Exploded Clown

Gruber point to an article that tracks down pundits who thought the iPhone would fail, and asks them what they think now.

One guy was surprised by the success. Translation: everyone else wrote that the iPhone wasn’t worth it, but fully expected it to succeed. This says something about their Jeremiah-like journalism or their complete cynicism for page views. Probably a little of both, but I’m leaning toward the latter.

It’s not until page three that someone mentions Android, Google’s big phone play. Then Enderle does, too, which is a pretty good indication that Android will fail.

Also this, from Enderle:

Apple could probably sell refrigerators to Eskimos

Well, yes, but that’s because Eskimos already buy refrigerators. They use them to keep food from freezing.

Jeff Atwood thinks that iTunes is Anti-Web:

Is it so unreasonable to expect links in your browser to resolve to, oh, I don’t know, web pages containing information about the thing you just clicked on? Is there anything more anti-web than demanding users install custom software to display information that could have just as easily been delivered through the browser?

Jeff– whom I met at WWDC last month at a party and had a blast talking with– is just wrong here, because iTunes falls into a breed of application between Web Applications and Desktop Applications, which I have taken to calling Network Applications: they live in the desktop and inhabit that world, but some large part of their functionality– sometimes but not always all– is based on having a network connection. Your feed reader is a Network Application. So is your Email client. So is MarsEdit, which is the application I’m writing this blog post in.

But Network Applications live in a continuum measured by how much they do with the network. Email and Feeds are useful offline when you’re reading the stuff you’ve stored, but needs the network to get new stuff. MarsEdit is useful for writing and revising, but needs the network to post. Most networked games have a fully playable single-player mode that works without the network. Etc.

What distinguishes iTunes is that it’s a Network Application for only one part of its functionality– the iTunes Store– but that is a tiny part of the whole application. Moreover, it’s a function that a lot of competitors built on the open web. But iTunes builds the store into the application so that it can offer a more seamless experience for downloading. Should they replicate the entire store online for people who want to browse, but then force people to open the app if they want to buy? That thing we just tripped on was a seam in the downloading process.

Now a more reasonable suggestion comes later in the article:

At the very least, I might want some basic information about the media I just clicked on. Right here in my browser where I already am. Information like what the heck it is, some artwork, maybe some audio clips, how much it costs — sweet talk me. Make me want to buy it through the Apple Store. Dazzle me with your simplicity and ease of use. Beguile me with your wares!

In the case where iTunes can’t be found, this would absolutely be the right way to go. But it should be pretty minimal because you don’t want it to become a backdoor way of browsing. It should show the song or album that was linked to, and that should be it. And they should keep that big fat “Download iTunes” button that would let you see more.

Apple put out a press release last week saying that iTunes is now the number two music retailer in the US, behind only Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart, for it’s part, is making rublings:

Wal-Mart stirs CD pricing pot with multi-tiered plan - Yahoo! News:

Wal-Mart… has proposed a five-tiered pricing scheme that would allow the discounter to sell albums at even lower prices and require the labels to bear more of the costs.

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Wal-Mart has seen Apple beat retailer after retailer on this, and sees the writing on the wall: buying online is cheaper and faster, so there’s no reason to buy from a store. If they want to keep sellng music, they need to change the rules. And that’s what they’re proposing.

But, as the article makes clear, that’s only if they want to keep selling music, and that’s not necessarily true:

One label executive said, “This sounds like the Hail Mary pass, and if it doesn’t work, they could be out of the music business; or maybe they reduce music down to a couple of racks” from the 4,000 titles carried by Wal-Marts with larger selections.

That’s a huge play for Wal-Mart, and it sounds eminently reasonable from Wal-Mart’s perspective. Basically, the Labels have given Apple the sweet deal (cheaper prices) that Wal-Mart is used to getting, and because Wal-Mart is all about cheaper prices, they’re not able to compete. And if they can’t, then they’re willing to cut off the non-competitive part of the business. Wal-Mart is nothing if not ruthless.

Note, though, that there’s a giant gap between “non-competitive” and “not profitable,” and therein lies the interesting part. As long as Wal-Mart is making money selling music, why would they care if Apple is making more money selling music? Unless Wal-Mart is just feeling stilted about not being given the best price, it has to mean that they don’t think they can fend off Apple given the current pricing scheme. And seeing as how Wal-Mart’s online music store did have the lowest price when they were still in business, I have to guess that it’s the later.

All told, it’s great news for Apple. Wal-Mart is in a reactionary position, but if Wal-Mart wins against the labels and holds onto the number one slot, Apple can argue that lower pricing is better for sales and demand it themselves. If new pricing doesn’t keep Wal-Mart up top, it’s Apple who takes the crown. On the other hand, if Wal-Mart doesn’t get better deals and does cut their music shelf space, Apple catapults into first place, and again has more leverage.

And of course, this is really bad news for the labels, who are going to have to choose to lower their margins or lose a chunk of business, or both. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of guys.

And this is what actually happened. Yeah, a little bit with the too-optimistic for me.

Things I got wrong:

1. I called the Mac Pro based on John Siracusa’s (who made the game, and the rules) assertion that it’d count “if and only if the new Mac Pros are mentioned in the keynote.” I figured they would be, and they were, but it’s not marked in this “official” what-happened version.
2. The displays haven’t been updated in forever. It seemed a shoe-in.
3. I was skeptical of the MacBook Thin, which turned out to be the MacBook Air, the major announcement of the keynote.
4. Having just got a new MacBook Pro, I figured Apple would announce a new version to spite me. It’s happened every other time I buy something, so it seemed a reasonable guess. I was happy to be proven incorrect.
5. Jobs didn’t use any of his catch-phrases. I think it was an intentional effort to spite Bingo players. He used the word “Zhoom” for crying out loud.
6. I expected a new iPhone, and SDK details. Mostly this was just hope on my part, since I want to buy an iPhone, and play with the SDK.
7. Schiller got a mention, but no appearance. I miss that guy.
8. Vista got by without any mockery. And really, I think that it came down to the fact that Jobs couldn’t come up with anything new; it’s all been said. Over and over.

So obviously, I’m not too great at this. When I posted my predictions before, I almost went back and updated my bingo chart (I had done it almost a week before my post), but decided to go with my first impressions. Big mistake; my second guesses (no iPhone, no Blu-ray, no One More Thing) were far closer to the truth.

So there’s this “cleaning tool” for the Mac that’s actually a scam and/or trojan horse. It always reports that you have something awry on your system, and offers to fix it if you cough up some dough.

This kind of stuff has been all the rage in the Windows world for years, now, but I can’t see this one taking off, because the app itself is ugly as sin and we Mac folk just don’t take too kindly to that.

(Via Slashdot.)

Here are my predictions for MacWorld. Looking at the whole thing, it seems I’m being overly optimistic. But I can’t find any one square that I don’t think is going to happen–except maybe the iPhone, but I really want that one to be announced, so I can order one.

I should also add that this house of cards is built on top of itself; if I get one wrong, it’s tied to so many other that I’ll get many wrong (the Apple TV with built-in Blu-Ray and movie rental support, or the Blu-Ray stand-alone drive, each with obvious HD output).

In fact, if Blu-Ray fails to make an appearance, my batting average will plummet.

Seth’s Blog: Apple’s next problem:

When your entire culture is organized about being the other, the outsider, the insurgent, the one that’s better than the masses… what do you do when you are the masses?

Apple doesn’t have that problem quite yet; the office is still solidly in the Windows camp, and shows little sign of moving.

The way it was supposed to be:

Instead I’m going to show everyone the way it was “supposed” to be.
This is not a hack, this Dock was taken from one of the Leopard beta installations that was seeded to developers and beta testers before the official release.

(Via Digg.)

It’s nifty, but I can see why it’s disabled: it hides certain apps (which might be running), and it adds makes everything more complicated.

Moreover, perusing my Dock, I can’t see any app group I’d like to do this to; they’re either important enough I want to have their position fixed, or they’re single apps (like iPhoto) that have no relation to others.

I have a *lot* of keywords; I keep one for every person in any of my photos. When I use the search feature to search for keywords, the dark black window that appears to let me choose a keyword stretches up above the screen, making the first few dozen keywords impossible to search for, since the window does not scroll.

So far I’ve been able to overcome this by using the wide variety of Smart Albums I have, but that won’t work forever.

The Non-Maximizing Maximize Button:

That’s my problem with Apple’s non-maximizing maximize button. Allowing users to maximize any window to a monitor has its problems, to be sure. But Apple’s method of forcing users to deal with more windows by preventing maximization is not good user interface design. It is fundamentally and deeply flawed. Users don’t want to deal with the mental overhead of juggling multiple windows, and I can’t blame them: neither do I. Designers should be coming up with alternative user interfaces that minimize windowing, instead of forcing enforcing arbitrary window size limits on the user for their own good.

(Via Coding Horror.)

Spoken like someone who has yet to embrace Exposé. Flick to the corner, flick to the window.

rentzsch.com: *Sob*:*Sob*

It’s sad or wrong or something that I can recognize the obfuscated icon for a program I never even used that hasn’t been updated in eight years.

In Tiger, when I put an open Mail message into the background, the Delete button disables itself. None of the other buttons do.

Bizarre.

Tim Bray isn’t so sure he likes Tiger. And I’d agree, but with enough caveats that I thought a blog post would be worthwhile.

OS X has gone through five major revisions since I’ve been using it. It had more before, but since I didn’t use them I don’t really know about them, and won’t comment about them here.

The first release was Public Beta. This was a developer’s release: it was slow and had some bugs and everyone knew that it wasn’t a finished product. That was part of the name.

Release two was Mac OS X 10.0, which was the real deal. It was the ‘come and get it release’ that was supposed to signal that normal, everyday people could now run UNIX on their desktop and it would be pretty and they wouldn’t have to use UNIX just to use UNIX. This was UNIX for the rest of us: this was an end-user release.

Next came 10.1, which was for everybody, because the one feature in 10.1 was speed. If you’re keeping track at home, you can almost declare this as a non-release: this is what 10.0 was supposed to be, but for reasons of compiler– and press– release cycles couldn’t be.

Then we move into the big cats and get Jaguar, 10.2. This was a release for the developers again: we got Quartz Extreme APIs and Rendezvous Bonjour and a significant update to most of the internals. There was much rejoicing on the mailing lists, and there was the beginning of a Renascence in the Mac Shareware world. Jaguar contained little for the end-user, but it contained a lot of springboards that the developers could launch off of and bring amazing new things to the end user.

Panther (aka 10.3) was the result of Apple using all of those springboards and launching everything in the OS up a notch. Panther was targeting at the end user again: the foundations didn’t shake much (we did get Bindings), but the world shifted: the bar moved up because it was just expected that every app would pull out all the tricks: after all, everything in the system did.

And that brings us to 10.4, Tiger, which with CoreData and CoreAudio and CoreVideo and CoreNameYourComponentHere is to my eye quite definitely a developer release. Apple is shoving more tools in the toolbox, and seeing what the community can do with them. When it’s obvious which ones are the good ideas, Apple will take them and run with it: persistent SQL stores backing the iApps? Let’s hope.

What Apple is doing is alternating between the releases for the devs and the releases for everybody. But you can’t just give the devs special builds, because the interesting part of the experiment is what gets built, and in our networked world the interesting apps are the ones that rely on the network effect of having lots of installations. Quote the Cluetrain, “Markets are Conversations,” and the conversation is more interesting the more voices speak.

I’ll also note that this theory is made even better by the fact that it cannot be proven: if Apple started admitting that every other release was developer-oriented, then non-developers would stop buying those releases, and the whole house of cards falls down.

As long as it stays up, though, it’s a neat trick. It pulls the platform forward in leaps and bounds, and it does a pretty nice job of growing the third-party developer scene: every other release, Apple is providing lots of new areas to create new apps, to make new waves, and to ride those into the sunset (which may or may not be the next major release).

But I think the best part is that it dovetails wonderfully with the quick revision cycle they’ve been peddling: Apple never appears to be behind the curve, but the developers and the platform always seem to be on the leading edge. And that’s where all the alpha geeks want to be.

So maybe setting my default browser to the WebKit nightly wasn’t so great an idea…

So there’s talk all over the web about Apple moving to Intel processors, but one thing I couldn’t find was the fate of AltiVec. AltiVec, or the Velocity Engine, is the part of the G4 and G5 that does the heavy lifting when you need giant numbers crunched: it is the reason why G5s have been seen in a few supercomputers lately. It is one of the biggest selling points that the more recent PowerPCs had, but I couldn’t find anyone who was talking about it. What was the future of AltiVec?

Well, I finally found out from Apple’s own docs, page 53 (emphasis added):

AltiVec instructions, because they are processor-specific, must be replaced o Macintosh computers using Intel microprocessors. You can choose from these two options:

• Use the Accelerate framework. The Accelerate framework, introduced in Mac OS X v10.3 and expanded in v10.4, is a set of high-performance vector-accelerated libraries. It provides a layer of abstraction that lets you access vector-based code without needing to use vector instructions yourself or to be concerned with the architecture of the target machine. The system automatically invokes the appropriate instruction set.
• Port AltiVec code to the Intel instruction set architecture (ISA). The MMXTM, SSE, SSE2, and SSE3 extensions provide analogous functionality to AltiVec. Like the AltiVec unit, these extensions are fixed-sized SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) vector units, capable of a high degree of parallelism. Just as for AltiVec, code that is written to use the Intel ISA typically performs many times faster than scalar code.

So the long and the short of it is that all the work you’ve put into those optimizations is effectively dead, unless you did them recently and wrote to the Accelerate framework.

This may seem like a little thing, but AltiVec was one of the big reasons why Apple was seeing an upsurge in popularity among the sciences; big pharmaceutical and biotech firms were using G5s to run their massive numbers. Can ApTel compete?