Tag: Tech

Mountain Lion Marks a Change at Apple

On Thursday night Apple pulled Mountain Lion out of a hat. A select number of journalists and bloggers had been given early access to a developer’s preview version for about a week and kept them quiet. These lucky ones got to see Apple’s next major operating system for the Mac and all of them published their reviews almost at the same time, giving Apple maximum coverage on the web and surprising everyone else.

Unlike in years past, Apple this time did not reveal its upcoming Mac OS X version on stage in front of a large audience with full press coverage. Instead it did things very differently.

As John Gruber noted in his impression of the unveiling, Apple’s Phil Schiller told him that Apple was starting to do things differently. Like not giving early access to New York Times for one. David Pogue was once among Apple’s most favored journalists but not this time as Apple shunned the Times for its scathing series of reports on the working conditions of Foxconn’s factories in China which made Apple’s products.

Apple had staged a press event for the education sector a few weeks ago in New York and is expected to do another one for the next version of iPad in early March. If it had done another one for Mountain Lion, it would have had three events in three months and could be seen as cheapening the value of its press gatherings. Apple hasn’t had press conferences for Mac product releases in a while either as the current versions of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro notebooks were silent updates to the Apple Online Store.

Apple will definitely talk about Mountain Lion at the Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco in June and that is when it will get its stage time. Mountain Lion comes a year after Lion when nobody was expecting an update until 2013 since Lion took nearly two years after Snow Leopard.

From 2001 to 2003 Apple had released yearly upgrades for Mac OS X but it took longer to release Tiger in 2005 and since then, new versions had been released approximately every year and a half. It looks like Apple is now hoping to catch the momentum of the iPhone and iPad and bring the Mac back in the spotlight.

Additionally, while Apple had started calling its Mac operating system as OS X instead of Mac OS X with Lion, it took until Mountain Lion to finally drop Mac from the About This Mac display. The Mac name will obviously still be used for its hardware products, Apple is just differentiating the OS from the computers.

As I noted in my post about Tim Cook’s speech at a Goldman Sachs conference being streamed by Apple, it was a clear sign that Apple was beginning to institute a different policy with regards to public engagements. Phil Schiller’s statement to John Gruber only confirmed that.

[update]

Shortly after posting this I found out that David Pogue was indeed among the early group of people given access to Mountain Lion but of course, I was already on a trip out of town with little access to the internet and almost no way of editing this post. Gruber especially noted some time later that Pogue was the next person to be briefed after him.

It’s Like Tap Tap Tap Buying TUAW*

So this happened.

There was this post the other day by M.G. Siegler citing an example of Disney owning both ESPN and Anaheim Mighty Ducks at the same time for a period and that Boston Red Sox is owned by The New York Times Company. This particular situation however, is not exactly comparable. Like the title said, it’s like Tap Tap Tap buying TUAW. Or the Red Sox buying the NYTimes.

I see it as purely a talent acquisition. The founder of the blog is after all a graphics and interface designer and he’s getting a position in the new parent company which is an app development house while a contributor gets to be chief editor.

In no situation can I expect this deal to make sense. The reason given? Shared vision of growing and reaching out to the Indonesian Mac and iOS communities. That’s bullshit. Come on. Sure it’s a shared vision, sure both parties would like those communities to grow (clearly for very different reasons) but giving that as a reason is purely press talk.

If the acquisition was by an investment or a holding/parent company who happened to have a stake in the other, there’d be no problems with that. It’d be exactly like Disney owning both ESPN and the Mighty Ducks, or like East Ventures owning Apps Foundry and Penn Olson. Oh wait.

Will the blog survive and maintain its course? I don’t see why not. Will it remain an independent blog? I doubt it, after all, it’d be run by an app company instead of by itself. So congratulations on the pile of cash, commiserations on the acquisition.

*Reposted and revised on DailySocial

Apple CEO Tim Cook Spoke at Length About The Company

While DailySocial isn’t about gadgets, there’s always a discussion about our favorite fruit company, especially now that Apple is arguably the largest mobile devices company in the world with the most prominent developer and application ecosystem. With Tim Cook now at the helm, the company has taken an unusual step to stream his talk at the recent Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference.

This represents a divergence from how Apple had been conducting its public appearances in the past and perhaps offers a peek into how the company will address the press as well as the public through its executives.

While this is news in itself, the real discovery is what Cook said during his hour-long session. If you’d rather read than listen, Macworld has put together an excellent transcript of his talk.

Cook talked about a very wide range of topics including opportunities in developing countries, the distribution and sales performance of the iPhone and iPad, the recent controversy about working conditions at Foxconn’s factories, product pricing, and lots more.

Monetizing Mobile is Facebook’s Greatest Challenge

Jenna Wortham for the New York Times:

Amid the jaw-dropping financial figures the company revealed last week when it filed for a public offering was an interesting admission. Although more than half of its 845 million members log into Facebook on a mobile device, the company has not yet found a way to make real money from that use.

“We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven,” the company said in its review of the risks it faces.

Monetizing Mobile is Facebook’s Greatest Challenge

The Linley Group offers a possible reason why Apple is limiting Siri to iPhone 4S.

To reduce system cost and eliminate the extra package required for the Audience chip, Apple cut a deal to integrate the noise-reduction technology directly into its A5 processor, which appears in the iPhone 4S. This technology is critical for the new phone because not only does it improve call quality, it blocks out background noise when users provide voice commands to Siri, the intelligent assistant built into the iPhone 4S. Without this noise reduction, Siri would be unusable even with a modest amount of background noise.

Recently I had installed Dragon Search and Dragon Dictation on my 3GS. While the underlying software that power these apps and Siri are from Nuance, the above finding by The Linley Group could be a reason why Nuance’s Dragon software titles have difficulties in a crowded room in my phone.

Apple is of course known to refrain from introducing or featuring technologies and abilities that have yet to meet its own threshold of acceptable performance in its products.

Another reason that have come up in the past for the lack of Siri in older products was the possibility that because Siri is still in beta, the company may be testing and collecting data to eventually deliver a more complete experience.

Of course, should Apple offer Siri in older iPhones, the value of iPhone 4S will be diminished greatly, and Apple certainly doesn’t want that to happen given that the company still sells the 3GS and 4 for the lower end of the market.

Internationally though, it makes little difference since Siri doesn’t offer much of an assistance beyond dictation and personal reminders outside of the United States at the moment anyway. Additionally, its linguistic limitations makes Siri practically unusable in many markets.

/via @charlesarthur

The Linley Group offers a possible reason why Apple is limiting Siri to iPhone 4S.

The LA Times brought up the issue that Scottish people have with Siri. Despite being part of the UK, the Scots clearly have such thick accents that Siri has trouble understanding them. The results are obviously unfortunate for the Scots and for Apple but make for some humorous exchanges. At least Apple knows it has a wee bit of problem over the Atlantic.

Avid Studio goes to the iPad

AllThingsD:

“We’ve seen a shift in how creation is happening, and it’s really happening on almost any device,” said Tanguy Leborgne, vice president of consumer and mobile technology strategy at Avid. “We think the tablet is more than just a consumer device; more and more people are creating on it.”

The app will be iPad only for now and costs $4.99 for the first 30 days after which it will be $7.99. 

If there’s anyone out there who still say the iPad is a media consumption device, go suck on this.

Avid Studio goes to the iPad

Thinking about ebooks the way we think about console games and mobile apps

Maybe I haven’t thought this through but amidst all this kerfuffle about proprietary eBook formats, has anyone thought about ebook platforms? Apple has its own format for iBooks, Amazon’s Kindle reads its own format as well, so does Kobo, etc. Yes, there’s the standard ePub format that everyone is supposed to agree on but we know that it may not necessarily serve the commercial interests of each eBook platform provider.

Authors and publishers are pretty much beholden to the whims of platform providers like Apple and Amazon because they rely on these big consumer electronics guys to deliver their work to their readers as far as the digital format is concerned.

Why not think of these as platforms? You know, just like how console game developers have to recreate their games for every console they want to distribute their games on. Just like how mobile application developers have to recode their apps to deliver the best experience on each mobile platform. Just like how software developers have to redo their work for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

The path that delivered us these platforms may have differed from how the ebook formats have come to be but what we have now is pretty much the same situation. Consider the standard ePub format as the web app of ebooks, able to be read anywhere on any platform but has yet to deliver the richer experience that “native” formats are able to.

Just a thought.

Foxconn’s workers in context

The working conditions at Foxconn has been the subject of much discussion and outrage over the last few days following the New York Times exposé. Apple has since bore the majority, if not the full, brunt of the criticisms for allowing what looks to be a sweatshop full of suicides with workers earning very little while making iProducts despite other consumer electronics companies also employing Foxconn to do their manufacturing and assembly.

What everybody has missed on however, is context. Thanks to Tim Worstall at Forbes, we now have that context and even better, there’s a clear infographic to illustrate that if you can’t be bothered reading Worstall’s counter argument. I had to link to Worstall’s entire blog instead of the infographic post since Forbes seems to have messed up the link but I’ll embed it for you.

Foxconn’s workers in context

Reason to Attend Conferences: The People

Earlier this week I posted some thoughts on DailySocial on whether it’s worth attending conferences, especially technology-oriented conferences.

In it I said that the contents of conferences generally aren’t worth the money you pay to attend because you’ll more likely come across them on the Internet one way or another. Often the keynotes or talks are posted online via streaming, live blogs, look backs, or podcasts. Photos are almost always abound.

What makes conferences worth attending, I argued, are the connections you make with fellow attendees whether they’re new acquaintances or friends that you rarely catch up with and the chance to meet or rub shoulders with other people in the industry.

In San Francisco this past few days was Macworld | iWorld, the latest incarnation of the long-running Macworld Expo. Stephen Hackett at 512 pixels posted his own thoughts about attending the conference.

Again, the talks and speeches at Macworld can be found online, but  what he found most valuable is the chance to catch up with a lot of people that he wold not have otherwise met in person on a regular basis.

As he said,

I learned that people I know from the Internet are real people and – more importantly – that our friendships are real, even though we don’t see each other most of the time