From the LA Times:

The San Mateo district attorney’s office has opted not to charge Gizmodo and writer Jason Chen for buying an iPhone prototype from a man who found it in a bar last year, months before the device was made public.

What the fuck?

Chen and Gizmodo’s decision to pay $5,000 for the lost iPhone was “not motivated by financial greed,” said Morley Pitt, San Mateo County’s assistant district attorney. “His claim was that he was undertaking a journalistic investigation.”

What the fuck?

Yeah, sure Gizmodo was all about the journalism when buying stolen property. It was in the public interest to buy stolen property and report on it, because the world would have been DOOMED without that particular story. It had NOTHING to do with financial motivations, such as the fuck-ton of page hits Gizmodo got from reporting on the stolen device, and yet, brilliantly, still missing a ton of the new things Apple had added to the device, rather suggesting the ‘investigation’ part of ‘journalistic investigation’ was a bit rubbish.

Still, hey, all US journos: be happy! Precedent has now been set, and it’s absolutely fine to buy stolen property and perhaps even try to blackmail the owner, as long as you write an article about it! PHEW! *headdesk*

There’s a certain amount of “the sky is falling” hackery surrounding the iPad right now. Apple commanded a massive 94.3 per cent of the market not that long ago, when it was pretty much the only game in town. Now, according to sources such as T3, Apple’s share has dropped “as Android soars”.

The figures state Apple’s going to end up with 61.3 per cent of the market during Q2/11, with Android on 30.1 per cent. It’s notable that most Android figures appear to involve units shipped rather than sold, but let’s ignore that for a moment; let’s also ignore the fact that 61.3 per cent of the market is still massive. For me, the most interesting news is from HP, which has dropped the TouchPad’s price by $100.

When so-called ‘iPad killers’ first appeared, they were like little clones and also aped the iPad’s price, matching it as closely as possible. “Look! We’re just like the iPad in every way,” the rivals claimed, despite some of them being a wee bit smaller than Apple’s model (Engadget has a rather nice photo of the Galaxy Tab atop an iPad).

With the TouchPad, I think it’s a pity HP is attempting to fight the battle on price, because webOS is in many ways a very good system. But it’s an inevitability if a system doesn’t have the critical acclaim, popularity and ecosystem enjoyed by the likes of the iPad. Expect those rivals that haven’t dropped their price to follow suit soon; but when they do, bear in mind Apple’s been using its billions to buy up major components for tablets at the best possible price. This means while Apple could feasibly cut its tablet’s price and still make a massive profit, that’s certainly not the case for most other companies. And while in the world of PCs, massive sales sometimes led to at least some profitability, if you’ve only got a smallish share of the tablet market and are making naff-all profit per unit, you’re pretty much done for.

Yeah, I know. Everyone and his dog is banging on about Apple briefly topping Exxon to be the world’s most valuable company by market-cap. According to 9to5Mac:

1:19PM EDT, Apple’s market cap is at $341.53B while Exxon Mobile’s [sic] is at $341.51B.

Exxon regained the lead, presumably to a whoop of joy from Michael Dell, whose statement in 1997 (“What would I do [about Apple]? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders!”) will forever haunt him. But it’s clear Apple’s going to battle for that lead again; and given where the company was in the 1990s, the rise is truly astonishing.

My first Mac was a PowerMac 8600/250. It was then a shiny and new model, with ‘AV’ ports that enabled you, when the computer behaved, to import 320 x 160 videos at about 12fps, which I duly used to work on multimedia projects. (Back then, I was an art student, but already heading towards digital work, largely through the influence of the hugely talented and, frankly, slightly bonkers Paul Granjon.) Most of my friends thought I was nuts and wasting money on a computer made by a company that would be dead before I finished my course.

But the only thing that died was the computer’s hard drive and also its built-in Jaz drive (oh, Iomega—how I don’t miss you in the slightest), although between the two they just about survived until I finished my degree. The Mac was soon duly repaired and, later, I decided to grab another Mac, which I recall being a G4 tower. Most of my friends thought I was nuts and wasting money on a computer made by a company that would be dead before long.

And so it went, until about five or six years ago. Suddenly, quite a few people became curious about Macs. Programmers were excited about OS X being based on Unix and no longer derided the Mac as a ‘toy’. Web designers were stoked at the fantastic dev tools available to Mac users, along with the built-in server. And home users became interested in the Mac’s stability and lack of viruses.

The tide turned. Now, as many people I know own Macs as don’t; and those who don’t at least no longer ridicule the idea of the Mac. The press often still don’t get it. They don’t understand why Apple keeps products under wraps until the last minute, despite the flurry of clones flying around once Apple does something revolutionary. They don’t get why people buy ‘overpriced’ Apple kit when you can grab a PC laptop for 300 quid, even when that laptop falls to bits in no time. They struggle to see how anyone can be happy with an iPad that doesn’t run Flash and Windows. And Apple is far from perfect in a whole number of areas, not least in some of its handling of the App Store and the way it’s often blinkered to the world outside of the USA; however, that decision back in the 1990s is one I’ve never regretted, and one for which I’m increasingly vindicated.

There are, of course, critics who relish Apple taking the lead and losing it. Once you’re number-one, the only way is down. But at least Apple made it (however briefly), and, in doing so, provided an astonishing number of innovative and exciting products along the way.

TechRadar reports on Amazon releasing the Kindle Cloud Reader for iPad, presumably to get round Apple banning links to Amazon’s store from inside the Kindle app. This is a smart move, but it’s a section later in the article that caught my eye:

If Apple’s annoyed about the Kindle Cloud Reader web app, it’ll have to file it under ‘quash later’ as it deals with another ebook niggle; the company has been named in a US lawsuit over ebook price fixing.

Here we go.

Filed in San Francisco, the suit accuses Apple of working with major publishers to control pricing, naming Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster, which collectively control around 85 per cent of popular fiction and non-fiction titles.

Amazon, of course, is beloved by publishers, who enjoy the manner in which it orders tiny quantities of each book and ruthlessly discounts them until there’s no profit left.

Apple and the named publishers have been working an agency pricing model, whereby publishers become the book sellers and Apple takes a slice of the sales (30 per cent). This means that the publisher-as-bookseller sets the price of a book at whatever it fancies and all other retailers of that ebook have to fall in line; because Apple takes such a huge chunk of the profit, the pricing is alleged to be higher than it otherwise would be.

I’ve not really seen much evidence of this so far on any ebook store. Pricing seems to be dropping, although expectations that ebooks should be almost free because they’re not made of paper are not

The lawsuit claims that publishers “would simply deny Amazon access to the title” if it tried to sell an ebook at below the publisher-set price.”

Hmm.

It seems that the plaintiffs are very pro-Amazon

You think?

with the lawsuit complaint also alleging “that Apple believed that it needed to neutralise the Kindle when it entered the ebook market with its own e-reader, the iPad, and feared that one day the Kindle might challenge the iPad by digitally distributing other media like music and movies.”

That’s the bit that rubs. Apple’s ‘ereader’? What? The iPad was never an ereader, and given the number of Kindles I saw on a recent trip to London (far more than the number of iPads), I can’t see Apple has having somehow battered the Kindle into submission.

Don’t get me wrong: some of Apple’s policies are hateful and stupid. I fully understand its decision to remove direct in-app purchasing through external stores, but also demanding apps remove links to stores (that would then open in Safari) is utterly ridiculous. But it’s also dumb to suggest that Apple’s attempting to “neutralise” the Kindle; if anything, Apple’s policies combined with Amazon’s hardware prices are driving more people to the Kindle, even if they already own an iPad.

So Mrs G fancied watching Iron Man 2 on Sunday, and we duly checked the Apple TV, since we’d bookmarked the movie a while back. Oddly, there was only a preview and no rental option, on both the UK and US stores. Remembering that The Social Network and Salt both recently vanished from the store, we figured this was yet another movie studio playing silly buggers and decided to rewatch Sherlock Holmes instead… which also wasn’t available.

Naturally, both movies are available to buy on iTunes, which isn’t much cop in the UK, given that you can’t buy movies through Apple TV yet. And even if you could, it’s insane that studios are now only allowing short-term digital rentals, before they leave buying a movie as the only option. With Iron Man 2, that’s doubly insane, since the iTunes purchase costs twice what the DVD does on Amazon. And in our case, it was an impulse decision anyway. We didn’t think the movie was amazing first time round and we certainly don’t want to own it, but a few quid for a one-off rental would have been fine.

In the mind of movie-studio execs, here’s how this all plays out:

1. Release movie for digital rental and watch as loads of people rent during the first few weeks. MAKE MONEY!
2. Remove movie from rental and watch as people buy the movie instead. MAKE MOAR MONEY!

What happens in reality:

1. Release movie for digital rental and watch as loads of people rent during the first few weeks. MAKE MONEY!
2. Remove movie from rental and don’t understand as people watch something else instead. MAKE NO MOAR MONEY!