Someday, I will stop talking about my iPod prediction of 2001 – the one Gizmodo called “the best iPod prediction ever made.” Today is not that day. In that column, I predicted that not only would the iPod be a hit (despite criticism that it was way too expensive among other things), but that the iPod’s…
It’s easy to make fun of CES, as we found out when we announced our excitement at not attending it in 2012. Now, even stalwart, general technology reporters like the New York Times’ David Pogue are getting in on the act, questioning whether we really need to watch a bunch of shiny new hardware unveiled for…
Last week, we learned that Google is taking steps to compete more directly with Apple AirPlay, as the music connection between smartphones and home entertainment systems becomes increasingly important to companies and consumers alike. Now comes news (originally from The Verge) that Microsoft is working on a shrunken-down, media streaming-friendly set-top box for television and sound…
We’ve been hopping up and down, waving our metaphorical hands in the air, wondering when Google will realize that Apple AirPlay represents a fundamental threat not only to its budding media business, but to everything from its mobile operating system to Chromebook sales. Finally, Google gets it. Eight years after Apple unveiled AirPlay, four years…
It’s no secret that DJs trigger samples made by other people. So why keep it a secret by only playing audio? Video DJs bring a new level of transparency to the DJ craft by including video in the mix, usually depicting the source of the audio sample (although really, they can attach any video to…
As noted here on several occasions, Google is way behind Apple (and even Microsoft) when it comes to integrating apps and services with the next hot screen: the television. Apple has AirPlay for sending music and video to televisions. Google has nothing of the sort, but at least now it has a small $300 sphere called…
For many Windows devotees, the first experience with an Apple product came in the form of the Windows iPod. For starters, Steve Jobs made sure that the Mac faithful were the first ones to use the iPod, iTunes, and even the iTunes Music Store — in fact, he resisted making them available on Windows at…
Music fans, and everyone else with a smartphone in their pockets for that matter, face a big problem: We have lots of stuff; it’s all on different machines; and we want it to be on other machines. Oh, and we don’t want to get an engineering degree in order for that to happen. You might…
The late Steve Jobs told the handpicked scribe of his biography Walter Isaacson that he had figured out “one more thing” — how to unite the world of Apple devices and services with the ubiquitous television. Jobs is no longer with us, but at the AllThingsD conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed that television remains…
Sonos was way ahead of the game when it comes to piping digital around the home. It took years for Apple to catch up, which it might have, by implementing AirPlay across its operating systems, iOS devices, AirPort Express, and AppleTV. Before that happened, I used to call Sonos the “iPod Home” that Apple should…
If you own an iPhone, iPad, or iPad Touch — and an AppleTV, AirPort Express or AirPlay-enabled system — you probably already know that you can play the music from any Apple AirPlay-enabled app (like Spotify or Pandora). All you need to do is tap the button within the app that looks like this: Suddenly,…
Apple unveiled a developer preview of its upcoming “OS X Mountain Lion” on Thursday morning, the latest of the company’s operating systems to be confusingly named after a cat. As with previous releases, Mountain Lion will offer the Mac faithful and fresh converts a host of new features once it launches to the general public in late summer….
Just yesterday, we posted a widely-disseminated guide to zapping music from Android smartphones and tablets to Apple AirPlay devices. Why? Because Google has been slacking on its wireless Fling technology, leaving Apple to eat its wireless music lunch. As we put it yesterday, “Google should be worried. This is how people develop a taste for…
Apple’s AirPlay gives people the pleasure of watching movies, looking at photos, and of course listening to music wirelessly, zapping the content from their iPhones, iPod Touches, or iPads to their televisions and home speaker systems with a variety of popular iOS music apps. What about Google’s Android devices — do those work with AirPlay too?…
We have long maintained that the television is a killer music app platform waiting to happen, so we’re not too surprised to find that Apple sold 1.4 million Apple TVs during its stunning fourth quarter of 2011, when it earned more profit than Google did revenue. As GigaOm points out, that’s half as many units…
