The Wall Street Journal is reporting that AT&T will offer free access to its 10,000 WiFi hotspots “to nearly all of its broadband Internet customers starting early next week.” It had previously been offered only to its premium broadband customers.
This is good news for iPhone and iPod Touch owners who also get their broadband through AT&T (like me). I will report on how it works when the service is up and running.
The most interesting comment from Apple's 2008 Q1 quarterly earnings report came from CFO Peter Oppenheimer."This new iPod [Touch] has the potential to grow the iPod from being just a music and video player into being the first mainstream WiFi mobile platform running all kinds of mobile applications."Unfortunately, WiFi hasn't proven to be a reliable public utility. Searching for free public access tends to be a frustrating experience, even in downtown Chicago with its diluge of WiFi signals. I've tried to use both my MacBook and iPhone to connect to these seemingly free WiFi networks, and it rarely works. There are weak signals and "fake" open networks that actually require you to log on and pay via a web page (mostly hotels.). I don't even bother with WiFi on the go anymore, and unfortunately have to rely on EDGE. I hope Apple is thinking more toward wireless broadband services with broader coverage in the future, like the Kindle's lifetime subscription to EVDO. Wouldn't it be cool if you could buy a $20-a-month unlimited data plan for the iPod Touch, like the iPhone has from AT&T? Now that would change things, especially if there were broadband speeds.
Just as Gruber and others were commending Apple for their ability to keep new products secret, it turns out that for this year's Macworld, most of Apple's offerings were leaked well beforehand. In fact, 9 to 5 Mac was the first to describe the MacBook Air in September 2007 in a post titled "Slim Aluminum Coming Soon From Apple," stating the laptops would be “considerably slimmer that current MacBook,” "the screen reaches much closer to the edges than current MacBooks but is the same size as current MacBooks, indicating a somewhat smaller footprint"and “there is something strange about the touchpad.” (9 to 5 Mac was also the site which first leaked pictures of the “fatty” Nanos). The 1.1.3 software update to the iPhone was leaked (captured in a video), and movie rentals were leaked and confirmed via numerous media sources. It might be that Apple can maintain secrecy for the really big announcements, but for Macworld 2008, Apple was leaking like a screen door in a submarine. Still, I will recognize that the secrecy surrounding the iPhone was a great coup for the company.
"Although the tiny Silverthorne is not as powerful as Intel's top-of-the-line Core2 or Core2 Duo, it will support the x86 instruction set that makes a PC chip a PC chip. That's especially noteworthy in terms of the iPhone. Right now, the main chip inside the iPhone comes not from Intel, but from Samsung. And the Samsung chip is not an x86 chip, but one based on a core from Britain's ARM Holdings (ARMHY).The possibility of squeezing an x86 chip like Silverthorne inside a future iPhone would make adapting software from a future Mac computer for Apple's handheld substantially easier. (This assumes that Apple makes good on its promise to make the iPhone software development process easy and open.) Suddenly, the iPhone would be capable of running pretty much any Mac software with few, if any, programming changes."
This conjecture along with Apple's recent patent application for a docking station for a ultramobile computer hints toward the notebook as a "pod" of your digital life as opposed to the centerpiece. The combination of new technology in mobile chips and synching allows for very lightweight yet powerful mobile computers, which will allow for full access to the power of the Internet and also a select (yet still large) amount of data from a user's digital life. These computers will finally have battery life that maintains the computer's usefulness, a synching process that is relatively painless (as it is with the iPhone), and a light weight and size that is truly portable . My MacBook weighs around 5 pounds and I have come to hate the idea of taking it on the go. But if there was a notebook that only weighed a pound, I would gladly stuff it into my bag every day and take it to work, even if I had no plans to use it.
