thomas fitzgerald.net

All this talk recently about the possibility of Apple buying Adobe has me wondering, what would happen if such an earth shattering acquisition did happen. I’m not trying to discuss the likelihood of it, because frankly it’s pretty remote, but imagine for a second if Apple did go down that route. It would send ripples through the technology industry the likes of which have never been seen before. Windows users would immediately go into panic overdrive and cries of “monopoly” would be heard across the globe. But what would it mean for the average consumer? Who would be the winners and losers if such a take over took place?

[Read more]

There has been this rumor floating around for the past couple of months that Apple is planning to sell off its Pro Apps devision, namely Final Cut studio and Aperture. The rumor was dying down but then Robert Cringly over at PBS posted a fanciful story that Apple was planning to sell its pro apps so it could buy Adobe. Of course the idea that they need to ditch their own Applications to make way for Adobe’s is completely ridiculous. It’s doubtful if Apple could afford to buy Adobe even if it wanted to, and Apple’s competing Apps are, for the most part better than the Adobe Counterparts. Having said that I do think here could be benefits for both consumers and Apple if they did buy Adobe (putting an end to Adobe’s insane overseas pricing would be one benefit). I consider it unlikely but not totally beyond the realms of possibility. What is completely beyond the realms of possibility though is the idea that Apple plans to sell off its pro apps.

This all started when Apple announced that they weren’t going to be exhibiting at NAB this year. This sparked immediate and rampant speculation as to their motives. As I work in the Television post production Industry I have first hand experience of it. After the announcement I was having discussions with some of the people I know who work in the industry and the first chicken little reaction was that they must be planning to ditch Final Cut Pro so they can focus on the iPhone. (The iPhone pretty much gets the blame for everything these days) Of course it’s complete nonsense as they are two completely separate and independent devisions within Apple. Anyway, I’m sure discussions like this were being held by post production professionals across the globe. That in itself would have been enough to start the ball rolling, but then take those same professionals, and have them all congregate in Las Vegas under the one roof for a week and rampant speculation quickly becomes a rumor. All it takes is one person in that situation to make the jump from “I wonder are Apple selling off their pro apps” to “I heard that Apple are selling off their Pro Apps” in a hot convention center with several thousand video nerds and you have an instant scandal.

Such was the furor over this that Apple came out and firmly denied that this was to be the case. Mind you that didn’t stop Robert Cringly publishing his piece and multiple sites picking up his speculation and translating it to potential fact. This isn’t the first time this kind of water cooler chatter got out of hand about Apple either. Thanks to a wonderfully bad piece of attempted journalism by the now dead Think Secret, people had pronounced Aperture end of life and there were “rumors” that Apple was going to kill the project. Anyway, you can rest assured that with Final Cut pro’s 44% market share it’s not going to happen.

So why weren’t they at NAB this year and why has there been no major Final Cut updates considering they usually release a relatively big upgrade at NAB every year? I have a pretty good idea as to what’s going on, and the inspiration came, ironically enough from Adobe. When they made their stark warning at Photoshop World recently that they would need to migrate Photoshop’s code from carbon to cocoa in order to take the application to 64bit I realized that Apple was faced with the same dilemma. Final Cut Pro started out as an OS9 Application and has been building on that legacy code ever since. It’s actually pretty inefficient by todays standards too (for example it barely uses multiple processors), and it was only a matter of time before they would have to do a major re-write. Why now though you ask? Well, there is a growing trend in the high end of the industry towards 2K and 4K post production. This is basically even higher resolution than high definition and is used for cinema post production. Cameras like the Red One are pushing this way of working forward into the mainstream and because of the huge file sizes involved I suspect than in order to work efficiently Apple needs to go 64bit with Final Cut Pro.

The reason the weren’t at NAB was simply that they didn’t have anything to show this year. Their main competitor, Avid, was not there and it costs a lot of money to have a space as large as Apple’s usual booth so why waste the money when you’ve got nothing to show. From what I’ve heard from people at the show they might as well have been there anyway considering the amount of other booths showing Final Cut or using Apple technology.

So the upshot of all this is that there is no great conspiracy in action here. Apple is not selling their Pro Applications. Final Cut is not going away. the sky is not falling and the iPhone is not the root of all evil. Rest assured that if they are re-writing Final Cut the end result will be even better than ever. And still way better than Premiere.

[update: Added link to Apple’s denial of the rumors]

[UPDATE: Fixed Broken Links]

Looks like it’s that time again. Not entirely sure what to expect. Rumours of a Mac Mini or iMac refresh were doing the rounds recently. There is also the possibility with NAB coming up next week that it could be some revision to the Pro Video Apps. Find out in an hour or so!

When enthusiastic snappers managed to get the first pictures of the banners being erected at sanfrancisco’s moscone centre the text of the banner “2008:There’s something in the air” promptly led to rampant speculation. MacRumors quickly put foreword the most likely theory/rumor that the much rumoured sub notebook from Apple will be called the “macbook air”. I think this is quite likely, because it is a typically Apple-esque name for an ultra thin laptop, and certainly better than some of the alternatives (macbook thin, macbook nano, macbook anaemic ?)

What’s even more attractive about this rumour is the tag-line that will supposedly go with it: “Cables not included”. The technology certainly exists to have a device that is completely wireless. Wireless USB is now entering the mainstream, networking is a no-brainer with wifi. Technology even exists to send video signals wirelessly to a monitor (wireless hdmi) and Apple has patents on a wireless charging system. Apple has supposedly balked at the idea of a sub-notebook before, and generally don’t take on new markets unless they can do it in a uniquely apple way (e.g., the iPhone, AppleTV), and this would certainly be a unique approach. It could also solve the problem of having an external optical drive. If that too was completely wireless and didn’t even require a power cable, that would certainly overcome allot of the problems of having a drive attached to your laptop via a cable. Coupled with the already leaked patent on an iMac style docking station, this could be one impressive product offering from cupertino.

Luckily there is not long to wait to find out but for mac geeks everywhere the next two days are the longest of the year.

During the lead up to the Holidays I was extremely busy with my day job, so I had to put the blog on the back burner for a while. One of the big stories that I missed out on going into in detail was the big bru ha ha surrounding the “demise” of think secret. Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few weeks you have undoubtedly read all about the somewhat cryptic press release on Think Secret claiming that the long running lawsuit Apple had filed against them had been settled and part of that settlement was that Think Secret would no longer be published. Now, I put the word “demise” in inverted commas earlier, because as of yesterday the site is still being published. So just what the hell is going on?

I have never been a big fan of Think Secret. Anyone who is a long time reader of this blog will attest to that. I have nothing against rumor sites per se, and certainly they had a reasonably good track record at one stage compared to some other sites, it’s just that Think Secret is so full of it’s own b.s. it’s sickening. The problem with the site was that it thought of itself more like the New York Times when a far closer analogy would be the national inquirer. The author, Nick Ciarelli, even compared think secret to the afore mentioned NY Times at one stage on the website. They would frequently refer to their rumor based posturing as if it was a given fact, saying something “had” happened rather that “may have”.

But it was their handling of rumors and inside information that really got me annoyed. There was their much publicized breaking story that Aperture was about to be terminated by Apple. It was a classic case for jumping to conclusions based on the little facts that they had, and again, it was a case of stating a fact based on a rumor. Often the site would report on something a few days after it had broke on another site, and write the story as if they were the ones claiming to have broke the news. They hardly ever even acknowledged the fact that someone else had the story days earlier, instead attributing it entirely to their “sources”. My personal favorite thing the did though was when they were wrong. If they predicted a product would be launched at an Apple event and then it wasn’t, rather than admit they were wrong, they would claim it was “delayed” due to some unforeseen technical problem. This was especially grating because so many other websites in their own journalistic incompetence would pick up on something think secret had published and report it as almost a given fact, so when Apple didn’t launch some product, there were wide spread questions of “what’s going on at Apple”

So when the site announced that it was going to cease publishing, I certainly wasn’t shedding a tear. I wasn’t even going to bother wasting electrons on it, except their cryptic press release, first of all, got a lot of people riled up against Apple, and secondly may have been deliberately vague as to appear like a victory for Think Secret. There is no evidence what so ever that Apple forced the website to shut down. As someone pointed out on a forum post I read recently, he could have intended to stop publishing anyway, considering there has not been anything of note (rumor wise) published on the site for quite some time. Some corners of the press who love to sensationalize things, jumped all over this as a bad sign for web journalism that big bad Apple forced this poor little blogger to shut down, but there’s no evidence that that’s what happened, and I wonder if anyone even bothered to check the validity of the press release with Apple, as Apple published no such press release of their own regarding the settlement.

The fact that the site is still posting stories on the “secret notes” section would seem to counter the idea that it was forced to shut down. So just what exactly does “think secret will no longer be published” actually mean. Apparently not what one would assume. So are they going to keep the site alive by just not publishing on the home page? If Apple did force them to stop publishing, then I can not imagine Apple are going to be to happy about this unless it was part of the settlement, and if so, why were they so vague about it. If they didn’t force the site to stop publishing then I hope the rest of the mac web calls them on it and starts asking questions for what would then have been a very misleading press release. They could of course have an agreement to stop publishing on a certain date, but the exact line from the press release is “no sources were revealed and Think Secret will no longer be published” which kind of implies an immediate cease.

Perhaps the site’s demise was “delayed due to unforeseen technical problems”

UPDATE: There’s now a new post on the main page of Think Secret too.

UPDATE 2: Updated with additional line about ceasing on a certain date (thanks to Shawn via twitter)

Interesting rumour from Apple Insider regarding search functions coming to the iPhone:

“We expect the next major update to come in February when the iPhone is opened to third-party applications,” analyst Gene Munster wrote in a research report Monday. “As part of this update we also expect a contextual search feature, similar to Spotlight on a Mac.”

[Read AppleInsider | iPhone to gain Apple Spotlight search in 2008]

Another day, another Apple tablet rumor. This really does have to be the longest running rumor of all times, although there has been a lot of “chatter” about an Apple tablet lately (Note I said “Apple” tablet and not “Mac” tablet)

Does John Gruber know something we don’t know?

Anyone taking screenshots of the Dock on the side of the screen, for example, is going to have to retake them after installing the public release.

UPDATE: Apparently he did

According to Crunch Gear.com…

you’ll soon be able to purchase a selection of high-definition movies and television shows that’ll work on AppleTV. Finally.

They’re rumor is backed up by Mac OS Rumors, so that is not a good sign, as MOSR is not exactly reliable to be kind. Incidentally, they also think a major revision of the AppleTV is also due soon.

According to Ars Technica

Portents of an imminent Leopard release appear aplenty. Shortly after the final Tiger update and a small Leopard update, a full-sized install of Leopard, 6.5GB, was made available to ADC members. Both ThinkSecret and AppleInsider are suggesting this may be the beginning of the end.

Rumor: Mac OS X Leopard Gold Master:

Personally I would expect that if this is true it is being rushed out the door to meet the october deadline based on comments from multiple people who are using the beta (who really shouldn’t be talking about it, but anyway). It also appears that the dock issues have not been resolved, although the menu bar now looks less transparent. I would expect that the dock UI issues will never get resolved. Either way I suspect there will be a 10.5.1 update issued shortly after release.

Ok, not much to say yet until I get a chance to explore Apple’s site once it gets updated. You can read about it just about everywhere. One thing I do find amusing though… Think Secret yesterday in their usual self assured way:

“The new iPod will feature similar dimensions to Apple’s iPhone, with which it will share the same display, but sources say the iPod will likely continue to sport a hard drive in place of Flash memory. Solid state media commands a roughly 15-fold price premium per gigabyte over a 1.8-inch hard drive, which is now available in substantial quantities at capacities up to 120GB.”

I guess what your sources “confirmed” wasn’t quite a confirmation now was it? I’m sure they’ll have a post soon taking credit for having predicted the iPod Touch (even though it was a given since the iPhone came out)

Yeah yeah, I know Think Secret are considered sacred to some but when they come out with comments like…

“The rumormill has been ripe with other speculation surrounding the features of the new iPod, some more far-fetched than others.”

…and then miss the boat completely, I call it fair game. I love the way they consider themselves above the “rumormill”. I wonder will they do their old trick of “the product was changed at the last minute”.

Ok, rant over.

It is almost a given that Apple will introduce it’s new iPod line up during Wednesday’s “The Beat Goes On” event in San Francisco. While many rumor sites and discussion boards have thrashed out the potential details of what the new iPods may hold few have discussed what else Apple might release or announce. One thing is for sure though, and this may sound obvious, but Apple would not hold an event like this at such a large venue if they were just showing off hardware revisions to the iPod line. If that was the case a press release or a smaller event would suffice, but this has the hall marks of the typical Apple launch with some major announcements no one quite expected.

Usually these type of events are for Jobs to show off something that requires some type of demonstration. I suppose it could be just a new operating system for the iPods, but then how long can you spend demoing the iPod. Even if they do introduce the “iPod Touch” that everyone is suggesting, it will be so similar to the iPhone (as the rumors would have us believe) that it won’t exactly require a half hour demo either.

So what could it be?

Well, there are numerous rumors flying around suggesting that Apple will offer wireless downloads, that they will launch iTunes kiosks, ring tones for the iPhone, and of course that the Beatles catalogue will finally be launched on iTunes.

Anyway, it’s only a few days away now, so just a few thoughts to keep the hype flowing!

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, iPod Touch, iPhone, Rumor, iTunes

From Ars Technica:

The company plans to drop the bomb on us with a major unveiling during the first week of September—specifically, September 5, according to our sources within the company.

Source: Major Apple event on September 5th:

Appleinsider builds upon 9to5mac’s assertions of new iPod nanos with its own article entitled “Apple to usher in era of Mac OS X-based iPods”.

The article makes some interesting points, rumors aside, that it would mean Apple’s main product lines would depend on OS X in one form or another, spreading out the influence of it’s technology to a wider range of devices, much like Windows. The only difference being, Apple makes the whole thing and not just the OS.