Amongst the emails that Steve Jobs has been responding to, he also responded to an inquiry by a MacRumors reader Siva about future of Blu-ray on the Mac. While Blu-ray has been a long requested feature for Macs, Apple has described Blu-ray licensing as bag of hurt and hasn’t made any moves to incorporate the drives into their desktop Macs.
That seems unlikely to change in the near future if Steve Jobs’ recent email replies are any guide. Siva emailed Jobs about being disappointed that the recently revised Mac mini didn’t include a Blu-ray drive. To this, Steve Jobs replied:
Bluray is looking more and more like one of the high end audio formats that appeared as the successor to the CD – like it will be beaten by Internet downloadable formats.
Siva responded that even though this may be true in the long run, he argued the medium term benefits were substantial, including high density backups and high quality video. He also argued that high-end video formats have had a much higher uptake and points out the lack of DRM was in part what made MP3 take off. Jobs’ final response, however, offered little hope:
No, free, instant gratification and convenience (likely in that order) is what made the downloadable formats take off. And the downloadable movie business is rapidly moving to free (Hulu) or rentals (iTunes) so storing purchased movies or TV shows is not an issue.
I think you may be wrong – we may see a fast broad move to streamed free and rental content at sufficient quality (at least 720p) to win almost everyone over.
Amongst the emails that Steve Jobs has been responding to, he also responded to an inquiry by a MacRumors reader Siva about future of Blu-ray on the Mac. While Blu-ray has been a long requested feature for Macs, Apple has described Blu-ray …
One of the key features of iPhone 4 is its ability to record high-definition video in 720p. Users have found, however, that getting the HD video off of the device requires connecting it to a computer for…
As it has done on a monthly basis for the past several years, AdMob today released a new Mobile Metrics Report for May 2010. The report highlights worldwide trends in mobile requests to its ad network from over 23,000 mobile websites and application…
As noted by Engadget, Apple has been busy posting job listings for engineers to work on design and testing of antennas for the company’s iPhone and iPad. While Apple typically posts a number of new job listings each day, the fact that the co…
UBM TechInisghts recently performed a teardown of the iPhone 4 and discovered that Apple may have originally planned on including a gyroscope in the iPad first. After examining the iPhone 4 motherboard, they found that the iPad also had an e…
Anandtech has managed to provide a detailed analysis of the iPhone 4′s potential antenna signal issue. Their analysis may shed some light on people’s experiences with the iPhone 4 and the drop-off in signal when the device is being held in hand.<br…
Earlier this evening, MacRumors forum member jav6454 related his story of how his iPhone 4 signal issues had resolved. Essentially, while at the Apple Store for a tech support issue related to his iPhone 4, his SIM card was removed for a period of t…
One of the key features of iPhone 4 is its ability to record high-definition video in 720p. Users have found, however, that getting the HD video off of the device requires connecting it to a computer for download. While Apple offers users simple options for sharing videos directly from the iPhone via email or MMS, or by uploading the videos to MobileMe or YouTube, those mechanisms result in compression of the files, losing significantly quality in the process.
MacDailyNews reports that one of its readers emailed Apple CEO Steve Jobs to ask about this issue and express disappointment at the inability to directly upload HD content to the web while on the go. In an email reply, Jobs notes that the ability to upload HD content over the air is coming “in the future”.
You can upload them via a Mac or PC today. Over the air in the future.
Sent from my iPhone
While Jobs gives no timeframe for when we might see such a feature, it does give users looking for this capability some hope for the future. HD video uploads via 3G would obviously place a greater strain on carriers’ networks and also eat further into customers’ data limits. For that reason it might make sense for Apple to either roll out the feature as a Wi-Fi-only at first, and perhaps offering it via 3G further down the road with user-selectable options for varying export quality.
This month’s report shows continued strength for the iPhone and other iOS devices during the lead-up to the iPhone 4 launch just last week. Google, AdMob’s parent company, is making strong inroads with its Android operating system, however, growing rapidly from a negligible share of the mobile ad request market only a year ago to approximately 25% today.
Android’s overall strength, however, results from its inclusion on a wide variety of smartphones from a variety of manufacturers. That is in contrast to Apple, which offers essentially only a single iPhone that currently leads the pack by a wide margin with nearly 40% of worldwide ad requests compared to only 6.8% for the second-place Motorola Droid.
AdMob’s data also offers an interesting glimpse into the geographic distribution of Apple’s “iOS” family of devices. Among the interesting pieces of data included in the report is a note that fewer than half of all iOS devices are located in North America, with 43% residing in the United States and 5% in Canada. When it comes to the iPad specifically, however, the U.S. sees a full 58% of the devices, an unsurprising result given that Apple is still working to roll the device out to its international markets.
In comparing iOS and Android devices, the report shows that Android is rapidly approaching the iPhone’s ad request share in the U.S., with 11.2 million unique iPhones registering there during May while 8.5 million Android devices appeared on the company’s network. As many have argued, however, Apple’s iPod touch and iPad also contribute significantly to the “iOS ecosystem” and, while not true smartphones, should be counted in some way as important players in the mobile web and application market. Adding in iPod touch and iPad data boosts iOS devices to 19.3 million in the U.S., giving iOS a 2-to-1 advantage over Android. Worldwide, the data leans even more strongly in Apple’s favor as Android has yet to catch on significantly in most international markets, with iOS devices out-numbering Android devices 3.5-to-1 on a global basis.
With today’s release AdMob also noted that its monthly metrics reports will be going on hiatus for at least the next several months as the company looks to rethink the best way of sharing information on the rapidly-growing mobile market with the public.