He called Apple television five years ago, but it is a good idea?

By Jason D. O'Grady | October 25, 2011, 7: 18 pm PDT

Summary: has emerged the mythical Apple TV! A passage in the biography of Steve Jobs's Walter Isaacson has resurrected an old dinosaur of a rumor that I first broke in 2006.

There has been an increase in the rumors about the mythical Apple TV recently and a passage in the new biography of Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs has risen that old dinosaur of a rumor. In the work of the book told his biographer that he had cracked the mystery the saying of "integrated television":

I would like to create an integrated TV is completely easy to use. It could be perfectly synchronized with all devices and with iCloud. You will have the user interface more simple that you could imagine. He had finally cracked.

Jason Calacanis told CNet UK in October 2008 that "I knew first-hand that Apple was working on a television network." But more than two years before (January 06, 2006) he wrote about the PowerPage about how Apple could launch a television at the Macworld Expo 2006.

I wrote this post based on the edge of a nearby spring which had been reliable in the past. Of course the Apple TV fails published in MW06 (Apple released a Core Duo iMac and MBP15) but my contact was pretty sure about it.

Also, it is obviously not out yet, so saying "Call Me" could be a tad premature.

Analyst of Piper Jaffray Gene Munster has been beating the drum of the Apple TV a few months ago and recently wrote in a research note you can get to late 2012 or early 2013:

Service of Apple iCloud for storing media simplifies the own several Apple devices and share content between them. stores iCloud programs of television and photographs, but believe that Apple can add films. While a solution of TV in alive along with shows previously transmitted "recorded" in the cloud continues being an obstacle important, perhaps this code is precisely what believed positions of work has been "cracked. We also believe that Apple could use Siri, its voice recognition, technology of personal assistant to strengthen its offer of TV and make it easy to enter information like show titles or names of actor in a TV (usually with a remote control).

Bloomberg added fuel to the fire when reported Jeff Robbin Apple - the fame of the iPod and iTunes Music Store, is heading an effort to internal Apple TV. It seems that this story may have legs after all, five years later.

Despite getting an early point in a plasma of Apple, I don't think that it is a good move for the company. They simply don't want to have to remove a 50-my wall 60? TV when I want to upgrade in a year or two. It is better to have the smarts in an easily updatable table - which is for the current Apple TV.

I suppose that Apple could solve the problem through the construction of the "television" in a card that can be inserted into a slot on television (a bit like a CableCard, above), but it is a stretch at best.

Also, Apple already has a TV. Is called the iMac.

Is an Apple TV a good idea or bad idea?

Scale model of the Apple TV: Tabletis.com, firing of CableCard: ArsTechnica

Jason or ' Grady + is a journalist and writer specializing in mobile technology. He has published six books on Apple and mobile devices and your blog PowerPage has been publishing for more than 15 years.

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Users, developers react to Apple iOS 5's new Music app on iPad. Hate it!

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AppId is over the quota
Summary: While the Music app on smaller iOS devices may be acceptable, users of the new player software on the iPad say it’s more than several big steps backward, especially when listening to large files such as audiobooks.

While the Music app on smaller iOS devices may be acceptable, users of the new player software on the iPad say it’s more than several big steps backward, especially when listening to large files such as audiobooks.

Reader Andrew Morton called the software on the iPad “iPod Lite.”

The new OS has moved us from the iPod.app to the Music.app. As a consequence, we no longer have the pop-over panel for music files that had the 30-second rewind button or chapter list. The only controls left for us poor(er) users is the forward/reverse buttons and the short progress slider. Using the buttons is worse than having to go back to the wheel iPod; at least it had a wheel. And making small time adjustments to a 10-hour file is quite a challenge.

I received a series of thoughtful posts from longtime developer Chris Tomlinson, who is now working in Kathmandu at the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center Digital Library preserving texts and developing cataloging and search software.

He said with no display of the Chapter Title for a selection, there’s no useful way to know where one is in an audiobook. Of course, audiobooks often have several dozen chapters in a segment that usually comprises about 100MB.

The iPhone (and I presume iPod Touch) version of the Music.app retains the chapter viewing and selection functionality from previous iOS 4.3. Only the iPad version of the app has lost the functionality. Without viewing of chapters and their titles and direct selection of chapters, Audiobooks in the Music.app are basically unusable on the iPad.

I routinely record and assemble lectures and seminars for various groups and deliver them as *.m4b audiobooks — with chapter marks, titles and so on. The users that I distribute these audiobooks to have a variety of devices: iPods, iPhones and iPads and so on. Now the ones with iPads won’t be able to listen to the audiobooks effectively.

The Audible player and the Bookmark app player are not solutions because the interface provided from the iPod/Music shared library area does not provide access to chapter information. Audible I suppose has no incentive to support non-DRM’d audiobooks and Bookmark uses whatever interface is provided by Apple to the shared area.

Essentially, the only app that can be used to access chapterized non-DRM’d audiobooks is the Music.app, which is no longer functional on the iPad.

Tomlinson doubted that the Apple developers were experienced with the demands of audiobook listening when designing the controls. He said he was aware of this issue before the GA of iOS 5 but said he could only file warnings into Apple’s Developer Bug Reporter database.

I suggested to Tomlinson that this might be an “opportunity” for a third-party developer. He said it was unlikely that any developer outside Apple would have the juice to do it properly for audiobooks.

The iOS 5 SDK does not make available any access to chapter information in decrypted streams which is why only Audible and Apple have players with chapter access for DRM’d audio. Audible can do it because they control the DRM of their streams.

A third-party will have to make arrangements with Audible for example - and that would have to be a large third-party (like Apple) - in order to develop a full featured player. A small third-party could develop an app that plays non-DRM’d audiobooks complete with chapter information but I expect that without access to decrypted DRM’d streams they can do no better than the Bookmarks app.

Tomlinson said that he hoped that an update to the Music app would be forthcoming, without having to wait for an “entire iOS 5.x monolithic update.”

I suggest that users post a message about this issue at Apple’s feedback page for the iPad.

David Morgenstern has covered the Mac market and other technology segments for 20 years.

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Apple adds Photo Stream via Aperture 3.2 Update

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AppId is over the quota
Jason D. O'Grady+ developed an affinity for Apple computers after using the original Lisa, and this affinity turned into a bona-fide obsession when he got the original 128 KB Macintosh in 1984.

He started writing one of the first Web sites about Apple (O'Grady's PowerPage) in 1995 and is considered to be one of the fathers of blogging. He has been a frequent speaker at the Macworld Expo conference and a member of the conference faculty. He also co-founded the first dedicated PowerBook User Group (PPUG) in the United States.

After winning a major legal battle with Apple in 2006, he set the precedent that independent journalists are entitled to the same protections under the First Amendment as members of the mainstream media.

O'Grady is the author of The Nexus One Pocket Guide, The Droid Pocket Guide, The Google Phone Pocket Guide, and The Garmin nuvi Pocket Guide (Peachpit Press), the author of Corporations That Changed the World: Apple Inc. (Greenwood Press), and a contributor to The Mac Bible (Peachpit Press). In addition, he has contributed to numerous Mac publications over the years, including MacWEEK, Macworld, and MacPower (Japan).

When he's not writing about Apple for ZDNet at The Apple Core, he enjoys spending time with his family in New Jersey.

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Cards for iOS puts Apple in the snail mail biz; pits it against American Greetings and Hallmark

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AppId is over the quota
Jason D. O'Grady+ developed an affinity for Apple computers after using the original Lisa, and this affinity turned into a bona-fide obsession when he got the original 128 KB Macintosh in 1984.

He started writing one of the first Web sites about Apple (O'Grady's PowerPage) in 1995 and is considered to be one of the fathers of blogging. He has been a frequent speaker at the Macworld Expo conference and a member of the conference faculty. He also co-founded the first dedicated PowerBook User Group (PPUG) in the United States.

After winning a major legal battle with Apple in 2006, he set the precedent that independent journalists are entitled to the same protections under the First Amendment as members of the mainstream media.

O'Grady is the author of The Nexus One Pocket Guide, The Droid Pocket Guide, The Google Phone Pocket Guide, and The Garmin nuvi Pocket Guide (Peachpit Press), the author of Corporations That Changed the World: Apple Inc. (Greenwood Press), and a contributor to The Mac Bible (Peachpit Press). In addition, he has contributed to numerous Mac publications over the years, including MacWEEK, Macworld, and MacPower (Japan).

When he's not writing about Apple for ZDNet at The Apple Core, he enjoys spending time with his family in New Jersey.

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Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview foretells his return to Apple

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AppId is over the quota
By Jason D. O'Grady | November 16, 2011, 9:27pm PST

Summary: PBS magically found the master tape from a Robert X. Cringley interview with Steve Jobs from 1995 and has released it as a 70-minute feature film.

I went to see Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview tonight at a theatre in downtown Philadelphia. The movie is the “entire tape” interview that Robert X. Cringley did with Jobs in 1995 for a PBS television special “Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires” that premiered in June 1996.

Here’s the official trailer for the film:

Only about 10 minutes of the interview made it into Triumph of the Nerds — which is available on YouTube — and the rest of the interview landed on the proverbial cutting room floor. The rest of the tape was feared lost, or so the story goes, until the original tape was recently discovered in the director’s garage.

The movie is playing for a limited two-day engagement (November 16 and 17) at 23 theaters across the U.S. Tickets and showtimes are on the official movie Web site.

The ’95 interview, about 70 minutes all told, captures a spunky and charismatic Jobs at the wise age of 40, speaking about Apple after a bitter power struggle with John Scully ended in his ouster. Jobs is about 10 years into his stint at NeXT and one point he asks Cringley “you don’t want to hear about NeXT, do you?” — almost as if he didn’t want to talk about it.

Although clearly not over his split with Scully — Jobs describes how Apple in 1995 was in a “glide slope” that “isn’t reversible” — it’s easy to detect a hint reverence in his voice when Jobs speaks about Apple.

Was Jobs making his big pitch for Apple to buy NeXT? Could be, because Apple indeed acquired NeXT (for $400 million) just 18 months after the interview was taped, and Jobs made his biggest triumph to date — returning and resurrecting Apple.

A couple of short clips from the movie:

My advice is to see the movie if you can. It’s definitely worth your time, especially if you’re, ahem, enlightened.

Jason O'Grady+ is a journalist and author specializing in mobile technology. He has published six books on Apple and mobile gadgets and his PowerPage blog has been publishing for over 15 years.

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Is AMD slimming down for a date with Apple?

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AppId is over the quota
By Jason D. O'Grady | November 11, 2011, 12:01am PST

Summary: Did Intel just become a one-night-stand? Are Apple and AMD headed to the altar?

The recent layoffs at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) have me scratching my head. With revenue and profit growing, why is AMD laying off more people?

AMD was slowly being smothered by Intel’s revenue-capping onslaught which was exposed by the New York Attorney General’s lawsuit (PDF). Now that AMD is recovering (courtesy of the Federal Trade Commission’s consent decree) why is it trying to lose a few more pounds? (Word is that AMD is shedding a lot of non-engineering staff.)

In 2010, it was reported that Apple was testing AMD processors in the MacBook Air. Curiously, just one year later, Intel announced a $300 Million dollar fund to help unleash an army of clones to compete with the MacBook Air. (Here’s the video of Intel CEO Paul Otellini’s announcement.) ZDnet UK’s Jack Schofield concludes that Intel is going after the Air.

They represent Intel’s attempt to take ultraportables similar to the latest versions of Apple’s MacBook Air and make them mass market.

Is Intel jealously smacking its runaway bride (Apple)?

Could Apple be cozying up to AMD?

In his biography by Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs compared Intel to a steamship noting that its graphics suck. Page 493:

We tried to help Intel, but they don’t listen much. We’ve been telling them for years that their graphics suck… They wanted this big joint project to do chips for future iPhones. There were two reasons we didn’t go with them. One was that they are just really slow. They’re like a steamship…Second is that we just didn’t want to teach them everything, which they could go and sell to our competitors.

What if Steve wanted to move beyond “steamship” innovation and sucky graphics?

Steve had the foresight to see that if Apple acquired AMD it would get a treasure chest of patents which would help it defend against future lawsuits (like the recent case with S3).

Most importantly, Apple would get AMD’s engineering team, which has historically innovated quite well despite a limited R&D budget resulting from very limited market access due to Intel’s unusual practices. (Dell alone reportedly received $6 billion from Intel between 2002 and 2007 to not buy AMD chips. Sometimes those payments exceeded Dell’s profits.)

To hear Anton Shilov tell it, Apple’s chip design team will never stack up to Intel.

Apple has never attempted to develop its own central processing units and used off-the-shelf chips for many reasons, the main of which is state-of-the-art technologies required for competitive microprocessors along with experience, patent portfolio and so on.

What do you think?

Related: Did AMD take a bite out of Intel’s forbidden Apple?

[image: Maximum PC]

Jason O'Grady+ is a journalist and author specializing in mobile technology. He has published six books on Apple and mobile gadgets and his PowerPage blog has been publishing for over 15 years.

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Airport Utility for iOS is extremely powerful - if you have an Apple 802.11n network

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AppId is over the quota
By Jason D. O'Grady | October 20, 2011, 12:01am PDT

Summary: The new Airport Utility is the iOS equivalent of the Mac OS X tool by the same name. it’s super-compelling because iPhones and iPads are great for Wi-Fi troubleshooting in the field.

This app falls squarely into the it’s-about-time category.

Last week Apple released iOS 5 for the iPhone, iPad and iPod. Alongside it Apple also launched a handful of completely new iOS apps, including Trailers, Cards and Find My Friends. In the melee I overlooked a fourth new iOS app from Apple that might be the best of the lot: Airport Utility (App Store, free).

Just like its name implies, Airport Utility is the iOS equivalent of the Mac OS X utility of the same name. It’s a compelling experience on an iPhone because it’s actually better suited for use in the field than a laptop — especially when troubleshooting problematic AirPort devices.

But that’s also its biggest limitation, Airport Utility for iOS only works with Apple-branded AirPorts (or “access points”), specifically the AirPort Express, AirPort Extreme, and Time Capsule, and it doesn’t support third-party access points from other manufacturers. (Hey, it was a big deal for Apple to change its beloved “AirPort” menu to “Wi-Fi” in Lion).

Another limitation is that Airport Utility for iOS only supports 802.11n devices. I verified this by testing 802.11n and 802.11g AirPort Express side-by-side and the app only picked up the 802.11n hardware. Planned obsolescence?

Airport Utility works as you’d expect: scanning the network its connected to and mapping the discovered Apple Wi-Fi hardware. From this graphical view you can change base station and network settings, or manage advanced features such as security modes, wireless channels, and more.

If you’ve got an Apple 802.11n network, this is a must-have app. Although I’m annoyed that it doesn’t work with my 802.11g hardware from Apple.

Jason O'Grady+ is a journalist and author specializing in mobile technology. He has published six books on Apple and mobile gadgets and his PowerPage blog has been publishing for over 15 years.

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Recalling a summer when Steve Jobs saved Apple and the Mac

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AppId is over the quota
Summary: The world is a lesser place without Steve Jobs. Here are a few recollections from a bygone summer in 1997 when he played the key role in shaping the Mac and Apple’s history and perhaps the course of technology innovation.

Like so many others, I am so sorry to hear of the death of Steve Jobs. He was a very great man and technologist. I extend my condolences to his family and friends and colleagues. Every computer user in the world owes a great debt to Steve Jobs, even if they don’t realize that they should thank him: for the very beginnings of personal computing with the Apple II; for bringing into mass markets the Mac with its graphical user interface and the mouse; and more recently, for the groundbreaking iPhone/iPad/iOS platform.

As a longtime Mac user and Apple industry observer — I built VisiCalc spreadsheets on the Apple II, have owned Macs from every generation since 1984, and in the 1990s worked my way to be Editor at MacWEEK, the Mac industry’s trade publication — I would offer a few recollections from a bygone summer in 1997 when Steve Jobs played the key role in shaping Mac and Apple history.

One tough one was the decision to kill Apple’s Mac OS licensing program.

In 1994, Apple decided to join a number of other OS vendors to support a common hardware platform based on the PowerPC RISC processor. (You can read more about this history in a piece I wrote a number of years ago at eWEEK.com.)

Apple signed up a number of licensees to make Mac clones and the introduction of early units were successful in the market. But the cloners and the Mac installed base were really looking forward to machines with the next generation of RISC goodness, the PowerPC G3 and G4 processor. I saw the demonstrations of the high-performance clones in the summer of 1997. Their prospects were excellent. And since the smaller cloner companies were fine with shipping way smaller volumes of machines than Apple, they could cannibalize the top of the market with the richest margins.

The common wisdom of the time was that licensing was the correct strategy for software companies. It was the accepted model. Not to Steve Jobs. He understood that for Apple to stay afloat and be able to afford its OS software transition, it would need to keep the G3 processor to itself. He drove the decision to kill the licensing strategy, despite the legal action and outrage by software developers and Mac VARs.

Over the rest of the year, Apple unraveled the licensing agreements. In November 1997, Apple released the PowerMac G3, followed in mid-1998 with the iMac G3 and PowerMac G3 (both of which were developed before Jobs returned to Apple). The machines were hits with the installed base. Apple survived thanks to a loyal installed base and good machines from Cupertino.

Check out: Stop the lies! The day that Microsoft ’saved’ Apple

Another remarkable performance I witnessed was Jobs’ “fireside chat” with
angry Apple developers at the 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). This was a critical moment in Apple history. Microsoft was wooing away hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of longtime developers inside and outside the company. The trope running in the technology press for several years was that the Apple was a zombie company, walking dead.

At WWDC, developers were pitched that the future of the Mac OS would be found in Rhapsody, a set of APIs based on NeXT OpenStep that would run on PowerPC and Intel processors. Many familiar frameworks, some of which had been viewed as the future of the Mac for years, were to be scrapped. Developers and companies had spent hundreds of millions writing to these now-orphaned technologies.

I recall speaking around that time with a division head of a major Mac market software company, who said that an engineering vice president had screamed in a meeting that this company would never write to an Apple API again. Yikes!

How would Apple keep its developers in the fold?

Perhaps, it would start with some honest talk from the Apple founder who at the time was just a “adviser” with the company? Jobs walked out and took on the questions in a town-hall format. He was amazing, handling hecklers and fans alike, and there were more of the former than the latter in attendance.

His talk was blunt and tough and unapologetic about “putting down” APIs and software teams. He told one developer that he was sorry for being “one of the people who put a bullet in your technology.”

Of course, he wasn’t sorry at all. Jobs said that Apple needed to focus, and “focusing is about saying no.”

He told the crowd that Apple had to get away from expensive, proprietary technologies. If most of the market — meaning the hated PC market — wasn’t going to use a technology, “so why should Apple do it?” he asked at the time.

Developers stayed with the Mac and the shift to a Unix foundation, while painful and long, revived the Mac as a platform. At the iPhone 4S roll-out this week, Apple said the installed base is more than 60 million.

At the same 1997 fireside chat, Jobs revealed perhaps his most significant contributions to Apple: the focus towards customer-centric solutions.

One heckler yelled out that Jobs didn’t have a clue to fixing Apple’s problems, to which Jobs said that the heckler was probably right. No doubt, this was a lie, since Jobs had plenty of ideas that he was already cooking: getting rid of the current Apple executive team, killing the licensing program and more restructuring, aka “putting down” entire divisions.

But Jobs hammered back with a call for increased customer values.

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back to the technology — not the other way around. I’ve probably made this mistake more than anybody, and I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it,” Jobs said.

Some 14 years later, this is still something that most technology companies don’t get.

Amazing.

David Morgenstern has covered the Mac market and other technology segments for 20 years.

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Did AMD take a bite out of Intel's forbidden Apple?

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AppId is over the quota
By Jason D. O'Grady | October 31, 2011, 10:00am PDT

Summary: Are Intel’s aging exclusivity agreement, the rumored 2010 testing of AMD processors at Apple, and Intel’s new “Attack of the Air Clones” really a coincidence?

A guest blog by Justin:

Am I the only person who is wondering why Intel seems bent on using Ultrabooks to undercut sales of Apple’s MacBook Air? After all, thin PC notebooks are nothing new. Why did Intel suddenly decide to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at non-Apple manufacturers to make thin laptops? And why do they all look like MacBook Airs?

I think I figured it out!

I have linked together several events in the last few years that may reveal a fascinating, underlying motive behind Intel’s Ultrabook initiative:

1. Most consumers and Apple fans do not know that Intel actually succeeded in locking Apple into an exclusivity agreement in 2005 - in exchange for porting Apple’s computers and laptops over to the X86 platform. For the last several years since that rumored event, Apple has not put a single AMD central processor in a single Apple computer.

Naturally, Intel hasn’t exactly complained about the illusion from consumers that Apple doesn’t think AMD’s CPUs or APUs are suitable for Apple products. In reality, Apple sacrificed their freedom of choice, in exchange for Intel’s help with porting.

2. Exclusionary requests are nothing new at Intel. In 2010, Intel got into antitrust trouble in Europe and America (after getting in trouble in Asia as well) for engaging in numerous, secretive, billion-dollar “carrot and stick” schemes to coerce and compel manufacturers and even retailers into not making or selling AMD-based products. Intel even secretly paid Dell 6-billion dollars (among many other complying manufacturers and even retailers) in exchange for not using AMD processors. European regulators took an unprecedented SWAT team approach to their investigation and raided the corporate offices of retailers.  They found that Intel was bribing tech retailers not to even stock AMD-based systems.

Wow!   No wonder AMD doesn’t have any money left for proper R&D these days!  AMD even had to sell their factories to stay alive!

Intel apparently avoided antitrust scrutiny for many years by allowing most manufacturers (except Dell) to produce a few intentionally-low-end AMD systems, as their existence  helped Intel avoid antitrust scrutiny yet and were little threat to Intel’s image of superiority. Based on subpoenaed emails in the NY Attorney General’s complaint, HP’s executives were so scared of Intel’s unwritten yet enforced punishments that they refused a gift of thousands of free processors from AMD.

When manufacturers violated Intel’s demands by using too many AMD processors, Intel would exact punishment in many creative forms on the manufacturers. Thus, Intel has a long history of punishing manufacturers for attempting to break free of Intel’s monopolistic demands.

3. The Federal Trade Commission’s Consent Decree in 2010 was forward looking, so Intel’s exclusivity with Apple was probably allowed to continue to its unknown end date.

4. How long was Intel’s secretive exclusivity agreement with Apple? In order to figure this out, we must of course speculate about how long Apple would be willing to sacrifice their freedom to Intel in exchange for Intel’s porting service. Maybe five years?

5. Just as a note, AT&T’s well-known exclusivity agreement with Apple was five years in duration. So perhaps the Intel/Apple agreement was a similar duration?

6. In mid-2010 (coincidentally five years after Intel succeeded in locking Apple into an exclusive relationship), very few people noticed the news that Apple started testing AMD processors in their labs.

7. Thus, Apple apparently seriously considered AMD inside Apple products in 2010. Or perhaps Apple even started making plans for AMD inside Apple products?

8. Since we know that Intel has a long history of devising carrot and stick schemes to encourage manufacturers to cooperate with Intel’s monopolistic demands, is it possible that Intel’s true motivation behind Ultrabooks (MacBook Air clones) was to punish Apple?

It seems like a plausible explanation for why Intel is getting all the non-Apple manufacturers to make MacBook Air clones, and it also may explain the unusual 300 Million dollar fund that is probably enabling the Air-Clone manufacturers to undercut Apple MacBook Air on price?

The end result is that Apple is between a rock and a hard place: Apple must either lose market share in the “Air and Air Clone” segment of the market, or they can compete with Intel’s artificially-low-priced clones by reducing MacBook Air’s prices to unprofitable levels. Of course, Intel knows that Apple’s only painless option is neither of the two; the only painless option is for Apple to drop any plans for AMD and therefore return to Intel.  Thus, the MacBook Air would then officially become an Ultrabook!

In a recent interview, an Intel executive said that “it is up to Apple” to decide whether or not the MacBook Air is an Ultrabook. Did the executive mean that it isn’t too late for Apple to return to Intel’s arms and take a seat at the 300-million dollar Ultrabook dinner table?

The FTC’s recent Consent Decree to Intel clearly states that Intel is not allowed to threaten or punish manufacturers for using a competitor’s processors. However, Ultrabooks and the accompanying 300-million dollar fund may be a brilliant, if not rather ingenious, monopolistic punishment from Intel, as it just narrowly avoids direct conflict with the terms set forth by the FTC’s Consent Decree.

By claiming that they just want to “innovate” by creating a not-so-new product category, Intel may likely sidestep conditions set forth in the Consent Decree. Lawyers at the FTC will probably have difficulty proving that Ultrabooks are nothing new, and Intel just created the category to wriggle through a Consent Decree loophole to get at Apple.

Additionally, paying the non-Apple manufacturers to undercut the MacBook Air on pricing may be argued as “using venture funds to market and create the products”, rather than predatory pricing. Pressing the manufacturers to make steep reductions in their Ultrabook retail prices will make their margins dependent upon “advertising and development payments” from Intel Ultrabook Fund, but that could be argued as aggressive pricing on a not-so-new product.

And, of course, the fact that these Ultrabooks look almost exactly like MacBook Airs? Well, that’s just… coincidence?

Image: AppleInsider

Jason O'Grady+ is a journalist and author specializing in mobile technology. He has published six books on Apple and mobile gadgets and his PowerPage blog has been publishing for over 15 years.

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