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Went out for sushi and when I came back, a new Macbook had been released, along with a nifty (but poorly named) wireless multi-touch mouse!
White plastic unibody, built-in 7 hour battery, 13.3″ screen, multi-touch glass trackpad, $999.
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What interesting timing. A NYTimes article just came out today about Apple’s wicked sales gains in the last quarter. I’m convinced this company lives in its own universe outside of the recession.
Apple managed to surprise optimistic investors, posting a 47 percent increase in profit in the fourth quarter and handily beating Wall Street’s estimates.
[Apple’s Profit Climbs 47% as Sales Gain via NYT]
From Apple’s Rock&Roll event this morning:
iPod Nano now has a 2.2″ screen, a built-in video camera, microphone, speaker, FM radio, and pedometer. Comes in nine colors; 8GB model for $149, 16GB model for $179. (Make it >30Gb and I’ll buy. My music library is obese.)
iPod touch 8Gb price cut to $199. 32Gb for $299 and 64Gb for $399. The Touch is fastest-growing product in the line.
iPod Classic 160Gb for $249. This model won’t be scrapped until flash memory gets cheaper.
iPod Shuffle comes in five colors and a polished steel special edition. 2Gb for $59, 4Gb for $79. People complained about the on-cord controls, so maybe we’ll see buttons later.
iTunes 9 has Genius playlists and IMPROVED SYNCING! You can selectively sync certain playlists, artists, genres, photos, etc. (Always wanted to do this!)
Adam Benton imagines this is what it will look like:
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”Apple is working with the four largest record labels to stimulate digital sales of albums by bundling a new interactive booklet, sleeve notes and other interactive features with music downloads, in a move it hopes will change buying trends on its online iTunes store…The new touch-sensitive device Apple is working on will have a screen that may be up to 10 inches diagonally. It will connect to the internet like the iPod Touch – probably without phone capability but with access to Apple’s online stores .” [via FT]
It had to happen. Apple couldn’t have held out forever on this netbook market. People are scrambling for every penny in this recession, especially in California (where they are experience a fiscal nightmare to end all nightmares). A lower price point will be much appreciated.
Patents have been afoot; there have been rumors about an affordable, oversized iPod Touch AKA “iTablet” for months. How much will it cost? What kind of screen will it have? And how gorgeous will it look…
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If Sony is willing to stoop down and serve out netbooks (VAOI W Series, starting at $499), then the sky’s the limit. A Sony executive once condemned $300 laptops as a “race to the bottom” that would hurt the PC industry in the long run.
The beauty of electronics — complexities hidden away inside simple exteriors.
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The 3rd generation iPod has always been my favorite because it lacked physical buttons. The futuristic face was one piece with an embedded touchwheel and 4 touch-sensitive ‘buttons’ that glowed orange with the backlight. Unfortunately, in later models, it was replaced by the more functional (but less cool) mismatched grey clickwheel.
I picked a used 15GB 3rd Gen iPod off eBay to have as a collector’s piece and a backup external hard drive. The battery was shot, so I bought one of those 1100 mAh DIY battery replacement kits. The instructions certainly looked easy enough – right?
First, I was trying to preserve the integrity of the casing, prying ever so gingerly…yeah, that didn’t work. Apple iPods are like little white fortresses. At the point where the screwdriver drew blood (ow, my thumbs) I resorted to brute force.
The directions were wrong. The best point to stab it open was near the TOP around the headphone jack where there were no accursed latches, not the suggested point 1.5″ down on the side. After I got it open, it was relatively straightforward: I disconnected the hard drive and switched out the battery.
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The Interactive Displays Conference last week was absolutely fascinating. I’ve some things to wrap up before I can post about it.
“The Taiwanese company Elan Microelectronics has sued Apple, alleging infringement of two of its touch screen patents…The lawsuit alleges that Apple products — including its MacBook computer, iPhone and iPod Touch — use technology that infringes on two of Elan’s patents…” [via NYTimes]
Elan Microelectronic Corporation is a semiconductor & product design house that strives to create solutions which enable smart human-machine interactions. The company’s area of expertise is in the development of multitouch-sensitive inputs for handheld devices and computers, such as the touchpad on the Asus EeePCs.
Honestly, having a multitouch touchpad on my netbook is wonderful–I get a little sad every time I do a two-finger or three-finger tap or swipe on Powerbook (Mac OSX Tiger) and nothing happens. The guess the smart thing would be to upgrade to Leopard, but it’s not entirely necessary.
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“The first patent at issue, U.S. Patent 5,825,352 (“the ‘352 patent”), relates to touch-sensitive input devices with the ability to detect the simultaneous presence of two or more fingers…The ‘352 patent is a fundamental patent to the detection of multi-fingers that allows for any subsequent multi-finger applications to be implemented. The second patent, U.S. Patent No. 7,274,353 (“the ‘353 patent”), is directed to touchpads capable of switching between keyboard and handwriting input modes.” [via ELAN]
Elan has been in licensing talks with Apple for years, but the two companies were not able to come to an understanding. So Elan went ahead and filed suit. Does Elan Microelectronics stands a chance? They did manage to conclude litigation with touchpad-maker Synaptics at the end of 2008 (the two companies agreed to dismiss pending lawsuits and cross-license their patents). Perhaps cross-licensing will be in order for this case as well as the forseeable one between the Apple iPhone and the Palm Pre.
All the IP hurdles are going to make it difficult for companies to bring multitouch technologies to the mainstream market. I hear that Google disabled multitouch on the Android G1 to avoid patent infringement.
This is the feature walkthrough of Bumptop, a gorgeously intuitive 3D user interface that mimics the functionality of your desk in real life.
BumpTop, which debuted at TED 2007, was finally launched earlier this week. There’s a free version available for download and a Pro version for $29. First of all, it looks great. I’m definitely going to to give BumpTop a try this weekend.
PROS
- Multidimensionality means more desktop space for user content. (Like Spaces on Mac OSX Leopard.)
- You can make “piles” or “shelves” of related files, flip through them like a book or put them on a grid. (I’m a big fan of making stacks in real life).
- You can make enlarge more important files and shrink others. (Yes! Visual prioritization!)
- You can toss files around the desktop. Because BumpTop is physics-enabled, larger files are have more “weight” and will plow through smaller files. (Entertaining, functional, and obeys the laws of physics!)
- Social media integration allows you to update Facebook, or Flickr by dropping photos onto their respective icons.
CONS
- Since it’s not a real OS, the 3D environment is constrained to the desktop. Applications will pop up as flat windows, which is kind of awkwardly inconsistent. Not a permanent fix.
Perhaps the full potential of BumpTop cannot be realized unless it’s paired with a touchscreen device. Windows 7 is said to support multi-touch gestures in BumpTop, which should be a lot more fun.
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Of course, the better solution is if Microsoft or Apple revamped their entire OS’s to give true 3D computing environments. I love the idea of a pseudo-gestural interface that takes on the appearance of a real working environment. It’s about time we transitioned from dealing with files & folders to a more tangible and intuitive means of data manipulation.
As mentioned previously, Apple has gotten the ball rolling and patented some ideas for multidimensional desktop environments for future Mac OS’s.
The new iPod Shuffle is ridiculous minimalistic. Weighing in at 11 grams, it’s about the size of a small housekey, which means that you will lose it soon after you buy it. New features: multiple playlists, VoiceOver, and a shiny clip.
The Shuffle controls have been relocated to the headphone cord, which I find particularly worrisome. What happens when you lose the headphones? Sure, you can plug in another pair, but you can’t do anything but listen to music at a preset volume! Clearly, this was not designed for control freaks.
And judging by these instructions, you will have to learn Morse code to navigate around your Shuffle. One function per button, please!
This Apple product isn’t so much innovative as it is strange. I’m very confused by the design choices. What if I don’t want a disembodied voice to read out song titles to me? I like my first generation iPod Shuffle just fine–the ones that looked like a stick of gum & double as flash drives.
Apple and Palm kicked a lot of dirt at each other last week — acting Apple CEO Tim Cook flatly told analysts that “We will not stand for people ripping off our IP” when asked specifically about competition like the Palm Pre, and Palm responded with a similarly-explicit “We have the tools necessary to defend ourselves.” At issue, of course, is that the Pre employs a multitouch screen and gestures almost exactly like those made famous on the iPhone — and if you’ll recall, Steve Jobs introduced multitouch on the iPhone with a slide reading “Patented!” To top it all off, the past few days have seen a number of media outlets proclaim that Apple’s been awarded a “multitouch patent” without so much as a shred of analysis, instead hyping up a supposed future conflict. That’s just not how we play it, so we enlisted Mathew Gavronski, a patent attorney in the Chicago office of Michael Best & Friedrich, to help us clear up some of the confusion and misinformation that’s out there — read on for more. [via Engadget]
“Here’s what’s amazing about the Mac as it turns 25, a number that in computer years is just about a googolplex: It can look forward. The Mac’s original competition—the green-phosphorus-screened stuff made by RadioShack, DEC, and then-big kahuna IBM—now inhabit landfills, both physically and psychically. Yet the Macintosh is not only thriving, it’s doing better than at any time in its history. . .[The] Mac market share has quietly crept into double digits. That’s up from barely 3 percent in 1997, just before the prodigal CEO returned to the fold after a 12-year exile. Any way you cut it, the Mac is on the rise while Windows is waning. . . Apple COO Tim Cook lists six factors: better computers, better software, seamless compatibility with Windows, marketing acumen, successful retail stores, and the belly flop of Microsoft Vista.” [via Wired]
25 Years of Mac: Click to explore a full sized timeline of Apple products
The color progression is awesome. I am glad beige is no longer the default color for PCs!
History shows that a recession can be an auspicious time to invest in a brand. Some of the most successful brand campaigns in the past six decades began during economically challenged years. Of Advertising Age’s “Top 100 Ad Campaigns of the 20th Century,” fully a quarter that got under way after 1945 did so during recession years. Several of the most effective were launched in the ugly years of 1974 and 1975, when consumer spending tanked and gas and commodity prices soared (sound familiar?). In 1974, for example, BMW introduced itself as “The Ultimate Driving Machine,” a slogan that endures to this day and helped turn the German automaker from a niche sports sedan in the minds of American drivers into a top luxury auto brand known for superior engineering in everything from roadsters to SUVs…
[Read more on the Best Global Brands @ BusinessWeek]
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Coca-Cola continues to top Interbrand’s 2008 Rankings of the Best Global Brands. Intel, McDonalds, and Disney are holding on spots #7-9, respectively. Apple rose from #34 to #25 in just a year, edging out Sony at #24. Hennes & Mauritz (abbr. H&M), a rapidly expanding Swedish clothing company known for cheap and “fast fashion”, makes its debut appearance at #22. Aw, I love H&M!
Also, check out Brand New’s Best & Worst of 2008 brand redesigns. Pepsi gets top dishonors. {Below: the hideous new Pepsi logo}
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Sol Sender tells the story of conception and birth of the Obama ’08 logo, including the strategy behind it, developmental concepts and finalist designs for the identity not chosen by the campaign. Read more about the Obama logos that weren’t chosen @ LogoDesignLove. {Below: another finalist design}
