Apple’s strategy of a “walled garden” now seems to be inspected by U.S. antitrust authorities. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department are overhauling Apple’s latest license change for the iPhone OS SDK 4.0. Although the process is at a preliminary stage, the interest of antitrust authorities show how powerful Apple has become in the field of mobile computing.
Some critics contend Apple is now engaging in the kind of tactics that got Microsoft Corp. in trouble with antitrust enforcers in the 1990s. “Apple is playing right out of Microsoft’s playbook—and it’s one they complained about a lot,” said David Balto, a former FTC official now at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.
Apple could try to head off trouble with antitrust enforcers by changing the terms of its developer agreement, one person familiar with the situation said.
On Wall Street Journal Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen yesterday nite answered to Steve Jobs latest attack. Jobs had released an open letter yesterday morning. The bottom line of Jobs’ letter is:
Adobe Flash is something from the past, as it is not open,
it is not energy efficient and
it does not unleash the full powers the individual platforms (meaning: the full power of Apple’s iPhone or iPad).
Narayan responded in the WSJ.com interview, that
It’s got nothing to do with technology, but with control.
Apple wants to maintain control on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch platforms.
he wonders if Flash is one of the most reasons for crashing a Mac, it’s also got much to do with the operating system
if hardware acceleration is provided from the operating system, playing Flash takes a lot lesser energy than on a Mac.
Flash is an open specification
Well, well, that love is not over. We wonder how far we’re away from the point when Adobe decides to stop developing for the Apple platform? Would Apple even care? Or would they just tell thousands of designers to switch to GIMP?
We hope you don’t mind, we embed the whole WSJ.com interview as Adobe Flash ;-)
Apple now has confirmed to be no fan of Adobe Flash. It is too buggy and not open standard and this and that. And foremost: it is no Apple technology ;-) Well, erm… Aswell as the iPhone the iPad is gonna show those nice and tiny Lego bricks instead of Adobe Flash based content. Bringing the web to your mobile device? Or rather bringing back the Lego bricks from our earliest childhood.
Now Adobe strikes back and reimplemented the iPad with all its amazing, wonderful and outstanding features – using real Lego ;-)
Picture is courtesy of Joe Meno of Brickjournal. Find a lot more pics here…
American actor Stephen Colbert pulled an unreleased Apple iPad yesterday at the Grammy Awards to read the list of nominees. Colbert said
“I’m sorry where’s the list. Oh, I know! It’s on my iPad. Jay-z, did you not get one of these in your gift bag? Am I cooler than you?“
This product placement seems to have happened last minute, as you can tell from the reaction of Colbert’s wife. When asking her with a tongue-in-cheek:
Hunnie, Hunnie, does this make me look cool?
She just disapproves by shaking her head.
Anyway this is psychologically a brilliant step by Apple – as it generates demand for the iPad among the most important multiplier target group – the celebrities.
Tablet PCs seem to be the next big thing. After Apple’s smartphone revolution with their iPhone, it seems the next big market revolution might be the Tablet PCs.
Steve Ballmer of Microsoft introduced one of the Tablet PCs – a prototype of the HP Slate – last week on the CES 2010. In his presentation the HP Slate is of course running Windows 7, what else, but there are rumors it might also be shipped with Google’s Android. We suppose Amazon’s Steve Bezos will not really like it, because Steve Ballmer showed the HP Slate running the PC Kindle application.
Dell seems also be ready to enter the Touch PCs’ market with the Dell Slate. Gizmodo.de got photos of a prototype of Dell’s Slate. Dell’s Slate has a 5-inch screen, most likely an OLED, a SIM slot and a 5 megapixel camera.
If Apple was a typical tech company they would also have showed something to the public on the CES, but Apple isn’t. Anyway there are enuff rumors floating around about Apple’s Touch-Mac – rumored to be named Apple iSlate. According to Reuters Apple might be launching the iSlate in Q2/2010. It is expected to have a 10 or 11-inch display and a aluminium case. TheStreet.com reports that Apple’s Slate will be shipped with a P A Semi CPU, instead of Intel based Atom CPUs. This could be also the reason, why Atom CPU has been removed from Mac OS X Snow Leopard’s latest update 10.6.2. It is widely expected that Apple will announce the iSlate on Januar 27th, 2010.
Kara Swisher of AllThingsD interviewed Mr. Podfather Prefather Jon Rubinstein of Palm at the CES. Although he seems to have been highly involved in the development of Apple’s iPhone back in the days when he was Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, he said he never used an iPhone. Well… All in all he wasn’t telling too much, but when Kara asked him, if Palm will do a Tablet aswell, Rubinstein answered: “(..) we designed webOS to scale and it could be used in different form factors.”
The last weeks are full of rumors if AT&T will prolong their exclusive contracts with Apple. Rumors say the original contracts are gonna expire in the middle of 2010.
Thus allowing Apple to negotiate with different carriers like Verizon or T-Mobile. T-Mobile is currently the exclusive partner for Apple in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic.
AT&T is said is willing to prolong their contracts until the end of 2011, but Verizon and T-Mobile seem to be secretely testing Apple’s forthcoming device named internally iPhone 3,1.
In contrast to Apple’ AppStore, Palm today announced, they will also allow distribution of Palm Pre applications outside of Palm’s App Catalog.
The WebOS developer program will officially start in december 2009 for an annual fee of 100US$. The annual fee does not apply for open source applications, as they will be taken into the App Catalog and distributed for free.
For commercial apps aswell as Apple with their AppStore, Palm with their App Catalog will charge 30%, while 70% will go back to the developer.
Adobe released a video yesterday featuring the Palm Pre running Adobe Flash. Adrian Ludwig from Adobe Labs shows websites running with Flash Player 10.1 beta on the semi-official iPhone challenger Palm Pre.
“A public developer beta of the browser-based runtime is expected to be available for Windows® Mobile, Palm® webOS and desktop operating systems including Windows, Macintosh and Linux later this year.”
Interestingly neither this statement nor the statement on Adobe Labs include a single word about Apple’s iPhone or the iPhone OS X. Could this mean Flash will not come anytime soon to the iPhone?
While letting those rumors dwell, enjoy the Palm Pre video featuring Adobe Flash…
We’re almost sure, you read it already all over the net: Steve Jobs is back in his office. Rumors say he was transplanted a liver about two months ago and he is in good health condition.
Our comment
Does all these news affect anything? Currently it seems no.
Apple’s presentations can also be run by Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, Bertrand Serlet, and Scott Forstall as we’ve seen on the last WWDC. But what about the future? What about the products?
This year’s WWDC
This year’s WWDC did not have new big products. It was all about the operating system update to 10.6. (called Snow Leopard) and iPhone 3GS that mainly has been speed improved and now got features that many people said to be overdue.
The future?
What will be the next WWDC presentation about? Yet another Mac Book Super Pro? Or another iPhone 3Gs2?
Who will be the wholistic spin doctor who feeds the company with ideas and innovations? This is the main question. And we’re gonna find out within the next few years.
Competition
We suppose competition will become harder at least in the field of cell phones. As Palm hired Apple’s iPod architect Jon Rubinstein three years ago it seems Apple has lost someone knowing how to design user interfaces for digital media.
What leads us to the bold question: why not buying Palm to stop those “separatistic” tendencies and make Jon Rubinstein Steve Job’s successor?
Businessweek.com reports that there are rumors about an iPhone Lite and an Apple Media Pad. Both could be distributed exclusively by Verizon Wireless. One or both of the devices could be introduced in this summer. Businessweek writes they were talking to someone who got his hands on a prototype of the iPhone Lite already. Moreover Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam confirmed that he has been talking to Steve Jobs during the last six months.Verizon Wireless is a U.S. american joint venture of Verizon Communications and the british Vodafone.
Businessweek writes as there is no deal done yet, from Apple’s point of view the Verizon talks may be helpful on certain levels. Verizon is also a potential Palm Pre distributer aswell as Sprint Nextel. Talks between Apple and Verizon could delay the introduction of Palm’s Pre. In contrast to Sprint who got 35 million customers a Palm Pre on Verizon could be a much harder competitor as they got 86 million customers. Moreover Apple can also use these talks to put pressure on AT&T to incur more expenses of the iPhone manufacturing.
Our comment
Remember this is rumors. We feel it is quite unlikely that Apple will no prolong their partnership with AT&T.
