Attempting to understand Apple’s future plans is essentially the tech world’s version of Kremlinology. Once upon a time, when the Soviet Union was a vast and often impenetrable structure, experts made their names explaining the significance of the position of Soviet leaders on balconies and their prevalence in reports in the Communist Party newspaper, Pravda.

Unlike the Soviet State, Apple doesn’t need a Pravda, it eschews any kind of official news source besides the self-aggrandising stream of news stories on the Safari start page and the “I’m A Mac ads”. It has a far more powerful ecology of blogs and rumour sites. Places like Apple Insider and The Unofficial Apple Weblog feed on every scrap of information they can find while there is a deeper level of extremely specialised blogs like Patently Apple scrutinising ever document Apple has to file.

Most of the time, the rumours that spread through the Apple rumour ecology are based on very little – a copyright filing indicating the name “iSlate” makes people believe that will be the name of a new product but few mention that Apple has secured copyrights for names that is has never and will never use. Apple’s an incredibly protective, litigious organisation. A lot of its moves are defensive.

But this week, we got confirmation of something Apple watchers already knew instinctively – Apple has and is continuing to seed rumours to certain publications. The main one (and the title that has the best track record with correct speculation) is the Wall Street Journal which appears to be Apple’s favourite conduit for controlled leaks. It’s likely that it chooses the Journal because it is (understandably) widely read by the people working in the financial markets.

Apple does PR like the Soviets did foreign policy – they have a message and stick to it. You don’t talk about the future until it officially arrives. It operates with high security and a serious level of paranoia. It’s an attitude that its main suppliers have to share (sometimes with negative consequences). Kremlinology became important during the dying days of the Soviet Union because the situation could quickly go from “this party leader is well” to “this party leader has a cold but is recovering” to “this party leader is dead”.

Steve Jobs’s health issues began a new age of Apple “Kremlinology” – who would lead Apple next? Would it be Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook (now looking likely to go to GM)? Phil Schiller, Apple’s stand-in pitchman while Jobs was away? Or even, Jonathan Ive, the design genius behind the iPod, the iPhone, the rejuvenated iMacs and the Macbook line? Beyond that question, another, more fundamental one remains – will Apple’s success continue without Jobs?

Apple’s work continued during Jobs’s absence but many argue that it was able to because he has seeded his way of thinking throughout the organisation. The suggestion is that there is a WWSD (what would Steve do?) philosophy at work. Apple stumbled during Jobs’s period in the wilderness but that was before he totally restructured the company. When he returned, he rebuilt Apple in his own image. The obsessiveness and the secrecy at the heart of its corporate persona is drawn directly from Jobs’s own personality.

The latest rash of Apple “Kremlinology” surrounds the idea of the Apple Tablet and its potential to create a real market for tablet PCs. The iPhone jump started the smartphone market and created a real awareness that apps could make money. Before it the iPod created the current digital music market. Other devices existed before them but Apple changed the approach. That’s what people expect from the Tablet, if Apple doesn’t deliver that or more, the rumour economy and more importantly the stock market will explode with disappointment.

Apple’s taste for controlled leaks and the volume and spread of rumours around the Apple Tablet suggest that will we get just that on January 27. But what we don’t know is what the “just one more thing” moment will be, the surprise that Jobs will have spring loaded into the announcement.

If the rumours were too far wide of the mark, Apple’s organisation would have pushed out some clues to what they’re really up to. 

It’s in Apple’s interest for the general direction of the rumour ecology to be going in the right direction. False rumours can be viciously detrimental to their stock price. Apple has built up the expectation that it’s launches are genuine news events and it has to maintain that.

With 18 days to go until Apple makes its next official pronouncement, the Kremlinology will go into overdrive. It’s said that the announcement could be Jobs’s final keynote – could that be his “just one more thing”, an emotional swan song to follow his acknowledgment of the young liver donor that kept him alive? It’s unlikely, Jobs is the evangelist but he always wants the product to be the star.

But like the status of Soviet leaders, we’ll not know what the product or products Apple is ready to launch will be or how they’ll work until they arrive. Before the iPhone, the name was well known but just how it would work was a mystery. That’s where we are now – we know something is coming but what could it be and what will come with it? A TV subscription service, a new iPhone as well, iTunes thrown up in the cloud? All of those are possible. Let the Kremlinology continue…

Just a quick call back to my piece a few weeks back on the workers that build the consumer electronics we’re drooling over. Read it here

There was a lot of talk that the Apple iPad announcement would be Steve Jobs’s final keynote, the swan-song appearance from the king of the consumer electronics showmen. There was no sign of that. But the previous fire and excitement of his presentations arguably wasn’t there. 



The Apple iPad showcase opened with a long period of Jobs browsing on the device which was informative but not insightful. Then when Phil Schiller demonstrated iWork on the Apple iPad, it was cool but it wasn’t sexy. It’s one of life’s universal laws that unless you’re a fetishistic accountant, spreadsheets aren’t sexy. But good on Phil for trying.

If the iPad announcement is not Steve Jobs’s final bow at Apple, there are good signs that it is his Let It Be, the prelude to the final master piece. When The Beatles recorded Let It Be, they created a solid record that played to their roots but did not sing with the excitement of earlier records. Oddly, Abbey Road, recorded after Let It Be, came out  before it, concluding The Beatles with a work of creative genius but not their discography.

The iPad is potentially the Let It Be of the Apple catalogue, a solid move forward that keeps it rivals at bay on price and with features but the next product, the next version of the iPad will be Jobs’s Abbey Road, introducing innovations that will tie together the Macbook, iPhone and iPad worlds in ways that many commentators have already speculated on.

The iPad’s ebook reading smarts and the iBook Store put Apple in a new market, it’s WiFi and 3G capabilities presage iTunes in the cloud and it’s potential as a portable TV and movie watching device could allow Apple to do some massive things in that market.

Just as the first generation iPhone was the one that sent the fans to the doors of the Apple Store, queuing overnight to paw at their new device, so the Apple iPad is the initial taster for Apple’s new tablet product class.

I think the next generation will bring a front-facing camera for video while moves later in the year will bring clever integration between iPhones, Macbook and the iPad. The low price point and affordable pay-as-you-go data plans are about Apple outflanking its rivals but it will still need to show every day consumers what they’ll use the iPad for.

To mangle a phrase from Leonard Woolf, after the fanboys comes the deluge. The hardened shock troops of Apple’s fanatical fanbase will grab iPads as soon as they can. They will evangelise about them at every step and mere civilians will be drawn in by their love of the tablet.

Apple’s marketing campaigns will take some of the strain but it’ll be that magic moment of seeing and envying someone else’s iPad which will send the more partisan consumers to the tills.

The iPad is destined for millions of living rooms and kitchen worktops as well as offices thanks to Apple’s big talk of hooking up to projectors and all the Schiller chatter about spreadsheets and Keynote.

But that mainstream acceptance will come over a couple of generations. The first Apple iPad is a slab of classic rock’n’roll, Apple playing to its strengths and showing its rivals that it’s still got the chops.

The Apple iPad’s implementation of newspapers and books won’t convert the doubters yet but when they see friends and colleagues on the train clutching their iPad, it’ll start them thinking. Then, a next generation iPad will seal the deal, pushing the concept into a truly creative space. Jobs’s Abbey Road is yet to come…

The article is great because it finds Jobs during his NeXT period and feeling reflective. It’s him at a low ebb but at a point when he was willing to speak to journalists at length and really discuss his philosophy on things.

One of the killer quotes for me, especially in the context of the Apple iPad is this one:

To make step-function changes, revolutionary changes, it takes that combination of technical acumen and business and marketing — and a culture that can somehow match up the reason you developed your product and the reason people will want to buy it. I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.

Also funny to read the views of “insiders” back then who were pretty much counting him out:

“Remember, this is a guy who never believed any of the rules applied to him,” one colleague says. “Now, I think he’s finally realized that he’s mortal, just like the rest of us.”

Tell that to the Tech Moses who just threw his tablet down from the mount.

I’ve written before about my issues with iTunes. It is the worst Apple application (running iPhoto into a close second place), a bloated terror of a programme that struggles to do the basics.

iTunes needs to be stripped back and separated, pulling elements into lighter weight apps that work as a suite rather than a lumpen whole. If Apple did that (which it won’t), I have one big feature request – iTunes analytics. 

iTunes analytics would be one of those features for geeks only but it would be brilliant. Why have to rely on Last.fm scrobbling to measure play counts and give you stats? Built in analytics would let you graph your iTunes play statistics by date, time, month, time of day, type of artist, maybe even mood.

You could also pull in play counts and stats from your iPhone or iPod when you plugged it in or even better via wireless sync. iTunes is paradoxically bloated and basic. I would love to see Apple put the polish of the hardware into iTunes. I don’t hold out much hope. 

Imagine Apple if Steve Jobs never returned. Imagine it had continued to allow poor-quality machines with the Mac OS onboard to be sold. Imagine if it had continued to dilute its brand and its influence, allowing everything good about the Mac to ebb away while a hardcore of fans cried foul. Without the presciding central intelligence of Steve Jobs, there’s every chance Apple would have gone down.

That’s what happened to Polaroid. An iconic brand originally guided by the vision of one amazing man, Edwin Land, was squandered on bad products. The strong central idea of Polaroid instant photos was disgarded and the solid presence of the brand was wasted. The great packaging design spearheaded by Paul Giambarba was left behind and executives became happy to put out poor quality products in ugly boxes, to allow the digital world to sweep the analogue beauty away. 

But Polaroid fought hard against the dying of the light. People still loved those little instant snaps. There was a hardcore of Polaroid lovers who would have bought Polaroid products forever. The average Polaroid owners only bought 5 film packs in the entire lifetime of their cameras but the obsessives bought many times that.

When I wrote about The Impossible Project, the band of dreamers and geniuses that brought the Polaroid instant film factory in Holland back to life and developed their own compatible brand of instant film, I discovered a mindboggling fact: Polaroid film didn’t die because of lack of demand. It died because the executives let it. 

A decision was made by Polaroid head office that the firm should stop ordering the chemicals to make the film  and just ride their stockpile out for what they thought would be at least 10 years. But they miscalculated the level of demand. 24 million film packs were shipped from the Dutch Polaroid factory in 2008 alone.

Polaroid and the last vestiges of its original form died on June 14, 2008. Since then collectors and fans have scoured the web and the world in general for the last remaining stock and the DNA of the true Polaroid has transferred to the brilliant team at The Impossible Project who are producing instant film for Polaroid cameras. 

But the Polaroid name has been sold and horse-traded countless times in the past 20 years. It is now owned by a consortium of business types with a love of Lady Gaga who they have called in as creative director. She swore and postured during the CES press conference in a way that would have angered Edwin Land immensely.

Out of three products revealed by Polaroid from the Lady Gaga Grey Label collection, only one was in its working state. Bobby Sager, the new head of Polaroid, stood beside her dressed in a curious outfit with sneakers on his feet and a cardigan tied around his shoulders. It’s a curious outfit because in reality Sager is a Boston bruiser with a hard-nosed business sense. He ain’t no Lady Gaga loving dilettante whatever image he wanted to pedal in Vegas. 

The New Polaroid is like New Coke – a terrible idea. It now pumps out crappy television, awful digital photo frames and instant cameras that look like they were designed by some state-owned skunk work in a former Soviet State. Lady Gaga could not care less about Polaroid or its heritage.

Polaroid is just another Lady Gaga brand extension and fair play to her really, the necrophiliacs now screwing Polaroid senseless are paying her a pretty penny for the publicity she can draw for them. Polaroid is dead and buried and every press story you read about its resurrection is a crock, a lazy regurgitation of one of the firms numerous Gaga-picture-stuffed press releases. Want the soul of instant photography? Look to The Impossible Project.