« Audience’s Emotional Response To Advertising At The Cinema | Home | Recent Comments | Categories | WWII graves smashed in Libya »
Futulele
[Quote]:
FUTULELE is an upcoming Ukulele synthesizer for iOS. Although it can work on a single iPad, similar to our well-known guitar synth OMGuitar (http://amidio.com/omguitar), Futulele really shines with a special guitar-shaped case that holds both an iPad and an iPhone, which are connected to each other via Bluetooth. iPhone is used to define the chords and iPad is used for strumming.
How PayPal and Apple’s Fraud Policies Punish the Honest User – LockerGnome
[Quote]:
Seven days later, my account was frozen again by PayPal. This freezing was due to the same batch of claims resulting from the same fraud I had reported almost four months ago. I went through the reactivation steps again with PayPal, and everything was put right again within the hour.
My Apple ID was also frozen again, and this time I received some startling news from the supervisor at Mac support via the chat she had with iTunes support which was apparently being very pushy with her for having bothered them.
She told me that if I reactivate my account now, and iTunes freezes it again, I’ll never regain access under any circumstances. That means that by using my Apple ID, I could risk losing access to my software purchases, licenses, and OS X Lion. Yes, I could lose everything I had spent my hard earned money on, having to start over from scratch with the hardware I still had in-hand. I’d have to buy Mac OS X Lion again, Final Cut Pro, Compressor, hundreds of dollars in iOS apps, and hundreds more in Mac software.
To say the least, I’m discouraged.
Any company the size of Apple or Paypal is going to have some customer service flubs that lead to negative blog posts. That doesn’t mean they’re bad companies. But there’s a fundamental issue here: if you become victim of abuse of your AppleID, you may lose access to support and upgrades for all the software you’ve bought with that ID. That doesn’t seem like a big deal for 99 cent iPhone apps, but it extends to OS (security) updates, and now to your purchases in the Mac App Store. These walled ecosystems ruled by a benevolent dictator leave you more & more vulnerable to the dictator’s mistakes with limited recourse.
Adobe Photoshop Touch Review
[Quote]:
So when I finally got to try out Adobe Photoshop Touch, I was intrigued to see what Adobe had accomplished. After a couple of hours playing around in the app (it accidentally went live yesterday, then Adobe pulled it) I’ve come away very impressed with what Adobe has accomplished. Photoshop Touch is a powerful and capable version of Photoshop for the iPad, without a doubt. To me, it is the latest iPad app that has demonstrated that the iPad is for more than “content consumption” — that’s just an old myth now.
Also available for Android.
Going above and beyond…
Fair Labor Association Says Apple Factories Are ”First Class”
[Quote]:
Earlier this week, Apple announced that it had requested that the Fair Labor Association inspect its suppliers’ factories in Asia. The move followed heightened criticism over how these manufacturing plants were treating the people that were assembling products from numerous big-name companies, including Apple. However, despite reports of worker mistreatment, it seems the staff at Foxconn enjoy above average working conditions. At least, that’s what the Fair Labor Association says.
Though the agency will not be releasing full details of its inspections until sometime next month, the FLA has said that the conditions at the factories are better than those at garment factories or other facilities in China. Reuters cites FLA President Auret van Heerden as saying the conditions at Foxconn are “way, way above average.” The head of the Fair Labor Association goes on to suggest that ‘the problems’ at Foxconn can probably be attributed to boredom and monotony rather than a high-pressure work environment.
|
Daring Fireball: Mountain Lion
[Quote]:
But this, I say, waving around at the room, this feels a little odd. I’m getting the presentation from an Apple announcement event without the event. I’ve already been told that I’ll be going home with an early developer preview release of Mountain Lion. I’ve never been at a meeting like this, and I’ve never heard of Apple seeding writers with an as-yet-unannounced major update to an operating system. Apple is not exactly known for sharing details of as-yet-unannounced products, even if only just one week in advance. Why not hold an event to announce Mountain Lion — or make the announcement on apple.com before talking to us?
That’s when Schiller tells me they’re doing some things differently now.
|
Apple’s Size Clouds Market
[Quote]:
Earlier this month, Jonathan Golub, the chief U.S. equity strategy at UBS AG, caused a stir among his clients by publishing two versions of his regular quarterly earnings update: one for the companies that make up the S&P 500, and another for what he calls “S&P 500 ex-Apple.”
“In two and a half years, I haven’t got as much response as I did to that note,” Mr. Golub says.
Strategists at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Barclays Capital and Wells Fargo have done similar analyses recently to offset Apple’s impact.
The results are striking: For all the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, earnings are on track to post a 6.6% year-on-year rise in the fourth quarter. Once Apple’s earnings are factored out, the expected fourth-quarter gain shrivels to just 2.8%, according to UBS.
[Quote]:
Of course, being who I am, I went home and built a spreadsheet to recalculate what would have happened if Dow Jones had decided to add Apple to the index instead of Cisco back in 2009. Imagine my surprise to see that the Dow be over 2000 points higher.
In real life, the Dow closed at 12,874.04 on Feb 13, 2012. However, if they had added Apple instead of Cisco, the Dow Jones would be at 14,926.95. That’s over 800 points higher than the all-time high of 14,164 previously set on 4/7/2008.
Can you imagine what the daily financial news of this country would be if every day the Dow Jones was hitting an all-time high? How would it change the tone of our politics? Would we all be counting the moments to Dow 15,000?
Guesswork about AppleTV
That Samsung bravado about a possible Apple iTV got me thinking. Obviously if Apple is going to release a TV, it’s going to be much more than just a screen. It won’t be about display quality like the Samsung exec seems to think.
What would differentiate an Apple TV? I can think of a few possibilities:
1. Content access
The obvious scenario is a TV with a built-in iTunes store that lets you buy/rent TV shows and movies without having to have a cable TV subscription. This would be an extension of the current iTunes and AppleTV, maybe with better selection of content and integration with iCloud to store your media, à la Amazon’s cloud storage for media.
2. App-TV
This is #1 plus “iOS apps come to the Apple TV”. (Maybe even Siri.)
So far, both of these can be done with a cheap separate device like the current Apple TV. What makes it compelling for Apple to sell you the display as well? So far, nothing other than skipping a bit of wiring set-up.
3. New input/interaction model
The simplest way to describe this is as “Apple’s response to Kinect”. If Apple has developed a remote-control-free interaction technique that requires new hardware like the Kinect box, maybe that’s compelling enough that if it were integrated into a display, you’d be willing to buy the entire display device. But Kinect isn’t tied to a specific TV. Can Apple come up with something so much more compelling that people will be willing to toss out their existing TVs?
I’m not sure which way to bet. I’m still skeptical about Apple going into the TV-display market.
Any other guesses on what’s coming?
|
Mooresville School District, a Laptop Success Story
[Quote]:
Mr. Edwards spoke on a White House panel in September, and federal Department of Education officials often cite Mooresville as a symbolic success. Overwhelmed by requests to view the programs in action, the district now herds visitors into groups of 60 for monthly demonstrations; the waiting list stretches to April. What they are looking for is an explanation for the steady gains Mooresville has made since issuing laptops three years ago to the 4,400 4th through 12th graders in five schools (three K-3 schools are not part of the program).
The district’s graduation rate was 91 percent in 2011, up from 80 percent in 2008. On state tests in reading, math and science, an average of 88 percent of students across grades and subjects met proficiency standards, compared with 73 percent three years ago. Attendance is up, dropouts are down. Mooresville ranks 100th out of 115 districts in North Carolina in terms of dollars spent per student — $7,415.89 a year — but it is now third in test scores and second in graduation rates.
“Other districts are doing things, but what we see in Mooresville is the whole package: using the budget, innovating, using data, involvement with the community and leadership,” said Karen Cator, a former Apple executive who is director of educational technology for the United States Department of Education. “There are lessons to be learned.”
|
Samsung not worried by Apple iTV threat
[Quote]:
But Samsung isn’t bothered one bit. Well, AV product manager Chris Moseley isn’t, at least. Pocket-lint caught up with the AV boss at the Korean company’s European Forum in Prague and he explained that Samsung’s superiority in picture quality means that Apple’s much touted TV isn’t ringing any alarm bells at Sammy HQ.
“We’ve not seen what they’ve done but what we can say is that they don’t have 10,000 people in R&D in the vision category,” he said.
“They don’t have the best scaling engine in the world and they don’t have world renowned picture quality that has been awarded more than anyone else.
“TVs are ultimately about picture quality. Ultimately. How smart they are…great, but let’s face it that’s a secondary consideration. The ultimate is about picture quality and there is no way that anyone, new or old, can come along this year or next year and beat us on picture quality.
And there’s no way, no way I tell you, that a company like Apple could create a phone that could possibly compete, remember?
|
iOS Surpasses OS X in Share of U.S. Web Traffic
[Quote]:
Analytics firm Chitika today released a report showing that by its metrics iOS has now surpassed OS X in overall web traffic share in the United States. Chitika’s methodology involves an analysis of browser user agents for hundreds of millions of ad impressions across its expansive network.
I guess OS X as a desktop platform still generates significantly more traffic than iOS. This measurement is by an ad network, so it doesn’t see anything from people using AdBlock or similar stuff on their desktop.
Your Phone Loses Value Pretty Fast (Unless It’s an iPhone)
[Quote]:
At Priceonomics, we firmly believe that resale value is the best objective indicator of product quality. If you wanted to figure out the best cell phone, you could look at all the reviews, test out all the phones, talk to all the experts, but still your assessment will be subjective. Or you could let the market tell you which phones are the highest quality by seeing which ones best retain their value over time.
Priceonomics phone pricing data strongly indicates that Apple phones are a better value than smartphones on other platforms. The market has spoken, and Android and Blackberrys do not age well.
|
Apple’s iPhone Business Alone Is Now Bigger Than All Of Microsoft
[Quote]:
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
[Quote]:
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.
|
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.
|
Students’ math scores jumped 20% with iPad textbooks, publisher says
[Quote]:
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.
|
Apple’s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement | ZDNet
[Quote]:
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?
|
CEO of FoxConn: ‘Managing One Million Animals Gives Me A Headache’
[Quote]:
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.
|
‘Time to Sell Apple’
[Quote]:
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?
|
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.)
|
Apple, RIM deny claims of data backdoor for Indian government
[Quote]:
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
[Quote]:
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!
|
‘The Sims’ Designer Creating New Game for Real Life
[Quote]:
“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.
|
Domo Arigato, Mr Roboto
[Quote]:
“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
|
Jonathan Ive is knighted in New Year Honours list
[Quote]:
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.
|
Samsung: no ICS upgrade for Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab because of TouchWiz
[Quote]:
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.
|
RIM now worth less than Apple’s App Store alone
[Quote]:
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
[Quote]:
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.
|
« Older Entries Newer Entries »
If 0.5% of the users have issues with a certain product, then 0.5% of the users complain about it online.
I have personal experience with emailing the Apple CEO with a problem like this.
Apple will fix it very fast.
I know Apple fanboyism is a strong faith, but believing in the help of a dead CEO is stretching it a bit…
@John: I would like to have confidence that Apple would fix such issues, but note two things: (1) it was the Apple CSR who told the customer in the first place that he now had 2 strikes against him and that a third would lock his account; (2) it doesn’t address my point that we’re putting the continued use of products and tools we’ve fully paid for under someone else’s control. No amount of issues with my account with Apple should revoke my access to products I’ve already fully paid for.
Chase made me contact Customer service because I updated my browser and they didn’t recognize the PC. Customer service was out of India or something like that. I’m sure they’ll respect my financial information and passwords. Why don’t they just base Customer service in Kenya, once they have access to my financial information they can stop sending me email about winning the lottery?