Logotards

Blogging has some advantages over a more considered publication schedule in a weekly magazine or daily newspaper (much less MDJ or MWJ), including the ability for a quick and amusing post to set the agenda on a topic before anyone realizes what's happened. John Gruber did just that on Tuesday when he quickly branded a question at Apple's media event: The Dumbest Question I’ve Ever Heard Peter Cohen, Macworld: One question that came from the audience wondered why Apple doesn’t participate in the “Intel Inside” program, in which PC manufacturers affix the well-known labels to their computers. “We like our own stickers better,” Jobs said. “Don’t get me wrong. We love working with Intel. We’re proud to ship Intel products in Macs. They’re screamers, and combined with our OS, we’ve tuned them well. It’s just that everyone knows we use Intel processors. We’d rather not tell them about the product that’s inside the box.” Jobs offers a rare chance for a public Q&A and someone asks why they don’t booger up their computers with horrid stickers? Will someone please tell me who asked this question so I can name him jackass of the week? This caught on fairly quickly. John Moltz at CARS satirized that the questioner was a beyond-clueless Rob Enderle. Mac Publishing has since identified the questioner as Bob Keefe of Cox Newspapers, leading to ridicule from the publishing corp.'s MacUser blog, and from (sigh) MDJ staffer John C. Welch. All of this is predicated on the assumption that someone who had the chance to ask Steve Jobs any question in the whole wide world would ask something as clueless as a question they interpret as "Why don't you want your computers to look more like everyone else's junky sticker-covered crap?" In the words of The Weekly Attitudinal, "You're all morons that tempt the Attitudinal to unplug from the Intertubes." Asking questions of Apple executives is a complicated ritual because they don't talk about future products, they don't stray from the pre-determined message, and they make you feel stupid for trying. As MDJ will soon report, in the recent conference call with financial analysts after Apple's third fiscal quarter results, executives repeated canned answers as often as we've ever heard them do, no matter how non-responsive they were to plainly relevant questions. In that conference call, Apple announced that even though it had achieved 36.9% gross margins in the June 2007 quarter, the company guided analysts to expect about 29.5% gross margins in the September 2007 quarter "as a result of the back-to-school promotion [that gives student buyers a free iPod Nano when purchasing a Mac], higher commodity costs, and product transition." Before the call had even ended, analysts were speculating out loud that such a huge margin drop must either mean a huge increase in component costs, lower retail pricing, or both. You may recall that this spurred quite a bit of speculation over what Apple might have up its sleeve: dramatic price cuts, vastly improved functionality at today's prices, black magic, or something else. Quarterly results still kick us in the pants on our schedule, but MDJ and MWJ will make what we believe is a compelling argument that this is not the big deal it was made out to be. Apple's gross margin guidance has been 2-3 points under actual results for a long time, so guidance of 29.5% probably means results of around 32%. What's more, 37% gross margin is too high for Apple's business—dropping a few points should result in higher volume and market share that's even more valuable to Apple at ths point than the extra cash. Nonetheless, just two weeks ago, the Mac community was abuzz with Apple's "product transition" that would reduce margins. It's also widely known that Intel pays companies big bucks to place the "Intel Inside" logo on computers. Ten years ago, it was common for Intel to reimburse PC makers between US$30 million and US$60 million per year for using the Intel Inside logo. The guidelines were strict, but for those companies that would play along, "Intel reimburses 6 percent of the total average selling price of each vendor's worldwide monthly microprocessor shipments." As one PC maker told ZDNet a decade ago, "You're not competitive if you're not on board." We know this, Keefe knows this, everybody knows this, and it's just two weeks after Apple told analysts its margins would drop precipitously during this quarter due to "product transition" and "higher component costs." That's what Keefe was asking. If you strip away the formal dance and political niceties, this is what the exchange really meant: Q: If your margins are going to drop so much this quarter, why don't you take the free money from Intel like everyone else does and place the sticker on your computer? You've made a big deal about using Intel chips, so it's not like you'd be surprising anyone. A: Because they're ugly, and we don't need the money so badly that we can't afford to make the beautiful products that our customers want. We like the chips, but our products are different than everyone else's and we're going to act like it. If asking why you're turning down free money just two weeks after warning that your gross margins are going to drop quite a bit is the dumbest question Gruber's ever heard, he needs to get out more. This whole bit about "but he could have asked Steve Jobs anything he wanted! is just beyond stupid and right into fantasyland. What questions do you think Steve Jobs is going to answer? He doesn't talk about the past, and he doesn't talk about future products. He ruled out talking about iPods, iPhones, and the music business because it was a "Mac" event. Read Macworld's coverage of the live event and look at these other killer questions that people asked Jobs at the event: Does the iMac have a future now that more and more people are buying laptops? (Hint: Jobs had, within the hour, announced three new iMacs) How is Apple's relationship with Google? (Who really expected an answer other than "Fine, thanks for asking?") Is Apple going to make a multitouch-operated Mac? (Jobs called it a "research project," noting, as have many others, that it's not clear the concept makes sense for the normal orientation of a display. In other words, he didn't rule it in or out.) Is it Apple's goal to surpass Windows in PC market share? (They've only been asking this question for 22 years, so who really expected a no-win yes-or-no answer? As Apple has done for decades, Jobs said they're focused on making the best products possible.) These people had the chance to ask Steve Jobs "any question in the whole wide world," and this is what they came up with, yet somehow they avoid excoriation. MacUser's Dan Moren posed a few theoretical questions of his own about a month ago, but you're a fool if you think Jobs would answer "How do you think Apple would survive without you," or "Where is the Macintosh platform headed" with something other than marketing platitudes about great new products, great Intel chips, how cool Leopard is, and how hard they're working on the future. Seriously, people are lambasting Keefe for asking why Apple is predicting lower margins and turning down free money from Intel, and their idea of acceptable questions are "Do you like Google?" and "Do you think the new computer you just showed us has a future?" It makes you want to wrap your head in duct tape without breathing holes until the pain goes away. But one well-timed snarky assessment set the agenda for the entire discussion and made a laughingstock out of a guy who asked what is, by any but the most banal guidelines, a perfectly reasonable question. Perhaps we'll all be lucky and Apple will release a new version of iTunes so everyone can go back to obsessing about the exact shade of blue on various 1-pixel lines. We're going back to work now. Update: The Macalope disagrees and says it was a stupid question, because the answer was obvious that there was no way Apple would ever put those stickers on its products. It was also obvious, at one point, that Apple would never switch to Intel processors, and that it would not build an absolutely flat iMac because Steve Jobs said those "motherboards glued to the back of LCDs" didn't work well and weren't what Apple wanted to make. Many people said it was completely obvious that there'd be a native iPhone SDK, or that ZFS would be Leopard's default file system. "Obvious" is in the eye of the beholder, and we still say that if you think the answer to "why aren't you taking free money after announcing lower margins" is obvious, you need to do more beholding. # - Posted to In The News on 8/9/07; 4:49:06 PM

Xyle Scope on MacZOT!

This is the kind of thing that would not make it into MDJ or MWJ in time for you to act on it anyway, so we have no trouble taking 5 mins from Q3 to post it here: Xyle Scope: A tool for web designers Normally: $19.95 ZOT Price: $11.95 Click to MacZOT    Debug and fine-tune CSS like never before! Xyle scope offers new ways of debugging, fine-tuning, and discovering Cascading Style Sheets. It works like a web browser and is just as easy to use. Simply enter a URL and discover all the HTML and CSS files that make up the design of the given page. Clicking on an element of a web page suffices to display its formatting box (box model) and the precise HTML and CSS code that is responsible for its appearance. You can immediately start changing the CSS code. The effects of your changes will be visible instantly without saving the CSS or refreshing the page. And since Xyle scope is also a web browser it doesn’t just work for your own sites… To learn more about the many features of Xyle scope and to sign up for Cultured Code’s newsletter to get all the latest information on their upcoming app “Things”, visit www.culturedcode.com. Requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later We don't use all of the features in Xyle Scope, but when we want to drill down into WebKit elements and figure out what's going on, it's been an invaluable tool. The Inspector in current versions of WebKit (and in Leopard) shows a lot of the same things, but doesn't let you change the CSS on the fly to see how new versions would render. If you haven't looked at Xyle Scope, this is a good excuse to do so. # - Posted to In The News on 8/1/07; 12:30:56 PM

How the technology press got broken

If you want to know why coverage of Apple, Inc. has been almost completely clueless for most of the company's existence, look no further than this tiff involving Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner, who criticizes David Pogue for writing reviews about Apple products when he also writes books about those products. This is exactly what we saw a decade ago when Apple was "beleagured" - the people who actually understood the platform and the company were locked out of the discussion, dismissed as "Mac fanatics" or "Apple partisans," while people like Quittner, who can't even run his own magazine, dictate who can and who cannot be "trusted" on products about which he knows nothing. Keep in mind that, per the previous link, Quittner pays his own bloggers thousands of dollars per quarter to reprint decades-old inaccurate stories trashing Steve Jobs' compensation, yet Quittner (who does not own an iPhone) is qualified to review it and David Pogue is not because Pogue had early access to an iPhone and wrote a book about it. This is how the technology press became not a meritocracy, but a mediocracy—by letting ignorant people lock out the knowledgeable to protect the bottom line of their fellow ignorami. After all, if Pogue wasn't allowed to write for the New York Times, maybe Quittner could get the gig—he's the editor of Business 2.0! That's a Time Magazine imprint! He has to be qualified, right? He's certainly unfettered by potential conflicts like knowledge of the subject. # - Posted to In The News on 7/17/07; 11:50:09 PM

Let's make it "Understand the Dock Day" instead

We've just finished reading today's normal crop of a few hundred stories, blog posts, press releases, and so on—and no one has yet mentioned that today is "iCal day", the day listed by default in iCal's application (and Dock) icon because the program was introduced five years ago today, 2002.07.17, as part of Apple's then-new ".Mac" services. For some reason, this still grates on some people who can't seem to understand that an icon is simply an image—in its own format, to be sure, but a static and unchanging bitmap that's just like any TIFF or PNG image. "But…but Dock icons change," you cry plaintively. Sadly, the active voice fails you here. The icons do not change; they are changed by the application to which they belong. At any time while running, an application can tell the Dock, "Hey, use this icon for me instead of my default application icon." That's how you get badges in Mail and NetNewsWire, changing colors in Mailsmith, dynamic status gauges in iPulse and Activity Monitor, and the current date in iCal. When the application is not running, there's nothing to tell the Dock to use anything other than the static, standard icon located in the application's bundle, so it doesn't change in the Dock. If it really really drives you crazy, you can use the donation-ware iConiCal, a program that keeps iCal's Dock icon updated and can even change its color from red to blue or green? How? It changes the icons inside iCal's application bundle. That way, when iCal updates its own Dock icon, it uses the style you prefer. If you want the current date always, iConiCal opens iCal to get the updated Dock icon, then quits iCal again while preserving the icon. No matter how you look at it, either iCal or iConiCal must execute to get the Dock icon updated. "But…but the iPhone's home menu always shows the correct date even if iCal isn't running on the phone," you cry again. First, the iPhone doesn't run "iCal," it runs a new iPhone-specific calendar application. Second, you don't know that it's not running; the iPhone may initialize it as part of normal booting. Third and most important, the iPhone is not the Dock. Since the iPhone isn't available to third-party developers, you don't know how that program works or how generic its icon mechanism may be. Since the iPhone's launcher currently only displays 16 "applications," it's possible that it has special-case code for the calendar—code that's obviously missing even for the clock application, whose icon does not represent the current time even though the top of the display has the current time. "Why can't the Dock do the same thing?" You're essentially asking Apple to change the Dock to have a special case for one application, and for the Dock to decide (on its own) what that application's icon should be based on the current time. If the Dock does that, though, it really ought to be a more generic mechanism so Now Up-to-Date and Microsoft Entourage and any other application could also tell the Dock how to update its icon even when not running. In fact, the Dock needs an internal makeover just like that. While an application can tell the Dock what icon to use anytime it's running, no other application can get access to that icon image from the Dock. The excellent DragThing, for example, cannot display another application's dynamic Dock icon in a DragThing dock because the Dock won't let DragThing (or any other program) get access to another program's current icon, much less be notified when it changes. Similarly, while any application can control the menu that appears when you Control-click (or Right-click or click-and-hold) on its Dock icon, only the Dock can display that menu—not DragThing, not any other program launcher, not even Finder. Don't hold your breath waiting for comprehensive Dock access, though. If other applications could have access to these same features, that would mean you don't have to use the Dock—you could hide it permanently and use a third-party alternative. Yet from the first public descriptions of "Mac OS X" from Apple, the company has made it clear that the Dock is not optional and not replaceable. It's a poor amalgamation of a program launcher, status center, and application menu/switcher—but Apple has affirmatively acted at every revision to make sure that you can't do away with it without losing access to exclusive features like badges, notifications, and Dock menus. People who killed the Dock anyway got a stick in the eye with Tiger because Dashboard is part of the Dock—kill the Dock and you kill Dashboard as well. Leopard's new "Stacks" feature appears to be another Dock exclusive, too—keep the newly-redesigned ("now with extra ugliness!") Dock visible at all times or do without the new feature. It's fine—heck, it's expected—that Apple's utilities won't meet everyone's needs. That's why the OS provides frameworks to allow third parties to develop their own. You can even argue that there wouldn't be nearly as many QuickTime-savvy applications out there if QuickTime Player had played movies full-screen for free before version 7.2—the capability was always part of the free QuickTime software, but QuickTime Player simply chose not to use it, and dozens of other application stepped into the void with their own unique feature sets. You can't do that with the Dock—Apple has steadfastly refused, for close to a decade, to allow any third-party utilities access to the information that the Dock uses to provide its unique features. That's not concern for the user experience, that's old-school NeXT Software politics aimed at proving their "Dock" concept was right and by God you're going to use it whether you want to or not. So let's stop treating July 17 as if it's some proof that iCal is inadequate and focus the attention where it should go—on the Dock, the program that you may not like but can't live without, the launcher that Apple claims as superior but really knows is so defective that it will not allow third-party competition for it. We're not saying third-party replacements would special-case iCal and keep its icon updated every day whether iCal is open or not, but it would be nice if developers and users had that choice. # - Posted to In The News on 7/17/07; 3:34:22 PM

Just so everyone knows

…we'll note that Apple has once again moved its announcement of quarterly results, this time for the third quarter of FY 2007 that ended on Saturday. Earlier this year, Apple's investor calendar said the announcement would take place on the third Wednesday of the following month, or on 2007.07.17. On a hunch, we looked today - and it's been moved to 2007.07.25, the fourth Wednesday of July. Apple similarly moved the last quarter's results back by one week. The calendar currently has no investor dates beyond the Q3 results announcement, but we have Q4 results on our calendar for 2007.10.17, the third Wednesday following the end of Apple's fiscal 2007. We'd bet even money that gets pushed out one week by early October. # - Posted to In The News on 7/3/07; 2:21:51 AM

Tens of thousands? What tens of thousands?

Given the previous post, it's at least amusing to notice that Business 2.0's "Apple 2.0" blog has now posted about first-weekend iPhone sales, and yet the author somehow manages not to mention his own post from Saturday on the same subject, the one that has numbers he invented out of whole cloth. Commenter "Rezzz" was not so forgetful: "What happened to 'tens of thousands'?" They did sell tens of thousands. Looks like somewhere between 100 - 150 tens of thousands. Meanwhile, DeWitt brought in a couple of millions hits to this website with that headline. Enjoy your bonus, dude. It was perhaps unfair for us to refer to Apple 2.0 blogger Philip Elmer-DeWitt as "Elmer Bulwer-Lytton," but "MDJ" had spent time on this blog in May and was not impressed. From coverage in "MDJ" 2007.05.02, available to MWJ readers in the secure RSS feed, discussing the stock options backdating brouhaha of the time, just after noting that the SEC conducted a large investigation and determined that Jobs was not to blame for backdating: Misinformation 2.0 Don't expect any of this to stop those who take great pleasure in seeing Jobs suffer. The "Apple 2.0" blog, an effort of Business 2.0 magazine, recently noted that nearly six years ago, Fortune called Steve Jobs's compensation "highway robbery," prompting protests from Jobs who noted that all of his options were underwater, and therefore not worth US$872 million. Jobs wrote, "They are worth zero." The blog brings this up because the author of that piece from June 2001, Joe Nocera, dredged it up for last Saturday's New York Times, and you could cut the schadenfreude with a knife. Nocera wrote, "What a delicious surprise to discover that Mr. Jobs, who had ostentatiously taken only US$1 in salary since returning to Apple in 1997, had a stock option package bigger than any ever bestowed on such well-known greed heads as Sanford I. Weill of Citigroup or Michael D. Eisner of Disney." According to Nocera, Jobs had options worth US$872 million at the time of the story, which made his public acceptance of a US$1 salary hypocritical, and its exposé "delicious." Nocera wrote that Jobs "railed" about the unfair cover story, offering to sell his options to Fortune for half of their supposed US$872 million value. Jobs pointed out that since the options were underwater, "They were worth zero." Nocera smugly adds, "That is not how options are valued, but never mind." Actually, you should mind, because the article in Fortune was a complete hack job, one covered in MDJ 2001.06.15. The cover said Jobs's options were worth US$872 million, but the story inside said Fortune valued Jobs's options at US$381 million: "We have valued his monstrous options grant at one-third the exercise price of the shares options. And, of course, we've included the US$90 million Gulfstream the Apple board gave him." Not only did Fortune publish two estimates of Jobs's option worth on the same page that differed by half a billion dollars, Jobs was right. As MDJ has noted since at least 2001, Jobs's options were not standard options. They could not be sold or traded, so they had no value to anyone but him. A block of options that big on the open market might reasonably be valued as worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but since they couldn't be sold on the open market, they were worth a total of US$0 until Apple's stock price rose above the option price. It matters not how venomous or sarcastic Nocera gets in his smug condemnation, for the value that Fortune set was wrong in 2001 and it's wrong now. Nocera doesn't seem to care, though, as long as he can keep selling the same article to the mass media. As Upton Sinclair once said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." Oh, here are some other details that the "Apple 2.0" blog didn't tell you in flogging this story. First, blogger Philip Elmer-DeWitt is actually the executive editor of Business 2.0 magazine, which, like Fortune is published by Time, Inc. Before joining Business 2.0, Elmer-DeWitt worked for Time for 27 years, where his work included a not-so-flattering 1998 mini-profile of Steve Jobs, and where he was science editor when sister publication Fortune ran the originally incorrect story. Elmer-DeWitt sees his blog as a counterpoint to "fan blogs," because he says he is "someone who loves MACs and can bring a journalist's skepticism." (Yes, that's his spelling of "Macs.") It's too bad that Elmer-DeWitt didn't let readers invoke their own skepticism by alerting them to the fact that he was praising a former colleague's attempt to rehabilitate a discredited story for his own company's publication. Perhaps that's because Elmer-DeWitt just got a check from Business 2.0 "in the area of US$2000 to US$2500" for writing the number-two Business 2.0 blog in the first calendar quarter of 2007. That's a lot of incentive to get readers, especially for a blog that spends much of its time repeating rumors and mocking fan sites that don't share Elmer-DeWitt's "journalist's skepticism." So, just to recap - claiming that underwater options that can't be sold at all are worth hundreds of millions of dollars for six years despite plain facts is applying journalistic skepticism, but earning US$8000 to US$10,000 per year to repost items from Wired, AppleInsider, and MacDailyNews is blogging "outside the reality distortion field." You make the call. It's unclear how well the whole "we're experts" thing is working out for Business 2.0 - just before that issue of MDJ went to press, we learned that Business 2.0 lost every production file for its June 2007 issue on 23 April when its editorial system crashed, and only then did the magazine learn that its backup server hadn't been backing anything up for at least days. They lost everything - the only way they were able to get the magazine out was that it was a monthly (not a weekly), and they had a week to reconstruct all of the art and layouts. The text of all the articles was only saved because they'd sent it to the lawyers for approval. As the article notes, this is the magazine that annually publishes "The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business." Perhaps some of this explain why the News Corp-owned New York Post reported last week that the magazine "is a long way from seeing any of the investments pay off," and may wind up being folded into Fortune magazine - the same one whose completely incorrect stories about Steve Jobs got stroked by Elmer-DeWitt recently. Maybe they'd save some money if they paid the bloggers for quality instead of traffic, as Rezzz implied. # - Posted to In The News, MDJ on 7/2/07; 3:35:30 PM

How many phones did Apple sell on night one?

Elmer Bulwer-Lytton doesn't know, but a simple problem like that isn't going to stop him from pulling numbers out of…let's say "thin air": Apple and AT&T (T) are not releasing sales figures, but piecing together eye-witness accounts from stores around the country and doing some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations, it's clear that Apple sold tens of thousands of iPhones -- and perhaps as many as 200,000 -- the first night, not millions. There are several reports of AT&T stores selling out their consignment of iPhones -- 60 in one Wall Street store, 40 in another, 20 in a smaller store. […]If you generously assume that 500 iPhones were sold at each of Apple's 164 retail outlets (including the tiny mall stores), and that all AT&T stores sold out an average of 50 phones, that's                                 500 * 164 = 82,000                                 50 * 1,800 = 90,000                                 TOTAL   = 172,000 Not bad for one night's work. Because that doesn't include online sales, it's roughly in line with earlier analysts' estimates that Apple could sell 400,000 iPhones in the first few days. Apple has not commented on the estimates. Steve Jobs has said he hopes to capture 1% of the worldwide cellphone market by 2008, which comes out to roughly 10 million iPhones over the next 18 months. UPDATE: An AAPL watcher whose opinion I trust thinks this estimate for AT&T sales may be 25% to 35% too low. He believes the smaller AT&T stores had 60 to 70 phones and the larger ones 100 or more. He also points out that many, of not most, customers at Apple stores bought two iPhones. If we assume that half did, the numbers come out somewhat differently:                                 500 * 164 * 1.5 = 123,000                                 50 * 1,800 = 90,000                                 TOTAL   = 213,000 Or, rephrased more tersely: "If we take a few guesses at how many phones a few stores had and extrapolate them nationwide with absolutely no supporting evidence, we can come up with a number that makes it seem like Apple didn't sell as many phones as some unnamed people projected they would." Elmer has no idea how many iPhones each Apple or AT&T store had, nor does he know if each store of the same size got the same size allotment. Small stores in big cities might have gotten more phones than small stores in areas with less population - or vice-versa, as Apple and AT&T may have figured that the fewer stores serving a population, the more phones each would need. AT&T Wireless doesn't serve 10% of the US, so Apple stores in those areas may not have gotten many phones at all. MDJ's publisher got in line at a "smaller" (strip mall storefront) AT&T store at 5:30 PM local time, and was in the store by 7:00 PM purchasing an 8GB phone. He was #64 in line, and there was absolutely no indication that the 35-40 people behind him in line were being refused tickets or turned away. Like other AT&T stores, purchasers were only allowed one iPhone per trip through the line, but Elmer again has no evidence that "many, if not most" Apple store customers bought two iPhones. It's all voodoo math. We'll know when Apple and AT&T issue press releases saying so. Since Apple has already said it will book iPhone revenue over a 2-year period for each phone sold, the company will only book 1/24 of the revenue for any phones sold yesterday and today during the June 2007 quarter that ends tonight. With just 1/24 of two days' worth of sales going on Apple's Q3 books, it would be amazing if the iPhone makes any meaningful impact on the Q3 financial results in a few weeks. Until the companies tell us, though, it's all invented statistics. All we really know is that about 2000 retail outlets started selling the iPhone on Friday night at 6:00 PM local time. If you believe rumors that Apple had at least 1,000,000 iPhones ready for retail sale on Friday night, then on average, each outlet would have had around 500 units available - some more, some less. If you really think each outlet only had about 100 phones (averaging across both Apple and AT&T stores), then you think Apple had only 200,000 retail units ready on Friday. And you're free to believe that, but you'd then have to ask yourself why Apple kept running expensive iPhone TV ads over the past two weeks if the company knew it couldn't possibly come close to meeting demand. That would just be wasting money, and Apple's grown pretty good at not doing that. # - Posted to In The News on 6/30/07; 2:11:53 PM

Cult-like behavior?

The June 2007 New York magazine piece calling Steve Jobs "iGod," combined with iPhone hype, brings back charges of a "cult" of Apple and its followers. However, The Weekly Attitudinal, MWJ's right-by-definition opinion feature, took on this canard nearly a decade earlier. The Attitudinal examined actual scholarly definitions of "cult-like" behavior, and found that not only is there no "cult of Macintosh," but also that you could argue equally well that there was a "cult of Wintel." This is from 1998—no Mac OS X, no iPod, no iPhone, no Intel transition, so some of the references are a bit dated, but it's a good way to let you see where the Attitudinal has been on this issue all along. We don't update the online samples as much as we should, and sometimes it shows. For example, this month, we put MWJ 2003.05.25 into the subscribers-only MDJ and MWJ RSS feeds because that issue includes MacCyclopedia's primer on the HFS and HFS Plus file systems - a fine companion to the Attitudinal's exposition and takedown of ZFS as a "default" Mac OS X file system this month. What we forgot was that the issue was already available as a free sample of MWJ, in both PDF and setext formats. So everyone can enjoy it, while we work on the definitive answer on empirical vs. deterministic upgrade information. And stay out of the rain. We swear, every bit of rain that California's missing, we've found. # - Posted to In The News, MWJ on 6/28/07; 5:30:31 PM

The AP on Apple's iPhone "hype machine" (Updated [twice])

Yes, that's right, AP says that Apple's "hype machine" is in overdrive for the iPhone: Even for a company that's mastered the art of product-launch hoopla, Apple Inc. appears to have pulled out all the stops to propel iPhone hysteria into the stratosphere. Here is the page with all of Apple's 2007 press releases. Counting the one about Safari for Windows, Apple has issued six iPhone press releases in all of 2007, as of this date. In contrast, these are the Associated Press stories from just the past two weeks that contain "iPhone" in either the headline or the first paragraph, not counting the one about the hype, which we'd call #1: Treo Expected to Face IPhone Pressure (AP) BlackBerry and Treo devices will continue to slug it out this week, as their respective companies post their latest quarterly results Thursday, a day before the launch of their much-anticipated competitor known as the iPhone. Release of iPhone has industry abuzz (AP) AP - There's hype. There's hysteria. And there's history. The hype around Apple Inc.'s upcoming iPhone is abundantly clear. So is the hysteria. But how the iPhone will leave its historical mark after Friday's launch is to be seen. Industry awaits 'revolutionary' iPhone (AP) AP - There's hype. There's hysteria. And there's history. The hype around Apple Inc.'s upcoming iPhone is abundantly clear. So is the hysteria. But how the iPhone will leave its historical mark after Friday's launch is to be seen. (Also moved as "Consumers, Industry Eagerly Await IPhone") Qualcomm CEO Welcomes IPhone (AP) Qualcomm Inc. has nothing to do with making Apple Inc.'s iPhone, but the chief executive officer of the world's No. 2 cell phone chipmaker said Thursday that he has plenty to gain. AT&T Adds Staff to Prepare for IPhone (AP) AT&T Inc., which will be the exclusive carrier of Apple Inc.'s much-hyped new iPhone, has hired 2,000 extra workers to staff its company-owned stores for the launch, a spokesman said Thursday. Market Spotlight: Gauging IPhone Impact (AP) When Apple Inc. releases the iPhone on June 29, the hybrid gadget will undoubtedly change the face of the company which, until recently, was known as Apple Computer Inc. Verizon: IPhone Doesn't Change Our Plans (AP) The Apple Inc. iPhone won't change the game plan for Verizon Communications Inc., Chief Executive Ivan Seidenberg said Wednesday. iPhone to play YouTube clips (AP) AP - The eagerly awaited iPhone will be able to play Youtube videos when it ships next week, Apple Inc. announced Wednesday. AT&T Launches Cell-To-Cell Live Video (AP) AT&T Inc. on Tuesday launched what it said is the first service letting callers share live video between cell phones. The new AT&T Video Share service won't apply to the iPhone, which uses an older network. Apple: iPhone battery life improved (AP) AP - Apple Inc. gave rival smart phone makers another reason for heartburn Monday, claiming its upcoming iPhone will have a battery life that exceeds the company's previous estimate and the battery life of competing phones. Sector Snap: Online Music Stocks Mixed (AP) Shares of online music providers were mixed Monday, with Apple Inc. shares gaining ground on more buzz around the iPhone. Apple Shares Gain on More IPhone Hype (AP) Shares of Apple Inc. jumped in trading Monday as hype surrounding the upcoming release of the company's much-anticipated iPhone continued to drive up the stock's price. iPhones only at AT&T, Apple stores (AP) AP - Customers clamoring to get their hands on Apple Inc.'s highly anticipated iPhone better make sure they're at the right store. Out of the Gate: AT&T Rises (AP) Shares of AT&T Inc. ticked higher Thursday, after a Bear Stearns analyst raised his price target on the telecommunications company, expecting gains from its exclusive deal to carry Apple Inc.'s iPhone. Sector Glance: Online Content Mixed (AP) Shares of online content providers traded mixed Wednesday, with Apple Inc.'s shares slipping as some investors sold shares in the weeks before the company's highly anticipated iPhone is released. Apple Extends Web Browser to Windows (AP) Apple Inc. has set the stage for yet another rivalry with Microsoft Corp. by launching a Windows version of its Safari Internet browser and inviting developers to create Web-based programs for its upcoming iPhone. Keep in mind that AP moved multiple versions of most of these stories. We collected 52 separate copies of these 16 17 (we forgot the "hype" story itself) stories. Just in 14 days. Just from AP - the service that says Apple has gone into overdrive to hype the iPhone by issuing six press releases in six months. There is something about this phone that makes people absolutely lose their reason. Update: For those who think it's unfair to leave out mention that Apple has been running iPhone commercials, that's a fair point. After all, running commercials for something not yet available is certainly, to use AP's words, "pulling out all the stops to propel iPhone hysteria into the stratosphere." It's never been done before. By the way, have you heard there's a fourth Die Hard movie coming out this week? Where did you hear that? Meanwhile, Apple has issued two more iPhone press releases: one about iTunes activation, and one about data plan pricing. AP, in return, has already moved three versions of a story about that over the wires: Apple, AT&T unveil monthly iPhone plans (AP) AP - AT&T Inc. and Apple Inc. on Tuesday said wireless service for the iPhone will range from $59.99 per month to $99.99 per month. One version in "technology," one version in "finance," and one version in "top stories." How evil Apple must be to somehow make AP do that. That makes 18 stories in 15 days. Update #2: We're not going to stay on this forever, but it's worth noting that just one day after AP complained about iPhone hype, the wire service ran four new iPhone stories - the one mentioned above in the first update, and three more: IPhone May Not Rock Music Industry (AP) Carlos Gomez could be the recording industry's ideal mobile music customer. His phone is his music player of choice and he spends about $100 a month buying songs for it -- often on impulse after hearing a tune on his car radio. Customers Line Up for IPhone Launch (AP) For Jessica Rodriguez, waiting four days for an iPhone is nothing when the prize is "the next big thing." On Tuesday, Rodriguez became the fourth person to line up outside Apple Inc.'s Fifth Avenue store in New York. IPhone Plan Pricing Lower Than Expected (AP) At $59.99 a month for 450 minutes, the cheapest available plan from AT&T Inc. for the Apple iPhone costs the same as a comparable voice-and-data package from Sprint Nextel Corp. We're not even going to count this one, where the AP ran a photo of Steve Jobs and the iPhone in a totally unrelated story about a Paul McCartney concert just because it would get more hits and more attention: Fans camp out for free McCartney show (AP) AP - Equipped with folding chairs and sleeping bags, hundreds of Paul McCartney fans lined the street outside a funky Hollywood record store on Tuesday to secure a seat for a free show there by the ex-Beatle. Words fail us. # - Posted to In The News on 6/25/07; 11:14:37 PM

Three quick tips on installing 10.4.10

Back up your system before you upgrade. Not just two or three files here and there, but the whole thing. The traditional "most people don't need to back up regularly" conventional wisdom is no longer operational in a world of fast Internet connections and security threats (MDJ 2007.01.03). That way, no matter what goes wrong, you can get back to square one within a finite amount of time. If you went futzing around with files owned by Mac OS X while running 10.4.9, go put them back they way they were before you run an updater. We're not talking about things like installing Safari 3 Beta, but rather things like opening old updaters and installing one or two files from them here or there to fix real or perceived problems. It's your system, put whatever files you want wherever (take a sledgehammer to the thing if you want, it's your money), but don't expect installers or updaters to work when you've created a system configuration that Apple could not have anticipated. This generally includes moving files out of the /Applications folder because you're more anal-retentive organized than Apple is. Sorry about that, but the system puts things where it wants, and it really doesn't want you to move them. Welcome to the perfection that is Unix and 1970s software design. Don't go overboard. Of course you can use Software Update. MacFixIt tends to go off the deep end with these things - just about the only thing missing from its recommendations is preparing a brew of eye of newt and lizard tongue, so you can drink three sips of it from a mug made of ancient Egyptian marble while dancing in a counterclockwise circle at noon repeating "I wish I could rebuild the desktop!" five times before pressing the "Install" button. Maybe that's coming for Leopard, thought. MacFixIt has a couple of decent ideas. Don't launch new applications once you start updating the OS, because that wonderful 1970s Unix design (using only pathnames for shared libraries) means they may crash trying to load the updated versions while already-running programs are still using the older versions. But you don't need to restart twice, and you don't need to restart in "Safe" mode unless you know you've got some skanky kernel extensions loaded. Feel free if you want, but it's all superstitious nonsense unless you know why you would need to reboot without optional kernel extensions, which is what "Safe" mode does. MacFixIt doesn't seem to know why you should do this, either, except that the very scary mysterious installer will eat your children if you don't! (We have a long-running dispute with MacFixIt over the difference between empirical data and supported design, as in "we see that this works but we don't know why" vs. "it's documented that it works this way." See this previous entry for some other examples.) If you're just really determined to clean up first, try using a tool like TinkerTool System or your command-line savvy to empty all of your caches before installing. Quit all applications, delete the contents of both /Library/Caches and ~/Library/Caches, then install and restart. Our own production system tends to have cascading crashes after OS updates - all login items crash, the crash reporters for them crash, the system crashes explaining the crashes, and on and on. Emptying the cache folders and restarting fixes it every time. We suspect it's something to do with the font caches. (We do horrible things to fonts around here. You don't even want to know.) We meant to have MDJ and MWJ out last weekend, but there was so much stupidity associated with WWDC 2007 news that we actually broke our keyboards, and are waiting for replacements. One arrived today, D.O.A.; the replacement's replacement is supposedly on the way, but we don't know the scheduled arrival date. If it doesn't work, we may dig out the USB-ADB adapters and some old Apple Extended Keyboards - but we might need bigger desks to hold them. If you heed only one of these three tips, make it the first one. Back up your system before updating the OS, every time. If you're lucky, you'll never have to feel glad you did it. # - Posted to In The News on 6/20/07; 10:53:41 PM

Shorter Wall Street analyst reaction to WWDC 2007 keynote address

"None of the predictions for WWDC 2007 that we completely pulled out of our asses came true. Obviously, this is entirely Apple's fault, and the company must be punished." # - Posted to In The News on 6/12/07; 8:32:17 AM

Under a barrel

In his latest column, CNet News's executive editor of commentary Charles Cooper does his level best to keep the options backdating scandal alive and well at Apple Inc. He starts by calling former Apple CFO Fred Anderson a liar, then goes on to cast Anderson as credible because Anderson is disagreeing with Apple's board of directors, people that Cooper says would never fire Steve Jobs because he is their "meal ticket." Along the way, he distorts the facts without blinking to continue his decades-long crusade of venom against every Apple executive he can manage to name. Facts about Apple have rarely mattered to Cooper in his quest. Some examples from the current column: Apple reported financial results far ahead of Wall Street's expectations in its most recent quarter as profits soared 88 percent on a 21 percent sales climb. That was enough to propel the stock price past the $100 mark. Those are the kinds of numbers that buy lifetime job security. The old-timers at the company remember the prolonged time of troubles (pre-Jobs) endured under a succession of increasingly feckless CEOs. Since 1983, Apple Computer (now Apple, Inc.) has had exactly four chief executiev officers: John Sculley (1983-1993), Michael Spindler (1993-1996), Gil Amelio (1996-1997), and Steve Jobs (1997-present). Before Sculley, it appears that Apple didn't have a formal "CEO" position, and only had two presidents before Sculley: Mike Scott and Mike Markkula. Cooper's "succession of increasingly feckless CEOs" appears to refer to three people over 11 years. Suffice it to say that Jobs would need to get caught on video robbing every gold brick in Fort Knox in broad daylight before this board would lift a finger. "This board" undertook its own options investigation before it knew that Steve Jobs would be cleared. The SEC had access to all of the same information, as the SEC itself says, and also cleared Jobs. Cooper can't stand this. Anderson's story is still only hearsay. Jobs remains untouched by the investigation into the stock option-backdating scandal. What's got Apple on edge is the understanding that that could easily change. If the federal government decides to start taking depositions, then the ignorance-is-bliss defense won't hold up. And then we may learn that all these striving, corporate alpha execs just have faulty memories--or that somebody really is a fibber. Cooper has no information that the SEC did not take depositions; his own CNet News site did not report that the SEC questioned Steve Jobs about these allegations, perhaps because the news broke at a time that required CNet News to note that CNet itself has problems with options backdating, a story that's hard to find on CNet News itself. Anderson, who paid $3.5 million to settle with the SEC, is free to rat out his old boss if he wants to. Will he? If Anderson wants to rekindle our long-standing relationship, he's got an open invitation to call me any time to fill in the blanks. Until then, we're left to speculate on motivation. "Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to!" We're sure that after Cooper opened his column by calling Anderson a bald-faced liar that Anderson will be eager to call Cooper and say things in private for Cooper to misrepresent, forcing Anderson into a public "I didn't say that" game. Yet Cooper manages to gauge it as a threat - unless Anderson dishes something to Cooper, Cooper will just make stuff up because he has no other choice. Anderson is still fuming about his forced resignation from Apple's board. Following the conclusion of an internal investigation into the options backdating mess, he was served up as the sacrificial lamb. Are the facts alleged in the SEC complaint also because he was a "sacrificial lamb?" Does Cooper have even one shred of evidence to support his actual claim here - that Apple made Anderson a scapegoat and the US government decided to support the company's decision without facts? Of course not, but Cooper rarely needs facts to accuse Apple executives of malfeasance. Would we be any better if we didn't offer proof of that? Well, that's the easy part, thanks to our massive back-catalog of Cooper's venom. Cooper actually benefits from ZDNet and CNet Web changes over the past decade - most of his past fact-free columns trashing Apple and its executives are no longer available to people evaluating his credibility. That's why MDJ and MWJ quoted him. In July 1997, Cooper compared then-Apple CEO Gil Amelio to a homicidal dictator: But far from being the story of a can-do guy who turns Apple around, the ongoing soap opera is turning out to be a tragic tale of an overmatched executive who bears a disturbing resemblance to Emperor Nero. He said that advertising agency BBDO deserted Apple Computer, when in fact Apple initiated an ad agency review because it was unhappy with BBDO, and BBDO declined to fight for the account. NIne months later, Apple's new agency, TBWAChiatDay, showed the new "Think Different" campaign that proved changing agencies was the right move. And in a mental glitch typical of stories at the time, Cooper said, "Talented junior and middle managers are leaving in a troubling brain drain robbing Apple of its future," ignoring the fact that if these people had in fact been the ones pushing Apple's "failed" strategies of 1994-1996, would losing them necessarily be a bad thing? In 1997, for some reason, Apple was commonly portrayed as unable to do anything right, yet when the people who made those decisions left, it was supposed to be unambiguously bad for the company. You can't have that both ways. (MDJ 1997.07.03) In March 1997, Amelio gave a long speech at the Internet World conference. The speech contained one line about more layoffs coming at Apple. Cooper covered the speech by reducing it to that single line, not mentioning anything else Amelio covered in the long presentation. (MDJ 1997.03.13) In March 1998, just before Amelio's book On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple was published, Cooper trashed Amelio and the book without having read it. Without any inside knowledge, since Cooper was never an Apple employee and was not on the inside during the events Amelio described, Cooper called Amelio "just another Milli Vanilli" and said Amelio was "faking history." From MWJ 1998.03.30: Cooper claims Amelio portrays himself as fighting covert and overt "schemers and dysfunctional managers undercutting his plans to resuscitate the company," something that's no distortion of history as Amelio occasionally complained about it during his tenure (as noted in MDJ 1997.02.03 but without an original quote). Amelio portrays journalists who write about Apple as clueless or vicious, although few regular MDJ or MWJ readers would have any problem finding serious problems in the writings of John Markoff (whose exclusive stories are always wrong), Jim Carlton (who's selling a book claiming Apple can't survive) and Jon Swartz (who seems to prefer headlines to facts), among others. And Cooper absolutely lambastes Amelio for "smothering his enemies with vitriol." There's only one thing worse than cluelessness, and that's hypocrisy. [Cooper accused Amelio of "vitriol" but didn't mention his own writing comparing Amelio to Nero.] Cooper didn't like Amelio then, he doesn't like Amelio now, and claiming that the book distorts history without proof to the contrary is more suited to politics than journalism. Upon the release of the iMac - the computer that spawned a worldwide design revolution of brighter-colored objects and computers with more attention to design - Cooper said that the machine would not change the world, called Steve Jobs a "huckster" for foisting the iMac upon a public that was somehow too dumb to realize they were being conned. (MWJ 21998.08.17) That wasn't enough for Cooper, though. Apple made the supportable and reproducable claim that the 333MHz PowerPC G3 processor in the original iMac actually beat the contemporary 400MHz Pentium II processor in several BYTEmark benchmarks, including the integer computation test. PC Magazine decided to test that and reported that the Pentium II and even a Celeron processor could beat the iMac in BYTEmark tests - but they got these scores by recompiling the benchmark suite with Intel's super-optimizing compilers, while leaving the PowerPC version as an unoptimized version built with a little-used Motorola compiler. If the magazine had optimized the PowerPC version as heavily as the Intel version, the PowerPC benchmark would have won the test again. Cooper ignored the unfair test and took an opinion column about it to the much larger audience of USA Today, calling Apple's completely supportable test "clearly overstated." The only way to rig a Mac test, in Cooper's world, was to find that the Mac came out on top. If that happened, Cooper thought it must be rigged. (MWJ 1998.08.31) When the testimony of Dr. Avie Tevanian, chief architect of Mac OS X, went against Microsoft's party line in the long antitrust trial, Cooper called the widely respected Tevanian a "doofus." (MWJ 1998.11.07) Even though Apple's board of directors and investors were happy with Steve Jobs as "interim CEO" before he took the title permanently in January 2001, Cooper thought there was something vaguely wrong with it, though he couldn't quite say what that was. (MWJ 1999.05.02) In December 1999, Cooper praised Jobs as "exec of the year" even as he belittled every one of Apple's accomplishments for that same year. He again called Amelio feckless and said the former CEO "had as much personality as a piece of wet toast," said Jobs is "all show business," and attributed the success of the "candy-colored iMac" and other Apple products like the iBook to "the reality distortion field." (MWJ 1999.12.18) When a contract worker at Apple leaked confidential product plans onto Yahoo, Apple sued a "John Doe" to discover who had leaked the information. For acting to protect its secrets, Cooper called Apple's executives "a bunch of Grade A jerks" who "have stepped over the line yet again." Cooper invoked the First Amendment, blissfully unaware that freedom of the press only means the government can't stop you from publishing something, not that you can steal private information and make it public. He compared Apple's response to the criminal activity of Watergate, and unilaterally decided that Apple has no right to keep secrets unless he gives the company special dispensation: "It's all part of the game. The problem is that Apple is making up special rules as it goes along." In Cooper's world, where Jobs is a "huckster" and Tevanian a "doofus," only Cooper gets to make the rules, and reserve high dudgeon for those who don't play it his way. Cooper, interestingly, does not hold any other company to the standard of not being able to set its own product announcement dates. (MDJ 2000.08.07) When Apple released the original flat-panel iMac G4, Cooper liked it. That was a real problem for the Apple basher, so this excerpt from MWJ 2002.02.18 shows how he tried to work around it: In his recent perspective for CNet News (the successor to ZDNet, his former publisher; the merge has wiped out the online archive of much of his older vitriol), Cooper again blasts Apple, more as a kind of self-therapy to remind himself why hates the company than to convince anyone else. The problem? Cooper really likes the iMac (Flat Panel), admitting that he wants one: "Not long ago, I ran a friend's new iMac through its paces, concluding the evening suffering from an acute case of computer envy." So he spends the rest of his article convincing himself - and, perhaps, his readers - that Apple's ability to make superior products that perform tasks well is irrelevant. "The heart of what's really wrong about Apple - what has always been wrong about Apple, ever since Steve Jobs's first incarnation as CEO [ - is] the company's congenitally poor job of reaching out to IT users." There it is - Cooper's corporate market, where he happens to have influence, is the Holy Grail of his computing. If a company can't beat Microsoft at a game Microsoft defined, it's doomed to irrelevance. The same writer who blasted Mac owners for being thoughtless lemmings here criticizes Apple for portraying PC users as the same in "those obnoxious, anti-corporate Super Bowl ads of the mid-1980s." (There were only two such ads, and the first of them, "1984," is widely regarded as the best television commercial of all time.) Cooper criticizes Apple for not jumping to the forefront of the market in 1994 "as the Internet moved front and center into the corporate world," ignoring that at the time, Apple's packaged operating system included a now-defunct system component that made every application into an E-mail program. PowerTalk was overengineered and ahead of its time, but only half of that is Apple's fault. As [other news in this issue] shows, plugging the Macintosh into a network is not all Apple's responsibility - if Microsoft will only make Windows clients for its software and holds a monopoly OS position, all Apple can do is persuade or sue. But Microsoft's position on Exchange all but guarantees that employees at places like the San Jose Mercury News must have some kind of Windows machine just to stay connected. The worst part, of course, is the hypocrisy: in 1994, Macs were far easier to get onto the Internet than Windows machines. Apple had released MacTCP years earlier when Microsoft was still doing private networks; PowerTalk included Internet-friendly gateways, Claris Emailer was released in 1995, and in the early years of the Net, surveys showed that some 25%-30% of Web surfers were using the Mac OS when Apple had about 6% market share. Yet all Cooper could see is a non-Microsoft operating system in his Microsoft world. Had Apple had blindingly superior Internet features, he would have said exactly what he's saying now: that's not enough to overcome the Microsoft hegemony. Methodical madness Cooper won't be happy unless Apple tries to become Microsoft, because in his limited view of technology there really isn't anything else. He reinforces it wherever he can: an "interview" he conducted last year with Dell education manager Bill Rodrigues was little more than a free advertisement for Dell's education plan. Cooper lobbed softball question after softball question with no understanding of what he was asking or the answers he was getting. He let Rodrigues say Dell had a superior model for working with school because it sold directly instead of through channels, not telling readers that Apple sells about 80% of its education systems directly as well. He let Rodrigues take all the credit for Apple's education sales stumble. He let Rodrigues argue that because the corporate market tends to prefer Wintel that students have to "learn" it or be left behind, and lots more. It was an interview, sure, but Cooper's questions and lack of challenge to the answers turned it into a commercial. In a recent interview with Microsoft's Jim Allchin, an executive who lied on the stand in the antitrust trial (MWJ 1999.02.06) and who a year ago called open-source software "a threat to the American Way" (MWJ 2001.02.24), Cooper asked him what he thought of the new iMac. The rest of the interview, by the way, was about Windows XP and ".NET" services, something Allchin is responsible for at Microsoft. Out of the blue, Cooper throws in an iMac question, and won't even print his full response: "It's a warmed-over Mach (kernel) … The technology didn't blow me away." Cooper cut out the middle section, and didn't even notice that Allchin didn't respond to the iMac, he responded to Mac OS X, which wasn't the question. When there's an opportunity to make Apple look second-rate, Cooper can't pass it up, nor has he [ever] been able to in the five years we've been tracking his reports. Given that Cooper is "the executive editor of commentary at CNet News.com," it might explain why CNet News never fails to find a headline that makes Apple look bad. The end of Cooper's evisceration of Apple this time ends, "It may be impossible for the leopard to shed its spots, but Apple could make more headway into the corporate world - even at this late date - if it had a mind to solve the problem. The trouble is that it just doesn't give a damn." He can't even get the cliche right - leopards don't change their spots. When it comes to Apple, Cooper is the leopard that can't change his spots - and doesn't give a damn. No pun on the currently-in-development Leopard was intended - Cooper can't even see the present clearly, much less the future. We have other, less egregious examples of Cooper taking joy at any misstep by Apple, real or perceived, but you get the point. Cooper is the prototype for Paul Thurrott - he hates not only Apple but also its executives, employees, and customers. Cooper takes glee anytime he can blast the company, and does not pause at publishing fiction or distortion about Apple or its products to enable his insults. Every Apple product is overpriced or a loser on launchin Cooper's world, and if it turns out to be otherwise, well, all you people who purchased it were just brainwashed morons. Cooper has spent a career kissing up to Microsoft and blasting everyone else, a task for which he has such passion that little things like truth become unimportant casualties. Cooper publishes opinion, but as the cliché says, he's entitled to his own opinion, not his own facts. And yet after ten years, despite consistently being wrong and hypocritcal on nearly every Apple-related topic, one of the biggest tech news sites in the world still gives him front-page space to allege wrongdoing at Apple and a coverup by the SEC without a single piece of evidence except a statement from a man he calls a liar - a statement that can be completely true and not contradict anything the SEC or Apple said, as noted today in MDJ 2007.04.27. Cooper's absolute lack of objectivity on Apple, or even his acceptance of the company's existence, has made him write badly about the company for over a decade, yet he never gets called on it - he merely "fails upward" to positions of greater prominence, while those who point out his errors and bias are just "Apple fanatics" in Cooper's world. Of course, it's CNet's right to publish the opinions of whomever the company chooses, and to give them whatever level of prominence they think those opinions deserve. It would just be nice, given Cooper's decade-long track record of deception and attack, if someone would call them on it. # - Posted to In The News on 4/27/07; 8:42:40 PM

Quick Apple Q2FY07 coverage prediction

The numbers have been out for about 15 minutes, and here's our quick prediction of the initial non-SEC coverage: Lots of stories about "Is the iPod overpriced? Has Apple lost iPod dominance?" and the like. Why? Apple's music revenues are up only 7% year-over-year, despite selling 24% more iPods in the March 2007 quarter than in the March 2006 quarter. Sequentially, iPod unit sales were down 50% from the Holiday 2006 quarter and revenue down 51%, but you expect to sell a ton more iPods for Christmas than you do for St. Patrick's Day. The problem? Last year, in the March 2006 quarter, Apple's music sales were up 79% year-over-year, including 61% more iPod units than in March 2005 and 69% more iPod revenue. On top of that, Apple had guided analysts to expect gross margins of about 29.5% for the March 2007 quarter, but the gross margin was actually an almost-obscene 35.1% - a relative increase of 17.4% in margins that Wall Street already considered to be pretty high. Therefore, we predict the usual suspects will take high margins and lowered sales and ask if Apple's missed the boat - if the company could have made more money and grabbed more marketshare by lowering iPod prices, since the iPod provided 39% of Apple's quarterly revenue, and all music products combined comprised 50% of Apple's revenue - perhaps a first for a non-holiday quarter (we'll have to check). Add this to the SEC drama and it should be a fun conference call to observe, in the sense that observing an episode of 24 is more fun than actually being in it. Check out the live webcast if you want here, or click that link after 5PM PDT today for a replay. # - Posted to In The News on 4/25/07; 4:09:06 PM

"1984" aired more than once

Without taking sides in the way that Apple's famous 1984 ad has been turned into political fodder, we feel obliged to point out that the trope "it only aired once" is false. It only aired once nationally, but in local markets: In keeping with industry tradition, Chiat/Day paid $10 to run 1984 in the 1:00 A.M. sign-off slot on December 15, 1983, at a small television station (KMVT, Channel 11) in Twin Falls, Idaho, thereby ensuring that the commercial would qualify for that year's advertising awards. And beginning on January 17, the 30-second version of the commercial aired for weeks in ScreenVision, an advertising medium played in movie theaters before previews and feature presentations (some theater owners loved the commercial so much that they continued running it for months without pay). It should also be noted when talking about 1984, but rarely is, that Apple's choice to run this ad in the 1984 Super Bowl is what established the Super Bowl as a premier advertising showcase, something that's still true 23 years later. # - Posted to In The News on 3/19/07; 11:41:29 PM

Your Mac Life Show Program Live Broadcast!

MDJ's publisher talks with Your Mac Life host Shawn King on tonight's (Feb 21) show about the iPhone, the mysterious pause in Apple's Mac development, and other meta-topics in the Apple universe. Listen live to the show at 8:30 PM ET at http://yourmaclifeshow.com (and note the new domain name). Matt says, "I sound worse than I feel, so please ignore the voice that's a cross between Harvey Fierstein and the AFLAC duck." # - Posted to In The News on 2/21/07; 1:56:52 PM

Local winter storm warning

When the weather gets as severe as it does around here, we learn to take warnings seriously even if the actual weather probably will not be as bad as they anticipate. After a summer of record-breaking heat, the winter has so far been mild. They're saying that ends tomorrow: THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN NORMAN HAS ISSUED AN ICE STORM WARNING...FROM 6 PM FRIDAY TO 6 PM CST SUNDAY. .PERIODS OF FREEZING RAIN WILL OCCUR BEGINNING FRIDAY NIGHT AND CONTINUING THROUGH SUNDAY. HEAVIER PRECIPITATION WILL LIKELY OCCUR FRIDAY NIGHT WITH ANOTHER ROUND EXPECTED SATURDAY EVENING INTO SUNDAY MORNING. SLEET MAY MIX WITH FREEZING RAIN ON SUNDAY BEFORE THE PRECIPITATION ENDS. ICE ACCUMULATIONS OF ONE HALF INCH TO ONE AND A HALF INCHES ARE EXPECTED WITH THE MOST SIGNIFICANT ACCUMULATIONS EXPECTED TO EXTEND ALONG THE INTERSTATE 44 CORRIDOR. ICE ACCUMULATIONS AND WINDS WILL LIKELY LEAD TO SNAPPED POWER LINES AND FALLING TREE BRANCHES. THIS MAY RESULT IN EXTENDED POWER OUTAGES IN SOME AREAS. Some of you may recall that in February 2003, GCSF World Headquarters and its entire neighborhood lost power for over three days. Roads were passable even as power lines were covered with ice, so we decamped to another part of the state for a couple of days. That was up the "Interstate 44 corridor," though, so we're not sure we could do that this weekend. We have plenty of options if the power goes out for more than a few hours; we learned lessons in 2003. We have food and can find local shelter if necessary. This server, providing news and issue distribution, is co-located in Oklahoma City with its own power; mail and local internet services at GCSF World Headquarters are completely separate. Even if we lose local power or Internet, this server won't go down, though mail may not reach us for a few days. (If you've been with MDJ for a long time, you may know that we didn't have a secure subscription page until 1998. If you subscribed before then, you probably called us; if you called, you probably talked to Marie. She says "hi," but she's even more prepared than we are - in 2003, her house was without power for sixteen days. The backup generator and power cut-off switchover are all tested in the past few weeks and ready to go, you can believe it.) We've rebuilt the RSS feeds today so MDJ 2006.01.09 (with pre-keynote Macworld Expo coverage) is now in the MWJ RSS feed. We're working on more - yesterday we managed to get NetNewsWire (a primary news collection source) down to 2 unread articles from a peak of, I believe, 3785. (It was at zero on Tuesday morning.) If weather interferes there may be more delays, but we're prepared to work around them as best we can. Theoretically, the more prepared we are, the less likely we are to need any of those preparations, so there we go. # - Posted to Administrivia, In The News on 1/11/07; 5:31:01 PM

A free style guideline

…for writers covering next week's big trade show in San Francisco: Macworld Conference & Expo. Macworld Expo is acceptable on first and subsequent references. Never just Macworld—the stand-alone name refers only to the magazine, not to the trade show. Note that there are no capital W letters in any spelling of the trade show or the magazine. Please pay extra attention to spelling if you work for the Wall Street Journal, Wired, or AppleInsider, or if you're one of the analysts the site constantly quotes. Expert Macintosh users who see "MacWorld" in an article know you don't know what you're talking about, just as most technology-literate readers would laugh at "MicroSoft," "QualComm," or "LexMark." Referring to a famous technology event without the correct name or spelling is a quick way to throw away your credibility. Saying "That's how I always thought it was spelled, and besides, everyone knew what I meant" is saying "I didn't bother to get the facts about my subject before I wrote my article." Don't be that writer. Readers sometimes benefit from changing odd capitalization to more traditional usage: Before: The iPod shuffle play button is big and friendly. After: The iPod Shuffle play button is big and friendly. This is not one of those cases - changing "w" to "W" is neither more traditional nor does it aid understanding. Dropping "Expo" is fine for casual conversation, but since the magazine is heavily involved with the trade show, correctly referring to "Macworld Expo" and Macworld assists the reader: Macworld has announced its list of "Best in Show" products for the current Macworld Expo. It also simplifies searching your database for articles about the trade show. When in doubt, use the correct name instead of the short version. Being clear and accurate is more important than being trendy. # - Posted to In The News on 1/6/07; 4:10:45 PM

A podcasting device?

We normally don't make much room in MDJ for iPod-related items other than those affecting Apple's financial situation. MDJ and MWJ are about the Macintosh, not about the iPod or about Apple Computer generally (excepting Apple's corporate health). However, people scoping out new devices still constantly ignore the principles that made the iPod a smash hit. Today, Dave Winer touches on two while quoting analyst Michael Gartenberg on what an iPod-like device designed specifically for podcasts should look like. It's hard not to love Winer's gung-ho attitude; the first thing we'd ask is "what's the last successful consumer device spec'd out by any analyst?" Analysts tend to argue that future devices should be the best parts of old devices plus some kind of magic new pixie dust to make them "better." Individuals and small groups do the real innovation. Nonetheless, Dave says: Since we agree that it should have built-in wifi capability, why should it have USB? USB may be a little faster, but if I can save money and space by only having one communication interface, then I'm going that way. I don't see myself pushing content from a desktop or laptop to the device, I see it downloading on its own over wifi Various clueless people have been calling for the iPod to have Bluetooth or Wi-Fi capability since it was released. It wasn't going to happen, but it may in the next year? Why? Battery life. The first iPods had a realistic battery life of 6-8 hours if you avoided battery-draining options like shuffle play and constant backlighting. Thanks to advances in battery technology, Apple is now claiming audio playback time of up to 20 hours on a full charge (or up to 6.5 hours of video playback), or up to 24 hours for an iPod Nano. That's approaching the levels where you could get 10 or more hours of playback with the constant battery drain of a radio transmission, either to Bluetooth headphones or to find a Wi-Fi network. It would still require you to think carefully, though - if you leave Wi-Fi on while not intending to connect to anything, you'd be draining the battery in a constant search for a Wi-Fi network that you don't intend to use. Winer may not see why to put a USB port on such a device, but it would require a way to configure itself without a network. He lives in Berkeley and has lived in other major cities where comprehensive free-or-cheap Wi-Fi is taken for granted. Most of the world does not - once most people go jogging or start the commute, they have no network available until they return to home or office, and even that network may be modem-based and very slow. A USB port allows for traditional desktop-based loading of content, and as Winer may not have remembered, for charging the battery. When you can combine both control and power into an industry-standard connector, it's a clear win. Gartenberg is correct in that making a new proprietary connector is a bad idea, and there's little reason to put in a dumb power port when a smart USB port takes the same space and provides many more capabilities. The second thing? I do think I'm going to have to tell it what to subscribe to over the interface, the podcast discovery mechanism really has to be on a system with a rich user interface. Wifi has plenty of bandwidth for that kind of communication. The key lesson of the iPod is that jamming a lot of controls onto a pocket-sized device is a bad bad bad bad tragically bad idea. The first lesson of the iPod is that you don't try to use its four buttons and a scroll wheel to load or manage content on the device. You use iTunes for that, since it has a huge screen and the resources of your entire computer to make that task easier. A device that can find and download podcasts on its own is a fine idea, but how do you subscribe to a new podcast that you know about? Does anyone really want to have to navigate Web sites or enter URLs on a pocket-sized device that should be optimized for playback? Gartenberg says he doesn't want "syncing" because he can just drag and drop stuff to a standard device, but the market hasn't really embraced that solution, has it? A Wi-Fi interface means such a device could automatically update podcasts on its own, perhaps discarding old or already-heard episodes by rule to save space as new episodes come in. But it seems silly to imagine anyone investing big bucks in a device that ignores the lessons of the iPod solely to stamp "podcast" all over everything. Such a device could succeed in its niche not by being more complicated, but by improving upon the strange iPod-iTunes podcast support. Wi-Fi and automatic updating is a cool start, but not if that's its only advantage and it's harder to use than an iPod. It would have to be as simple as the iPod-iTunes combination, with more features for podcast listeners (and viewers?). Configuring Wi-Fi on a tiny screen won't ever meet that burden. # - Posted to Home Page, In The News on 11/30/06; 12:10:01 PM

Google accidentally sends out Kama Sutra worm

From our friends at Macworld: Google accidentally sent out e-mail containing a mass mailing worm to about 50,000 members of an e-mail discussion list focused on its Google Video Blog, the company said Tuesday. “On Tuesday evening, three posts were made to the Google Video Blog-group that should not have been posted,” Google said in a statement, posted late Tuesday night. “Some of these posts may have contained a virus called W32/Kapser.A@mm — a mass mailing worm. If you think you have downloaded this virus from the group or an e-mail message, we recommend you run your antivirus program to remove it,” said the statement, which was attributed to the Google Video Team. W32/Kasper.A@mm is better known as the Kama Sutra worm. Discovered in January of this year, it deletes files and registry keys on affected Windows systems. It is blocked by most antivirus software. Google uses its Video Blog group to let subscribers know when “interesting and fun” videos have been highlighted on the Google Video Blog. E-mail to the group’s mailing list are posted by a handful of Google employees, called Google Video Team This team was responsible for sending out the malicious e-mail Tuesday night, said Gabriel Stricker, a Google spokesman. Stricker did not have any more details on how Google ended up distributing the worm code, but he said that internal protocols are now in place to prevent this from happening again. It's about time those smug, self-satisfied Google users joined the real world instead of living a "security doesn't matter" fantasy land. Google, as you know, is powered through invisible programs that live on every personal computer. And yet despite this massive security hole, Google users have continued to believe that they were immune to viruses, worms, and other security threats that only I, as a columnist, could see coming. They perform search after search, day after day, believing they're better than those of us who use Alta Vista, which as you know is the world's leading search engine and therefore used by all people who are smart enough to read IT columns. Even this blatant example of how using Google can completely destroy your systems is unlikely to awaken them from their cult-induced sense of superiority. When contacted for comment, Google's spokesperson, who said things I don't believe and therefore was obviously lying, said that this heinous security breach had nothing to do with the Google search engine, even though the names are exactly the same. But I saw my good hacker friends take over a system that had Google running on it at the time, so this misdirection doesn't fool me, and it shouldn't fool you either. I can tell you this without revealing details of all the secret demos I want you to believe I've watched and perhaps understood: this should be a glass of water in the face of all those insufferable Google users. Using Google makes you just as likely to get a virus (or, as I more correctly call them, "thromboses") as if you use Windows or ATM machines. I know it won't wipe the smirks off their faces, but I'll still go to bed tonight muttering to myself as if it would. [OK, ZDNet - can we have the column gig now?] # - Posted to In The News on 11/8/06; 6:17:55 PM

"But Steve Jobs' options really WERE worth millions!"

We probably should have expected people to respond to our previous trip down memory lane by complaining that Steve Jobs' 27,500,000 options of Apple stock, though underwater, were indeed "worth something" when Apple's board asked him to trade them in for 5,000,000 shares of restricted stock in March 2003. (Apple's SEC documents say that the board decided to reduce option overhang, not that Jobs asked to trade in the shares himself, so barring any evidence to the contrary, that's what we believe happened.) Alas, the evidence for this claim is the work of "compensation experts," specifically Graef Crystal, whose balloon of "All Apple CEOs are overpaid" has been deflated in MDJ and MWJ repeatedly for nearly ten years (first mentioned in MDJ 1997.04.11, when the "overpaid" CEO was Gil Amelio). As an antlered Mac observer said: As Graef Crystal has pointed out, Jobs was given the present value for the options in March 2003 using an industry-standard means of calculation. This value is calculated based on the strike price of the options, a price that was benefitial to Jobs. He received shares valued at $75 million. If he had received a less favorable strike price - such as that on the date he received the options - he would have received less in 2003. Parts of this are factually incorrect, and the conclusion is therefore unsupported by evidence. Jobs was not "given the present value for the options in March 2003 using an industry-standard means of calculation" anywhere but in Graef Crystal-world, where he's been inventing fantasy numbers for Jobs' compensation since 2000. Crystal and other critics continually try to value Jobs' options using the Black-Scholes method of determining the present value of a future asset. We covered this in MWJ 2003.04.15: Compensation columnist Graef Crystal has ridden this story hard, initially estimating Jobs's grant of twenty million options as worth US$471 million, and second 7,500,000 option grant as worth US$52 million. However, in a recent Apple-bashing column, Crystal estimates that the present value of the 27,500,000 options as of 2003.03.20 was about US$89 million, while five million shares of Apple stock that day would have been worth around US$74.5 million. "Allowing for some elasticity in the assumptions that go into the Black-Scholes option-pricing model, exchanging US$89 million of underwater options for US$75 million of free shares is pretty much an even exchange," he writes. And, as always, that's the rub. Option-pricing models use stock price statistics over time to put a present value on stock option warrants because people like to trade them, just as they like to trade all kinds of commodities. If someone offers to sell you an option to buy 100 shares of Apple Computer stock for US$30 per