Apple leaks clues to new "Back to the Mac" products, including mystery product
Summary: It seems that Apple has jumped the gun a bit and posted up placeholder pages on its support forum giving us clues as to what might be upcoming.
It seems that Apple has jumped the gun a bit and posted up placeholder pages on its support forum giving us clues as to what might be upcoming.
So, what are these clues?
Well, there's a new placeholder for MacBook Air related discussion:
There's also placeholders for iPhoto 11, GarageBand 11 and iMovie 11.
There's also a placeholder for a mystery product:
Great work Spidersweb for spotting this!
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Talkback
Mystery item: Verizon iphone
Changing name again?
I wonder if Apple will change the name again to Apple Computers.
RE: Apple leaks clues to new
"..will change the name again to Apple Computers"
Don't bet on it. Apple is leading on all fronts, they can chew gum and walk at the same time. Microsoft, start your Xerox machines...
What did Apple invent?
GUI? Nope.
Webkit? They took KHTML and changed it. They improved it, but that still isn't them "inventing" anything.
The mouse?
The Keyboard?
No, no.
What did they invent?
What did Apple invent?
However, what Apple did invent is the User Experience that you get with every Apple product--something that can't really be quantified in hardware or software alone, but is the sum total of the two working together. Nobody else has made the desktop computer as easy to use, as integrated and as reliable all in the same package. This doesn't mean it can't be done, but rather that if you want to get a truly integrated product, you have to spend as much or more money for the combination of hardware quality, hardware performance and OS capability. Reducing any one of these components reduces the overall experience of using the device.
Geeks and techies can meet or even beat Apple's off-the-shelf devices, but the average consumer is not a geek or a techie--they don't know the difference between a GUI and a CLI. The Consumer is where Apple aims its products and the Consumer is learning that Apple's products tend to be a better value.
My point, in case you didn't understand it
Copying, or re-imagining?
The GUI created by Apple was based on a Xerox concept, yes. If I remember, Xerox invited both Jobs and Gates--among others--to demonstrate it. Xerox themselves cancelled development, saying nobody would ever have a use for it; Microsoft flat turned it down while Apple engineers actually worked with the Xerox engineers to create the first computer GUI--essentially licensing the concept from Xerox and expanding on it. When Microsoft found out that Apple was working on it for their new Macintosh computer, they rushed out their own Windows 1 simply to say they were first--and compared to Apple's System software was hardly better than a CLI on a graphic background. Who copied whom?
The mouse and keyboard were already established I/O devices even before the desktop computer became popular, since all computers used keyboards of one sort or another pretty much from day one while the mouse was invented somewhere back in the 60s. Apple never made claim to inventing them, but they were the first to make the keyboard a physical part of the computer (AppleII) and the mouse a standard means of point-and-click computing with the Lisa if not the AppleIII before it. Again, Apple didn't invent it, but they did make it something people <i>wanted to use</i> as compared to a mere peripheral device.
And this is where Apple has been the leader for all these years while other companies have been 'Xerox copies'. Apple takes things that should have been cutting edge from the outset but failed and turned them into things people really want to use. They've made their mistakes, yes, but on average every new device Apple creates, despite there being "prior art", is different enough that people swarm to adopt it, forcing other companies to copy the style if they even want to stay competitive. Do you think Microsoft would be the OS leader if they were still using a CLI instead of creating Windows? Yes, they had a huge installed base of users in the enterprise, but consumers really didn't start using desktop computers until Windows 95 came out, which essentially looked like Mac System 6 which had already been on the market for several years. The funny thing is that I, as a user of a 9-year-old Mac Plus had to teach managers and supervisors at the plant where I worked how to use the file system, it was so different. That's right, Win95 looked and worked almost exactly like the OS I'd been using on a Mac. Again, who copied whom?
It's not who invents the technology, it's who makes that technology work in a way that the average user wants to use it. In that, Apple has been a leader for over 25 years.
Apple the leader?
Too many assumptions on not enough data
Your first assumption is that Android is "...kicking Apple's butt..." followed by "...iPhone being dethroned completely over time,..." At the moment, at least for the June quarter, Apple's iPhone activation numbers were 20% higher than Android in general and the iPhone's activations were 40% higher than all Android devices shipped during that quarter according to Gartner estimates. That certainly doesn't look like their butt is getting kicked nor does it look like any pending negative trend for the moment.
Your second assumption is that there <i>are</i> 20+ iPad competitors when in all honesty there are none, though I won't deny that some are in the works. As yet, there is no direct competitor other than the netbook, whose sales appear to be slipping compared to this time last year.
However, Apple's iDevices are not Apple's sole product lines. A lot of people--mostly anti-Apple zealots--say that Apple has been ignoring their computers for too long. I disagree, but I will acknowledge that they haven't been changing the styles that much, only doing performance upgrades which are internal and working on semi-annual software updates. The article above points out the belief that most of this event will be focused on software.
Also, if you have read the transcript of Steve Jobs' discussion during Monday's financial report, Apple is not specifically a hardware vendor, so a change to "Apple Computers" would be a misnomer. Rather, Apple tends to focus on the software, designing the hardware that can work best with that software. The interview with John Scully bears this out.
RE: Apple leaks clues to new
:)
RE: Apple leaks clues to new
That would be more appropriate considering the content of all of his blogs for the last few months.