They fixed this in the latest point release. I'm back in business.

Ok for more fun with predictions check out The Unweary Prediction Score Card. Print it out and pass it around the office. Or for even more fun buy the prediction iPhone app.

(Note: shameless plug for my friend's app.)

I don't know if these pics are real or not, but this pretty much what I think it will look like.

I agree with you on pretty much all of this, although I have no idea about the actual measurements. Definitely pa semi and modified iphone os. Hmm, I have a hard time with it not running iPhone apps. I agree that they won't run stock (a small windowed mode would be dumb). But I think the API will be so similar that a UI expansion and re-compile will be an easy port. Also, given Apple's history with "fat binaries", I imagine the SDK will let a single .ipa file to contain both the iPhone and the iPad UI with a common shared back end logic.
BTW, I don't like the name iPad - sounds like something you get at a drugstore for your girlfriend.
I also reaaaallllly hope they surprise and have a camera on front and back. Front for video conferencing and back for augmented reality.
I think they won't announce all the potential of all the apps, like full online application suite integration. They will focus on the media subscriptions and kindle++ aspects of this.

I'm guessing someone will make a cover for it with the words 'Don't panic' on it.

Updated the post to compare the predictions to actual.

So how do I feel about it? Well I tried to set my bar pretty low, or rather tried to filter out the un-realistic hype that has been on the web. In the end I was still way overly optimistic on things like cool new UI, multi-tasking and handwriting recognition.

There were some positive surprises however, like works with external keyboards including bluetooth, and battery life. Also I was expecting something 200 - 300 more expensive for wifi only. So all in all I think it is pretty cool.

The mood on the web seem pretty negative at the moment. But that is to be expected. No product could live up to the Apple fan boy speculation machine. I think we'll see long lines at the Apple store, yet again, in 2 months.

I'm hoping that the FCC investigation and the general bad press Apple is getting willl make them open up. I doubt it though, this is a part of their corporate culture.

The real solution is to vote with your dollars and buy other products. I've been using the latest Android software, and it's really nice. It doesn't have quite the UI polish that the iPhone has, but it's getting close. My next phone will likely be an Android phone + Google Voice. I'm just waiting for a slimmer Android (no physical keyboard) to be released...

Interesting article (I have no inside information either way).

Yeah, Apple is pretty full of crap on this one. Not too many people are going to buy that story. I'm guessing the app will be released in a couple of weeks. -Oops 'our bad'.

Fixed?

On a positive note, the "Genius" functionality in iTunes 8 is pretty cool... I can certainly see myself spending more money on good music!

The only good iPhone is a jailbroken iPhone. Remember when Jobs and co. used to hack the phone system for free calls back in college?

Another app goes down.

That is bad. Does is compete with something Apple has? I don't see anything wrong with that type of app.

The two major things I was pretty sure would get banned on the app store were 1. A tethering app, and 2. Voip. I guess we'll wait for #2. Apple made some comment about allowing it, but not over ATT. I'm not sure how they can control / stop that.

VoIP over WiFi is not a problem for ATTle, you're already paying for voice and data, so they'd rather have you use another network because it's less bandwidth for them. Obviously VoIP over 3G loads their network so they won't want that. They can control it just like this - whacking the app.

It gets worse. Apple has some mechanism in place that allows the phone to automatically check for invalid apps and remove them. In some cases people have had their NetShare app automatically removed when they sync with iTunes.

More info on the App store's performance including Job's comment on the kill switch.

I thought this was a cool article about iPhone restrictions and why we need a black market. Microsoft gets drawn and quartered for having "secret apis", but with Apple it's standard practice.

Well is shows that there is interest in more powerful apps from both the developer and user communities. I guess the question in my mind is if people want those types of apps bad enough, will they switch platforms to get them? You can certainly develop nearly all the types of apps mentioned on Windows Mobile today (many already exist). It is also very likely you will be able to develop them on the Android/ G phone.

Sure you can do these things with the black market apps, but there is no business model there. You are at the whim of the Apple vs. Jailbreakers arms race. My advice is this; if you want to pressure Apple into changing their practices you're not going to do it building black market apps. Instead put your effort into developing cool things for iPhone competitors. Make Apple squirm a bit explaining again why the iPhone can do things you can do on a WM device.

More censorship. Why would anyone want to invest any time in building a fun little iPhone application when Apple can yank it for any reason?

It seems like they need a pre-approval process where you layout your idea and design. At least that way they can shoot it down before you waste time developing it.

The rejection game goes on. As a developer would you risk the Apple Lottery?

Nope. There are too many other things to do with my time than learn a bunch of iPhone specific APIs, only to then have Apple reject you for no good reason. You simply can't base a business on that... your investors would have to be insane.

I'm not even going to write a hello world test application for the iPhone until the policy is changed.

Another app banned for "duplicating functionality".

And now they are trying to silence any reports of app rejection? Sometimes you have to wonder about Apple.

Wil Shipley chimes in on the topic. He makes some interesting points, like what would happen if Apple baned Mac apps for "duplicating functionality".

Opera Browser banned from App Store. Apple really doesn't like competition. But wait - how does this hurt their sales of iPhones?

What is tethering?

Using the phone and the expensive data plan as a modem for your laptop.

WWDC summary: Well 1 out of 3 isn't bad?? Or is it. No announcement of the data plan pricing was given. I assume it is the same? Shame #2 and #3 will only be addressed by hacking the phone.

I like the mobile me sync stuff a lot. The things Apple is doing with this phone are the things we've wanted to see in phones for years. Microsoft just totally blew WinMo. They have all the pieces, but just don't get it. I'd like the syncing for less than $100 a year, but at least they're doing it.

The GPS and $199 price are nice. Are they going to require a contract now? Really the main thing that keeps me liking this "platform" is that it's jailbroken/p0wned. Otherwise it's just another closed platform locked down by a single carrier.

A few other comments:
- Games look good.
- The Apple Proxy for internet app notifications only solves part of the problem. I want wake up notifications for many more events (picture taken, incoming call, new appointment added to calendar, etc.) There should be a large suite of events that you can register to run with. Come on - some of us remember programming cooperative multitasking :-)
- Flogging 2.5G doesn't impress me. It's Apples "fault" they didn't go 3G in the first place!

Also - I agree with John on the total failure to support bluetooth devices. Jobs is keeping these things locked down tight. A bluetooth keyboard or headset might be really nice...

Interesting that the black one is the cheaper one this time...

No camera on front of phone... A lot of people thought it would. You'd think they could develop a plastic lens system that could pipe the light from the front or back of the phone.

Another thing... throw a microSD slot in there already!

Fred is getting the wood put to him again as an iTouch owner. :-)

Word on the street is a 10.00 bump in the ATT data plan:
http://www.engadgetmobile.com/2008/06/09/iphone-3g-from-atandt-unlimited-data-for-30/

But that's not all bad. It seems Apple no longer gets revenue sharing from ATT. That could mean they could continue to turn a blind eye to the unlocking of the phones.

It seems that the minimum cost you can get the phone out of contract is for $200 + one month of service + $175 early cancellation fee + random taxes and activation costs.

Apparently, you will have to sign up for the contract at the point of purchase, and there are "no plans" to sell the phone out of contract.

Remember when you could get a PDA for $300 and the manufacturers allowed any software to run on it, and made no additional revenue through airtime, a music store or an app store? The "subsidy" of phone hardware is largely a myth.

Haven't seen this mentioned much, but the MobileMe suite of applications makes it clear why Safari was ported to Windows. It provides a consistent platform to run these web applications under. The upcoming version of Safari will support much faster JavaScript and the ability to run Web apps "outside the browser".

Is it clear that the mobileMe app will only work with Safari??

I would expect that it will work best with Safari. Web apps that mimic standalone apps are usually pretty fickle as to what environment they run well in.

George just told me that it looks like the difference between the consumer plan and the enterprise plan, which is $15.00 more, is exchange support. Also the rumor on the street is that the previous bundle of free text messages a month is also gone now.

It sure looks like Steve lost the arm wrestle with ATT.

Apple releases a video conferencing kit for the iPhone after all.

Be careful: step 7 is paying Apple's retail price for extra RAM. No one is ready for step 7.

Pic?

http://images.apple.com/macmini/gallery/images/gallery1img20060228.jpg

You just don't want to show a picture of your mini because it's likely trapped in some Silence of the Lambs pit in your basement.

..."It puts the lotion.jpg on its hard drive"...

You just don't believe that I actually have one. I suppose you'll be wanting me to take a photo of it with today's paper?

There are you happy? You can clearly see that it is still alive and well, and if you want it to stay that way you'll...

I'm surprised that you didn't have the 360 ON TOP of the mini :-)

ZOMG look at all the cables!

I thought you'd notice that. It is only the beginning. You can't see the rest of the cables behind the monitor or the mammoth pile of cables under the desk. I have two PCs a mac and a 360 connected to that monitor through a switch box plus various audio and spdif fibers back there. Luckily the wires are confined to the neither regions for the most part as I use a wireless mouse, keyboard, and headphones.

I don't think that it will happen quite yet if ever, for several reasons:

1. Apple's software works really well because it has a reasonably small set of hardware to run on. Putting it out in the wild world of PC hardware might expose them to a lot of problems that could damage their "it just works" image.

2. Apple still makes a ton of money from their hardware sales. Just go look at one of their quarterly earnings reports. They would take a big hit by trading a $3000 sale into a $129 sale. I think since they dropped the word "Computer" from their name, they realize that a growing portion of their income is coming from iPod, iPhone, iTunes Music Store and other random peripherals and accessories. But it's not large enough yet for them to sabotage a major income stream.

3. Steve's strengths can also be weaknesses. He's often been right about design and strategy, but remember the cube? AppleTV? You need to believe in yourself to succeed, but too much of that can blind you to good ideas. Steve's ideology of building beautiful things means that he's probably averse to seeing Mac OS X running on a creaky Packard Bell junker.

4. Trends are hard to see at the moment. Apple is growing their sales significantly faster than the market, but since their numbers are small, it's hard to see how much of that is noise. Apple has been making significant forward progress for a solid ten years now, so they may well feel that they should just stick to the current plan. Who knows where the trend line will go? 10 percent of the market? 20? Either would be a huge gain, but their already a very profitable company today.

It would be cool if they did that. I'd go and buy an Alienware desktop right away and dual boot it!

Did you guys see the latest price for AAPL after market: +$13 (or ~8%). They just had a record quarter that beat their previous record quarter by 25%.

More detail.

This is why they don't need "free" Mac OS X... it's doing great even when bundled with moderately expensive hardware.

Yes there are compelling reasons not to try and fix something that isn't broken. But yet I wonder...

Steve you are a coward. Bill Gates is way braver than you. He deserves to have more money.

Come on George, Bill took his OS to the mainstream. He stepped up. He took on the thousands of hardware combinations, crazy device vendors multiple processor vendors, and hordes of 3rd party developers. It's all nice to claim you have the best OS while keeping it limited to the laboratory 'clean room' where you control all the variables. Lets see them take OSX out into the real world and see how it holds up. I'm talking to you Jobs - its time to bring it!

If only Bill's OS actually worked on all that hardware they claim it does. 'Softies always love to claim how much hardware they support, then claim what a tough job they have when stuff doesn't work properly (i.e. Vista's driver nightmare). You can't have it both ways. Either it all works or it doesn't.

Apple's "clean room" actually works as advertised, and considering that OS X is Darwin (BSD), it already supports more hardware than Windows does (Windows for PowerPC? Alpha?).

Ok XP runs on all the hardware they claim it does. Vista will eventually.

BSD might support more hardware than Windows, but OSX certainly does not. For proof of this take a dip into the OSX86 world and see just how difficult it is to make OSX work on modern PC hardware. It's not the hacking around the 'protection' scheme, it is the lack of drivers. Apparently it is not as easy as just dropping a BSD driver onto the disk. If it were All PCs would be supported, and that certainly is not the case.

More calls to open OSX.

His points are all silly, armchair nerd CEO stuff ignoring the fact that Apple is not a software company. They sell hardware that happens to have nice software on it. Not to mention that much of Apple's software was obtained through acquisition: Next, BSD, iTunes, Logic (and a bunch of other high end stuff). How does it benefit Apple to "open" Mac OS X?

Yeah it was pretty weak. I thought the whole 'open it' or 'we will' threat was pretty funny.

All smartphone applications need to be signed (approved by the carriers, I believe) so Apple is being no different here. I have no idea why they didn't just say they're working on the SDK. I think it would have helped their share price to see that they're growing the ecosystem: as of the SDK announcement, AAPL is up $1.41.

Another thing I really think they should have / will do at some point is the integration of a camera with the iPod. -At least with the HD based iPod. A camera would let you record full frame rate mp4 video in addition to photos. With the Wifi you would be able to upload content directly to Flickr, YouTube or .mac. -This sort of thing seems a natural fit for Apple's new 'consumer' focuse. It also seems a natural complement to the iLife app suite.

The thing that I take away from this announcement is the possibility of what might be. The wifi on the iPod is just the beginning, but it's still missing the camera, larger capacity, trading with others, etc. I guess we'll have to wait until Apple trickles out those features over the next few years.

I was also hoping that they'd announce that The Beatles would appear (sans DRM) on iTunes. I like enough of their songs that I'd probably buy a few albums.

Personally I think they should have gone portrait mode on the nano (ala zune). That would force you to hold it on it's side to watch movies, but at least they could have kept it similar to the old nano form factor.

Here is an interesting factoid:
Old nano:
* Height: 3.5 inches
* Width: 1.6 inches
* Depth: 0.26 inch
* Weight: 1.41 ounces

New nano:
* Height: 2.75 inches (69.8 mm)
* Width: 2.06 inches (52.3 mm)
* Depth: 0.26 inch (6.5 mm)
* Weight: 1.74 ounces (49.2 grams)

3.5 x 1.6 = 5.6 sq in
2.75 x 2.06 = 5.665 sq in

Ok so technically it is the same size. But the new one does way .33 ounces more.

This pricing is just another example of the "myth of the phone subsidy." Time and again we see hardware sold without any service agreement at basically the same price as the supposed subsidized carrier phones. Remember when you could get a VGA width Dell Axim with 624mhz processor for $300, and yet the equivalent phone was over $300, WITH a 2 year agreement? Same thing here with the iPod Touch / iPhone. Won't someone make an unlocked phone that just accepts any freaking SIM card?

Agreed that the ringtone thing is ridiculous, haven't read any reviews that think it's reasonable. It's a freaking music player - just point the ringtone to an existing song! I guess the iPhone hacks already let you do this for free. I wouldn't be surprised if it was AT&T pushing for this additional charge (which Apple was happy to get a piece of).

I like the "classic", it seems like a reasonable update and the 160GB capacity is pretty awesome.

Totally agree that the nano should have been in portrait mode. Much better use of space.

Standard Apple hobbling the iTouch device by (apparently) not including bluetooth to support a headset/mic for VoIP calls. With that capability, I'd consider this a great deal over the iPhone. I use the phone feature so little that the $2K contract is ridiculous for me, but I still need to take that occasional call. I'm fine with using data only in WiFi zones.

I'm fine with the capacity and the lack of camera. I'm a DSLR guy so these minicams just don't cut it for me anyway. I'm most interested in using the iTouch as a mobile web browser. It's the best mobile web experience I've ever seen. I hate to still have to carry around my cheap phone though...

Overall I'm pretty excited about the future direction, and we've sure seen a bunch of other manufacturers planning for doing touch screen phones now too, so the market might heat up.

Do you guys know if the iTouch is going to have a virtual scroll wheel? It would seem strange that the new interface is just a scroll bar, since so many iPod clones had the scroll bar. If it supports multitouch, it should have been easy to do a circular touch wheel that maybe pops up with more than one finger on the screen.

In related news Apple drops the iPod Hi-Fi. This product was about as good an idea as the Foleo... :-)

First: "a bunch of other manufacturers planning for doing touch screen phones...". What you mean is that the 'bunch' of manufacturers that have already been selling touch screen phones for years are finally going to get serious and make them usable. Just because people never noticed touch screen phones before doesn't mean they haven't been on the market for many, many years now.

Second: the iTouch is not going to have a virtual scroll wheel. The interface is exactly the same as the iPhone. Flick to scroll.

Oh John, don't you know that nothing exists 'till Apple markets it? :-)

Flick to scroll may work for the smaller storage size of the iPod touch. But I'm not sure what the resistance has been to doing a virtual scroll wheel.

Check out the guided tour. It will show how they deal with large libraries. Flick is a natural interface. Moving your finger around in a circle is not. -It works well, just not a natural.

http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/guidedtour/

Jobs is giving out 100 dollars to all existing iPhone owners! Granted it is in store credit, but again Jobs surprises me.

Desperately trying to fit your entire music collection into a 16G iTouch? A product has popped up that claims to cut the size of your mp3 files in half with no* noticeable loss in quality. (* ok that really depends on a lot of things). Their scheme is supposed to do a better job than most MP3 encoders VBR settings and works on existing MP3s rather than having to start over from the CD source. Wired checked it out here. It costs 40 bucks though! Is it worth it? Would any of you use something like that so you can cram 32G of music in 16G of space?

Somebody really likes the iTouch.

I'm going to pick up one of these dogs with my $100 coupon and employee discount.

Seriously, NBC wants the per episode price to go to $4.99 from $1.99. Right.

NBC also figures that not offering their shows on iTunes (like Battlestar Galactica and The Office, both of which I bought through iTunes) will help decrease piracy. What kind of crack are they smoking?

Yeah, it's all just a negotiating ploy before their contract is up. To add insult to injury, Lost and BSG are both only doing half seasons, starting in January! Ahh, that's how the math works - they need to double the price because they're only doing half the episodes. LOL. Greedy bastards - who needs 'em?

Seems there is more going on behind the scenes. ARS is reporting that part of the tiff is that Apple is pushing hard to lower the price of TV shows to .99! The thinking is that it will help drive iPod sales and that the studios would make it up in volume. Wow. I would buy shows at $1 a piece and I'm a cheap bas**** when it comes to DRM'd media. I think a buck is the perfect price point. Go Steve! I also think that $1 is too much to pay per track of music though.

Yeah I read that. I think NBC is crazy (well Jeff Zucker at least). How he could think that the iPod's success was due to 'riding on the back of their content' is beyond me. The iPod was successful by riding on the back of the free mp3 file. I doubt a single iPod was sold because of a need to watch a specific NBC show on the go. Why don't they go and try to get a cut of every TV sold? Certainly those devices are riding on their back as well.

Ok, Paul, now it's your turn for a gPhone predictions post :-)

More Apple tablet rumors.

Have you ever had a cell? (This comment posted via iPhone and free Google wifi out doors)

Nope, never.
So, don't keep us waiting. How do you like it?

Reasons for Safari on Windows:
1. More Safari users means more site compatibility with Apple's rendering engine (WebKit). If webmasters perceive that "no one uses Safari", they won't go to the trouble of making all their Web 2.0 apps compatible (it takes a lot of Javascript hackery to get something like Google Maps to work in IE and Firefox). A poor web experience means less people wanting to use Macs.
2. Make it easy for webmasters to test their sites without having to buy a Mac.
3. Syndication cash from third parties (default search engine, etc).

hmmm,

1. Do you use Safari on your Mac?
2. Does the world need yet another Web browser (on Windows)?
3. Why would someone use it? It seems to have less features than even Opera.

Actually more important than #3 is 'how' are they planning on getting people to use it? I am having visions of Apple exclusive (DRM laden) content that only works with Safari - ala Netflix Watch Now, which only works with IE. *Raises feeble fist*

From your list I think #2 if most relevant. From what you said and other horror stories I have read, it sounds like Web 2.0's version of write once run anywhere is even worse than with Java. I feel sorry for those poor saps.

I don't like or use Safari on the Mac: it doesn't display fonts in Gmail very well. On my powerbook, I use Camino, and on the iMac I build my own version of Firefox from their latest trunk source.

I like it when there are multiple choices of software available. I think that their is plenty of space left for innovating in web browsers, especially now with all the ajax apps coming out, and things like Gears. The more non-IE users there are, the more likely it will be that web developers will follow web standards rather than IE quirks (like in CSS today).

I have no idea why someone would use Safari on Windows: it doesn't look nice, the fonts are crap, window resizing is insanely slow, and bookmark management is horrible. And that's from about 20 minutes of messing with it. No, I'm sticking with Firefox.

Joel On Safari: world's slowest browser... heh heh.

Ahh, that Joel. He is a funny guy. Nice to call Apple on the whole PowerPC rules / Intel rules thing. Is he kidding about that last part though? Each time he starts Safari on Vista it gets faster? Um either he is being ironic, or he hasn't heard about SuperFetch? I can't tell.

As for rendering performance, I didn't do a scientific survey, but for the sites I visted today, Safari was rendering them slower than IE7. I did a couple of quick control-F5 refresh tests and in some cases it was taking twice as long. Maybe something else was going on.

Back to the Web 2.0 app platform on the iphone. Maybe I'm the only one, but I find it ironic that the public 3rd party app model is strictly Web 2.0 based while the only apparent 3rd party client app allowed on the phone is Google Maps? The same google maps that helped pioneer the Web 2.0 / ajax model? Why is that a local app?

If you watched the "All Things Digital" videos I linked too, Steve mentions that iPhone Maps is an actual client application written by Apple using Google Maps APIs. Google is the data provider, and Apple does the rendering in their app, not Safari. That's how they get the neat animated pushpins.

Daring Fireball's summary.

Another interesting thing was the appearance of Carmack at the keynote, where he described some of the new technology they're using in their next project. Electronic Arts also announced that they're bringing a bunch of games to the Mac, so that was nice.

Google Maps client just to do neat animated pushpins seems a bit overkill. I guess of course they also integrated some feature to lookup and dial phone numbers. One issue, however, is that a 3rd party would not be able to do the same thing as a client app.

Daring Fireball didn't beat around the bush with that post. I have to agree. Job's may be an expert at selling a product's weakness as a 'feature' to the mass market, but developers are not quite as gullible.

The Carmack thing was strange. He didn't really announce a new game or that they were doing anything exclusive for the mac. I guess the point was that OSX was included as a release platform for whatever it is. EA's announcement is good news for Mac gaming. The Mac market is finally getting large enough to catch the interest of the major game houses. It has to be easier to port games over to OSX now that they are on Intel.

Word on the street is that EA's Mac games will be powered by TransGaming's Cider".
That's pretty cool stuff. If it works as advertised that is. It also means that it is really a minimal cost / risk for EA as it is not a real 'port'. If the first few games are successful I predict TransGaming will make a barrel full of money.

It might save EA money, but here's why it might not be such a good idea.

I only use Safari for quick web browsing, because it loads faster than Firefox with all the tabs I keep open - LOL. Remember that Safari doesn't support the live GTalk chat in GMail, so I think it's got a ways to go to being Web 2.0 capable. I really wish that Apple would have gone with Firefox, and helped them improve that product, rather than launching being the third (or fourth) browser candidate.

For Web 2.0 phone apps, they'll have to have an offline usage model for them. Sounds like several companies, including Google are starting to do this somehow.

Mac gaming seems totally irrelevant to me, but kids might like it. As John mentioned in the other post - the virtualization stuff happening on the Mac right now seems way more interesting.

Also, I agree with Daring Fireball. And I have to say about Safari on Windows - I stay away from Windows apps written by Apple. iTunes is still a huge POS on Windows, and MP3 playback actually stutters if I'm scrolling the song list.

The security community didn't take long (a few hours) to slam it for holes, and Apple for generally making false claims about how secure its stuff is.

I think supporting Firefox would have been a better move also.

As for iTunes on Windows.. don't get me started. It still pegs the CPU of my fastest machine just downloading a file.

I generally agree about Apple apps on Windows. I find it funny that neither Quicktime (free edition) or Safari has a full screen mode. But... if they were to offer the full iLife suite for Windows that would be another story. My daughter is still hounding me for Garageband.

There is no way a for-profit company like Apple can rely on an open source group like Mozilla to build their interface to the web. The real issue is that web sites and browsers should implement standards, so it wouldn't matter which browser you use, you just pick the one that is best for you.

Apple has been burned in the past by waiting for Adobe, Quark and Microsoft to support their platform and transitions, so now they make iLife, iWork and the high end stuff like Aperture, Final Cut and Logic. It makes sense for them to build their own browser. Even though it's crap implementation, at least they can evolve it and fix security holes as fast as they like.

Yet their kernel code and much of their critical plumbing is open source. I'm not sure I agree with your argument. Just take the devs from Safari and apply them to the camino or firefox projects. If you get stalled out, fork it for awhile.

Darwin is their BSD derivative, so they control it as they like and can accept external patches (on not) as they like. They are't waiting around for the BSD guys to accept their patches.

If you've ever tried to get something interesting / significant committed to the Firefox code base, you'll know what a pain that is. You just can't wait for those guys to get around to doing something you want.

So it sounds like what you are saying isn't necessarily open source vs. closed source issue, but BSD license vs. GPL issue? Or is it just a project by project issue? I just don't get it. I thought the whole point of open source was that you could make your own fixes / changes and not have to wait for some '3rd party'.

Wouldn't it just be as simple as Apple creating and releasing 'FireMacFox' based on and synced from the current Firefox code base? Apple fixes bugs, builds and updates their own distro and submits the fixes back to Firefox for eventual inclusion there.

Seems like lots of projects work this way. And it should still be less or equivelent effort to what they have to do with Safari anyway.

No, it's not a license issue: it's about code ownership.

For example, Mozilla Corporation employs most of the people that decide the direction of Firefox, and they may or may not take patches from Apple, or maybe they want to change the default search engine, etc. Apple might want Firefox to use native Cocoa widgets in HTML form controls (for Gmail), but Firefox wants to do its own widgets to be consistent across all platforms. There will be no agreement on that, so Apple forks the code and now has to spend a significant engineering effort to merge new Firefox code into their fork, making sure not to introduce security bugs, performance regressions or changes that make merging really difficult.

Then Apple has to hope that the major feature set in Firefox 3 meshes with their desires. At some point, syncing the diverging source trees is more work than it's worth to maintain a bunch of code that doesn't completely fit your platform strategy... it's no secret that Firefox is an awesome browser on Windows, pretty good on linux, and butt ugly on the Mac.

So, yes, Firefox and Darwin are open source in the sense that you can download (and fork) the code when you want, but just try submitting patches upstream to them when they may have completely different priorities with the direction that they're taking. Any project from Apache to linux to Firefox have owners that may outright reject your changes if it doesn't take them where they want to go.