Parity Violation

Dell Trails Its Rivals in the Worst of Times – NYTimes.com.

It’d be easy, to oh, you know suggest they shut down and return the money to their shareholders like Mr. Dell suggested Apple do 11 years ago. But I won’t go that far. After all Dell has thousands of employees, and is a Texas company – so I hope the company can do well again.

I always thought Michael Dell’s statement about Apple just showed him to very obtuse – Dell was and is and always will be just another maker of PCs. He can differentiate with price, support, and maybe a little with design. Apple, was and is for whatever reason, one of the trail blazers of the consumer tech world.

If Apple had shut down 11 years ago, think of all the things we’d have missed. OS X, the iPod, the iPhone. What exactly would the universe be missing if Dell Computer had just disappeared instead?

Apple Announces Its Last Year at Macworld; no Jobs keynote..

My guess is that Apple is tired of the forced schedule of having to have something to talk about every January… and right after the holiday shopping season. Without Macworld, they can announce new products and make other announcements on their own timetable, rather than always in January.

Still, the Macworld keynote has always been a mainstay of Apple watchers since Jobs returned to Apple. And without Jobs this year, surely various talking heads will make all kinds of interpretations as to what this means for him, his health, the future of Apple, etc, etc.

I uprgraded to wordpress 2.6 recently and this means I can now post using the Wordpress iPhone app. Of course at the moment I’m just sitting in my apartment so this isn’t exactly mobile blogging. But I had to test it out. :)

And I can add photos easily from the iphone camera…

Check this mess of an article presumably about Leopard problems “plaguing” Apple. The problem with it? Virtually none of the issues mentioned have anything to do with Apple and/or Leopard.

The “blue screen” problem is due exclusively to an unsupported “haxie” from Unsanity. He fails to link to this apple support document which explain the problem is due to Application Enhancer. That’s what happens when people use unsupported hacks – you get problems.

The other is the imac screen freeze issue. This has nothing to with Leopard whatsoever – and it’s been fixed. See here.

The “data loss” bug when moving (not copying) files to a network volume had actually been around since 10.2 (which, I suppose in some eyes makes it worse) so while it should have been fixed long ago, it’s not a Leopard-specific problem.

And the reports of hard drive problems with Macbooks is, while troubling, related entirely to some subset of Macbook hard-drives and have nothing to do with Leopard.

The only real problem he mentions is the new application firewall which, with its “signing” of applications is breaking some things like Skype and Blizzard games.

So, some bad headline writing in the least, and mostly just an unfocused, confusing article.

The Worst Thing about Macs. Here we go again. Another clueless list of what is bad about Macs. Are there bad things about Macs? Yes. Does this list make any sense? No.

Microsoft Just Copies Everyone and Buys Everything. The author claims that Apple copies people and buys things. The favorite example of this is the whole Dashboard stole Konfabulator’s idea bit. Daring Fireball thoroughly debunked this idea in 2004. A little thing called Desk Accessories predated either of them. Yeah Apple bought Cover Flow, and they bought iTunes too. Anyway, David Pogue “proves” that Vista didn’t steal from OS X in this satirical video.

Every time someone mentions a competitor to something Apple does well, the Mac cultists flood message boards and inboxes with snickering messages to the effect of “why do they even try?”. Well, he’s invoking Artie Macstrawman. The Zunes are pretty underwhelming, as they basically match the iPods at best, and certainly don’t go above and beyond them. I would love to see a legitimate iPod competitor, but these aren’t them. Pointing out that the Zunes offer pretty much nothing distinguishing is hardly “cultist” behavior. He also could cite an actual “cultist” but he prefers his strawman.

Apple fans have an attitude where, when Apple does something bad, it’s okay, or at least understandable. More strawmen – “Apple fans.” Who are these people, exactly? Anyway, he rambles on about 3rd party apps on the iPhone and that because MacOS X only runs on Macs somehow this is the same as the Windows “monopoly.” Little difference here – Apple makes all their computers, Microsoft doesn’t own Dell, HP, etc. Nor has anyone accused Apple of using their OS “monopoly” to stifle application development. Yet anyway. If you want a phone that allows 3rd party apps, go use a Windows Mobile phone – go nuts. At the moment, that’s not who the iPhone is targeting.

I myself, do get annoyed when people blame Apple for DRM (which is the music industry’s idea), or for breaking sim unlocked iPhones (um, you thought hacking the SIM card somehow obligated Apple to support your hack?).

Anyway, I have detailed some actual lame things about Apple before, the last time some dumb list like this was published. Quicktime Pro, the “black paint tax” on Macbooks, .Mac, etc.

Amazon.com MP3 Downloads: Popular music, classical music, new releases and more, in MP3 format. With more DRM-free tracks than iTunes, good Mac-iPod-iTunes integration and lower prices – this looks like the place to shop for digital music first. It looks like they have EMI and some Universal tracks, along with some indie labels previously available (as far as I know) only on eMusic. Hopefully this will spur Apple to get independents on board “iTunes Plus” or something similar. (Why the independents who sell DRM-free on eMusic still have DRM on iTunes is beyond me.)

With the cheaper prices one wonders – is Amazon getting a better deal from the record labels or are they making less money per song? If it’s the latter, then it begs the question – can Amazon make money selling music online? Apple probably doesn’t – but it created the iTunes store to help sell iPods, which they do make a few bucks on it would seem.

Fortunately since this is DRM-free mp3 music, there won’t be any problems if the Amazon experiment should come to and end, unlike the Virgin Music store. That store’s subscription-service based music will go poof and no one seems to know what will happen to purchased tracks.

I’d like to see DRM-free music become the norm, and without the 30% markup we’re seeing with EMI and Apple via iTunes Plus. Hopefully Amazon will help push that possibility forward.

Update – Wired attributes this DRM-free Amazon store to the desire of record companies to create an iTunes competitor even if that means no DRM. Why? Because the music needs to work on the iPod and the iPods won’t do any non-Fairplay DRM. So, some irony – because Apple only uses their own “proprietary” DRM (no more proprietary than Windows-Media DRM, which doesn’t work on Macs at all) – that forces the music industry to ditch DRM just so people can play music from other stores on iPods.

CNN reports on possible iTunes movie rentals, which if priced at $2.99 aren’t a bad deal – but … Netflix seems to offer a better deal. I suppose the idea with renting on iTunes would be the ability to watch them on an iPod or iPhone. I wonder if they’d rent TV shows as well? I’m guessing not – since those just cost $2 to buy (well, unless NBC had their way.)

What I find interesting is it was my understanding that the iPod was completely unaware of the DRM in the iTunes purchased music and video files, which is one reason why iTunes purchases can go on an unlimited number of iPods. iTunes act as the gatekeeper checking the DRM to see if it can go on the iPod (I think) but the iPod is blissfully unaware of Fairplay.

Clearly these movie rental downloads would have to expire at some point; and the iPod would have to know as much. That wouldn’t be too hard on the iPhone and iPod Touch but on the iPods that don’t run OS X, clearly this will require some sort of iPod firmware upgrade.

Ted Landau’s User Friendly View – Apple’s New iPods: Which One to Buy? || The iPod Observer – Now Playing – This post and others have suggested how hard it is to decide which iPod to buy; and this is not a good thing. There is the phenomenon known as the tyranny of choice, where by having too many choices people anticipate regretting their choice, among other things, and are likely to not choose anything at all.

So, with all these iPod models out there – it’s confusing. Apple could stand to simplify the lineup – I think the main problem is the existence of both the iPod Touch and the iPod Classic. I think combining those, even if it meant a thicker touch, would be wise.

Apple – Support – Downloads – iMovie HD 6 – Looks like Apple concedes that iMovie ‘08 has limitations and has made the old iMovie available to people who bought iLife ‘08 (or who have a new Mac presumably.) Begs the question why they didn’t just give the new iMovie a different name, make it a seperate application, and keep/enhance the old iMovie. Some things like the new share to iTunes and share to youtube features would be nice in iMovie 6.

My initial skepticism about iMovie ‘08 seems to be born out in the initial rections in the Apple Discussion forum on it, which shows a lot of complaints. While the new iMovie looks to be handy for quickly slapping videos together, a lot of the functionality of iMovie ‘06 is missing. Fortunately, it keeps the old version around, but – this seems like it should be a new Quick iMovie app or something, and not the new iMovie. While fortunately I have access to iMovie ‘06, buyers of new Macs will have no such recourse. What are they supposed to do if they want the timeline and multiple audio tracks and other such real video editing features? Buy Final Cut?

This iMovie thing makes me rather uninterested in paying for iLife ‘08.