Higher iPhone sales fuels applications and accessories

Apple's announcement on Wednesday that quarterly iPhone units sold were up nearly 88 percent (to 4.4 million units) over the same quarter last year is a rare bright spot in an otherwise bleak economy.

Such growth helps account for the continuing increase in the number of iPhone applications sold through the iPhone App Store.

When I was at Macworld recently, some iPhone (and iPod Touch) applications caught my attention. Here are some new titles you might want to look into:

• Truphone is a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) app for both iPhone and 2G iPod Touch, using a wi-fi connection to make calls (free between Truphone users). It may save money on international mobile calling in particular.


• E-wallet from Ilium Software lets you store all your critical data and passwords in one place accessed by one strong password. It offers 256-bit encryption, 30 UI templates, and multiple "wallets" allowing users to store by type (banks, credit cards, social sites, etc.).


• Consumer Reports even has its own free iPhone app, which carries the complete postings of this blog as well as our sister blogs on Cars, Shopping, Home, Health, Safety, Money and Babies and Kids. The next update, which should be live in a week or two, will add videos with regular updates on the above topics and much more. (Do you have the latest version of iTunes and want to try out our free app? Click on the image above and you'll be taken directly to the page on Apple's online App Store where you can download our program for free.)

It's the end of Macworld as we know it (but I feel fine)

Steve Job's announcement yesterday that he will be taking a six-month medical leave of absence as Apple's CEO has raised widespread concerns about the company's future. Even before that announcement, while I was still at the Macworld show last week, I found equally widespread concern about the future of the show that has been such a mainstay of Apple's marketing machine.

I spent much of my day last Friday doing an informal poll of key exhibitors selling software, peripherals and services. Of those I polled, in my informal and unscientific effort 17 percent believed Macworld SF would not live past 2010 without Apple as an anchor tenant. Forty-three percent saw little change in store with the current format, while the remaining 40 percent felt that Macworld may change a great deal, with fewer exhibitors, and a greater emphasis on the consumer side of things, along with continuing education for Mac managers. In essence, it will be more about iPhone and less oriented to Mac.

That's the part people forget about:  Macworld is a Conference, as well as an Expo, with four days of sessions on everything from new tricks on Photoshop or Final Cut to learning how to do a podcast. Professional learning and networking is what makes Macworld more than just a trade show and both would still exist even if the show floor was half the size.

Macintosh security: Heightened threats, new products

Last year was a year for increased computer security consciousness among Mac users. According to security software provider Intego's annual report, Apple issued 35 security updates in 2008. While some potentially nasty vulnerabilities were discovered for Mac OS X, and for certain apps like Safari and Quicktime, all were patched quickly and no actual exploits made it to the wild.

Another notable threat last year was "scareware"—spam e-mails claiming your computer is in danger that offer a low-cost downloadable protective product, but one which simply scams you by tricking you into divulging confidential passwords.

E-mail scams can affect Mac users just as easily as Windows users. In fact, our 2008 State of the Net survey found that Mac users fall prey to phishing scams at about the same rate as Windows users, yet far fewer of them protect themselves with an anti-phishing toolbar (Ratings available to subscribers). As a result, we listed Mac users' laxity as one of our 7 Online Blunders for computer users to avoid.

But the biggest threat of all in 2008 was the SSL Certificate hack. Revealed a little over a week ago, the attack leverages a weakness in the algorithm used to sign SSL certificates that in turn tie authentic corporate identities to Web site addresses and encryption keys. The researchers, using 200 networked computers, were able to create an official-looking, but completely false, Certificate Authority (CA), one that then became trusted by browsers.

Macworld: The iTunes Music Store gets a refresh

As of Tuesday, on the basis of a new arrangement with the major labels, iTunes moved to a 3-tiered pricing structure ($0.69, $0.99, and $1.29), with 80 percent of its 10 million tracks (at 256 kbits) available DRM-free and the other 20 percent to follow by the end of the quarter.

iTunes is still the number one channel for online music sales in the world, continuing to beat Amazon and Walmart. It has sold over 6 billion songs and has 75 million unique credit-card customers. Recently it offered an "iTunes Plus" section, where the tracks were DRM-free, but usually at a higher price.

I'm sure a lot of people in the larger universe applaud the new pricing structure and dumping of DRM. It just didn't hit the peak applause meter inside Moscone. But then, one has to first grasp the concept of DRM before the meaning of the announcement becomes clear.

People with iPods who download music regularly get it. Casual iTunes users (and maybe more than a few Macworld attendees) who play vintage 'Stones CDs at home may not. But digital customers have been clamoring for DRM-free, tiered-pricing for years (like they already get at Amazon), so this comes as welcome news. Plus, if it restores interest in iTunes for Limewire users and others who operate outside the music industry’s reach, the RIAA might be happier, too.

That's it for the major Keynote announcements.

Of course, it wouldn't be a Macworld Keynote without a musical guest to close the show. For this last time it was grand old crooner Tony Bennett, singing "The Best is Yet to Come", and his classic "I Left My Heart in San Francisco."

After the Keynote, I got a look at some of HP's new products and took in events sponsored by VMWare and Microsoft's Mac Business Unit.

More on those to come.

—Thomas A. Olson

Macworld: The new 17-inch MacBook Pro

"The day of the swappable battery is over for at least some of our laptop models, and probably all of them, sooner or later—get over it," seemed to be the subtle message of Apple's demonstration earlier this week of the new 17-inch MacBook Pro, at which it claimed that its new model will get up to 8 hours of battery life. (Click on the image at right for a closer look.)

I particularly liked Apple's film of the new battery systems being made, with the developers explaining how it worked. Apple claims that something called "adaptive charging" reduces wear and tear and extends battery life. There's a chip in the battery that talks to individual cells, reports the state of charge, and adjusts the connection to the power line accordingly.

And of course the argument for this engineering sounded quite familiar: As the battery is expected to last 5 years, you'll probably replace the computer before you need to replace the battery. (Do I sense a variant of planned obsolescence creeping in here?) I was later told that if a battery was DOA out of the box, one could simply take or ship the computer to the nearest Apple store (including the one in Beijing, I presume), and they'll swap out the part or even the entire laptop. I found the statement particularly amusing since, during the keynote, I had to swap out the spent battery on a 2007-vintage Intel MacBook Pro, as there are always few power outlets in Moscone and those are guarded jealously. At Macworld, it has always been carry a spare or lose the ability to file content in real time.

Otherwise, the new Pro's feature set is quite robust, with two built-in video card environments, up to 8GB of RAM, and a 320GB hard drive. There is an "anti-glare" option for the screen (essentially removing the glossy-glass cover), 1920x1200 resolution, and an 700:1 contrast ratio. It comes in 2.63 and 2.93GHz Intel Core2 Duo configurations. The base model starts at $2799.

While this "battery issue" may not be a huge deal for iPod or even iPhone owners, the jury is still out on MacBook Air's battery. (When we tested the Air last spring, its battery life was in the same range as other Mac laptops, 4.5 or 5.5 hours, depending on the processor). It remains to be seen whether serious cross-media creative pros will overcome their fears and develop an interest in the 17-inch MacBook Pro.

Next up: Changes to the iTunes store.

—Thomas A. Olson

MacWorld: iWork '09 is robust, yet budget conscious

I previously discussed the new iLife '09, announced at MacWorld on Tuesday. The new version of the iWork productivity suite, also announced at the MacWorld keynote, offers a host of enhancements, all for $79.

Here are a few highlights:

Keynote '09. There's a lot of new eye-candy, with particular emphasis on an animated/morphing transition effect they called the "Magic Move." There are also a lot of new charting features, including animation, and charts could be embedded directly from Numbers, for one-click updating. A separate iPhone app lets you run the presentation remotely via your phone (if, say, you left your remote-control at the office) . The kicker is that the next slide will preview on the phone, so the speaker knows what coming next.

Numbers '09. There are now more than 250 math functions, a new "categorization" command for organizing tables, and improved charting features for financial and scientific uses.

Pages '09. This sports new dynamic outlines, integration with Mathtype and Endnote, new templates, integration with Numbers charts with one-click update.

Apple also launched a new beta "iWork.com" web-services collaboration tool, which can be called up on the fly from within any of the iWork apps without having to leave them. Third parties can see shared files on any browser, annotate and update, or download a copy in any format.

While fully interactive with each other, (and the outside world, via iwork.com), the application suite also has a feature that flies under the radar: full compatibility with standard MS Office formats. So, for example, a small business owner or independent consultant startup on a tight budget can share work with their Office-wielding clients with no problem.

Next up: The new 17-inch MacBook Pro.

—Thomas A. Olson

Macworld: A closer look at the new iLife

They may not have been as earth-shaking as the iPhone, but the new products Apple announced Tuesday offer lots of goodies.

Here are the details on iLife '09:

The big hits of this upgrade were iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand.

Previous versions of iPhoto let you create libraries of images based on Events. The new version adds Faces and Places.

New face recognition technology lets you tag images by a subject's face, and create custom directories on that basis. When new images are imported, iPhoto will scan the faces in the image and ask you if that is in fact your child, spouse or best friend, and if so, tag and file the image accordingly.

iPhoto '09 also offers "GPS geotagging" that lets you sort images by Place (the location at which they were taken). Using Google mapping technology, a map is displayed with "pins" in it, representing the places one has visited. Click on the pin to access those pics from last winter's Aspen trip. iPhoto now includes a database of thousands of locations, including satellite images.

There's also one-button support for Facebook and Flickr that's totally interactive. You and a Facebook friend may be sharing an image with someone in it that you don't know, but your friend does. If your friend adds that identifying information, it will route itself back to your iPhoto library and autoupdate.

There are also new slideshow themes, the face recognition can auto-center faces in the slideshow, new music and timing functions, and the Book feature includes the new map-generation technology. Slideshows can be exported to iPhone and played using a 99-cent app.

Macworld: Notes from (probably) the Last Keynote Ever

I guess if I wanted to spin it, I could argue that Apple staff was much better at crowd control Tuesday than in previous years. Otherwise, I might have been asking, "Where was the crowd?"

Over the last decade of "Stevenotes," attendees have simply grown accustomed to Mac cultists camping out literally all night in front of Moscone Center, so they could be first in the door when it finally opened and Steve Jobs made his product pronouncements. During those years, a festival atmosphere ruled. I would arrive around 6AM to see the line already snaking three-quarters of the way around an entire city block, four people or more thick.

Tuesday was a much more subdued environment. No long lines, no festival atmosphere, and certainly no overnight campers. When I arrived at 7:30AM, there were two small waiting areas in front of Moscone, one for the Platinum Pass folks, and one for Media. Each held only a handful of people. When the lines got too long, the groups would be escorted to larger, segregated waiting areas inside, on the ground floor. The only groups I saw were Platinums, Media, and VIPs, whom media folk outnumbered 4 to 1. I couldn't see where they were staging the "general" audience, but it certainly wasn't anywhere in sight.

Given Apple's announcements of recent weeks, expectations were low, at least in the estimation of colleagues I spoke with while waiting. They fell even further when Apple, at the last minute, canceled all private press briefings, including one that a colleague and I had tried to schedule for six weeks. That made us wonder whether there wouldn't be anything presented worth a private briefing.

Macworld Keynote: Modest expectations are fully met

There were no lines outside the door of MacWorld this morning, a change from recent Keynotes. Another change: No new "killer" product. Nevertheless, the Phil Schiller presentation played to a relatively full house of very supportive Apple fans.

The high points: Significant upgrades to the iLife and iWork application suites, a new 17-inch MacBook Pro (finishing off the upgrades to the entire laptop line), and the iTunes Music Store is going DRM-free and fully supports both Wi-Fi and 3G on the iPhone.

Here's a quick rundown on each:

iLife '09
The new suite (iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, Garageband) sports some major and more robust feature upgrades, including new special effects for iPhoto and iMovie, and mapping/geo-tagging capability to let users sort images by place, or make an animated map of your vacation journey between movie clips. Garageband now offers nine free music lessons for guitar and keyboard as a new feature.

As a bonus, Apple is offering "Artists Lessons" (at $4.95 per download), where artists like Sting will teach you one of their hit songs on piano or guitar, including a bit of history about how the song was created. iLife '09 ships the end of January, free with a new Mac purchase, or upgrades for $79 (single) and $99 (5-seat family license).

Macworld 2009: What to expect at today's keynote

Leave it to Apple CEO Steve Jobs to steal everyone's thunder—even by his absence.

As I noted yesterday, speculation concerning the fate of Macworld, and the decision by Jobs to skip delivering the keynote for health reasons, has so dominated the blogosphere that even educated guesses regarding what new Apple products may be announced at the keynote address for the Apple community's trade show is taking a back seat.

Never one to shrink from risky speculation, I'll take a stab at handicapping what Apple VP Phil Schiller—subbing for Jobs—may say today:

• The first thing we're usually treated to at a typical keynote are stats: sales milestones, total downloads of songs/films/apps. iPhone App Store stats will be a new category to boast about, and since Mac market share has passed double-digits in the domestic market, expect some celebratory oration there, as well.


• We'll likely see a demo of Snow Leopard, OS 10.6. As Apple back in June filed for patents for a 3-D interface, it's also possible that we'll get a first taste.


• We may see some upgrades to the iLife and iWork productivity suites, possibly with a web component.


• There may be some incremental improvements to iPod Touch and iPhone, along with new offerings at the iTunes Music Store.


• We may get a look at Apple's first major update to their Cinema Display line of monitors in many years.


• I expect we'll hear something about AppleTV, the set-top box that ferries content to your TV set. Will it undergo yet another facelift to boost lagging sales, "merge" with MacMini, or quietly disappear, like the XServe Raid? More likely we'll see some updates to MacMini, and they'll sneak in some of AppleTV's features when they think no one is paying attention.