“The only words you really need to know in the statement below emailed to me by Twitter: ‘We’re concerned’…”
January 2012
33 posts
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This is absolutely insane. In no way can this be taken as anything other than a way to push Google+.
Come on.
“What about the next 5 years? Many of the things that matter today will still matter: Hardware design, OS features and elegance, app stores, pricing, etc. But also things like cloud services, home and car integration, and mobile commerce platforms, which are in their infancy today. Those are some of the next races between Apple and Google worth watching.”
That last bit.
Who would have ever imagined, five or six years ago, that those would be the two companies that would be racing?
“‘Inside Apple’ book coming this month”
Still haven’t finished Isaacson’s biography.
NBD.
“Apple says the event will be about an education announcement and will take place on January 19 at the Guggenheim Museum.”
Just the Guggenheim. No big deal.
Numbers.
“As for Q1 2012 itself, Apple CEO Tim Cook said they were confident to have enough 4S supply to go through the holiday season, and also confirmed the company was expecting record iPhone sales for the quarter with revenue guidance set at $37 billion (Asymco’s Horace Dediu, however, expects revenue to hit $44 billion).”
Frederico Viticci at MacStories.
Think about that number. That’s quite a bit of money.
“Either way, it’s going to be a “blow-out quarter” for iPhone sales — even if we consider Apple’s Q3 2011, the biggest ever for iPhone sales to date with 20.34 million units sold.”
Think about that number. Three phones going up against hundreds.
Three.
Think about that number.
It's only a small distance, really.
“If you think that Amazon’s real cost to make that Kindle Fire is $201, then by all means, go to China and cobble one together yourself.”
It’s interesting that people complain about bad fruit at the grocery store. Somehow it made it from the other side of the planet before ripening, and there are many people who find that to be a problem.
I think it’s amazing.
And I thought they had a chance. →
businessinsider.com
This is laughable.
"Will big media realize it’s a software industry now?" →
splatf.com
Shit, I’d never thought of it like that. I still see digital magazines and books as publications, not as software. Even though I’m viewing them through software and as an interface.
My iPad 1 doesn’t run magazine apps terribly well (with the exception of Distro, which runs phenomenally). As such, my experience with digital magazines is both limited and rather negative. Everything needs a lot of work.
Dan’s perspective is the perspective needed to make that work mean something.
“But the Mac App Store has still been able to attract a significant amount of business from Aspyr customers, with Aspyr telling us that the Mac App Store accounted for sales of roughly 500,000 units across all of Aspyr’s titles in 2011, representing 50-60% of the company’s digital distribution business.”
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Well, shit. My point from yesterday seems less important, now.
That’s a lot of sales on a platform that has always been known to be bad for gaming. The Mac App Store is a great way to get right in the face of your target consumer when they buy a new Mac that has the App Store sitting right in the dock.
I’ll say this much: I prefer to download apps (I rarely purchase Mac games) on the Mac App Store versus the web, if only for the convenience of the billing and updates. The former is huge for a lot of people that aren’t tech savvy. They don’t trust developers they’ve never heard of with their credit card information.
“HTC needn’t ring any alarm bells just yet, it’s a company with a strong portfolio of competitive products, both in the Android and Windows Phone markets, however its period of unconstrained growth seems to be at an end. Now the challenge for the company will be to stabilize its profits and ensure that they don’t drop any further.”
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I would disagree with that.
A 20% year-over-year drop over two months, especially during the holiday season, says very bad things. The situation isn’t a burning platform, but HTC is not on the Queen Mary, either. A lot needs to be done.
Samsung was lucky to gain traction and record profits. While there may be room for HTC to do just as Samsung did, streamlining needs to occur.
The success of Samsung comes primarily from its Galaxy line, not from the plethora of phones that are not Galaxy devices. HTC doesn’t have the recognition that “Galaxy” does.
More quality. Fewer devices.
Someone doesn't know what dual core is. →
daringfireball.net
Gruber gets the link because he deserves the traffic.
Markos does not.
Siri doesn’t add any extra functionality to the iPhone; it is just a different, but not better, way of navigating the phone. Therefore, Siri doesn’t add much value to the iPhone 4S. Combined with the fact that the 4S’s tech specs haven’t made significant improvements over the iPhone 4, it may be an indication that Apple’s innovation machine may be running out of steam. This won’t bode well for the Apple’s stock momentum – innovation has been the cornerstone of the company’s sustainable competitive advantage.
Sound the alarm! Apple is failing! The iPhone isn’t selling!
No spec improvements? Because that really matters these days? Not as if the processor gained another core, or anything, anyways.
Don’t get me started on the whole “Siri isn’t useful” thing.
And innovation hasn’t always been the cornerstone. That’s quality, you’re thinking of.
That's not the point. →
marco.org
Marco Arment’s response to Matt Alexander’s rebuttal of Marco Arment’s response to Matt Alexander’s e-reader post from yesterday.
Marco held slightly similar views to me, though neither he nor Matt touch on what I touched on yesterday: some people just want to read a damn book.
Matt makes something clear from his original article, though I think this point still doesn’t take into account the primary user of the e-reader:
The e-reader becoming a “fringe device” is precisely the point of yesterday’s article. The difference is that I used the word “doomed” (once in the title, once in the body). Why “doomed,” specifically? Well, when I think of healthy, flourishing products, I tend not to think of once-popular “fringe” devices.
To a certain extent, I think that the e-reader is still a fringe device right now. If it wasn’t, Amazon would probably tell us, rather than give vague statements about sales. Many people who buy an e-reader don’t want a tablet and probably never will.
Marco brings up the big issue in the debate in his most recent post:
Then why does anyone buy grapefruit spoons, prime lenses, or two-seater sports cars?
Or tablets? Laptops do everything tablets do fairly well along with dozens of other features, and you probably already own one.
That analogy applies easily to the tech consumer who buys many things. But it also applies, in a slightly different manner, to the consumer who will never, ever, buy a tablet.
The Kindle readers are selling and will continue to sell. Thing is, they just go to a different market segment.
“I also installed and ran a copy of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim just for fun. I couldn’t maximize all graphics settings, but it definitely looked better than the console edition to which I’m accustomed, showing more detail, superior draw distances, and less pop-up.”
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Chad Sapieha for The Globe and Mail.
Huh, interesting. I hadn’t thought about what a big deal this is.
Of my gamer friends at school, I can’t think of a single one that owns a PC. But a bunch of them have Bootcamp installs set up in order to use Steam and play games.
Imagine all these college kids stealing sharing their copies of Windows so they can run (real) games on their MacBook Pros.
Looks like Apple finally conquered this problem.
Excellent PR! →
macgasm.net
Great customer service is easily found nowadays.
“‘For those that want to abuse it, we can knock them off,’ Hesse said at an investor conference Thursday. He said Sprint pares back data use for about 1% of users, a practice known as throttling.”
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How long have they been doing this? Because they’ve been running ads to the contrary for some time.
“You’d be shocked how much data you use in a month,” Sprint asks in a recent television advertisement. “What happens if you go over? With Sprint, you don’t have to worry; only Sprint offers truly unlimited data.”
At least we know iPhone users won’t ever be in that 1%, because Sprint’s data speeds for the iPhone are painfully slow.
Yahoo! is in the News! →
allthingsd.com
And the last time that news was positive was…?
