixel is a pixel. I'm not going to continue to flog the "native resolution" issue that has been brought up time and time again in this discussion, I think that any self-respecting geek ought to know why running an LCD at anything other than its native resolution will look like ass. So putting that behind us, remember that CRT's have a "dot pitch" specification which does not apply to LCD's. It's very relevant with CRT's however, because on an analog CRT a pixel is not really a tangible thing. It's just where the electron beams happen to repeatedly go. As a result CRT's even have a (very) fine "native resolution" which is many times finer than that of any LCD. Still, it is there, and no matter what a CRT can NEVER be a sharp as any digitally-connect LCD, where each pixel is actually a separate group of three phototransistors, which do not blur even slightly into the next pixel.
For this reason I believe LCD's tend to offer a far sharper view that is generally less stressful on the eyes.
By the way, if you haven't seen it for a while watch "Total Recall" (the Arnold Shwartznnegger flick) - it's hilarious how it dates itself... this movie was made in around 1990 I think, and is set in around the year 2020 or so. There are video screens everywere in this movie, for advertisements and home computing applications, and they're all these ricidulous big bulky CRT's. Why is that interesting? Well, because when I watched it a few months ago it was the first time I ever thought that CRT's look obsolete. They are clearly not the future of video display devices. It could be anything else, but the prominent CRT's alone make Total Recall look archaic.
here's the text of it. sorry it's not heavily html-laden, like the original: ----- Apple Store, Yorkdale 9:30 a.m., Saturday, May 21
See the latest from Apple up close. Help us celebrate the grand opening of our first Canadian store and be one of the first to check out Mac OS X Tiger. See for yourself how the iPod family and iPod accessories continue to redefine the way you experience music. You can also try the powerful and compact Mac mini--the most affordable Mac ever. And while you're at it, test-drive iLife '05 and iWork '05, software that lets you create and present better than ever. What's more, the first 1,500 people to stop by the grand opening get a fre e Apple T-shirt.
A great place to shop. A great place to learn. The Apple Store is more than just a great place to shop. It's also a great place to get answers to tough questions. Come in and schedule an appointment with a Genius at our Genius Bar or attend our free classes and workshops. You can also speak with a Business Consultant about our range of service and support options, as well as get details of our Business Day.
Grand Opening Contest. Come by between May 21 and June 30 and enter to win a Digital Lifestyle Collection valued at $2,985.* The collection includes a 17-inch iMac G5, a Canon digital camera and camcorder, an Epson printer, and an iPod mini.
Join us on May 21. This is one grand opening you won't want to miss.
Sour grapes for sure!
on
Safari vs. KHTML
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's not Apple's fault the KDE development community doesn't have a lot of use for the code that makes WebCore.
This is the nature of OSS. Software continues to evolve and fork.
KHTML developers who can see the big picture beyond their own egos should be ecstatic that somebody has applied their effective, standards-compliant codebase to a commercially viable, successful product that will help bring tighter standards adherence to html / web authors.
It would certainly be a lot more sportsmanlike than "boo-hoo I can only use 10% of Apple's code".
Suck it up. You develop open source so that people can modify it for their own needs, provided they share their code with you.
I agree with you about 90% about the Finder. Apple would do well to listen to John Siracusa. Every time I have lots of files to sort through or move around I try my hand at it, I try putting folders in the thingie on the left (which aren't spring-loaded for some reason), I try using modifier keys with drag-and-drop operations that never seem to behave the way I expect them to, you can't marquee-select stuff in list view by starting in vacant white space...
I wish somebody could just recreate the elegance of the classic finder from the OS 9 days. Every nuance, every feature. It was just perfect. Oh well....
What I like about Dashboard is its integration with the UI. These "widgets" are actually representations of little fictitious devices. The Macintosh operating system of old had "desk accessories" - essentially cute little applets, like an alarm clock and a calculator, that were launched from the Apple menu, and appeared on top of whatever app you were running.
21 years later Tiger kicks that concept up a notch, by having a sort of a desk accessories layer that allows you to have all these little movable devices appear on top of the document you're currently working on. There's value in that! If you're working on a document you don't ever need to take your eyes off it if you just want to paste a word into your thesaurus for a quick synonym, or quickly figure out 53 divided by 8.
Virtual desktops are another approach, but the effect is visually jarring and your brain takes a moment to get back on track when you finally return to your work. With dashboard's widgets sitting on top of your work, you're not likely to forget what you were doing.
OS X is chock full of gratuitous visual effects and animations like icons that shrink a little to make room for one more, minimizing windows pour themselves into the dock, menus fade out, panels slide out of the window you're working on instead of dialogs just appearing front and center -- while you don't really need any of that stuff, it gives the whole computing experience a natural feel. It makes you feel more like the UI elements on your screen are actual physical things that you touch and interact with. Dashboard builds on this.
OS X's UI is advanced, and it comes at the expense of some processor cycles. Other GUIs need processor cycles too, just less.
Re:They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video
on
New Mac System Specs
·
· Score: 1
Well, Apple also touts the liquid-cooled 2.5 GHz G5 as being quieter than the other G5's. This is attractive to me, as I work in audio.
Even if the next-generation G5's don't require liquid cooling, I'd like to see it as a BTO option. If it is only a few hundred dollars more I'd probably spring for it if it in fact is quieter than fans.
Re:They both make knives for the Swiss Army ...
on
New Mac System Specs
·
· Score: 2, Funny
both have been manufacturing Swiss Army Knives for over 100 years and both must meet identical specifications laid down by the army.
Just what kind of army specifies that they need a corkscrew?
Usage Note: The verb loan is well established in American usage and cannot be considered incorrect. The frequent objections to the form by American grammarians may have originated from a provincial deference to British critics, who long ago labeled the usage a typical Americanism. Loan is, however, used to describe only physical transactions, as of money or goods; for figurative transactions, lend is correct: Distance lends enchantment. The allusions lend the work a classical tone.
I was taught in school that "loan" is a noun while "lend" is the only verb you can use in any case. Mind you, I'm Canadian, and apparently you guys reject the use of "eh" as well (go figger)...:)
Slashdot Mirror
products != ipods
OK, according to the rumour mill there will likely be a new iPod today, but let's get it straight here: Cook said Apple has some innovative new products up its sleeve, but did not mention whether those products are iPods.
If this story wasn't so misleading I wouldn't have even bothered to read the linked article. Please, Slashdot, be more careful ... this is misinformation that wastes my valuable nerd time.
A Canadian lobby group similar to the RIAA unsuccessfully tried to impose a levy on iPod sales. This is clearly the wrong approach, because people who use them legally and fairly still get penalized.
Paying extra money to RIAA / artists / whatever when you buy your MP3 player is like having to buy your music twice.
Apple doesn't need to "test the waters" with an iPhone. In fact an iPhone would probably be another company's hardware platform / RF section combined with Apple software and a click wheel. Something like this may appear one day, but the ROKR will have had little to do with it.
As to how Apple is trying to shape the future of personal electronics technology by including a functionally limited iTunes inside a third-party cell phone, I'd like to offer a much simpler answer that people are somehow missing:
Currently there are a few phones with built-in MP3 players. Simply put, it is therefore necessary that Apple enter this market by introducing a cell phone capable of playing iTMS purchases.
This is absolutely essential for the iTMS to remain most attractive to record companies.
Music-playing phones aren't quite perfect yet, so the initial ROKR iTunes offering doesn't need to be anything great - the point is that Apple is now in that market, and no other music store can say "unlike iTunes, our music can be downloaded to cell phones, which is the future of personal music players".
iTunes on the ROKR is for no other purpose than to establish a position in the wireless phone market, and the 100-song limitation is to ensure nobody buys a ROKR if they want an iPod. In fact this could work to their advantage: "Hey, having all this music is really great, but I just wish I could carry more songs around with me. I guess now I need an iPod!"
iTunes has a separately stored "play count" which you can use, along with ratings, as criteria for your smart playlists. The field isn't shown in your listings by default, but I leave it showing because I think it's kinda cool.
I'm an Intellivision spaz, you insensitive clod!
When I eventually own an Intel-based Mac I'm sure I'll install Windows on its own partition, just for gaming. After all, when I want to play a game I really don't care about the user experience my OS gives me. When I want to do anything else I'll boot into OS X.
Why would anybody bother to develop or port games for Mac when it will be so easy for Mac gamers to use Windows, and the future of Windows gaming is (sadly) DirectX? As soon as you launch a game the user experience of the OS is gone, and thus so are most of the advantages of OS X from the users' perspective.
Note: my comment about DirectX is not a troll, it is based on the following article from the same site that carries TFA:
The casing is not flexible. It's a hard shell. Whether you left- or right- click, the action is the same: the whole front of the mouse moves downward. It determines which side you clicked on using touch sensors.
Sony's seamless mouse has a microswitch under each side and a flexible case.
He played the loveable dad in American Pie. Thanks to the Canadian government you can't get him on your iPod any more, even if you ask for him!
I just installed the wood case mod to my iPod and now I find that it just feels snappier overall. Good work.
Imagine if the big phone companies were the only ISPs allowed on copper. That's exactly what's happenening here, except it's only the big cable companies who are allowed to be ISPs on coax. It is only bad news for the consumer.
That's an interesting thought, except that if this is a result of pressure from music and movie companies, then whatever they have up their sleeve - new music / video apps that rely on hardware-level DRM - will not be released for PPC.
In other words, you won't see universal binaries of apps that require that level of DRM. They'll be intel only.
Where do you get the ideao that Li-ion batteries have memory effect? In fact they exhibit memory effect even less than NiMH, and NiMH batteries must be much bigger to have the same amp-hour rating. This is why most major current-guzzling consumer electronic devices like laptops, wireless phones, video cameras and MP3 players use Li-Ion (or its more svelte cousin, Li-polymer).
LCDs keep getting better as their prices continue to plummet. The original poster needs a CRT for high-end medical stereoscopic imaging - as long as there is a demand for that type of thing it will remain available, but as the niche grows smaller the cost will of course rise.
Apple still has that gorgeous 30" Cinema HD display which to me is the ultimate monitor. I can't afford one of course, so the two 21" Sun CRT's on my desktop will suffice quite nicely until something goes wrong with them!
Continuing on the pro-LCD side of things, remember that a pixel is a pixel. I'm not going to continue to flog the "native resolution" issue that has been brought up time and time again in this discussion, I think that any self-respecting geek ought to know why running an LCD at anything other than its native resolution will look like ass. So putting that behind us, remember that CRT's have a "dot pitch" specification which does not apply to LCD's. It's very relevant with CRT's however, because on an analog CRT a pixel is not really a tangible thing. It's just where the electron beams happen to repeatedly go. As a result CRT's even have a (very) fine "native resolution" which is many times finer than that of any LCD. Still, it is there, and no matter what a CRT can NEVER be a sharp as any digitally-connect LCD, where each pixel is actually a separate group of three phototransistors, which do not blur even slightly into the next pixel.
For this reason I believe LCD's tend to offer a far sharper view that is generally less stressful on the eyes.
By the way, if you haven't seen it for a while watch "Total Recall" (the Arnold Shwartznnegger flick) - it's hilarious how it dates itself... this movie was made in around 1990 I think, and is set in around the year 2020 or so. There are video screens everywere in this movie, for advertisements and home computing applications, and they're all these ricidulous big bulky CRT's. Why is that interesting? Well, because when I watched it a few months ago it was the first time I ever thought that CRT's look obsolete. They are clearly not the future of video display devices. It could be anything else, but the prominent CRT's alone make Total Recall look archaic.
here's the text of it. sorry it's not heavily html-laden, like the original:
-----
Apple Store, Yorkdale
9:30 a.m., Saturday, May 21
See the latest from Apple up close.
Help us celebrate the grand opening of our first Canadian store and be one of the first to check out Mac OS X Tiger. See for yourself how the iPod family and iPod accessories continue to redefine the way you experience music. You can also try the powerful and compact Mac mini--the most affordable Mac ever. And while you're at it, test-drive iLife '05 and iWork '05, software that lets you create and present better than ever. What's more, the first 1,500 people to stop by the grand opening get a fre e Apple T-shirt.
A great place to shop. A great place to learn.
The Apple Store is more than just a great place to shop. It's also a great place to get answers to tough questions. Come in and schedule an appointment with a Genius at our Genius Bar or attend our free classes and workshops. You can also speak with a Business Consultant about our range of service and support options, as well as get details of our Business Day.
Grand Opening Contest.
Come by between May 21 and June 30 and enter to win a Digital Lifestyle Collection valued at $2,985.* The collection includes a 17-inch iMac G5, a Canon digital camera and camcorder, an Epson printer, and an iPod mini.
Join us on May 21. This is one grand opening you won't want to miss.
It's not Apple's fault the KDE development community doesn't have a lot of use for the code that makes WebCore.
This is the nature of OSS. Software continues to evolve and fork.
KHTML developers who can see the big picture beyond their own egos should be ecstatic that somebody has applied their effective, standards-compliant codebase to a commercially viable, successful product that will help bring tighter standards adherence to html / web authors.
It would certainly be a lot more sportsmanlike than "boo-hoo I can only use 10% of Apple's code".
Suck it up. You develop open source so that people can modify it for their own needs, provided they share their code with you.
I dunno what they ate, but they sure drank the Kool-Aid.
From a previous article, you really should read this comment.
I agree with you about 90% about the Finder. Apple would do well to listen to John Siracusa. Every time I have lots of files to sort through or move around I try my hand at it, I try putting folders in the thingie on the left (which aren't spring-loaded for some reason), I try using modifier keys with drag-and-drop operations that never seem to behave the way I expect them to, you can't marquee-select stuff in list view by starting in vacant white space...
I wish somebody could just recreate the elegance of the classic finder from the OS 9 days. Every nuance, every feature. It was just perfect. Oh well....
There is another promising open-source Mac alternative which is just getting off the ground.
What I like about Dashboard is its integration with the UI. These "widgets" are actually representations of little fictitious devices. The Macintosh operating system of old had "desk accessories" - essentially cute little applets, like an alarm clock and a calculator, that were launched from the Apple menu, and appeared on top of whatever app you were running.
21 years later Tiger kicks that concept up a notch, by having a sort of a desk accessories layer that allows you to have all these little movable devices appear on top of the document you're currently working on. There's value in that! If you're working on a document you don't ever need to take your eyes off it if you just want to paste a word into your thesaurus for a quick synonym, or quickly figure out 53 divided by 8.
Virtual desktops are another approach, but the effect is visually jarring and your brain takes a moment to get back on track when you finally return to your work. With dashboard's widgets sitting on top of your work, you're not likely to forget what you were doing.
OS X is chock full of gratuitous visual effects and animations like icons that shrink a little to make room for one more, minimizing windows pour themselves into the dock, menus fade out, panels slide out of the window you're working on instead of dialogs just appearing front and center -- while you don't really need any of that stuff, it gives the whole computing experience a natural feel. It makes you feel more like the UI elements on your screen are actual physical things that you touch and interact with. Dashboard builds on this.
OS X's UI is advanced, and it comes at the expense of some processor cycles. Other GUIs need processor cycles too, just less.
Well, Apple also touts the liquid-cooled 2.5 GHz G5 as being quieter than the other G5's. This is attractive to me, as I work in audio.
Even if the next-generation G5's don't require liquid cooling, I'd like to see it as a BTO option. If it is only a few hundred dollars more I'd probably spring for it if it in fact is quieter than fans.
both have been manufacturing Swiss Army Knives for over 100 years and both must meet identical specifications laid down by the army.
Just what kind of army specifies that they need a corkscrew?