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Mac/Linux Chrome arrival hint?
Asus e-reader: cheap, two screens.
Record your entire life automatically?
Author Archive | Harry McCracken
Is the Classic iPod a Goner?
Tumblr developer/blogger Marco Arment has posted his best guesses about what Apple will announce–iPodwise, at least–at its music event next Wednesday (Technologizer will be there to liveblog the news). Arment’s predictions seem logical enough–which doesn’t guarantee their accuracy, of course–and the most interesting thing about them is that he thinks that Apple will discontinue the iPod Classic, the high-capacity, small-screen, no-touch, no-apps model that’s the direct descendent of the original 2001 iPod.
In the era in which the iPod Touch is unquestionably the most exciting iPod and the Nano is the dominant “traditional” iPod, are there any reasons why Apple wouldn’t kill the Classic?
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Join Us for Live Blog Coverage of Apple’s Music Event Next Wednesday
If it’s September in the world of technology, one thing is pretty much a given: Apple will release some new iPods and update iTunes. I’ll be in the audience at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens next Wedneday at 10am as the company does that–I’m assuming–and maybe tells us other stuff of interest, too. (If you think it’ll announce a tablet, tell us now so you claim immense foresight, really good sources, or ESP if it does–most of the world has decided it won’t.)
I’ll blog the event as it happens, as quickly as humanly possible (courtesy of Cover It Live). If there’s a Q&A session, I’ll try to ask a question on behalf of the Technologizer community, so if you’ve got any queries right now relating to Apple and its music-related products, ask ’em in the comments on this post or at the home page for our coverage. And join us on Wednesday right here, won’t you?
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iPhone Tethering: Soon Is in the Eye of the Beholder
On November 6th of last year at the Web 2.0 conference, AT&T Mobility President and CEO Ralph De La Vega told the audience that the company would soon let AT&T customers tether their iPhones to laptops as a wireless modem. I blogged about it and called it cheery news. And waited. In June of this year, Apple announced that the iPhone OS 3.0 software would enable tethering, and that a bunch of carriers would offer it immediately–but AT&T wasn’t among them. It just said it would offer tethering at some unspecified date.
Yesterday, the company said that MMS for the iPhone was finally coming on September 25th. But its intentions about tethering are vaguer than ever–it isn’t promising a darn thing:
As for tethering, by its nature, this function could exponentially increase traffic on the network, and we need to ensure that some of our current upgrades are in place before we can deliver the expanded functionality with the excellent performance that customers expect. We expect to offer tethering in the future.
Fair enough, I suppose–except for the part about the company president telling customers and prospective customers that tethering was almost in place ten months ago. I wonder how many people plunked down money for an iPhone based in part on the not-unreasonable belief that “soon” meant…soon?
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Diebold Ditches E-Voting
Ars Technica is reporting that ATM maker Diebold is selling its e-voting machine unit to a competitor for a paltry $5 million. The move gets Diebold out of a business that accounted for very little of its revenues but caused enormous damage to its reputation, and means that the world will need to find some other company to associate with all the downsides of electronic voting.
Ars’ piece recaps some of the controversies surrounding Diebold’s machines, and notes that ES&S, the company acquiring Diebold’s e-voting unit, has had multiple problems of its own. It also quotes former Diebold CEO and George W. Bush supporter Walden O’Dell’s statement in a 2003 fundraising letter that he was committed “to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President,” which should have gotten him fired on the spot for gross stupidity if nothing else.
I make no claims to know much at all about the technical issues involved in implementing e-voting systems, so my take on the matter is that I accept the possibility that they’re a good idea in principle–but I have grave misgivings about their use in the real world. The companies involved in the field have an uncanny knack for damaging the reputation of the whole idea…
Which brings up today’s T-Poll:
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1984 All Over Again
Back in July, Amazon.com endured a bout of bad publicity and inspired debate about the ethics of copy protection when it remotely deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from customer’s Kindle e-readers after discovering they were pirated. CEO Jeff Bezos eventually apologized and called the action stupid. Now the Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog is reporting that Amazon has e-mailed the Kindle owners whose books it erased and offered to restore the tomes (along with any notes taken) or issue a $30 gift certificate or check.
It’s not entirely clear why Amazon is making the restitution six weeks after the dust-up, but Digits notes that a class-action lawsuit was filed over the incident.
Maybe I’m just being a Pollyanna–hey, was she an Orwell character?–but I tend to think that Amazon’s decisions and consequent humiliation served the greater good. Or at least I’d hope that other companies with the technical power to delete content from customers’ devices will remember the Amazon case and decide the bad publicity just wouldn’t be worth it.
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5Words for Thursday, September 3rd 2009
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Snow Leopard’s old Flash Player.
Another AT&T/iPhone angst story.
iPhone MMS coming September 25th.
Windows 7 parties across America.
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Is RSS Dead?
I’m on a plane (without Wi-Fi, alas) and the flight attendants are about to tell me to close my laptop, but I didn’t want to go out of pocket for a few hours without throwing a topic open for conversation: Is RSS dead? Feeds have been a favorite geek tool for years; I check out scads of them every day, in part to prepare 5Words. But my friend Sam Diaz started a mini-tempest a week ago when he said that RSS is past its prime. He must have struck a chord, because the debate is still going on.
So what say you?
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5Words for Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009
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Google explains the Gmail outage.
Of Google, outages, the future.
Nokia netbook: very neat, pricey.
Pandora upgrades its desktop app.
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TV in 3D: To Be or Not to Be?
I’m not at the IFA consumer-electronics exhibition in Berlin this week, but Sony Chairman Sir Howard Stringer is–and the Financial Times is reporting that he’s going to announce an ambitious initiative to build 3D products–everything from HDTVs to laptops. It’s the latest bit of 3D boosterism from an entertainment and electronics industry that’s increasingly gaga for the technology.
Me, I’m instinctively skeptical of anything that’s in 3D except the real world–the effect fails to work for me as often as it succeeds, and the glasses give me a headache. (I blame the fact that I wear glasses anyhow, and must jam the 3D ones over my normal specs.) I’ll believe it’s the next best thing when it stays popular for more than, oh, nine months.
But let’s use this as an excuse for a T-Poll: