“On Monday, July 21st Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer dropped a bomb on those listening to Apple’s quarterly conference call on earnings for Wall Street analysts. He said that gross margins for the coming quarter, and possibly beyond, would be lower for three reasons: 1) a back-to-school special; 2) a one-time charge related to a contract manufacturer, and; 3) ‘a future product transition that I can’t discuss with you today,'” Robert X. Cringely writes for PBS.
Cringely continues, “Here’s what I THINK Apple is about to do. I reported more than a year ago and repeated in this year’s predictions that Apple would be adding H.264 hardware support to its entire line of computers. The chip they are adding comes from NTT in Japan and was developed in cooperation with Japanese broadcaster NHK. The chips began sampling a year ago and should now be available in volume, though Apple may be paying as much as $50 each for early production.”
“The NTT chip is not just an H.264 decoder, it encodes, too, which is what makes it so special. The last I heard NHK was claiming the chip could compress a 1080p video and audio stream into four megabits per second, down from the 20 megabits normally required. If we assume Apple will apply the same kind of wink-wink, nudge-nudge transcoding to 1080p that they’ve already applied to 720p in the Apple TV, then it is within reason to expect they’ll claim to distribute 1080p over iTunes in two megabits per second,” Cringely writes.
“This is all about taking command of the 1080p video market. Apple’s strategy with iTunes will continue to evolve, but for the moment having a unique real-time 1080p capability will suck a lot of early adopters back into the Apple stores and give Apple’s emerging content competitors like Netflix something new to worry about,” Cringely writes. “Though it is doubtful that many will use it, you can be sure Apple will trumpet the ability to support 720p video in iChat.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: “We are working to develop new products that contain technologies that our competition will not be able to match.” – Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer, July 21, 2008
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Mtnmnn” for the heads up.]
Cringley has come up with some great theories in the past. Too bad none of them have come true.
I would not put ANY weight on what he thinks will happen.
And the crystal ball says, or is it the Magic 8 Ball? I wish these analysts would quit speculating and building up anticipation in the market with no foundation. Apple innovates – it will likely be pretty cool; whatever it is. As long as it doesn’t flop like MobileMe. Apple, like Coke – can survive one bad product; not two.
I don’t believe that this makes any sense.
Okay, it’s a possibility.
How about high-def video chat?
@Let the Speculation Continue
Do we know that MobileMe has flopped? Have people left the service in droves? Is it losing money?
No question the rollout has been very poor and many people have been inconvenienced but the thing is hardly Windows Vista. I think the Coke analogy is much more appropriate when looking at Vista than MobileMe. Let’s wait ad see how MobileMe is performing six months after launch.
“Apple, like Coke – can survive one bad product; not two.”
Apple and Coke have both already had more than one bad product. MobileMe will be straightened out in due time.
MEH
iPhone doesn’t do it for me.
Screen is too damm small, storage space is terrible, AT&T;/NSA/hackers combined with a insecure iPhone equals NO PRIVACY. Not to mention that EFI on Intel Mac’s represents a serious invasion of privacy and security, but at least one can control it by controlling when they hook up to the internet.
Corporate Intelligence is BIG BUISNESS!!!
Imagine if you had your huge client and price list stolen?
How about automatic encryption for the iPhone like it is on OS X?
Anyone?
Apple?
Bueller?
I don’t think this is what Oppenheimer meant. When he says “…that our competition will not be able to match…”, I tend to take his word for that. Since any company can purchase these codec chips then anyone could build the same thing.
I think it has something to do with Apple’s recent purchase of PA Semi. A custom chip designed by Apple is exactly the kind of thing that competitors will not be able to match, at any cost. I’m thinking along the lines of system support chips that would greatly boost the speed of any Apple computer, or even a turbocharged iPhone/iPod that would further distance Apple from the rest of the pack in that area.
Go ahead, iCal me.
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Speaking of Coke, some of these flavors are a little strange.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola variations:
Coca-Cola
New Coke (renamed Coke II)
Diet Coke (also known as Coca-Cola Light)
Diet Coke Plus
Coca-Cola C2
Coca-Cola Zero
Coca-Cola Cherry Zero
Coca-Cola Cherry
Diet Coke Cherry
Coca-Cola with Lemon
Diet Coke with Lemon
Coca-Cola Vanilla Zero
Coca-Cola Vanilla
Diet Coca-Cola Vanilla
Coca-Cola with Lime
Diet Coke with Lime
Coca-Cola Raspberry
Diet Coke Raspberry
Coca-Cola Black Cherry Vanilla
Diet Coke Cherry Vanilla
Coca-Cola Blāk
Diet Coca-Cola with Citrus (Lemon and Lime)
Coca-Cola with Orange (Out June 2007 in the UK)[68]
TaB (original Diet Coke, still available in some countries)
Passover Coca-Cola – a Kosher for Passover Coke made with pure cane sugar instead of corn syrup.
It doesn’t seem fair that they make a version for Jews and not the Catholics. How about Coke Ripple?
In time they will come out with Coke Erect.
This variation will be laced with female pheromones and Viagra.
Wingsy,
“Go ahead, iCal me.”
Oh yeah, you have been soooo iCal’d mister!
What were you talking about anyway?
Raving MacHead,
“Corporate Intelligence is BIG BUISNESS!!!”
I just heard about a new search BUISNESS called ‘Cuil’.
Those Irish are strange.
Interesting theory, but since Cringely is usually full of crap, the probability of it happening is probably in the sub 10% range.
I put my money on the one thing Apple can do quickly across their whole Mac lineup that will negatively impact their margins immediately, that is, lower prices.
Video conferencing everywhere.
If AT&T;’s 3G network can handle it.
@ Raving MacHead,
The new iPhone firmware has support for secure remote erase in case of theft.
Also, with all that EFI talk you sound like that other dude who posted about that stuff constantly a while back.
For Cringley, this is a pretty tame prediction. Usually he’s way out there. And way wrong.
the prices for laptops are in a free fall, at least here in germany and i am not even talking about the eepc. apple has always managed to keep a higher asp thanks to better hardware-quality, superior design, brand-awareness and the osx. that was difficult enough but let to amazing groth-rates over the last 3-4 years when an average windows laptop was 1000 euros. but now they are 500 euros. i dont know the prices in the us but probably they have fallen as such. apple hast to lower their prices and add features that others can’t match (which means higher costs) at the same time to outgrow the industry. i am pretty confident we will see amazing new macbooks, a macbook touch and new macbook pros at 10-15% lower price-points than today. the new $899 macbook will be available in september. ical me. (please i want to be icaled)
Once again Wingsy, You bring up the PA Semi connection. I think you are onto something big. This strategy would leave any copy cats and wannabe cloners stranded and just SOL.
ralph from berlin,
You do realize the consequences of being iCal’d, don’t you?
Your comments are automatically forwarded to the FBI, or in your case the Bundeskriminalamt.
But, if that’s what you want …
@Raving Machead: “screen too small?” “Storage space too small?” On what planet? Except for me and two others, my company of 500 uses Blackberries, and every single one of them has a screen smaller and crappier than the iPhone. Not a one of them can hold as much as my iPhone. On top of that, our BBs are not encrypted, but they are–like the iPhone–wipe-able. When you have something inteligent to say, please send up a flare.
“When you have something inteligent to say, please send up a flare.”
Unless you live in California.
Cringely was wrong when he made this guess more than a year ago, and he’s still wrong today. For Apple to include an H.264 encoder in every Mac, they’d have to be convinced that enough of their users would need it to to justify the cost of the part. Most Macs have a CPU and GPU that are capable of decoding 1080i H.264 video signal already, and there just aren’t that many Mac users who encode video to make it worth doing.
My company is working on H.264 encoder hardware for the Mac, and it would be a very good thing for us if Apple did this, since it would drive the H.264 adoption curve much faster, and we’d still be the company to go to if you wanted to do more than one stream at a time per host. I wish Apple would do this, but I don’t see it happening.
-jcr
Yeah, this is stupid. Hell, current Mac’s are fine with decoding H.264 1080p video, even without taking advantage of the H.264 support in ATI and NVidia chips.
The SOLE reason that we don’t get HD movies on MacOS X [that it’s limited to the AppleTV], is because Apple can’t reasonably bolt the absolutely stupid amount of DRM-related code that Microsoft did for Vista, like with the stupid ‘all loaded drivers must be signed by MS or you get SD output’, or the multiple times a second “has the user physically modified any attached hardware” checks.
Surely they’ve got something better coming than this.
I think the Fingerworks multitouch input across the Mac product line, which would obsolete the 20+ year old keyboard and mouse input that every PC uses (copied), may finally be ready for prime time. It would also fit the bill of Oppenheimer’s “no competitors would be able to match”.
My two cents.
Peace.
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Olmecmystic