A Little Mac Satire Before Thanksgiving

Arik Hesseldahl

I seriously thought for a minute that I was going to have start swinging a polemic hammer at David Kepplemeyer, the "CEO" of "The Kepplemeyer Group." But about two paragraphs into reading this essay at Danaquarium.com I realized it was satire. So when you read, don't fire off a bunch of indignant comments as so many already have been baited into doing already. The holidays are upon us, people. Have a laugh.

It reminds of another satiric anti-Mac rant, this one which portrayed the Mac as a tool of anti-Christian anti-creationist values. At least I think it was meant as satire.

Ranking right up there along with it is the classic "Is Your Son A Computer Hacker?" which asks if your son has asked to install a computer chip from AMD, which it describes as a "third-world based chip company" and describes "Lunix" as "an illegal hacker operation system, invented by a Soviet computer hacker named Linyos Torovoltos." Sometimes its a little tricky to tell satire from stupidity.

New MacBook Pro Is Cooler Than Previous One. No, Really.

Arik Hesseldahl

Jason O'Grady over at The Apple Core has taken some serious measurements concerning something I had noticed as well. When I took my first MacBook Pro out for a run -- a 17-inch with an Intel Core Duo -- I noticed it was running somewhat hot, hotter in fact than my older PowerBook. But then once Apple swapped out the Core Duo for the higher-performance Core 2 Duo the outer temperatures seemed to be less. It was just a little difference I noticed, but which I didn't think much about.

It seems I wasn't too far off the mark. O'Grady took temperatures on both MacBook Pros and found the newer appears to run much cooler than the older one. The newer, high-performance machine actually runs as much as 21 degrees F cooler than its predecessor. More here.

My first though was that it gives proof to that old rule of thumb about buying Macs: Never buy the first generation of anything. Charles Jade at Infinite Loop seems to agree.

Wanna Invest In the iPod? Stick with Nvidia, one analyst says

Arik Hesseldahl

Here's still more fuel to the fire on the speculation of a video iPod and iPhone. An interesting research note crossed my desk this morning from FBR Research analyst Chris Caso concerning graphics chipmaker Nvidia and PortalPlayer, one of the main chip suppliers on the iPod.

Caso says he thinks Nvidia has landed one of its chips in the upcoming video iPod and that PortalPlayer has been designed out of it. But a PortalPlayer application chip has been designed into the iPhone. Either way its a win for Nvidia, which is in the process of acquiring PortalPlayer for $357 million."

One loser, Caso says, is Broadcom, which you'll remember, provided the video chip in the first generation of video-ready iPods. All this new iPod business for Nvidia, Caso says, will add $100 million in incremental revenue in 2007 once the deal to acquire PortalPlayer closes, plus another $30 million in business from non-Apple MP3 players.

On the iPhone he says "We believe Apple selected PortalPlayer so as to provide all of the functionality of an iPod with little software rework." He further says he expects Apple to move 22 million of the phones in 2007, which will have a revenue impact of $150 million on Nvidia.

Why Does Bill O'Reilly Hate The iPod?

Arik Hesseldahl

What exactly does Bill O’Reilly have against the iPod anyway? In a recent radio rant, he held up Apple’s popular music player and the Sony Playstation 3 as example of how “American society is changing for the worse because of the machines.” Later, overcome with disgust, he loses his ability to speak in complete sentences: “I don’t own an iPod. I would never wear an iPod… If this is your primary focus in life - the machines… it’s going to have a staggeringly negative effect, all of this, for America…” Takeouts of his talk are here.

It’s not exactly clear to me where O’Reilly is going with this, but it appears to have something to do with jihadists killing people, his inability to have a conversation with “computer geeks."

I’m a little unclear as to what my neighbor – O’Reilly’s employer, Fox News Channel is across the street from my office – is trying to say. Because there are “jihadists killing real people,” which I don’t dispute, he seems to think that “computer geeks” shouldn’t be making products to sell to the American public like video games and iPods. Is that it? I’m not entirely sure what his point is, but I’ll do my best to respond.

No less a conservative icon than Ronald Reagan praised the virtues of video games. Reagan entered the Oval Office about the time people first started playing “Space Invaders” and later “Pac Man.” The games were good for the reflexes, he thought, and as such would help encourage a generation of military pilots and soldiers with sharp hand-eye coordination and nerves of steel under fire. Here’s the direct quote: “I recently learned something quite interesting about video games. Many young people have developed incredible hand, eye, and brain coordination in playing these games. The air force believes these kids will be our outstanding pilots should they fly our jets.” The date was August 8 1983.

Anyhow, that’s what Reagan, a man O’Reilly professes to admire, had to say on the subject of video games.

I still don’t get what he’s got against the iPod. (Perhaps he thinks Apple should ditch it and start building jihadist-killing machines?) But it certainly is incongruous with all those promotions for his podcasts promoted on his Web site. Take a look here at www.billoreilly.com and scroll down a little, and you’ll find a picture of an iPod with the head of a bald eagle photoshopped onto the screen. Click on it, and it takes you to a screen where O’Reilly promotes podcasts of his “Radio Factor,” which are available only to “premium members” of the Web site. And what does “premium membership” cost? $4.95 a month or $49.95 a year.

I’ve never met, watched, read or listened to O’Reilly, and now I think I now have a hint as to why. If the existence and popularity of the iPod is his idea of a threat to America – a device whose existence is apparently making him a slightly richer man assuming that “premium memberships” to his Web site are selling well – then I know exactly how much I have to learn from Bill O’Reilly, and you could fit it all onto the tip of a pencil. I wonder if pencils are a threat to America too? They were pretty popular once.

Apple-AMD Rumors Gain Traction

Arik Hesseldahl

I've asked Hector Ruiz, the CEO of chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices about his views on Apple several times, especially in light of Apple's switch to using chips from Intel over the last year and change. He's always been at once supportive of Apple, and happy that the Mac now runs on an x86-based processor. But he's never confirmed any talks between Apple and AMD concerning microprocessor supply deals.

So what then to make of this? Digitimes of Taiwan, which is often a good source of early warning intelligence about such things, is reporting on the surge in demand for a particular type of component that is going to be used in an Apple-made notebook that would use an AMD chip.

The component is called a Multi-Layer Ceramic Capacitor or MLCC, and the notebook in question allegedly requires 70 of these parts, and supplies of the part are already tight. A current Apple notebook using an Intel dual-core chip apparently requires 80 of these MLCCs.

One interesting note, is that AMD recently acquired graphics chipmaker ATI, and Apple is an ATI customer. Owning ATI gives AMD yet another entry into Apple HQ in Cupertino, and would offer AMD the chance to give Apple some pretty sweet package deals. But then again, its not as if Hector and Steve Jobs don't already have each others phone numbers.

But here's one reason I'm doubtful about this report: AMD can't make enough chips right now to meet its current demand. I've heard from a few PC makers that AMD's factories are on allocation status, which is industry jargon that means not everyone is getting as many chips as they've ordered. One big reason for this is AMD's new relationship with Dell.

If ever Apple and AMD do business together, however, I think it will be on the server front. Server customers like flexibility and having the ability to choose the chip you want is important to server customers, so I think we'd see an AMD-based XServe before an AMD-based Mac Pro.

That said, the number of Intel-only PC makers is dwindling. The only other Intel-only major PC maker I can think of is Toshiba, and it only makes notebooks. After losing some of Dell's business to AMD, Intel will put up a fight to keep its exclusivity with Apple, which, honestly, wouldn't be a bad thing.

More More MORE Speculation On The iPhone

Arik Hesseldahl

Now here's an interesting iPhone rumor. Om Malik of Gigaom.com is speculating the Apple might sell the phone unlocked, as in, beholden to no network in particular. Did I not read somewhere that Apple had done some sort of exclusivity deal with Cingular Wireless concerning this phone?
Such a move, he argues might "save the handset business" especially in the U.S., where carriers have far too much say over what features a phone can have, because it is the service provider who sells, the phone in it stores.

Well maybe "sell" isn't the right word. The service providers subsidize the upfront cost of the phone in exchange for your commitment to stick to a service contract for a year or two. And if the carrier doesn't want a feature, the phone's manufacturer usually has to do what its told or risk losing the sale.

This fact really annoyed me a few years ago when I first got a Motorola V710 phone, which was technically capable of many fancy Bluetooth features -- like syncing with a Mac via iSync for instance -- but many of those features had been turned off at the demand of the wireless carrier who offered it, which in this case happened to be Verizon Wireless. Eventually consumer outcry over the deliberate hobbling of the phones functionality caused Verizon to see the light. But by the time I got around to updating the firmware on my phone, it was more or less time to upgrade again.

One issue that would certainly annoy the carriers: Music downloads. Motorola's ROKR phone was a side-loader, meaning you'd load your music onto the device via a physical connection and not an over-the-air toll-bearing download. The iPhone, I would imagine would be a side-loader too, just like its cousin the iPod. I can imagine wireless carriers finding this very irritating, seeing how they've invested billions in wireless data networks that aren't getting quite the volume of use they should be and want people to download music over their networks.

In fact they could want wireless downloading so badly they could conceivably tell Jobs and Apple to take their pretty little phone and go jump in a lake. Selling the phone unlocked could be his response, and could explain why it's taken this phone so long to come to market.

iPhone Rumors All But Confirmed?

Arik Hesseldahl

A Chinese language newspaper, The Commercial Times, is reporting that Hon Hai Precision Industry, aka Foxconn, the company that builds the iPod for Apple, has secured a contract to build 12 million "iPod handsets." Of course Hon Hai hasn't commented for the record on the report, and as usual Apple isn't saying anything, and wouldn't if you pilfered one from the factory and showed it to them.

Personally I'm so sick of the iPhone rumor, which goes back years, that I'm beyond the point of caring. Almost from the minute the iPod first saw the light of day 61 months ago, the rumors first about an iPod-PDA and then the iPhone have been incessant.

John Markoff of The New York Times did an extended story on the potential for the iPhone in August, 2002, and the rumor of the phones existence has run hot and cold ever since. Right now we're clearly in a "hot" phase of this rumor cycle, and based on all the available evidence, its pretty clear there's something to it. By this point, the impact of a Steve Jobs confirmation at Macworld in January will have about all the surprise of opening a birthday present you watched your Mom buy at the store. By now you'd think that the release of an iPhone would be so widely expected that it would fact would have been priced into the stock by now.

Not so, says Andy Neff of Bear Stearns. Assuming that the 12 million unit figure is correct, and assuming that the iPhone cannibalizes about 30% of the iPod market -- an estimate I think is large -- the device could add 70 cents per share in earnings to Apple's EPS and as much as $6 billion in sales in for fiscal 2007. When all is said and done, Apple could end up with 3% of the global market for wireless phones, just like that.

But this leaves me wondering if Steve will have any real surprises at Macworld. The iPhone? Expected. The larger-format screen video iPod? Expected. iTV? Already shown, and therefore expected. What's left for Steve to surprise us with this January?

Macs On The Top 500 List

Arik Hesseldahl

The latest list of the Top 500 supercomputing sites in the world is out today. This is a regularly updated list put out by The University of Mannheim, The University of Tennessee and the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. It charts the 500 most powerful known supercomputers around the world. Topping the list -- making it the fastest known computer in the world -- is BlueGene/L, an IBM system in place the U.S. Government's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. It can deliver a sustained 280.6 TeraFLOPS of performance. FLOPS refers to floating point operations per second, and one teraFLOP, and if I understand it right, I think that means it can do 280.6 trillion of these operations every second. That's some serious processing power, and it requires 65,536 dual-processor compute nodes to get the job done.

I spotted two Apple-based systems on the list, and both are in the Top 50. The first came in at number 28, and it's called MACH5. Comprising a batch of Apple XServes using 3,072 of the old IBM PowerPC G5 processors, and reaches a performance of 16.18 teraFLOPS. It's owned and operated by The Colsa Corporation, a privately held defense contractor based in Huntsville, Alabama.

The other Mac on the list is at the Terascale Computing FacilityVirginia Tech, using 1,100 dual-processor PowerPC-based XServes for a combined performance of 12.25 teraFLOPS. This is the facility that got so much attention a few years back for being the third fastest supercomputer in the world, when it was really huge room full of interconnected PowerMac G5s. When they upgraded to XServes, it still managed to come in as the seventh fastest. BusinessWeek covered Virgina Tech's installation here.

I have to wonder what Apple's shift to the Intel architecture will do to its chances of being used in major supercomputing projects again. Of the systems on the list, 261 systems or more than 52 percent use Intel processors, and that is down from 333 or two-thirds of the systems a year ago. Sure, Apple loves promoting the Mac for use in serious science applications, and OS X can certainly hold its own as a platform for science applications.

Meanwhile, AMD's Opteron chips are the second most popular on the list, with 113, or nearly 23 percent of the systems, up from 55 systems or 11 percent a year ago. IBM Power Processors, which would include the self-assembled Apple systems, were used in 93 systems or 18.6%, up from 73 systems of 14.6% a year ago.

I'll be interested to see when the first Intel-based Apple system makes the Top500 list, because its bound to happen eventually.

The Three Rules of Cool

Arik Hesseldahl

I just got into the office and have no fewer than a dozen requests for a link to Malcolm Gladwell article I mentioned in the final few paragraphs of today's Byte Of The Apple column. For those who have The New Yorker's DVD archive set, the article is called "The Coolhunters" and it appeared in the New Yorker issue of March 17, 1997. It also available at Gladwell's personal web site right here.

New MacBook Pros

Arik Hesseldahl

Apple boosted the specs on the MacBook Pro line today, adding the Intel Core Duo 2 processors at speeds of 2.16 and 2.33 GHz today. Here's the part that got my attention, however: Standard configurations now ship with one gigabyte of RAM installed on the lower end of the range, and TWO gigabytes of RAM on the higher-end.

Also Apple told me in a conference call today that according to the SpecInt measurements, this 2.33 GHZ Core Duo 2 chip is up to seven times faster than the PowerBook G4 I bought in 2005. Now I know why that machine is starting to feel a little slow of late. Such is the way of things.

What Would We Do Without Analysts?

Arik Hesseldahl

What, did I fall into a time machine back to 1997? You know those days when Apple was the computer industry’s hard luck case, and when the triumvirate of Microsoft, Intel and Dell were on their way to conquering the world? Well that was nine years ago, and if Apple’s earnings report plus a few other industry indicators didn’t suggest that times have changed a great deal then you’re just not paying attention.

To sum up: Apple’s now a nearly $20 billion company on an annual sales basis; It sold 5.3 million Macs worldwide, and in the U.S. market is now within less than 40,000 units of overtaking Gateway as the third largest PC vendor. Meanwhile Hewlett-Packard has eclipsed Dell as the world’s biggest PC vendor, Intel is fighting off a serious competitive threat from rival Advanced Micro Devices, and Microsoft, is still turning out second-rate computer operating systems, and constantly missing delivery date targets on its major upgrades.

So what’s to complain about? Well, this. Here we have a report from Gartner, the uber-IT consultant firm, saying that Apple should license the Mac OS to Dell, and stop making hardware.

Yes. Read that one again. My head hurts at all the many things that are wrong with this argument, that I don’t know even where to start. But I'll do my best , after the jump.

Continue reading "What Would We Do Without Analysts?"

Office 2007 For Mac Will Be Late. I Care.

Arik Hesseldahl

Macworld UK is reporting today that Microsoft's Mac Business Unit has confirmed that it will not have the next version of Office for the Mac on the shelves until the second half of 2007. How many different ways can we put the words "Microsoft" and "late" together in a sentence?

To Redmond's credit, the first thing I buy after a new Mac is a box containing Office for the Mac, but now I'm beginning to wonder if I will bother the next time around. I mean, $400 is a lot to pay, especially when you consider that Google's Writely is a suitable stand-in for Word, Google Spreadsheets can pinch-hit for Excel, and Gmail and Google Calendar can handle email and scheduling as well or better as Entourage (which I don't bother to use anyway), while Apple's own Address Book is excellent at contact management. Then there's Apple's own iWork suite, which I haven't tried.

And finally who among Mac users even bothers to use MSN Messenger when there's both iChat and the extremly flexible IM client Adium which lets you sign on to pretty much every IM protocol there is? All things considered, I think I could probably get by quite nicely without Office for Mac throughout most of 2007. So Microsoft, go ahead. Take your time.

Enough About GoogTube. Google Totally Hearts Apple

Arik Hesseldahl

Yeah yeah. So Google ponied up for YouTube. So what else is new?

Well there is a rumored Apple angle in all this. Last month Macrumors picked up chatter about Google supplying video to Apple's forthcoming iTV device once it bows early next year. Certainly owning YouTube will make that easier, because Google Video, for all its finer points, certainly hasn't floated to the top of the Web video Zeitgeist. It certainly would be cool to surf YoutTube offerings from the comfort of the couch.

Meanwhile, Google has started touting its Mac-friendliness in a new "Official Google Mac Blog" which in turn points to a download site for various Google-oriented Dashboard widgets and so on. Nice to see in the wake of Eric Schmidt becoming an Apple director last month.

From the Department of Dumb Ideas: The Apple 9/11 Boycott

Arik Hesseldahl

I didn't watch ABC's "The Path To 9/11," a two-part miniseries that aired on the Disney-owned network on Sept. 10 and 11. I prefer my entertainment choices to be unconnected to extremely unpleasant personal experiences. So I can't tell you one way or the other what I think about any political slants the movie may have contained.

But I can tell you what I think of chatter making the rounds regarding a boycott effort targeted at Apple Computer to protest the movie. Since Apple CEO Steve Jobs sits on Disney's board, is Disney's biggest shareholder, thanks to Disney's acquisition of Pixar, the thinking goes, Apple should be singled out for content in the movie that some people think is wrong or misleading about the events leading up to the terrorism attacks and who was responsible for what.

Such a boycott is a dumb idea because as a non-executive director and shareholder, Jobs has practically zero input in the content of this or that Disney film project. That's not what directors do.

But this brings up an interesting question about the nature of the businesses connections between Jobs, Apple and Disney now that they're so intertwined. It seems to me that every time a Disney film courts any kind of controversy, Apple is probably going to have to contend with this sort of misguided silliness from time to time. If you're upset with Disney, express your opininions to Disney management. In that capacity, you're clearly within reason to express your opinion to Steve Jobs as a Disney director. But venting your rage at Apple and boycotting its products? To me it seems like picking the wrong target.

Summer's Over. Let The Product Announcements Commence

Arik Hesseldahl

As rumored, a great big new 24-inch iMac hit the market today. That in itself is already pretty impressive. But even more impressive is the fact that the entire iMac lineup now contains an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. Here's the specs:

* 24-inch widescreen LCD display;
* 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor;
* 1GB of 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM expandable to 3GB;
* 8x SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW);
* PCI Express-based NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT with 128MB GDDR3 memory;
* built-in iSight video camera;
* built-in AirPort Extreme wireless networking & Bluetooth 2.0+EDR;
* 250GB Serial ATA hard drive running at 7200 rpm;
* mini-DVI out (adapters for DVI, VGA and Composite/S-Video sold separately);
* built-in stereo speakers and microphone

Not bad. Next comes the iPod- and Mac mini-related media and entertainment products - including the iTunes Movie download service, that I expect to be central to Apple's special event in San Francisco on Sept. 12.