Peter Nixey writing at Gizmodo:
Then you gave me a beautiful iPad which would looked so perfect for curating my iPhoto library. I couldn’t wait to edit and organise photos from the comfort of my sofa except that you didn’t give me any way to save things back to the library. So I couldn’t. So things just kept piling up on my camera roll.
Apple needs to do a better job at the cloud, and especially when it comes to photos.
Via CNN Money:
“You shouldn’t expect an iTunes app on Windows 8 any time soon,” said Tami Reller, chief financial officer of Microsoft’s Windows division. “ITunes is in high demand. The welcome mat has been laid out. It’s not for lack of trying.”
Here’s the deal, Microsoft: You release Office for iOS, and then Apple will release iTunes for Windows 8. Sounds like a fair trade, no?
Unfortunately, Microsoft is scared to death of what Office for iOS would do to Windows 8 sales. Instead of playing offense, they’re playing defence – a lack of risk-taking that will cost them dearly in the end.
Via CNET:
According to Cannacord, Apple generated 57 percent of the handset industry’s profits during the first quarter, leaving 43 percent to Samsung.
Samsung’s stranglehold of non-iOS smartphone profits makes it tough to be an Android manufacturer in 2013. It’ll be very interesting to see if HTC’s new focus can bring in profit along with market share this year.
This is the best commercial Apple has done since the Yeah Yeah Yeahs-soundtracked “What is iPad” ad. Interesting timing with HTC’s just-launched and Samsung’s impending flagship phone making waves.
Via China Daily:
Electronics giant Apple Inc was ordered to compensate three Chinese writers a total in excess of 730,000 yuan ($118,000) for infringing their copyright, Beijing No 2 Intermediate People’s Court ruled on Tuesday.
The irony… it burns.
Via the Gadget Lab at Wired.com:
In the fourth quarter of 2012, Android made up 70 percent of the smartphone market according to IDC’s numbers. iOS held a mere 21 percent. Gartner’s estimates for the same period show the same breakdown.
Let’s contrast that with some mobile web-browsing stats. The latest from Net Applications, which tracked 160 million visits to over 40,000 websites last month, found Safari for iOS captured more than 61 percent of mobile web traffic. Android’s browser made up a third.
Simple explanation: A lot of people who get an Android phone do so because it’s given to them for free on a contract. They “buy” a smartphone, but use it as a feature phone. Phone calls, texts, photos. Probably never even figure out how to connect it to WiFi.
Via AppleInsider:
AppleInsider has also discovered a series of recent job postings related to car integration for Apples iOS platform. One such listing for an In-Car Software Quality Assurance Manager was posted by the company on Wednesday.
“Apple is looking for a Software Quality Assurance Manager to drive iPod/iPhone/iPad integration testing with car stereos,” the listing reads. “In this role you will be a hands-on manager, guiding the team to test car stereo compatibility with iOS products.”
Using a car’s stereo interface after using an iOS device is torture. This would be a perfect market for Apple to enter.
Via The Verge:
That’s perfectly in line with what we’ve heard about the watch project, which we’re told is being led by Ive himself with some 100 engineers under him. Interestingly, we’re also told that Apple’s chosen to rework the full iOS to run on the watch instead of building up the iPod nano’s proprietary touch operating system — although the previous nano was already watch-sized and seemed like a great starting point for a wrist-sized device, Apple’s betting on iOS across product lines.
When there’s smoke, there’s fire. Along with today’s report from Bloomberg about an iWatch, it seems like Apple is going to add another category to their product lineup.
Via The Verge.
The Wallet app is designed to let users store things such as event tickets, boarding passes, membership cards, and coupons in one central location, much in the same fashion as Apple’s Passbook app for iOS. In addition, Wallet offers time and location-based push notifications (again, just like Passbook) to alert users as to when they are able to use the passes stored in their account, and it provides real-time updates for membership points and boarding pass changes.
It’s a complete copy, but they did pick a better name. With the success Samsung is having duplicating Apple, I don’t understand why other Android makers haven’t followed that lead. It is clearly the only way to make money selling Android phones.
Forbes has an interview with Dave Morgan, TV ad mogul:
But Morgan thinks Apple could bust into the elite club–and this is where the crazy idea comes in. He thinks Apple could buy a big producer of TV shows and movies. He suggests that it would take a third (by now, actually, a little more than that) of Apple’s $137 billion cash hoard to buy Time Warner. CEO Jeff Bewkes, Morgan adds, is the “anti-mogul,” willing to do any deal that works for Time Warner’s finances. “Then, Apple’s got a seat in the cabal,” he says. “If you’re going into the TV business, you go in big.”
There’s only one problem with this scenario: The rest of the world. An Apple TV needs Europe, Japan, Asia, and everywhere else in between. I believe working with cable and telcos to make their TV services even more valuable remains the most likely way Apple can change television.
Nat Brown, one of the people responsible for Microsoft’s gamble on Xbox, thinks the company’s strategy has now put Apple in position to crush it and all competitors. Via his blog, iLike.code:
Apple is already a games competitor broadly, even if Apple-TV isn’t yet a game platform or a console. Mobile generally and iPad specifically have grown the total hours of game play and grown the overall game market. Only in the last 18-24mo has that overall growth turned from a segment-expanding rising tide to a tsunami swamping the console game vendor profit boats hitched to the docks. It is accelerating.
Apple, if it chooses to do so, will simply kill Playstation, Wii-U and xBox by introducing an open 30%-cut app/game ecosystem for Apple-TV. I already make a lot of money on iOS – I will be the first to write apps for Apple-TV when I can, and I know I’ll make money.
Brown could not be more right, a lot of what he writes echoes what I’ve said on air for a while. There’s a reason Microsoft and Sony are pushing out their new consoles so quickly – they know that once Apple releases an Apple TV with an App Store, it will be too late for them to react. For their sake, the next Xbox and Playstation need to be as easy to use (and develop for) as an iOS device.
Bruce Tognazzini, founder of Apple’s Human Interface Group and 14-year employee of the company, on what an iWatch would be like – via his blog, askTog:
The iWatch will have a few functions it performs entirely on its own, chief among them being telling you the time. It’s chief role will be that of office manager, facilitating and coordinating your use of your other iDevices and the Internet by gathering data, delivering messages, storing and forwarding, coordinating tasks, and carrying out functions that extend the capabilities of your other devices. The iPhone or other primary device will be the executive in charge, making the decisions, setting the strategy, and apportioning tasks. The watch will have the least energy resources available, so the watch will be used sparingly. Still, as time goes on, more uses will be found for it, and it will receive increasing amounts of traffic.
Check out his entire vision for an iWatch. It’ll make you want a product that doesn’t exist.
Christopher Breen writing at Macworld:
Yet when I saw that evasi0n was in the wild, I didn’t hesitate to jailbreak my iPhone and iPad. Why?I’m now too old for the leather jacket and hipster language that would define me as a rebel. And I don’t hold any truck with those who think they’re sticking it to The Man by skirting a device’s protections. I jailbreak to gain features that make my iPhone and iPad more useful. Specifically, I jailbreak to add a couple of forbidden apps.
Jailbreaking has brought many terrific things to iOS, and that’s why I fully support it. There’s even a good case that jailbreaking has brought more change to iOS than competition from other platforms.
RazorianFly details Apple’s prominent appearance on Netflix’ flagship series, House of Cards:
The scene sees both Underwood and his aide sat at a desk, in what appears to be the congressman’s office – where the two are surrounded with iPads and iPhones. There’s 2 iPads laid out in a line on the desk in front of Spacey, and a separate 4 iPhones which are lined up and scattered alongside. Counting the iPhone in the aide’s hand to the left, we see 5 iPhones and 2 iPads in one shot – (that’s not to mention the two further iPads in cases complete with kickstands, in-front of both Spacey and his aide).
A lot of the time, Apple doesn’t even pay for product placement – their products are just popular among those in Hollywood. In House of Cards however, the Apple logo is so prevalent, there has to be an exchange of cash going on here. Check the link for photos of just how blatant the product placement is on the show.
Marco Arment on his blog, Marco.org:
I’ve noticed a very clear trend among tech sites I read: Android fans are unusually quick to fill the comment box with rage on articles that mention anything positive about Apple or its products. The reverse — Apple fans leaving angry comments on pro-Android articles — is almost completely absent from the sites I’ve seen, including sites like The Verge that have many readers in both camps.
An excellent read on the politics of tech fans.
Marco Tabini demystifies the price of Apple products over at Macworld:
This is where the second part of Apple’s retail strategy kicks in: The company supplements its tiny wholesale discounts to resellers with more substantial monetary incentives that are available only if those resellers advertise its products at or above a certain price, called the “minimum advertised price” (MAP). This arrangement enables retailers to make more money per sale, but it prevents them from offering customers significant discounts, resulting in the nearly homogeneous Apple pricing we are used to.
Very recommended read that explains why Apple products are rarely on sale.
Christopher Mims writing at Quartz:
One category of mobile device will blow away all others in the pace of its growth, expanding 70% in each of the next three years and yielding a $135 billion market by the end of 2015. Vendors will move 142 million units of this device in 2013 and up to 402 million by 2015, project analysts at Barclays. That’s more than three times the number of iPhones sold in 2012.
And, oh yeah, Apple doesn’t make one of these.
An eye-opener. Asia is going to push Apple into the Phablet market.
TIME.com‘s runner-up for Person of the Year:
As long as he was handpicking his successor, you’d think Jobs would have chosen someone in his own image, but he and Cook, who was Jobs’ COO at Apple, are in a lot of ways diametrical opposites. Jobs was loud, brash, unpredictable, uninhibited and very often unshaven. Cook isn’t. He doesn’t look like the CEO of Apple, he looks more like an Apple product: quiet, tidy, carefully curated, meticulously tooled and at the same time strangely warm and inviting. He doesn’t look like Jobs, he looks like something Jobs would have made. Cook’s flawless cap of white hair could have been designed by Jony Ive and fabricated in China out of brushed aluminum.
There’s a lot of pressure on this man.
Via PCMag.com:
In the 24 hours after the release of the Google Maps iOS app, Chitika only saw a very slight uptick in iOS 6 adoption – from 72.77 percent to 72.94 percent.
Why would the app inspire iOS 6 upgrades? Those who make the move from iOS 5 to iOS 6 lose the Google Maps app that had been pre-loaded on all iOS devices until the release of iOS 6. With iOS 6, Google Maps was replaced with the much-maligned Apple Maps, forcing users to go in search of other mapping apps, or access Google Maps through the browser.
Jailbreaking is keeping way more people on iOS 5 that Google Maps is. Most non-jailbroken iPhone owners who haven’t updated just don’t keep up with those kinds of things, and probably couldn’t tell the difference between IOS 5 and 6′s stock Maps app.
Samsung’s Young Sohn, in an interview with MIT Technology Review:
I use a Mac, actually, at home. I’ve always used Mac, an iPhone, and an iPad. I also have the Galaxy.
At work I’m using Samsung devices; Apple at home, mainly because all of my systems and files are done that way. That’s sticky, you know?
There are two types of Samsung customers (When it comes to smartphones, not washing machines): Those that are geeks/hackers/tinkerers and who want great hardware to go with the messy but tweakable Android OS, and those that just walk into the mobile store and want the free phone.
Sohn, highly educated and wealthy, doesn’t fit into either of those two categories. Of course he’s going to use Apple products at home. Doesn’t surprise me he was at Intel before, either.
That’s not just a problem for Samsung, it’s also a problem for companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. Even if they make their own phones, beg their employees to use them, at the end of the day, these employees have great salaries and want products that work. So they choose Apple products.
