While Spinal Tap is probably one of the funniest movies ever made, and one of the best satires of the music business, there's one idiosyncrasy of bands that has become the stuff of legend, but has its roots (usless trivia coming up) in a rational and functional purpose.
It used to be Van Halen that included, among other things in their contracts, a requirement that a bowl filled with a specific mass of M&M's in all colors EXCEPT absolutely no brown. Since the days of their wild contract riders, many recording artists have followed suit with their tour promoters and required some utterly bizarre requests to be fulfilled. One of the funniest moments in the film for me is Nigel being baffled by the meat tray. It's inconceivable to him that the meat could just be folded to fit the bread... to him, the bread isn't big enough. I was backstage at a concert where precisely this kind of stupidity reared its ugly head, and specifically concerning a meat tray that arrived late where the band still had time to send someone down the street at least and pick up some takeout. Of course that never occurred to them.
Regarding Van Halen, though... their tour managers actually included bizarre requests like the one about the M&M's (which has been repeated ad nauseum in other contracts in homage to Van Halen) as a safety check. Their reasoning was that if the promoters weren't paying attention to items like this they also might not be reading carefully through critical safety requirements included in the same contract.
The guy concludes that AppleTV must not be "well suited" for HD (he defines that as maybe, possibly, there are inadequate hardware resources because the device consumes very little power).
Then, in an absolute stunner, he makes it abundantly clear he has never seen HD content played through AppleTV!
Speaking as a former film critic, I'm amazed this passes for journalism.
Furthermore, given the extremely generic analyses of the AppleTV and XBOX (which give no strong indication that the writer actually got his hands on and comprehensively dissected either device's features, as his comments seem to be restricted to observations you could discover on Google) the review seems to have been written either by an incompetent writer or for a dumb audience.
Of course one question begs the other... What kind of writer, do you suppose, attracts a dumb audience?
Of course I wasn't implying that no one had done a plot twist before... I was simply speaking of on a local timeline. Not every narrative has to have a twist, but between 1993 and 1996 there was a significant resurgence of popularity in the twist ending. While seemingly unrelated to gaming, I think that films like "The Usual Suspects" and "The Sixth Sense" raised expectations of viewers that there ought to be a twist ending... an expectation which had both good and bad effects on popular cinema.
Myst was not only the first million-selling CD-ROM game ever, but it is also the best selling computer game in history until it was overtaken by The Sims.
The ingenuity of Myst was that it ushered in an era of adventure-puzzle games but in my opinion there wasn't even a close second until the sequel, Riven, came along. Some other notes of distinction attributable to Myst:
1. Prior to Myst's release on the Macintosh, CD-ROM drives were optional on computers. The timing of Myst's release with the emergence of Macintoshes that came standard with CD-ROM drives and the explosion in sales of Myst drove consumers to demand CD-ROM drives in their computers which quickly led to CD-ROM drives becoming standard equipment.
2. Myst was not originally ported to Windows and until it was, many consumers bought Macintoshes just so they could play Myst.
3. The use of Cinepak compression and other resource-conserving techniques resulted in a game that had outstanding still graphics and video for the time.
4. With the success of the independently developed Myst (by Rand and Robyn Miller) and, incidentally, the low-budget sleeper hit "The Usual Suspects", one could argue that the plot twist became a staple in entertainment culture... Games and movies developed suspenseful storylines often predicated upon a last-minute twist.
5. Myst was one of the few games where the objective wasn't merely to survive (you technically cannot die in the game).
6. The actual objective of the game, the concept, and anything beyond basic navigation is not even hinted at in the documentation. In fact, figuring out the objective of the game IS part of the objective of the game.
7. Myst was one of the first successful wholly-immersive experiences whereby visual and auditory cues were not merely window dressing but an integral part of understanding how your actions affect your immediate surroundings (e.g. listening to water flow in the Channelwood age to verify whether valves are set properly to power the machinery of that age).
Something to replace the Newtons and E-Mates out there.
Funny you should say this.
Take a look at this job posting and then note that the Apple iPhones are using ARM processors just like the e-Mates did.
The only thing is, with regard to the previous poster's point, I don't think a stylus will be implemented because multitouch capacitance sensors require skin contact. Tapping it with a stylus will do nothing since the stylus cannot alter the capacitance of any part of the screen which is what makes it function.
But a stylus is entirely superfluous (and downright clunky) when you contemplate the massively flexible and intuitive means of input that multitouch facilitates.
Apple's definitely going in this direction... and we'll probably start seeing Mobile Mac devices to start following iPhone within a year, featuring more elaborate versions of Leopard with richer 3D navigation and probably as sophisticated as this within 2-3 years.
1. Wal-Mart fears they will lose customers to Apple. 2. Wal-Mart launches internet distribution. 3. Wal-Mart removes Safari and Firefox support, thus ensuring they WILL lose customers to Apple. 4. PROFIT! err... Oh, snap!
You seem to have confused Apple for a music company. They are not. The content facilitated by iTunes is provided by the Big Four record distributors.
Apple is a hardware manufacturer, and they make hardware that directly competes with Sonos. Apple's Airport Express and soon the AppleTV are directly competing with the Sonos system.
Asking them to make their library accessible to Sonos is like Chevy telling Ford they want Ford to let Chevy use their engines. Ferrari would be entirely within their right to tell Chevy to go build their own engines.
Likewise, Apple is entirely within their right to go tell Sonos to go build their own relationships with the music industry... especially considering that Apple did all the R&D, all the industry networking, all the groundwork, all the labor, to set up all the relationships they have with music distributors from whom Sonos can just as easily negotiate to build their own music store to serve their own hardware.
That being said, even if interoperability had some benefits for Apple, and even if Apple did see themselves as a music retailer first and foremost (which again they are not), what other reasons might there be for Apple to tell Sonos to go to hell?
Well, Jobs already pointed out a big one... DRM. In order to allow Apple protected iTunes files to play on Sonos' hardware, Apple would have to either abolish DRM or license FairPlay to Sonos.
This is precisely what Jobs' letter addresses... the problem is this:
1. Abolishing DRM at present would mean losing their relationships with record companies. Apple would lose, and so would Sonos.
2. Licensing FairPlay would open up myriad cans of worms which inevitably risk Apple losing their ability to carefully manage the DRM to the satisfaction of the record companies. It would only be a matter of time before Apple fails to keep the record labels satisfied and thus loses their relationships as well as their catalogue of available songs. Again, both Apple and Sonos lose.
Even if DRM weren't the issue, I would still point back to this: Why should Apple, who makes hardware solutions, help Sonos? Because it makes you all warm and fuzzy inside? Again, would Sonos license any of their unique hardware/software components to their direct competitors just because it feels gosh darn awful nice to do so?
Apple is not a music company. They are not a software company. They are a hardware company that incidentally builds software to make their hardware functional in order to provide an integrated solution with components that work seamlessly with one another.
What you seem to be suggesting is that Sonos sucks without Apple.
Odd, then, that Apple doesn't suck without Sonos... .
This demonstrates that, in principle, if Sonos knew how to build integrated solutions they could just go build one and stop blaming Apple for their own engineers' failure of imagination.
They had everything to do with it. If it were up to Apple, there'd be no DRM. Due to the DRM restrictions, and the fact that Apple will not open the legal can of worms presented by licensing FairPlay, there's no way they can facilitate their content streaming over Sonos without creating a huge loss for themselves.
Do you honestly mean to tell me that Sonos would help support another company's product and simultaneously bear all the legal and financial risks for none of the returns?
Throughout the discussion here I've noticed one observation conspicuously and repeatedly being ignored for its subtle, but ultimate, relevance to the matter at hand.
Jobs noted the proportion of iTunes Music Store purchases on the average iPod... 2.2%. Note how surreptitiously his real point is being made...
People buying iPods are barely loading them with DRM iTunes.
I'll repeat that... People buying iPods are barely loading them with DRM iTunes.
This should be ringing off alarm bells in your head. Jobs is not a moron. He is very careful to position his RDF in direct relation to how much leverage he inherently possesses over the entity he's selling to... whether the music industry or consumers.
In this case, the data begs, no, screams the obvious... DRM iTunes are an insignificant factor in the usage of iPods. They are a loss leader that may attract some consumers to the concept, but practically anyone buying an iPod discovers, sooner or later, how absurdly easy it is to pop in a CD, rip it, and drop it to your iPod.
Apple stands to lose very little if the record companies fail, once again, to pay attention to the tea leaves that indicate the public isn't buying their artificial attempts at keeping a dying distribution monopoly on life support. Someone suggested Apple has more to lose because if they have no songs on the store, they won't sell iPods. I think the data suggests otherwise. Clearly they sell far more iPod capacity than is used to hold purchased iTunes... which is a good indication that they could continue to sell iPods like crazy without any iTunes Music Store because iTunes without the music store still facilitates a very aesthetically appealing, functional, integrated solution, quality controlled top to bottom by Apple without reliance on third parties for operability assurance.
There's an argument about interoperability but let me remind everyone that a device that doesn't like to talk to other devices still functions in and of itself. A device that doesn't even talk to itself or its own peripherals very well is, however, entirely useless. Interoperability isn't as critical an issue as operability assurance. If you buy a device, you expect that it works. Third party conglomerations of software and hardware very often fail this most basic consumer expectation in too many ways to count. Hence my absolute amusement whenever naysayers play down "it just works" as a superfluous requirement demanded only by design aesthetes. I presume there isn't a consumer of sound mind on the planet who wants their product to "just fail."
In that regard, iPod + iTunes still has strategic competitive advantages of tremendous importance against competing hardware and software.
Jobs isn't being philosophically altruistic in his statement. This isn't to say his action isn't admirable, but to fully understand just what kind of balls he has to come out and deliver such a bold ultimatum to the recording industry, one has to understand the confluence of factors that give support to his assertions.
It was evident as early as the birth of the world wide web that internet distribution of music was an inevitability. Record companies hurried up and did nothing. This is not for lack of foresight. They knew it was coming. But the implications go far beyond piracy. The real fear of opening up the distro monopoly has to do with the realization by recording artists that record companies are now superfluous. Once upon a time, record companies offered promotion, marketing and distribution resources that were largely unmatched. The internet has entirely changed this. The RIAA barrage of lawyers being hurled at every twelve year old and grandmother is not because piracy threatens their bottom line. Artist independence threatens their bottom line. The entire internet threatens their bottom line. But if we put the internet and RIAA on a scale, and factor in growth momentum, the scale tells us that the internet is unstoppable. RIAA also knows this. But t
There's no need to resort to ad hominem. If appreciating sensible industrial design and presenting a cogent, systematic argument, makes me a "fanboy" in your mind, so be it.
I am only speaking of the product concept behind the AppleTV and therefore I don't think a test drive is relevant at this point. If I were speaking of its actual performance, then yes I would want to have some experience with the device to back up my assertions.
You presented a few objections, and I responded to them with detailed explanations as to why I think those explanations don't hold. Then you cried "fanboy". You're right, it's time to end this conversation because with that remark it ceases to be any kind of productive discourse.
I left pharmaceutical sales because, quite frankly, I was tired of being nothing more than an interruption in a doctor's day. In fact, I left sales entirely as a result of that experience.
The entire purpose of pharmaceutical sales at the doctor, clinic and hospital administration level is this: To abnormally influence the prescribing of drugs beyond what information is public by way of peer-reviewed scientific research. The drugs your doctors prescribe are sometimes influenced by how many pens, pads, lunches, dinners and other free crap are given to the physician and/or his staff. The drugs your insurance company covers are most influenced by what pharmaceutical company wines and dines the formulary administrators the most.
Physicians and administrators who participate in golf junkets, etc., are just as much to blame, but that doesn't remove the culpability of the pharmaceutical companies who know exactly what they're doing and are constantly pushing to be able to intrude even more in the treatment of a patient by way of these methods.
There are examples of egregious behavior at various levels of the pharmaceutical business ranging from minor nuisances to egregious breaches of ethics. One competing company's rep, while I was covering Mayo Clinic, got his company kicked out for six months by following a physician into his office WHILE the physician was seeing a patient... What was the rep's urgent matter? To deliver his canned sales pitch for his product. There have been pharmaceutical companies nailed for including large gifts in honorariums given to physicians for speaking on behalf of their products.
Mayo Clinic is one of the few institutions that has extremely strict rules... No pens, no pads, no papers, samples are signed in through a controlled process giving the rep very limited access to physicians. At the same time, they'll gladly throw up a banner for your product if you'll give them a huge research grant... While that's no guarantee that they'll bias the research in the pharma company's favor, human nature is such that money tends to drive a sense of obligation to the benefactor.
The advertisements have taken the Creationist approach to marketing... by appealing to the opinions and attitudes of the average, uninformed layperson. In doing so, they are still interfering in the process without really contributing anything of value that cannot be obtained by a physician who keeps up by reading the peer-reviewed journals on his or her own time... as a good physician will want to do. Physicians already have a motivation to do this research... it's called avoiding malpractice lawsuits.
Previously reputable pharmaceutical companies have stepped up and started direct advertising to consumers on television... It's getting worse and the cacophony of products being advertised by these companies creates a confusing atmosphere of insufficient information that does what exactly? The commercials don't begin by encouraging patients experiencing certain symptoms to go see their doctor and let them do their educated diagnoses. The ads begin by summarizing symptoms in a manner that creates a sort of confirmation bias, i.e. rattling off a barrage of symptoms, one of which might lead the viewer to suspect they need the drug... while ignoring the specific COMBINATION of symptoms that preclude a specific diagnosis. Then the ads encourage the patient who SUSPECTS they might have this problem not to go to the doctor and find out the proper course of treatment... but to "ask your doctor for".
They know what they're doing and even though I agree, simultaneously, in the principle of customer awareness... The ignorance of the average customer does not change the fact that it was the intention of the company to defraud and profit on the basis of that ignorance and therefore does not make the company any less responsible for doing so.
While I agree that medical science is a luxury and not a public utility, the health of a country's citizens does directly impact the nation's
I'm going to address both your replies in this post...
Steam is not a music service. If it were, their terms might be different because the recording industry refused to license to iTunes without certain limitations. But iTunes made a compromise by making it easy for you to back up your entire collection... not just to CD or DVD ROM, but you can copy the protected files to other authorized machines. The limitations on authorization and deauthorization are no different than a number of software applications. If I install Final Draft on two machines and I don't back up either of them, I'm pretty well SOL.
What I hear you saying is that Apple is to blame if you lack the sense to back your stuff up. Next time you lose a DVD or CD you purchased from Best Buy... take the receipt to the store and see if they'll give you a new one. They are not to blame for your own negligence or loss once the item is purchased.
Apple won't stay at 640x480 for long. They went to 640x480 when their iPods went from 320x240 to 640x480 resolution. Now that AppleTV is the new "killer app" with the highest capabilities, I'm reasonably certain they'll introduce 720p content... as that's what AppleTV's main profile is designed to support. What is presently supported is a non-argument because AppleTV hasn't hit stores yet. It's like arguing now that the local Ford dealer doesn't have sheepskin seat covers for their 2009 Mustang.
Let me clarify that actually you can have it both ways with AppleTV. But it's not incumbent upon the device alone. However, the extra cost is really nothing... assuming you already have several machines and a server/host machine. We have to assume that; you wouldn't be asking for the ability to stream to machines you don't have. Here's how it works:
AppleTV enables you to stream from 5 machines to one TV. But say you want to stream from one server to many machines... That's what Music Sharing is for. This is set in the preferences for iTunes. But just for argument's sake lets say you want to stream to five displays. Two ways to do this: If your client machines have video cards to support an HD display, then connect them directly (not the best solution since they won't have the hardware to support the correct ATSC color gamut) or buy an AppleTV for every remote display NOT connected to a computer that you want to stream to. If you don't have three client machines but three HDTV's, then AppleTV is going to be cheaper than buying three client machines. Any way you slice it, if you have AppleTV you have to have iTunes and therefore you can stream both ways... from one source to many displays or from many sources to one display. Since iTunes already supports media sharing itself, there was no need to build in that reverse-functionality into AppleTV. This still means that you, personally, could do without the AppleTV because iTunes alone will do what you're looking for. But if you ever wanted to go the other way, or support wireless streaming directly to a standalone HD display, you'd want AppleTV to do it.
The DRM argument is unnecessary as AppleTV is not bound to DRM'ed media only. You can get media from outside sources, convert it to H.264 and store it without DRM... but quite frankly Apple's DRM is really not very restrictive at all. I've heard the various arguments and none of them really wash. Between an iPod and Airport Express or AppleTV, I can listen/watch wherever I want and with higher clarity than most of those hackish poorly-integrated third-party solutions out there. Ok so maybe you want a player other than an iPod... but why is it everyone always blames Apple for not being more open-ended? They're trying to maintain tight integration with products they can guarantee will work the way they're intended. If they did what everyone else did, people would be pissed off when they discover how poorly the third-party players work, supporting only limited features/functionality relative to what the iPod/iTunes combination can do. Of course, customers would st
It's going to be very interesting to see how Apple changes the playing field for phone manufacturers with this.
Given that the phone is not discounted but the service likely will be. In a way, it actually makes sense - A LOT of sense.
Think about it: Phones are one-time purchases that a user can rationalize with a bonus or hell, even just on impulse credit purchasing (fire-and-forget buying). If you already have a sizable credit payment, adding the Apple iPhone to it won't make much of a dent in your rather predictable card payments. Any way you slice it, a phone purchase is, fundamentally, a one-time charge.
On the other hand... you can't as easily forget about a plan because you keep getting kicked in the head with that figure every month. A single purchase is not something you need to budget for, but a recurring charge is. My guess is that Apple knew this very well, and it underscores that they understand something about consumer psychology that the cellular service providers so far have not.
Furthermore, Apple has another huge advantage on their end in this type of model. They have a formidable profit margin on most of their hardware products. This gives them a lot of flexibility to charge full price and kick back some of that price to the cellular service providers. The Time Value of Money principle dictates that the future value of a present payment higher than the present value of a future payment. The more the cellular carrier collects up front as a portion of the phone price, even if it forces them to drastically cut their recurring charges, is worth more to them than the recurring charges they sacrificed. This is the same reason they apply corrections and credits in the next billing cycle (or if they're Cingular they "forget" to do so for a couple months on end), and the same reason they bind you into contracts... because if they have to wait for the money, they want a guarantee that they're going to get it.
Now, granted, I don't know if and how much of the iPhone price Apple is sharing with Cingular, but since the iPhone isn't discounted/subsidized, Apple's got a lot of headroom to play with to make this much more sensible for Cingular while at the same time playing to the impulse-purchasing psychology of the average consumer.
The only reason charging less for the phone than one month's service works nowadays is because of contracts... but even contracts are a risk because they're no guarantee of solvency. If the consumer is unable to pay, involving collections and going 30, 60 or 90 days without the revenue diminishes the value of the payment stream once they finally do receive it (which is why banks charge interest for loans and mortgages). They can make up some of the money with late fees and early termination penalties, but again not having the money in months A, B, C, D, etc. is extremely detrimental and if they have a lot of delinquent payments across the board because they have millions of customers with contracts, shareholders are going to take notice. It's far more valuable to the company and the shareholders to get the value up front without having to take the risks involved in a long contract term.
I'm not quite sure why you want to store at the TV but let me approach that issue with a counterargument from two directions... for purely academic reasons, and not out of a hope to convert you:
Most users in the target demographic for Apple's products, i.e. semi-affluent to affluent families, are likely to have more than one computer and consequently multiple playlists from multiple iterations of iTunes... also given the fact that it coincides with iTunes existing design platform: That is, one can license several machines to the same account. Licensing several machines to one account makes sense unless you're a bunch of college guys rooming together but generally, they're not Apple's bread and butter. I'm sure model this was chosen on the basis of feedback picked up by Apple's customer engineers who travel countrywide to gather data from various ad-hoc focus groups, analysts, vendors, retailers, etc. What the customer engineers do is they take some disembodied concepts/features and throw them out at their small audience, e.g. "What do you think of this? Is it useful? What do you like/dislike?" etc. and then they shape their products along these needs. The AppleTV is no exception. The MAJORITY of people in Apple's target market, and in the public at large, want to be able to coordinate many sources of media to one entertainment system.
From the other direction, you have users like myself who have a more elaborate home network and quite a bit of distributed computing firepower on the LAN but currently no way to really harness this firepower into a rather elaborate home entertainment system. I have about 500 gigabytes of combined storage on my existing machines. My response to your preferential setup is that I don't understand the benefit. Namely, I don't see the point in using one kind of appliance, a TV, as the central point for storage because most products designed to couple with a TV will be designed with output to the TV in mind. But what if I have different kinds of media that I want my home entertainment system to be able to access? I don't particularly like listening to music on a PC-mated sound system. I tend to do most of my casual listening in the living room which is uncluttered compared to my computer room. Not only that, but I have enough money for one kickass sound system, not five. Likewise, I fail to see the usefulness in watching SD or HD movies in my office. I bought a 34" HDTV for the living room because that's where I prefer to watch my movies. For me, the AppleTV is the kind of solution that bridges the firepower of the network, which is an ideal place to serve all kinds of content from, to the entertainment appliances (HDTV, surround sound receiver, etc.) which are best-suited devices from which to experience the playback.
Building flexibility into this kind of a system isn't complicated because it doesn't require upgrades to expensive home entertainment hardware, or replacement of the AppleTV (to a point), but can easily facilitate the merging of new media sources because the framework already exists for storing and accessing all kinds of media in all kinds of formats... it's your computer.
As Doc Searls and David Weinberger have pointed out on their website World of Ends, the more specific complexity you build into the internet, the less useful it becomes. Optimizing a network for one kind of media means deoptimizing it for other kinds of media. This is why AppleTV makes a hell of a lot more sense than a device like TiVo, whose sales have been doing rather poorly. Granted, I said something about "jack of all trades, master of none"... but the AppleTV isn't a jack of all trades, in a sense. What it is designed to do is one thing... but what that one thing IS just happens to facilitate many other kinds of things. This is exactly what Searls and Weinberger point out about the internet... it is a dumb network. It doesn't know or care about one type of media over the other, and consequently just about any type
AppleTV will more than likely be offering 720p downloads in the near future. One clue to this, in my view, is the addition of a $50 million datacenter in the months before the WWDC announcement of the product. Also, as I understand it, the WWDC demo was using a 720p file, not the current 640x480 resolution. Apple typically does not upgrade their iTunes content ahead of the corresponding hardware release date... and their store employees and customer service do not know about the content support until the street date of the hardware.
By the way, not to pick nits but 640x480 isn't 480p. 720x480 is 480p. Also, there is NO content on cable that's 1080p. At most, 1080i, but 1080p is not part of the ATSC (HDTV) spec. And no, there aren't plenty of devices that do what the AppleTV can do. There are a few devices, such as the Media Center PC, that do part of what AppleTV does, but do it poorly. There's no integration of multiple streamed sources within your own network. There's no integrated solutions running 802.11n for coherent streaming of HD content. Also, AppleTV's menuing system is driven by AppleTV itself and not computer hardware, therefore taxing resources dedicated to this function and not the resources from which the content is being streamed. The majority of said solutions do it over wired connections, and the few that do it wirelessly don't really equate pound for pound to the AppleTV in terms of the particular combination of features. Additionally, the AppleTV's design makes it inherently scalable to future formats for both picture and sound, seeing as H.264 can in principle support a variety of resolutions (not just capped at 720p or 1080p) and up to 24 channels of audio. I could go on but I think you get the point on this...
The reason Apple went to 640x480 was because, at the time, their newer iPod displays supported that resolution so they introduced content to match it. This tends to be their strategy, rather than having users resort to other outlets to get the most out of Apple's hardware. Additionally, you're not bound to Apple Store's content since you can use utilities like Handbrake to convert other media sources to H.264 or another supported format for viewing over AppleTV. You'd just have to mount the file to the iTunes library. Big deal. Arguing that this is not a choice is like bitching about the lack of choice of laser transport mechanisms in your CD player... or arguing that you didn't have a choice of fuel management software when you bought your car.
That being said, AppleTV works with Windows and OS X... provided you have iTunes installed. I'm not sure why it would benefit you to use it from third-party apps. But what I find especially interesting is that you likely wouldn't hear people complaining that third party app developers don't each support ALL of the possible functions available on AppleTV (e.g. streaming from five computers, content-synch, online movie trailer access, etc.). Instead, they'd pin it on Apple... which is of course why it's better for Apple to not allow third-party app integration because they have no control over what those third party apps will do to erode the features and functionality of AppleTV, and consequently diminish its image in the eyes of the consumer.
I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "working outside of the iTunes player". The UI for AppleTV is not iTunes, but it interfaces with iTunes for its content. I don't imagine it will interface with any other third-party players but I'm frankly glad it doesn't. Since AppleTV is more than just a wireless streaming interface, it has certain operability requirements that could be severely hindered by having to make it compatible with every crappy third-party player out there. Furthermore, some of its functions, such as trailer streaming direct from the web, would not be supported by third-party players. Additionally, Apple would have no control over playback quality. What amuses me about the "choice" argument is that technically-savvy users who generally complain
If people read your post they might understand that Apple wasn't being stupid when they designed AppleTV with 720p resolution. They wanted a product that wasn't going to be astronomically expensive, and they wanted to get it out the door at a time when 720p downloads were feasible whereas 1080p downloads were not only hellishly impractical but also cutting out the vast majority of HDTV owners.
There are two reasons for this, and both are tied to the idiosyncrasies of computer-based multimedia formats:
1. File support - It's easier to support a progressive format than an interlaced format in terms of the interoperability between inherently progressive video hardware in computers, and progressive video hardware in HDTVs. Interlaced (lower-field first) encoding is possible but really only useful to video editors producing content for SD DVD or SD TV, who usually have adequate hardware to output the interlaced video to an NTSC display. Also, your file is either going to be interlaced or progressive, not both... and either 480p, 720p, 1080p... not all three or even two of the three. Choosing the wrong resolution to run with means alienating a potentially huge set of customers.
2. Usability - this leaves you with three options, 480p, 720p and 1080p. 480p offers no competitive advantage in a time when HDTV sales are surging. 1080p is too large a file for reasonable download times, uninterrupted playback (hardware limitations), storage requirements and the fact that the vast majority of consumers do not have 1080p sets. 720p is a great compromise.
I'm sure that 1080p will be something Apple may support in the future but to do so now would have meant launching a brand-new product concept at a price too difficult to digest, with questionable performance at the given resolution and being usable only by the narrowest group of TV owners. Neither is that wise from the standpoint of recouping fixed costs of initial R&D and product marketing, but it's not part of Apple's successful formula.
They always put feeler products out there to get the initial reaction from the market before they introduce their larger strategy... If this one fails, they won't lose as much as they would have if they spent several years more R&D and packed even more tech into it to make it horrendously expensive and appealing only to the narrowest demographic. Here, if they lose, they lose less. But if they win, it'll open the door to what could be the "killer app" for Apple for the next ten years... with as many product iterations or more than the myriad iPods that have been introduced since the first generation model.
Thank you, Bill, for that Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious., Or, to quote the illustrious philosopher Ren Høek, "Stimpy, I'm completely astounded by your wealth of ignorance."
It's amazing that this guy is the richest man on Earth. Here he is, offering punditry that is, really, at the very least five years behind Apple in terms of his thought patterns on technology. As early as 1996, the writing was on the wall when Progressive Networks (now RealNetworks, Inc.) and Apple were developing multimedia streaming and THAT should have been the first signal that IP networks were capable, in principle, of carrying full television programming in the near future.
Unfortunately, nobody listened... Well, almost nobody. While Gates is touting this technology as something five years down the road, it's interesting to note how this article comes just one week before Apple's AppleTV, which was announced months ago. Apple had to be researching this for at least the past three years and developing working prototypes as early as five years ago or as recent as two years ago. Sure, Microsoft has their hands in this game... but they're taking a different approach to the model. Their idea of a leap ahead is to mimic the fee-based cable subscription model. Apple has gone in the other direction, toward an a-la carte ownership-based model. This is important because, while it doesn't encompass all the options a customer wants (maybe they want to rent some, and buy others), it does differentiate their product more drastically from cable than does Microsoft's concept... and it demonstrates, more importantly, the kind of forward thinking that Apple is known for... Re-arranging and re-defining the way we use existing technologies. There's nothing fundamentally different about a fee-based model over the internet versus over cable. But there is something radically different about a-la carte programming in a way that underscores a dynamic service that IP can facilitate easily which cable companies can not or will not.
This is why Microsoft continues to lose the battle for brand dominance in multimedia to Apple... and why Apple, not Microsoft, will be the key player in determining the future of how we buy, access, receive and experience our home entertainment. But rest assured, AppleTV and the upcoming iPhone are only tactical products in a much larger strategic vision at Apple. As I've said in other posts, while Microsoft is barely catching up with Vista and XBOX Live and (only in brand diversification if not in sales) Zune, Apple is already focused on the next five years during which they will set out to completely redefine the user interface they popularized 22 years ago.
The computer was once argued by Apple to be the "digital hub" in their appliance-based strategy but they have since moved on to a bigger picture in which the computer is only a host or nodde in the NETWORK, which is becoming the backbone of home entertainment and productivity. iPhone, AppleTV are just devices that tap into these networks for their distributed computing power... Microsoft has several disadvantages here.
First, Microsoft's philosophy confuses the ability to do complex tasks with the appearance of complexity. As a jazz percussionist once told me, an average drummer takes something simple and makes it look complex. A great drummer takes something seemingly impossible and makes it look effortless. Microsoft's other hindrance is that they have little control over the myriad hardware systems on which their software resides. They have very little experience at developing completely integrated products and services. Last, Microsoft seems to begin all their ventures with the question, "How can we make customers like what we have to offer?" Look at it... They spend eons developing some "major" software upgrade, which is little more than rearranging the parts to make it look different, not necessarily better, and then they figure out how they're going to market it. In other words, Microsoft finds ways to convince others t
As many have already mentioned, Apple needed to make the announcement due to FCC filings that would make their intentions public anyway. Not only did the author of the article cited fail to acknowledge this, but few people are yet seeing the bigger picture.
Apple is a company that has a tremendous brand presence, one that influences brands in many other industries and has a "following" more unique and devoted than say Nokia or Motorola. People will be clamoring to dig up FCC filings on Apple's first foray into cell phones... but how many people are clamoring to find out what Motorola's next whiz-bang product is going to be? This is perhaps why the author didn't understand just how critical it is for Apple to come out and set the expectation. And that's another thing... The FCC filings put information out there that may be ambiguous and not set the proper expectations for consumers and developers. Apple was smart to take a lead on this and set the expectation according to what they want people to know about the upcoming product.
That being said, iPhone is not a strategic product. It's a tactical product in a much larger strategy. And this is something the press doesn't seem to grasp at all.
Yes, iPhone lacks this and that but do they need to "test the waters" to know the demand for 3G or other features they have yet to incorporate? No, of course not... there's plenty of industry data for these existing features. What they ARE testing that NO phone manufacturer yet has is multitouch capacitance sensors. This is a key to Apple's larger strategy, in my opinion.
Based on a closer examination of the technology (Synaptics Onyx Concept phone, Multitouch Demo at TED) it's clear that iPhone is only scratching the surface of what multitouch can do... and they have only begun tinkering with the UI, gestures, etc.
Note how everyone pissing and moaning about the lack of tactile contact is ignoring something critical in Apple's redefinition of the UI. One of the first things I noticed about the early iPod interfaces was that the scrollwheel seemed to possess both acceleration and some momentum... i.e. fast scrolling will keep up momentum for a second when you let go of the wheel. There's more feedback received by your senses than just tactile sensory input.
When you touch an object and move it with force, you expect momentum. You also expect to see the result of momentum... an object continuing to move once you let go. Also you expect proportional momentum... push harder, retained momentum is higher. Multitouch capacitance sensors have velocity, pressure and acceleration sensitivity and a smartly designed UI will mimic the physics of these behaviors. The end result is that the 2D simulation of 3D space behaves more as you would expect it to if it were a space of real objects. This is also feedback... except it's many layers of feedback telling you where you should expect objects to be, how much force you need to apply to achieve a given result, etc. A keyboard offers only one layer of feedback. And this puts most PDA's not just five years behind, but as far behind as typewriters in their ability to tell you something more substantive about the work space.
But most companies don't think this far. Apple, however, does. Apple's designers don't look at other PDA's and think "Hey, they have keyboards, people put up with them enough to buy them... let's make a physical keyboard." When people tell you they want feedback, they're not saying they want a tiny keyboard. They're saying they want feedback... but your combined sensory input gives you much more information about where you are in space and time and subconsciously what your brain needs to do to achieve certain results.
So what Apple's designers tend to do when faced with this is they will go to the root of the issue and research how people receive and perceive sensory input... and what that combination of
Remember once upon a time even Mac fans such as myself wondered what a better world it might be if Apple had won its suit against Microsoft? This is relevant to the topic at hand because here are the analysts again wondering what a wonderful world it might be if Apple and Microsoft held hands and sang Kumbaya.
Well, I've come to the conclusion that we were wrong. I have to take a step back though, to the time when analysts kept arguing that licensing Mac OS to run on other machines was the way to go. The analysts never understood, as Steve Jobs did, that Apple is not a software company. That where Microsoft believes that the profits are in the software, that only works if your goal is to be the Wal-Mart of the computer industry... brand dominance by quantity, not quality.
We saw what happened when Apple licensed out its OS... it was a total disaster. Apple's strength was not the OS alone. They have always been a hardware company that made an operating system only because it allowed them to manage every level of the user experience in one integrated package. No other PC manufacturers have this advantage, and must instead rely on only the hope that a third party OS manages to work just well enough with zillions of third party apps and drivers so that consumers aren't driven away. Well, they're being driven away now... and they're going to Apple. Maybe not in a flood, but one by one they're popping up at Apple's doorstep because the iPod has shown them what a tightly integrated hardware and OS can do -- when it's done right, anyway.
But could it have been done right if Apple won the suit? I don't think so. By the time it would have happened, Steve Jobs was out of the picture, and Jonathan Ive hadn't yet carved a place as Apple's product design genius. At the time of the 9th Circuit's decision, Spindler was CEO. There's every likelihood that then-bloated and corporatized Apple would have gained some market dominance but would have played it just as complacently as Microsoft has.
The fact is, the underdog position Apple has held has been very good for pushing them to require better design than Microsoft and Apple's PC manufacturing competitors like Dell, Toshiba, HP, etc. It's possible the company's premature financial success, at a time when Spindler and Amelio were more concerned with turning out "beige boxes" just like the next guy, would have pre-empted any return by Steve Jobs and Apple would not have emerged as the brand zeitgeist to which all other companies designs aspire. Today, while they do not dominate the market in terms of sheer volume, they dominate the market in brand perception, regarded as the most desirable brand by consumers across all products of all types. They have a reputation for quality that PC manufacturers do not. They have a following that PC manufacturers do not. So strong is this following that Apple was forced to announce its iPhone before FCC filings because there's a voracious appetite for Apple rumors. Can anyone imagine throngs of consumers digging through FCC filings to be the first to announce what Motorola's next new whiz-bang product is going to be?
So, would a partnership with Microsoft be good for Apple or Microsoft? No. Not only would it risk Apple's name being dragged in the mud by inferior multimedia standards managed by a company that doesn't have half the design aesthetic or QC concerns that Apple NEEDS to have. Microsoft can make a shitty product and sit back and watch people have no choice but to buy it... Apple has to work to impress people... ESPECIALLY core mac fans whose expectations of Apple have never been higher as evidenced by the post-announcement iPhone backlash.
It wouldn't work for Microsoft either. They've had this fanciful notion that they can make people love their feeble attempts at multimedia domination simply by latching on to Apple's superior product. Where's the benefit for Apple? We already tackled that one. Ok, what happens to both Apple AND Microsoft when customers see
Slow day at the InformationWeek news desk? Seriously... is there some shortage of real events in the world worth discussing that space needed to be occupied on a news website discussing the myriad misinformed opinions of John Q. Public on two operating systems that haven't modified in any radical way the fundamental structure of the user interface in 20 years.
What I find hilarious is that the news media are missing the larger implication of iPhone. While they're now falling all over themselves in post-orgasmic feature-flogging (iPhone lacks this, iPhone lacks that)... they've entirely missed the bigger picture. iPhone and the Synaptics capacitance sensor technology it uses are, in my opinion, a testbed leading up to a much larger revolution that Jobs has completely obfuscated from view with his overindulgent intro at MacWorld.
While the press are transfixed on that, Jobs and Co. are very likely hard at work adapting the technologies in the iPhone to computing itself... to completely redefine the user interface as a three-dimensional space within which to work, manipulate data and objects, and navigate three-dimensionally using both hands.
If the media want to report something worthwhile, how about doing some homework on multitouch sensing surfaces and what the implications are for the traditional "desktop" GUI even just five years down the road?
iPhone is just the beginning...
on
iPhone Roundup
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I recently had a conversation with an Apple alumnus, today in fact... He was there when Jobs came back on board and made some very interesting comments that made me realize something.
The iPhone is just the beginning of a much larger revolution in computing, in fact probably the biggest revolution since the birth of the graphical user interface. Not sure what I mean? Look at the submitter's link to the TED demonstration, and also take a look at the Synaptics Onyx Concept.
Put it this way... if you still haven't guessed where Jobs' head is right now, the iPhone with its arguably limited feature sets is a way of not showing your best work up front. In fact, Apple I think has something much bigger in mind... for which the iPhone is really just a loss leader.
When you see what multipoint capacitance sensors can do, it should become evident that Apple's probably already researching how to redefine the user interface of the home computer... and eliminate the mouse and physical keyboard entirely, but simultaneously give us a user interface far more advanced than a mere 2D touchscreen. A touchscreen tablet strips away some of the advantages of a keyboard and mouse, but a tablet PC with a multipoint capacitance sensor opens up new dimensions of desktop navigation and application control.
Put it another way... Have you seen the Pre-Crime computer in Minority Report? Now you've got some idea where Apple's research is very probably currently focused.
iPhone not meeting expectations, not living up to the hype? Pfeh... I guarantee you Steve Jobs and company are already thinking another five years ahead to the day when the desktop GUI framework will undergo the first systemic metamorphosis in 20 years.
The cold war was an ever-escalating chain of threats, the actual execution of which was always extremely improbable (as both sides knew the end result)... For decades the threat of nuclear war was carted out as an excuse for giving away billions upon billions to defense contractors.
Shortly after the cold war ended, various skirmishes and, then, Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom became the new dog-and-pony by which Congress to appease their constituencies and lobbyists in states where defense contractors represented significant employment. But now it's blossoming into another Vietnam and is beginning to blow up in Congress' face.
So, what's the answer? Give the defense contractors a new mission: Counterterrorism! Since the supply of irrational fear is virtually limitless, the demand for solutions to calm these irrational fears is equally unbounded. Naturally, this could go on for decades, just like the cold war...
How can they convince the people to buy into it? Remember Lisa Simpson and the tiger-repellent rock? You don't see any terrorists around do you? That's the beauty of irrational fears... you don't need to use a rational argument to soothe them.
This is not to say that counterterrorism is bunk... No, it's necessary. But there's a pragmatic approach to identifying real threats and determining the cost of real solutions to them, and then there's the Chicken Little approach. The sky is falling. Watch out for terrorists in Fargo, North Dakota. Attack them before they attack us.
The big problem with this mania that has been exploited by the Bush administration and Republicans in particular is this: While they are quick to point out that no terrorist attacks have occurred on Bush's watch since September 11, 2001... I am equally quick to point out that the worst terrorist attack in US history did, in fact, occur on Bush's watch.
The climatologist quoted is arguing for something that actually makes sense, sort of. But what they're arguing, and what the submitter implies they're arguing are two different things.
The climatologist is talking about climatologists and meteorologists in her profession of weather reporting. Like a science classroom, the Weather Channel is not the arena for scientific debate over global warming or anything else. The peer-reviewed science literature is the arena for debate, and as far as I can tell, the climatologist is not arguing for censorship there... at all.
Do I agree then with the idea that climatologists who present their personal opinions as fact against the consensus of the scientific community should be stripped of their credentials? Well, in some sense, yes. But it's not that simple...
If people in other professions repeatedly give false information in the routine of their job, they can be stripped of their certifications... so I don't think it's out of the question. Each incident requires a thorough case review to determine whether or not willful negligence was involved... which is to say that these instances should not be overlooked.
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While Spinal Tap is probably one of the funniest movies ever made, and one of the best satires of the music business, there's one idiosyncrasy of bands that has become the stuff of legend, but has its roots (usless trivia coming up) in a rational and functional purpose.
It used to be Van Halen that included, among other things in their contracts, a requirement that a bowl filled with a specific mass of M&M's in all colors EXCEPT absolutely no brown. Since the days of their wild contract riders, many recording artists have followed suit with their tour promoters and required some utterly bizarre requests to be fulfilled. One of the funniest moments in the film for me is Nigel being baffled by the meat tray. It's inconceivable to him that the meat could just be folded to fit the bread... to him, the bread isn't big enough. I was backstage at a concert where precisely this kind of stupidity reared its ugly head, and specifically concerning a meat tray that arrived late where the band still had time to send someone down the street at least and pick up some takeout. Of course that never occurred to them.
Regarding Van Halen, though... their tour managers actually included bizarre requests like the one about the M&M's (which has been repeated ad nauseum in other contracts in homage to Van Halen) as a safety check. Their reasoning was that if the promoters weren't paying attention to items like this they also might not be reading carefully through critical safety requirements included in the same contract.
So let me get this straight...
The guy concludes that AppleTV must not be "well suited" for HD (he defines that as maybe, possibly, there are inadequate hardware resources because the device consumes very little power).
Then, in an absolute stunner, he makes it abundantly clear he has never seen HD content played through AppleTV!
Speaking as a former film critic, I'm amazed this passes for journalism.
Furthermore, given the extremely generic analyses of the AppleTV and XBOX (which give no strong indication that the writer actually got his hands on and comprehensively dissected either device's features, as his comments seem to be restricted to observations you could discover on Google) the review seems to have been written either by an incompetent writer or for a dumb audience.
Of course one question begs the other... What kind of writer, do you suppose, attracts a dumb audience?
Of course I wasn't implying that no one had done a plot twist before... I was simply speaking of on a local timeline. Not every narrative has to have a twist, but between 1993 and 1996 there was a significant resurgence of popularity in the twist ending. While seemingly unrelated to gaming, I think that films like "The Usual Suspects" and "The Sixth Sense" raised expectations of viewers that there ought to be a twist ending... an expectation which had both good and bad effects on popular cinema.
Myst was not only the first million-selling CD-ROM game ever, but it is also the best selling computer game in history until it was overtaken by The Sims.
The ingenuity of Myst was that it ushered in an era of adventure-puzzle games but in my opinion there wasn't even a close second until the sequel, Riven, came along. Some other notes of distinction attributable to Myst:
1. Prior to Myst's release on the Macintosh, CD-ROM drives were optional on computers. The timing of Myst's release with the emergence of Macintoshes that came standard with CD-ROM drives and the explosion in sales of Myst drove consumers to demand CD-ROM drives in their computers which quickly led to CD-ROM drives becoming standard equipment.
2. Myst was not originally ported to Windows and until it was, many consumers bought Macintoshes just so they could play Myst.
3. The use of Cinepak compression and other resource-conserving techniques resulted in a game that had outstanding still graphics and video for the time.
4. With the success of the independently developed Myst (by Rand and Robyn Miller) and, incidentally, the low-budget sleeper hit "The Usual Suspects", one could argue that the plot twist became a staple in entertainment culture... Games and movies developed suspenseful storylines often predicated upon a last-minute twist.
5. Myst was one of the few games where the objective wasn't merely to survive (you technically cannot die in the game).
6. The actual objective of the game, the concept, and anything beyond basic navigation is not even hinted at in the documentation. In fact, figuring out the objective of the game IS part of the objective of the game.
7. Myst was one of the first successful wholly-immersive experiences whereby visual and auditory cues were not merely window dressing but an integral part of understanding how your actions affect your immediate surroundings (e.g. listening to water flow in the Channelwood age to verify whether valves are set properly to power the machinery of that age).
Funny you should say this.
Take a look at this job posting and then note that the Apple iPhones are using ARM processors just like the e-Mates did.
The only thing is, with regard to the previous poster's point, I don't think a stylus will be implemented because multitouch capacitance sensors require skin contact. Tapping it with a stylus will do nothing since the stylus cannot alter the capacitance of any part of the screen which is what makes it function.
But a stylus is entirely superfluous (and downright clunky) when you contemplate the massively flexible and intuitive means of input that multitouch facilitates. Apple's definitely going in this direction... and we'll probably start seeing Mobile Mac devices to start following iPhone within a year, featuring more elaborate versions of Leopard with richer 3D navigation and probably as sophisticated as this within 2-3 years.
1. Wal-Mart fears they will lose customers to Apple.
2. Wal-Mart launches internet distribution.
3. Wal-Mart removes Safari and Firefox support, thus ensuring they WILL lose customers to Apple.
4. PROFIT! err... Oh, snap!
I think you're missing my poiny.
You seem to have confused Apple for a music company. They are not. The content facilitated by iTunes is provided by the Big Four record distributors.
Apple is a hardware manufacturer, and they make hardware that directly competes with Sonos. Apple's Airport Express and soon the AppleTV are directly competing with the Sonos system.
Asking them to make their library accessible to Sonos is like Chevy telling Ford they want Ford to let Chevy use their engines. Ferrari would be entirely within their right to tell Chevy to go build their own engines.
Likewise, Apple is entirely within their right to go tell Sonos to go build their own relationships with the music industry... especially considering that Apple did all the R&D, all the industry networking, all the groundwork, all the labor, to set up all the relationships they have with music distributors from whom Sonos can just as easily negotiate to build their own music store to serve their own hardware.
That being said, even if interoperability had some benefits for Apple, and even if Apple did see themselves as a music retailer first and foremost (which again they are not), what other reasons might there be for Apple to tell Sonos to go to hell?
Well, Jobs already pointed out a big one... DRM. In order to allow Apple protected iTunes files to play on Sonos' hardware, Apple would have to either abolish DRM or license FairPlay to Sonos.
This is precisely what Jobs' letter addresses... the problem is this:
1. Abolishing DRM at present would mean losing their relationships with record companies. Apple would lose, and so would Sonos.
2. Licensing FairPlay would open up myriad cans of worms which inevitably risk Apple losing their ability to carefully manage the DRM to the satisfaction of the record companies. It would only be a matter of time before Apple fails to keep the record labels satisfied and thus loses their relationships as well as their catalogue of available songs. Again, both Apple and Sonos lose.
Even if DRM weren't the issue, I would still point back to this: Why should Apple, who makes hardware solutions, help Sonos? Because it makes you all warm and fuzzy inside? Again, would Sonos license any of their unique hardware/software components to their direct competitors just because it feels gosh darn awful nice to do so?
Apple is not a music company. They are not a software company. They are a hardware company that incidentally builds software to make their hardware functional in order to provide an integrated solution with components that work seamlessly with one another.
What you seem to be suggesting is that Sonos sucks without Apple.
Odd, then, that Apple doesn't suck without Sonos... .
This demonstrates that, in principle, if Sonos knew how to build integrated solutions they could just go build one and stop blaming Apple for their own engineers' failure of imagination.
They had everything to do with it. If it were up to Apple, there'd be no DRM. Due to the DRM restrictions, and the fact that Apple will not open the legal can of worms presented by licensing FairPlay, there's no way they can facilitate their content streaming over Sonos without creating a huge loss for themselves.
Do you honestly mean to tell me that Sonos would help support another company's product and simultaneously bear all the legal and financial risks for none of the returns?
Throughout the discussion here I've noticed one observation conspicuously and repeatedly being ignored for its subtle, but ultimate, relevance to the matter at hand.
Jobs noted the proportion of iTunes Music Store purchases on the average iPod... 2.2%. Note how surreptitiously his real point is being made...
People buying iPods are barely loading them with DRM iTunes.
I'll repeat that... People buying iPods are barely loading them with DRM iTunes.
This should be ringing off alarm bells in your head. Jobs is not a moron. He is very careful to position his RDF in direct relation to how much leverage he inherently possesses over the entity he's selling to... whether the music industry or consumers.
In this case, the data begs, no, screams the obvious... DRM iTunes are an insignificant factor in the usage of iPods. They are a loss leader that may attract some consumers to the concept, but practically anyone buying an iPod discovers, sooner or later, how absurdly easy it is to pop in a CD, rip it, and drop it to your iPod.
Apple stands to lose very little if the record companies fail, once again, to pay attention to the tea leaves that indicate the public isn't buying their artificial attempts at keeping a dying distribution monopoly on life support. Someone suggested Apple has more to lose because if they have no songs on the store, they won't sell iPods. I think the data suggests otherwise. Clearly they sell far more iPod capacity than is used to hold purchased iTunes... which is a good indication that they could continue to sell iPods like crazy without any iTunes Music Store because iTunes without the music store still facilitates a very aesthetically appealing, functional, integrated solution, quality controlled top to bottom by Apple without reliance on third parties for operability assurance.
There's an argument about interoperability but let me remind everyone that a device that doesn't like to talk to other devices still functions in and of itself. A device that doesn't even talk to itself or its own peripherals very well is, however, entirely useless. Interoperability isn't as critical an issue as operability assurance. If you buy a device, you expect that it works. Third party conglomerations of software and hardware very often fail this most basic consumer expectation in too many ways to count. Hence my absolute amusement whenever naysayers play down "it just works" as a superfluous requirement demanded only by design aesthetes. I presume there isn't a consumer of sound mind on the planet who wants their product to "just fail."
In that regard, iPod + iTunes still has strategic competitive advantages of tremendous importance against competing hardware and software.
Jobs isn't being philosophically altruistic in his statement. This isn't to say his action isn't admirable, but to fully understand just what kind of balls he has to come out and deliver such a bold ultimatum to the recording industry, one has to understand the confluence of factors that give support to his assertions.
It was evident as early as the birth of the world wide web that internet distribution of music was an inevitability. Record companies hurried up and did nothing. This is not for lack of foresight. They knew it was coming. But the implications go far beyond piracy. The real fear of opening up the distro monopoly has to do with the realization by recording artists that record companies are now superfluous. Once upon a time, record companies offered promotion, marketing and distribution resources that were largely unmatched. The internet has entirely changed this. The RIAA barrage of lawyers being hurled at every twelve year old and grandmother is not because piracy threatens their bottom line. Artist independence threatens their bottom line. The entire internet threatens their bottom line. But if we put the internet and RIAA on a scale, and factor in growth momentum, the scale tells us that the internet is unstoppable. RIAA also knows this. But t
There's no need to resort to ad hominem. If appreciating sensible industrial design and presenting a cogent, systematic argument, makes me a "fanboy" in your mind, so be it.
I am only speaking of the product concept behind the AppleTV and therefore I don't think a test drive is relevant at this point. If I were speaking of its actual performance, then yes I would want to have some experience with the device to back up my assertions.
You presented a few objections, and I responded to them with detailed explanations as to why I think those explanations don't hold. Then you cried "fanboy". You're right, it's time to end this conversation because with that remark it ceases to be any kind of productive discourse.
I left pharmaceutical sales because, quite frankly, I was tired of being nothing more than an interruption in a doctor's day. In fact, I left sales entirely as a result of that experience.
The entire purpose of pharmaceutical sales at the doctor, clinic and hospital administration level is this: To abnormally influence the prescribing of drugs beyond what information is public by way of peer-reviewed scientific research. The drugs your doctors prescribe are sometimes influenced by how many pens, pads, lunches, dinners and other free crap are given to the physician and/or his staff. The drugs your insurance company covers are most influenced by what pharmaceutical company wines and dines the formulary administrators the most.
Physicians and administrators who participate in golf junkets, etc., are just as much to blame, but that doesn't remove the culpability of the pharmaceutical companies who know exactly what they're doing and are constantly pushing to be able to intrude even more in the treatment of a patient by way of these methods.
There are examples of egregious behavior at various levels of the pharmaceutical business ranging from minor nuisances to egregious breaches of ethics. One competing company's rep, while I was covering Mayo Clinic, got his company kicked out for six months by following a physician into his office WHILE the physician was seeing a patient... What was the rep's urgent matter? To deliver his canned sales pitch for his product. There have been pharmaceutical companies nailed for including large gifts in honorariums given to physicians for speaking on behalf of their products.
Mayo Clinic is one of the few institutions that has extremely strict rules... No pens, no pads, no papers, samples are signed in through a controlled process giving the rep very limited access to physicians. At the same time, they'll gladly throw up a banner for your product if you'll give them a huge research grant... While that's no guarantee that they'll bias the research in the pharma company's favor, human nature is such that money tends to drive a sense of obligation to the benefactor.
The advertisements have taken the Creationist approach to marketing... by appealing to the opinions and attitudes of the average, uninformed layperson. In doing so, they are still interfering in the process without really contributing anything of value that cannot be obtained by a physician who keeps up by reading the peer-reviewed journals on his or her own time... as a good physician will want to do. Physicians already have a motivation to do this research... it's called avoiding malpractice lawsuits.
Previously reputable pharmaceutical companies have stepped up and started direct advertising to consumers on television... It's getting worse and the cacophony of products being advertised by these companies creates a confusing atmosphere of insufficient information that does what exactly? The commercials don't begin by encouraging patients experiencing certain symptoms to go see their doctor and let them do their educated diagnoses. The ads begin by summarizing symptoms in a manner that creates a sort of confirmation bias, i.e. rattling off a barrage of symptoms, one of which might lead the viewer to suspect they need the drug... while ignoring the specific COMBINATION of symptoms that preclude a specific diagnosis. Then the ads encourage the patient who SUSPECTS they might have this problem not to go to the doctor and find out the proper course of treatment... but to "ask your doctor for".
They know what they're doing and even though I agree, simultaneously, in the principle of customer awareness... The ignorance of the average customer does not change the fact that it was the intention of the company to defraud and profit on the basis of that ignorance and therefore does not make the company any less responsible for doing so.
While I agree that medical science is a luxury and not a public utility, the health of a country's citizens does directly impact the nation's
I'm going to address both your replies in this post...
Steam is not a music service. If it were, their terms might be different because the recording industry refused to license to iTunes without certain limitations. But iTunes made a compromise by making it easy for you to back up your entire collection... not just to CD or DVD ROM, but you can copy the protected files to other authorized machines. The limitations on authorization and deauthorization are no different than a number of software applications. If I install Final Draft on two machines and I don't back up either of them, I'm pretty well SOL.
What I hear you saying is that Apple is to blame if you lack the sense to back your stuff up. Next time you lose a DVD or CD you purchased from Best Buy... take the receipt to the store and see if they'll give you a new one. They are not to blame for your own negligence or loss once the item is purchased.
Apple won't stay at 640x480 for long. They went to 640x480 when their iPods went from 320x240 to 640x480 resolution. Now that AppleTV is the new "killer app" with the highest capabilities, I'm reasonably certain they'll introduce 720p content... as that's what AppleTV's main profile is designed to support. What is presently supported is a non-argument because AppleTV hasn't hit stores yet. It's like arguing now that the local Ford dealer doesn't have sheepskin seat covers for their 2009 Mustang.
Let me clarify that actually you can have it both ways with AppleTV. But it's not incumbent upon the device alone. However, the extra cost is really nothing... assuming you already have several machines and a server/host machine. We have to assume that; you wouldn't be asking for the ability to stream to machines you don't have. Here's how it works:
AppleTV enables you to stream from 5 machines to one TV. But say you want to stream from one server to many machines... That's what Music Sharing is for. This is set in the preferences for iTunes. But just for argument's sake lets say you want to stream to five displays. Two ways to do this: If your client machines have video cards to support an HD display, then connect them directly (not the best solution since they won't have the hardware to support the correct ATSC color gamut) or buy an AppleTV for every remote display NOT connected to a computer that you want to stream to. If you don't have three client machines but three HDTV's, then AppleTV is going to be cheaper than buying three client machines. Any way you slice it, if you have AppleTV you have to have iTunes and therefore you can stream both ways... from one source to many displays or from many sources to one display. Since iTunes already supports media sharing itself, there was no need to build in that reverse-functionality into AppleTV. This still means that you, personally, could do without the AppleTV because iTunes alone will do what you're looking for. But if you ever wanted to go the other way, or support wireless streaming directly to a standalone HD display, you'd want AppleTV to do it.
The DRM argument is unnecessary as AppleTV is not bound to DRM'ed media only. You can get media from outside sources, convert it to H.264 and store it without DRM... but quite frankly Apple's DRM is really not very restrictive at all. I've heard the various arguments and none of them really wash. Between an iPod and Airport Express or AppleTV, I can listen/watch wherever I want and with higher clarity than most of those hackish poorly-integrated third-party solutions out there. Ok so maybe you want a player other than an iPod... but why is it everyone always blames Apple for not being more open-ended? They're trying to maintain tight integration with products they can guarantee will work the way they're intended. If they did what everyone else did, people would be pissed off when they discover how poorly the third-party players work, supporting only limited features/functionality relative to what the iPod/iTunes combination can do. Of course, customers would st
It's going to be very interesting to see how Apple changes the playing field for phone manufacturers with this.
Given that the phone is not discounted but the service likely will be. In a way, it actually makes sense - A LOT of sense.
Think about it: Phones are one-time purchases that a user can rationalize with a bonus or hell, even just on impulse credit purchasing (fire-and-forget buying). If you already have a sizable credit payment, adding the Apple iPhone to it won't make much of a dent in your rather predictable card payments. Any way you slice it, a phone purchase is, fundamentally, a one-time charge.
On the other hand... you can't as easily forget about a plan because you keep getting kicked in the head with that figure every month. A single purchase is not something you need to budget for, but a recurring charge is. My guess is that Apple knew this very well, and it underscores that they understand something about consumer psychology that the cellular service providers so far have not.
Furthermore, Apple has another huge advantage on their end in this type of model. They have a formidable profit margin on most of their hardware products. This gives them a lot of flexibility to charge full price and kick back some of that price to the cellular service providers. The Time Value of Money principle dictates that the future value of a present payment higher than the present value of a future payment. The more the cellular carrier collects up front as a portion of the phone price, even if it forces them to drastically cut their recurring charges, is worth more to them than the recurring charges they sacrificed. This is the same reason they apply corrections and credits in the next billing cycle (or if they're Cingular they "forget" to do so for a couple months on end), and the same reason they bind you into contracts... because if they have to wait for the money, they want a guarantee that they're going to get it.
Now, granted, I don't know if and how much of the iPhone price Apple is sharing with Cingular, but since the iPhone isn't discounted/subsidized, Apple's got a lot of headroom to play with to make this much more sensible for Cingular while at the same time playing to the impulse-purchasing psychology of the average consumer.
The only reason charging less for the phone than one month's service works nowadays is because of contracts... but even contracts are a risk because they're no guarantee of solvency. If the consumer is unable to pay, involving collections and going 30, 60 or 90 days without the revenue diminishes the value of the payment stream once they finally do receive it (which is why banks charge interest for loans and mortgages). They can make up some of the money with late fees and early termination penalties, but again not having the money in months A, B, C, D, etc. is extremely detrimental and if they have a lot of delinquent payments across the board because they have millions of customers with contracts, shareholders are going to take notice. It's far more valuable to the company and the shareholders to get the value up front without having to take the risks involved in a long contract term.
I'm not quite sure why you want to store at the TV but let me approach that issue with a counterargument from two directions... for purely academic reasons, and not out of a hope to convert you:
Most users in the target demographic for Apple's products, i.e. semi-affluent to affluent families, are likely to have more than one computer and consequently multiple playlists from multiple iterations of iTunes... also given the fact that it coincides with iTunes existing design platform: That is, one can license several machines to the same account. Licensing several machines to one account makes sense unless you're a bunch of college guys rooming together but generally, they're not Apple's bread and butter. I'm sure model this was chosen on the basis of feedback picked up by Apple's customer engineers who travel countrywide to gather data from various ad-hoc focus groups, analysts, vendors, retailers, etc. What the customer engineers do is they take some disembodied concepts/features and throw them out at their small audience, e.g. "What do you think of this? Is it useful? What do you like/dislike?" etc. and then they shape their products along these needs. The AppleTV is no exception. The MAJORITY of people in Apple's target market, and in the public at large, want to be able to coordinate many sources of media to one entertainment system.
From the other direction, you have users like myself who have a more elaborate home network and quite a bit of distributed computing firepower on the LAN but currently no way to really harness this firepower into a rather elaborate home entertainment system. I have about 500 gigabytes of combined storage on my existing machines. My response to your preferential setup is that I don't understand the benefit. Namely, I don't see the point in using one kind of appliance, a TV, as the central point for storage because most products designed to couple with a TV will be designed with output to the TV in mind. But what if I have different kinds of media that I want my home entertainment system to be able to access? I don't particularly like listening to music on a PC-mated sound system. I tend to do most of my casual listening in the living room which is uncluttered compared to my computer room. Not only that, but I have enough money for one kickass sound system, not five. Likewise, I fail to see the usefulness in watching SD or HD movies in my office. I bought a 34" HDTV for the living room because that's where I prefer to watch my movies. For me, the AppleTV is the kind of solution that bridges the firepower of the network, which is an ideal place to serve all kinds of content from, to the entertainment appliances (HDTV, surround sound receiver, etc.) which are best-suited devices from which to experience the playback.
Building flexibility into this kind of a system isn't complicated because it doesn't require upgrades to expensive home entertainment hardware, or replacement of the AppleTV (to a point), but can easily facilitate the merging of new media sources because the framework already exists for storing and accessing all kinds of media in all kinds of formats... it's your computer.
As Doc Searls and David Weinberger have pointed out on their website World of Ends, the more specific complexity you build into the internet, the less useful it becomes. Optimizing a network for one kind of media means deoptimizing it for other kinds of media. This is why AppleTV makes a hell of a lot more sense than a device like TiVo, whose sales have been doing rather poorly. Granted, I said something about "jack of all trades, master of none"... but the AppleTV isn't a jack of all trades, in a sense. What it is designed to do is one thing... but what that one thing IS just happens to facilitate many other kinds of things. This is exactly what Searls and Weinberger point out about the internet... it is a dumb network. It doesn't know or care about one type of media over the other, and consequently just about any type
AppleTV will more than likely be offering 720p downloads in the near future. One clue to this, in my view, is the addition of a $50 million datacenter in the months before the WWDC announcement of the product. Also, as I understand it, the WWDC demo was using a 720p file, not the current 640x480 resolution. Apple typically does not upgrade their iTunes content ahead of the corresponding hardware release date... and their store employees and customer service do not know about the content support until the street date of the hardware.
By the way, not to pick nits but 640x480 isn't 480p. 720x480 is 480p. Also, there is NO content on cable that's 1080p. At most, 1080i, but 1080p is not part of the ATSC (HDTV) spec. And no, there aren't plenty of devices that do what the AppleTV can do. There are a few devices, such as the Media Center PC, that do part of what AppleTV does, but do it poorly. There's no integration of multiple streamed sources within your own network. There's no integrated solutions running 802.11n for coherent streaming of HD content. Also, AppleTV's menuing system is driven by AppleTV itself and not computer hardware, therefore taxing resources dedicated to this function and not the resources from which the content is being streamed. The majority of said solutions do it over wired connections, and the few that do it wirelessly don't really equate pound for pound to the AppleTV in terms of the particular combination of features. Additionally, the AppleTV's design makes it inherently scalable to future formats for both picture and sound, seeing as H.264 can in principle support a variety of resolutions (not just capped at 720p or 1080p) and up to 24 channels of audio. I could go on but I think you get the point on this...
The reason Apple went to 640x480 was because, at the time, their newer iPod displays supported that resolution so they introduced content to match it. This tends to be their strategy, rather than having users resort to other outlets to get the most out of Apple's hardware. Additionally, you're not bound to Apple Store's content since you can use utilities like Handbrake to convert other media sources to H.264 or another supported format for viewing over AppleTV. You'd just have to mount the file to the iTunes library. Big deal. Arguing that this is not a choice is like bitching about the lack of choice of laser transport mechanisms in your CD player... or arguing that you didn't have a choice of fuel management software when you bought your car.
That being said, AppleTV works with Windows and OS X... provided you have iTunes installed. I'm not sure why it would benefit you to use it from third-party apps. But what I find especially interesting is that you likely wouldn't hear people complaining that third party app developers don't each support ALL of the possible functions available on AppleTV (e.g. streaming from five computers, content-synch, online movie trailer access, etc.). Instead, they'd pin it on Apple... which is of course why it's better for Apple to not allow third-party app integration because they have no control over what those third party apps will do to erode the features and functionality of AppleTV, and consequently diminish its image in the eyes of the consumer.
I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "working outside of the iTunes player". The UI for AppleTV is not iTunes, but it interfaces with iTunes for its content. I don't imagine it will interface with any other third-party players but I'm frankly glad it doesn't. Since AppleTV is more than just a wireless streaming interface, it has certain operability requirements that could be severely hindered by having to make it compatible with every crappy third-party player out there. Furthermore, some of its functions, such as trailer streaming direct from the web, would not be supported by third-party players. Additionally, Apple would have no control over playback quality. What amuses me about the "choice" argument is that technically-savvy users who generally complain
If people read your post they might understand that Apple wasn't being stupid when they designed AppleTV with 720p resolution. They wanted a product that wasn't going to be astronomically expensive, and they wanted to get it out the door at a time when 720p downloads were feasible whereas 1080p downloads were not only hellishly impractical but also cutting out the vast majority of HDTV owners.
There are two reasons for this, and both are tied to the idiosyncrasies of computer-based multimedia formats:
1. File support - It's easier to support a progressive format than an interlaced format in terms of the interoperability between inherently progressive video hardware in computers, and progressive video hardware in HDTVs. Interlaced (lower-field first) encoding is possible but really only useful to video editors producing content for SD DVD or SD TV, who usually have adequate hardware to output the interlaced video to an NTSC display. Also, your file is either going to be interlaced or progressive, not both... and either 480p, 720p, 1080p... not all three or even two of the three. Choosing the wrong resolution to run with means alienating a potentially huge set of customers.
2. Usability - this leaves you with three options, 480p, 720p and 1080p. 480p offers no competitive advantage in a time when HDTV sales are surging. 1080p is too large a file for reasonable download times, uninterrupted playback (hardware limitations), storage requirements and the fact that the vast majority of consumers do not have 1080p sets. 720p is a great compromise.
I'm sure that 1080p will be something Apple may support in the future but to do so now would have meant launching a brand-new product concept at a price too difficult to digest, with questionable performance at the given resolution and being usable only by the narrowest group of TV owners. Neither is that wise from the standpoint of recouping fixed costs of initial R&D and product marketing, but it's not part of Apple's successful formula.
They always put feeler products out there to get the initial reaction from the market before they introduce their larger strategy... If this one fails, they won't lose as much as they would have if they spent several years more R&D and packed even more tech into it to make it horrendously expensive and appealing only to the narrowest demographic. Here, if they lose, they lose less. But if they win, it'll open the door to what could be the "killer app" for Apple for the next ten years... with as many product iterations or more than the myriad iPods that have been introduced since the first generation model.
Thank you, Bill, for that Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious., Or, to quote the illustrious philosopher Ren Høek, "Stimpy, I'm completely astounded by your wealth of ignorance."
It's amazing that this guy is the richest man on Earth. Here he is, offering punditry that is, really, at the very least five years behind Apple in terms of his thought patterns on technology. As early as 1996, the writing was on the wall when Progressive Networks (now RealNetworks, Inc.) and Apple were developing multimedia streaming and THAT should have been the first signal that IP networks were capable, in principle, of carrying full television programming in the near future.
Unfortunately, nobody listened... Well, almost nobody. While Gates is touting this technology as something five years down the road, it's interesting to note how this article comes just one week before Apple's AppleTV, which was announced months ago. Apple had to be researching this for at least the past three years and developing working prototypes as early as five years ago or as recent as two years ago. Sure, Microsoft has their hands in this game... but they're taking a different approach to the model. Their idea of a leap ahead is to mimic the fee-based cable subscription model. Apple has gone in the other direction, toward an a-la carte ownership-based model. This is important because, while it doesn't encompass all the options a customer wants (maybe they want to rent some, and buy others), it does differentiate their product more drastically from cable than does Microsoft's concept... and it demonstrates, more importantly, the kind of forward thinking that Apple is known for... Re-arranging and re-defining the way we use existing technologies. There's nothing fundamentally different about a fee-based model over the internet versus over cable. But there is something radically different about a-la carte programming in a way that underscores a dynamic service that IP can facilitate easily which cable companies can not or will not.
This is why Microsoft continues to lose the battle for brand dominance in multimedia to Apple... and why Apple, not Microsoft, will be the key player in determining the future of how we buy, access, receive and experience our home entertainment. But rest assured, AppleTV and the upcoming iPhone are only tactical products in a much larger strategic vision at Apple. As I've said in other posts, while Microsoft is barely catching up with Vista and XBOX Live and (only in brand diversification if not in sales) Zune, Apple is already focused on the next five years during which they will set out to completely redefine the user interface they popularized 22 years ago.
The computer was once argued by Apple to be the "digital hub" in their appliance-based strategy but they have since moved on to a bigger picture in which the computer is only a host or nodde in the NETWORK, which is becoming the backbone of home entertainment and productivity. iPhone, AppleTV are just devices that tap into these networks for their distributed computing power... Microsoft has several disadvantages here.
First, Microsoft's philosophy confuses the ability to do complex tasks with the appearance of complexity. As a jazz percussionist once told me, an average drummer takes something simple and makes it look complex. A great drummer takes something seemingly impossible and makes it look effortless. Microsoft's other hindrance is that they have little control over the myriad hardware systems on which their software resides. They have very little experience at developing completely integrated products and services. Last, Microsoft seems to begin all their ventures with the question, "How can we make customers like what we have to offer?" Look at it... They spend eons developing some "major" software upgrade, which is little more than rearranging the parts to make it look different, not necessarily better, and then they figure out how they're going to market it. In other words, Microsoft finds ways to convince others t
Apple is a company that has a tremendous brand presence, one that influences brands in many other industries and has a "following" more unique and devoted than say Nokia or Motorola. People will be clamoring to dig up FCC filings on Apple's first foray into cell phones... but how many people are clamoring to find out what Motorola's next whiz-bang product is going to be? This is perhaps why the author didn't understand just how critical it is for Apple to come out and set the expectation. And that's another thing... The FCC filings put information out there that may be ambiguous and not set the proper expectations for consumers and developers. Apple was smart to take a lead on this and set the expectation according to what they want people to know about the upcoming product.
That being said, iPhone is not a strategic product. It's a tactical product in a much larger strategy. And this is something the press doesn't seem to grasp at all.
Yes, iPhone lacks this and that but do they need to "test the waters" to know the demand for 3G or other features they have yet to incorporate? No, of course not... there's plenty of industry data for these existing features. What they ARE testing that NO phone manufacturer yet has is multitouch capacitance sensors. This is a key to Apple's larger strategy, in my opinion.
Based on a closer examination of the technology (Synaptics Onyx Concept phone, Multitouch Demo at TED) it's clear that iPhone is only scratching the surface of what multitouch can do... and they have only begun tinkering with the UI, gestures, etc.
Note how everyone pissing and moaning about the lack of tactile contact is ignoring something critical in Apple's redefinition of the UI. One of the first things I noticed about the early iPod interfaces was that the scrollwheel seemed to possess both acceleration and some momentum... i.e. fast scrolling will keep up momentum for a second when you let go of the wheel. There's more feedback received by your senses than just tactile sensory input.
When you touch an object and move it with force, you expect momentum. You also expect to see the result of momentum... an object continuing to move once you let go. Also you expect proportional momentum... push harder, retained momentum is higher. Multitouch capacitance sensors have velocity, pressure and acceleration sensitivity and a smartly designed UI will mimic the physics of these behaviors. The end result is that the 2D simulation of 3D space behaves more as you would expect it to if it were a space of real objects. This is also feedback... except it's many layers of feedback telling you where you should expect objects to be, how much force you need to apply to achieve a given result, etc. A keyboard offers only one layer of feedback. And this puts most PDA's not just five years behind, but as far behind as typewriters in their ability to tell you something more substantive about the work space.
But most companies don't think this far. Apple, however, does. Apple's designers don't look at other PDA's and think "Hey, they have keyboards, people put up with them enough to buy them... let's make a physical keyboard." When people tell you they want feedback, they're not saying they want a tiny keyboard. They're saying they want feedback... but your combined sensory input gives you much more information about where you are in space and time and subconsciously what your brain needs to do to achieve certain results.
So what Apple's designers tend to do when faced with this is they will go to the root of the issue and research how people receive and perceive sensory input... and what that combination of
Remember once upon a time even Mac fans such as myself wondered what a better world it might be if Apple had won its suit against Microsoft? This is relevant to the topic at hand because here are the analysts again wondering what a wonderful world it might be if Apple and Microsoft held hands and sang Kumbaya.
... ESPECIALLY core mac fans whose expectations of Apple have never been higher as evidenced by the post-announcement iPhone backlash.
Well, I've come to the conclusion that we were wrong. I have to take a step back though, to the time when analysts kept arguing that licensing Mac OS to run on other machines was the way to go. The analysts never understood, as Steve Jobs did, that Apple is not a software company. That where Microsoft believes that the profits are in the software, that only works if your goal is to be the Wal-Mart of the computer industry... brand dominance by quantity, not quality.
We saw what happened when Apple licensed out its OS... it was a total disaster. Apple's strength was not the OS alone. They have always been a hardware company that made an operating system only because it allowed them to manage every level of the user experience in one integrated package. No other PC manufacturers have this advantage, and must instead rely on only the hope that a third party OS manages to work just well enough with zillions of third party apps and drivers so that consumers aren't driven away. Well, they're being driven away now... and they're going to Apple. Maybe not in a flood, but one by one they're popping up at Apple's doorstep because the iPod has shown them what a tightly integrated hardware and OS can do -- when it's done right, anyway.
But could it have been done right if Apple won the suit? I don't think so. By the time it would have happened, Steve Jobs was out of the picture, and Jonathan Ive hadn't yet carved a place as Apple's product design genius. At the time of the 9th Circuit's decision, Spindler was CEO. There's every likelihood that then-bloated and corporatized Apple would have gained some market dominance but would have played it just as complacently as Microsoft has.
The fact is, the underdog position Apple has held has been very good for pushing them to require better design than Microsoft and Apple's PC manufacturing competitors like Dell, Toshiba, HP, etc. It's possible the company's premature financial success, at a time when Spindler and Amelio were more concerned with turning out "beige boxes" just like the next guy, would have pre-empted any return by Steve Jobs and Apple would not have emerged as the brand zeitgeist to which all other companies designs aspire. Today, while they do not dominate the market in terms of sheer volume, they dominate the market in brand perception, regarded as the most desirable brand by consumers across all products of all types. They have a reputation for quality that PC manufacturers do not. They have a following that PC manufacturers do not. So strong is this following that Apple was forced to announce its iPhone before FCC filings because there's a voracious appetite for Apple rumors. Can anyone imagine throngs of consumers digging through FCC filings to be the first to announce what Motorola's next new whiz-bang product is going to be?
So, would a partnership with Microsoft be good for Apple or Microsoft? No. Not only would it risk Apple's name being dragged in the mud by inferior multimedia standards managed by a company that doesn't have half the design aesthetic or QC concerns that Apple NEEDS to have. Microsoft can make a shitty product and sit back and watch people have no choice but to buy it... Apple has to work to impress people
It wouldn't work for Microsoft either. They've had this fanciful notion that they can make people love their feeble attempts at multimedia domination simply by latching on to Apple's superior product. Where's the benefit for Apple? We already tackled that one. Ok, what happens to both Apple AND Microsoft when customers see
Slow day at the InformationWeek news desk? Seriously... is there some shortage of real events in the world worth discussing that space needed to be occupied on a news website discussing the myriad misinformed opinions of John Q. Public on two operating systems that haven't modified in any radical way the fundamental structure of the user interface in 20 years.
What I find hilarious is that the news media are missing the larger implication of iPhone. While they're now falling all over themselves in post-orgasmic feature-flogging (iPhone lacks this, iPhone lacks that)... they've entirely missed the bigger picture. iPhone and the Synaptics capacitance sensor technology it uses are, in my opinion, a testbed leading up to a much larger revolution that Jobs has completely obfuscated from view with his overindulgent intro at MacWorld.
While the press are transfixed on that, Jobs and Co. are very likely hard at work adapting the technologies in the iPhone to computing itself... to completely redefine the user interface as a three-dimensional space within which to work, manipulate data and objects, and navigate three-dimensionally using both hands.
If the media want to report something worthwhile, how about doing some homework on multitouch sensing surfaces and what the implications are for the traditional "desktop" GUI even just five years down the road?
The iPhone is just the beginning of a much larger revolution in computing, in fact probably the biggest revolution since the birth of the graphical user interface. Not sure what I mean? Look at the submitter's link to the TED demonstration, and also take a look at the Synaptics Onyx Concept.
Put it this way... if you still haven't guessed where Jobs' head is right now, the iPhone with its arguably limited feature sets is a way of not showing your best work up front. In fact, Apple I think has something much bigger in mind... for which the iPhone is really just a loss leader.
When you see what multipoint capacitance sensors can do, it should become evident that Apple's probably already researching how to redefine the user interface of the home computer... and eliminate the mouse and physical keyboard entirely, but simultaneously give us a user interface far more advanced than a mere 2D touchscreen. A touchscreen tablet strips away some of the advantages of a keyboard and mouse, but a tablet PC with a multipoint capacitance sensor opens up new dimensions of desktop navigation and application control.
Put it another way... Have you seen the Pre-Crime computer in Minority Report? Now you've got some idea where Apple's research is very probably currently focused.
iPhone not meeting expectations, not living up to the hype? Pfeh... I guarantee you Steve Jobs and company are already thinking another five years ahead to the day when the desktop GUI framework will undergo the first systemic metamorphosis in 20 years.
Read the whole ... paragraph.
The cold war was an ever-escalating chain of threats, the actual execution of which was always extremely improbable (as both sides knew the end result)... For decades the threat of nuclear war was carted out as an excuse for giving away billions upon billions to defense contractors.
Shortly after the cold war ended, various skirmishes and, then, Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom became the new dog-and-pony by which Congress to appease their constituencies and lobbyists in states where defense contractors represented significant employment. But now it's blossoming into another Vietnam and is beginning to blow up in Congress' face.
So, what's the answer? Give the defense contractors a new mission: Counterterrorism! Since the supply of irrational fear is virtually limitless, the demand for solutions to calm these irrational fears is equally unbounded. Naturally, this could go on for decades, just like the cold war...
How can they convince the people to buy into it? Remember Lisa Simpson and the tiger-repellent rock? You don't see any terrorists around do you? That's the beauty of irrational fears... you don't need to use a rational argument to soothe them.
This is not to say that counterterrorism is bunk... No, it's necessary. But there's a pragmatic approach to identifying real threats and determining the cost of real solutions to them, and then there's the Chicken Little approach. The sky is falling. Watch out for terrorists in Fargo, North Dakota. Attack them before they attack us.
The big problem with this mania that has been exploited by the Bush administration and Republicans in particular is this: While they are quick to point out that no terrorist attacks have occurred on Bush's watch since September 11, 2001... I am equally quick to point out that the worst terrorist attack in US history did, in fact, occur on Bush's watch.
The climatologist quoted is arguing for something that actually makes sense, sort of. But what they're arguing, and what the submitter implies they're arguing are two different things.
The climatologist is talking about climatologists and meteorologists in her profession of weather reporting. Like a science classroom, the Weather Channel is not the arena for scientific debate over global warming or anything else. The peer-reviewed science literature is the arena for debate, and as far as I can tell, the climatologist is not arguing for censorship there... at all.
Do I agree then with the idea that climatologists who present their personal opinions as fact against the consensus of the scientific community should be stripped of their credentials? Well, in some sense, yes. But it's not that simple...
If people in other professions repeatedly give false information in the routine of their job, they can be stripped of their certifications... so I don't think it's out of the question. Each incident requires a thorough case review to determine whether or not willful negligence was involved... which is to say that these instances should not be overlooked.
"the same can be said of many different types of software" ... and hardware, I meant to say.