Two Apple iPod chief execs to leave the company - for their family?

November 4, 2008 · Filed Under Recent News · Comment 

Yes, you heard correctly. Putting family over work. A rarity in today’s society, indeed.

Apple on Tuesday confirmed rumors circulating yesterday that Tony Fadell, a longtime executive in charge of the company’s iPod division and regarded as mainly responsible for its mainstream success, is stepping down.

Fadell will be replaced by Mark Papermaster (greatest company exec name ever), a vice president at IBM, who will join Apple as senior vice president of devices (the devices being mainly the iPod line), which is a nice grab for Apple.

Fadell will remain at Apple as an adviser to CEO Steve Jobs, the company said. Apple also announced that Fadell’s wife, Danielle Lambert, plans to step down from her position as vice president of human resources at the end of the year, after a successor is found. She will leave the company, Apple said.

Both stated their reasons were for spending more time with their growing family. I say, good for them. We’ll see if this impacts the iPod or its strategies going forward in any way, though.

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Microsoft and Zune gain ground against the iPod

September 18, 2008 · Filed Under Product Reviews · Comment 

It’s been no secret that Apple’s iPod has dominated the portable music player scene for awhile now, and even less of a secret that Microsoft’s Zune has been an afterthought next to the iPod.  But that hasn’t stopped MS from innovating, even a bit past the features offered by the iPod. Their latest release is no exception.

MS announced a new lineup of Zune players with new features, including being able to buy songs from the FM radio feature by “tagging” them. It’s a little imperfect, according to several reviews, but it’s a big step towards total integration of music and instant buying power (using wi-fi, if available), a recommendation feature based on your listening habits called MixView, and different “channels” that can be wirelessly added (again with Wi-Fi) to your player, each with 20 different songs, updated weekly.

It even allows you to download and listen to songs as often as you want with a $15 monthly subscription (a feature I wish the iPod had).

Physically, the players haven’t changed much; there’s a slick touch menu and a few new colors. Price ranges from $79-$250 or so, depending on storage capacity. They’re a bit bigger and thicker than an iPod, but some larger hands may welcome that development (speaking as someone who’s dropped an iPod a few times).

Microsoft is defintely beginning to give the iPod a run for its money, based on their latest products. No longer are their players an afterthought.

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iTunes 8 causes major Vista headaches

September 11, 2008 · Filed Under Recent News · Comment 

You think that Apple has the resources to test iTune 8 on all kinds of platforms, so there’s little excuse for this sort of thing.

Reports are emerging this morning that the newly released iTunes 8 doesn’t like Windows Vista very much, though the Apple forums indicate its a more sporadic problem.  Some are seeing the much beloved blue screen of death after connecting iPods, etc with iTunes 8 running.

The solution seems to to be to uninstall the whole thing and reinstall it, and apparently the USB driver file with it may cause a conflict on some Vista systems, depending on the devices installed. Lovely. Even Apple seems to have fairly low regard for Vista, it seems.

One of the issues with this is the secrecy with which Apple does its beta testing; this is what typically happens when you don’t do widely public testing, with its myriad hardware configurations and users of various skill levels. I understand their perspective on this, but…you end up with a product that doesn’t always work on different types of configs the way it should. Hopefully, Apple will patch this one up pretty quickly and all will be well.

Here’s the Apple thread (Warning: it’s big and loads slowly).

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Apple event yields few surprises, incremental improvements

September 10, 2008 · Filed Under Recent News · Comment 

The recent Apple “Let’s Rock!” event displayed the old adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” in action as CEO Steve Jobs announced a series of incrementally improved products, updates and managed to indicate that the iPhone may even work as it should have in the first place soon with the 2.1 firmware update. We’ll go through the highlights one by one:

iPhone update: Most believe the 2.0 iPhone OS to be one of Apple’s most bug-infested releases in years, and Jobs announced the 2.1 update to be released Sept. 12th will fix poor battery life, frequent dropped calls, and apps that don’t work. When even the creator uses the phrase “lots of bugs”, you know they had to do something.

iTunes 8: The awaited iTunes 8 was announced, with support for HD programming, new features and bug fixes, and “Genius”, the contextual intelligent search feature described further below.

New slimmer iPod Nano, iPod line updates: No, it isn’t earth-shattering, but a new longer, slimmer iPod Nano was announced, along with new color choices for various lines, and price reductions for a few models. Investors didn’t seem overwhelmed, but many who follow Apple didn’t expect anything apart from incremental improvements and to be entertained.

Also announced was the “Genius” playlist feature to be added into the next generation of Nanos, iPod classic and iTunes), an intelligent feature that allows to pick a single song from your player, and it will generate 25 songs that share similar musical tastes or characteristics. Of course, it depends on the available music in your collection, but it’s still a very interesting potential feature. There will NOT be an upgrade path for some of the new features for iPod products, which is a bit of a shame, but not a surprise.

Jobs is still alive, news at 11: Jobs even joked about rumors that his health wasn’t very good. He seemed energetic and fine, according to most reports from people attending the event.

Jack Johnson, iTunes Giant: Jobs announced that Jack Johnson was the top-selling iTunes male artist of all time. A bit of a shock, but then again, sleepy guitar music might be just the thing after a hard day of work.

Apple held the status quo, which is good and bad: they make good products with a solid set of features, but companies that are established and comfortable tend to take fewer risks and are slower with innovation (see: Microsoft for Exhibit A of this business axiom). It’s good to be on top of the heap, but hopefully Apple can step things up a bit in the future to keep the innovation flowing. For now, their engineers seem happy with a solid single rather than a home run.

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