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.

I’ve purposely invoked Betteridge’s Law of Headlines for this article:

Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no’.

The reason is that the headline I’ve used is the natural stance for the press to take, along with claiming the riots were in part caused by videogames. (As I said on Twitter yesterday, it’s terrible how videogames can lead you into a life of crime. After playing Nintendo games, I cannot pass a turtle without either stamping on it or hurling it at a passing car, so I can overtake.)

It would certainly be naïve to suggest that the likes of Twitter and BBM had nothing to do with aiding the rioting, since they were in part used to plan attacks, but as Paul Chambers said:

Aren’t social networks to blame? Yes, I saw a social network hurl a petrol bomb right into a kitten’s face.

Also, it would be easy to argue rolling news coverage, showing how overwhelmed the police were and how easy it was to loot might just have encourage some additional people to get involved, but I can’t see the press running with “We are in part to blame for riots. Oops” any time soon.

Social networks, though, are just tools, and they can be used for positive and negative acts (unless you’re a Daily Mail reporter, of course—see the BBC’s report for how that publication despicably edited and doctored innocent tweets to make them look malicious). @buttonista also makes a great comment on such technology being to blame for the riots:

If you’re going to blame Twitter, Blackberries etc. for #londonriotsyou might as well blame cars for transporting looters & loot.

And late last night, social networking as a force for good in the riots became astonishingly clear with @riotcleanup and associated hashtags; these have organised mass clean-ups for London, Liverpool and other affected cities, getting things closer to normal far more quickly than councils and locals alone would have been able to. I guess we can await the “Twitter helps with riots clean-up” front-page headline from the Daily Mail any day now, yeah?

Also, a public thumbs-up to @34SP, hosts of riotcleanup.co.uk, which got slammed by traffic and went down (along with other sites on the shared server); the company has now shifted the site to dedicated hosting for free, for a few days.

 

I already today translated Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata’s apology regarding the 3DS, but I realised I wasn’t done. After all, Nintendo hasn’t just apologised to early adopters, but it also unveiled the Ambassador program.

Great Price, Great Games

Finally Somewhat Competitive Price, Not Enough Games!

Nintendo of America today announced plans to drop the suggested retail price of its portable Nintendo 3DS™ system to $169.99 in the United States. The new price takes effect Aug. 12 and makes an outstanding value even better.

Our console wasn’t selling so we’re now getting desperate. Maybe by Christmas, we’ll be giving it away for free.

Building on the popularity of The Legend of Zelda™: Ocarina of Time™ 3D, which launched June 19, the upcoming game calendar for Nintendo 3DS is a Who’s Who of iconic video game franchises. Star Fox 64™ 3D arrives on Sept. 9, followed by Super Mario™ 3D Land in November, Mario Kart™ 7 in December and Kid Icarus™: Uprising during the holiday season.

Look! We’ll be releasing at least three games before Christmas, based on really old series that you’ve played to death! No other console has such a range of games, according to our exhaustive research!

And don’t forget that Nintendo 3DS has a bunch of fun features, including Nintendo Video™, the Nintendo eShop and access to Netflix, that make it a must-have video game system.

Also, luckily, no other handheld system has any access to videos, otherwise we’d be totally screwed about now! Phew!

But what about the 830,000 of you who already own a Nintendo 3DS?

Man, we really wish we could have put a ‘5’ in front of that ‘830,000’.

You’re some of Nintendo’s most loyal customers

And, presumably, are fiercely questioning that decision.

and we’re rewarding you for getting in on the action early with not one

*ANTICIPATION*

not 10

*IT’S JUST LIKE BEING AT A SUNDAY MARKET, WAITING FOR THE GUY SELLING BOXES TO REVEAL THE PRICE OF THE BOXES*

but 20 free downloadable games from the Nintendo eShop!

Wow! 20 free downloadable games! Hurrah!

Here’s how it works:  The 20 free games are available to anyone who owns a Nintendo 3DS system and uses a wireless broadband Internet signal to connect to the Nintendo eShop at least once before 11:59 p.m. Eastern time on Aug. 11.

We don’t care enough to extend this offer indefinitely.

1. Starting Sept. 1, Nintendo 3DS Ambassadors will be able to download 10 NES™ Virtual Console™ games at no charge and before they are available in the Nintendo eShop to the general public.

Free NES games to use when you’re not playing your 3DS updates of N64 updates of SNES updates of NES games!

2. By the end of 2011, Nintendo will provide Ambassadors with 10 Game Boy Advance Virtual Console games. These include games like Yoshi’s Island™: Super Mario™ Advance 3, Mario Kart™: Super Circuit, Metroid™ Fusion, WarioWare™, Inc.: Mega Microgame$ and Mario vs. Donkey Kong™. These games will be available exclusively to Ambassadors, and Nintendo currently has no plans to make these 10 games available to the general public on the Nintendo 3DS in the future.

We don’t currently have any plans, but please don’t read any of our press releases after August 11! KTHANKSBYE!

Via TechCrunch, Satoru Iwata’s apology to 3DS owners:

This unprecedented timing for a price cut is because the situation has changed greatly since we originally launched the 3DS.

We copied those smartphone guys in laughing off the threat from Apple. Man, I wish we’d paid attention to what actually happened to those smartphone guys.

We decided it was necessary to take this drastic step in order to ensure that large numbers of users will continue to enjoy the 3DS in the future.

The 3DS? Yeah, that’s screwed. Maybe if we do a fire-sale more people will buy one.

If the software creators and those on the retail side are not confident that the Nintendo 3DS is a worthy successor to the DS and will achieve a similarly broad (user) base, it will be impossible for the 3DS to gain popularity, acquire a wide range of software, and eventually create the product cycle necessary for everyone to be satisfied with the system.

It’s really really screwed.

We feel a strong responsibility to develop the 3DS as a platform

Although not enough of a responsibility to come up with any new ideas for games.

— to ensure that, in the end, everyone is satisfied; we will make every effort to do so.

Unless we have to make some new ideas for games.

Additionally, we know everyone is waiting for Super Mario 3D Land and Mario Kart 7.

Like we said, we’re not big on new ideas for games.

They are scheduled for release in November and December, respectively

Nor are we that big on rushing recycling our existing properties.

Man, I hope we don’t end up like those Sega guys…