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All the entries posted on August 10, 2007.
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Home > Plugged In > Archives > 2007 > August > 10
Friday, August 10, 2007
Google, Apple and storing your stuff online
Google and Apple are supposedly buddies now, but trouble may be brewing.
Google said Friday it is significantly expanding the storage for its Gmail e-mail service and its Picasa digital photo and video sharing service. For $20 a year, you can now bump your Google storage up to 6 GB, or for $500, up to 250 GB. Currently, the limits for the free Google services are 1 GB for Picasa Web albums and 2.8 GB for Gmail.
On its own, Google’s announcement is innocuous. But earlier this week, you may recall that Apple announced its new Web Gallery photo-sharing service and is bumping up the storage capacity for its .Mac (dot-mac) online service. With Web Gallery and .Mac users can share videos and photos using their computers, iPhones and other Apple devices. Apple’s service is expensive: A subscription to .Mac and 10GB of storage starts at about $100 a year.
Is Google’s timing coincidental, or is a fight with Apple over who’s going to be your online self-storage site on the horizon?
And They Call it the Cult of Mac…
I’m the Jackass of the Week.
That’s what another, er, “journalist” is calling me at a Web site called Daring Fireball. Another esteemed news site, macuser.com, reveals in a “World Exclusive” that I’m the “infamous and dastardly Intel Sticker Guy.”
What, you say, is this all about?
It all stems from a question I asked Apple CEO Steve Jobs the other day at a press conference in Cupertino, Calif. My apparently stupid, insulting, dastardly question was — brace yourself: Why doesn’t Apple participate in Intel’s “Intel Inside” program (which pays computer makers for putting their stickers on its boxes and logos in their ads)?
Jobs quipped, “We like our own stickers better,” and then went on to adroitly explain how since everybody already knows Macintoshes now come with Intel chips, stuff like stickers would be redundant.
But the Mac world apparently went wild. Emails started coming in calling me an idiot and pleading with me “in the name of good journalism” to ask a better question next time. The Macuser site apparently launched an in-depth investigation to uncover just who would be stupid enough to ask such a ridiculous question. Ultimately, Macuser tracked down and posted my bio, e-mail address and Web site info (but didn’t bother contacting me). One poster to the site suggested someone spy on my home and office to see how many Intel stickers I have on my computer (which by the way is a sticker-less MacBook). Others said I obviously know nothing about Apple, “good design or good taste.”
Of course none of the Web “journalists” bothered to call and ask me, but my question had nothing to do with Apple or its computer design and all to do with a story I’m working on about the future of the long-running “Intel Inside” program. You’ll be able to see that story here and in our papers beginning Sunday.
Even though this was all much ado about nothing, finding myself in the “online dunk tank” as my editor puts it, reminds me of just how thick the “cult of Mac” can be.
It also reminds me of how scarily quick people can get stirred up in today’s Internet world if somebody else even hints — even if incorrectly — that something might be connected with something that’s important to them.