Author: The Macalope

Extra Credit

A few show notes before the show notes.

While we’re waiting for the episode to get posted (hey, voice manipulation is a tricky business and Leo’s a busy man), The Macalope has some further comments on some things that were discussed on MBW:

  • In the All Things Digital love-fest between Jobs and Gates, Gates kept talking about how cameras were going to be set up in everyone’s house and your computer would react to your movement. Indeed, Roughly Drafted discusses at length the fact that Microsoft’s new conference table is not a touch-sensetive table, but works with cameras. Personally, the Macalope can think of few things creepier than Bill Gates and Microsoft installing cameras in his home (one of them is that Jerry Lewis movie). Thank you, no.
  • The Macalope’s pick was PandoraJam. Having used it more thoroughly in the past 24 hours, he should now point out that it’s a little buggy. On slower machines or connections the files it creates will likely have some skipping, but at least you have access to the full songs so you can go back and listen to them to decide if you want to buy them. Maybe the flaws are nice way of keeping people honest. Not for the Macalope, of course. He is as honest as the day is long. It’s for you people. At any rate, the Macalope still thinks it’s worth $15.
  • The Macalope did mention this, but if you listen to the All Things Digital interview, twice Jobs alluded to an upcoming online offering in the next year or two that he wouldn’t elaborate on. He then said that .Mac was going to get an update “soon”, leading the Macalope to believe that these are separate topics. He’s interested to hear the thoughts of his charming and well-manicured readers who might have sat through the cast.

Oh, my gawd! Does my voice really sound like that?

MBW.

Just finished recording this week’s MacBreak Weekly which was a blast. Probably won’t be up until tomorrow, though.

The Macalope is very pleased that he was able to work in the phrase “strangely homoerotic”, but Merlin’s description of the disturbing Jerry Lewis movie that never got made is going to keep him up all night.

iPhone. June 29th.

Straight from the horse’s mouth.

Apple released three lovely iPhone ads tonight and set the release date for June 29th (tip o’ the antlers to David Josephson via email).

So, some people were right about the release date and some people were obnoxiously wrong

Could we be wrong? It’s possible, but not likely.

Mmm-hmm (they did own up at least).

What the Macalope finds funny is that the ads appeared shortly after 7pm EST on a Sunday night and the Apple web was ablaze with the story shortly thereafter. Apple Insider did get the date right yesterday, but no one the Macalope knows of predicted the ads. Engadget had it earlier today, but the Macalope isn’t terribly impressed by scoops that are hours in advance.

On the other hand, if you look at the date and time on the iPhone in the ads, they were apparently just thrown together today (isn’t Apple amazing?!). So maybe Engadget actually got wind of them while they were still filming!

BFF

Jobs and Gates chummy at All Things Digital.

Jobs and Gates trade jests at rare joint appearance.

“PC guy is great, he’s got a big heart,” the chief of Apple Inc. said…

People let me tell you ’bout my best friend,
He’s a warm hearted person who’ll love me till the end.

Jobs, 52, and Gates, 51, reminisced about the industry and old partnerships. The tone was jovial, even sentimental, but Jobs did get in a few good-natured digs.

People let me tell you bout my best friend,
He’s a one boy cuddly toy, my up, my down, my pride and joy.

At one point, Gates said employees working on Microsoft’s Zune portable media player admired Apple for creating the market for such devices with its hugely successful iPod line.

“And we love them because they’re all customers!” countered Jobs.

People let me tell you ’bout him he’s so much fun
Whether we’re talkin’ man to man or whether we’re talking son to son.

“We’ve kept our marriage secret for over a decade now,” Jobs said, to roars of laughter.

Cause he’s my best friend.
Yes he’s my best friend.

iTunes 7.2

DRM-less tracks hit iTunes.

iTunes 7.2 with DRM-less tracks is just a software update download and seemingly unnecessary reboot away! Have at it.

And can anyone explain to the Macalope why an iTunes update forces a reboot on a Mac but not on a PC?

UPDATE: The Macalope’s mistake. It’s QuickTime 7.1.6 that forces the reboot. So, OK, why does QuickTime (often?) force a reboot on the Mac but not on Windows?

Anyone upgraded any songs yet? A whole 5% of the Macalope’s iTunes-purchased music is upgradable. Hmm. Well, at least it’s only going to cost him $6.90.

Click.

The process prompts you to either have the files replaced and deleted or have the old copies moved to a folder on the desktop. The Macalope had them moved but he’s not sure why.

Mr. Gruber says the upgrade option isn’t working for him.

Not.

Paul Thurrott attempts to make lemonade from Zune lemons.

Yesterday Paul Thurrott welcomed the news that Microsoft had sold it’s millionth Zune, proudly declaring that it’s “not doing all that horribly.”

Thurrott, who does not hesitate to rail against those who point out the Mac’s market share gains, thinks nothing of pimping this piece of Microsoft marketing tripe. Sadly for Thurrott but humorously for us, a funny thing happened on the way to writing the original piece he links to and, well, turns out it’s wrong. Microsoft is gonna probably have sold a million Zunes. Someday.

Even if it had been true, however, Thurrott’s post is an escapade in jackassery.

Of course, Apple sells several million iPods a quarter, so there’s still some ground to make up.

“Some ground.”

This, incidentally, is also what Thurrott calls the land mass between Hungary and Mongolia. We call it the Russian Steppe. He calls it “some ground”.

No one’s really sure why he does this. He just does.

Now, the Oxford American Dictionaries (better known to Mac users as “Dictionary”) defines “several” as “more than two but not many”. The Macalope will leave it up to his intelligent and fabulously sexy readers to decide if last quarter’s 10.5 million or the previous quarter’s 21 million can accurately be described as “several” million.

But still. Not too shabby.

Well, actually, no, still rather shabby.

Microsoft is a notorious channel stuffer, so that might explain why while the company can claim to have “sold” 1 million Zunes you, like the horny one, might not have seen anyone actually using one outside of a CompUSA sales associate killing time before he’s downsized.

Thurrott makes a point of noting in his retraction that Apple only sold half that number in its first six months. Indeed.

Which is amazing considering the size of the overall market at the time and and that the iPod was effectively being sold only to Mac users as it didn’t ship with software for Windows until July of 2002 (see Wikipedia’s iPod entry).

Look, it is much harder to break into the digital music player market now than it was in 2001. But this is also Microsoft we’re talking about. They can practically force retailers to take as many as they tell them to. Is 10% of the hard-drive based market really anything to crow about? Great, it looks like they’ll make their target, albeit probably by stuffing the channel. But the Zune doesn’t have “some ground” to make up. It still has to prove that it can be anything more than a distant second in a subset of the market.

Whither the mini?

Dead? Maybe, but…

The tender flowers of the Mac web are all a-twitter (not to be confused with the popular social networking site of the same name) over an Apple Insider report claiming that the Mac mini will soon be pushing daisies (not to be confused with the much-anticipated ABC series of the same name, coming this fall, check your local listings).

The Macalope doesn’t doubt this could be true, but he did find it amusing that in trying to bolster their argument that “Apple just doesn’t like the mini darn it!”, Apple Insider cites as evidence the fact that a rumored enhancement of the mini they pimped failed to materialize. It’s the theory of Apple rumor site infallibility in action.

But on the face of it, it seems unlikely that Apple would completely do away with the mini or, rather, decide to abandon the market it targets.

Now, what is that market? The Macalope doubts anyone outside Apple knows for sure as they don’t release that kind of data. The mini was introduced ostensibly for the switcher (“Bring your own monitor, keyboard and mouse!”) but the Macalope doubts that’s who’s really buying them. It’s anecdotal, of course, but the switchers the Macalope knows have all bought either iMacs or MacBooks. The horny one does hear that the smallest Mac of them all is popular with developers and, possibly just by definition, people who already own a bunch of other Macs. For some it temporarily filled the niche that’s now filled by the Apple TV. And then there are the schools. And the businesses.

There’s two ways of looking at that. Either the low price of the mini is allowing people who already own a Mac to buy another, or it’s eating into sales of Macs with higher margins.

Unlike Apple Insider, the Macalope doesn’t think the mini is analogous to the G4 Cube or the 12-inch PowerBook, both of which, while lovely, probably did not generate sales like the mini. It seems unlikely to this furry Macophile that even if Apple drops the mini it won’t be replaced with something cooler.

So, killing the Mac mini is not to be confused with, well, killing the Mac mini.

Are you still talking about that?

Information Week writer still ponders the iPhone’s January announcement.

Information Week’s Brad Kenney asks of Apple’s decision to reveal the iPhone six months in advance: Strategic Misstep, Or Supreme Confidence?

Uh, are those the only choices? (Hint: noooooooo.)

First of all, consider the name. At the time of the Macworld announcement, San Jose-based Cisco Systems owned the exclusive rights to the term iPhone…

Yes, believe it or not, Kenney wants to party like it’s January, 2007!

News flash, dude: Cisco settled! It’s over! Time to live in the now!

By giving such a long (it’s been almost six months and still no iPhone) time lag…

Yeah! Where the hell is that damned phone?!

Oh, wait, that’s right. It’s still May.

…Apple has not only allowed excitement to dim but has also negatively impacted iPod sales in the interim.

Yeah, because now nobody’s talking about the iPhone! Everyone’s into lol cats!

And were you talking about these iPod sales? The sales that were up 24% from last year? Are those the sales you’re talking about?

Huh?

Huh?

Because, you know, not so much.

The brightness of Jobs’ iPhone spotlight inevitably meant that quite a few consumers were left in the dark concerning [the Apple TV].

Which the company had already grandiosely announced back in September at its own special event.

Now, look, Apple could have hacked up the Macworld keynote and spent some time on the Mac and some time on Apple TV and some time on the iPod and some time on the company’s lol cat strategy. But the iPhone is arguably the biggest Apple product announcement in the last twenty-three years and Jobs clearly poured his heart into this thing. Give the man his hour and a half.

In a letdown, however, Kenney then pulls the rug out from under his arguments.

Despite what was widely characterized as bad timing by Jobs, the iPhone’s unique intuitive interface, rich feature set and undeniable cool factor paired with Apple’s pre-loaded customer loyalty means that, so long as Apple’s product developers remain at the top of their game, no amount of marketing missteps can keep this new Apple product from getting eaten up by the market.

Lame.

C’mon, Brad! Don’t string the Macalope along like that and then get all goo-goo eyes for Apple at the end!

Yes, some of the slower analysts have said it was somehow a mistake, but let’s look at what it gained Apple.

  • The iPhone announcement completely stole the thunder from CES.
  • Discussion of the iPhone took some of the heat off Apple over subsequent revelations about the options scandal.
  • The announcement silenced the non-stop speculation about when/if/could the company make a phone.
  • As iPod sales growth as leveled off, the announcement answered the question of where the company expects its growth to come from in the future.

Now, Brad, surely some of this must have occurred to you. Funny you didn’t see fit to mention it.

iTunes doomed!

Forrester all wet.

Roughly Drafted has a marvellous piece on the latest nonsense about video downloads. It quotes the geniuses at Forrester thusly:

“Television and cable networks will shift the bulk of paid downloading to ad-supported streams where they have control of ads and effective audience measurement.” McQuivey wrote. “The movie studios, whose content only makes up a fraction of today’s paid downloads, will put their weight behind subscription models that imitate premium cable channel services.”

This is so stupid it hurts the Macalope’s furry head.

Forrester’s fallacy is in not realizing that iTunes downloads are not a replacement for broadcast or cable television.

They’re a replacement for DVD sales.

Yes, iTunes downloads are different in that you don’t have to wait months for the DVDs to ship and they don’t feature the extras the DVDs do. But they are alike in that you can time-shift your viewing, you can repeat your viewing as often as you like, they’re portable to a variety of devices (albeit Apple-only except for iTunes on Windows) and, most importantly, there is no advertising.

It’s as if Forrester doesn’t know that people go to Target every day and buy DVDs of TV shows and movies.

Ad-supported content online is the replacement for broadcast and cable television and these two things are not the same.

It seems like every year some brilliant think-tank issues a bone-headed report that says ad-supported X will replace its for-fee equivalent.

And it never happens.

Because people hate ads.