Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

Today I purchased a 1GB iPod shuffle at the San Francisco Apple Store. I chose the 1GB because I intend to use it for music and as a USB drive. As you may know, in order to use the shuffle as a USB drive, you have to specify in iTunes how much space is reserved for music and how much for user data. This is necessitated by the Autofill feature that can fill an iPod shuffle with just the right amount of random music from the iTunes library.

The interesting note here is that the data portion of the iPod shuffle in USB drive mode is formatted as Macintosh PC Exchange (FAT32 for all you Windows readers) by default. I think this is a great choice made by Apple because I use my USB drive across platforms often. I presume users who want an HFS+ -formatted iPod shuffle can use the erase function in Disk Utility to do so. (I have not tested that hypothesis.) The filesystem works similarly to the iPod. There is a hidden folder in the root of the drive named iPod_Control that contains the device’s music.

In today’s podcast (RSS feed available here), my friend Shawn King at Your Mac Life states that a little birdie from Apple told him why the keynote won’t be webcast this year.

It’s not anything sinister. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s not the angry hand of Steve coming down to punish Mac users for the transgressions of rumor sites. It’s a simpler, more common sense reason.

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This story from Lisa DiCario at Forbes further illustrates a point I’ve made on this site a few times recently: The world as a whole is largely ignorant of the Mac and the workings of Apple Computer and the Mac community, and some people aren’t afraid to put that ignorance in all it’s glory on display in public forums (such as Forbes’s website).

I really don’t like writing line-by-line analyses of such things, but sometimes when I get caught up in the pre-Expo excitement and I read something that’s especially bad, I’m a little more motivated to do just that.

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Yesterday at CES, a Motorola executive previewed a new phone that plays music from Apple’s iTunes Music store. A brief story about the preview can be found at PC Magazine. The phone mimics the iPod’s interface when browsing music, and according to the article, it can be sync’d “with a computer and the iTunes Music Store”, although in reality it would sync with iTunes and not the music store directly.

This product was announced on Your Mac Life back in July, I believe, and should be a surprise to no one.

Here’s the important thing to learn from the introduction of this device: There is no Apple-branded iPhone. There will be no Apple-branded iPhone any time in the near future.

Apple simply doesn’t believe there is anything special they can do with cell phones that isn’t already done by someone else. Apple has no value to add to the product to make it uniquely theirs, so they won’t create one. It’s not hard to understand.

Please note that I don’t believe this is the end of the rumor. Stupid rumors have an infinite life-span in the Mac world, it seems, and I anticipate hearing about an Apple-branded phone before every Macworld until my death, and 25 years after that.

I present, for your reading and comprehension, this statement, allegedly from Apple, concerning Tuesday’s Macworld keynote address web broadcast:

Apple will not be making satellite coordinates available. Although the keynote WILL be available on our web site - it will NOT be available until sometime AFTER the keynote is over. They do NOT have a time determined, so it may not be immediately after the keynote is over.

This statement seems to have been received by a MacInTouch reader and posted on their site. That’s all good. What isn’t good is the paragraph that precedes it:

Steve Jobs has killed real-time webcasting and satellite broadcast of his Macworld Expo keynote, according to an Apple note forwarded by a MacInTouch reader:

Woah woah woah, stop just a minute. Where did this bit of exaggeration come from?

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