Before He Died, Steve Jobs Said He Wanted Apple To Make A Car

Jay Yarow spotted a gem of a line in Nick Bilton’s post on Apple’s curved glass iWatches:

In a meeting in his office before he died, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and former chief executive, told John Markoff of The New York Times that if he had more energy, he would have liked to take on Detroit with an Apple car.

 

Is Apple About To Make A Serious E-Commerce Move?

Apple is currently pursuing The Fancy, a social commerce site similar in nature to Pinterest, according to Owen Thomas at Business Insider.

Thomas:

The objective: to secure a role for Apple in the growing e-commerce market, putting the 400 million-plus users with credit cards on file with Apple’s iTunes Store to work shopping—with Apple getting a cut of the action.

This almost makes too much sense for it not to happen.

Back in Cupertino for presentation number two, I walked Steve through the new names first. After I’d gone through the new list, he still didn’t like any. That’s when I pulled out “iMac” again and told him we still had a lot of heart for that one. Steve gave it the courtesy of a fresh look. “Well, I don’t hate it this week,” he said. “But I still don’t love it. Now we’ve only got a couple days left, and I still think ‘MacMan’ is the best name we have.” Depressing as that was, there was at least a shred of hope this time around. Steve had said he didn’t hate “iMac” anymore. Felt like positive energy to me.  It’s amazing to think about how different Apple would be if they named the iMac the ‘MacMan’. This drawn-out naming decision paved the way for a new era of simplicity and branding around the single letter “i”. (via)
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Back in Cupertino for presentation number two, I walked Steve through the new names first. After I’d gone through the new list, he still didn’t like any. That’s when I pulled out “iMac” again and told him we still had a lot of heart for that one. Steve gave it the courtesy of a fresh look. “Well, I don’t hate it this week,” he said. “But I still don’t love it. Now we’ve only got a couple days left, and I still think ‘MacMan’ is the best name we have.” Depressing as that was, there was at least a shred of hope this time around. Steve had said he didn’t hate “iMac” anymore. Felt like positive energy to me. 

It’s amazing to think about how different Apple would be if they named the iMac the ‘MacMan’. This drawn-out naming decision paved the way for a new era of simplicity and branding around the single letter “i”.

(via)

We try to develop products that seem somehow inevitable. That leave you with the sense that that’s the only possible solution that makes sense. Our products are tools and we don’t want design to get in the way. We’re trying to bring simplicity and clarity, we’re trying to order the products. I think subconsciously people are remarkably discerning. I think that they can sense care.
Jonathan Ive Interview: Apple’s Design Genius Is British To The Core

350,000 Textbooks Downloaded From Apple’s iBooks in Three Days

This just in — Apple is going to take over the textbook market, and the early results are encouraging. Within the first three days, Apple sold more than 350,000 textbooks from the iBooks Store.

The textbook industry is broken. Students rely on old content, worn out and over-highlighted physical books, and hard-to-read text to study course material. The customers in the industry are practically crying out for digital copies of their course textbooks.

It’s clear that Apple is on to something big, so what could possibly hold this back? Well, it’s more on the technology than the textbooks themselves. Students constantly flip around textbooks to find the material they need. If Apple can develop technology within iBooks to make flipping and quickly scanning a textbook a reality, there’s no reason people would ever not prefer the digital copy over the physical copy. Add in the ability to lend a textbook to a friend, and it’s a slam dunk.

Wearing Your Computer on Your Sleeve

Michael Liebhold, a senior researcher specializing in wearable computing at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif., predicts that the next step in technology is the blurring of the real and virtual worlds.

Over the next 10 years, he says, he envisions that people will be wearing glasses with built-in screens and, eventually, contact lenses — with working displays.

“Kids will play virtual games with their friends, where they meet in a park and run around chasing virtual creatures for points,” he said.

According to Nick Bilton, wearable computers will become a new standard as people become “more absorbed by the [smartphone] screen.” While it’s hard to envision what exactly these prototypes could look like, it’s reported that Apple and Google have already begun testing prototypes of their own.

If anything, the smartphone — which already takes up a significant part of our daily lives, both in time and attention — will only grow in importance. And if Google and Apple are placing heavy bets in building and developing technologies around this device, then we have to assume that smartphones aren’t going away anytime soon.

Dell quits netbooks, says 'thin and powerful is where it's at'

First Acer, now Dell. Recognizing that the netbooks fad has quickly come and gone, Dell announced today that they will be shifting away from netbooks completely towards “thin and powerful” products, ultrabooks.

Now that more than one company is essentially mirroring Apple’s MacBook Air approach, can we agree that the MacBook Air pioneered the ultrabook industry? Think iPad to tablet, MacBook to laptop.

The phrase “It’s a copycat league” can easily be applied to consumer electronics, and Dell publicly admitting that netbooks haven’t worked and that ultrabooks do, says a lot. Even if we may not go to the extent of crowning Apple as ultrabook pioneers, the company’s tremendous impact on technological norms cannot be questioned.

Apple and Google mobile grew in 2011, all others shrank

Android and iOS combine to secure a whopping 82 percent of the smartphone market. Apple has 29 percent of the market, while Android has the lion’s share with 53 percent. These two platforms were the only ones to record growth in 2011. RIM’s BlackBerry OS, which has struggled this year, declined to a meager 8 percent of the market share. Newcomer Windows Phone 7 didn’t plummet like RIM, but it didn’t climb either. Throughout 2011, the platform never went above 2 percent.

The NPD has released smartphone market share numbers for the year. They aren’t surprising. Apple and Google continue to lead the way, as Android and iOS were the only platforms that grew.

Windows Phone 7 didn’t move, which is a minor surprise considering that Microsoft seemed to advertise their devices on television fairly extensively. 

Apple's MacBook Air to dominate ultrabook market, says analyst

J.P. Morgan went out on a limb today (note the sarcasm), calling for huge MacBook Air sales and retention of dominant market share despite the increase in competitors.

Analyst Mark Moskowitz:

“Ultrabooks are not a competitive threat, yet,” Moskowitz said in an investor’s note released today. “In general, we think that ultrabooks are highly discretionary devices, and pricing on competitive offerings must fall below $800 before posing a viable threat to Apple’s MacBook Air.”

If pricing is the only way for ultrabooks to beat the MacBook Air, it will be a little while before they take a meaningful chunk of market share away. The MacBook Air is so far ahead of its competitors that unless companies take a super-discount approach (see Acer from the other day), they will have a hard time putting their products in winning positions against Apple.

As MG Siegler has mentioned before, it’s a possibility that the MacBook Air may result in a consolidation of sorts with regard to Apple’s MacBook line. The MacBook Air has all but killed the MacBook in terms of functionality and portability, so why can’t it become the standard?

So let’s turn the tables another way. Could ultrabooks made by direct Apple competitors completely replace established main laptop offerings by those companies? It’s highly doubtful, and that, by itself, makes the MacBook Air stand alone.

The Air is functional enough to replace a whole category of main laptop offerings. Sure, the Air has no optical drive and it isn’t the most powerful machine out there (buy a MacBook Pro for the power), but it just works. And that’s what consumers are ultimately looking for.