www.nickhodge.com

The recent escal­a­tion of rumours sur­round­ing the so-called Apple Tab­let / Slate / Big iPhone / xxx (where xxx is a super cool Apple-ish name) seem to focus on the hard­ware. The gad­getry. The hard­ware specs.

I am a little over gad­getry. Every week there is a new phone, device or somesuch that junks the old tech­no­logy. Surely this is neither eth­ical nor sus­tain­able?

But that is not where the innov­a­tion, nor the future lies for Apple. Recent Apple acquis­i­tions, invest­ments and suc­cesses leads me to con­clude that Apple and Google are about to square off. Not in search. Search is rather bor­ing and a commodity.

In the forth­com­ing weeks, ignore the hard­ware. Hard­ware is dime-a-dozen, and many vendors are going to release slate like gad­getry in a sim­ilar form factor. Rather, watch what Apple does with their iTunes / App store. Presently this sys­tem provides music, tv, movies and with the advent of the iPhone – Apps.

The next depart­ment for the store are news­pa­pers, magazines and books. Either sold as sub­scrip­tion, or with embed­ded advert­ising. Just wait.

The rev­enue model will appeal to the tra­di­tional main­stream media — so expect a con­tinu­ing ava­lanche of obsequious and self-serving cov­er­age. Not of the store — but rather the hard­ware. Embed­ded within these stor­ies will be the expect­a­tion of a holy grail. The holy grail of the future of print media, without paper.

Some­how, I doubt it.

Liam, unpromp­ted, at the Sydney Apple Store earlier this after­noon. For the LULZ!

Apple I Basic, recently recovered from an old Apple I has been recom­piled to run on MacOS X as a Unix Shell.

There is some­thing per­versely won­der­ful about bring­ing a mod­ern lan­guage such as Apple I Basic to an older OS (Unix) <grin>

It’s nearly a week since I upgraded my iPod from a gen­er­a­tion 3 to one of the cool, uber-geek iPod Touch devices. As a 99.5% Win­dows Vista user, I am impressed.

The iPod Touch works on our home wifi. In the morn­ing I check emails and other overnight hap­pen­ings from the com­fort of my bed in Safari.  The syn­chron­isa­tion between my Inter­net Explorer (Vista) and Safari (iPod Touch) browsers works well.

It beeps at me when I have an appoint­ment. My con­tacts are in there.

All it needs is a mini email applic­a­tion. A slightly less finiky onscreen key­board. A cam­era and a VoIP. Oh, that’s right — that’s an iPhone!

You know you are get­ting older when you read stor­ies about his­tory, and have played a very minor part in them.

• Apple sales staff were in Hawaii in 1996 when Gasee came to visit Gil Amelio (it was the Asia-Pacific Sales Con­fer­ence). We didn’t see him as he “flew in under the radar” of the media and employees.
• I remem­ber Ellen Han­cock ask­ing the internal crowd about OS altern­at­ives. I spoke pos­it­ively about Unix, and Sol­aris. Re-reading the his­tory… I didn’t help out much!
• See­ing a pho­to­graph of Rhaps­ody run­ning on a Power Mac from the NeXT cam­pus in March 1997.
• WebOb­jects. What the RoR crowd now think of as the pin­nacle of MVC (model-view-controller) on the web just echoes NeXT’s Open­Step UI devel­op­ment from the late 1980s.
• The 1997 Mac­World con­fer­ence in San Fran­cisco (which I atten­ded, includ­ing the now-famous key­note) with Woz and Steve Jobs as guest speaker was a major love-in

Oh, and not that Pir­ates movie either. I just can­not see Bill Gates as Capt’n Jack.

Thanks to Michael, who passed on this link, (Sir) Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are going to talk­ing at the same con­fer­ence: Wall Street Journal’s Fifth Annual D: All Things Digital Con­fer­ence. (May 29 to 31 near San Diego, CA

Us geeks may look at this co-appearance as two industry heavy­weights attempt­ing to out-pitch each other.  Mere A vs B char­ac­ter­isa­tions are too easy, and down­play the his­tor­ical impact of this event.

I rather think about the echoes both Billg and Stevej have on the future of this planet. Bill with his phil­an­thropy includ­ing the desire to cure many of the for­got­ten third world dis­eases; and Steve with the heart warm­ing kid’s movies and chan­ging to the music industry. Maybe they will have more in com­mon than the world expects?

How will our des­cend­ents remem­ber these men, the giants of our time?

Mac Geeks vs. Apple Account­ants. Fight!

Accord­ing to The Inquirer, Apple is “blam­ing” an Enron-inspired US Fed­eral Law Sarbannes-Oxley (SOX) for the need to charge US$2.00 for the 802.11n update to MacOS X 10.4. Fol­low­ing the link at the bot­tom of the page, there is a slightly longer art­icle on iLounge.

SOX? Prob­ably more import­ant than the Audit­ing (and that lovely open ended sec­tion 404 about ‘Man­age­ment on Internal Con­trols’, which I’ve read) sec­tion, its the FASB Rev­enue Recog­ni­tion rules. All com­pan­ies that provide a con­tract (let’s say a End User License Agree­ment) have strict con­trols and rules related to how the rev­enue from that con­tract must be accoun­ted for. There are whole teams of law­yers and account­ants that know these rules blind, and apply them to com­pany revenue-related activities.

Com­pan­ies that mis-state rev­enue, let’s say as it has offered an mater­ial update to tech­no­logy in a fol­low­ing quarter and not cor­rectly accoun­ted for it, and if offered “free” later would have to re-state rev­enue for pre­vi­ous quar­ters. Now, if Apple had “pre-announced” their 802.11n plans, and been a more open com­pany, I think there would be no charge. Apple has chosen it’s own destiny.

Yes, account­ing can be weird. The world of con­tract law is weirder. But these are the corner­stone of the cap­it­al­ist world we find ourselves in, and stable for nearly 500 years. Until Enron bent the rules, too far.

So, now US$2.00 seems like a minus­cule amount to pay com­pared to enga­ging teams of Apple pro­fes­sion­als to this Sis­yphean Task. How­ever, the cost to Apple is more chip­ping away at the inform­a­tion con­trol fort­ress.

ps: I am neither a rev-rec, nor sox expert!

Update: 21^st Janu­ary 2007: Apple to Charge for Faster WiFi from CNet. Also amended prices above from US$5 to US$2.

• The “Apple” icon sits in front of the iPhone and tv. (yes, lower case). It seems Apple in deeply com­mit­ted to rebrand­ing as a con­sumer brand. New iPods, when they announce this year, will also be dra­mat­ic­ally changed.
• The iPhone is most likely a plat­form on which future high-end iPods will be released. The OS, as stated by Apple, is MacOS X. Essen­tially Apple have a com­mon base OS from their multi-CPU boxes to the smal­lest device: in total con­trol of the UI/UX. Or maybe smaller-configuration Mac tablets?
• The only suc­cess­ful ser­vice Apple has is the iTunes store, which sells nearly 60 songs per second. In a con­nec­ted world of desktops to phones, online ser­vices become more crit­ical to tie things together. Both Google and Yahoo! were onstage with Steve at the key­note. There is more to come, here.
• The tar­get mar­ket is the cur­rent iPod user, not the stand­ard Mac user. There are way more iPod users in the world than Mac users.
• Apple has some sur­prises in Leo­pard to tie iPhone into the OS. Some people are think­ing that there are com­pon­ents of the iPhone that will be in the desktop Leopard.
• Can it do VoIP? The Wifi would lend itself to this. Break­ing the lock on cur­rent car­ri­ers would be revolu­tion­ary. I sus­pect Apple is going to start out with carrier’s help and break­out. Or, they could test hardware-only sales in free-er 3G mar­kets (Asia, Europe) where there is no lock-in.
• The specs on the cam­era are not spe­cified, apart from “2 Megapixels”
• The oper­at­ing sys­tem mar­ket from phones is rather sat­ur­ated, but Apple could license this OS as there is no sub­stan­tial poten­tial rev­enue loss (if they did this with MacOS, they are risk­ing their hard­ware revenues)
• The whole exper­i­ence of using the phone (as a piece of hard­ware) puts all other inter­faces to shame. This alone will bene­fit all phone users as Nokia et al struggle to make their phones work like an iPhone.

More excel­lent notes on MediaVidea

Hands on the iPhone from David Pogue, NYT

Steve Jobs renamed his com­pany to Apple, Inc. Renamed the iTV to Apple TV and the iPod to iPhone. Well, not quite. How­ever, the iPhone is an iPod with a new OS: a baby MacOS X and lots of con­nectiv­ity. If you live in the US.

Apple’s first round of product announce­ments for 2007 at Mac­world have been rumoured for many months — if not years. I think the build up has led to dis­ap­point­ment in the Mac-crowd.

The iPhone is avail­able in June in North Amer­ica, based on a 2 year exclus­ive with Cin­gu­lar. Europe is slated for the end of 2007 and Asia for 2008. With the cur­rent shenanigans in Aus­tralia with Telstra’s new net­work and oth­ers scram­bling — I am not ask­ing for an iPhone for Christ­mas 2007. GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth etc. etc. are all in a nice pack­age where the screen is a touch­screen. Apple have innov­ated on the UX with multi-finger ges­tures to make all the apps work in a small pack­age. Look­ing at the online demos, as you would expect — Apple have gone a long way to cor­rect the cur­rent staid phone user interfaces

The Apple TV seems like a nice idea: a media cen­ter with wire­less and smart integ­ra­tion with the Macs on your local net­work. Seems a little late and me-too. Not 1080i, nor can it play HD/Blueray DVDs. Niftly little thing, but it doesn’t do enough quite yet.

In what was a strange key­note, there were no MacOS X (a good call since all that would occur are many Leo­pard vs. Vista com­par­is­ons), no new Macs (strange since Intel announced new Quad-core pro­cessors overnight) or no new soft­ware. The key­note should have been given at CES, not MacWorld!

My opin­ion is that Apple Inc, as it moves out of the wild-west of com­puters into the highly con­trolled world of tele­com­mu­nic­a­tions and tele­vi­sion is going to have to learn the art of part­ner­ing quicker. It is not yet big enough to push its weight around to get its own way. But like the iPod/iTunes store fran­chise: this could all change within a very short time. Apple is late to the game with both these products, and has a long road ahead to be successful.

Boom! The Ari Gold (Entourage)/Steve Jobs Key­note video

Took the oppor­tun­ity to watch Bill Gates and team present at CES 2007. The theme of the Microsoft show was Con­nec­ted Experiences.

All devices, includ­ing the ‘fridge, all con­nec­ted: this is the vis­ion as described at the begin­ning, and shown in a futur­istic bus-stop, kit­chen and bed­room of the future. More than con­sumer, it per­vades other envir­on­ment — as we are see­ing the explo­sion of the digital dec­ade. In Microsoft’s vis­ion, its most recent products are found­a­tional: Win­dows Vista, Office 2007 to the Live ser­vices: we all must share files, con­nect email, sched­ules and files.

Justin Hutchin­son gave an over­view of Win­dows Vista, and a glimpse of a couple of things not shown pub­licly before: not search­ing, but find­ing files/apps/websites vis­ted from all local com­puters. Thumb­nails for files in your file sys­tem; restore pre­vi­ous cop­ies (named Shad­ow­copy: “bet­ter than going back in time”). From Office 2007, link to live.com to nav­ig­ate through Live3D using an XBox360 con­trol­ler into Vista = Live3D fly thru’ (cool)

Also shown was SportsLounge, a new fea­ture of Media Cen­ter: HD feed, Media Cen­ter, Fox Sports (SportsLounge) alerts based on play­ers. The sooner Aus­tralian digital cable has extra, open fea­tures such as PVR the better.

Also, there is some­thing in Vista Ulti­mate: Extras. This will down­load extra soft­ware pieces to the Vista desktop. For example: Group­shot for fix­ing images where there are mul­tiple people.

Final “wow” fea­ture is a Full motion video desktop back­ground. Oooh, aaahs all round.

Win­dows Home Server, due in the second half 2007. The video cast feed was cut as a HP video was shown. Auto backup from home net­work; con­nectiv­ity Zune XBox, remote from out­side home net­work. Capa­city, put new stor­age in — soft­ware move data around. Any house with more than one com­puter and loads of digital con­tent need a server. From per­sonal exper­i­ence, doing this by your­self is too tough for the aver­age user. May not be a hit in 2007, but cer­tainly will go off in 2008.

Also com­ing XBox Live on Vista (Win­dows) and XBox 360 with IPTV along with HD DVD and Movies down­load (7Gb for Spi­der­man returns, format­ted HD!). More into on Chan­nel 10.

It will be inter­est­ing to com­pare and con­trast with Apple in a few days time. Will Apple get this con­nec­ted­ness? It per­vades Microsoft: from Zune to XBox; everything is connected.

Run downs: Engag­det, and Read/Write Web.