Posted on August 30th, 2009
These days, I’m writing more about software testing for the uTest blog than for my own, so I want to begin linking to some of my posts as I write them.
First up:
The Hassles of Supporting Older Products – Adobe vs. Apple
On Friday, Apple released version 10.6 of their Macintosh OS X operating system. “Snow Leopard,” as this new version is called, is an unusual release for Apple. Whereas previous updates of OS X often brought big usability changes, Snow Leopard is all about under the hood improvements. It’s faster and better, but not different.
So it came as a huge surprise last week when John Nack, senior product manager for Adobe Photoshop, announced that Adobe wasn’t supporting the two and half year old CS3 version of their products on Snow Leopard and would instead encourage their customers to upgrade to CS4. Nack later clarified that the CS3 products actually work fine – Adobe just couldn’t allocate resources to fix any undiscovered problems. Despite these assurances, many people were confused and upset, especially because Snow Leopard wasn’t supposed to be a major upgrade for Apple.
Keep reading…
Posted on July 22nd, 2008
After saying such bad things about the iPhone 3G, I thought I would point out that the new 2.0 firmware is nice.
“Hello!” from the new iPhone Wordpress application.
Posted on July 18th, 2008
The iPhone 3G is very nice, but there are also some disappointments. Perhaps the biggest for me is that it won’t charge using the iPod interface in my Audi A3. Actually, it won’t charge in a lot of things (lots of cars and quite a few docks) because Apple decided to change the charging standard at the last minute.
It turns out that Apple dropped the Firewire charging circuit on the 3G model in favor of using a dedicated USB circuit. Any device that uses the Firewire pins to recharge an iPhone/iPod will not charge the iPhone 3G. Firewire charges with 12V while USB charges with only 5V. Most cars have 12V internal systems, so their iPod chargers use 12V because it’s incredibly convenient.
I haven’t bought my own iPhone 3G yet, but it now seems like I’ll have to wait until an adapter appears. Fixing this shouldn’t be too hard, and it sounds like the kind of thing Belkin will create and charge $30 to buy. Still very annoying.
Details here.
Posted on February 11th, 2008
Being both an iPhone owner and an Audi owner, I absolutely love Apple’s new commercial titled “Cars.”
Consequently, I also think the Audi Superbowl commercial was the best of the night. I wonder if I can use my iPhone to find the best deal on a $118,000 Audi R8?
Posted on January 15th, 2008
As TechCrunch, BloggingStocks, and others have reported, Apple’s stock price fell hard both during and after Steve Jobs’ keynote (summary here). Reasons vary for the now $12 drop, but certainly part of this is related to the overall market drop today on the Citigroup news. However, BloggingStocks hit on three other distinctly Apple reasons:
- The iPhone quite frankly hasn’t done as well as expected. Selling 4 million units so far isn’t bad, but they promised 10 million unit sales in 2008. Given that there were no updates to the core product itself (3G support), the expectation for a boost in sales this year beyond that figure will be hard to come by. Expect Apple to make their target but not kill it. End result: the stock is probably overvalued because it’s priced with higher expectations.
- The price drop for the Apple TV lowers its margins. I’m not so concerned about this, mostly because it’s a dirt cheap system to begin with, its specs aren’t dramatically changing, and it’s demand curve will likely change in the coming year because of the new movie rental deal.
- Nobody is really sure about the Macbook Air. It’s a cool product, but at $1,799 it almost seems overpriced. At $3,000 when equipped with a 64GB solid state drive, it definitely seems overpriced. My take is that it’s a gorgeous product as usual, but there’s nothing here to dramatically shift the market for lightweight portables. The people who bought thin notebooks before will find this interesting, but the average buyer will find more value in a regular Macbook at a far lower price point. Expect this product to do well, but not stellar.
End result: the stock just doesn’t have that much to go on. The biggest news from a revenue point of view is the iTunes rentals, but Apple makes very little off of traditional iTunes sales. If this boosts Apple TV sales, that might be nice, but it’s still an unproven product with a poor track record. Rentals might sell more iPods or notebooks, but all that is probably already baked into the price.
On the other hand, someone who thinks the Apple TV will be the next iPod could make a very nice purchase on AAPL today.
What do you think of the Macbook Air?
Macbook Air?
- Need one (25%, 1 Votes)
- Want one (0%, 0 Votes)
- No thanks (75%, 3 Votes)
Total Voters: 4
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