Technovia

Apple announces MacBook Wheel

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard The production values on this put many news programmes to shame...

Repeat after me: browsing share is not market share

How many times are we going to have to go through this? Computerworld reports that "Windows lost nearly a full percentage point of market share for the second month in a row in December". Except, of course, it's not market share.

In fact, they're "reporting" (I don't think it actually justifies that label) the Net Applications survey of Internet use, which the company itself erroneously describes as "market share". It isn't. It doesn't indicate sales, only a particular kind of usage.

And that's something Net Applications acknowledges itself, in a roundabout way. As it notes on its page on "market share" at present, "the December holiday season strongly favored residential over business usage. This in turn increases the relative usage share of Mac, Firefox, Safari and other products that have relatively high residential usage."

That's the important word, here: usage. And usage doesn't tell you much about the number of machines being sold, or the installed base. So to draw out a headline which makes it sound like the sales of Windows machines are on the wane, as Computerworld does, is either hype or sloppy journalism.

UPDATE: TUAW gets on the same bandwagon, with the same dumb headline and opening line. Look, I know that an Apple blog is going to want to say that Mac market share is "almost 10%", but reporting this without the caveat that it's not really market share AND ignoring NetApplications own warning about Windows being under-reported is either consumate spin or stupidity. Are reporters no longer supposed to look at things like this critically?

More UK censorship could be on the way in the name of "saving the children"

BBC NEWS | UK | Website age ratings 'an option'

"Mr Burnham, a father of three young children, believes internet-service providers should offer child-friendly web access"

Many UK ISPs already offer "child-friendly web access", by including bundled parental control tools - BT, for example, includes them with all of their Total Broadband packages. Mandating that all ISPs included these tools would be an easy option.

But my prediction, given Burnham's other comments, is that the government will use the pretext of "protecting children" to push through further measures requiring ISPs to censor the Internet at source. Watch this space. Technorati Tags: Internet access, UK government, censorship

Possibly not the most informative release notes ever

Up there with Apple's classic "Bug fixes".

Private APIs and Apple's role as the iPhone policeman

John Gruber has posted one of his usual thoughtful pieces on the role and usage of "private" APIs in the iPhone - APIs which exist, but are not part of the public frameworks which developers are supposed to use. John makes many good reasons not to use such APIs - the most important of which is simply that they're likely to go "bye-bye" at any moment, breaking your app completely.

However, John - perhaps wisely - doesn't step into the bigger question: Why should Apple be the arbiter of good programming on the iPhone at all?

The most often-cited reason is that a phone is not a computer, in the sense that it's vital that it keeps working. Given the iPhone's abysmal battery life, this seems to be something which Apple itself is happy to ignore when it suits. My iPhone is more likely to be out of battery when I want to make an emergency call, rather than constantly crashing.

There's a second reason why this argument is a red herring: no third party application can run in the background, which makes it much harder for an app to lock-up your phone to the extent of being unable to place or receive calls.

So why is Apple keen to keep private APIs private? I think it's simply a misguided attempt to protect users from bad programming. But the problem with this approach is that it's a slippery slope: at what point do you stop trying to protect users from bad programmers? Do you reject applications on aesthetic grounds? Because they're memory hogs? Because you simply don't like them, and don't see a need for them?

Restricting the market for applications, even with the best of intentions, inevitably leads to a stale marketplace. Sooner or later, Apple will either open its market up, or miss out on the next generation of truly-useful apps.

Steve Jobs has been ill. Is it any wonder he wants to cut down the keynotes?

Joe Wilcox is right: Apple used a standard move from the PR playbook to push the really bad stuff down the agenda. In announcing that Apple would no longer be attending Macworld Expo and - almost as an side - that Steve Jobs would not be doing January's keynote speech, was trying to push "Death of Macworld Expo" up the news agenda at the expense of inevitable speculation as to the state of Jobs' health.

I know no more about how well Jobs is than anyone else outside his family and inner-circle of friends and colleagues, but I do know this: the kind of illness and surgery that Jobs had means reduced energy levels for anyone, and for someone as actively involved as Jobs is in his business, that means tough choices have to be made about priorities.

Jobs' keynotes are so brilliant as to appear effortless. I've been lucky enough to see Jobs on stage ten or so times, and at no point do they feel staged. As anyone who's good at presentations will tell you, that degree of casualness takes vast amounts of time in preparation and rehearsal to perfect. In fact, it's worth reading former Apple product manager Mike Evangelist's excellent account of preparing for a Jobs keynote for an idea just how much hard work is involved.

My guess is that each keynote speech takes two or three weeks of high attention from Jobs, with days of writing, editing, honing and actual rehearsal. From my own experience of big, important presentations I know that the energy levels required are huge.

If I was an Apple stockholder, I'd look at it this way: do I want a Steve Jobs who needs to take it a little easier than before spending weeks-worth of energy on a presentation, or on honing and developing the products and marketing strategies which have made the company billions?

If Apple needs to see less of Steve, then that decision is a no-brainer.

The real "I'm a PC guy"

Is Apple recession proof? The answer is "no", but...

Jason O'Grady has a good post summing up the theory (first espoused by American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu) that Apple is "recession proof". In fact, I think there's good reason to think that the opposite it true, but also that the bright points for Apple outweigh the bad ones.

Where the iPhone sits

The first thing to think about is to break down Apple's product lines, because the economy will affect each in different ways. Perhaps surprisingly, I think iPhone is probably the least vulnerable of the product lines. The upfront cost of the iPhone is heavily subsidised by phone companies, and that will make it a tempting upgrade when someone's phone contract runs out. In tough times, a luxury product with a low upfront cost is likely to be quite attractive.

How will the iPod perform?

For iPod, there are good and bad points. People who already own one will probably put off buying a new version, and as the market for music players reaches saturation point the upgrade market will be the most important one. However, the speed of development of technology means that someone replacing what was a top of the range iPod from two years ago can get a much lower cost replacement - and low-cost luxuries do well in downturns. So, while iPod sales will head down, they won't get hammered too hard.

Mac: from market share hero to market share loser?

The big question mark is over the Mac. Over the past couple of years, Mac sales have been nothing less than stellar, with an overall market share increase compared to the rest of the computer industry. The reasons for this have been partly due to an exceptionally well though-out product line, the failure of Windows Vista to impress virtually anyone, and improved mind-share for Apple in general thanks to the iPod and, more recently, iPhone.

But Apple's pricing remains on the high side. That's not to say that they aren't close to the prices of equivalent Windows-running hardware (sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't). If you want to spend £1000 on a laptop, Apple offers good options - and even better ones if you want to spend £1700.

In tough times, though, the number of people prepared to pay that much shrinks, and the number of people prepared only to stretch to, say, £500 increases. Even people who have money are more inclined to be careful with it. And for those people, Apple presently is not an option. Some customers might defer buying anything until they can afford a Mac, but if you have a four year old PC which barely runs Windows, or a child heading off to university, you're going to be buying something very soon.

So the question isn't "will Apple sales be hit by the recession?" - they clearly will - but whether Apple will be hit harder than the rest of the PC industry. The bare-bones analysis of pricing suggests it will, but you also have to take into account the momentum that its increasing market and mind-shares have given it. I'd expect Apple's Mac share growth to continue over the next couple of quarters, but decline after that if the recession continues. At some point, if the recession continues long enough, they will start to decline if Apple doesn't change its product line mix - but that decline could be a year away, and depends on a whole host of macroeconomic factors.

The management factor

The other factor which needs to be taken into account is the incredibly well-managed nature of today's Apple. The company, probably more than any other in Silicon Valley, has exceptional aggressive control over costs - it doesn't waste money. This, plus its supply-line management, will help it ride out the worst of the recession. When the recession is all over, the shareholders should give Tim Cook a big bonus, because as COO he's turned Apple from a management joke into one of the best-run businesses in the world.

The product mix: time for a "value" segment?

Given that the biggest potential weakness seems to be the lack of lower-cost products, should Apple introduce a new "value" section into its product matrix? Some would argue that this would be counterproductive: that part of the allure of the Mac is that it's firmly in the high price/high value segment. There's something to be said for this, and whether sticking with the strategy makes sense depends almost entirely on how long you think the recession will last. Apple could easily ride out six months to a year of slowing sales in the high-price segment, thanks to its vast cash reserves and excellent cost management.

The danger would be that if Apple starts to under-perform the rest of the market, it could lose a lot of the impetus it has gained over the past year or two. There's also the possibility that, if the recession last long enough, consumer confidence will erode to the point where its Mac sales will fall off the metaphorical cliff.

These risks are, undoubtedly, the ones which Jobs and his team have been weighing up for a while. Given the company's cash and income situation, I don't expect any rush to introduce "recession-buster" low cost products. But I'd be very surprised if Apple wasn't working on them, as a hedge against the downturn lasting.

Could Apple create low-cost products? Of course: in fact, it already has done. Both the Mac mini and the iPod demonstrate that, if it wants to, it can produce exceptional, high-value low-cost products. The mini is a bit of an unsung hero in Apple's current product line, and its easy to imagine that it could produce a laptop which fulfill the same purpose in the portable range.

So overall, it's fair to say that Apple isn't recession proof. No company is. But it's not in a disastrous position, and it's incredibly well-managed. This buys it the time to either ride out a shorter recession or readjust its product strategy if the downturn is likely to be a long-term thing. It's revenues and market share aren't going to fall off a cliff any time soon.

Pointless DRM fails yet again

The DRM on Nokia's "Comes with Music" service has, it seems, been cracked (or more accurately, bypassed) already. When will they learn?

Are some UK ISPs censoring Wikipedia?

It looks like Wikipedia has fallen-foul of the long reach of the Internet Watch Foundation, which has decided to block pages on it.

The main offending page is dedicated to the rock band The Scorpions album "Virgin Killer", which featured on its original 1976 sleeve a pretty tasteless image of a naked pre-pubescent girl. Try and access this page from many UK ISPs at the moment, and you'll get an error message telling you it was "not found on this server". In fact, it is on the server - you're just not allowed to access it.

The issue first came to attention when it was noticed that a large number of UK ISP users were coming from a single IP address, including all of those from my own ISP, Be Unlimited. This address was used to spam Wikipedia, and so got blocked - leading to thousands of people unable to edit articles or create new user logins.

The discussions of this on Wikipedia suggest that what's happening is this: once a site has been notified to the IWF as containing child pornography, traffic to it is filtered through an invisible proxy, and offending pages are silently blocked with what looks like a legitimate 404 error. Not all UK ISPs use the same system for filtering and blocking, which explains why some users can still get to page.

However, it's very easy to route around this: within about five minutes of reading about it, I'd found three ways to get to the offending page (which is how I know what album they're talking about!). None of them involve anything complicated, but instead simply substitute alternate URLs. No one actively looking for child porn would be stopped by this.

And, in fact, some ISPs acknowledge this when they talk about how they use the IWF blacklist. Demon, for example, talks about it stopping customers from "accidentally viewing illegal child abuse imagery", rather than it preventing a committed paedophile.

The IWF doesn't comment on individual cases, nor does it notify those responsible - which is why it appears that Wikimedia has not been told it is now being filtered. There is an appeal process if you get on to its censorship list - but obviously, it's fairly difficult to appeal if you don't know you're being filtered.

The IWF has performed a good and valuable function in helping to get rid of real child porn sites hosted in the UK. But this issue with Wikipedia is troublesome: there is no transparency and no notification even when the site involved is one as widely-known and valued as Wikipedia. The appeal process ultimately relies on the judgment of the police as to what might be pornographic, rather than an experienced prosecutor - and the police are, of course, inevitably (and generally rightly) going to be reluctant to allow any image which even potentially could be regarded as child porn.

We need to deal with the issue of child porn seriously and effectively - and silent black lists created by unaccountable bodies with no judicial oversight is not the best way to do it. It's a typically British form of censorship - quietly done, swept under the carpet, in the hope that no one will notice. Bill Thompson described it best four years ago, when he wrote about BT's Cleanlist: "It is censorship, but it is a typically embarrassed and underhand British form of censorship". Bill also said this:

"Because the announcement is about child abuse, anyone who dares to challenge it is instantly under suspicion as a supporter of paedophiles. But this should not stop us pointing out that Cleanfeed is a bad idea and must be stopped.

This is not just because it will not achieve its goal, although it seems that it will be easy to get around, but because it sets a precedent for ISP control over what their users can do online that is simply unacceptable"

Bill was right then, and he's right now. And this case with Wikipedia should, at least, bring some of these issues into the light.

Update - More coverage:

Jonathan Sanderson makes some good points, as does Rupert Goodwins. The Register writes a frankly weird post which uses the issue to bash Wikipedia.