WWDC and the future of APPLE - Page 4

CATIA for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger? That would be very nice, even though my non-professional needs are served well enough by VectorWorks.

Escher

Hello to you as well, kormac77.


I still have my 12" iBook G3/500 from May 2001. But I plan to order a new 12-inch PowerBook G4/1.33 before June 30. (I finished law school and my educational discount expires at the end of June.)


Of course, I still believe you, Kormac. As Mandricard has always said: Hope springs eternal!


Apple will introduce a sub-PowerBook in 2004? That would be very nice! I am still going to buy a 12-inch PowerBook. Later, IF Apple introduces the i****v2 or a sub-PowerBook, I can replace the 12-inch PowerBook with a PowerMac G5 and an i****v2.


An introduction at WWDC would be a wonderful surprise. When is Fall CES 2004?


Kormac: I look forward to anything else you say about the i****v2 and Apple sub-PowerBook.

Escher

thanks for your thoughts kormac...

was interested in your ideas for the details of the workstation class G5 which you think might be announced at siggraph...

Fuggetaboutit. Steve hates TV.

Oh, while we are on the subject of integrating HDTV into Macs:

"During a recent restricted access conference, Steve Jobs has apparently asked movie distributors not to transfer part of their film collection to the HD-DVD format. SJ is complaining that this format is not enough DRM capable. As we can expect, this is SJ as Pixar's CEO who was speaking...

But going further in his logic, he has strongly expressed his wish to never see computers harboring HD-DVD burners."

Trust me, he hates the idea. It's not going to happen and Apple's customers will pay the price... or switch. This is a serious conflict of interest.

Kormac,
Because the posts you dig up mention it, are you still saying the Raycer chip exists?

It is hardly a conflict of interest. As CEO of Pixar he represents his various creative, artistic, innovative talents who are all in the business of creating a product and making profits (yes, even if in obscene amounts) from that product as well as paying the talent a high wage and having enough left over to do it all again.

As CEO of Apple, he heads a company that creates products that empowers a great many creative, artistic, innovative talented people (you and me) to be able to create products, for example, movies, music and TV shows, to be purchased by consumers and bought by companies to be shown commercially in theaters or cable/network.

Jobs taking the high road and not wanting HD-DVD burners -yet - protects Apple's very own customers - the creative people that are trying to preserve their works against an onslaught of piracy, one company of which happens to be Pixar.

It is a confluence of interest.

He wants DRM to be good enough to protect the artists (in this case, film and TV) etc. just as iTunes is good enough to protect against casual theft. Nothing is foolproof, there will always be hacks and free rippers especially on PCs, and sure, 3rd party companies will make the hardware anyway, but Jobs just wants a better head start, using what he's learned during the iTunes journey.

Imagine a world in which Jobs took the opposite stance, a Chuck D-like screw 'em attitude. If Jobs put in HD-DVD burners, everyone is pirating full quality DVD movies, the movie industry would go in the shitter as would most video stores.

Better to first set up decent DRM and create avenues to legally purchase movies (and burn them) with iTunes like limits. Do it earlier, rather than later.

That, I think, is all he is saying.

I'd like the source of that quote (I presume it's a Kasper - lots of assumptions in it).

I pine for the day when the legality of a technology was determined by whether there was a substantial non-infringing use.

I can take some consolation in the fact that Steve's idea of DRM is that it keep honest people honest, rather than attempting absolute control. Still, though.

In Steve's defense, movies and music are totally different. You can acquire a song "illegitimately," decide you like it, and then go buy the album, because people listen to songs they like often. But although I've heard of people previewing ripped films to see if they're worth seeing in the theater, and then going to see them in the theater, that equation might well change if you could see a film in full HD quality for free. After all, how often do you see a movie you really like? (Well, besides watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail until you had it memorized in high school? What? You did do that, didn't you? )

Still, in my gut, I'm more sympathetic with Chuck D - who is, after all, a content creator himself.

One could argue when a movie about dodgeball is #1 at the box office the movie industry is already in the shitter.

Well something big must be coming at WWDC as Apple has gone out of their way to introduce as much as possible beforehand.

The problem with the Chuck D mentality is this:

He started from nothing, worked hard against all the adversity he likely faced, as anyone does in business but especially so a young black man in a fledgling music genre (at the time).

Thanks to the existing structure, he was able to amass a fortune....he's a multi-millionaire. Being successful is not a bad thing.

Problem is that now that he has climbed up the latter and is on the parapet, he wants to pull up the ladder behind him, so no one else can climb up out of the ghetto (or trailer park or tenements) they same way he did.

It is too arrogant/ignorant to suddenly say that the system is bad despite it working for you so magnificently. Any system can be made to work and be improved. But he wants to completely dismantle it with no logical, well-thought out replacement that I've ever heard of. (I'll gladly listen to alternatives).

I mean I can envision a world where all music, all t-shirts, all posters, all CD/DVDs, all concerts are free, listeners/viewers pay nothing for anything anywhere. Let artists rely solely on voluntary contributions. Pay out of appreciation. I love you Ray Charles, here's $10.

And then I wake up

...post has been deleted. Friend thought it was a joke to post a 'Macs are rubbish' notice from my account. Off to severly punish him.

It was reported on last week from various sources. His actual quote was more along the lines that he never wanted to "have" to put a HD-DVD drive in a Macintosh so it's actually a bit worse. As the format is not set in stone it is a bit premature to be denouncing it. That is what worries me. What he is saying is that Apple will never put a HD-DVD drive into a Macitnosh unless their compeditors make it absolutely necessary to do so in order to survive. Maybe it's another excuse for not including the latest technology. I don't know. I can see a situation develop where everyone else includes one but Apple holds out for years while we are taunted by are PC friends...

...or maybe you are right and he is sinply worried about DRM but he has come off as so arrogant lately. Check out the interview about the iPod last week. It's as if he became everything he hated in the interview. I imagine a 70s era Jobs would be agast at what he saw.

\

It has been suggested this may be more a ploy about HD-DVD using Windows Media 9 and Apple wanting H.264 instead. Who knows? Maybe we will find out in the 2010 edition of Apple Confidential or something...

That's the thinking...

PowerBooks: updated
PowerMacs: updated
iPods: updated, mini released

iBooks: probably not updated
iMacs: time for it, but tech might not be ready for a big leap
iSight: meh

And we *know* that 10.4 is going to be previewed, Xcode 1.5 shown off, etc.

So what's left that could be 'big'?

QuickTime 7
New Unforeseen Hardware

Well, the iBooks were just updated. The iMac is overdue however.

i think the link is here....
not sure how to post as a link so...

here is a try

http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2004/...14144108.shtml

I'm curious, considering the huge lead-time required for setting up certain long term products and strategies, how much of what we are seeing is merely a run up to an iTunes app and store for movies (no, I'm not rehashing this in the sense that I think it's imminent) say by like 2005, 2006 or so?

How much of Apple's horrifically slow CD burner adoption was directly related to Apple/Jobs wanting to first formulate an iTunes & DRM strategy?

What point did Sound Jam get bought/licensed by Apple for use in iTunes?

When did DRM first start to be developed in QuickTime?

The timescale for a video version of iTunes (obviously the name needs to be something else) need not be the same as it was for iTunes (for music) since they've learned a lot and can utilize most of what they've learned.

(I'm also not suggesting video iPods or people watching videos on their laptops or desktops in any significant numbers, I'm presuming there would be a HD TV-centric device for watching on actual TVs.)

The Mac/Apple "survived" Apple's late arrival to CD burning and of course thrived in terms of music listening. I certainly envision them doing the same with movies - but cautiously. And not identically. Jobs will take video's unique requirements into consideration. Like Hank Hill said "Do you want it done quick or do you want it done right?"

iSight need not be meh.

It's achilles heel is clearly it's Mac-onliness.

I'd love to use iSight. I'd also love if all of my friends and family owned and used Macs. None do.

My fiancé is in Thailand (and on a PC, like most of the world). I'm in Boston. Crummy video options here we come. iSight not an option.

Now, what is promising is all of the cross-platform products like Airport Extreme & Express, iPod and iPod mini, iTunes...

What I'd love is an iSight 2 that could do more of the number crunching itself and have it be PC-friendly.

I know, I know, if we keep it up everything will be Apple except the CPU and the OS...but really, an internet-based communication device that is Mac only? Come on. I bleed 6 colors. My kids will be named Mac and Lisa. But that's a useless product in the real world, outside of Mac-only bubbles.

No problem, Kormac.

So i****v2 is an iPad? That's good for me. I can buy my 12-inch PowerBook without regret (along with AirPort Express). If iPad comes out, I can buy it as an additional fun toy. By the time this new portable device is announced, I'll probably have a new job that will allow me to spend more on electronics. So it's all good.

I'm sure WWDC will be fun. But, as always, we will continue to need patience...

Escher

Hi, his prediction has survived 4 Macworlds and 2 WWDCs, are you really sure you still believe him? kormac prediction is fun and seems to indicate a grand plan (reminds me of X-Files...), but so far except for some surprises (wifi base station with a sound output, portable music player with a harddisk), it has been pretty evolutionary, not revolutionary.

*NOW* it seems evolutionary.

A couple of years ago when he started this, people said the opposite: "Too revolutionary! Too far out! Never happen!"

Well...

Actually, so far, the only thing really revolutionary comes out is not on the Mac side of business, but the Music side. iTMS is revolutionary (same for iTunes when it integrate the stores using web services).

Many of the things discussed above by Kormac are been there, done that. Smart display from Microsoft comes and goes, same for WIFI-based tablet. I do see Apple probably pick up one or 2 failed projects and improved it to such a point that it is usable (like iPod is not the first HD-based player, but Apple wait till it is small enough...). I will personally buy a tablet at around Newton size (current table is way too big...), or a detachable smart display IF it is normally part of the iMac but I can take it out when I go to toilet... (wait, the last part is what smart display is, and have even tested a Viewsonic version).

Kormac nailed the Panny DVCPro HD codec. He also nailed Motion when no one else was talking about it. Put it this way..if Kormac doesn't have insiders information his is keen on looking at the market and predicting with better accuracy than most on these boards.

Johnq you bring up an interesting point on DRM. As much as we all hate it I think it's a must. I hope that QT7 has the appropriate DRM. Despite the much hyped "convergence" it is happening just a wee bit differently than many people assumed it would.

QT7 should be supporting MPEG TS ...soooooo if Apple has HDCP protection infused into QT7 it's one large step towards being able to record a OTA HD program with a simple ATSC tuner card. Cool.

I'm also curious to know if Pixlet is just going to be a one hit wonder(Panther keynote) or if we'll see further work done on it. Many people thought Pixlet was going to be something to help movie downloads but Jobs clearly stated that a prime benefit of Pixlet is no interframe compression. This would be something that would be desired in say editing or maybe a DVR setup where you want to keep compression artifacts low and access to specific areas.

I'd like to see Apple support the new hdmi connector. It's the new standard for connecting HD, DVD and other devices together. It's DVI compatible and can make longer cable runs. Plus it offers multichannel outputs.

We'll soon know if Apple intends to broaden their focus on the digital hub strategy. QT7 should be key as well as Tiger.

Personally I don't think he is an insider (like he present himself to be), and it is quite obvious what he predicts right or wrong and can guess what fields he is in. He nails Motion and some others, but got it wildly wrong with bigger pictures like SGI purchase, etc. I don't think he knows about Airport Express too. Check out his old post 2 years ago...

So he nails A, misses B, and has never heard about C (which had *ZERO* leaks)... and from that he's a bad source? Eh... still a better track record than almost anyone else on these boards, with the possible exception of moki's outrageously subtle hints, someone who we *KNOW* is on an insider track...

Thing about downloading movies is that it's being done illegally now, like crazy. I know people that have Family Guy, South Park, etc., etc., all pulled off of Bit Torrent et al. I'm talking the DVD files.

So, some of the "people won't want to buy and download movies like they do songs in iTMS" insistence that many people espouse just doesn't add up to me. Sounds more like the familiar "Hey, I'm getting my music for free with this Napster thing, why buy music on iTunes" from a few years ago.

The time is definitely now or soon to want to have an iMovie Video Store (iVideo Movie Store? ) in place. Yes, there needs to be a radically Apple-ified, kickass, for lack of a better phrase, "TiVO killer".

TiVO's nice. But like the several to many iPod predecessors (remember that 1GB or so brick called Jukebox something or other? Blue?) Apple can coolify and make more usable TiVO's gig.

What I want is hot swappable 2.5" drive bays, nicely designed, say iPod-like (but bigger) with multi-line LCDs to list the drive contents (presuming they only contain movies). Imagine "VCR tapes" with no paper labels - and they label themselves based on metadata.

So the iHub never gets full. Could sell a related multi-drive array so your multiple drives can be accessed anytime. Kinda XServe RAID minis. (But not actually RAID, well, RAID 0 anyway - or JBOD)

Ok...dreaming a bit...

Now if we want to talk about a guy that was spouting nonense it would have to be "allenmcjones". Search and you'll find his "Lucida, Glove, Wolf and Pressely" crap that went nowhere. Trust, AI has had plenty of fakes who got nowhere near as close as Kormac.

An apple waterproof camera wasn't it? Still waiting on that one....

If you list down every single things you think might have happened, you might nails one or 2 too. Hear me, Apple is going to release a WIFI-enabled iPod (since AirTunes is here), release something related to iMac (since it is overdued), have something with pen-input (I don't believe Pen interface in OS X is just fot what it is now), released something using Pixlet - does this make me an insider? No, just educated guess. And check out these 4 pages, how many things he throws out? I guess one or 2 will make it, and does not make him any insider than you and me.

I guarantee we won't see WIFiPods.

(Of course I might be wrong, I just prefer sounding authoritative until then )

Ok, with Macs, yes, we can stream and listen to each other's music via Rendezvous & Airport. Typically this is done either briefly (if one or both are on batteries) or for longer periods of time if one or both are plugged into an AC outlet.

By adding this ability to iPods, you'll need to:
1. Add an AirPort card (perhaps radically modified to be smaller)
2. Add WIFI/Rendezvous networking code to the iPod OS (makes the OS slower and take up more RAM and HD space).
3. Would need to stream to or from other similarly equipped devices (limiting its usefulness).
4. Would need to extend the battery's lifetime, something hard enough to do when keeping other things equal, let alone adding even more power-draining features.
5. Would certainly increase the size and/or weight of the iPod

Let's imagine the real world usage.

1. You can't "beam" a song to a buddy, as we could, say, contact info between one Newton to another Newton, because of DRM/licensing issues.

2. So WIFiPod then merely becomes a stream receiver from another WIFiPod, a PowerBook/iBook/Power Mac or a Mac/PC broadcasting via AirTunes, perhaps merely writing a buffer to the hard drive.

3. Decrypting the AirTunes music won't be trivial for an iPod. Less battery life, higher temperature.

4. Possibly a Mac/PC could receive a stream from and iPod via WIFI. But is anyone seriously going to either waste the charge doing so? Why not just plug the iPod cradle's mini stereo jack into an AirPort Express?

I think the technology involved is overkill for such relatively minor convenience and even smaller likelihood of it actually being useful considering it take 2 to tango and not all iPods or Macs/PC are WIFI enabled.

iPods are not servers. You don't want to have them playing constantly and if they are it is in the portable context, which is what it was designed for. Streaming music wirelessly is better served by larger faster hard drives in a Mac or PC.

I just can't envision it being worth the extraordinary effort.

Now, I could see a device (basically a tablet but tiny with zero input ability aside from iPod click wheel) but almost a literal clone of the iTunes interface but made into a real object. 12" color screen, iPod click wheel in the center on the bottom (used with index finger like a trackpad more than with thumb). Plays DVD's. CDs, MP3...basically a tablet Mac but with ZERO visible Mac OS, no OS interface, nothing at all except a modified iTunes. Only iTunes. WIFI enabled. Buy an Airport Express. Plug the Ethernet into it and plug your Stereo into it. Now use your iTunes Tablet to browse the iTMS or remote iTunes libraries on other Macs/PCs or the Tablet's internal library. Play out to the stereo (or use headphones).

More dreaming...

mmmmmmm........... dreaming

You probably didn't know that there are now small chipset for 802.11g. It does not take up too much size and weight, and will be a perfect candidate for bigger iPod. Battery is a different issue, perhaps next one will have a replacable battery?

The biggest problem with Airport Express is that you have to go back to your Mac to change -anything-. If you have WIFI in iPod, then you don't have to. Of course, Apple - if want to - can add some other things to make this more useful to, perhaps can sync with Mac over the air? listen to Internet Radio? These will definitely add more appeals to the bigger iPod.

Predict everything and you're bound to be right about something.

Yes, if Apple release a PDA, he wins. Appe release a video player, he wins. Apple release a new iMac with a detachable monitor, he wins. If Apple didn't release anything, just wait another 2 more years.

The problem with this thread is that despite half a decade of my constant begging and whining for an AppleWorks update, Apple's only bothered to fix the import options.