Articles for November 2010

Mobile carriers in the UK — 3, T-Mobile and Orange — are providing iPads through a subsidized model, perhaps as early as year’s end. Fresh on the heels of the UK carriers, Japan's mobile provider Softbank has just announced a subsidy program for iPad. Apple's competitors, who have been unable to compete pound-for-pound with iPad's pricing, thought they had found Apple's soft underbelly via the carrier subsidy model; however, it appears Apple is more than willing to play the same game, but that's where Apple stops playing fair.

The UK carriers are taking an agressive approach, bring iPad to the masses for around £199, with a two-year subscription. But in Japan Softbank's approach is nothing short of stunning, offering the iPad for free, with a two-year contract.

When Steve Jobs introduced us to Lion (OS X 10.7) back in October, there were a few items that were certainly interesting to note:

• Lion OS X 10.7

  Lion will be the next giant step away from computing as we have known it for the past 25 years.

  App Store was a Lion Feature but will be available four-five months before Lion is released — We should mark our calendars for January 20th, which will be 90 days since Jobs' announcement. Will Apple will release iWork 11 on that date and make it available only via the App Store? Expect Apple to move this way to make their Apple Store shelves less filled with software (I mean how many iPhone Apps can you buy at an Apple Store? Answer: Zero) and more filled with accessories and Mac/iPhone gear that is tangible.
• Lion is a move away from the Finder — The Finder was Apple's original way of helping us technical neophytes understand directory structures and files. It is clear that Steve wants to move to the next step which is to make us less dependent on files and where they are stored. Instead we are just use them in the appropriate application. For example, think of Mail.app. Do you deal with files per se? No, you are dealing with an App called Mail.app and it helps you organize "files" called E-mails. A better example is iPhoto. Few of us rarely ever see the actual files in iPhoto but instead manipulating those files through the application. Never must one go to ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/ and so on. My bet is Steve would like to make our computing day file-and-directory-structure-free. Apps just handle everything for us, in a more useful way.
• Lion is a move away from the Dock — We were introduced to the Dock (in its current form) with OS X 10.0 (sure there were previews of it in OS 9 and 8). But the Dock is limiting. There are only so many items one can fit on the Dock until it becomes so small that you need a magnifying glass to understand what is in there. You should see Mark (Guy #1's) dock. It is so small and so busy, only he can use his computer. If you think about it, the iOS has a dock, but it is far more flexible and far more customizable... yes the main screens (or windows) we swipe through to find,.... what? Apps. See the previous point. Apps become center stage and Lion will make this more evident.
• Lion will make files, not apps, cloud-centric — In Lion expect to see that auto-save also means auto-save to the cloud. For those of you who use IMAP as your e-mail protocol or MobileMe (based on IMAP), you can quickly picture how all files could work that way — not just e-mail. This makes sense with Apple's massive data center in North Carolina. So with Lion I can work on a presentation, then continue when I get on the plane with my iPad.... because all files are synced (like IMAP e-mail). Apps on the other hand are not. They must be installed on each device. In the future, I'm sure if you buy an app for the Mac (through the App Store) it will also have an iOS flavor as well (like iWork does).

A lot more is in-store for us with Lion. Steve said he only had a limited amount of time to share with us some key features. What I think that really meant is he wasn't quite ready to reveal the massive change (and improvements) Lion will bring to our computing lives. Lion will be the next giant step away from computing as we have known it for the past 25 years.

Apple, Inc. the darling of the consumer industry, adored the world over, yet hated by others. But it isn't the consumer that's fallen out of love with Apple. Just look at Nielsen's latest iPad is number one survey if you have any doubts. Apple's enemies live in the corporate space. Large tech and service-based companies that once scoffed at Apple being nothing more than niche player are lining up in droves to bash Apple in the public square.

With success come enemies — and for Apple list grows long:

When September rolled around and we revealed Apple would likely hold a Special Event in October, revealing the all-new MacBook Air, we felt a wee bit apprehensive in doing so. At Three-Guys-And-A-Podcast we can't say we feel any less squeamish about looking forward to Apple's next Mac hardware special event either, but here we go again...

Since Apple has quit attending the MacWorld trade show, MacBook Pro launches roughly follow a fall or spring release schedule. This year proved to be different due to the MacBook air being the major Mac focus for the fall/winter timeframe. January will likely be reserved for Apple's annual iPad refresh. This leaves April as Apple's launching point for the all-new MacBook Pro design. We don't believe this will be a simple refresh of the MacBook Pro, rather, Apple will deliver an all-out redesign, the big brother of the MacBook air.

 News Corp and Apple are teaming up to bring you an iPad only newspaper called The Daily. It will push content throughout the day and cost $99 a week. The content will be exclusive to the iPad as it will not be available online or in print.

If News Corp was developing this type of application alone, I might question how successful it will become. The fact that Apple is also working on this application almost insures that this will be successful. Apple will not only bring its marketing power to bare, but also their application development know how. This should be a great looking application if nothing else. Rupert Murdoch is fully behind the iPad and this application, so he should be putting some good editors and writers on this project. Will those writers know what to write for a publication with a limited amount of viewers, especially at the beginning? We will have to see what the content is looks like to find out. Either way, it is an interesting experiment to see if people will pay for news content.

If you haven't seen T-Mobile's latest television ad campaign you will, as they're running it heavily. Multiple versions of the campaign have already aired and it seems to be a campaign T-Mobile will be fixed on for some time.

Unfortunately for T-Mobile the ad smacks of desperation. It is a cheap knock-off of Apple's award-winning "Hello I'm a Mac and I'm a PC" campaign, but in this rendition, T-Mobile plays the good looking hipster, and the iPhone with AT&T is the dumb and dumber tandem.

Watching Microsoft open their latest store (luck number seven to be exact) in Bellevue, WA on Thursday was quite a display. It reminded me of Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney's Say, Say, Say video. If you're too young to know what I speak of, Michael and Paul pull into an unsuspecting town in the 30's or 40's, and excite the crowd with a new magic elixir that will make the weakest man strong or heal an aching back, you know, infomercial stuff.

Watching Microsoft's "customers" consist mostly of teen girls for Miley Cyrus tickets, mixed with a few Microsoft loyalists really started to make me queazy, and it brought me to realize exactly what this store is:

  RIM has a video up on their YouTube channel showing that the iPad is slower than the Playbook in browser performance. Now, I would like to go and look at this playbook and see how it compares, but the Playbook is not available. Basically it is still vaporware, so until RIM actually starts selling this Playbook, it really does not matter. Now the Playbook is supposed to come out sometime in the second quarter 2011 and have a sub $500 price. We should really wait until RIM has a shipping Playbook before performance tests are conducted. It would be better for RIM just to demo the cool new features instead of trying challenge their competitors with vaporware products.
   The tests do seem accurate on my ipad, although I find it interesting that the Playbook is being compared to a current generation iPad. When we know that a new version of the iPad is coming out sometime in first quarter of 2011. From the tests, RIM is only comparing the browsers and not any of the other applications. They don’t show battery life either. All of the test shown in the video are performance based tests except for the Acid3, which test web standards. It is expected that the Playbook, with its 1GHz ARM processor, would bet the old iPad. As far as the Acid test goes, Safari mobile may not be pixel accurate, but Safari for the mac is. I am sure by the time the Playbook ever comes out, Safari Mobile will be just as good as the Playbook. The Playbook uses webkit for browser rendering, which is the same as Safari and Chrome. I don’t see an advantage here for RIM.
   Does RIM think Apple will not update their iPad before the Playbook comes out? No, they know a new version of the iPad is coming out soon. They need to show some advantage over the iPad, so they better do it now, with the first generation model. It certainly will not be screen size, as the Playbook looks tiny compared to the iPad. They know, when the second generation comes out, they won’t have an advantage. They released this demo in hopes it will prevent people from buying iPad and waiting for the Playbook if it ever comes out. I guess RIM needs to trick consumers in buying a Playbook instead of an iPad. Why not just build a better product?
   They may have demoed the browser, but what about some of the other applications that will be available. Did they demo any of those? So RIM tried to find something that the Playbook an advantage of over the iPad, and this was it? They could only find faster browser performance and Acid3 tests as the best advantages for the Playbook, a vaporware product, over a first generation iPad? It does not look good for the Playbook, they may need more time.
   As you can see, the Playbook is no iPad killer. Just like the Samsung Tab is no iPad killer. If a real iPad competitor does emerge, it will need to dominate these hopefuls in order to get enough developers on board. Without developers, a tablet is dead in the water. Tablets need developers far move than smart phones do. My guess Android will be the OS, but Android will not be tablet ready for at least another year. So we won’t see a true competitor for the iPad for at least another year. That gives a whole another year for Apple to keep improving their iOS. The longer Apple gets, the harder it will become to compete with them.

When Apple's home page post declared an event for Tuesday morning, with visuals suggesting this would be an event the entire world should tune into, it quickly had many on edge. Would this event, tagged with the comment "Come back tomorrow for an exciting announcement from iTunes" finally deliver the iTunes cloud or backup technology we've been waiting for, or perhaps something far better?

No. Not even close.

In October Apple introduced us to the all-new MacBook air lineup through a special event held at Apple's Cupertino campus. But Apple's MacBook air event was not the typical show Apple had held in the past. Oh sure, Steve was on stage with his great looking presentation, and the message was filled with Apple's typical "amazing" and "stunning" venacular, but there was one little addition; the event was streamed. 

Today Apple unleashed a special event for tomorrow morning, 7 AM Pacific, as a live stream. Double expresso mandatory.

Bloomberg's Amy Thompson has given us a glimpse of what Rodman & Renshaw, LLC believes is going to happen to iPad sales this Christmas quarter; fall short of estimates by a wide margin.

Rodman & Renshaw's analyst Ashok Kumar believes the estimates of 6 million iPads being sold this quarter is out of line and may run as few as 5 million. 

Anyone who has been waiting for the next version of the iWork suite knows that it is a year late as it comes out almost every year so far.  Looks like a new version of iWork should be coming out when the Mac App Store arrives and could be called iWork 11.

A Verizon-branded commercial for iPad on their network. What's the big deal? The deal is that Apple has NEVER done this - allowed some other "partner" or company co-advertise, never. That is a big deal. AT&T does not advertise the iPhone and they are not even allowed to mention iPhone or Apple in their commercials. Apple controls all the iPhone marketing, and produces all their own ads. The only thing regarding AT&T in Apple's ads is AT&T's logo at the very end - always covered and ending with Apple's logo. 

So why now? Why let Verizon advertise the iPad? Why does not Apple do this? One possible reason is Apple has only so much marketing money available. Once they only advertised Macs. Then iTunes and Macs and iPod, and then also iPhones, and iPod touch and iPad, etc. With Verizon advertising iPad, it gives Apple more marketing bandwidth to reach the general audience. With the amount of money Apple has in the Bank, we know this not to be true. Another reason is Apple is testing the waters with Verizon, laying down a new marketing philosophy - at least with iPad. Everyone and their dog will be able to advertise iPad with Apple's soft-touch blessing. Best Buy, Verizon, AT&T, Target, everyone can go for it. Of course, Apple will brand the product with it's campaign and everyone else gets to say they have it. The overarching goal is a massive, massive awareness campaign. We'll see if Verizon is the only one allowed to do this, but I highly doubt it.

  Last week Apple announced they are discontinuing the Xserve. The Xserve is a rack mount server solution running the Macintosh OS. Apples added a alternative, which is the Mac Pro running their server software. The new product looks interesting, but it does not replace an Xserve as the Mac Pros are not rack mountable. Some have suggested Mac Mini as a replacement, but the Minis don't have RAID capabilities. The Mac Mini will work great for small server applications, but not those that need more power. The French Website MacGeneration sent an email asking Steve Jobs why. Steve respond, by saying “Hardly anyone was buying them”. Now I know the Xserve does not have the volume of an iPad, iPhone or even a iMac, but I don’t buy the fact that they were not selling. The Xserve is a solution to those who want to run the Mac OS in the server environment. As of January 1, that will no longer be possible.
   Is this a move away from the professional or business user? No, Apple discontinued the Xserve because it was not worth their time to develop the hardware. With the long wait for Aperture 3 and the big delay for Final Cut, Apple is continuing to show they are more focused on the consumer than the professional. The new OS 10.7 Lion are nice, but they are adding more consumer features, not the professional ones. The professional may not be the bread and butter for Apple as it was before the iPod, but that does not mean Apple should stop focusing on them. Apple needs the professionals to develop the iOS apps, create iTunes content and just generally buy or recommend Apple products. A lose of the professionals would be bigger than just the sales of the professional products.
   Apple could license the Mac OS to someone like VMware as vitalization is the future for server technology, but don’t see Apple doing this. We will not see legal non-Apple hardware running the Mac OS while Steve Jobs is running the company, even though many hope they will. Apple needs to give more focus to the professional to keep them on the Mac. The best way for Apple to do this is by creating a division (or a spin off company) that can focus on solutions for the professional and business user. They should move their Mac Pro hardware and Final Cut, Aperture, Logic, and other professional software into this division. This new division would then give the focus to the professionals that they need to keep them on the Mac. It would also free up Apple to keep their focus on the consumer instead of have to switch back and forth.

  When the iPad first came out, many people speculated whether the it could compete against the current line of notebooks. Apple told us that the iPad fit in-between the iphone and Macbook product line-up and this is where the notebooks market is. When people are looking at buying a notebooks, they are either wanting a cheap or a small and light computer. Most notebooks are small and cheap, but the computer part is their weakness. Yes, they run desktop application, but they run them very slowly.
   We find out this week that Microsoft admits the iPad is not only competing against the notebooks, but cannibalizing notebooks sales. Tablet sales are up 26% percent with the iPad taking 95% of the market. Netbook demand sinks 80% in October surgery results. The same surgery showed that 95% of iPad users are either very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their device. Analysts are predicting that Apple will sell as much as 48 million iPads in 2011. Clearly, the iPad is not only competing against the netbook, it is destroying the competition. The iPad is cheap at $499, it is light 1.5 pounds, and it is small. The iPad is the first punch against the notebook market. Now, is the iPad a computer?
   The iPad runs applications from the app store and if you can find the applications for the stuff you do, then yes it is. If you need to run desktop applications, then no it is not the computer for you, yet. In the beginning of October, Apple release an new version of the Macbook Air. The Macbook Air is twice the price of the iPad and does not have a hard drive or optical drive. The Macbook Air is underpowered compared to the current MacBooks except for the solid state drive. A solid state drive uses flash memory instead of spinning disks to storage information on your computer. The Macbook Air comes in two sizes; 11-inch and 13-inches. The 11-inch version has either a 64GB or 128GB Solid state drive. The Air is small and light at 2.3 pounds. Is the Air fast enough?

   The key to the Air it not the processor, but the solid state drive. Hard drives are the biggest bottle neck in the computer, adding a much faster solid state drive, makes the computer much faster. Commentators were not sure about the speed as it runs a slower Core 2 Duo Processor. The Air is not a netbook by performance, it does have a real desktop processor compared to notebooks which use a slower ATOM processor. Those who have had a chance to use the Air though are raving over the performance. It is definitely fast enough for most desktop tasks. You may not be editing the next Cars movie on it, but for most tasks, it will be fast enough. If you are looking at a netbook because it is cheap, you are not going to get an Air, as the price starts at $999. If you are looking for a netbook that is light and small and runs desktop applications, the Macbook Air is the best choice. The Macbook Air is the second punch against the netbook market. Look for the Macbook Air to be a huge seller in the next year as it is fast enough for 90% for the users looking at buying a laptop. Put the iPad and Macbook Air together, and you have a one, two punch that will knock out the netbook market.

  Apple has been holding off adding USB 3.0 support to their Macintosh line up. It is not like Apple to hold off adopting a new technology. USB 3.0 is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 and is ten times faster. The data transfer rate for USB 3.0 could be 4.8 Gbps where USB 2.0 is 480 Mbps at best. It does require a new connector for the faster data rate though. So one has to ask why is Apple not adopting USB 3.0? Last last week, Tom Kruk emailed Steve Jobs to ask why. Steve responded by saying “We don’t see USB 3 taking off at this time. No support from Intel, for example”. This could be a possible answer, but I don’t buy it. Apple does not wait for other companies when it comes to new technology. If Apple put USB 3.0 into all of their new Macs, new products would come out almost immediately. Apple leads, others follow.
   I think Apple is not adding USB 3.0 because it is waiting on another better technology, Light Peak. According to CNET, Light Peak could be coming out sometime next year. Light Peak is a new optical cable interface that Apple and Intel have been working on together. It promises 10 Gbps data transfer speeds, which is twice as fast USB 3.0. Since Light Peak uses an optical interface, it has a potential of much greater data transfer rate, up to 100Gbps for 2020. I think Apple will be replacing USB and Firewire with Light Peak in the coming years. Keyboards and mice are already wireless, so they don’t need a USB connector. Light Peak was developed to replaces not only USB and Firewire, but also HDML, PCI express, SATA and SCSI. It would replace all of the connectors in the back of a Mac with one Light Peak connector except for the Ethernet. Light Peak can be daisy chained together, so there is no need to have more than one or two. Light Peak is the direction Apple will be taking, not USB 3.0.

   Silverlight was pretty much gone from Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference last week with HTML5 taking its place. Even as Silverlight continues to be Microsoft’s development platform for Windows Phone 7, Microsoft looks to be pushing HTML5 as the only true cross platform solution. Over the past few months, Microsoft has been getting aggressive in their HTML5 support as Internet Explorer 9 was shown off with HTML5 demos. More evidence is shown with Office for Mac using webkit instead of IE for displaying web content. Webkit is used in Safari and Chrome as the HTML rendering engine.
   By moving from Silverlight to HTML5, Microsoft has put another nail in the coffin of flash. One may think that moving away from Silverlight was be a good thing for Flash, but that is not the case.  Silverlight had an uphill battle against Flash because it has yet to achieve critical mass.  RIAS (Rich Internet Application Statistics) reports Silverlight having only a 57% browser adoption rate.  Microsoft must have seen this and is now moving to embrace HTML5 which should be in every new browser. HTML5 is Flash’s major competitor and adding Microsoft to the HTML5 camp is not good news for Flash. Hopefully this means full support for HTML5 on one of the last major browsers to support it, Internet Explorer. With HTML5 being supported by all major browsers, we should see less browser incompatibilities, one of the main reasons to use Flash in the first place.
   We have also seen HTML5 video adoption continue to have substantial growth. MeFeedia came out with a report that showed 54% of web video can now be played in HTML5. Compare that to only 10% back in January 2010. One has to ask, what happened in January to change things? One word, iPad.
   Video, applications, browser independence, and easy interactive content are the main reasons to choose Flash for your website. I would think a year from now HTML5 video should be above 80-90%. Most ad insertion apps still use Flash for adding ads to video. That should change over the next year as HTML5 ad solutions continue to be developed. As far as web applications go, HTML5 and AJAX can easily do what Flash delivers.  As an iPad user I see very few flash apps out there, and when they are available, the Apps in Apple’s iTunes store are much better. Browser independence should really start to diminish with HTML5 adaptation.

   That leaves one area for using Flash; easy interactive content. I see this most often on the iPad, websites that want to look cool and be interactive. They don’t have time to write for different browsers or spend money on AJAX coders, so they resort to Flash.  I see Flash sites for small cars companies, musicians, and restaurants to name a few. Flash’s biggest strength is an easy to use, non programming, development platform. It is a platform that designers use as well as coders. Designers don’t code in HTML5 or AJAX. If HTML5 whats to replace Flash, it will need an easy to development environment for the non-programmer - the graphic designer.  A development platform for both graphic artist and coders to collaborate.  Something like iWeb on steroids that lives outside of MobileMe.  This type of application would be the last nail in the coffin for Flash.

As a iPad user, I am excited to hear 4.2 has reached Golden Master. What does that mean? When program developers decide the code is finished and ready to be sold, they would make a Golden Master CD to send the CD manufactures for production. They may not be sending it to the CD manufactures anymore, but when the final software testing has been complete, they still call it Golden Master. This can only mean 4.2 will be coming out to the iPad and iOS soon. I can’t wait to get those new iPhone 4 features on my iPad.

  Rumors are flying today about iPhone5 adding Near Field Communication (NFC) capability. You may also see the term RFID used as well. With NFC, your iphone could become a electronic wallet so you could carry some sort of secure ID for purchasing your groceries. It could also be used to store you home folder, so that you could go to any Mac, wave your iphone over it, and your files and settings automatically appear.
Now, this seems interesting, and it would be nice not to carry around a wallet. To bring my home folder along would require a 500GB iPhone, so I don’t think that will be possible for the iPhone5, maybe in the future. It would be nice to go to any computer to use your stuff, but I see lots of problems in the near term. What about applications, are they transferred as well? What happens to the data when I leave that computer? How secure is the whole transferring of data? The electronic wallet also has me concerned with identify theft. In order for these to really work, security will really have to be greatly improved to trust it.