Unsought Input

I found an interesting article today that says the acutal inventor of the iPod is not Apple but some furniture salesman named Kane Kramer from the UK.  Apparently his invention was patented in 1979 (I believe he calls himself a revolutionary) but since he couldn’t afford to pay the costs to keep the patent, it fell to public domain where Apple more than likely found it and gobbled it up .  I do admit, it’s a great design and years ahead of it’s time.

I am borrowing this picture from his site that shows his early patent drawings.

What I also find interesting is that no mention of this guy would have ever come up if Burst Patents hadn’t tried to cash in on Apple’s sucess by trying to claim the iPod violated it’s own patents.  In Apple’s defence they said, wait, no, you don’t have the patent, we stole it (legally) from this British Bloke over here.  Oh, and thanks for the good idea, buddy, here’s a free iPod for your trouble!

Too bad his iPod broke after less than a year.  I feel kinda bad for this guy, I mean, if he had been able to hold onto his patent would we all be listening to music on our Kane Digital Audio Player?  Or would Apple have found another public domain patent to copy? It’s always interesting to me how these things turn out.  Any comments?

My wife surprised me with an iPhone. Huge surprise. I like my Treo 650, except for one major flaw - it periodically freezes up and requires a reset. This was frustrating for me, but even more frustrating for her - if she called and I didn’t answer, she had no way to know if I would get the message in a little while or hours and hours later, when I finally realized my phone was dead.

So she surprises me with an iPhone. I check to make sure I have the latest version of iTunes and plug it in. Then, nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. Windows tries to “add new hardware” but it can’t find the drivers for the iPhone. I try manually looking for them under iTunes’ folder, but no *.inf files are to be found.

Apple is well known for their focus on eas of use, so why am I having problems? My iPhone will work quite happily with my PC, once I pay Microsoft $100 or so.

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A lot of people are buying laptops and skipping desktop computers entirely. Laptops are portable, more energy-efficient, and wifi connections are pretty easy to find just about anywhere. Today’s laptops and notebooks are fairly comparable to desktops in speed and memory. The one drawback is that desktops are still a lot easier to add on to.

So what do you do if your trusty iBook is running out of hard drive space? You could buy a larger internal hard drive and replace your old one, but then you have to deal with installing OSX, reinstalling all your applications, and moving all your old files over. This applies to Windows computers too - swapping out the hard drive of your Dell requires all the same tediousness.

If you just need more space to store your photos, music, and videos, and external storage might be the right solution. You have a few options here, and there are a few tricky details you’ll want to know about that I’ll cover below.

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A few months ago I was looking at blood sugar meters and cholesterol testers for family members.  I have had my blood tested for various things throughout my life and I’ve seen the standard drugstore-issue glucose monitors in action, so I had a very basic idea of what I was looking for.  But I wasn’t exactly an expert, so I went online.

Now one of the benefits of living in the Internet age is that if you need to learn about any technological device, from MP3 players to video cards to application servers, you can quickly and easily find out all about it online.  Making a major purchase?  Some skillful Googling will lead you to novice-level tutorials, product comparisons, recommendations from normal users, and jargon-laden details from experts.

Unless you want to buy a glucose meter.  I found virtually nothing except for short blurbs on retailers’ sites.  I even had a hard time finding product info from manufacturers!

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Earlier we wrote about why people will pay for free music. Apple’s Steve Jobs wrote that he would happily remove all the DRM locks from iTunes if the record companies would let him.

Now one company is. EMI and Apple reached a deal to allow totally restriction-free songs for sale. The kicker is that the songs will cost 30 cents more that the locked-down DRM versions.

At ZDNet, they think the success of this move rests on three factors: will this bring in more customers, will the new customers stop file trading, and is the extra $0.30 per track worth it to the record companies?

I think the first question is a good one but the last two miss the point completely. The problem here is the way the issue is framed: the record companies have long been more concerned with stopping file trading and suing “pirates” than actually making money.

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Steve Jobs is right again. In a post on the Apple web site he reacts to calls for Apple to open their Fairplay DRM system to licensing with an interesting (and insightful) proposal:

“The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.”

This has gotten a lot of coverage today, from Business Week to the New York Times. Jobs’ post was prompted by a number of European countries examining (and in some cases declaring illegal) the digital rights management (DRM) system that Apple uses with the iTunes music store and the iPod. The system is there to make sure that if you cough up $.99 for a song, you don’t spread it around the internet for free. These countries say the effect is to lock customers in to iPods and iTunes so they can’t buy another player without forfeiting their music.

Jobs’ response? He never wanted to have a DRM system in the first place. He would gladly dump the whole thing, and let you buy music anywhere you wanted and use any player you wanted - but it’s not up to Apple. Although you might buy your Ben Folds from iTunes, Apple doesn’t have any of the rights to that music - the vast majority of the time, the rights are owned by a major record label, with just four labels dominating the market. They require DRM.

That said, why wouldn’t Apple like the idea of DRM? A naive observer (or record company executive) would say it’s good for Apple, too, since it means iPod buyers will use the iTunes store and vice-versa, and it forces people to buy songs instead of pirating them. This is why Steve Jobs has been so successful. He thinks more people will pay for free music than music tied up in the rules and inconvenience of DRM. And he’s right.

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Apple gets a lot of credit for putting effort into the user experience. Many attribute the success of the original Mac, iPods, the iTunes Music Store, iBooks, and their other products to ease of use.

But building a brand based on user experience can be much harder than, say, a brand based on low prices (like Dell) or ubiquity (like Microsoft). Because it doesn’t take too much to go from “it just works” to “it doesn’t work,” which has been my experience with iTunes 7. The worst problem: it freezes up whenever I don’t have an internet connection.

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Today Apple finally released details about their new iPhone. There have been rumors and speculation about how Apple could bring it’s iPod design skills to the mobile phone world for years now. Lots of web sites have posted predictions, feature wish lists, insider information and supposed leaks, including this one.

Does the iPhone live up to the hype? We’ll take a look at it by going down the list of our 10 predictions about the Apple iPhone.

1. Simple controls. - Apple has struck a blow against the proliferation of buttons by creating a phone with only a few buttons and a large touchscreen. This is a welcome change from smartphones and PDA-phones which have a whole QUERTY keyboard. The keyboard is nice the 5 percent of the time I’m taking notes to texting, but 95 percent of the time they just make it harder to hit the button I do want.

2. Consistent controls - This is a little bit harder to judge without having an iPhone in hand to play with, but from the demos and the fact that the iPhone runs OSX it seems likely you won’t have to learn totally different ways to navigate your voicemail, songs, and photos any more. At the very least Apple has solved the mystery of the Green “dialâ€? button and the OK button.

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Since the dawn of time, man has wondered: will Apple come out with a iPhone, and will it match the success of the iPod?

This is the Internet, of course, so by the dawn of time I mean three or four years ago, well before the Motorolla Rokr came out. Despite whipping the rumor mill into a frenzy, the Rokr ended up being not much of an Apple iPhone and was immediately overshadowed by the iPod Nano.

Now, it seems Apple may be actually coming out with an iPhone in early 2007. And you are going to want it. Here’s why.

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