Update: Both MobileMe and Gmail seem to be back up and running. (I had to force quit Mail.app and restart it to get it functional again). Was this a DDoS attack? Brown-out in San Fran? Downtime while some changes to prevent DNS cache injection were made? The intertubes are on fire with rumors. Feel free to make up your own!
Yup, Apple’s on-again, off-again MobileMe service is currently off-again, at least as far as email is concerned. Poorly planned? Ill-conceived? Just plain cursed? Probably none of the above, but it sure can’t catch a break from the breakdowns, now can it?
Your MobileMe Mail is currently unavailable.
We apologize for this service interruption and are working hard to resolve the problem.
For more information, please refer to System Status on the MobileMe Support Page.
Et tu, blogger David G? Still MIA? (Or when you said later in the week you just didn’t mean that particular week? Le sigh.)
Meanwhile, Daring Fireball presents a very interesting comparison between the recently leaked memoranda of the two Steves, Jobs on MobileMe and Ballmer on Microsoft’s future. As a footnote, Gruber reveals the following:
Those Apple employees who are fortunate enough to work on the MobileMe team were treated to something extra: a 40-minute lecture from Jobs in Apple’s Town Hall theater, which lecture was, shall we say, slightly more profane. E.g. where the memo says “we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year”, in Jobs’s Town Hall address to the MobileMe team, it came out more like “You better [redacted] fix it by the end of the year”. Paraphrasing, but you get the picture.
I do! Let’s hope they did, can, and will.
(Though in all fairness, I should reveal that my primary account, Gmail IMAP has been positively frustrating for me for the last few weeks — far more than MobileMe (since I was not a 1%). Multiple certificate errors, time-outs, etc. to the point where “unable to contact imap.gmail.com” is becoming my “you’ve got mail!” — is IMAP really that hard, or are the megacorps taking us out for a little messaging ride?)
Ars Technica’s crack ninja infiltration squad somehow snuck into the Jobspod and snatched up a copy of the full email his Steveness sent out to Apple last night.
Head on over to read the full text, meanwhile we’ll just note the concluding paragraph:
The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services. And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.
That’s not a timeline that makes us happy, but the fact that it’s at least a bit more realistic does inspire some confidence.
While David G. seems to have forgotten his pledge to update us on MobileMe’s status late last week, following what can only be called a disasterous launch, Steve Jobs seems to have just dropped the BOOM! on MobileMe’s status within Apple.
Ars Technica claims to have seen an email sent out late last night in which Jobs admits:
It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store. We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.
Instead of dropping MobileMe on/around July 11th, Jobs believes a staggered approach would have been better, where features and WebApps were rolled out one by one, each with considerably more testing. Saying MobileMe was “not up to Apple’s standards”, Jobs also said “The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.”
How so?
Eddy Cue, former VP of iTunes, adds MobileMe and AppStore to his portfolio, and now reports directly to jobs as VP of Internet Services.
Steve Jobs only speaks to the media when he has to, when he launches an iPod, the iPhone, the MacBook Air… the App Store. Here’s what he just said to USA Today:
“This is the biggest launch of my career.”
From the man who brought us the Apple II and the Mac? Really? That’s a lot of faith in what some are calling the next major platform. And it looks like Jobs isn’t taking any chances. Heck, it looks like he’s positively stacking the deck:
500 Apps in the Store at launch. 450 of them under $10. 125 of them FREE.
Of course, to enjoy these Apps, you’ll need iTunes 7.7. It’s live now, just crank up Apple’s Software Update or go to Apple.com for the direct download!
Use iTunes 7.7 to sync music, video, and more with iPhone 3G, and download applications from the iTunes Store exclusively designed for iPhone and iPod touch with software version 2.0 or later. Also use the new Remote application for iPhone or iPod touch to control iTunes playback from anywhere in your home - a free download from the App Store.
You’ll need iPhone firmware 2.0 as well, unfortunately, so that means we’re still waiting for another big drop… and/or an iPhone 3G!
UPDATE: According to MacRumors, while the App Store proper is not visible yet in iTunes, APPS ARE!!! To find them, just search for their names (or parts thereof), i.e. AOL, Remote, etc.
(And YES! Apple’s iTunes Remote is there, and it works with iTunes and Apple TV!)
What with the shareholders meeting yesterday and the SDK event tomorrow, Apple’s often reclusive CEO is downright chatty this week!
Hot on the heels of Fortune Magazine’s stories on Apple being “America’s Most Admired Company” and the almost yang to its yin of “The trouble with Steve Jobs” comes the title-case-challenged interview: “Steve Jobs speaks out“
Amazing insights abound, starting right off with the Birth of the iPhone!
“We all had cellphones. We just hated them, they were so awful to use. The software was terrible. The hardware wasn’t very good. We talked to our friends, and they all hated their cellphones too. Everybody seemed to hate their phones. And we saw that these things really could become much more powerful and interesting to license. It’s a huge market. I mean a billion phones get shipped every year, and that’s almost an order of magnitude greater than the number of music players. It’s four times the number of PCs that ship every year.
“It was a great challenge. Let’s make a great phone that we fall in love with. And we’ve got the technology. We’ve got the miniaturization from the iPod. We’ve got the sophisticated operating system from Mac. Nobody had ever thought about putting operating systems as sophisticated as OS X inside a phone, so that was a real question. We had a big debate inside the company whether we could do that or not. And that was one where I had to adjudicate it and just say, ‘We’re going to do it. Let’s try.’ The smartest software guys were saying they can do it, so let’s give them a shot. And they did.”
Not to mention this little bombshell:
Take the iPhone. We had a different enclosure design for this iPhone until way too close to the introduction to ever change it. And I came in one Monday morning, I said, ‘I just don’t love this. I can’t convince myself to fall in love with this. And this is the most important product we’ve ever done.’
“And we pushed the reset button. We went through all of the zillions of models we’d made and ideas we’d had. And we ended up creating what you see here as the iPhone, which is dramatically better. It was hell because we had to go to the team and say, ‘All this work you’ve [done] for the last year, we’re going to have to throw it away and start over, and we’re going to have to work twice as hard now because we don’t have enough time.’ And you know what everybody said? ‘Sign us up.’
Whatcha waiting for? Get reading!
Also asked and answered at the Apple shareholders meeting covered earlier was a question about the oft-rumored Flash player for iPhone. CEO Steve Jobs put a Goldilocks-esque kibosh to the rumor thusly:
John Gruber’s toldjasos and youmustbejokings were interrupted only by Jobs stressing that Apple and Adobe (who makes and markets the ubiquitous player) maintain good relations, so potential enough remains to feed the rumor-mill for posts to come.
However, it’s worth remembering that:
- Flash is a notorious resource hog on OS X and Adobe has never really addressed this for the desktop
- Regardless of its ubiquity Flash remains a proprietary standard and Apple has stressed open standards (like AJaX for MobileSafari)
- And perhaps most importantly, Flash is a competitor to Apple’s (admittedly languishing) QuickTime and Apple could very well be preparing to put some of their sudden mobile browsing penetration behind their own product rather than just handing Adobe the space.
Macworld also adds that, with regards to raining on Dieter’s iPhone SDK parade tomorrow, “you’ll see a lot of applications out there this summer.”
CEO Steve Jobs (with a veritable chorus of board members and execs answering backup), took his annual grilling yesterday courtesy of Apple’s shareholders meeting.
Among the iPhone related news:
- When asked why Apple doesn’t take games seriously enough to acquire their own Halo-class developer (ironic, as Halo was originally intended for the Mac), Jobs highlighted Thurday’s iPhone SDK event as opening a new door for Apple gaming.
- With regards to the still languishing .Mac online service — specifically the possibility of blogging tools — Jobs responded that we’d see more from .Mac before the end of the year, and with the iPhone SDK, if Apple didn’t provide a mobile blogging tool, a 3rd party would be able to. (Then El Jobso kindly suggested the questioner learn Cocao and write the app himself!)
- On the subject of iTunes movie rentals, and why Apple does not yet have the 1000 movies Jobs said would be available by now, the mustache-twirling serial villains at Big Media were handed the blame, specifically the longer-than-anticipated delays in securing download rights for older films before such rights were ever foreseen, much less clarified. (Perhaps next time someone could ask Le Steve about international downloads for those of us outside the USA?)
- Tim Cook, as previously reported, fielded the question on the iPhone in China, and in Asia in general.
- In what some are interpreting as a rare slip in the long tradition of Jobs not commenting on potential future releases (his ship don’t leak from the top!), longer than normal pauses apparently prefaced Jobs’ no-comments on questions about an X-Serve Mini style embedded home server and an Apple TV supported by advertising rather than download purchase fees. Not iPhone specific, but either bit of tech could substantially impact the iPhone’s capabilities or content models.
- Lastly, when asked why the iPhone always has half the memory of the iPod Touch, Jobs pointed out that things like the cell radio take up more space in the iPhone, leaving less for memory, and that the iPod would likely always take the lead in storage size.
Be sure to check out AppleInsider’s complete coverage on the shareholders meeting in general, including the Mac, Apple Retail, and more.
