Just a quick thought: Is an airport with WiFI hotspots the perfect place to conduct online piracy? How on earth could you be tracked? Even if the you cut down the number of possible people who are suspects using the flight times and who is booked – how could any authority figure out who exactly downloaded that mp3 of something or that movie?
In no way do I condone the abuse of Airport WiFi for piracy. Please use WiFi responsibily and legally.
The Mac Mini is a very nice piece of engineering. It’s a diminutive computer that takes up very little space, looks nice, and is very quiet. The only problem? It is limited by its size. It uses laptop hard drives which means you pay a premium for a small hard drive. Additionally, Apple stuck to its odd clip system to keep the case together. Four tiny screws on the bottom of the machine would have been nice for user upgrades.
While I think the form-factor is great, perhaps another Mac should exist. It already existed – and as you can tell by the title of this article – the PowerMac Cube should return. I guess with the new naming convention it would be the Mac Pro Cube or iMac Cube or Mac Cube. The cube was a user-serviceable machine. Maybe a larger form factor – maybe the size of two Mac Minis stacked on top of each other would be the right size. The motherboard could reside in the lower part of the new Cube. The hard drive could be mounted below the slot loading DVD burner. Use your imagination for the rest of the engineering. With a larger size comes full sized desktop hard drives that reach 750GB these days.
This poises the new Mac as a true media center. While I’m coming up with ideas, maybe with the purchase of your new Mac you get special software that allows you to LEGALLY rip your DVDs for your convenience. Apple must pay a royalty for their DVD player application. They could probably wrangle a deal with the movie studios and come up with an authorized DVD-Ripping application. Now that I think about it, a Hollywood-sanctioned DVD ripping application would allow the MPAA to track who is pirating and who is not (with P2P) by using a signature. But, I digress.
The Mac Cube could be a media center with a TV Tuner. Alternatively, the cube shape may look odd with video components. So perhaps a throwback to the pizza-box style desktop computers would benefit Apple. I had read this idea on someone else’s blog (I’d give them credit if I remembered where). That blog discussed the idea of the upcoming Mac Pro in the standard desktop form-factor in a move to differentiate the Apple product in a world of towers.
Since the Cube may not be the right shape, the component style format may work. If Apple felt wishy-washy they could go with a similar idea as the XBox 360 and have a machine that could lay on its side or as a tower and look snazzy.
In short, Apple needs to come out with a new mac that is a headless iMac. A mac in between the Mac Mini and the Power Mac or Mac Pro that can use standard desktop parts and allows users to easy access to upgrade their Mac. It could be in cube form or pizza-box with a TV Tuner with an official DVD-Ripping software. What should we call this mythical Mac? Let’s just call it Macintosh. Just “Mac.”
DRM is an awful thing. It prevents the movement of data between machines. I’ve heard many a podcaster lament that iTunes locks down your music to the iPod. You cannot play songs purchased in the iTunes Music Store (“iTMS”) on any music player other than the iPod. However, you can play the file on your laptop or tablet PC. While iTunes is the only program that can play iTMS music, it runs on both PCs and Macs. You can authorize several machines to play the same music files.
That’s where the OQO comes in. This device has not received many good reviews. The machine runs too hot and its battery life is not good enough. It’s a good start though. While DRM may be limiting as to what type of accessory you may buy, DRM does not seem to pose a problem to Windows or OS X based computers. So why not carry around a computer capable of handling a number of DRM schemes? You’re never truly locked down – if the system can run iTunes, you can play your music.
At this point, I’d like to state that I have never personally purchased a song or video from the iTMS as I find it too restrictive, of low quality and prefer to purchase CD’s that allow me to control the quality and provide a decent backup when necessary.
Microsoft went ahead with its UMPC line and it has confused many people. (By the way, I have this odd feeling that if Apple came out with the UMPC product, people would think it was the best thing since sliced bread. They’d call it the “iMac Mini” or something). It seems as though the prices of these pieces of hardware are making people balk at the idea of buying them. Then again, when I had heard there was a $400 mp3 player being introduced by Apple, I thought it was kind of crazy.
The price of the UMPCs may be causing a problem. If they could drop the price below that of a laptop – around $200-$600 – then the device would not be competing with laptops. It would be competing with the PSPs, the iPods and other portable devices. I still think $400 is a crazy price for a music player. Apple refused to budge and marketed the thing as “cool.”
There’s no way UMPCs can be marketed the same way. Their coolness will not justify their price. OQO had a great idea. Forget syncing your handheld with your computer – your handheld IS your computer. UMPCs are out and are struggling to get a foothold in the market.
If they can’t lower the price just yet, there should be a new marketing scheme: on the box and in promotions market the device as “iTunes Compatible.” Market the UMPC as a device that can play your music that you bought from Apple and the videos with Microsoft DRM. Throw your TiVo shows and your iTunes on your UMPC.
I’ve thought of yet another alternative pricing scheme – the UMPC could be sold at a loss like a video game system and make their money back with software and killer apps. Pack an optical drive in there and market the device as a portable XBOX 360 or PC Gaming Platform. Microsoft could convince video game makers (or themselves with their various studios) to create UMPC optimized video games. These games could be a bonus version bundled with the true version of the game.
If people are willing to sacrifice some quality – a smaller screen and diminished quality of graphics – to get their gaming fix, this method may work. Microsoft could even capitalize on an idea Sony had. Moving your video game progress forward on your portable device and then syncing it to your main machine.
UMPCs can be a success if the makers knew what the UMPC could be. It should not be marketed as “a small computer” – it needs to be marketed as a device that can play any DRM’ed media. It needs to be marketed as a device that does not care what format your media is in. WMA? WMV? MP3? MP4? MPEG? All of them play on an UMPC. Just get some drivers or VLC and you’re good to go. It can be a mobile video game device.
Just pack a better battery (or a sleep that saves your session) or additional battery and, if possible, an optical drive. The prices of these devices are bound to drop (if not because of success and improved manufacturing methods, then it will be cheap because it will be on clearance).
Several weeks ago, a piece of software was on the front page of digg.com. It was the Secondary Click installer – it would allow a MacBook Pro users to “right-click” or “control-click” using two fingers on the trackpad. I installed it on my MBP and it kind of works. It had an installer, it asked for my password and I had no problem installing it on my laptop.
That got me thinking about how digg or sites like digg could be used to spread viruses very easily. Digg allows the users to act as editors and the most popular stories get promoted to the front page. One of the great features of digg is how quickly a story can move from obscurity to the front page. The more interesting the story, the quicker it gets dugg. Since the users are the ones promoting the stories, there isn’t anyone really doing long-term checks and experiments on the software that gets promoted to the front page.
If someone wanted, they could put together a piece of malware that acted as a ticking time bomb. The Secondary Click installer could have easily installed the first real Mac virus by adding some terminal commands to format your hard drive a couple of days later using the password you typed in when you agreed to install Secondary Click. Now, I’m not a virus-writer so I don’t even know if this is possible, but it seems plausible to me.
People would be quite happy with the piece of software for a couple of days and it would have been promoted to the front page of digg. No one would know that anything malicious was involved until days later when the virus gets full blown. By the time anyone felt the effect of the malware it would be too late. A couple of thousand would be infected and the thing that makes sites like digg so great, pushing stories with an immediacy not found in traditional news sites, could cause plenty of problems.
As an aside: I am a big fan of digg and I check the site out several times a day. I am eagerly awaiting Digg version 3 with its new features.
Google has its new Spreadsheet web-application and it’s ruffling feathers at Microsoft. People are saying that this is Google firing a shot across Microsoft’s bow (I didn’t know that they had boats, but whatever). So, Google’s got their Spreadsheet and it’s supposed to be a competitor of MS Office’s Excel (and of course Writely is a competitor to MS Word). Well, here I am (a Microsoft shareholder and former Google shareholder) giving my opinion.
In general, webapps are a great idea. You can access your programs anywhere, from any computer, from any operating system. It’s a wonderful idea – however, there is a problem. These webapps depend on online connectivity. It does not matter that these webapps are almost good enough to replace the expensive Microsoft Office. Feel free to be paranoid that your files are saved on Google’s servers. With the U.S. Government breathing down the necks of ISPs, do you really want your data on Google’s servers? You could just keep it on your local hard drive and avoid this entire problem. If the NSA wants my hard drive, they have to get MY hard drive that is in my laptop or desktop. Why make it easier for the government to grab your data?
It does not matter if Google goes ahead with their Spreadsheet. If Microsoft wants to destroy a product, they can. Case in point: Netscape. How did Microsoft destroy Netscape? Internet Explorer was free. It was the underdog – it was the rebel browser for a while. If Google has its free Spreadsheet program and it starts eating away at Microsoft’s market share, then Microsoft will make Office incredibly cheap. MS may not make it free – would you pay $2 per license for the full functioning MS Excel versus the free Google Spreadsheet that is close to (but not exactly) MS Excel? Microsoft knows how to beat their competition to death.
At worst, Microsoft and Google will become the biggest company in the world. Micro-Google could exist one day. Their market capitalization would be amazing. The fun thing about tech companies is that they are smart. Microsoft and Google could one day become ONE company. Google could own the web and Microsoft could own the desktop (save for the 5% Mac contingency – which I am a part of). Either way, these webapps cannot replace local applications just yet. So if anyone from Microsoft is reading, just relax – everything will be fine. [BTW, Microsoft’s Windows CE or Mobile or whatever it’s called – their PocketPC OS is terrific – just make it work with Macs]. If anyone from Google is reading – you have an excellent search engine – think about joining with Microsoft. There’s no need to compete if you’re part of the same company. Plus, even if you decide to stay on your own, the world appreciates that there’s a company out there that forces Microsoft to have a better product. Good luck, msft and goog.