Last year, before the 4S was announced, I wrote about one of the reasons Apple’s product launches are so successful:
Good marketing may get people in the door the first time, but it’s good product development that gets them in the door the second time and the third time.
Marco Arment (via Michael Mulvey):
When Apple makes a new product, usually the message is, “Can you believe how great this is?”
And when Amazon makes a new product, usually the message is, “Can you believe how cheap this is?”
Dan Frommer:
Apple and Amazon are both in the business of designing small computers – tablets, ereaders, phones, media players – and selling them to the public. But how they do it is the big difference. And that’s best depicted by the astonishing difference in the two companies’ profits.
“How am I supposed to give a dramatic keynote if people already know what the iPhone 5 looks like?”
Because, you know, maybe you’re in need of another easter egg factoid to prove that yes, you are the biggest Mac nerd your friends or family know.
When sending a website as a to-do item to OmniFocus, now if you’ve selected some text in the page then it too will get added to the task’s notes in addition to the URL itself. I didn’t even know I could do this ever, let alone that it was broken in Safari 6.
That’s what it said on the back of the HP TouchPad box I bought last summer. I wonder what it says on the back of the Spectre One box.
I’m not sure how long Siri has been doing this, but I just noticed it the other day. I have a tendency to talk to Siri like she’s a real person, and I often say things like, tell my wife that I’ll be home in 10 minutes.
A request like that used to produce a text message like this: “That I’ll be home in 10 minutes”. But no longer.
Now I’m wondering how long it will be until a request like this:
“tell my wife that I’ll be home in 10 minutes and ask her if there anywhere she needs me to stop”
get’s turned into:
“I’ll be home in 10 minutes, is there anywhere you need me to stop?”
My thanks to muvichip for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.
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Watching a movie in the post-DVD world is a mess. Blu-Ray startup times are measured in dozens of minutes. Digital is faster, but good luck finding your movie. If you find it, you’d better not get interrupted because you’ve got 24 hours to watch it!
There has to be a better way.
muvichip is the first global, solid-state, movie distribution media that can be used anywhere and on any device that has a USB port, and, when paired up with the muvifi or muvifi+ streaming device, you can watch a movie on ANY device. Studios are excited to distribute their movies on muvichip, and national stores want to stock it.
But we need your help.
We’re running a funding campaign on IndieGoGo to get our first batch out the door. You can be the first to order the muvifi and your favorite movies on the muvichip by helping to fund us on IndieGoGo. You’ll only be charged if we hit our funding goal.
Help us make the future of movie distribution that combines the ease of use of digital with the quality and catalog of DVD/Blu-Ray.
Horace Dediu:
The logic of selling a product which has a profit model unrelated to the cost of goods sold is tricky. The incentives are different. The risk is not selling too few but selling too many.
I’ve been a member of the Read & Trust crew since the beginning. It’s just a fun little network of folks that read and recommend one another’s work. There used to be a weekly email newsletter that you could sign up for, and proceeds of the newsletter went to support the writers on the R&T network.
Well, the newsletter is now a monthly magazine. It’s well designed, ships as a PDF, and costs $5/month for a subscription or you can buy individual issues for 6 bucks a pop.
You can snag a free version of the magazine that was built using last May’s emailed articles centered around staying creative, and which features a piece by yours truly.
Dan Frommer:
Imagine, for instance, an Amazon phone with no monthly voice-plan requirement, fair pricing on data plans and unlimited text messaging. It could conceivably cost half what an iPhone does per month, running on the same AT&T LTE network. And this would help Amazon win with its customers and turn gadgets into services.
If — if — Amazon shipped a phone, maybe it would be more akin to Amazon’s version of an iPod touch but with a cellular data connection. 250MB of data per month may seem like little for a tablet, but that’s a decent amount for a phone (I use just around that on my iPhone). Imagine a data plan for your mobile phone that was $50/year? Wowzers.
MG Siegler:
So it’s possible that Amazon is passing the entire $130 from consumers over to AT&T to secure their good-looking deal. But if that’s the case, why not either tack-on or eat the remaining $50?
Maybe Bezos really wanted to offer a tablet that was the same price as the iPad?
Having a same-priced product is one way to tell potential customers that you are on an equal playing field when compared to “other tablets”.
Because pretty much every educated consumer who is in the market for a tablet knows that the iPad is unequivocally great. But that doesn’t mean the iPad is a no-brainer for everyone in the market for a tablet. And so Amazon is competing by saying that for the price of an entry-level iPad you could instead get a 4G Fire with a super-cheap data plan. Too bad it comes with ads that supposedly you won’t be able to disable.
Lots of clever tips and tricks from Michael Schechter about one of the few apps I always have running on my Mac.