News for Thursday, 31 May 2007

Yesterday, during the well-renowned "All Things Digital" executive conference organized by The Wall Street Journal and moderated by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Steve Jobs has made some product announcements and interesting comments. As we already mentioned it today, he announced an Apple TV featuring a larger HD 160GB which will be able to access YouTube thanks to a firmware update in June. Later on during his discussion with Walt Mossberg, Steve made some interesting comments, among them we picked some:
- When asked about the change from Apple computer Inc. into Apple Inc, and dropping computers, SJ replied: "We're in two businesses today, we'll be very shortly in three businesses and a hobby. One is our Mac business, second is our music business, third business is the phone business, handsets. And the hobby is Apple TV. The reason I call it a hobby is a lot of people have tried and failed to make it a business.” Does it mean that the Apple TV project is a trial, and will be dropped without much trouble if it does not work the expected way?
- About video contents available on the iTunes Store, Steve jobs made a comment potentially announcing the future launch of HD movies/series on the iTS; "You can buy movies off iTunes as well. It's pretty good quality -- we are not selling high def... at this point. But I think in the future that might change!" Will it be more expensive or it was only a technical matter that prevented HD contents to be already available on the iTunes Store?
- When asked about potentially exiting out of the computer business with the name change, SJ replied: "No. If you come to WWDC we're rolling out our new version of OSX -- massive investments in desktops. You'll love it." So in addition to Mac OS X Leopard, one should expect to see new hardware model soon? Then was Steve meaning hardware when saying "desktops" vs. handheld, or should we expect new desktop hardware to be unveiled at the WWDC? One would expect new Santa Rosa-based MacBook Pro to debut at the WWDC, but should we be prepared for a new iMac, or a revamped Mac mini?
- Later on when discussing with Bill Gates, Steve made a comment about .Mac service: "… and we'll make up for lost time in the near future." So, does it mean that Steve Jobs agrees with us: the current .Mac service is overpriced for the current features it offers? Will the .Mac account been updated with the release of Leopard as a part of the new version of OS X or will the future .Mac update be backward compatible with Panther and Tiger? Should we expect a deeper integration of .Mac with iApps, as it could prevent users without a .Mac account to fully benefit from iApps, as it is already the case with iWeb for example...
We would not need much time to wait for as the WWDC is starting soon, Steve Jobs' keynote is only couple of days away.

The website Hubpages has setup a quite incredible test to compare performance of a old Mac plus from 1986 sporting 4MB of RAM, and a PC powered by an AMD Athlon 64x2 clocked at 2.4GHz and featuring 1GB of RAM. The test is based on the launch time for Word and Excel, as well as booting time. Of course such everyday test, does include all kind synthetic benchmarks usually CPU demanding. Results are quite surprising as the Mac plus is far from being ridiculous as it even scored the best result for some tests!
Of course, this test does not mean by any way that an 8MHz CPU is faster than a 65nm dual core processor clocked at 2.4GHz, but it illustrates perfectly how such a CPU power is lost in today's applications because most of today's software are not ultimately coded.

We could not publish this information before testing it ourselves, from different iTunes Stores. Yesterday, Tuaw showed that DRM-free music tracks and album available from the iTunes Plus are tagged. When opening the file in a text editor, one can find the name of the original purchaser. We do not consider this as a major problem as one is not supposed to share music on P2P networks (this is part of the license agreement)

In France, the large piles of unsold Apple TV standing in the middle of some consumer electronics shops (such as the FNAC) is the proof of the poor success of this devcce in France, and also in Europe (from our sources). The Apple TV is not the iPod. Among the criticisms, one can clearly point poor contents available, not full HD support (at least 1080p) and the ridiculously small HD.
Steve Jobs announced yesterday that the Apple TV could feature a larger 160GB HD as a BTO for US$100; and in June one will be able to directly access YouTube video contents library from the Apple TV.
This is quite of a change when considering that the Apple TV was intended to repeat the iPod ecosystem for video on TV: provide a device that will be able to simply play legally purchased video contents from the iTunes Store then play them on TV. In June, one will be able to access a huge library of video contents known to include numerous illegal copies of movies, series, etc. Apple should also consider giving access to Joost via its Apple TV, as it contents only legal video with a greater image quality.
If such changes do not help the Apple TV sales to take off, Apple might be forced to quickly release the new version with higher hardware capabilities including full HD support.

If the physical Apple Stores are a perfect place to meet Mac users and discover Apple-branded products, some consumers have recently decided to turn them into a free cybercafé. One can enter, sit and use high speed internet connection for free.
If one can test hardware model in an Apple Store, some consumers were able to spend hours on the same computer for browsing the web, and especially MySpace.
To avoid this problem of having some users preventing potential consumers to try some hardware models, New York Apple Stores have banned MySpace at the server level. It seems that other Apple Stores have taken the same decision to prevent similar abusing usage of demo hardware models. If it is not the first website to be banned at the server level, so far it mostly concerned websites with pornographic contents.