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You can’t beat Apple at being Apple
Open…and Shut There’s a growing list of would-be iPad killers born each month, but none yet to grok the central message that made Android beat the iPhone: cheapness.
Motorola and others may have all sorts of reasons for why their tablets are superior to Apple’s iPad, but until the price tag is significantly lower, their devices are going to sit on the shelves as museum pieces. Motorola’s mobility head, Sanja Jha, articulates a bevy of reasons for why the Xoom tablet is worth its $799 price, the primary one being “our ability to deliver 50Mb/s [will] justify the $799 price point.”
But he’s wrong. For one thing, though the Xoom comes with Verizon’s lightning-fast 4G network access, “Verizon’s new 4G LTE network is so fast that you can use up your entire 5GB, $50 monthly allotment in 32 minutes,” as PC Mag’s Sascha Segan found. So forget the cost of the device for a minute: once a consumer actually starts tapping into the power of the Xoom and its network, the consumer is going to be paying through the nose in data overage charges. Ouch.
But there’s a bigger reason few consumers are going to be willing to pay the same price for a Xoom (or any other tablet) as they would for an iPad: it’s not an iPad. The default brand that consumers associate with tablets is Apple. That’s where the cachet is. So long as its a Motorola Xoom, a RIM PlayBook, etc., it’s got to be cheaper or it’s not going to sell. (The only possible exception to this is Android-based devices, because Android has a great brand all its own, but even Android is ultimately successful because it’s cheaper. More on that below). There really isn’t any good way around this, either.
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Net neutrality is back in the again and after a recent House vote it appears that it is facing an uncertain future.
Macworld has the latest news on the subject and last weeks vote. The unclear position on the subject is summed up with this, “The dueling budget bills leave a cloudy future for the net neutrality provision. Some advocates in the net neutrality debate see little chance the provision will survive; others aren’t so sure.”
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From MacRumors:
Early this morning, a couple of sites posted specs from the upcoming low end 13″ MacBook Pro and revealed that Apple will be incorporating Light Peak into the new machines under the name “Thunderbolt”. We’ve confirmed that these specs and photos are legitimate, but only for the low end 13″ MacBook Pro model. We still haven’t seen the specs for the mid-range and high-end model.
Mac4Ever has posted a followup close-up image of the new Thunderbolt/DisplayPort hybrid port found on the new 13″ MacBook Pro.
Intel is expected to officially launch Light Peak/Thunderbolt on Thursday alongside Apple’s new MacBook Pros.
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As we approach the time when Apple is expected to launch two of its flagship products for 2011 — the iPhone 5 and the iPad 2 — the rumors around the company, its plans, the products’ features and the launch dates are entering a frenzy matched perhaps only by high profile celebrity rumor mills.
It is at this point that, to paraphrase the legendary post-modern saying, the rumors get so intense that everything is pointless. Even if you’re closely following Apple, which keeps its secrets behind a tightly locked 10-inch-thick steel door, it’s getting hard to track every single rumor about the upcoming products, and it’s even harder to discern which of them could be true.
We cannot be certain what features the iPhone 5 and the iPad 2 will have. Hell, we don’t know for sure that these products even exist. The rumors themselves, however, follow an interesting set of patterns that seem to reappear every time an Apple product is about to be launched.
1. The Age of Innocence
At this early stage, actual products are several months away, and the only palpable data anyone really has is the timing of Apple’s yearly events, such as the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference. It is also at this time when the rumors actually make the most sense, as analysts and media outlets take the obvious picks. The new iPhone, you will often read at this time, will have a better camera, a faster processor and more memory.
Well, duh. The features sound good, but they’re also so obvious that anyone could’ve predicted them. While the predictions at this stage are often correct, they only point toward an evolutionary product release, which Apple often does.
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There isn’t a lack of cloud note taking apps for your iDevices. Some of bigger players include names like Simplenote and Plain Text.
But how do you sort out which may be the best one for you? To start you can head over to 9to5 Mac. They have the short lowdown and the “winner” of that review. You can see the detailed review here.
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Verizon’s webpage dedicated to the Xoom has just gone up and one of our eagle-eyed readers has already spotted a disquieting bit of small print: “Adobe Flash expected Spring 2011.” You don’t sit around expecting what you already have, so that leads us to conclude that the Xoom, the mighty iPad-slaying, Honeycomb-bringing, world-changing tablet… won’t have Flash at launch. The version of Adobe’s rich media player it’s waiting for is most probably 10.2 for mobile devices, scheduled to arrive in the coming weeks, which should mean first-day buyers this Thursday will get a limited-time premium feature on their tablets: no Flash ads.
[Thanks, Chris]
Update: Motorola has confirmed this, in a very roundabout fashion. The company’s statement in full:
“Motorola XOOM will include full support for Adobe® Flash® Player® for accessing the rich video and animations of the web, to be available after launch.”
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Amazon will be offering unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows for Prime members at no extra charge.
You can see some details about the news over a Mac|Life. As their post points out this “move is clearly a shot across the bow at Netflix and Hulu Plus, who recently rolled out $7.99 per month streaming packages for their customers.”
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So you’ve captured the world with your various digital cameras and now its time to print them. But what’s the best way to to that? And how do you figure what is best?
You visit Macworld that’s how. They have posted an excellent tutorial on the subject of resizing those digital images for printing. As they start out, “While most image editing programs are happy to resize your photo for you in their respective print dialog boxes, knowing how to do it yourself gives you more control.”
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While we’ve already reported that new MacBook Pros are expected to launch on Thursday and reports have even surfaced claiming that sealed shipments are already on their way to retailers, it’s worth noting that Apple’s top-priority U.S. online store has now gotten in on the act by pushing shipment estimates for all new MacBook Pro orders out to 3-5 business days.
Apple’s brick-and-mortar retail stores will of course continue to sell off any remaining stock of the current models, but the company’s online distribution system has clearly dried up and any new orders placed will almost certainly be upgraded to the new models released later this week.
Some observers have questioned why Apple would release new MacBook Pros on a Thursday, as opposed to its traditional Tuesday release date. The most likely reason is related to the federal Presidents’ Day holiday in the United States today. Apple generally prefers not to launch new products straight out of a weekend, in part due to ensure that media coverage is not diminished as some reporters may still be making their way back from the long weekend. Consequently, Apple has been known to deviate from its usual Tuesday and Wednesday releases in weeks with major U.S. holidays.
Others have noted that Thursday is Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ 56th birthday (as well as MacRumors’ own 11th birthday), which almost certainly simply makes for a nice coincidence.
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