Two skeptical grumbles about Apple

[mmcirvin]

I don't believe this. They'd surely be selling at a loss, Steve Jobs has specifically denied the possibility, and it happens to mesh perfectly with unsupported wishful thinking that people have been batting around for months. A $100 iPod would have to be a lower-capacity, flash-based gadget, and I doubt Apple would price even such a thing that low.

This is kind of harebrained. iPhoto is basically a generic alternative to the low-end consumer photo-handling programs that come with digital cameras; it's a simple repository for uploaded pictures, with some primitive editing capabilities and the ability to hook into better external editors. Its real raison d'etre on the Mac is that the Mac versions of the programs that ship with the cameras are often poorly-written afterthoughts. I like iPhoto just barely enough to use it, but that's mostly because it comes free with the OS. If I had to pay extra for it, I'd just concoct a Finder-based scheme for organizing my photo library instead (I might feel a bit differently if I were using Windows, but I probably still wouldn't pay the money). Also, it's better in concept than in execution: it's kind of unstable and becomes sluggish with large picture libraries. Its early version of the Apple iApp "brushed-metal" interface is also getting long in the tooth; I'd like to see a major update for the Mac. If it had evolved in step with the various updates to iTunes, it would be a kick-ass utility by now.

Comments

[pootrootbeer.livejournal.com]

Hard drive manufacturing costs do not scale linearly -- the more space you buy the cheaper the per-megabyte cost becomes, and likewise the less you buy the more expensive it becomes. A drive with half the capacity of the iPod's current 10GB disk would likely cost Apple no less than 80% of the regular cost -- if they can even find a manufacturer that hasn't migrated all their production lines away from 5GB drives already. Flash media or some other storage format could theoretically be a possibility, but Apple has always discouraged hardware diversity across a product line.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

My thoughts exactly. A 5GB drive just isn't that much cheaper than a bigger one; at some point there's no reason to use the little ones.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Hypothetically, the bottom could drop out of the market for 5GB HDs and they'd go for bargain-basement prices to a large OEM willing to take them off the hands of the manufacturer. But I don't think this has happened, since there are still some 5GB players on the market.

[jwgh]

The only way I could see Apple releasing iPhoto on another platform is if they made some sort of iPod-like camera thingie that would have special features that required it, and I don't see who would buy that, really. Though I suppose that could be the reason I'm a lowly tech support drone and not the head of a major hardware company.