Time traces

Only a month ago Apple released the iPhone 3G, but analysts are already expecting another big announcement from the company next month. Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, expects Apple to announce redesigns of its iPod line this fall, just as it has for the past three years, as well as changes to the MacBook and MacBook Pro.

But if you’re one of the thousands who are salivating over the imminent release of the MacBook Touch, keep dreaming.
According to Apple watchers this design is too far fetched from what we might actually see from Apple.

In a research note, Munster points out Apple’s MacBooks have not had a serious redesign update for 2 years and the MacBook Pro hasn’t changed for about 2.5 years. He also notes that when the MacBook was redesigned it really wasn’t that different from the PowerBook G4 that came out almost 5.5 years ago.

That’s lead Apple prognosticators, Munster included, to expect revolutionary changes to the Apple laptop line. This may seem far fetched, but just a few weeks ago Apple reportedly sent out a note to retailers to stock up on various MacBook and MacBook Pro stocks, which usually means that Apple is getting ready to announce a change to those lines. Added to this is the earnings call last month where CFO Peter Oppenheimer hinted at a future “product transition.”

Munster also expects the low-end MacBook to drop to the $999, perhaps to make it more competitive with the ever diminishing price point on Windows PCs.

For the iPod Munster says an increase in storage capacity for the Nano and Shuffle, and possibly a redesign of the iPod Touch or a $199 pricetag to bring it inline with the iPhone 3G.

But what about those other rumors that are flying around, like the MacBook Touch? Not likely, says Munster, predicting that a Touchscreen MacBook is at least two years away. But Munster did predict a new MacBook Air in 2009.

And that other rumor? You know, the iPhone Nano that was reported in the Daily Mail? Well, as Harry McCracken, former editor in chief of PC World, put it on his Technologizer site, “There are Apple rumors that ring true. There are ones that sound like they might be true. And then there are the ones that have a whiff of fantasy about them.”

The iPhone Nano, with its touchscreen on one side and a dialing wheel on the other seems like all fantasy to me as well.

In a move to help companies follow their sales and perhaps calm some disgruntled iPhone developers, Apple is now providing daily statistics that can be downloaded or viewed on the Web.

Several developers Macworld spoke with confirmed receiving the stats, which gives them sales per day or per week, broken down by country of sale and SKU. While the sales stats are helping, they aren’t quite where developers want them yet.

“It’s definitely more useful than no data (which was ridiculous), but the reports are a bit sparse at the moment,” said one developer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

For instance, the developer said that if you want the total sales of a particular product on any given day or week, you have to manually add up the sales from every country.

With such stiff competition in the App Store, developers want the sales stats to adjust pricing or generally track how their applications are doing.

The new reports are certainly a step in the right direction for Apple in working with its iPhone developers.

One bad apple in IT, 1M good Apple iPhones

Jason and Keith talk about the San Francisco IT guy holding the city “hostage”, how cybercrime is becoming like the Mafia, and of course our thoughts on the iPhone 3G now that we’ve touched one (sort of). (39:54)

As the iPhone 3G hits stores this week, Apple is aiming to gain more users by offering it at reduced prices through carriers.

Apple has slashed the iPhone’s price nearly in half, possibly attracting new buyers who balked at paying US$499 for the original 16G-byte iPhone. The new model will work on faster 3G (third-generation) broadband wireless networks for quicker downloads and come with GPS (Global Positioning System) capabilities.

In the U.S., AT&T will start selling the iPhone 3G on Friday, starting at $199 for the 8G-byte model and $299 for the 16G-byte model, each with a two-year contract. In the U.K., O2 will offer iPhone 3G for free with some contracts. The device will also bow Friday in 20 other countries including Germany, Japan and Australia; Apple hopes to sell it in 70 countries by year-end, including India, the Philippines, South Africa and Egypt.

Support for 3G networks will enable the new iPhone to download data up to 2.8 times faster than the earlier model, according to Apple. It will come with a 3.5-inch screen with improved battery life, talk time of five hours, standby time of 300 hours, six hours of high-speed browsing, 20 hours of audio and seven hours of video, the company claims.

The phone runs Mac OS X, weighs 113 grams (0.29 pounds), and is a hair thicker than its predecessor at 0.48 inch, or 12.3 mm. The new iPhone includes a standard audio headphone jack, which the previous model didn’t include.

The new phone has some shortcomings, such as the lack of a video camera, but the new features and low price points should attract buyers now that the iPhone is tried and tested, said Fareena Sultan, associate professor at Northeastern University’s College of Business Administration.

“The issue is not about the box, it’s about the service,” Sultan said. The carriers are assisting Apple in subsidizing the phones and ultimately hope to make money through higher-priced contracts and additional services, Sultan said.

The price drop and addition of GPS and 3G support are dramatic enough to boost consumer adoption, said Bill Hughes, principal analyst for wireless devices at In-Stat.

Dropping the price won’t hurt the iPhone’s enterprise adoption, but it won’t open the floodgates either, Hughes said. Enterprises are looking for mobile devices to handle back-office applications, and the iPhone 3G needs to prove itself capable, Hughes said.

There are also questions in larger enterprises surrounding the security and manageability of iPhones, Hughes said.

“It takes a courageous manager to justify the skeptics around them to prove the [iPhone] as a compelling device,” Hughes said.

The initial adopters could be small and medium-size businesses, Hughes said. It may take longer for the iPhone to make a dent in larger enterprises, where Research In Motion’s BlackBerry is widely used, especially for e-mail.

The phone may also face competition in the consumer space from iPhone clones, said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates. The original iPhone set a precedent for new devices like Samsung’s Instinct and HTC’s Touch Diamond, with touchscreens and similar interfaces to the iPhone, Gold said.

But Apple can’t keep innovating technologically, so it is developing a proprietary software ecosystem to deliver applications that could differentiate the iPhone from competing mobile devices, analysts said. The iPhone will come with iPhone 2.0, a new software platform that builds in support for Microsoft Exchange, allowing enterprises to push e-mail, contacts and calendars from Exchange Server to the iPhone.

Developers can write applications for the iPhone 2.0 platform and sell them through Apple’s online App Store, which will also launch on Friday and be accessible to users in 62 countries. Users will be able to download iPhone applications under 10M bytes over cellular networks, by Wi-Fi or through iTunes. Downloading applications larger than 10M bytes will require Wi-Fi or synchronization through iTunes on a PC. Users will also be able to distribute applications by syncing iPhones.

Markets in which the iPhone will bow Friday include Mexico, Hong Kong, Ireland, Austria, France, Portugal, Switzerland, Canada, Singapore, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands and New Zealand. The new iPhone will support 16 languages including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Russian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese.

U.S. air carrier United Airlines has followed Singapore Airlines to offer iPod and iPhone connectivity in business class for international flights.

The carrier has begun to re-fit its fleet of aircraft with new entertainment systems that allow passengers to plug in (and recharge) their iPod or iPhone in-flight, enabling them to watch video or listen to music held on the device using the aircraft’s existing entertainment system and 15-inch video screen.

The first aircraft with iPod and iPhone connectivity left Washington, D.C. for Zurich yesterday, the carrier confirmed. United’s entire fleet of international, widebody aircraft are being reconfigured over the next two years with iPod and iPhone connectivity in first and business class. The technology was developed by Panasonic Avionics Corporation.

“The iPod and iPhone have become essential for millions of travelers around the world,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of iPod & iPhone product marketing. “We think United customers are going to love being able to listen or watch personal music and video content on their iPod or iPhone via the in-flight entertainment system, and we can’t wait for United to roll this out to their fleet.”

Skyhook says the new version improves accuracy by a range of 35% to 50%. That means if you previously got an indoor fix with 50-meter accuracy, you now can get a fix with 30-meter accuracy, Morgan says.

As it did with Wi-Fi access points, Skyhook has launched an ambitious cell tower mapping effort, starting in metropolitan areas. Using signal tracking gear, drivers systematically cruise an area, picking up cellular signals and fixing their locations, and then adding the locations to an ever-expanding database. If WPS and GPS aren’t available, the cell tower positioning data can quickly yield a more approximate fix within a 300- to 400-meter range.

XPS 2.0 is now shipping for device makers and mobile operators.

Skyhook Wireless has released the latest version of its positioning software, adding new algorithms to blend Wi-Fi and GPS signal data to boost accuracy data, and using cellular signals as a new option for mobile devices to fix their location.

XPS 2.0 will give customers a choice, and blend, of three positioning options: Skyhook’s original Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS), GPS, and now cellular base stations. Apple liked the original version enough to include it as a standard element in its iPhone .

The Skyhook software is sold to device makers and mobile carriers to load as firmware onto mobile devices. The code exploits a handset’s existing radios, and when available, the satellite GPS interface. In the original version, which impressed Network World blogger Craig Mathias, the software checked for Wi-Fi signals, compared them with Skyhook’s database of millions of access point locations, checked the GPS data, and then selected the one deemed most accurate. In dense urban areas or indoors, that would often be the Wi-Fi fix.

The new version makes two key changes. First, it now collects the raw signal data from both Wi-Fi access points and any available GPS satellites, and runs them through a set of algorithms to calculate the best possible fix based on data from both, says Ted Morgan, CEO and cofounder of Skyhook. Second, if those radio sources are not available, the software can make use of cellular signals to give an almost immediate, but much less precise, fix.

GPS is very precise, and a rash of specialized location products increasingly smarter versions of it.

But GPS requires that a device be able to pick up signals from at least three satellites to calculate its location, according to Morgan. In some cases, that may not be possible; in other cases it may take 30 to 60 seconds to complete, compared with less than 5 seconds for the Wi-Fi positioning. Running tests in an “urban canyon” created by adjacent tall buildings in Boston, Skyhook found that the handsets could get a standard GPS fix 70% of the time.

XPS 2.0 can start processing data almost at once, from both the Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) and the satellites. “We use the data from just two satellites, and then blend this with our WPS data to improve the latter’s accuracy quickly, and then shut everything [saving battery power],” Morgan says.

Skyhook says the new version improves accuracy by a range of 35% to 50%. That means if you previously got an indoor fix with 50-meter accuracy, you now can get a fix with 30-meter accuracy, Morgan says.

As it did with Wi-Fi access points, Skyhook has launched an ambitious cell tower mapping effort, starting in metropolitan areas. Using signal tracking gear, drivers systematically cruise an area, picking up cellular signals and fixing their locations, and then adding the locations to an ever-expanding database. If WPS and GPS aren’t available, the cell tower positioning data can quickly yield a more approximate fix within a 300- to 400-meter range.

XPS 2.0 is now shipping for device makers and mobile operators.

10 things Apple did right in the iPhone

1. The display, the display, the display. Everything looks good on it.

2. The menu design: It’s simple and clean, and the home screen icons look like so much eye candy.

3. Fingertip navigation, zooming and scrolling that’s intuitive, effective and fast.

4. Video playback that’s so good you can tell when you’ve done a sub-par job of ripping your movies.

5. Visual voicemail lets you get to the calls you care about faster.

6. Great integrated applications, including Google Maps, YouTube, and a world clock that packs a timer, stopwatch and multiple alarms.

7. Cover Flow. It’s incredibly fun to choose your music by visually flipping through album art.

8. It’s tough: Our initial stress tests suggest that the iPhone is more durable than you might expect for such a sleek handset.

9. The first Apple music player with a built-in speaker–and it’s not half bad for a phone.

10. No disconcerting “do not disconnect” messages when syncing with a PC.

10 things they did wrong

1. We want our AOL Instant Messaging–and Yahoo and MSN IM clients, too.

2. What about MMS support for sending picture mail?

3. No voice recording–and more importantly, no voice dialing support.

4. How are you supposed to use an iPhone with a hands-free car kit?

5. It’s the most locked-down phone we’ve ever seen. Not only can you not swap out the AT&T SIM card for one from another network, you can’t even swap it out for another AT&T SIM card.

6. AT&T is building out its mobile broadband network, but iPhone users are stuck with older EDGE technology–or battery-consuming Wi-Fi.

7. You know those great headphones you already own? They won’t fit the iPhones headset jack, so your first iPhone accessory will be a bulky, ugly $10 adapter.

8. The software keyboard invites typos–but when you’re entering passwords there’s no way of telling whether you’ve got them right.

9. It’s great that the iPhone can reorient pages in Safari, CoverFlow, and the photo album, but why not extend that capability to other apps such as e-mail? Some messages could benefit from a widescreen display. And even when it does reorient, it doesn’t always follow through with all features: CoverFlow loses access to the volume slider, for example. No support for custom ringtones, surprising in a music phone.

10. The camera’s rudimentary, with no audio/video or even zoom capability. No to-do list support, a basic in most calendar applications.

With Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) only days away, industry analysts are putting this year’s conference on a par with the release of Mac OS X and the Intel transition in terms of importance for the company.

“This is a hugely significant WWDC for Apple because they are bringing out a new platform,” said Michael Gartenberg, vice president and research director at research firm JupiterResearch. “This is the coming out party for the iPhone.”

Ross Rubin, director of analysis at market-researching NPD Group agreed. “Certainly the iPhone SDK is the most significant expansion to the platform since OS X,” he said.

Speculation has been swirling around the Internet for months that Apple will unveil the next-generation 3G iPhone at WWDC, but the significance of the event doesn’t rely on a new iPhone release. Having thousands of developers on hand, beginning work on applications for the iPhone is what’s most important.

While WWDC is a developers conference in every sense, Apple CEO Steve Jobs will be speaking to more than the developers when he takes the stage for his keynote on Monday morning. Jobs will also have a message for the mobile industry, according to Gartenberg.

“They are saying, ‘there is a new mobile platform in town and it’s us,’  said Gartenberg.

Interest in the developers conference has never been higher. Having a sold out event for the first time in the company’s history, Apple engineers will see the greatest variety of developers that have ever attended the event.

Analysts expect to see traditional Mac developers, mobile developers from other platforms, and internal developers from companies that want to be part of the iPhone revolution.

Many developers and consumers wanted Apple to release a native software development kit (SDK) for the iPhone when it came out, but Apple stood its ground at the time and only let peoeple create Web-based programs.

“In typical Apple style, they attack problems one at a time, fix it and move on to the next one,” said Gartenberg. “They could have done this right away, but at this point consumers are aware of the iPhone and developers have seen the popularity of the iPhone.”

By delaying developer access to the iPhone, Apple also had time to create a delivery system for the programs to come - the App Store, giving Apple another significant advantage over its competition in the mobile market.

“Putting apps right at the users fingertips and enabling them to acquire that software from anywhere is definitely a step forward in building exposure for the applications,” said NPD’s Rubin.

Gartenberg agrees. After spending years trying to navigate mobile Web sites and managing what is sometimes a difficult installation process, the App Store should be a welcome change.

“The ecosystem Apple is providing is super important. Most just aren’t consumer friendly,” said Gartenberg.

The App Store could also lead to another benefit for Apple and its developers - the impulse buy. Much the same way that users often purchase songs from iTunes on a whim, Rubin expects the same thing could happen with iPhone applications.

Whatever the announcements next week, Apple will deliver a shot across the bow of the mobile industry - and should set itself up nicely to reach its 10 million iPhone sales goal.

A new report from market research firm DisplaySearch shows Apple’s notebook shipments grew 61 percent from the first quarter of 2007 to the first quarter of 2008. Shipments rose from almost 900,000 to just over 1.4 million.

The growth puts Apple in seventh place in overall notebook market share with 4.6 percent. HP (20.8 percent), Dell (15.1 percent), Acer (14.6 percent), Toshiba (9.3 percent), Lenovo (7.5 percent), and Fujitsu-Siemens (5.2 percent) all had higher market share numbers. Asus (4.3 percent) and Sony (4.2 percent) rounded out the list behind Apple.

The growth rate from 2007 to 2008 tells a different story. Apple is second overall in growth behind Asus, which grew 67 percent. Lenovo is the only other company that was close coming in with 58 percent growth.

Most of the other companies saw growth between 20 and 40 percent, except Sony, which posted a meager three percent growth for the same period.

Of particular note in the report is the growing market for the mini-notebook with displays from 4.5-inches to 10.2-inches. This segment saw year-over-year growth of 3056 percent and quarter-over-quarter growth of 70 percent.

In all 31.1 million notebooks were shipped in the first quarter of 2008. DisplaySearch is forecasting shipments of 135 million units for the year.