Posts from — December 2007

Daniel Eran Dilger
What’s Apple going to be up to in 2008? The previous article looked at clues from the Newton MessagePad to the iPhone. Here’s a look at the potential future of the rest of Apple’s businesses, from hardware to software to services.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Rumor sites have long been atwitter about Apple resurrecting the Newton MessagePad. While officially dead for nearly a decade, those rumors got a boost this year when Steve Jobs rolled out the iPhone as a combination “mobile phone, iPod, and breakthrough Internet device.” The iPhone first appeared to be Jobs’ version of the Newton, but after the iPod Touch revealed Apple’s long term plans for targeting a wider range of devices, the idea of a tablet assistant gained new credence as a realistic possibility. What does Apple’s past reveal about its future? Here’s a look.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Forbes’ Dan Lyons, author of the Fake Steve Jobs blog, decided it would be entertaining to parody the unplugging of ThinkSecret by pretending his own blog was under threat from Apple. Except that in order to do that, he had to stop pretending to be FSJ and start pretending that the real Steve Jobs was threatening him. That’s where he left the world of parody and reentered the familiar territory of lucrative scandal.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
In another example of the “Apple is the new Microsoft” campaign, Computerworld’s Gregg Keizer recently reported his speculation that patents Apple filed related to restricted execution of applications were not only similar to Microsoft’s notorious Windows Genuine Advantage spyware, but actually a bit worse. That’s wrong, here’s why.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
CNET’s ZDnet bloggers are becoming a parody of themselves in a mad rush to see who can serve up the most inane example of bottom feeding. Somewhat ironically, their excitement for all things Microsoft has been picked up by a major news source: as a joke.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Notorious Zoon Award winner George Ou is again trying to convince the world that Mac OS X’s security is in shambles while Microsoft has solved the security crisis it created, at least for users of new PCs and when excluding that pesky problem of vast existing networks of compromised Windows bots that plague us all with mountains of spam no matter what platform we use.

This time, the problem isn’t just his penchant for getting facts wrong, failing to understand anything about the subjects he writes, orchestrating elaborate conspiracy theories, or dramatically casting derision on anyone who corrects him. Instead, he’s teamed up with ZDNet cohorts to disingenuously present false information he knows is wrong because he’s been corrected about posting vulnerability statistics from Secunia without context before.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
This year, Apple gave the iPhone and the new Classic, Touch, and Nano models improved TV out features while harmonizing the AV cables used by its entire product line. Here’s a look at what’s what’s changed, a review of Apple’s recently released AV Cable kits, why the invented controversy about Apple’s new cables is simply misinformed, and how using an iPod for video output compares against Apple TV.

AppleInsider | Using iPod & iPhone Video Out: Background and In-Depth Review

Technorati Tags: Apple, Apple TV, iPhone, iPod, Review

Daniel Eran Dilger
It is popular among Windows Enthusiasts to dismiss Apple’s use of open source as both a self-serving crutch to offset the company’s imagined inability to write its own code–insisting that Mac OS X is really just FreeBSD with some extra graphics tacked on is a common meme among certain wags–and also a one-sided grab that takes more than it gives. In reality, Apple does a variety of things for the open source community that are often ignored. Here’s a closer look.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Apple appears to be following up its successful strategy of enabling code reuse of software designed for Unix/Linux through work on new efforts to sample existing code tied to Windows. Here’s what’s involved.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Microsoft’s rapid rise to power and its ability to hold onto control over the PC desktop throughout the 90s has long been revered by pundits as a classic example of copying an existing business model and then defeating all competition through price efficiencies, despite the fact that Microsoft’s Windows software has only ever gotten progressively more expensive with the passing of time. This copy-killing strategy, also described as “embrace, extend, and extinguish,” is now reaching a dead end. Here’s why.

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