Is Siri artificially intelligent or just a robot?

By Peter Nowak - Monday, October 17, 2011 at 12:26 PM - 5 Comments

Having just returned from a trip to New York on Sunday evening, I haven’t had much time to play with the week’s hottest new gadget —the iPhone 4S—but I have been able to formulate some initial impressions, especially in regards to its main new feature: the Siri personal assistant.

First, the basics. Yup, the iPhone 4S works as advertised. It’s faster, slicker and generally better than its predecessor, the iPhone 4. Some nifty additions to the operating system make things easier, like you can fire the thing up initially without having to connect it to your computer and you can share iTunes purchases between devices by turning on the iCloud storage option. Both options do a lot for eliminating cables and computers from the iPhone equation.

I particularly like the camera as well. The iPhone 4 had the best camera on any phone I’d tried so far and the 4S is yet another step up. Apple is continuing to strengthen the case for leaving the full camera behind and simply relying on a phone to take photos, at least in casual situations.

Much of the brouhaha over the new device, however, lies with Siri, the voice-recognition feature that can tell the user about everything from the weather to sports scores to scheduled meetings. Continue…

The computer as modern art

By Anne Kingston - Monday, October 17, 2011 at 8:50 AM - 2 Comments

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPod in 2001, he did something that would have been counterintuitive for any other consumer-product company CEO: he showed the back of it first. “I’m in love with it,” he said of the elegant, shiny surface reflecting the Apple logo in matte relief. “It’s stainless steel; it’s really, really durable. It’s beautiful.” By then Apple devotees expected such attention to detail from the man in the black mock turtleneck who took computers from geek to chic—the imperative was embedded in his company’s very DNA.

In his 2009 TED lecture talk about inspirational leadership, Simon Sinek observed that Apple challenged the status quo and expressed its ability to think differently precisely by making products that are consistently “beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly.” And certainly the public’s appetite for innovative, human products is reflected in consumers’ willingness to pay a premium for Apple products. But Jobs’s greatest design legacy was reframing its parameters in the mass market. As he told the New York Times in 2003, Apple didn’t see design as product veneer: “That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works.”

The iPod, coveted to the point of theft, exemplified Apple’s fusion of function and form: the technology was revolutionary (“You can put your entire playlist in your pocket,” Jobs boasted), yet every user touch point was carefully considered to be familiar and seem pleasing—its gift-like packaging, playing-card proportions, intuitive scroll wheel, even the tiny clip that prevented its distinctive white earbuds cord from tangling when it was packed up. The Museum of Modern Art put an iPod in its collection and extols the device for raising expectations for all consumer products—and also “stimulating manufacturers to recognize the importance of good design and to incorporate design considerations at the highest levels of their corporate structures.”

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Turned on and tuned in: Steve Jobs as a child of the sixties

By Jay Teitel - Monday, October 17, 2011 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

Apple/dpa/Corbis

In 1969, the year of Woodstock and the first moon walk, Steve Jobs was 14. A yearbook photograph from Homestead High School in Cupertino, Calif., shows him with the rest of the electronics club, looking as geeky as his buddies. Three years later, the 1972 yearbook includes a grad photo that shows Jobs, virtually unrecognizable, with long hair, in a tux and bow tie. Something about the Summer of Love had gotten to him.

For the past week or so, in the instantly mythic aftermath of his death, Steve Jobs has often been characterized as a nerd who made good, but he was never a nerd: he was the coolest tech guy who ever lived, a little foppish, a little ascetic, like a combination of Oscar Wilde and St. Augustine. What Jobs was—in an American do-it-yourself, perfection-unto-arrogance tradition that few admirers today are aware of—was a hippie.

Some of the counterculture trappings of Jobs’s life were sixties stock. After dropping out of college in his freshman year, he worked at the pioneering video-game firm Atari to raise money for a trip to an ashram in India. He returned a Buddhist, complete with Indian garb and a shaved head. He took LSD, later describing it as one of the defining experiences of his life. And of course there was his legendary Jobsian observation that Bill Gates would have been “a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.”

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Tim Cook: Apple’s most humble servant

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, October 17, 2011 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Paul Sakuma/AP

Tim Cook took the stage, but not the spotlight. In his public debut as Apple chief at the unveiling of the updated iPhone on Oct. 4–the day before Steve Jobs died—the 50-year-old seemed comfortable enough, dressed in jeans, a button-down shirt and his trademark Nike runners (he also sits on the sportswear giant’s board). He even cracked a couple of jokes in his measured Alabama drawl. “This is my first product launch since being named CEO,” he said, the threat of a smile crossing his face. “I’m sure you didn’t know that.”

But it was the things that Cook didn’t do that garnered the most notice. There were no stirring Jobs-ian speeches about future-altering technology. The “ta-dah” introductions of the new phone, a social network, and a greeting card application were all left to other Apple executives. And the CEO’s sales pitch—such as it was—was all about the brand, rather than the vision. “I’m so incredibly proud of this company,” Cook told the assembled journalists. “I consider it the privilege of a lifetime to have worked here for 14 years and I am very excited about this new role.” The message was clear. Apple’s cult of personality begins and ends with its founder.

And all indications suggest that is just the way the new boss likes it. A lifelong number two—he even finished second in his class at high school—Cook has always preferred to stay in the background. He almost never gives interviews, or speaks in public settings. (The exception being his beloved alma mater Auburn University, where he gave the commencement address in 2010.) He was raised in Robertsdale, a small farming town near Alabama’s Gulf Coast, whose only other “celebrity” son appears to be Obie Trotter, a college basketball star now playing in Szolnok, Hungary. The middle of three boys born to a shipyard worker and a homemaker, Cook played in the marching band and was voted “most studious” by his peers. He went on to take engineering at Auburn, where professors remember him as “very quiet, very reserved.” After graduating in 1982, he took a job at IBM in North Carolina, distinguishing himself as the guy who volunteered to work over the Christmas holidays so that the company could fill its orders by year-end. In 1994, he joined the computer-reselling division of an electronics wholesaler, rising to COO before jumping to Compaq in 1997. Six months later, an executive recruiting firm came knocking on Apple’s behalf.

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Kevin O’Leary on Steve Jobs

By macleans.ca - Monday, October 17, 2011 at 8:10 AM - 11 Comments

Jessica Darmanin/Maclean's

In the mid-’80s, if you’ll recall, there was a massive rivalry between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Gates decided early on that he would license his operating system to every manufacturer who wanted it. In a matter of years he got 97 per cent of the PC market. On the other hand, Jobs said, “I’m never going to license the Mac operating system to anybody. I am going to control the hardware and the software and package it to consumers.” He lost huge. He ended up with two per cent of the market.

At the time, The Learning Company was the largest provider of educational software. I’m the guy that’s providing 80 per cent of the market for reading and math software in schools and for consumers, with brands like Reader Rabbit, Carmen Sandiego and Oregon Trail. It cost about $500,000 a title to develop software for Windows and $500,000 for Mac. It was very easy for me to find my Windows user—97 per cent of people who have a computer can use the software. But my cost of acquiring the Mac customer keeps going up the more share Jobs loses in the market. I’m losing about $50 million a year doing that and my board is squeezing my head saying, “What the hell are we supporting Mac for?”

We were working closely with teams at Apple and I finally said, “I’ve got to go see the big guy. We can’t go on like this.” I planned to ask him for $50 million, but was willing to accept $12 million [to continue making software for Mac]. I got there and sat down at a boardroom table; there were five or six of us on each side. It started with the pleasantries of the product management teams and then probably half an hour into it, Jobs walked in and the whole room shut down. It went silent. Nobody would say anything when Steve was in the room. He was the king.

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The life and times of Steve Jobs

By Chris Sorensen, Jason Kirby, and Michael Friscolanti - Monday, October 17, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 4 Comments

John G. Mabanglo/AFP/Getty Images

Theo Gray was at the wheel of his car when he learned his friend Steve Jobs was dead. The call from his assistant came as a shock, not because Gray didn’t know of Jobs’s failing health—“I had some information about how bad he was”—but because it was difficult to comprehend a world without the legendary Apple co-founder. Jobs not only built one of the world’s most successful companies, with a market value of more than US$350 billion, but he elevated technology into the realm of the magical and gave us our first true glimpse of its potential. “I don’t know, maybe I was repressing the knowledge,” says Gray, who has known Jobs since 1988 and whose software company, Wolfram Research, has worked closely with Jobs and Apple for the past two decades. “I hoped maybe he would have another year or something.”

One more year. It boggles the mind to imagine what a digital dreamer like Jobs could do with 365 more days on this planet; the wonders he might conceive, or even the little annoyances of the mobile age he would inevitably solve. Jobs reshaped the world and how it communicates more in his 56 years than almost any other person of the last century.

It was why, moments after Apple Inc. confirmed Jobs’s death on Oct. 5, tributes began to pour in on sites like Facebook and Twitter, by the tens of millions. A few hours later, makeshift shrines popped up outside Apple stores throughout North America, Europe and Asia. President Barack Obama was moved to write: “Steve was among the greatest of American innovators—brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.” Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple Computers with Jobs in the 1970s, put it even more simply: “It’s like the world lost a John Lennon.”

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The dark side of Steve Jobs

By Claire Ward - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 10:28 AM - 24 Comments

In what seems like an endless stream of Steve Jobs tributes and devotions, one voice stands out as a reality check. Mike Daisey, New York-based author and monologuist, is hoping to cut through the nostalgia and remind people of the nastier side of Jobs’ legacy.

“I’m almost tired of hearing what a genius he is,” says the 37-year-old creator and performer of The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a one-man show about the life and work of the former Apple CEO that opened off-broadway at the Public Theater in New York City on Tuesday. “I think he’d be disgusted by this level of nostalgia. He was a very unrelenting, unwavering person—focus was really the centre of his skill set, his genius.”

Daisey’s show touches on everything from Jobs’s mastery of industrial design to the objectionable practices of iPhone and iPad manufacturing plants in China. The monologue tells the story of Jobs’s obsessions and his impact on humanity—from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen. Daisey’s style is semi-improvised, or what he calls “extemporaneous monologing”—which means the show differs from night to night, often depending on the mood of the room. “The work happens in the room so it’s hard to say what is going to change,” says Daisey. “At the same time, the fundamentals of the story aren’t affected by his death. In fact, they’ll be amplified. The end of an era, the loss of individual personal power in the face of corporatism.” Continue…

Freedom to fail is what made Steve Jobs

By Paul Wells - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 7:50 AM - 20 Comments

David Paul Morris/Getty Images

Having paid Steve Jobs the full measure of our devotion, let us now argue about how to create the next Steve Jobs. Which choices can governments and educators make that will encourage the next miraculous hybrid of gearhead, design genius, marketing whiz and change catalyst?

It’s fair to answer, “Give up. It’s impossible.” The rise of Jobs 1.0 looks more like a happy accident than anything else. He dropped out of a liberal-arts college in Portland and then stuck around to audit the calligraphy course. And yet I’m pretty sure that if everyone in Canada were required to take calligraphy without credit, it wouldn’t spark a new renaissance. To be fair, probably people would send more and nicer thank-you notes.

But still. It’s worth spending a little time to ask what was germane and broadly applicable in Jobs’s life. After all, no matter what governments do, it won’t be long before they’re claiming to be producing a new generation of Jobses.

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Steve Jobs and Apple: somewhere between bohemia and business

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 7:40 AM - 18 Comments

Ian Waldie/Getty Images

When I was growing up, the world was in the grip of what was then called the Computer Age. Computers, everyone knew, were where things were going. And so we were all given training in computer science to prepare us for the Jobs of Tomorrow, which as everyone knew were in computer programming.

To program a computer meant poking little holes in punch cards, stacks and stacks and stacks of them, which you then handed in to the computer lab. When your turn came in the queue, they would feed your stack of cards into the computer; you would get your homework back the next day in the form of a printout. If, as often happened, you had made some small mistake—somewhere—and the computer, baffled, had responded with a string of hysterical gibberish, you simply repeated the whole fiddling, nitpicking exercise.

And for most of us, that was that. The premise, that we were all going to be computer programmers, was false, and we knew it. Computers were for geeks, science fiction enthusiasts and others even further beyond the pale. Though in some ways my own mildly obsessive-compulsive nature made me a natural for it, my teenage identity was even then coalescing around the idea that I was actually some kind of artsie, or at least destined for the humanities.

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How Steve Jobs rescued old media

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 7:40 AM - 4 Comments

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

It seems strange to think of Steve Jobs as the man who saved traditional media. After all, everywhere you look, his products are wreaking havoc on old media formats: people are watching TV shows on their iPads instead of staying home to watch them live; people are reading e-books instead of lugging around paper; bookstores and record stores replace much of their shelf space with iPhone and iPod sections. But never mind the shakeups that are occurring in businesses like music: if it hadn’t been for Jobs and iTunes, there might not be a music business to shake up. Jobs’s fellow corporate tycoon, Viacom’s Sumner Redstone, put it very simply in a 2007 speech at Boston University: iTunes “resurrected the music industry.”

Think back to 2000, before the iPod and iTunes existed. Napster had cut deeply into music sales, and while the service itself was shut down, there was no shutting down the concept of music piracy. The ’80s and ’90s compact disc boom, when people ran out to buy physical albums in little plastic jewel cases, was over, and music companies couldn’t accept that: Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in technology issues, told Maclean’s that “they sought to sue the MP3 player out of existence. Any sort of innovation that left someone other than the industry with control was something to be feared and stopped.” But no lawsuit could change the fact that people wanted music that they didn’t have to stuff into suitcases and carry from place to place, and they wanted it for free.

Computer Weekly proclaimed in 2000 that “the battle against piracy may be lost completely,” and that “mass copyright infringement over the Internet” would be the future. The music companies countered by trying to create their own music services, which bombed because, as Geist puts it, “They were label-specific, they only played on a limited number of MP3s. It was just so consumer-unfriendly.” Jobs realized that no one was going to sign up and pay for only the music that Sony or Universal was willing to give them. “People don’t want to buy music as a subscription,” he told Rolling Stone in 2003. “They want to own their music.”

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The $30 tablet is here. But you can’t have one—yet.

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 6:00 PM - 19 Comments

The Aakash is a pretty crappy tablet computer.  Made in India, the Android gadget’s touchscreen is small, with no multitouch functionality. Its battery only lasts for a few hours, its processor is fairly slow, it has no camera, and though it has WiFi, you’ll need a USB dongle to connect to the mobile Internet when away from wireless broadband. Compared to the iPad, the Aakash is a piece of junk—except for the one stat where it blows Apple completely out of the water: price.

The Aakash costs $37.98 to manufacture. Ten thousand units are currently in the hands of Indian students. Thanks to a government subsidy, they cost $30 each. A retail version of the Aakash is expected soon, with 90,000 units shipping to Indian stores bearing a sticker price of $50 to $60. There’s no word on a North American release just yet.

Here’s a short video report on the Aakash from NDTV: Continue…

Björk is crazy, like a fox

By Elio Iannacci - Monday, October 10, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 1 Comment

Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin

Many have tried—and failed—to figure out the thinking behind singer-songwriter Björk Guðmundsdóttir’s sometimes magical, sometimes questionable career moves. In 1994, for instance, Madonna asked the Icelandic talent to collaborate on the pop queen’s sixth studio album. Björk repeatedly declined Her Madgesty’s requests but, as a consolation, sent Madonna one song—which ended up becoming the most obscure hit of her career: Bedtime Story.

Six years later, after a critically praised performance in the movie Dancer in the Dark, for which she won the best actress prize at Cannes, Björk announced that she would never act again. Most confounding of all is her walk on the red carpet at the 2001 Oscars: she managed to stupefy Hollywood by wearing a dress that resembled a stuffed swan. Joan Rivers demanded Björk be “put into an asylum.” (Ellen DeGeneres further mocked the singer by wearing a version of the frock when hosting the Emmys later that year.)

Her latest disc, Biophilia, to be released Oct. 11, maintains Björk’s status as the weirdest—and craftiest—kid at the school of pop. “I feel technology has finally caught up with humans,” explains the 45-year-old via phone from New York. “That’s why I got this guy in Iceland who makes instruments to make me a small pipe organ that I could connect directly into an iPad touch screen. He reworked my old celesta [a keyboard that resembles a glockenspiel in sound] this way—which made composing much more tactile and impulsive.”

Continue…

Steve Jobs and iEverything

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 6:20 PM - 1 Comment

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By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 4:26 PM - 11 Comments

Someone was on CNN last night comparing Steve Jobs to Edison, Ford and Disney in one, and for once it didn’t seem like the usual Apple fanboy hype. Jobs had Edison’s flair for innovation (and his ruthlessness in exploiting others’ ideas), Ford’s concern for process, and Disney’s sense of the culture.

So much of what the computer became was made possible or driven by Apple that it’s difficult to separate the two, just as it’s difficult to separate Apple’s story from Jobs’s. Often he wasn’t the first, but he took things that others had tried and failed with and made them succeed, by doing them better (Microsoft’s formula was a little different: it took things that others had done first and did them worse.)

His emphasis on the primacy of design, his fanatical attention to detail, his strategic vision—standing by the closed, proprietary, all-in-one model even after it had been “proved” wrong, long enough to see it triumphantly vindicated—would make him a business legend quite apart from any innovative wonders. That’s significant not only for Apple, but America—at a time when the Big Three and other long-time industrial titans were being eclipsed by foreign competition, often from low-wage economies, Jobs showed how advanced economies could still compete: by innovation, design, quality. And of course, marketing: there really was none better at delivering the sizzle with the steak.

And there’s the sociological impact: more than anyone else, Jobs made technology cool, and not just technology but business itself. I can’t remember young adults discussing business strategy, back when I was one of them, with the intensity that today’s young adults do about Apple’s, at least among the tech-minded. But these days that’s just about everybody. He not only made geeks hip, but made everyone into a geek, at least a bit—including, not insignificantly, women, who in the computer age’s early years would have not been caught dead using a computer, should anyone have thought to ask them.

Before Apple, the scientific and artistic worlds rarely intersected. After, a “techie” was as often as not a creative type. With a Mac, technology could be used not only to make things, but works of the imagination. Artists, musicians, photographers, film makers, even writers—one by one, they all entered the digital world.

I can’t think of any other business figure whose death would have prompted such widespread mourning, especially among people you would not ordinarily have thought would have any interest in business. One well-known tech-girl tweeted last night that she was hugging her MacBook Air while she watched the TV coverage. I don’t think it was just because he made great products. I think it’s the vision he offered of what business could be, what it could mean—that being in business could be a meaningful way to spend your life. Jobs’s story reminds us not only of the heroism of the entrepreneur, but of the nobility of craft: of what an honourable activity it is to make useful, beautiful things for each other, even if you make a fortune doing it. .

Steve Jobs’s commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 12:29 PM - 0 Comments

Steve Jobs is America (and so can you)

By Peter Nowak - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 1:11 AM - 10 Comments

In a classic case of “where were you when,” I was just finishing up as a guest discussant at York University in Toronto Wednesday night when I found out Steve Jobs had passed away. It was sad news, especially given that Jobs, Apple and the iPhone had ironically come up many times during the class, which is all about broadband, the Internet and technology.

My book Sex, Bombs and Burgers is actually part of the course reading, presumably selected to give students a break from the dry TCP/IP protocols and CRTC regulatory issues they normally have to digest. The chapters assigned for reading and then discussion in class were those dealing with the Internet’s formation, as well as the pornography industry’s influence in helping to develop it. Continue…

Once a hacker, forever an artist. RIP, Steve Jobs.

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 1:05 AM - 18 Comments

Yes, Steve Jobs was a genius, but I think a misunderstood one. He wasn’t really an inventor—he was an artist. And like all great artists, he was a tyrannical control freak, an absolute perfectionist. With art, that’s not a problem. Picasso’s Guernica would not be improved in the slightest if I were allowed to add a few brushstrokes.

But the wonder of computing used to be that anyone could make it better. Anyone could take apart their machine and tinker their way to a better machine. Anyone could write code, usually by building on someone else’s code. Anyone could innovate from their garage, and they didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission to do so. That’s what allowed Steve Jobs and his hacker buddy Steve Wozniak to create Apple I in the first place. But Apple products aren’t made like that anymore. As elegant and intuitive and beautiful as they are, they are also perhaps the most closed computers ever made—devices without screws, devices with rules, devices that are increasingly better described as appliances than as computers. Continue…

Imagine Rembrandt with an iPad

By Sara Angel - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Photo Illustration by Sarah MacKinnon/Maclean's

According to David Hockney, if the 17th-century Dutch master Rembrandt were living today, he’d be using an iPad. Hockney should know. Not only is the British-born painter, printmaker and photographer recognized as a virtuoso himself, he’s an authority on Old Master techniques and the first major art-world figure to have a show featuring iPhone- and iPad-made pictures, Fresh Flowers, which opens Oct. 8 at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum. “In Rembrandt’s drawings you can see that he worked very fast. That’s what the iPad permits,” explains Hockney from his studio in Bridlington, a seaside resort in Yorkshire. “Without ever having to get up for a pencil, you can draw from the first moment of inspiration.”

At 74, neither Hockney’s age nor his struggle with deafness has diminished his interest in innovation. He is as famous for his Fauvist landscapes and vibrant images of California swimming pools (in 1964 he fell in love with L.A., where he still has a residence) as his career-long embrace of new methods for making pictures.

In the seventies, Hockney arranged Polaroids as well as 35-mm prints to create photo-collages of a single subject. In 1989, he sent his exhibition art to the São Paulo Biennial via fax. As Charlie Scheips, curator of Fresh Flowers, explains, for decades Hockney’s work “has questioned the role of media and reproduction in art.”

Continue…

Apple falls victim to high expectations

By Peter Nowak - Tuesday, October 4, 2011 at 5:22 PM - 6 Comments

The inevitable has happened—Apple has become a victim of its own success.

After repeatedly coming up with fancy new toys that would go on to be desired by zillions of people around the world, the company’s much ballyhooed press events at which these gizmos are launched have become the tech world’s equivalent of must-see TV (except, ironically, they’re not video streamed, forcing interested parties to follow along on live blogs that frequently crash). Whenever one of these things takes place, the pressure is on to deliver something that inspires oohs and ahhs. Continue…

Apple releases upgraded iPhone

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, October 4, 2011 at 4:13 PM - 0 Comments

Apple released an upgraded version of its iPhone 4 model – the iPhone 4S – during an event at the company’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters hosted by CEO Tim Cook on Tuesday. Among other improvements, the upgrade includes a new A5 chip and improved download speeds of up to 14.4 megabits per second, which will dramatically improve upon the speed of the iPhone 4. Despite the unveiling, some Apple investors and observers were underwhelmed by the hotly anticipated launch, during which shares dropped 3 per cent. The launch comes at a critical juncture in the smartphone market. While Cook maintains that Apple controls 5 per cent of the market, companies like Google and Samsung are becoming increasingly competitive, although Canada’s Research In Motion continues to struggle. The iPhone 4S will be available in Canada on Oct. 14.

The Globe and Mail

New iPhone: the ‘S’ is for ‘suckers’

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, October 4, 2011 at 3:52 PM - 17 Comments

In their hearts, even the faithful know it: every iPhone since iPhone 1 has been treading water.  

A mobile phone that lets you surf the Internet, take pictures and check your email—that’s 95 per cent of the value. Everything else is gilding the lily.

Sure, GPS added some functionality and 3G provided a welcome speed bump. Though nobody uses it much, a video camera can be nice to have. But slimmer width, higher res, longer battery life, faster processor—these are the predictable, incremental improvements all consumer electronics undergo. Slap a new shell on it, change the colour, market the hell out of it, and perhaps folks will be convinced to ditch the pricey, still-functioning gadget you made them want so badly just a short time ago.

Eventually, people figure out that the differences are minor, and only the most insecure, status-obsessed early adopters will keep taking the bait. At that point, there’s only one place to go: downmarket. In Apple’s case, downmarket is most of the market.

For all of Apple’s dominance in mindshare, iPhones comprise just 5% of the cellphones in the world. While we in North America have been squealing with glee for an extra camera on our phone, Second and Third World nations have been experiencing true technological transformation through cheap, rugged phones like this, the world’s most popular handset. For millions, the homely Nokia 1100 isn’t just their first cellphone—it’s their first phone.

All phones will eventually be smartphones, and Apple wants to sell most of them. To do so they don’t need to offer new features, but cheaper phones.

That’s what the iPhone 4S will prove to be: the first entry in Apple’s budget product line. That’s why it works on GSM and CDMA. Pleasing U.S. carriers is now less important than offering a universal device. It’s their priciest iPhone right now, but soon the iPhone 5 will be here, giving Apple occasion to slash the 4S’s sticker price and market it (along with the 4 and the 3G) as Apple’s first affordable options overseas. To buy it here, now, at top dollar, is a sucker’s choice.

In the long run, there’s nowhere for the iPhone to go but down.

Jesse Brown is the host of TVO.org’s Search Engine podcast. He is on Twitter @jessebrown

Inconvenient truth?

By Alex Derry - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 1 Comment

Carlos Duran/Corbis

Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, the self-described inventor of the Internet and global warming prophet, has once again displayed his oracular powers. While speaking last week at an economic conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, Gore, an Apple board member, made specific mention of “the new iPhones coming out next month.” His statement, which he said was intended to be a “plug,” sent tech watchers into a tizzy of speculation over whether Apple would be launching not one, but two models of the iPhone—a slightly upgraded iPhone 4S and the brand new (and hotly anticipated) iPhone 5—at a rumoured launch event on Oct. 4. Neither Gore nor Apple, which is notoriously secretive about new products, has clarified the remarks. But given his inside knowledge of the company’s plans, Gore seems to have confirmed that there will be at least one new iPhone hitting the shelves in October.

Zune Music comes to Canada

By Peter Nowak - Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 12:18 PM - 4 Comments

If digital music is your thing, you’ll have one more option come Monday. Microsoft is today announcing that its Zune Music service is finally coming to Canada, starting Oct. 3.

The service will offer 14 million download-to-own tracks at variable pricing, with no copy protection on them. More intriguing is the Zune Music Pass, which is basically an all-you-can-eat option for $9.99 per month (the U.S. store is also dropping its pricing today to that level from $14.99). If you buy a 10-month pass, you get the last two months free.

The pass is pretty cool because it extends across devices, so it can be enabled on a PC, Xbox 360 or Windows Phone.

Microsoft is usually pretty good at getting new products into Canada quickly, but it has been a bit of a laggard with Zune-related things. Continue…

YouTube on TV

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 1 Comment

People have been debating the value of YouTube for years. Some predicted Google wasted billions on something that could never make money. If recent rumours are true, the naysayers may soon be eating their words. The search-engine behemoth has apparently stepped up its efforts to deliver an alternative to cable television. The company is competing against Amazon, Yahoo and Dish Network to acquire Hulu, the online video site owned by Walt Disney, News Corp. and NBC Universal. Google’s initial offer far surpassed those of the other bidders, according to AllThingsD, a technology news website. This could be part of Google’s strategy for acquiring original video content to upload to YouTube, speculated Business Insider, a business blog, which also quoted two anonymous industry sources saying the tech giant is spending as much as $500 million shopping around for premium titles to boost its online video offering. Google also recently bought Motorola Mobility Holdings, which, among other things, makes cable set-top boxes, devices that allow users to access the Web via TV sets.

It’s all proof that the technology giant is gearing up to battle rivals like Netflix and Apple in the race to reinvent television. Its most formidable weapon, industry watchers agree, is YouTube’s unrivalled popularity.