01-16-2008, 01:00 AM
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Executive Editor
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
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All That Apple Stuff Today...
Apple unleashed several new products today, and updates to older products, so I thought I'd jot down some thoughts and reactions about what I read about (this text is adapted from a series of emails I sent to the Mobius email list while discussing this).
Apple Charging $19.95 for the iPod Touch Software Update
Utterly ridiculous, but it's what Apple does - remember the $2 charge for 802.11n? Apple has the worst type of corporate arrogance imaginable, and almost everyone lets them get away with it. But that's also how they're able to create some pretty impressive products - so you take the bad with the good. Myself, I take none of it (for now - I continue to be tempted by some of their products).
iTunes Movie Rentals
It's so incredibly frustrating seeing Microsoft have all the same pieces - Xbox Live videos, Windows Mobile + Zune hardware - and not do a damn thing with it. Microsoft could have beaten Apple to the punch by more than a year, but there's probably still some committee arguing about it. The Apple solution looks slick, and the pricing looks a bit better than the Xbox Live pricing (I think - points confuse matters somewhat).
Apple TV v2
The update looks great, lots of cool features. Finally, the product is no longer a joke - they evolved it to what it should have been when it was first released. The UI is slick, I love it. And at least current Apple TV owners don't need to pay for the upgrade. I finally got access to Xbox Marketplace movies in December, and it was a truly pathetic launch - about 30 movies, no TV shows, only a handful are in HD or even movies you've ever heard of. Apple now had a powerful round-trip solution from TV room to computer to mobile device.
MacBook Air
So it's a thin laptop - is that so exciting? Maybe it's more impressive in person. Multi-touch on the touchpad is pretty cool, though I think it's one of those "makes a great bullet point" but most people won't use it past the first day. Seems like it would be useful in iPhoto more than anywhere else. I watched the demo video for Macbook Air and I had to chuckle at how they made the lack of an optical drive a feature rather than a limitation. The "remote optical drive" thing is pretty slick though. 80 GB 4200 RPM hard drive? Bleh. 5 hours of battery life is good, and I sure wish my XPS M1330 came with a back-lit keyboard! I don't see any mention of a memory card reader either. What's with Apple's hate-on for memory card readers? It's silly their monitors don't have them, but it's inexcusable for a laptop not to have an SD/Memory Stick/XD card slot at the bare minimum. It's like if they didn't invent it, or they don't sell it, it doesn't exist. One USB port? No Ethernet port? No Firewire? This laptop is obviously aimed at a very specific niche, so while it might be a killer solution for some, it doesn't seem to be very well-rounded. I have to admire Apple's engineering though, and it's impressive that Intel designed a smaller CPU for them - I wish more notebook makers would care about making their notebooks as small as possible. Every spare millimetre matters.
iPhone January Update
This video was interesting to watch. Apple added significantly useful features to the iPhone only a few months after release - by controlling the hardware, the software, and ultimately the customer, they're able to innovate much faster than Windows Mobile can. We've all known this for a long time, but this is real-world proof of the huge liability that Microsoft finds itself in.
Time Capsule
So this is Apple's answer to Windows Home Server? Seems nice and simple, and has some good features, but it's insane that they didn't make it dual hard drive setup in case the drive fails. I suppose if it's ONLY a backup and no unique data is being stored on it, then you have a copy of that data on your Mac/PC and it's not such a big deal of your Time Capsule drive crashes. But hard drives do fail, "enterprise class" or not.
Did anyone else notice how much of this new stuff is "Windows friendly" in terms of inter-operating with a Windows ecosystem? Apple is really stepping into Microsoft's turf, which is quite interesting to see.
So what are your thoughts on what Apple unveiled today?
Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. He's still not ready to buy a Mac.
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01-16-2008, 02:36 AM
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Thinker
Join Date: Apr 2004
Posts: 327
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I too am tiring of the arrogance. I do not give a rats ass about the iPhone, the iPod Touch, or the super slim Macbook.
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01-16-2008, 03:35 AM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 197
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Apple does interoperability really well. To a large extent they make it easy on themselves by specifying both hardware and software (in the case of their PCs, only a small sub-set of Intel hardware), but they do make it all work together. In contrast, it seems as though Microsoft's offerings could just as well have been from different companies as difficult as it is to get them to work together. Vista does a lot better at seeing Windows Mobile devices as media devices, capable of content synching, but it's still way behind Apple's integration of iPod, iTunes, etc. What Microsoft seems to need is a whole set of people whose job would be to make sure various product lines work together (as forethought rather than afterthought). It does seem ironic that Apple, who has always suffered from "Not Invented Here" is actually making steps toward making Macs play well with PCs.
I'm actually not that fond of Apple products, even though I'm running a "Hacintosh" for my daughter to use. Apples big selling point is also their biggest drawback. They lead users by the hand so much that it's a major pain if you want to go a different direction. As an example, Time Machine, their new backup software is quite a nice piece of work. Once you tell it where to store the backup data, you can go backward and within most applications and find your documents as they were before each and every change. However, it fairly quickly fills up backup space with what are probably mostly extraneous copies and, while it works well for documents, it doesn't seem to address being able to restore the full system after a hard-drive failure or something of that sort.
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by controlling the hardware, the software, and ultimately the customer, they're able to innovate much faster than Windows Mobile can
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Very true. I ultimately like Microsoft's approach better as it allows for a far greater depth of devices, but it's easy to see the advantages of Apple's tighter control.
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HTC HD2 US (unlocked) + 16GB micro SDHC (in holding)
HTC Evo + 16GB micro SDHC (in use)
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01-16-2008, 04:56 AM
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Thinker
Join Date: Apr 2004
Posts: 312
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being an Apple user, 4 macs and one PC left in the house...
Nothing released today has earned me to pull out my wallet. I was hoping for an AppleTV hardware upgrade and possible Blu-Ray intigration. I would love to ditch my TIVO...
However my biggest disappointment of the day was from Microsoft. Office 2008 with no Exchange support for Tasks, Notes or Categories? What a serious joke. Without full Exchange support I have been asking myself why I should keep my WindowsMobile device. Heck why even keep my Exchange account rental? another missed opportunity for Microsoft.
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JohnJohn
PocketUp.com
- iPhone3G - Blackberry Curve
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01-16-2008, 05:34 AM
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Pupil
Join Date: Dec 2006
Posts: 37
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I think all of those are very good points. The $20 charge - for early adopters again! - is unbelievable. They obviously feel like the iPhone price cut thing went well.
I also think your comments about Apple's ability to crank the updates out quickly is a big deal. Only Nokia / Symbian should be able to match them ijn that area, and it does give them a big edge. Now if they could just throw in a few more basics on the next update ...
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01-16-2008, 10:26 AM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Dec 2007
Posts: 54
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by JohnJohn
being an Apple user, 4 macs and one PC left in the house...
Nothing released today has earned me to pull out my wallet. I was hoping for an AppleTV hardware upgrade and possible Blu-Ray intigration. I would love to ditch my TIVO...
However my biggest disappointment of the day was from Microsoft. Office 2008 with no Exchange support for Tasks, Notes or Categories? What a serious joke. Without full Exchange support I have been asking myself why I should keep my WindowsMobile device. Heck why even keep my Exchange account rental? another missed opportunity for Microsoft.
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I use live.mail2web and my tasks are synced.I believe mail2web is using ms exchange 2003. I dont use notes anymore for anything important because they dont sync.
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Part of the Team at www.pda-247.com. Devices - HTC Hero, iPod Touch 2g, Blackberry Curve, FSC n560. |
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01-16-2008, 10:49 AM
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Intellectual
Join Date: May 2002
Posts: 171
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Arrogance?
While there's little in these announcements that interests me, the Mac Air was the only thing I was waiting for and it's too thin and light for me, I find the accusation of arrogance a little difficult to understand.
Apple sold the Touch as an iPod with wireless technology so that you can buy music without the need to tether to an iTunes installation. Safari was included, probably because they could. So people asked for email which was an obvious extension that for some reason Apple excluded from the original package, probably to differentiate more strongly the Touch and the iPhone.
So Apple provide it and ask for a nominal sum, something like 5% of the US purchase price. Hardly seems unreasonable to me.
And then the iPhone. One of my colleagues has one and more or less all of the new features that have been added, he already has through hacks. However, the point here is that Apple looked at what people are doing with the product and added that functionality into the official release.
So there you have two examples from yesterday where Apple have listened to what people wanted and responded in a positive way to those requests.
Contrast that with Microsoft. How long have people been asking for a perfectly reasonable feature like the close button actually closing an application? And what is the response?
Or Sony with the PSP and homebrew apps? Now that you can use a Pandora battery to hack a PSP Sony are more or less stuffed. But if they'd listened to the market and taken the best of what the hacker community had to offer, I suspect they'd still have had to waste a lot less time and effort closing holes the hackers open up and be in competition with the DS Lite instead of being taken to the cleaners by Nintendo.
So we have Apple's arrogance. Sony's stupidity and Microsoft's ignorance. If those are the choices, give me arrogant any day.
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01-16-2008, 02:21 PM
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Neophyte
Join Date: Feb 2003
Posts: 4
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May not be arrogance
With Sarbanes-Oxley some companies have gotten very leery of "free" updates to existing products that add features for fear of running afoul of financial disclosure laws and having to restate past earnings. It's safer to chareg and avoid any possible violation.
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01-16-2008, 02:44 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 197
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unxmully: I guess point of view changes everything. Apple's arrogance has soured me on any advantages they might have. I could run OSX, but I'd either have to buy Apple-approved hardware or spend time hacking each new version to run (and quite possibly not having all the hardware work because the drivers aren't there), then I have to load in VMWare to run those applications that only run under Windows. Or I could run Windows and be done with it. There are countless other examples.
One problem is everyone of us sees very clearly what Microsoft, Apple, Sony, etc should be doing, yet most of us don't agree on what that is. Take the close button, for example. I've suggested using tap to minimize and tap and hold to close myself, but if Microsoft put in a "really close" button, you'd suddenly have a bunch of people compaining that they can't switch between applications as easily as they used to.
On the whole, I like Microsoft's more open approach, but that's just from my point of view.
jlc61: I guess Sarbanes-Oxley just goes to show how laws can mess up things they're trying to fix. It seems to me that the law is the problem, not the free updates. Unfortunately, not giving away free updates is easier than trying to fix the law.
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HTC HD2 US (unlocked) + 16GB micro SDHC (in holding)
HTC Evo + 16GB micro SDHC (in use)
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01-16-2008, 02:57 PM
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Neophyte
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 3
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Ummm...$19.95 "unreasonable" for an Ipod Touch upgrade? How much is it to purchase a single application for a Win Mobile device? How much is it to purchase a Windows upgrade for my desktop machine?
Why do people continue to believe that software upgrades should be provided at no cost? Consumer electronics have razor-thin margins and software developers cost money. It certainly seems reasonable to me to pay a small anount to insure that a company continues to support and enhance the device that I purchased.
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