TheMacAdvocate

Like any good fanboy, I followed the Apple event blogs as SJ and his band of merry men trotted out the iPad and its capabilities.  The best advice I’ve heard on the internets about the device is “don’t knock it till you’ve held it”.  The worst  - well – just hit up any of the comment sections of sites like Gizmodo and Engadget – or Paul Thurrott’s site.  You’ve got your usual assortment of idiots condemning a device that they haven’t touched.

TMA knows that version 1 of products like the iPad are going to have their limitations – just like the iPhone did in 2007.  But then came the SDK, and the App Store and 3G, etc. Even at version 1.0, the iPhone was itself an amazing device, not just because Apple made it but because of what came before it. Do you remember a lot about your cell phone before you got your iPhone? Me either. Those memories are tucked away like a childhood incident of inappropriate touching.  The iPhone rocketed to success off the back of an industry that seriously needed – and got – its ass kicked.

TMA also knows the iPad – in the short term – may also be a victim of Apple’s prior successes.  2 of Apple’s most innovative products, the MacBook Air and the iPhone, are the parents of the iPad. The light/thin Air with its non-removable battery and the touch-based UI of the iPhone combined. That awesome bloodline may also limit some people’s perception of what is possible with the device.   The iPad is an evolution of 2 existing products made by Apple, not a revolution against crappy products made by others. People may perceive the *want* factor slightly differently because several Apple products share some of its functionality.

I believe the ultimate success of the device – which it will enjoy by the way – will come down to how quickly developers can take advantage of the iPad’s increased real estate and some of the SDK’s bonus goodness like “popovers”.  Scaled up iPhone apps are nice, and the fruits of the 2 week development cycle afforded the handful of developers that presented the iPad at the Apple event give an inkling of what’s possible, but what’s concocted before the late March/early April release will be much more of a harbinger of the iPad’s success – in the short-term.  No one thought the iPhone would resonate in the market the way it did, but Apple took its revolutionary 1.0 product and proceeded to make measured, relentless improvements to keep it well ahead of the market. Apple’s commitment to that leadership, backed by the App Store model bodes well for the long-term success of the device.

People made retarded comments when the iPhone was announced.  There’s as much accountability as there is memory on the internet.  That didn’t make a whit of difference with the iPod or the iPhone. It won’t make a difference with the iPad.

Is there any stopping this wagon train? As the country slowly crawls out of an economic slump, Apple continues to kick the crap out of estimates in every category of profitability.

Unit sales of Macs and iPhones both sold at record levels, with the revamp of the iMacs boosting units above the million mark for the first time ever this quarter. Earnings were announced at $3.67 per share, up from $2.50 a year ago.

Macworld, as usual, has a nice recap of the earnings call.

These are lofty times, Macheads.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve come to sympathize with AT&T’s infrastructure plight. After trying and trying to accomodate iPhone users, their service is still compromised by the greedy 3% of users who hog 40% of their bandwidth. This isn’t a Marxist state, so people should pay for what they use, right?

Tell you what guys: I support your scary proposition to charge people for what they use and to smash the buffet table of unlimited use you currently grace all of us ingrates with.

Here’s the thing: if $30 represents unlimited use – by your definition - then $30 should be your ceiling.  So those piggish 3% should pay $30 – or more if they account for more than the established average bandwidth of that 3%. The rest of us should pay less.

That’s what you had in mind, right?

When you’re spawning products and updates like Jerry Bruckheimer throws off bad forensic crime dramas (“From the 200x blow-up of this webcam footage, you can clearly make out the perp’s face…”), it must be tough keeping all this stuff straight.

Oops! Steve just nuked employee #10,220.

UPDATE: Ars reports that ATV 3.0  is in the wild out and it looks to be worthy of “full point upgrade” status.  TMA’s happy muscles are officially twitching a little jig.

To say it is a laughable copy of an Apple Store is really understating it.

If I were an investor in Microsoft, I’d really, really want to know how they’re going to track the financial performance of these things.  Bury them in the “Entertainment and Devices Division”?  These stores – which sell nothing that you couldn’t get cheaper online and offer you no level of service beyond telling you that your PC-maker screwed you over – will fail.  And quickly.

In boxing, there are few things more satisfying to watch than a well-executed combination.  A lot of it is the result of what a fighter does before entering the ring.  Once there, it’s about opportunity and timing.

In Apple’s case, coming off another estimate-stomping quarter, they announced major refreshes to the iMac, the once-thought-dead MacBook, the artist-formerly-known-as-Mighty Magic Mouse as well as a respectable bump to the Mini.

In the iMac’s case, the specs are impressive: the top-of-the-line $2,199 model tops out at a 27″ 2560 x 1440 display and a 2.8GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 (Nehalem) processor ($200 less will get you an i5).  The MacBook gets the MBP treatment and now sports unibody (polycarbonate) construction and a 7-hour enclosed battery.  The mouse is an interesting concept.  In short, it’s a multitouch trackpad grafted onto a mouse’s body and it supports all the gestures of its integrated cousins.  We all know about Apple’s pathetic history with mice, so it’ll be interesting to see how it’s reviewed.

So in this boxing analogy, who is the opponent for which this one-two is intended?  I don’t know – is there anything else going on this week?

According to The Wall Street Journal, the analysts have finally shaken a little bit of the stupid out of their Q4 estimates for Apple:

Investors have grown accustomed to Apple crushing Wall Street estimates, so there are strong expectations for the company’s fiscal fourth-quarter, which ended September. Nearly 20 analysts have lifted price targets since September.

Analysts finally stopped notching their estimates at an average of $9.2 billion revenue and a profit of $1.42 a share.  So I guess the days of Apple catching analysts with their pants down are over, right?

Notsomuch.

This afternoon, Apple reported Q4 revenue of $9.87 billion and a net quarterly profit of $1.67 billion, or $1.82 per diluted share, destroying every estimate on the Street.  You can take your pick of summaries, but Apple Investor News is a nice aggregator.

Apple must still be exploiting that lull in anticipation of Windows 7.

Apple holds its quarterly earnings call on Monday, which means that analysts are tripping over themselves trying to anticipate Mac sales for the quarter.  Both Gartner and IDC predict Apple continuing to buck the trend – to the tune of 7 – 12% growth, depending on who you ask.

The folks at IDC (the same IDC that found that “Windows is cheaper than Linux“) cannot understand why people continue to buy Macs.  I mean, WTF?!

“Their sales just seem to defy all logic,” [IDC's] O’Donnell repeated. “There are obviously a certain number of people buying Macs even in the face of a recession.”

There are also a certain number of people who persist in their employment despite having their heads cemented up their asses.

Pity poor Ed Bott.  Aside from being one of the most transparent Microsoft shills beating the tech pavement, he is also a sometime user of Apple’s products, which must be hell for a M$ apologist.  One of the prerequisites for being a really effective Micronaut is that you have to feign respect for Apple – sort of how your closeted racist cousin claims to “have a number of black friends”.  You see, this front allows him to seem like a fair critic‚ while also letting him play the outraged user and bash Apple at every turn.

Ed’s latest shaken fist is over Apple’s bundling of the iPhone Configuration Utility with his update of iTunes.  Being the vigilant watchman he is, he was immediately wise to Apple’s game.

THEY LEFT THE CHECKBOX CHECKED!  Such incursion; such violation!

This isn’t the first time Apple has tried to bundle other software with updates for iTunes, which gives birth to Ed’s clever click-bait title: “Apple up to its old tricks, pushing unwanted software onto PCs”.

I’ll let you soak in the irony of the title for a moment.  Funny huh?

It gets better.  Because I like to point out irony to Windows enthusiasts (who by their very definition have no sense of irony), I’ll bang out a sentence or two in the comments section of webskid like Ed’s article.  Most of the time, doing so requires that you register at the site.  Undaunted by the time and effort required to create a user name and password at ZDNet (and stifling the urge to shower immediately afterward), I was treated to the following:

Note the three checked boxes to the right.  HOW DARE THEY CHECK MY BOXES FOR ME?!

So, I chuckle at the bonus irony and uncheck the boxes.  No thanks, boys.  Then I get the confirmation email:

I wish to WHAT?  Not only do I have to UNCLICK MY OWN CHECKBOXES on the site where Ed cries his self-righteous tears of injustice, I’m being spammed by them anyway?  Are you for real?  Well, obviously, I want to change my newsletter preferences from “no, don’t send me shit” to “really I fucking meant “don’t send me shit” when I unclicked those checkboxes”.  So I click the link to change my preferences and:

Wow. You want more information about me in exchange for the privilege of unsubscribing from spam that I should have never been on a list for to begin with?

To recap:

1. Ed Bott bitches about Apple’s software update foisting things on his PC he doesn’t need – that is, if he doesn’t understand that a checkmark in a box means he will in fact be downloading these things.

2. To register to leave comments on Ed Bott’s site, ZDNet‚ you have to uncheck 3 boxes to prevent you from being spammed by them.

3. Unclicking a checkbox on ZDNet apparently doesn’t mean what Apple thinks it means.  ZDNet still spams you.

4. You have to provide ZDNet with more information about yourself in order to really, really unregister for the shit you shouldn’t have been getting in the first place.

I mean, as a Mac guy who likes to laugh at Wintards, I’m all about the low-hanging fruit, but this even makes me a little embarrassed.

If you’re the kind of person that tries to rope friends into helping you move‚ claiming it’ll be “fun” and offering a cold beer in lieu of money‚ Microsoft has an idea for you: the Windows 7 launch party.  They’ve even posted a video how-to guide‚ with a somewhat incomplete list of suggested activities.  What happened to “pin the driver on the peripheral” or the “custom install app registration code treasure hunt”?

If you choose to host‚ I’d recommend a strict designated driver policy.