This week, on the first episode of our new show, Myke, Federico and I discuss the past, present and future (lol) of the iPod.
If you were subscribed to The Prompt, you’ll need to resubscribe. We were hoping to avoid this, but ran into some technical reasons that new feeds would be better for everyone. You can do so here:
We’ll be back next week with Episode 2, which should stream live on the Relay FM site.
Cyrus Farivar at Ars explains how Adam Curry’s audio-via-RSS experiment exploded into the world of content so many of us enjoy everyday.
Two notes:
My very handsome five year old son is featured on the St. Jude website today. Go donate to save more childrens’ lives.
I love the What-If strips; this may be my new favorite.
Tim Cook:
Apple is committed to transparency, which is why we are publishing statistics about the race and gender makeup of our company. Let me say up front: As CEO, I’m not satisfied with the numbers on this page. They’re not new to us, and we’ve been working hard for quite some time to improve them. We are making progress, and we’re committed to being as innovative in advancing diversity as we are in developing our products.
Inclusion and diversity have been a focus for me throughout my time at Apple, and they’re among my top priorities as CEO.
As great as this, Apple still has a ways to go in some areas of its business.
Myke Hurley, on why we decided on creating a network:
Podcast networks are not pots of gold. They don’t guarantee you success nor advertising dollars. That still has to come from the hard work that you put in. Joining an established network today does not necessarily make you a runaway hit tomorrow.
So why do I want to set up a new network? For me there is one clear reason. I host six shows. Working on one show is a simple enough affair, but once you start to grow from there, it becomes a lot more tricky to scale. I don’t want to set up separate webpages for all of the shows that I do. For me, it makes most sense to put all my shows in one place that I can point people too. It’s as simple as that.
As I type this, it’s sometime between 1 and 2 in the morning on Saturday, August 9. My kids and wife are in bed. It’s raining. I’m on the couch, with my iPad, thinking about the last several weeks, months and years of doing whatever it is I do on the Internet.
This fall, 512 Pixels will be six years old. A few years into it, I got invited to be on The Bro Show, an interview show with two guys from England who wanted to talk to me about tech. We hit it off, and over the last four years, Myke and I have created hundreds of hours of audio content for listeners to enjoy.
A couple of years ago, Myke sent me an IM about the opportunity to join 5by5. He asked my advice, and I gave it. We joined 5by5 and kept making things together. We have enjoyed greater success than I ever thought possible. What we do is enjoyed by tens of thousands of people each week. We have parody Twitter accounts and t-shirts we’ve been asked to sign. The high is amazing.
Leading up to this year’s WWDC, Myke and I were talking about the future of our shows and about what the next step could be. I could tell it was leading to something bigger. We tossed ideas around and used the opportunity to meet with several people we look up to when in San Francisco and discuss our potential plans.
Since getting home from California, I’ve had many late nights like this. I’ve pored over business paperwork, set up a livestream server and reviewed endless rounds of design work. I’ve woken up almost every morning to a barrage of iMessages from Myke, following up on things, the six hours between our respective time zones slowly closing as we’ve worked longer and longer hours.
I’ve heard it said not to go into business with close friends, but there’s not another person on the Internet I’d rather make things with than Myke.
We’ve spent lots of money, lots of time and lots of energy in creating Relay FM. It’s ours. We’ve molded it with our own hands; what it is and what it becomes is up to us and our amazing hosts. Relay is a labor of love, and I think it shows.
In one week, thousands and thousands of people will download our shows and tap play on their devices, hearing Myke’s laugh, Federico’s accent, Brad’s passion and Casey’s near-cursing.
That makes it all worth it. Join us as we switch on.
Verizon and others will have to answer for their throttling of some customers’ data. This should be fun to watch.
In my “Future Classics” series, I try to guess what current-era Apple products may become collectable in the future.
Back in April 2013, Jordan Merrick shared a bit about his iMac G5 here on 512:
The iMac G5 was far more mature in comparison to its predecessors. This machine was simply a neutral white rectangle, less than 2” thick, held aloft by a single piece of aluminum. Gone were the cutesy colors and childish nature of the infant iMac G3 as well as the nose and lip piercings of the teenage iMac G4 that made sure it stood out of a crowd. The iMac G5 had finally grown up, moved out and got a job. It was the deliberate lack of any ostentatious characteristics in the iMac G5 that would pave the way for Apple’s minimalistic design choices over the next decade.
The iMac had finally reached adulthood.
As Merrick pointed out in his article, the iMac G5 was very serviceable, which turned out to be handy, as Apple had to open a wide-reaching repair extension program due to bad capacitors on the logic board and in the power supply.
In October 2005 — a mere 14 months after introducing the iMac G5 — Apple replaced it, with the iMac G5 (iSight).
Here’s a bit from the press release:
Apple today unveiled the new iMac G5 which features a built-in iSight video camera for out-of-the-box video conferencing and the debut of Apple’s breakthrough Front Row media experience. Front Row gives users a simple, intuitive and powerful way to play their music, enjoy their photo slideshows, and watch their DVDs and iMovies, as well as popular movie trailers from apple.com and music videos and television shows purchased from the iTunes Music Store, on their iMac from up to 30 feet away using the new bundled Apple Remote. The new iMac G5 comes in a sleek, new design that is even thinner than its predecessor, and starts at just $1,299.
“The new iMac G5 debuts our amazing Front Row media experience, and we think users are going to love it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Plus, the built-in iSight video camera delivers out-of-the-box video conferencing with friends and family, as well as hours of fun with our new Photo Booth application.”
The iMac G5 (iSight) was introduced at Apple’s October 2005 Music Special Event, alongside the 5th generation iPod (the first with video playback) and the inclusion of TV shows in the iTunes Store.
The new iMac had three headlining features, according to Steve Jobs:
Up until this point, the iSight was an external FireWire camera, but with the new iMac, Apple brought video chat to many more of its customers via iChat AV and shipped PhotoBooth, which Jobs called “the funnest app we’ve ever written.”
Front Row is the spiritual predecessor to the Apple TV. The six-button IR remote controlled a new UI that laid on top of OS X:
Front Row pulled in media from users’ local iTunes and iPhoto libraries, could be used to play DVDs and even user-created iMovies and video podcasts.
Jobs hinted that Front Row was going to take on Microsoft Media Manager, and while I’m not sure it took any sales from Redmond, it turned out to be a popular feature for OS X users. I remember installing it on my PowerBook G4, ignoring Apple keeping it just for IR-port enabled Macs.
So, why does the iMac G5 (iSight) deserve to be the considered a future classic?
The software features introduced with this machine helped shape much of what we do with computers today, decade later — enjoy media, hold video conferences and good off. All of that was possible before the iMac G5 (iSight), but this machine excelled at these things. Plopping down on the catch and firing up iTunes from across the room was no longer a task reserved for nerds with crazy hardware setups.
Equally notable is the machine’s lifespan. At Macworld 2006, just three months after being introduced, Jobs announced that the first Intel-powered machine from Apple would be the iMac.
The Intel iMac shipped with the same features, size and price as its G5-powered friend, but with twice the power, thanks to Intel’s Core Duo silicon.
While I’m sure some users were glad to hold on to their PowerPC-based iMacs, having a $1299+ machine replaced within three months didn’t leave a good taste in many customers’ mouths. More importantly, it makes the iMac G5 (iSight) a rare machine.
Maybe even collectable.
I got this as an email since I’ve published using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform, and could hardly believe what I was reading. Regardless of which group is in the wrong here (Spolier Alert: both are), this hit me as incredibly unprofessional and unbecoming.
With lots of chatter this week about Apple and Intel, the costs of Apple switching to ARM have been on my mind.
I firmly believe Apple has ARM-powered Macs running ARM-ready OS X in a lab somewhere. This isn’t a technical problem; its a philosophical one.
With the platform transition from PowerPC to Intel, Apple had Rosetta, a software layer that let code compiled for PowerPC Macs run at neat-native speeds on Intel machines. It was an impressive feat, and one that Apple could certainly pull off again if OS X were to transition to ARM. However, I think there are three big reasons the Mac is going to stay x86-based for the foreseeable future.
When Apple announced its move to Intel in 2006, Steve Jobs said:
When we look at Intel, they’ve got great performance, yes, but they’ve got something else that’s very important to us. Just as important as performance, is power consumption. And the way we look at it is performance per watt. For one watt of power how much performance do you get? And when we look at the future road maps projected out in mid-2006 and beyond, what we see is the PowerPC gives us sort of 15 units of performance per watt, but the Intel road map in the future gives us 70, and so this tells us what we have to do.
There’s no doubt this topic is still on Apple’s mind, but comparing iPad-class ARM chips and Mac-class isn’t exactly Apples-to-oranges, as Siracusa pointed out on last night’s ATP.
The iPad Air has a 1.4 GHz A7 chip coupled with a 32.4-watt-hour battery that provides 10 hours of battery life. The 13-inch MacBook Air ships with a 1.4 GHz Intel Core i5 chip and a 54‑watt‑hour battery that provides 12 hours of battery life.
While the clock speeds are the same, the MacBook Air is computationally more powerful (roughly twice as powerful, according to tools like Geekbench. The iPad Air is a good bit more power efficient than the MacBook, but that difference isn’t a good talking point with such a wide gap in raw performance.
(When thinking about ARM-powered Macs, many think of the MacBook Air not only because it’s become the default Mac, mindshare-wise, but that the thought of an ARM-powered iMac or Mac Pro seems laughable.)
In short, Apple’s ARM-based A7 isn’t a good choice for a MacBook Air at this point. While I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility for Apple to ship a slower notebook if the tradeoffs were right, but that current performance gap isn’t enough to justify the possible gain in Cupertino’s beloved performance per watt metric.
One huge gain Apple made when switching to Intel in 2006 was the ability to natively run Windows. While Apple certainly made fun of the Microsoft operating system (like in the ad above), the ability to run OS X and Windows side-by-side is a huge selling point for power users.
For example, I use modern.IE virtual machines to QA websites at work. If I were to be running an ARM-based Mac, I wouldn’t be able to do this. As much as Apple might like to think its customers can be OS X-only, I’m not alone in these needs.
(Assumedly, Windows RT could run natively on an ARM-based Mac, but that’s not a robust enough solution for people who need real Windows apps.)
Of course, the first two reasons can be brushed aside by a simple statement:
Apple could keep Intel chips in the MacBook Pro, and use ARM chips in the MacBook Air.
I think that line of thinking has some serious flaws.
Apple likes simplicity in its products and its product lines. Selling one family of machines that can’t do what another does isn’t a very Apple-like thing to do. A Mac mini can do what a Mac Pro can do, even if its not as fast. How does Apple pitch a slower, less-featured MacBook Air?
For these reasons, I don’t think we’re going to see an A7 or A8-powered MacBook Air anytime soon. The Broadwell delay is annoying, but not a big enough reason to do something as crazy as moving away from Intel. Cupertino might not like spending its time waiting on new silicon from Intel, I don’t see what choice it has.