Official iCreate Blog > Apple

By now you’ve probably seen one of the new Microsoft adverts. You know the ones, Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld bantering in a seemingly nonsensical manner and at no point mentioning quite what they’re talking about or, at least, attempting to advertise.

Then there’s the other lot of ads from Bill and Co. The Gatesmeister doesn’t feature and Seinfeld has allegedly been canned, but the Redmond boys take aim at Apple’s I’m a Mac/I’m a PC campaign by, well… repeating the “I’m a PC” line. A wide range of people from all walks of life repeat the simple phrase “I’m a PC and I…” filling in the blank with everything from charity work to graffiti (yeah, PC users break the law too guys). This culminates with one chap proudly proclaiming “I’m a PC and I sell fish”. What the hell is going on!?

Online, people are wondering about hidden meanings in the Seinfeld ads, is the old woman Steve Jobs? Are scallop potatoes meant to be Macs? Was it really Bill Gates behind the Grassy Knoll? That’s stage one of the – wait for it - $300 million advertising campaign complete. People are talking about the ads.
Whether the consumers get it or not, they’re talking about Microsoft rather than just blindly using its software.

Then there’s the second batch of ads, the Seinfeld-less “I’m a PC” ones. Am I the only one to think this was a bad move? Even if I didn’t have a clue what Shoe Circus was meant to represent as Bill and Jerry tried on loafers, at least I was intrigued. Joe Public and a sprinkling of cash-hungry celebrities yelling “I’m a PC” in between my regular TV programming tells me two things; one – PCs are used the world over for a wide variety of tasks, both creative and dull. Tell me something I didn’t know. Two – Microsoft is aware of, possibly even worried/annoyed by, Apple’s “I’m a Mac” campaign.

The Bill & Jerry’s ads completely overlooked Apple’s ads. They ignored them as a company with such an enormous market share should. Microsoft is the Ford of the technology world, and you don’t see the Fiesta trying to rival a Ferrari when it comes to marketing.

So what are we left with? A petty playground squabble that will end up costing Microsoft about as much as it would cost to fix its currently flawed operating system. Don’t worry about Apple, boys. Take a look at yourselves! You’re re-branding a dead horse, that’s for sure, but people are still buying PCs and they’re still buying Windows. Just because the Zune didn’t take off doesn’t mean you’re failing.

Ultimately my problem comes down to the Microsoft fan boys (yes, I said “fan boys”). For years, us Mac users have been elitist and we’ve said that our platform is better than yours. There’s no getting around that. Now it actually IS better, and we’re still saying it. That hasn’t stopped Microsoft ruling the roost in the market share stakes. Nobody stopped buying PCs. But now, a set of overpriced and over hyped ads have appeared and the Windows users have crawled out of the woodwork to laugh and point and jeer and boast about their ads as if they’ve won some kind of battle. It’s a sad truth, but the Microsoft crowd are acting like the underdogs and that’s what entertains me the most. You don’t like our ads, nobody understands yours.

However you look at it, in terms of PR or user satisfaction, I’ll tell you one thing. I’m still glad “I’m a Mac and I don’t sell fish”.

Apple generally know how to get the Mac community excited and it seems they’ve done it again! This time with a monstrous banner. Well played Apple, you have whet my appetite. Roll on tomorrow. Look out for Twitter updates on the day (search twittter for iCreateMagazine) and we’ll also be trying our hand at live-blogging from the event itself - ok, not the event itself in San Fran, but the beamed show in London. So, watch this space as of about 4:00pm BST.

Can’t wait.

We love September. It means new iPods. This September is no different, Apple has just invited us to a ’special event’ on September 9th.

We’re expecting to see a new iPod Nano as well as a form factor change for the iPod Touch so it matches the iPhone and we’ll probably get various storage bumps in there too.

Stay tuned on the day because I will sending blogs up as the event happens. Can’t wait.

Its getting to that time of year again when we start thinking about new Apple products. As each summer winds down, the misery of the good weather leaving us is put on hold by the promise of new goodies from Cupertino. September is the time of year when Apple gives us something new to play with. Usually its an iPod update, so at the very least we’ll get some new features and a bump in memory.

This year however, we’re hopeful for a whole lot more. I have just been speaking with our esteemed Head of Design, Ross Andrews and we have now both convinced ourselves that we’ll see an update to the laptop line (its about time!) and also a brand new bit of hardware.

This is the point we couldn’t agree on. Will it be a small netbook with a 7-9inch screen and physical keyboard? Or will it be a fully pimped dual touch-screen tablet that you can plug into you Mac at home and use instead of a mouse?

We love to speculate on Apple products and we want your ideas too, what do you think is the next big thing that will come out of Cupertino? Let your imaginations run wild and if you have mock ups that you’ve made in Photoshop let us see those too!

Here are some images we’ve nabbed off the net to whet your appetites…

There is an interesting story on www.macnn.com which offers some interesting insight into Apple’s market share of the computer world. Whilst its commonly known that in the market as a whole Apple occupies about 14%, its come to light that when compared to the market of PC’s that cost over $1000 (which accounts for the majority of the Mac lineup) Apple actually holds around 66%!

Surely, these stats should be telling Apple to crack on and create a mid-market machine that has some of the appeal of the iMac but with a nice low starting price. As much as we love the Mac mini, its lack of a dedicated graphics card and basic upgrade-ability make it a bit of the stick in the mud to those people on a budget but with plans for expansion over time.

So, come on Apple. Build us a cool machine that can sit between the iMac and the Mac mini. Please…

Hang on a minute, has a Tuesday been and gone without Apple releasing anything? What’s going? I feel empty….

Luckily, we’ve heard rumours that there are going to be updates to the iMac and Mac Mini. They will be getting a little speed bump with some new processors.

Also, a quick note to let everyone know that the latest podcast is out and available to download from iTunes or the iCreate website. Why not log in to iTunes and write a review and let us know what you think…

If anyone cares about the plight of the piece of scrap metal I bought from Microsoft (XBox 360 for those who didn’t read my earlier post). I made it work again. 

How did I do this? Did I fold under the pressure, void the warranty and open the case to fix it? No. I did what any self respecting Apple fan would do when confronted with a piece of hardware from Redmond - I gave the thing an almighty punch. 


I’m not kidding, I hit the thing so hard it made my knuckles red and suddenly the whirring noises stopped and it could read discs again. It’s true, Microsoft hardware hasn’t progressed much further than the typewriter when it comes to crucial updates and quick fixes. As far as an entertainment platform goes, my XBox 360 is the jukebox at Arnold’s and I’m the Fonze (Check out some old Happy Days episodes if you don’t catch my drift).  


Talking of Microsoft incompetence, what’s this I see? A “Critical” update to Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac? Surely not.


Not only was Microsoft the last of the major players to release an Intel-native version of its software for Mac (probably due to the giant delay-fest that was the disappointing Windows Vista) when it finally does deliver the product, it needs to bash out an update to prevent applications from quitting unexpectedly or stopping responding.






Once again, hats off to Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates and the rest, you’ve brought us yet another half-baked, unfinished product. What would we do without you? 
 
 

I admit it. I bought an XBox 360.

Well come on, until Apple really goes for it and launches a games console (not the Pippin!) I didn’t have much choice. I had a Wii for a while (because it seemed the most Apple-esque choice) but it didn’t quite cut it against the next-gen breed. 

So…I’ve had this Microsoft product in my home for a fortnight now. All has been good and, I hate to say it, I’ve enjoyed using it. I bought the top of the line Elite model and a bunch of games and, despite it looking like a VCR or some kind of high tech shoebox, things have been fine.Today I come home looking to settle down for a quick game of Call of Duty and what happens… the disc drive is emitting some kind of buzzing sound and no game can be read. I knew the last 14 days had been too good to be true.

Online I hop and, lo and behold, literally hundreds of people have had this problem if not thousands. Apparently it’s my fault. I should have made sure my XBox was kept cool and rested on its side!

What the @$%&!? 

There are some things I don’t need to be warned about. I know the coffee in my cup is hot and I know that smoking kills.What I didn’t know was that if you position an XBox in one of the ways it’s built to sit/stand it will break. I also didn’t know that if you allow an XBox to heat up to anything close to room temperature, it’ll break.

So Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is sitting out in Vegas at the moment complaining that the MacBook Air is too heavy, he’s moaning about the iPhone price, always dissing Apple. Ok Steve, at least when Apple brings a product to market, “It just works”. The bastard child of Sloth from The Goonies and an albatross can blindly tout Vista as a revolution and Windows Mobile as groundbreaking but can he honestly say that any of his products really face up to actual use and tests of functionality?

I’ve had a MacBook for two years. No faults. An iMac which I’ve had fixed once in 5 years of ownership and an iPhone thats been dropped, knocked and had a cigarette put out on its screen and it still works, still looks great. All of the above run Mac OS X by the way. Any problems with that? No. Even after upgrading to the latest OS which (unlike Microsoft’s effort is better than the previous version).

I’ve had an XBox less than half a month and its stopped working.

Another admission: I’ve owned an XBox before. The original model. What happened to it? The drive broke. Then the HD. Then some kind of video fault developed. All within one year.

I’m the idiot here. I naively thought that, as much as its operating system is a pile of the proverbial, Microsoft had its games devision nailed and would certainly have been committed to more stable hardware after many issues with the original XBox model. Man was I wrong.Knock it together, fire it out to the masses, pay the price when a huge percentage of the products fail.

The guy who sold me my XBox tried to push me onto a PS3, citing the “hundreds” of returns he’d been plagued with since he began stocking the XBox 360. I wish I’d listened to him. I wish I’d taken his advice, given my money to another company that cares about the end user, cares about products standing the test of time and cares about quality.As we well know, Microsoft is not a company on that list. 

I’m the sucker for thinking things couldn’t possibly get any worse.

So, to Evil Steve (Ballmer): Screw you, your stupid dancing antics, your sweating and your mangled vocal chords.

To Good Steve (Jobs): It’s time to bring out yet another device to shame the morons at Microsoft.

   
Not content with having us wander around seemingly jabbering to ourselves when making a phone call on the iPhone headset, Apple has yet another confused look-provoking feature to share. 

Games are coming to the iPhone in June thanks to the recently released SDK (Software Developers Kit). Not just point and click stuff, not just Tetris, games that require shaking, rotating, twisting and flipping. The accelerometer in the iPhone is incredible when you’re looking at pictures or websites and need to quickly rotate the screen and now this impressive technology is being harnessed to make the device the “Wii of handheld gaming”. The iPhone is not a toy, stop it, stop it, stop it! 
 
Picture the scene: 

9.45: Hop on the bus, plug in iPhone headphones and listen to the latest iCreate podcast. A couple of suppressed giggles garner some strange looks from other public transport users but nothing to worry about.   

9.50: Podcast is getting going but I’m interrupted  by a phone call. Click the button on iPhone headphones to receive call. “Hello?” I say, apparently into thin air. Most assume I’m singing along to Lionel Richie.  


10.00: Finish chatting away while appearing to still listen to iPod with no discernible telephone anywhere nearby. It was a friend informing me that the new iPhone App store is available with games and really cool third-party apps. I fire up Safari. 


10.20: Successfully download Super Monkey Ball for iPhone. It’s a primate in a ball that must be rolled, Marble Madness-style, to the end of the level. The controls? You guessed it - accelerometer.


11.30: Level one completed. Successfully navigated the ape in a ball by tilting the iPhone. Imagine how stupid you look playing tennis on a Nintendo Wii and multiply it by ten. Then imagine doing it in public. 


10.35: Game’s getting harder, motions more frantic. Concerned onlookers fear some kind of fit from the guy talking to himself a few minutes before. I bought this iPhone to look cool! 


10.40: Bus arrives outside office. Police & Ambulance are waiting. Apparently someone with a “regular” telephone tipped them off.   


So what’s next? Default ABBA ringtones? A voice-activated unlock feature that requires you to sing the first four bars of Build Me Up Buttercup? Apple, this is the coolest piece of technology ever to be produced, please don’t reduce it to a plaything. Perhaps that’s why they announced the Microsoft Exchange support for iPhone at the same time, to balance the lightweight, consumer extras with heavy business power tools. Then again, that’s Microsoft technology and when have those guys ever been cool? 

Let’s just hope that beyond the games studios, some truly brilliant third-party apps for iPhone are in the works that don’t make us look like morons when using them. Either that or the popularity of the phone will grow by such a degree that swinging your arms and legs about and talking to yourself in public will become the norm.  

It’s not just Macs and iLife down here in iCreate-land. 
We’re also lucky enough to check out some of the great iTunes events held fairly regularly in London. 

 

Last week, Jimmy and I hopped on a train to the capital’s Air Studios in Hampstead where we caught an intimate show recorded for iTunes Live: London Sessions. Featuring the sultry vocals of Dawn Kinnard, effortlessly cool folk-rock from Jason Mraz and the powerful simplicity of Canada’s Ron Sexsmith, it was certainly a night to be remembered.
 
 

Located in the scenic enclosure that is Lyndhurst Hall which has played host to recording sessions from such luminaries as Coldplay, Madonna and George Michael, competition winners and assorted press (the only people with access to the show) stood mere feet from the performing artists. Bathed in ethereal light and with tunes stripped down to simply vocals, piano and guitar, all three artists enjoyed a substantial share of the stage and even spent time singing together, with Americans Mraz and Kinnard performing a delightful duet.There were special guests aplenty too with Nick Lowe and James Morrison gracing the stage to perform alongside Ron Sexsmith and Jason Mraz respectively.
   
The performances are set to be released exclusively on iTunes in March. For more information and an access all areas sneak peak of the show, featuring interviews and detailed reviews, check out the upcoming iCreate podcast on iTunes or at www.icreatemagazine.com/podcasts  For more information on iTunes Live visit www.ituneslive.co.uk