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Posts Tagged ‘Mac Observer’

Macworld 2010: TMO’s Dave Hamilton and IDG’s Paul Kent

Filed under: Macworld, Video, Cult of Mac

Along with meeting readers and having a place to stash our laptops, one of the other novel pleasures of having a booth on the show floor this year was the serendipity of having our friends and colleagues in the Mac community walk on by — just so that we could pounce upon them and interview them on video. Case in point: late on Saturday afternoon, we enlisted Dave Hamilton of The Mac Observer, Backbeat Media & the Mac Geek Gab for a quick chat, only to be unexpectedly joined by his bandmate-slash-Macworld Expo general manager, Paul Kent.

Dave & Paul each shared their impressions of the show, the expectations of vendors and attendees for next year, and the secret of putting together a great cover band when you only get one rehearsal before each gig. It’s fair to say that the outlook for Macworld 2011, from their perspective, is much brighter now than it was in the leadup to this year’s show.

Thanks to both Dave and Paul for joining us for the final livestreaming session of the week. Although this is the last interview we recorded on Saturday, it’s far from the last one you’ll be seeing here on TUAW; we have a shelf-ful of great conversations that will be posted to the site over the next few days.

TUAWMacworld 2010: TMO’s Dave Hamilton and IDG’s Paul Kent originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Macworld iPad panelists defy Steve Jobs’ snub of the show

This year’s annual Macworld conference is missing a key component: Apple. The company — very likely Steve Jobs himself — decided last year that they weren’t getting enough out of Macworld.

This year, Macworld bravely carried on without an Apple booth or a Steve Jobs “One more thing …” keynote. With Apple nowhere to be found at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, there’s a new-Apple-gadget buzz missing from the show.

But in another way, Macworld has opened up. Daddy Steve Jobs and Mommy Apple PR are gone. Let’s party!

On Saturday afternoon, Macworld editor Jason Snell brought out four serious Mac geeks to talk about the iPad tablet computer, despite the fact there were no iPads in the room, nor anywhere else at Macworld. Macworld editor Dan Warren, Mac Observer and Macfixit writer Ted Landau, GDGT co-founder and Engadget veteran Ryan Block, and roaming columnist for Macworld and the Chicago Sun-Times Andy Ihnatko discussed their expected plusses, minuses, and ultimate uses for Apple’s tablet.

Instead of real iPads, the panel handled cardboard mockups. Conference emcee Paul Kent flung one, Frisbee-style, into the audience to warm up the crowd. He also promised a free iPad to the attendee who ended up holding a large green beachball the crowd had bobbled while waiting for the show to start

Panelits dove right into praising and panning the iPad. Ihnatko, who like everyone except Landau had handled a real one at Apple’s launch event, said the iPad stands out from previous Windows-based tablets because of its build quality. “You can tell you’re handling a premium product,” he said. “The device itself disappears after the first five seconds. You feel like you’re interacting directly with the mail app.” This has one potential downside, he said: You might stop paying attention and drop the thing. “I think a lot of people will go down to Walmart or Home Depot and get that grippy tape to put on the back.”

Landau said,  ”I think the majority of people who are happy with a laptop today will be happy with an iPad in three to four years.” That’s because developers will conjure up apps we haven’t thought of yet.

“Will I be able to use it as a phone?” Warren asked. “Or a camera?” Landau added.

Panelists criticized Apple without restraint for the company’s closed, intractable approval process for apps. Landau spun a funny parable in which he tries to use his Cuisinart toaster oven as a space heater on a cold day. Cuisinart customer support tells him his extension cord doesn’t say “Made for Cuisinart,” so it won’t work. And the Pop-Tars in his pantry won’t toast, because they weren’t purchased from Cuisinart’s online store. And in fact, the terms of use document that came with the toaster forbid even trying to use it as a heater.

“I tried to tell a friend about this, but he was totally unsupportive,” Landau joked. “He’s kind of a Cuisinart fanboy. ‘They’re just looking out for your best interest,’ he told me, ‘And those Pop-Tars really aren’t good for you anyway.’” That, Landau concluded, is how it feels to struggle with Apple’s app store.

Snell argued that he likes the app store because the apps almost always work flawlessly and don’t break his iPhone. “Why not an app store for the Mac?” he asked.

The toughest topic for panelists was the iPad’s use as a reader for electronic books, newspapers and magazines. Block said the iPad reaffirmed his Kindle, a much better dedicated device for reading entire books on a computer screen. “I can see a day when the Kindle is free,” Snell said, as a means of bringing customers into Amazon’s e-book embrace. Block agreed that a cheaper Kindle would sell a lot more books.

Snell concluded that it was too soon to forecast the iPad’s success, or even its modes of operation, for books. “iBooks was obviously a work in progresss,” he said of the book-reading app Steve Jobs demonstrated at the iPad’s launch event in January. “I think there’ll be fifteen different ways to read a book” on the iPad, he said.

Ihnatko blamed the Internet for making it hard for publishers to go digital. The Net, he said, treats expensive, hard-won, tightly written and thoroughly fact-checked investigative journalism with quickie blog posts. Internet users have been trained to believe that all content should be free. Ihnatko thinks digital rights management tools will be a boon to publishers, just as they were to music and movie companies. Once people find it’s easy to buy the New York Times or a novel online, he said, they won’t mind paying a small price for much better content than what they can get for free.

But publishers, like Hollywood, he concluded, will need to come to accept lower prices for each individual item online before they can really dive in and deliver the superior content for which iPad toters will pay.

For a blow-by-blow report on the event, see TUAW’s liveblog post.

(Disclosure: Macworld is owned and mostly run by IDG, the enormous tech-topics publisher — Macworld, PC World, Infoworld — that also owns the DEMO conference now produced by VentureBeat.)

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Apple’s "controlled leaks" and how they spin them

Filed under: Apple Corporate, Hardware, Rumors, Other Events, Apple

Here’s an interesting story that popped up this week, made even more relevant by all of the tablet rumors flying around lately. John Martellaro at the Mac Observer has called out the Wall Street Journal piece earlier this week as a controlled leak from Apple. What he says makes sense: the news came from an unnamed source and was published by two different authors, the WSJ’s Apple beat writers, to keep the responsibility divided (and keep Walt Mossberg above the fray, perhaps). If Apple does want to leak information, it seems easy enough — as Martellaro says, an executive phones a friend, asks to keep their name out of the story, and then a rumor is out there. Of course, there’s the question of how often (if ever) this actually happens; most Mac media folk have never been on the receiving end of such a leak.

The other real question is: why? Apple could merely be sending ideas out there to see how they’ll play — the WSJ post specifically mentioned a 10 or 11″ display, so it’s possible they wanted to pre-test that idea. Martellaro also reckons that Apple’s message could have been directed at another company, either a competitor or a partner who needed to be reminded that the tablet release was approaching quickly. And finally, it could have been directed at us press — rumors build more rumors, which build hype, which, as Martellaro says, put butts in seats at the event later this month.

Of course, there’s always the question of stock manipulation, and it could be argued that leaks like this might cause problems there. But otherwise, leaks by Apple are more or less harmless to everyone besides the company itself. If Apple did leak something it doesn’t end up delivering on (i.e. promises of one product and another one ends up getting released), it’s the companys own reputation that will be on the line. Apple can say that it doesn’t respond to or support rumors, but when the company’s own executives are allegedly telling the WSJ what the tablet is like, the onus falls on the company’s reputation as a whole.

[via Apple Insider]

TUAWApple’s “controlled leaks” and how they spin them originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yet another use for Dropbox: USB cable

Filed under: Tips and tricks, TUAW Tips, iPhone

As a seasoned world traveler and Apple geek, I’m always fascinated to see how others in the Mac and iPhone community make lemonade from lemons when they encounter difficulties on the road. The Mac Observer’s Jeff Gamet was recently in Italy (and may still be there) and from the sound of a recent post, he must have arrived well before part of his luggage did. The result? He had a lot of photos on his iPhone that needed to be moved to his Mac, and didn’t have a USB cable to link the two.

His solution? Use Dropbox and the hotel’s Wi-Fi connection instead of emailing photos and then saving the attached photos to a folder on your Mac. The simple answer involves making sure that you have a Dropbox account (doesn’t everybody?), the Dropbox iPhone app [Free, iTunes Link], and access to a Wi-Fi network.

Within the Dropbox app, tap on the Camera button, then tap Existing Photo or Video. From the iPhone’s photo albums, you can send your photos to any one of the folders in your Dropbox. As Jeff points out in his post, this has the added benefit of making sure that your vacation photos are backed up online.

Once you’ve moved the photos to your Dropbox, it’s a simple matter of moving or copying them over to your Mac’s photo library by literally clicking and dragging them (or option-clicking and dragging if you want to make a copy and keep the originals in the Dropbox) to the iPhone app icon in the dock.

There’s only one issue; you have to move one photo or video at a time with the current version of the Dropbox app. Let’s hope that Dropbox can address that in an upcoming version of the app.

[Tip of the travelin' hat to Jeff Gamet, The Mac Observer]

TUAWYet another use for Dropbox: USB cable originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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TUAW’s Steve Sande provides gift ideas on the latest MacJury podcast

Filed under: Odds and ends, Podcasts, Holidays

Here it is, T-7 days until Black Friday, and you don’t have any gift ideas?

I joined MacJury podcaster Chuck Joiner earlier this week to provide my ideas for gifting. This was part two of a holiday gift ideas episode on the popular podcast.

Joining me on the podcast were MacMouseCalls support genius (and grandmother) Pat Fauquet, Julio Ojeda-Zapata from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and The Mac Observer’s Jeff Gamet.

Storage seemed to be a popular gift idea from the panelists, along with iPhone / Mac jewelry, video tools, and even some freebies. I take no responsibility for the singing that was taking place…

You can listen to MacJury Episode 918 at the MacJury website, or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

TUAWTUAW’s Steve Sande provides gift ideas on the latest MacJury podcast originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iPhone leads Apple past Nokia to #1 in mobile phone profits

Filed under: Apple Financial, iPhone

Apple doesn’t make the most mobile phones but, as of the third quarter of 2009, the Cupertino company does make the most money from them. Research firm Strategy Analytics says Apple is now the world’s most profitable mobile phone maker, kicking Nokia from the top spot between July and September.

Apple’s phones only command about 2.5% of the world’s cellphone market, though the iPhone’s cool factor and the company’s premium pricing let it rake in about $1.6 billion in operating profit from the iPhone in the third quarter of 2009, besting cellphone stalwart Nokia and its $1.1 billion in operating profit for the same period.

Alex Spektor, an analyst with Strategy Analytics, says, “With strong volumes, high wholesale prices and tight cost controls, the PC vendor has successfully broken into the mobile phone market in just two years.”

What did Nokia do wrong? Reverse what Apple did right. Nokia seems to have slipped thanks in part to lower margins from the weak economy and a less-than-stellar presence in the United States, though Spektor thinks there is time to turn the Finnish ship around. He suggests the company focus more on the U.S. and less on traditional ‘non-smart’ phones, which don’t make as much money per unit as the likes of the iPhone or the Blackberry.

While Nokia may not make the most money, at this point it still makes the most handsets. Nokia’s worldwide market share for mobile phones sits at 37.9%. At least for now.

[via The Mac Observer, Electronista]

TUAWiPhone leads Apple past Nokia to #1 in mobile phone profits originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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