Carl Howe at the Blackfriars’ Marketing wrote a great piece on Wednesday refuting all the garbage about Apple having to slash prices and sell loss-leader products. It’s fitting the headline began “News flash to reporters and analysts”, because a few of them appear to have read it.
CUPERTINO, California—January 31, 2008—Apple® today released Release Notes Restrictor ® 1.1, a worthy upgrade to its powerful note-restriction software. Release Notes Restrictor 1.1 adds support for even shorter sentences, fewer nouns, more ambiguity, and in some cases does away with verbs completely.
Rumors and speculation are all over the place on Windows 7. It’ll be here in 2010. No, it looks more like 2009. Oh look, screenshots! Wait, it’s gonna be 2011. No, no, it must closer than that, says Mary Jo Foley, let’s try 2009 again.
So, reviews are pouring in on the device, and it’s enough to make you pull your hair out.
Why can’t anybody review this machine for the purpose it was intended? If I see one more tech pundit explain to me that this really needs to be a second Mac, not a primary machine, I’m gonna puke.
Just as they did at the 90, 180, and 270-day mark, Microsoft has cherry-picked and juggled statistics to arrive at the conclusion that Vista is more secure than XP, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and Mac OS X. Oh please.
There’s been so much written about the MacBook Air since it was introduced that you can’t swing a dead cat on the Internet without running into some commentary on it.
A lot of what’s written is pretty silly. Seems like only now are some people getting a handle on its dimensions, etc. that should have been obvious from day 1.
There’s an InfoWorld web site all about saving Windows XP from its “fate” of being discontinued come June 30 this year — complete with a countdown clock.
Lots of other articles and links on the site; they even have a petition to sign:
A good article on The Lefsetz Letter about the Stones deal with EMI. One portion of the article makes it clear that Mr. Lefsetz is as fond of Universal’s Doug Morris as I am:
Doug Morris is waiting for Congress to approve blowing up traders’ computers, possibly lynching them in the town square, he thinks he can beat this thing, he believes the good old days are just around the corner.
Too true.
It’s no secret I’m not enamored with the new MacBook Air. In fact, I chose to purchase a MacBook instead. While I think it’s a beautiful design, I also think it’s less a sub-notebook than it claims to be given its footprint.
Paul Thurrott of Windows SuperSite was just fine with it the day it was announced, but is now blasting it to high heaven. Why the reversal? I’m assuming it takes a while for him to get his marching orders from Redmond.
In today’s Macworld keynote Steve Jobs announced that the iPod Touch will now be getting five applications from the iPhone that it previously did not have:
But not as light as air. Alas, I just can’t see going with the new MacBook air. The price is OK (for now), but it’s just too much compromise for me, and here’s why.
OK, fresh from all the keynote blog reading, I plugged in my iPhone and the 1.1.3 upgrade was available. Install went without a hitch and I’ve been playing with it a bit. Overall this is a nice upgrade, and there’s a guided tour video for it. I really like Apple’s guided tour videos and think they’re a nice touch.
What an amazing device this is.
No optical drive, but the included software, which lets it “borrow” the optical drive from any Mac or PC, is pretty cool and takes care of software installations. Other features:
Tomorrow is Steve Jobs’ Keynote for Macworld ‘08, and this one is going to be special for me for a reason I’ll get to in a minute.
But first, what will be offered? While there may be some very cool stuff announced (current and future), and I’m interested in it all, I’ll be especially watchful for laptop announcements. I recently wrote my views on this subject, but for this particular keynote I’m even more interested. Why? Well, for the same reason this whole keynote is special for me…
Paul Thurrott attempts to set the record strait on DRM-free music. And in Paul’s world, the move to DRM-free tunes had nothing to do with Apple or Steve Jobs. You see, Paul’s been re-writing Microsoft history for so long he’s not above trying to re-write Apple’s as well.
Just a note to mention that I finished migrating my old .Mac articles. This site now contains all articles since I started blogging nine months ago. It was a PITA but I’m glad I did it (I removed the “Missing archives” page; it’s no longer needed).
For those tired of my feed showing “new” articles when it was just me posting an older one, thanks for your patience. It’s done now; any feed updates from now on will be valid new articles.
Let’s face it, next week we’ll all be discussing Macworld news, so I thought I’d review some tech headlines from the last few days and get them out of my system before the real fun begins next week…
What a busy week for Sony!
First, I assumed that they were going to offer their wares DRM-free from Amazon but not iTunes, and I speculated on what the labels were up to.
Then, they threw me a curve by being incredibly stupid, which diverted my attention briefly.
With all the talk about the updated Mac Pros coming with 8 cores standard, I think one thing has been understated: There’s still a 4-core version.
Good article from Wired on the untold iPhone story. It’s not a hit-piece, or even a worship-piece, but rather an article that confirms — for those to blind to see it — just how the iPhone has shaken up the wireless industry in the US.
Well written, and with numerous details I had not yet heard. Recommended reading.
(Landov photo from the Wired story.)
So a Brazilian ice cream maker has started a promotion where some of its Popsicles will instead contain a free iPod Shuffle.
Cool idea (pun intended). However, in looking at the pictures of what a winner looks like, I predict the next time we hear about this will be because stores have a lot of poked, prodded, and broken Popsicle packages as users try to determine if they’ve got a winner.
Just a few days ago BusinessWeek ran a story that Sony was looking to sell DRM-free music, thereby joining the other “big” labels (Universal, Warner, and EMI) in offering at least a part of their catalog DRM-free. There was no mention of iTunes; speculation was that, like Universal and Warner, iTunes would be avoided and Amazon would be the online store of choice.
Microsoft must really think seven is their lucky number. After bragging about how Windows 7.0 was going to blow away Apple just a few weeks ago, now Microsoft is “leaking” about how terrific, incredible, stupendous, colossal, magnificent, and really, really good Windows Mobile 7.0 will be. This would be laughable except some people might believe it.
Joe Wilcox of Microsoft Watch was at least decent enough to correct Bill Gates’ statement during his keynote Sunday night at CES about 100 million people actually using Vista:
“We have 100 million people using Vista now,” Gates told the capacity crowd in Las Vegas this evening. Maybe the user number was wishful thinking on the part of Gates. Microsoft’s press release refers to the more believable number of 100 million licenses sold.
You’ve probably seen what seems like random posts on the Feed Burner feed. It may give the impression the feed is broken, but that’s not the case. It’s just me adding older posts to the blog. You see, I was able to import my old Blogger posts into this new site. However, the more recent posts from the .Mac hosted site could not be imported. I’ve linked to that site’s archive page, but my goal is to physically move all those posts onto this site.
Problem is, that means adding them one by one. It’s slow-going and tedious, and it may take a while. Today I added maybe six. When I do so they come in as “new” posts on the feed. Since they are new to this blog, Feed Burner is correct. But when you read them you’ll see they have the same date as when originally posted way back when. I don’t know of any way to stop Feed Burner from posting these, it’s not doing anything wrong.
I have at least 60 more of these to post, and since I’m pretty busy they’ll get added whenever I have time, and it could take weeks. So if you get a few posts some days that turn out to be old, my apologies. Ultimately I think it will be worth it to have my complete body of blog posts in one place.
Much has been made lately of the recent news that Warner began selling DRM-free music via Amazon. There was even talk about how three of the big four labels are now offering DRM-free music, so all that was needed was for Sony to get into line.Well, now there’s a story from BusinessWeek that Sony is negotiating DRM-free music sales as well.There’s a certain amount of rejoicing over this, but I’m still unimpressed.
There is a great article on Blackfriars’ Marketing on this topic.
It’s been known for a long time that Windows Vista has DRM built-in that could shutdown your media if it felt something wasn’t “right”. Now that someone has bumped up against this wall, it’s almost frightening to see it in action.
The money quote from Blackfriars’:
Technology vendors need to remember a simple rule: the people who pay them for their products are their customers, not hardware OEMs, Hollywood studios, or music labels. Tech vendors who ignore that rule — no matter how big they are — risk the future of their business. It’s that simple.
I wouldn’t hold my breath for Microsoft learning that lesson anytime soon.
I’ve pulled the trigger on this new WordPress site, leaving behind .Mac hosting.
WP allows for the use of a personal domain, so I’ve pointed http://www.thesmallwave.com to this site. You can get to the old site (.Mac hosted) via its address: http://web.mac.com/treestman/TSW/Home/Home.html.
The last time my site moved this all went so smoothly it was frightening; hopefully the same will occur this time around.
As for the feed, for now I’ll continue to use Feed Burner. I’ve changed it to this site, so you should not have to make any changes to it. However, I may leave FB behind at some point because I can’t use its stats in WordPress, and since WP has its own burner and stats facility I may just choose to use theirs.
I don’t know what Paul Thurrott’s New Year’s resolutions were, but apparently being objective about reporting anything Apple was not one of them. On his Windows IT Pro site he’s posted an article on how Apple can fix the iPhone. Forget about the fact that as a huge success the iPhone can hardly be said to need “fixing”, when you look at his actual “fixes” you see this is a ridiculous article even by Paul’s standards.
Indeed they are. Nice story from DF.
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