Apparently Apple has started inserting cryptographic checksums in the DB of music stored on iPods. This breaks 3rd party software for managing your iPod music library, tying the iPod to iTunes.
I’m sure there are a lot of bad reasons for implementing this, like keeping people from creating applications that let people share music directly between WiFi enabled iPod’s and iPhones.
I use iTunes, I own Apple stock, but really, this is complete customer hostile crap. Screw them.
We went to the movies tonight. I asked for tickets to “Shoot Em Up,” the girl in the box office gave me tickets to “Superbad.” I should have taken the hint. “Shoot Em Up” was terrible. I was bored in the first five minutes.
On the other hand, we saw “Superbad,” last weekend. It was foul-mouthed, hilarious, and sweet. Seeing it again would have been a much better way to spend our evening.
Instead, I feel dirty. “Shoot Em Up,” was soul-killingly stupid bullshit. I want to take the jaded 17 to 25 year old male morons it was designed to appeal to and beat them with an overgrown zucchini. Or I would if any of them had actually wasted the tip money from their job at Domino’s on the thing. The huge auditorium they showed the movie in was pretty much empty, and at least half the audience were people over 30 who are now no doubt questioning Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti latest career choices.
You have been warned.
I apologize for yet another iPhone related post, but I still have something I need to get off my chest. For months now, various stock analysts have been attracting press coverage and garnering free publicity for their firms by publicly worrying that iPhone sales would “cannibalize” sales of the iPod, that people would buy iPhones instead of upgrading their iPods.
I’m sure that dynamic has played out in a number of cases, but if you take a step back and think about Apple as a whole, it is clear that this isn’t cannibalization, its up-sell. The most expensive iPod goes for $349. The cheapest iPhone is $499, while retaining nice healthy margins.
In other words, if someone forgoes an iPod for an iPhone, Apple is getting even more money! This is not something to worry about.
It might have made sense to worry that iPod sales would slow while people waited for the chance to by an iPhone, but apparently this was not the case. iPod sales grew faster than expected in the last quarter.
Yesterday, Apple announced they sold 270,000 iPhones in their last financial quarter. This is no doubt giving conniptions to people who were, only days ago, calling iPhone sales disappointing.
Earlier in the week, some members of the press seemed to be having second thoughts about their profession’s participation in the iPhone hype storm, so some of them lept upon a little fact from an AT&T earnings call that they’d only activated 140K iPhones in their last quarter, the last 30 hours of which overlapped with the iPhone’s debut.
This was terrible terrible terrible, because it was only a few weeks ago that they were hyping reporting the most breathless predictions that 700,000 or even one million iPhones had been sold shortly after launch. So they eagerly compared this information about iPhone service activations with AT&T over a 30 hour period to the most optimistic estimates for iPhone sales (ie, they compared oranges to apples) for the entire weekend. They also ignored or downplayed the fact that a lot of iPhone customers had trouble getting their phones activated that weekend, because AT&Ts systems couldn’t keep up.
Predictably, the same people who bought the earlier hype, happily swallowed this “news,” and Apple’s stock price, which had recently shot up on the positive spin, sank due to the negative spin. This drop then lead to more stories about how disappointing the iPhone was and reassured the press that they still have some influence.
Well, Apple stock is back up again. It’s recaptured everything it lost two days ago after the AT&T earnings call. The latest numbers hold up well against earlier estimates of earlier iPhone sales, many of which were in the range of between 300,000 and 500,000. Even if Sunday’s sales were 1/3rd of what they were for Friday evening and all of Saturday, it’s likely that Apple sold over 350,000 phones in the first weekend, and it looks like sales during the following week were also quite strong as most stores sold out of the phones almost as quickly as they received new shipments. I should note that even these estimates would probably have been considered optimistic back in June.
Apple stock took a 4% hit today because their carrier partner, AT&T announced they only activated 146,000 iphones in the last two days of June
Here is a fine friendly clue. The iPhone didn’t go on sale until 6pm eastern, 3/4 of the way through the first of those days two days. Furthermore, the optimistic estimates from various stock analysts were for the whole weekend, which included Sunday, July 1st. Finally, AT&T had trouble servicing iPhone activation requests over the weekend, so some significant number of iPhones probably weren’t activated until JULY, which would put it after the quarter AT&T was reporting earnings on.
In its second-quarter earnings report Tuesday morning, AT&T said it activated about 146,000 customers who bought the iPhone during those two days.
This number would not include buyers who purchased the device with the hopes to re-sell it over venues such as Craig’s List and eBay. However, the figure seemed to worry investors who had been primed to expect much larger numbers.
Before Tuesday, analysts had been projecting opening-weekend sales for the iPhone of between 200,000 and 400,000 units.
A few projections reached as high as 500,000 units, with analysts citing long- lines at stores and initial inventory figures for the device.Watch interview with Piper Jaffray analyst predicting initial iPhone sales of 500,000 units.
I guess “reporters” need something else to do now that they’ve beaten to death the whole “the iPhone really costs $2000,” because they cleverly included the cost of a two year service plan. Never mind that most iPhone buyers probably already have cell phone service, which would probably run them $1000 over two years anyway. That leaves us with $500-600 for the iPhone, and $480 for the incremental cost of the data service.
All eight people involved with a series of pathetically bungled “terrorist attacks” in Brittan and Scotland over the last few days were involved with Brittan’s National Health Service, the Guardian newspaper reports.
All eight people arrested have links with the NHS – seven are doctors or medical students and one worked as a laboratory technician. All entered the UK legally.
At least two were doctors, and two others were trainee doctors.
The attacks came in two waves. One involved two cars loaded with gasoline, propane, and nails left in downtown London. The first smoldered, the second had been towed to an impound lot before anyone realized something was amiss. Neither sounded capable of inflicting more than minor property damage, though they could have killed or injured firemen who might have tried to douse the burning vehicles. The next involved crashing a Jeep Cherokee filled with similarly flammable materials into an entrance of Glasgow’s airport and then running around on fire, screaming.
The sheer incompetence of the plot must have Brittons terrified, not at the prospect of more terrorist attacks, but at the possibility that the rest of the staff of the NHS is as overwhelmingly incompetent at medicine as these eight appeared to be at mayhem.
Relatives of one of the suspects also seemed stunned at the staggering incompetence.
Jamil Abdel Kader Asha, Dr Asha’s father said that he learnt about his son’s arrest through the media and claimed his “son is incapable of such acts”.
Yes, clearly incapable.