Technovia

Apple announces MacBook Wheel

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

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.

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.

New Mac OS X malware - OSX_LAMZEV.A - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

New Mac OS X malware - OSX_LAMZEV.A - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).

"Many Mac OS X-based malware seems to be similar in nature, requiring users to actually launch the installer and give it permission to install the payload. Unlike Windows-based malware, you shouldn't need to install any anti-malware apps to annoy you and slow down your Mac. Just make sure to follow the basic rules of Internet safety -- don't install applications that aren't legitimate or visit Web sites that you don't trust."

The same is, of course, true of Windows malware. Check out any of the lists of top ten current malware threats for Windows, and you'll always find that all of them require someone to download something and run it.

So I bought a new computer

I bought a new computer. It's not a Mac.

It's a Dell. It runs Linux. It didn't cost me £1400.

And I love it. I'll write some more about why I decided to switch later, but so far I've had it a week, and the only reason I've picked up the Mac again is to get copies of some files which aren't supported by anything other than Mac apps and save them into something sane.

Best. Tech. Discussion. Evah

Read it. Go on. You know you want to.

Why Apple's iPhone sales aren't really that RIMarkable

I've got a long post over at Mobile Computer Mag on why Apple beating RIM's sales for their most recent quarter isn't totally surprising. The headline is a little bit misleading - they certainly are remarkable results - but who can resist a pun like that in a headline?

AppleInsider's coverage of Apple versus RIM is wrong

AppleInsider.

"Apple announced quarterly iPhone sales that surpassed those of BlackBerry maker Research in Motion by nearly a million and a half units or 25%: nearly 6.9 million iPhones versus 5.4 million BlackBerry units in the third calendar quarter of 2008." (My emphasis)

It's amazing how many inaccuracies you can cram into a single sentence. This one manages two, which render the entire thing worthless.

First RIM hasn't reported results for the third calendar quarter - its quarters don't match up to calendar quarters, being out by a month. Its last report, on the 25th September, covers the three months ended 30th August.

Secondly, it didn't report sales of 5.4 million BlackBerry devices. As Steve Jobs noted, during that quarter it reported sales of 6.1 million. "Prince McLean" has picked up the results for the previous quarter (RIM's first of fiscal 2009).

One sentence, two simple errors, and a misleading report which is now propagating across the Internet.

Apple's results might be great, but coverage of Apple results is disappointing

There isn't much doubt in my mind that Apple's had a great quarter. But what I'm deeply disappointed by is the coverage we've got from the media about it.

Take, for example, the summary that GigaOm provides. There is nothing - absolutely nothing - that I couldn't have got from simply listening to the conference call and writing down the facts myself. There's no contextualising, there's no questioning, there's no comment from people who they, as reporters, have access to and that I don't.

There is, in fact, no added value at all. I might as well read the press release. In fact, as the press release contains a pretty decent decription of how GAAP works, I'd actually be better-off reading the press release.

Now I'm not singling GigaOm out here, because almost no one has actually done this news as a proper news story. The only person I've seen who's actually added any value to the story is Joe Wilcox, who did more actual journalism in a single Twitter than anyone else has done in all their stories. Joe simply pointed out the fact that when Jobs compared BlackBerry sales with iPhone he wasn't comparing the same periods - which means that you can't claim that Apple is outselling RIM with real authority.

Joe was also the only person I've seen who pointed out that Apple's reporting of non-GAAP earnings isn't a great way to measure if you're trying to compare its performance with its rivals. As Joe puts it, "I've covered Microsoft for a decade, and I've never seen this kind of accounting before. Microsoft has huge amounts of deferred revenue because of annuity licensing contracts. Deferred, or unearned, revenue is just that."

Tech writing deserves better than it's currently getting from the blogs and writers who have come into the game in the last few years. It's time for a few of the leaders to step up and raise their game. Otherwise, I suspect that quite a few of the "blogging networks" won't survive the next couple of years.

The iPhone as multi-purpose gadget

Self-Reliance 2008 - The Atlantic (November 2008):

"The postmillennial version of a Leather­man is the Apple iPhone. Like all digital technologies, the iPhone has yet to achieve the hard-grained, Spartan elegancies of the steely Leatherman. It makes up for this with its cannibal appetite for other tools. Leathermans will disappear—I commonly give mine away—but iPhones devour other tools, digesting them into virtualized application services: phone, camera, e-mail, Web browser, text-messaging, music and video players, whole planet-girdling sets of urban Google maps, house keys, pedometer, TV remote, seismometer, Breathalyzer, alarm clock, video games, radio, bar-code scanner … the target list grows by the day"

It's worth remembering that the iPhone represents the best embodiment yet made of what will be an entirely new technological platform, the first designed to be connected all the time. The PC, and its luggable cousin the laptop, are direct descendants of room-sized computers which stood on their own, connected only to dumb terminals, and which did "processing" - crunching massive amounts of data, which was then churned back out.

Phones are something very different - they are designed from the start to be communication devices, rather than processing devices. The assumptions and roles which machines like the iPhone will take will also be about communications: who you are, what you want, how you want to do it.