Joe Maller.com

Called it! $100 iPhone rebate

Me, yesterday:

The price drop on iPhone was shocking. I was all set to buy a new Nano, but the idea that my iPhone now costs one-8GB-nano less has me waiting. This seems like a big enough PR blunder, or setup, that Apple will followup with some easy goodwill. I’m still going to get a new nano, but I’m going to wait at least until the weekend.

Today Apple does it again: To all iPhone customers

…[W]e need to do a better job taking care of our early iPhone customers as we aggressively go after new ones with a lower price. Our early customers trusted us, and we must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these.

Therefore, we have decided to offer every iPhone customer who purchased an iPhone from either Apple or AT&T, and who is not receiving a rebate or any other consideration, a $100 store credit towards the purchase of any product at an Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store. Details are still being worked out and will be posted on Apple’s website next week. Stay tuned.

We want to do the right thing for our valued iPhone customers. We apologize for disappointing some of you, and we are doing our best to live up to your high expectations of Apple.

I think they fully expected this reaction having done something similar to quell outrage after dropping the price on Aperture last year. It’s a win-win for Apple, if there was no outrage, then eh, they just sell more phones. If there is outrage, as there was, Apple wins, probably more.

The intial news cycle only lasts so long, Apple got some press for the new iPods yesterday, then got more as the media picked up on all the iPhone owners who felt robbed.

All publicity is good publicity.

Apple waited just long enough for things to die down a little, then grabbed everyone’s attention again with a remarkable conciliatory, gesture of goodwill. Happy customers, more coverage. The initial news cycle stretched two or three times what it was and ends on an undisputed high note.

It’s called public relations for a reason. How much does it cost to grab people’s attention? How much to stay at the top of the news cycle?

Apple is playing the game masterfully.

And my new iPod nano is suddenly half off.


September 5th Apple Event

Pre-event predictions:

  • touch iPod, basically the iPhone without the phone
  • Some sort of mobile iTunes Store
  • new version of iTunes
  • iPhone software update with some noticeable new features
  • still no iPhone SDK
  • New iPod Nano (predicted here)

Other than that, I have no idea. I’ve got a bunch of browser windows open and will be posting on Twitter. Reactions posted here a little later.

Aftermath

Overall, a pretty impressive run of new stuff. I’ve also never been this accurate in predictions, basically 100%, although there wasn’t much swinging for the fences in that list.

iPod Nano

I’m getting one. Mostly for Nike+, but I do really like the new form factor. It’s astonishing how small these things are getting. The colors seem very mid-80s, but I expect the metal will have have more depth in person. One more video-playing device won’t hurt to have on the next plane flight either. (can we get Yo Gabba Gabba on iTunes pls?)

iPod Touch

The iPod Touch looks great, but I’m mostly surprised at how much it doesn’t do.

  • No Email
  • No Maps
  • No Stocks
  • No Weather
  • No Notes (not that I’ve ever actually used iPhone Notes)

If email was there I’d be hard pressed to justify breaking an existing phone contract for iPhone. But the missing features are most likely conscious choices to differentiate iPhone and to maintain the focus of iPod. There’s room for the inevitable To Do List application which will come alongside Leopard’s To Do list framework.

iPod Shuffle

The iPod Shuffle is close to a perfect product. We got one as a gift early this year along with one of the best wooden watches and we both love using it at the gym. New colors, it really doesn’t need much else, except maybe an internal clock and a bit more space.

iPhone Price Drop

The price drop on iPhone was shocking. I was all set to buy a new Nano, but the idea that my iPhone now costs one-8GB-nano less has me waiting. This seems like a big enough PR blunder, or setup, that Apple will followup with some easy goodwill. I’m still going to get a new nano, but I’m going to wait at least until the weekend.

iTunes Everywhere

The iTunes & Starbucks integration is jus asonishingly huge. This is the beginning of a complete re-imagining of how recorded music works. The idea of a “record store” just evaporated throughout the air we breathe. In a few years this system will be used all over. Any place that plays music will be able to enter into a music distribution profit sharing arrangement with Apple. Doubtlessly they’ll also be able to use custom playlists to promote local or smaller artists. This is the beginning of iTunes Everywhere. Anytime you hear a song, you will be able to take out your iPod and buy a copy. I fully expect to see this in the Apple Stores in a few months as well.

This was the promise, it’s finally happening.

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link: Sep 05, 2007 12:04 pm
posted in: Apple
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SlickSpeed

Valerio Proietti, author of the MooTools JavaScript framework wrote a benchmarking tool called SlickSpeed. This tool runs a number of JavaScript libraries against a suite of CSS selector tests. The source is available from Google Code, I downloaded a copy so I could run tests against the most recent versions of Prototype, MooTools and JQuery against one another.

prototype
1.5.1.1
jQuery
1.1.4
MooTools
r873 (svn)
MooTools
v1.2dev
Firefox 2.0.0.6
(Gecko/20070725, Mac)
210 454 218 243*
Firefox 2.0.0.6
(Gecko/20070725, Windows XP)
177 339 180 164*
Safari 2.0.4
(419.3)
1385** 372 837 727*
Webkit
(AppleWebKit/523.5)
120 185 154 149
iPhone
(AppleWebkit/420+ Version 3.0 Mobile/1C28)
35975 13224 25594 22811
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7
(Windows XP)
969** 421 867 811*

Results are in milliseconds (ms), smaller numbers are better. Asterisks indicate errors returned during the test.

All tests were served and run from a MacBook Pro 2.16 GHz Core Duo, iPhone tests were run on a 1st Generation 8 GB model. Firebug was disabled for the Firefox tests.

A few things which are immediately apparent:

MooTools is a solid performer. Not the fastest and not the slowest, but Valerio Proietti’s code is consistently impressive.

JQuery has gotten significantly faster in the most recent version, John Resig is also writing really good code.

At least as applies to Valerio’s set of selector tests, JQuery is the fastest library on iPhone, nearly twice as fast as MooTools and almost three times faster than Prototype. Joe Hewitt’s iUI project uses Prototype, how much would iPhone performance benefit from switching to JQuery?

The Webkit team is writing some seriously crazy speed optimizations. If they could just get Safari to stop leaking memory we’d be all set (don’t go looking all smug Firefox, you’re standing in a puddle). As it stands now, when Leopard ships Safari will have the fastest JavaScript engine available. The difference between jQuery and Prototype on Webkit and iPhone is surprising, iPhone runs JQuery nearly three times faster than Prototype using the same browser core.

Firefox runs faster in virtualized Windows than it does native on the Mac. Camino (Mac native version of Mozilla/Firefox/Gecko) was slightly faster, but still not as fast as Firefox Windows.

I’ve got one project wrapping up soon which used MooTools and I’ve been very happy with it. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of buzz about JQuery and might be working that into another project. These tests were mostly just done to satisfy my own of curiosity.


iPhone two-way video prototype

The Ecamm brothers got two-way video conferencing working between two iPhones. As good as I think the iPhone is now, just wait a few months when this thing is really broken open. (link via Buzz @ C4)

I don’t know why I’ve waited this long (ok I do, my life has a density), I’m jailbreaking my phone tonight.


iPhone battery nonsense, round 2

So some attention-deprived class action lawyers are suing Apple because of a false statement about iPhone batteries that appeared in a sensationalist article a few weeks ago. Patrick commented on my previous post with a link to a Business 2.0 posting about this. I’m sure it’ll be all over the press in the coming days.

Gizmodo summed this up perfectly with “dumbtastically stupid.” That phrase could also apply to Business 2.0, but would need a few other clauses added to cover petty, wrong and dull. Oh, and broke. And clueless. Reinforcing all of that, this bit of the Business 2.0 posting stood out as just pathetic:

My memory is not what it used to be, but I seem to recall that it wasn’t until after the iPhone went on sale that Apple issued a formal description of how many times the battery could be recharged before it might need replacement, in which case there might be something to the complaint.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt, you are getting paid to blog, how hard is it to use Google? Or, you know, just remember something that was a huge stink in the area you cover professionally just two and a half weeks ago? You are paid to blog. Find the damn link. Here: Apple – Batteries – iPhone.

Apple’s battery page clearly states:

A properly maintained iPhone battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity at 400 full charge and discharge cycles. You may choose to replace your battery when it no longer holds sufficient charge to meet your needs.

I’m pretty sure this all started with Kent German and Donald Bell’s original iPhone review for CNET, also published by CNN:

Unfortunately, the Phone does not have a battery that a user can replace. That means you have to send the iPhone to Apple to replace the battery after it’s spent (Apple is estimating one battery will keep its full strength for 400 charges–probably about three years’ worth of use).

That slightly misleading paragraph, which implies the battery will be spent after 400 cycles, first echoed by Gizmodo, was later breathlessly parroted and made more dire by MSNBC’s Bob Sullivan:

The iPhone battery will only survive about 300-400 recharges, the company says.

Well that’s just completely wrong. Bob seemingly didn’t bother to check his facts against the original source. Gizmodo at least had the good sense to recant. John Gruber of Daring Fireball named Sullivan Jackass of the Week, the title could have gone to any number of people.

Apple has sold over 100 million iPods, none of those have had user-replaceable batteries. That obviously hasn’t stopped what seems like every fourth person on the sidewalk from buying and using iPods.

Frankly, I doubt most people ever change the battery on their cell phones and Apple discovered this during market research. I don’t ever recall doing so with my RAZR, for the most part I just charged that POS every night. I had a spare for my previous LG, but never used it. The iPhone’s fixed battery was most likely a well-founded design consideration reinforced by the unmitigated success of the sealed-battery iPod.

This whole mess should have been pretty much dealt with a few weeks ago. Jason Snell thoroughly covered this in MacWorld back on July 12th. Yet I was talking with a friend about the iPhone earlier this week and she brought up the 300 charges number.

No one ever sees corrections in the news. If a story gets in the paper, no matter how wrong, people will believe it and very few will ever find out that the truth was largely contradictory.

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link: Jul 28, 2007 12:35 am
posted in: Apple
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150 iPhones per minute

During their quarterly conference call Apple stated they sold 270,000 iPhones in the first 30 hours. That’s somewhere between $75,000 to $90,000 each minute. Apple’s stock punched through $150 after hours and was still trading over $148 when I published this.

The day prior, AT&T claimed activation of 146,000 iPhones over the first two days. That figure seemed very low and the news duly tanked Apple’s stock.

Another way of reading those numbers is that AT&T botched 124,000 activations. Considering my own iPhone activation experience and that of many friends, this seems very possible. Thankfully things have been flawless since.


iPhone and the non-deleting email

I’ve seen this happen a few times, an email message just will not delete. Clicking the trash can shows the message delete animation, but the message just reappears behind the animation. The same thing happens in list view. The solution is to reboot the phone, everything should be fine after a restart.

To reboot the phone, hold the wake button for several seconds. A slider will come up asking you to power off. Shut it down, wait a second or two and then press wake to turn it back on. Your email should work normally.

I’ve found rebooting every few days is a good way to clear any slightly odd behavior or minor slowdowns. iPhone is a 1.0 release and these are software bugs. I’m confident they’ll be fixed in a future update.

Update: Force-quitting Mail can also help. To force-quit any iPhone application, just hold the home button for about 10 seconds, until the home screen displays.



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