Latest Rants
Letter to Steve Jobs (19/12/2008)
This is pretty self explanatory…
Hi Steve,
Just wanted to drop you a quick note to say how disappointed I am at your decision not to give the keynote address at Macworld 2009. I have been an Apple user for almost 20 of my 27 years and have worked in the Apple retail & consulting ecosystem for almost 10 years. Living in Australia, however, I have never had the chance to see you speak live - until, I thought, this year. I am currently in the USA for a holiday, and made many of my travel plans around Macworld 2009 - and have already booked flights, hotels and a keynote ticket. I am due to arrive in San Francisco on the 4th of January, for what I was hoping would be a great week of ‘long time Mac-user indulgence’, kicked off by watching you deliver the keynote live.
Until today, that was. When I read today’s announcement I was filled with a mixture of surprise and disappointment. As a business person, I can understand Apple pulling out of MacWorld Expos. I could also understand the need to start a transition to someone other than yourself presenting the traditional yearly keynote at MacWorld San Francisco if Apple were to continue the tradition.
What I cannot understand, however, is that given this is the last ever MacWorld keynote, why you would choose not to present yourself. This can only lead to much speculation about your health - and I hope beyond all measure that this is not the reason for the decision to not speak this year. If your health is not the reason, which I sincerely hope to be the case, I think it is disappointing that you have decided not to give the ‘farewell’ keynote, as it were.
Personally, I was looking forward to hearing you speak. I think you are the most visionary corporate leader of our time, and I am disappointed that you have chosen to pull out of this engagement at quite literally the last minute. Your decision has cost many of your most loyal customers a significant amount of money, in fact thousands of dollars in my case alone. I would not be coming to MacWorld this year if not to see you present the keynote. I understand that this statement validates the decision to not attend Macworld in future years. But I think it simultaneously invalidates the decision to not give the keynote yourself given this is the last year.
I am not the only person making the trek to San Francisco to hear you speak. This decision will cost hundreds of your most important customers (the ‘early adopters’ as it were) thousands of dollars. Let’s be frank for a moment. I don’t think anyone would have a problem with either announcement, if Apple had chosen to make the announcement 6 months ago. Before everyone had booked their (expensive) keynote and conference tickets (not to mention airfares and hotels in my case!).
I strongly believe some level of explanation is needed, and hope that you take the time to consider the contents of this email. To simultaneously say that you (Apple) are pulling out of MacWorld and you (personally) are not delivering the last ever keynote is surprising & disappointing. It is an action that requires some form of explanation. I look forward to your reply.
Regards, John
No reply as yet. 
If you are in a similar boat (i.e. having booked tickets, flights, hotels etc.) drop me a line.
Tags: Apple
Steve JobsMacworld Expo
T-45 minutes (07/12/2008)
Well, I’m sitting in the departure lounge at Tullamarine. 45 minutes till I take off on QF93. We go direct MEL -> LAX (all the cool kids are using airport codes these days) and then I’m catching another American Airlines flight on to JFK.
It’s been an interesting build up to the trip this time around. I’ve been working full time this year (i know, i know) and I’ve really been under the pump to get a lot of stuff finished before I go. But it’s (mostly) all done now, and I’m at that immutable deadline. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I should book a holiday as soon as I get back - it’s the only way I get anything done! 
Well, time to sign off. See you on the flip side!
Tags: USA 2008
TravelFlightsApple Doomed .... not that old story again! (07/05/2008)
Recently, a friend forwarded me an article about Apple - and how they were doomed.
On 05/05/2008, at 7:12 PM, Steve wrote:
The Mac: Apple’s (AAPL) Achilles’ Heel
Most analysts thought that the good news out of Apple (AAPL) was that Mac sales were up 51% to 2,289,000. Nothing could be further from the truth.
iPod sales sales have slowed considerably. They were up only 8% in the quarter. to 10,644,000. With almost 150 million sold since the product was introduced, it is surprising that the music player has held up that well. The product saved the company from obscurity but its best day are over. Apple also sold 1.7 million iPhones. that keeps it on track with expectations, but it is not likely to overtake Nokia anytime soon.
The Mac has been a hot product before. In the early days of the PC, the Mac was consider the cool product. When the iMac came out in 1998, it was a hot seller. But, the rate limiting step was that Apple could never get deeply into the corporate market. Colleges and design firms would use it. But, the IT departments at mid and large-sized companies would not support two platforms. The PC and Windows had done too good a job.
Apple is a a “run rate” to sell almost 10 million Macs this calendar year. That has to get the attention of PC shops like Dell (DELL) and HP (HPQ). It is also more than interesting to Microsoft (MSFT).
The big wall that Apple cannot knock over is the wall that being in second place erects. The really substantial buyers, corporations, who could move Mac sales toward 15 million or 20 million units never did buy the Apple product and they won’t now. It represents extra work for them, and extra costs. Extra costs are not popular these days.
The Mac has hit is glass ceiling. Apple investors may be hoping that the machine can make it out of the consumer market to keep the rapid growth going, but that is not in the cards.
Douglas A. McIntyre
This is my reply to him.
Hey Steve,
I don’t actually agree with that article. I agree that Apple is growing way too fast (from a build quality, software engineering perspective), but it’s pretty sad that the only problem that guy could trot out is the same one we’ve been hearing for 20 years. “Enterprise doesn’t want the Mac”.
Well I’ve got news for him. Apple don’t want Macs on corporate desks. They just don’t! They never have, and they certainly don’t now. If they were serious about enterprise, they’d give you 3 years warranty standard on the Pro range, you’d actually get stock on time, they’d tell business what’s coming in 6-9 months (to help with standard for forecasting purchases in big companies), etc. etc.
Trust me, Apple don’t want corporate. But, there are more than enough home PCs out there for Apple to double or tripple it’s market share. And I promise you, that’s where the extra 51% of Mac sales came from in the last financial year.
As far as phones go, Apple aren’t expecting everyone who buys a cheap Nokia to buy an iPhone — yet. Look at the iPod market. Originally there was one model, it was very expensive and only rich people and early adopters bought them. Then they diversified the range to iPod Nano, and more people could afford it, and then they took the last piece of the market share pie with the nano. I think they will do the same with the iPhone over the next few years. iPhone is how they will increase iPod sales now. I predict in a few years that the bulk of ‘iPod’ sales are phone models.
Oh, and 8% year on year growth for a mature luxury product (i.e. iPod) sounds pretty damn good in today’s financial climate to me.
John
P.S. As a complete aside - I predict Blackberry will be dead (to the point of obscurity) within 5 years. The combination of Microsoft, Nokia and Apple all using the same server side technology for their mobiles (Microsoft’s ActiveSync - which Apple license) is a done deal. Blackberry won’t go broke, of course, but they will loose their dominant position, no question.
I think it’s interesting that even with Apple this successful, the pundits still trot out the same old criticisms of Apple, instead of the real issues - like say software that is so broken in parts it’s a freakin’ joke (Leopard, I’m looking at you) or loss of focus (iPhone - yep, you). They clearly don’t actually use the product - or they’d be able to give you much better reasons why Apple fans should be slightly worried about this recent growth at Apple.
If you wanted me to give you an overview of the problems with Apple today, it would consist of growing too fast and loosing the focus you used to have. Not selling too much. Or not selling not enough. And certainly not that “we don’t sell to big corporations, we’re all doomed”.
I’d look at things like how Apple clearly rushed the release of Leopard, or have been hiring so fast that they have had to hire less competent employees. I leave you with this thought: if all the top developers went to work on the iPhone (Apple said that was why Leopard was late btw), who finished Leopard? The interns? Would certainly explain why stuff just doesn’t work (Airport Utility flakiness, .Mac Sync ‘just-not-working’, AFP on Leopard Server, etc. etc.).
Anyway, this is fast becoming a completely different rant!
John
Tags: Technology
RantsAppleiPhoneIf you've ever watched an Apple product introduction video... (18/08/2007)
Tags: Apple
TechnologyFunnyCamp 2007 Portfolio (15/08/2007)
So a few people have asked me to post some pics from Camp this year… well here are a few of my favs. If you click on one of the photos it will enlarge it, and then let you scroll through them. There are 17 at the moment.
All of them were shot on my Nikon D50, with a 35-70mm AF Nikkor Lense (Fixed 2.8 Aperture).
Tags: Camp
PhotographyWhat have I been up to all winter/summer? (15/08/2007)
For those of you who didn’t know, or I haven’t really spoken to for a while, I thought I’d write a quick update about what I’ve been up to for the past few months.
Most of you probably know that I went back to the USA to camp this year, but some of you may not know what it is I do there! 
Basically, I’m the camp photographer. This means that I take roughly 12,000 photos in 8 weeks. Of that 12,000 I choose about 6,000 ‘selects’ which then get uploaded into a photo tagging & management website that I built. I keep track of which camper is in each photograph - so that each parent that signed up to get photos of their camper at camp can then log in and see a personalised set of photos.
Yep, that’s right. In 8 weeks, I took and sorted 12,000 photos. This would simply not be possible without my MacBook Pro & Aperture. Aperture is Apple’s professional photo management tool - a little like iPhoto on steroids. I’ve written about Aperture before, but I’ve never really described my workflow. I figured it may interest a few of you, so here it is.
I basically shoot a schedule that is generated from the Camp Registration system. During the week, each camper chooses 4 activities that he/she wants to do. This may be things like Archery, Mountain Boarding, Horseback Riding or even Circus Trapeze (I know - how cool is that!). They also have the option of signing up for the Photo Program, which means they are on my list of campers to photograph.
At registration (where the campers arrive, have their heads checked for lice, etc.) I would take an ID photo of each of the campers I was going to be photographing that week. I did this using PhotoBooth (the fun app that comes with every Mac with a camera) and my Web Application (which accessed the folder PhotoBooth captured the photo to). I could then see what each camper in my program looked like:
At the start of each week, I would generate a schedule that listed for me which campers I will be photographing. Because the campers are broken into two age based ‘units’, there are actually 7 periods of activities each day that I need to photograph (the older and younger kids overlap for one period each day). Based upon that schedule, I would then make my way around to each of the activity periods in the week. I generally made it to each activity once in the week, and took photos of each camper.
Back in my (thankfully airconditioned) office, I would download the photos a few times each day. I generally shot about 600 photos each day (on shoot days). Then, in the evening, I would trawl through the photos from that day and using Aperture’s Star Rating system, give the photos a rating. I basically rated as either nothing, 3-star or 5-star. 3-Star I used for photos that were my second choice, and 5-Star were my ‘selects’.
I would then export the photos out of Aperture. Here, again, I would not have been able to have managed so well without Aperture, as it has a fantastic ‘Export Presets’ system, where I could specify that I wanted each photo exported at a certain size (i.e. 50% of original) and with a custom name + counter. I exported them in the form photo_xxx.jpg. The great thing about Aperture is that it remembers what number your counter export was up to, which is great, but more importantly if I needed to export just one photo using a different preset, when I switched back to my custom preset, it still remembered where it was up to.
After the batch of selects (usually around 300) was exported, I would then ‘upload’ them to my web application. Here again my MacBook Pro was a godsend (as all macs are) because I was able to run PHP, MySQL and ImageMagik locally on my laptop. So while I ‘uploaded’ the photos - at this point I only really uploaded them to the webserver folder on my own machine. This made the process far faster than if I had had to wait for the photos to upload to my server in real time. (I bulk uploaded them later - as I’ll explain).
My web application let me add photos based upon activity. So for example, from the exported batch of photos (300) I would preview them in the Finder, and then choose the 10 photos for one activity, and upload them in a batch. These photos would then automatically be assigned to an Activity, and the Web App would create a thumbnail as it uploaded the photos (using ImageMagick). After the upload was complete, it would show me a list of the uploaded photos.
From here, I was able to click each photo (I usually opened them all in a new tab each) and then tag which camper was in the photo. The beauty of my system was that because I had a list of which campers were in each activity, and I’d taken an ID photo at registration, each photo would be presented with a list of which campers could possibly be in that photo (based upon the activity etc.). Each photo was a link that added a tag for that camper, so I would simply click the faces that matched the photo and close the tab to move to the next photo. It worked a treat, and looked like this:
After each Photo had been tagged, I then did an manual SFTP batch upload of the photos (and thumbnails) to my web host. This server was running a copy of the same MySQL database as my local MacBook, so I also did an export of that database and uploaded it to the server. I then updated that database on the server with the newer version (with info about the new photos I’d added). It looked like this:
Because each camper had a parent email address in my system, I then had a script that emailed the parents a notification to let them know that new photos had been posted. This directed them to a custom page on my server that was the Parent Login, which checked their credentials and then showed them just photos of their camper.
On that page, the parents could download the full size image (well, 50% from camera actually, but it was still 1500x1000). And that was basically it. The system was great, and scaled quite well.
Over the 8 weeks, I took around 12,000 photos, chose 6000 good ones, categorized and individually tagged each of them, and uploaded them to my web server. I had 474 individual registrations (i.e. kids to photograph, tho some were the same kids in subsequent weeks) which generated around $4700 for camp (it was $10 per week). Each Parent got at least 5-10 personalized portrait shots of their camper, and in most cases many more.
This is why I didn’t get much time to write my Blog, or respond to emails! Single handedly I ran the program, successfully I believe, and we actually limited how many campers we accepted into the program in later weeks because of the limitations on actually photographing so many kids. My system would scale nicely to even twice as many photos - we’d just have needed 2 photographers. But as a single photographer / admin guy, I think we did ok!
Want to see some pics? Check out this Gallery of my favorite pics from my 2007 in the next post.
Photography Equipment Used:
- Nikon D50 with a 35-70mm AF Nikkor Lense (Fixed 2.8 Aperture)
- 1gig SanDisc SD Memory Card
Computer Equipment Used:
- Apple MacBook Pro 15” CoreDuo (2.0Ghz) with 2gigs RAM, 256mb ATI Graphics Card
- FirmTek ExpressCard eSATA Adapter
- Vantec External eSATA Case with 320gig Hard Drive (for my Aperture Library of raw JPEGs)
- 19” Chi Mei LCD Display (1440x900) as secondary monitor
- Griffin Technology Elevator Stand
- MacAlly IceKey Keyboard
- Logitech Optical Scroll Mouse
Tags: Camp
PhotographyTechnologyAppleMacBookSitting in a departure lounge... (14/06/2007)
Well, I’m sitting in the departure lounge at Melbourne Airport. Ok, so I had to correct a small typo there. I typed it as “AirPort”. Yep, I’m a nerd. :P
Anyway, from where I’m sitting, I can see 8 people on laptops (apart from me). And get this - there is only ONE windows machine! That’s right - I can see SEVEN other mac users from where I’m sitting. Crazy! Of course I snapped a pic on my Nikon - I’ll upload later for all the Mac fanboyz/gilz.
Anyway, for those of you that didn’t know, I’m back off to camp. Done with this winter weather. Time for some sun!
Ooh - flight has just been announced for boarding. Better go! Catch you all on the flip side!
John
Tags: Travel
Camp 2007TechnologyAppleIt's good to be back... (18/05/2007)
In following up to this post, I am now back on a 15” MacBook Pro. It’s a 2.0Ghz CoreDuo (original spec), with 256mhz VRAM RAM. And it’s good to be back. I can play games on Windows again (thank-you ATi XT1600 256mb) and I can look at photos on a color accurate screen.
Long story short, it’s good to be back.
John
Tags: MacBook Pro
TechnologyIf you liked I don't feel like dancing... (11/04/2007)
Hey everyone, if you liked I don’t feel like dancing by the Scissor Sisters, you have to check out this song.. I’m hooked on it..
Grace Kelly, by Mika. I’ve been listening to it for about two weeks, practically non-stop!
You can watch it on YouTube here and then, once you’ve fallen in love with it like I have, buy it from iTunes here…
I promise you, you’ll love it!
Tags: Songs
Finding just my South Africa trip entries... (01/04/2007)
Because a few people have asked me, if you just want to keep up to date with my trip updates (which you may miss the last few of now I’m posting them out of sequence with new posts) but not read the rest of my blog about technology etc., you can read this page, which will only show you posts about South Africa.
Thanks, John.
Tags: Travel
Notices