Sam Iles's Blog

You know how I have a problem with the 5th iPhone being called the iPhone 4S and the fact that the 6th iPhone is likely to be called the iPhone 5?

Well, with Apple dropping the numeral altogether from the new iPad, why not do the same for the iPhone? You’ve got to admit, ‘iPhone 8′ and ‘iPhone 11′ do sound silly. They’ve got to stop somewhere, right?

I think it makes sense to drop the numeral altogether, and just have the next iPhone called the ‘iPhone’.

(And, while we’re on the topic, will I be buying a new iPad? Of course.)

Last week, Apple unveiled an application called iBooks Author which allows companies or people to make text books for use in schools and to sell those text books through Apple for direct delivery to iPads. It can also be used to create sales brochures and training manuals for companies and so on, but right now, it’s about text books.

I’ve thought a lot about this and whether or not I think it’s a good idea. And I’ve finally come to the conclusion that it’s bad. Here’s why:

Firstly, I think it’s a major threat to the free and open dissemination of information. With this plan, Apple becomes the arbiter of information, with the ability to pick and choose which text books it allows into its store. Information becomes reliant on every student in the school having an iPad. With text books, there is absolutely zero barrier to entry. If you have £15, you can get a text book. With iBooks Author, text books require a £500 investment. (I say £500, not £400, because these text books are apparently 3 or 4gb each, meaning a 16gb iPad just won’t cut it). Of course, this money needs to be supplied by the state as the majority of parents can’t afford to furnish all their kids with new iPads when they start school (let alone replacing them during their many years of education). This means schools need to buy loads of iPads and replace them when they get old (which, in a school system full of moronic teenagers, is likely to happen quickly) and by tons more books than they’d need to and these can’t be used year after year by different students as they are now. And, of course, the resale market is killed by this.

Not to mention the fact that I can’t this working. Give the people I went to school with an iPad and tell them to open a text book, and they’ll sit at the back and play Angry Birds. I know I would have. We had these little laptops in secondary school which had a penguin game on them. Half the teacher’s time was spent walking around telling us to stop playing the game when we should have been working. But I digress.

This isn’t free and open information – what should be the basis of education – but is an expensive tie-in to Apple’s iPad market. The point of open standards is that information remains free, with infinite possibilities. But, iBooks Author is propriety and owned entirely by Apple. Information, especially in education, is the crux of democracy and freedom and we’ve spent centuries railing against the idea of one company or organisation controlling all of that. iBooks Author wipes all of that work away.

Of course, Apple is a commercial company, and this move is pretty smart. If it can get even one US state or even an entire country, or just few school counties, to agree to give all their students iPads then Apple is in the money. And that’s not even including the 30% Apple gets from selling the books.

So. More expensive for schools and considerably less open. And, what exactly is the benefit to iPad text books? Oh, you can embed video in them? Well, a) the teacher can show us a video with his whiteboard, and b) education shouldn’t really be about watching videos anyway, should it?

Text books are a perfect standard. You don’t even need electricity. Anyone can make them, anyone can buy them, anything can happen with them. With iBooks Author, you’ve got an incredible important standard controlled by one company which can only be enjoyed by those who buy and continue to buy their expensive gadgets. It just doesn’t seem right to me.

In the face of blatant evidence of Apple’s superior quality and user experience in its products, Apple ‘haters’ usually resort to calling Apple expensive and – most usually – overpriced.

While you can’t really disagree that Apple’s products are expensive – anything which costs £1000 is expensive regardless of what it is – they certainly aren’t overpriced.

Hardware

Take the MacBook Air. I looked around a few companies websites to find the closest matching product (ultra-thin design and specs) and noted their prices.

So, the Dell has a smaller screen, weighs more and a slower processor but it’s still £10 more… Apple’s not so overpriced now, is it.

The misconception that Apple is overpriced comes from the fact that Dell do sell laptops from around £400 and Apple’s cheapest laptop is £849. You can see why someone would get confused but what they don’t realise is that that cheapest Dell is a much worse product than the cheapest MacBook. It makes sense for the Air to cost more because it’s a lot better. And, even when you get a Dell which is specced near the same as the MacBook the Dell is more expensive!

Bottom line: Apple’s hardware is not overpriced. It priced according to what it is.

Software

So the hardware is a lot better than its competitors, but, even if it weren’t, could Apple still be justified in charging more than for a PC? I think so. Namely because of the software.

Mac OS itself is supremely better than Windows, whichever way you look at it. I’ve known many people who say they want a Mac over their PC but they can’t afford it. And, they all say that the reason is the software. Everything is so much simpler on a Mac. Installing software involves dragging an icon to the Applications folder. No silly installer. Viruses are a thing of the past. Everything just works. In fact, you can probably cut hours and hours out of your work by using a Mac.

Also consider iLife. Windows users have nothing close to iLife in its power and simplicity. ‘Windows Movie Maker’. Please. That silly Windows Gallery app for photos? For a Windows user to replicate the power of iLife they would need to spend hundreds of pounds on iLife. Already they’ve lost all that money they think they saved by not buying a Mac.

Software is a major value add and makes the Mac very worthwhile.

Support

When you buy a Mac you get a one year guarantee. You ales get 90 days of phone support included (which you can extend for a small fee). That means that for 90 days any problem can be solved over the phone. Try doing that with Microsoft.

Longevity

I know people still using PowerBooks. Macs seem to last forever and, treated well, hardly ever break. You can easily stretch a MacBook out to last you five years. A cheap £400 Dell will last a few years tops. For every one Mac a Mac user buys, you’ll probably have to buy two PCs. Macs last ages.

Cheap ≠ Value

If you want to buy a fridge or cooker in the UK you can go to Currys and Comet or John Lewis. Currys sell the cheap, horrible ones which quickly lose efficiency and break and John Lewis sells brilliant stuff that lasts – but it’s expensive. (This makes it worth noting the fact that John Lewis sells Macs whereas Comet and Currys don’t). When shopping for food, you can go to the cheaper Tesco or to the more expensive but higher quality Waitrose. Dell, HP and Acer found themselves trapped in a race-to-the-bottom, each trying to make their products cheaper. What happened? Crappy products and slim margins. In fact, there’s so little money in the PC business for these guys that HP recently called it quits.

Apple decided to stay out of that game. They avoided making awful products and instead made high quality stuff. Apple went for a different market.

Sure, Macs can cost more than PCs. But, they’re better. They are better value and you get a lot more out of a Mac.

Besides, I’ve never understood how people say Apple makes worse computers because their stuff is “overpriced”. A Ferrari costs more than a Volkswagen, but nobody would argue for hours that the Volkswagen is a better car. Sure, it may be cheaper and it may be better for a person with little money, but that doesn’t mean the Volkswagen is better. Just that it’s cheaper.

Steve Jobs in a 1985 Playboy interview on designing the Macintosh:

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

And, in the same interview again on the Macintosh:

Some people are saying that we ought to put an IBM PC on every desk in America to improve productivity. It won’t work. The special incantations you have to learn this time are the “slash q-zs” and things like that. The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel––one that reads like a mystery to most people. They’re not going to learn slash q-z any more than they’re going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about.

Even then he knew exactly what it was all about. That’s the spirit that has been in Apple since 1985 and will continue to be in Apple without Steve.

Steve Jobs has resigned as the CEO of Apple. He wrote:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

Apple’s stock has dipped 4 or so percent in after-hours trading and was to be very much expected (given the chance to make a quick buck). There will, I’m sure, be a lot of speculation and blog posts over the next few days about what this means. I’ll add my comment now.

I’m very sure it means very little.

Firstly, Steve is a smart man. He has known he couldn’t be Apple’s CEO indefinitely and has no doubt been planning for this. Steve doesn’t walk into the office each day and tell everyone what they’ll be doing on that day. They’ve planned for years. And, not just planning, but he’s clearly built a perfect culture and ethos at Apple – everyone is on the same page.

Not only that, but he’s still on the board and still the chairman and the CEO is still, ultimately, accountable to him.

Even more, Steve wrote in his letter that he would remain chairman, a board member and an ‘employee’ of Apple. That employee bit sounds like he’ll be going a step further than what a chairman usually does.

So, while he might not be CEO on paper anymore, both his ‘beliefs’ and the man himself will continue to live on within Apple for a long, long time.

And, of course, Steve being just in his mid-fifties but saying he can’t ‘fulfil his duties’ as CEO any longer is a stark admission of ill health and jolly upsetting. I do hope he’s OK…

Gizmodo recently wrote an article called “Lion – Not the Future We Were Hoping For”, in which they complained that Lion wasn’t a big upgrade and was a mishmash of interfaces which would confuse the basic user. Many other people have complained about this, comparing Lion to Snow Leopard and calling it a small, evolutionary, boring update.

Well, friends – THAT’S THE DAMN POINT.

Apple said a long time ago that the days of bringing incredible innovation and new features to OS X was ending and that the future would focus on crossing the Ts and dotting the Is, tightening the bolts, improving what’s already there, increasing stability and simplifying the systems across their different platforms. It seems to me that they are achieving that.

Remember, this is Mac OS X – 10 – and each update has been a new decimal place, with Lion being 10.7. Increasing a tenth of a version shouldn’t be a big jump.

(Also, Gizmodo’s comments about basic users not being able to use Mission Control, etc, are moot because a) they won’t even know it exists, they’ll just use the dock like they do now and b) someone who is so stupidly beginner they can’t work out Mission Control won’t have dozens of apps open anyway.)

One day, Apple will probably release Mac OS 11 and that update will be the big evolutionary one. Right now, Apple is fine tuning and making version ten better, as it said it would and as it should. One day, when it’s ready, it will revolutionise Mac OS with version 11.

Don’t complain that Lion isn’t changing the way you use your computer, because it isn’t supposed to. If you’re not happy with Apple’s roadmap, switch to Windows or Linux.

Steve demos NeXTSTEP in his inimitable style, right down to saying doing something which happens instantly on NeXTSTEP would take “weeks on Windows”. It’s also great to see him hatin’ on the Mac. Also fascinating is the way so much of NeXTSTEP is now in the Mac (most notably being the dock).

It’s long, but worth it:

What’s this – an Apple keynote in which the contents has been pre-announced…? Why, yes, it is! Here is what they said:

Apple will unveil its next generation software – Lion, the eighth major release of Mac OS® X; iOS 5, the next version of Apple’s advanced mobile operating system which powers the iPad®, iPhone® and iPod touch®; and iCloud®, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering.

Now, I’ll talk about it for a bit:

• Lion: We’ve already seen a great deal of the unification of Mac OS X and iOS and I guess we can expect to see it in its near-finished form on Monday. If I recall correctly, they originally hinted at a “fall” release, which probably means something around September (that was the Snow Leopard date). Although I was greatly unimpressed and scared by the previous Lion unveiling, I hope to be a little more impressed this time. (On a side note, Windows 8 looks like it will be unveiled later today and looks to be a whole lot better than Mac OS X for a lot of reasons, so that should be jolly exciting…)
• iOS 5: Well this should be jolly exciting! All I really care about is some nice new notifications (“we waited because we wanted to get this right – AND WE HAVE!”) and that’s it. I am not in with the hipsters who want their widgets (“battery life is terrible on devices with widgets, so we didn’t do it”) and the like. In fact, iOS is perfectly fine as it is, in my opinion. But it will still be nice to see an update…
• iCloud: What’s this? An unannounced product in a press release? Why ever they did it, it’s still nice to know something is happening. The way I see it, there are a few options of what they could be doing (assuming it features some kind of music service):
  1. A digital locker service for music you already own. In other words, you would be able to play music from the web on your iOS devices. But, only music you already own. There are two ways Apple could do this: a) the Amazon and Google way of uploading music you already own and then letting you play that or, b) scanning your hard drive for music files and marking you off in a database for owning that file. There are two big differences between them:
     • Method a) requires you to upload gigabytes of data to the Internet and for Amazon and Google (and Apple) to store it. Even if a million people have the same Lady Gaga song, it has to be stored one million times. This is so that when the RIAA swing by, they can prove they are just storing data and not running a streaming service. This is obviously a silly way to do it.
     • Method b) would require deals with the record companies and means Apple scans your computer and then can say, “yes, Sam owns every single Beyoncé song, so he can now stream them to himself for FREE!”. This is obviously much nicer and a conceivable possibility.
  2. A streaming service like Rdio and Spotify. This would mean you open iTunes and type in the name of the artist you want and play their music to your heart’s content for a monthly (or, knowing Apple, yearly) fee. Apple offering such a service (and iOS app…) would no doubt spell the end for Spotify and Rdio and really could be huge. I hope they do it, because I might even pay for it…
  3. A hybrid of the two. This is really just the streaming service, but with some kind of concessions if you already the music (like the ability to play music over the streaming service which isn’t strictly in the steaming catalogue.
  4. All of these services are probably to be bundled in with MobileMe in some form. It makes little sense for Apple to call a purely cloud music “iCloud” and continue making MobileMe separately (which would be perfect if called iCloud). No, I think you may be looking at paying $100 a year for ‘MobileMe + Music Service = iCloud’.
• So, out of all these iCloud options, I guess I have to make a choice. My bet would be with music locker using method b) of not having to upload your content. Apple is (ostensibly, I guess) doing perfectly well with selling music and they have little incentive to switch their business model. Not to mention the fact that the labels have little incentive too, given that Spotify is still a (failing) experiment. Of course, it’s possible Apple could have secured something Amazing and could blow us away but, well, I just don’t feel it.
• Will there be a one more thing? They really have made it clear in the press release that this event is for software, and perhaps the prophecies will come true and the iPhone will be announced and released later in the year than normal. Perhaps the usual September event will be the place for iPhone 5? I won’t be getting the iPhone 5 anyway, so I really don’t care. All I do care about is this: iWork! Please, Apple, make your one more thing iWork ‘11 or ‘12. Or, any of these, of course.