Apple To Rewrite Computing Again

Up next for Apple: the return of the Newton

Externally, the mutil-touch PDA has been described by sources as an ultra-thin “slate” akin to the iPhone, about 1.5 times the size and sporting an approximate 720×480 high-resolution display that comprises almost the entire surface of the unit. The device is further believed to leverage multi-touch concepts which have yet to gain widespread adoption in Apple’s existing multi-touch products — the iPhone and iPod touch — like drag-and-drop and copy-and-paste.

More broadly characterized as Apple’s answer to the ultra-mobile PC, the next-gen device is believed to be tracking for a release sometime in the first half of 2008. Assuming the project remains clear of roadblocks, sources believe it could make an inaugural appearance during Jobs’ Macworld keynote in January alongside some new Mac offerings. Still, manufacturing ramp and availability would seem unlikely until closer to mid-year, those same sources say.

Now everything is beginning to make sense to me.

1) Why Apple does not want people to hack the iPod Touch for third-party software — it would undercut sales of this future device with one that does not offer the same profit margin*

2) Why Apple doesn’t care if the iPhone has third-party software on it — there is sufficient profit in the monster volume sales of this device to let it slide (for now)

3) Why Palm believed the Foleo had to be introduced now — it was its only chance to gain a foothold in a market Apple will soon dominate

4) Why Asus chose as its low-ball computing introduction a subnotebook-size device (which has higher manufacturing costs) — they believed Apple was going to do that

5) Why there has not been a scramble to add ebooks to The iTunes Store — this device will offer a true “paperback-quality” reading experience

6) Why a portable Bluetooth keyboard has not been offered by Apple for the iPhone — it will be offered for this machine

7) Why Nokia persists in its efforts with its Anti-Internet Tablets — they fear Apple is going to grab the market (and the entire world!) from them

8) The rumor of internal H.264 decoder chips in future Macs — will this device have that, to further position the Apple brand as one for consumer electronics?

What I think still has to fall into place:

1) Apple announcing joint ventures with social sites such as MySpace (Murdoch just recognized the importance of The iTunes Stores for TV, is this a hint of secret talks?)

2) Hackers revealing secret features in the upcoming Leopard OS release that aren’t yet being used

3) The discontinuation of the Mac mini (could this new device be called the mini II or the Mac nano?)

4) Leaks of Apple making deals with print publishers (not limited to just books)

5) iSync being enhanced

6) This device being announced at MacWorld Expo in January along with the revelation of a customized version of the iWork suite for it

Apple’s Thermonuclear Bomb Of Mobile Applications

One company I wouldn’t want to be is Palm. And one business I wouldn’t want to be in is offering non-phone devices running Windows Mobile.

(*Personally, I think this is a mistake. It would help to create the market for this larger device. It would whet people’s appetite. It would also create an ecology of developers ready to port everything over to the new device.)

=======================
Did you just read this post? Now click here.

Previously in this blog:
Can Apple Create A Real Handheld Market?
eBooks On iPhone: Reading Software
New MacBooks = Optical Drive Bye-Bye
The Asus Eee Effect?
Wow. I’m Really Out Of The iPhone Loop!
Is The Foleo Completely Dead Now?
Foleo: Dude, I’m Not Getting A Fat-Ass Dell!
The iPod Touch: Don’t Touch It?
Size-Off: Foleo Versus Powerbooks
Asus Eee: OS X?!
Will Palm Die Or Show Others How To Be Reborn?
Hey, SanDisk! Buy The Foleo IP From Palm!
Ed Colligan’s Worst Nightmare
New Disease: Post-Foleo Nightmare Syndrome
The Foleo Dispossessed
Quote Of The Day: Popular Mechanics
The Palm Foleo Disaster: Part Two
Quote Of The Day: Michael Mace
Quote Of The Day: Flashback To iPod Introduction
You Still Make Me Want To Bleed To Death
Foleo: The Beat Goes On…
The Palm Foleo Disaster: Part One
Dumbass Of The Year: Ed Colligan
The DUH! File: BoingBoing Catches Up
S.O.S. Steve Jobs! eBooks Will Save You!
If We Can’t Have Momentum On This, Can I At Least Get An Amen, Brother?
Newsflash! Pictures Of Corpses Left In Wake Of iPhone Price Cut!
Today’s Episode Of The Steve Jobs Show, Plus More
Tomorrow’s iPod: The Beginning Of Bliss?
Palm Kills Foleo
OK, Now The Foleo Scares Me
A Post-iTunes Fable For NBC
Nokia’s Upcoming Fake iPhone
Should Apple Turn iTunes Into A Platform?
iPod Price History: Will Apple Fight Or Lose?
Quote Of The Day: Nokia’s Innate Ineptness
iPod Touch Coming Next Week?
Poor Ed Colligan. Ascared Of Me.
Apple Wins The Internet Video Wars
Oh Look! I Get To Bash Palm And Nokia At The Same Time! It’s Two Two Two Hits In One!
Do New Apple Keyboards Hint At An iPhone Keyboard?
iPhone Death Star Upgrade Coming
Splaying The Code Guts Of The iPhone: TV-Out & Filesystem
Microsoft, Palm, And Nokia: You Better Be Freaking Out!!
I Don’t Think You Understand Just How Incredible The iPhone Really Is!
Some People Catch On Later Than… Everyone Else.
iQuote Of The Post-iDay
I’ve Fondled The iPhone!!
Record Blog Traffic: Apple iPhone Vs. Palm Foleo
Jobs Gets YouTube On iPhone — But Without Flash!
Oh My God! What Did We Buy?!!?
Oh Look At This! My Apple-YouTube Prediction Will Come True!
A Picture Of Two Tech Devices That Should Have Never Been Released
My Reaction To Palm’s New Foleo Device
On A Day When Palm Gets Everything Wrong, Apple Gets It Right
Does Apple Hold The Key To Breaking Open Computing Everywhere?
Prediction: YouTube/Google Drop Flash Video
The iPhone Is A First-Generation Pocket Mac
A Pocket Keyboard Fit For The iPhone?
OS X Widgetry And iPhone Possibilities
Applenomics, Or Why Steve Jobs Will Now Hate Me For Ever And Ever
Bravo Nicholas Carr!

eBooks On iPhone: Reading Software

Books.app

A native eBook reader for the iPhone. Capable of reading HTML and plain text stored on your iPhone.

I drool!

Previously in this blog:
S.O.S. Steve Jobs! eBooks Will Save You!
Another Argument For eBooks On The iPhone
Reference: Installing Native Apps On An iPhone
eBooks On iPhone: HarperCollins Kicks In
eBooks On iPhone: Well, There Are Magazines At Least!
The eBooks On iPhone Campaign: Steve Jobs Loves Books! Hey, Steve, So Do We!!
eBooks On iPhone: The Clamor Continues!
eBookery For iPhone?
eBooks on iPhone: Another Person Who Won’t Wait For Apple
eBooks On iPhone: Not Waiting For Apple!
iPhone: First eBook On It?
iPhone Death Star Upgrade Coming
Mucho Namaste To FSJ!
Will Apple Steal The eBook Limelight From Sony And Create Another Mass Market?

Reading: September 23 2007

Just Read:

Outrageous Fortune by Tim Scott
— A huge romp that loses track of all its threads towards the end and leaves an unsatisfying feeling that not everything has been wrapped up as neatly as the author thought. It’s also horribly mis-titled. His next book is to be called Love In The Time Of Fridges, so this one probably was going to be Don’t You Hate It When This Happens? but something must have gone awry in editing/marketing land. If you like Jasper Fforde‘s bizarre works, you’ll love this book. For most of the book, I kept thinking it was Fforde writing under a pseudonym. Apparently Tim Scott is a real person (who does not have a site or a blog!):

Tim Scott is not Jasper Fforde!

Today:
I have no idea yet. I have a few non-fiction books and several Palahniuk novels. I’ll have to see what captures my fancy…

Tomorrow:

Ammunition by Ken Bruen
— it’s Bruen! He always jumps the Endless Reading Queue. Here’s a quick YouTube video of him. He’s one of my writing gods and has been in the Blogroll since the start. I would have had this read already, but I didn’t get to the NYPL in time. It’s on hold there and now I have to wait until tomorrow. Just what I need: a reason to wake up tomorrow.

Abandoned:

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon by Crystal Zevon
— bloody hell. This is a two-inch thick book that also weighs a ton. I just couldn’t keep lugging it around. I’ll have to return to it another time.

Go Get Yer Stephen Fry, Unillustrated

A poster over at Gear Diary has cloned the electrons of Stephen Fry’s now globally-famous cri de coeur about smartphones and other like pocketable devices.

Go read it here.

Thanks to Jim Moat for the email tip.

Yeah, you still can’t get it from Fry:

We’ve enjoyed extensive web traffic over the past few days. As a result, the Forum and Blog will be shutting down from Saturday 6.00AM-12.00PM (British Summer Time) whilst we upgrade the server.

Please return for the latest on Stephen’s blog and events in the Forum.

And for those of you (which probably includes Fry himself) who doubted I’ve read his novels, here’s one of the many bits I scanned and carry around with me in my PDA (currently a wretched Palm LifeDrive):

Jane’s house found itself somewhere near Onslow Gardens. There was money in her purse, no question, courtesy of her Uncle Michael no doubt, and, like every rich, ignorant girl these days, she passed herself off as an interior decorator.

“People saw what I’d done with the flat,” she said, as the taxi drew up outside a standard South Kensington white-pillared portico, “and asked if I could help them out too.”

The interior lived up to my ripest expectations. Hideous flouncing swags for curtains, raw silk instead of wallpaper, you can picture the whole sham shambles for yourself, I’m sure. Barbarically hideous and as loudly wailing a testament to a wholly futile and empty life as can be imagined. Just how fucking idle, just how rotting bored, do you have to be, I wondered, to sit down and dream up this kind of opulent garbage? She was standing in the middle of the room, eyebrows raised, ready for my gargles of admiration. I took a deep breath.

“This is one of the most revolting rooms I’ve ever stood in all my life. It is exactly as hideous as I expected, and exactly as hideous as ten thousand rooms within pissing distance of here. It’s an insult to the eye and fully as degrading a cocktail of overpriced cliché as can be found outside Beverly Hills. I would no more park my arse on that sofa with its artfully clashing and vibrantly assorted cushions than I would eat a dog-turd. Congratulations on wasting an expensive education, a bankload of money and your whole sad life. Goodbye.”

That’s what I would have said with just two more fingers of whisky inside me. Instead, I managed a broken, “My God, Jane . . .”

“You like?”

“Like isn’t the word . . . it’s, it’s . . .”

“They tell me I have an eye,” she conceded. “Homes and Interiors were here last week, photographing.”

“I’m sure they were,” I said.

“You should have seen the place when I moved in!”

“Such a sense of light and space,” I sighed. Always utterly safe.

“Men don’t usually appreciate such things,” she said with approval, moving to the drinks table.

“Fuck you, you mad, sad bitch,” I said inside, while “Even a man couldn’t fail to be knocked out by this skilful, tasteful blend of the ethnic and the domestic,” said my cowardly outspread arms.

— The Hippopotamus by Stephen Fry; pgs. 21-22

Right then. Hurry off and go buy his books. They are hugely funny, witty, and intelligent.

Previously in this blog:
Someone Bop Stephen Fry On His Noggin, Dammit

Fight Club By Chuck Palahniuk

Blame Richard Perez, author of the excellent novel The Losers’ Club, for upsetting my Endless Book Queue. He sent out a MySpace Bulletin asking if he was the last person to find out that Palahniuk was gay and then wrote a bit about Palahniuk’s Fight Club.

Intrigued, I got the book. I’d never seen the movie (I am further behind on movies than books…).

This is a hypnotic, amazing novel, unlike any other I’ve ever read.

I don’t know how to go about describing it without ruining any of it. It’s almost like one of those You Had To Be There things.

The unnamed narrator and a guy named Tyler Durden become entwined in a bizarre friendship between one another and a flipped-out young woman named Marla. The narrator’s insomnia and Durden’s daring ultimately lead to the establishment of Fight Clubs, where men can step into a ring hidden in the basements of bars to beat the living shit out of one another. The Fight Clubs in turn lead to the deification of Durden who then goes on to establish a series of Committees: Arson, Assault, Mischief, and Misinformation. It all turns into a cult manned with shaved-head ‘space monkeys” who have wound up, by dint of their low-level positions of employment, infiltrating almost every part of society. Think of a cult as powerful as Scientology but without the outer space bullshit.

The narrator, without ever admitting it, seems to be a closeted gay man whose self-loathing ultimately rears its head (no pun intended) to avenge itself on a society that will not accept him. There’s some stuff about anti-materialism thrown in, but I think that’s a red herring for the real point: self-determination, self-respect, self-acceptance, and Fuck All to a society that wants, above all, homogeneity (again, no pun intended).

Palahniuk’s writing is a revelation. It twists upon itself, plays with time and space, and has a rhythm that just entrances the reader and pulls him into the story.

From the first page I should have understood what was really happening. I didn’t for two reasons: 1) I don’t read books to figure them out while I’m reading them; I read to enter a different world and point of view, and 2) Palahniuk is like an expert magician, using words to pull off a sleight-of-hand.

I’ve never seen the movie. I don’t know if I want to. Movies from books are usually disappointing at best or utter shit (there are exceptions, but they are very rare). If you’ve seen the movie, forget it. Just go and get the book to read. It’s bound to be better. And it’s a reading experience you’ll never, ever forget.

Reading: September 8 2007

Today:

Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis
— the NYPL got it in. It jumps to the head of the queue.

Still Reading:

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon by Crystal Zevon
— lyme?! All-lime and all-green furnishing and clothes? Christ, we were all insane… First, to do shit like that. Second, that we bought it.

Reading: September 5 2007

Now Reading:

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon by Crystal Zevon
— went to the head of my Endless Book Queue because of this.

Just Read:

Dork Whore: My Travels Through Asia as a Twenty-Year-Old Pseudo-Virgin. by Iris Bahr
— see separate post.

White Corridor by Christopher Fowler
— separate post coming at some point.

About Time (short stories) by Jack Finney
(a re-read or 2nd re-read…)
— Finney is always a delight. Of the twelve stories, the final two are ringers and not about time travel at all. One of the time travel stories has a man who goes into the past using a car. Hmmmm, I’m looking at you, Back to the Future.

Ocean by Warren Ellis, Chris Sprouse and Karl Story.
— I surprised you with this, eh? It hadn’t been listed in Reading. Got it from the NYPL unexpectedly. It’s a neat little tale. The art is nearly like motion picture storyboards. It’s also been optioned for a movie. Someone page Ridley Scott or David Lynch. There’s one problem I had with this book: its presentation. It read like one book. It turns out it was a series and this is a compilation. I didn’t find this out until I saw a cover gallery in the back. That really pissed me off. I think the covers should have been chapter breaks. And what’s this — no page numbers?! How can I quote anything without citing a page number?!

Reading: August 25 2007

Now Reading:
Dork Whore: My Travels Through Asia as a Twenty-Year-Old Pseudo-Virgin. by Iris Bahr
— a rare non-fiction for me right now.

Soon Reading:
White Corridor by Christopher Fowler
— hmmmm… no coverage on Fowler’s site!

Just Read:
Spider Kiss by Harlan Ellison
— it didn’t do anything for me.

Still reading:
About Time (short stories) by Jack Finney
(a re-read or 2nd re-read…)

Reading: August 23 2007

Now Reading:
Spider Kiss by Harlan Ellison
— after decades and decades of not having read it!

Recently Read:
Red Bride by Christopher Fowler
— Fowler’s usual greatness. I wasn’t keen on the supernatural element he warned me about. Had he been able to persuade his publisher to drop it, it would have been a novel about how a person can get trapped in the grip of a bad idea. That would have been scary enough!

Still reading:
About Time (short stories) by Jack Finney
(a re-read or 2nd re-read…)

Another Argument For eBooks On The iPhone

One in four read no books last year

The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year — half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn’t read any, the usual number read was seven.

This is interesting:

[It’s] reflected in book sales, which have been flat in recent years and are expected to stay that way indefinitely. Analysts attribute the listlessness to competition from the Internet and other media, the unsteady economy and a well-established industry with limited opportunities for expansion.

Get that last reason:

a well-established industry with limited opportunities for expansion.

There’d be plenty of expansion if ebooks weren’t priced like print books! It’s an outrage that publishers think a flow of electrons must be priced the same as a physical object. There’s no excuse for such pricing. It’s greed and cowardice.

There’d be plenty of expansion if Apple would create an “iRead” application for the iPhone and finally create an ebook mass-market by adding ebooks to the iTunes Store.

Previously in this blog:
eBooks On iPhone: HarperCollins Kicks In
eBooks On iPhone: Well, There Are Magazines At Least!
The eBooks On iPhone Campaign: Steve Jobs Loves Books! Hey, Steve, So Do We!!
eBooks On iPhone: The Clamor Continues!
eBookery For iPhone?
eBooks on iPhone: Another Person Who Won’t Wait For Apple
eBooks On iPhone: Not Waiting For Apple!
iPhone: First eBook On It?
Mucho Namaste To FSJ!
Will Apple Steal The eBook Limelight From Sony And Create Another Mass Market?