Castro's Blog

Making Apple Sauce from Rotten Apples?

Apple seems to be taking responsibility for well reported iPod nano problems involving cracked screens. The company announced on Wednesday that all defective nanos will be replaced free of charge. Coincidentally, Merrill Lynch downgraded its ratings from “buy” to “neutral” expressing concern that Apple's earnings might be under some pressure. Replacing defective units is not cheap. Also, iPod sales account for nearly one-third of the company’s total revenue. The minis, which are being replaced by the nanos, are the strongest selling segement of the iPod family. So this is a very serious issue for Apple.

An Apple official exaplained,

"It is a real, but minor issue involving vendor quality problems. Any user with a defective screen should contact Apple ... and we will replace it for free. It's not a design issue."

This is the risk with Apple. Their hardware products are cutting edge and they push the envelope on the engineering side to provide the great design they offer. However, every now and then you have to deal with issues like this. Personally, I purchased one of the early iMac G5 and was struck by the power supply issue. Stuffing all that stuff into a sleak box with IBM's overheated G5 is bound to cause problems. As with the nano, Apple took care of this gratis.

As long as Apple is quick to fix the problem, and makes it easy for consumers to replace the defective nanos they've already purchased I do not anticipate any long term problems for Apple. The nano is just too hot to not be a huge success. Apple would have to work hard and do some very stupid things to screw this up.

Rotten Apples?

There have been numerous reports that the iPod nano's LCD screen is very fragile and breaks frequently. This makes me feel a whole lot better about resisting tempation and not buying one. I even feel a little smart, since I felt it might be "too small" for me.

"It is way too fragile. Apple markets it in a pocket. Hell, Steve Jobs himself pulls it out of his when he announces it," wrote Peterson, who himself was smitten with the Nano upon its release. "It was in my pocket as I was walking and I sat down. No, I didn't sit on it."

So much for my hypothesis that the nano would improve Apple's earnings by reducing the support costs associated with a hard drive based player. Oops!

Here are some lines to selected sites online that provide more information about the nano's problems.

• CNET article
• Ars Technica report that claims the nano stood up well in stress testing
• iPodNN
• flawedmusicplayer.com

Empire Strikes Back - Palm Embraces Windows Mobile

Well, it has been a good couple of days. Perhaps the rumors of Microsoft's demise have been greatly exagerated. Perhaps it was very appropriate that Steve tried to rally the troops by playing "Eye of the Tiger." Shit - I'm driking the Kool-Aid, but unlike Mini-Microsoft, I didn't even attend the company meeting this year, and I don't even work there anymore. Still, it was nice to see a nice win for Microsoft poke out of the sea of of all this "Google Will Rule" noise.

Palm will still sell the Windows Mobile version of their phone for up to the next 5 years, so they still have some long term options. However, I suspect they will eventually embrace Windows Mobile completely in the years to come. Some of the problems with existing Windows Mobile phones include few quality form factors to choose from, poor phone quality, and poor battery life. I believe with the Treo line, we will see these problems dimish or disappear completely. So basically, you will be able to buy a top notch smartphone with an MS OS soon. And, if Palm screws this up, Motorola might get it right. Well, if you look at the Razr, not the Rockr.

Amazon and Microsoft Announce Developer Contest

Amazon and Microsoft have teamed up to create a web services developer content. The first place prize is for $5,000.

You basically have to build a cool application using Amazon Web Services.

Here is a link with more details - Contest Information

Sweet Apple Juice - iPod nano is more expensive for Apple

In my earlier post, I wondered about the financial impact of switching from hard drives to flash to Apple's overall finances. Turns out that flash is more expensive than hard drives. I didn't realize this. Here is a quote from a CNET article:

"Right now, 1GB of flash memory in the volume market costs about $45, according to both Semico and iSuppli. Thus, the 2GB iPod Nano, which sells for $199, contains around $90 worth of flash, while the $249 4GB version has about $180 worth of flash, said Semico's Jim Handy."

So, some very simple math, tells us that is $160 worth of memory. Now, we're talking about Apple here, so they probably got a great deal from their supplier. Still, this is expensive. However, there is an element to the consumer electronics space that is similar to the fashion industry. The nano is new, hot, and sexy, and based on the reports of crowded stores, it was a smart move on their part.

I suspect whatever negative financial impact the switch from hard drive to flash may have, will be offset by an uptick in sales due to the new model (and the longer battery life enabled by flash) and perhaps lower customer support related costs.

More progress on kitchen remodel (granite slabs 4 less, etc.)

We’re making more progress on our kitchen remodel. Yesterday, Jen and I found a source for our granite countertops. We initially planned on using the granite people from Costco Home since we are using the cabinet people from Costco as well (Baywood Cabinets in Kent, WA).

Unfortunately, we were told it would take several months for them to get around to our order. We then spent some time calling granite folks all over town to try to find any way to complete this kitchen remodel in 2005.

We found a place in West Seattle (I will update this post with their info later) that offers slabs for $300 a piece. We figured we could do our entire kitchen with 4 slabs. This is a great value and their referred us to a guy with 20 years experience installing granite who only charges $45.00 an hour. They can have the granite ready in only 4 weeks. It pays to shop around.

Now, for those of you who don’t care about my kitchen saga and prefer my technology oriented, let me tie this all together for you.

I wish we could have entered in “granite seattle” into one of the local search engines and more easily have found out who would meet our timelines, who polished and cut the granite, who offered installation. It took several weeks of asking all of our different friends and people we know, then several weeks of calling to ultimately find the company that worked for us.

What this really means is there is a ton of room for improvement in how the Internet can make chores like this easier. I know the  search engine players like Google, Local, A9, and MSN are focused on this huge market. There are also some interesting start ups like Judy’s Book that aim to use social networking and reviews as a way to improve this often painful process.

See more progress on: remodel my kitchen

iPod Nano and Motorola ROKR announced today

Well, I've been waiting to hear what all the hype was about today. It was somewhat of a let down since ThinkSecret accurately reported that a new flash based iPod along with the iPod phone would be announced today. Still, I enjoyed having some pretty pictures to look at today.

Here are my thoughts...

The iPod product line is a little confusing right now. The iPod Nano seems to be a replacement for the iPod mini since it supports up to 4GB and the largest iPod mini supported 6GB. I've always liked the white and silver style more than the pastels used with the mini. So this might push me to finally replace my trust G1 iPod.

This is a smart move for Apple, because my survey of personal friends and family reveals a number of people who are interested in the iPod as a companion for their workouts. If you do much running as part of your workout then the HardDrive based iPods will sometimes skips. That is what I've been told. I still believe this whole exercise thing is a fad and 50 years from now we will be told of studies that show exercise is bad for your health. That is my story and I'm sticking with it. Anyway, with a *real* (as opposed to the faux iPod shuffle) flash based iPod, I suspect a whole new segment of consumers will purchase iPods. Kudos to Apple on this. It seems to me that the full iPod is becoming less of the meat of the player market. The percentage of folks that really need 20GB all the time and want the bigger device is not that large.

I'm curious about the cost and margin impact to Apple of switching from a HardDrive based model to a smaller flashed based device. Certainly, a flash based device has fewer moving parts which may lead to fewer support costs for Apple. I'm wondering if there is some other cost advantage to Apple. Anyone have anything to add to this angle?

The Rokr looks interesting. However, I'm a bit disappointed that I can't seem to find enough information on the web. For example, the specs list the phone as providing 6.5 hours of talk time. Given the nature of this phone, I'd be really interested in learning what the play time is as well. I assume many people will be listening to music on this device. Amazingly, the Motorola web site seems to not even mention this phone. Most of the information has been gleaned from the Cingular site or the Apple site.

I love the fact that when the phone rings, the phone automatically pauses any playing music. Very cool. Very smart. This is the type of attention to detail and user focus that makes products great.

The big surprise for me is that the phone doesn't support any over the air purchasing of music. Since the mobile carriers depend on additional services (e.g. ring tones, SMS, etc.) to drive profitable revenue, the conventional wisdom was that carriers pushed back on this iTunes enabled phone and wouldn't carry it unless it allowed users to purchase songs over the air. This created a bit of a pricing challenge since Apple sells songs for $.99 and the carriers typically sell ring tones for about $2. Why would someone spend $2 for a ring tone when they can purchase the whole song for $.99. So I guess Cingular just figured having an exclusive on this phone would drive new subscribers to their service and they'd make the money some other way.

Even more surprising is that the Cingular web site lists "real music tones" as a feature. Does that mean I can select a song (or some snippet of a song) to use as my ring tone. In that case, Cingular won't even be able to sell ring tones to users of the Rokr. Kudos to Cingular for just focusing on the fact that this is something consumers want and giving it to them before figuring our how to extract maximum revenue. It will be interesting to see how this plays out and how other carriers respond.

Microsoft...Microsoft...is anyone home....Microsoft?

Is Rails Schizo??

It has been a few weeks now since I started programming in Ruby and Rails. I really have it enjoyed it and I’m very impressed with Rails. However, I recently took some time to learn about the Ajax support in Rails and came away somewhat confused.

You see, Rails is an MVC (mode-view-controller) framework. However, the Ajax support in rails seems to encourage a developer to include view logic in their controller. Since one of the main benefits of Rails is the MVC framework, I was a bit confused by this.

Now, to be fair, my opinions here were formed after reading one article, Ajax on Rails by Curt Hibbs, and I’m still a Rails newbie.

Let me provide an example of what I found concerning. There form_remote_tag contains a paramter where you specify the ID of a DOM element that will be updated the action contain within the controller code.

For example,

form_remote_tag(:update => “my_list”, :url => { :action => :add_item }, :position => “top”)

This code snippet inidcates that add_item action is called in the controller when the form is submitted.

The controller code looks like this,

class ListdemoController < ApplicationController
     def add_item
          render_text "<li>"  params[:newitem]  "</li>"
     end
end

As you can see, HTML is generated from the controller. This means if you change the code in your view, you may need to go back and change the HTML generated by the controller so that is fits with the changes you made to your view. This is excatly the type of thing Rails avoids in so many other instances, and exactly why I’m so excited about Rails. What’s up with that!

I began to poke around the Ajax for Rails API documentation and found some reference to registering a client side javascript function that would be called. However, I wasn’t able to make this all work. I wasn’t able to find any good examples online and hope the new Rails book I ordered (Agile Web Development with Rails) will help.

In any event, I’m still very excited about Rails and hope this means there is still some opportunity for me to add to the community once I feel like I’ve overcome the learning curve.

Ordered Rails Book

I’ve found the Ruby “pickaxe” book fairly useful in general, but have been a little disappointed that is did not cover Rails much. There are some good sites and blogs out there, but I just didn’t feel I had all the information. So I ordered the Agile Web Development with Rails book. The authors took at interesting approach to publishing this book. They published several chapters in PDF format while completing the book. After downloaind and reading a few of the chapters I became convinced this book would help me in my quest to become a Ruby and Rails expert.

See more progress on: write an application on Rails

Local Search Shootout (Yahoo, Google, and A9) - Help with kitchen remodel

So my kitchen remodel, which is already behind schedule, was in jeopardy of slipping further behind. Aparently, the dark green tiles in the kitchen installed in the 1950’s are not only butt ugly  but potentially life threatening (asbestos). So I needed to test the tiles before we could begin tearing down the kitchen, and if the tiles contain asbestos I would need to hire some folks and pay them crazy amounts of money to remove them.

So exactly how do I figure this out? Well, that is where my trusty friend, Yahoo Local Search, came to  my rescue. I did a simple search for “asbestos testing” in Seattle and located a testing company fairly close by. I hard heard about the new rev of Yahoo Local from John Battell's blog and thought I'd do a little comparison of my own.

I initially tried A9, but they returned no matches for “asbestos testing.” Google Local and Yahoo Local both returned very relevant results.

I found Yahoo Local more useful because they had a nicer little homepage for the business that provided useful little features, such as, Send to Phone, Add to Address Book, etc. Send to Phone is really useful because it saves me from the hassle of copying down information on some random scratch paper on my desk, or printing everything out and bringing another piece of paper that will eventually find it’s way on the floor further cluttering my already cluttered life.

I simply click the Send to Phone link, enter in my phone number, and a few seconds later I receive an SMS message on my Blackberry with a link to a WAP page with the address, intersection information (very useful), click to call link (in case I get lost anyway), and a small map image. This was super useful. I would have loved a Block View photo of the storefront, but like I said, A9 came up with zero matches.

The only real complaing I have with Yahoo Local involves driving directions. The WAP page contained a link for driving directions (I was hoping I could avoid 99 or I-5 North), but then I was prompting to log in and provide my password. Ok – forget it. The problem is that Yahoo knew where I wanted to go, but not my location. Seems like an option of providing a zip code, or sending my address since I was already logged in to My Yahoo on my PC, would have been better options. It is super annoying that the web browser on my Blackberry doesn’t allow me to save username/password information. Constantly retyping this information on a tiny device is not a pleasant user experience.

The best option would be to incorporate location information, where the device can provide driving directions from it’s current location to the destination.

See more progress on: remodel my kitchen