Rumors of boxed software leaving Apple Stores and Apple’s push of the Mac App Store shows the company doesn’t think we need to install software via optical media anymore. There’s even a rumor that Apple may be ditching optical drives in the next MacBook Pro refresh and moving to a disc-less model that allows for thinner casings and larger batteries.

There’s also the fact that not a single Mac or iOS device ships with a dial-up modem port and a growing number of Apple devices include Wi-Fi (not Ethernet) as the only connectivity option. If you don’t have a wireless router, you’re just not going to be able get online (without third-party peripherals).

Yet, two-thirds of Americans are not using actual broadband internet service. In fact, the FCC states that 31 percent of Americans who have access to broadband won’t adopt it due to lack of need or a general fear of technology. Pew Internet Research found that over half of Americans don’t think broadband is worth it. This discovery stands out:

The report also finds that the 21 percent of American adults who are not online have little interest in going online: about half (48 percent) don’t find online content relevant to their lives, and six out of ten non-users would need assistant using computer or the Internet. Only about one in ten expressed any interest in starting to use the Internet.

Apple is often at the cutting edge of tech trends, but that means there is a market of users who want Apple devices in their lives but can’t have them because they’re not on a broadband internet connection. I was on a part time dial-up connection (capped by the hour) until 2005 when I moved to an area that had broadband, and my life as a Mac owner included a weekly visit to the library to do software updates and upload photos. The average consumer will probably just opt for a Windows device with built-in dial-up connectivity instead of making the trek.

Readers may note that the Mac’s price range means that most users willing to spend $999+ for a laptop likely already have broadband access. Some, however, especially older consumers, just don’t need broadband access, but would love to be able to take advantage of Apple’s reputation for quality and excellent design.

Apple devices don’t show your connection speed or bother you much about router connection problems. That’s because Apple makes an assumption that if you’re using its devices, you have a connection that can handle it. But, for Americans (and those in international emerging markets) without broadband, the Apple experience won’t be nearly the same as for those who do have it. While Apple is eliminating optical drives on their Macs, removing boxed software from retail stores and assuming we buy all our music via iTunes, a large number of people are going to be left out of this party, wondering why their purchase of iLife ’11 is taking 5 days to complete.

Is Apple missing the boat by ignoring these customers, or is the fact that some are getting left behind just a necessary part of Apple’s forward-looking product design roadmap?

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Motorola Mobility will acquire startup Zecter to enable wireless synchronization and video streaming capabilities on Motorola’s Android phones. Zecter is the producer of ZumoDrive and ZumoCast, services that facilitate cloud storage and media streaming of stored content to mobile devices.

ZumoCast, introduced in beta earlier this year for the iPad and iPhone, makes it possible to stream audio and video content from the home PC to the mobile device over either Wi-Fi or 3G connections. It also allows synchronizing that content to the mobile device, and could soon turn Android phones into mobile media powerhouses through Motorola’s MotoBlur widget service,. This makes perfect sense given the expected release of a Motorola tablet early next year, with which the company has been teasing us of late with a promotional video. Tablets make good video players given the screens larger than those on phones, and Motorola’s upcoming tablet would be a very good player coupled with this new technology.

This new media technology delivered through MotoBlur could give Android handsets the ability to play video right on the home screen. Motorola Android owners will be able to take their audio and video libraries everywhere they go, and play them without opening another app. While Motorola’s customers will almost certainly continue using popular online services like YouTube for media consumption, there’s a lot to be said for having your own favorite shows one tap away on the home screen.

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“MacBook Air. The next generation of MacBooks.”

This is Apple’s tagline for the new MacBook Air. I believe it means everything that’s good about the Air will make its way into the MacBook and MacBook Pro within the next year. Let’s look at what’s next for Apple’s notebooks.

Battery Life

The older Air I own has a claimed battery life of five hours, but I never see more than three and a half with brightness all the way down and Wi-Fi off. The new Air claims seven hours of battery life in Apple’s “Web-test” which, according to the company’s performance page, “measures battery life by wirelessly browsing 25 popular websites with display brightness set to 50%.”

We can expect this new test to become the standard for how Apple measures battery life specs across the board going forward and I expect seven hours to be the new minimum standard for the rest of the lineup. Most Macs meet this now, in fact, so 10-12 hours may be a more realistic expectation from next year’s MacBook Pro, as long as Intel continues increasing the efficiency of its chips at the current rate.

SSD As a Standard

Solid State Drives (SSD) enable quick booting, instant on and faster launch times of applications. I believe every new MacBook Pro sold will come standard with an SSD, with an option to drop down to an HDD for $200 less if you just needs lots of storage (500GB+). For most users, 256GB is all they’ll ever need, and for huge media libraries, an external drive is always an option.

SSD is great, and it’s finally achieving a price point where Apple can include it as part of a base configuration. Remember, only a little over two years ago, a 128GB SSD add-on for the MacBook Air cost an additional $999. Now, the $1699 model comes with a 256GB drive standard.

Sorry, No Optical

I’ve talked to a lot of people in coffee shops, at conferences and even my less-techie friends and they all come to the same conclusion: Optical drives are kind of pointless. If all software manufacturers provided direct downloads or flash drives for physical installs, there’s be absolutely no issue.

The optical drive, as far as Apple is concerned, is dead. The company has the largest collection of digital media available for sale, and with the Mac App Store, Front Row and Apple TV, why would you ever need to burn content to a disc? The external Air Superdrive is still available, and it’ll probably gain compatibility with the rest of Apple’s notebooks as the internal drives disappear.

Thinner and Lighter

SSD and the lack of an optical drive will mean thinner cases across the board. The MacBook Air’s logic board in 2008 was a thing of beauty: smaller than the length of a pencil, and it powered the entire computer. I think the move to SSD flash storage that’s soldered to the logic board, paired with removing those gigantic optical drives, will mean most Mac laptops will slim down. We’ll see this in new revisions that come out in 2011.

Higher Resolution Displays

As I said in July’s post about iPhone 4′s Retina Display, Apple will be beefing up the resolution of all of its displays, starting with notebooks. The MacBook Air already has an improved display; the MacBook Pro is next. How high a resolution is too high? We’ll see how Apple navigates the line between display quality and the concerns of users with weaker vision or older eyes. Unlike on the iPhone, you can always change the resolution on your Mac if it makes for a better reading experience.

Conclusion

I’ve always been sure that the MacBook Air was a test bed for innovation, and a peek at what’s to come from Apple portables. Cupertino’s clearly gone “all in” techs like flash storage and battery improvements that it pioneered with the Air, and it’ll be genuinely exciting to see those developments trickle down to the rest of the line.

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Thinner, yes. But better?

I am one of the few, proud MacBook Air (MBA) owners in the world. Every article you’ve seen from me in the past was written on the petite beauty. In one last month, I wrote:

I’m only here to make a case that anyone that hasn’t used one should give it a shot and that Apple needs to throw some marketing dollars behind it so everyone else knows what we MacBook Air owners have known for a long time: It’s the best notebook Apple makes and it also happens to be the smallest.

This is exactly what Apple did yesterday, and yet, I was severely disappointed. It seems as if Apple is finally throwing marketing dollars behind the MBA, and I watched my Twitter stream as thousands of geeks’ heads exploded at how thin it is. But I felt a little weird reading this on my MacBook Air and thinking out loud, “I know. It’s been that way for years.” It’s thinner, yes, but not significantly. That’s the whole story in a nutshell.

Pricing & Marketing

On the whole, the reason Apple’s MacBook Air wasn’t a hit before now was price. Imagine the iPad started at $999. Fewer people would own one, and those that did and sang its praises it to friends would be immediately be greeted with the response that it was simply too expensive for a tablet. Basically, Apple just dropped the price. The MacBook Air of today is largely unchanged from what we had before, and that’s disappointing.

11.6″ Model Versus the Sony TZ (circa 2008)

Consider Engadget’s live-blog from Macworld 2008, when the Macbook Air was introduced. Steve initially compared the MacBook Air to Sony’s TZ series. His biggest gripe was that the processor speed maxed out at 1.2GHz Core 2 Duo, and the display was only 11 inches.

The 11.6-inch MacBook Air is “too cramped” and “too slow” according to the Steve of 2008. To be fair, the Air isn’t the same as the TZ in every way. I haven’t used the new keyboard, but Apple claims it’s full-size and the body is still a bit thinner.

Let’s Talk Speed

Current MacBook Air owners won’t see a significant speed bump if they own the Revision C model (1.8/2.13GHz) released last year. In fact, not much has changed about the machine at all.

MacBook Air Revision C (Jun. 2009)

• 1.86 ($1499) or 2.13GHz ($1799)
• 3.0 Pounds
• 6MB of L2 Cache w/ 1066Mhz Frontside Bus
• 120GB HDD or 128GB SSD
• 2GB RAM (DDR3-8500 at 1066Mhz)
• 13.3-inch screen w/ 1280×800 resolution
• NVIDIA GeForce 9400 w/ 256Mb of VRAM (shared with main memory)

MacBook Air Revision D (October,2010)

• 1.86Ghz ($1,299) or 2.13Ghz ($1699)
• 2.9 pounds
• 6MB of L2 Cache w/ 1066Mhz Frontside Bus
• 128GB SSD or 256GB SSD
• 2GB/4GB RAM (DDR3-8500 at 1066MHz)
• 13.13″ screen w/ 1440×900 resolution
• NVIDIA GeForce 320m w/ 256Mb of VRAM (shared with main memory)

Of course, I’m only comparing the 13-inch models, but you’re getting a machine that’s basically the same speed with an option to add more ram and more storage,  plus a high-resolution screen which isn’t something I’d recommend to everyone. Some (especially those over 50) will prefer a lower resolution. Even I had trouble using a 17-inch MacBook Pro and eventually sold it.

What you are getting is a drop in price. Last year, a 2.13GHz machine with 2GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD would cost $1799. Today, that same machine costs $1699 with double the storage, and it’s only $100 to upgrade to 4GB of RAM.

Real World Performance

Will HD Flash movies on YouTube perform better? No. Will Photoshop CS5 filters apply faster? Maybe with a RAM upgrade. Nothing about this upgrade is impressive if you’re a current MacBook Air owner looking for more speed.

Why can’t Apple squeeze more juice out of this machine? Apple didn’t talk speed at all. They didn’t throw their famous “2x Faster” graphic up on the “buy now” page. Apple does tout the 2.9x faster graphics card, but I can guarantee you the Air released yesterday is only marginally faster than last year’s model, despite the introduction of the 320M, because that’s a video card using shared RAM, meaning the graphics performance goes down as you open more applications.

I was underwhelmed by today’s announcement, but the MBA was already a good notebook. I was hoping Apple would make it even better. It didn’t. “One more thing” was simply a minor evolutionary product refresh, and that’s too bad.

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Previously, there was an option for a Core i7 processor running at 2.66GHz over the standard Core i5, clocked at 2.53 GHz, for an additional $200. That options remains, but for true power users, this may be a nice way to eliminate the need for that Core i7 iMac and simply add a 27-inch Apple Cinema Display to your home office if you’re often working from the road. My preferred configuration is to get a new MacBook Air and go with the Core i7 iMac, but the new Air may not meet your processing needs.

The $400 price is pretty steep for the upgrade, but that’s just a reminder that despite lower prices among its other offerings, Apple still caters very much to the high end of computing market.

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Anyone who hasn’t owned one simply doesn’t understand. They see a speed that tops out at 2.13Ghz, and an SSD at only 128GB of storage, and that’s before they nearly faint when finding out it has only 2GB of RAM and a single USB port. The next question is always, “How do I burn CDs?”

Back in the 90s, Apple had a program where it would give you one of its computers risk fee for around 30 days as long as you provided your credit card number (in case you don’t send it back). It was a genius program, because many people who’d heard Macs were terrible would try one and be hooked after only a few days. The same might have happened to the iPad if Apple hadn’t marketed the heck out of it leading up to release day. People knew it would be amazing, but the general consensus was, “What do I do with it?” That’s where the MacBook Air sits today. It’s a machine that most people want but simply don’t know where it fits into their workflow.

I’ve been a Mac user since early 2000, and back then, when working from a café or library, everyone would stop by my tangerine iBook and ask, “Are Macs really worth it?” After the success of the iPod and the Intel switch, people stopped asking, because many people were already Mac users. They already had one in their bag. The sale was made.

That didn’t start happening to me again until late 2009, when I purchased a MacBook Air. I was skeptical, but I had a 17” MacBook Pro at my desk and thought if I didn’t like the Air, I could send it back within two weeks. Two weeks later, I sold the 17” MacBook Pro and bought an iMac. Today, when I sit at a café, that same coolness of owning a Mac back in 2000 takes people over when they see the Air. Their first question, “Is it worth it?” Yes. Yes it is.

People at Apple know this. I know employees that are designers, product managers and retail workers at Apple who all tell me that they love the Air and that it’s the most underappreciated machine in the notebook lineup. If Apple knows it, why doesn’t it do something about it?

There’s a trend at Apple that I see repeatedly. The machine with the lowest sales remains stagnant until Apple gets around to fixing it up. The Mac mini was plagued with this problem, and sat dormant from a design perspective from 2005 to 2010. The Mac Pro has far worse sales than the mini, and it sees a minor speed bump once every 18 months, but if you own a PowerMac G5 manufactured in 2004 and sit it beside a Mac Pro that just arrived from Apple yesterday, they look strikingly similar. Just compare a PowerBook from 2003 to a MacBook Pro today and you’ll see where Apple spends most of its time innovating.

The MacBook Air’s design has remained unchanged since it was introduced in January 2008, when the SSD model cost close to $3,000. Apple continued dropping the price and enhancing the features, to where today’s high-end model can be had for just over $2,000 and can handle most everyday tasks. If a laptop is your only computer and you do any digital media creation, the Air isn’t for you. If you have a desktop computer and occasionally fly across country only working on spreadsheets, PowerPoint documents or watching movies, the Air is going to be your new best friend. I’m not a designer, and I’m not a digital magician. I’m just a guy that writes, emails, reads news and watches YouTube videos, and for that, the MacBook Air is the best machine money can buy.

I’m not going to speculate what the next Macbook Air should have. I’m only here to make a case that anyone that hasn’t used one should give it a shot and that Apple needs to throw some marketing dollars behind it so everyone else knows what we MacBook air owners have known for a long time: It’s the best notebook Apple makes and it also happens to be the smallest. It’s a machine for 75 percent of the portable Mac users out there, and too many people are buying more than they need when the MacBook Air fits in just nicely.

Since the iTunes Music Store was announced in 2003 with only 100,000 tracks available for purchase, press and bloggers have been asking, “when will Apple release a subscription model?” Each time a new music service pops up from Microsoft, RealNetworks and Sony, the question is asked again. Jobs repeatedly insists people want to own content, and a subscription plan doesn’t allow for that. The thing is, when he makes a claim like that, it suggests Apple has considered the idea and decided it will never go that route.

If you look back at Jobs’ past quotes about mobile phones, tablets and even cloud services, he shot those ideas down publicly to the point where the person asking feels like an idiot. “The iPod is not a good device for watching video,” he said in 2004, but the iPod Video came out a year later as a “revolutionary way to watch video on the go.” Actions speak louder than words, and in the case of the Netflix partnership, Apple has given us two directions to ponder for the rumored Apple iTunes Subscription Model.

Netflix is a subscription service. You pay a set dollar amount each month, and Netflix mails you a DVD that’s in your queue, as well as providing access to Netflix Instant, which allows anyone with an Internet connection and a computer or gaming device to watch streaming movies any time. The selection of videos available to stream isn’t great, but it’s steadily improving. Over the past two years, Netflix has grown the Instant accessibility by partnering with hardware makers like Sony televisions, Panasonic’s Blu-ray players and Microsoft’s Xbox to make streaming available via gaming devices.

The inclusion of Netflix on Apple’s latest television appliance was a surprise to me, mostly because it shut down any rumors that Apple may one day offer a subscription service. Including Netflix on a web-connected television appliance isn’t a lure for potential buyers, since most of Apple’s potential Apple TV customers have one or more devices in their home capable of using Netflix Instant (computer, iPad, Blu-ray player, Xbox, etc.).

Did Apple add Netflix simply to play catch-up, or was it only Jobs’ way of saying, “Here’s a subscription service. Trust us, we’re not going to do one”? What about movies Apple wants you to rent for 99 cents through iTunes that you can now get through Netflix?

My far-fetched theory is that Apple is keeping an eye on Netflix and how consumers use this subscription model. I’m pretty sure that Apple realizes that the selection of new releases available within Netflix Instant is mediocre, and this is only a strategic partnership to help sell Apple TV to the consumers who prefer to use one device for all television and movie viewing, and Apple fans who don’t mind having four devices that all include the same access.

The day that Apple realizes it’s losing sales to Netflix Instant or it finally sees a viable business model for offering a better subscription service than Netflix, we’ll see this feature yanked from Apple TV. Of course, it’s not like Netflix is a music subscription service. Those rumors about an Apple music subscription service can keep flowing no problem.

The rumors that Apple TV would be getting an App Store treatment excited a lot of people, myself included, because app developers like Netflix and Hulu could easily build apps in the SDK and circumvent Apple’s built-in features. We all know Apple can do whatever it wants with its store, but with both apps available on the iPhone and iPad, Apple shows it doesn’t really care that using these services is just as easy as renting a movie the Apple way.

Apple’s partnership with Netflix indicates the company isn’t interested in the subscription business right now, but as soon as this becomes a priority, you can bet that Netflix won’t be an Apple TV feature anymore.

The downside of this new plan is that if you go over your 2GB cap, you’ll be charged $10 for every GB you go over. Those of us already on AT&T data contracts were grandfathered in to unlimited plans for the foreseeable future as long as we didn’t cancel our plans.

I wasn’t in a current plan. When I left my job last month, they had taken over my iPhone bill into their contract so, when I left for a new job, I had to setup a new plan even though I could get my old number back. It didn’t hit me that I was screwed until the Apple employee showed me the screen saying, “Choose a data plan” and the two options were 250MB 200 MB or 2GB. I sighed and chose the larger plan but I didn’t get tethering because I already own an unlimited 3G data card from AT&T. Update: I also want to add that the previous “unlimited” plan was actually somewhere around 5GB The iPhone didn’t have a 5 GB limit, however most data cards do have a 5GB limit on “unlimited” plans. Most carriers that say their data is unlimited are lying to you. Don’t be surprised if you download 10 movies from iTunes on your “unlimited” 3G data card and Verizon calls you up with some harsh words.

Eight days later I received a text message from AT&T:

Oh dear. Well, there was nothing I could do except simply turn off 3G data via iPhone’s system settings, which basically makes my iPhone an iPod touch where Wi-Fi is the only option. I wasn’t going to do that. For the sake of our readers, I chose to wait it out. First, let’s talk about what I do on my iPhone.

The No. 1 thing I do is use Twitter for iPhone. In my three years on the service, I’ve tweeted over 60,000 times and sent nearly twice as many direct messages. The second thing I do is email sending, receiving and moving messages around all day on an average of once every 10 minutes from 7AM to midnight. After that, I use eight different location based services to check in and “share” my location anytime I go somewhere and finally, I use apps for weather, video, news and Safari to get information on the go. This month, I also bought and downloaded the new Pearl Jam album via iTunes on my iPhone over 3G.

This line of service was created on August 21 and as I’m writing this it’s September 5. In 16 days with my iPhone 4, here is my current data usage.

At this rate, I will have to pay the 2GB monthly plan price of $25 plus an addition $10 for each GB I go over. It looks like I’ll be paying $20 extra this month for being a data hog. AT&T’s choice to limit us to 2GB of data is simply ridiculous and I have to remind everyone reading that I did not opt for tethering, so my iPhone data would have been above and beyond what I’ve shown above if that was the case. I did a test and in the three hours I’ve been sitting in this café syncing Twitter, email, RSS and uploading images to this blog, I’ve used 75MB of data in and 22MB out. If I was doing that tethered to my iPhone and not on the café’s Wi-Fi connection, it would count against that 2GB cap. The completely lame part of AT&T’s iPhone tethering is that it charges you $20 more just to tether your iPhone but doesn’t allow you more data. You’re still capped at 2GB. I’d happily pay $50 for 5GB of data with tethering on an iPhone but this isn’t an option.

This is mostly a rant but it shows that the choice to limit data bandwidth at a time when mobile phones are demanding more was a poor choice on one of the nation’s largest carriers and I’m paying for it by being a “data hog.”

What are your data usage rates like?

Related GigaOM Pro Research: Metered Mobile Data Is Coming and Here’s How

Right now, most of the content you own is stored locally on our Macs or iOS devices. This content includes apps, books, videos, music and documents. The cutting edge techies have embraced Gmail, Google Docs and cloud services like DropBox and Box.net. The only thing keeping you from storing movies in the cloud and viewing those on your iPad is Internet speed. What if I told you the copy of Finding Nemo you bought from iTunes can be streamed instantly to any Apple device no matter where you were in the world — a café, driving down the interstate or in the London tube? It’s almost here.

Our future is wireless at speeds that meet what we have in our homes. This may be a decade away and if carriers make wireless data truly unlimited this will be a reality, but it scares me for a few very obvious reasons that simply can’t be fixed by technology.

Corporate Control of Our Data

Control by a single entity is my main fear. Cloud storage isn’t democratized and it isn’t open. Currently, when you buy something, it’s stored, owned and managed by the company you purchased it from. Apple has maintained DRM in its iTunes Store since 2003. I’ve authorized files that I bought the day Apple’s store opened and they still play on any one of my Apple devices. If I lose that song, Apple can allow me to re-download it after some back and forth with its support team. My apps, movies, music and music videos are locked to its devices. The same goes with Amazon’s Kindle platform. Buying a book from Amazon’s Kindle Store means that file is locked to its software and hardware. If it ever abandons Kindle, your books are useless. There’s no reason for either of these companies to do this, but people who bought music from stores that are now defunct are in a bit of a pickle with the content.

An example of a failed system is Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM. A number of music stores and MP3 players adopted this, but most of those stores and hardware companies have shifted directions or gone out of business. The hundreds you spent on music may be playable right now but no one can guarantee you’ll be able to in 10 years.

Let’s simply alter my argument a bit and change the delivery of this content from DRMed files stored on your hard drive to music stored on the cloud operated by Napster or Real’s Rhapsody Store. If those services go away, the music you “own” is no longer playable…ever. Going all in on a service that is cloud based is risky business. The same goes for content stored on Google Docs, Flickr, MobileMe and YouTube. If you’re not keeping hard copies of your content uploaded to these services, you’re a fool. Hard drives are cheap. Store your content and don’t rely on these web services that have been around for less than a few years to store your content forever. Personally, I use Backupify.com to keep secondary backups of all my data from Gmail, Google Docs, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and WordPress. I download copies from Backupify once a month to my hard drive.

Remember when Amazon ironically pulled copies of 1984 from Kindle devices without warning? Cloud based companies can do this. They might give you a warning but no one can come into your house and take a book. Unless what you’re storing is illegal or your hard drives are compromised, the data in your home and on your computer is safe for years as long as you’re careful. Keeping a backup of your computers on an external drive at home and a duplicate at your office is good enough and I suggest anyone do that no matter how insignificant the data is. If you store photos, music and documents on your computer, back it up off-site — no exceptions.

Apple is playing it safe with its new Apple TV. Allowing us to stream rented movies and TV shows is a good way to get us comfortable with streaming content. You can still buy the same content on your iOS and Mac devices and stream those to the Apple TV but, if you’re on a TV browsing iTunes, the only option is to rent the content.

It won’t be like this forever. Soon, streaming will be offered as a more convenient and less expensive option for us. Apple and other companies will present products where you can hit play on anything you’ve ever purchased and it starts instantly as long as you have an Internet connection from your phone, tablet and computer. Invite a friend to borrow your copy of Braveheart and they can watch it as well. This convenience will not be without problems.

In Apple We Trust

Apple is on top right now. Its mobile devices are envied by every CE company, but this won’t be the reality forever. I own 300 iOS apps, 1,200 movies, 200 music videos and over 18,000 songs where over 5,000 of those songs were purchased in iTunes. I’ve invested thousands of dollars in Apple. Thanks to limited kindness of the music industry, my music is now DRM free in iTunes Plus format so it can be played on any other MP3 player, but the other content is stuck. When Apple’s devices aren’t the best and someone else takes over, I’ll be stuck to the Apple ecosystem. The same can be said for Mac software when you make the switch to Windows 7 (for whatever reason) but it’s a reality we all need to deal with.

When you want to switch to a cooler and better mobile platform, will you be okay with giving up the thousands spent on DRMed content that can’t be played on the new device? If Apple remains the dominant leader for the next 20 years, can we trust it to be kind to its loyal fans who trust when we buy a movie stored exclusively on Apple’s cloud to always be playable and never be pulled, removed or changed? Will my copy of Braveheart always work no matter where I am or will I be greeted with an error when I’m in China with, “this movie is not licensed to be played in your region.” Where the hard copy stored on my iPad would play just fine no matter where I was? We’ll see. Apple is not a movie studio so its hands are tied when it comes to content and how that content plays just as much as any other company when it comes to music and movies.

The White Album Argument

Maybe I’m not seeing the big picture. There’s another side to this where if you ask anyone over the age of 50 how many times they’ve bought The Beatles’ White Album and they won’t be able to keep count. There was record, 8-track, tape, cassette and maybe even mini-disk. They probably also bought it in CD form the first, second and third time it was remastered. You may have bought this album eight times since it was first available in record stores.

Perhaps that’s how it’s going to be when it comes to our digital music. Perhaps, you’ll buy the same content over and over again well into your old age because there would have been a few music services between 2000 and 2050. On my 70th birthday, I may lament to my grandkids that I spent thousands on music in iTunes and they’ll laugh because music is like $20 a song now and I shouldn’t be complaining that it cost 99 cents back then.

Planning for the Future

Whatever happens next, consumers are in control. We decide with our cold hard cash. We already voted that digital is the future since iTunes sales will pass the sales of physical CDs very soon, but if we go all-in on cloud content trusting in the corporations storing and delivering it, the world may shift immensely and when you take a vacation to the mountains with your family where there’s limited cell reception, the music, movies and important work documents will all be inaccessible stored in some server that’s unreachable and you’ll have to laugh because this was the future we all wanted that corporations gave us.

Maybe I’m skeptical, but the best content is physical (bookshelf) with a digital version (non-DRM) and a backup of that digital copy off-site. If your house burns down, you’ll still have the book or CD digitally but the world we’re entering into is all digital with single corporations holding the DRM keys and now they want to store the content as well. It’s unclear what’s going to happen next. Let’s hope we know what we’re doing.

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No matter what your company did in the past two years, Apple did it better. It reminds me of Sony in the 80s and Microsoft in the 90s. Companies were afraid of Microsoft in the 90s. All Microsoft had to do is decide to enter your space and you’d be out of business, if you weren’t lucky enough to be bought by the company. That’s not the case anymore. In this sense, Apple is the Microsoft of this decade.

Let’s take a look at RIM’s BlackBerry Torch, just released last week. Gizmodo had a great post on why the Torch launch was an utter failure, with only 150K units sold in the first week. In that article, they said:

The hordes are proclaiming the Torch a massive failure, and they’re right — but not because of how many units they sold. 150,000 handsets is a lot of phones. In fact, it’s totally in line with other major launches of the last couple of years: Sprint sold that many Evo 4Gs in its first three days, and it’s three times as many as the Palm Pre managed at launch.

Who it didn’t compete with, of course, is the iPhone. The 3GS and 3G both moved a million over their opening weekends, and 1.7 million people took home an iPhone 4 at launch. And that’s where RIM got into trouble.

They’re right. 150K units is a great number, but it doesn’t compare to Apple’s 1+ million numbers every time a new iPhone comes out. That’s the point. The Blackberry Torch, HTC Evo and Palm Pre all look like complete failures when measured against Apple.

Recently, Asus said they’re lowering production of netbooks due to a lower sales forecast. Nowhere in that quote did their CEO say Apple’s iPad is to blame, but it didn’t stop every blogger from making that causal link. What about the fact that netbooks have had the same Intel Atom processors, same form factor, same low-resolution monitors and same version of Windows XP on them since 2006 as the reason for lower sales? Maybe it’s time for Asus to actually innovate instead of putting the same stuff inside a different color case and throwing a $299 price tag on it.

The specifics of how other companies are doing doesn’t really matter. The issue is that, no matter what any tech company does, they’ll be compared to Apple in some way. Tech companies can’t release a mouse, display, keyboard or television-connected device without being compared to Apple. I’d like to see Microsoft release a battery charger at this point without drawing a negative comparison. Wait, never mind, they have one of those.

My point is, Apple is the yard stick by which all others are measured. There are better products out there with zero visibility and meager sales. In fact, the next Apple is probably out there somewhere. Let’s hope manufacturers don’t just throw up their hands and scale back in the face of stiff competition from Cupertino, and as consumers let’s keep an eye out for the next little guy swimming bravely upstream.

Related GigaOM Pro Research: Apple Company Analysis

Competition is non-existent for iPad right now. All the other guys have tablets shipping “end of the year,” and many more of the more formidable iPad competitors will be out in 2011. Apple’s going to do what it can to get the second revision out this year only for that one liner that Steve loves, “We’re releasing the next iPad today before our competitors have even caught up with the first generation.” He’s used that line a few times, but the iPad itself will probably look very similar to the one you’re holding in your hand right now. I predict it will have the same aluminum back, the same bezel and similar weight and the battery life will be mostly unchanged. What will be new?

New Screen Size

The rumor lately is that a 7″ model is on its way to sit right beside the current 9″ model, and due to Apple’s resolution independence and growing number of developers, a new size won’t cause many issues beyond a few optimizations that have to happen from App Store developers to make things look perfect. For the most part, Apple’s going to make sure most apps “just work.”

The new screen size will help iPad reach a lower price point for consumers and compete with the Amazon Kindle in size and price. Soon, an iPad with thousands of apps will sit along-side the Kindle nicely and make Amazon drop its price even lower to compete.

New Screen Resolution

You can be sure that Apple’s Retina Display, or something very close, will make its way to iPad. More and more iPhone 4 users are telling me that they use the iPhone over iPad because of the beautiful screen and how the iPad just feels empty and flat. This is an inevitable upgrade that is going to force us early adopters who own an iPad and iPhone 4 to jump in line. That screen is addictive and we want it.

FaceTime

Apple’s FaceTime making its way to the next generation iPod touch (via a front-facing camera) and Macs (by the way of a software update) seem like logical steps, but what about iPad? Steve’s promise of “millions of FaceTime devices by the end of the year” is starting to sound empty as we approach September, but it’s this month that we’ll see more of those “millions” of devices available to the public when new iPods and a new iPad is released.

In Apple’s latest iOS betas, you can FaceTime someone based on their email address so devices that aren’t phones (everything but iPhone) will be able to use FaceTime no problem. This is when things really start getting interesting

New Form Factor

I’m doubtful of this one but it’s worth mentioning in this post. Apple generally waits two to three refreshes before redoing the overall hardware of its devices, but a thinner iPad may be in line that mimics much of Apple’s iPhone 4. Squaring off the design would help the device lay flat, but would also make it more susceptible to scratches. I’ve long wanted an iPad bumper case to help in the event of a drop and wish Apple would move away from steel aluminum as it’s so darn slippery. This is a maybe as Apple can legitimately call this a second generation iPad without modifying the outer shell. Of course, if it’s releasing a smaller screen size, it might be a good idea to change things up a bit to throw off the competition. We’ll see.

Why iPad 2 So Soon?

Other than throwing off the competition, there are huge gaps now between iPhone and iPad from the display to FaceTime and the competition in price and size from Kindle that leads me to an iPad refresh right before the holidays as a way for Apple to blow all previous numbers out of the water and make it impossible for competition to position themselves against Apple by including any of those features in their devices. The rumored BlackPad from RIM is said to include a camera, and the Cisco tablet will be smaller than the iPad and easier to carry. A 7″ iPad with FaceTime would do the trick to put both of those products out to pasture before they even ship.

What do you think?

Related GigaOM Pro Research: Can Anyone Compete With the iPad?

The Apple Battery Charger has one of the lowest standby — or “vampire draw” — of similar chargers on the market. That’s the energy that most chargers continue to draw even after their batteries are done charging. Unlike other chargers, the Apple Battery Charger senses when a battery charge cycle is complete and automatically reduces the amount of power it uses to 30 milliwatts – more than 10 times better than the industry average.

Not only do these high-performance batteries have up to a 10-year lifespan, they also hold a charge for an incredibly long time. So you always have power when you need it.

These two statements make any consumer feel as if Apple just reinvented batteries and battery charging. The battery charger is Apple’s first, and already it’s better than what companies like Duracell and Energizer  have created in 20 years of innovation. Man, I feel sorry for those guys. Apple just kicked all of their butts. Except, maybe it didn’t. Could Apple have simply taken off-the-shelf parts and put its typical Apple spin on it?

What the Batteries Really Are

SuperApple disassembled and tested these batteries and the charger. What it uncovered is that these batteries actually appear to be Sanyo Eneloop HR-3UTG batteries. Apple charges $29 for six of them plus a charger, but you can purchase eight and a charger for less at any retail store. All Apple appears to have done is bought decent batteries from another company and touted what those are able to do, which is hold a 75 percent charge for three years when stored, and continue holding a charge for 10 years. These batteries aren’t “magical,” just premium.

Vampire Draw

As far as that claim for an amazingly low “vampire draw,” Apple’s announcement owns the page rank for the term. So what is vampire draw?

Standby power, also called vampire power, vampire draw, phantom load, or leaking electricity, refers to the electric power consumed by electronic appliances while they are switched off or in a standby mode.

I did find this page, which outlines the vampire draw of popular household items. Apple’s Battery Charger uses 30 milliwatts,which is “10 times better than the industry average.” Of course, it fails to cite what group did those tests, so let’s go over a few vampire draw stats for house hold items.

• Cell Phone charger – 140 milliwatts
• Laptop charger – 4420 milliwatts
• Desktop Computer (turned off) – 2840 milliwatts

Apple’s product is certainly using much less than any of those. What’s Apple’s notebook charger vampire draw? What about the iMac? When I power the iMac down, is the vampire draw “10 times below the industry average?” Maybe Apple should work on that as well.

Over-Hyped

My guess is, the Battery Charger is just another example of off-the-shelf parts wrapped in a pretty case and sold at a markup. That’s not really a bad thing, but Apple’s spin on something as simple as a battery charger gets to me. Just say that you released a battery charger and do it without making the entire battery industry look like it’s been playing around for the past 20 years.

Apple’s recent history hasn’t proven much when it comes to hype vs. reality. During antenna-gate, Apple showed all smartphones had issues with an external antenna (I still say that wasn’t Apple’s finest hour) rather than addressing the real problem, so it’s possible that the “magical” battery charger could end up with the same fate if there’s ever an issue of exploding batteries or leaks: Apple will point fingers and say it’s the manufacturer’s fault because Apple is a small company that doesn’t make its own batteries. Until that happens, Apple will take ownership of these as if they were hatched in Steve Jobs head from idea to final product.

My take is that the Apple Battery Charger is over-priced. It does what other chargers do. It’s $29 because there’s an Apple Logo on it. The 30 milliwatts vampire draw means nothing if you have a microwave in your home, which is using 3,000 milliwatts: the equivalent of 100 Apple Battery Chargers all plugged in at once that aren’t charging batteries. My final recommendation? Don’t throw away your current battery charger; it’s probably working just fine. It’s not Apple-branded and glossy, but it works, and you won’t save any money on your power bill by switching.

Related GigaOM Pro Research: Better Battery Life Motivates Mobile Chipmakers

Something sort of hit me in the head while reading the New York Times as Bob Marley played into my earphones: I have no visual or performance signs that a song is playing other than the music entering my head. Bob Marley is singing “No Woman, No Cry” and the iPad doesn’t signal to me that it’s actually doing that, which feels magical, but it made me think about the future and how Apple  is shaping it.

In 2001, my iBook G3′s 500Mhz CPU would be 50 percent utilized while playing high quality music through the speakers. That number has dropped to basically zero while playing the same song on my Core i7 iMac, but iTunes is still open, taking up screen space even if it’s minimized or hidden. I know iTunes is open but the way I interact with iTunes hasn’t changed since iTunes 1.0 was released 10 years ago. The way my Macintosh organizes folders, plays music, and manages windows is unchanged, and it still takes a certain technical proficiency to understand this even if it is an easy-to-use Mac.

Today, while music played on my iPad and I was reading the news story, I thought about how there’s nothing showing a song is playing other than a play icon at the top of the screen. When I change the page or zoom in to a photo, nothing about the iPad’s performance is compromised, even if that song is heavily compressed. Music is playing, and my iPad doesn’t mind.

No other consumer electronics company has done this.

That’s a bold statement coming from a guy that uses Apple products almost exclusively, but I’ve been looking for a product like this for years. The iPod did this, but when you clicked a button on the device, it would show you the currently playing song. It was single-purpose, even if it did come with a way to view your calendars (only view, not change). Devices like my Palm Treo did this, but the music app would crash, and browsing the web would have a 50 percent cut in performance while playing music. Yes, it’s been four years, and the Treo was much slower with fewer resources, but Apple has set us on course to a point where our kids won’t have that feeling of, “I shouldn’t open my web browser because the music might skip.” For those of you who used the original iPhone extensively, music skipping was very common when hitting the phone with heavy tasks.

I didn’t see a huge change in how we interacted with technology until Apple came along with iOS and shook things up. The Mac and Windows experiences feel dated. There are power, usefulness and capabilities that iOS (and yes even Android devices) can’t do now, but it won’t be long before they can. In 2007, iPhone was cutting edge for having a tough screen that worked. These days, I can FaceTime with friends, download movies over the air, read the news as it happens, and always know the answer to what guy played in that movie within the time it would take to boot up the ole’ Mac and fire up Safari. Grab iPhone, slide to unlock, click Safari and search.

I don’t give Apple all of the credit, but this is TheAppleBlog, so it’s good to highlight everything Apple got right that set us in this direction. Who was going to change things and set us onto the next era of computing? Microsoft is still introducing product flops (ie. Microsoft Kin) and Google’s business model is to create and leverage technologies in order to target ads to you. I can’t think of another company other than Apple that’s continued to pioneer the technology experience. Cisco is a distant 4th, but it’s too busy powering the entire Internet to make consumer electronics. Sadly, Sony (c sne) has become more irrelevant as simply “expensive” and not as breakthrough as it was in the 90s. I still buy Sony TVs, but only because it’s Sony and not because it’s doing anything truly remarkable over Panasonic or Vizio.

Apple has set itself apart in the way it’s brought power to elegance — where the design of the software and form factor of the hardware fades away, and all you’re doing is sitting on a train, reading a news article while listening to a song. Of course, now that I think about it, that 3G connection to AT&T is ticking along as well. There was no application I had to pull up to initiate the connection (like on Mac OS or Windows 7), and there’s no thought to it. As soon as I leave the office, my Wi-Fi connection there drops and 3G starts. This kind of experience is something we all assume would be common in 2010 but you’d be surprised how many devices simply don’t do this in a way that the consumer can consume with no awareness of what’s going on behind the scenes.

I don’t know what it is but, with Apple technology, I feel the future. It’s not a stylus smartphone with a hardware keyboard; it’s not a 24″ tall tower with a big power button on the front; and it’s not a mouse with a cord attached and a floppy disk that makes this wretched click sound while reading and writing data. Apple doesn’t have any of that, and it’s chosen to integrated technologies into an experience that no other company has.

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.

Kindle as a service

Kindle is a service that allows consumers to buy books from anywhere in the world as long as there is an Internet connection. Books can be purchased via any device with a modern web browser and you can read those books on any device that supports Kindle software like your Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, Android and Amazon’s own Kindle hardware.

[inline-ad align="right"]Amazon’s strategy is different from Apple’s. Apple developed the iTunes Store as a service to drive the sales of its hardware. Kindle software and hardware was created to drive the sale of books and other downloadable content. Kindle is huge for Amazon because going digital isn’t just convenient to the consumer. It’s great for Amazon because it doesn’t have to keep a stock of books and worry about paying to ship those books and the consumer wins by having that book accessible across multiple devices instantly. All Amazon has to do is ensure its selection of books is higher and its price is lower than the competition.

Kindle and iPad finally coexisting

Until today’s announcement, Kindle as a device was scrutinized against the Apple iPad, because while you could read books on both, the iPad was only $150 more than the smaller Kindle and a few bucks more than the larger Kindle DX.

Amazon aggressively slashed prices on the device in a way that made everyone think they were just being defensive and fearful of iPad but today, that all changed.

Kindle 3 is priced at $139 (Wi-Fi only) and an International version with 3G is only $189 (3G via GSM). TechCrunch Reports:

In addition to the price and screen change, the redesigned body is 21% smaller and 15% lighter, down to about 8.5oz. If their press release is to be believed, it’s also got twice the storage (4GB) and significantly improved battery life over the old Kindle.

Kindle is priced so aggressively that true book lovers can buy the new Kindle at a price that’s simply a no brainer considering that Kindle books cost considerably less than real books and you’re saving on shipping and the pesky 3-7 days it takes for a book to arrive at your door. No longer is there a decision to make between buying a Kindle device or simply paying $150 more and having an iPad that does books and so much more.

Amazon is finally showing the industry that it doesn’t want to make millions selling Kindles. It’s about the sale of digital books.

Apple and Amazon are both winners

When you’re just talking hardware, Apple will continue to sell millions of iPads to people who want books, games, movies, apps and the web and the Kindle will continue to sell in the millions for book lovers. This is a huge win for consumers because our decision is made for us and bloggers can stop comparing both devices like they’re the same. I’ll be buying a Kindle for my sister who reads books every day and an Amazon gift card so she can buy a few books to get started. It’s a much easier gift than paying $499 for an iPad that she’ll mostly be using for books, anyway.

So who are the losers?

Basically, everyone that’s not Apple or Amazon. For now and the foreseeable future, Amazon has done a phenomenal job getting Kindle on millions of computers, phones and other handheld devices. Its goal of selling books by the truck load is working well as it just announced Kindle books are now outselling physical books after only three years. The losers are Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Sony’s E-Reader, and any other devices that don’t either work with Amazon or have their own book store. B&N has a fighting chance but Amazon’s user base of passionate book buyers will stay true to Amazon and Apple has over 100 million accounts with credit cards who will dive right in to iBooks. Sorry, but it’s clear who the winners are in the digital book sales space.

What about iBooks?

Amazon and Apple may not be competing when it comes to Kindle hardware versus iPad but they’re still competing in the book sales space. I’ve been meaning to write this for a while but I won’t buy a book via iBooks outside of the free section. The reason is that Apple hasn’t convinced me that my digital DRMed books are safe with them. In the same way that my iTunes movies and music (prior to iTunes Plus) are not playable on other hardware other than Apple’s. Amazon has displayed the right strategy that any device or platform that comes out in the future will eventually get Kindle software and those digital books I bought in 2007 will sync to that device without fail and Amazon is a large company that I trust. iBooks may win me over eventually but for price, selection and compatibility, Kindle (the service) has me hooked.

Kindle versus iPad is a dead argument. You’re both winners. No one is arguing the iPad isn’t better hardware for much more than books but that comes at a price and, even on the iPad, Kindle is just one tap away via its own app.

Related GigaOM Pro Content (subscription required): Evolution of the e-Book Market