Apple iTunes Event: iPad iTunes magazine+newspaper subscriptions

Beyond Apple’s declaration that tomorrow’s announcement/event/webcast/whatever it is will have an iTunes focus, the company hasn’t given any clue what the product or service might be, nor is there any clear-cut leading candidate. But rather than tossing around left-field ideas that are missing from Apple’s iTunes strategy for the good reason that they’re not sound ideas to begin with (music subscriptions and so on), a more fruitful approach is to look at the pieces of the the puzzle that are missing from Apple’s existing iTunes strategy. And with the iPad such an obvious device for content consumption, the fact that Apple still offers no official method for publishers to get their magazines or newspapers onto the iPad or even iPhone is perhaps the most glaring hole in the entire equation.

Apple’s magazine and newspaper strategy for the iPad up until now has consisted of nothing more than allowing publishers to build an app if they want, with no real guidance as to how they should be going about it. ePub good, Adobe bad, has been about Apple has been willing to say on the subject. iTunes already has a massive subscription section, but it’s only for podcasts. And while you can run a PDF of your magazine issue through iTunes via podcast subscription (that’s how Beatweek Magazine has been doing it since 2007, for the record), it’s far too do-it-yourself and hands-off to fit into Apple’s plans long term. But if Apple ever finally gets around to launching an officially sanctioned magazine and newspaper stand within the iTunes Store, either tied into the app method of delivery or as its own beast, now that would be something to write home about. It would change the face of newspapers and magazines forever, effectively bringing and end to the “print” portion of print publications even more quickly, and at least in the longview, would in fact be a day in publishing history which would never be forgotten by those who consume magazines and newspapers, this living up to Apple’s tagline for tomorrow.

iPhone 4 pre-orders fraught with AT&T problems, Apple Store offline

Pre-orders for Apple’s iPhone 4 began early this morning on a sour note, as some customers were unable to place their order at all while others were quoted prices that were as much as four hundred dollars higher than they were supposed to be, and the white iPhone 4 model was nowhere to be found. Even Beatweek’s own staff faced pre-order issues, as one Beatweek senior editor saw apple.com repeatedly time out while attempting to process the the order with AT&T, before ultimately placing an order through wireless.att.com instead. Another staff member was quoted a $699 price tag on his pre-order confirmation despite being fully eligible for upgrade pricing. The absence of the white iPhone 4 model from even a pre-ordering option is more quizzical, as it calls into question whether the white model will actually be available on the 24th.

Conversation on Twitter confirms that these types of problems are widespread, and as of 6:00am Eastern Time, the online Apple Store has been shut down by Apple entirely, replaced instead with the “We’ll be back soon” post-it which generally appears when the company is adding new products to the store.

While you’re waiting for your chance to place your iPhone 4 order, here are some good reasons why it’ll be worth the wait.

Geek wanking over Apple’s Lala acquisition continues

This morning we laid out the facts surrounding Apple’s acquisition of the failed music rental service known as Lala, and we predicted that none of those facts, which make it abundantly clear that Apple acquired the company simply to add its engineers to their roster, would prevent geeks from continuing to insist that Apple was at any moment going to throw away seven years of success with the iTunes Store and instead replace it with an iTunes Rental Depot. And sure enough, those nonsensical headlines have continued to roll in throughout the day, with geek tech pundits continuing to connect the dots of the Lala shutdown in ways in which anyone looking at the situation rationally would laugh at.

So, to reiterate the actual facts of the matter regarding the Lala acquisition, which you’re apparently only going to get from us:

- Lala realized its business model wasn’t working and approached Apple about the buyout.

- Apple was not in the market to acquire a music rental service at the time.

- Every music rental service in the history of digital music has failed to find substantial success.

- The litany of failed music rental services includes early attempts made before the iTunes Store even existed, subsequent attempts made concurrently with the rise of the iTunes Store, and recent attempts made since the iTunes Store became the dominant force in the music industry. To reiterate, all of those attempts have been failures.

- For reason that are unclear to anyone but them, while the general public has clearly demonstrated no interest in renting music whatsoever, the geekiest segment of the population continues to insist that this is their preferred music consumption model and therefore continues to push the notion that Apple’s music efforts, which in their mind have been failure to this point, could finally succeed if Apple would just start renting music to people.

Much as we hate to waste further time even discussing this nonsense, it appears that if we’re going to be the only publication willing to lay out the facts of the matter, then we just may have to do so multiple times per day until those facts set in for those geeks who just won’t stop wanking to their music rental fantasies.

Apple only bought dying Lala for the engineers

Ever since Apple launched its iTunes Store in 2003, various geek pundits have openly speculated that the company would soon abandon its attempt at selling music in favor of a music rental model. And even seven years later, after Apple has proven digital music sales to be a highly profitable business model, while music rental has proven to be a failed model time and time again, those same pundits have still opined that an iTunes music rental service was somehow just around the corner. So when failing music rental service Lala concluded back in December that it wasn’t going to be profitable and decided to approach Apple about a buyout, Apple agreed to the acquisition so the ever-expanding company could add to its engineering roster.

But that didn’t stop those same pundits from looking at the failure of yet another music rental service and interpreting it as Apple, the only widely successful company in the history of digital music, getting ready to shift away from a music sales model which has been proven to work in favor of a music rental model which has been proven time and again to be a failed idea. And now that Apple has shut down Lala’s music rental service this month, a move that any dispassionate observer would have seen coming since the day of the acquisition, those same geek tech pundits have now declared that the shutdown of Lala is even more evidence that Apple is about to abandon its own successful business model in favor of Lala’s failed one. How can these pundits be so insistent on misinterpreting the blatant facts of the matter?

Seemingly the only conclusion is that these geek tech pundits are still so desirous of the opportunity to rent music that they’re willing to overlook every detail to the contrary in order keep their hope alive that Apple, the only company who’s shown any ability to succeed in digital music, will give them their rental service. Which is why this week’s shutdown of Lala, which almost no one was using, was met with cries of pain by geek pundits who saw it for what it was, and hoots of denial from those geek pundits who were able to convince themselves that it was reasonable that Apple would shut down its newly acquired music rental service in favor of launching it again later.

Why are geeks are so insistent that music rental is the future, even as years of evidence have mounted to demonstrate that no one outside the geekdom has any interest? Perhaps it’s just part of the fundamentally differing mindset between geeks and the mainstream. Geeks want a theoretically infinite choice of external monitors for use with their personal computer; the mainstream is increasingly embracing an all in one computer like the iMac. Geeks consider the App Store to be “closed” despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of apps from tens of thousands of developers; the mainstream considers the App Store to be wide open; what geeks call “open” the mainstream would refer to as anarchy. So while it’s unclear whether geek tech pundits (and all tech pundits are geeks) truly believe that the mainstream would suddenly want to swallow a music rental service after a lifetime of soundly rejecting the concept, or whether the geeks merely want such a service for themselves, it seems increasingly clear that while Apple won’t be launching a music rental service anytime soon to replace the failed music rental service that it just put out of its dying misery, every additional step that Apple takes in burying Lala will result in yet another round of headlines from geek tech pundits about how the move somehow represents Apple moving one step closer to finally getting around to shutting down the overwhelmingly successful iTunes Store and replacing it with an iTunes Rental Depot. But then that’s what bubble geeks tend to do.