Earlier this week Apple updated a few products in their range. The Mac Mini, iMac and the Mac Pro.

I’ve always wanted to find a place for an Apple Mac in my own technology but never get around to it.

The entry level Mac Mini would be an excellent place to start.

However due to the horrendous exchange rate affecting the UK pound most international tech companies have recently increased their prices.

So take the once desirable £399 Mac Mini this week becomes a £499 proposition.

Suddenly a £499 PC that ships with no Keyboard, Mouse or Monitor seems decidedly unaffordable.

I think most of the recent price increase is down to the exchange rate but a small part is Apple now know who a Mac Mini customer is and have figured they will stomach the cost.

The last couple of years have been horrible in technology The Windows Vista wilderness as I will no doubt remember 2007 to 2009 so as we approach the demise of the Windows Vista  era consumers have the increased cost of technology to contend with. No wonder low cost netbooks are all the rage.

If you are still interested in the new Mac Mini check out the PC Mag Review on the Link below.

Link: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2341928,00.asp

At the launch of the new Apple Notebooks yesterday Steve Jobs called Blu Ray a bag of hurt.

His actual quote goes

“Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. It’s great to watch the movies, but the licensing of the tech is so complex, we’re waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace.”

The licensing hasn’t stopped HP, Dell and Sony amongst others for including Blu Ray drives in their laptops.

Blu Ray’s market share is still very low at about 5% of the home video market so Steve has one point about market penetration.

However this is really about protecting his digital distribution business aka The iTunes Music Store that also sells HD TV shows and movies for download.

The truth of the matter is if you compare iTunes HD content with Blu Ray content there is a very significant quality gap in Blu Ray’s favour.

Apple should have got on the HD bandwagon and let the consumer decide.

Picture: Some of the Free HD TV content you can download from the US iTunes Music Store.

Lets delve deeper into this whole Apple HD TV content thing.

File Size: If you purchase any HD TV content from the US iTunes store you will also receive the iPod friendly version of the content. In the example below that would consist of a 1.64gb file and a separate 640mb file. A total of 2.2gb per episode. If your chosen show had 24 episodes a season that’s a 54.72gb download in total.

This presents two problems 1) You need to download that. Think bandwidth caps and putting up with slow Internet while it does it. 2) You need to store the content for in theory as long as you want to keep it.

Technical Details:

Video Codec: H.264
Resolution: 1280×720
Total Bitrate: 4439kbps

Video Quality: The 720 HD content looks a whole lot better than the 480 equivalent for sure but is it stunning? No, Don’t get me wrong it’s good, especially on a laptop or PC monitor in a window, but on a large 1080p TV the imperfections of compressed video are evident.

I can be very critical when it comes to video quality. I am sure half the time I am watching blu ray movies I am just looking for flaws in the transfer. So to recap it’s good but not perfect.

Tip: If you have a 1080p display and are distracted by image tear on the top section of the screen, try dropping down your resolution to something closer to the resolution of the video clip.

Audio: Some of the HD content comes with two audio streams  plain old stereo and the other a surround sound version.

Cost: $2.99 is the initial cost per episode but factor in the cost of storing the content and bumping up against any download caps on your Internet connection.

Tip: Download at night its the only way particularly with when you get into the 20 to 50 gig sessions.

Summary

It’s great having essentially an on demand HD content distribution system. The only competition is from from your Satellite or Cable company.

An Argument could be made that future generations will just cherry pick their content instead of buying 400 channels of content they have very little interest in.

So this business model is here to stay. In 5-10 years time it will be funny to re-read this post watching me complaining about file size, download speed and caps.

Yesterdays product announcement went pretty much as expected on the iPod Nano front.

These are sort of cool but I’m much more of an iPod Touch kind of guy. Video on a small screen just becomes annoying after a while.

The updated iPod Touch isn’t enough of an improvement to make me contemplate an upgrade. The additions of a volume control and speaker are nice but it doesn’t really make much odds to me.

The iPod touch is still a marvel to me. Here is what I do with mine:-

Listen to Music
Watch Video
Stream TV from BBC iPlayer
Stream Audio from AOL Radio
Read Twitter and my Gmail Email
Play Games and Apps
Read the New York Times

As well as all the standard things like Maps, Web sites and Pictures. The iPod Touch is more a computer than a Video playing mp3 player. It’s expensive but ultimately worth it.

The good news from yesterday is the Addition of HD TV content in their main store. Prior to this the only HD content available from Apple was locked to the Apple TV infrastructure, and that was movies and not TV.

Now you have the choice to download some TV Shows in 480p ($1.99) or 720p ($2.99).

Much like a drug dealer offering the first hit for free Apple are now offering free downloads of 10  episodes in HD from the likes of Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, The Office, Monk and more to showcase the HD content in the iTunes music store.

When you buy an HD episode you get both the HD and SD versions (one for your TV one for your iPod).

It’s nice to have the choice of quality and price points. But as I have said before paying extra for HD just feels like a tax.

Sadly if you are a UK resident don’t get too excited as none of this HD goodness seems to have filtered through to us.

When you ask customers to pay $99 for an online service it better deliver.

Having to report the loss of 10% of the affected customers e-mail over a multiple day period is frankly both shocking and embarrassing for any large tech company.

I think the only way  Apple can turn this around is to make Mobile Me free for six months. Iron out the bugs then let the consumer decide at the end of the term.

As it stands. Avoid.

Link: http://www.apple.com/mobileme/status/

Dell still remain the overall markets number two player behind HP however their Q2 2008 PC shipments were up an impressive 11.9% and in Q2′08 beat HP.

HP only grew by 5.6% HP however have just refreshed their major product lines so I imagine this will even out in the next couple of quarters.

The new number three player in the PC game in now Apple (See Ya Later, Acer) who managed to ship 38.1% more PC’s in Q2 2008 compared to Q2 2007. So out of the three (HP, Dell and Apple) Apple looks like the rising star.

Ill say it again “If Apple shipped on Windows HP and Dell would have a significant problem on their hands”.

Link: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=724111

Last Fridays roll out of the iPhone 3g was one of the biggest blunders in tech history.

Apple now wants you to buy the new iPhone 3g at retail so they can activate your product but more importantly they lock you into your phone contract (where all the real revenue is).

So this on-site Activation is really a man made road block.

This simple activation process collapsed on Friday under the sheer weight of activation activity. This left people with either brand new iPhones that would not work (activation failed).

Worse still their existing 1^st generation iPhone’s were temporarily “bricked” because it could not re-activate due to the activation servers being offline while they tried to upgrade to the free iPhone 2.0 Update.

Apple need to realise the iPhone isn’t a toy, it’s a phone and when thousands of customers can’t use their phones they are frankly unhappy.

Likewise if you just bought a new iPhone that’s going to cost you £600+ and you can’t use it. It must be very frustrating.

So what went wrong?

First let’s look at some numbers.

iPhone 1.0 customers = 20m+ and of those interested in a Day1 upgrade to the free iPhone 2.0 Upgrade is placed at about 6m.

The iPod Touch was eligible for a paid upgrade to the 2.0 Software upgrade.

I can’t see any numbers for touch users so let’s conservatively call it 500,000 users.

Finally the new iPhone 3g users, it 1m (the original iPhone did 128,000 first day sales) but the iPhone 3g was launched internationally.

So a minimum of 7.5m people intent on getting activated on the 2.0 software.

Note you need the 2.0 Update to download Apps to your Apple device (iPhone 1.0 or iPod Touch).

That’s a big number but Apple is in the content distribution business they can handle it.

On paper yes they can, they delivery an unimaginable amount of data via iTunes every day. But they made one mistake they forgot about the wisdom of a 6m+ crowd looking for a free upgrade.

The real problem started on Thursday. They seeded the App Store in iTunes.Don’t underestimate a bored iPhone user looking for some distraction. From that moment the iPhone 1.0/iPod Touch users start on mass upgrading to iTunes 7.7 and pressing the “check for update” looking for the illusive and in most cases free 2.0 update.

Now its human nature for people to keep pressing buttons in this case check for update if they think something’s going to happen imminently but doesn’t.

So the check for update crowd starts swarming from 5pm on Thursday as news travels around the Internet the App store is live.

If the App Store is live I must be missing something where is my 2.0 update, check for update.

And so on.

By the time the iPhone 3g launches 12/16 hours later millions of people are frantically pressing the check for update. This puts the Activation infrastructure under strain as installing the 2.0 Update requires Re-Activation.

Apple eventually seed the 2.0 update and people start downloading, but the sheer force of the numbers overload the activation servers. So people could download the 2.0 update but not activate leaving them in limbo without a working iPhone.

So those poor people standing in line for an iPhone 3g may be able to get one but had no way of activating or using it.

So one of the largest ever tech roll out’s fails miserably with some really upset customers.

Free Advice for Apple

Don’t roll out internationally if you can’t handle it.

Stagger the roll out. The 2.0 upgrade could have come out either a week before or after the iPhone 3g launch. The person who decided to globally launch 2.0 in one movement made a BIG mistake.

Update: This seems to work for some but not others. See the comments.

If you are having difficulty installing this update try temporarily disabling any Anti-Virus or Spyware software.

In my particular case I use Nod32 and after the Software downloaded the 222mb file it would fail with the error pictured above.

After I disabled Nod32 my Anti-Virus product (you can do this from the taskbar) my installation completed successfully.

Remember to re-enable your Anti-Virus or Spyware software once you have completed the upgrade.

He goes into this topic around 2:20 of the clip below.

Now you can imagine the problems having a phone with a non removable battery that doesn’t last a full day. You end up with no form of communication.

All that GPS, 3g, Google Maps, Visual Voicemail go out the window if the device doesn’t have the juice to turn on.

In the keynote for the iPhone 3g Steve Jobs took great pleasure in announcing “better battery life”.

Can you imagine a keynote where the claims were a bit more realistic.

Hi, I’m Steve Jobs

This is the iPhone 3g, we think its cool, we think you going to love it, isn’t this just amazing, look at that screen its gorgeous, but if you plan on using it all day the battery probably wont last. 

Anyway watch Walt’s review which is generally positive but he does point out the fact its more expensive to own than 1st generation iPhone.

Link: http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20080708/newer-faster-cheaper-iphone-3g/

I love gadgets and I do like to get a new phone every year.

However it hasn’t gone unnoticed at DiPonio central the cost of everyday essentials are going through the roof.

With the hype surrounding this weeks launch of the iPhone 3g. I wonder how many people have figured out the total cost of ownership.

There are other issues like do you actually have 3g coverage where you live/work. I have had a 3g enabled phone for about 3 years and I wonder if this 3g dream people are expecting of being permanently connected is actually going to work out.

The other sexy phone on the market is the HTC Touch Diamond

I could pick one up for £433 inc VAT and just pop in my SIM card.

So when compared to the cost of the iPhone the HTC Touch is much more affordable.

However lets be honest the HTC Diamond is just another Windows Mobile device with a shiny face. It doesn’t help that it has a User Interface running on top of a User Interface.

I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t want either device but at £639 or £433 respectively I think I am going to pass.

My current HTC Touch is small, light, has good battery life and most importantly I already own it.