I have no idea if Rex’s guessay will turn into reality, but it would be nice if it did. I do think there’s at least a reasonably decent possibility (how’s that for intentionally vague wording?) that Apple will release something in the coming months that competes with netbooks, at a slightly higher price than a typical netbook, without being a netbook. And I think it’s something close to a dead certainty that there will eventually be devices based on the iPhone OS that are at least a little more like traditional PCs in size and purpose than today’s iPhones and iPod Touches (or is that iPods Touch)?

My biggest question about the device I’m now thinking of as the iHammock (I can’t call it the iRex–there’s already an e-reader by that name) is simple: Is there any way to build one as thin as Apple would make it, and still deliver adequate battery life?

Hachman’s piece is based largely on an interview with a Monster Cable exec; that company plans to make lots of Shuffle-compatible headphones, and says that the commands aren’t encrypted and that it thinks that manufacturers could make compatible headphones without Apple’s blessing. On the other hand, the remote functionality apparently does fall under Apple’s “Made for iPod” logo program, which involves paying a fee to Apple if a company chooses to participate.

Bottom line: It looks like the remote may be a new revenue stream for Apple, but that it isn’t a nefarious plot to monopolize the iPod headphone market. Which doesn’t mean that the Shuffle’s design won’t continue to be controversial. I seem to be one of relatively few reviewers who was sort of won over by it–not that I decided it makes sense for everybody–and I remain very curious whether consumers will end up giving it a thumbs up. (The most obvious way to tell that will be if the design continues on to the fourth-generation Shuffle, whenever that shows up…)

Mozilla releases new Firefox beta.

AOL gets CEO from Google.

StumbleUpon preps a URL shortener.

Cybercriminals get down to business.

Unlimited-VoIP-and-data carrier.

New iPod Shuffle teardown photos.

A little more Pre news.

An iPhone 3.0 wish list.

Poor Woz fractures his foot.

Regimes that repress the Internet.

And me? The moment I saw it in person, I thought to myself, Pez. The player’s size and dimensions brought to mind a wrapped roll of Pez candy, the kind you insert into a Pez dispenser. So I did a comparison. The Shuffle is a tad wider than a Pez packet, but its depth is about the same, and it’s quite a bit shorter. And that’s including the Shuffle’s built-in clip.

Once you’ve started comparing an iPod to Pez, the next question is inevitable: Can you use a Pez dispenser as an iPod Shuffle case? I’m pleased to say that the answer is yes. Yes, you can. Almost as if Steve Jobs kept sending designers back to their drawing boards until it would fit, earbud plug and all. That would explain why Apple abandoned the square shape of the second-generation Shuffle for something long and skinny. And suddenly, the removal of the controls from the Shuffle itself make sense.

It is,  It is, I admit, a tight squeeze–I probably wouldn’t try this with my vintage Smurfette dispenser for fear of stressing her case. But I was willing to put a Meet the Robinsons one at risk, and the experiment was a rousing success.

How does the iPez Shuffle sound, you ask? Delicious!

There’s only one problem with all this, but it’s a major one: Once you’ve put an iPod Shuffle into a Pez dispenser, there’s no room left for Pez. You could carry two dispensers, I guess. But I prefer to think that somewhere in Cupertino, even as we speak, engineers are working on the fourth-generation Shuffle. If it shrinks again by 50 percent or thereabouts, it’d go into the dispenser with enough space left for six or so Pez. Bonus points if it comes in a rainbow of Pez-inspired colors.

More to come on the Shuffle, I promise–in the form of an actual review…

The company achieved the further shrinkage by moving the controls off the player onto a tiny remote that’s embedded in the headphones (making this, I guess, the first iPod that can’t be used with third-party headphones, unless someone comes up with some sort of adapter):

[UPDATE: Apple says you'll be able to buy an adapter for third-party headphones. Better than nothing--especially if you're the type of person who associates Apple headphone with a stinging feeling in one's ears, or with them just falling out--but adding an adapter certainly eliminates some of the appeal of the Shuffle's tininess.]

The new Shuffle also introduces a new feature called VoiceOver that reads menus, song titles, and the like out loud in a robotic voice; it can also read playlist names, allowing this to be the first Shuffle that supports playlists. Apple’s demo video shows how it works. Apple’s promotion for this new player says it’s the first talking MP3 player. Not so. It may have the most sophisticated text-to-speech interface, but the current iPod Nano also has a speech option.

(Side note: The video demonstrator, who says she’s an Apple Store employee, talks about how the remote control lets you use the Shuffle while on a “ride.” If she lives in Apple’s headquarters state of California, that better not be a bicycle ride–covering both your ears with headphones while biking is illegal here.)

At this point, Apple is presumably shrinking the Shuffle because, well, it can, and because some folks will buy a new one simply because it’s smaller. But it’s hard to imagine that anyone found the previous one uncomfortably bulky.

(Second side note: I wonder whether Apple will release a software update for the old Shuffles that gives them VoiceOver?)

The new Shuffle is made of aluminum, comes in silver and black (you gotta think that Apple will restore the old Shuffle’s rainbow of colors eventually),  and is available in one storage capacity: 4GB for $79. It’s shipping today.

Just to refresh everyone’s memory, here’s what the previous-generation Shuffle (which dates from September 2006) looked like. It was, arguably, a cooler piece of industrial design, or at least a less Spartan one:

And here’s the original Juicyfruit-sized  iPod Shuffle, announced at Macworld Expo in January 2005, and strikingly small at the time:

And here’s a hasty artist’s conception of what next next-gen Shuffle could look like:

Which is a shame–and, ultimately, a downer for consumers. iTunes still provides an outstanding experience, assuming you own an iPod and want to use iTunes. But it’s still rife with copy-protected music: Something like fifty percent of all music on iTunes is now in iTunes Plus DRM-free form, but if you’re talking about the best-selling stuff, the percentage is far lower: Of iTunes’ top ten songs and top ten albums as I write this, only Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” is free of copy protection. Amazon’s MP3 store has everything in those two iTunes top tens without DRM, usually for a lower price. (Footnote: You can buy Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” a la carte at iTunes; Amazon makes you buy the entire album.)

Well, wait a minute, you might be saying: Maybe Apple’s trademark integration of software, hardware, and service makes its experience so slick that Amazon is weak in comparison, despite its lack of copy protection and lower price. Maybe what we have here, in other words, is a musical equivalent of the computer wars, in which Apple manages to sell plenty of computers at a high price because they’re so much nicer than cheapo Windows competitors. (The comparison doesn’t work exactly, since Apple is an underdog in the computer market, not the overwhelming leader…but you get the idea.)

Apple doesn’t deserve to dominate music downloads based on the elegance of its experience. Yes, the iTunes Store is extremely well done. And Apple has a huge advantage in being the only music purveyor who’s right inside iTunes: Everybody else, Amazon included, feels a little afar from the iPod experience. It’s as if Apple was the anchor tenant in your favorite shopping center, and Amazon and others were off at some distant strip mall.

Except…the Amazon music shopping and buying experience isn’t bad either, especially if you’re an Amazon addict anyhow. And it provides a piece of software for both Windows and Macs which puts your purchases into your iTunes library, so they sync onto your iPod just as they would if you’d bought ‘em from Apple. And on the Web, all sellers are only a few clicks away. (Forget I used that distant-strip-mall metaphor, please.)

Really, Amazon’s MP3 store should be thriving: It offers a shopping experience which isn’t radically less pleasant than Apple’s, it’ll save you money, and it never shackles you with DRM. And I’d like to see Amazon and other online music stores chip away at Apple simply because consumers will get more music options at lower prices if there are multiple viable companies competing for their business. (I think it’s a given that Apple will go DRM-free at some point, and that it’s more likely to happen if it has strong competitors–even if the problem has less to do with Apple’s desires and more to do with restrictions imposed on it by music owners.)

So why is Apple still such an 800-pound gorilla when it comes to music, and why does Amazon remain a 98-pound weakling? I can think of multiple, possibly overlapping explanations:

–Consumers are uninformed. They’re oblivious to it and therefore Amazon’s lack of it isn’t a meaningful plus.

–Consumers do think about DRM, but don’t care about it. If you only use Apple products and don’t intend to switch, Apple’s FairPlay works just fine.

–Consumers are lazy. They’re not willing to venture outside of iTunes at all to get their music, even if it’s better and cheaper.

–Consumers are discriminating. They think that the iTunes Store offers the best music-buying experience, and are willing to pay a bit more and put up with FairPlay’s limitations to get it.

–Consumers are slow to change. They’re happy with iTunes and used to it; even if Amazon offers a better deal overall, it’s going to be a while before it gains critical mass.

Me, I’d never buy a FairPlay-restricted album from Apple when I could buy an unprotected one from Amazon or somebody else. Then again, I still buy much of my music on CD, since it gets me DRM-free music and a handy backup that preserves my music even if all my hard drives were to die simultaneously.

Your thoughts? What could Amazon do to make its MP3 store irresistible to even the most stubborn music fan?

]]> http://technologizer.com/2008/12/15/wake-up-world-amazons-mp3-store-deserves-better-doesnt-it/feed/ 13 Harry McCracken amazonmp3 http://technologizer.com/2008/11/26/25-unanswerable-questions-about-apple/ http://technologizer.com/2008/11/26/25-unanswerable-questions-about-apple/#comments Wed, 26 Nov 2008 21:10:09 +0000 Harry McCracken http://technologizer.wordpress.com/?p=4319 ]]> Everybody has two businesses, the old saying goes: their own business, and show business. It’s the same with technology, except everybody’s two business are their own business…and Apple’s. No other tech company on the planet is followed as avidly, nor is any so routinely second-guessed. And if anything, controversy over Apple’s decisions and dramas intensifies with time: I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if someone, somewhere, still contends that Jobs and Wozniak should have slashed the $666.66 pricetag of 1976′s Apple I to better compete with the $495 Altair.

Apple’s long history is rife with defining moments…and, therefore, with roads not traveled that might have led to radically different places. I call the twenty-five items in this story “unanswerable questions” because none of them have right answers: Nobody knows what would have happened if things had turned out differently. All you can do is speculate. Which is what I do, briefly, for all of the questions below. But mostly, I’m curious what you think. These questions may be unanswerable, but it’s still a blast to try and answer them anyhow, as I hope you’ll do in the comments…

Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? After the jump, that is…

1. What if Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had never met?

Today’s Apple may be a company dominated by a single mind, but at the start, there were two geniuses behind it. Steve Wozniak gave the Apple II sexy color graphics, slots for future expansion, and other impressive features;  Steve Jobs put it in a case that was anything but clunky, and marketed it like a master. The skills of the two founders were astoundingly complimentary, but they might never have partnered up at all if their mutual buddy Bill Fernandez hadn’t introduced them to each other in 1971.

Harry’s guess: It’s hard to imagine any scenario in which Steve Jobs never became a big deal doing something, or in which Steve Wozniak wasn’t a major figure of early personal computing history.  But if Apple had lacked either Jobs’s packaging and marketing gifts or Woz’s technical chops, it might not have made it into the 1980s, let along lived on into the next century.

2. What if Steve Jobs hadn’t visited Apple PARC?

In 1979, way before Apple released the Mac or the proto-Mac known as the Lisa, Steve Jobs talked his way into a guided tour of Xerox’s PARC, the fabled research facility that spawned graphical user interfaces, the laser printer, Ethernet, and other breakthroughs that just about everyone except Xerox went on to turn into successful products. Jobs and other Apple staffers visited PARC twice, and came away dazzled by its Alto user interface. And who wouldn’t be? In the days of command-line interfaces, its icons, menus, fancy fonts, and mouse-driven design were literally a preview of computing’s future. Apple cheerfully borrowed Xerox’s concepts for the pricey and unsuccessful Lisa, then reused them for the Macintosh, the first computer to bring a rich graphical interface to the masses.

Harry’s guess: The Jobs visit to PARC is the stuff of legend; it’s tempting to riff on the idea that if it hadn’t happened, we’d all be banging out DOS commands on our keyboards today. Or, alternatively, that Xerox would have released a Mac-like computer that changed the computing world forever. Um, no: GUIs were such a good idea that they would have dominated no matter what. And Steve Jobs was so persistent that he would have turned Xerox’s good ideas (as well as numerous ones not seen in Alto) into Apple products one way or another. As for Xerox, it did commercialize the Alto interface in its Star workstation. Used one lately?

3. What if Woz hadn’t crashed his plane?

Steve Wozniak’s brilliant engineering was just as important to Apple’s early success as Steve Jobs’ marketing wizardry. But in 1981, Woz totalled his Beechwood Bonanza, doing severe damage to his memory. He recovered from his bout of amnesia, and did some engineering work for Apple thereafter. But only a little work, and mostly on the Apple II, which was in the process of being eclipsed by the Mac. Otherwise, he filled out the 1980s by returning to school, becoming a teacher, bankrolling the US Festivals, and founding an unsuccessful universal remote control company called CL 9. He also continued on the Apple payroll, but the two-Steve era was over.

Harry’s guess: Woz was a virtuoso, which made him the most important figure of the first period of personal computer design. But it also makes it less likely that he would have continued to thrive in the more corporate, team-oriented era that followed. My guess is that he would have put aside engineering in favor of all his other pursuits, from educating kids to Segway polo, no matter what. And I can’t blame him.

4, What if the Lisa had been a hit?

In January 1983, Apple released the Lisa. The innovative and well-equipped machine sported a revolutionary user interface, a mouse, 5.25″ inch floppy drives, and a whopping 1MB of RAM–and a $9,995 pricetag that made it an unsuccessful, out-of-reach oddity in an era when many businesses weren’t sure they wanted computers at any price. By April 1985, the Lisa line was dead. That wasn’t a tragedy for anyone concerned, since the similar and far more affordable (if underpowered) Mac had debuted more than a year earlier.

Harry’s guess: This one’s easy. The only scenario in which the Lisa would have wound up a success would have involved it keeping all its good stuff but getting a lot cheaper–evolving, in other words, into something almost exactly like the Macs of the later 1980s. That didn’t happen in part because the Mac itself came along. But if the Lisa had gotten affordable and flourished, it might have been the Apple computer that continued on to the present day. The biggest real difference might have been the nameplate on the case. Oh, and Apple would have presumably had to hire someone other than Justin Long for its “I’m a Lisa” ads.

5. What if Apple had licensed the Mac OS in the mid-1980s?

From almost the moment that the Mac arrived in 1984, folks were telling Apple that its strategy–selling its own software on its own boxes–was all wrong. Among the naysayers was a guy who knew a thing or two about selling software on other companies’ boxes: Bill Gates. In a famous memo from July 1985, he recommended that Apple license the Mac OS to other manufacturers, and suggested three in particular: Northern Telecom, Motorola, and AT&T.

Apple gave Bill’s advice serious consideration, then declined to pursue it.  (unless you count a different Apple administration’s brief licensing of clones a decade later). For the most part, it’s stuck with its initial software-and-hardware strategy through good times and bad, and taken it into new realms such as music players and phones. The idea is core–pun unavoidable–to what makes Apple Apple. But when Gates wrote his memo, it wasn’t clear that the Mac was going to make it, Steve Jobs had lost his power struggle with Apple CEO John Sculley (although he hadn’t quite resigned yet), and Windows hadn’t shipped. More than most times in its history, 1985 was a time when the company might have decided to license its OS.

Harry’s guess: It’s always a mistake to claim that Apple would have essentially been Microsoft if only it had deigned to license the Mac OS–the move would have been so contrary to its instincts that it probably would have screwed it up. And Windows, unlike the Mac OS, had the advantage of being an extension of DOS, the dominant computing platform of its time. I think it’s possible that a licensed Mac OS might have been quite successful; I also think it’s just as likely that Windows would have come to dominate the market from a sales standpoint anyhow.

6. What if Steve Jobs hadn’t left Apple in 1985?

In 1983, Steve Jobs hired Pepsi president John Sculley to help him run Apple. In 1985, Sculley forced Jobs to resign on the grounds, basically, that he was impossible to deal with.Thus began twelve years of Apple history that were nowhere near as exciting as Jobs’ first reign at the company or his current one.

Harry’s guess: It’s beyond debate that an Apple that had kept Jobs on the payroll would have had a different history than the one that limped along for more than a decade without him. How it would have been different is tough to say, though. Almost anyone would come to the conclusion that being fired was good for Steve Jobs: He went away and founded NeXT (which built the operating system that serves as the Mac OS to this day) and Pixar (one of the most influential and profitable entertainment companies ever). And he eventually returned to Apple as a vastly more seasoned, disciplined person. If he hadn’t spent the years in exile, it’s possible that Apple would have boomed in the 1990s and the iMac, iPod, and iPhone would have come along just as they did. But I think it’s just as likely that Jobs would have been a different, less successful sort of entrepreneur, and Apple a different, less successful sort of company.

7. What if NeXT had succeeded?

Jobs’ second computer startup made an extremely cool workstation that was a decade or more ahead of its time. It just turned out that there wasn’t much of a market for it. The company drifted from business model to business model and received infusions of cash from outsiders such as Ross Perot and Canon for a decade; its life as an independent venture ended when Apple bought it in 1996, acquiring its Unix-based OS and bringing Steve Jobs back into the fold.

Harry’s guess. It’s not hard to come up with alternate scenarios in which NeXT would have been more viable. But they all involve it making products for use by big enterprises, programmers, and/or scientific and academic types–not friendly little computers, music players, and cell phones for consumers. If NeXT had thrived, Steve Jobs might well have been prosperous, respected, and happy; nobody, however, would have regarded him as a god, or even a household name. And I almost certainly wouldn’t be writing this article.

So Engadget has published a shot of what might be a next-generation MacBook built with an innovative manufacturing process:

The shot has several things in common with most tech-product spy shots:

1) It’s of an unannounced but eagerly-anticipated product;

2) Nobody really knows whether it’s real or not, except, maybe, for the person who leaked it;

3) It’s a horrible photo, one that’s fuzzy and which otherwise just doesn’t show the product in question in a manner that would help anyone judge its veracity.

Folks have been waiting for significantly new MacBooks for so long that the spyshots of them, or products that claim to be them, are queuing up. Here’s one from a few months ago–a little crisper than today’s image, but almost as confusing:

But the most famous Apple spy shot of 2008 (so far!) was probably Kevin Rose’s image of a new iPod Nano which, I’m ashamed to say, I thought was probably a fake even though Apple did, indeed, release Nanos that looked just like this one shortly thereafter. I was suspicious about the fact that it was not only fuzzy but in black and white; I shoulda realized that spy shot history seems to suggest that bad shots are just as likely to prove legit as good ones.

Some spy shots remain confusing even after the product in question is released. Such as this one (more grainy than fuzzy) from April of a second-generation iPhone. At the time, the idea it might have a black plastic case was new. And this photo is of something that looks almost like the iPhone 3G we actually got. (The “8GB” box is below the teeny type in this photo, but my real iPhone 3G has it above the type.) Convential wisdom at the time was that it was a fake iPhone, but not a fake, period–it was an iPhone case. Which it probably was. Maybe.

Then there’s this shot from a year ago–relatively crisp but also black-and-whitey–of a supposed Mac Nano. A year later, we’re still waiting for it.

This 2006 shot of a “video iPod” published by Macshrine was pretty crisp and clear; too bad it was utterly fake. (Well, it was a photo of something, but not a iPod.)

This apparently real 2005 shot of a 5G iPod from Engadget wasn’t as blurry as some, but it showed an iPod that was swathed in dingy marked-up plastic, with a screen with menus you probably couldn’t read to boot.

There is one completely reliable, incredibly simple way to tell if a leaked Apple image of an alleged new product isnt’ real: If it’s distributed in the form of a razor-sharp Apple ad with really bad ad copy, like this one for supposed second-generation iPhones in three colors, it’s very, very fake!

And there’s also one way to tell if a spy shot is real: If Apple demands that the site that posted it take it down. Like it did last year, for instance.

When you think tech spy shot, an image of an Apple product probably pops into your head, but it ain’t just Apple products that get the fuzzy treatment. Here’s a 120GB Zune, with the “120GB” just barely legible:

And poor Palm has probably had as high a percentage of its new products be leaked as fuzzy photos as any company on the planet:

(That shot above isn’t exactly crisp, but compared to your average spy shot, it’s practically in 3D…)

And BlackBerry maker RIM isn’t far behind:

(The above image, by the way, is of a fake non-working store-demo BlackBerry Storm, by the way…and it’s blurry!)

(I’m not sure what the above 2007 shot from Boy Genius Report is–or isn’t–of. I do, however, know that while it looks like a touchscreen device, it’s not the Storm. Oh, and it’s blurry.)

After doing all this thinking about spy shots, I’ve come to a few conclusions:

–There’s no correlation between fuzziness, or lack thereof, and the likelihood of them being legit;

–I don’t understand why some spy shots are monochrome–it’s like Ansel Adams took ‘em or something;

–I wonder if some shots are intentionally fuzzy–maybe even fuzzed-up in Photoshop–but I’m not sure why anyone would do that;

–If I knew someone who was in a position to take juicy spy shots, I’d try to convince them to buy a good-quality pocket-sized point and shoot camera with solid low-light performance, and would volunteer to give them photography lessons if need be;

–You’d think that spy shots of new cars would usually be worse than ones of gadgets, since they’re generally taken at a distance of objects that are in motion. In fact, they’re usually crisper and clearer.

Oh, and tech spy shots are usually confusing, sometimes misleading, and occasionally infuriating, when they get you excited about a product that doesn’t exist. But despite everything, I’m glad we have them…

]]> http://technologizer.com/2008/10/08/the-fuzzy-wuzzy-world-of-tech-spy-shots/feed/ 3 Harry McCracken spyshots-macbrick1 spyshots-macbookpro spyshots-ipodnano spyshots-iphone3g spyshots-macnano spyshots-videoiphone spyshots-ipod5g spyshots-iphones spyshots-zune spyshots-palmhollywood1 spyshots-palm spyshots-centro spyshots-treo850 spyshots-flipblackberry spyshots-blackberrydemo spyshots-blackberry9000