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?

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…

When the iPhone premiered, Apple and AT&T simply said that AT&T was the exclusive US carrier of the iPhone, and it was a “multiyear” agreement. They’ve never said anything else publicly, but people speculated quite a bit.

Somehow, due I believe to one report in USA Today that had no source or attribution, a five-year number was being thrown around a lot.

Now, today, USA Today has published an interview with CEO of AT&T Randall Stephenson. And again, while Stephenson does not comment on his contract with Apple, now USA Today says this:

In exchange for its payout, AT&T got a year extension, into 2010, on its exclusive distribution deal with Apple, people familiar with the matter say. Sources asked to not be named because the terms are confidential.

Under the original iPhone contract, Apple had the right to offer the device to other carriers beginning in 2009. If Apple exercised that clause, AT&T would have lost one of its biggest points of leverage with customers — exclusive access to the iPhone.

So, here we are a year later, and USA Today is now saying that the original exclusivity period was really just two years, and now has been extended to three years total. Hmm, two years – that’s exactly what I speculated over a year ago.

T3 has 10 things they hate, and 10 things they love about Apple. I assume these lists are both in general tongue-in-cheek, since T3 is not exactly a serious magazine. However, as with a lot of people who don’t know a lot about Apple or Apple products, some of their “hate” list is quite weak and ill-informed.

For example, how could any list of bad things about Apple not include a) exorbitantly overpriced memory upgrades at the online store, and b) the $30 they want for Quicktime Pro, or c) the poor value of .Mac (or now-called Mobile Me?)? The fact those three actual problems are omitted just shows the lack of thought that went into such a list.

Anyway, the most dubious things on this list are:

1 – The smugness Apple rips you off, dicks you around, releases products as virtual public betas, and has the worst customer service department in the known universe. Okay, everyone does that these days – tech products are now so complex, it’s virtually inevitable – but Apple do it with the air of Moses returning from the mount with a new batch of tablets.

Apple tops the customer satisfaction and the tech support surveys in Consumer Reports every year. Maybe it’s worse in the UK, but this seems demonstrably false.

2 – Apple Stores Like airport departure lounges, they’re cavernous, soulless and full of bored-looking tourists. They are staffed by “geniuses” who know nothing.

Two Apple stores just made it into Retail Week as “must visit” stores, including one in London.

3 – The first one’s always rubbish From the iMac to the iPod to the MacBook Air, there’s always some clanging design flaw in every new product Apple brings out.

This is an urban legend. With the exception of one iMac model, there’s no history of first generation problems with Apple products. The first iPod worked great. The first iPhone worked great. The Macbook Air is just fine. T3 seems to be confusing the fact that the second generation is always better with the first one being flawed.

4 – The prices Nobody minds paying a bit over the odds for a premium product, and some iPods are now perilously close to being good value. However, the prices of Apple’s computers and, for some reason, the iPod Touch, remain quite mad. Worse, the days when Apple was synonymous with rock-solid build quality are long gone. Our original iMac is still going strong, 8GB hard drive ‘n’ all. Our last one packed up after just over a 18 months with terminal hard drive and logic board failure.

I love build quality by anecdote. Ok, your iMac died in 18 months. That’s unfortunate, and outside the warranty period. I had some problems with my iBook G4. My PowerMac G4/400 is still working 6 years later, and my Macbook is going fine. Statistically, some models are more reliable than others, but that doesn’t mean all are bad now. Anyway, the price, yes – they cost more. But you get more. Apple’s Macs are comparable to equally equipped PCs. There just aren’t any “cheap” Macs. Mmm, and the Mac Mini may be overpriced.

5 – Apple TV A device that allows you to watch video in your front room. Cheers.

Maybe it doesn’t work properly in the UK, but the Apple TV does a lot more than let you watch video in your front room. You can purchase movies and TV shows and rent movies on it directly from iTunes, view photos, video files, and listen to Music. With the 2.0 software update, any iTunes machine can stream music to the AppleTV just like an Airport Express. For anyone with a good home theater setup and a lot of music in iTunes, this alone is a great feature. But no one is forcing you to buy one.

6 – The “keynote speeches” 2,000 hyped-up uber-nerds whooping like they’ve just won the lottery, just because Ocelot, or whatever the new Apple OS is called, now makes a slightly more booming “bong” sound when fired up. Apple’s product launches are like a Nuremberg rally on dress-down Friday.

Heh. This is funny, but it’s not exactly true. The crowds get bored and are unimpressed plenty when there’s nothing that exciting. Maybe they overreact now and then. I’m not sure T3 has ever actually watched an entire one.

7 – The iTunes Store DRM? 128Kbps tunes at 79p a track? Constant promotions for dreary, middle-of-the-road toss like Katie Melua? We’ll stick to Emusic and illegal file sharing, thanks.

DRM is something the music industry has thrust upon us, but I’d be fine if the music cost less, was a higher bitrate, etc. Fundamentally, the media owners control most of these things – not Apple. iTunes is the best thing to happen to online music for consumers in the last few years, period – before it we had crap subscription services and restrictive DRM that wouldn’t even let you burn things to CD. iTunes is a particularly dumb thing to be complaining about.

8 – The adverts Not the ones with Mitchell and Webb. They’re great. No, we mean the ones with “cool” silhouettes dancing to “cool” music by whatever “cool” band (or Bono) Apple has oh-so-easily convinced to whore themselves this month.

I think they’re just getting desperate for things now.

9 – Steve Jobs And his stupid voice, stupid hair, stupid clothes and stupid, unfunny jokes.

Yep.

10 – People who like Apple products Middle of the road bores who’ve convinced themselves they’re edgy. Passive aggressive twerps who go on Apple’s own message boards to defend Apple’s products from customers with legitimate grievances, saying things like “You’re not using it properly” and “You haven’t repaired permissions”. Beaming evangelists with hyena smiles and thousand-yard stares. Empty men with empty lives.

Ah, Artie Macstrawman is back. Most Mac/Apple users are gracious, helpful, knowledgeable, and critical of Apple when it makes mistakes or bad decisions. Witness the distaste when there was no real SDK for the iPhone.

Anyway, there are plenty of bad things about Apple – I just mentioned a few of them at the top. I could mention the lack of phone support after 90 days unless you buy Applecare, or the fact the iPhone can’t sync over WiFi when my Apple TV can, or plenty of other things. But this list is pretty absurd, as are most lists like this published.

Just a tip to the fine folks at HBO – just because HD signals are in a widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio doesn’t let you off the hook from using letterbox if the movie was, in fact, shot in a wider aspect ratio than that.

I just caught the last bit of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and while it looks lovely in HD, I see that now that the credits are rolling and all that’s to see is white text on a black background, they’ve chosen to letterbox. So, for the entire movie I’ve been missing some fraction of the movie as HBO decided to crop the movie to conform to my television.

HBO, trust me, your HD-buying customers probably are the same sort that want to see the movie in the same aspect ratio as it was shot and shown in theaters and on DVD, not cropped.

Some googling shows that I’m not the only one who feels this way. That home theater blog link also includes some illustrative screen caps.

Some might point out that the standard-def HBO channels don’t bother to letterbox either. One reason I’d say these “premium” stations are kind of weak. Even AMC and SciFi and plenty of other stations have the sense to show movies in letterbox now and then.

For the record, I have HBO (and Showtime) because of some Comcastic promotion for a year – soon they’ll either cost me an arm and a leg or I’ll have to drop them.

Mainly, the cost of the plans from AT&T. At first I was wowed with the new, lower, prices – $299 for a 16GB compared to the $499 I paid just a few months ago. But, AT&T has released some details, I refer specifically to this interview with AT&T mobility chief:

The data plans are different on the 3G iPhone vs. the 2G iPhone. Consumers will pay $30 a month every month, while enterprises will pay $45 a month. This is what you pay us on other PDA devices such as BlackBerry Curve. The SMS messages are not bundled anymore, and you pay for what you want. Again, the prices are based on what you buy.

The data part, I expected. iPhone users have voracious appetites for data and AT&T wants people to pay more for faster speeds, so I get that. But what’s up with this business about unbundling SMS? Does this mean that an iPhone user will have to pay another $5 a month just to get 200 text messages? Or perhaps to pay per SMS at fees higher than receiving data from space? Phooey on that.

I’m thinking I’ll be keeping my current iPhone until Apple opens up to other carriers, which hopefully will be the case by the time my contract is up in February 2010. (Don’t get me started about this “five year” exclusivity with AT&T – no one has confirmed that, it’s based one USA Today story which doesn’t cite anyone. Apple and AT&T have only said “multiyear”)

Now, I look forward to July so I can check out the app store. That should be quite awesome.

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.

Reuters – Apple’s iPhone can only help rivals in Europe. This sounds a lot like people saying that the iPod would “help” other, already established mp3 makers like Creative, etc. That didn’t exactly pan out. (I’m dying to find a quote I remember from 2002 or so from some Creative or similar exec saying that “every article” about the iPod mentioned them too and they were cheaper. But, I can’t seem to find it.)

The iFlop – Forbes.com. MMm, maybe it’s not selling well but I love my AppleTV. I only wish it could stream more free content, besides youtube. Like, NBC.com’s web site lets me watch TV shows with commercials. I’d like to be able to do watch that on the AppleTV.

Also, if this movie rental thing happens… that’d be something interesting. Anyway, I like the AppleTV for watching my own ripped video content and to play music to my stereo. I wouldn’t give it up for anything.

Not everything Apple does should be expected to sell like gangbusters ala the iPod.