May 2011 Archive
Rumormonger ⇝
Over at Boy Genius Report, they’ve caught wind of some super-secret-planning-and-training-ceremony at Apple Stores this weekend. Probably nothing… and I really hope Scott’s comments is wrong. (Ha Ha Ha)
Apple planning major product launch for 10th retail anniversary? | Boy Genius Report
Three tantalizing tidbits:
There’s an overnight shift planned for around 10-15 individuals at each Apple Store to work from late Saturday all the way through mid-Sunday.
During the overnight shift, it’s going to be required that employees lock cell phones in the main office. They will also have to sign an NDA with Apple.
Employees have had to download gigabytes of data from Apple corporate labeled, “training” in a password-protected zipped folder that won’t accessible to managers or anyone else until Saturday afternoon.
Rationalizing Microsoft and Skype ⇝
I, Cringely puts a good, rational analysis on the $8.5 Billion acquisition. Some good bits:
“[Microsoft and Ballmer] have lost confidence. Microsoft no longer believes it controls or even can control the game. Worse still, they don’t have confidence that they even know the rules.”
And this:
“Apple isn’t the next Microsoft, you see. Apple is not the next anything because the role it aspires to transcends anything imaginable by Microsoft, ever. Google is the next Microsoft, so Google is seen by Ballmer as the immediate threat — the one he has a hope in hell of actually doing something about.”
It’s a good, quick read.
The New Yorker App §
Earlier this week, Condé Nast announced it will bring its magazines to the iPad at reasonable prices. The first publication to arrive: The New Yorker.
I have subscribed to that tome of weeklies on and off for the last decade, stopping the subscription only because the content is often so lengthy for a weekly magazine that I would end up with towering stacks of bookmarked, half-read issues that left me feeling dirty when all 80 pounds were lugged out to the recycling. After allowing a subscription to lapse for more than several weeks, though, I would grow to miss the Talk of the Town, the wit of the comics, and fascinating analysis of some of the nation’s greatest minds — needless to say, a paperless iPad subscription will fit the bill nicely.
Post-The Daily Stress Disorder
I hesitated a couple of days before downloading the updated New Yorker app, waiting to hear the consensus from across the web first — mostly because of my traumatic interaction with The Daily earlier this year. I was the first among my peers to be excited for The Daily, despite Murdoch’s involvement. I thought “finally a major player with Apple’s direct involvement will enter the playing field and a sustainable subscription model à la The Kindle’s excellent subscribe and sync.” (Or something like that.) Needless to say, I was sorely disappointed. The Daily’s price wasn’t the problem, but the app is an embarrassment — absurdly slow, clunky, and more reminiscent of a mid-90s “multimedia CD-ROM!” than a respectable news resource.
So, back to The New Yorker. The app actually came out earlier this year, and I did quickly download it (it was free afterall), but the pricing model was ludicrous — $4.99 per issue. I could keep my paper subscription for less than the cost of one iPad issue per month, and get all 48 of them.
Like a Pig In…
So the other night I swallowed my fear and took the plunge. I downloaded the update, and immediately subscribed at the new monthly cost of $5.99 (that’s about 4 issues a month, 3, I assume, for the months that they publish the double issues). The experience is pristine.
Unlike The Daily, The New Yorker app is tasteful and understated. It’s not audio, and movies, and pictures, and charts, and graphs, because it can. It’s The New Yorker. On an iPad. Clean and no frills, all about the content and a pleasure to navigate. Beautiful typography, hi-quality photography (tastefully sprinkled, as in the print publication), and all of the comics bundled together in one spot — it’s practically perfect in every way.
I subscribe to a couple other Condé Nast publications in addition to The New Yorker and look forward to seeing what they have to offer for those as well.
Why did the publishers give in?
That’s the first question a friend asked when I was showing off the new New Yorker app the other day, and a good one. Why now, a year out, are these major publishers (I believe Hearst also made a similar announcement) deciding to finally introduce reasonable pricing on their publication’s app versions? I think the answer is two fold.
First, and most obvious, Apple just started to allow a subscription model earlier this year in conjunction with the release of The Daily. The second reason, which is a more recent development, I first noticed during the subscription process for The New Yorker — Apple is now sharing user information, and it is entirely opt-in. This is what the publishers really want — our information for their “real” business: selling it to marketing firms and advertisers.
And so be it. If that’s what it takes to get some real, good, content on my iPad I’m fine with it. It’s an opt-in system, and apparently over half of Apple users choose to tap OK. I can’t wait to see what these heavy players come up with, and others as they come on board. This is the year of the iPad all right, and maybe the year the “old” media figures out their future.
So, the New York Times Called §
Last night we got a short e-mail requesting hi-res screenshots of our Memorable Wines app from Bob Tedeschi, writer on the gadget blog on nytimes.com. We, of course, jumped on a response — but had little clue about what might come of it.
This afternoon, we found out. Memorable Wines is featured prominently on the nytimes.com Gadgetwise Blog. So incredible. Just a day after Apple featured us as New & Noteworthy on the App Store homepage.
We’ve spent a lot of energy developing Memorable Meals and Memorable Wines, and the reception has been astounding. Thanks for checking them out… just amazing.
Steve Ballmer ⇝
Ballmer should have been fired a long time ago, MSFT stock has been constipated since the turn of the century. The Skype deal is just the latest in a string of arrogant/bad moves by the infamous monkey-boy CEO.
Ben Brooks has a very nice piece on the state of the matter.
“This Skype deal should be the final nail in the coffin for the Ballmer era at Microsoft, yet I fear that employee number 30 may get a reprieve. Let’s take a stroll down Ballmer memory lane:”
And stroll he does: The Ballmer Days Are Over — The Brooks Review
Indie iOS Devs Under Legal Fire For Offering In-App Purchases ⇝
This story, and my Twitter stream, mention there are other indie developers under fire here. I think that Apple needs to, and will, step up to bat on this — patent trolling, maybe, but small devs can’t afford to prove it. Traction on this would not only put most indie devs out of business, but severely damage trust in the App Store, and Apple’s revenue stream.
Edit: A good suggestion from Marco Arment, let’s all go out and buy these apps as we hear about them — first stop, PCalc.
On MobileMe §
Tomorrow Apple, Inc. will automatically deduct $99 from my credit card for MobileMe subscription — and I’m not actually happy about that fact. I am cornered for payment annually, because they own my e-mail. A decision I regret every year at the this time.
There might be a glimmer of hope in the irritation, however. More than enough has been said about the now infamous North Carolina data center, but I truly believe it carries the key that unlocks a valuable MobileMe service. There are at least as many ideas for what the data center is for as there are hairs on my head, so why not add my own.
Wireless Sync for iDevices
Google has proved this is (mostly) possible on its Android platform — to setup a new Android device, Google credentials are entered, and all of the Google services that you use are automatically synced over-the-air to the device. Imagine being able to do the same with your iPhone. MobileMe incorporates this functionality to some extent for mail, calendars and contacts (the only reason I begrudgingly shovel over my money); but imagine if your media could be transferred with it. Just this week Google introduced its Music Beta, and at the same time Amazon is launching their Cloud Drive and Cloud Player services. Apple won’t sit by while Google and Amazon start allowing us to put our media on their servers to stream wherever we please.
A lot is being said about over-the-air updates to the OS itself, I don’t think this is in the cards just yet. The size of iOS updates at this point is a bit large, and failure could be troubling, at best, to recover from. I’m also skeptical about any of this over-the-air sync capability to work via the 3G connection at first, and will likely be wifi only until 4G integration is introduced to the platform. Though my experience is with AT&T, and this would be a handy set of marketing for Verizon when they’re the only carrier that allows it.
iDisk
Let’s face it, Dropbox has this space completely cornered. For no money whatsoever I have 2GB of space that is synced flawlessly to all of my devices (iMac, MacBook Pro, Web, iPhone, iPad). For $99 a year, this is what iDisk should have been. I don’t know what Apple need to do, but fixing iDisk to compete with Dropbox needs to be a priority. I get 20GB to share across my iDisk and e-mail, much more space then Dropbox, but the syncing isn’t on par and Dropbox is just so much more Apple-like than iDisk… how’s that for a critique?
I don’t think this crazy data center is needed, or related, to this feature. More like Apple needs to refocus some energy in this space and hire some brains to fix it, or buy Dropbox with some of their $80 Billion in cash.
Pricing Tier
I really don’t believe MobileMe will become an entirely free service, Apple always expects dollars for their superior service — the only difference here is that this service is not superior. Apple knows MobileMe is sub-par and needs attention, and I think that it has likely seen that attention in the past couple of years. There have been multiple iterative updates to the web interface over the past year — a cleaner mail and calendar — and Find My iPhone has gone free. Let’s not forget the excellent Back to My Mac, the unsung hero of MobileMe, and probably the second of the two reasons I’m willing to fork over the dough.
Apple will, of course, change the playing field when they finally turn on the new MobileMe. What the consensus of want is now (Dropbox-like sync, over-the-air media for my iDevices, FREE e-mail/calendar/photos, etc) I think we will get, but there are probably more than a couple of secrets left up Steve’s sleeve.
I envision a price tier for the new MobileMe that goes like this:
- Tier 1: FREE!; Back to My Mac, Find My iPhone, calendar, contacts, gallery, e-mail and iDisk (now an over-the-air sync capable media locker) with 16GB of storage;
- Tier 2: $29/year; all of Tier 1 with 32GB of storage;
- Tier 3: $39/year; Tier 1 services with 64GB of storage;
- Tier 4: $99/year; Tier 1 services with 200GB of storage and Time Machine backups (after all, Backup App used to be a .Mac only application).
And I think that’s it. The storage capacity is linked to the iDevices available at the time, so there is the possibility of all of your sync-able media living in your iDisk Locker and synced down to all of your devices. This type of pricing falls in line with Apple’s other products as well, one set of standard services differentiated by one or two easy to understand extra features.
I’m probably crazy, but I think it makes sense. In the age of Web 2.0 there are two things that aren’t commoditized yet, storage and bandwidth. MobileMe will be worth a reasonable price that covers those two factors. But the time for Apple to collect $99/year for basic web services available for free/way cheaper elsewhere is over. Come on MobileMe 2.0, I can’t wait.
Blogger. §
For the fifth time in ten years, there is a blogging engine on my website… Nothing old remains, those previous archives are scary even for me to read, so I’ve spared the modern web the indignity.
And so, here is my inaugural post to the latest charlesklein.org. What will I write about? I’m not exactly sure yet, but my interests are of the geek variety, so if that tickles your interest, buckle up and subscribe to the feed. I imagine the bulk of content here will include musings on all things Apple, iOS, web, Twitter, gadgets, etc. etc.
But, for today, here is a quick post to test the engine, update the web page, and populate the feed.
More will follow soon…
