Home Automation, Linux, X10, TiVo, iPods and other technology around the home
OK, I don’t care if you can duplicate any of this technology with Qik or anything else that exists right now: you gotta give it to Apple that they can just put their finger on the right sentiments:
Like a pregnant woman showing the ultrasound to her husband in the Army, or the two people using sign language. Isn’t that the coolest thing??
Next on the list is undoubtedly a front-facing camera for the iPad. Imagine the slightly larger screen displaying the same picture.
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Zedomax blog has a preview of an Android tablet running Android at the Adobe exhibit at Web 2.0. Although the preview shows off a lot of the functions (including the ability to run Flash and Air applications on the tablet), there are two distinct disadvantages for an Android/Flash tablet:
Yesterday Apple had its September presentation, which, as the title “Let’s Rock” may have given away, was focused on iTunes and the various iPod models. Here are the announcements in a nutshell:
It sounds that Apple is slowly retiring the iPod classic, and adding more emphasis on the AppStore. More news can be read at Gizmodo and other sites around the net.
A hectic schedule at work and at home has prevented me from reporting on the MacWord announcements Steve Jobs made in his keynote. A quick round-up:
Nice announcements, on top of the Mac Pro with 8 cores announced last week. The Apple Air is sexy and sharp, looks like you can cut someone with it. Time Capsule’s saving grace is the wireless base station, otherwise it’s just a high-priced USB drive. AppleTV v.2 might be just what AppleTV needed to take off, combined with the movie rentals. It sucks to have to pay $20 for an iPod touch upgrade, but it beats having your device obsoleted a couple of weeks after you purchase it.
Unfortunately, nothing earth shattering. Which seems to be reflected in the AAPL stock price: hovering around $177 beginning of this week, it now dipped down to about $163. That’s only a little higher than their three-month low of mid-November. I wonder what will Apple come up with around May (gut feeling they have “one more thing” up their sleeve)?
According to MacNN, Apple is set to raise the prices on downloadable movies in iTunes to $15, just a couple of dollars below the retail price of a physical DVD. This means that for $3 more, you can order the same movie, without DRM, with extra content, in a nice box, and probably in better quality.
It is suggested in the article that the studios are under pressure from retailers such as Wal-Mart. Which basically means that old-style retail is trying to hold on to their distribution model, and forces the new-style retail to mimic their inefficiencies… I hope Apple will come up with something else, especially now that there are serious indications on the music side that the old model is failing (EMI scaling back funding of the RIAA, more and more DRM-free music).
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