My work Halloween outfit
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The tech sites are rife again with stories about Apple planning to release a branded television set within the next 18 months.
I say If they do, it’ll mean the death of the Cinema Display.
Why?
Any Apple TV set would have to work with external devices to be at all useful. Most likely this would mean multiple HDMI inputs, possibly a DVI, maybe a Component/Scart interface (although the latter are unlikely I admit).
Hell, it may even have a Thunderbolt port.
Also, being Apple they’ll probably add USB ports for connecting external media, charging devices, a variation of iOS like we’ve seen on the Apple TV 2 hardware and all this with ethernet and/or wireless connectivity built in.
They might even throw in a FaceTime camera - makes sense to have teleconferences through your “tele” right?
Finally, if they want to compete with regular TVs then they’ll probably have to consider a built in digital tuner with (most likely) recording capabilities. You could use an external tuner but built-in would tie in nicely with iTunes/iOS etc.
So what’s the problem?
Price.
If the price of a full-blown TV is too HIGH then they are too close to the cost of a full-blown iMac. We’ve already seen stories of people buying iMacs instead of Cinema displays and using the target display mode to use it as a monitor!
If the price is too LOW then why buy a 27” Cinema Display when the TV will most likely come in sizes upward of 27” AND will have connectivity to your computer?
Apple are unlikely to release a TV set without external connectivity that is designed NOT to allow you to connect your Mac to it. So here’s what they’d need to do :-
a) reduce the price of the Cinema display dramatically,
b) price the TV set between the Cinema display and a base iMac,
That’s a pretty big challenge.
My feeling is that if Apple release an Apple Television then it WILL replace the Cinema display and on that basis an Apple Television would mean the death of the Cinema Display.
Lets face it OS “Ten” isn’t going to make much sense when the version number goes beyond 10.9.9.
Apple could of course forget the link ( as most of us have) and call it OSX 11 but there’s a very good reason why they will consider rebranding OSX to iOS.
Let’s review some numbers:-
Windows is used by approx 400m users worldwide.
OSX is approaching 60m users.
iOS is upward of 200m users.
Given Apples love for massaging figures (e.g. including iPhones, iPads, iTouch AND classic iPods for the purposes of “mobile” statistics) there’s a million good reasons to rebrand a future major upgrade of OSX as iOS.
Well, 260m+ reasons actually.
Me: you need to look after Poppy, she’s only tiny.
Leo: when I get big and strong?
Me: yep but also now, remember you’re her big brother, she’s only little.
Leo: Yes, I am.
Leo: and when I’m big and strong I can throw Poppy in the air?
Me: mmm, let’s go just over that looking after Poppy thing again….
hydroplaning asked: Hey! Really love your blog, I was having some issues with Hamachi and my main internet network connection, and that fixed it right up. :) I use it to host a minecraft server. Thanks!
Thanks, glad to help!
I’m not sure when it happened, what firmware or hardware upgrade changed things but inexplicably and without warning I was unable to re-install OSX Snow Leopard on my 2010 Unibody Macbook Pro.
No matter what I tried, a standard retail Snow Leopard disk, the original disks that came with the Macbook Pro, the same result - a kernel error on startup.
I looked on-line, I tweeted and found more and more people with exactly the same problem. I even put the original hard drive back in (which I’d replaced with an SSD) and the original RAM. I reset PRAM etc and still a kernel panic.
I couldn’t re-install OSX and the result was an abomination; a Macbook Pro running only a bootcamp partition with Windows 7 running natively. Worse still, I could only run OSX in a VMware installation within Windows 7.
I was definitely going to hell.
But suddenly it has all changed. OSX Lion has been released (well the GM in my case) and after burning it to a disk and trying it, it installed successfully.
So if you have an iMac or Macbook that won’t install OSX Snow Leopard, try downloading to spare/friends machine and burning a disk - you may be pleasantly surprised.
In the process of upgrading my mailbox to an Exchange 2010 I’ve found a neat way to do it without affecting my local network speed.
Using a remote server that’s connected to a very fast Internet connection I’ve installed Outlook 2010 and setup both exchange accounts. All I need to do now is drag emails between both accounts and the changes will be synced up to the new box.
The advantage of doing it using the remote server is a) I don’t have to my notebook syncing at home and eating up bandwidth and b) the remote server can transfer gigabytes in seconds which means it’ll be quicker.
Obviously this could also help with remote data transfers of any kind.
Useful tip of you manage/use remote servers.
I’ve talked about this concept in sales pitches with prospects, with clients and privately and thought It was time to “put it out there”.
This idea was inspired when Heath Ledger died and I’d visited an HMV to see copies of his film, Knights Tale next to the tills.
So here’s how it works (in the example above):-
1. You run a site that sells DVDs, Music etc.
2. You ensure your web content, e-commerce products are well described with keywords, actors names, locations etc, all properly indexed/tagged.
3. You choose a selection of news/feed “sources” that will be used to trigger content and having a weighting system in place to rank the data received. (ideally you’d want news sites, twitter, but could have as many as you like).
4. You build a “bot” which has the job of taking these feeds in, filtering by relevant content keywords and then matching these against your own index finding relevant content and promoting/displaying it.
So for example, an actor is reported dead by the BBC, Twitter, Reuters etc. Your bot picks these feeds up and is filtering for specific phrases/keywords/names. It matches this against similar words in your site/database and the result?
The actors DVDs are “featured” on your front page of your site and automatically.
The best bit you don’t have to be specific - you don’t have to say they’ve died, you don’t even care if they have - you’re just reacting automatically to the fact that *this* person is being discussed by multiple feeds/sites and multiple times.
You’re reacting to the trend and promoting your products/articles/content accordingly.
Another example - you run a site that sells home safety products e.g. smoke alarms, fire extinguishers etc. One day news reports come in of a house fire where a smoker detector wasn’t installed or working or testing. The bot kicks in, collates the stories, filters the common words and matches/cross-checks to your product database and FAQ/Knowledge-base.
Next minute, articles and videos you produced about checking smoke detectors are promoted to the front page with smoke detectors as featured products. You Twitter feed is showing links to smoke detector test articles and tutorials and this can happen in almost real-time and automatically.
I called it “Responsive content” - no doubt someone else has called it or will call it someone else and Apple will call it iContent. Oh well.
If it exists, I didn’t know, didn’t check and blew it.
If it doesn’t exist, you implement it and you get rich, throw me a bone or at least a bit of credit.