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Apple’s iPhone Business Alone Is Now Bigger Than All Of Microsoft
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Tech writer MG Siegler just noted a remarkable fact:
Apple’s iPhone business alone is now bigger than Microsoft.
Not Windows. Not Office. Microsoft.
Think about that.
Remember when Balmer said the iPhone would never amount to anything? Good times…
Apple Scotland
Watching Apple win the world
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Apple’s last quarter was the second most profitable quarter of any company ever in US history. Only ExxonMobile topped them slightly in 2008 when oil was at an all-time high. That’s an astounding and awe-inspiring accomplishment.
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Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class – NYTimes.com
This article is about Apple and iPhone manufacturing, but it explains in general why people say “nothing is made in America anymore”. I’m quoting more extensively than we usually do, but I think it’s worth it. What that means, of course, is that I think you should read the whole article.
[Quote]:
Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
(…)
“We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,” a current Apple executive said. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”
(…)
In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn’t driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.
For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.
(…)
It is hard to estimate how much more it would cost to build iPhones in the United States. However, various academics and manufacturing analysts estimate that because labor is such a small part of technology manufacturing, paying American wages would add up to $65 to each iPhone’s expense. Since Apple’s profits are often hundreds of dollars per phone, building domestically, in theory, would still give the company a healthy reward.
But such calculations are, in many respects, meaningless because building the iPhone in the United States would demand much more than hiring Americans — it would require transforming the national and global economies. Apple executives believe there simply aren’t enough American workers with the skills the company needs or factories with sufficient speed and flexibility.
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Students’ math scores jumped 20% with iPad textbooks, publisher says
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On the heels of Apple’s e-textbook announcement in New York City this week, publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced the results of its “HMC Fuse: Algebra I” pilot program at Ameila Earhart Middle School in California’s Riverside Unified School District. The Algebra I digital textbook is touted as the world’s first full-curriculum algebra application developed exclusively for Apple’s iPad.
In its test run, the “HMH Fuse” application helped more than 78 percent of students score “Proficient” or “Advanced” on the spring 2011 California Standards Test. That was significantly higher than the 59 percent of peers who used traditional textbooks.
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Apple’s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement | ZDNet
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I read EULAs so you don’t have to. I’ve spent years reading end user license agreements, EULAs, looking for little gotchas or just trying to figure out what the agreement allows and doesn’t allow.
I have never seen a EULA as mind-bogglingly greedy and evil as Apple’s EULA for its new ebook authoring program.
(…)
Exactly: Imagine if Microsoft said you had to pay them 30% of your speaking fees if you used a PowerPoint deck in a speech.
(…)
The nightmare scenario under this agreement? You create a great work of staggering literary genius that you think you can sell for 5 or 10 bucks per copy. You craft it carefully in iBooks Author. You submit it to Apple. They reject it.
Under this license agreement, you are out of luck. They won’t sell it, and you can’t legally sell it elsewhere. You can give it away, but you can’t sell it.
The positive spin would be that this is exactly like the well-accepted iOS App Store: you’re gambling that Apple will accept your app(/book), and if they don’t then you’re completely out of luck as you have no other way to sell it without rewriting it entirely for another platform. It’s not as simple as copy/pasting text and pictures into another authoring tool if you’ve done anything interactive that involves iOS code.
You could also say “well, that’s what you give up to get iBooks Author for free.”
But is this the world we want to move into? Where Amazon controls whether you can continue to read the books you’ve bought from them? And where Apple can reject your work after months of effort and leave you stranded?
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CEO of FoxConn: ‘Managing One Million Animals Gives Me A Headache’
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According to WantChinaTimes, Terry Gou, the head of Hon Hai Foxconn, the largest contract manufacturer in the world, had this to say at a recent meeting with his senior managers:"Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache," said Hon Hai chairman Terry Gou at a recent year-end party, adding that he wants to learn from Chin Shih-chien, director of Taipei Zoo, regarding how animals should be managed.
Apparently there are no psychologists in China.
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‘Time to Sell Apple’
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Let me get this straight. Apple entered the phone business five years ago with a strategy completely different than any other handset maker: treating the user as the customer, rather than the carriers. With this strategy, Apple has now captured two-thirds of the profit in the worldwide handset market. And but now, according to Lee, what Apple should do is start acting like all the other handset makers.
Where do they find these guys?
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Tim Cook’s stock grant
You’ve probably seen those headlines about Tim Cook making $378 million in Apple stock last year. Those articles are mostly a bit confused. He was awarded restricted stock, to vest over the next 10 years. Apple is just reporting the whole grant to the SEC in the year it was made.
OK, that seems a bit more reasonable than a $378 million payday, right?
Well, let’s do a thought experiment to see how much Cook actually might make with those 900,000 shares he will receive if he doesn’t get fired or leave before then.
I’m sure Apple’s Board would be happy if Cook kept Apple growing as much as it has the last 10 years. That seems like a good benchmark.
From Fall of 2001 to Fall of 2011), Apple stock increased from about $9 to $378, or 42x.
If Cook is successful and the stock tracks along, then in the Fall of 2021 his stock price will be 42 * $378, and Cook was not given options (where you only make money if the stock goes up) but actual stock, so he makes the full value, or 42 * $378 * 900k.
Per year Cook would make 1.4 billion dollars.
PER YEAR.
Minus tax.
(He only has to do roughly 1/4th as well as the past 10 years to make roughly $378 million per year.)
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Apple, RIM deny claims of data backdoor for Indian government
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Apple and RIM have denied providing the Indian government with backdoor access to customers’ data, after the release of a memo that appears to suggest that they and Nokia did a deal in exchange for access to the Indian smartphone market.
Open Letter to Apple Shareholders
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Paying a dividend and burning down our war chest would jeopardize all of that.
You see, one day a competitor will come along and cut our core product line out from underneath us. We will need all the cash we can muster to fend them off. When that cash is done, we will mortgage the company. The first several times we may be successful. However, as is always the case, eventually time will get the best of us and we will be unable to meet our creditors demands.
We will go bankrupt. Our creditors will seize the equity and the shareholders will be left with nothing and having made zero return on their investment.
Right. Makes total sense. And I want some of the same glue this guy is sniffing, it must be great!
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‘The Sims’ Designer Creating New Game for Real Life
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“It’s kind of remarkable. I’ve set up a couple of PCs and a few TVs over the last couple of years. Buying a new television and setting it up is far more complicated now than buying a computer and setting it up.”
No wonder people expect Apple to start selling TV sets.
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Domo Arigato, Mr Roboto
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“I can’t wake up one morning and say, ‘Screw the letter B,’” type designer Matthew Carter told me last year when I interviewed him for the Economist, just after he had received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellowship. Carter, arguably the leading living creator and adapter of fonts in the Western world, was talking about the limits of pushing legibility and readability.
I thought of his comment when a recent furor erupted over the new “house” font for Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), called Roboto. Roboto is a bespoke sans-serif font, created by a Google employee and used throughout Android’s user interface (UI) as part of the larger user experience (UX) overhaul. The intent is to make Android more intuitive, cohesive, and fluid, and work better on a variety of screen sizes, especially tablets.
Roboto was almost immediately branded a Frankenfont, a multi-headed hydra, and many other names by font purists and tyros alike, because of what seems to be a borrowing of identifiable features of several well-known fonts, including Helvetica. Stephen Coles at Typographica singled out characters he felt quite similar in form from Helvetica, Myriad, Universe, FF DIN, and Ronnia.
Bullshit
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Jonathan Ive is knighted in New Year Honours list
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Apple’s chief designer Jonathan Ive has been appointed a Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE) in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours list.
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Samsung: no ICS upgrade for Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab because of TouchWiz
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Samsung has just distributed the worst news of this Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade cycle: the popular Galaxy S smartphone that sold 10 million units last year and the 7-inch Galaxy Tab tablet won’t be upgraded to Android 4.0.
[Quote]:
it’s a development platform, not a computing platform. That’s why tech commentators can’t see the difference.
iOS for iPhone and iPad is a platform. Android is not. Android is something companies use to develop products. Anything done on Android after release of a product that has no relation whatsoever to the product. This is no different from iOS, except the company who developed iOS and the product is one and the same, and that has effects on what they think customers may expect from them. No wonder people are more loyal to Apple.
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RIM now worth less than Apple’s App Store alone
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Research in Motion’s struggles in the smartphone market have driven its stock price so low that the company is worth less than the estimated value of just Apple’s App Store.
Why the iPad Is the Most Hated Gadget Ever
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Here’s the under-appreciated reality of all this: HP, RIM and Amazon have all moved millions of touch tablets into the market at below cost. This has caused two problems for the market. First, it’s created a domino effect. HP’s fire sale on the TouchPad cut demand for the BlackBerry PlayBook, reducing unit sales. That contributed to RIM’s need for a fire sale of its own. (Plus, Amazon has probably long intended to sell below cost.)
All this crazy, unexpected discounting has both artificially taken market share away from the various Android tablets, and re-set consumer expectations about how much a touch tablet is supposed to cost.
Now, the only way to sell a non-iPad tablet in any significant quantity is to sell it below cost.
Android tablet makers are faced with the choice between making a little money on each tablet but selling few, or losing money on each tablet and selling many.
It’s a horrible state of affairs for the tablet industry, unless you’re Apple or Amazon. And it’s almost entirely the fault of the iPad.
The iPad’s reception convinced the industry that they could succeed, too. The success of the iPad made HP and RIM vastly over-estimate demand. And the success of the iPad made it impossible to compete against the iPad in the market, forcing companies to ultimately dump inventory at below cost and, in doing so, nearly destroy the Android tablet market.
That’s why the consumer tablet industry hates the iPad. But they’re not the only ones.
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Pair of Robbers Want Only iPhones, No BlackBerries
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A pair of would-be robbers targeting Columbia students in upper Manhattan seem to be rather picky as they prowl.
Twice at 526 114th St., and once at 556 114th St., the suspects demanded the victims hand over their iPhones, police said.
The first victim complied, but the second only had a Droid, according to police. The thieves apparently didn’t want a Droid — so they took cash instead.
[Quote]:
It gets under my skin because it is a pompous, privileged, insulting, and myopic viewpoint which reeks of class warfare — and it is indicative of a growing sentiment I see amongst people in the tech community.
(source)
So that’s why I prefer the iPhone…
[Quote]:
It looks like a human was involved in choosing what went where,” Marissa told them. “It looks too editorialized. Google products are machine-driven. They’re created by machines. And that is what makes us powerful. That’s what makes our products great.
– Marissa Mayer addressing Google designers, as quoted in “In The Plex” by Steven Levy
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Apple made Galaxy Tab a ‘household name’
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In an interview today Samsung Australia’s vice president of telecommunications, Tyler McGee, would not say how many sales Samsung missed out on as a result of Apple’s temporary ban on the Galaxy Tab.
But when asked whether the court action – which Apple launched after claiming Samsung "slavishly copied" its iPad – was the best marketing Samsung could hope for, McGee was under no illusions about the boost Apple’s case, and the subsequent media coverage, provided.
"At the end of the day the media awareness certainly made the Galaxy Tab 10.1 a household name compared to probably what it would’ve been based on the investment that we would’ve put into it from a marketing perspective," he said.
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Measuring corporate “evilness” by scraping litigation results from google scholar
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One way we can measure a company’s “evilness” is by how important litigation is to corporate strategy. We’ll open this series by comparing today’s three tech giants: Microsoft, Google, and Apple. Which company gets sued the most? And more importantly, which company sues others the most?
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Android glitch allows hackers to bug phone calls
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Computer scientists have discovered a weakness in smartphones running Google’s Android operating system that allows attackers to secretly record phone conversations, monitor geographic location data, and access other sensitive resources without permission.
Handsets sold by HTC, Samsung, Motorola, and Google contain code that exposes powerful capabilities to untrusted apps, scientists from North Carolina State University said. These “explicit capability leaks” bypass key security defenses built into Android that require users to clearly grant permission before an app gets access to personal information and functions such as text messaging. The code making the circumvention possible is contained in interfaces and services the device manufactures add to enhance the stock firmware supplied by Google.
[..]
Unlike out-of-the-box iPhones, which allow users to install only apps that have been approved by Apple, the official Android Market performs no security checks on the wares it offers. To compensate, Google built the permission-based security model into the mobile OS to give users control over the personal information apps get to access. Before a new program runs for the first time, it lists the sensitive resources it will access. Users who are uncomfortable with the permissions then have an opportunity to cancel the installation.
The researchers found that the manufacturer-supplied enhancements offer a way to circumvent this permissions-based model.
Again, not Google’s fault - unless you count allowing others to modify your software before release.
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Twitter / @csoghoian
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Prediction: within 2 weeks, all US carriers will ditch Carrier IQ. Within 2 months, Carrier IQ will change its name.
Microsoft tempts with WinPho demo on… iPhone
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Microsoft has pieced together an HTML 5-based demo of its Windows Phone OS’ Metro user interface, giving iOS and Android users a taste of what life’s like on the other side.
[..]
If you’re an Android or iPhone user and fancy giving it a go, visit http://aka.ms/wpdemo from your handset’s browser. Let us know how you get on.
Very nice – first time I get to see bits of Metro. Looks like Microsoft came up with something good!
Steve Jobs and NeXT
TellMe vs Siri
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I’m a PC, I’m a Mac…
You know, some people compare the above ad to the Mac vs PC ads that Apple did. There’s subtle difference: the Apple ads was heckling the actual devices – the PC – and this ad is heckling the users of said devices. Does anyone really think it’s smart to insult the people you are trying to win over?
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Mobile Safari on LG
Let me freeze-frame that for you:
Here are the iPhone and the Optimus browsers side by side:
“LG — None of us actually use our own phones, so we don’t spot mistakes like this until it’s too late.”
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The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face
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Inspired by the collaborative intelligence of her fellow software designers, Kare stayed on at Apple to craft the navigational elements for Mac’s GUI. Because an application for designing icons on screen hadn’t been coded yet, she went to the University Art supply store in Palo Alto and picked up a $2.50 sketchbook so she could begin playing around with forms and ideas. In the pages of this sketchbook, which hardly anyone but Kare has seen before now*, she created the casual prototypes of a new, radically user-friendly face of computing — each square of graph paper representing a pixel on the screen.
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Burnistoun Eleven.
Rofl thats hilarious