Who's the boss?
This week’s Macworld piece looks at tablet rumors and speculation and the Tweetie 2.0 dust-up.
1964 all over again
This week’s Macworld piece looks at the Beatles rumor, tablet rumors and your relationship with the iPhone.
The hook
Neven Mrgan on the specialized device
But while we wait for that future, the tablet doesn’t have to be a weird half-solution. See, about a year ago I said of tablets that they’re “small enough that you can take them anywhere, and big enough that you won’t take them anywhere.” As in, you always have your phone on you, and if you need something bigger – that is, big enough to need a carrying case or bag – why not just grab a laptop? But then I heard a few comments about certain special cases where a tablet would actually be the total bee’s knees; cooler and more useful than a laptop.
Special cases such as digital sketching and painting.
…
Or take the cases of professional photography and medical imaging…
But Apple’s not really really the kind of company that’s going to make a specialized device. Apple generally makes things that have broad market appeal, so the Macalope think there’s a hook we’re missing here.
The Macalope likes to imagine an Apple pitch meeting like something out of The Player in which every movie was pitched as a combination of two previous movies. “It’s Prizzi’s Honor meets Turner & Hooch!” etc. One thing is something Apple already makes, the other thing is something they’re not involved in yet.
The iPhone was phone meets Mac. The Apple TV was Mac meets TV. Maybe the tablet is Front Row meets iPod (phrased like that it doesn’t sound like it’d win approval – maybe there’s a better way to put it) or Mac meets book or newspaper. Or Mac meets hand-held game device as Neven alludes (although, the iPhone and Touch already fill that scenario).
Whatever it is, it seems to the horny one that a simple way of phrasing it exists, whether they actually use it overtly internal to Apple or not. We just don’t know what it is yet.
R.I.P. Apple Tablet
This week’s piece at Macworld looks at PC World’s pre-birth tablet obituary, rumors of Apple at CES and the iPhone bug.
Piling on
OK, there’s bitching and then there’s primo grade-A bitching.
Macworld Already a Bummer, With or Without Apple.
“Worst. Macworld. Ever.” said one attendee after the Tuesday keynote. “This sucks.”
This displays little more than a lack of proper historical perspective. Gil Amelio ring any bells? Please, let’s not review the tape, people. It could get ugly.
It also displays a lack of proper verbiage. More correctly, the attendee should have said “Worst. Macworld. Expo. Keynote. Ever.” as he or she could not have been to the showroom floor yet.
Also, there’s all the drinking. We’re not nearly done with that.
This year’s keynote was an epic yawner.
Personally, while the keynote obviously lacked the big announcements of recent years, the Macalope found the iLife demonstration to be awesome, and the crowd seemed to agree.
No new iPhone.
Please. No serious analyst thought there would be a new iPhone.
No new iPod.
iPod? Nobody at all thought there would be new iPods.
No new iMac, and — despite lots of pre-show hype, rumor and buzz — no new Mac Mini.
Yes. A bunch of people thought there might be a new Mini and maybe a new iMac. But did Apple in any way shape or form lead anyone to believe there would be? No. This kind of sentence construction is designed to make you think that it’s somehow a failure on Apple’s part that they didn’t deliver an iMac or a Mini. It’s not.
You can be disappointed that Apple didn’t announce more (and, don’t be mistaken, the Macalope is) but you’re just being a tool if you’re claiming to be disappointed because Apple didn’t announce specific items “everyone said they were going to announce”.
The keynote also ended with a thinly veiled insult: Tony Bennett singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” — surely a goodbye middle finger to International Data Group, which owns Macworld Expo.
Of course it seems to be a middle finger if you’re the kind of person who sees everything through the prism of motives that appeal to your high-school Heathers mentality. The horny one actually thought it was a nice send-off.
Was it a great keynote? Well, no. Phil Schiller actually did a great job delivering it. Has anyone watched CEOs from other companies? They’d be lucky to have their keynotes delivered by Schiller, let alone Jobs. Apple followers are spoiled.
The problem is he just didn’t have that much to announce. But expecting pie-in-sky items like new iPhones and iPods is just jackassery in the third degree.
The Macalope will have some more thoughts on the keynote in his piece for Macworld on Thursday.
ADDENDUM: The Macalope, while not shy about profanity, doesn’t usually point it directly at a silly pundit, but in this case he’s going to make an exception for this:
Topping it off was Tony Bennett, who came onstage and belted out a couple of songs nobody under 60 knows.
Well, a pleasant fuck you to you, Mathew. The Macalope is well below 60 and was utterly thrilled to see a legend like Tony Bennett singing classic songs. Unless you go to Vegas frequently, this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see someone whose name will go down in history as one of the greatest performers. And so far everyone the Macalope’s talked to has raved about it.
Don’t be a dick.
Pre-Keynote Rumor Roundup
The Wall Street Journal is now in on the iTunes movie rentals rumor. This one strikes the Macalope as having a high probability of being true. As was discussed on last week’s MacBreak Weekly, video rentals are really one of the ways Apple can make a compelling proposition out of the Apple TV.
The Macalope gives this one six out of six antler points.
He’s less sanguine about the Safari on Windows rumor (tip o’ the antlers to Daring Fireball). Sure, there’s the “gateway app” philosophy that says the way Apple makes inroads to Windows users is to offer them cool apps to show them what they’re missing on OS X.
But a browser? Seems to the horny one that most of the hot action in the browser goes on in WebKit, not Safari. Meanwhile, Firefox has already established itself as the “not IE” browser for Windows including all those sarcastic “Get a real browser!” reminders. Also, based on what the Macalope’s hairy ears have picked up about the relative stability of running iTunes on Windows, he’s not so sure the “gateway app” philosophy is as sound as you might think.
But assuming Apple has ironed out its Windows development issues, then are there really any other apps the company has that it could/would/should port? You don’t want to to give away the farm by porting iLife and you don’t just want to hit a small segment of the market by porting a professional app like Aperture.
Three out of six antler points.
Neither really seems like a great announcement for WWDC. But, then, they could just be bubbling to the surface because of WWDC and might only get announced later.
Oh, and the Google rumor below gets five out of six antler points.
Seven minutes.
.Mac/Google mashup?
Business Week’s Arik Hesseldahl asks, could .Mac be moving to Google?
As with all such things, the question is rather over-simplistic. The Macalope doesn’t expect .Mac to be wholly replaced by Google. That’d make for some very angry parents who have their child’s entire life story on their .Mac account.
But .Mac is an anachronism in Apple’s product lineup. Kind of like eWorld was. Admittedly not the only one, but an overpriced and frequently criticized one that marks an unnecessary hole in Apple’s offering. Maybe it made sense for Apple to roll .Mac all by itself in the early aughts when there weren’t necessarily that many ways to easily get your Civil War reenactment group’s pictures onto the web from your Mac, but that’s not really the case anymore.
OK, Uncle Clive who plays the unkempt Confederate with the handlebar mustache in a felt cap and cape (no, the other unkempt Confederate with the handlebar mustache in a felt cap and cape) shouldn’t have to download some kind of utility before he can upload his pictures of 17 middle-aged bachelors attempting to reenact the entire battle of Appomattox, but Apple can handle that part by including the feature in Leopard.
At any rate, you shouldn’t bet anything other than Confederate currency that Apple won’t be updating .Mac next week. And why do it on their own?
Extra Credit
While we’re waiting for the episode to get posted (hey, voice manipulation is a tricky business and Leo’s a busy man), The Macalope has some further comments on some things that were discussed on MBW:
- In the All Things Digital love-fest between Jobs and Gates, Gates kept talking about how cameras were going to be set up in everyone’s house and your computer would react to your movement. Indeed, Roughly Drafted discusses at length the fact that Microsoft’s new conference table is not a touch-sensetive table, but works with cameras. Personally, the Macalope can think of few things creepier than Bill Gates and Microsoft installing cameras in his home (one of them is that Jerry Lewis movie). Thank you, no.
- The Macalope’s pick was PandoraJam. Having used it more thoroughly in the past 24 hours, he should now point out that it’s a little buggy. On slower machines or connections the files it creates will likely have some skipping, but at least you have access to the full songs so you can go back and listen to them to decide if you want to buy them. Maybe the flaws are nice way of keeping people honest. Not for the Macalope, of course. He is as honest as the day is long. It’s for you people. At any rate, the Macalope still thinks it’s worth $15.
- The Macalope did mention this, but if you listen to the All Things Digital interview, twice Jobs alluded to an upcoming online offering in the next year or two that he wouldn’t elaborate on. He then said that .Mac was going to get an update “soon”, leading the Macalope to believe that these are separate topics. He’s interested to hear the thoughts of his charming and well-manicured readers who might have sat through the cast.
Whither the mini?
The tender flowers of the Mac web are all a-twitter (not to be confused with the popular social networking site of the same name) over an Apple Insider report claiming that the Mac mini will soon be pushing daisies (not to be confused with the much-anticipated ABC series of the same name, coming this fall, check your local listings).
The Macalope doesn’t doubt this could be true, but he did find it amusing that in trying to bolster their argument that “Apple just doesn’t like the mini darn it!”, Apple Insider cites as evidence the fact that a rumored enhancement of the mini they pimped failed to materialize. It’s the theory of Apple rumor site infallibility in action.
But on the face of it, it seems unlikely that Apple would completely do away with the mini or, rather, decide to abandon the market it targets.
Now, what is that market? The Macalope doubts anyone outside Apple knows for sure as they don’t release that kind of data. The mini was introduced ostensibly for the switcher (“Bring your own monitor, keyboard and mouse!”) but the Macalope doubts that’s who’s really buying them. It’s anecdotal, of course, but the switchers the Macalope knows have all bought either iMacs or MacBooks. The horny one does hear that the smallest Mac of them all is popular with developers and, possibly just by definition, people who already own a bunch of other Macs. For some it temporarily filled the niche that’s now filled by the Apple TV. And then there are the schools. And the businesses.
There’s two ways of looking at that. Either the low price of the mini is allowing people who already own a Mac to buy another, or it’s eating into sales of Macs with higher margins.
Unlike Apple Insider, the Macalope doesn’t think the mini is analogous to the G4 Cube or the 12-inch PowerBook, both of which, while lovely, probably did not generate sales like the mini. It seems unlikely to this furry Macophile that even if Apple drops the mini it won’t be replaced with something cooler.
So, killing the Mac mini is not to be confused with, well, killing the Mac mini.
The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here!
In an interesting addendum to the post below about Mac coverage, the Macalope has learned from his friend the Ratboy…
You may have heard of him. Part boy, part rat. He’s been in the papers.
Not to be confused with the bat boy. That guy’s just a publicity hound. And a total name dropper. Phew.
Anyway, according to the Ratboy, IDG — the parent of Macworld — is hiring a Mac reporter for the mother ship. While IDG does frequently cross-post Macworld stories to its various publications, a dedicated Mac reporter at the parent will likely mean more Mac coverage and wider distribution.
That sound you hear is the sound of the Mac universe expanding.
Or, possibly, somebody hates these cans.