Links to smarter people than I: Magic Touchpad, iPod Touch

Two interesting bits thought of by people not named Ben...

First Andy Ihnhatko (Beloved Technology pundit) loves the multi touch "Magic Touchpad"  (I hate these names)

Andy is right it is fargin cool.  The first whiff of the  Multi-Touch Mac OS, Apple TV?

Second because the iPod touch is such a second sister to the iPhone it had completely escaped my laser like focus (but not Grubers) that in the three years since the iPod touch came out there are still no competitors to this device.

iPhone/Safari Search Revenue

Mozilla receives 

Apparently v.2.2 of the iPhone Firmware includes a google search-bar on the top and right of the address bar just like in a "real" browser.

Revenue is the answer to the question you were going to ask.  Apple cut a deal with Google to put the search bar

 there and will receive income for how much it is used. 

Mozilla received the lions share of its income, $57 Million from Google for the Google branded search bar on it's browser last year.  Apple earns money on the iPhone/Safari browser too.

The back of the envelope...   Mozilla search share implies that 1% of search is worth ~$10 million from Google.  A month ago iPhone represented .3% of the Browser market or ~$3 million dollars worth of search.  It does not sound like much but wait a year.  When there are 50 million of these things on the ground the revenue will be $10s of millions of dollars.

Look, tens of millions of dollars is a lot of money even to a company that earned more than 4 billion dollars in the last year.

Just as an aside when I say iPhone I mean iPhone AND iPod Touch.  Don't be so offended shees.

Amherst College The Land of Mac Tech

Amherst College.  Appleland

Approximately 1/2 the incoming class of Amherst College (2012) has an iPhone or iPodTouch.  YOW! And is more likely to own a MAC (laptop) than a PC.  14 poor souls trudged to campus with desktops.  I suspect that at least half of these guys are first order geeks that wanted desktops, the rest just could not convince Dad to pony up.  

While that stuff is cool the Earth shattering number is that 1/3rd of the incoming class of 2003 applied online.  89% of this years class applied online.  That is dramatic.  

5 ...  Number of students with a landline phone.  FIVE.  

The world is changing.  Quickly.

Despite all the change that has occurred over the last thirty years we have only just begun to see the changes that will effect all of our lives as a result of the Personal Computing Revolution.

Apple TV: The Second Coming or iBrick

The folks at TUAW caught wind of a rumor regarding a possible update of Apple TV coming this Tuesday Sept 30th.  

No Predictions here as to what may or may not happen except to say that the current version of Apple TV is the only and original version of the Apple TV.  It is entirely possible that Apple TV is being updated without ANY real functionality change except to upgrade the hard drive and possibly the video output.  But heck maybe this is the iBrick, the second coming of the Apple TV.

If it is...  Than this is a good time to update my thoughts from a prior post regarding Apple TV.

To sell broadly Apple TV must Replace some or all of the products and services that it currently competes against.  It must be a Set Top Box Replacement.  It must be an effective replacement for Blockbuster/Netflix and it must have a working PVR. 

By broadly the market must reach beyond us geeks so ruling out those of us using any Elgato Product. (sorry Elgato your market is gadget geeks, but you knew that) 

In addition, and this is the deal breaker, Apple has to get hollywood to play along.  Without content equivalent to NetBuster (netflixBlockbuster)  say 95% of new releases and a back catalog of thousands,(Currently there are less than 1,900 movies available for rent in iTunes)Apple will only have limited sales with Apple TV.  

If they did it it would be too expensive for broad acceptance initially but who knows maybe this is the product they "Crush" their margins with.  Certainly the integration with iPhone/iPod Touch would be kick ass.

Longer Term Apple really wants to be the company to provide integrated home entertainment solutions but we are not likely ready for that yet.  For Now Apple TV Remains a serious Hobby.  The products existence gives Apple a reason to assign resources and keep tabs on the market.  

We will see on Tuesday.

iPhone/Touch/App Store Vs. Nintendo DS

So, why if you had the alternative of the iPod Touch would someone buy a DS for their kid.

If current pricing in the App store for major publisher games holds (5.99-9.99 per game) the iPod Touch is the less expensive option if you buy more than 5 games.  Even cheaper if you have 2 kids since one purchase on iTunes will legitimately sync on a number of iPhones/Touches.

No Lost games, bigger screen, cheaper to own.  The only current Nintendo advantage is a large (huge actually) library of existing games.

Developers must like it too because distributing thru iTunes they have zero packaging costs as well as much lower distribution and sales cost. (Typical cut for publishers at retail is 50%  vs. the 70% at the App Store) it is clear with both EA and THQ now producing iPhone/iTunes content that the publishers are sold on the platform.

This market will not be as big as the iPhone but since 2004,  77 million DS's have been sold.   5-20 million Touches a year would be a very nice number. 

The iPod Touch is a much more flexible platform for any kind of software development but is super for games.  The open question remains... Will the market agree with my impeccable logic?

Edit ya I left out that the iPod is in fact an iPod.  

App Store Blogstorm

So there is this kerfuffle regarding the App store.  On the one hand we have Gruber.  Defender of the liberal arts and on the other Mike Arrington of Tech Crunch defender of well gravity.

  

Gruber/Arrington make very different arguments so you would think that they could not both be right but they are.  The thing that makes this argument cool is that we are free to assign whatever motive we want to Apple since we have no way to know what really happened.

Gruber is right, Gruber is Always right (Daring Fireball.net )

It’d be different if Apple had published an explicit rule stating, for example, that podcasting apps are prohibited. But there is no such guideline. Podcaster seems to fully comply with Apple’s published guidelines, and yet it was rejected for violating a secret rule....

The point is not that Apple can’t reject apps arbitrarily. They can. Elsewhere in the SDK Agreement is a more or less wildcard clause that grants Apple the right to reject apps — and remove apps which were previously accepted — for whatever reasons it chooses. The point isn’t about what Apple can do but what they should do.

And they shouldn’t be doing this. 

Gruber gets hot about an issue once every couple of weeks and lets fly all of his substantial edumicated smoothyness.   Slick awsome and right.  He represents that part of us for the world as we would like it to be.  He is hopeful, but unyielding and ultimately willing to make a go/no go decision based on something that is a poor compromise.

Arrington:

The fact is that there are more than twelve million iPhones in people’s hands today, and another800,000 or so are likely sold each week. That is too much of an opportunity to pass up. Developers will complain, but ultimately they’ll play by whatever rules Apple demands. Even if those rules are ambiguous and subject to change regularly without notice.

Arrington is right, I mean he is seriously correct.  This is what will happen.  I like Arrington too, it's just that I don't want to agree with him.  He is drive, ambition, business everything I admire in someone that likely feeds his family.

The downside of Arrington's argument is that it means we live in that world that is not fair, where we don't necessarily like the choices we have at any given time.  There is this MBA/Machiavelli thing that while right is a little to grown up.  

(Daniel Dilger is involved in the argument too but besides being pedantic I don't think I like him and three ways are sooo confusing)

As an aside.  The App store continues to Explode with Apps.  Four Hundred have been added since last weeks iPod show (3405 current total). Including todays release of The Force Unleashed.  This is the first release on the App store by THQ and further evidence that the iPhone/iPod Touch are going to be taken VERY seriously as a gaming device.

Update:  Fake Steve Jobs Weighs in at his lucid best: Blow Blogstorm Blowww.

iPod Touch on Sale $1455 less than iPhone

Shawn Wu is wrong about this  

American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu last night warned that Apple's recently-revealed iPod touch price cut may not go far enough, saying: "While we are pleased to see lower pricing, we are concerned that price points may remain too high given the tough macroeconomic environment and relative to the 3G iPhone at $199 and $299."

The iPod Touch is an entirely different product than the iPhone.  Regardless of price which I will get to in a moment, the product is used differently by the person who buys it.  The "price out the door" does not begin to tell the price difference.  If the iPod Touch died after 24 months of use it would cost $1455 (69*24)-199) less over that period.  So you could buy say an iPod Touch AND a really bad used car for less.

Assuming he is thinking of unit sales and he was expecting iPods to be part of the Margin Crushing trend that Apple has told us about I suggest that iPhone Accounting and broader channel Sales of Macs are margin crushing enough.

Repeat after me.  iPods are the CASH COW! ...iPods are the CASH COW!

iPhone Hangover: The unfair expectations of the CGE!

When you have invented the coolest gizmo ever (CGE), everything that follows is ...   well ...  not the CGE.

Every Apple announcement cannot be the iPhone, Get over it.

Yesterday Apple introduced slick sequels to their iPod line of products and updated iTunes. They told us ahead of time what the purpose of the event.   The event went off pretty much as planned.  YET everyone went home feeling empty and sad.  Apple will sell between 25-30 million of these things between now and christmas that is impressive.

The problem is that at MacWorld in 2007 Steve Jobs Apple  changed expectations about what comes out of cupertino forever.  Nothing (Never say never but really NOTHING) can be as exciting as the introduction of the iPhone/coolest gizmo EVER (CGE for short)   And no matter how much we rationally thing about what is going to happen today, we hold out in the back of our feeble little Apple loving minds the hope that something magical like that time... back in 07....CGE... NOOOoooo

It does not help that the last several of these events have been anti-climatic since virtually everything but the color of the product is know ahead of time.  The leaks are a factor of the crazy fast growing size of Apple and its "affiliates" and likely cannot be changed.. but it does remove some of the magic of the reveal.

It also does not help that we have 47 year old men showing us how to play video games, DUDE. Schiller might has well have been wearing a leisure suit for how cool this was.   Truthfully the segment felt like filler for something that was not there.

There are the unreasonable unthoughtful expectations like iPods for $100 bucks or cheerful John Dvoraks, but this is different.  No matter what you thought was going to happen today it just was a little empty.  

You cannot invent the iPhone every year.

Manic iPhone owners crave. . . Peace?

By virtue of the fact that Apple has recently added the ability to sort applications in the App Store by "Popularity" it is now possible to know the following ironic factoid.

The top two most popular applications that require more than zero dollars for purchase for the ADD addled owners of the, in touch all the time in all places and conditions iPhone, are ... Wait for it

Ambient Noise generators...

Namaste  Ambience #73 overall, and Asleep #93 overall  as Fake Steve would say we honor the place where your quiet and our manic gizmoness become one...