Linked List: January 26, 2010

Tuesday, 26 January 2010

What Derek Powazek Hopes Apple Unleashes Tomorrow ★

Me too.

Apple’s 1995 Tablet Concept Video ★

Here’s the difference between the old Apple and today’s Apple, in a nut. In 1995 Apple made cool concept videos about Internet tablet computing. Today, they make it for real.

McGraw-Hill CEO Says That Tablet Is iPhone OS Based ★

That’s a good way to get taken off Steve Jobs’s Christmas card list.

Update: Pushback from several DF readers, who think it was a deliberate Apple-sanctioned leak. (I don’t buy it; I think the guy just has a big mouth.)

Conjuring Up the Latest Buzz, Without a Word ★

David Carr had an interesting piece in the NYT yesterday:

This Wednesday, Steven P. Jobs will step to the stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and unveil a shiny new machine that may or may not change the world.

In the magician’s world, that’s called “the reveal.”

And the most magical part? Even as the media and technology worlds have anticipated this announcement for months, Apple has said not word one about The Device.

That’s the most amazing thing about this run-up to the event. So much written (including several thousand words from yours truly), and Apple has not once said one word publicly about the device.

(I talked to Carr for this piece, and he quotes me as saying that Apple doesn’t “do prototypes”. To be clear, I mean they don’t unveil or reveal prototypes publicly. They of course build many prototypes internally.)

NYT on The Tablet and Apple’s Relationship With Content Publishers ★

This news piece by Brad Stone and Stephanie Clifford has an odd tone:

People who have seen the tablet say Apple will market it not just as a way to read news, books and other material, but also a way for companies to charge for all that content. By marrying its famously slick software and slender designs with the iTunes payment system, Apple could help create a way for media companies to alter the economics and consumer attitudes of the digital era.

This opportunity, however, comes with a sizable catch: Steven P. Jobs.

Mr. Jobs, the chief executive, made Apple the most important distributor of music by imposing its own will on the music labels, bullying them into accepting Apple’s pricing and other terms. Apple sold lots of music, but the music labels claimed that iTunes had destroyed the concept of the album and damaged their already deteriorating bottom lines.

Music industry executives may well not like what’s happened to their industry, but is it really bullying from Apple? Or isn’t it simply that Apple does not do what the music executives wish? That Apple runs its music store its own way? What the music industry really doesn’t like is the whole idea of downloads. They want to go back to selling $18 discs. Pre-iTunes, “music downloads” were pretty much all free bootlegs.

The print publishing industry should be so lucky to have iTunes do for them what it’s done for music.

Doonesbury on The Tablet Announcement ★

“You can feel it in the air.”