Much ado was made last week over the fact that for the first time in four years, the Walkman outsold the iPod in Japan for that one week’s sales. The only real reason to make note of such a thing is either (a) to report that Walkman is overtaking Apple as the leader in the DAP market in Japan, or (b) report the facts in context.

Unfortunately, many media outlets reported the false story (a) and glossed over or completely ignored the relevant context (b). For example, the stories in Consumer Affairs and The Post Chronicle both fail to mention that iPhone sales are not included in the count. Other stories, like those in Engadget and CNet note that the iPhone is not counted and even that Apple was planning on releasing new iPods soon–but they still did not seem to take note of the central fact explaining the numbers.

The general consensus was that Sony is nipping at Apple’s heels and is giving them a run for their money–one story even said that the Walkman was “striding past” the iPod. This because for one week, the Walkman sold 43% of DAP units and Apple sold 42.1%.

None of the non-Mac-oriented sites I found covering the story provided the full context: that for the week reported, Apple was clearing the distribution channels of iPods; new units were not being stocked, and consumers were well aware that within a week or two, they could get better models for the same or even a cheaper price. Well, of course Apple’s sales dipped. Duh.

Proof of this come with the new week’s sales figures: Sony’s sales fell to 32.1%, and Apple’s sales rose to 58%.

So much for striding.

Now, several weeks ago, there was a similar effect in the other direction: Apple was lauded for taking the #1 spot for cell phone sales in Japan. Apple fans expressed approval for this point, but also noted caution–it was the week after the iPhone 3GS was released, so figures were bound to be higher than normal. And sure enough, in following weeks, the iPhone ranking slipped.

However, ironically, in the week where the iPod Nano and Touch made the big news, the iPhone also climbed back up. During August, Apple took 3 of the top 20 spots in cell phone sales, with the 32GB 3GS topping Apple’s showings in the #7 spot. This week? The 32GB 3GS is #1 again, with the 16GB at #7 and the 8GB 3G at #14. Sony had phones at the #5 and #15 positions, as well as many spots down the list. And Apple may gain even more as the last of the 2-year contracts end and more people are free to switch to the iPhone. (That’s what one of the people in my office is doing–waiting to join the other six of us who have the iPhone already. And no, I wasn’t responsible for any of the purchases. For a change.)

This in a country where Sony and other domestic brands are supposed to have an overwhelming advantage, and where the public supposedly “hates” the iPhone.

A few more notes about Snow Leopard. First, small changes in the UI have crept in that don’t necessarily affect functionality. They are, however, very welcome and often convenient. Take the language switching, for example; when you switch languages using the keyboard shortcut, you get an on-screen change indicator similar in ways to the application switcher. I am not sure if plain-Leopard used to allow you to hold down the Command-key and switch through several languages by keyboard alone, but you can now, and you can see the languages as they come.

Another small but even nicer change is in taking snapshots of the screen. It used to be that each screen capture was called “Picture 1,” “Picture 2,” and so on. Now, they are titled by date and time. This is a nice difference because of naming conflicts. Say you took ten screen caps, named Picture 1-10. Then you dropped them into a different folder, Then you took more screen captures–they would start naming themselves starting with “Picture 1” again, as the previous set are no longer in the directory where screen caps are sent. But if you try to drop the new batch into the same folder as the previous set, they won’t go–filename conflict. You either over-write the original set, or you have to rename them all. Nice touch.

Another small but perhaps very significant change: the Keyboard Viewer is now resizable. For those who don’t know about it, the Keyboard Viewer has been around for years, showing what keys will type when special keys are depressed. For example, if you want to find out how to make the √ sign, open the Keyboard Viewer (Input menu) and hold down the Option (Alt) key; all of the characters that can be typed with the Option key depressed are shown on the virtual keyboard.

So why is it significant that this viewer can be resized? Because of the implications for the rumored touch-screen tablet. While I suspect that such a tablet’s virtual keyboard would be a bit sexier than the long-standing viewer, it is potentially significant–as is the fact that they viewer can now be activated via the Keyboard System Preference pane, as well as by the Language & Text pane.

One last point I found: auto-spell correction.

When activated, this will not fix all errors, but it will fix a lot of them. It does not even appear to be part of the new text-substitution feature, but a fully separate feature. It does not depend on common spelling errors in an MS-Word-like AutoCorrect mode, but instead seems based upon the spell-checker–if there is a spelling error and the spell-checker finds a strong correct-spelling suggestion, it simply switches it in. In this paragraph I have been intentionally misspelling many words, watching them all correct themselves. Sometimes they change to the wrong correct word, but usually it’s very accurate.

More as I notice it….

Well, I have fixed most of the printing issues. I re-established network printing at the office by discovering the color copier’s IP address and setting it up as an LDP printer. That got it back, and I could shut down the old Powerbook and put it away again.

At home, I opened Airport Utility and under Manual Setup, arranged for printing to be available over the Internet using Bonjour. That made the HP psc 2450 I have show up when adding a new printer. Those two were the big issues; now I can print at home and at work.

Still, many people are having printing issues; seems like Apple didn’t quite get that point straight before releasing the OS. But if you’re familiar with OS upgrades, then you know that printers are usually the first thing to go, and one of the last things to get cleaned up.

Big chink in the Snow Leopard armor: network printing is more or less gone. Apple finally killed off AppleTalk, which is what a lot of network printers depend on. Despite Apple’s claims that printing is now “easier” (USB printing was already dead simple, couldn’t get any easier), network printing is now pretty much decimated, requiring workarounds until the printer manufacturers get around to updating the Mac OS software and firmware–which usually means it’ll be a few years before it all gets back to being accessible again.

Before Snow Leopard, my Mac could easily detect the network printers even without any drivers, and the Add Printer software could easily pick up the drivers to allow detailed use of the advance printer features. Now? The printers simply don’t show up at all, and having the drivers installed won’t help even a bit (the drivers only make it possible to finely control the printer, and have nothing to do with detecting them in the first place).

Apple tech support was singularly un-useful, claiming no knowledge of how to cope with the issue (BIG oversight–they should have known that banishing AppleTalk would cause lots of problems with network printing), and the best they could do was (a) tell me to transfer files to a computer that could print, and (b) suggest that it was a problem for the printer manufacturers and that Apple didn’t have anything to do with it. That’s unacceptable: the printer makers did not change anything, Apple did. At the very least they could arrange an easily accessible suggestion for a workaround.

What worked for me: I happened to have my old Powerbook handy, and it could still see the printer. So I set that up and activated Printer Sharing. My Macbook Pro was then able to print by doing it through the older computer. A kludge (the printing is much slower than before), but it works for now. I’ll have to see if I can get shared printing from any office Windows boxes, but the downside is that the sharing computer has to always be turned on.

I broke down and decided to install Snow Leopard on my Macbook Pro. The main reason was that I found an alternate type of ad blocker which is not related to the SIMBL plug-in.

As it turns out, there is even more functionality than I imagined: you can use an App’s “Get Info” dialog box to set it to open in 32-bit mode and to use Rosetta for backwards-compatibility. This almost fixed PithHelmet, which refused to load because it didn’t recognize Safari 4.0.3; I believe it did allow SIMBL to work. But Rosetta allowed my text-swapping app to work, so no problem there.

In fact, most of the experience in Snow Leopard is pretty much the same as before–it’s just faster, slicker, and has some new functionality. This held true on my MBP, which I did not wipe-and-restore, so good for Snow Leopard.

Alas, the transition is not without a few bugs. The most notable is that the Mail app no longer recognizes as viable my outgoing (SMTP) server, and my ISP is one of those that absolutely insists that you use that SMTP server and nothing else, so for the moment my outgoing POP3 email is not functioning; I’m calling Apple tomorrow to see what they say about it. (Update: I just tried setting my SMTP port to 25, and SMTP now works. Strange, as 25 was one of the ports that it supposedly was using to start with. Anyway, problem solved.)

However, there are a few improvements in Mail, the most notable being that it now checks all of your accounts simultaneously. Previously, it would only check 3 or 4 accounts at one time, waiting for each one to finish before allowing the next account to start its check. Additionally, you can now view messages in threads–though I must admit that I am not 100% sure that that was not available before. Other than that, none of the many obvious lacks in Mail have been addressed.

Safari is noticeably faster, but does have a few things I don’t much like. I don’t care much for the “Top Sites” panel you get with a new tab or window; it never appealed to me, and I don’t see a way to turn it off (I’ll have to check to see if the 3rd-party hacks are still available). Also, I don’t really love the new tab setup with the invisible-until-you-hover-over-it close buttons. And SIMBL not working is more than just about losing ad blocking; I had grown quite used to SafariStand’s feature of allowing keystrokes to move you from tab to tab. I also miss not having the pages from the last session preserved.

I like Exposé’s new setup, including how it now lines up the windows instead of the previous scatter arrangement. It’s also interesting how it now lines up minimized windows as well, in addition to maintaining the largest possible size for smaller windows.

So far, so good; Snow Leopard has mostly delivered nice improvements with relatively few hiccups–not bad for a transitional OS.

Some years back, I had a fairly pronounced string of bad-luck experiences with hardware, stuff breaking down on me all the time. Not my Apple gear, but other appliances and 3rd-party computer peripherals. One 17-inch CRT I used with my desktop PC crackled, sparked, emitted black smoke and died on me, for example. More recently, my luck has been pretty good. Not that nothing breaks, but it breaks just in time.

For example, my last Macbook Pro developed a minor screen problem–nothing big, a slight darkening in the lower corners, but I was worried that it might worsen over time. And it happened just before the 1-year warranty expired. Apple fixed it (even letting me wait until after the warranty expired for a convenient time to have the replacement done), swapping out the screen with a brand-new one. Cool. And no problems since then.

My iPhone also had some glitches a bit back, about 6 months after I got it, I think. Took it in to SoftBank, they didn’t even ask what was wrong, they just replaced it. Nice.

With my iMac, having a 24-inch screen made me nervous–if that sucker broke, it’d be expensive as hell to get fixed. So I took out an AppleCare extended warranty on it. And it worked fine, up until just now–just a month before the 3-year warranty expired. I started experiencing graphics glitches, and after a very brief phone call with Apple Support (no waiting, even for an English-speaking operator in Japan), the operator told me that he felt it was a problem with the graphics chip, and without even telling me to do a clean re-install or anything (I had not reinstalled and added Snow Leopard yet), he made an appointment to have the iMac picked up. No big hassle–we’ll just take in your computer and fix it. It’ll be out for three days, is that OK?

While I was at it, I mentioned the wireless keyboard that I gave up on a few years back. OK, he said, we’ll ship out a free replacement unit. Didn’t even ask me to test it out–heck, he didn’t even ask what was wrong with it, just like with the iPhone.

I think I’ll call in and ask them to also check out the DVD drive while they’re at it, see what happens. It hasn’t failed, but I have used it a lot and those things are notorious for limited lifetimes–and it does make a slightly funny sound nowadays.

And now I have noticed a little flicker in my current Macbook Pro screen–when I am using the lower-power graphics chip, the top part of the screen flickers black for a fraction of a second every so often. Warranty expires in November, so I have time. For that one, I’ll either ask them to wait to fix it in December as I’ll need the machine every day in school, or will take it in to the Genius Bar so they can give me a first-hand diagnosis of what might be wrong.

Call me an Apple fanboy, but I do like their service–and have been having very nice luck in the timing of what small stuff does go wrong.

I just installed Snow Leopard on my iMac, doing a complete wipe and re-install of the hard disk drive–something that should be done with a computer every year or two anyway (more often if you use your computer more like I do). And the change is extremely noticeable.

First, I should say that I had not wiped the disk and reinstalled the OS for a few years, so that makes a lot of the difference right there. Crashes, errors, and just plain hard use over a few years will introduce enough glitches in the OS and with the hard disk that will slow your computer down significantly enough. Still, I don’t remember it being this fast before. I know, subjective, but still. Safari pages load fast, very fast indeed.

One of the first things to note about Snow Leopard is the footprint: Apple claims that you’ll save 6GB of disk space because they have slimmed down the system so much. When I installed, I customized it so that it would add in all printer drivers plus other software that Snow Leopard does not install by default, so as to remove any slimming-by-defeaturing. I started out with a hard drive with 219.5 MB of free space. After Snow Leopard was installed, it showed that I had 243 GB of free space. Whoa! Did I just get 24 GB of extra drive space?

Alas, no. But I did get the advertised 6GB. With Snow Leopard, Apple has also changed the way hard disk drive space is reported: in Snow Leopard, they switched from base two (binary) to base ten counting. When you buy a 250GB hard drive and plug it in to your computer, it only shows something like 238GB available; this is due to the difference in counting systems. Now that Snow Leopard uses base ten, just like the hard drive sellers, when you plug in a 250GB hard drive, it’ll show 250GB available.

That’s where I got the bulk of my “extra space” from, and this difference became clear with a simple test: I shut down my Snow Leopard iMac, tethered it to my non-Snow Leopard Macbook Pro, and held down the “T” key on the keyboard while restarting the iMac, making it start up (in just a second or two) as an external drive to my MBP. And on the MBP, the free disk space is listed as 225.14GB–almost exactly 6 gigabytes lighter than it was before I installed Snow Leopard.

So far, I have not had much chance to test the whole system out. Startup certainly goes a lot faster, and the icon-resizing slider is very cool. I have not used the new Exposé features much yet, but they seem to work as advertised. I tried out the new system-wide autotext replace feature (type in a text string and have it be replaced by another), and it works, though disappointingly weakly. It does not work in some places (such as, disappointingly, any text window or box in Safari), nor does it not allow you to control how it swaps the text (it only swaps after a space has been typed). It’s kind of a very weak version of the text-swapping software I have used–and suspect will no longer work in Snow Leopard.

And that leads up to the big thing, the reason why I might not be installing Snow Leopard on my Macbook Pro just yet: some software doesn’t work yet. I have become heavily dependent on two things: my autotext replace utility and PithHelmet, my ad blocker for Safari. PithHelmet doesn’t work either–I tried to install it, but apparently SIMBL doesn’t work in Snow Leopard yet. And for me, that’s a big deal–after having blissfully quiet web pages for so long, going back to pages filled with all those dancing, flashing ads is a jarring experience, not to mention an incredibly annoying one.

I’ll report more on Snow Leopard after I test it out some more, but it may be a week or two–Apple is taking in my iMac this week, something I’ll cover quickly in my next post.

What if the rumored Apple tablet is a subversive, anti-pirating transition device?

Apple has an extraordinary system built up with the iPhone, the best three points being (1) the App Store, (2) Multi-touch, and (3) style. The last point is more or less a given with Apple–they’ve always done style well. The first two are worth looking at.

Multi-touch I have reviewed previously, and it is just as valuable now as the Mouse and the GUI were in 1984; Apple stands to profit by being the first on the leading edge of a new interface revolution. Using your hands to interface with a computer is just shy of the perfect interface, the remainder being voice interaction. That’s how we interact with our world–through our hands and with our speech. Bringing Multi-touch to the PC will be a big thing, and Apple holds most of the patents on that.

But the secret weapon Apple wields is the App Store–or, more specifically, the new paradigm Apple has built for applications. Think about it: have you ever pirated an app? “Borrowed” an install CD of Microsoft Office from a friend or family member, or even downloaded something from the Internet via P2P? Most people have.

But who here has ever used a pirated iPhone app? Sure, the iPhone has the whole “jailbreak” thing, and it is possible to pirate iPhone apps–but it is not easy, nor is it common. It’s a very fringe thing, despite the widespread use of the iPhone.

The iPhone represents a software company’s dream: a closed system where users almost always pay for software.

The rumored Apple tablet could be a step toward standardizing that paradigm. If this takes over, then the days of easy pirating would be over; sure, you could do it, but it would be harder to do, and therefore less common.

But it’s not a loss to the casual pirate user; one of the reasons people pirate so often is because of the steep price of apps. Even cheap popular commercial apps usually cost more than a hundred dollars, and often more advanced software costs several hundred dollars, advancing to the four-digit range.

One of the reasons software costs so much: because so many people pirate it, software companies have to charge more to make up the difference. Why do so many people pirate it? Because it costs so much.

Enter the new Apple App Store paradigm. A system where most people pay for apps because (1) it’s harder to pirate apps, and (2) apps are much cheaper. That’s the key, breaking the cycle of expensive apps. If everyone paid full price for Adobe Creative Suite, it wouldn’t have to cost a thousand dollars. By starting with the iPhone app store, where the under-$10 price range is expected, Apple can build up from there. If the Apple tablet is a controlled app environment like the iPhone, it can engender cheaper apps.

Imagine the new Apple tablet coming out with iWork-for-Tablet being included free, along with iLife and Mail and Safari. And then you pay no more than $25 for new apps. Many people balk at buying PowerPoint for $100–but how about for $25? Most would probably say, “Hmmm, not so bad. Why not?” and plunk down the money.

Apple’s iTunes Store has made it clear that people will pay for something they could easily pirate, so long as the price tag is reasonable.

Is Apple’s new Tablet a step toward a closed, controlled, and pirate-free future for software?

If so, then Apple stands to profit enormously–as Microsoft does not seem to be poised to go the same way, and Apple stands to make a sweet 30% on all software sold–when currently, neither Microsoft nor Apple get a penny for third-party software sold for use on their OS.

Apple may be smarter than we give it credit for.

For a few years now, I have been tracking Mac market share, using Net Applications’ market share reports. From the beginning, I tagged the measure as unreliable in terms of representing actual market share, but found it acceptable as a way of measuring relative growth. Kind of like Rasmussen polls–you know they’re slanted to the right, but if they maintain the same methodology, they can be a relatively accurate measure of change over time.

Well, Rasmussen recently changed their methodology and so made it look like Obama tanked in the polls–much to the delight of their right-wing audience–when in fact there has not been too much change.

And wouldn’t you know it, at right about the same time, Net Applications changed their methodology as well, giving greater weight to foreign web surfers, which gives greater weight to Windows and much less weight to Macs. Previously teetering at 10%, the Mac OS is now rated at less than 5%. This may be more reflective of a worldwide market share, but the whole point of using Net Application’s data was it’s relative worth; we knew all along that the way it gathered data already favored Windows users.

Had NA kept both methodologies, that would be of some use, but now, I’ll have to throw all the data from the past few years out the window. Thanks for nothing.

While recently giving a guest lecture in a class at my college, I was asked what computers and computing would be like in 30 years’ time, and I found it hard to respond; although that’s been about how long personal computers have been around, there have been so many developments, both incremental and evolutionary, that it’s hard to predict what the product of so many upcoming separate developments may add up to in that much time–and that’s without considering that advancements in technology tend to be exponential in growth.

But one thing that should not be too hard to see coming is the next generation, what will take us through the next 10 years or so of computing, perhaps longer.

To start with, we have the interface: the OS. Think back to some of the early interfaces maybe half a century ago, which included punching holes in paper tapes and cards and feeding them into scanners that would translate the code into data on the computer. After that, we got the CLI: the Command Line Interface, the quasi-dialect of English which much more resembled human communication, but was still clunky and difficult to learn and use. After that, we got the GUI: the Graphics User Interface, with the mouse, the window, the desktop, the menu–visual metaphors which were much more intuitive, much more related to our human experiences, and so much better suited for human beings to deal with.

That’s where we are now. So, what’s next? It appears to be multi-touch. Yes, the thing that you have on your iPhone or iPod Touch, where you can swipe or pinch or twist and make the phone do stuff. That’s an embryonic form of what you’ll use to control your computer soon. To get a better taste of how that will work, watch the video below, with multi-touch whiz Jeff Han demo’ing his version of the interface. The real action starts at 2:45, so I have (hopefully) queued up the YouTube video to start at that time when you click ‘play.’ (If you want to start from the beginning, manipulate the slider to bring it back to 0).

But at 2:45, Han shows you how you can manipulate images. Some of it will be familiar, similar to what the iPhone does (note that this presentation is from February 2006, before the iPhone came out), but in a much more developed way, involving both hands, and with images moving independently. At 3:45, notice that Han calls up a virtual keyboard, resizes it, and then dismisses it when he’s through with it. At 5:50, see what he does with a program similar to Google Earth. At 7:25, note his use of a program that allows him to create elements which then act like real, dynamic objects instead of static drawings.

As Han notes during the presentation, one of the great things about this is that the interface simply disappears, it’s so natural that you hardly even realize that there’s an OS anymore. He also notes that the OS conforms to you, rather than you conforming to any kind of hardware–his example being the virtual keyboard, which is resizable.

So, when will this magical new OS come to a computer store near you? Well, potentially, we could be seeing it late this year or early next: very likely this is what Apple’s rumored multi-touch tablet device will use. It probably won’t be the total break from the current OS that the Mac OS was in 1985, but it should be the start of that evolution to the next interface. As I said, we’ve already seen elements in Apple devices already. Note, for example, not only the multi-touch features in the iPhone and the new Macbook trackpads, but also note the developments in screen technology, most notably the hard-surface screen that Apple snuck into the latest Macbooks–a must-have if you’re going to use a touch screen device–and the new Oleophobic surfaces on the iPhone 3Gs, also necessary to avoid a mess of smears on a tablet screen. New features in Snow Leopard may even facilitate the migration to the new interface. And patents filed by Apple over the past few years have pointed to pretty much exactly this.

But the tablet computer will be more than just a new interface: it may very well be a new composite device, rolling several previous devices into one handy gadget. Think of your current smartphone. (What, don’t you have one? How 2005 of you.) That’s not just one device, it’s 3 or 4. Remember when you used to have an iPod (or Walkman, if you want to go farther back) to keep your music, a PDA to keep calendars, contacts, and notes, and a cell phone to make phone calls? All three of those are now one device, with some functions from your laptop thrown in for good measure. I now kind of chuckle when I see one of my students in the elevator holding both a digital music player and a cell phone.

The tablet could be a similar rolled-up device. We already are moving from desktop computers to laptops; like the move from the big CRT screens to today’s flatscreen LCD monitors, laptops are more expensive and lower quality than desktop computers, but we are starting to buy more laptops than desktops, and they are quickly becoming the default computer to get. The tablet will be that computer, but it will also be an e-book reader, possibly even replacing the Kindle as the e-book device of choice. It could take over much of the netbook market, and could even take over some if not all of the functionality of your smartphone, should you find a way to handily lug the tablet around with you everywhere. Apple’s new tablet is supposed to come with a 3G connection, and with a Bluetooth headset, it could serve as a communications device, eventually doing more than just regular cell phone calls, but adding Skype/iChat communication as well. Phone carriers might see the future is in data plans rather than talk plans.

You may have heard people talk about how the new tablet from Apple will be a “revolutionary” device, and probably discounted that as hype, since we’ve heard that so often in recent years (we’re not all riding around on Segways now, are we?). And the tablet may not be that revolutionary–but it’s not a bad bet that it will signal the start of the next generation of computers. Just like the Lisa was the precursor to the Mac and the popularization of the GUI, the iPhone could be the precursor to the multi-touch tablet.

And yes, I do own Apple stock. But even if I didn’t, I’m pretty sure I would be saying the exact same thing as I am now.

I am long through with using Eudora as my email client, but I am still not satisfied with Apple’s Mail app. There is too much missing from a program which, by now, should be much better-managed. Like the Mail app on the iPhone, it simply doesn’t do things right–obvious features are left out, and very annoying bugs or badly-run processes are left to continue from version to version. Like making a mouse, Apple fails repeatedly at getting the email app right.

First of all, Apple’s Mail does not allow you to stop a send-mail process. For example, if you click “Send” for an email and then a moment later realize that you used an outgoing server which would not work from your location, then you are screwed, for the next long while at least. Mail will simply sit there are attempt to complete an impossible process, not allowing you to stop the process, recover the email draft, reset the outgoing server, and getting the mail sent right away.

No, instead, you have to wait for an indeterminate amount of time–sometimes longer than 5 or even perhaps 10 minutes–for Mail to figure out that it can’t do it, when it finally releases your message. Your only alternative is to completely re-write the email and send it correctly this time–which you don’t know is necessary, as the original email could pop back at any time. This is incredibly frustrating.

Apple claims that you can kill the process, but I have tried on several occasions, and it never works.

Second: you cannot edit received mail within the app. This is presumably to preserve the original email as a record. Eudora did not limit you that way, but Apple does. I find it frustratingly stupid. If I really wanted to fake an incoming message, I could just access the record directly and do so with a text editor. Keeping me from doing it in Mail doesn’t keep it from happening, it just makes legitimate uses for the act a royal pain in the ass. Why do it at all? Often times I will want to add notes to an incoming email, so that it will remain in my records and will be accessibly by searching for the email. Keeping separate notes makes it harder to keep track of things.

Third, Apple provides no way except for a “flag” to tag a message. Eudora allowed you to use up to 14 different colors to mark email as different types; I used this feature all the time. There is no reason for Apple not to make that highly useful feature available, and yet they never do.

And finally, the Mail app does a crappy job of marking mail as “Replied to.” When I give my students a test using a web page form, for example, I get their results by email; I then correct them and send them back. But when I reply to their original emails, sometime Mail stubbornly refuses to mark the message as “replied to.” Most will, but some will not, leaving me wondering later if I really replied to it at all.

It seems that if, while working on a reply, if you do a “Save” or close and later re-open a draft, the original message will not be marked. Worse, Apple does not give you the option of manually marking the message as having been replied to.

One other annoyance is the mail search. Eudora made theirs easy and powerful; Apple’s version is hard to handle. It took me a few years to realize that you could search for more than one keyword or element by using “Smart Mailboxes”–not an intuitive solution at all, nor an easy one to use. Even then, I am deeply dissatisfied with how Apple made it work.

Apple has had more than enough time to perfect their main Mail app, and the iPhone Mail app seems destined for the same fate, with no-brainer features like being able to batch-mark messages as read being left ignored for years.

It is strange that Apple can be so adept at most things, but in a few, isolated but important areas, to do such a poor job. I can only assume that such tasks are split into teams, and some teams are not nearly as good as others.

Some months back, there were questions about how Apple would weather the recession–after all, belts were getting tight, doom and gloom were predicted, netbooks were offering great deals, and Apple was this company selling expensive toys at ridiculous profit margins. Surprisingly, not as many people predicted Apple’s downfall–a break from the historical norm, in which Apple’s demise was foretold every other Tuesday. While some predicted that Apple would have to slash prices to get by, most were fairly confident that it would survive.

And survive it has. The Street predicted Apple would report a $1.17 earnings per share this quarter, with the more radical fringe predicting up to $1.27 or even $1.35. The report is out–Apple earned $1.35 per share, with revenue of $8.2 billion. Its shares, already up $15 over the past two weeks, jumped almost $7 in after-market trading.

In short, Apple is doing just fine, thank you. Impressively, in fact, as if there were not a recession. iPod sales are down slightly, but that is compensated for by strong iPhone sales, so much that Apple is having difficulty meeting supply. Apple alone is reported to be raking in as much as 20% of the cell phone industry’s operating profits, with the iPhone quickly becoming the standard everyone else wants to emulate.

When Apple hit $80 in January, people were wary of buying in–but now, in hindsight, it seems like it was a golden opportunity to buy. Already its share price has doubled since then. And Apple is fully expected to announce a breakthrough product in the next few months–a 9-10“ touch-screen tablet which could break new ground like the iPhone did. Apple is very likely on the path to the $200 mark it reached before the financial crisis dragged it down–and just as likely beyond.

[Note in the interest of full disclosure: I own Apple stock. Surprise!]

As I have mentioned before on this blog, I have noticed a repeating patten in the Mac OS’s acquisition of market share. Every first half of the year, usually from January to July, Mac OS market share stays steady, with occasional small ups and downs–but then, starting in August, it rockets upwards and keeps going until December. (Note in the chart below: light blue denotes the late-year growth season, darker blue denotes the early-year doldrums.) And so far, this pattern, which I noticed a few years ago, has held true.

Currently, the Mac OS is hovering less than 10%; if the past trend holds true, we’ll be seeing the Mac market share rise to 11.5% or 12% by December 2009.

I made a similar prediction almost exactly a year ago, guessing that the Mac market share could jump to anywhere from 9% to as high as 10%. Seeing the graph above, you can confirm that I was pretty much right on target: the Mac’s share stopped just shy of 10%. My prediction the previous year that the Mac OS would have an 8% share by the start of 2008 was a bit high, but close–it topped out at about 7.6%. So I am fairly confident that by January 2010, we could be seeing a 12% share, and a year later, maybe 14%. This also would track with my prediction in 2007 that we’d see the Mac market share rise to between 12% and 15% by 2010. As I mentioned before, if that trend continues, Apple could have 30% of market share by 2015–ten times what it had in 2005.

Also, at this rate, the iPhone is set to overtake Linux as an OS by the end of 2010.

Microsoft, smelling blood in the water, continues its cost-based assault on Apple. As usual, they seem to find it difficult to simply stick to the facts, and cannot resist using a fair amount of deception. In this case, it is a “white paper” (something which people associate with objective reports) written by a Microsoft shill who gets a lot of facts wrong. For example:

First off, Apple configurations tend to be higher. Apple makes the case that it, and only it, chooses configurations, …

Part of this is specious. Every computer manufacturer “chooses configurations” to a certain degree. Many manufacturers have limited model lines–in fact, Apple once tried making a plethora of model types and it didn’t work. Every manufacturer creates the models they believe sell best for them. Apple is no different, they just target different market areas. Still, Apple sells 18 models in 7 categories, each with customizable options. Maybe not as many as other manufacturers, but not exactly sparse, either. Here, Kay is trying to sell the “liberal elite” argument: Apple thinks it knows better than you do.

…and it doesn’t want to sell down market because those systems wouldn’t deliver the best experience. Thus, Apple’s lowest-end products are built to higher specifications than average, which cost more, even though Apple could argue that the higher cost has a clear relationship to higher value.

This I don’t think any Apple user would argue with this. Here is where the primary argument comes into play: which makes more sense? And here is where the “Apple tax” being “hidden” is nonsensical–Apple charges up front, that’s one of the reasons it costs more. It is with Windows machines that you get the hidden “taxes,” in the form of malware hassles, built-in adware, OS issues, incompatible hardware issues, maintenance and repairs, and so on. The “coolness” factor is just one of those, and could include not just “wow” coolness, but also ease-of-use and convenience.

All of this is highly subjective, and depends upon who you are and what you can handle. If you are familiar with Windows, know your way around, and have a fair amount of tech experience, then the Windows tax will be less of a burden–you’ll know how to get around the adware, what free apps will save money on anti-virus, and how to deal with a lot of the maintenance and OS issues. You’ll know where to get freeware and add-ons that give you functionality that comes with the Mac OS, and you’ll know how to tinker with settings to optimize performance–and likely you won’t mind spending the time to deal with all this. In this case, you should definitely go with Windows. Most people, however, don’t know most of this stuff, and would definitely benefit from Apple.

Kay then goes on to argue that similarly-specced Windows and Mac machines have a definite price differential–that Mac machines cost more. These comparisons have been made for years. In one sense, such comparisons seem unfair but are not: effectively, you are not just comparing one manufacturer to another, you are pitting one manufacturer against all the others combined. But this is the way things are: it’s Mac versus PC, which means Apple has to be better than a dozen or so other manufacturers, each of which can leverage profits from best-sellers and volume sales to provide savings on the cheapest models. But Apple can’t complain about that.

Something less fair is the quality of parts. For example, Kay compares the HP dv3510nr to the MacBook and derides the Mac’s shortfalls. But he compares only baseline features, not the finer points where a lot more differences appear. The HP has slower RAM and less battery life, is heavier and quite a bit thicker than the Macbook, and has a less solid frame. This is before many of the taken-for-granted, built-in Mac-vs-PC differences–Apple’s lack of ad and trialware, the lack of malware (including CPU hits for AV software and the sheer constant worry involved, not to mention the hassle of dealing with the ones that get through the AV software), its excellent hardware-software compatibility, better language support and flexibility, included software, better customer service and support, features like multi-touch trackpads, the built-in advantages of the OS, etc. etc.

And yet, out of all the manufacturers, making all the hundreds of different systems, this one is perhaps the best alternative to the Macbook. I think that says something–that it takes a dozen or so manufacturers using all of their research & design, and all of the built-in advantages of the Windows platform to make a few machines that compare well to Apple’s basic laptop. One never hears about the many, many, many PC models which fare far worse–which leads to another hidden PC tax: you have to be very savvy and do your research well to find the best Windows machine, whereas with the Apple line, you know that every machine is going to be a good one. Again, not an advantage for the well-informed, but a big difference for those who are not.

The Mac blog at Fortune points out a variety of other issues with the report: the tables of “data” are riddled with errors, old Mac models are compared with current PC models, different standards between the machines in terms of including software costs, etc.

Indeed, some things Kay just gets flat-out wrong; he quotes prices for Apple products that are semi-fictional, and/or at least artificially inflated: MobileMe for $150? Try $100 ($70 with a Mac purchase)–but Kay claims the most expensive family pack price is required. He quotes iLife upgrades at $100, when they are $80, and Office for Mac “starting” at $150, when Amazon has it for $112, and he completely ignores the cheaper $80 iWork suite.

In the end, Kay uses highly specific user needs (unless everyone needs to use Blu-Ray on their machines, for example) inflated with incorrect and often unnecessary prices while ignoring extra costs required for Windows use to make the absurd conclusion that Mac users will pay an extra $3367 over five years in order to use a Mac.

There’s a lot more, but I am on vacation and don’t have the time. Read this review for more information.

In short, the report is, to say the very least, heavily biased. Kay is a paid consultant for Microsoft, which demanded changes before he published it. Not in accuracy, though–they left in the incorrect data, but demanded that Kay remove some information that they didn’t like, such as his note about Microsoft copying much of Apple’s innovations.

The bottom line: for some people, Windows is better; for some, Macs are. But Microsoft just can’t seem to be satisfied with pointing out its advantages, it has to constantly lie and distort to make it seem better than it is.

Sachi and I saw several stores that bore prominent Apple logos. None were official Apple Stores (do they even have any in Shanghai?) but Apple gear apparently has a bit of a reputation here.

Of course, much of the “Apple” gear you see here is fake, like so many of the bags and watches that are sold. This display was in the Yuyuan shopping area; some of the fakes were very good, but some were less convincing.

I think they have to work on getting the Apple packaging style down, however. I don’t think many would be fooled by this:

On the close flip-side of the FUD story is that of new product rumors. While market manipulators create false rumors for profit, a lot of Mac fanatics out there spread rumors which may or may not be false based upon pure enthusiasm. And recent reports of Apple ordering lots of ten-inch touch screens for later this year (now backed up by some high-level news sources) follow up on years of rumors that Apple has been developing a tablet computer. We saw a similar pattern with the iPhone–years of rumors that Apple was developing a phone, official denials of same, then orders by Apple for parts pretty clearly intended for such a product, then the product being announced. There’s no guarantee that the last phase will come to pass, but we have now seen all the prior stages, so there’s a good chance that something is there.

The question is, what would the product cost? Some are speculating that this is Apple’s entry into the “Netbook” market, but with Apple charging an effective $400 or $500 for the iPhone, I kind of doubt that a 10“ touchscreen would come in at netbook prices. If Apple follows its past patterns, it will release an ultra-cool device at premium prices. In the current economy, maybe Apple will change that strategy–the iMac, after all, is now very competitively priced–but somehow, I doubt we’ll be seeing a $500 Mac Touch Tablet.

One thing such a computer would bring is true multi-touch; Apple holds a lot of patents on this, and would be foolish to pass up profiting from it, so long as they can make it work really well. We’ve seen pop-up semi-transparent keyboards and how they might work. There is talk about handwriting recognition, but I doubt that more–Apple is opposed to using a stylus, it seems, and the virtual keyboard just seems to make more sense.

Here are a few mock-ups of a Mac tablet that have been making the rounds:

That last one seems inordinately contrived–taking a Leopard screen and adding iPod/iPhone elements. The keyboard would never be so limited and the virtual scroll wheel would be useless. Likely none of these will be spot-on or even very close, but they do give you an idea of what a 10-inch touchscreen would look like with a bit of Apple styling applied.

We’ll have to see if this even comes to pass at all–who knows, the 10-inch touch screen could be for something we haven’t even thought of yet.

Jon Stewart finally had Jim Cramer on his show last night, and boy, did Cramer come across as a giant ass. Not to mention, a clip Stewart showed of him in a webcast interview from TheStreet.com from a few years back (before the iPhone was released) shows how and why FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) was “fomented” by hedge fund managers (like he was) to bring stocks like Apple down–because though it was “blatantly illegal,” it was easy to do and the SEC wouldn’t go after you for it. In his words (video here):

Jim Cramer: You can’t create yourself an impression that a stock’s down. But you do it anyway ‘cause the SEC doesn’t understand it. That’s the only sense that I would say this is illegal. But a hedge fund that’s not up a lot really has to do a lot now to save itself. This is different from what I was talking about at the beginning where I would be buying the Qs and stuff.

This is just actually blatantly illegal. But when you have six days and your company may be in doubt because you’re down, I think it’s really important to foment if I were one of these guys. …

Aaron Task: Okay. Another stock that a lot of people are focused on right now seems to be Apple.

Jim Cramer: Yeah. Apple’s very important to spread the rumor that both Verizon and ATT have decided they don’t like the phone. It’s a very easy one to do because it’s also you want to spread the rumor that’s it not gonna be ready for MAC World. This is very easy ‘cause the people who write about Apple want that story, and you can claim that it’s credible because you spoke to someone at Apple, ‘cause Apple doesn’t –

Aaron Task: They’re not gonna comment. They’re not gonna –

Jim Cramer: So it’s really an ideal short. Again, if I were a short Apple, I would be working very hard today to get that. The way you would do that is you pick up the phone and you call six trading desks and say, “Listen, I just got off the phone with my contact at Verizon and he has already said, ‘Listen, we’re a Lucky G house. We’re a Samsung house. We’re a Motorola house. There’s no room for Apple. They want too much. We’re not gonna let them in. We’re not gonna let them do what they did to music.’” I think that’s a very effective way to keep a stock down.

Oh, great. So here’s a stock that I have invested in with money that I worked hard for years to earn and save, and there’s some scumwad hedge fund manager who made some bad choices–so to help himself, he goes out and spreads fake rumors to rob me of money. And here is this self-described “banking class hero” scum virtually bragging / instructing others to do this kind of thing, on national TV. And here we are more than two years later, and the guy still has a TV show on CNBC and other high-profile writing gigs.

Yes, unchecked capitalism works so well.

(Click here for an article from RoughlyDrafted on this, from back in 2007.)

I have to say, I really don’t like it. I installed it and used it for a day, and I have to say that the feature I like most is the ability to easily uninstall it and have Safari 3 back. Even using my fairly new late-2008 Macbook Pro, performance was abysmal. Maybe it was just something about my machine, but it was like going from smooth graphics performance to a choppy 1-frame-per-second nightmare. Scrolling would not roll, it sputtered and jumped. And frankly, most of the features are simply unnecessary eye candy–wasteful, in fact.

The Top Sites really doesn’t make sense. It essentially comprises an automatic loading of a dozen commonly-visited sites whether you want them right now or not. I set up my bookmarks so that the top sites I decide on will load when I click the bookmark; Safari 4’s new feature does the same thing with processor-eating and time-consuming graphics, and it chooses sites in an order I no longer control. What’s so great about that?

Cover Flow was never one of my favorite Apple features, and it seems that Apple isn’t happy unless it’s everywhere. Don’t need it. And Tabs on Top is just stupid–like Apple is trying to copy Chrome or something. Tabs on top even limited the ability to remove tabs from one window and drop them into other windows–you now have to grab the tab in a small, specific area to do that (not intuitive, Apple). There’s absolutely nothing wrong with tabs where they are in Safari 3–in fact, having them closer to where your mouse is usually focused (the body of the web page) makes more sense, not less. Why limit functionality so you can place a perfectly reasonable feature in a less familiar and less logical position? And why did they get rid of the blue page-laoding animation in the address bar? I always thought that was the best such indicator among all browsers, and now they just replaced it with a rotating doohickey that gives you no clue as to how much of the page has yet to load.

There were actually a few features that I found useful–the full-page zoom made sense and has been too long in coming, and the smart address and search fields seemed to hold promise, though I didn’t explore them fully. For me, the fact that the extra features choked the graphic performance were the biggest down point. Hopefully the final version of this beta product will perform a lot better, and they’ll make it so you can disable the new features à la carte without having to access the Terminal.

It’s still a trojan, and not a virus or worm, but this one seems to be the first serious malware for the Mac found out there in the wild. It’s been dubbed “OSX.Trojan.iServices.A” and is embedded in some pirated versions of iWork 09 downloaded from Warez and BitTorrent sites. There are reports of people having downloaded installed the trojan, and as many as 20,000 may have downloaded the file. Once installed, the trojan then sends out a signal to its creators telling them that the machine has the trojan; the hackers can then “perform various actions” and install additional malicious software. There are reports that already such software is being used to launch denial-of-service attacks on some web sites.

It is simple to find out if you have been infected. First, did you download a complete iWork installer package from BitTorrent or from a warez site? If so, did you install it? If so, then you should go to your main hard drive directory, open “System,” open “Library,” and then check inside the folder called “StartrupItems.” If there is a file in there called “iWorkServices,” then you’re infected. If not, then relax.

To remove the trojan, this procedure is recommended:

1) (open Terminal.app)
2) sudo su (enter password)
3) rm -r /System/Library/StartupItems/iWorkServices
4) rm /private/tmp/.iWorkServices
5) rm /usr/bin/iWorkServices
6) rm -r /Library/Receipts/iWorkServices.pkg
7) killall -9 iWorkServices

However, if the hackers installed other software on your computer, it may be hard to find it. Most recommended is to back up all data (though not applications or system files), then do a clean wipe-and-reinstall of the OS, re-install your software, and then copy back all your backed-up data files.

Frankly, when I saw the iWork 09 torrent files pop up immediately after the software was released, I was somewhat puzzled. Even if you’re not willing to spring for the $80 package ($71 if you’re in education; I’ve bought every new version that came out), then why were people downloading the torrent anyway? All it is is the exact same installer Apple provides as a test-drive download, but with serials attached. All that’s needed, really, are the serials which people list in the torrent’s comments, and the download from Apple is much, much faster.

This news does all come from Intego, an anti-virus software vendor, so the usual caveats of self-promotion apply. But this one has the ring of truth to it, plus there have been reports from actual users of having been infected.

Anyway, this is still significant in that up to 20,000 people could have been infected (it will be interesting to see how many really were hit by it), making this the first widespread piece of malware for the Mac which can actually have harmful effects on your computer. That said, it is a trojan, so it will not spread like a virus or worm. But it’s also still a major threat, even if to a limited community of Mac users, and likely few if any people from this time forward. But it could also pop up elsewhere–it doesn’t have to be iWork 09, it could probably be applied to any pirated software with an installer that accesses the System.

Apple reports another record quarter, not only beating expectations, but for the first time in its history, topping $10 billion in revenues. Computer sales are up 9%, and iPhone sales have almost doubled. Despite being seen as an almost luxury-class high-end maker of computer software and equipment in harder economic times than most people can remember, despite criticism of being over-priced and aiming too high, Apple has a bigger market share and better brand recognition and appeal than before. Everyone was saying that Apple’s gear was wrong for a bad economy, but the prognosticators in the industry have been forecasting Apple’s doom every other week for more than a decade now. Apple’s doing just fine, thank you.