Technovia

Daring Fireball: Is the iPhone NDA About Patents?

Daring Fireball: Is the iPhone NDA About Patents?:

"At my company, our lawyers advised us to keep what we considered more-or-less public software under NDA for a very long time because demoing software to someone under NDA, no matter how many people it is, avoids ‘publishing’ the software and any inventions contained therein."

While John finds this credible, I'm going to call "bullshit" on this. Software is published the moment it is made available for sale. The iPhone is for sale. Keeping a tiny subset of customers under NDA will not affect that.

Of course, some might argue that there's something specific about the APIs which is patentable, but this is unlikely. Remember that patents don't cover the specifics of code.

My guess is there some unspecified legal snafu, but I don't think this is it.

Are Apple machines really overpriced?

Joe Wilcox on the Price differential between Macs and PCs:

"On Saturday, Aug. 2, I got to wondering about Mac versus Windows PC pricing after seeing two HP notebooks on sale at the local Target. One of them, a 14-inch model, the HP DV2946NR, sold for $699.99 and packed 4GB of memory and a 320GB hard drive. Capacity for both features is twice that of the $1,299 MacBook—and shared graphics is 356MB compared with a meager 144MB for the MacBook. I wondered: If Vista notebooks are selling for so little and packing so much, how does this compare with Mac desktops and notebooks?

Today I contacted Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis, about computer average selling prices at retail. That HP notebook is right on mark: ASP for retail Windows notebooks is $700. Mac laptops: $1,515. Yeah, right, they're more than twice as much. But there's more: The ASP for Mac desktops is more than $1,000 greater than for Windows PCs, and Mac desktop ASPs were higher in June than they were two years ago."

I'm not surprised by this, because Apple's pricing is always cyclical. It introduces a new, upgraded model which evens things out, usually to the point where people are paying a premium of 10% or so over equivalently-specced Windows machines.

However, it then maintains those specs until the next product rev, rather than continually incrementally upgrading them, as, say, Dell does. That means that over the lifetime of a product, the price differential increases until the point where Apple's machines are really overpriced for what you get - which is where we are now.

Of course, none of this seems to be damaging Apple's sales, which have shown excellent growth.

But in an economic downturn, will Apple be able to maintain this in the face of fierce price pressure? Even though I can't imagine buying another Windows PC (except in markets where this is no Mac, like ultraportables or tablets), I would be reluctant to buy an Apple at the moment, as the hardware you get for the money just isn't that great.

Even if, for example, my MacBook Pro broke down I probably wouldn't buy another one - I couldn't justify the expense, given that the hardware I'd get just isn't all that leading edge. I'd probably buy a MacBook instead - and curse its crappy graphics every time I wanted to play games.

It's time for the digital hub to quietly die

In a post about iPhone calendar syncing, John Gruber notes this:

"But as it stands today, with MobileMe syncing, there is no hub."

John is right - and it's now time for the digital hub to go away.

With the iPhone 2.0 release, iTunes has been reduced to music transfer, podcast hub and playlist management. Contacts, email, calendars are all pushed from the cloud. Songs and applications can be bought directly from the iPhone and iPod Touch. It wouldn't take much to completely set the iPhone free.

Google notebook now supporting Safari

Google Notebook has had a bit of an update, and it looks like it now supports Safari as well as Firefox and IE. At least, it no longer complains if I use Safari with it.

The truth about Apple PR

The Real Dan Lyons:

"One of the many ironies and contradictions about Apple is that while the company presents this hip, open, cool image to the world, its PR machine is the most secretive, locked-down, hard-assed and disciplined of any company in tech, including IBM. To get a sense of how weird IBM is, consider that one time, while I was waiting for an elevator with a flack at IBM headquarters in Armonk, I asked, just to pass the time, if the guy ever did any jogging. The guy gave me this panicked look and said, ‘Why do you want to know?’

Apple is even weirder than that. They’ve set new records for secrecy and obfuscation and arrogance among tech companies. More important, these are not amateurs. These are hardcore PR people. They know the impression they’re creating when their CEO does an ambush call and then demands to be off the record. Yet they did it. "

I'm liking the real Dan Lyons a whole lot more than I liked the Fake Steve Jobs. In these couple of paragraphs, Lyons states something that's very rarely said by anyone within the media: Apple's PR is all about the tightest control-freakery in the business.

It goes way beyond the need to keep new products secret, and into an obsessive attempt to control all aspects of communication about the company. As Lyons says, they are incredibly disciplined, and very, very hard assed.

Lyons hits the nail on the head with his final line, too:

"The unfortunate thing about this arrogance is that no matter how hot a company may be, eventually every company stumbles. Someday Apple will need friends among the hackery. I’m not sure it will have any."

We're beginning to see that now, with the stories surrounding the issues with MobileMe, the shambles of the iPhone launch, and so on. Let's hope that the years of attack-PR which Apple has conducted with the media doesn't actually come back and bite it too hard.

Two things I need to see in MobileMe

I've been a .Mac subscriber since the day the service came out, and despite the various moves from free to paid, I've stuck with it all the way.

MobileMe, the service's successor, was pitched as "Exchange for the rest of us", which is something that really excited me. I've had an Exchange account on my personal domain for a while, and got used to having the capabilities it gives you.

So I was eager to try out MobileMe. But, sadly, it's proved to be a bit disappointing. That's not only because of its well-documented early problems, but because there are a couple of things missing which I really would miss if I switched away from using Exchange.

Reliability

There's no doubt that MobileMe hasn't had the best of starts in terms of its reliability. There is the oft-cited 1% who have had no email. There have also been various other gremlins in the system, such as the one which robbed me of all but three of my Address Book contacts. Thankfully, I had a backup - Time Machine saved me.

With a service such as MobileMe, reliability isn't optional. Even if I'm not using it for business, I can't afford to lose my calendars, address book and email. It needs to be there, 100% of the time, with no if's or buts.

Better email

One of the nice things about .Mac (and its successor) is the personalised domain. Basically, give it a domain name, and it will use your MobileMe web space for it. It's all highly-intergrated, and works very well.

Except for one thing: it only works for web traffic. If you have email at that domain, you're out of luck - Apple does nothing with your mail exchanger records, which means you won't receive email to an email address at your personal domain.

To put it bluntly, this is pretty lame: this, after all, is a feature which Google gives away for free in Google Apps for your Domain. To pay and not get the same from MobileMe is pretty poor.

MobileMess

Apples MobileMess - Pogue’s Posts - Technology - New York Times Blog:

"I called Apple. Would the P.R. team be willing to say what the problem is? What is being done to solve it? When might it be fixed? What kind of resources or time is being spent on a resolution?

No. Apple declined to comment on any of that.

A P.R. manager did, however, offer me this official statement: ‘The .Mac to MobileMe transition was a lot rockier than we had hoped, and we are still having some growing pains. Some users have been having problems with their e-mail in particular, and we are trying to restore the service as soon as possible. We’re very thankful for our loyal customers’ patience as we work out the kinks.’...

It’s amazing that Apple doesn’t recognize this situation. This is an airplane that’s stuck on the runway for hours with no food or working bathroom. And the pilot doesn’t come on the P.A. system to tell the customers what the problem is, what’s being done to fix it, how much longer they might be stuck, and how he empathizes with their plight. Instead, he comes on once every three hours to repeat the same thing: ‘We apologize for the inconvenience.’"

David is completely right. It's not just that MobileMe is a MobileMess, although launching a service that's clearly nowhere near ready is bad enough. It's the completely lack of communication about the issue, other than the same message, over and over.

This is the flip side of Apple PR's inability to comment on anything. "Wall of silence" isn't always a good marketing message.

Well now this is interesting

WordPress app for iPhone:

"Robust but simple to use, the WordPress for iPhone Open Source application allows you to create and edit content on your WordPress blog(s) with support for offline use."

Can an application that comes wrapped in a DRM layer even when it's free (as in beer) and the source code is freely available truly be "open source"?

Motorola sues Apple executive over trade secrets

Bloomberg.com: Technology:

"Motorola Inc., the largest U.S. mobile-phone maker, sued a former executive now working for Apple Inc., accusing him of disclosing its trade secrets to aid in the marketing of Apple's iPhone.

Michael Fenger in March ended an almost six-year career at Motorola where he was a vice president for the company's mobile- device business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He is now Apple's vice president for global iPhone sales, according to a complaint filed yesterday in state court in Chicago"

Apple isn't named as a defendant, but obviously will be rather unhappy if Motorola wins this one.

If Apple is going to control the iPhone app channel, it needs to do it properly

Fraser Speirs – App Store Review is broken.

"The problem that I and others are having right now is that it doesn’t scale. Apple requires that every single update to every app go through the same vetting process (although who knows exactly what this involves?). I submitted Exposure 1.0.1 to the App Store last Friday and, five days later, one version is “In Review”. The other is still, mysteriously, “waiting for upload”, even though I already did.

If Apple can’t guarantee a maximum 24 hour review process, they should drop it. What would happen if I was trying to correct a data loss or security bug, and the update sits in App Store limbo for five or ten days? Fortunately I’m not facing that situation, but these are fixes for painful crashing bugs that are really affecting users of Exposure. All the while, users continue to comment negatively on these already-fixed-but-not-released bugs in Exposure’s reviews on iTunes. Without demos, those reviews are an app’s lifeblood."

Fraser is completely right, of course. If Apple is assuming the responsibility of ensuring that each and every application meets some nebulous "quality" threshold, it has a duty to both consumers and developers to do things promptly. If a developer can't release bug-fixes in a timely manner because Apple can't check code, the system is broken and needs to be fixed.

I get the feeling that Apple is only now learning a set of lessons. How to handle an online software distribution channel, something that it appears to have assumed would be a piece of cake after its experience with music and video. And how to create and manage enterprise-level messaging infrastructure ("Exchange for the rest of us").

Unfortunately, it's learning those lessons in public, and taking the knocks to its reputation as it goes.