Archive for category Apple
Macs no longer to be Pro
The latest rumour from the internets is that Apple are considering canning the Mac Pro product line, because people are not buying them.
Well when they are such a premium product I am not that surprised, however there are many of Apple’s core industries rely on pci-express – Audio, video to name two and for whom an external Thunderbolt card cage’ four lanes is not going to cut it.
Should we be surprised if this happens. No, not really. Look at the XServe, MacOSX server and FinalCutX if you want evidence of Apple’ abandonment of the high-end.
So take a good look at HP’s Z800 because if you are doing anything that needs a little more grunt than an iMac can provide, it will soon be your new best friend.
iPhone4S tariff bizarre’ness from O2
Being an O2 iPhone customer I was eager to see what their tariff prices are for the new iPhone4GS
The first thing I noticed is that they are offiering a 12 Month contract – obviously ready for the upgrade debacle when the iPhone5 is launched.
Secondly they are listing the data as a bolt-on which include Tethering and Visual Voicemail – from £3/month for a measly 100MB through £6 to £10/month which includes 1GB of data allowance, Wifi and a paultry 50 MMS’s.
Reading between the lines it looks like you don’t get Visual VM unless you get a data bolt-on “All our data Bolt Ons include Visual Voicemail and Tethering for iPhone.”
It’s when you start to crunch the numbers it becomes interesting, which if I am reading it right has all the tariffs (except the unlimited) are more or less the same when you factor in the cost of the phone. In fact the 1200 minutes tariff is cheapest of them all!
Here’s a little chart that demonstrates what I found.
So if I stick with O2 (which is likely taking a cursory look at Vodafone’s tariffs for the device) I’ll be signing up to the 12month 1200 minutes tariff and saving myself some cash.
Steven P. Jobs 1955-2011
After many years of battling illness, Steve Jobs – co founder of Apple, has passed away aged 56
I guess in respect for Steve’s Buddhist beliefs, I should probably say moved on.
You could tell that Steve knew he wasn’t long for this life by the way he was getting his affairs in order, in fact it was amazing that he held on to the CEO position for so long into this latest bought of his illness.
Pancreatic Cancer rarely has a good outcome and it’s treatment is very invasive and life changing.
The years that he had after diagnosis were a (painful) gift, and if you listen to speeches he gave I think he understood this, he seemed changed almost humbled by the reality that we are visitors on this planet and have a relatively limited time here and how we use that time is up to us.
Money can make you comfortable, sure but it can’t buy you well and doesn’t guarantee happiness.
It’s the love of friends and family that count, everything else is secondary.
Everything.
So a chap in America died today, he was a complicated mix of business-man, artist, inventor, perfectionist, some might say tyrant or even genius.
Under his direction, a whole lot of other people have produced some really neat stuff that have informed, entertained and helped millions of other people around the planet, frustrated lots of us and have made others rich (or at least kept some of us gainfully employed for the last 25 years).
So thanks Steve, you know – for all the stuff, it’s been cool.
Seeking alternatives – a growing trend among Final Cut users
The FCPX bitching is still going on and an interesting thing is happening, people are thinking about leaving their Macs behind.
A number of commentors from around the production sites are saying that the only reason they are using Macs is to get FCP. These are the type of people who use computers as a tool, the editors and producers of this world who have to have a computer because they don’t shoot on film any more and their Steenbeck machine is looking a little dusty nowadays. These folks don’t care about OS loyalties. It’s just there to do a function – edit.
Earlier, even I started reading-up on Avid and premier products (my knowledge is sorely lacking in both camps, being a Macolite), looking for alternatives to FCPX for that time when my management say – OK so what about this new FCPX thing and I’ll have to answer that it doesn’t do all the things we need it too. In actual fact, because it can’t even talk to our Final Cut Server DAM it’s a complete non starter.
It is of course not personal on Apple’s part, they are just talking to the larger audience - it is all about the numbers, it always is.
Apple can (in theory) afford to lose vertical market customers like us, we buy ones and twos at a time and there aren’t that many of us. Even bigger organisations don’t have huge numbers of installed seats – in the 10s or at most low 100s.
On a global scale, these customers although nice to have, make-up a very small percentage of overall revenue when iOS devices and stores rake in billions. This is true doubly so for products like Final Cut Server which although I am not party to the numbers, I would imagine has a very small potential marketplace. Where would any sensible company spend it’s development budget? Not on a new version of Final Cut Server.
It is all very understandable, however what agreeves the people caught up in these situations is the lack of communication on Apple’s behalf. At some point they knew that this was going to happen and they were going to have some customers who would be left behind (or more accurately up the creek) following a technological dead end like FCS. It would have been nice for them to be a little more up-front and honest about it really, nods and winks are all well and good but are no basis to justify the huge expense of changing something as fundamental as a DAM system.
On the grapevine, I hear that there’s an interesting new product coming from an alternative supplier around Xmas time.
For now. our systems are all still working, we have sufficient FCPS3 licenses and we still have support for the time being.
You never know in 6 months time Apple may have seen the light and fixed the omissions in FCPX and built a FCServer replacement into Lion server (or whatever).
Not sure if I’d be gullible enough to bet my job on it though. Not again.
Note: I think it is worth pointing out here that the views expressed on my blog are mine only and are in no way shared or endorsed by my employer.
CoreData at the heart of FCPX
From what I am reading an Apple Technology called CoreData is at the heart of the new Final Cut Pro X software.
CoreData is a bit like a monolithic database that stores all the metadata for all your FCPX projects, instead of the data being stored in a project file as Final Cut Pro did. I believe this is the same for the latest generation of iMovie too and is the basis of the ‘events’ based organisation in these packages.
This is why (currently) there’s no direct import of FinalCut Pro projects into FCPX and is also why it’s not possible to use Final Cut Server with the new software.
CoreData doesn’t seem to directly lend itself to network environments – looking at various articles it seems to be another one of those Apple Technologies where they have taken it just so far and not thought how it might be used in the wider environment.
Cue collective sigh and shake of bowed heads. I might even venture a facepalm at the same time.
All a matter of scale
I sent my buddy Ian (probably the only reader of this blog – Hi mate) an article from Daring Fireball:
Demoted
Monday, 6 June 2011
Today’s was a jam-packed keynote. Apple announced a lot of news; there is much to talk and think about. But the key line was when Steve Jobs, describing iCloud replacing iTunes as your digital hub, said, “We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device.”
iCloud is the new iTunes. The tethered digital hub is dead; long live the wireless digital hub. Apple sees iCloud as shaping the next ten years the way the iTunes-on-your-Mac/PC digital hub shaped the last ten.
This is a fundamentally different vision for the coming decade than Google’s. In both cases, your data is in the cloud, and you can access it from anywhere with a network connection. But Google’s vision is about software you run in a web browser. Apple’s is about native apps you run on devices. Apple is as committed to native apps — on the desktop, tablet, and handheld — as it has ever been.
Google’s frame is the browser window. Apple’s frame is the screen. That’s what we’ll remember about today’s keynote ten years from now.
Ian’s response was basically that Google has the economy of scale that will mean they will eventually win out:
I think the Apple world will be more feature rich, but Google will appeal more to the masses, people who don’t want to buy Apple hardware, I think both ideas have a market
Unfortunately this story has been told many times before:
- Betamax v VHS
- Mac OS v Windows 3.x
- iCloud v Google
I’m not saying iCloud will go the way of Betamax, just that it is unlikely to triumph overall
Hmmm, well lets look at the numbers:
Apple announced at the keynote that there are now 200 million iOS devices out there.
Google don’t release numbers however according to Wikipedia: ”It is not known how many people use the Google Apps platform, although a Google blog post in March 2010 claimed that 25 million people had “switched to Google Apps.”
So, working on the basis that Google have managed to double their subscribers over the last year and there is a 50% uptake of Apple’s cloud service that’s still leaves Apple with double the number of subscribers of Google and the number of potential customers for iCloud are growing at about 500k/day.
WWDC Predictions
OK, it is that time of year (now MacWorld is off Apple’s calendar anyway) to make some predictions about what lovely stuff Lord Jobs of Cupertino will be displaying to his acolytes on the 6th.
Lion, iOS5 and iCloud are a given – we have seen the posters. The new Time Capsule – also quite likely (sorry Mike), but what other fodder will come from the Jobsien nosebag?
Here’s my (and others) predictions/hopes/fleeting fantasies/depressing visions:
- Launch of a new Mac Pro with a slightly narrower form factor and handles that can be replaced with rack ears (oh please guys do this, we REALLY miss XServe)
- Licensing of the Spotify architecture – Funny how there’s no Spotify in the US yet – can’t all be a labels issue. What if Apple have licensed it’t tech for iCloud?
- Home directories in the cloud with continual intelligent syncing (Caching) to all devices
- User log-ons to iOS devices
- Terminal services for MacOS X, including an iOS app to access it.
- Apple TVs (as opposed to AppleTV)
- Unification of the various (i)stores to one app
- iWork in the cloud – HTML5/Ajax based office suite
- Run iOS apps on Mac – possibly as widgets
- Hand-over of media playback from mobile to fixed devices
- All apple devices to become touch enabled
- Lion Server is more expensive after all
- A strategy for corporate use of the Mac OS X App store is announced (unlikely I know)
- Apple transition all portable Macs to ARM (Doubly unlikely – at the moment)
- iPhone5! – Yeah right.
Feel free to discuss below!
SpotifApple?
Here’s a prediction that probably will fall flat, but I have been looking at Spotify recently – good but could be so much better.
Apple need to buy Spotify and incorporate it into iTunes – 10 million tracks at random chosen by Apple Genius. What more could you want.
As I said, probably barking up the wrong tree but how fantastic would it be.
Apple as the new ‘evil empire’
OK, I’ll admit – I am an Apple fanboy. Anyone who knows me will confirm this. I have relied on Apple for my daily wage for the last 25 years, Apple has put food on my table and a roof over my children’s head. Either directly or indirectly I owe a lot to the company.
I love their products but I accept sometimes they have faults, no company is perfect and as a commercial concern they have the right to do what is best for the company but on the whole I trust Apple to sort them out.
I also trust them with my credit card, my personal data and I trust them to deal with my communications and systems. So far, to my knowledge, they have not betrayed that trust.
Over the last 25 years I have watched the company be buoyant, struggle, become beleaguered then rally and become very successful again. Throughout all this time they have been the whipping boy of the industry press, when they are down everyone puts the boot in, calling for the execution of the directorate and the sale of the company to people no better second hand car salesmen. When they are up everyone in the press watches for the slightest kink in the armour and then, when they eventually find one (or make one up) there is a feeding frenzy.
The latest ‘kink’ is of course the signal issue on the iPhone4. No-one I know who has the new device has seen the issue in the UK but still there is a massive disinformation campaign going on at the moment to label the new phone as a useless piece of junk.
When my friend’s dad comes and asks me whether he should wait before buying an iPhone4 because of the design fault and the coming “recall of all the handsets” there is time to be concerned about how my favourite computer company is doing in the PR war.
I read a troll piece on the Telegraph website earlier (which I am so disgusted at I am not going to link) that was designed to spread FUD by quoting an internal support memo that said that bumpers should not be given to complaining customers. This is entirely right if Apple don’t accept that there is a physical issue with the device, it would set a precedence so that anyone could request a bumper for free by saing they were having the issue, once that has started it would be impossible to stop.
The paper however painted that as Apple not caring about their customers and the commenters gleefully joined in. When one poor soul made the mistake of posting that all his Apple kit, including his nice new iPhone4 was functioning just fine thank you, he was verbally lynched by multiple posters who were foaming at the mouth in disgust. I am betting a goodly number of these people have never owned an Apple product and would rather nail their tongue to the table before they did.
I don’t know what Apple can do in this situation. There will always be an issue that can be picked away at like some sort of cold sore, as I said no company can be 100% perfect 100% of the time.
In my experience, most people’s experience of Apple customer service is good to great. In my experience, most people who get an Apple product fall in love with it and would never go back if they could help it.
Why then does the mention of Apple cause the ‘non-believers’ to rise in such fervent anger, Bigotry? Jealousy?
At the end of the day it is just tech. It isn’t worth wasting time arguing the toss and getting stressed nor is it worth insulting someone personally because they like a different manufacturer to you.
We live in a free(ish) world with some personal choice. I choose Apple, they choose Wintel or Linux. why can’t they be happy with their own tech and leave us to be happy with ours?
Hmm, there’s some curious parallels to religious fervour going on here isn’t there? – “My god is the one true god” / “My operating is the best operating system”.
“Why can’t they be happy with their own theologies and leave us to be happy with ours?” = Why can’t we all just get along?
iPad and the BBC
In the morning we normally have the BBC news on while we are getting ready. At about 08:20 this morning they did a piece about the iPad, well I say ‘a piece’, it was a hatchet job.
Technology reporter Rory Cellan-Jones, who looked quite flustered and confused for some reason, had a bunch of pad devices in his hands (obviously to show that the iPad wasn’t the only game in town) but only talked about the Apple device and the Kindle.
Firstly he angled the device so that the screen reflected the studio lights (and all the finger prints – it looked like he had been using after eating KFC) into the camera.
He then showed an iBook on the device but slagged it off for being £15 and it not being shareable (“you can’t loan it to your friends can you?”).
Then he tried to demo the new Times app (launched today – this should be good I thought) but after moaning that it cost a tenner a month, it crashed on launch and he ended up showing a kids book instead – oh how embarrassing, way to go guys, that was your 15 minutes and you failed. Cellan-Jones commented “well I’m sure it will get better” in reference to the Times app.
No mention of iWork, nothing on the thousands of other fantastic apps on the store.
He finally summed up by calling it an expensive useless toy trapped in Apple’s ecosystem.
Tosser.
****Update****
I was speaking to a chap in the studio earlier who is closely involved in the Times App project (he was demoing it on camera for the site) and he knew about the “crash” of the app. Apparently it didn’t crash at all. It has been rock solid for all the time he has been using it including early betas and watching him demo the thing today it certainly looked like the onscreen graphics that I saw on the spot this morning were actually it’s splash screen with the Times masthead and then the choose and edition page – there’s only one edition in the middle of the screen because the thing only launched today!
Thinking back to the BBC footage, there wasn’t an unexpected close which the iPhone/iPod Touch does to misbehaving applications, they cut away to a wide shot before the app had started and he angled the thing away from camera. There were no blue dialog message boxes popping up or any other indications that is had fallen over.
The plot thickens – was Cellan-Jones deliberately pouring scorn on the Times App at the same time as dissing the iPad to really show it in a bad light?
As I said – Tosser