Steve Jobs was reportedly wearing a top hat when he visited New York publishers last week. It’s a fitting lid for the Apple CEO, who can be as tricky as a magician.

Jobs has a knack for throwing off Apple watchers with his masterful misdirections. Ever wonder why analysts and journalists grossly overestimated the price of the Apple tablet prior to its official announcement? Part of the reason is that Jobs had said during a 2008 earnings call that Apple could not make a $500 computer that was not a “piece of junk.” That assertion lent credence to rumors that the tablet would cost $1,000.

Oops. The entry-level iPad announced in January will cost: $500, at least at the low end of scale. Presumably Jobs doesn’t consider it a piece of junk.

Nice one, Steve. You got us there. Actually, you’ve fooled us not once or twice, but at least six times, by our count. What follows is a list of five more famously misleading quotes that Jobs pulled from his bag of tricks.

No Plans to Make a Tablet

There were plenty of naysayers who, for the longest time, thought the Apple tablet was a pure myth. Jobs did, after all, tell Walt Mossberg during a 2003 All Things Digital conference that Apple was not working on a tablet — because the keyboardless form factor was a recipe for failure, according to a second-hand account.

“There are no plans to make a tablet,” Jobs was quoted saying to Mossberg. “It turns out people want keyboards…. We look at the tablet, and we think it is going to fail.”

That was seven years ago. And a lot can change in seven years. But there’s plenty of evidence Apple has been mulling over tablets for a while. The New York Times’ Nick Bilton reported the Apple tablet was in development for at least five years, and that it was actually a precursor to the keyboardless iPhone. And Apple filed a patent for a touch tablet device in 2004. To rewind even further, Apple was working with Frog Design on tablet prototypes as early as 1983. Those ancient tablets included keyboards, but Jobs has clearly had tablets on his mind for a very long time.

Not Interested in the Cellphone Business

In that same interview with Mossberg, Jobs said he didn’t feel Apple would fare well in the cellphone business.

“I get a lot of pressure to do a PDA. What people really seem to want to do with these is get the data out. We believe cellphones are going to carry this information. We didn’t think we’d do well in the cellphone business. What we’ve done instead is we’ve written what we think is some of the best software in the world to start syncing information between devices. We believe that mode is what cellphones need to get to. We chose to do the iPod instead of a PDA.”

Of course, in hindsight that quote served as a clue that Apple wasn’t making a traditional cellphone, but rather a brand new device that fused the characteristics of an iPod, a PDA and a cellphone into one. The result was the iPhone. Still, a tricky statement nonetheless.

People Don’t Read Any More

Jobs made a rather provocative statement in 2008 when he told The New York Times that the Kindle would go nowhere:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read any more.”

Of course, the CEO backpedaled on his Kindle-dissing during his iPad keynote when he was introducing the iPad’s very own e-book reader and store, iBooks.

“Amazon’s done a great job at pioneering this functionality with their Kindle, and we’re going to stand on their shoulders and go a bit further,” he said during his Jan. 27 keynote this year.

No Movies on a Tiny Little Screen

When Mossberg in 2003 asked Jobs whether he planned to put video in an iPod, the CEO said he was turned off by the idea.

“I’m not convinced people want to watch movies on a tiny little screen,” Jobs said. “To paraphrase Bill Clinton, ‘It’s the music, stupid, it’s the music!’ Music’s been around for a long time, will continue to be, it’s huge.”

Then two years later, in 2005, Apple released the fifth-generation iPod whose tiny, 2.7-inch screen played video. And then in 2007 Apple released the third-generation iPod Nano with video — with an even littler 2-inch screen. But hey, people’s minds change, and clearly so does Jobs’.

We Don’t Need to Add New Stuff

In a September 2009 interview with Jobs, New York Times columnist David Pogue asked the CEO why Apple crammed a camera into the puny iPod Nano and not the new iPod Touch. Jobs explained the lack of a camera was to keep the price down, so Apple could market the Touch as an inexpensive gaming device.

“So what we were focused on is just reducing the price to $199,” Jobs said. “We don’t need to add new stuff. We need to get the price down where everyone can afford it.”

But later, teardown company iFixit ripped apart the iPod Touch and found a gap that would fit a camera. And on top of that, AppleInsider received a tip that cameras were planned for the iPod Touch, but ultimately delayed due to technical problems. We’ve yet to see if Apple does indeed add a camera to the iPod Touch, but we suspect that’s likely to happen eventually.

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Continue reading Apple iPad rumor roundup: Abraham Zapruder edition

Apple iPad rumor roundup: Abraham Zapruder edition originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 06:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Mashable, GeekWord  |  Apple, TechCrunch, Mission Repair  | Email this | Comments

Macmillan’s US CEO, John Sargent just confirmed that Amazon pulled its inventory of Macmillan books in a powerful response to Macmillan’s new pricing demands. Macmillan offered the new pricing on Thursday, just a day after Apple announced Macmillan as a major publishing partner in its new iBookstore — a revelation that certainly factored into the discussions along with Skiff and other emerging e-book distribution and publishing models. During the meeting with Amazon in Seattle, Sargent outlined what he calls an “agency model” that will go into effect in early March. Under the terms offered, if Amazon chose to stay with its existing terms of sale then it would suffer “extensive and deep windowing of titles.” Amazon’s hardball response was to pull all of Macmillan’s titles from its Kindle site and Amazon.com by the time Sargent arrived back in New York.

Macmillan claims that its new model is meant to keep retailers, publishers, and authors profitable in the emerging electronic frontier while encouraging competition amongst new devices and new stores. It gives retailers a 30% commission and sets the price for each book individually: digital editions of most adult trade books will be priced from $5.99 to $14.99 while first releases will “almost always” hit the electronic shelves day on date with the physical hardcover release and be priced between $12.99 and $14.99 — pricing that will be dynamic over time. So when Steve Jobs said that Apple’s and Amazon’s prices would be the same, he was almost certainly referring to the $12.99 to $14.99 e-book pricing originally rumored by the New York Times — not the $9.99 price that Amazon customers have been enjoying so far. Funny how Jobs, the man who once refused to grant the music labels’ request for variable pricing on digital music so that Apple could maintain a low fixed $0.99 price per track, is suddenly the best friend of a new breed of content owners. Guess the old dog just learned a new trick, eh?

Update: Amazon has conceded, but not willfully. It has decided to give the consumer the option of paying too much for a bestseller, and frankly, that’s the right thing to do. Let ’em vote with their wallets, we say. The full response is after the break.

Continue reading Amazon pulled Macmillan titles due to price conflict — confirmed (update: they’re back!)

Amazon pulled Macmillan titles due to price conflict — confirmed (update: they’re back!) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 31 Jan 2010 04:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink BoingBoing  |  PublishersLunch  | Email this | Comments

Now that we’ve seen the iPad in the light of day, there’s a lot of chatter about what it can’t do. But Apple is now a massive threat to anything not a PC or smartphone. Here’s why:

Generally speaking, the iPad’s goal is not to replace your netbook, assuming you own and love one. It’s not about replacing your Kindle either, assuming you cashed in for that as well. We have reviewed plenty of both, and know there’s plenty to like. If you derive pleasure out of using either, then Apple might have a hard time convincing you to switch to the iPad. But for the millions of people who aren’t on either bandwagon, yet have the money and interest in a “third” device between the phone and the computer, the iPad will have greater appeal.

250 Million iPods Earlier…

When the first iPod came out, its goal was not to grab the customers who Creative and Archos were fighting over, with their dueling 6GB “jukeboxes.” It was to grab everyone else. I remember listening to arguments about why Archos had a better device than Creative or even Apple. Lot of good that early-adopter love got them in the long run. The pocket media player market exploded, with Apple eating over half the pie consistently for almost a decade.

When the iPhone came out, BlackBerry users were like, “No flippin’ way.” And guess what, those people still buy BlackBerries. (And why shouldn’t they? Today’s BlackBerry is still great, and hardly distinguishable from the BB of 2007.) The point is, the iPhone wasn’t designed to win the hearts and minds of people who already knew their way around a smartphone. It came to convince people walking around with Samsung and LG flip phones that there was more to life. And it worked.

iPhones now account for more than half of AT&T’s phone sales. You can bet that WinMo, Palm and BB combined weren’t doing that kind of share pre-iPhone. Globally, the smartphone business grew from a niche thing for people in suits to being a 180-million unit per year business, says Gartner, eclipsing the entire notebook business—about 20% of which, I might add, are netbooks. The iPhone isn’t the sole driver of this growth, of course, but its popularity has opened many new doors for the category. Just ask anyone in the business of developing/marketing/selling Droids or Palm Pres.

You could say, “Those were Apple’s successes, what about their failures?” In the second age of Steve Jobs, there aren’t a whole lot. Apple TV is the standout—quite possibly because Apple discovered, after releasing the product, that there wasn’t a big enough market for it, or any of its competitors. Apple TV may be crowded out by connected Blu-ray players, home-theater PCs and HD video players, but Apple TV’s niche is, to this day, almost frustratingly unique.

So how do you know if a market exists? You ask the “other” Steve, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

It’s Business Time

There’s a famous Ballmerism, one he’s even said to me, that goes something like, “A business isn’t worth entering unless the sales potential is 50 million units or more.” 50 million. That’s why Ballmer is happy to go into the portable media player business and the game console business, but laughs about ebook readers. Microsoft may not sell 50 million Zunes, but it’s worth being a contender.

You can bet Apple thinks this way. You can easily argue that, despite its sheen of innovation, Apple is far more conservative than Microsoft. Apple TV is a bit of an anomaly, but with no major hardware refreshes and a few small-minded software updates, you can hardly accuse Apple of throwing good money after bad. Presumably Apple TV was a learning experience for Jobs & Co., one they’re not likely to repeat.

With that in mind, let’s look at these popular in between sized devices, particularly at netbooks and ebook readers.

Like Notebooks, Only Littler

Netbooks are cooking, but it’s well known they’re cooking because notebooks are not. A netbook was originally conceived as something miraculously small and simple, running Linux with a warm fuzzy interface that dear old gran could use to bone up on pinochle before Friday’s showdown with the Rosenfelds. But instead of growing outward to this new audience (always with the grandmothers, it seems), it grew inward, cannibalizing real PC sales.

The Linux fell away, mostly because it was ill-conceived, and these simply became tiny, cheap, limited-function Windows PCs. They may have been a 40-million-unit business last year, according to DisplaySearch, but they only got cheaper, and the rest of the business was so depressed nobody was happy. (And just ask Ballmer how much he makes on those XP licenses, or even the “low-powered OS” that is Windows 7 Starter.)

Point is, nerds may love their netbooks, but the market that the netbook originally set out to reach is too far away, running farther away and screaming louder with every blog post about what chipset and graphics processor a netbook is rumored to have, or whether or not it is, indeed, a netbook at all. Clearly the audience is cheap geeks, and while that may be a good market to be in (just read Giz comments), it’s definitively not Steve Jobs’ market.

Easy on the Eyes

Now, about that Kindle. Best ebook reader out there. Every time we say that, we say it with a wink. We totally respect the Kindle (and I for one have hopes for Nook once it pulls itself out of the firmware mess it’s in), but we think e-ink is a limited medium.

Its functionality is ideal for a very specific task—simulating printed words on paper—and for that I have always sung its praise. The Kindle is ideal for delivering and serving up those kinds of books, and as a voracious reader of those kinds of books, I am grateful for its existence. But there are other kinds of books of which I am a consumer: Cookbooks, children’s books and comic books. (Notice, they all end in “book.”) The Kindle can’t do any of those categories well at all, because they are highly graphical. E-ink’s slow-refreshing, difficult-to-resize grayscale images are pretty much hideous. No big deal for the compleat Dickens, but too feeble to take on my dog-eared, saffron-stained Best-Ever Curry Cookbook.

So, e-ink’s known weaknesses aside, let’s talk again about Ballmer’s favorite number, 50 million. Guess how many Kindles are estimated to have been sold ever since the very first one launched? 2.5 million. Nobody knows for sure because Amazon won’t release the actual figures. Guess how many ebook readers are supposedly going to sell this year, according to Forrester? Roughly 6 million. In a year. Compare that to 21 million iPods sold last quarter, along with 9 million iPhones.

I am not suggesting that the iPod or iPhone is a worthwhile replacement for reading, but I am saying that, for better or worse, there are probably at least 2.5 million iPod or iPhone users who read books on those devices.

Are you starting to see the larger picture here? I am not trying to convince you to buy an Apple iPad, I am trying to explain to you why you probably will anyway. As the Kindle fights just to differentiate itself while drowning in a milk-white e-ink sea of God-awful knockoffs, you’ll see that color screen shining in the distance.

Sure the iPad may not be as easy on the eyes as a Kindle. But you will be able to read in bed without an additional light source. You will be able to read things online without banging your head against a wall to get to the right page. And, once the publishers get their acts together, you will be able to enjoy comics, cookbooks, and children’s books, with colorful images. Even before you set them into motion, dancing around the screen, they’ll look way better than they would on e-ink. (I haven’t even mentioned magazines, but once that biz figures out what to do with this thing, they will make it work, because they need color screens, preferably touchscreens.)

Tide Rollin’ In

So we have this new device, carefully planned by a company with a unique ability to reach new markets. And we have two types of products that have effectively failed to reach those markets. And you’re going to bet on the failures? The iPad has shortcomings, but they only betray Apple’s caution, just like what happened with iPhone No. 1. Now every 15-year-old kid asks for an iPhone, and the ones that don’t get them get iPod Touches.

We can sit here in our geeky little dorkosphere arguing about it all day, but as much as Apple clearly enjoys our participation, the people Jobs wants to sell this to don’t read our rants. They can’t even understand them. My step-mother refuses to touch computers, but nowadays checks email, reads newspapers and plays Solitaire on an iPod Touch, after basically picking it up by accident one day. That’s a future iPad user if I ever saw one.

Jobs doesn’t care about the netbook business, or the ebook business. He’s just aiming for the same people they were aiming at. The difference is, he’s going to reach them. And the fight will be with whoever enters into the tablet business with him. Paging Mr. Ballmer…

PS – If I’ve gotten to the end of this lengthy piece without telling you much about the iPad at all, it’s because other Giz staffers have already done such a handsome job of that already. If you missed out, here are the best four links to get you up to speed:

• Apple iPad: Everything You Need To Know

• Apple iPad First Hands On

• Apple iPad Just Tried to Assassinate Laptops

• 8 Things That Suck About Apple iPad

Only way to interpret the launch of the iPad? Apple has declared the PC dead. Well-crafted but closed devices are their future of consumer computing. And if no one else can match the iPad experience, they may be right.

“In many ways this defines our vision, our sense of what’s next.” – Jonathan Ive

PCs will be around as expert devices for the long haul, but it’s clear that Apple, coasting on the deserved success of the iPhone, sees simple, closed internet devices as the future of computing. (Or at the very least, portable computing.) And for the average consumer, it could be.

It’s the “internet device” vision of a decade ago all over again, except now Apple can offer what is arguably the best user experience for internet and media consumption combined with a very reasonable (for a brand new gadget) price.

It may not be good for you, because you’re an internet dork who wants to do heavy video editing or run Photoshop. (Or, you know, multitask.) But for the average person off the street walking into a Best Buy, their laptop money may now be going to an iPad.

What happens when they find the iPad is all they needed in the first place? They never buy a laptop again.

In the meantime, here are a few things to think about for we full-time dorks.

Does it kill netbooks?

If there’s anything that you can take home from today’s announcement of the iPad it’s this: from here on out the battle between physical keyboards and touchscreen ones has moved beyond smartphones and into every other area of computing. Get ready to hear someone say “I touchtype just fine on a soft keyboard on my PC” very soon.

I’d be lying if I said the giant bezel doesn’t ward me off a bit, even if I understand why it’s necessary to be there. But it isn’t as sexy as it could be, all things considered.

But a 1.5-pound device with a (theoretical) 10-hour battery life? Done and done. Heck, I’ll haul two.

Yet I will buy the dock! Perhaps, even if I am frustrated to no end that they are not simply supporting the Bluetooth keyboard. But I suppose that is that—this really is what Apple imagines the future of laptops to be.

Belay that! A couple of you have pointed out that the Bluetooth keyboard is in fact supported! I am a’flutter.

But it’s a lot more likely I’ll carry around an iPad than a netbook.

What about the add-on keyboard, though? I sort of love it, but it is so very un-Apple to have a keyboard attachment. And all the dongles. And only a VGA output, not DisplayPort! It seems like the iPad came from an alternate dimension.

Productivity

If typing on the iPad’s soft keyboard is even slightly faster or more comfortable than typing on an iPhone, they could have a productivity winner here. But I sort of doubt it’s going to be comfortable enough to use for hours of typing at a time.

For emailing, attachment browsing, and the like, though, I think it’ll be a pretty powerful little device. Its form factor is perfect for pulling out of a little executive bag to check mail or show off a PDF to a coworker.

The new cloud-based iWork looks amusing, but who really wants to switch from Office to iWork? Email and other web-based tech is still the most portable solution. On the other hand, a functional iWork is what convinces your CTO that you can use the iPad to display Powerpoints.

Screen Aspect Ratio

There was never going to be a perfect size, especially since movies are widescreen, but a single page of a magazine or book is decidedly not. Yet the aspect ratio, which is something close to 4:3 (if not exactly), surrounds widescreen movies with a lot of black, especially when you include the bezel. I would expect future iPad models to lengthen ever so slightly, but not much.

3G Access

250MB for $15 a month; unlimited for $30. No contracts. Unlocked SIM slot. Completely reasonable.

Of course, it uses AT&T, so if you’re in NYC or San Francisco you’re screwed. But it also means you could switch in other carriers’ SIM cards if you like.

And the free Wi-Fi access in an AT&T hotspot—presumably only if you’ve paid for some AT&T access—won’t hurt.

That the iPad is unlocked, though, also means that T-Mobile could potentially roll in with a 3G option for even less money.

Pornography

It’s simple: You can hold something that weighs 1.5 pounds in one hand.

Relaxation

A few have mentioned how sitting down with an iPad may feel casual, less prone to send one into “work-mode”. I can buy that—but that will also serve to delineate use-cases between laptops and iPads, making the iPad seem more like a toy.

Reading

Don’t call it a Kindle killer. Books on iPad will probably be more expensive than Kindle’s titles, at least at first. And there’s nothing about the iPad’s screen that will make it better for reading than, say, a laptop. But having a dedicated iBooks store? That’s good for everybody, including iPhone and iPod touch users.

And for anything color—comics, children’s books, magazines—the iPad will destroy what e-paper can do.

Multitouch

Here is the thing to know: When it comes to multitouch, consider the iPad the harbinger of all the interface tricks that will be coming to iMac and MacBooks in the relatively near future.

VoIP

It has a microphone. There’s no reason to think it won’t be able to do VoIP.

All in all, I think they’ve got a category-straddling winner here, but it’s a bit of a gangly pseudopodal mutant at the same time. It doesn’t kill the laptop or the PC quite yet, but you can at least see how Apple intends to choke the life out of those markets.

Don’t like that? Better get to work on a better tablet.