BGR brings the note that starting tomorrow, upgrading to Windows 8 will go from U$39.99 to U$119.99. If nobody was buying it before with the promotional price, I want to see how much they’ll sell now.
I wonder if the price of aggregated services will rise too… You know, services like this:
I don’t know if Steve Ballmer is really this idiotic or he just pretends to be. The fact is that whenever he opens his mouth you’ll feel a mix of urge to laugh and indignation.
The latest stupidity from Microsoft’s CEO/Buffoon came in a Bloomberg interview, in which he says that compared to the Microsoft Office numbers, Dropbox (which he refers to as a fine little startup) has very few users. That would be 100 million users, by the way.
Of course nothing beats the pathetic answer he gave regarding the iPhone back when it was first announced, but it’s this sort of crap and line of thinking that is making Microsoft sink lower and lower inside a hole they already can’t get out of.
He’s a poet when he keeps his mouth shut.
Answer: 83Gb.
Yep, when you buy a 128Gb Surface and get it out of the box, you’ll notice that 45Gb are already taken. And in case you buy a 64Gb Surface? Well, in this case you’ll have glorious 23Gb available to enjoy your tablet as much as you can (or try). That’s because the Surface has the great Windows 8 and a few preinstalled apps. For your comfort, of course.
Just for a quick comparison, iOS 6.1 takes up about 900 megabytes.
Via 9to5 Mac
Apple has just posted a press release detailing the release of the 128GB iPad, which had been rumored since mentions to this model had been found in the iOS 6.1 code.
For sale starting on Feb 5th, the Wi-Fi model will cost $799, while the Wi-Fi + Cellular will cost $929.
In Brazil, it will probably cost as much as a small car.
Released late last week, Twitter’s Vine has a simple premise: record a 6-second video and share it with the world. It’s sort of an animated GIF with audio. A few hours after it hit the AppStore, Gizmodo noticed the huge amount of posts of people testing the app right from their desks at work, and made a funny post about it.
Today the thing looks quite different. Several websites [1, 2, 3, 4] are reporting that the app became a huge source of porn, since nothing posted is approved beforehand.
Last week, Apple pulled the excellent 500px from the AppStore exactly because among the images being posted, it wasn’t hard to find images with explicit content.
Unless Twitter manages to find a quick solution for this issue, without having to depend on the frail ‘user flagged’ moderation system, it shouldn’t be long until Vine gets pulled from the store as well.
UPDATE: While I was writing this, I decided to download Vine (before it vanishes). The very first post I was presented with was porn already, and to be able to find the “hey, this is porn!” button, I had to click on a completely non-intuitive ellipsis mark button on the bottom right-hand corner of the post.
So until today, Windows RT (meaning, Surface) comes without the company’s standard email client? It’s getting harder and harder to take them seriously.
Via The Verge
And at the end of the day, the Wall Street Journal was off. Way off.
Last week the news they ran about Apple cutting iPhone 5 parts orders caused quite a commotion. The news spread quickly, stock prices went down just as fast, the more naïve decided to believe everything that was being said, and the source for this news or their accuracy became a rather unimportant detail. A mere afterthought.
To refresh the memory, this news firstappeared in a japanese newspaper called Nikkei, and the Wall Street Journal reproduced the whole thing. Well, almost. The only part they didn’t put in the news (actually, they did put, and then they took it out) was a little comment as to the source of the news: “people familiar with the matter”. Very precise, huh? Forbes made quite a nice article about that.
Yesterday Apple unveiled the fiscal results for Q1 2013. And the only problem they are facing is the same as always: to match the gigantic demand for their products. They sold a total of 10 iOS devices. Per second. Compared with the same period of the year before, the earnings went from $46.3 billion to $54.5 billion, iPhone sales went from 37 million to 47.8 million, and WSJ credibility for this sort of stuff fell to below zero.
They sold 75 million iOS devices. That’s more than the entire population of Italy, or France.
Tim Cook took a moment to address specifically what the WSJ did:
“Let me make one additional point on this: I know there’s been lots of rumors about order cuts and so forth, and so let me just take a moment to make a comment on these. I don’t want to comment on any particular rumor, because I would spend my life doing that, but I would suggest it’s good to question the accuracy of any kind of rumor about build plans. And I’d also stress that even if a particular data point were factual, it would be impossible to accurately interpret the data point as to what it meant for our overall business, because the supply chain is very complex, and we obviously have multiple sources for things. Yields might vary, supplier performance can vary, the beginning inventory positions can vary, I mean there’s just an inordinately long list of things that would make any single data point not a great proxy for what’s going on.”
To sum up: Do you know who actually knows what is going on at Apple? Apple. Don’t trust these news that deduce facts from isolated data. Apple is selling like crazy and the only problem they are facing is to find time to count the mountain of money they are sitting on. The only thing that is not doing well in this market is editorial responsibility.
Yep. After failing miserably with the Surface RT, Microsoft unveiled today the price and release date for their next big flop, the Surface Pro.
Promised to be Microsoft’s real alternative to the iPad, it’s going to cost U$899. That’s U$400 more than an iPad 4 (so it’ll be almost twice as much), and U$100 less than a MacBook Air, as noticed by Cult of Mac.
If Microsoft wanted to create some sort of anticipation for this, they did just that. I can barely wait to see all the mockery that will surround (and surely follow) the release.
UPDATE: Oh, yes. If you want to add the little clicky cover/keyboard thingie which they are putting as the great advantage of buying a Surface, get ready to throw in another U$130. This, of course, makes it U$30 more expensive than a MacBook Air.
In its recent advertising history, Samsung has adopted a strategy that bashes Apple instead of talking about its own products and qualities. In 30″ and 60″ movies, they’d spend at least 80% of the time showing how iPhone users are morons and in the remaining 20% they were able to cram up one or two benefits of their own stuff.
Then, they decided to change their focus and adopted a new line of campaign. First they released a video that featured mommy making some porn for daddy, followed by an almost exact same version bringing Mrs. Claus making some porn for Santa Claus. Yep, very classy. Both commercials brought exactly the same benefit (yes, singular) that had already been displayed in the prior campaign: the little magic trick that you rub phones together to exchange data.
Today Samsung unveiled another commercial. And it looks like they decided to step inside their comfort zone again. This time around, their main target is RIM, who’s just about to release BlackBerry 10. Samsung made sure that everyone notices how superior they are to this fierce and dangerous competitor.
During the movie, they throw a few punches at Apple, but surprisingly this is not their focus. That’s already an advance when compared with those commercials that showed iPhone users as brain-dead hipsters. Now they don’t bash them. They just bash everyone.
Infact, even Galaxy S3 and note II users take a few hits in the commercial, being portrayed as nerds and geeks who make un-funny jokes and are socially awkward. Hey, who said all advertising had to be deceitful?
According to PublishNews, this is the first time the company does something like that. Amazon kiosks can be found in two major Brazilian malls, namely Morumbi Shopping in São Paulo, and Barra Shopping in Rio. Their only objective is to sell Kindles.
The initiative is a result of a partnership between Amazon and a company called Superfone (which approached Amazon with the idea), and they expect to sell 50 devices daily.
Interesting. We’ll see how this works out.
Via Gizmodo Brasil