Tech Pragmatist

Apple yesterday announced results that clearly surprised the market:

Profit rose to $1.23 billion, or $1.35 a share, Apple said today in a statement. Sales gained 12 percent to $8.34 billion in the quarter ended June 27. Analysts on average predicted profit of $1.17 and sales of $8.21 billion, according to a Bloomberg survey.

I don’t doubt that Mr Gruber is going to have a field day with all sorts of people’s incorrect predictions leading up to this quarter, so I’ll leave you to have a watch for his signature ‘Claim Chowder’ posts.

One interesting fact that came out of the results and the conference call is that although sales of the iPhone, Mac and iPod touch are all up, sales of the regular iPods must therefore be a long way down. Sales seem to be indicating that the iPod is dying and is therefore coming to the end of its sales life in its non-touch guise.

I therefore predict that September will see the introduction of both a tablet and nano touch-style iPod players that both run OSX. However, I don’t think that there will be any new non OSX iPods, other than perhaps a new variant on the shuffle. If we see a new shuffle, I also expect to see some sort of evolution on the ‘music player that talks to you’ theme, as I think this concept has room for more innovation.

As usual I am about a month behind on my tech news, but this little gem popped through the miasma of Apple news recently.

Apple thanked NAD for confirming its green credentials in a “thoughtful review” of the issues.

Like Mr Carmo, I have been becoming more and more frustrated with the sheer amount of noise there is online and I am struggling along with the rest of the interverse to swim the stream without feeling like I’m drowning.

I have gone a little further by deleting my twitter account, and I have always had a rule of friends on Facebook, colleagues on LinkedIn and with only two exceptions, it stays that way.

Evidently I am somewhat younger (or just more juvenile) than Mr Carmo though, as I have decided to set up my own photo gallery on my own infrastructure rather than use other services like Facebook with questionable retention policies, or Flickr where a subscription is required for decent functionality.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. […] We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. […] It should just work.

At last, another operating system to challenge the status quo. I also salute the target of tech pragmatism.

This can only be good for the competition that is already out there. Challengers push existing players to new heights and the arrival of a challenger is in itself often enough to trigger a rash of innovations from everybody, not least the newcomer.

Exciting times.

What are they playing at? Do they want anybody to buy Windows? Have they never heard of grace in defeat? Obviously not.

Microsoft seem to be the only ones who feel contempt for the EU commission, I believe that the EU Microsoft case is the reason that Apple has (and will probably continue to) charge a little extra money for the full version of their media player, Quicktime Pro.

The BBC’s Richard Black at The International Whaling Commission’s (IWC) annual meeting. The (admittedly tenuous) link to technology is the mention of the The Cove, a soon to be released movie about the habitual killing of dolphins in Japan. The movie was filmed using all sorts of high tech gadgets and techniques and is a film I am looking forward to seeing.

Whether it will have any political impact is much less clear than the obvious emotional impact it is projected to have. Mr Black interviewed the outgoing IWC chairman, Dr William Hogarth (the audio clip embedded in the linked page). The most controversial thing he said:

I’ll probably get in trouble for making this statement but I am properly convinced right now that there would be less whales killed if we didn’t have the commercial morratorium [on whale hunting].

I would have posted this as a link, but the choices are pretty much every single news site (video, audio and web), blog, personal website and almost all the micro blogging sites are getting flooded.

In the UK we saw the concept of mass grief when Lady Diana, Princess of Wales passed away. I predict we are going to see something rather bigger here, probably the first (or at least the biggest so far) case of mass grief pandemic the world has ever seen.

RIP Michael Jackson. You will always be remembered for the music, the dance moves and the eccentricity.

Please, please, please don’t try this yourself. Report it to the police.

I still think Apple implemented this feature as a response to the wonderful software Undercover which was built for the mac (I have installed this on both mine and my wife’s macbooks). Unfortunately the iPhone version is vastly inferior in my opinion and I will be waiting until the mobile me location and iPhone Undercover technologies converge before buying it for the iPhone.

It is tempting to say that Apple are verging on the irresponsible with their actions in making this functionality available. I like the idea of tracking my lost iPhone and being able to remotely force it to make noise to find it down the back of the sofa, but the very real possibility of trying to track down a stolen iPhone concerns me. With America being the litigious place it is, I won’t be surprised to read about a case brought against Apple for somebody claiming that Apple allowed them to approach a dangerous individual who had stolen their iPhone and getting physically injured as a result of using the new mobile me service.

The European Commission has hailed a significant step towards pan-European music licensing.

Hurrah for EMI and others who have laid the groundwork, this can only be a step in the right direction.

Talk about using the tools available to you at the time. Apparently it only took an hour too, very pragmatic work.

The linked page (Thanks to Mr Gruber) has a video of how it was done, Ms Eisenberg has a good image of the front cover.