It's amazing how if you ask Microsoft why their products suck they will tell you that software is "hard" and it is "expensive" and their are "security barriers" and "support issues" but apparently over at Apple software just appears out of thin air when you assemble an arbitrary $220 collection of parts.
Going by this logic, one should be able to buy a $220 phone from Motorola and just reconfigure it into an iPhone with a screwdriver.
Using this same logic, Windows Vista is $1 in parts (DVD) and $2 of packaging (retail bubble pack) and should have taken one guy at Microsoft less than an hour to make.
The Mona Lisa? A $20 art canvas and a $20 set of paints at the art store is clearly the same thing.
I actually like when the software in a device is completely ignored, I think you give the whole device credit or blame for either functioning or not, never mind how it was made, and that is what 99% of humanity does with stuff. Whether the video is decoded on a chip or in software is a design decision just like any other. But you can't go one step further and pretend that there is no software in a device, that it did not need to be developed, or that it just appeared like magic.
Also, saying the iPhone is $220 in parts implies that all the parts are off-the-shelf. There are at least two chips with Apple logos in there and the multi-touch display technology is Apple's also, acquired when they bought Fingerworks. OS X is almost completely unique.
The people who must laugh at this the most are like Nokia designers who are working on a new model that has a $220 parts budget per unit and can't get around the deficiencies of Symbian or Flash Lite or JavaFX or Windows Mobile. Those guys know that you can have $1000 in parts and if you have to run Windows Mobile on it in the end it will still be awful.
Finally, the whole point of the Intel Mac is to use the exact same commodity PC hardware as all other PC makers, so that Apple's costs and supplies of e.g. CPU's are the same as everyone else. Shortages at Intel hurt everyone, bugs in Core 2 Duo hurt everyone. With iPhone, same strategy. They could have put an Intel chip in iPhone and made the software part easier but inside iPhone it is a phone. So if you ignore the software and do a hardware tear down and you realize "why, it's just a PC inside" or "why, it's just a smart phone inside" then well, duh.
Apple bought this company called Fingerworks, they made keyboards also that you could gesture over. You could send in your Apple laptop and they'd send it back with a new keyboard in it, with no moving parts. If your gesture was typing the keyboard would react like a keyboard, but you could also wave your hands over it in various ways without touching it.
Given that Apple notebooks have had multi-touch in the track pads for years now, it could be that they are going to remove the track pad altogether and the same functions will happen by gesturing over the keyboard. They are trying to make stuff smaller right now, look how big the track pad is.
Another option is a notebook where the screen is multi-touch and where the keyboard should be you have another multi-touch screen. When you're doing video editing it could show a specialized keyboard, or show DJ turntables, or display any keyboard layout in any language, or show a newly updated layout for use with Unicode (give me smart quote buttons). All the stuff that Steve Jobs said about Treo keyboards being stuck one way goes double for a Mac/PC because it is much more general purpose.
> The trickier-part of multitouch will be the iPod nano. That might become the new "simple music player."
The iPod nano is by far the most popular iPod and most popular music player of all time. When Apple released the iPod mini it stole the show from the full-size iPod right away. The nano just sent that into orbit. For two years the full-size iPod has been a video player. After you see a nano it's hard to carry an iPod video around just for music, most people would rather bring just part of their collection in a nano. The thing is practically indestructible, weights almost nothing, fits in any pocket.
> I think it's unlikely for Apple to release an iPod with a screen as big as the iPhone, simply because there is no need > for so much information on a simple music player.
No, there is an iPod called "iPod video" and it is two years old and when it first came out the major complaint was the small screen. The next video model is going to run OS X and have the same screen as the iPhone. I'm not just speculating, Steve Jobs already said OS X is in "some iPods we're working on" the other day right after the iPhone launch. It's not hard to imagine a fat iPhone with 100 GB disk inside and only the iPod features from the iPhone.
A nano where the whole front was a screen and showed Cover Flow would also rock, but probably not OS X in there for a while yet. Although you never know. Storage is not a problem, OS X is less than 1 GB, the next nano will have 16 GB.
> As a side note, the iPhone is going to be a pain to use while driving as well
That is a great feature of iPhone. Here in California it is illegal to touch a phone while driving. You can use a hands-free only. iPhone has a hands-free built in.
> no voice dial
You plug your iPhone into a dock in the car and you get voice dial and engine diagnostics if they decide to add that also. There is a whole iPod car platform, many cars come from the factory with an iPod plug in them.
> no buttons you can feel
You buy a third-party Bluetooth controller if you want that. I can't imagine we get through the year without somebody releasing a keyboard that looks just like an iPhone, with a little holder for the phone so it looks like a mini-notebook when in use. Ideally, though, you would have the keyboard in your lap and the iPhone in the dock next to the HDTV.
Whatever accessories exist for phones today, you will see them all for iPhone in no time.
> The best part? It's a feature which is pretty unusable for anyone with a visual impairment.
That could be said of 95% of the features of every device.
By your logic we should all be using huge monochrome screens with 72 point Helvetica Extra Bold and also we should throw away all of our cameras and guns.
> I'm going to be really happy when everyone copies the iPhone interface and suddenly the visually impaired > have few/no options for a usable mobile phone.
I'm not visually impaired, but it seems like the iPhone would be better for most people who are rather than a Samsung Blackjack and its little chiclet buttons. The iPhone's buttons actually shoot light into your eyes... how can that not be better for someone with bad vision to see?
Also, iPhone's display can zoom, and if there isn't now, then soon there will be a visually impaired setting so the display turns high contrast.
> I'm glad to see you bringing back Apple's initial OS X less-than-friendly period in a new device
When OS X first came out, I complained to Apple about usability for people with special needs because a friend of mine uses his mouth only to run a Mac and OS X was no good for him in the first version. However someone from Apple's OS X group called my friend and asked him to give them his wish list for what he wanted to see in OS X and they built all that stuff.
> he could fund a cure for blindness!
I have a friend who is an ER nurse, he tells me the medical community is going MAD for iPhone. They want to have a pocket device that they can look up information quickly such as in iPhone's Web browser, and also communicate for consultations and such, and finally you have to be able to wipe blood off it without it getting stuck in the keys.
So maybe the guy who cures blindness finally will be using an iPhone when he does it.
You put the screen flat on the desk like a placemat. If you like, you can put a second display in the traditional place. Same idea as Wacom's Cintiq Tablet
Or, you detect the hand in front of the screen, so the user can perform gestures without actually touching. Wacom's tablets detect the pen when they're not touching the tablets, so you can do gestures like kick your elbow back and drive the cursor into the corner and trigger Exposé. Apparently this can be done with the bare hand also, already been solved.
Also consider how bad the mouse and keyboard are in this regard, all the carpal and the twisted wrists and bad posture. People are already getting wrecked by stuff. If fingers are more natural people may use them more intuitively and with natural movements.
I've been using an Art Tablet for many years, having a real-world spacial relationship with the items on the screen is completely addictive, I'm not at all surprised that people like their iPhones. The mouse feels like pushing an egg around with a spoon, it is completely abysmal, very hard to do it now that I'm used to every pixel of the display always being in the same place under my fingertips. I don't even have a mouse hooked to this computer.
Now that our UI's have true 3D and physics it is only a matter of time until we all get our hands in there.
I think it will stun the nerd mind how fast the keyboard is abandoned also, first chance. If you are a coder or a writer you love the keys like they are a piano, but 95% of computer users would toss it in a blink. Gone. The only thing most people hate more than typing is writing with a pen or stylus. If you try and use a stylus for 8 hours a day you will be at the doctor before the week is done (hello Tablet PC's not going mainstream). I do it but I'm working Photoshop all day and I have a selection of band-aids and tape and other methods to repair my hands some but even so I am at the doctor once a year at least.
The only thing that's coming to replace the mouse is gestures. Either in front of or on the display.
There is a new framework in iPhone called CoreSurface. Not hard to imagine it coming to the Mac.
I was at the Apple Store in SF the other day and they had a giant iPhone in the window which had an HD iMac inside it, showing off the iPhone features as a movie, acting like a giant iPhone. That may be the rumored touch screen aluminum iMac so maybe this is all speculation. Maybe they'll wait a year or two. Then again the Mac line is due to be refreshed, we had the Intel Macs looking just like the previous generation, it's time for an all-new line with touch screens in my opinion.
As for the multi-touch track pads, I heard the track pads in Macs have been multi-touch for some time now. Maybe that is true of other PC's also. In the past you could only touch them with one finger and putting a second finger on there was unpredictable.
I noticed that in the iPhone you have a new OS X framework called "CoreSurface". It's not a huge stretch to think that might show up on the Mac.
It says on the side of the iPhone box that you need Mac OS X v10.4.10 or Windows 2000 (SP4), Windows XP Home or Professional (SP2), or Windows Vista. That's the current version of Windows, the one before that in two flavors, and the one before that also, going back to Y2K.
If you can't run iTunes on it, you can't run iPod or iPhone on it. There are 5 year-old kids who can explain the concept to you.
Further, the 64-bit versions of Windows are a software management disaster. The fact that it is incompatible with 32-bit Windows is clearly Microsoft's fault. Every user of 64-bit Windows faces the sad realization that they are running the single most obscure PC operating system in existence, with hardly any third-party support or interest. If you are running 64-bit Windows IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO VIRTUALIZE A 32-BIT VERSION ALSO FOR COMPATIBILITY.
So get your shit together, get a virtualizer, and see if you can't get iTunes running on your box you loser.
FSF Chief and iPhone FUD
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GPLv3 Released
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
I saw the iPhone FUD coming out of FSF chief, that was really low class. He's like we're very interested to see if there is any GPL on there, if there is there will be hell to pay. I was like, is that FSF or BSA? Two sides of the same fucking coin is all. There is no excuse for that kind of comment.
Apple has been using BSD since 1988, Apache since 1998, OS X since 1999, WebKit since 2003... how did porting them to the iPhone suddenly get some GPL on there?
Releasing today was also low-class. If there were 365+ nerdy events this year that would be one thing, but there is no doubt Apple claimed this week six months ago. Even if it is not petty it has the appearance of petty. It's like Bill Gates showing up at D with a really low-tech multi-touch screen, oh that is pathetic. If the hottest thing at MS really was their enormous multi-touch screen, that would be a reason NOT to bring it to D, when people are asking Steve Jobs to show them his personal iPhone with all the same features but in a ready-to-ship consumer product that goes in your pocket and runs all day on batteries.
Finally, there is something disturbing about knocking the iPhone for not being open source enough. It is clearly the market leader in phones when it comes to both open source and interoperability standards. At a time when there are no real Web browsers on phones, Apple puts in an open source, standards-compliant Web 2.0 browser and says "make Ajax if you want to be on the user's phone." The iPhone is compatible with the entire Internet instead of a menace to it because of BSD. It is a remarkable open source success story. To the extent that it has anything to do with FSF they should be proud of their contribution and to the extent that it doesn't, they should recognize that also.
These comparisons are a joke. The number of bugs or vulnerabilities itself is completely meaningless because of the wide variety of issues you can have. For example, would you rather have 10 vulnerabilities that each enable a malicious Web site to crash your browser, or 1 vulnerability that enables a malicious Web site to browse your local disk?
Vista still encourages users to run with higher privileges than necessary, and the platform is still host to over 99% of the viruses and malware ever created. It is not even recommended to run Windows without third-party security enhancements such as anti-virus. Many will tell you to run it only in a virtualizer, not on bare hardware, so you can wipe the Windows "disk" every night and start fresh the next day. In fact, Microsoft will tell you to do that, it's what VirtualPC is for.
Anyone who believes this crap deserves Vista. Enjoy.
If you want to upgrade your 256 kbit/s AAC to lossless in a couple of years then leave the proof of purchase IN your iTunes Plus tracks. It enables iTunes to tell that you bought the track from iTunes Store. If you use this app on your iTunes Plus tracks you will be buying lossless for full price like a newbie.
Look, here is how Window will die: it will be virtualized seamlessly on other operating systems for 5 years until hardly anybody needs it anymore. The way you know this is that is what happened to Mac OS, and Windows is a copy of Mac OS that is 10 years behind.
1984 Mac GUI = Windows 95
1997 Mac "blue box" virtualizer on Rhapsody developer preview = Parallels 2007 on Mac OS X
1999 Mac virtualizer in Mac OS X Server = 2009 Parallels on high-end PC's running Unix
2001 Mac virtualizer in consumer Mac OS X = 2011 PC virtualizer with Windows in all consumer PC systems running Unix
2002 Classic Mac OS funeral (WWDC) = no new Win32 development by 2012
2003 Mac virtualizer now an optional component of Mac OS X, not pre-installed = 2013 PC's say "bring your own Windows if you need it"
The last person that Microsoft is afraid of with regards to virtual Windows is Apple. It is much worse for them if Parallels or VMWare become Windows OEM's and hide Windows completely yet still run its apps. It is much worse for Sony to ship a Unix with PC virtualizer and Windows in it and hide Windows but still run its apps. Apple doesn't need to hide Windows to get Photoshop, that is a native Mac app for 10 versions, on Windows for only half that time. Apple likes it just fine if an AutoCAD user can buy a Mac and Parallels and still run their AutoCAD next to iLife and Apache.
If somebody can show me another consumer OS and app platform being migrated to a modern system in some other way, I'd be willing to reconsider my position. But wow do the PC pundits of today sound like Mac pundits of 10 years ago all talking about app platforms and virtualization and modern operating systems and Unix and how to we get there from here.
If you only want it as an iPod, wait three months. At that point, iPod video is 2 years old and it will have been 9 months since Steve Jobs said the iPhone is "the best iPod we've ever made." Obviously, the wide screen, multi-touch, and Cover Flow are all coming to iPod video, I bet the Wi-Fi and Web browser come along also. With big disks in them they will be fatter than iPhone but not huge.
Part of the reason the iPhone has had so much hype is that they put the first next-generation iPod into it... the iPod features are sizzle right now for the iPhone but not going to be exclusive to it for long.
Not only will this iPlayer venture be dead by 2010 but so will the careers of every single person involved from the BBC side.
I have to congratulate them on their big balls, though. Not many people are willing to bet against Apple, Google, Sony, Panasonic, the major music and movie studios, and the hundreds of millions of $500 consumer video players that can only play standard MPEG-4 H.264/AAC. When it comes to consumer audio video formats, most people would see both Panasonic and Sony and that would be enough for them. For others, Apple and Google would be enough. For still others, the fact that you can play H.264 in the palm of your hand on a $249 iPod for 2 years now would be enough for them to pick the internationally standardized audio video playback codec. But the BBC, they are doing another thing. They are certain that what people really want is to get the BBC on their PC's, enjoy it in the den on a $1000+ device rather than say on their phone wherever they happen to be. That's balls, baby.
Even the name "iPlayer"... that sounds remarkably like it would work with your iPod, iPhone, iTunes, doesn't it? Except it's the OPPOSITE. Weird, huh? Ha ha. Microsoft, still milking the rubes.
I bought an Apple AirPort Base Station in 1999 for $299 and plugged it onto a broadband connection in the garage ceiling under the house, turned on the encryption, closed the network, and for 5 years after that computers came and went and all you ever had to do was tell the computer the network name and enter a password and everyone was on the Internet. We had occasional business meetings where you would have 5 notebooks and no problem, you are all on the Internet. New computer? It takes less than a minute to get it onto the Internet.
If I'm doing that at home with almost zero configuration, since 1999, then I have no sympathy if your I-T staff can't make it work seamlessly for you in 2007. Crying about it is even more embarrassing. Wi-Fi is almost 10 years old now. Get your fucking shit together.
No, no, no, no, no. Your app only needs to be connected if it actually requires the network. Whether your app is written in C or Python or JavaScript that is always the same.
> so no local caching
Web browsers have been caching locally since the beginning. With Ajax you cache the whole app locally inside the sandbox instead of outside the sandbox that is the only difference.
If the network is not available, the HTTP request coming out of your JavaScript is answered by the browser, mimicking the server's response from the browser's cache.
The thing to notice is that all phone applications to date are craplets. With the iPhone, even if they are still craplets, at least the will be standardized craplets running in a sandbox with automatic over the network updates. Instead of your interface being 20 shitty UI objects made by some programmer at a phone company pieced together by yet another programmer until it cannot reasonably be decoded by 98% of humanity, you can hire a Web developer to work Photoshop and CSS3 and make your app look like it is going to get its users laid. You can make the most of a small screen by customizing your UI to exactly the app's needs.
Basically, you can make this argument real by comparing any non-Apple smart phone's apps with the Mac Dashboard. Compare the diversity of apps, the quality of apps, how much users love them, and how much they cost (almost always free with Dashboard).
> Nokia has the symbian sdks and java, microsoft has the.net compact framework
Yeah but MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Google (the whole Google) do not run on those platforms. For that you need Web 2.0. Since you need Web 2.0 anyway to run the Web it is pretty hard to argue for phones that have.net on them but no Web 2.0.
Microsoft has yet to get Web 1.0 onto a phone, and they had 100% of Web 1.0 market share back in the day when they were still making Web browsers.
> but remember that since AT&T stands between Apple and Apple's customers
No, that is not true.
Let's say AT&T charges more than they should for data and are slower than the competition. All the competition has to do is offer iPhone users a cell modem for their service for a cheaper price with better service and people will eat them up like Nike iPod Sport Kit. How are punters going to attach a cell modem to their iPhone you ask? All the cell modem has to do is say "here I am" over Wi-Fi the iPhone will attach automatically. Make it a private network and the user will actually have to ask the iPhone to join it the first time and provide a password but that is all. On the Mac that is painless, the menu is always on the screen. It can't be hard on the iPhone either.
Not to mention that non-cell Wi-Fi Wi-Max interests are pissing their pants with joy over iPhone.
Cell-related iPhone complaints are as temporary as DRM-related complaints about iTunes Store.
The iPod was the most anti-DRM music player and the iPhone is the most anti-cell phone because it not only has Wi-Fi "n" but it also obviously has the sophistication to run any kind of software necessary to bridge the gap between its phone features and its Wi-Fi connection. All it lacks is Wi-Max or equivalent to get this going, but iPhone is the best argument for Wi-Max yet.
Roughly Drafted is a blog, you are going to learn the guy's actual opinions and biases. But if you compare his articles about Windows Home Server, which he gives a "do not buy" rating, to the anti-iPhone articles he cites here, you see that he compared Windows Home Server feature for feature with Apple's AirPort Extreme Base Station, and found Windows Home Server to be lacking. He showed his work, in other words. Same with AppleTV.
The anti-iPhone articles don't show you another device feature-for-feature and warn you away from the iPhone. They don't sell you a competing phone by showing one with better battery life, better features. The best knocks on the iPhone are "lack of Microsoft Exchange integration" and "lack of a keyboard" and "lack third-party craplets". There are plenty of phones with those three features already and everybody hates them. And iPhone has standardized email, standardized craplets, and Bluetooth+Wi-Fi+iPod dock for accessory keyboards and sex toys (sex toys already available).
So I don't mind somebody's bias showing if they show their work also. But the bias is clear in the anti-iPhone stuff, they are trying to re-sell Windows Mobile again one last time just like Zune was a last kick at the Windows Media can. Too late. Until there is a phone running Firefox it is going to be tumbleweeds in I-T phones.
You will be able to buy a selection of third-party keyboards. I predict one that is both keyboard and case so you get a "top" for your iPhone, when it is closed it will look like two iPhones fucking.
There have been accessory keyboards made for Bluetooth/ARM portables like iPhone for years. Anyone who was selling one last January already made the right calls to Apple just like they know how to make calls to Nokia.
There are also 3000+ iPod accessories that already run on iPhone. If iPod can do photo card readers and voice recorders and Nike iPod Sport Kit, surely the iPhone can handle a keyboard? Those developers similarly jumped on iPhone because the parts for dock accessories are cheap and the system is set up so you only have to plug them on and they just work, the software is always inside the device, provided by Apple.
Also there is a good reason not to have an integrated keyboard. Since iPhone has a dock connector, TV+speakers become an iPhone accessory, you can go all over and find an iPod dock with TV and speakers hooked up to it right now, often an HDTV. Plug your iPhone onto the TV and sit back on the couch with your Bluetooth keyboard and do email.
Dumbass it is not "Internet" on a cell phone, it is "Web 2.0" on a cell phone.
Point both your Internet phone and Firefox on your PC at apple.com or flickr.com or twitter.com or myspace.com or slashdot.org and tell me if you see THE EXACT SAME FUCKING THING. No, you do not.
> Besides it's only pretend geek phone - a real geek phone would fit in a CF socket so you could drop it into any device you like
Or it could have Wi-Fi "n" with which it shares its Internet connection with 10 nearby devices at once and you don't have to plug in anything. That's how Macs do it. You can take 10 Macs into a room and plug one of them onto Ethernet and choose Create Network from the Wi-Fi menu that is always at the top right of the display and now all 10 Macs are on the network.
> and come with an unlimited high speed data plan as standard.
That is apparently true of the iPhone, some people are complaining about it because they don't want to pay a flat rate for data when there is Wi-Fi in there, they can get data for free most of the time.
> But Apple is being positioned such that if the margins go away, they'll just shut down the Mac division and concentrate > on other things, instead of desperately trying to save the computer business.
No, that is so wrong. In the first place, what would Apple themselves use to develop brilliant new technology like iPod or iPhone? They are one of their own biggest Mac customers, and one of their own biggest success stories.
Saying they would drop the Mac to focus on iPod or iPhone is like saying that if the PlayStation3 does really, really well, Sony will stop making the development kits for PlayStation3 that are used to write games for it. Or that the DVD player threatens the video editing workstation. All of Apple's products orbit the Mac. The music you play on your iPod is made on a Mac. The software for the iPhone was made on a Mac. The iTunes Store and Apple Store are doing unique things, all run entirely on Macs. iTunes itself is a Mac application with almost 10 years of heritage, Safari is a Mac application with 3 years of heritage (which is old by Web 2.0 standards). These are key to both iPod and iPhone.
All of Apple's non-Mac products are "a piece of the Mac to go." The iPod enables you to take your iTunes music collection from your Mac anywhere. The iPhone lets you take that plus the Web and Email from the Mac (literally, the same two apps and same OS) and run it anywhere. The phone is almost extra, but if you look at iChat and Skype, what you have in the iPhone is like a bridge to getting the same "phone" from the Mac. It is going through AT&T because the wireless Internet is not everywhere yet, but it will be, and at that point we would not be surprised to see iChat AV running on an iPhone. The iPhone's Wi-Fi connection is like 100 times faster than its cell connection, it's by far the fastest data phone ever shipped. Hardly anybody else even has Wi-Fi, never mind Wi-Fi "n".
So the Mac is the golden goose for Apple. The more success for iPod, iPhone, AppleTV the more the Mac is essential.
Any lack of progress in Mac hardware doesn't have to be traced to lack of manpower due to iPhone or Leopard, it can be blamed solely on Leopard not being ready.
If you are a new iMac ready to ship in June with Mac OS X Leopard pre-installed and possibly some new hardware feature that specifically requires it, then a delay in Leopard going gold means no new iMacs just yet. The Intel transition is over so a new line of Leopard Macs would make more sense than some more Macs that can run Tiger.
I would guess that the original plan was to ship iPhone and a new iMac running Leopard and the Leopard update kit all at the end of June. That way an iPhone shopper can be offered the matching computer to go with their Leopard phone, or a Mac Pro user will get an update kit along with their iPhone. After the iPhone introduction, when demand was seen to be so large, now they are worried about being able to handle the crowds in Apple and AT&T stores, they don't need to do anything to bring any customers in. The marketing and sales people alone would have lobbied for delaying Leopard and new Macs for a few months even if Leopard was singing, just completely purring along. So for once the marketing people are saying "don't ship it, cook it some more" that is a good problem to have.
> H.264 may become a "de facto" standard which would stop the Windows Media only sites I keep encountering.
MPEG-4 H.264 is already both the actual standard and the de facto standard for consumer video playback. It has been for years. It's the only kind of movie you can play on HD DVD, Blu-Ray, PSP, iPod, iPhone, AppleTV, and many other devices. They all have video decoders chips that speak H.264.
H.264 is also the default video encoding for QuickTime, which is to content creation as Unix is to servers.
This all happened years ago. Windows Media lost this battle even before the iPod. MPEG-4 itself had to drop their proposed content tax before implementing it because it was so unpopular. With Windows Media, the content tax is its raison d'etre. People who make music and movies were never interested.
Where you find Windows Media or Flash content on the Web, remember that is Internet content designed for PC's. It is not part of the World Wide Web, and it is not part of consumer audio video. You have to have a PC with both those non-standard, resource-hungry video codecs installed, that is beyond the Web and beyond consumer audio video. The video decoder in consumer devices is a dedicated decoder chip that speaks the standard only. That's why Google is transcoding their H.263 YouTube into H.264 to get on iPhone and AppleTV and all other devices.
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It's amazing how if you ask Microsoft why their products suck they will tell you that software is "hard" and it is "expensive" and their are "security barriers" and "support issues" but apparently over at Apple software just appears out of thin air when you assemble an arbitrary $220 collection of parts.
Going by this logic, one should be able to buy a $220 phone from Motorola and just reconfigure it into an iPhone with a screwdriver.
Using this same logic, Windows Vista is $1 in parts (DVD) and $2 of packaging (retail bubble pack) and should have taken one guy at Microsoft less than an hour to make.
The Mona Lisa? A $20 art canvas and a $20 set of paints at the art store is clearly the same thing.
I actually like when the software in a device is completely ignored, I think you give the whole device credit or blame for either functioning or not, never mind how it was made, and that is what 99% of humanity does with stuff. Whether the video is decoded on a chip or in software is a design decision just like any other. But you can't go one step further and pretend that there is no software in a device, that it did not need to be developed, or that it just appeared like magic.
Also, saying the iPhone is $220 in parts implies that all the parts are off-the-shelf. There are at least two chips with Apple logos in there and the multi-touch display technology is Apple's also, acquired when they bought Fingerworks. OS X is almost completely unique.
The people who must laugh at this the most are like Nokia designers who are working on a new model that has a $220 parts budget per unit and can't get around the deficiencies of Symbian or Flash Lite or JavaFX or Windows Mobile. Those guys know that you can have $1000 in parts and if you have to run Windows Mobile on it in the end it will still be awful.
Finally, the whole point of the Intel Mac is to use the exact same commodity PC hardware as all other PC makers, so that Apple's costs and supplies of e.g. CPU's are the same as everyone else. Shortages at Intel hurt everyone, bugs in Core 2 Duo hurt everyone. With iPhone, same strategy. They could have put an Intel chip in iPhone and made the software part easier but inside iPhone it is a phone. So if you ignore the software and do a hardware tear down and you realize "why, it's just a PC inside" or "why, it's just a smart phone inside" then well, duh.
Apple bought this company called Fingerworks, they made keyboards also that you could gesture over. You could send in your Apple laptop and they'd send it back with a new keyboard in it, with no moving parts. If your gesture was typing the keyboard would react like a keyboard, but you could also wave your hands over it in various ways without touching it.
Given that Apple notebooks have had multi-touch in the track pads for years now, it could be that they are going to remove the track pad altogether and the same functions will happen by gesturing over the keyboard. They are trying to make stuff smaller right now, look how big the track pad is.
Another option is a notebook where the screen is multi-touch and where the keyboard should be you have another multi-touch screen. When you're doing video editing it could show a specialized keyboard, or show DJ turntables, or display any keyboard layout in any language, or show a newly updated layout for use with Unicode (give me smart quote buttons). All the stuff that Steve Jobs said about Treo keyboards being stuck one way goes double for a Mac/PC because it is much more general purpose.
> The trickier-part of multitouch will be the iPod nano. That might become the new "simple music player."
The iPod nano is by far the most popular iPod and most popular music player of all time. When Apple released the iPod mini it stole the show from the full-size iPod right away. The nano just sent that into orbit. For two years the full-size iPod has been a video player. After you see a nano it's hard to carry an iPod video around just for music, most people would rather bring just part of their collection in a nano. The thing is practically indestructible, weights almost nothing, fits in any pocket.
> I think it's unlikely for Apple to release an iPod with a screen as big as the iPhone, simply because there is no need
> for so much information on a simple music player.
No, there is an iPod called "iPod video" and it is two years old and when it first came out the major complaint was the small screen. The next video model is going to run OS X and have the same screen as the iPhone. I'm not just speculating, Steve Jobs already said OS X is in "some iPods we're working on" the other day right after the iPhone launch. It's not hard to imagine a fat iPhone with 100 GB disk inside and only the iPod features from the iPhone.
A nano where the whole front was a screen and showed Cover Flow would also rock, but probably not OS X in there for a while yet. Although you never know. Storage is not a problem, OS X is less than 1 GB, the next nano will have 16 GB.
> As a side note, the iPhone is going to be a pain to use while driving as well
That is a great feature of iPhone. Here in California it is illegal to touch a phone while driving. You can use a hands-free only. iPhone has a hands-free built in.
> no voice dial
You plug your iPhone into a dock in the car and you get voice dial and engine diagnostics if they decide to add that also. There is a whole iPod car platform, many cars come from the factory with an iPod plug in them.
> no buttons you can feel
You buy a third-party Bluetooth controller if you want that. I can't imagine we get through the year without somebody releasing a keyboard that looks just like an iPhone, with a little holder for the phone so it looks like a mini-notebook when in use. Ideally, though, you would have the keyboard in your lap and the iPhone in the dock next to the HDTV.
Whatever accessories exist for phones today, you will see them all for iPhone in no time.
> The best part? It's a feature which is pretty unusable for anyone with a visual impairment.
... how can that not be better for someone with bad vision to see?
That could be said of 95% of the features of every device.
By your logic we should all be using huge monochrome screens with 72 point Helvetica Extra Bold and also we should throw away all of our cameras and guns.
> I'm going to be really happy when everyone copies the iPhone interface and suddenly the visually impaired
> have few/no options for a usable mobile phone.
I'm not visually impaired, but it seems like the iPhone would be better for most people who are rather than a Samsung Blackjack and its little chiclet buttons. The iPhone's buttons actually shoot light into your eyes
Also, iPhone's display can zoom, and if there isn't now, then soon there will be a visually impaired setting so the display turns high contrast.
> I'm glad to see you bringing back Apple's initial OS X less-than-friendly period in a new device
When OS X first came out, I complained to Apple about usability for people with special needs because a friend of mine uses his mouth only to run a Mac and OS X was no good for him in the first version. However someone from Apple's OS X group called my friend and asked him to give them his wish list for what he wanted to see in OS X and they built all that stuff.
> he could fund a cure for blindness!
I have a friend who is an ER nurse, he tells me the medical community is going MAD for iPhone. They want to have a pocket device that they can look up information quickly such as in iPhone's Web browser, and also communicate for consultations and such, and finally you have to be able to wipe blood off it without it getting stuck in the keys.
So maybe the guy who cures blindness finally will be using an iPhone when he does it.
You put the screen flat on the desk like a placemat. If you like, you can put a second display in the traditional place. Same idea as Wacom's Cintiq Tablet
http://wacom.com/cintiq/index.cfm
Or, you detect the hand in front of the screen, so the user can perform gestures without actually touching. Wacom's tablets detect the pen when they're not touching the tablets, so you can do gestures like kick your elbow back and drive the cursor into the corner and trigger Exposé. Apparently this can be done with the bare hand also, already been solved.
Also consider how bad the mouse and keyboard are in this regard, all the carpal and the twisted wrists and bad posture. People are already getting wrecked by stuff. If fingers are more natural people may use them more intuitively and with natural movements.
I've been using an Art Tablet for many years, having a real-world spacial relationship with the items on the screen is completely addictive, I'm not at all surprised that people like their iPhones. The mouse feels like pushing an egg around with a spoon, it is completely abysmal, very hard to do it now that I'm used to every pixel of the display always being in the same place under my fingertips. I don't even have a mouse hooked to this computer.
Now that our UI's have true 3D and physics it is only a matter of time until we all get our hands in there.
I think it will stun the nerd mind how fast the keyboard is abandoned also, first chance. If you are a coder or a writer you love the keys like they are a piano, but 95% of computer users would toss it in a blink. Gone. The only thing most people hate more than typing is writing with a pen or stylus. If you try and use a stylus for 8 hours a day you will be at the doctor before the week is done (hello Tablet PC's not going mainstream). I do it but I'm working Photoshop all day and I have a selection of band-aids and tape and other methods to repair my hands some but even so I am at the doctor once a year at least.
The only thing that's coming to replace the mouse is gestures. Either in front of or on the display.
There is a new framework in iPhone called CoreSurface. Not hard to imagine it coming to the Mac.
I was at the Apple Store in SF the other day and they had a giant iPhone in the window which had an HD iMac inside it, showing off the iPhone features as a movie, acting like a giant iPhone. That may be the rumored touch screen aluminum iMac so maybe this is all speculation. Maybe they'll wait a year or two. Then again the Mac line is due to be refreshed, we had the Intel Macs looking just like the previous generation, it's time for an all-new line with touch screens in my opinion.
As for the multi-touch track pads, I heard the track pads in Macs have been multi-touch for some time now. Maybe that is true of other PC's also. In the past you could only touch them with one finger and putting a second finger on there was unpredictable.
I noticed that in the iPhone you have a new OS X framework called "CoreSurface". It's not a huge stretch to think that might show up on the Mac.
It says on the side of the iPhone box that you need Mac OS X v10.4.10 or Windows 2000 (SP4), Windows XP Home or Professional (SP2), or Windows Vista. That's the current version of Windows, the one before that in two flavors, and the one before that also, going back to Y2K.
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It also says online at apple.com:
iTunes for Windows not currently supported on any 64-bit editions of Windows
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=30
If you can't run iTunes on it, you can't run iPod or iPhone on it. There are 5 year-old kids who can explain the concept to you.
Further, the 64-bit versions of Windows are a software management disaster. The fact that it is incompatible with 32-bit Windows is clearly Microsoft's fault. Every user of 64-bit Windows faces the sad realization that they are running the single most obscure PC operating system in existence, with hardly any third-party support or interest. If you are running 64-bit Windows IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO VIRTUALIZE A 32-BIT VERSION ALSO FOR COMPATIBILITY.
So get your shit together, get a virtualizer, and see if you can't get iTunes running on your box you loser.
I saw the iPhone FUD coming out of FSF chief, that was really low class. He's like we're very interested to see if there is any GPL on there, if there is there will be hell to pay. I was like, is that FSF or BSA? Two sides of the same fucking coin is all. There is no excuse for that kind of comment.
... how did porting them to the iPhone suddenly get some GPL on there?
Apple has been using BSD since 1988, Apache since 1998, OS X since 1999, WebKit since 2003
Releasing today was also low-class. If there were 365+ nerdy events this year that would be one thing, but there is no doubt Apple claimed this week six months ago. Even if it is not petty it has the appearance of petty. It's like Bill Gates showing up at D with a really low-tech multi-touch screen, oh that is pathetic. If the hottest thing at MS really was their enormous multi-touch screen, that would be a reason NOT to bring it to D, when people are asking Steve Jobs to show them his personal iPhone with all the same features but in a ready-to-ship consumer product that goes in your pocket and runs all day on batteries.
Finally, there is something disturbing about knocking the iPhone for not being open source enough. It is clearly the market leader in phones when it comes to both open source and interoperability standards. At a time when there are no real Web browsers on phones, Apple puts in an open source, standards-compliant Web 2.0 browser and says "make Ajax if you want to be on the user's phone." The iPhone is compatible with the entire Internet instead of a menace to it because of BSD. It is a remarkable open source success story. To the extent that it has anything to do with FSF they should be proud of their contribution and to the extent that it doesn't, they should recognize that also.
These comparisons are a joke. The number of bugs or vulnerabilities itself is completely meaningless because of the wide variety of issues you can have. For example, would you rather have 10 vulnerabilities that each enable a malicious Web site to crash your browser, or 1 vulnerability that enables a malicious Web site to browse your local disk?
Vista still encourages users to run with higher privileges than necessary, and the platform is still host to over 99% of the viruses and malware ever created. It is not even recommended to run Windows without third-party security enhancements such as anti-virus. Many will tell you to run it only in a virtualizer, not on bare hardware, so you can wipe the Windows "disk" every night and start fresh the next day. In fact, Microsoft will tell you to do that, it's what VirtualPC is for.
Anyone who believes this crap deserves Vista. Enjoy.
If you want to upgrade your 256 kbit/s AAC to lossless in a couple of years then leave the proof of purchase IN your iTunes Plus tracks. It enables iTunes to tell that you bought the track from iTunes Store. If you use this app on your iTunes Plus tracks you will be buying lossless for full price like a newbie.
Look, here is how Window will die: it will be virtualized seamlessly on other operating systems for 5 years until hardly anybody needs it anymore. The way you know this is that is what happened to Mac OS, and Windows is a copy of Mac OS that is 10 years behind.
1984 Mac GUI = Windows 95
1997 Mac "blue box" virtualizer on Rhapsody developer preview = Parallels 2007 on Mac OS X
1999 Mac virtualizer in Mac OS X Server = 2009 Parallels on high-end PC's running Unix
2001 Mac virtualizer in consumer Mac OS X = 2011 PC virtualizer with Windows in all consumer PC systems running Unix
2002 Classic Mac OS funeral (WWDC) = no new Win32 development by 2012
2003 Mac virtualizer now an optional component of Mac OS X, not pre-installed = 2013 PC's say "bring your own Windows if you need it"
The last person that Microsoft is afraid of with regards to virtual Windows is Apple. It is much worse for them if Parallels or VMWare become Windows OEM's and hide Windows completely yet still run its apps. It is much worse for Sony to ship a Unix with PC virtualizer and Windows in it and hide Windows but still run its apps. Apple doesn't need to hide Windows to get Photoshop, that is a native Mac app for 10 versions, on Windows for only half that time. Apple likes it just fine if an AutoCAD user can buy a Mac and Parallels and still run their AutoCAD next to iLife and Apache.
If somebody can show me another consumer OS and app platform being migrated to a modern system in some other way, I'd be willing to reconsider my position. But wow do the PC pundits of today sound like Mac pundits of 10 years ago all talking about app platforms and virtualization and modern operating systems and Unix and how to we get there from here.
If you only want it as an iPod, wait three months. At that point, iPod video is 2 years old and it will have been 9 months since Steve Jobs said the iPhone is "the best iPod we've ever made." Obviously, the wide screen, multi-touch, and Cover Flow are all coming to iPod video, I bet the Wi-Fi and Web browser come along also. With big disks in them they will be fatter than iPhone but not huge.
... the iPod features are sizzle right now for the iPhone but not going to be exclusive to it for long.
Part of the reason the iPhone has had so much hype is that they put the first next-generation iPod into it
Not only will this iPlayer venture be dead by 2010 but so will the careers of every single person involved from the BBC side.
... that sounds remarkably like it would work with your iPod, iPhone, iTunes, doesn't it? Except it's the OPPOSITE. Weird, huh? Ha ha. Microsoft, still milking the rubes.
I have to congratulate them on their big balls, though. Not many people are willing to bet against Apple, Google, Sony, Panasonic, the major music and movie studios, and the hundreds of millions of $500 consumer video players that can only play standard MPEG-4 H.264/AAC. When it comes to consumer audio video formats, most people would see both Panasonic and Sony and that would be enough for them. For others, Apple and Google would be enough. For still others, the fact that you can play H.264 in the palm of your hand on a $249 iPod for 2 years now would be enough for them to pick the internationally standardized audio video playback codec. But the BBC, they are doing another thing. They are certain that what people really want is to get the BBC on their PC's, enjoy it in the den on a $1000+ device rather than say on their phone wherever they happen to be. That's balls, baby.
Even the name "iPlayer"
I bought an Apple AirPort Base Station in 1999 for $299 and plugged it onto a broadband connection in the garage ceiling under the house, turned on the encryption, closed the network, and for 5 years after that computers came and went and all you ever had to do was tell the computer the network name and enter a password and everyone was on the Internet. We had occasional business meetings where you would have 5 notebooks and no problem, you are all on the Internet. New computer? It takes less than a minute to get it onto the Internet.
If I'm doing that at home with almost zero configuration, since 1999, then I have no sympathy if your I-T staff can't make it work seamlessly for you in 2007. Crying about it is even more embarrassing. Wi-Fi is almost 10 years old now. Get your fucking shit together.
> So your apps need to be connected
.net compact framework
.net on them but no Web 2.0.
No, no, no, no, no. Your app only needs to be connected if it actually requires the network. Whether your app is written in C or Python or JavaScript that is always the same.
> so no local caching
Web browsers have been caching locally since the beginning. With Ajax you cache the whole app locally inside the sandbox instead of outside the sandbox that is the only difference.
If the network is not available, the HTTP request coming out of your JavaScript is answered by the browser, mimicking the server's response from the browser's cache.
The thing to notice is that all phone applications to date are craplets. With the iPhone, even if they are still craplets, at least the will be standardized craplets running in a sandbox with automatic over the network updates. Instead of your interface being 20 shitty UI objects made by some programmer at a phone company pieced together by yet another programmer until it cannot reasonably be decoded by 98% of humanity, you can hire a Web developer to work Photoshop and CSS3 and make your app look like it is going to get its users laid. You can make the most of a small screen by customizing your UI to exactly the app's needs.
Basically, you can make this argument real by comparing any non-Apple smart phone's apps with the Mac Dashboard. Compare the diversity of apps, the quality of apps, how much users love them, and how much they cost (almost always free with Dashboard).
> Nokia has the symbian sdks and java, microsoft has the
Yeah but MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Google (the whole Google) do not run on those platforms. For that you need Web 2.0. Since you need Web 2.0 anyway to run the Web it is pretty hard to argue for phones that have
Microsoft has yet to get Web 1.0 onto a phone, and they had 100% of Web 1.0 market share back in the day when they were still making Web browsers.
> but remember that since AT&T stands between Apple and Apple's customers
No, that is not true.
Let's say AT&T charges more than they should for data and are slower than the competition. All the competition has to do is offer iPhone users a cell modem for their service for a cheaper price with better service and people will eat them up like Nike iPod Sport Kit. How are punters going to attach a cell modem to their iPhone you ask? All the cell modem has to do is say "here I am" over Wi-Fi the iPhone will attach automatically. Make it a private network and the user will actually have to ask the iPhone to join it the first time and provide a password but that is all. On the Mac that is painless, the menu is always on the screen. It can't be hard on the iPhone either.
Not to mention that non-cell Wi-Fi Wi-Max interests are pissing their pants with joy over iPhone.
Cell-related iPhone complaints are as temporary as DRM-related complaints about iTunes Store.
The iPod was the most anti-DRM music player and the iPhone is the most anti-cell phone because it not only has Wi-Fi "n" but it also obviously has the sophistication to run any kind of software necessary to bridge the gap between its phone features and its Wi-Fi connection. All it lacks is Wi-Max or equivalent to get this going, but iPhone is the best argument for Wi-Max yet.
Roughly Drafted is a blog, you are going to learn the guy's actual opinions and biases. But if you compare his articles about Windows Home Server, which he gives a "do not buy" rating, to the anti-iPhone articles he cites here, you see that he compared Windows Home Server feature for feature with Apple's AirPort Extreme Base Station, and found Windows Home Server to be lacking. He showed his work, in other words. Same with AppleTV.
The anti-iPhone articles don't show you another device feature-for-feature and warn you away from the iPhone. They don't sell you a competing phone by showing one with better battery life, better features. The best knocks on the iPhone are "lack of Microsoft Exchange integration" and "lack of a keyboard" and "lack third-party craplets". There are plenty of phones with those three features already and everybody hates them. And iPhone has standardized email, standardized craplets, and Bluetooth+Wi-Fi+iPod dock for accessory keyboards and sex toys (sex toys already available).
So I don't mind somebody's bias showing if they show their work also. But the bias is clear in the anti-iPhone stuff, they are trying to re-sell Windows Mobile again one last time just like Zune was a last kick at the Windows Media can. Too late. Until there is a phone running Firefox it is going to be tumbleweeds in I-T phones.
You will be able to buy a selection of third-party keyboards. I predict one that is both keyboard and case so you get a "top" for your iPhone, when it is closed it will look like two iPhones fucking.
There have been accessory keyboards made for Bluetooth/ARM portables like iPhone for years. Anyone who was selling one last January already made the right calls to Apple just like they know how to make calls to Nokia.
There are also 3000+ iPod accessories that already run on iPhone. If iPod can do photo card readers and voice recorders and Nike iPod Sport Kit, surely the iPhone can handle a keyboard? Those developers similarly jumped on iPhone because the parts for dock accessories are cheap and the system is set up so you only have to plug them on and they just work, the software is always inside the device, provided by Apple.
Also there is a good reason not to have an integrated keyboard. Since iPhone has a dock connector, TV+speakers become an iPhone accessory, you can go all over and find an iPod dock with TV and speakers hooked up to it right now, often an HDTV. Plug your iPhone onto the TV and sit back on the couch with your Bluetooth keyboard and do email.
Dumbass it is not "Internet" on a cell phone, it is "Web 2.0" on a cell phone.
Point both your Internet phone and Firefox on your PC at apple.com or flickr.com or twitter.com or myspace.com or slashdot.org and tell me if you see THE EXACT SAME FUCKING THING. No, you do not.
That is the difference.
> Besides it's only pretend geek phone - a real geek phone would fit in a CF socket so you could drop it into any device you like
Or it could have Wi-Fi "n" with which it shares its Internet connection with 10 nearby devices at once and you don't have to plug in anything. That's how Macs do it. You can take 10 Macs into a room and plug one of them onto Ethernet and choose Create Network from the Wi-Fi menu that is always at the top right of the display and now all 10 Macs are on the network.
> and come with an unlimited high speed data plan as standard.
That is apparently true of the iPhone, some people are complaining about it because they don't want to pay a flat rate for data when there is Wi-Fi in there, they can get data for free most of the time.
> But Apple is being positioned such that if the margins go away, they'll just shut down the Mac division and concentrate
> on other things, instead of desperately trying to save the computer business.
No, that is so wrong. In the first place, what would Apple themselves use to develop brilliant new technology like iPod or iPhone? They are one of their own biggest Mac customers, and one of their own biggest success stories.
Saying they would drop the Mac to focus on iPod or iPhone is like saying that if the PlayStation3 does really, really well, Sony will stop making the development kits for PlayStation3 that are used to write games for it. Or that the DVD player threatens the video editing workstation. All of Apple's products orbit the Mac. The music you play on your iPod is made on a Mac. The software for the iPhone was made on a Mac. The iTunes Store and Apple Store are doing unique things, all run entirely on Macs. iTunes itself is a Mac application with almost 10 years of heritage, Safari is a Mac application with 3 years of heritage (which is old by Web 2.0 standards). These are key to both iPod and iPhone.
All of Apple's non-Mac products are "a piece of the Mac to go." The iPod enables you to take your iTunes music collection from your Mac anywhere. The iPhone lets you take that plus the Web and Email from the Mac (literally, the same two apps and same OS) and run it anywhere. The phone is almost extra, but if you look at iChat and Skype, what you have in the iPhone is like a bridge to getting the same "phone" from the Mac. It is going through AT&T because the wireless Internet is not everywhere yet, but it will be, and at that point we would not be surprised to see iChat AV running on an iPhone. The iPhone's Wi-Fi connection is like 100 times faster than its cell connection, it's by far the fastest data phone ever shipped. Hardly anybody else even has Wi-Fi, never mind Wi-Fi "n".
So the Mac is the golden goose for Apple. The more success for iPod, iPhone, AppleTV the more the Mac is essential.
> hence the lack of updates in the Mac Pro line.
Any lack of progress in Mac hardware doesn't have to be traced to lack of manpower due to iPhone or Leopard, it can be blamed solely on Leopard not being ready.
If you are a new iMac ready to ship in June with Mac OS X Leopard pre-installed and possibly some new hardware feature that specifically requires it, then a delay in Leopard going gold means no new iMacs just yet. The Intel transition is over so a new line of Leopard Macs would make more sense than some more Macs that can run Tiger.
I would guess that the original plan was to ship iPhone and a new iMac running Leopard and the Leopard update kit all at the end of June. That way an iPhone shopper can be offered the matching computer to go with their Leopard phone, or a Mac Pro user will get an update kit along with their iPhone. After the iPhone introduction, when demand was seen to be so large, now they are worried about being able to handle the crowds in Apple and AT&T stores, they don't need to do anything to bring any customers in. The marketing and sales people alone would have lobbied for delaying Leopard and new Macs for a few months even if Leopard was singing, just completely purring along. So for once the marketing people are saying "don't ship it, cook it some more" that is a good problem to have.
> H.264 may become a "de facto" standard which would stop the Windows Media only sites I keep encountering.
MPEG-4 H.264 is already both the actual standard and the de facto standard for consumer video playback. It has been for years. It's the only kind of movie you can play on HD DVD, Blu-Ray, PSP, iPod, iPhone, AppleTV, and many other devices. They all have video decoders chips that speak H.264.
H.264 is also the default video encoding for QuickTime, which is to content creation as Unix is to servers.
This all happened years ago. Windows Media lost this battle even before the iPod. MPEG-4 itself had to drop their proposed content tax before implementing it because it was so unpopular. With Windows Media, the content tax is its raison d'etre. People who make music and movies were never interested.
Where you find Windows Media or Flash content on the Web, remember that is Internet content designed for PC's. It is not part of the World Wide Web, and it is not part of consumer audio video. You have to have a PC with both those non-standard, resource-hungry video codecs installed, that is beyond the Web and beyond consumer audio video. The video decoder in consumer devices is a dedicated decoder chip that speaks the standard only. That's why Google is transcoding their H.263 YouTube into H.264 to get on iPhone and AppleTV and all other devices.