Category Archives: apple

Lust, cussing and ambivalence: Erik considers the iPhone

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Ok, I really want an iPhone, but I really don’t want an iPhone.

On the plus side: Shiny shiny shiny shiny. I could almost choke down
the price.

On the down side: HOWMANYFUCKINGDOLLARS?!?!?!?!?!?, AT&T, slowww-ass
internet for $50something a month. AT&T Fuckin Ed Whitacre, feudal
cocksucker. SLOOW. No 3rd party apps unless you are Google. No
upgradeable memory. HOWMANYFUCKINGDOLLARS?!?!?!?!?!? AND tied to AT&T
and their slowww-ass mobile internet.

Oh, but so shiny.

I’m considering slaking my lust with a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet PC.
Cheaper. Not as shiny. Open platform (down to the OS). WiFi only,
but theoretically can piggyback on a bluetooth phone for internet access.

The last one is probably the clincher. If I can figure that one out, I may do it.

Apple’s Rich Internet Application Platform Play (or maybe not)

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At the Apple World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) today, Apple made a few very interesting announcements. First, their Safari web browser is now available on windows. Second, developers can create small widgety apps for the iPhone in the same way they can build small widgety apps for the Mac desktop using XML, HTML & Javascript.

What no one seems to be mentioning yet is the connection between the two. You see, mac desktop widgets basically run in Safari. If Safari runs on windows now, it’s a small step to offer widgets. If Apple makes that step then the same rich mini-applications can run on Windows, the Mac, and the iPhone. Apple will be distributing Safari as part of a bundle with iTunes, which suggests that they have big plans for Safari.

Update: Also worth mentioning, WebKit, which is the core HTML and Javascript engine on which Safari is based, is open source (and derived from software in the open source KDE project). Furthermore, Nokia has already used WebKit on some of it’s mobile devices.

Of course, I have no idea what it really means, but it suggests that Apple is providing weight to creating rich internet apps based on existing widely adopted open standards, This is in contrast to Adobe with whatever they are calling Apollo now, which seeks to leverage their Flash product, and Microsoft with Silverlight, which while open in some ways, involves a lot of Microsoft-isms.

Another Update: I misunderstood the initial announcement. The iPhone will have safari, but it won’t support widgets. Disappointing and lame. I hope it’s not a permanent condition.

Hints About the Apple TV Business Model

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Electronics market research firm iSupply just released an estimate of the bill of materials c+ assembly cost of the AppleTV at $237. They note that Apple’s margins on their “little hobby,” are quite low, on the order of 20%, compared to the 30-50% Apple enjoys on other products.

I find a few things interesting about this.

First, the performance requirements of the Apple TV aren’t likely to change much for the next decade or more. They may need to bump up the $15 nVidia GeForce Go 7300 GPU a bit to eventually handle full 1080p HighDef video, along with more RAM and hard disk, but for the most part, the costs are just going to go down. The most expensive part right now is a $40 Pentium M CPU, Other notables
are the accompanying $28 chipset and $19 802.11n broadcom wireless chips. How much are all these things going to cost in a year? In 18 months they’ll probably be half as much, which will wack $50 out of the costs, pushing margins up to almost 40% (assuming they can hold the price point).

How much will apple save if they can redesign around a more integrated solution. The AppleTV actually has a GPU as part of the Intel chipset already. In 12 months it’s replacement may well perform well enough to eliminate the need for a discrete GPU. I’d guess the wireless chip is also a candidate for either integration, or bundling (a la centrino).

The other thing this information suggests is that Apple may be more serious about this market than they’ve led people to believe if they are willing to sell the AppleTV at or near cost to gain market share. It also suggests that their take of video downloads may be better than their take from music downloads, where they seem content to make most of their money on selling iPod hardware.

Joost and the Apple TV?

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I used to think a lot about “convergence,” and ubiquitous computing. It’s obvious that I’m not doing much of that any more, because it took me until now to have me consider the fact that the Apple TV runs OS X might mean that 3rd party apps, like, maybe, Joost, end up running on it.

What finally jogged my brain was this item from Om Malik’s live blogging of a talk by Steve Jobs at the D conference.

Q: Why do you call AppleTV a hobby?
A: What every body has tried is that coming from computer market, you think about getting content from your computer to your TV. I am not sure that is what consumers want. More we think about it, they are like peas. We think the content from the Internet is the real play.
GigaOM LIVE BLOGGING: Apple adds YouTube to AppleTV «

Update: Not surprisingly, this dim insight isn’t exactly news. People have already hacked the AppleTV to run 3rd party apps, including Joost.

Stupid iTunes Podcast Tricks

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I installed iPodder shortly after its release and after trying once or twice to listen to podcasts, I gave up on it. The podcasts I found weren’t that interesting and the “online podcast directory was weak”:http://www.geekfun.com/archives/000402.html.

I liked the whole idea though, and so when Apple decided to make it easier to consume podcasts in the latest version of iTunes, I decided to give things a second look.

There are certainly a hell of a lot more podcasts to choose from these days, thats for sure. I lot of established media players have jumped in, driven, in part, by Apple’s entry into the space. All of which is cool, but I’m most interested in podcasting because of the opportunities it offers the unaffiliated up-and-comers.

In the early days of the iTunes podcast directory, those very people, the people who had pioneered the medium, seemed to be shoved off to the side in favor of the big media types. It took some digging to even find them. Happilly, on my latest visit, the “indies” as Apple calls them, are featured more prominently, including a section featuring a handfull of “interesting indies” near the top of the directory.

But, as you can tell from the title, I found something to gripe about. The process of subscribing to podcasts is utterly irritating. Once you’ve found an interesting looking podcast you click a subscribe button to add it to your subscription list. This is where things get bad.

As soon as you click subscribe, iTunes exits the podcast directory and jumps to your podcast subscription list. The browser buttons disappear and the only way (that I can find) back to your place in the directory to subscribe to something else is to start from the beginning again in retrace your steps. VERY LAME!

The podcasts I’ve listened to lately have been better than the early batch, but there are still a lot that are clearly not worth my time after one or two listens. It would be nice if I could easily unsubscribe from a podcast from my iPod.

When iPod news isn’t new

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Over a year ago, “Downhill Battle”:http://www.downhillbattle.org/ did a little math on some numbers from some Apple press releases and came to the conclusion that there have been an average of 21 songs sold on the iTunes Music Store for every iPod sold. It’s a striking statistic that’s been getting a lot of attention after “Boing Boing linked to it”:http://www.boingboing.net/2005/06/14/21_itunes_sold_per_i.html yesterday.

What’s getting lost in the retelling is that the data is over a year old. Boing Boing includes the full dateline on the quote in their post, but “other people”:http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/1442 aren’t being careful about including the year, making it look like the data is recent. I have to wonder if they are even aware that this news isn’t really news.

Other’s picked up on things and note that the current numbers (now that more than 16M iPods have been sold) are more like “31 songs per iPod”:http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/online/archives/2005/06/15/where_does_the_music_come_from.html.

I think it’s also important to keep in mind that 13M of those iPod’s are less than a year old and so the owners haven’t had that much time to accumulate songs from iTMS. Broad averages don’t necessarily tell you much about a dynamic and varied population.

That said, I’ve had my iPod about 18 months, and I have 47 songs i”ve purchased from iTMS. In that time, i’ve probably purchased 2-4x more tracks on CD. There are a couple reasons for this. First off, i’m not entirely satisfied with 128kbps AAC tracks. Lately I’ve been ripping at 160kbps. Secondly, the discount for buying via iTunes isn’t quite enough to make me feel good about being stuck with a compressed copy of the song and, on a related note, I don’t feel the loss in flexibility that comes with DRM is compensated by the discounted iTMS rate in many cases. Basically, if I just want one or two tracks off an album, I’ll buy off iTMS, but if I think I want most of the album, I put up with the added expense and hassle of buying a CD from a local store or online retailer.