Dan Knight
- 2007.09.12
iPod touch with AirPort Express?
From Ernesto Tohme:
Hi Dan,
Have you wondered if the iPod touch can stream audio to AirPort
Express? I think this would be great for Apple, it would be a "cheaper"
option to Sonos systems. I could stream to AE, connected to my Bose
Soundwave, and control the music I want to hear while playing poker
with my friends, instead of using my trusty G4 12" PB. And, of course,
it would be much cooler.
Greetings from Mexico,
Ernesto Tohme
Ernesto,
I imagine this could work - and with the iPhone as
well. Likewise, will they work with Apple TV? The big question is
whether Apple will enable it.
Dan
Is the iPod touch a Real PDA?
From: Bill Doty:
Hi Dan
I hate cell phones. I don't have an iPod. The music I play is from
CDs that I own.
I use a Palm Tungsten E every day of the week. I have an e-Bible
program, music (REAL audio), and photos on an SD card. I can play music
in the car with a cassette adapter (from a Sony Walkman CD player). I
can also power it from a cigarette lighter bung. I also have an SD card
with games.
I could not live without the memo, calculator, and calendar program.
When I'm on holiday, I even use the alarm clock.
The Acrobat Reader and DataViz are a bit poopie.
It is now 3 years old.
If I had to replace it, I would not have much choice.
Palm is headed to the dumpster. They still make the Tungsten E and
the Tx, but they both have a bad on/off switch. (I had mine repaired by
a guy in Minnesota.) Windows CE handhelds suck just as bad as Windows
computers.
If Apple would come up with a software package, similar to the Palm,
for the iPod touch, it would be perfect for me.
Bye
Bill Doty
Bill,
I hear you. I liked my Newton, but it was too big to
haul around. I like my Palm Zire 31, especially with an added 512 MB SD
card for storage. I like my iPods (a 1G with a 20 GB upgrade and a 60
GB iPod photo) for storing files and listening to music. I like my cell
phone, and I don't really want to have my iPod and cell phone in the
same device.
At first blush, the iPod touch looked like the perfect
solution. Take the iPhone, strip out the cell phone, and sell it for
less. Oh, and drop the camera. And the Bluetooth. And the ability to
edit you calendar. And who knows what other compromises so it won't be
a real PDA that could replace Palms and Newtons and WinCE handhelds
while competing with the cash cow iPhone.
Don't make the mistake of being an early adopter with
the iPod touch. Every day we seem to learn about one more design
compromise that makes the iPhone the better choice - except that I
don't want to switch to AT&T wireless, pay a termination fee with
Alltel, and pay $60 a month to AT&T for at least two years.
The iPod touch has the potential to be the perfect
PDA, but Apple seems hell bent on crippling it compared with the
iPhone.
Dan
Apple's Marketing Formula
From Matthew Wright:
Hey Dan,
Just wanted to make mention of the big iPhone dust up regarding
price and features. The only thing surprising to me about the drop in
price and increase in basic storage for the iPhone is that anyone is
surprised anymore by this behavior from Apple.
Apple, especially since Jobs return a decade ago, releases new
products with less features than they could at an inflated price (and
usually with software and hardware bugs for a first generation
release). Exhibit A is the original iPod. 400 bucks for 5 GB upon
initial release. A short while later 400 bucks got you four times more
storage.
Then there's Exhibit B - the original MacBook Pro. It lacked
FireWire 800 for no comprehensible reason, after FireWire 800 had been
a standard feature on the PowerBooks for a while. It had a slower
SuperDrive than the PowerBook it replaced, without support for dual
layers. Both of these things were "miraculously" amended a short time
later. Did Apple respond to a customer demand, or was this all planned
from the beginning?
And remember the original iPod nano? How long did those stay black
and white? The nano was supposed to replace the wildly popular colors
of the iPod mini, and then "surprise" we're making them with colors now
a few months later! Or how about the original shuffle? Those were
around, what, a couple months?
All I'm saying is that this whole sky is falling routine from the
Mac community is getting theatrical. Farcical even. Of course the
iPhone went down in price. Of course the low-end model was
discontinued. A horse is a horse. It's called marketing.
I'm going to get really geeky now and recall a Star Trek: TNG
episode where the original series' Scotty was written into a story
line. The old engineer spent all his time with the new engineer Geordi.
When Picard asks Geordi how long it will take to fix something, Geordi
says something like, "8 hours." Scotty then asks him how long it would
really take to fix it. Geordi seems confused and replies, "8 hours."
Scotty then tells him that he should have told Picard it would take "16
hours" so that when it's ready "early" he'll be viewed as a miracle
worker.
The above is exactly the marketing model Apple uses for every new
product launch. Every product will be intentionally ham stringed so
that the addition of what are essentially features that could have been
in the original launch of the product can be added to the second
iteration, increasing the "wow" factor. I can't be the only person that
believes Apple had no intention of launching the MacBook Pro with
processors running at 1.6 and 1.8 GHz. When they announced "upgrades"
before shipping to 1.8 and 2.0 (at the same price!), it made everyone
say, "wow!" but to me it seemed like one more carefully planned attack
on the senses.
One last thing, as far as looking ahead with this sort of thing:
every piece of hardware coming out of Apple has switched over to being
predominantly metal except the MacBooks. And people are still
saying how much they miss the 12 inch PowerBook. Used 12 inch
PowerBooks are actually retaining their value better than the 15 inch
PowerBooks, mostly because the 15 inch form factor has a near-identical
Intel based replacement). Hmmmmm . . . I wonder what Apple
has planned? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess when the 12 inch
MacBook Pro comes out it will have more features than the Black MacBook
(but still less than its second generation release) and be roughly the
same price. The price for it will drop less than 6 months later, and
its features will increase. Upon its release everyone who bought a
MacBook for roughly the same price will be really steamed.
as always, the site kicks butt.
best,
-matthew
Matthew,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Sure, everyone
expected the iPhone to drop in price eventually - but not by one-third
($200) just nine weeks after release. That's unprecedented for Apple.
Not that I'm saying those early adopters aren't getting their $500-600
worth. They knew what they were buying, decided it was worth the price,
and Apple is being very generous by offering all of them $100 in Apple
Store credit.
By slashing the price, Apple may have doubled the
iPhone's potential market. A lot of people who would have balked at
$499 will be more tempted at $399. Apple needs to accelerate the
iPhone's sales pace to reach its goal of 10 million units by the end of
2008, and this could be the move that does it.
And the latest rumor is that we'll see 16 GB iPhones
in November.
Was the original iPod overpriced? Probably, and it
wasn't the wildly successful device we know today back then. It was
expensive, and it only worked with Macs. Divide R&D and marketing
plus production cost by the number of units you expect to sell. With
each new version, parts costs decrease and other costs are spread over
a lot more units. Maybe the only surprise was that the shuffle hadn't
dropped in price.
Yeah, it was just 9 months between the 5 GB iPod and
the first 20 GB model. A big part of that was due to the huge market
Apple helped create for those 1.8" hard drives, which helped drive down
costs. Another factor was releasing a Windows version of the iPod.
As for the initial 15" MacBook Pro, there were some
design compromises as Apple had Intel design the motherboard. At least
that's the excuse I hear for the lack of FireWire 800. Likewise, the
Core Duo was a brand new chip architecture and the MacBook Pro among
the first notebooks to use the mobile version. I don't think Steve Jobs
wanted another G4 fiasco (announcing a 500 MHz G4 that didn't ship for
4-5 months because Motorola overpromised) or G5 disaster (promising
3 GHz within a year only to discover that IBM couldn't hit the
mark). Better to announce slower processors that you know you can ship
than faster ones that may miss the deadline.
Then there's the MacBook mini - at least that's what
I'd call a pro MacBook smaller than the 13.3" widescreen plastic
MacBook. If I had to guess, I'd say an 11-12" widescreen display (1280
x 800), the same keyboard found in the MacBook and aluminum keyboards,
a 1" thin design including a SuperDrive, about a 7.5" x 10.5"
footprint, an aluminum enclosure, and a weight below 4 lb. Time will
tell.
Dan
Dan,
Some interesting points, as always. I just love reading both LEM and
Apple-History and seeing
what look like patterns to me. When you break it down into a timeline
of when things came out and see the prices that were there, it
sometimes feels like a marketing scam. Like with the "Black Tax" on the
high-end Macbook. I guess I feel like Apple thinks they can get away
with a little more all the time. Wasn't the U2 special edition iPod
also more money for no additional features (other than Bono's
faux-signature)?
I work for a national corporate chain (to remain nameless), and we
have overpriced merchandise that always has set dates when it goes down
in price. The mentality seems to be see how many people we can get to
overpay before items are reduced to a more reasonable price. The effect
is our regular customers are used to the regular "clearance sales" and
buy up merchandise like crazy then. We're still making a profit though,
even after it's marked down. And I think our sales overall are
so high because of the illusion of a "deal" created by the initially
inflated prices. I sorta see the iPhone in that light too.
Also, regarding Tiger on a B&W. I
had a fantastically upgraded B&W that ran Tiger as well as my G5 on
the basic stuff (word processing, some simpler Photoshop work, surfing,
iTunes importing). It had a Daystar G4 (550 MHz) and a GB of RAM, and a
Radeon video card with 32 MB of VRAM. It was a great machine and stable
as a rock. I gave it to a friend of mine, and it's still in regular
service. I think the Velocity engine on that G4 makes all the
difference in the world.
best,
matthew
Matthew,
Thanks for sharing your additional thoughts. The
original Macintosh was deliberately overpriced, and one of Steve Jobs'
marketing mantras is that you stay in business by turning a profit, not
necessarily by selling a lot of stuff cheaply.
The U2 iPod was a bit more expensive, but for the true
U2 fan, the ability to download the entire U2 library (or was it
preinstalled?) made it worth the price.
I've heard very mixed reports on Tiger with B&W
G3s. Yours helps confirm the fact that the G3 is pretty much a dead end
- but a G4 upgrade can give it a new lease on life.
Dan
Cooling a MacBook
From Jeff Wiseman:
Dan,
I'm using a MacBook Core Duo 1.83
GHz as my primary computer and found the best way to keep it cool
(on the desk) was to use smcFanControl
and a passive cooling stand. I set the fan to run at a minimum of 3000
RPM and find that works for most situations. The slight increase in
noise is covered by the normal noise of the environment. I really like
this fan control software, as I can set up several default settings and
quickly switch back and forth as needed.
BTW, I had tried the Targus Chill Mat when I was using an iBook
G4/800 and found it ran hotter (about 5° C) than when just sitting
on the CoolPad. YMMV.
Jeff Wiseman
Jeff,
Thanks for writing. How weird, that a cooling pad
would increase your iBook's temperature!
I'll forward your email to John Carlson.
Dan
IBM Used AAUI
From William Walsh:
Hi!
Thanks for taking the time to read my message. I'm glad you wrote me
back. Hopefully Mr. Williams will be able to fix his Mac and get it
back up to top performance once again. Even today, those G3 CRT based
iMacs make great computers for a lot of regular work.
I've also been reading the recent conversations around AAUI
connectors and who used them. Even IBM found a place to put them, on an
option card that they marketed back in the days of the Personal
System/2, known as the IBM LAN Adapter/A. I have such a card and did an
outline of the circuit board here: <http://greyghost.dyndns.org/mcastuff/lan/a/>
(may take a while to load, so wait a bit or check the attachment on
this message)
Look at P2 on the board drawing. (Yes, I'm quite the low end PC fan.
Whatever happened to that site, anyway?)
So there's another entry for the list of manufacturers who used AAUI
connectors. Again, you're more than welcome to publish the text of this
message or even include the image if you so desire. All I'd ask if you
want to use the image is credit for the illustration.
William
William,
Thanks for the info.
Low End PC seemed like it had a lot of potential.
After all, there is probably 20x as much old PC hardware out there as
Mac hardware, much of which could be repurposed with FreeDOS, Linux, or
an older version of (shudder) Windows. I guess people just don't get as
attached to their old IBMs, Compaqs, Packard Bells, etc. as we do to
our Macs.
Needless to say, we never made a penny from the
project and eventually let it die a natural death. I've archived the
content from Low End PC here on Low End Mac at <http://lowendmac.com/lowendpc/> and let the
lowendpc.com domain lapse.
Dan
Partitioning Tray-loading iMacs for OS X
Hi Dan,
Read with interest your coverage of
the good old tray-loading iMacs, one of which I am working with at
the moment.
My question: Do OS X and all OS X applications (say, Firefox,
Toast, etc.) have to be installed in the first 8 gigs of hard drive
space on a drive greater than 8 gigs? That would be pretty restrictive.
(I know nothing about partitioning, never having done it.)
Thank You,
Tom Gabriel
Tom,
No, only the operating system itself has to be within
the first 8 GB. A lot of programs will install themselves on the boot
partition by default, and they may look there for software updates, but
almost everything can run from another partition, a different hard
drive, or a flash drive.
Dan
Dan Knight has been publishing Low
End Mac since April 1997. Mailbag columns come from email responses to his Mac Musings, Mac Daniel, Online Tech Journal, and other columns on the site.
