ARTS & FARCES internet

Macintosh sales represent a full third—US$22 billion—of Apple’s revenue for fiscal year 2010. And all we get is an updated operating system (not now; next summer) an updated MacBook Air, updated iLife, and a Mac App Store. Really? For a third of the business?

The touchpad- and mouse-based multitouch gesture support in Mac OS X Lion is a welcome improvement, but the good news apparently stops there.

The show-stopper is the Mac App Store. In 1984, Apple introduced the Mac with the jaw-dropping 1984 commercial. In the ad, an unnamed heroine representing the advent of Macintosh promised to save humanity from conformity. In the commercial, the Big Brother-like character is celebrating the anniversary of the “Information Purification Directives,” a once-and-for-all-forever end to “contradictory thinking.” Here’s the entire bit:

“Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!”

Wait. What?

Under the guise of “dropping by for [Apple’s] first US$20 billion quarter,” Steve Jobs used the Apple earnings call to rant about the company’s competition (Google, Research in Motion, tablet developers) and—strangely enough—stakeholders (customers and developers). But mostly Google’s Android operating system for mobile devices.

Jobs did address the open v. closed business models head-on—if seemingly scripted—citing Microsoft’s abandoned PlaysForSure digital rights management (DRM): “Even if Google were right and the issue is ‘closed’ versus ‘open,’ open doesn’t always win. We think the ‘open’ versus ‘closed’ argument is a smokescreen for what’s really best for the customers. We think Android is very, very fragmented and becomes more so every day. We think this is a huge strength of our approach when compared to Google’s. We think integrated will trump fragmented every time.”

He also addressed human factors issues related to tablet computers with less than 10 inches of screen real estate, saying, “One naturally thinks that a seven-inch screen would offer 70 percent of the benefits of a 10-inch screen. This is far from the truth: Seven-inch screens are 45 percent as large as an iPad…. Apple has done extensive user testing and we really understand this stuff: There are clear limits on how close you can place things on a touch screen, which is why we think 10 inches is the minimum screen size to create great tablet apps.”

Google’s Andy Rubin responded to Jobs’s rant with a tweet making it clear that Google needs to hire a few lot more user experience professionals: “the definition of open: ‘mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make’” For the uninitiated, that’s a command-line sequence to make a directory, download Android source code, and build the operating system. What’s missing—from a developer’s perspective—is the fact that only major releases of the Android source are available and only those inside Google can add to the code base. What’s missing—from a user’s perspective—is that the vast majority’s eyes glaze over when they see this; they don’t want to deal with all that crap on a mobile device.

TweetDeck chief executive Iain Dodsworth responded to Jobs with a bit more finesse, again with a tweet: “Did we at any point say it was a nightmare developing on Android? Errr nope, no we didn’t. It wasn’t.” TweetDeck also released a chart visualizing the Android ecosystem. TweetDeck has two developers working on the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) platform, which is basically Flash with support for HTML, Ajax, and JavaScript.

Here’s a laundry list of what I’d like to see from Apple at its “Back to the Mac” event on Wednesday, 20 October 2010 (in addition to the next major revision of Mac OS X, of course; all apply to the 15-inch MacBook Pro, my tool of choice):

1. Top-of-the-line Intel Core i7 processors with updated, automatically switchable, slide-scale variable third-party graphics (I’m looking at you NVIDIA Optimus), and a user-replaceable battery
2. High-resolution (1680x1050) antiglare display standard
3. 8GB RAM and larger hard drives standard
4. Lower prices for optional solid-state drives (SSD).
5. HDMI and USB 3 ports
6. Integrated WiMAX radio
7. Updated, fully 64-bit iLife and iWork
8. Updated MobileMe, with an iDisk as useful as Dropbox
9. An explanation of the North Carolina data center (see 8, above)
10. That one thing in OS X that will make us all wet ourselves (no, not FaceTime; that’s a given in an updated iChat)

I know it’s too much to hope for, but I’d really like to see an OS X roadmap with regard to iOS. If they’re going to merge—and I’m not at all sure that’s as likely as everyone else on the planet seems to believe—I want to know about it definitively sooner rather than later. And if the Touch interface comes to OS X, I sure hope its in the trackpad and not in the screen.

My Apple TV arrived earlier in the week, but I didn’t get a chance to putz with it until today. My wife is eagerly—but very patiently, at least on the outside—waiting to use it.

Setup couldn’t have been simpler. Plug the power cable into the wall and connect the HDMI cable—the one I ordered from Apple at the same time I ordered the Apple TV; it’s not included—between the Apple TV and the television. Mash the Menu button on the remote to turn it on, and the rest is Apple-simple. Pretty cool, so long as you’re going to rent your visual media from the iTunes Store.

In theory it’s only marginally more difficult if you want to view media stored somewhere on your network: Launch iTunes, select Advanced > Turn On Home Sharing, and enter your iTunes Store account information. If you don’t have an iTunes Store account you’ll have to create one even if you only want to stream media from your local network. Some will find this inexcusable—I almost do. Apple requires you to provide a credit card number to create an iTunes Store account. So, this is a backhanded way for Apple to collect who knows how many credit card numbers from people who merely want to stream media on their local network.

Strike one.

Today Apple streamed its media event, announcing new versions of its iOS for its mobile devices, evolutionary iPods, and a new version of iTunes that contains Ping, a “social network for music.” As Dan Gillmor writes in his Salon piece, anyone who believes that “probably expected Amazon to remain just an online bookstore.”

The difference that makes a difference with Ping, compared to all of the other social media networks, is nothing short of astounding: Apple already has the credit-card numbers of 160 million verified users. It’s easy to explain why the record companies haven’t done something like this (their brains were small and, like the dinosaurs, they died). But it’s incomprehensible why Amazon wasn’t the first-mover here. As Gillmor writes, “... Amazon, which has been leagues ahead of everyone else on so many things, and which has had all the pieces in place for years now to create a transformative social/community operation, never tried.”

Apple has never done network products or social media well, but Ping may be different. Early reports are that Ping has an API (or will have) but Apple requires approval of the integration code.

Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, announced that iTunes 10 with Ping was available “now.” It’s not. And still no Beatles music in Apple’s iTunes Store.