Stacey Higginbotham writing on why the pricing of Google’s internet and TV services are so low. Spoiler: it’s not because the service is a loss leader.

On this week’s episode of The B&B Podcast, Ben and I talked about the Kansas City rollout of Google Fiber and the just-announced Google Fiber TV, internet speeds and privacy policies, Mountain Lion, the Mac App Store, Notification Center, Sparrow’s acquisition and email clients in general, and speculations about the future of Apple TV and how that could relate to either Siri and or the theoretical iPad Mini.

As a former GTI owner I’m embarrassed that someone else had to point this out to me.

The long and the short of it is that Google will begin offering Gigabit internet access to Kansas City, KS and central Kansas City, MO starting around September 9.

They’re offering three plans:

• Gigabit Internet for $70/month.
• Internet plus their newly-announced Google Fiber TV service for $120/month (and the TV plan comes with a free Nexus 7 to use as your remote control).
• Or free internet (for up to 7 years) if you’ll pay for them to run the fiber optic cable to your house. It’s not gigabit speeds though; they’ll cap you at 5Mb down and 1Mb up.

Since each house that signs up for Google Fiber will have to have a fiber optic cable physically run to their home, Google is picking which neighborhoods to begin residential activation in by having people pre-register their “fiberhood”. You pay $10 to pre-register your house and then the neighborhoods with the most registrations will get set up first.

Alas, since I live on the southern edge of Kansas City, Google Fiber isn’t yet available in my neighborhood.

Daniel Jalkut to the rescue:

My beta-quality, more-or-less unsupported Subscribe to Feed extension adds a handy button to the toolbar that, when a page offers RSS or Atom feeds, can be clicked to easily open the feed:// link, which should automatically open your favorite news reader.

Works like a charm.

Ryan Jones:

On a past Apple conference call, Tim Cook said “one thing we’ll make sure is that we don’t leave a price umbrella for people”. What’s that? A price umbrella is when a company with dominant market share maintains high prices, leaving an opening for new competitors to enter at lower price points. In the case of the iPad, the price umbrella until recently was at $499. Someone could enter that market at lower prices and exhibit classic disruption to push them out from the bottom up.

(Via Jim Dalrymple.)

Great piece by Thomas Brand looking at nearly 30 years worth of skeuomorphic designs in Mac OS, from the Mac’s first Calculator app to brushed metal to green felt and corinthian leather.

A bunch of cool geeks exercising in the park with our iPads and iPhones.

Among other things, the $7 eBook includes Federico Viticci’s epic review of OS X 10.8 and the foreword was written by yours truly. Also, 30-percent of its proceeds go directly to the American Cancer Society.

Cult of Mac put together a nice 2-minute video showing 30 things that are new or different in Mountain Lion.

And if you buy it from the Mac App Store via this link I’ll get a small kickback.

My thanks to Harvest for again sponsoring the RSS feed this week.

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