Tech journalism is not an oxymoron
Valleywag picked up on on a Silicon Alley post that calculates Daring Fireball’s publisher made almost $6,000 from Amazon affiliate links on the site to Leopard orders.
Two things. One: Gruber’s no fanboy; when Apple does something stupid he calls them on it. Two: Good for him. If I could make that much money on the traffic flowing through my site, I’d do it too.
(via Shawn King)
A manager at Best Buy told me the company’s Point of Sale systems (we used to call them cash registers) are being monitored for any sales of Apple’s Leopard operating system in advance of the official 6 p.m. local time release.
“We’ll be fined $130,000 for each copy we sell before six,” he told me.
That seems like a pretty steep fine. I think he might be mistaken about the per-sale part, though. I don’t know why Best Buy would agree to something with such a high potential cost in comparison to the potential return. Even if they make $40 on each copy, they’d have to sell over 3,000 copies to make up the profit lost from each one that went out early.
For those who just can’t wait the remaining few hours until Leopard’s release (or are just curious), AppleInsider has posted a gallery of screenshots from Apple’s newest big cat.
Seeing them all laid out like this gave me some overall impressions I hadn’t picked up on yet.
In terms of eye candy, at least, it looks like a great release.
While I love the idea of Spotlight, Apple’s system-wide search utility, the reality is that it’s always been too dog-slow to be of much practical use as either a search tool or a program launcher (I’ve turned to the excellent Quicksilver for that). Maybe Apple realizes that, too: in Leopard, they’ve added some features that have the potential to make it much more attractive — much like some of the expanded capabilities of Google’s search bar.
Take this little tidbit, for instance, from David Pogue’s email newsletter, wherein he describes a sort of mini-calculator feature in Spotlight:
The Spotlight menu (upper-right corner of the screen) is also a tiny pocket calculator now. Hit Command-Space, type or paste 38*48.2-7+55, and marvel at the first result in the Spotlight menu: 1879.6. You don’t even have to fire up the Calculator.
Neat.
Spotlight also (smartly) brings up applications that match your search criteria instantly — documents and other files come up later, making it potentially much more useful as a program launcher.
Finally, Spotlight now support Boolean searches, so you can look for things like “receipt AND iMac” or “report NOT biology.”
Now let’s hope Apple’s engineers have put similar effort into speeding up Spotlight’s performance.
The MacObserver reports that Piper Jaffrey’s Gene Munster (one of the few analysts who seems to actually understand the Macintosh market), has raised his target price for Apple to $250 a share. When I first started recommending Apple stock to my friends, it was selling at $13 a share — and that was before the stock split two for one. You can imagine how hard I’m kicking myself that I didn’t buy back then.
I’d calculate how much I could have made it I followed my own advice, but I might have to kill myself afterwards.
Leopard’s Time Machine feature is spurring a lot of discussions on backups, and that’s a good thing. A lot of the discussion, though seems to be centering around backing up your whole machine, and whether or not your Time Machine drive is bootable if your Mac goes down for the count. (It’s not.)
I may be in the minority here, but I don’t backup my whole machine — I don’t wind up with a mirror image of my drive that I can swap into my Mac and reboot as if nothing ever happened. That would be an ideal situation, I suppose, but I’m more concerned with preventing data loss — things like pictures, family movies, important documents, receipts, email, songs I’ve purchased or ripped from CD, etc.
I have my original installer discs for both my Mac and my applications. If my computer crashes, I can just re-install them. It’s the irreplaceable stuff I want to make sure I protect. My backup strategy is to have multiple backups of my home folder and the separate hard drive that houses most of my media. Backing up those items takes less space and less time — and that makes it more likely that I’ll do it.
The fact that Time Machine doesn’t create bootable backups doesn’t matter to me in the least.
Silicon Alley Insider reports on a Piper Jaffrey research note estimating that Apple gets an $18 monthly fee from AT&T for each iPhone on its network. That works out to $432 per phone over the length of a two-year contract. Even I can do the math on that: Almost $500 million for the roughly 1.1 million iPhones Apple’s already sold that are still on AT&T’s network (excluding those that have been unlocked or bricked.)
No wonder Apple is so intent on not allowing users to unlock their iPhones for use on other networks — at these numbers, those 250,000 “missing” iPhones represent over $100 million in lost revenue over the next two years.
Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg favorably compares Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to Microsoft’s Vista operating system. For current Mac users, however, he says the upgrade isn’t a “must have,” calling it evolutionary rather than revolutionary. From what I’ve seen of the Leopard’s features (and I’ve only seen what’s publicly available), I can’t disagree, and I also can’t speak to what the “under-the-hood” features might mean for the future. It seems to me, though, that there’s a lot of anticipation over this release — even more than for Tiger.
In an uncharacteristic departure from his usually excellent reporting, Macworld’s Dan Frakes makes one of those bone-headed journalism mistakes that drive me crazy, and that epitomizes the problems with the Mac web.
In an Editor’s Notes blog posting entitled “Has Time Machine’s AirPort Disk use been grounded?,” Dan notes the fact that Apple has removed references to using hard drives connected to its AirPort Extreme Base Station from its online descriptions of Leopard’s new Time Machine application. Running through a list of what might cause Apple to remove AirPort support, Dan ends the post with this: “On Friday, we’ll at least know if the feature has been removed from Mac OS X 10.5.0.”
Why Friday? What’s wrong with right now? Why speculate when you can just shoot off a note to Apple and ask them? If they give an answer, stop speculating. If they say “no comment,” report it.
Journalists don’t wonder, they find out. They don’t speculate, they investigate. If online journalists want to be taken seriously (and they should want to), they need to start acting like journalists — even in blog posts.
And before you ask: Yes, I did contact Apple. The answer is no — Time Machine will not ship with support for AirPort Extreme.
You can stop wondering now.
At first, it could be mistaken for a conventional, albeit extraordinarily sleek, airplane. The craft’s engines roar, and it picks up speed as it races down the runway. Upon liftoff, though, it doesn’t level off like an ordinary plane, but continues upwards at an increasing angle as if it’s straining to reach the stars. Suddenly, booster rockets kick in, and the craft reveals itself to be a true spaceship, rising higher and higher into the sky, its clean white body marked only with a light grey Apple logo on the tail.
It may sound far-fetched, but it might make sense for a computer maker that’s revving on all engines and enjoying iconic status as a purveyor of all things cool. After all, who would have thought just a few years ago that Apple would own such a large percent of the music business. And surely Apple’s cult-like followers would line up to plunk down big bucks for a ride on the “iCraft.”
Practically admitting the rumors were true, Apple refused comment on the story.
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OK, back to reality — “down to earth,” if you will.
The above scenario is pure wild-eyed speculation, based on absolutely no evidence and fewer facts. Which means it’s got a lot in common with another piece of nonsense published in Forbes. All that’s missing in our little piece of fiction is a quote from Rob Enderle, who’s practically made a cottage industry of writing dumb, wrong things about Apple.
In “Everybody in the Pool,” Forbes writer David M. Ewalt reports on how Apple is considering launching its own mobile phone network. Go ahead, read the story. Now read it again. Nowhere is there a shred of evidence — or anything other than Ewalt’s imagination, for that matter — to suggest the story might be true. To give the writer credit, (I suppose) he doesn’t even try; there isn’t even a suggestion of an “according to sources who wish to remain anonymous” attribution. The only facts in the story concern other companies’ plans, not Apple’s. Disney, for instance, has announced it plans to launch a “family-centric” wireless network. ESPN has already launched a service, as has convenience store chain 7-Eleven. How Ewalt makes the leap to Apple launching a service is no less reality-defying than our own little iCraft fantasy.
The one item that relates Apple to phones is the iTunes-enabled phone being developed with Motorola. Since when is launching a mobile network a prerequisite to developing a mobile phone? And why would Apple want to limit the potential distribution of such a phone to its own fledgling network? Even Enderle’s quote doesn’t suggest that. He only asserts that mobile carriers would prefer to sell music through their own service and would rather have an iTunes phone sync through their networks rather than a computer.
So why make Apple the focus of this piece of pure speculation? My guess is it’s because stories about Apple draw eyeballs. Lots of them. And lots of eyeballs translate into lots of advertising dollars. It’s an old trick that still works. Even when Apple wasn’t the wunderkind of American, even worldwide, culture, websites would run “Apple is dying” stories that would incite Macophiles, excite PC users and make giddy the advertisers who were serving ads to everyone. These days, however, its getting harder to run that kind of story without looking genuinely clueless, so “What-secret-device-will-Apple-unveil-next” stories are taking their place — to the delight, no doubt, of the twenty or so advertisers on the page hosting the Forbes article.
“Everybody in the Pool” could have been a nice little look at boutique phone networks, and the ways companies are extending their brand equity through emerging technologies. It could have been a nice thought piece about why Apple might want to consider such a move — but that would have required analysis, and analysis is hard work. Instead, it becomes a sensationalist supposition unworthy of Forbes, good for nothing but generating page views. It can’t even be called a piece of good old rumor-mongering, because by all the evidence available in his article, Ewalt isn’t reporting on rumors, he’s making them up.
So does that mean Apple isn’t launching its own phone network? I have no idea. But based on what we can see in Ewalt’s article, neither does he.
