The saga over AirPlay continues. The folks over at Cydia who jailbreak iOS devices have developed a hack that gets AirPlay working with all iOS apps including Safari though it’s said to be less than fully stable at present.
In the meantime John Gruber, who has an uncanny sense of how Apple thinks and what they’re working on, said tonight on his 5by5 podcast with Dan Benjamin, that he thought Apple just ran out of time in getting AirPlay to work without a hitch and released AirPlay in less than its final estate to meet their desired deadline. Apple had promised that iOS 4.2 would be available in November and Apple wanted to meet that deadline because it’s the Xmas shopping season and iOS 4.2 is a big upgrade for the iPad which Apple wants to sell as fast as possible.
One of the famous quotes attributed to Steve Jobs is “real artists ship” which makes reference to the fact that any piece of software is feature incomplete but if you’re always trying to get every feature to work perfectly, you’ll never ship your product. So instead of delaying iOS 4.2 Apple left out the finished version of what AirPlay will be when it finally does ship feature complete. At that point It’s my belief that AppleTV will sell like proverbial hotcakes.
