Apple TV is still on the fritz
Despite a hasty fix to repair the last update, reports of problems continue to pour in
Photo: Apple Inc.
Only hours after Apple (AAPL) released version 3.0 of the software that runs its Apple TV set-top box, complaints began appearing on its online discussion boards — the company's own early warning system for detecting major bugs.
By Saturday, Nov. 7, when Apple advised owners by e-mail to immediately update to version 3.01, the discussion topic TV 3.0 — Many Problems had drawn 134 posts and been read more than 10,000 times. A second topic, Apple TV lost all media, had 108 posts and more than 3,000 reads.
Unfortunately, update 3.01 addressed only the "lost all media" issue. The other problems — periodic freezes, random restarts, overheating, sluggishness, disappearing networks, screens going "blocky red" etc. — haven't gone away.
"3.0.1 has actually made things worse for me," wrote user "laozi" late Saturday evening. "Now iTunes won't see the AppleTV at all, and no combination of rebooting/resetting is helping. Totally stuck. Apple, please fix this."
Apple TV may be a "hobby" for Steve Jobs, but Apple's customers don't sound happy about being treated like hobbyists.
"I don't know about you," wrote a user who calls himself baron von benjamin, "but this is the most problem-prone upgrade to any hardware I've ever seen."
Below the fold: The e-mail Apple sent Apple TV owners Saturday afternoon.
Apple invades France
The opening of a retail store near the Louvre draws huge crowds in Paris
Photo: Fabio M. Zambelli, setteB.IT
Who says Parisians are blasé? Tout Paris, it seems, turned out Saturday morning for the opening of Apple's (AAPL) first retail outlet in France. The video posted below the fold shows lines of shoppers that stretched for blocks.
Planning for the store, located in the Carrousel du Louvre, an upscale shopping mall beneath the Tuileries garden and adjacent to the museum, began more than two years ago. A second store in Montpelier was actually ready before this one, but its opening was postponed, according to ifoAppleStore, in deference to the City of Lights.
There are several videos of the event, including a four-minute version suggested by reader Rick in San Jose, Calif. But we've selected piratec.net's because it's been edited down to less than two minutes:
Inside Apple's industrial design lab
A rare visit with the man who designed the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone
Jonathan Ive. From Gary Hustwit's "Objectified."
"I guess it's one of the curses of what you do," says Jonathan Ive, Apple's senior vice president for industrial design, "is that you are constantly looking at something and thinking 'Why why why is it like that? Why is it like that and not like this?'"
Ive's five-minute appearance in Objectified is one of the centerpieces of Gary Hustwit's 2009 documentary about contemporary industrial design. It's a follow-up to Hustwit's amazing Helvetica (2007), the only full-length film about a typeface. Objectified may not be as surprising or groundbreaking, but it does feature this rare inside look at Apple's (AAPL) secretive design lab, an inner sanctum on the Cupertino campus only slightly less guarded than Fort Knox.
"I remember the first time I saw an Apple product," says Ive as the camera pans across a busy Apple Store. "I remember it so clearly because it was the first time I realized when I saw this product I got a very clear sense of the people who designed it and made it."
Below fold, unless Hustwit has pulled it, a YouTube clip of that video.
Apple is coming to Broadway
The Big Apple's newest Mac store is opening on the Upper West Side next Saturday
Source: Apple Inc.
Media invitations went out Friday for a press preview of the new Apple Store in Manhattan — the city's fourth — scheduled to be unveiled Saturday, Nov. 14.
The store, located on a nearly triangular site at Broadway and 67th Street, is well-positioned to get attention from the crowds and TV cameras heading for Central Park West to catch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade less than two weeks later.
New York City has been good to Apple (AAPL). The glass cube of its flagship store is believed to be the highest-grossing retail outlet on Fifth Avenue, bringing in an estimated $35,000 per square foot, nearly double the gross of Tiffany's sales floor and triple Harry Winston's, according to a New York real estate expert interviewed by Bloomberg reporters last summer.
Below the fold: Photographs showing the plastic faux curtain that's covering the building site and the curve of the store's unusual glass roof, courtesy of ifoAppleStore.com.
[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]
Vista sold more PCs than Windows 7 did
Microsoft moved a lot of install disks, but hardware makers got a bigger bump two years ago
Photo: Philip Elmer-DeWitt
When Microsoft (MSFT) launches a new operating system, as it did two weeks ago, PC manufacturers like Hewlett Packard (HPQ), Dell (DELL) and Acer are supposed to reap the benefits. And everything seemed to be in place on Thursday Oct. 22 for that to happen.
"Never before has the industry launched such a variety of new form factors, price points, technology upgrades, and design innovations at one time," wrote NPD's Stephen Baker just before Windows 7's release. "This past weekend I happened by a Best Buy store and there was not one single PC for sale with Vista on it. Lots of Windows 7 machines, however, all of which were marked 'not for sale until October 22.' Someone did a great job in the supply chain making this happen. This will give Win 7 a tremendous boost out of the gate." (link)
Two weeks later, Baker is singing a different tune. Microsoft got a big boost according to NPD's weekly tracking data, racking up sales of Windows 7 that were 234% higher than Vista's during its first few days of sales. (More on that below the fold.)
But PC makers didn't make out quite as well. Although they had a relatively strong week, with unit sales up 49% year over year and 95% from the week before, it was nothing like Vista's launch in Feb. 2007. Then, sales soared 68% year over year and 170% from the week before.
In a press release issued Thursday, Baker explained what happened:
Fortune magazine names Apple's Steve Jobs CEO of the decade
Runners-up include Gates, Buffett, Page, Brin, Winfrey, Stewart and — wait for it – Madoff
Photo: Time Inc.
Steve Jobs is the CEO of the decade, according to the new issue of Fortune magazine.
"Jobs is back," writes Adam Lashinsky in the cover story published Thursday. "It's as if his signature 'one more thing' line now applies to him as well. After a six-month leave of absence in the early part of this year, during which he received a liver transplant, he is once again commanding a 34,000-strong corporate army that is as powerful, awe-inspiring, creative, secretive, bullying, arrogant — and yes, profitable — as at any time since he and his chum Steve Wozniak founded Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) in 1976."
The piece includes the revelation that Jobs twice considered taking Apple private, once in a leveraged buyout with Silver Lake Partners and once a few years earlier with financing lined up by his old friend Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle (ORCL).
Sure to stir controversy is Fortune's provocative list of also rans, which includes, along with some obvious contenders (Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, for example), two convicted felons: Martha Stewart and Bernie Madoff.
CNNMoney.com (which carries this blog) has put together an elaborate online editorial package that includes excerpts from Lashinsky's story, a video of him explaining the choice, praises of Jobs from the rich and famous, celebrities' favorite iPhones apps, an interactive timeline, rarely seen photographs and more. The entry point is here.
[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]
Droid vs. iPhone: The reviews are in
Motorola and Verizon invited comparisons, and that's what they got
Photos: Motorola, Apple
The Droid lands in stores Friday, and on Thursday the heavyweight reviewers — which is to say the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg and the New York Times' David Pogue — weighed in.
Given that Motorola (MOT) and Verizon (VZ) pitched the Droid in its first TV ad as everything Apple's (AAPL) and AT&T's (T) iPhone was not, it was perhaps inevitable that every reviewer so far, including these two, treated its arrival as a grudge match.
Mossberg's review is positive but tepid — especially the video version. He plods through the comparisons item by item like a slightly boring homework assignment. His top-line summary:
The man who put the 'i' in iMac
Meet the creative director who named a generation of Apple products
Photo: Apple
The TBWA\Chiat\Day creative team was horrified in 1998 when Steve Jobs pulled back a cloth and revealed the bulbous teardrop that came to be known as the Bondi-Blue iMac.
But then Jobs wasn't so crazy at first about the name they proposed for it.
No one had ever seen anything like the new computer, veteran creative director Ken Segall tells Cult of Mac's Leander Kahney in an exclusive interview published Tuesday evening.
"We were pretty shocked but we couldn’t be frank," Segall recalls. "We were guarded. We were being polite, but we were really thinking, 'Jesus, do they know what they are doing?' It was so radical."
Segall eventually came up with "iMac," a name that connected the original 1984 Macintosh with the rapidly expanding Internet. But Jobs took some convincing.
Below the fold, excerpts from the story as Kahney tells it:
The iPhone's first 100,000 apps
Games dominate with nearly 17% of titles. Entertainment, books and travel are close behind.
Click to enlarge. Source: 148Apps.biz
Less than 16 months after it opened for business, the App Store now offers more than 100,000 applications for the iPhone and iPod touch, according to an Apple (AAPL) press release issued early Wednesday.
Two independent sites, AppShopper.com and 148Apps.biz, which track listings in the U.S. App Store, count 97,026 and 96,161, respectively. [UPDATE: A third, apptism.com, lists 100,699.]
Apple's total includes 3,000 or 4,000 apps available only in its 76 overseas stores. Another nearly 9,000 apps have been approved by Apple but for one reason or another are no longer available for download.
The distribution of applications remains roughly the same as it was a year ago. According to 148Apps' count, the U.S. App Store carries, among other offerings, more than 16,000 games, 13,000 books, 2,700 navigation programs, 1,200 medical applications and 442 weather apps.
Below the fold: A bar chart comparing the App Store's 100,000 with the numbers available at the official application markets for Google's (GOOG) Android platform, Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry, Nokia's (NOK) Symbian, Palm's (PALM) Pre and Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows Mobile phones.
33% of U.S. touchscreens are iPhones
Touchscreen phones are on fire, comScore reports, and Apple is leading the pack. For now.
Three months ending Aug. 2009. Source: comScore MobiLens
There's a thundering herd of imitators behind it, but Apple's (AAPL) iPhone still dominates that fastest-growing segment of the U.S. smartphone market, according to a comScore report issued Tuesday.
Touchscreen mobile phone adoption in the U.S. grew at a breakneck 159% rate last year, comScore reports, easily outpacing the 63% growth of the broader smartphone market.
By last August, nearly 34 million Americans were carrying smartphones, 23.8 million of them touchscreen devices. And of those touchscreen phones, 32.9% were iPhones.
“The iPhone clearly set the trend in the industry for touchscreen devices, so it’s no surprise that it has the largest share of the market,” said comScore VP Mark Donovan. “But as other players have entered the touchscreen market with compelling devices, competition is clearly heating up.”
Donovan mentioned Google's (GOOG) Android platform in particular, although the closest Android contender in August was the T-Mobile (DT) G1 running a distant seventh after two proprietary LG phones, the BlackBerry (RIMM) Storm, the Palm (PALM) Pre and the Samsung Instinct.
Below the fold, comScore's spreadsheets, including one that shows preference by age group. (The smartphone sweet spot seems to be ages 24 to 34.)
