Latest Posts in Mac Word
AT&T's many missed iPhone opportunities
Who would have expected that Public Enemy Number One coming out of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference would be AT&T? I mean, nobody loves the phone company, or the cable company, or the electric company. (As a kid I did love “The Electric Company,” but these days as a homeowner my local utility features many more bills and much less Rita Moreno, thereby diminishing my enthusiasm.) But the outright booing of AT&T, egged on by Apple executives? I was shocked.
This is not to say that AT&T doesn’t deserve the criticism. Presumably Apple chose to single out its U.S. carrier partner out of frustration with AT&T’s intransigence, as a negotiating ploy, or a little bit of both. But the fact remains, Apple provided the set-up. First, by mentioning AT&T as an afterthought among carrier partners who would be offering MMS support on the day iPhone 3.0 shipped. As Apple’s senior vice president of iPhone software Scott Forstall said:
Now, MMS requires carrier support as well. Twenty-nine of our carrier partners in 76 countries around the world will support MMS at the launch of iPhone OS 3.0. In the United States, AT&T will be ready to support MMS later this summer. Next.
Where's Waldo?
Like MMS, this requires carrier support. We have 22 carrier partners in 42 countries around the world that will support this at the launch of iPhone 3.0, and more will be rolling out… later.
This time Forstall didn’t mention AT&T. He didn’t have to. The accompanying slide featured Apple carrier partners great and small, such as LuxGSM (Luxembourg), Telkomsel (Indonesia), VimpelCom (Russia), Telenor (Scandanavia), and Turkcell (Turkey), not to mention the European heavyweights O2, T-Mobile, and Vodafone and even much-maligned Canadian carrier Rogers. The familiar AT&T globe logo was nowhere to be seen. And thus began a cadence of boos along with plenty of derisive laughter.
Don't look inside Apple's black box
Ask Apple what’s in the iPhone and they’ll treat it like a black box, albeit one powered by Apple’s special brand of technological magic. Or maybe elves. Or magic beans.
I exaggerate, a little. But the fact remains: when it comes to the iPhone (and its non-phone counterpart, the iPod touch), Apple doesn’t want the product to be described using the geeky tech language that we all use to discuss computers.
When I sat down with senior director of worldwide iPhone product marketing manager Bob Borchers on Monday, he was clear that “the usual speeds and feeds” aren’t the way Apple likes to talk about the iPhone. “Overall, it’s just a snappier experience. There are so many different facets to it — it’s just faster, better, quicker, snappier, and a great experience.”
All Apple wants you to know about the iPhone 3G S is that “the S simply stands for speed,” to quote Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller — speed at opening apps, speed at playing games, speed at downloading stuff on the network. How does that speed get in there? Let’s not go there.
Apple: The low-price leader?
This morning all the ads on my radio were about sales, deals, and other ways to save money (by spending it). That’s what I always notice during an economic downturn: the advertising. It’s no longer so much about the products as about their low price tags or the efficiency that you’ll gain if you buy them. Buy this magazine for $6.99 and you’ll save a hundred bucks in added productivity!
But in a time of thinning wallets, rising unemployment, and plunging home prices, what happens to a company that refuses to compromise on features in order to slash prices? What happens to a company that emphasizes profitability over expanding market share? What does the terrible economy mean for Apple?
If reports on the rumor blogs are to be believed, it means price cuts are imminent. Specifically, the rumors seem to focus on price cuts for the iMac and MacBook to make those consumer-friendly models more attractive to shoppers who might otherwise be swayed by Microsoft’s stepped-up advertising efforts.
The knives are out
In late March, Microsoft unveiled one of its most aggressive—and if I’m being honest, most effective—ad campaigns in recent memory. The first two spots in the campaign featured a gal named Lauren and a guy named Giampolo trying to buy the most feature-filled laptop they could for a given amount of money—$2,000 for Giampolo, $1,000 for Lauren. Spoiler warning: neither Microsoft ad ended with the people buying Macs.
Apple to netbooks: Drop dead
As someone who’s fascinated by the idea of Apple doing some sort of small device—not necessarily a netbook, but something bigger than an iPod touch and smaller than a MacBook—I pay close attention to what Apple says about the whole netbook market.
(If you haven’t been paying attention, a netbook is a cheap, small laptop. PC-makers are selling a lot of them. Apple doesn’t make one.)
During the company’s quarterly conference call with financial analysts Wednesday, the analysts once again wanted to know what Apple was doing in the netbook market.
Back in January’s first-quarter results call, an analyst asked Apple COO Tim Cook what Apple’s intentions were for the fledgling Netbook market.
Google gives Safari a kick in the pants
Tuesday’s release of a Safari 4 public beta is a radical departure from previous Apple interfaces, not just in Safari but in Mac OS X as a whole. Out goes the standard Mac OS X window bar, replaced by a window bar that serves double duty as browser tabs by sectioning itself up into smaller segments.
It’s a big change that helps Apple tout Safari 4 as “the world’s fastest and most innovative browser.” Which it would be were it not for the fact that almost six months ago Google announced Chrome, its own innovative browser that features — among other features — tabs on top, above the browser’s URL window and control buttons. (See the addendum at bottom for a clarification on who "invented" tabs on top.)
So when I first saw Safari 4 Tuesday morning, I couldn’t help but think that the arrival of Chrome must have had a big impact on the Safari team. I’m not saying that Apple’s engineers saw Chrome’s tab interface and decided to rip it off—for all I know, the Safari team was working on the very same concept in parallel. But I do think that Chrome, when viewed as an attempt to change the way people think of and use web browsers, must have been a spur to a company that’s accustomed to being at the forefront of software innovation.
Safari 4 (top) and Chrome (bottom) both provide tabs above the URL bar.
Chrome [is] “a wake-up call for the Safari UI guys.” It’s not that any particular feature of Chrome is so wonderful… It’s the idea that someone other than Apple has taken such clear leadership in this area. Google Chrome makes Safari’s user interface look conservative; it makes Apple look timid. And when it comes to innovation, overall daring counts for a lot more than individual successes or failures on the long-term graph.
'Watchmen's' Adrian Veidt looks at his own Top Sites view.
Apple’s made a lot of strides in Safari 4, as well as introducing some new features that will take some time getting used to. Some of them might end up being duds, but others will no doubt become ones we rely on regularly.
Whether or not the individual features of Chrome inspired Apple, it’s clear that Apple isn’t going to let Google have the lead in browser innovation without a fight. And the more innovation that happens, the better it will be for users of Web browsers—which at this point is pretty much everybody with a computer! So it’s a big deal.
(Stay tuned for our first look of Safari 4, which we’ll be posting soon.)
Addendum: Reader Faruk Ates points out that "tabs on top" began with Opera. Fair enough, but I'm not sure anyone cared that Opera did it. (Sorry, Opera fans.) Google's announcement of Chrome — a completely new browser dedicated to shake up the browser world and with the strength of Google behind it—is what I feel shook up Apple, as I wrote above. Even if Opera pioneered some specific features, I don't think Opera was what motivated Apple to chuck out all Mac OS X UI conventions and stick tabs in the window bar. In my opinion, it was Google and Chrome that did that, not Opera. Is this yet another case of the true innovators in a category being ignored when their inventions are hijacked by companies with better PR and bigger budgets? I won't deny it.
Getting geeky with Twitterrific and AppleScript
I am most definitely a devotee of the social-networking message service Twitter. (Explaining Twitter’s appeal is the topic of another story, one I haven’t written yet.) But if you use Twitter, and especially if you use The Iconfactory’s Twitterrific for Mac (
; free with ads, $15 without) you might be interested in discovering some of the program’s hidden features.
Before I begin, an aside: There are a lot of Twitter apps for the Mac. I’ve tried most of them, but I keep coming back to Twitterrific. Its simple interface does what I want, when I want. Some of the competitors offer interesting features, but none of them work well enough to tear me away from Twitterrific. I do have a wish-list for Twitterrific that’s about a mile long—but again, that’s another story. Despite my recognition of its flaws, Twitterrific’s the Twitter app that works the best for me.
Anyway, on to the geek-out.
Filtering tweets
During the run-up to the election last year, I got really tired with seeing people use Twitter to argue about politics. Not that I’m not engaged in the political process—I vote in every election. But I find Twitter, with its 140-character limit, to be the death of nuance, and in my mind any political conversation worth listening to involves nuance. So I decided to nuke every single Tweet in my timeline that mentioned the candidates.
iMovie '09 image stabilization
iLife ’09 has arrived, and with it, new versions of iPhoto and iMovie.
We’ve been playing with iLife ’09 around the office today and we’ll have much more on iPhoto in a little while. But I wanted to present a brief sample video of the new image-stabilization features in iLife ’09.
Here’s what I did: I imported a few sample clips (I happened to have video of my Thanksgiving floating around, so I used those), and waited as iMovie cranked for quite a while on them, preparing them for image-stabilization. (Advice: import your videos before going to bed or going out of the house for a while—it’s a long process.)
Then I found a few clips that I’d consider representative of hand-held consumer video—namely, me trying to carve the turkey (Alton Brown’s Good Eats Turkey, by the way) with a dull knife, and a long zoom pull-back shot of the dinner table from above. These were taken with a Sony HDR-SR11 camcorder with built-in image stabilization, and yet there's still noticeable improvement with iMovie's stabilization.
In the video player below you’ll see both clips, first without any image stabilization, then with image stabilization applied.
By the way, here’s how image stabilization works: it zooms in on your video a little bit, then pans and zooms the video as necessary in order to exactly counteract the camera shake. Sometimes the zooms can be a bit extreme, but iMovie ’09 is pretty smart about it: first, it adjusts the zoom based on the portion of your clip you choose to use. Import a very long clip, and you might see that it’s dramatically zoomed in—but if you trim the clip to a smaller, less shaky portion, you may find that it’s automatically zoomed further out. And you can also force iMovie to zoom further out by using the Maximum Zoom slider in the Clip Inspector palette.
We’ll have much more about iLife ’09 in the coming days, including tips and tricks and full reviews. Stay tuned. In the meantime, if you have any questions about iMovie ’09, I’d be happy to attempt to answer them in the Macworld.com comment thread attached to this story.
Apple: We're not a one-man show
In the days since Steve Jobs announced that he was taking a leave of absence from Apple, I’ve been inundated with questions from users, friends, colleagues, and members of the mainstream media. The most popular conception of Apple—one that, let’s be honest, Apple has nurtured to a certain degree—is that it’s the Steve Jobs Show. Popularly, he’s the man who invents the products, designs them, plans their marketing campaigns, the works.
Which is obviously silly. Apple is a huge corporation with tens of thousands of employees. It’s not just Steve Jobs and a bunch of lackeys. And yet, I do think that’s the perception most people have about Apple.
Jobs is, as Reggie Jackson famously said about himself, the straw that stirs the drink. And to beat the baseball metaphors into the ground, Jobs is undoubtedly Apple’s most valuable player, because he has skill in so many different disciplines. But as we San Franciscans know, having suffered through losing seasons as Barry Bonds concluded his march on the home run record, a single franchise player isn’t enough to make a winning team.
That’s why, in the decade-plus Jobs has been back at Apple, he’s remade the company in his own image, bringing in people who fit his vision and working style. If and when Jobs steps away from Apple permanently, he won’t be replaced by any single person. He will instead be replaced by a bunch of different people, each with strengths in particular areas. Apple’s bench is deep.
This idea—that Apple’s got a strong team and a core philosophy that’s far beyond any single player—was brought home by a lengthy reply Apple COO Tim Cook gave to a question about Steve Jobs’ health during Wednesday’s financial conference call. Here’s what Cook said, word for word:
There is an extraordinary breadth and depth and tenure among the Apple executive team. And these executives lead over 35,000 employees that I would call all “wicked smart.” And that’s in all areas of the company, from engineering, to marketing, to operations, sales, and all the rest.
And the values of our company are extremely well-entrenched. You know, we believe we’re on the face of the Earth to make great products, and that’s not changing. We’re constantly focusing on innovating. We believe in the simple, not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution. We believe in saying no to thousands of projects, so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollinization of our groups, which allows us to innovate in a way others cannot. And frankly, we don’t settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company, and we have the self-honesty to admit where we’re wrong, and the courage to change.
And I think regardless of who is in what job, those values are so embedded in this company that Apple will do extremely well. And I would just reiterate a point Peter made in his opening comment, that I strongly believe that Apple is doing the best work in its history.
What about the next six months, while Jobs is on leave save for “major strategic decisions?” During Wednesday’s call, Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer repeatedly declared how excited they were about Apple’s “new product pipeline.” That’s sending a signal: Apple is a company that works on a long schedule, with a road map of developments that goes out quite a ways. Certainly longer than six months. So I’m sure there are plenty of interesting products in the pipeline. The company will announce them when it’s good and ready.
I’m sure that Jobs’s health issues have led to the company considering how to structure itself so that not as much of the weight of management falls on him, but that may have happened five years ago when Jobs had cancer. Apple will keep doing what it’s been doing. It’s riding the wave of the iPhone’s success, especially when it comes to the third-party app store. There will be a new version of OS X this year, new Mac hardware, new iPods, possibly a new device somewhere between an iPod touch and a MacBook… in other words, I think this will be your typical Apple year in terms of products, whether or not Jobs is present at their unveiling.
The Mac at 25
As I write this, I have the very first issue of Macworld sitting in front of me. It’s a magazine without a cover date: because it was produced with the cooperation of Apple Computer itself—back when Apple still called itself Apple Computer—the first issue was set to debut the same day as the Mac itself. The editors back then didn’t know exactly when that day would be, and so went to press without a date on the cover.
As it turned out, the day was January 24, 1984. And so this week, we’re marking the 25th birthday of both the Mac and Macworld.
In flipping through that first issue, the few familiar things really stick out, since so much has changed in the intervening years. For example: Steve Jobs is on the cover (though he’s in a brown pinstriped suit, not in his modern-era black turtleneck and jeans). In front of him are three all-in-one Macs. Of course, they’re the originals. But I’m struck by the fact that the iMac—an all-in-one device designed for mainstream computer users—continues to be inspired by those very first Macs.
From the cover: Steve Jobs introduces the world to the Mac on the pages of Macworld a quarter-century ago.
A lot of the ideas introduced in that first issue seem remarkably normal today. The very first feature article, “A Tour of the Mac Desktop” by longtime Macworld contributor Lon Poole, includes an illustration of features I can see on my Mac screen today: a menu bar with an Apple logo in the left corner, a window full of files and folders represented by icons and names, and a desktop area.
The difference, of course, is that today these concepts are absolutely common. Back in 1984, that first article had to carefully explain the concept of the desktop; its entire first page was devoted to a complicated metaphor about trying to drive a car with a keyboard instead of a steering wheel.
Looking forward
But Apple, of all companies, is not prone to looking back. With the iPhone, especially, we see the company changing the way people use cell phones and other handheld devices. And here, 25 years later, the Mac is more successful than it has ever been. Apple sold more Macs in the last year than it has in a single year ever before, and sales are accelerating.
That’s why we’re going to spend a lot of energies looking at what comes next (with a few fond glances back at how we got here, of course). Followers of a company with such a ruthless dedication to innovation should expect nothing less. All this week, you’ll find previews of where Apple technology—both hardware and software—could be headed in the next few years. Yes, we put together a timeline of Mac history and had a few Mac notables offer their opinionated picks for the best (and the worst) the past 25 years had to offer. But the focus is on the future, as it should be.
As for where Apple goes next, I think we all have a pretty good idea. Apple is going to continue going by the playbook that has served it in good stead since the day it was founded: combining innovative hardware and software in a seamless package. The truth of the matter is, Apple has succeeded by realizing that technology companies fail when they specialize on hardware or software to the exclusion of the other. The best products are those where the hardware and software fuse together to form a single product that’s powerful, or lovable, or otherwise just what the user ordered.
We saw that 25 years ago with the original Mac, which was a quantum leap forward in usability for personal computers. We saw it with the iPod in 2001, and again with the iPhone in 2007. Where will Apple go next? The people locked inside a development room somewhere on Apple’s Cupertino campus may know for sure, but the rest of us will just have to watch and wait—and marvel at the next innovation from the company that brought us the original Mac back in 1984.
Introducing Macworld's Mobile Mac Superguide
But over the years, portable technology improved. The original PowerBook line created an entire subculture of road warriors—digital nomads who worked when and where they wanted.
These days, thanks to the light and fast MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air, using a portable computer isn’t reserved for a handful of gearheads. In 2005, 40 percent of the Macs Apple sold were laptops. Now that number is 60 percent. We’ve crossed some sort of dividing line: portable computers are as mainstream as it gets.
Of course, even the MacBook Air isn’t the lightest portable computer Apple makes. That distinction goes to the iPhone and iPod touch, which may pose as handheld devices for use in making phone calls or playing music and video but are in fact complete touch-screen computers running a version of OS X.
Along with the developments to computer hardware has come another development vital to the growth of portable computing: the massive expansion of Internet connectivity and wireless networks. The iPhone is attached to a broadband Internet connection almost all the time. Cafes and hotels from Maine to Montana offer speedy Internet connections via Wi-Fi. Small computers and easy-to acquire Internet connections mean that you don’t have to be tethered to your desk to take full advantage of modern technology.
There are a lot of great things about being a mobile Mac user. But being mobile also means there are unique challenges. Let this book be your companion when you’re on the go.
Want to see more before you shell out for this book? We’ve created a downloadable sample that includes the book’s complete table of contents as well as sample pages.
Also available in our Superguide series are the Mac Security Superguide, Mac Basics Superguide Leopard Edition, Mac OS X Hints, Total Leopard, the Macworld Digital Photography Superguide, and the Digital Music and Video Superguide. We think they’re really great books, and we think you will, too.
Click here to get more information about how to buy the book.
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