MacWorld 2007 Predictions: Apple No Longer Just a Computer Maker
UPDATE: Keynote is over… notes below. Additional post coming soon.
“I need the simplest phone you can produce, I need it to run WebKit, and oh yeah, I’m going to need a big “Apple” button in the middle of it.”
That’s how I believe the conversation started between Steve Jobs and the president of the handset manufacturer who will be proudly appearing with Jobs on stage at next week’s MacWorld Expo.
Well, that may be how the conversation started, but it certainly didn’t end that way. We got a whopper of a phone.
The 2007 MacWorld Expo is the most anticipated Steve Jobs appearance in years and for good reason. I have it on good word from trusted friends close to the situation that this one is going to be special. Really, really special. So don’t gear yourself up for a letdown, because it ain’t gonna happen. You might not get all 100 of the products you’ve been speculating about, but what you *will* get will be really, really good.
Yep, not disappointing at all. Best MacWorld ever.
The world clearly doesn’t need another post speculating what will be announced but I’m going to do one anyway. I claim no detailed inside information, no clairvoyance, and no 100% certainty. These are speculative statements, just like all MacWorld predictions.
iTheater
While most people are occupied with thoughts of an Apple phone, the one thing I’m most confident about is that this year’s MacWorld will be largely dominated by the big screen. I expect a full Netflix/Blockbuster killer here and I expect at least one, but probably all of the major studios to already be on board or close to it. iTheater will likely be available as an add-on box for your current TV and also possibly integrated into an Apple-branded, Samsung (or Sony) manufactured LCD TV… probably in two sizes: 37-inch and 50-inch (or thereabouts). Most of the world’s plasmas and LCDs are already made in only a handful of factories so slapping an Apple casing and some extras on shouldn’t be overly difficult.
iTheater will be dead-simple to use, and initially it will only do two things: download movies for $5 and play them. The DRM scheme will be simple: three plays or three months… whichever comes sooner.
iTheater will eventually pull down video from all sorts of places, most notably Google Video, and by extension, YouTube… but for now, the proposition must remain simple: forget Netflix and Blockbuster… iTheater is where you should rent your movies. I also expect live and recorded concerts to be a part of this offering shortly. Remember, Steve Jobs doesn’t hate the TV as a medium… he just hates the TV ecosystem.
Partially correct on this one. No integrated TV sets or one-click downloading (yet), but Disney and Paramount are now signed up and more studios will follow. I think Apple TV is a good start and not too different than what people were expecting, but it didn’t blow me away. I will not be buying one until it solves a real world problem for me. I was also wrong that the big screen would dominate the show… the little screen clearly dominated.
MobileMe
This is the phone we’ve all been waiting for. It may not be as mature as we’d like it to be, but it will be a fascinating start. In listening to Dan Benjamin’s podcast with John Gruber, I noticed that the majority of their skepticism around an Apple phone revolved around the problem of keeping it quiet. While Dan and John both think an Apple phone may be announced, they had a hard time believing there haven’t really been any solid leaks yet given the extraordinary amount of non-Apple people that must be involved in such a thing (e.g. your carriers, your hardware manufacturers, etc.). While I think this is a valid concern, look again at the first sentence of this blog post. If Apple were to make a phone, there is a sliding scale of how many non-Apple people they could involve.
The end-all, be-all phone with every feature under the sun might involve the help of many external resources. But imagine the other end of the scale for a moment: what if you could pack all data capability into one lightweight framework? A framework that supports http data transfer, html, javascript, cookies, and the rest of the toolbox we seem to rely on for all of our data needs these days? Oh wait, you already can. It’s called WebKit and it’s been embedded in many Nokia phones for several months now. It’s the same engine that powers one of the best browsers in the world: Safari. Has anyone ever used the WebKit browser on Nokia phones? It’s the best mobile browser I’ve ever used.
So if Apple confined 90% of their data features to a simple instance of WebKit, what sorts of things could they provide in an easily accessible way via the default start page (something like mobile.apple.com) that would come up every time you hit the Apple button? Google Maps with Live Traffic. Access to your contacts stored on .Mac. Access to your email (anyone notice the nice new web interface to .Mac mail?). Select video clips. Google searches. Wikipedia searches. What else do you really need? It’s all available in HTML these days and with a little server-side simplification, it can be made to look really pretty via Mobile WebKit.
It’s possible the integration goes deeper, but under the scenario I just described, Apple needs very little help from anyone. Just a simple handset with an Apple button that launches WebKit. This will be the Expo where WebKit goes primetime and busts out of the browser. In the phone, in the iTheater, and in whatever other devices Apple may come out with.
The words to express exactly how significant this device is cannot be contained in one update box. There will be a separate post on it. Simply put: best electronic device ever, and I haven’t even used it yet. I was correct in that it appears to make heavy use of WebKit and other existing Apple web technologies, but incorrect in that it’s a flat out jawdropper of a device, complete with OS X and deep integration with the wireless carrier. I guess people outside of Apple *can* keep a secret. A big part of this is because Apple really was able to leverage most of their own technologies and simply provide Cingular with a spec for what *they* needed to do in order to support it.
Leopard
Expect plenty of Vista bashing here. When Leopard was first unveiled, we were told “many” of its features would be revealed at a later date, so expect a few biggies to be shown off. I’d love to see built-in virtualization, but for some reason Apple is still pushing the whole Boot Camp approach. I tend to think Boot Camp is more proof-of-concept than anything else, and virtualization is really what 95% of users will care about and use (if they must). I’d love to see some implementation of Jef Raskin’s “interfaceless interface” principles in Leopard as well. For instance, if you sit down at the computer and start typing “59 x 20”, the calculator should just automatically pop up and compute it for you. Same thing if you type something like “Dear John”; your word processor should pop up and begin a well-formed letter. Who knows what else Leopard will hold, but I expect several more showstoppers.
Nothing on Leopard, unfortunately, although we did see some Raskin-esque interface principals on display in the phone.
Laptops
I think the only thing we’ll see on this front are new MacBookPros. The MacBookPros, to me, are a poor value proposition compared to MacBooks right now and that situation is bound to change soon. If not here, then a few months down the road. I expect subtly new cases and I hope a new subnotebook species.
No new laptops. I still expect an update shortly.
iPods
The only new iPods I can see coming out are video iPods with a different form factor and bigger screen. I don’t know how well the current video iPods are selling, but they are the only model that I never really hear anybody talking about. Revision one seems far from perfect to me and an update here would be nice. A touch-screen could also be included on these units.
No new iPods but does anyone even care anymore now that they’ve seen the video capabilities of the iPhone?
Blu-Ray
If Apple hasn’t already internally jumped off of the Blu-Ray bandwagon, they have to be thinking about it. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are in a battle for hearts and minds right now and a lot of people I’ve talked to, including Danny over at Mavromatic, think Sony is losing the battle so far. Apple did Sony a huge favor by supporting Blu-Ray early on, but things may have shifted since then. I wonder, in fact, how the latest discussions between Steve Jobs and Sony have gone:
Sony: “Hey Steve, how’s the weather in Cupertino! We’re still on for co-branding those 50 inch Sony LCDs, right?”
Jobs: “Can you guarantee me they won’t catch fire like those laptop batteries you sold us?”
Sony: “Hee hee! Sorry about that! Yeah, these aren’t battery powered. We’re still on for Blu-Ray, right?”
Jobs: “We don’t comment on future product announcements.”
Caveat: I’m not a good person to ask about the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD debate. I think by the time it’s all decided, we’ll be doing most of our stuff over IP anyway.
Nothing here either. Not surprising. The DVD format wars are a buzzkill.
Mystery Google Integration
I expect Apple’s increasingly cozy relationship to Google to get even cozier at this year’s Expo. Maps on the Apple phone would be one possible integration point, as well as maybe something on the video front. Vague, I know… but it’s hard for me to believe the two companies haven’t been working behind the scenes on *something* lately.
Correct on this. Eric Schmidt got on stage to explain how many of the iPhone’s search and mapping technologies were co-developed with Google. Location-aware Google Maps… money!
iMac
Don’t care… they are already cool enough.
Nothing. Who cares.
PowerMacs
Don’t care… they are already overkill for everything except video editing.
Nothing. Who cares.
Wrap Up
When you give detailed predictions about things, you’re bound to be wrong on at least some counts, but one thing I’m fairly sure of is that 2007 will be the year that Apple starts to shed its image as a high-end computer company. To some extent, they’ve already accomplished this with the iPod, but the next wave of product releases — encompassing things like phones, living room technology, and possibly another gadget we aren’t even expecting — will begin to move Apple out of the high-end computer zone and into the digital lifestyle zone. They’ve already mentioned this shift before, but my feeling is that next week is when it really comes together.
All in all, the iPhone stole the show like no other Apple device ever has. My last paragraph here, along with the very title of the blog post was underscored by Jobs’ final announcement of the day: Apple Computer is no longer Apple Computer. They are “Apple, Inc.”. I actually almost penned this as a prediction as well, believe it or not… but I didn’t, so no credit. All in all, the predictions were a mixed bag. But more important than that, we got a great show.
An Animated Look at Why E-Mail Is Broken
The interactive animation below accurately describes the state of my e-mail situation, in this, my 13th year with the medium:
Over the last couple of years, I’ve gone from someone who returns 99% of e-mails — and relatively quickly — to someone who routinely takes days, weeks, and sometimes even months to return certain mails, recently resorting to instant deletion just to avoid the buildup.
I’ve tried to figure out how to best express the dynamics of the situation in words, but an animated illustration seemed to get the point across much better, so this weekend, I whipped out Flash for the first time in about a year. The end result is kind of soothing actually… turn spam off, slide the top to “Fast”, and slide the bottom to “Manageable”. Now that’s e-mail nirvana… something I’ll never achieve.
Thanks also to professional mathlete Tom Laramee of SongStage.net for helping me even out the slider effect with an exponential decay equation.
What’s In Al Gore’s Bookmarks Bar?
I have this really peculiar habit of always examining what is in the Bookmarks Bar of people’s browsers. I do it when I’m looking at someone’s computer screen, when someone sends me a screenshot which includes their browser, and even on TV when I see a browser somewhere in the frame. You can tell a lot about someone by what they’ve decided to drag in there.
So tonight, I was watching Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” on DVD and about halfway through the movie, they cut to a scene of Gore typing on his Powerbook. For a split second they showed his web browser and I hit pause and snapped this picture:
I’m not sure exactly what URL that is, but it appears to be one of the results from this Google Images search.
I don’t know why I think this is worth posting about, but it just seemed weird to me. You can tell by the rest of his Bookmarks Bar (not shown) that he hasn’t customized much else, but he apparently felt the need to have photos of him on the web one click away at all times.
So what’s in your Bookmarks Bar? Post screenshots in the comments using a standard IMG tag…
UPDATE: Thanks to Mike West’s further investigative work, we also now know that Gore is apparently using Gwen Cassidy’s nytimes.com account! … and possibly her laptop as well.
sIFR 3 Beta Is Here
Just in time for the holidays, the Dutch Wolf has posted the first official beta of the brand new version of sIFR! sIFR 3 is chock full of great new features that are sure to bring out your inner typography genius, and because Flash is now owned by Adobe, we’ve even created an unimaginative new icon for it! :)
Some highlights of sIFR 3 include:
- Much easier implementation with no need for font tuning anymore.
- Constant font sizing with no more fuzzy logic used to determine actual type size.
- Smoother anti-aliasing and better readability via Flash 8/9’s Saffron rendering engine.
- Ability to use Flash’s text effects such as shadowing.
- sIFR now renders on-demand instead of after everything else has loaded, making for a much quicker viewing experience.
- … and a whole lot more.
So head on over to the Dutch Wolf’s place and check out the new beta for yourself. The quicker we can all help squash any remaining bugs, the quicker an official sIFR 3.0 implementation can be released.
The Ultimate Showerhead Post
It’s not too often you can stump Google these days. Search for any product, current or past, and you almost always get a slew of results telling you all sorts of things about it. Specifically, what it is, where to buy it, or what product has now replaced it in the product line. This usually even works on nostalgic products purchased decades ago.
Recently, however, I searched for a type of showerhead I’ve used since my college days and couldn’t find a single useful reference anywhere on Google. It’s the simplest and most powerful of showerheads I’ve ever used and it’s called “The Skimpy” (pictured to the right). It shoots a concentrated, forceful mist in a controlled stream unmatched by any other showerhead I’ve tried. The last time I purchased one was at a local hardware store maybe five years ago. It was about $8. The only reference on Google was an image of the showerhead in an obscure “product photos” section of the Interbath website. Subsequent searches on Interbath turn up no mention of The Skimpy.
So, I have a few options here. I can move the old Skimpy to my new place and use a different showerhead in the second bathroom. Or I can scour the interwebs for a place that somehow might still have Skimpies. OR… I can write a blog post soliciting opinions far and wide on what the best showerhead in the world is.
So that’s what I’m doing. Number three.
If you have any useful information on what you believe to be the most excellent showerhead you’ve ever used, post it in the comments along with a brief explanation as to why it’s so great. With any luck, after a few weeks, we’ll have the world’s most complete resource on superlative showerheads.
UPDATE (4/13/11): The Kohler Flipside is the best showerhead in the world.
“Guaranteed in Stock” Debunked
I swear, I was *just* about to write a really positive post about Blockbuster Video’s New “Total Access” program (which I think is totally great and I will definitely try), but upon visiting a Blockbuster location this evening, I ran into another episode of Blockbuster ridiculousness I had to post about.
You see, Blockbuster has this promotion called “Guaranteed In Stock!”, which leads consumers to believe something along the lines of “If you come to a Blockbuster store for a really popular movie, we’ll have it in stock… guaranteed.” They even back it up by proclaiming that if it *isn’t* in stock, you get to rent it for free as soon as copies become available.
So you can imagine my surprise when I saw the display below at my local store:
What’s that? Two identical shelves, both 6-wide and 6-tall. On the left is Al Gore’s popular new documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”. On the right is a movie I’ve never even heard of called “John Tucker Must Die”. There are at least 40 copies of the obscure Tucker thing available and exactly ZERO copies of An Inconvenient Truth. And guess which one is “Guaranteed In Stock!”? Tucker, baby!
Seeing this display made me immediately suspicious of Blockbuster so I approached an employee about the situation:
Me: “I noticed that ‘Josh Tucker Will Die’ is guaranteed In stock and ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is not… and yet, they both have the same amount of shelf space.”
Blockbuster Employee: “Yes, that is correct.”
Me: “So, you guys didn’t just remove the ‘Guaranteed In Stock’ thingie from ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ because it was inconveniently out of stock?”
Blockbuster Employee: “No. The only movies that are ‘Guaranteed In Stock’ are the ones which we order a certain number of. I think it’s 200.”
Me: “Ok… so the ‘Guaranteedness’ of Blockbuster movies has more to do with how many of them you order than how popular they may be?”
Blockbuster Employee: “Yep.”
Me: “Interesting. I’ll take Crash then.”
So the good news is that there’s nothing nefarious going on here. The bad news, however, is that Blockbuster still seems to be out of touch with its customer base. If you want to instill in me the trust that a popular movie *I want to see* is going to be in stock, then just make sure it’s in stock. Hopefully Total Access helps get this company back on track. It’s probably their last chance to crush Netflix.
Results from the Google AdSense Experiment
Well it’s been a week since I threw a Google ad into the header region of this site and the results are in. With just under 50,000 page views, my earnings were just under $100.
It was sort of a low traffic week with not a lot of posting, linkage, or commenting activity, but even so, $400 a month isn’t enough for me show that huge ad to everyone who comes to this site.
But still… it’s more than a few pennies so I wanted to come up with a solution which would let me continue to show the ad in some cases and not show it in other cases. I could frequency-cap it but that would change the design in the middle of a user session (not good). I could only show it a few days a week, but that would be a similarly inconsistent experience.
In the end, I came up with a happy solution: show the ad to everyone except subscribers to this blog. That way, people who come here often and have more than a passing interest in what is written here will get a nice, clean ad-free experience, while those who arrive here via searches for MySpace Layouts, sIFR, or other linkage will see the ad and in some cases help monetize it. This will likely result in a small revenue decline, but that’s of little concern to me.
Currently, I’m achieving this conditional ad serving by setting a three month cookie every time someone clicks on a link from my RSS feed. As long as that cookie is around, you should see no ads. I’m also considering extending the ad-free experience to every visitor who doesn’t come in with a referrer. That way, people who have Mike Industries bookmarked won’t see ads either.
That’s it. Happy Thanksgiving!
The Best Two Blocks You’ll Ever See
Chances are you’ve heard about or seen 5′ 7″ Nate Robinson’s block of 7′ 6″ Yao Ming from this Monday night. Nate’s a fellow Washington Husky so everyone in Seattle has seen him perform some crazy aerial stunts on both the basketball court and the football field but for a guy a full TWO FEET SHORTER than the tallest man in the NBA to issue a rejection like the one below is pretty amazing. Here’s the Chinese version, just for kicks:
Now that’s a great block, BUT, last week I think I saw probably the best football block I’ve ever seen in the West Virginia/Pittsburgh game. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be on YouTube, but ESPN has it inline with the recap of the game. 100 times more impressive at full TV resolution, but man… those two punt coverage guys go down like dominoes. And not a bad runback either!
Experimenting with Ads (and Legitimate Asbestos Writings!)
Last night, I don’t know what hit me, but I decided to throw a Google Ad on this site. You can see it right up there at the top of your screen. It’s the first ever (and probably last ever) ad on Mike Industries and it’s there as an experiment more than anything else. I know a lot of bloggers who have experimented with ads only to take them down days, weeks, or months later, and I’m sure I will follow suit, but for now, there it is!
So far, I’ve been pretty impressed with Google’s targeting capability, not only applying “real estate specific” ads to posts about condos, but actually geo-specific as well, serving up spots for new condo developments in my home town. Good stuff.
So speaking about ad targeting and experimenting, what better time to write about the high-cost-per-click-topic of asbestos! Seriously!
In preparing to move into the new Mike Industries Global Headquarters, I had to take a sample of the popcorn ceiling down to an asbestos testing lab yesterday. Since my building was built in 1963, I was told there was a greater than 95% chance there would be asbestos in the ceilings. If the test turned out positive, I’d have to call a professional abatement crew in there in order to ensure the place was properly cleared of mesothelioma-causing fibers. The stuff is pretty nasty and is the cause of many ugly lawsuits and cancer diagnoses.
Shockingly, however, everything came back negative! No asbestos. So now it’s just a question of taking down the popcorn ceiling as fast as possible and repainting the concrete slab ceiling above it. Does anybody have any experience with painting and resurfacing concrete slab ceilings? Is it a day job? Two days? Three days? A week? Any good recommendations for contractors in Seattle?
Condo Kismet
I generally don’t write much about real estate, but those who have visited Mike Industries over the last couple of months may have noticed a few posts about the housing market; the cause of which being, I’ve been looking for a new place.
Well happy, happy day. I just bought a place! I wouldn’t call the back story miraculous or anything, but I do find it extremely satisfying that after months of going through the standard channels of condo shopping (an agent, e-mail alerts, RSS, etc etc etc), it was a simple post on this very blog that set into motion the chain of events that led to a happy purchase.
Here’s what happened:
A week after writing this entry, I got a call from a friend of mine, Jason Grove (Thanks Jason!), who had read the post and said he knew a friend who was about to put her place on the market. I was skeptical because without seeing pictures first, chances are I wouldn’t be into it. I arranged to head over there the following evening not expecting much. Turns out the place was really great and the sellers were very nice people as well.
The place was scheduled to go on the market in three days so I made one more visit the next day to check it out under brighter conditions. I ended up making an informal offer that day, and long story short, we were able to come to an agreement about a week later which cut out the 6% realtor fees and let us both quit worrying about the Seattle real estate market for the foreseeable future. Everybody’s happy.
A few details on the place: 2 bedrooms. 2 baths. 1188 square feet. Lower Queen Anne neighborhood. Four blocks from Newsvine. Walls of windows to the north and the west overlooking Puget Sound and Magnolia… so yes, the Mike Industries Live Cam will return to its functional state in a couple of weeks. The only downside to the place that needs immediate remedying is the popcorn ceiling. Any advice on how best to remove this stuff (cost, time, safety, contractor recs, etc)?
It’s weird that a simple 15-minute blog post can have such a dramatic impact on your life sometimes. It’s even weirder that I’m going in for the inspection tomorrow and the seller sent — in her absence — a friend to let me in. That friend’s name? Mike Davidson.