Apple on Bulrush Labs — Richard Tibbetts

Three Months Without Cable

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:03:00 +0000

As was widely reported in the media, the second and third quarter of 2010 show a steady decline in cable subscriptions. This is earth-shaking for the cable companies, who have seen growth in US subscribers over their entire history. It’s a key indicator of not only consumers being more careful with their spending, but the rise of Internet-delivered media as a compelling alternative.

In August of this year I joined the ranks of people “cutting the cord”. I was moving, and when we set up Verizon FiOS at the new house we left off video. Three months later, I’d like to fill you in on how it has gone and what I see in the future of consumer video delivery.

Apple is a Luxury Brand, Android Will Never Be

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 22:48:00 +0000

Recently I’ve had several good conversations about exactly what business Apple is in. They have clearly transcended their traditional role as a computer maker. Some people think that Apple has become a media company, or a telecommunications company. What they have really done is to become a luxury brand. As a luxury brand they are shielded from feature- and performance-based competition, enjoying higher margins and more stable revenues than other consumer electronics firms. The future of the iPhone and iPad and their strategy for competing with Android will be based on Apple’s luxury brand.

Device Convergence, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Kindle

Sun, 09 May 2010 20:05:00 +0000

A number of months ago I posted my disappointment in the version 1 Kindle. I’ve also tried out the version 2, and continue to be convinced that the Sony Reader is a better piece of hardware for dedicated book reading.

But (if there wasn’t a but there wouldn’t be much of a post here) the Sony eBook store is painfully terrible. Titles are expensive, hard to search for, and often not available. The result is that my book buying on the Sony gradually trailed off. On my last two business trips I haven’t bothered to bring the Reader, and it sits on a shelf right now, probably running out of battery.

Android G1 and Palm Pre versus iPhone and BlackBerry Benchmarks

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 23:26:00 +0000

In my last post, I shared benchmark data for the web browser on the iPhone versus BlackBerry. My theory is that web browser performance is critically important for smartphone user experience. Furthermore, the BlackBerry seems to be embarrassingly inferior to the iPhone in this respect. This begs the question, how do other phones stack up.

Thanks to two friends, I have SunSpider JavaScript benchmark results for the G1 and for the Palm Pre. Based on the graphs here, it’s clear that the G1 and the Pre are both considerably better than the BlackBerry Bold. Specifically, the G1 is 9.6 times faster than the Bold, and the Pre is 15 times faster.

Switching to OSX, productivity and development tools

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 19:11:00 +0000

Two weeks ago I got a new laptop from work. After extensive hemming and hawing, I went with an Apple MacBook (the black one, cause it looks hotter^Wmore professional). Previous to this I had been running Ubuntu on a Thinkpad T40 bought around the founding of StreamBase. My goal for the change was to have a laptop that would “just work”, and to stop having to administer my personal machine. I was last on a Mac when I was in grad school.

MacBook Pro – Killing the PowerBook Brand

Sat, 28 Jan 2006 19:58:00 +0000

When Apple announced the MacBook Pro, my first reaction was not to any of the hardware changes but to the name. This machine represents the end of the PowerBook brand name, a brand that dates back well before the PowerPC processor, to the first Apple notebook computers in 1991. I believed that PowerBook was one of the strongest brands in the high tech industry, and thought it was remarkably stupid to change it.
Yesterday at the University of Michigan Futuretech conference I got a chance to ask someone from Apple about it. They gave an interesting justification: Apple wants the names of all of their computers to have “Mac” in them. It is important that unsophisticated consumers have a single identifier for all Apple computers. He repeated this justification like it came off a sheet of talking-points. And it does make sense.
Which leaves the big question: What are they going to rename iBook to? My guess is we will have MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Maybe we would have seen them already, if not for rumored last-minute changes to the keynote.