The Mac Professional's Resource
If Steve Jobs puts his mind to it, there really is nothing he can’t do. Truly the world has not seen such awesome power contained in one individual. After Chuck Norris, whose tears can cure cancer, he might be the most impressive man on earth. Jobs is busy with MacWorld this week, but BusinessWeek believes he can help put an end to the writer’s strike simply by existing. OK, that is not entirely true. Instead, BusinessWeek comments on the speculation that Apple will announce a more robust AppleTV to go along with a wider selection of iTunes Store offerings, including video rentals. They speculate that the announcement will help spotlight “the major issue separating the writers and movie moguls”, i.e. how to share revenue from television and movie downloads.
I know that many people listen when Steve Jobs has something to say, especially now that he is the largest shareholder in Disney, but if anything, studios have been trying to get away from letting any one voice have too much say in what they do. Movie studios will more likely take a page from the music industry, which is trying to find ways to make sure their move away from physical media does not depend on Apple. If there are any voices that can end this thing quickly, they will have names like Sumner Redstone and Rupert Murdoch.
— Joe Fahs
Deep down inside the bowels of One Infinite Loop in Cupertino lies Apple’s Customer Torture Center, and they have done some great work ahead of Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynote tomorrow. Last week, AppleInsider posted pictures of the Mascone center where Apple has foisted banners proclaiming that “Something is in the Air”, and since there has been no smug alert issued for the Silicon Valley, we must assume that Apple is having fun with their little play on words, all in an effort to keep the loyal Apple fanboys squirming and the PC lovers who hate them waiting to froth at the moment Steve “Monochromatic Jesus” Jobs takes the stage.
Gizmodo laid out some reasons why they think this year’s MacWorld could be bigger than usual, (something we hinted at weeks ago BTW), and now it seems like everybody is trying to figure out what Apple meant by “Something in the Air”, with some outlets suggesting that Apple is going to Save WiMax. Ummm, no. A slightly more creative take believes that this is all a cover for the rumored Apple ultra-portable laptop.
What do I think? At the latest MacEdition Editorial Board Meeting, I floated the idea that “Something in the Air” comes directly from Apple Board Member Al Gore Jr. As we know, Gore has done yeoman’s work in the fight against global warming, and carbon emissions, not to mention the hunt for the elusive ManBearPig. Therefore, my official prediction is that Apple will announce that all of their computers will now run on biodiesel. My second prediction is that Apple and Tom Cruise will partner to sell home faraday cages to prevent psychologists from reading our minds. I would have a third prediction, but after having finished one bottle of absinthe, another member of the editorial board put on some Josh Groban and I fell asleep.
— Joe Fahs
In the ongoing security pissing match between lovers of OS X, Windows, and Linux, many often cite OS X lesser installation numbers as a reason for a relative lack of exploits. The “security through obscurity” theory postulates that all of those hackers coming out of the Eastern Europe, Asia, and the like would rather focus on a big target than a little one. Oh, there are plenty of proof-of-concept viruses and exploits out there, but their effectiveness in the wild is thing for debate.
Well, with hopes of nearly 10 million sales in the first 18 months and ubiquity in pop culture, the iPhone is decidedly not obscure, so I guess there is no surprise that Information Week tells us iPhone has its first trojan. Sounds scary right? Well, not so much. To use the Trojan, one needs to download a file and install it manually on the iPhone. For the vast majority of people who get their iPhone updates through Apple’s official channels, this doesn’t affect them. What it does mean is that the lazy iPhone hacker should only jailbreak his iPhone from a trusted source. As of this post, the website offering the download is offline, so maybe Apple has figured out how to be obscure again.
In other news, Opera software announced that the Opera browser is coming to the iPhone. If you’ve used the iPhone, you know that the built-in Safari is a great browser, but we welcome the choice of Opera as well, since it has always proved to be fast on any other mobile device and as long as iPhone users are stuck with EDGE data rates, they can use all the help they can get.
— Joe Fahs
With CES in full-swing in Vegas and MacWorld looming just around the corner, Apple chose to sneak a few product releases on to the public by announcing new Mac Pros and xServes. It has been a little easier to estimate new Apple product releases since the company has moved their products over to Intel processors and so the revisions to the top of Apple’s line had been suspected.
Apple has held back from releasing new computer hardware at MacWorld in recent years, usually saving product announcements for special events spread throughout the year. Still, the timing seems kind of odd. Normally, The Steved One wants to make sure whatever he is talking about at MacWorld will be the focus, and so product introductions occur a few weeks after his keynote. Perhaps Apple was caught off guard from the Bill Gates retirement video (Et Tu, Bono?) and needed something to keep them in the news.
Taking a look at things a little less cynically, it might simply mean that Jobs has such a huge list of things in store for MacWorld, he simply couldn’t be bothered with discussing how his company is using the latest 45nm processor cores for their top-of-the-line products. It’s sort of sad, really, because we sort of miss the days when Phil Schiller would put his cheese danish down and do a bake-off, but it’s much better than when Steve would have “New Visualizations in iTunes” as a bullet point for his keynote.
— Joe Fahs
As we mentioned last week, we are sort of down on the Internet movie download thing. This week sees more speculation arising as Apple is working on movie rental agreements with more studios, after many reports had Apple completing a deal with Fox last week. As Apple looks to compete in the video download business, these deals make sense for them. Unfortunately, the movie rental business does not yet make sense for consumers.
The rumors are that Apple is looking to do movie rentals starting at $3.99 for a 24 hour rental. That should be enough to woo some people who are too lazy to go to Blockbuster, but at that price, Netflix allows you to have up to three DVD movies at once for an unlimited amount of time. Additionally, the Netflix price comes with 16 hours of the “Watch Instantly” movies on demand feature, not to mention a much wider selection. And if you have invested a lot into your home theater, NetFlix offers HD-DVD and BluRay rentals, serving up picture and audio quality Apple can’t match. So while Apple might be better at wooing the studios in, there is much more work to do before their sweet talk works on the consumer.
— Joe Fahs