Now me personally, I don’t have either an HD DVD or Blu-ray player, and I don’t plan on ever getting one. Now that HD DVD is dead, all that’s left is Blu-ray — but wait, could there be another competitor on the horizon? Many people have been talking after the death of HD DVD, some saying Blu-ray is not in the clear yet and in fact might not have much of a victory at all. It appears that all these people are pointing at Apple. Apple, the one already covered in blood from the death of many digital download stores and/or media players.

Companies below either closed shop entirely, or discontinued a product:

Yahoo!, Virgin, MTV’s Urge, AOL, MSN, BenQ, Rio, Dell, iRiver, Thomson, Olympus, BuyMusic.com, TowerRecords, Sony’s Connect, Google Video, and Wal-mart.

Now Apple is a company that has created many industry standards; it’s considered by many as the “trend setter.” It’s made the mouse a standard (1981), USB a standard (1998), developed FireWire as a standard (1995, 2000), optical mice a standard (2000), super drives a standard (1988, 2001), the modern laptop design a standard (1991), 16+ million colors (24 bit) on screen a standard (1987), Wi-Fi a standard (1999), etc., etc., etc.

So what I’m getting at is Apple is trying to set a new standard. Steve Jobs has pointed this out many times directly and indirectly. He has pointed out the decline of optical disks and the increase of digital downloads. He shared his vision in which everything could be downloaded digitally. You see Apple wants to get rid of the concept of physical storage devices like the optical disk (not SSD or HDD, of course). Knowing Apple, I could seriously see the fading of optical disks in just a few years, and I could also see Blu-ray not lasting very long.

When Apple makes a change, it takes six months to as much as 10 years, but soon the industry follows its lead.

As BYTE Magazine said back in December, 1994 (link):

“Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to describe the history of the computer industry as a massive effort to keep up with Apple.”

“It’s no coincidence that every new version of Windows looks more and more like the Mac.”

“In 1984, critics derided the Mac for its appliance-like simplicity, but it went on to pioneer or popularize almost every innovation in personal computing: the GUI, desktop publishing, built-in networking, plug and play, integrated multimedia, API-based software development, visual programming, hypertext, 24-bit color, the global clipboard, undo, voice control, built-in color calibration, dynamic memory allocation, SCSI, and even 3 1/2-inch floppy drives.”

“Apple’s R&D lab, located in Cupertino, California, is the inspirational R&D center for the entire industry.”

“Apple is pushing ahead with some exciting new technology, and the industry would be much poorer without Apple’s technical leadership.”- this one has to do with the fact that Apple was dying at the time.

I could get more quotes, but I think this one source says it all. Apple is one of the biggest innovators in the industry and when it does something, whether it gets noticed or not, the industry shifts in its direction. So I really can’t see Blu-ray as a standard for very long. Congrats Blu-ray, on the victory, but your life will be short. Apple’s behind you, ready to strike.

Back on July 31 of 2007, Apple said it had sold three billion songs, making it number 1 on the Web as a music download retailer. This also made Apple the third largest music retailer as a whole, surpassing Amazon and Target. Today Apple has sold more than four billion songs and is now the number 2 music retailer in the world, only behind Wal-mart. It is, of course, still number 1 on the Web.

What this shows is that iTunes is not just gaining ground, but is gaining ground faster over time, slowing down to a nice pace. Originally it took iTunes three years to reach one billion songs (from 2003-2006). Then it took only 11 months to gain another billion songs. Again, the third billion took a mere five months. Finally the last billion, getting up to four billion, took roughly six months. So iTunes shows that iTunes should be gaining around two billion songs sold per year.

This data does not count the movies, TV shows, podcasts, or games that are downloaded through iTunes.

New MacBooks and MacBook Pros were released today, the MacBook Pros have the multi-touch gestures like the Air. The new lower end model MacBooks however don’t have this feature (yet).

In addition it appears that all new laptops have 2 gigs of memory standard (still able to go up to 4).

The MacBook Pros’ high-end video card now has 512MB GDDR3 memory (from 256).

Nothing much more is new, but the processing power in the MacBooks which now start at 2.1Ghz and goes to 2.4 (last model went up to 2.2).

Links: store.apple.com, www.apple.com/macbook, www.apple.com/macbookpro

I have just tested the newest build of WebKit from February 22. I was astounded by the score I got in ACID3. I tested Safari 3.1 a few weeks ago and got a 66 score, with Firefox at 60. Now with the latest build of WebKit, it jumped from 66 to a whopping 87!

If anyone knows about the ACID tests, you’d know 87/100 is pretty darn good, and at this point from my testing that’s the best score so far, with second place at 67/100 (the latest Firefox build).

Internet Explorer is still at the lowest with only 12/100.

Here’s the ACID3 link.

I’ve noticed recently that people have been giving Apple’s Pippin attention, saying Apple did once have a gaming console. The truth is Apple has never had a game console, unless you count the Apple ][ with the old DOS games. The Pippin physically doesn’t truly exist. It doesn’t have a form of solidity because it’s an SDK and an operating system, not a computer or console. Now what people have seen, if they’ve seen a console-like device, is something called World. World was a platform made by Bandai, the only Licensee that Apple could get for the Pippin platform. I do need to add, however, that in America people sometimes refer to World as Pippin instead of just the operating system or SDK.

World is not a gaming console. It was based on Apple’s idea that the computer world would end up in the living room. In other words, it was a Windows Media Center before there was a Windows Media Center. It could, of course, play games, but it could also play much more — like movies and music. It also had Netscape to access the Internet.

Here’s a video I have from Computer Chronicles (1995):

Now before I begin, just to clarify, because I see this mistake many times. Astrology and Astronomy are completely different subjects, Astrology is a false science that uses patterns in the sky to tell your future.

For a long time now, I’ve been telling people that the market share graphs and surveys are false; it seems very few believed me. The reason I said that had to do with the fact of how market share information was gathered. You see, a company like Net Applications has a snippet of code that is put into hundreds of Web sites. The code can tell what computer the visitors are on, and then send that information back to Net Applications.

The bad thing about these types of invisible surveys has to do with the Web sites themselves. From what I’ve learned most of Net Application’s Web sites are on e-commerce sites. At this time there are still many e-commerce sites devoted to Internet Explorer and/or Microsoft. One of which was Wal-mart’s online music store (which is gone now). You see Net Applications doesn’t list the Web sites its code is on, so you don’t know if any Web site is biased toward an OS or works better on a specific browser, or tends to get more of a specific OS because of what they sell.

Well now today I’ve found proof of how unreliable this method is. I found another Web site, which I trust a lot more than New Applications, called w3schools.com (W3 is the consortium that creates the open Internet standards).

Here’s a comparison:

So as you can see, there are some big differences, and actually W3 and Net Applications can’t seem to agree on any of the browsers. Firefox for instance seems to have more than twice the market share on W3’s side compared to Net Application’s.

This statement above can reflect on another similar market share Net Application does — the one that everyone seems to base their facts upon: The Operating System Marketshare. This has the same results as above. W3 actually says that Linux has a market share that is over five times the amount Net Applications says (3.6 > 0.67). So what does this say about Vista? Well, let’s look at Apple’s share. Net Applications says there are roughly 8% of computer users on Macs. Steve Jobs commented a while back that there are 23 million Mac OS X users. Estimating, I believe it is close to 26 million today. So what does that say? In total it appears that there are only about 320 computer users in the entire world. 320! that’s impossible — that’s less than 100 million over the population of the United States, so what about the rest of the world? I remember Microsoft claiming that there are close to a billion computer users out there, but then where did they go? I then did the same thing with W3’s information and got double the users at around 650 million. So who’s right? Are they both wrong? Who knows?

So once again, do listen about who has a larger market share, it’s all just a pseudoscience.

• W3 Browser Statistics

• Net Applications Browser Statistics

Recently Apple had added a few key words and phrases under it’s Trademark name.  Many of these had to do with a gaming console and/or handheld unit.  This caused mass amounts of rumors.

The truth is, from a senior developer at Apple, that this is simply not true:

“Apple is very protective of the reputation it has built in the electronics market, don’t hold your breath for an announcement of an ‘iGame’ console just yet”.

The actual reason for adding to the Apple trademark actually has to do with expanding the gaming market on their Mac OS X platform.  Specifically, they plan to expand it on the iPod and iPhone.  Read my other article here, about the iPhone’s gaming potential.

Mac OS X applications seem very solid and functional, but in fact an Application in OS X is just a basic folder with the “.app” extension on it. This type of file structure is called a bundle and it’s what Apple has been using not only for Application architecture, but for documents as well. Native iWork Documents, for instance, are folders that contain a compressed gz file, extra resources, and an informational property list.

So what does this mean? It simply means you can get into the contents of an Application or document very easily, just like opening a folder.

Below is a video showing how to open the contents of Safari.app and changing the Activity Window, and making the Activity Window the first item to open. You do need Apple’s Xcode tools to be installed to do any modify of Applications with ease(otherwise your going to have to use a text editor and edit the xml files by hand). This of course makes it so the MainMenu item wont open, so no menu will appear at the top of the screen. I did this by openning up the ActivityViewer.nib file. A NIB(NeXTSTEP interface Builder) file is an interface file, modern files now are called XIB(Xcode Interface Builder). I also modify Safari through a property list. A property list is very similar to a Hex code based system that holds certain properties to a file. The great thing about a property list though is that it is completely human readable. Even a non-programmer can understand it.

Ever since the fall of last year it has seemed inevitable that Blu-ray would win. Warner Bros. said it all when it planned to only sell Blu-rays and to stop production of HD DVDs in May. Then Target stopped selling HD DVDs, and just recently, Wal-mart has stopped selling them.

Today it has been said that HD DVDs are officially dead and Toshiba is planning to stop production; the cost to scrap all the HD DVD players and materials will end up costing hundreds of million of dollars.

So, everyone that bought a HD DVD player, or who own an Xbox 360 with an HD DVD player, welcome to the wonderful world of obsolete, unsuccessful products. Sony’s Betamax has been here for a while waiting for you.

When the Apple TV first came out, I thought it was an okay set-top box. Over the first few months I saw nothing but good reviews, yet at the same time very few people were buying them. I do have to comment though, Apple TV so far has had the best results, selling about 800,000 units in 10 months, and that’s with very little advertising.

I personally have not been one that has bought one yet. I can’t find anything appealing enough about it to shell out $229 (was $299) for it. The new features in Apple TV take 2 have added some appeal. I can now watch or listen to podcasts on it, and I can rent movies.

The only problem with renting movies on it, is the fact that I’m one of the few people Steve Jobs didn’t count at Macworld when he said that most people only watch a film once. I normally watch a movie many times over again. So I really could careless about the renting part of the Apple TV.

Then there’s the new flickr feature. I’ll just come out clean and say, I don’t have an account there and I only go to Flickr when one of my friends gives me a link to it. I don’t know why, but I’m just not interested in it, just like how I don’t care about MySpace. The closest thing to Flickr I go to is YouTube, and that’s about videos not photos.

Now I recently posted an article about a new patent for the Apple TV that lets you watch broadcasted TV as well as live iChat with friends. This I would like very much. Now what I really want from Apple TV is the ability to use a wireless keyboard and/ or mouse, to have Safari built-in, and some form of IRC system to go along with iChat. I would also like a news feature that allows me to view current news, preferably video cast, but text is fine, and weather.

Finally there is one great Web site that should have been added to Apple TV, that being Blip.tv. What a great source of independent shows and clips, that would fit perfectly next to the YouTube channel.

Until Apple TV gets an iChat, Safari, and something like Blip.tv channels, I doubt I’ll get one. Maybe someday it’ll add something I like, but so far there isn’t much appeal at this point for me.