(Click to enlarge)

Update: This infographic has been updated to fix the errors in the original version.

Infographic courtesy of Column Five Media. This graphic originally appeared at

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile payments: forecasts, technologies and opportunities

As expected, the masses began speculating as to what this exciting announcement from the House Of Jobs would be. Of course many predicted what we now know as true, but many others hoped for something else, believing that such news didn’t warrant such a bold ‘unforgettable’ statement.

Either way, excited or not, Apple’s battle with The Beatles has been a long one. Ever since the iTunes store appeared back in 2003, folks have been asking for digital versions of the Fab Four’s music. But the story of Apple and The Beatles starts a long time before the days of iPods and iTunes.

A Tale of Two Apples

During the late sixties The Beatles formed the company Apple Corps. Their new company was a conglomerate consisting of several divisions, including Apple Records — the company even had its very own Apple Store.

Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer in 1976. Just two years later, in 1978, The Beatles’ Apple Corps warned the then Apple Computer (now Apple Inc) to get back, by suing the younger company for trademark infringement.

Rumor has it that the late George Harrison spotted an advertisement for an Apple Computer in a magazine, prompting The Beatles to take action. With both companies bearing a similar name and logo, the battle resulted in a court case over trademark violation, which was settled in 1981. Apple Computer agreed that it would never enter the music industry, paying Apple Corps $80,000. The Beatles agreed only to use their brand within the entertainment industry.

Apple Computer Gets More Musical

However, despite both parties settling, the fight between the two companies was far from over. During the 1980s Apple’s computers, such as the Mac Plus and the Mac II, began incorporating musical features. The computers were capable of both creating and playing music (MIDI files) — something The Beatles saw as an infringement on the original settlement.

A second round of court action again concluded with a settlement, reached in October of 1991. The altered agreement allowed Apple Computer to sell and market “computers, microprocessors and microprocessor controlled devices, telecommunications equipment, data processing equipment, ancillary and peripheral equipment, and computer software of any kind on any medium”. However, this arrangement, which cost Apple Computer $26.5 million, still gave Apple Corps the right to sue if Apple Computer started selling “creative works whose principal content is music.”

Apple Computer Becomes a Music Seller

Of course, this wasn’t the end. At the turn of the century Apple Computer began development on an MP3 player, along with a store to accompany it. These developments resulted in the release of the iPod and the iTunes Store, arriving in 2001 and 2002 respectively. Apple Corps deemed the iTunes Music Store as a direct violation of the 1991 arrangement. From 2003 to 2007 Apple Computer battled it out with Apple Corps. Various settlements fell through, including one in which Apple Computer offered The Beatles’ Apple Corps just $1 million to exercise the Apple name within the music industry.

Eventually judgement came down in favor Apple Computer, defending the company’s sale of music. The ruling concluded that Apple’s sale of music was fine, because although the iTunes Store was branded, the music that the store sold was not. This was despite Apple Corps’ best efforts to demonstrate just how many times Apple Computer’s similar logo appeared during a typical download session. Apple Corps manager Neil Aspinall disagreed with the court’s decision — “with great respect to the trial judge, we consider he has reached the wrong conclusion.”

With the case settled, Steve Jobs extended the olive branch, inviting the The Beatles’ record label to sell their music on the ever-growing store. Jobs said, “We have always loved The Beatles, and hopefully we can now work together to get them on the iTunes Music Store”. From that point, the speculation as to when the boys from Liverpool would arrive on the digital store has been ever-present.

After iPod conferences, years, rumors, hints, songs from The Beatles are finally available for purchase in the iTunes store, and I for one am glad it’s happened, and the speculation can finally end.

Will you buying any Beatles music on iTunes? Let us know in the comments.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• With Ping, Apple Builds a Social Network Inside a Walled Garden
• Strategies for the Future of Digital Content Storage
• Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

Why Are Apple and Microsoft Keyboards So Different?

The disparity is a little deeper than a simple case of Apple and Microsoft just not being able to get along. It’s actually rooted in the core of Apple’s engineering principles of thinking things through and getting it right the first time. Apple started from a proven and well accepted principle, whereas Microsoft saw value in a ‘feature’, didn’t bother to understand it, and screwed it up. Human nature being what it is, since more people grew up PC than Mac, PC had it “right”, and Mac had it “wrong.”

Controlling Teletype Machines

The use of control key sequences date back to teletype systems, where certain commands were mapped into the American Standard Code for Information Interchange
(ASCII) character set. Teletype systems basically replaced the telegraph and were used to send typed messages over long distances. The ASCII was created in part to standardize the communication protocols between teletype machines. These teletype systems would send commands to control non-printing functions like movement of the printing cartridge.

This is where the “control” key originally got its name, since it controlled the mechanics of the machine it was sending instructions to. By holding down the control key when striking another character on the keyboard, you actually applied a sort of offset to the ASCII code, sending a different signal and producing an effect not related to actual typing.

Communicating to Unix Computers

Enter the age of computers. Early computer input worked in a very similar way as two teletype systems communicating with one another. In fact, the protocol that Unix uses to map keyboards as devices comes from teletype. Modern day Macs running OS X are based on Unix, and therefore, still support this paradigm. The Terminal application found in Utilities could actually be considered a software version of an old teletype system, sending commands to the computer to be executed.

The exact same control sequences used in early Unix-based systems are still supported on modern Macs.  The original Control+C keyboard sequence once used to stop teletype printing is being used today by the Terminal Application to instruct the computer to cancel or stop an operation. Apple has chosen to maintain the integrity of its systems by choosing not to change the way the control key works.

Open Apple on a Swedish Campground

The command key, on the other hand, is an Apple original. Given that Apple was into selling hardware, and not just licensing software, adding a key to the keyboard was just part of the engineering process when creating new products.

The existence of an additional command key on Apple hardware dates back to the original Apple IIe. The first Macintosh computers also had a need to create specialized command key sequences and kept the Apple key.

Mapping menu functions to keyboard shortcuts were emphasized in part because the graphical interface of the Macintosh could actually display complex images like the Apple Logo on screen.

Rather than devalue the brand image by littering the menu system with an orchard of Apple logos all over the place, the Apple Icon was replaced by a symbol used in Sweden to indicate an interesting feature at a campground.  Thus the Command Key as we know it today was born.

Disk-Based, not Terminal-Based Operating System

At the same time, Microsoft was growing up from its roots on DOS. Microsoft was not in the business of manufacturing and selling hardware, and had to deal with what was readily available on the market. Since early PC keyboards were born from older terminal based computer keyboards, and those keyboards have origins rooted in teletype systems, there was an extra control key just waiting for a disk-based OS to abuse.

Almost every MS-DOS application had a different mapping of keyboard sequences for common functions like open, close, cut, copy and paste.  And they all abused the control key. When Windows first came around, Microsoft also wanted to map the menu actions to keyboard shortcuts in exactly the same way that Apple did. Rather than add a new key as Apple did, the control key was adopted as Microsoft’s command key, and Windows strong-armed its software vendors to follow the new shortcut convention.

It wasn’t until Windows 95 that Microsoft decided that it really needed its own true command key, but by that time, it was too late, and users had already formed habits and burned their favorite shortcuts into their brains.

Online Keyboard Mapping Resources

Now that you know why the two operating systems look at keyboards differently, how do you adjust smoothly?  There are actually some great online resources from both Apple and Microsoft that map all of the keyboard shortcuts and even show some of the PC to Mac equivalents. It may take keeping a browser window open with these resources on hand for a while, but trust me, you’ll get there, and you’ll be glad you did.

• Apple Support Article ID: HT1343 - Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts
• Apple Support Article ID: HT2514 - Switch 101: On Windows, I used to…
• Mac OSX Reference Library – Apple Human Interface Guidelines - Keyboard Shortcuts Quick Reference
• Microsoft Support Article ID: 970299 - Keyboard mappings using a PC keyboard on a Macintosh

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• Live Event: The Completely Open Source Enterprise
• Demand Response as the Back Door Smart Grid?
• Transient Apps: The Consumer Influence on Enterprise Mobility, Part 2

I wish meaningless facts like the viewing angle of Apple’s 23″ Apple Cinema Display and the price of the Dual 500Mhz PowerMac G4 were just stuck in my head, but they’re not. I cheat quite a bit, but not by running all over the web trying to find wiki pages and old press releases. Instead, I use Mactracker.

This donation-ware application that’s available for Mac and iPhone is a tool I fire up before starting a blog post about Apple or Macintosh products. In addition to price and technical specs, Mactracker also contains history of models, their code names, and the startup chime associated with that machine. As a blogger and fanboy, this application can keep me entertained for hours, and I’m never caught wondering what stock hard drive came on the 600Mhz iBook G3 (it was 20GB).

I hope you’ll download this great application and send a nice little donation off to the developer. I discovered Mactracker in 2004, but the developer has been updating it with info since 2001, which is quite the commitment from one guy.

“Make no mistake about it,” Dan says, “the era of the familiar PC mouse is coming to an end. It may not be a 2012-style apocalypse (and the mouse will surely hang on in some form for many years to come), but the door is slowly shutting on the universal acceptance of this single iconic piece of hardware that we have equated with personal computing for decades….”

I beg to differ.

Dan suggests that the mouse will be replaced by an array of touch input devices and icon-focused operating systems built (not always for the better, I congratulate him for acknowledging) around expediency over flexibility, noting that touchscreen tablet PCs have been around for years but never generated more than niche-level consumer interest until Apple’s iPhone, followed by the iPod touch, changed that, finally popularizing one-to-one touch among the masses. At least to a point.

Disruptive Success

Dan predicts “disruptive success” for the iPad in building a larger touch environment that has so far received almost universal praise, noting that while it may not be as productivity-friendly as your ThinkPad or MacBook (to say the least), he thinks adding a Bluetooth keyboard and Apple’s iWork apps will give you a reasonable approximation of a laptop experience.

I disagree. One of my biggest gripes about the iPad is its lack of support for the very device Dan Ackerman seems enthusiastic about shoveling dirt on the coffin of — the mouse. Even with an external keyboard, you still have to poke around on the too-easily-smeared-with-finger-grease touchscreen for pointing, clicking, and dragging, the body-English associated with which, even when the iPad is mounted on a stand or dock, can most charitably be described as awkward and non-intuitive, involving reaching past the keyboard at a clumsy angle.

Touchpads a Touchscreen Trojan Horse?

Ackerman, suggests that multitouch touchpads have served as a Trojan Horse for touchscreens for some years now, with laptops outselling desktop PCs and the portables’ ubiquitous touchpads acclimating people to touch control, Apple again leading the way, incorporating multitouch gestures into its oversized trackpads, observing that nowadays it’s hard to find a laptop touchpad that doesn’t support some kind of swiping, zooming, or flipping with two or more fingers.

Well, yes, but…I’m a dyed-in-the-wool laptop computer aficionado, and I own an aluminum unibody MacBook that supports Apple’s latest gesture-supporting multitouch trackpad technology, but guess what? I virtually never make use of it, with my MacBook spending most of its runtime mounted on a stand hooked up to an external keyboard, and not only one conventional mouse, but also a rollerbar, a foot mouse, and from time to time trackballs, freestanding touchpads, or a graphics tablet — all input modes that appeal to me a great deal more than pawing the display screen.

Even on my other laptops that I use in mobile mode, I almost always hook up an external mouse if I’m going to be using the machine for more than a few minutes at a time, and I always carry a mouse in my laptop case or backpack.

Touch Migrating Beyond Tablets and Smartphones

Ackerman concedes that the laptop-to-iPad comparison may not be a one-to-one match, and that the tablet device is not a fully workable replacement for even a netbook for on-the-go computing, but remains adamant that icon-driven touch interfaces will continue to migrate into more-traditional laptops and netbooks, with OS desktop interfaces increasingly presented in a manner supporting different input methods, such as touch, instead of being primarily mouse-driven.

That view is, regrettably, corroborated by a recent Gartner Group report that predicts more than 50 percent of PCs purchased for users under the age of 15 will have touchscreens by 2015. “What we’re going to see is the younger generation beginning to use touchscreen computers ahead of enterprises,” comments Leslie Fiering, Gartner research vice president. “By 2015, we expect more than 50 percent of PCs purchased for users under the age of 15 will have touchscreens, up from fewer than 2 percent in 2009.”

Schism Developing Between Touch Aficionados and Professional Traditionalists

However, Gartner also perceives a developing schism between younger consumer users and serious workers in the enterprise, projecting that fewer than 10 percent of PCs sold to enterprises for mainstream knowledge workers in 2015 will have touchscreens.

Gartner predicts the overwhelming majority of slate, tablet and touch-enabled convertible devices planned for 2010 will have a consumer focus, and that resistance to touch-enabled devices’ adoption by serious workers in the enterprise can be attributed to heavy requirements for typing and text input, the “muscle memory” of mouse users, and the potential problems of moving a user’s hands from the keyboard to the touchscreen creating particular adoption barriers for knowledge workers. It will be consumers and education users who will form the preponderance of earliest adopters for touch-enabled PCs and notebooks.

“As with many recent technology advances, touch adoption will be led by consumers and only gradually get accepted by the enterprise,” says Ms. Fiering. “What will be different here is the expected widespread adoption of touch by education, so that an entire generation will graduate within the next 10 to 15 years for whom touch input is totally natural.”

Even Dan Ackerman admits computer mice are not going to disappear overnight, despite the premature obituary in his column’s title, but he still contends that like New York Times obits for aging celebrities, the computer mouse has already been written and filed away, and it may not be that long before it gets to run. I suggest and hope it will be a good long time yet before that becomes necessary.

Image courtesy of Flickr user raneko

Icon Garden

Any discussion of Apple’s icon design should begin with a discussion of some of Apple’s most infamous 8-bit icons from its original GUI. Apple used to feature large versions of these in its icon garden at 1 Infinite Loop, however at some point around 1998, Apple removed the icons. Featured amongst the garden were classic icons, such as the eraser, hand, stopwatch, and even Clarus the Dogcow. (Moof!)

Check out how the paint bucket is "filling" the grass with green and the paint brush and pencil have just finished "creating" the flowers.

Whoa! The eraser is erasing the flowers!

Similar Colors

Depending on how cluttered your Dock is, you may or may not have noticed that the most prominent colors chosen by Apple for its icons is from the blue family. This trend was originally favored in Apple’s hardware (the original Bondi blue iMac, for instance). Associated with the sky or the ocean (a la OS X’s original UI codename Aqua), the blue also evokes a sense of stability, trust and calmness. (It really does make the infamous Blue Screen of Death a lot less harsh than if it were red.) It wasn’t until the release of Leopard that Apple shipped with a default desktop background that wasn’t blue.

Evolution of Icons

Some icons in OS X have evolved over time. Occasionally there may be some rhyme and reason to changing icons, such as the inclusion of the video camera for when iChat AV was originally launched, or the major redesign of iMovie between iMovie HD and iMovie ’08.

Other times, icons are seemingly changed sporadically, like the evolution of the iTunes icons. Originally every new version came with a new icon, but even that trend has wavered.

Other applications have also seen different icons with new versions, such as Backup, iDVD, iPhoto and Keynote. Though the Keynote icon has not seen a drastic change since Keynote ’08, the version that ships with iWork ’09 updates the date of the fourth-quarter report on the icon to Q4 2009.

Alternative Uses

Some icons depict their contents, such as the icon for a photo or a typeface. Other icons present users with dynamically updating information, such as the iCal icon which changes to reflect the current date. Other icons “change” by badges that indicate various information (unread emails, download speeds, etc.).

Another example are icons for exported vCards. If you have set them up in Address Book, they will export with their photo in the icon.

With the introduction of Snow Leopard this fall, users will once again begin to find new uses for icons, as the operating system allows users to preview media directly on the icon itself.

Bonus iPhone Icon

If you haven’t had a chance yet to take your iPhone or iPod touch into Starbucks, when you do, you’ll notice a new icon in your iTunes Store app. Specifically the Starbucks icon, and it is the only navbar icon on the device that exists in full color and not the usual masked blue color as typically seen.

Have you noticed any other unique or interesting icon changes or features?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Report: Monetizing Digital Content
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

He also mentions there’s “more sniffing from people who love Macs about how inadequate the current crop are.”

I believe there’s some truth to that statement. The gist of his article is that netbooks are great, and people who don’t get that may be missing something.

People who don’t think these are great computers must not have a sense of history. My first personal computer, purchased in 1979, cost $10,000, had two small floppy drives, 64K of memory and ran a very bare-bones OS.

True enough but, unlike David, it’s the sense of history that has me uninterested in netbooks, not enamored of them.

First of all, the argument should be about today’s netbook stacked up to today’s laptop. After all, that’s the choice the consumer is making. However, if I use the perspective of history, consider the $700 Radio Shack laptop I bought circa ’89. It was text-based with a Tandy “easy to use” text front-end. It stored everything on a floppy. I bought it to write on the road, then I’d import the text into Word 4.0 on my Mac SE/30 to format it. Worked like a charm. I consider that somewhat analogous to what a netbook does for people today (i.e., supplement their desktop PC).

But in ’89 I could not get desktop performance in my lap. The average laptop cost way more, with way less power, than the average desktop. Both gaps have closed tremendously since then. Especially in the last half-decade, where chips and laptop design have received the engineering attention necessary as the market demanded more portable solutions. The trade-off now in performance between laptops and desktops is almost trivial, and the price delta is much smaller as well. No, I’m not talking about a monster desktop video editing station with three video cards, a 2TB RAID array, and six monitors. But then, neither is David. The 2.4GHz unibody MacBook I’m using right now runs neck and neck with the 2.8GHz iMac I bought only a year earlier — including graphic-intensive apps — yet it cost nearly half as much. That’s a price/performance delta unimaginable even 10 years ago, let alone 30.

I do not “sniff” at netbooks. If someone wants a machine analogous to what I bought 20 years ago — in terms of price/performance — go for it. Everyone has their own needs. But back then, we chose between “good” performance (desktop) and “bad” performance but with portability (laptop). Today’s buyer can choose portability with “good” performance (laptop) or “bad” performance (netbook). For maybe 25 years we lived with much weaker performance on portable machines because we had to; that’s no longer true. That Tandy served me well, but I’ll pass on taking a step backwards for something similar today.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• What Google’s Honeycomb Means for Apple and Microsoft

The clipboard in a modern operating system is one of the most useful and practical tools available. Being able to select some text or images, copy them to the clipboard, and then paste them in other places is indispensable (look at the uproar over the fact that the iPhone OS 1.0 & 2.0 did not support a clipboard to see how valuable it is). You most likely use it without giving it another thought.

The standard clipboard behavior is that when you copy a new item, it replaces the existing item. You can’t go back to the previous item as there is no history of items copied. This is what a Clipboard Manager does, providing a memory and browsing history so you can paste something, and then find it later, even after using the clipboard multiple times.

There are quite a few Clipboard Managers available for OS X, some free, some not. Here’s a quick overview of what is on offer and what they can and can’t do.

Clipper

Clipper is the most simple of the clipboard managers available. It sits in the menu bar and allows no-frills access to text clipboard history. It’s an open sourced tool that provides no keyboard shortcuts, but does the job for a simple text clipboard manager.

Jumpcut

Jumpcut is another open source clipboard manager that focuses on the basic text history. A customizable hotkey will let you cycle through the various items in the history with an on-screen overlay, or you can directly select an item from the menu bar.

Clyppan

Originally also known as Clipper in earlier versions (name changed to avoid confusion with the Clipper mentioned above), Clyppan is an open source solution that sits in the menu bar, popping up with a customizable hotkey to let you see what’s in the history. Clyppan only supports text clippings, but the history is searchable and pressing the spacebar will give you a Quick Look-style preview of the clipping. It also has a rapid paste function, which pastes the current item, and then sets the clipboard to the next item; this lets you copy lots of items in a row to then quickly paste later on.

ClipMenu

ClipMenu is a freeware clipboard manager that offers support for both text and images. It sits in the menu bar and will break the history into browsable menu sections to avoid UI crowding. It has customizable hotkeys and many functional aspects are configurable, including being able to hold control when selecting an item to perform configurable ‘Actions’ before pasting (such as converting to upper case). ClipMenu also lets you configure regular text clippings for quick access to items you use often.

Savvy Clipboard

Savvy Clipboard is the simplest of the paid offerings, costing $12 (a free trial available). It supports both text and images in the clipboard and provides customizable hotkeys for accessing it.

PTHPasteboard

PTHPasteboard is comprehensive clipboard manager that supports multiple text and image clipboards. The normal version is free, while a Pro version is available for $24.95 that allows you to share and synchronize clipboards across multiple Macs, as well as run configurable filters on text (such as converting to upper case). Full configuration of hotkeys and aspects of the UI is present and you can search the clipboard history to find what you’re looking for.

iClip

iClip is a beautifully designed application (perhaps too fancy for a simple tool) that can behave in a Dock-like way, staying attached to a side of the screen and popping out when the mouse goes to the edge. iClip can handle images as well as text, and also allows groupings of permanently availably items, providing quick access to often used resources. It has fully customizable keyboard and UI behavior support. iClip costs $29 and a free trial (which can be run 30 times) can be downloaded to try it out first. Also available is iClip Lite, which is a completely free Dashboard Widget that allows you to view the clipboard history. If you only need basic use and like using dashboard widgets, the lite version may fit your needs.

Clipboard Evolved

Clipboard Evolved offers multiple custom-named clipboards for both text and images for $15 (a free trial is available). It offers full keyboard hotkey customizing and various UI options (such as a Dock-like display) including various quartz graphics transition effects (and thus requires OS X 10.5).

Cute Clips

Cute Clips is another OS X 10.5 only clipboard manager. It costs $15 and a free 15 day trial is available. It supports both text and images and focuses on a rich UI experience and provides features such as ‘stickying’ a clipping (so it will stay in that position and not drop off), naming a clipboard item, or giving a specific clipping a keyboard shortcut.

Stuf

Like PTHPasteboard, Stuf (formally known as Shadow) offers a shared clipboard across multiple Macs. It lets you create multiple clipboards and elect to make them visible to other Macs. It supports text and images, lets you search the clipboards, allows a customizable hotkey and provides Quick Look integration by pressing the spacebar. Stuf costs around $20 and a 30 day trial is available.

Which one?

There’s a great range of choices for clipboard managers on OS X — all which add great utility to the built in clipboard. I personally have been using Clyppan for a while now as I don’t deal with images often — the fact that it handles text only is no problem for me. However all of the options do their job well so it really just comes down to your workflow requirements and personal usability preference. If you’ve never used a clipboard manager before, give one a try.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era

Since that time, though, along with the return of Steve Jobs, Apple has made slow and continuous improvements to the Apple experience, something that encompasses every part of owning an Apple product. From the quality of the packaging to booting OS X, Apple makes owning a Mac a different experience from just owning a computer. One of the most important aspects of owning a Mac is the quality of the construction. In my mind at least, plastic has been considered “cheap” for a long time, and metal considered “well built.” A lot of the toys from when I was a kid were made out of metal, and they lasted. Now they’re made out of plastic, and fall apart.

The latest unibody aluminum MacBooks are precision engineered, solid, and feel worth their weight. It’s almost like Apple designs with blinders on, ignoring what everyone else is doing and focusing on what they believe is best. So far, Apple has been very resistant to release a low-end computer. Even the tiny Mac Mini is at least twice as expensive as a low-end Dell. It’s not that Apple doesn’t have an interest in the low-budget market, it’s that Apple refuses to create a product that doesn’t live up to their expectations of what a Mac should be. The Mac Mini is relatively inexpensive, but it is also a high-quality machine. The iPhone and iPod Touch are excellent examples of Apple’s commitment to quality. How easy would it have been for Apple to release both machines with cheap plastic cases and screens? They would have been able to reap the profits of the low cost of manufacturing, but at the price of releasing an inferior product, and the long-term cost of lower customer satisfaction. The iPhone is one of the most well-made pieces of electronics ever. As John Gruber said, “There is no better phone, at any price.”

Creating great products is only useful if you can tell people about them, and be able to tell the people who are most likely to be customers. Apple’s marketing is the result of an evolution of several years. Apple uses product placement in high-rating television shows and popular movies, ads on TV that demonstrate the functionality of the Mac, or poke fun at the competition in a tongue-in-cheek way, but the real Apple marketing are the thousands of blogs and web sites (this one included) that are dedicated to all things Apple. It seem natural to me now to read Mac-related news, but there are relatively few Lenovo blogs, or Dell blogs, or Acer blogs. Most of this is because PCs are fundamentally the same. They all have the same basic components, and run the same software.

Macs have always been different, although they are not quite as different now as they used to be. Macs also lost the popularity contest with businesses to Microsoft and IBM. The company from California that started the personal computer industry was, in the 90s, pushed out of the office by big, faceless companies. Apple was the underdog. Luckily, people like underdogs, and Apple gained a cult following that persisted through its darkest of times, when there were rumors that it was going to be bought out and dismantled. Most of this happened while Steve Jobs was off creating other insanely great things, like NeXT and Pixar. When Jobs returned, he made some drastic changes at Apple, and began the slow, steady climb that has brought them to the top of the customer satisfaction ladder. They went from being the underdog to being the comeback kid. Apple is an American success story.

Apple’s stigma cannot be explained by generous return policies or coverage. Both Dell and HP offer more lenient return policies, each allowing 21 days to return the product compared with Apple’s 14 days. HP and Dell also offer accidental damage protection, something lacking from the otherwise excellent AppleCare. On more than one occasion I’ve had a claim denied because the damage was considered “accidental,” and therefor not covered. However, for what AppleCare does cover, it provides excellent support. AppleCare will repair your Mac, answer questions about software, and replace faulty parts. If you scratch up your install disk, AppleCare will replace it. The unique thing about AppleCare is that it covers not only the hardware and operating system, but all other Apple software. If you want to know how to import a movie into iMovie, call AppleCare and they’ll be happy to walk you through it.

When you buy a Mac, you join a club. It’s more than simply owning a computer, it’s being part of the entire Apple ecosystem. Each part of each product is tied together to provide a seamless experience that brings together your electronics so you can get on with the business of living your life. Take photos, make movies, write a book, and do it all without worrying about how. This is the real reason for Apple’s customer satisfaction. Apple is a success story, and when you buy a Mac, in a small way, you become part of that story, too.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Richard Haddock, President of the Haddock Corporation, an Apple reseller that has been in the Mac business seriously since there have been Macs.

I first found Haddock a couple of years ago when, in a panic over accidentally wiping out my hard drive in some kind of strange Linux experiment, I needed OS X installed and couldn’t find my install disks. Not only that, but loading Linux had rewritten the boot record of the disk and wiped out how the Mac looked at it, resetting it from GUID, which the Mac installer requires, to MBR. 

Long story short, I couldn’t load OS X back on my MacBook. So, I called around town and was pointed at Haddock. I dropped by and explained my problem, and the staff booted my MacBook into target disk mode and mounted it on another Mac, and then fixed the disk with Disk Utility. I was very, very grateful for their help, I almost thought I had ruined my Mac! Haddock earned a customer that day with their honest help and technical expertise.

TAB: The Haddock Corporation has a long history with Apple. Can you tell me a little about what impressed you the most about your first Macintosh?

Richard Haddock: When I was shown the first Macintosh 128k, I was programming on an IBM 5110, which used BASIC, and I had to constantly work on the screen layout for my programs. When I saw it I knew that this new graphical interface was the future of computing, so I immediately signed up to be an Apple Reseller. We’ve been an Apple Reseller since 1984. During the time that Dr. Amelio was the CEO I became friends with him and asked him to set up the Apple Specialist program, which would reward and help dealers who mostly sold Apple products. He asked me to help him design this program with the help of Paddy Wong and a few others. I think it’s one of the longest running dealer programs at Apple. I’m very proud of that.

TAB: Apple went through some tough times in the 90′s, did Haddock also hit some rough spots with them?

Haddock: Fortunately we were able to hang on while Apple got things going again. It was a slow-down, but we were able to make it through.

TAB: What can you tell me about your involvement with the education market?

Haddock: We’ve been involved in the education market for nearly 30 years, selling into 11 states. In the past we sold Apple products to these schools, but Apple has since taken those education sales inhouse. We currently sell the Promethean interactive whiteboard to schools in 8 states in the midwest.

TAB: How has the opening of Apple’s chain of retail stores affected Haddock?

Haddock: I think that overall Apple stores have helped the Macintosh business. It has taken some business from us, but overall our Apple sales are up every year.

TAB: How do you use a Mac to run your business?

Haddock: We use Macintosh exclusively in our business, from ordering to research to our accounting.

TAB: Are there any “Must Have” applications that you use on a daily basis?

Haddock: Right now I have the following applications open, which is fairly normal for me:

Mail, iCal, Address Book, Safari, iTunes, Preview, Firefox, Calculator, Filemaker, Excel, OmniFocus and Google Earth. OmniFocus is an excellent program which I use constantly and actually syncs my to do list with my iPhone.

TAB: Haddock started out as Wichita Software, are you still involved in software development?

Haddock: We do some in-house software development on Filemaker, but no longer develop software for others. We sold off our Petroleum Accountant program to a company in New Zealand who still supports it.

TAB: What do you think about Apple’s focus on consumer technology with the iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV?

Haddock: Apple is playing to their strengths and making great consumer products. Everyone who I know owns any of these products really likes them and uses them daily. I know these products will only continue to only get better and lead the market in innovation. I think we’ll see many more breakthrough consumer products.

TAB: What do you see as the future of Apple, and Haddock Corporation’s relationship with Apple?

Haddock: We’ve had an excellent relationship with Apple over the years. In fact, I served on Apple’s Reseller Advisory Board for 10 years. They have an excellent strategy, and a great management team. I know that we’ll continue to do business with them for years and years. We continue to look for ways to expand and support Apple products for our customers.

I also was able to get some insight into the retail and repair side of the Mac market. Speaking with the technicians at the store, the topic naturally went to the new MacBooks. It seems that they are not nearly as excited about them as the average consumer is; they expect them to be much more difficult to service.

My many thanks to Richard for taking the time to answer my questions. Here, in Des Moines, we are a long ways away from Cupertino, but you never know when you might have a little piece of Apple history right in your backyard.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

Everyone remembers when they get their first Mac — the instant feeling of belonging in an elitist group of technologists. You go to class, a coffee shop, or down the street and see cars driving past with an Apple sticker on their back windshield as you ask yourself where you’re going to put your sticker. There is no other company on the planet that makes its fans feel this way. This is one of the main factors that makes Apple such an incredible company while making its fans even more incredible.

The loyalty of a Mac user to its company is like that of a child to its mother, and only other Mac fans understand this. Apple has surpassed being a simple company and transitioned into a religion. Just as everyone has the story of their first kiss, or their first car, they have one of their first Mac. The film MacHEADS is about just this — the symbiotic devotion between a company, its product line, and its customers.

MacHEADS is a feature length documentary directed by Kobi Shely which exploits this loyalty of Apple Fanatics and their obsession. Aside from Pirates of Silicon Valley, this is one of the few films solely based on Apple and its fans, for its fans.

The film explores the nature of the Apple fan base and what turned a simple computer company into a worldwide phenomenon and religion. Featuring various interviews with key Apple enthusiasts, including Apple’s first employee, it shows the unrivaled dedication to this company and brand.

The film is currently scheduled for a Fall release. You can check out the trailer and website here.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

apple.com, 9 May 1998 [via]

Noted blogger and podcaster Daniel Eran Dilger writes today at Roughly Drafted on Leopard and the History and Future of Mac OS X on PowerPC.

For those of you, like our own Stephanie Guertin, who are running on older PPC systems, Dilger lays out why support for the PowerPC isn’t going away anytime soon. With an informative examination of historical Apple products, his article provides a sound argument for G4 and G5 owners to stay calm.

His article (as well as his blog in general) is worth a read whether you’re panicking about support for that PowerBook you bought just before the MacBook Pro was announced, or you merely want a refresher on the history of Apple’s products and CEOs during the dark ages (the years when Jobs was gone).

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A 2011 Green IT Forecast
• A 2011 Infrastructure Forecast
• Green IT’s Q4 Winners: Wind Power, Solar Power, Smart Energy