Jul 28
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…
Jul 27
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 designing 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).
This is an insane amount of money for what is a rather pedestrian and basic website.
You can read more on this story on the BBC website here where they state that a similar site built for the private sector would cost nearer £1.5 million to build, with running costs of around £150,000 per year. That’s an utterly astonishing 50 times less than our Government was willing to pay and begs the question, what else are these clowns wasting our money on?
Jul 27
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.