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TheAppleBlog, published by and for the day-to-day Apple user, is a prominent source for news, reviews, walkthroughs, and real life application of all Apple products.
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Apple's Mythical Tablet Perfect for Comic Books

In his latest article for the Chicago Sun Times, Mac-afficianado and supergeek Andy Ihnatko discusses LongBox, an iTunes-like comic book online store and screen reader. If you're into graphic novels, you'll likely want to know more about this service, which promises to bring order and unity to the chaotic digital world of comic books. What caught my eye, however, was Ihnatko's belief that LongBox is deep in discussion with Apple over bringing its app to the iTunes Store and making, in due course, the mythical Tablet the perfect e-reader for their graphical content.

Ihnatko describes how LongBox CEO Rant Hoseley dropped a very juicy hint at a recent convention:

Rantz spoke at the Long Beach Comic-Con last weekend, as part of an industry panel on the future of digital distribution. Referring to a future strategic partnership with an unnamed company, Rantz said "It seems like everything is going to go through as planned." He identified the company only as one that "all of a sudden leaves us with a multinational launch with literally millions of installed users."

That sounds a hell of a lot like access to the iTunes Store, either in the form of software in the App Store or readable content in a hypothetical "iTunes Newsstand."

Ihnatko spoke with Rantz for an hour, relentlessly questioning him and expecting him to "stumble" over common issues that have kept the comic book industry from so far settling on a unified online sales and distribution platform. Apparently, Rantz didn't stumble, but provided further tantalizing clues that something is afoot with our friends in Cupertino.

I'm pretty sure that Apple is entering into a formal alliance with LongBox. When I asked Hoseley about what kind of partnerships the company is forming, he spoke vaguely of what was taking up most of his time at the moment: a lengthy and complicated agreement with a seriously large company operating in the media space.

What follows is an explanation of further clues and detective work that convinced Ihnatko LongBox is working with Apple. It’s worth reading in full. However, he's cautious, and warns against getting too excited too soon.

CEOs say a lot of things during these briefings and when you're on the other end of the phone, you need to be cautious before passing along any speculation that makes the company look this good. Even on the record, a tissue-thin hint isn't the same as an open confirmation.

So I’m wishing LongBox well. And I hope that this deal with Apple is, in fact, more than just a busload of wishful thinking from a comic book geek with a tech column. An alliance with Apple would benefit everybody in the comix [sic] industry. It would kickstart digital sales through a single, united storefront the same way that Apple's alliance with record labels kicked off the digital music industry in 2003.

To be sure, LongBox will want to get its app onto as many platforms as possible. And there is no lack of choice. Amazon's Kindle is in its second iteration and was recently made available outside America. Barnes & Noble's brand spanking new Nook is making waves, too. And there are plenty more e-readers on the market, with more on the way.

Amazon's Kindle offers hundreds of thousands of titles, but ultimately, it's a one-trick pony

While devices like the Kindle have established online stores with hundreds of thousands of titles on offer, they remain single-purpose machines. Sure, most e-readers can store photos for viewing on their grayscale e-ink screens, and the Sony Reader even offers MP3 support to boot — but none of the readers on the market today can offer wider multimedia capabilities.

Apple’s fabled tablet is expected to ship with some flavor of the iPhone OS and feature a full color capacitive touch screen. But more importantly, it's expected to make full use of the iTunes store and all that it makes available to its millions of active users. So add music, TV shows, movies, podcasts, games and apps to the yet-to-be-launched e-book category. That’s content that works across all your computers and your phone, too. None of the other e-readers on the market even come close to competing with that sort of functionality.

For that reason, I barely use my Sony Reader, and have bought only a handful of books for the thing and have resisted the (sometimes rather strong) temptation to buy a Kindle. And believe me, I’ve been tempted; I have long-harbored a quaint desire to sit in my conservatory on a sunny, peaceful weekend morning and enjoy a long, slow coffee while catching up on the news. But I want my reader to do much more that simple news feeds.

I haven't made a serious effort to read comic books for a long time (years, in fact) but I used to love them. I don't bother now because I don't like reading them on my monitor and I don't like buying the dead-tree editions (it's a personal preference — I simply don't like buying literature on pressed wood-pulp any more).

So I'm holding out for next year when the Tablet is released because I know that not only will I be able to fill it up with books, all my other content from iTunes will work on it, too. And when that happens, I might just start buying comic books again.

In Q3, NewNet focus turns to business models and search. Read the, "NewNet Q3 Wrap-up."

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Charts (Sort of) Prove What We Already Knew: iPhone Pwns!

Microsoft's Windows 7 is released yesterday, and the boys and girls at Redmond are probably feeling very pleased with the news that pre-orders on Amazon for its latest OS have broken records. Windows 7 is now the biggest pre-order product in Amazon's history.

Not to be outdone, Apple is busy breaking records too. At the Web 2.0 Summit this week, Morgan Stanley's Managing Director Mary Meeker revealed that the iPhone/iPod touch is the fastest growing consumer electronics platform in history. And she had some charts to prove it. TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld picked through her 60+ page presentation to focus on three iPhone-relevant slides.

Catchy title, no? But impressive. The iPhone/iPod touch has seen far steeper user adoption than that of other popular consumer electronics platforms, including other iPods.

However, Gizmodo's Dan Nosowitz very wisely points out:

Comparing one gadget to another in a different category is messy and inconclusive. iPhone adoption is different than, say, Wii adoption for lots of reasons: The iPhone is a phone, a gadget which pretty much everybody has and needs, and it combined the capabilities of a phone with that of an established hit, the iPod. In contrast, the Wii is a videogame system, a category with a totally different demographic, requiring different kinds of software and accessories. They’re just not the same (and I only mentioned a couple reasons), and comparing unit shipments doesn’t necessarily prove anything.

A slightly busier one, this illustrates how, in the two year period following its launch, the iPhone/iPod touch's mobile internet user base has enjoyed a faster, higher adoption rate (57 million) than NTT Docomo's mobile internet platform imode (25 million) and even desktop Internet legend AOL (7 million).

Of course, it's important to remember that Apple benefits (at least a little) from the changing times. Both AOL and imode enjoyed their super-growth in the mid to late 1990’s — the Internet's Stone Age. While the iPhone platform is undoubtedly sophisticated, it takes advantage of extraordinary advances in hardware and software engineering that, a decade ago, were merely the stuff of geek dreams. Also, let's not forget that — relative to the Internet's ubiquity and sophistication today — the mobile and desktop Internet of the 90’s was far more expensive, harder to use and much less rewarding of an experience. Still, these are impressive numbers nonetheless. It's just helpful to put them into perspective.

If you want a chart that demonstrates just exactly why AT&T's network is trembling at the knees beneath the strain of millions of data-hungry iPhones, look no further. Schonfeld added two arrows to pinpoint the June 2007 and July 2008 launches of, respectively, the iPhone and iPhone 3G. If you're an iPhone owner and you don't spend more time using the thing for email and web browsing than, y'know, actually talking to people, you're in the minority. iPhone owners love their unlimited data.

You can bet your bottom dollar Steve's next keynote presentation will extrapolate some of this data (of course, his charts will contain no numbers but look way more sexy).

View or download the entire presentation from Scribd, and tell me in the comments how no one uses the word "Pwns" any more.

As Q4 begins, online video is now mainstream. Read the, "Connected Consumer Q3 Wrap-up."

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Does the New iMac Foretell the Next Apple TV?

Apple’s brand new 27-inch iMacs come with an interesting feature: the ability to act as a display for connected devices via the built-in DisplayPort connection. This means that, with the proper adaptors, you can connect an array of home theatre devices to the iMac, including Blu-Ray players. The screen has also moved to the HDTV standard 16:9 ratio and it’s wall mountable. All of this makes me think one thing, my next HDTV may be an iMac.

The setup would be relatively straightforward. The new iMacs already come with wireless mouse and keyboard, so controlling it from your couch isn’t a problem. Add a tuner attachment from Elgato to get your cable on the iMac, as well as DVR capabilities. Plug in your Blu-Ray player via DisplayPort and then install any of the plethora of multimedia interfaces available for the Mac. My personal favorite is Boxee.

None of this is particularly groundbreaking, you could have done something very similar with a bit more hackage the day before the new iMacs were announced. But it does lead one to start thinking in an interesting direction. There’s no doubt that the computer and the television are moving towards convergence. Apple’s made its first play for the digital living room with the Apple TV, to less than impressive results, as we’ve discussed before. It’s also a company that learns from its mistakes and has a history of taking small, evolutionary steps that can, in a few years, add up to some really exciting changes. Just look at how they’ve handled multitouch.

Combine these small steps with the slow death of desktop computers and Apple has to be thinking about what the future of the iMac will be. What would be the next steps toward a real iMac as HDTV? Well, you’d need to integrate the tuner, and you’d definitely have to offer a large range of sizes, while simultaneously dropping prices. This wouldn’t be quite as hard as you might imagine. The current 27-inch iMac is much more powerful than you really need, and the cost of LCD displays is quickly dropping. Integrate the Apple TV’s media interface and tweak OS X a bit to make it easier to control from ten feet away and you’re almost there.

Do I think this is definitely the direction Apple is moving with the iMac? Not necessarily, but its actions thus far have certainly got me thinking about it and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple make a strong play at the high-end of the HDTV market. In a few years you may be able to buy 30, 40 and 50 inch iMacs, at a premium over standard HDTVs, but with a lot more functionality built-in. It’s certainly Apple’s style to go into an industry and try to slice off the top 10 percent of market share, which also happens to include the lion’s share of the profits. It’s done it in computers, it’s done it with cell phones, why not with HDTVs?

In Q3, NewNet focus turns to business models and search. Read the, "NewNet Q3 Wrap-up."

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Hands On: Magic Mouse

Our very own Olly Farshi dropped by his local Apple Store in Helsinki and was kind enough to hook us up with a quick hands on video looking at Apple’s new Magic Mouse. So, enjoy!

As Q4 begins, online video is now mainstream. Read the, "Connected Consumer Q3 Wrap-up."

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Psystar Still At It, This Time With Software

Apparently not content with just selling cloned Mac hardware in the form of PCs built out of components that are OS X friendly, Psystar, that perennial legal foe of Apple, has now released a software program, too. The program, dubbed Rebel EFI, perhaps in an effort to stir the patriotic hearts of American and Star Wars fans alike, “allows for the easy installation of multiple operating systems on a single system.”

Despite the odd syntactical choice made by Psystar’s copy editor, the ramifications are clear: you should, in theory, be able to install Mac OS X on any old PC hardware. Not only that, but Rebel EFI also reportedly scans your system for compatible hardware and downloads all the appropriate drivers where they are available.

Of course, Psystar is in the business of making money (though sometimes I wonder how it thinks that’s possible when tangling with Apple in court), so Rebel EFI isn’t free. It’ll cost you $49.99 to get the full version, which ships as a direct download.

You don’t have to dive in blind, though. Anyone can download and use Rebel, but the trial version limits some hardware features and only works for two hours. To prevent piracy, you see, or the unlicensed use of Psystar’s software. Yes, the irony is delicious.

Psystar bundles the Rebel EFI with the Darwin Universal Boot Loader, or DUBL, which allows for users to install multiple operating systems on the same computer on different drives. It supports up to six, so you could have OS X, Windows, and any number of Linux builds all running on the same machine, for example.

Rebel also uses the same “Safe Update” method Psystar includes on its pre-modded hardware, which automatically screens updates from Apple and lets you know if they’re safe to install. The same tool also checks with Psystar’s servers to make sure all your hardware is using optimal drivers.

Finally, Psystar has even introduced a new “home certification program.” The program encourages users of the Rebel EFI software to send in hardware components that aren’t fully compatible with the tool, so that the clone-maker’s engineers can correct the problem for all users affected. To me, sending your own hardware components in to a company with a questionable track record which could, theoretically, close its doors any day doesn’t seem like the wisest course of action, but to each his own.

If anyone is planning on purchasing the Rebel EFI, or even just downloading and trying out the demo ISO, we’d welcome an account of your trials and tribulations in the comments.

Growing mobile data use turned up heat on carriers in Q3. Read the, "Mobile Q3 Wrap-up."

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New "Get a Mac" Ads Target Windows 7

Microsoft may have only just launched Windows 7, but Apple isn’t sitting back and letting Redmond enjoy its time in the spotlight. Instead, last night it revealed three new ads in the popular “Get a Mac” series featuring John Hodgman and Justin Long, all of which go after Windows 7 by name.

The three ads, “Broken Promises,” “Teeter Tottering,” and “PC News” all have a slightly different take on what’s wrong with Windows, but they all manage to find fault. And they all do so without actually citing anything concrete about Windows 7, which really hasn’t been around long enough to generate the kind of widespread complaints that plagued Vista.

PC News

It’s the Windows 7 release news coverage, except the excited masses aren’t on board with Microsoft. They’re taking advantage of the call to upgrade to Macs instead. The theory being, if MS is saying “All right everybody, ditch Vista!” they might as well switch to an OS they know for a fact actually is user-friendly. Not the best of the bunch, and the logic behind it is kind of a stretch.

Teeter Tottering

Sort of like a single case study of one PC user from the first ad, this one follows an XP user getting ready to switch. To Mac, not Windows 7, despite PC’s repeated overtures to try to get her to stay. What’s great about this commercial is that Justin Long as Mac never says a word, and instead the only debating that goes on occurs between the PC user and Hodgman, so the customer ends up convincing themselves. Hence, the real benefits of Mac are self-evident.

Broken Promises

Only the basic Mac/PC duo are featured in this third new ad, unless you count the inclusion of their former selves from years gone by. This is my personal favorite of the bunch. It uses fictional remembered exchanges between Mac and PC over the years as each iteration of Windows was released, all the way back to Windows 2. A nice visual touch on the part of Apple’s advertising team is the way Apple’s outfit changes only minimally from clip to clip, while PC seems to be a slave to the fashion trends of the time. It paints PC as dated and Mac as timeless.

PC users probably haven’t even had a chance to become disillusioned with Windows 7 yet, but Apple is doing the smart thing by not letting them get the chance. These ads say it all: If Microsoft’s laid the groundwork for an upgrade mentality, best to swoop in and grab a few switchers while the getting’s good.

Growing mobile data use turned up heat on carriers in Q3. Read the, "Mobile Q3 Wrap-up."

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