failure posts

Filed under: Software

Pssst. Want to win a 1.5TB SATA drive?

by Steven Sande (RSS feed) on Dec 9th, 2008

Volitans Software has announced a giveaway to publicize their hard disk diagnostic utility, SMART Utility for Mac. Between now and 11:59 PM EST on December 24th, you can enter a giveaway in which the winner gets a choice of either a new Momentus 5400.6 SATA 500GB laptop hard drive or a Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 1.5TB desktop drive.

You don't need to purchase SMART Utility or even try out the software to enter, although Volitans would be happy if you download a free trial. SMART Utility provides more information than the SMART Status in Apple's Disk Utility, including predictive fault detection that can inform you that a drive is about to fail. Disk Utility only gives you an indication when your drive has already failed. While you could always run smartmontools from the command line, SMART Utility displays drive information in a clear, easy-to-read format.

Only one entry per person is allowed, and the winner will be announced on Christmas Day. Another 1.5TB of storage for the pile 'o equipment in my home office sounds like an incredible Christmas present!

Tags: failure, hard drive, HardDrive, smart, software, utility

Filed under: Apple Corporate, Apple Financial, Apple, iPhone

Why the iPhone should tank

by Mike Schramm (RSS feed) on Jul 27th, 2007

Doctor Macenstein has a very good commentary up: even though he's a happy iPhone owner, he wants the iPhone to fail. Fail miserably. In fact, he was cheering on the news during the earnings announcement yesterday that Apple completely missed ~~their~~ analysts' fever dream-induced goal for iPhone sales. Why would a man (woman? Did we ever find out what the Doc's gender was?) who's invested $600+ in a phone want it to not sell well? If you're like me, you might answer that, "because he's crazy." Everyone knows success is always good for a product-- if the iPod had failed, we'd never have had the Nano, the Shuffle, or, for that matter, the iPhone. So if Doc Mac wants to wish the iPhone wrong, he's a loony.

Or is he? He makes good points-- lower-than-expected iPhone sales might make Apple nervous enough to get in gear on pushing new software features and updates out, and get that price point dropping for the rest of us. And on the price point Doc's especially got a point-- when Apple was asked if there was going to be a lowered price point, they actually cited customer satisfaction as the reason not to drop it. In other words, if people are happy with the iPhone (and Apple is convinced that they are), there's no reason to change it.

With AAPL doing so well, Apple has a chance to sit back on their laurels and let the AT&T payments roll in. But any self-respecting iPhone user shouldn't let them take it. With a happy customer base, Apple has less incentive to fix those "little" problems like copy and paste and a missing iChat Mobile.

Update: My good colleagues point out that the iPhone missed analysts' goals, not Apple's.

Tags: apple, earnings, failure, iphone, macenstein, numbers, sales

Filed under: Humor, iPod Family, Cult of Mac, Odds and ends

iPod USB Power Adapter Beats Zune on Amazon

by Dan Lurie (RSS feed) on Dec 2nd, 2006

By all accounts, the Zune has been and will be a big failure for Microsoft, and now there is hard retailer data to back that up.

Tucked inside a MarketWatch article on APPL's all-time high and the prominence of the iPod is this absolutely delectable statistic:
"...Microsoft's new Zune media player, despite heavy marketing, came in only at No. 75 on Amazon's list of 100 best-selling electronics, trailing items such as Apple's $29.99 iPod USB power adapter, at No. 65."

Not much more commentary on this from me today, just something quick to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

[via Jupiter Research]

Tags: failure, marketwatch, microsoft, zune

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, iTS, Internet Tools

Why Sony Connect failed

by Scott McNulty (RSS feed) on Jun 1st, 2006

Cnet has a great article up detailing how Sony's Connect (their answer to iTunes) failed so miserably. Sony, by all rights, should have the position in digital music that Apple has, but a series of missteps ensured that Sony would be... well not so successful.

They tried, they really did. They hired a former Apple employee, they wanted to use the Walkman brand, but it never worked out. Read the gory details, if you dare.

Tags: failure, sony, sony connect, SonyConnect

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