a blog by Ian Kennedy
In the absence of any real substantive announcement from today’s MacWorld, people are talking up a fictional device announced by The Onion, the MacBook Wheel. I’m assuming you’ve already seen the video but here’s a screenshot of the predictive sentence feature with some choice samples.
Steve Jobs ain’t no dummy. Robert Cringely writes,
Apple introduced the iPhone at $599 to milk the early adopters and somewhat limit demand then dropped the price to $399 (the REAL price) to stimulate demand now that the product is a critical success and relatively bug-free. At least 500,000 iPhones went out at the old price, which means Apple made $100 million in extra profit.
Had nobody complained, Apple would have left it at that. But Jobs expected complaints and had an answer waiting — the $100 Apple store credit. This was no knee-jerk reaction, either. It was already there just waiting if needed. Apple keeps an undeserved $50 million and customers get $50 million back. Or do they? Some customers will never use their store credit. Those who do use it will nearly all buy something that costs more than $100. And, most importantly, those who bought their iPhones at an AT&T store will have to make what might be their first of many visits to an Apple Store. That is alone worth the $50 per customer this escapade will eventually cost Apple, taking into account unused credits and Apple Store wholesale costs.
Not only that, think of all the free publicity this stunt created. All eyes will be on what gets put into the next version of the Apple OS, due to ship next month. . .
Turns out Forbes columnist, Daniel Lyons, was the one behind Fake Steve Jobs’ blog. Brilliant timing too (heh), his satirical novel written in the voice of Mr. Jobs is due to hit the shelves in October. He was outed by a reporter at the New York Times who received an advance copy of the book for review.
That was quick. I thought the distribution of home movies directly downloaded to Tivo would have been handled by the Amazon Unbox arrangement which I wrote about last week but I instead Tivo is promoting a service called One True Media.
Here’s how it works. Upload your photos and short movies to the service that allows you to add a soundtrack, titles, and simple effects. In return for your subscription ($3.99/month, $39.99/year), you will get a special Tivo subscriber’s code. Any broadband-enabled Tivo can then use this code to subscribe to anything you upload to your One True Media account. More details on the One True Media site.
While this is exciting, there is also a compelling alternative with the Apple TV which supports subscription to any Video Podcast via the iTunes store. While Tivo’s solution seems well integrated and easy to use, it still relies on the publisher to give the Tivo owner a subscription code that they manually need to put into their Tivo setup.
Historically, the more open publishing models prevail. I’m afraid that charging your publishers to upload their videos is going to limit the market to just those that want to push home movies of their kids to their grandparents. I wonder how many grandparents have an IP-enabled Tivo?
A better idea would be to set up Tivo’s to publish so all you need to do is upload your finished movies to your Tivo box via the USB port and then it’s available on a peer-to-peer network. When grandma or anyone else who browses the Tivo catalog wants to pull a file (either via one-time request or RSS subscription), the peer-to-peer network copies the file either off the seed Tivo or off any other Tivo that is hosting the file. Tivo can manage the index and use the metadata on what you watch to improve recommendations and suggest other things to watch, either from the networks or from the peer-to-peer network.
Who do you think will be the winning solution a year from now? Apple TV or Tivo?
Steve Rubel points to an interesting development of Apple’s iTunes client.
The addition of PDFs to iTunes is more than just a mildly interesting occurrence. iTunes, as a ubiquitous cross-platform app, has its own embedded browser that powers the music store. It’s conceivable that Apple could turn iTunes into a dedicated RSS reader that operates like Safari and become a clearing house for all subscription-based content. In addition, wireless is on the way according to this patent filing.
Taking this a step further, it’s also highly possible that if iTunes enhances its DRM to include other enclosures it will move into e-books and or e-magazines. Oh, and where might those eBooks be consumed?
– via Micropersuation
I’d take this one step further. One of the more lucrative lines of business for the news business is the timely delivery of profiled news. Could iTunes become a platform for newspapers to delivery their premium content to subscribers? With a built-in browser and DRM, the iTunes client becomes much more attractive than email or even some of the current branded RSS readers such as the one available from USA Today.
Apple announced today that it will run graphical ads in the lower-left hand corner of the iTunes product as users listen to podcasts on their PC. Advertising Age goes on to write that this will help offset the costs of producing and hosting podcasts. Everyone will be looking at this closely.
In other news, I’ve been pointed to another version of advertising, one that comes from and is amplified by the community. Here’s the Firefox Flicks community on “other browsers” in Wheee!
The sheer beauty of their design and packaging brings out a bout of technolust. Jason O’Grady posts a pictorial of the unpackaging of his brand new MacBook Pro. He even takes photos of the styrofoam cutouts!
Text of a poem that’s embedded in the new version of MacOS which runs on Intel chips. Apple today confirmed that it was put there to prevent piracy (or at least make those that pirate their software think twice.)
There once was a user that whined
his existing OS was so blind
he’d do better to pirate
an OS that ran great
but found his hardware declined.
As much as I hate the prediction game, the temptation is just too great. With the keynote less than 24 hours away, here’s a roundup of some of the latest rumors of what’s going to come out of Steve Jobs’ pocket tomorrow followed by my picks.
My pick is for the Intel-based machines to lead off, followed by an introduction of a 2GB Shuffle that syncs via Bluetooth, demos of the lates iLife & iWork and a “just one more thing” being the unveiling of a Mac Mini as a TiVo that has video-out ports to support HDTV.
Some background: Behind the Magic Curtain, an Apple insider describes what’s involved in preparing for the Keynote.