The Apple Tablet has been something of a holy grail for gadget fiends. Now print publishers are enlisting in the cause with just as much fervor. Condé Nast's plan, as described by company execs to Peter Kafka of All Things D: Port Wired to Apple's tablet by mid-2010, followed later by all 17 other titles. By using a special digital format now under development by Adobe — which makes the publishing software that Condé and most other magazine publishers use — Condé also hopes to gain compatibility with tablet and other touch-screen devices made by Hewlett Packard and others.

Jobs should be flattered that such a high-profile publisher is chomping at the bit to get onto his new gizmo. Condé joins New York Times editor Bill Keller in talking up Apple's device; News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch is another recent print-media convert to the tablet religion.

Condé, clearly eager, should keep its enthusiasm in check. The company has closed six magazines and slashed budgets 25 percent at its remaining titles this year, setting off a wave of layoffs. It's doubtful that even Steve Jobs can come up with a silver bullet to rescue businesses that have spent many years squandering past digital opportunities. Especially if the company rushes too quickly and turns out a slapdash tablet product that burns its readers on the format forever.

(Photo illustration by Photo Giddy on Flickr)

TechCrunch is running pictures of Apple's c. 1990 prototablet today. Not much more than an inch thick, supposedly, the device was a portable Mac that responded to stylus input. The design was ahead of its time: judging from the photo above, it might actually pass for an Amazon Kindle 19 years later. But then-CEO John Sculley killed the deal so the company could focus on the doomed Newton PDA. Short-sighted? Hardly; here's what resurrected Apple messiah/CEO Steve Jobs himself said about tablets in 2003:

We look at the tablet and we think it is going to fail.... Tablets appeal to rich guys with plenty of other PCs and devices already. And people accuse us of niche markets.

Tablets: They suck and are useless until the day Apple says they don't anymore.

Just witness the position Apple is in with the New York Times. After we pointed out that Times editor had casually mentioned "the impending Apple slate" at an off-the-record confab, the newspaper's editor clammed up. When Peter Kafka of All Things D Keller asked him to elaborate, he got a stern quote via PR: "I ain't sayin'" anything about Apple's rumored device. But the horse was already out of the barn. One can only imagine what sort of conversation Keller might have had with Apple's famously caustic CEO Steve Jobs after that slip.

It's a clash of cultures: Keller specializes in publishing information as quickly as possible; Jobs in keeping in secret, for long stretches of time. It's also an unavoidable situation for Apple. To get beautiful content to show off the capabilities of the tablet and its (presumed) sharp color display, Apple has been meeting with magazines, newspapers and book publishers, who have lots of glossy, high-resolution content. There's no way Apple executives would talking to these guys about a forthcoming device if it didn't feel they absolutely had to.

It must be a painful situation for Apple. At least the company has lots of practice in manipulating the media. Just not usually from such an uncomfortably close distance.

Realizing that they've lost their edge as the world's great evil empire, Disney has called on Apple overlord Jobs, who joined the board back in 2006, to help them steer a new path toward consumerist greatness. And, to that end, Jobs gave Disney access to his Apple Store blueprints and encouraged engineers to "think bigger," which means stores are no longer retail centers, but "Imagination Centers" that bubble with "Pixar-esque winks and nods."

Yes, gone are the days of plush toy displays and in are the days of video clips on demand, fake trees that sing happy birthday and, while they're at it, olfactory experimentation:

There will be a scent component; if a clip from Disney's coming "A Christmas Carol" is playing in the theater, the whole store might suddenly be made to smell like a Christmas tree.

Wow! This all sounds totally necessary!

Taken with Disney's plans for a brand-centric Comic-Con, it seems the company's poised to recreate the broken world in its own nightmarish image. And, in a move that would finally validate all those "Disneyfication" critiques of New York, Disney may open a new flagship store in Times Square. Sigh.

As our colleague Brian Lam at Gizmodo has reported, Apple — and presumably CEO Jobs — is trying to woo magazine, newspaper and texbook publishers to provide content for Apple's forthcoming tablet device, rumored to resemble an overgrown iPhone. It must have been humbling for magazine publishers, a notoriously egotistical bunch, to be summoned to Apple's Cupertino campus to submit their vision of the future to Jobs, as Lam reported.

So it's not entirely surprising that a backlash is said to be forming. Here's how one newspaper executive described Jobs and his previous iTunes Store deals, in Ad Age: "People put their hands out and let him put the handcuffs on them... The same thing now is happening with the publishing industry. They are afraid to do anything, to say anything. At the same time, they're saying, 'Let's see what other options we have.'"

The dissident publishers are talking about putting their own storefront app on the tablet, selling content from all the different publishing companies, according to Ad Age. That way, their thinking goes, the content doesn't become a "commodity" eclipsed by the device, as happened with Apple's music store and iPod.

Never mind that the iTunes Store has provided the only significant source of digital revenue for the struggling record labels, and became the largest single music retailer in the U.S. this year, according to an NPD estimate, moving 25 percent of units and turning about 70 percent of the gross proceeds over to content creators.

It's entirely likely print publishers will be able to create their own Apple tablet storefront if that's what they decide to do. After all, Apple recently enabled the selling of content within iPhone Apps, and there's no reason to think the situation wouldn't be the same on an iPhone-like tablet, particularly with Apple under government scrutiny about apps it vetoes.

But withholding print content from Apple's own store would be like the self-destructive act of a petulant, confused teenager. Consumers are already running searchers within the iTunes Store for music, movies, TV shows, e-books, audio books and other media; if newspaper and magazine publishers are in the mix, they get the chance to sell related content in the search results. Assuming a reasonable revenue split can be reached, why wouldn't publishers want to be where the media consumers already are? It's not like they've been irrationally lashing out at the internet lately. (Ahem.)

Apple's innovation over previous head mounted displays is, in part, to separate the laser engine from the headgear, stowing the engine in a separate unit connected to the frames via fiber optic cable. Such an "iGlasses" setup, as our tipster calls it, would allow a more immersive television, gaming or conferencing experience when using, say, an iPhone. Or you could just walk around pretending to be a commando from the future, with frickin' laser breams attached to your head.

It's not clear whether Jobs will ever turn this officially-designated innovation into a product; his company boasts an impressive cash hoard with which it funds more research than it can use. Many of the patents from Apple's seemingly endless stream are never heard from again. The obsessive CEO remains, by all accounts, infatuated with his forthcoming tablet product at the moment, so we're not counting on being able to buy iGlasses anytime soon. But simply by putting the patent into the trophy case, Apple adds a little something to its mystique among its growing base of fans, the press included.

The first page of the patent is below, along with one drawing; we've archived the full filing here. AppleInsider summarized the application back in April.

The drawn-out confusion about why Apple rejected the Google Voice telephony application from its iPhone App Store has been agonizing to anyone who has followed it. Apple sources spread the rumor the call-forwarding system was rejected due to objections from Apple partner AT&T. This proved completely false, Apple was the one with issues. Apple then insisted, in a public letter to the FCC, "Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application, and continues to study it." The letter went out July 31, at least a full month after Jobs resumed his CEO duties.

Google has now made public its own FCC response. And, go figure, it offers specific details on how Apple did, in fact reject, Google Voice, directly and repeatedly. Apple marketing honcho Phil Schiller delivered the news, according to Google (click any image to enlarge):

Here are the reasons Apple gave:

Apple, we predict, will try and explain this contradiction away as a miscommunication, either between Schiller and Google or between Schiller and the Apple team that prepared the response to the FCC. That puts a lot of heat on Schiller, but it wouldn't be the first time Jobs has allowed one of his underlings to take the fall for misleading outsiders.

UPDATE: Now Apple says it's Google that's not telling the truth. John Paczkowski of All Things D quotes an Apple spokeswoman saying "Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application and we continue to discuss it with Google." Fun!

On the bright side, regardless of what Apple has told Google in the past — now subject of a "he said/she said" dispute — Apple does seem to be sticking by the idea that it could at some point approve Google Voice. And for Google Voice users that's at least a nice thought.

Those sites are claiming that there's enough space to fit an iPod nano camera in the iPod touch 3rd generation. This is their evidence:

That's ok. However, if you look at the guts of the iPod touch 2nd generation, you will find there's probably plenty of space to fit a nano camera too:

So Apple may be able to fit the iPod nano camera in the iPod touch third generation and the second generation. So?

The question is: Why the hell should they do that? Why should Apple include the lame 640 x 480 webcam of the nano—a camera that Apple doesn't allow to do still photos because they would look like crap—in a high end product like the iPod touch? Wouldn't people expect the same quality as the camera in the iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS?

Like I already said in this analysis of the potential reasons, if there's no iPod nano camera inside the iPod touch, it is probably because the nano webcam sucks. Plain and simple. It just doesn't match the feature mix of the touch, and the standard set by the iPhone.

So no, I'm afraid there is no need to find mysterious conspiracies in this one, neither to justify failed rumormongering. In this case, Jobs points out perfectly valid reasons for the exclusion of the camera in the third generation touch, even if that fact sucks. It's a marketing decision on their part, not a technical one. He is not lying this time. You can crucify him for that, if you want. We already did.

I'm sure that, in time, they would include a camera in one of upgrade cycles, when they actually need it. But you can be sure that it will be a decent camera, and not the nano's. [iFixIt's iPod touch 2nd generation and 3rd generation teardown]

Hoodwinking the press is an old tradition for Jobs, and reporters were immediately suspicious when Jobs told Times columnist David Pogue he decided to omit a much-anticipated camera from the iPod Touch in order to keep the cost down. Jobs said "we were focused on... reducing the price to $199. We don't need to add new stuff." But an Apple rumor site then heard that the camera was delayed because it was too buggy, leading Fortune to ask if Jobs had been lying.

Now comes tangible evidence he probably was: Hardware website iFixIt took apart the new iPod Touch Jobs was talking about, only to discover a conspicuous gap at the top of the device just large enough for the camera Apple is using on its other new iPod, the Nano:

It took months for the facts to catch up with Jobs' misleading spin about his health; in this case, the turnaround has been reduced to just five days. If Jobs has no moral qualms about dissembling in the press, this acceleration should at least instill some practical concern.

We're guessing that whoever arranged to place an ad for Halloween skeletons next to a picture of Apple's famously a gaunt CEO (click above image to enlarge) is already fired, or perhaps just severely spanked. Still, good luck getting Jobs to return to speak at your next lucrative D conference, Journal guys! (Maybe if you promise him it won't be a bare-bones affair...)

Hat-tip to iPhone Savior, which first posted this. PDF via WSJ.com.

Apple has posted video of its closed iPod event yesterday, material Wall Street will no doubt seize upon to double-check its initial reaction to Jobs' return yesterday, when Apple shares hit a 52-week high but closed down 1 percent. It could have been worse, had Jobs been a no-show, a stock analyst tells the Wall Street Journal. Such is the demanding CEO's importance to Apple, and shareholders must now weigh Jobs' still-gaunt look and scratchy voice against his characteristically enthusiastic delivery.

Ideally they could take Jobs at his word, and leave the physical evaluations to the CEO's own medical caretakers. But Jobs' past obfuscations and distortions have made hard evidence an especially valuable commodity.

Sure, Apple's stock would have survived if he'd skipped out. But, as we wrote earlier today, it would have taken a hit. Many investors would have seen Jobs' absence as a conspicuous, out-of-character dodge by a leader known for his obsession with control and an amazing ability to extract money from worshipful customers via direct appeals. We were right to question the expectation that Jobs wouldn't show up; wrong to write that it was only a "remote" possibility.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that, as much as he hates providing information about his health, Jobs would rather calm Wall Street with a public appearance than spend months answering especially heated questions about his health, which would certainly have happened if he hadn't walked onto that Moscone Convention Center stage.

Now, of course, comes the endless analysis of how Jobs looked and sounded. We might as well get things started; above and below are Getty pictures of Jobs at this year's iPod event, on the left, next to pictures from last year's event, on the right. (Full-sized originals are here and here.) The CEO seems to have neither lost — nor added — much weight. But given the once-declining state of Jobs' health, no news is probably good news.

Will Apple's CEO, recently recovering from a liver transplant, step onto an Apple stage today, or won't he? The company isn't saying anything, but the consensus in the press is that he won't:

• Brad Stone of the New York Times: "With Mr. Jobs still convalescing from a liver transplant - and this being a somewhat minor news event - an appearance seems unlikely."
  
• Joseph Menn of the Financial Times: "But most analysts aren't expecting him this time around, in part because he is still recovering from a liver transplant that followed his bout with pancreatic cancer and in part because they don't think Apple has anything truly tremendous to roll out."
  
• John Gruber of Daring Fireball: "I hope he's up on stage doing his thing, but my gut still says no, that he's done as the company's spokesman."

So, wait a minute: Steve Jobs, the longtime face of Apple Inc., isn't going to run this little show, even though two publications, including the Wall Street Journal, say he is well enough to obsessively shepherd the development of a tablet device? Even though he's apparently driving himself to work again? And even though he's a control freak, famous for treating those around him at Apple like inept bozos? And even though he ran the same iPod event last year?

Sure, it's possible Jobs has carved out a brand-new role for himself at Apple as the behind-the-scenes product shepherd, and is skipping public events, at least until he has bulked back up again and appears more healthy. But if that's the case, Apple is going to have to pay in two big ways, neither of which Wall Street will be thrilled about: First, less free product hype in the press, since Phil Schiller lacks Jobs' charisma and fan base. Second, less transparency about the state of Jobs' health, since he's out of the public eye.

Indeed, the context of the Jobs health scare will make it harder for Apple investors to swallow the idea that Jobs would skip this event because it's too small time. The CEO knows his health is a longstanding issue on Wall Street, and he knows this event is one opportunity to allay concerns. If he's a no-show, some investors are going to see that through the prism of health and assume, at the very least, the he doesn't appear well enough, at the moment, to walk onto a stage.

There's also the remote possibility that Jobs will show, that Apple's led people to believe, or allowed them to believe, that he'll be absent in order to maximize the positive buzz when he actually shows up.

Whatever happens today with regard to the Apple CEO and his products, a new chapter will have unfurled in the great Steve Jobs Psychodrama, and Apple obsessives will have new information about their Dear Leader — he showed and looked like ______, or, more likely, he didn't show as expected — which they can spin in innumerable ways.

UPDATE: Jobs made a surprise appearance on stage.

(Pic: Jobs at a special iPod event September 9, 2008. Getty Images.)

Take, for example, these excerpts from a MacRumors chat forum about the event. Apple is widely expected to make a fairly routine update to its line of iPod portable music players, adding larger storage capacities and perhaps cameras. But that's not going to keep the fanboys from fantasizing about jetpacks and unicorns!

Or, literally, rainbows:

Or how about a device that lets you keep 10 years worth of Steve Jobs porn video and audio in your pocket?

What could possibly be better than the Beatles showing up? The Beatles and Steve Jobs showing up, and pushing Phil Schiller to the curb, forever:

This guy is very eager to spend $400 so he can run things slightly faster:

This guy wants to see a real, live, humanoid female! Ha ha, good luck with that buddy LOL:

Finally, here are a couple of overlong wish lists involving AT&T subsidizing the return of the LP, via the iPod, with free cable TV, animated album covers (read: free drugs), half terabyte hard drives and alien "OLED" screen technology. OK!

(Top pic: Jobs holds a new iPod at Apple's iPod event, September 9, 2008. Getty.)

Jobs is reportedly obsessing over a forthcoming Apple tablet, a top-secret device that is said to look like a giant iPhone. The device went through at least six redesigns, AppleInsider has reported, a tell-tale symptom of Jobs' perfectionism. The tweaking continues relentlessly and annoyingly, staff told the Journal's Yukari Iwatani Kane:

[Jobs] has been pouring almost all of his attention into [the tablet]... Those working on the project are under intense scrutiny from Mr. Jobs, particularly with regard to the product's advertising and marketing strategy, said one of these people... Mr. Jobs's focus on the tablet has been jarring for some Apple employees, who had grown accustomed to a level of freedom over strategy and products while the CEO was on leave, said a person familiar with the matter.

Freedom over strategy and products? What the hell kind of hippie commune were you operating while Dear Leader was gone, Tim Cook? Something tells us you'll be first through Jobs' inevitable reeducation camps, once he gets this tablet shipped out the door.

There is no ambiguity about the facts now: In response to an FCC inquiry, Apple has released a statement absolving its carrier partner, stating, "Apple is acting alone and has not consulted with AT&T about whether or not to approve the Google Voice application." AT&T confirmed, "AT&T had no role in any decision by Apple to not accept the Google Voice application for inclusion in the Apple App Store."

For users, the death of Google Voice on the iPhone — via the removal of some iPhone apps and indefinitely delay of another — meant more expensive text messages and international calls, and more snafus in trying to get friends to use the Google Voice phone number. It kept them locked in close to Jobs and his software, a relationship the Apple CEO guards jealously, some say anticompetitively. Jobs, for example, tried to lock Palm out of Apple's iTunes music jukebox; apparently tried to lock employees out of lucrative offers from competitors like Palm and Google; and tried (successfully) to lock competing browsers and podcasting software off the iPhone.

And yet blame was consistently placed on AT&T over the past few weeks. A Wall Street Journal op-ed, written by a Silicon Valley hedge fund manager, explained excatly "Why AT&T Killed Google Voice" (because "AT&T is dragging down the rest of us... and stifling innovation"). TechCrunch, the Valley blog that broke the Google Voice news, immediately declared that "it's not hard to guess who's behind the restriction: our old friend AT&T."

Prominent Mac-news writer John Gruber was the most certain on his Daring Fireball website. "Trust me," he wrote, "it was AT&T's decision." Gruber cited "an informed source:"

A reliable little birdie has informed me that it was indeed AT&T that objected to Google Voice apps for the iPhone. It's that simple.

Of course, it wasn't. Gruber did not respond to our emails, but so certain did the well-connected indy blogger sound that we can't help but wonder if he wasn't snowed by Apple itself. The company would not necessarily have anticipated that a swift, aggressive and public FCC investigation into the Google Voice incident would have proven AT&T blameless. And it's not like the company's flacks haven't been down this road before; Jim Goldman's sometime source and former CNBC coworker is an Apple flack, and Goldman's Apple sources had him reporting for weeks last fall that Jobs' health was "fine," before Goldman was suddenly forced to acknowledge it was very much not fine. (Gruber pointedly trumpeted CNBC's party-line reporting at the time while pissing on ultimately-vindicated posts from our colleagues at Gizmodo; in the interest of disclosure, we should note that this trend continues to this day, and that we find Gruber as reliably entertaining when he's wrong as when he's right, albeit for entirely different reasons.)

No matter how Apple's defenders were rallied this time around — we suspect, as a rule, that it had more to do with anti-AT&T bias than some pro-Apple whisper campaign — one can only hope this incident will further erode the myth that Apple is fundamentally any less inclined toward spiteful self-defeating authoritarianism than any other corporation of its size, be it AT&T, Google or, only slightly larger these days, Microsoft. Apple is uniquely molded to the whims of a single man, it is true, and already apologists have begun to excuse the Google Voice decision as fallout from Jobs' well-intentioned obsession with control. But Jobs, like his competitors, must be judged on actions, rather than intentions. And this one is pretty disgraceful.

UPDATE, Aug. 26: Gruber responded to our email:

I saw your post, and I think it's great. Totally fair.

My source (a) was wrong, not lying; and (b) from the enlisted ranks at Apple, not an officer. I am strong believer that when anonymous sources go wrong, readers deserve to know as much as possible about why, so, based on a few emails today exchanged with this same source, I plan to write about it briefly on DF. [Summary: The Apple source had his own Apple source, who he misunderstood.]

* * *

As for Goldman, I do not believe that he was spun back in December. Here's the nut paragraph Goldman wrote in December:

"I can tell you that sources inside the company tell me that Jobs's decision was more about politics than his pancreas. Sources tell me that if Jobs for some reason was unable to perform any of his responsibilities as CEO because of health reasons, which would include the Macworld keynote, I should "rest assured that the board would let me know.""

Clearly, we now know, wrong. But wrong about what? It was wrong that there was nothing seriously wrong with Jobs medically. But I am not convinced at all that anyone at Apple or on the Apple board was aware of how dire his condition was at that time, other than judging by his gaunt appearance — which at that point had been obvious for 8 or 9 months.

My hunch is that it is far more likely that Goldman's sources were unaware of Jobs's medical condition in December than that they lied to him about it. Think of it this way: Apple didn't benefit at all from December's "Jobs is fine" coverage, other than in the very short run. Come January, when he was forced to take his medical leave, these reports from just a few weeks prior made Apple's PR situation far *worse* than if they had said nothing at all to Goldman.

I suspect Jobs himself was not aware of the life-threatening magnitude or specific cause — his liver — until January.

It's not entirely surprising that Jobs wanted to strip his employees of their right to seek market wages; for all his talk of disruptive nonconformity, he has a notoriously nasty and authoritarian management style. And he reportedly had a similar "no poaching" deal in place with Google. What is eye-opening about Bloomberg's report is the frank manner in which then-Palm CEO Ed Colligan pushed back:

"Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other's employees, regardless of the individual's desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal," Colligan said to Jobs, 54, according to the communications.

Palm had just hired iPod executive Jon Rubinstein away from Apple and surely knew it would soon embark on an epic Apple hiring spree; Rubinstein's blunt response was no doubt intended to be part of a library of evidence of Apple's behavior, should one ever be needed. But Jobs was not cowed. According to Bloomberg, he stated that "Apple had patents and more money than Palm if the companies ended up in a legal fight."

Who leaked these "communications" — emails, presumably — to Bloomberg? The obvious bet is Palm, which has been engaged in a back-and-forth war with Apple to allow its Palm Pre mobile device, which competes with Apple's iPhone, to sync with Apple's iTunes software. Apple's attempts to stop such syncing have been the object of deserved ridicule online, and Jobs' threatening message to Palm might have been leaked to drum up further outrage and put more pressure on Apple to open its platform .

There's also a chance someone involved with the Justice Department's ongoing investigation into Silicon Valley hiring is the source of the leak. That probe involves not only Apple but Google and Yahoo, as well, according to a Washington Post report.

Whatever the source of the information, the bottom line for Apple is that it faces a mounting perception that it is a bully, between this, the Palm Pre issue and the two federal investigations into ties between Google and Apple, to say nothing of its exclusionary policies concerning the iPhone app store. That's not going to dent, say, iPhone sales anytime soon. But it's going to hurt Apple's ability to pose as the Valley's corporate iconoclast, which will have a real, if intangible, effect on the company long-term.

[via Business Insider]

Jobs and his secretive minions are notorious for this sort of behavior; the company famously derailed a Vanity Fair excerpt of Alan Deutschman's Jobs biography. Apple flacks had less luck with the Times:

"We want to discourage profiles," an Apple PR tells me stiffly, apparently unaware she is waving a sackful of red rags at a herd of bulls. Another PR rings the editor of this magazine to try to halt publication of this piece.

This attempt to block the report launched a flurry of headlines about a story that was otherwise a thumb-sucker: "Apple Attempts to Suppress Steve Jobs Profile Article;" "Apple Tries to Kill Steve Jobs Story in Sunday Times;" "Apple Practices 'Corporate Omerta';" etc. The incident was a perfect illustration of the Streisand Effect, named after an incident in which Barbara Streisand attempted to remove from a public database a photograph of her house, causing the image to spread far more widely than it would have otherwise.

It's foolish PR, sure, but this sort of heavy-handedness is also as good a sign as any that Jobs has resumed his very firm grip on Apple Inc. Welcome back, Steve!

Jobs' parking job does, indeed, bode well for his health, as the blog iPhone Savior suggests. Prior to his liver transplant and medical leave, Jobs' Mercedes was repeatedly photographed in this very spot, always without the license plate, per his usual flouting of various automotive regulations. The one time it wasn't in a handicapped spot was, ironically, during the period when Jobs looked sickest in public. How heartening to see that his old brazenness is back.

(Pic by Nicholas Brown)