Charles on… anything that comes along

I haven’t written anything about the earthquake and tsunamis in the Indian Ocean because, hell, I was away, and there seemed little to add to everything that was going on. (Of course, if you haven’t donated yet, then go to see how Giftaid works, and how you can increase your donation by 18 per cent if you’re a higher-rate UK taxpayer. That’s what we did.)

But it was salutary to hear Bob Geldof on the Today program, pointing out in response to Michael Howard’s claim that this is the worst disaster we will see in our lifetimes, that the events there have so far killed 100,000 people; but the famine in Africa from 1984 onwards has killed 1 million. One is an act of nature, or God; the other is “an act of man”.

Gives you something to chew on, huh.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Annual piracy figures from the IFPI: yes, but what do they prove? (24 June 2005; score: 47.12%)
• Richard Dawkins's book reduced to 10 lines (24 July 2007; score: 36.15%)
• It's only possible once a year: Borat, and then the Eurovision judging (12 May 2007; score: 32.73%)

Over at MacDailyNews there a report that IGG Software, which has - had - a product (for the Mac) called “iWork” has changed the name to “iBiz”.

Which gets all but one obstacle out of the way to a launch. Yes, what about iWork.com? The whois record gives:

Domain Name: IWORK.COM

Created on: 22-Aug-95

Expires on: 21-Aug-07

Last Updated on: 15-Nov-04

Administrative Contact:

yucca@att.net

iwork.com

Chris Cha P.O. Box 750565 Forest Hills, NY 11375

Note the long expiry date, and early registration. We’ll see. But it seems to me that we’re going to see something work-y next week. (Though if it includes Appleworks, I’m staying away from it.)

Update Tues 1030: I emailed Ian Gillespie, who is in charge at IGG Software, asking why the change of name. His reply: We feel that the new name better reflects the direction in which we see our product going, towards business management and not just time-billing. It was a difficult choice to make, but we feel that the transition will be smooth and we look forward to improving iBiz.

Which to me neatly sidesteps the question of why change it now. (Some of the links on the website were still showing “iWork” last night.) He hasn’t replied so far to a query about why now, and whether a Cupertino-based company in any way helped the decision. (Further update 1100: MacRumors has this down. Apple has sweetened IGG to hand over the iWork name, no doubt for some nice folding stuff, as IGG had registered for the trademark first.)

And what could iWork contain? Certainly Keynote. Something for documents. But I wonder whether Apple would really step on Microsoft’s toes on this one. It would need a spreadsheet from scratch - which could only be a poor Excel copy. Then again, Appleworks has that. Perhaps it is a ground-up rewrite of that suite, with some more thrown in. Aimed at the punter who can’t afford MS Office (as not many people can, if it’s their own money they’re spending).

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Apple sues Think Secret over headless iMac and iWork: yeah, but try finding them (5 January 2005; score: 93.69%)
• Mail 2.1: could we have some better IMAP, please? Because 33 crashes in 6 hours is too much. (15 October 2007; score: 49.83%)
• These things I found interesting.. 8 September 2005 (evening) (8 September 2005; score: 45.6%)

OK. So Think Secret has its very interesting rumour of a headless iMac to cost $500, to be announced on January 11 at Macworld. (Update Tue 1055: my story for the Indie on this, which is pretty much pro-forma, is here.)The basic idea being that people are buying iPods like they’re going out of fashion (which in a way they are..), and find them easy to use, they’ll want to buy a cheap iMac without a monitor for about $500 (say, 400 pounds) because they’ll have a spare monitor hanging around from their old virus-ridden PC which they’ll want to be getting rid of.

The specs Think Secret offers are:

• 256MB of RAM
• USB 2.0
• FireWire 400
• 10/100 BASE-T Ethernet
• 56K V.92 modem
• AirPort Extreme support (note that’s support, not the wireless thing itself. Lots of Mac gear comes with “support”, meaning “you have to buy this part yourself.”)

There’s also the expectation it will have a G4 processor running at 1.25GHz.

Now let’s rehearse arguments in favour of this happening. They are:

1. Lots of people might be tempted to buy a $500 machine, especially if it came with a big software bundle for things like music encoding (iTunes), movie editing (iMovie), consumer DVD production (iDVD), making your own music (the really-not-as-usefful-to-so-many-people-as-you-might-suppose Garageband). And lets you do email and surfing easily.
2. People might like it if they thought there weren’t going to be any viruses and spyware issues.
3. $500 is an easy price - hell, you bought an iPod for about that money.
4. Other PC companies are selling cheap PCs.
5. the latest iMac has a screen built in and it’s pretty thin.
6. Apple could make this so the only thing you could add would be the Airport (Wi-Fi). You couldn’t change the hard drive, perhaps not even the RAM. After all, Apple doesn’t care if you expand the machine afterwards; it makes no money from that. Making it non-expandable could cut down costs. And there must be a motherboard template that could be re-used from the iBook.
7. Think Secret has a pretty good hit rate on rumours.

Got those? Now let’s look at the arguments against.

1. Apple has never aimed for the low-cost market. It doesn’t feel the need to wrestle that pig.
2. It likes a 25% - or more - margin on its hardware. It is very careful not to cannibalise sales of its pricier machines - see how it doesn’t advertise the eMac (a cathode-ray tube G4 desktop) but pushes the iMac like mad. The eMac is pretty cheap, but not $500, and leaving its monitor out won’t make it a $500 machine. (Then again, the eMac is pretty much the template of this “headless iMac”.) How are you going to make $125 from something with the specs above?
3. Apple has never marketed OSX (or previous OSs) on the “free from viruses” tag, despite years of journalists and amateur marketers asking them why on earth they don’t. Steve Jobs is on record saying last August that doing that would just be a red flag to virus writers.
4. A $500 iMac would surely cannibalise sales of more expensive machines. Peope would buy them in preference to something else. Apple does not pursue market share over profit. Profit is rare in the PC business. Market share isn’t.
5. Who says there’s really demand for $500 headless machines? I don’t see PC companies selling them. (This is, I’ll admit, a weak argument for anything Apple might or might not do.)
6. Apple has done headless before. Remember the Cube? People who loved it, loved it. Most people didn’t. True, it didn’t cost $500 (might have sold better at that price). Apple put it on ice in July 2001. (Though with a “small chance” that it would reintroduce an upgraded version at some point in the future.)

Basically, my feeling is that this is not a headless iMac. If it is coming, it’s something else. Maybe costing around $500 - perhaps a media server? - but the money angle, as in its potential effects on Apple, is what says to me this isn’t coming, not quite in that form. I mean, look at what this company charges for a small hard drive and a 2″ LCD screen packaged in a friendly form-factor. It’s not about to start doing pizza-boxes. (Also, it would only offer a CD-burner, not a DVD-burner, at that price, so you couldn’t run iDVD, which works against the “enticing software package” argument in favour.)

What will we see? I think:

1. Keynote 2
2. “Tiger”, the next version of OSX, to be launched on March 24 2005, four years after the 10.0 release. (Someone else suggested this. I’ve nicked it shamelessly, but will link to it if someone will remind me who.)
3. G5 Powerbook, a top-end machine, delivery some time around March.
4. More Powerbooks using G4s.

That will do, I think.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• "The ads are for OCD... or blogging" (26 August 2004; score: 32.98%)
• My predictions for 2005: wireless iPods, more phishing, and many more Firefox users (30 December 2004; score: 27.02%)
• The intersection of art and computing (26 August 2004; score: 26.19%)

Noted over at Microsoft: Bridging the Product Gap: hardware makers shipped a mere total 189,031 Media Center PCs worldwide during the third quarter — a tiny fraction of the overall 44 million computer shipments during that period, according to market research firm IDC.

Going to take something special to speed that up, I think. Is it just that the time is wrong? Or the design and user interface?

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
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• Well, that about wraps it up for the Portable Media Center (or Centre) (12 July 2004; score: 43.03%)
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