Tag Archives | Apple

Apple's September Music Event is Official

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 25, 2010 at 11:06 am

I just got an invitation to an Apple press event in San Francisco on September 1st. Here’s the art–either the company is finally making its long-awaited move into the guitar business, or it’s scheduled its traditional September iPod launch.

Sadly, I won’t be covering this particular Apple event in person. (I have a good excuse: I’m going to be in Berlin at the IFA tech show.) But I’m curious about just how significant the news will be. New iPods are a given, and there are rumors of an Apple TV replacement and a seven-inch iPad. As is my wont, I’ll ask you for formal predictions shortly before the event, but any initial guesses and/or hopes?

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Apple's Google Voice Pondering Goes on. And on.

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 23, 2010 at 8:30 am

TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid notes that it’s now been a year since Apple told the FCC that it hadn’t rejected Google’s Google Voice app–it was just concerned about Google Voice bypassing the iPhone’s own Phone interface, and “pondering” how to respond.

Twelve months later, Apple is still pondering–which is confusing, because it’s also approved Line 2, Skype, and other apps which let you make phone calls without using the iPhone’s phone features. Meanwhile, Google ended up releasing a Web-based version of Voice for iPhone users–not bad, but nowhere near as seamless as the native one for Android and BlackBerry. And most of the other interesting things that Google has done for iPhone users in the past year have come in the form of Web apps, not local ones. I don’t think Google is boycotting the iPhone, but it sure would be understandable if it preferred not to invest a lot of time in apps that Apple might decide to “ponder” indefinitely rather than approve.

If there’s any explanation for Apple’s permanent pondering of Google Voice at the same time that it approves other phone apps that doesn’t involve its rivalry with Google, I’d love to know what it is. And I’d love to know the FCC’s take on Apple’s explanation. Maybe it’s still pondering it.

Meanwhile, Kincaid notes at the end of his story that he, like TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, is one of the few folks who have been permitted to port their existing phone number to Google Voice, making it possible to make that number reach them on any phone. He says Google plans to roll out the feature to everyone “soon.”

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Microsoft's Latest PC-Mac Comparison is…Almost Reasonable

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 10, 2010 at 10:01 am

For years, Microsoft’s marketing efforts for Windows ignored the fact that Macs existed. That changed last year. In the wake of rising sales for Apple’s computers, Microsoft went on the offensive. But the case it made for Windows PCs and against the Mac was touchy and evasive. It ran PC ads that knocked Macs as overpriced but couldn’t find anything nice to say about Windows. It got pointlessly insulting about Mac users. And it commissioned a white paper on the “Apple tax” that was rife with fuzzy math and bizarre errors.

All that stuff happened in the late, not-at-all-lamented Windows Vista era. Back then, you could understand why Microsoft would be crabby about the whole subject of Windows vs. Mac–especially since Apple was repeatedly sucker-punching Vista in the face, via the meanest ads ever in its long-running “Get a Mac” campaign.

Today, however, is a new day. Vista has been replaced by the vastly superior Windows 7. Apple seems to have ditched the “Get a Mac” campaign in favor of a much lower-key, lower-profile Mac/PC comparison section on its site. And now Microsoft has responded in kind with a “Deciding Between a PC and a Mac” section on the Windows 7 site.

As with much of Microsoft’s consumer marketing for Windows, this new comparison is aimed at teeming masses of folks who don’t know a whole lot about computers, not geeks and enthusiasts. It clearly strives to come off as calm and reasoned, not snarky and emotional. There’s as much boosting of Windows as there is knocking of the Mac, and the whole thing is free of name-calling.

Let’s look at Microsoft’s claims, section by section. I understand that Microsoft isn’t going to make a balanced comparison of pros and cons here; you won’t hear about the hassle of dealing with Windows security, or the fact that few PCs come standard with creativity software to rival the iLife suite that’s bundled with every Mac. But checking out Microsoft’s case for Windows in the age of Windows 7 is a worthwhile exercise. And it’s reasonable to expect that even marketing copy should contain no gross mischaracterizations or factual errors, right?

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Beatles on iTunes? Yoko Says No Go

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 6, 2010 at 10:24 am

Reuters’ Dean Goodman snagged an interview with Yoko Ono in which she says that the Beatles aren’t likely to show up on iTunes any time soon:

“(Apple CEO) Steve Jobs has his own idea and he’s a brilliant guy,” Ono, the 77-year-old widow of John Lennon, told Reuters. “There’s just an element that we’re not very happy about, as people. We are holding out.

“Don’t hold your breath … for anything,” she said with a laugh.

If the main issue is Steve Jobs being stubborn about some unspecified negotiating points, shouldn’t Jeff Bezos rush in, buckle under, and give Paul, Ringo, Yoko, and George Harrison’s widow Olivia basically anything they want to get the Beatles catalog on Amazon MP3? Wouldn’t that be the best publicity Amazon ever got? Wouldn’t it sidestep having to do things Steve Jobs’ way? Wouldn’t there be a chance that Apple would respond by figuring out a way to make the Beatles folks happy?

And isn’t it increasingly bizarre that we’re this far into the digital music revolution and there’s no way to legally acquire the music of the greatest rock group of them all?

Back in November, I predicted that the Beatles would be available for download within 18 months. I thought that Sir Paul’s declaration at the time that it might not happen was canny hype for a release that was already in the works. Now I’m not so sure. The big question now: Will the Beatles be downloadable before the last CD store in the world closes, or after?

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Kinect is to Microsoft as Multi-Touch is to Apple

Posted by Jared Newman on August 5, 2010 at 1:52 pm

Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan got a lengthy tour of Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360, the upcoming gaming peripheral that detects 3D motion with a camera and captures audio with microphones. His conclusion? This is the future for Microsoft, an idea with boundless possibilities that will spread far beyond gaming.

One project manager said Kinect’s technology could some day allow Star Trek Holodeck-style environments, no joke.

Pondering this, I can’t help but draw parallels to the way Apple has approached multi-touch. After popularizing two-finger scrolling in MacBooks, and gestures like pinch-to-zoom on the iPhone, Apple has steadily expanded the role of multi-touch in all its computer products. First came the multi-touch Magic Mouse, then the iPad, and now the Magic Trackpad. Apple put its faith in flat, pressure-sensitive surfaces, and it’s paying off. Microsoft is investing in the air, and hopes to see a similar expansion.

Motion control and multi-touch are not all that different in spirit. Both input methods are supposed to feel natural, as if there’s no barrier between you and the machine. This is especially true with Apple’s iOS devices, with which you interact simply by touching what you see. On the downside, neither input method solves the problem of physical feedback; anyone who’s tried typing on an iPad without looking at the keys should understand why that’s an issue.

For now, Microsoft and Apple are not having an input war. Multi-touch emerged from personal computing, and remains entrenched in it. Kinect’s origins are entertainment, and the technology will probably work back to the computer as an accessory for multitmedia and communications.

To oversimplify, Microsoft’s trying to kill the game controller and the remote control, and Apple wants to slay the mouse, and maybe the keyboard, but it’s clear that both companies have input revolution on the brain. They complement each other beautifully.

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Microsoft's Magic Trackpad Competitor: Arc Touch

Posted by Ed Oswald on August 5, 2010 at 6:37 am

Remember those cryptic images teasing something “flat and touchy” that appeared on Microsoft’s Twitter account earlier this week? Sources are telling Neowin that the device is the Arc Touch Mouse, a touch-enabled mouse that will make its debut in September at a price of $69.95.

While it may look like a response to Apple’s recently announced Magic Trackpad, it appears that the timing may be more coincidental than anything. The device is part of a larger project within Microsoft called “Mouse 2.0,” which has been underway since at least last year.

(See this research paper from Microsoft Research as evidence of what I’m talking about.)

Apple may have a leg up here on Microsoft: it appears at least initially the device is not multitouch. It may not really matter though either: neither is the Magic Trackpad on Windows for the time being.

It’s not clear whether touch is the name of the game here, or as the name suggests, traditional mouse use is also possible. If its the latter, it may be more accurate to put Apple’s Magic Mouse as its chief competitor instead.

Either way, it does seem to me that Apple may have been onto “the next big thing” as Harry asked last week. Maybe the mouse really is just about dead, after all.

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New Study: (Most) iPhone 4 Owners are Satisfied

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 4, 2010 at 11:50 am

A couple of weeks ago, we published the results of a survey of Technologizer readers–both iPhone 4 owners and prospective iPhone 4 owners–about the “Antennagate” controversy. While the happy campers outnumbered the disgruntled consumers, it did show a meaningful minority as dissatisfied, some to the point where they said they intended to return the phone.

I said that we weren’t attempting to collect data that was projectable to reflect the experiences and opinions of all iPhone 4 owners. Nevertheless, a bunch of irate commenters griped about the survey because…it wasn’t projectable to reflect the experiences and opinions of all iPhone owners. They explained to me why our methodology was meaningless. (As my friend and former colleague Ed Albro noted, you never know how many statistics experts read your publication until you publish a study whose conclusions they dislike.)

Okay. ChangeWave, an outfit that does nothing but consumer research, has conducted an iPhone 4 satisfaction survey of its own. The company doesn’t detail how it found iPhone 4 owners to survey, or the demographic breakdown of respondents. (It does say that it surveyed 213 people–I surveyed 500, and several people who didn’t like our conclusions informed me that anyone who knows anything about surveys knows that was so small a sample as to be meaningless.)

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