Digital Trends
There’s no denying that Apple’s App Store has been wildly popular amongst iPhone and iPod touch users—“Shaking Baby” applications aside—and that Microsoft, RIM, Palm, Nokia, and others are all looking to emulate Apple’s success with application stores of their own. Just to underscore how far they have to catch up, however, Apple has announced that customers have downloaded over 1 billion programs from its App Store since it launched a little over nine months ago.
Back at January’s Macworld Expo—Apple’s last, remember—Apple’s senior VP for worldwide marketing Phil Schiller announced that Apple was finally going to introduce variable pricing in the iTunes music store—something music labels had wanted for years but which Apple had resisted, insisting it’s $0.99-per-track model was key to consumer adoption. Apparently Apple now feels that a handful of consumers have already adopted iTunes—it is the number one music retailer now—so introducing variable pricing won’t inhibit many people from using the service.
Taking the stage at Apple’s final Macworld Expo, Apple’s senior VP of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller stepped into Steve Jobs’s shoes and got set to deliver "three new things" to the Macintosh faithful: iLife ‘09, iWork ‘09, and a new 17-inch MacBook Pro.
Acknowledging the controversy surrounding Apple’s decision to abandon Macworld Expo, Schiller showed images of Apple’s successful retail store operation, noting the stores bring in 3.4 million visitors every week…and that’s the equivalent of 100 Macworld Expos every week. The implication in Schiller’s presentation is that Apple doesn’t believe it need to shell out millions of dollars (and considerable effort) to reach a comparatively small gathering of its most faithful customers…and, in hosting its own product announcement events (as it has with the iPhone 3G and recent iPod and MacBook announcements), the company has proven it doesn’t need the publicity boost provided by the Expo to announce new products.
Following Apple’s announcement that this week’s Macworld Expo in San Francisco would be its last —and that this year’s the keynote address would be given by Phil Schiller rather than Steve Jobs—the industry press has been awash in a flurry of rumors and speculation of about the state of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ health. Investors worry that no clear path of succession to the Apple CEO seat has been articulated, while Job’s very apparent weight loss following surgical treatment for pancreatic cancer has been on display at public events…even prompting Jobs himself to quip that rumors of his death had been greatly exaggerated following the mistaken publication of an obituary. Of course, barely a month later, Apple’s stock price was slammed by fabricated reports Jobs had suffered a heart attack.
Some Mac fans are mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore. Their method of protest? Silence.
After Apple announced on Tuesday that it would officially be abstaining from an appearing at the Macworld expo after this year, Mac faithful have been expressing their disappointment in the company quite vocally on the Web. And Lesa Snider King, a Mac fan who actually got married at Macworld, has taken it to another level.
At a special event held at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Apple CEO Steve Jobs—who opened with a brief note that rumors of his death were greatly exaggerated—announced iTunes 8, new content offerings, and—as expected—updated to its iPod line of portable media players.
Apple has revamped its line of iMac all-in-one desktop computers, offering improved CPU speeds and graphics processing power. At the same time, the company has also expanded the high end of the iMac’s build-to-order options to including a Core 2 Duo processor running at 3.06 GHz on the 24-inch iMac, along with Nvidia GeForce 8800 GS graphics with 512 MB of discrete video memory.
Apple has released Safari 3.1, the latest version it’s cross-platform Web browser which also ships as the default browser for Mac OS X computers. Apple has always aimed for a sleek interface, broad standards compatibility, and fast performance with Safari, and the company claims version 3.1 improves on that history by being up to three times faster than Internet Explorer and Firefox in HTML rendering and JavaScript execution. Version 3.1 also becomes the first browser available that supports portions of the upcoming HTML 5 standard, including HTML offline storage (in a local SQLLite database) and audio and video media tags. Safari 3.1 also implements support for CSS Animations (yes, something else that can blink and twitch on your screen), downloadable CSS Web Fonts.
Apple has updated its Airport Express wireless base station to 802.11n, offering up to twice the range and five times the performance of previous 802.11g models while keeping the base station at its attractive $99 price point. The AirPort Express has proven popular with travelers and other mobile users for its diminutive size and portability; home users also appreciate its built-in USB printer sharing feature and AirTunes, the ability to stream music from a Mac or PC with iTunes to a home stereo.
Lawyers representing users in a class action lawsuit against Apple Computer claiming the screens on its popular iPod nano portable music player scratch too easily have filed suits in California on behalf of customers in Mexico and the United Kingdom.
The complaint alleges that the screens on the iPod nano scratch too quickly during normal use, and that Apple was aware of the flaw but chose to ignore the issue in a rush to get the product to market. Steve Berman, lead attorney on both cases, says the second suit resulted from a large number of international requests to be included in the firm’s original class-action suit. Berman said, “Apple’s iPod Nano has sold in record numbers around the world, just as it did in the U.S. It seems that wherever the Nano is sold, problems with the defective design soon follow.”
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