Category Archives: Apple

Highway robb… er, Grand Theft

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Wow! This from today’s New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — Grand Theft Auto IV, the latest iteration of the hit video game franchise, racked up first-week sales of $500 million, Take-Two Interactive, the game’s publisher, plans to announce on Wednesday. The report exceeded the sales expectations of analysts.

The company is expected to report it sold six million copies of the graphically violent game, 3.6 million of them on the first day.

The sales exceed projections of industry analysts who were estimating that some five million consumers would purchase the game in the first two weeks….

Rather puts the movie business in perspective, don’t you think?

The iPod firm makes computers, too! You don’t say?

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This morning’s Observer column…

Wall street made an interesting discovery last week. Apple, the iPod and mobile phone company, also makes computers! Shock! Horror! This elementary fact had hitherto escaped the notice of investment analysts, hypnotised as they were by the glamour of the iPod, the implosion of the music industry and the belief – ably fostered by Dell & Co – that making computers was a low-end, commoditised business…

Humph RIP

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From BBC NEWS…

Veteran jazz musician and radio host Humphrey Lyttelton has died aged 86.

The chairman of BBC Radio 4’s comedy panel show I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue recently had surgery in an attempt to repair an aortic aneurysm.

The latest series of the quiz programme was cancelled after Lyttelton was admitted to Barnet Hospital in north London on 16 April.

BBC Director General Mark Thompson described “Humph” as “a unique, irreplaceable talent”.

Yep. He was. The Daily Telegraph described him as “the doyen of the double entendre” — and then went on to print some of the more printable ones.

Shock! Horror! iPod company makes computers too!

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From SiliconValley.com

Globally, Apple sold 7.8 million desktop and notebook computers, capturing 3 percent of the market last year, according to research firm IDC. Worldwide, the company experienced a 38 percent growth rate, which was more than double the industry average.

In the United States, Apple sold 4.2 million units, which was 6 percent of the market. That was a 34 percent increase from 2006 and five times the industry average.

“What always gets lost – because everything is focused on iPhones, iPods, iPills, whatever – is Mac sales,” said Scott Rothbort, president of LakeView Asset Management, which is a longtime owner of Apple shares. “Mac sales, Mac sales, Mac sales – that is the story of this company. The Macintosh is capturing more and more market share.”

Mac sales were $3.49 billion, a 54 percent jump from the same period last year. Revenue from the company’s iPod business increased 7.6 percent to $1.81 billion.

“The iPod is not the story,” Munster added. “The portable music player market just isn’t growing a lot.”

Get your Mac clone now and beat the big cease-and-desist rush

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John Murrell, writing in Good Morning Silicon Valley

An outfit called Psystar finds itself in the spotlight today after advertising what it claims is a Leopard compatible Mac built from standard PC-parts for $399, but it probably feels less like a stage star than an escaping convict in the prison yard. See, the license for the Mac operating system bans its installation on non-Apple hardware. Apple, as we know, does not take kindly to trespassers on its turf, and in instances like this, here’s what I like to think happens: A loud bell goes off in the sleeping quarters of Apple Legal, and a squad of attorneys, already dressed in their three-piece suits, jump out of their cots, slip on their tassel loafers, slide down a pole, pile into a fleet of Priuses and roar off (or hum off, I guess) to the scene of the conflagration. So if you have your heart set on an ugly box that might work sort of like an Apple, at least until you try to update it, jump now.

Airy reflections

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From David Pogue’s latest column in the NYT…

After having used Apple’s loaner review unit for a couple of weeks, I reached over to pick up my existing Mac laptop, the five-pound MacBook. After the Air, it felt like a piece of Soviet Army field equipment. When I tried to pick it up one-handed, I thought I’d break my wrist.

So that’s it: I bought an Air for myself.

When I was getting it loaded with my programs and files, I deeply mourned the lack of high-speed file-transfer options like FireWire. A couple of times, I was seriously grateful for the optional Ethernet USB dongle — in hotels with wired Internet but no wireless, for example. And I’ll repeat my advice from the original review: this machine doesn’t make a great primary computer, thanks to its smallish hard drive.

Otherwise, though, I’ve lived and flown with this machine for a month, presented nine talks on it, and have not missed its missing features one iota. It’s plenty fast and capacious as a second machine.

Meanwhile, when your laptop has the thickness and feel of a legal pad and starts up with the speed of a PalmPilot, it ceases to be a traditional laptop. It becomes something you whip open and shut for quick lookups, something you check while you’re standing in line or at the airline counter, something you can use in places where hauling open a regular laptop (and waiting for it) would just be too much hassle.

Yep. My experience too.

Bricks ‘n mortar retailing

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This morning’s Observer column…

From further along the arcade could be heard shouting, whistling and general sounds of excited hubbub. Further examination revealed a 100-yard queue of people. Every so often, a steward would motion the 10 people at the head of the queue to enter a store. As they did so, the staff applauded them. Many of the customers took photographs of themselves as they entered. Inside they were greeted by more applauding staff and given a white box containing a complimentary T-shirt, after which they proceeded into the seething centre of the emporium. As they left, a smiling staff member thanked them. And from the expressions on the departing faces, it was clear that they had had what in marketing cant is called ‘a great retail experience’. This was the only shop in the entire arcade that had generated any excitement…

Quote of the day

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“Likely to encounter issues for which there is no resolution.”

From Adobe’s summary of software that won’t run under Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

Translation: You’re screwed, sucker. Buy an upgrade.

If they’d said something like: “Look, this is old software and we can’t afford to keep every release we’ve ever issued up to date”, then that would have been fine. It’s the impersonal “issues for which there is no resolution” that bugs me.

MacBook Air: first impressions

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I’ve been using an Air for four days, so these are first impressions.

Other people’s reactions

These three are almost universal:

    “Wow! It’s really thin!”
    “It’s amazingly light!”
    (With puzzled expression) “It feels quite robust.”

All correct. Quentin thinks that the robustness comes from the way the edges are curved.

Geeky disdain

The Air has come in for a fair amount of geeky disdain because the design compromises needed to fit it into such a slender package are perceived as having crippled it for serious use. Thus: it can only take 2GB of RAM; the hard drive is ‘only’ 80GB; it’s slow; it doesn’t have a Firewire port; there’s no audio-in port; it doesn’t have an Ethernet port (you have to buy an optional USB-to-Ethernet adapter); it doesn’t have an optical drive; the battery can only be replaced by a dealer; etc. There’s a whiff of the ‘real men don’t eat quiche’ about all this, but really I think that these criticisms — though broadly accurate (except for the comment about speed) — are beside the point. They’re criticising the Air for not being what it was never intended to be.

For the record…

Pluses: The Air is not slow — in fact it’s very responsive and nippy. It’s very quick to wake from sleep — almost instant on. The keyboard is lovely — nicer than either the MacBook Pro’s or the Macbook’s. The screen is very like that of the Macbook’s. Battery life is good. It doesn’t run hot — unlike the MacBookPro which can char-grill an average thigh in half an hour. It’s quiet. And wonderfully light. In fact, it’s a pleasure to use.

Annoyances: It comes with Leopard, about which I am still ambivalent. Well, actually, the main reason I’m irritated by it is because it won’t run PhotoShop CS. (But Aperture runs fine on it.) And Leopard does have Screen Sharing (of which more below.)

So who is it for, then?

My hunch is that it has two target user-groups. The first is people who are highly mobile and use a computer mainly for email, web-browsing, word-processing, presentations and music. For these users, the diminutive heft of the Air is very attractive, and its processing power and storage are perfectly adequate. The other target category is comprised of heavy audio-visual users, programmers, editors etc. who really need a desktop machine with sophisticated i/o, big screens etc. but who are finding that lugging even a MacBookPro around is an awkward (and backbreaking) chore.

Although I’m not a programmer, I fall into the second category (see pic).

My MacBook Pro has become, effectively, a desktop machine. It’s comfortably anchored in a setup with a big screen, high-end audio and video connections, auxiliary hard drives and other clutter, such that disentangling it every morning and reconnecting it at night was becoming really tedious. So for me, the Air is really just a highly-portable, lightweight component of a wider system. They key issues then become:

  1. What is the minimal set of applications that are absolutely necessary?
  2. What kinds of data shall I carry around?
  3. How will I keep the various components of the overall system in sync with one another?

1. It’s very instructive to have to think hard about which applications are absolutely necessary and which are just nice-to-have. My MacBookPro is stuffed full of the latter (a by-product of the amazing software ecosystem that has evolved around OS X). But most of them I use only occasionally — though they seem really essential when the need arises. So none of them goes on the Air.
2. My ‘desktop’ machine holds colossal amounts of audio, video and photographs. I’ve decided that there’s no need to carry music on the Air (what else is an iPod for, after all?), and it will be used only as a working store for audio recordings, photographs and video — all of which will be uploaded to the desktop when I’ve finished working on them. As a result, that 80GB drive suddenly looks big enough. (Famous last words?)
3. Syncing applications like ChronoSync and ExpanDrive have suddenly become key pieces of software. So too has VNC and the terrific Screen Sharing app built into Leopard.

So, the story so far…

The Air has been a delight to use, so far. One of the reasons I got it was that I had dinner a few weeks ago with a thoughtful senior engineer from Apple’s Cupertino HQ. Half-jokingly, I asked him if I should think about getting one. He replied by asking me to describe what I used computers for, and what my work patterns were like. Having heard me out, he said that I would find the Air a useful and productive working tool, but if I’d been a software developer he would have advised against it. Looks like he was spot on.