Archived Post

AWT News Update: March 10, 2015

Today in the world of Apple news:

  • The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple Stores draw so many customers that they lift mall sales by an average of 10%, giving the company an advantage in negotiating mall rents
  • Apple’s battle with court-appointed antitrust monitor Michael Bromwich may be nearing a conclusion as the company goes to the Second US Court of Appeals for relief
  • Swatch co-inventor thinks the Apple Watch will put pressure on the watch industry and jobs in Switzerland

Join us tomorrow for another episode of the AWT News Update, and be sure to leave a rating in the iTunes Store for this podcast.

On Monday, we followed an ancient and hallowed TUAW tradition and ran a liveblog during the Apple Spring Forward event. After the fact, the team talked a bit about the future of liveblogging.

Liveblogs are usually quite popular and this was no exception. Our traffic on Monday was quite nice, something we’d like to see every day. But as we noticed while watching the event, there was another liveblog that was competing with ours — Apple’s.

Apple has begun posting real-time commentary and photos to Apple.com during (although not as fun as ours and presumably pre-written) during press event livestreams. As a result, if you missed something said by one of the presenters or had issues hearing Jony Ive during one of his many video narrations, chances were good that you were going to get the facts in a short blurb from the Apple liveblog.

We were using a new and rather untested (but free…) liveblogging tool that worked pretty well, although there were some glitches on the editorial side. We could probably move to another tool for future events, but the question is — do we really want to do another liveblog?

What might make more sense is for the AWT team to do a livestream video of commentary during an event — something you could watch or at least listen to while Apple is introducing the fourth-generation Apple TV, the Apple Car, an even thinner MacBook, or the next-gen Mac Pro with six USB-C ports… After the event is over, we could segue straight into a post-mortem.

It’s a thought, or we could just continue the tradition of fast typing (yay, Erica) and snapping screenshots as fast as we can, all the while hoping the liveblog tool holds up. In our new tradition, we want your opinion on how to handle future Apple events. Just leave a comment or two in the comments below, and we’ll take everything into consideration.

Steve Sande
the authorSteve Sande
Steve is the founder and former publisher of Apple World Today and has authored a number of books about Apple products. He's an avid photographer, an FAA-licensed drone pilot, and a really bad guitarist. Steve and his wife Barb love to travel everywhere!