Apple today announced the brand new Apple TV. So far this device has been given ‘hobby’ status from Apple as it’s not matched the sales figures achieved by the likes of the iPhone and iPod.

The latest version of Apple TV is less than a quarter the size of the outgoing model and does away with storage completely, relying on streaming from either the iTunes Store or any other computers in the vicinity which have the latest version of iTunes installed.

It looks slick, but like the previous version is compromised by mostly relying on iTunes rental content for TV viewing capability. One interesting feature is that any iOS device can now stream directly to it, so pictures and video taken on your iPhone can be viewed easily on your TV.

Apple announced a huge and very welcome reduction in price to only $99 which sounded great until I seen that UK customers are being asked to stump up £99. Not fair.

Great post from Neven Mrgan on the subject of the new iMac compared to its two main all-in-one competitors. He’s not comparing the machines themselves but their websites.

This is one area where Apple continuously excels and the competition is beyond hopeless. Check out the URL’s for each product page. The iMac is just www.apple.com/imac. Simple, compact and memorable (just like the site itself). You won’t believe the mess of the HP page and it’s 4 line URL.

The simplicity Apple brings to the naming of its products actually says a lot about them. Mac’s tend to be quite elegant, uncluttered and easy to use. Would you prefer an Apple MacBook or an HP Pavilion Dv6-2113sa Entertainment? Or maybe an Acer Aspire Timeline 4810TZG-414G32MN. How about a Packard Bell Easynote Butterfly XS-EV-001UK? Thought not…

Here’s a question for you, how do you spend £105 million building a website?

The answer it seems is to get some UK Government civil servants involved. The Central Office of Information have published a report on the costs and quality of selected UK Government websites in 2009-10 and it makes eye-watering reading.

The staid www.businesslink.gov.uk site cost a stunning £35 million per year over 3 years to build.

As someone who has experience in building websites I simply cannot fathom how you can spend, in one year, £6.2 million on strategy and planning, £4.4 million on design and build and £4.4 million on testing. They also managed to spend £4.7 million in a year on hosting for a site which only gets a million visits per month (it works out that each visit to the site cost an incredible £11.78).

Apple today announced some major new products, with long overdue updates to the iMac, Mac Pro, Cinema Display and an innovative new multi-touch trackpad for desktop systems they’re calling the Magic Trackpad.

Only a couple of years ago these products would have been launched with some fanfare, but now only the iMac even makes it onto the Apple homepage (and then only very small at the bottom of the page along with the iPhone case program and the iOS 4.01 software update). The big story is still that the “iPhone 4 is here”, old news now surely.

It really does show where Apple is heading though. The external Mac Pro case design hasn’t seen a major update for over 7 years (over 4 generations in computer time) and before today the Mac Pro hadn’t received any updates at all for over a year and a half. The iMac, once the biggest thing in Apple land, had gone over a year before this update.

Apple certainly does seem to be relegating it’s OS X machines to second class citizen status as it concentrates on the iPhone and iPad which now account for more revenue than desktop and laptop Mac divisions added together.

Sweet Jesus, according to Slashdot the British Royal Navy submarines are now running Microsoft Windows. Hardly a week goes by without huge security scares involving Microsoft products so surely it’s crazy to see that our fleet of NUCLEAR submarines will now be running Windows 2000 network servers and XP workstations.

I understand that they are trumpeting a huge cost saving (which will come almost entirely from the use of commodity hardware replacing the specialist and extremely expensive custom hardware of old) but surely a Linux/Unix based system would have been cheaper and much, much more secure. I mean, Windows 2000 and XP are a hackers dream and a security nightmare, surely Vista/Windows 7 with their much heralded improvements in security should have been the OS of choice if it absolutely HAD to involve Microsoft.

My God, we’re talking of nuclear submarines here, I’m breaking out in a cold sweat just thinking of what could go wrong…

Brilliant post over at Counter Notions regarding how we take what the iPhone has give us for granted. To all the people who have jumped on the Apple slaying bandwagon of late, read the article here

from Counter Notions…
But it’s sobering to remember that a single device by a company with zero experience in the industry and against all odds caused such a tidal wave of change. Change didn’t come because of Nokia, Microsoft, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, RIM or any other player in the market for the past 15 years bet their company on it. Android and webOS weren’t there before the iPhone.

With the much anticipated Chevrolet Volt, GM has hit upon exactly the right solution to the problem of how we are going to power our cars.

The hybrid Volt uses electric motors to turn the wheels, with energy being stored in Lithium Ion batteries similar to the ones in an ordinary laptop and a petrol engine to keep it topped up when you are away from a socket. It has enough power to travel 40 miles on battery power alone. This is enough to cover most daily journeys and a recharge using a standard 240V power supply takes around 3 hours.

The clever part is that the battery can be charged on the go using the 1.4 litre petrol engine. It doesn’t power the wheels and only acts as a generator to charge the batteries. This gives it the same kind of range as any normal petrol car and addresses the main problem of driving electric vehicles, their pathetically short range.

Internal combustion engines run most efficiently when kept revving within a set range. This rarely happens though as in order to accelerate we need to cycle through the gears, constantly changing the speed of the engine as we go. Using the engine as a generator means that it can find its sweet spot for efficiency and stay at that speed all the time.

And remember this is just the start. The next generation will probably give you 100 miles between charges (how many people do more than 100 miles in a day?). The on-board combustion engine will become smaller and even more efficient and after a couple of generations will likely disappear altogether as superfast charging batteries become mainstream. These will take just as long to charge as we take to fill up with petrol today.

Of course it will take huge infrastructure investment to build the charging stations and the electricity capacity to power it all but it will be worth every penny if it can take away our reliance on middle east oil.

World peace AND clean air, surely that’s a goal worth chasing?