Author: The Macalope

David Pogue is a pussy

But his post is still worth a read.

David Pogue pens a hilarious walk down memory lane with all those brilliant prognosticators who sagely predicted Apple’s imminent demise in the mid-1990s.

The Macalope’s only complaint: other than Microsoft’s Nathan Myhrvold , Pogue doesn’t name names.  [Correction:  he also mentions David Winer – so Microsoft and bloggers are fair game, but not journalists… hmm…]

Ah, the privileges of membership in the big media boys and girls club.

C’mon, Pogue! Bwaaak-buck-buck-buck-bwaaaaa!

That’s a chicken sound, in case you can’t tell.

A Note About Corrections

Some comments on how the Macalope rolls.

The Macalope’s still getting his feet wet in this whole blogging thing, but he’s a little confused by the varying standards for corrections.

Two polar opposites seem to be George Ou and Victor Keegan (or, rather, the Guardian).

Say what you want to about Ou (the Macalope certainly does), but he notes corrections in situ (like a man!), which is the policy the Macalope intends to follow.

And there’s good precedent for it. In an email, John Gruber notes:

if it’s a correction, or a significant addition, or somehow changes the meaning, then I call it out somehow. My rule of thumb is — if it’s a change that I would like people who have already read the article before to notice if they happen to skim it again, I’ll call it out.

To the Macalope, that’s the most sensible policy and it was rather startling to him that when Victor Keegan corrected the two mistakes in the online version of his column, the mistakes were “disappeared.” 86-ed. Flushed down the memory hole. Anyone reading the article now would never know there was were any errors. Anyone reading pissy blog posts about the errors (cough) might wonder what they were talking about.

In fairness to Keegan, it’s probably the Guardian’s policy that online content be corrected in this manner rather than his and it’s not at all unusual for the big media companies. It is a little schizophrenic, though. Print journalists have traditionally been brow-beaten over corrections, which are often used as a metric in annual reviews. But while journalists may still get dinged for them, many of the papers have thrown the transparency out the window in moving to online media. Just because you can magically correct something doesn’t mean you should.

Further, using the number of corrections as a basis for performance seems overly draconian.  It’s not that the Macalope doesn’t think sloppy reporters should be held accountable – they should. But people make mistakes and it’s likely that some reporters are going to get called on them more often than others. A simple counting system doesn’t work.

A political reporter – for example – is going to get heated calls more often than someone covering the local flower show (“Those were dahlias, god damn it! DAHLIAS!”).  Likewise complex tax regulations or the nuts and bolts of technology are going to be easier to make a mistake on than coverage of the county fair. And if readers don’t complain, reporters have zero incentive to correct a story if it’s going to pop up on their annual review.

The papers have made a decision to try to reduce the number of corrections instead of trying to increase overall accuracy.

Anyway, all of this is a long way of saying that the Macalope will be providing corrections where the errors appeared – sometimes right next to the error and sometimes at the end of a post, depending on how it affects readability and whether or not the error is isolated or throughout.

Also, on the advice of Gruber, the Macalope won’t be calling out spelling corrections anymore. There’s a fine line between diligent and being pedantic. No one cares if the Macalope has a problem with homonyms, they just care if the information is wrong or misleading.

This has been a public service announcement. We now return you to Mac news, rumors and silly pundit take-downs.

Threat level reduced to "Aluminum"

The Macalope receives his replacement battery.

The Macalope’s new non-explosive battery arrived yesterday, causing a great sigh of relief from Mrs. Macalope who had been giving the old one a wide berth ever since the announcement of its potential to be the family Yule Log this holiday season.

Apple’s instructions ask that you drain the battery before sending it back, leaving the Macalope to wonder why the company left out that little safety tip in the emailed instructions for the exchange program.

Oh, sure, it’s OK for the Macalope to sit around with a fully charged incendiary device on his lap, but god forbid it get within Steve Jobs’ zip code.

Now the Macalope’s trying to remember the shamanistic ritual of initiation you’re supposed to go through with a new battery to make sure it’ll last 4-evah.  He thinks it’s charge, drain, charge, drain.

Or is it drain, charge, drain, charge?

Or maybe it’s drain, drain, charge, charge, charge, drain, charge.

[Edited for spelling.  It’s just not the Macalope’s day…]

A kwality product

The Macalope responds to “iTV” doom and gloom.

Not that the Macalope isn’t sympathetic to the argument that the “iTV”‘s ability to stream a quality picture to HDTV sets is in question, but there are a couple of counter-arguments to be made to Davis Freeberg’s turd in the Apple special event punch bowl.

First, the Macalope notes that you can almost exactly replace “iPod” for “iTV” and “CD-quality” for “HDTV quality” in Davis’ argument. Davis notes this and says:

If you let someone hear a CD track and an iTunes track and ask them to rate each on a scale of 1 to 10 you will get very little difference between the two. If you show someone a show in HDTV though and then in non HDTV you will get a much wider differential.

The Macalope is sure that’s true, but while the HDTV-owning portion of the market is growing, not everyone owns one yet and even if consumers do notice the difference it may not matter that much to them if it provides another feature: ease of use. That doesn’t make them “idiots”.

Hell hath no fury like a tech purist surveying a compromised solution.

[ADDENDUM:  the Macalope, for example, owns an HDTV set.  He’s downloaded TV shows from iTunes and – while he’s noticed the quality is not as good as DVD – it’s been acceptable.  The movie downloads are supposedly four times as good and if they’re good enough on Steve Jobs’ TV, they’re probably going to be good enough on the Macalope’s.]

Most importantly, however, all that’s known so far is that Google and Apple are in talks. If you follow the links all the way back to the Engadget piece that started it all, you’d see this is the key graph:

All we’ve got to go on so far is a quote from Google’s consumer product chief, Marissa Mayer, who has confirmed the two companies are “engaged in talks.”

Engadget’s coverage focuses on video, but if that’s all there is to go on, this could just be related to the advertising connection speculated in the post below (although the Macalope suspects they must have meant “video talks” or the whole piece is jumping to conclusions). Also, it doesn’t mean it’s related to streaming existing Google video to the “iTV”. It could be something entirely new.

If Davis wants to jump off the “the ‘iTV’ is gonna flop” balcony, that’s his business. But the Macalope would preach a little patience.

UPDATE:  Customers download 125,000 poor quality, over-priced movies from the iTunes Store in its first week (antler tip to Daring Fireball).

Ha-ha!  Idiots!

UPDATED AGAIN: Via Daring Fireball, here’s another source talking about the Apple/Google “talks.”

But again the key graph is nebulous:

Google’s consumer product chief, Marissa Mayer, tells me that indeed, the two companies are engaged in talks.

Mmm. “Talks.”

“Talks, talks, talkie, talks.”

“Oooh, we talked about our hair and boys and all the great stores down at the mall. And then we had a pillow fight!”

Hmm.

[Edited for spelling.]

Your ad here.

Coming soon to www.apple.com: an “Advertise on this site” link?

The Macalope can’t wait for Apple to put up something about Bonjour and have GoogleAds dump a bunch of “Vacation in France” ads on them.

Now you’ll know how we feel!

ADDENDUM: Another thought on this: ad-based subscription service for iTunes? It’s not the Macalope’s cup of tea, but it could appeal to a segment of the market Apple’s not currently reaching.

If it’s not that, it’s annoyingly close to what the Macalope joked about below – a fee service that also made you watch ads.

Can a punch in the gut be far behind?

Details of Office 2007 for the Mac.

You have to hand it to the folks at the Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit.

As is convention for the Office family, at this early stage the product is known only by its version number as ‘Office 12′. “That won’t be the name it goes to market with — we’ll have something brilliant, like the year it launches, as the name!” laughs Mary Starman, group product manager for Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU).

They’re very good-natured about their position in the Mac world. Why, they even realize what some silly pundits don’t: you can’t just tell Mac users to “boot into Windows”.

“Mac customers would prefer to run a native version of Office on their Mac” says Sheridan Jones, Lead Marketing Manager for the MacBU “We don’t expect and I don’t think Apple expects lots of their customers and our customers to be running the Windows version of Office on their Mac.”

Indeed.

Silly report prompts silly conclusions

Jupiter Research report draws some specious conclusions.

Perhaps some of the Macalope’s readers from across the pond can tell him, is there something in the water over there? Or did Jonathan Ive do something really, really horrible that everyone in the UK hates him for and then have to flee to the U.S. and we just don’t know about it because we refuse to read the British press because of our fervent belief that Zed is a sodomist who is dead and not the last letter of the alphabet?

Via MacSurfer, the Macalope read Personal Computer World’s Clive Akass’ latest post on the iPod. Clive links to a PCW story on a recently released report by Jupiter Research that shows that just five percent of iPod tracks were purchased through the iTunes Store.

Now, before the Macalope goes off on Clive, it seems possible that the story Clive links to was subsequently changed because it’s very clear to the Macalope at least that what Jupiter is talking about is the total percentage of tracks on an iPod’s hard drive, not purchases.

From the story:

A survey by Jupiter Research has discovered that an average of just 20 tracks on an iPod are bought from iTunes – about five per cent.

From Clive’s post:

Figures from Jupiter Research indicating that iPod owners buy only five percent of their tracks from Apple’s ITunes online store…

The difference between “bought” and “buy” is rather important in this instance.

It seems rather unstartling to the Macalope that in the 3+ years of the iTunes Store’s existence that it hasn’t surpassed the 20 years of the CD or the orgy of downloading that took place during Napster’s heyday.

What would have been meaningful is a representation of overall music purchases, not music ownership, and the trend of online buying.

Even with the questionable meaningfulness of the statistic that drives the Jupiter report, there are some really odd conslusions they draw from it.

The report warns that the ‘free’ concept is still very important to most digital music users and advises that newer services should look into offering ad-supported ‘free’ services, like the forthcoming Spiral Frog service.

There are few problems with that. First, people’s time is not free. In fact, to many, it’s their most precious commodity. Second, another conclusion you could draw from the continued prevalance of music ripped from CDs is that people like to own their music and ad-supported services give you zero ownership. “Free” to digital music pirates also means “free to play anyway and anywhere I want.” Plus, the Macalope can’t help but wonder how that question was phrased.

“Hey, kids! Who likes free music?!”

“I do! I do!”

So, the report concludes that people prefer CDs (the most expensive option but it lets you do what you want with the music) and pirating (the least expensive option which also lets you do what you want with the music) to iTunes downloads.

It then recommends the most restrictive type of service currently imaginable, short of having to pay a dollar and watch an ad every time you want to listen to a song.

And get a punch in the gut.

People pay for this research?

But let’s get back to Clive because the Macalope knows you want to see how silly the rest of his post is.

Trust the Macalope. It’s very, very silly.

Neither will the iPod work with any online music store other than Itunes, which is rather like a CD player being restricted to playing disks only from the device’s manufacturer.

Clive could not have picked a worse analogy as the iPod actually will play music ripped from anyone’s CDs (with the possible exception of a smattering of DRM-ed CDs).

But, like it or not, in Apple’s business model, the iTunes Store is the handle and the iPods are the razor blades. Apple gets you in the door with that neat iPod all the kids are talking about and then wants to lock you in by getting you to buy your music off of iTunes.

Even so, it’s a rather velvety lock. You can always burn your songs to CDs and re-rip them.

The Macalope finds it odd that the people who complain about how restrictive the iTunes Store and the iPod are don’t complain at all about subscription models.  Or, for that matter, the Zune, which apparently doesn’t play PlaysForSure (antler tip to Daring Fireball).

The iPod bonanza, which has seen Apple sell 1.5 billion tracks online, is not going to last forever.

Hmm, yes, well that’s certainly setting the bar a little high. But the Macalope seems to remember this other company that’s held a lock on the PC operating system market for over fifteen years. No, that’s not an eternity, it just seems like it.

There are countless rival players that do not carry the same restrictions, and Apple has been slow to bring a portable video player or musical phone to market.

Uh, Apple release a portable video player almost a year ago. Called the iPod. Don’t let that whole thing about it not being the “true” video iPod fool you. It was, in fact, a video iPod.

And Apple is widely expected to release a music phone in 2007. As for that being “slow”, the Macalope remembers similar statements when Apple first released the iPod. But just like the MP3 player market in 2001, no one owns the music phone market right now.

The company could come badly unstuck if it tries to lock people into its video downloads when there are plenty of other sources available.

Yes, it would be a shame if Apple uses the same highly successful model with video that it uses with music.

If it starts to be perceived generally as being guilty of anti-competitive practices, it could lose some of the momentum it has gained over the past five years.

Ah, yes, the Macalope remembers when that happened to Microsoft and people took their copies of Windows to the ocean and threw them in to show their…

Wait a minute…

The Macalope is just a little uncertain why so many people think that what made Microsoft so successful will make Apple a failure. But they sure do think that a lot.

The silly cherry on top of this silly post is when Clive closes by commenting how fun it would be if Apple licensed OS X.

Fun for you, maybe…

More on "iTV"

Commenter V M Respectable provides this link to Dan Eran’s speculation that Apple’s waiting until January for the 802.11n standard. He also seems to confirm the Macalope’s original speculation yesterday that 802.11b would be insufficient for streaming this kind of content and even says 802.11g would just barely be sufficient.

It’s possible Apple’s waiting for 802.11n, but we’d need some dongles to transmit to an “iTV” via 802.11n and Steve Jobs wasn’t showing us any of his dongles yesterday.

Not even when he bent over.

Of course, not everyone likes to get up on stage and wave their dongles around.

But 802.11n isn’t built-in, so we’d need to see some dongles.

OK, so the Macalope just likes saying “dongles.” That’s not such a crime.

Is Vic There?

The Macalope responds to The Guardian’s Victor Keegan.

UPDATE 9/14: Victor Keegan responds in comments.

Dear Victor Keegan of The Guardian:

The Macalope knows we haven’t met before, but he felt compelled to respond to your recent column entitled Every Empire Crumbles.

There are some notable errors and an overall paucity of critical thought. The Macalope knows a little about how newspapers work in the U.S., but in the UK is it common for columns to be handed out like tuppence to a busker performing “God Save The Queen” in the Covent Garden Underground station on a guitar that hasn’t been tuned since the Falklands War?

It looks as though Steve Jobs, boss of Apple, might need a charisma download after what many people thought was a lacklustre performance – by his own high standards – at the company’s much hyped developers’ jamboree in San Francisco yesterday.

The Macalope thinks you must be confusing WWDC – which is for developers but was in August – with yesterday’s Special Event which was for members of the media. In your defense, developers are somewhat like reporters in that they’re sullen, ill-tempered and often look like they slept in their clothes.

Actually, since he had hardly anything new to say, he didn’t make a bad fist off it.

It’s been a long time since the Macalope has seen Quadrophenia, so forgive him if he isn’t “hip” to your “funky lingo”. But he thinks he at least understands the first part of that and wonders what it would take for you to think Apple had announced something “new”. Jobs announced a new movie download service, new iPods across the board – including the first digital music player the size of a postage stamp – and a new set-top box that has the technology world abuzz.

The Macalope hates to break it to you, but he thinks Crazy Apple Rumors is just kidding about the whole sexbot thing. Here in the real world, yesterday’s announcements are pretty big.

But, Vic, Vic, Vic. Would that were the only point that causes the Macalope to think you’re just the latest in a string of columnists that attended John Dvorak’s summer program on How To Increase Your Web Traffic Through Apple Bashing.

[The iPod] simply can’t maintain the phenomenal growth of recent years (indeed sales have dropped for two successive quarters).

Mmm. Yes. It’s always shocking when people don’t buy iPods as much in the first two calendar quarters of the year as they do in the quarter that includes Christmas.

Hey, you know, maybe that’s why serious analysts always compare quarters year-over-year. Just for fun, let’s take a look at that.

Wow. Both quarters were above the same quarter from the previous year, the first calendar quarter by 60% and the second by 32%.

If you’re looking to pass yourself off as a serious analyst, Vic, the Macalope suggests you might criticize the decline in sales growth quarter over quarter, but even then it’s hard to knock a company for failing to sustain 60% growth.

And, Vic, buddy, it just gets worse from there.

Leaving aside the question of why we need an extra intermediary to get films to our television sets…

Hey, if you want to drag your tower over to your TV every time you want to watch a downloaded movie, be the Macalope’s guest.

…the mere fact that he announced it at all, was a sign of weakness. It was done to prevent people buying a rival device from Microsoft. Or whoever.

Who sells a comparable device that works with a movie download service out of the box with a minimum of configuration (this is Apple we’re talking about, remember)?

And is there a lot of chafing when you pull things out of your ass like that?

Meanwhile, Apple is hoping that its user friendly iTunes infrastructure will enable it to be a natural host for the video revolution. It may. No one should ever write off Apple’s amazing ability to reinvent itself. But this time it is leading from the rear.

If by “rear” you mean “front.” Yes, Apple doesn’t have as many studios as Amazon. But every single iPod owner already has iTunes loaded on their computer reminding them to update to iTunes 7. Amazon faces an uphill battle to try to entice people to come download their intrusive client software (antler tip to Daring Fireball).

And one other thing: Amazon’s service isn’t available yet. [Macalope: the Macalope saw the pre-release last week and missed the release on Friday. Apologies. He also assumed that based on the reports of buggy software, that it was still weeks away from production.]

Then you link to yourself to try to make the point that cell phones are going to crush the iPod.

It is no coincidence that in the first quarter, when Apple suffered a sharp drop in iPod sales…

Yeah, that 60% year-over-year growth is a killer.

… (blaming it, implausibly, on seasonal factors)…

Yeah, cyclicality is such bullshit! The oil and gas industry has been milking that crap for years!

… the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said that half of all digital music sold in 2005 went directly to mobile phones (including ringtones).

Ringtones.

Right. [Macalope: In comments, Victor Keegan says the only ringtones included were full tracks, but the Macalope still contends there’s a world of difference between phones that are “music phones” and those that play a handful of ringtones of varying quality.]

Nokia alone, a late entrant to music, plans to ship 80m music phones this year (almost double last year’s iPod sales).

Wow. That seemed like an awful lot to the Macalope. He was curious, Vic, whether or not you were still including phones that just play ringtones.

According to a July 12th MP3.com article:

Nokia said today that its own music phone has sold more than 1 million units in less than four months.

Uh-huh. So… yeah, unless you’re expecting them to have a really monstrous second half of the year, you’re still including ringtones. Okey-doke.

There will always be lots of people wanting dedicated cameras or iPods, but the majority of people in future will opt to have all these functions on one device rather than two or three. They already are.

If you include ringtones!

But if you don’t, not so much (at least yet). And here’s why.

Nokia’s 3250 sells for $350 and comes with 1 GB of space for music. A 1 GB iPod is $79, leaving you $271 to spend on a phone that doesn’t play music but does a whole lot of other stuff and probably doesn’t cost nearly $271. Or you could just get the free phone that comes with your plan and use the $271 pay for a whole year of calls.

MP3.com also says:

According to market research firm Ovum, an estimated 27 percent of the mobile phones sold globally this year will be able to store and play music and will jump to 69 percent by 2010.

Note that MP3.com doesn’t seem to include ringtones in the group of phones known as those that “store and play music.”

According to CNet, mobile phone sales were projected to be about 850 million this year, so 230 million will be what most people think of as “music phones.” That’s still a lot and probably more than 5 times the number of iPods Apple will sell, but it’s from all vendors, Apple actually sells music for some of those phones and buying a music phone and buying an iPod are not mutually exclusive.

Some of those music phone purchasers also own iPods. The kind of person who buys a $350 cell phone that only holds a smattering of her music collection may very well also have a higher-capacity iPod that holds all of her music collection.

But let’s get back to yesterday’s Special Event and your alternate-reality interpretation thereof.

The only people who will definitely clean up are the lawyers. Apple’s decision to call its new device iTV may just possibly produce a thundering legal letter from a certain television company in the UK.

Oh, dear.

Now Vic, let’s be honest…

…you didn’t actually watch the presentation, did you? Because if you had, you would have heard Steve Jobs clearly say that “iTV” was a code name and was going to be replaced when the product ships.

Vic, Vic, Vic, Vic, Vic, Vic, Vic, Vic, Vic, VIC!

It’s not the Apple-bashing the Macalope detests so much.

It’s all the lying [Macalope: meant as hyperbole but the Macalope will withraw it at Victor Keegan’s request].

The Macalope understands if you have yourself a comfortable gig over there at the Guardian where they – for whatever reason – pay you to write your desperate cries for attention.

But the thing is, your cries aren’t very compelling when they’re so bad.

The Macalope would suggest you look no further than your previous column for guidance:

Feeling in need of literary refreshment this morning, I dipped into the 1851 edition of the Sentences and Maxims of the Duke of La Rochefoucauld, the great seventeenth century cynic, who ought to be compulsory reading for all who take themselves too seriously. One of the Duke’s aphorisms, “It is a great folly to wish to be wise all alone,” would sit well on every blogger’s desktop.

Physician, heal thyself. Next time you sit down to write about Apple, do a little homework.

Fondest regards,
The Macalope