The Odds at Macworld 526
Moby Cock writes "Jason O'Grady has posted the odds on what is to be announced at the Macworld Expo beginning next week. Coming in at 100:1 is OS X 10.5 and even money on a new and sexy Intel Mac Minis and iBooks. Gentlemen, start your credit cards."
check with the lawyers (Score:5, Insightful)
Price increases for iTunes (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Price increases for iTunes (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I don't care if the prices go to a tiered structure. I don't buy the "hits" so the songs I'd purchase would probably come out cheaper than $.99.
Who cares about the pro users? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, basically, he's saying that because a certain segment of the userbase will be waiting a little while, EVERYONE should wait?
If Apple doesn't ship Intel Powerbooks now, these users are going to be waiting, because they certainly aren't going to buy G4 powerbooks unless they absolutely have to. If Apple does ship Intel Powerbooks now, these users are going to be waiting for their apps to be shipped as Universal binaries.
So, given that these customers are ogoing to be waiting either way, why shouldn't Apple get hardware on the market to serve the customers who *can* buy now? Customers for whom XCode is their main app, not Photoshop or Final Cut.
Re:check with the lawyers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Price increases for iTunes (Score:3, Insightful)
The music industry would, I'm sure, like to have a tiered structure set up like so:
Tier 1: Music you don't buy: $.49
Tier 2: Music you do buy: $2.99
Re:new and sexy Intel Mac Minis and iBooks (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The irony (Score:4, Insightful)
I think Mac zelots (arguably myself included) are more enamored with the OS than the hardware. My gripe with PC manufactures out there is a lot of shoddy support, bottom-of-the-barrel parts, and bulky/ugly laptop design and only a handfull of gems.
Inconsistencies... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:iLife '06 comes in at 10:1 (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Probably not... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The irony (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Price increases for iTunes (Score:2, Insightful)
Now that would be a great business plan, charging people for things they don't buy.
Cable TV networks charge you for things you don't watch. In order for me to get The Space Channel (in
Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
-The AirPort "Ultra" would "be able to stream video to your TV - in High Definition". Where is all this HD content coming from? Not from the iTMS, not from DVDs. Assuming this AirPort is running 802.11g, streaming HD content is iffy at best. Apple is known for making things easy. I don't see how this could possibly fly as a consumer product. Maybe in another year or two, with faster WiFi and more HD content.
-Jason reckons that the Intel PowerBooks won't be released because (despite all the engineering done) not all the pro software is written yet for Intel, and Rosetta emulation just isn't fun. But then his #1 prediction is for Intel iBooks? Doesn't make sense to me.
-Why are iLife & iWork updates so unlikely (10% and 4% odds, respectively)? Unless Apple is just willing to let this software die (unlikely given relations with Microsoft), this is practically a given. Maybe not until summer, but the odds of an announcement or mention are more likely on the order of 50% - 75%, IMO.
Sorry, I'm just not buying it. Guess I'll wait until next week to find out for sure.
Re:My breakdown... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Price increases for iTunes (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd totally buy into it if they also drastically lowered the price of less popular tracks. I don't listen to top 40 crap anyway. Go ahead and jack the price of Jessica Simpson tracks up by two or three times what they cost today just as long as you lower the prices of the less popular tracks by the same scale. You'd be doing us all a favor.
Of course we all know that's not how it would happen. If the RIAA had their way the popular tracks would be "raised slightly" to $3.00 a track and less popular tracks would "drop drastically" to $0.95 a track.
Re:Jobs is the Anti Buddha (Score:5, Insightful)
Why the "Replace Tivo" hardon? (Score:4, Insightful)
I just dont think Apple is going to make a DVR to actually compete with Tivo. Let alone "defeat it in one fell swoop!!#!11111!!!".
Might they make DVR software for say, college kids and such? With a little dongle for cable input? Sure. But this would hardly make any waves in the DVR market.
That sound you hear? (Score:5, Insightful)
That sound you hear in the background is thousands of executives worldwide laughing at your naiveté.
Re:Price increases for iTunes (Score:3, Insightful)
The one sure thing (Score:3, Insightful)
Geoff
Noooooooo! (Score:4, Insightful)
And then Apple can kiss all of its corporate sales goodbye. Nope, not gonna happen. Maybe a light-duty, somewhat-compatible spreadsheet for people to make little lists with, but Apple knows it will lose more in corporate hardware sales than it can ever make back with their little $99-a-pop suite.
Besides, if there's one thing we have learned, it's that 100% compatibility with MS Office file formats is impossible. Can OOo do it? Can Quark or InDesign perfectly import Word docs? Hell, do MS Office for Mac and Win perfectly read each others' files? No, no, and no.
Re:SpeedBump's Mini wishlist (Score:3, Insightful)
A DVD player which doesn't moan about regions and doesn't prevent you from skipping would be a good start. I know about VLC and MPlayer OS X, but they don't work well on all DVDs. I have Region 1 DVDs which I can't even play on my Mac, but which work fine on my Linux box. This isn't the way it's supposed to be ...
Rich.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple (aka. Steve Jobs) (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually the mightymouse only has one button and it looks and works just like the old single button mice. The trick is that depending on which finger you press down on the single button with you get a left or right click functionality and the trackball on top of it doubles as a third button. This is a typical Apple (aka. Steve Jobs) solution:
Fact #1: Official Apple policy is that a user only needs one mouse button.
Fact #2: Unfortunately experience has shown that it is better to have more mouse buttons.
Fact #3: Since we are talking aboute Apple (aka. Steve Jobs) it is not an option to back down on Fact #1.
Ergo: Design a mouse that has a single button that works like two buttons and has a trackball built in instead of a scroll-wheel giving 2d scrollingcapability. This has the dual effect of adding a little novelty to a new product and most importantly it enables Apple (aka. Steve Jobs) to save face by not having to back down on Fact #1.
It never ceases to amaze me how Apple continually seems to succeed in coming up with gadgets that sell like hotcakes but that really are only redesigns or recombinations of already existing ideas. Both the iPod and the Mighty Mouse really just combinine two old ideas into a new one. I have seen mice with builtin trackballs before but no design that was quite as elegant as the mightly mouse. Similarly the iPod is nothing new either, the inovation is really to marry an MP3 player with an obscene amount of storage space and package it in an elegant and ergonomically well designed package. Both these are, surprisingly enough, ideas that nobody had thought of even if they had been bloody obvious for years.
Re:Nah.... (Score:5, Insightful)
OS X has supported multiple buttons and scroll wheels natively since its very first release, as the OS's event architecture was originally designed to accommodate Next's three-button mouse. Apple continued to develop the multi-button support under OS X despite shipping a single-button mouse. Most OS X applications (Cocoa, Carbon, and even Java) have always automatically taken advantage of the OS-level support for scroll wheels and right-clicking for basic tasks (e.g. copy, cut, paste) without doing anything, plus OS X developers routinely add additional contextual menus and other types of support for modern mice. I don't know a single OS X developer who routinely uses a single button mouse, and I've met a good number of them. On top of that, I believe that the Mighty Mouse's buttons are fully customizable in the System Preferences (not sure on that - I still use an old Logitech mouse on my Mac)
OS X applications never require a multi-button mouse, but they almost universally support them.
Re:Who cares about the pro users? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because unlike every other laptop vendor out there, Apple is all about the full experience, not just the box. If Apple did what you're describing, why wouldn't people just go buy a Dell, or a Sony instead? It's the same hardware for the most part now...
If they want to keep their premium rep, they can't ship the new hardware until *all* of the new software is ready.
Re:The odds? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Noooooooo! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My breakdown... (Score:3, Insightful)
I've seen this incorrect information in more than one place. It's not emulation, it's on-the-fly translation. It is not painfully slow, and some of that software will run substantially faster on the new notebooks than on the old G4s.
Native x86 software, of course, will be faster still.
I'm getting an Intel Powerbook as soon as I'm reasonably sure there aren't design/manufacturing issues.
Yonah is hot, power hungry, 32bit, and has pathetic floating point performance.
Not one of these points is correct. Nice job.
Re:How about giving putting a DVD-R in the iBook (Score:1, Insightful)
I could give less then two shits about any "Apple Product Strategy." Apple is a company, and they are allowed to do what they want in these regards, just like I'm allowed to bitch and ultimatly make the choice to not buy it.
Because of this little bit of BS, they lost a sale.
The 12 inch iBook fits everything I want in a product, except it lacks a dvd-r. Super small, Plays emulators, Browses web wirelessly, has office suite, connects to TV.... but you cant burn a dvd of the shit you download.
C'mon, thats some mega bullshit right there. Heck, I even want to pay them for the upgrade, and they wont let me.
Its apple zealots like you that piss off so many. Stop defending them, they dont need it. They already arnt getting my money because of their "product strategy" and thats enough.
My complaint stands, and apple still doesnt get my money.
Re:Who cares about the pro users? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple switches to 32-bit clean 68K: Adobe promptly updates Photoshop
Apple switches to System 7.0: Adobe promptly updates Photoshop
Apple starts using 68040: Adobe promptly updates Photoshop
Apple switches to PowerPC: Adobe promptly updates Photoshop
Apple starts using SMP: Adobe promptly updates Photoshop
Apple switches to OS X: Adobe promptly updates Photoshop
So except for these events you're correct. If you want a laggard, try Quark.
Re:Apple (aka. Steve Jobs) (Score:3, Insightful)
To put it bluntly, that's just because your expectation of what sort of innovation a good product should contain is abnormally high. All Dell ever seems to do is make things cheaper. All monitor manufacturers seem to do is to make bigger monitors with better resolutions. All printer manufacturers seem to do is to print smaller dots faster. The thing is, at some point the incremental improvements cross a threshold of usability and become hits. For example, once we got 1024x768 monitors and 300 dpi printers, the computer became a viable tool for desktop publishing. Similarly, my 128 MB Rio MP3 player was a mere toy, but once somebody found a way to hold hundreds or thousands of songs, the product was a very different gadget. We can't all be inventing revolutions like zippers and velcro every year, you know.
Re:My breakdown... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm going with the article, and expecting to see x86 ibooks. We'll see what happens.
Firewire and iLife (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't be surprised if this IBook is the first to ship without a FireWire port.
Which instantly eliminates one of the big USPs of the whole iLife suite - that you can import, edit and burn your own movies. Without Firewire, how are you supposed to get the data off your digital camcorder? (Do many camcorders support USB 2.0 yet?) And what about all those people (like me) who have their data backed up on Firewire external drives? What are they supposed to do, transfer it on Zip discs when they upgrade?
Hell, Apple invented Firewire, so it's not like they have to pay a per-unit royalty to have one somewhere on the machine.
Re:Price increases for iTunes (Score:3, Insightful)
Now assuming they have the money put aside, as is required by Russian law, is it my fault that the recording companies haven't registered for the money?
No. In fact, if I were a recording artist, I'd be hounding my manager and anyone else that would listen to get their arses in to gear and sort it out because it's their fault that I wasn't getting my money.
Like I said in another post: if I were able to get government welfare but hadn't registered for it, whose fault is that? Mine, pure and simple. The money's there and the government is willing to give it to me, but I need to register for it to claim it.
I kind of look at it this way: if the money wasn't there, why haven't the record companies applied for it then told EVERYONE that it's not there? I mean, in one fell swoop, that would bring the whole reputation of the site down.
Again, it's no-ones fault but the record companies if they can't either:
a) register for the money and get it; or
b) register for the money, find out it's not there and yell it from the hilltops that it's a ripoff site.
Like I said: that would once and for all tell the world about the truth of that site.
Instead, they sit there. Why aren't their artists complaining, forcing them to do what allofmp3.com says they need to do, just so that everyone can know the truth?
I think (and will continue to do so until shown otherwise) that they WILL NOT register because they KNOW that it's all above board, and they DO NOT want to legitimise that site. Pure and simple.
Naturally, saying "obviously it's a fake because they don't give any money out" is also pure and simple. But in the end, they've shown their hand: "this is what you need to do to get your money". Why is NO-ONE willing to call their bluff?
It's just not as simple as saying "it's a fraud".
Just for the record, I don't buy from allofmp3.com. I don't buy from iTunes and I don't download music illegally.
My entire music collection was either bought on CD or from independent sites such as eMusic and Magnatune.
I just can't see how anyone can say "it's obvious that it's a scam" when it's so easy for the recording industry to jump through a few hoops and say "yes, it is a scam."
Why has no-one tried to claim their money?
Re:Who cares about the pro users? (Score:3, Insightful)
And (Mac, Unix, Java) developers, scientists and, well, people who like good technology and can afford to splurge.
It's been widely noted how common OS X laptops have become at technical conferences and get-togethers. Those people are all potential happy purchasers of Intel Powerbooks, who would probably not be satisfied with an iBook (for one thing, iBooks don't have DVI out.)
The Mac user world is not divided up between graphic/sound pros and teenagers. Graphics, video, and sound pros are not the only customers buying Powerbooks, with everyone else buying iBooks.
I work for a huge global consulting company, which is Windows-oriented, but I spotted one manager-level employee at the Philly office who preferred to use a 17" Powerbook, even though he also had to lug around a Windows laptop for occasional use.
This seems to be news to a lot of people: Powerbooks are not the exclusive territory of graphics/video/sound pros.
Re:How about giving putting a DVD-R in the iBook (Score:3, Insightful)
Those are just work arounds.
Fact is, this is how Apple works. They like to dangle a carrot in front of your face (The $999 iBook, the Shuffle) to get you interested. But the thing is, they cripple the low end models so they can try to upsell you to the higher end models. And they like to carefully set their price points so that the next model up is "just a bit more".
On the PC side of things, the manufacturers can't pull that crap. If Sony decided they weren't going to put a DVD burner in their lower end models to try to sell more high end models, everyone would just go and buy a Compaq/HP/IBM/Dell/Acer/Gateway/EMachines/Toshiba
Re:Apple (aka. Steve Jobs) (Score:3, Insightful)