I suppose since every other blog on the face of the planet is buzzing with this fantastic news, I should say something. Yes, now the Mac can run Windows XP and Apple is supporting it. How cool is that? It’s pretty cool. It’s phenominal. It’s outrageous. It’s the best version of Windows XP ever. *drinks more kool-aid* OOOHHHHHH YEAH!!!!!!

It seems like every time you turn around Sony is pimping some new format that is meant to change our life, or perhaps just Sony’s bottom line. Yet Sony, more than any other company I know of, seems to be consistantly hell-bent on creating a new format for every device they create. At the same time the failure rate of these formats is extremely high and very well known. When I hear Betamax, MiniDisc, and UMD almost by default my eyes glaze over and I think what might have been. I sypmathize with Sony because they create some really awesome technology, but the more I look at Sony, the more I see a company who doesn’t even understand its own success. (more…)

According to Reuters, Google is raising $2.1 billion in a new stock offering by offering to sell 5.3 million shares of what was not so long ago the hottest stock out there. Now, as soon as I found out about this, the first thing I thought was, how in the hell is Google going to spend another $2 billion? Rob Hof over at Business Week thinks that maybe it could be to buy Facebook, which supposedly turned down $750 million and is seeking $2 billion. Now, the numbers do match up as far as Google having $2 billion and Facebook wanting $2 billion, but what would the real motive be?

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The Mercury News is reporting that Microsoft is working on a portable game system based around the Xbox brand. It’s being assumed that this portable gaming device is going to be some kind of iPod/PSP/DS killer. I really just don’t think that Microsoft can pull it off. Wait, let me rephrase that. I sincerely hope that Microsoft doesn’t rip off the PSP or the iPod because if Microsoft does that, the Xbox Portable would be a failure. The iPod is great because of the fantastic iTunes integration and a super-simple interface. It’s does all the important things right and is a huge success because of it. Competitors who have tried to kill the iPod have failed because they tried to do the whole bigger is better/more features thing that just doesn’t work in consumer electronics.

The PSP is successful because of the Playstation brand and that’s it. There are a handfull of games that are good, but it’s mostly overpriced trash rehashed from the PS2. To combat the lack of real games Sony has opted for a media strategy with the PSP. Make it do everything other than games and people will love it. Where this strategy falls short is that it doesn’t do music as well as the iPod and it doesn’t do games as well as the Nintendo DS. In most respects I think that the PSP is a pretty weak product among gamers. I and I’m sure many others don’t even use mine anymore and am waiting for the Nintendo DS Lite. The hottest thing to do on a PSP is to play emulated (and illegal) copies of old Nintendo and Super Nintendo games. Even UMD sales are slowing to a halt.

Microsoft, take notice of these facts. You need to create a device that capitalizes on the coolest innovation that you’ve created in gaming - The Xbox Live Arcade. Don’t try to do what Sony has done and made a portable PS2. Instead, make a cool device that plays Xbox Live Arcade style games - fun games that I can pick up and play for a few minutes and stop as needed. Geometry Wars on a portable console would be incredible. Gamers don’t want to play through an hour long Halo level on a portable gaming machine. Gamers want quick fun that they can put down at a moment’s notice. If gamers have to spend ten minutes getting to a save point, then you’ve already lost the battle. Take a page out of Nintendo’s playbook. Make the Xbox Portable cheap, make it have some killer games, and make it “portable fun” instead of living room fun. After all, the Gameboy, Gameboy Advance, Gameboy Advance SP, DS, DS Lite are the gaming machines that are on top, not the PSP.

I know that the Video iPod is one of the most talked about Apple products that has not yet been released. Yes, the 5G iPod can play videos, but Steve Jobs and company are very careful to say that the 5G iPod is a music playing device first and that it just happens to be able to play videos. However, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that the 5G iPod wasn’t made specifically for playing movies. It has a 4:3 screen ratio, a somewhat limited video content selection currently available, and most importantly, a horrible battery life for playing movies. If Apple wants to sell full movies on iTunes, they are going to need a device capable of playing movies in a widescreen format at the very least.

Now, before the latest Apple annoucements, a lot of rumor sites reported on a possible video iPod being announced. Someone even went so far as to make a really excellent fake of a real production sample of the iPod Video. It was really joke on everyone. Needless to say there are many people out there who think that it’s only a matter of time before Apple launches the iPod Video. I tend to agree.

So, this latest bit of rumor comes from the good folks at Apple Insider. According to the site Apple has put the “at risk” classification on the 5G 60GB iPod. That means that within the next 60 days the product could get replaced and that retailers should carefully monitor their inventory levels.

Now, I will be the first to admit that rumors and speculation mean absolutely nothing until the real products are unveiled. This is especially true with Apple. I don’t think that this Apple Insider report proves that Apple is going to unleash the iPod Video soon.

Also, this week iTunes did start selling a Disney Movie. It wasn’t a big hit movie like the Lion King. Instead, it was a Disney Channel movie, so it seems like more of Apple testing the market, rather than making an honest attempt at selling whole movies on iTunes.

So, will we see the iPod Video during Apple’s 30th birthday celebration?(probably the next Apple event) I honestly don’t know. The last two Apple media events have been a bit of a letdown for me. Macworld unveiled the MacBook Pro, and the February event unleashed the iPod Hifi. I realize that the MacBook Pro is really exciting to a lot of people, but we all knew Apple was going Intel, so it wasn’t exactly a shock. Ever since the “one more thing” event there hasn’t really been “one more thing” for Steve to unveil. I hope that Apple has been saving the good stuff for the 30th anniversary. Otherwise, we won’t be seeing an iPod Video, we’ll be seeing the iProjector - a LCD projector that has a built in iPod dock. Whoop-de-do.

I’ll try and keep this short, but there will probably be some followup postings in the next week or so about the ramifications of today’s annoucements. Yes, the PS3 is delayed until November worldwide(I was pretty much on the money with that) due to Blu-ray DVD copyright protection issues. Yes, the PS3 is going to have a big online service that is more media-centric, but will probably have some cool gaming features. Yes, Sony still doesn’t want to pay for the infrastructure to have games hosted on their servers. No, there was no iTunes integration for the PS3 announced. There was also more media-centric stuff annouced for the PSP, but I honestly don’t care about the PSP anymore. It’s not a good enough gaming device or a good enough media device for me to use it as either, much less both. I think the real winner in this is Microsoft, but I’ll get to that later…

Gaming Age is reporting that the recent rumors of a PS3 announcement on March 15th are true. Joystiq and others have already reported this. So, is it really going to happen? What are they going to announce?

Here is a short recap of the various PS3 rumors and their probability of being confirmed:

Playstation 3 Delay - Will the PS3 hit it’s supposed spring launch date? I really doubt it. At this point everybody is expecting a delay. Nobody really knows when the PS3 will be shipping and thus no stores are taking pre-orders yet. It’s most likely that the PS3 won’t hit the US until November. Perhaps it will show up in Japan as early as this summer, but don’t count on it.

New PS3 Controller - Everybody seemed to hate the original boomerang design even more than the Spiderman PS3 font. If they are going to unveil a new controller now would be the time, so it could very possibly happen. However, don’t expect it to look like the dualshock. They already got into hot water with that controller design once.

PS3 Online Service - I expect this to happen at some point, but don’t expect it to be annouced until E3. If they are building anything, then it’s probably going to be more media-centric than game centric. It’s going to disappoint a lot of people. It won’t be an Xbox Live killer by any means.

iTunes PS3? - As unlikely as this probably is, it also makes a whole lot of sense. If Sony would ditch their whole Sony Connect and latch on to the iTunes user base of millions of people, they might have the next generation’s “killer app”. However, the one thing Sony wants more than money right now is control, and without the ability to control the iTunes format, they won’t ever go for it.

So there you have it. Any other PS3 predictions?

It seems that we are hearing about high definition everything these days. Blu-ray and HD-DVD are both launching this year and every major media company is really starting to push the high-def revolution. This year might be the year when enough devices take advantage of HD and enough HDTV’s are within the budget of most consumers. However, is it really all wine and roses for this forthcoming technology advance?

In a word, no. The dirty little secret of this push to high-definition is really a push to DRM and closing the so called “analog hole”. Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray are going to use a content protection scheme that degrades the quality of the so called “high definition” movies to something much closer to DVD quality if you aren’t using a HDCP enabled connection to your television. Now, if we all owned HDCP enabled HDTV’s this wouldn’t be a problem. However, most of the HDTV’s sold in the last 5 years DON’T have HDCP enabled HDMI(or DVI) connections. What’s worse is that many HDTV’s being bought by consumers today still don’t have HDCP and thus the shiny new Blu-ray and HD-DVD’s they are going to be buying in the next year aren’t going to even show up in high-definition.

So, what is the movie industry going to do about this? Well, they are going to try to not really tell anyone until it’s too late, which I think is a mistake. You don’t hear Sony talking about how Blu-ray isn’t going to be high-definition on most televisions, instead they keep refering to it as “true high-definition”. However, it wouldn’t be fair to point the finger squarely at Sony. Toshiba and others aren’t doing much better to educate consumers about what is really going to be required to experience this high-definition revolution.

Ironically, the only comapnies that seem to realize that most HDTV’s don’t support HDMI/HDCP are the cable/sattelite television companies and Microsoft. Despite the seemingly constant evil of Microsoft, they have actually came out as pro-consumer in the high-def debate. They at least recognized that most HDTV’s use component inputs for their high-definition input when they built the Xbox 360. I for one thought that was a very intelligent decision. My only hope now is that the HD-DVD addon drive for the Xbox 360 somehow bypasses the content protection and allows the watching of HD-DVD in 1080i or 720p. Otherwise, the HD-DVD/Blu-ray battle is going to end up being one of the biggest wastes of consumer dollars ever and the winner is not going to be either HD-DVD or Blu-ray. The winner is going to be the cable and sattelite comapanies that offer video-on-demand or perhaps a video download service such as iTunes offering movies in HD.

Dude, you’re getting an Alienware. News article at The Inquirer outlining why it makes sense.

The Mole’s Take

I think this is a move that Dell needs to make. Dell has driven down prices to the point that they have razor-thin margins on their consumer PC’s. Most of Dell’s money is made in Corporate lease and server deals. That’s where the money is. The consumer PC business is not a place where Dell makes a lot of money. Their companion products aren’t exactly selling like iPods either. Buying Alienware would make a lot of sense because they have a high profit margin and are really good at selling gaming PC’s. If Dell does this they will most certainly need to retain most of Alienware’s operations as they currently are. If Dell tries to make Alienware into something that resembles Dell, then they would kill it and gamers would go elsewhere for their gaming rigs.

One thing is for sure, Dell is a cheap computer company and not a “cool” computer company. No matter how shiny you make a Dell, it still isn’t “cool”. The best evidence of that is the Dell DJ’s and other music devices. They are a joke and haven’t even put a dent in the iPod that it was intended to kill. Now that Apple is going Intel, Dell needs something to help their consumer image, otherwise cheap is not going to cut it.

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It’s the morning of the next great Apple announcement. What should we expect to see today? Video iPod? MacBook(iBook)? MacMini? iTablet? Well, all of those are great possibilities, but are they fun enough? A couple of them are, but as the mole I try to look deeper into the conspiracy theory to find the hard(ly) published rumors that slip through the cracks of most journalistic efforts.

So what could it be? Don’t be surprised if we see iTunes show up on the PS3 or the Xbox 360. Both systems are extremely media-centric and want to be the center of your digital life in the same way that the iPod and iTunes already are. Now, since Apple has partnerships with both Sony and Microsoft for various things, either company could have made a deal with Apple to get iTunes on their system. However, it’s more likely that we would see iTunes on the Xbox 360 for two reasons. One, it’s already on the market. Two, Apple owes Microsoft big. It wasn’t too many years ago that Microsoft gave Apple the cash infusion that it needed to stay alive, not to mention that Microsoft signed a 5 year deal to support OSX with Office. Apple wants iTunes and iPod to be everywhere. The iPod already works great with the Xbox 360. If iTunes shows up on the Xbox 360, it will sell 100 million consoles for that reason alone. That’s 100 million people buying movies from iTunes. That’s just too much business for Apple to turn down.

Any other great conspiracy theories out there? Think I’m crazy? MAKE A COMMENT!