apple

I was reminded about our MacBook Air conversations (including the comments on a recent post from Walter) by seeing it as one of the minor stories on the cover of Laptop magazine. So I did some poking around the web to see what platform neutral and PC-oriented pubs had to say about Air.

By far the most often-cited reason to love it is how cool it looks, and how much fun it is to use. "An undeniable sexiness," says Gizmodo. PC Magazine tested it running Vista under Boot Camp, and says it's "hard to pass up." The reviewer at Ars Technica says, "I won't be able to go back to a MacBook or MacBook Pro—despite the Air's other downfalls."

I found a bunch more along these lines, and planned to keep going along the "pull quote and link" style, but got a little bored. The fact is that EVERY review I found said that they either wanted them, or had already bought one with their own money...even after much of their reviews were quite explicit about Air's shortcomings, including some you've never heard about, like the discovery that watching movies in iTunes destroys battery life.

These aren't consumers. They're people who work with computers for a living. Of course the one thing they had in common is, not a pro app in sight. And they ultimately love Air.

Which brings me back to my peeps at Laptop magazine. Look, there are a million ways and places and reasons to use a laptop, and the folks in our neck of the woods count for about a dozen of those million. I love Laptop's assessment because it very much agrees with my own -- why else?

This work of art is worth considering for corridor warriors who attend lots of meetings, as well as for commuters who do a fair amount of work while traveling to and from the office.

The last company I worked at was barely mid-sized, around 2,000 people worldwide, maybe a tenth the size of a corporate giant like Apple. And I saw scads of people spending their own money on super-light, super-small computers that they preferred to the corporate issued dogs. Not one of the disadvantages of Air mattered a whit:

All software was on the network, and even the wireless was fast (g speed then, probably up to n by now) and accessible (the only place in the buildings you can stand without being in sight of 2 AirPorts was in the bathroom).

I personally loaded software from disk TWICE - one was Final Cut Studio. That feature where you connect to another optical drive, Remote Drive, works great even if the computer you're connecting to is a PC. Connects automatically when there's one in the vicinity. You can even use the option key to BOOT from a Remote Drive. And that's without buying the $99 USB DVD drive. Which, by the way, can't be used with any other computer, including those from Apple.

Which also reminds me, I'd be more interested in an ethernet adapter than an optical drive. Oh wait, THERE IS ONE, and it costs $12.99. Pushes up to 100BaseT full speed through a USB 2 port. Did I mention that it's only $12.99?

The biggest benefit, as noted above, is the crazy portability. It wasn't unusual for me to be in meetings in 6 or 8 different rooms in a DAY, or that many CITIES in a WEEK. (No kidding. Sometimes more.) I'd have freaking KILLED for a computer like Air. If you think that cutting the thickness AND WEIGHT more or less in half doesn't make all the difference in the world, it's because you haven't gone through this.

Oh wait, one more reason. Every technology company, including the couple I worked for, is paved wall to wall with gear lust - cars, home theater and on and on. Laptop envy is darn near the top of the list, and tiny was always prized over powerful because, frankly, for business, they're all plenty powerful. This tiny computer would make any corporate weasel carrying it the absolute biggest of gear lust dogs.

And why buy a Mac at ALL if this isn't part of the reason you do it? 'Fess up. You know it is.

I can think of a whole bunch of other use cases scenarios where Air is absolutely ideal, but that's the one I lived in. Did I mention that I'd have KILLED for Air? You can find other scenarios at Amazon, where all 9 reviews so far are 5 stars.

Heck, if I had $1800 laying around, I'd buy one. Of course I'm very happy with my MBP, and there are a bunch of things I'd rather spend that kind of money on, all the rest of which my wife would enjoy every bit as much as me. Still, I don't mind being alone again -- naturally -- in my opinion on this, but after chewing on this for a couple of months, I think this is the most interesting Apple machine since...

...well, since the Cube. This ain't anything like that, but I'm just saying. Apple gets big when they do small, and I think this one's a lot likely to be bigger for Apple than smaller.

PS. The "Why is there air?" title is a reference to the 1965 classic comedy album by Bill Cosby of the same name. It's easy to forget today that he won an unprecedented SIX consecutive comedy Grammies, and he did them all IN A ROW. This one starts a run of truly indispensible discs that include Wonderfulness, Revenge, and To My Brother Russell With Whom I Slept. Not really a comic but a storyteller, he was the best at it since Will Rogers, and maybe since Mark Twain.

PPS. Look at the picture for Mr. Cosby's take on the answer to his own question.

...or so some observers believed in 2006! This was upon the news of the second laptop to include Blu-ray drives, this one from Dell. And why not? When Apple joined the Blu-ray Disc Association in 2005, they said they were committed to promoting the format. Seen anything to back that up since then? Anything?

I think Dell makes better computers than a lot of people think, and you certainly have them to thank for the idea of truly custom configurations and computer sales over the internet, both of which they practiced years before many others did. But their stuff is nothing next to Sony's. The VAIO line is pretty elegant, and introduced thin form factors, wide screens and 1920x1080 res back before the turn of the century.

Oh wait, Apple still doesn't support 1920x1080. In fact, the current fave res for PCs is 1980x1200, to allow player controls on a 1920x1080 movie. I love my MacBook Pro - I use it for 90% of my computing, 100% for the last few months, and I am of course typing on it now. But I've long ranted about how far behind the curve Apple's display technology is, and this is one of many examples of what I mean.

Anywayyyyyy.....

So back in MAY OF 2006, they introduced a laptop with these specs:

1920x1080
Blu-ray reading AND WRITING
HDMI out, so you could play those Blu-ray disks out to your HDTV
Built-in TV tuner
4 GB RAM standard
GeForce 7800 with 256 MB VRAM
Built-in camera

At least the 17" MBP has those last 2 now.

The price of that Sony laptop 2 years ago was $3500, very much in keeping with the $2500 price of the MBP plus 2 more gigs of RAM when you add back in the 2 years of price decline for today's MBP...which 2 years later has no TV tuner, no HDMI, no Blu-ray reading or writing, and no 1920 res.

Hmmmm....

And then just about a year ago, Sony introduced a later VAIO that unambiguously smacks on the MBP, with a few tweaks from the previous year's model to bring the base price under $2000.

15 in. screen (check - second lightest in the game after the MBP)
Santa Rosa Intel (check...wait, a YEAR ago?!?)
No longer standard 1920x1080 res, but you can upgrade to that! I HATE that MBP's video options aren't upgradeable
HDMI 1.3 a YEAR ago
Blu-ray burner/reader
Upgradeable to 400 GB storage with 2 internal 200 GB hard drives a YEAR ago

Did I mention that the base price was under $2000?

Again, I love my MBP, and am using it now. I've never owned a VAIO. I'm just saying that Apple has a long way to go to catch up to the state of the art.

Oh, and lest anybody suggest that Sony brought these models out because they had such a large stake in Blu-ray's success, I say, not so fast. The exact numbers are hard to pin down, but most of the sources I've found place Sony's stake in the format at somewhere around 20%. (Look it up - plenty of references.) The job of the laptop team is NOT to support the Blu-ray team (Japanese companies don't work that way). Their job is to sell laptops, and with this kind of price-performance, they're keeping themselves at the top of the PC game.

Couple of other notes as I write this on Sunday March 2 aught 8, Acer has also announced Blu-ray enabled laptops in Q2, supporting 1080p in both 16 and 18 in configurations. (I have no idea what's up with those sizes.)

And in a "you had to see this coming" announcement from the week before, Toshiba has confirmed that it isn't ruling out Blu-ray drives on its laptops.  I'm not sure what "confirmed" means in the context of "maybe," but there you go. The "see this coming" part is because Toshiba still has the biggest laptop market share...and see above re: Sony. These guys couldn't care one flip about the outcome of the format war. They have numbers to meet, and they'll do what it takes. 

Now, to see why this would be cool, check out the specs on T's HD DVD laptop last summer. HD DVD-r of course, and the usual suspects (802.11n, webcam, bluetooth, etc.) but check out the rest:

Santa Rosa 2Ghz Core 2 Duo
GeForce 8600 with 512 MB VRAM (!!!)
included HD tuner
fingerprint reader (a big deal for business computers, trust me)
2 160 GB drives
4 Harmon Kardon speakers

Early last summer, for $3199 stock. You might not care about some of these features, but the price-performance is once again, well ahead of the current generation of MBPs, and maybe the next.

The fact is that I DO own a Toshiba laptop from my PC days. After 4 years, I still love it, a true entertainment powerhouse -- cable tuner, built-in (and very good) DVR with one-click burning to DVD (from 4 years ago, so SD of course), and the best sound I've ever heard on a laptop...with only 2 Harmon Kardon speakers. You know they sound great since HK was the first, and still the best, mfr of matched external speakers for the Mac.

My point isn't to pee on my own MBP...ewwww....a computer that I truly adore. Just an addition to Walter's admonition to Apple, to shake a leg and add the features that have existed on PCs for years.

Final notes from our peeps at Wired:

Later this month (3/08), Dell will ship a sub-$1000 Blu-ray enabled laptop. Wouldn't it be a kick to see this introduced in the MacBook, or even iMac, before the MBP? It's happened before. And btw, if it would work with the Pro Apps, I'd use a 13" MacBook in a heartbeat. Still the biggest bang for the buck in the Mac universe, and a great form factor.

The bulk of the article focuses on what an energy pig the Blu-ray drives are for laptops. The big thing is that Blu-rays decode is currently processor-intensive, but efforts are underway to move that to the GPU. I suspect that this is how Dell is pulling off the sub-$1000 price: a less expensive CPU, and as is ALWAYS the case (grrrr), a less expensive, higher-performing GPU than the MBP has.

So, to invoke the Prophet Biscardi again, Hello Apple! What about it?

Seriously. Check it out. Be sure to click on the image to see a close-up detail.

The story comes courtesy of "Steve Jobs." His blog and The COW are all the internet you need.

...in, uhm, 2007. It really did make a huge splash at that show: in addition to MacWorld naming it best of show, I love this article from Ars Technica called "ModBook Rules MacWorld." It's easy to see why - this is the super cool thing that Apple should have released this year...if not last year...if not before. Yeah, yeah, laptops get all the buzz right now, but I'm telling you, tablets have been rocking the PC world for years because for a dramatic part of the laptop market, tablets work so much better. By such a long shot it's ridiculous.

Perhaps not for most folks here, but nobody here, including me, is in anything more than a teeny tiny niche of the market, even with the Apple ecostystem. So when I tell you that tablets are better than laptops for a large part of the market, "large part" by definition excludes us. :-)

(BTW, our boy Gates is on record saying that the tablet form factor will surpass all others....of course he said that would happen by 2006. Yeah yeah, evil empire, borg, whatever. The man knows something about selling massive numbers of things.) 

One of the easiest ways to understand the ModBook is as a cross between a laptop with a rotating screen, and a Newton on nuclear-strength steroids: touch sensitive screen designed by Wacom, handwriting recognition that actually WORKS, 25% higher contrast ratio than any MacBook, a bigger screen and faster processor than the Air, GPS, and on and on.

As for the Newton part, the CEO of Axiotron is the guy who KILLED Newton, so if nothing else, he has a good idea of what DOESN'T work.  And along the way, he's picked up on some things that do. Here's a more recent Ars Technica article, an interview with said CEO, Andreas Haas.

One of the most interesting things about this story is that Apple signed these guys up as an official Apple Proprietary Services Provider, and have made clear that they're just not interested in tablets.

"Apple just isn't interested in this type of thing, and that's why we're fulfilling that need. We're thrilled about it, and we are not going anywhere."

Of course the folks at Digital Voodoo and Matrox probably said the same thing, so whatever.

In any case, I think one of the things this shows is that Apple is only marginally interested in expanding its reach into new markets in the computer biz. Even if it's not at all useful to YOU, I think that the ModBook will be around longer than Air, which I think is destined to join Mac models like The Cube on the list of interesting failures.  

Robert Cringely is one of the higher profile tech pundits, and like all pundits, is only barely credible based on predictions coming to pass.

But he brings up again the possibility of Apple buying Adobe. 

Actually, he says flat out it's going to happen. His reasons are a teensy bit more interesting this time, plus "inside sources," but I wasn't persuaded before and I'm not now.

He uses the Final Touch acquisition as an example of Apple's commitment to pro apps, and it is...but Final Touch wasn't a $36 billion purchase, as Adobe is likely to be. 

Another example he uses is just flat out wrong: "Of course content creation has been the heart of Apple's business ever since the original LaserWriter and the invention of desktop publishing...."

Sorry, try again. Apple didn't own any desktop publishing software. Clarisworks was interesting, but they killed it for good reason. It was a distaction from their core business of building computers and OSes.

Although Apple's core business is changing -- which Apple acknowledged when it dropped "Computer" from its name -- but look at how it's changing. 

The first big clue was QuickTime, which is still being used far far FAR more as a distribution and consumption platform than a creation platform. Seriously, QT is critical to us, but are there hundreds of millions of us? No. And the most compelling content being sold in the iTunes Music Store is sometimes only marginally created with QT at all. (I said sometimes.) And even there, the big money is in distribution and consumption.

iPods? Distribution and consumption.

The iPod/iTunes infrastructure is especially interesting to me. It used Mac users as a beta test before rolling it out to the whole world...which is frankly what non-Mac users comprise. Although Apple is growing far faster than the rest of the industry, it'll still be a while before it breaks out of single digit market share, and will likely never reach the heights Apple had before Mac.

(In fact, until stabilized at 3%-ish for a while, and starting a meaningful rise this year, Apple's market share has plummeted at least 90%. Discuss.)

My point here isn't primarily about market share, but about strategy: nobody, and I mean NOBODY, who's playing for keeps can do it on the Mac alone. (Sorry FCP.) Apple's iPod/iTunes business didn't change the world until the whole world could use it.

iPod. iTunes. Distribution. Consumption.

Not creation. You can barely use 'em to create anything.

Add iPhone to the mix: one-to-one distribution, if you will, on a massive scale. 

Look, I'm an idiot. I don't know a thing. But I only barely see Adobe fitting into this. Macromedia? Absolutely. I was among the thousands of people who thought Apple should have bought the whole company when they bought FCP from Macromedia. They could have gotten it for a song compared to what Adobe paid.

(Speaking of which, I believe that Adobe paid to be taken over by Macromedia -- the best money that Macromedia never spent. Discuss.)

I say that because Flash is a far bigger distribution platform than QuickTime, and because of its dynamic nature, is part of business infrastructure in ways that QT never will be. Websites are just the beginning. QT may never be useful in a database driven infrastructure. Flash is already being used as an actual driver interface in cars! 

So where does the rest of Adobe fit into this. Photoshop might seem like a big fish, but I've heard Adobe folks tell me that they see this as the most vulnerable app in the portfolio: being undercut by digital cameras, iPhoto, Aperture and the like. Those apps are forcing Adobe to change their game to meet Apple's challenge. So why buy it? Maybe to get at Pshop's science and medical business, but that's awfully niche-y.

After Effects? Meet Motion. Encore? Premiere? Encore? Buh-bye. Not that these don't all offer some superior aspects, but $36 billion?

After Flash, PDF is the other central Adobe technology...and Steve spent a full 45 minutes spanking Flash at the WWDC a couple of years ago. Included side-by-side comparisons of performance, image quality, the whole deal. Apple's flavor of PDF came out on top.

I think some of this was a shot over Adobe's bow: yes, PC has been your dominant platform for a decade, but leave Mac development behind at your peril. But how could he not have also been saying, we'd rather have you do this for us...but we can do it ourselves very, very easily.

Again, PDF has powerful features like built-in desktop sharing, video conferencing, etc. -- but I'm still waiting to see anything here that adds up to $36 billion.

Cringely says it will be announced this week. Do you? 

First, I want to underscore Shane Ross's outstanding, super-critical advice on upgrading your operating system. Although he wrote it in the context of upgrades to Leopard affecting your Final Cut Pro installation, it applies much more broadly of course. What he recommends is the right thing to do for any OS update, on either platform.

(Yo, Mac users...of whom I'm one. Following Shane's directions, the upgrade to Vista is smooth as silk. Certainly no more disruptive than OS 10.2, less disruptive than the migration to Intel architecture, and FAR less disruptive than the first OS X....which doesn't even hold a candle to the transition from System 6 to System 7, the worst OS update EVER. If you were using Macs then, you know I'm right.

BTW, this is neither a pro Vista or anti Mac observation. I'm just saying.)

Since Shane covered the OS, I'm going to focus on applications.

I don’t know if this is true, but I’ve heard that Thomas Jefferson said something along the lines that nobody who loves them should ever watch the making of sausages or democracy.

The same is generally true of software. It can be fun, but it’s always messy. My observations below don’t necessarily reflect anything I saw at the companies I worked for. I've had product manager pals of both software and hardware in a variety of industries for 10 years. They've told me stories far worse than these.

These are bad enough.

1) Nobody has tested your configuration.

Think about what you've got at the absolute core of your system. Drives and drivers. IO, QuickTime. OS, plug-ins... You think anybody inside a company has a configuration exactly like yours? I can tell you now THEY DON'T.

I'll go in reverse order, and start with the computer. Companies don't get these for free. They MIGHT get a loaner when they're testing the computer itself...but don't count on it. The absolute worst, worst WORST for this is Apple.

Which means that most third-party vendors, Windows or Mac, has to BUY EVERY configuration they want to test. Every computer, every array, every IO. What do you think the odds are that they've tested a system even a LITTLE like yours? Trust me, they probably haven't even gotten close.

No need to ask whether they’ve tested every camera and deck. You know the answer

2) Nobody has tested your workflow.

Yes, there are plenty of things every workflow has in common….and those are pretty much the only things you can guarantee have been tested: cut, copy, paste, save, open, close, capture, render, output.

Every format? Every frame rate? Every conversion between them? If you live in Europe but your software is developed in the US, I'm telling you now: PAL gets nowhere near the testing NTSC does, and yes, PAL-only bugs pop up plenty. I've never even heard of SECAM being tested...but surely somebody does, right? Right?

The other obvious thing every conscientious NLE developer tests is the export/import tango with Adobe After Effects. Beyond that, maybe yes, maybe no.

We’re mostly talking about NLEs here, but let me add a speedy note about OS software for pro users. Not registered users of the big pro software packages, which is north of a million each. I’m talking about real live editing pros – no more than a few tens of thousands, maybe a couple of hundred thousand tops, for everyone combined.

Any of you kids beta tested an OS? If it was Windows, you might have. Love those public betas, baby.

But Mac or Win, you think they’ve gone through everything you might do with their shiny new operating system?

3) Nobody has tested your features.

Shhhhh. Not every new feature is tested in every new release. The big ones, yes. One hundred percent, in every possible way they might be used? Uhm, not so much.

You'd be amazed how often you hear the phrase, "It should just work" bouncing around the software world. We don't need to test everything because "It should just work."

So let's pretend that all the new features get tested. The new ones get most of the attention. Everybody loves shiny babies. But what about the gawky adolescents known as old features? Which is to say, THE FEATURES YOU USE MOST.

Maybe the old features work with the new ones. Maybe not. Early adopters will find out the hard way if older features get broken by new ones. They do. Do you want to be the one who first tries to get it fixed?

Which brings us to,

4) New software can break your old stuff.

This one truly doesn't happen much at all, but when it does, it's heinous. I've never heard of things like entire projects getting torched, but presets? Absolutely. Keyframes? It’s happened with software I’ve bought. Thank goodness it’s rare, but it really is a heinous experience.

Don't forget: if things get hairy in your new version and you decide that the only way you can finish your project is in the old software, you're hosed. Opening new projects in an old version is a no can do.

Bailing on a new OS to go back to the old one that worked? Truly ugly, unless you followed Shane's absolutely critical advice for upgrading.

OS or app, back up everything. Trust no one.

5) Where'd I put that thing?

Unless you need a new feature or a specific old problem is fixed, adding new software is a guaranteed productivity killer.

Among the best-tested, most-reliable applications ever is Photoshop....which is the WORST application about moving features, changing toolbars, changing what's on menus. That would all be survivable if keyboard shortcuts stayed the same. Oops. Photoshop is the worst ever about this, too.

(Love ya, P-shop. I’m just saying.)

It’s just one example to illustrate the rule of Upgrade Inverse Proportion: the importance of the software is inversely proportional to the speed with which you should upgrade it.

In other words, don't upgrade if you need to get work done NOW.

6) Testers? What testers?

The industry's dirty little secret: many applications barely get any testing at all. One Very Famous Product has had outside testers in the single digits.

A product manager from the same Very Famous Company bragged to me about a release that “nearly 24” testers. Nearly?!? He clearly didn't want to just come out and tell me the real number...but he thought I should be impressed.

I was DEpressed that anyone thought this was a good idea. See numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, above.

BTW, if you're reading this, you almost certainly use this Very Famous Software.

(No, not that one. Not that one either. Yep, THAT one.)

7) There are lots of reasons to ship a product. The product being ready isn't always one of them.

Did you ever say to yourself, "Wow, who tested this stuff?"

My observation from many, many companies, is that even the best beta testers are nowhere near as diligent and thorough as the company’s internal QA (quality assurance) folks. They find a ton of problems that beta testers don't.

(You’ll also find a ton of problems they won’t. See numbers 1, 2 and 3, above.

There's even sophisticated, AI software to automate the testing of every single button and slider, as well as stability across hundreds of hours. In fact, they generate a number called MTBF, or Mean Time Between Failures. They almost know EXACTLY when and where things are going to go wrong.

Which is why I’ve seen QA folks practically chain themselves to the loading dock to try to keep software from shipping.

You should let developers off the hook a little here. I'll bte that everything you've ever "finished" -- term papers, projects for clients, mopping the kitchen -- could have benefited from more "finishing." Sometimes you have to say "enough already" and move on.

As they say in the game, "Shipping is a feature." Maybe shipping is what will give the company money to actually finish development.

How badly do you want to find out?

8) Third parties get the final product when you do.

There’s the software itself, then there’s all the people besides you who rely on it to create drivers, plug-ins, and all that good stuff. When they ship their compatible products, they need them to actually BE compatible.That’s why the REAL testing for those applications begins when the shrinkwrapped version of the software or hardware hits the streets. There's simply no other way development and testing can happen with a realistic chance of success.

Yet another reason to avoid overly-early adoption.

[edit, 10/30] A number of sites (here's one) report that Apple first released its developer build on 10/26....the same day YOU got it.

As mentioned above, there are obvious exceptions, but not many...and for Apple, far fewer than with other companies. Not passing judgment here, because it really is true for everyone. I’m just saying.

9) They don't always tell you all the bugs they know about. But they tell you plenty.

This one isn't as bad as it sounds. There really truly are edge cases, with combinations of genuinely obscure circumstances. They hope that you don't have them. Odds are better than even that it's not in the release notes.

There are other bugs that they hope to have fixed not long after shipping. The odds are about even you'll see it in the release notes.

If you don’t read the release notes, thoroughly, TWICE, before you even THINK about installing an upgrade – well, as my man Scooby Doo would say, “Ruh-roh.”

The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

The actual process is scary, but you know what? Things mostly turn out okay. Developers are almost all very smart people full of the best intentions. I know it can seem hard to believe when you’re on the receiving end, but they have more at stake in the product’s success than you do.

Upgrades usually go fine. As long as you’re only changing one thing at once.

Upgrading an OS, though? That's a whole lot of moving targets to hit.

You can avoid almost all of the pain by doing two things. The first is following Shane’s advice to the letter.

The other way to avoid the pain? Keep reading the Cow, and learn from all the people who’ve ignored all this.

PS. I'm about to install Leopard, and install Vista into Boot Camp. Two new OSes on the same day, on the same computer. Woo-hoo!!! Can't wait. Obviously. Stay tuned.

It's not even a background, really. It's pretty explicitly the absence of a background. Even lighting, no shadows, almost adrift. Not in a bad way. Stephen Smith did a great job of covering this in the May-June issue of Creative COW Magazine, including why it's best to use chroma keys to acheive the look.

The most frequent place you're seeing it these days is the "I'm a Mac" ads. (Check the end of this entry for a great variation.) If you cast your mind back a little further, you might recall the same look in the Apple "switch" campaign. As an Oscar-maniac, I hope you saw the short film with this look in the 2006 Academy Awards show, one of the highlights of what I thought was the best Oscarcast in years.

All from the same guy. The guy who invented the look: Errol Morris.

Almost. While it was common in still photography, it hadn't been used in any meaningful way before he used it for the first time in a short film for the 2002 Oscars.

You may have heard his name before, by the way. He won an Academy Award for the documentary The Fog of War, and has been nominated for others of his films, which include The Thin Blue Line, Mr. Death, Gates of Heaven, and Fast Cheap & Out of Control

Roger Ebert has said, "After twenty years of reviewing films, I haven't found another filmmaker who intrigues me more...Errol Morris is like a magician, and as great a filmmaker as Hitchcock or Fellini."

Mr. Morris is not shy. This quote is on the front page of his website.

I've always been struck that he's also unapologetic for enjoying making commercials, including the Mac Switch and "I'm a Mac" campaigns. You can find dozens and dozens of his commercials at his website. Be sure to check the links in the right margin -- yet dozens more.

These full-frame commercials are what got him the gig making the short film for the 2002 Oscar Award, where he used the white background style for the first time. The short film that opened the show that year instead of the traditional musical number is a whole bunch of folks, famous and not, talking about movies they love.

First, watch it here. I watch it pretty regularly, and it still delights me every time.

Then read the whole tale of how it happened in this AMAAAAAZING New Yorker story.

Just in case you're thinking that reading this might be a waste of your time, here's an excerpt from the article.

The interviews were stacked up, one per half hour, and by mid-morning the schedule was a shambles. Walter Cronkite was [on camera.] Donald Trump was waiting, with mounting impatience, in the wings. Mikhail Gorbachev and entourage were trudging up the stairs. And Iggy Pop was in the greenroom.

You read correctly. Iggy Pop was scheduled to go on after Mikhail Gorbachev, who it turns out is a big Russell Crowe fan. "And anything with Julia Roberts." You think I'm kidding?

BTW, I also put the "schedule was a shambles" quote in there because every one of us in production can relate to that nightmare.

So here's where he talks about that "white background" style for the Oscar film.

I interviewed over a hundred people on a white background....Of course, I'm not the first person to film someone on a white background. It's been done by a whole number of photographers, August Sander, Avedon, etc. I have no patent, no trademark, on shooting someone on a white background. Of course, when you try to do something that's free of artifice, somehow that becomes artificial as well.

(Although I can't find it online, here's an article in the Hollywood reporter talking about it, again, very much worth your time to read.) 

The white background isn't the reason that that Oscar short, as well as the Switch and I'm a Mac ads, among others that he's done, so compelling. It's the way that people look so directly and comfortably into the camera. To acheive that, he's created a device he affectionately calls The Interrortron. It's like a teleprompter, but instead of text, it superimposes his face in front of the lens.

Soon after the Mac Switch campaign, he applied the same white background style to a series of political ads for MoveOn.org that also played on his own site. They were a variation on the switch campaign if you will: dozens of people who voted for Bush in 2000, but were voting for Kerry in 2004. Darn near none of them was happy about it either, but they felt compelled by their consciences to switch anyway.

When we first discussed shooting [them], my producers and I would have endless discussions about the way to shoot these political ads, what the appropriate way of doing it might be. Should the lighting be absolutely flat? Should the background be white?...But I like the idea that there's something very straightforward about the ads....

So no matter how you feel about either of those candidates, take a look at political advertising at its best. (Sez me.) And again, lots of related links in the right margin.

After watching the spots, you might think you've got his politics pegged, and maybe you do, but it's more complicated than that. He bumped into Karl Rove in a Hilton breakfast room in Waco. I introduced myself. I said, "I'm Errol Morris. I made this film The Fog of War." Karl Rove said, "That's one of my favorite films. I give that as a present to my friends." So it's certainly not that he's incapable of accurately representing what people say across the range of political experience.

That's really the power of The Fog of War, and an example of how startling it is to look someone in the eye, really look. McNamara's clarity is startling, an experience you won't forget.

I could keep yammering about it, but I'll spare you that to show you this, six of Fog of War's strongest minutes. 

As deeply visceral a reaction it provokes while watching it, Morris has little confidence that much will happen as a result of his work.

I think we're rudderless bumblers, regardless of what we might imagine. You can think of my films as cautionary tales, but you might even think of them as despairing tales, because at least in a cautionary tale, you have this idea that by listening to the story you can assure a better outcome. Whereas I'm not at all convinced that's the case. In fact, if anything, I'm convinced that it's the opposite.

That's from an interview in a magazine called, appropriately enough, Stop Smiling. Still, there's a reason he keeps going.

My interest is primarily in what people are saying, and in not detracting or distracting from what they're saying, because that's at the center of what I'm doing.

That perspective, applied across all the work he does, and his strong visual style, are a few reasons among many why I agree with our man Roger that Morris is among the most important filmmakers -- and commercial-makers -- of our time.

And you thought this was going to be an article about keying.

PS. Xavier Reivax made a short film called "Same" that matches Nine Inch Nails' "Every Day is Exactly the Same" with film footage, the largest source of which is The Fog of War.

PPS. On the I'm a Mac ads, your pal and mine Eric Bliss sent me this GREAT picture:

I'll be honest, I thought Steve Jobs was blowing smoke when he encouraged the end of DRM. I still think the timing around the unfair business practices investigations in the EU is way, way too convenient to be a coincidence. It really did have all the hallmarks of a diversion and little more. So I'll give him all the credit in the world for actually making it happen.

You've heard the news by now of course, but I have to tell you, reading the transcript from the press conference with Steve and the guy from EMI is a gas.

Some highlights that I haven't seen mentioned widely yet:

• The DRM-free tunes will be at twice the data rate.
• Your current EMI downloads from the iTMS can be upgraded to higher-quality, DRM-free for the difference in price. (This is a no-brainer purchase, IMO.)
• EMI is making their DRM-free music available to any music store to sell. And why not? They want the money, and more stores offers the potential of more money.

Anyway, you definitely want to check it out.

In the meantime, Microsoft followed this up with their own story about working on DRM-free music themselves. I still kinda like Microsoft. But this is just sad.

OTOH, the article I cite above is riddled with errors, starting with four of the first five words. It calls Apple a "digital music pioneer." What?!? Apple came late to the game, and aren't even close to the first to offer DRM-free music. They've also offered among the lowest bandwidth music for a long time, so stop with the pioneer chatter. There are other errors, too. You could make looking for them a drinking game...as if you don't have enough of those already.

Now here's the thing. None of this is even close to the "death knell" for DRM, which will surely be around even longer than cockroaches.

It's also easy to forget that there's a large-ish industry that makes money selling DRM technologies, and they're not about to give up their livelihoods without a fight. And since their customers are almost all much, much bigger than EMI, well, the cockroach thing.

DRM Watch sounds like it would be keeping their eye on DRM mongers. Nope, it's keeping an eye on DRM foes. You'll want to take a shower after reading this, but you should read it anyway.

The headline says the story's about Microsoft jumping on the DRM bandwagon, but it's actually an overwrought screed. Here's one of several money quotes: "As far as EMI is concerned, the deal was shortsighted, risky, and possibly irresponsible to the company's shareholders."

Here's another: "A more effective arrangement would have been with a major multinational retailer, like Amazon or Target, that has no current digital music strategy."

Last one: "Apple...stands to benefit most from any additional unauthorized copying resulting from the lack of DRM." Maybe, but only to the extent that they sell the most music players. As Steve J. points out, the vast majority of iTunes owners have never purchased a thing from iTMS. Their iPods are filled with the legal, DRM-free rips of their own disks. I think he's absolutely right.

No, here's the last one: "we believe that the number of consumers who would truly benefit from "interoperability" is small." Riiiiiiight.

Choose what you drink carefully when you read this, because you'll surely be shooting it through your nose with laughter.

Okay, after raining on DRM Watch's parade, the article makes some interesting observations.

One is that EMI is getting a cash advance of $5 million from Apple. He says that, combined with the new sales of online tracks, we're talking about 3% of EMI's annual digital sales of $290 Million from digital revenue (really? that sounds high to me), and a tiny fraction of the company's overall revenue of about $3.4 Billion. He's not at all clear if this is simply music revenue or includes publishing, etc. -- but that's to be expected. His goal isn't clarity as much as it is to protect his own DRM business.

That said, this squares with my own impression of the impact of online music store downloads relative to hard-copy sales -- in the low single-digit percentage range.

He also has some interesting speculation that the real intent of EMI's move was to drive up the price of Warner's attempt to acquire them. I'm not buying it, but it's still interesting.

Anyway, I have to agree with him that DRM is far from dead.

Yet.

So on March 23 we hear that Leopard's coming in October rather than spring, to wait for Vista compatibility. Later that day, Apple's official response is that we don't respond to rumors. The same day, someone says that Apple says Leopard'll come out on time. Three weeks later Appple announces that Leopard is coming out in October, but the reason is iPhone, not Boot Camp. So there you go. Wait. Did somebody say they're delaying Leopard to wait for Vista compatibility?!?!

Taipei-based DigiTimes was first on the scene. On March 23, they cited "industry sources" who claimed that the reason why Leopard is slipping is "not due to software design problems with Leopard but instead is attributed to Apple's plan to have its new OS support Windows Vista through an integrated version of Boot Camp."

So ZDNet asked Apple straight out for a comment that day, and got the very straight-out reply "We don't comment on rumors and we've made no announcements about Leopard availability more specific than Spring 2007."

Alas, nobody asked the obvious question: Delay Leopard for Vista on Boot Camp? Are you kidding? "We're keeping Leopard off the streets until we can support Vista" is a story that not even Jose Chung would buy.

(Please tell me you know who Jose Chung is. If not, follow that link, then check this one, too.)

Just when it seemed all was lost, up stepped our boy Michael Gartenberg from JupiterResearch Analyst Weblogs, with just the sanity we needed. He kept sniffing around the story, and firmly reports on the very same day, March 23: Just spoke with Apple who confirmed the reports are wrong and Leopard is still scheduled to ship in this spring as they previously announced. The rumor mill is wrong again.

Oops. Way to get it right, dude. The rumor mill is wrong, but so's your source.

Okay, back to actual news.

Anyway, once Apple announced the delay themselves on April 12, I like how very plainly they say that Leopard is running late, and they say plainly why: to ship iPhone on time, "we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team."

Actually, I love it. Crystal clear. No excuses, just an explanation of the way it is, and the steps they're taking to get it all done.

While Leopard's features will be complete by [the Worldwide Developer's Conference in early June], we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October.

Getting it right takes as long as it takes. Love it. I've had to help craft similar statements, and they're much harder to get right than they look. Apple gets, as always, maximum style points.

The trade-off also sounds about right to me. They'll have iPhone out on time, and a tardy OS won't delay the sale of a single OCTOMAC (hey, that's right! Apple has new CPUs out!!) C'mon, it's not like we're talking about a release as disruptive as Vista....or even System 7 and OS X.

For the record, I liked both of those releases...but don't try to tell me they weren't disruptive. Leopard'll be a walk in the park.

But my guess is that Apple will make more money from the first six months of iPhone sales than they might ever make from selling boxes of Leopard. The more I think about it, iPhone's sales in the first month will probably beat Leopard's total sales. I'm sure it'll sell plenty, but not iPhone plenty.

So my next guess is that this wasn't even a very long conversation around the ol' whiteboard...if it even got that far. No brainer.

PS. The address for you cats to send the iPhone? Right there on my business card. They'll sign for the delivery at the front desk. Thanks.

I've made no secret that I think Fake Steve Jobs has the funniest blog on the web, and that he's also a consistently outstanding (and entertaining) source of Apple news and commentary, and uncannily accurate predictions.

Today, he unmasked himself as Dan Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes who lives in the Boston area. As that article notes, he was contacted by the New York Times' Brad Stone, who'd noted strong similarities with the blog Lyons keeps at Forbes.

And WHERE did Brad unmask Steve? Why, at the NYT's Bits blog of course.

Needless to say, Fake Steve's response is hilarious.

Forbes says FSJ will be relocated to Forbes.com starting today, but it's not there yet.  Anyway, they tell a great story about the story

The real Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (who publicly denied being Fake Steve) are among FSJ's readers.

Even knowing who Fake Steve is, this is still absolutely essential reading, no matter how you feel about Apple. Other than The COW, and emusic.com, this is the site I check most often. Check it out yourself if you haven't. To make it easy, you don't even have to scroll up: here's the link again for your convenience.

From Fake Steve Jobs, who remains the absolute best resource for Apple information, and by far the funniest blog on the web:

The nice folks at Sugarcat Cakes sent along this photo of their latest cake creation. They call it the Jesus Cake. Feeds a whole party of hungry geeks, but alas, you can't remove the battery.

You know that you can't remove and replace the iPhone battery yourself, right? Just like the iPod, you have to send it to Apple, and pay $79 plus $6.95 for shipping for them to ship it yourself.

On top of wiping off the fingerprints, they throw in erasing everything stored in your phone for free. Classy.

You're probably a couple hundred charge cycles away from need to replace the batter, but seriously, back your stuff up before you do.

Check this out: The Unofficial Apple Weblog features an AppleScript for opening major WWDC news sites!!! 

Anyway, I've been meaning to get to this for-freakin-ever, but here we are. It's the morning of Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference. There was a time when this was nothing but code geeks and the like, getting their dev ducks in a row. It has since become a key venue for rolling out products and announcements. Some of these have been development-related (move to Intel), some not (iSight, new flat panels), but increasingly, a good time will be had by all.

(Hey, Macworld is a show named for a magazine. No way is Apple going to save all their good stuff for them.)

There are acres and acres of WWDC predictions out there -- look it up, you'll be amazed. You might also be amazed at how many of them are from blogs, but not me. Blogs are the number 1 source of news on the web, by a long long long shot. Seriously. Long shot. What surprised me, though, was how many, uhm, no-name blogs ranked higher at the google than name-brand blogs.

Still, here are some sources of note to check and score against as the week goes on.

Fake Steve Jobs, in classic fashion, begins with Steve at a meditation center getting a high colonic, and getting accused of smoking cannabis, which he denies. Unusual, since he's quite explicit recommending it elsewhere. (I'm not encouraging this sort of thing, but a truly hilarious entry.)

Anyway, he talks about his prep for WWDC, and concludes "this one is going to be the most awesome WWDC we've ever had. Seriously."

Jason O'Grady is another of my daily reads at zdnet. He's been making WWDC predictions for weeks. One of those, new MacBook Pros, has already come to pass. How's he do with the rest? We'll see in a few hours.  He begins with a tantalizing come-on: Apple has publicly stated that Steve will demo a “feature complete” version of Mac OS 10.5/Leopard, so that’s a given. But if you remember back to the Stevenote at Macworld Expo in January Jobs mentioned that many of the features in Leopard were “top secret.” Presumably WWDC is where SJ will produce the proverbial rabbit from the hat.

He also reposts Apple Gazette's predictions:

1. Multi-Touch in Leopard
2. New GUI for OS X
3. New iLife w/iTunes HD
4. Blu-Ray Support
5. Leopard/iPhone integration
6. New Mac Minis and MacBook Pros,

and one more thing…

7. Ultra Portable iMac w/Multi touch screen

Some other notables:

MacNN has been a premiere site for Mac headlines for over a decade. They quote analyst Shaw Wu (please tell me he's a doctor) who mentions a recurring wish, a true Apple virtual machine for Windows. Interesting to me if only because it allows Apple to more explicitly go after Dell and the like for Windows computing market share. I'm not convinced, but hey, we'll know soon.

Apple Insider is another venerable news site, although unlike MacNN, there's some hardcore reporting here, consistently the best I see. They make several common observations, but here's one bit of hardcore reporting, this one razor-sharp:

A new track, named Content and Media, is tailored just to those developers who need to focus on getting their media to the Internet. Though offline production will be covered, most tracks will focus on blending Apple's latest software with the web -- ranging from web-only AJAX and WebObjects code to the mixed-media Dashboard in Mac OS X or even crafting websites made just for the iPhone.

Finally, you're going to want to get your WWDC Keynote Bingo card from Ars Technica.

If you're going to the keynote in person, print out the bingo card and play along live. The first person in the audience to win the game is expected to yell "BINGO!" loud enough so that the rest of us can hear it when we watch the keynote webcast video later. If we can't actually hear you, it's also acceptable if Steve Jobs hears you on stage and indicates this in some way...perhaps, by having you thrown out or "disappeared." Hey, no guts, no glory!

Fun for all.

Apple is notorious for filing bogus patent applications, but this one looks kind of cool. Ars Technica points to the Apple-filed patent application 20070103454, Back-Side Interface for Hand-Held Devices.

Dude, they really said "Back-Side Interface." 

An electronic device uses separate surfaces for input and output. One of the surfaces (e.g., the bottom) includes a force-sensitive touch-surface through which a user provides input (e.g., cursor manipulation and control element selection). On a second surface (e.g., the top), a display element is used to present information appropriate to the device's function (e.g., video information), one or more control elements and a cursor.

The idea is pretty slick. Instead of wasting the back side of the iPod, the patent application imagines the back side as a touch-sensitive navigation surface.

As is often the case, Apple is coming late to the game. Touch-sensitive surfaces have been around in other MP3 players for a while. (I can name names if you want.) But as is also often the case, Apple's idea sounds more interesting.

SOUNDS more interesting. As Ars Technica points out, holding an iPod and spinning a wheel with your thumb is one thing. Try holding your iPod and using your index finger on the back-side (stop laughing). It feels much more awkward to me than navigating with my thumb. Here's my favorite quote:

Sometimes a patent is just a bad idea that's original

The example they use is the easily-smudged iPhone -- they realllly don't like it -- but I'm not so sure they're right about that. Does anyone besides Walter Biscardi really know how the iPhone really works yet?

But given how easy it is to scratch some surface or another of an iPod...if not most of the surfaces...it's an interesting question. Just as interesting as the question of whether this thing will ever see the light of day.

There were a couple of (wholly legitimate) nits I had to pick with Apple's green announcement, but here's something I totally missed until Jason O'Grady pointed it out: Apple also divulged a technology advancement currently in development – LED backlight technology. (His emphasis.)

He continues:

Backlit LEDs provide higher brightness, significantly larger color gamut (greater than NTSC and EBU) – expanding the range of reproducible hues by as much as 45 percent, lower voltage and emissions. LED backlighting technology is currently integrated in Sony's 40" and 46" QUALIA series televisions. The technology, also called "Lumileds," is also known to reduce motion artifacts without a brightness or lifetime penalty.

He points out that Apple says very plainly We plan to introduce our first Macs with LED backlight technology in 2007. Not displays, but Macs. That means that we'll be seeing LED iMacs or notebooks by December 31, 2007, folks.

(BTW, Jason is one of the net's very first bloggers, with the O'Grady Power Page. Both this and his blog at cnet (linked above) are two of my daily stops.)

It could well be iMacs first. I might be remembering wrong, but isn't that where the Intel chips showed up first? I think so, because I remember a bunch of Avid engineers with iMacs on their desks saying yeah, it's crazy fast, but the screen is too small to do any real work. (I don't think that part was coincidental either, but that's a discussion for another day.)

Now here's the thing: I don't think Apple let that in "accidentally." Since nobody I know, or have seen in print, has been demanding that Apple hop on the LED bandwagon...because there's not one. So who's the announcement for? And seriously, make no mistake. This is an announcement. My guess is that it's aimed squarely at other developers: we may be behind you in greeny-ness for the next few years, but we're firing a technological shot over your bow as of today.

Of course, another side effect, maybe even the primary effect, was to make people start salivating for a new machine already. It worked for me.

A few weeks back, I wrote extensively about the EMI/Steve Jobs press conference, as well as the DRM establishment's response. Check it out if you haven't. It's really good stuff, and not just because I wrote it.

Well, here's the rest of the story, or at least as much of it as I accidentally found this morning.

Here again is the transcript of the press conference with EMI Group chief executive Eric Nicoli and Jobs. You'll find that Steve does much of the talking (surprised?), but both guys come off as smart, funny and self-deprecating. A nice read.

Of course, you'll want to hear it yourself. So allow me to present an MP3 of the press conference!

And because you're a glutton for this stuff, here are the slides in PDF form. How cool is that?

On one hand, the slides don't actually say much at all. That's the point. You kids out there? Don't do drugs. And don't put a pile of crap on slides!!! That point-by-point build nonsense? Strictly for amateurs. Don't ever, ever, ever do it. Seriously. Give people a big pretty picture to look at, then tell 'em a story.

If you give them a slide with a lot of bullet points, they'll read 'em fast, assume that this is all you have to say about it (especially if you read even one line aloud to them), and stop listening. It's a waste of time for everyone.

But if you show them a pretty picture, they'll immediately turn back to you, breathless, waiting for you to tell them what it means. You think I'm kidding about this? I'm not. Pay attention to El Jobso. He won't lead you astray.

Okay, slides rant over. But I have plenty of other stories to tell on the subject some other day. For now, back to fun with DRM, EMI, Apple, etc.

Not long after the original press conference, EMI Senior Vice President Jeanne Meyer did a great follow-up interview with bloggers at The Download Squad. (In case you were wondering, bloggers do indeed carry enough weight to get VPs from multinational companies to sit down with them. I suspect that the Download Squad strategy included just asking. So if there's some heavyweight you want to interview for your blog, just ask.)

Here are some choice bits:

The reason we decided to go with a DRM free version was because of the lack of interoperability between the various stores and devices were becoming too confusing and too frustrating.

So it turns out that EMI's strategy was based, at least in part, on the limitations of the iPod/iTunes closed architecture! Read it again. It's her point not mine, but I'm surprised we missed this before.

Not that she's singling out iTunes, though:

It will allow any retailer to sell our music to the owner of an iPod for example, not just iTunes, at the same time it will allow iTunes to sell music for people to buy for use on any number of different digital music devices and in fact mobile phones.

This quote might be the most interesting to me:

When we offered DRM free in an standard format next to a DRM free but with a higher bitrateand priced a little higher consumers on a ten to one basis went for the premium product.

I'm totally in the majority on that count, but I'll be interested to see how it holds up. On the one hand, the MP3/MP4 format is a testament to how little sound quality matters when compared to convenience. (CDs are too, for that matter.) But when higher quality is every bit as convenient? Maybe.

Also worth remembering: that the average number of tracks that iPod owners buy through iTunes is 20. Twenty. But let's put it this way. Say every iPod is responsible for just a single download of higher quality, non-DRM music that they wouldn't have bought anyway. So 100 million times $1.29 equals....where's my pencil?....$129 million dollars. I'll take it.

She also notes, as Steve did, that nearly all music currently sold has no DRM. Even if every downloaded track had no DRM, it would account for far less than 10% of overall music sales. Which begs the question, what was the fuss in the first place? Anyhoo.....

Two last updates, one new and one old. The new one first. Steve says no dice on the subscription model for iTunes. ""Never say never, but customers don't seem to be interested in it," he says, "People want to own their music." Hard to argue.

On the other hand (I'm saying that a lot, aren't I?), I watch whatever it is, 20 or 30 hours a week watching subscription TV (okay, closer to 40 once you throw in Red Sox games), and maybe 2-4 hours a month watching DVDs I own. So all the hoop-de-doo about subscriptions being the wrong model is nonsense to me. Subscription models have been proven again and again. We just don't have the right model of the right model yet.

Wait! The whole XM thing is the perfect evidence that subscription models for music do work well enough for a sizable and fast-growing audience. And radio's ratings are up while TV's are down. So there. You don't have to either own music or steal it to listen to it.

Now here's the old "update." Folks as old as me will remember when Real Audio was the coolest thing ever. Cooler than QuickTime, by a long, long shot. (Not that QuickTime could stream then. Could it?) Rob Glaser seemed like a stud because, when Apple was adrift and a non-player, he left Microsoft with the express purpose of kicking MS's ass...which for streaming media, he totally did...uhm, until...well, I'm not sure when. But sometime around when they became RealNetworks, Real became (or was revealed as?) the lowest quality, most invasive annoyance on the net. Am I wrong about this?

Anyway, here's Rob at the end of 2005 saying that the iPod's reign is going to fade "closer to 2 years than 10" (although he makes an interesting analogy with Apple's computer market share sliding from 40% to less than 4% at the time of the interview), the reason the subscription model isn't getting traction is that most people steal their music (what?), and using Lynyrd Skynyrd as an example of why Real's Rhapsody music subscription service is the coolest. I was going to say it's hilarious and provocative in equal measure....but it's more like 75% hilarious, 10% provocative, and 10% "huh?" and 5% sad for anyone who remembers when Real was cool. But you'll dig the interview. Maybe a lesson to never say anything about anything about the future in print, even online, because you'll almost certainly look like an idiot later. 

Speaking of which, where's my dang rocket car? Didn't somebody say we'd have rocket cars by now?

That's from AT&T's CEO Randall Stephenson, in his keynote speech at the CTIA wireless technology conference. But made "the audience snap to attention" was when he pulled one out during his speech. Before the speech, the chairman of the FCC grabs the phone from Stephenson. "He spent more time with it than I did," Stephenson said in an interview afterward. For a minute, "It seemed like he wouldn't give it back."

The part of the story I find most remarkable is that there a million people who've taken the time to get on AT&T's radar. Doesn't that seem low to you? I swear I've heard at least a million people talking about it myself, and I doubt any of them have also spoken to AT&T about it.

While they're not taking pre-orders yet, Cingular has set up a page on their website for you to enter your email address. When the iPhone's ready to order, they'll let you know. That and a picture of the phone is pretty much all that's there, but chances are that you've already heard plenty from your millions of friends.

BTW, we've mentioned that The COW's podcasts do pretty well. That's not just in the software how-to section of the iTunes music store. Our business podcast debuted ahead of The Wall Street Journal and Business Week. And the debut of our Serious FX podcast went to #3 in the overall technology category...just two spots behind the keynote speech introducing the iPhone. Gotta love that....

CNN reports that Apple has started charging credit cards for the shipment of Apple TVs. They continue, "Analysts say it's likely to sell well initially." Wow. You think so? The same analysts believe that Apple has taken pre-orders for more than 100,000 units, and, well, since I read it on the internet, it must be true.

Blog pioneer (he was doing it 10 years before blogging had a name) Dave Winer reports that one of his readers says he got a notice from Apple that his has actually been shipped. I got Dave's link from NewTeeVee, who quotes Dina Kaplan of Blip.TV: “The impact of Apple TV is going to be pretty big.” You think?

I'm not mocking Apple TV, just the analysts. And not even all the analysts. Jonathan Hoopes is an analyst for ThinkEquity, and has been bullish on Apple for a long time. (He rates Apple a buy, with a target of $120/share. You can look it up.) He sent a letter to his clients with a slightly more articulate take on the potential impact of Apple TV:

"In addition to sharing digital content within the home, we believe investors should understand the value of the various potential business models that Apple TV could enable.

As a digital media content delivery vehicle positioned in users' living rooms, we think the AppleTV/iTunes combination could become as disruptive to legacy video purchase-and-consumption behavior as the iPod/iTunes combination has been to the traditional music business model."

Ah, disruption! Now we're talking.

Jeremy Horwitz adds another dimension to the picture:

Apple has quietly added an “Export to Apple TV” feature capable of creating high-definition videos viewable on the Apple TV accessory. Unlike Export to iPod, which currently creates sub-DVD-quality 640 by 480 videos,

Export to Apple TV creates not only full DVD-quality 720 by 404 videos, but also 1280 by 720 videos.

He's done a little experimenting with this, and observes that a 90-minute movie weighs in at about 3 gigs. That sounds about right, but it also sounds a little heavy for Apple TV's initial offering of a 20-gig hard drive. (Oops.)

Still, check this out: the video from Jeremy's experiments so far only plays back in iTunes! It seems to herald HD delivery through iTunes. I don't think our boy Hoopes was even aware of this when he wrote in the article linked above that Apple TV is poised to blow Netflix clear out of the water, and is a step away from torching TiVo too.

That said, Apple is quick to admit that the average iPod user has bought 20 tracks from the iTunes music store. Which suggests to me that the stunning majority of iPod users have bought nothing from iTMS.

So this is one area that Hoopes is clearly flat-out wrong. iTunes isn't disrupting the music industry's basic business model. I don't think it ever will. Disrupted the portable music player industry that iPod was so late to join? Absolutely.

Is it going too far to say that iPods have taken off because you don't need to buy anything from iTMS to get a dandy experience? iTunes is awesome software for ripping your entirely legally purchased CDs and elegantly getting them on your iPod.

Unlike the iPod, Apple TV will require payment to view content on a big screen. Apple can't include DVD ripping tools in its official software so you're going to be limited to viewing content purchased from the iTunes store.

That's Jason O'Grady, one of the hardest of the hardcore Mac users ever. Like Hoopes, I think he lets some of his arguments take him off course, but I think he's zeroed in on this: Apple TV takes off when I can use it for my media.

Anyway, we're about to find out, ain't we?

One of the favorite games of Mac Kremlinologists is looking under the hood of new releases to find "hidden" text strings for hints of what's coming. Monday's release of QuickTime 7.1 hints at a whopper: Apple TV could be doubling as a game hub.

What Apple has not yet said, but is quite apparent from Monday's iTunes release, is that Apple TV will also sport some rudimentary gaming capabilities. "Are you sure you want to sync games? All existing games on the Apple TV," reads a localized string file hidden in the software. Another reads, "Some of the games in your iTunes library were not copied to the Apple TV [...] because they cannot be played on this Apple TV."

 

In total, iTunes 7.1 includes a little over a dozen text strings relating to game management on the new Apple device. In addition to syncing, the strings offer user prompts for various other operations such as removing games, preventing unauthorized games from making the sync, and warning users when their Apple TV can no longer accept new games due to a lack of space.

 

Note that this is still a long way from becoming a full-bore gaming console a la the Wii, et. al. Instead, it looks like a way to sync your iTunes games with your Apple TV.

Wait, iTunes games? Apparently so. On the one hand, this suggests something pretty lightweight, not nearly as intense as a console experience. On the other hand, two developments shed still more light on this.

In an interview with Wired, the former general manager of Xbox's online download component now works for a gaming company in a role that includes porting games to new platforms:

It will be about taking the stable of franchises and games out of PopCap's studio and adapting, customizing it for different platforms -- adding multiplayer, new play modes, HD, customizing the user interface and display for Zune, ipod, Apple TV, Nintendo DS, PSP.

 

And how's this from Apple Insider?

Students at the Savannah College of Art and Design reported today receiving an e-mail from a recruiter working directly for Apple, Inc., who appears to be actively tracking down skilled graphics designers among those enrolled in the school's Fine Arts programs. Those hired for the summer program would be tasked with creating "consistent, high quality 3D and 2D art for games," the message said.