David (Lord) Puttnam checking email on his iPad after the Open University ceremony last Friday awarding an honorary doctorate to Cathy Casserly, the new CEO of Creative Commons.
As it happens, it was 30 years to the day since he won an Oscar for his film Chariots of Fire.
Apple currently has $100 billion in cash, which is probably more than the US government holds at any given moment. The company has scheduled a conference call for 9am EST today, which many observers think is going to be about its plans for that cash mountain. Here are Henry Blodget’s musings on the subject.
LATER: The FT reports that “Tim Cook has made his first major break from the legacy of Steve Jobs by choosing to return billions of dollars to shareholders in dividends and a share buyback programme.”
Source: Business Insider
In my Observer column yesterday, I tried to put the new iPad in some kind of context. (It’s really just the iPad 2S.) I wish I’d been able to set the scene as amusingly as Rex Murphy did.
Thanks to Joel Greenberg for the link.
This morning’s Observer column.
Unless you have been holidaying on Mars, you will have gathered that Apple launched a new version of its iPad last Wednesday. They’re refusing to call it the iPad3 but everyone else is. I’d be more inclined to call it the iPad2S, following the nomenclature the company has adopted for its mobile phones. That’s because, no matter how the Apple Reality Distortion Field spins it, the latest iPad is really just an evolutionary advance on its predecessors.
Granted, it has a significantly better display, a more powerful processor (therefore better graphics performance), a better camera, which will record HD video, and a wider range of mobile connectivity options. But otherwise, it’s the mixture as before – though that didn’t stop the Apple website being swamped on Wednesday evening, presumably by folks anxious to pre-order the newest new thing. (Memo to Apple: why not set up a system whereby customers’ salaries are paid directly to the company and they are then issued with food stamps and other necessities as the need arises?)
Interesting: it’s now 21.38 on March 7, just over three and a half hours since Apple announced the iPad3 and their website is clearly being swamped — to the point where they have had to put up a static page.
(Image from GDGT’s excellent live blog of the presentation.)
In the presentation, CEO Tim Cook claimed that Apple had sold 15.4 million iPads in the last quarter. That’s more than the number of PCs sold by any of the big computer manufacturers.
Other interesting factoids from the presentation: iPad, iPhone, and iPod sales accounted for 76% of Apple’s revenue during that quarter, and the company sold more than 172 million of these devices in total last year. In comparison, all PC makers combined shipped about 350 million PCs last year.
From Quentin’s blog.
There’s a piece in Business Insider based on an interesting fact first noted by MG Siegler. It’s this:
Apple’s iPhone business is bigger than Microsoft
Note, not Microsoft’s phone business. Not Windows. Not Office. But Microsoft’s entire business. Gosh.
As the article puts it:
The iPhone did not exist five years ago. And now it’s bigger than a company that, 15 years ago, was dragged into court and threatened with forcible break-up because it had amassed an unassailable and unthinkably profitable monopoly.
Wow! It seems only yesterday when Microsoft was the Evil Empire.
Fascinating piece by Charles Arthur in the Guardian pondering the implications of revelations that Apple has been porting OS X to the ARM chip.
Written by Tristan Schaap, the paper describes working in the PTG [Apple’s Platform Technologies Group] for 12 weeks, porting Darwin to the MV88F6281 – an ARMv5-compatible processor that’s a couple of generations old now. They were then porting Snow Leopard, aka 10.6; Mac OS X is now onto 10.7 (“Lion”), released last year.
“The goal of this project was to get Darwin building and booting into a full multi-user prompt,” Schaap wrote in the introduction that’s generally visible on the DUT page.
But in the paper he goes significantly further: “The goal of this project is to get Darwin into a workable state on the MV88F6281 processor so that other teams can continue their work on this platform.” Emphasis added. That tells you: Apple is working on porting Mac OS X to ARM, and thus giving itself fresh options if the ARM architecture – known for its low power demands, but equally not until now seen as a competitor in processing heft to Intel – starts offering the horsepower users need.
And there have been indications that ARM is moving up the horsepower ratings, even while Intel tries to lower the floor on its chips’ power consumption.
Apple has just reported quarterly profits that are bigger than Google’s revenues for the same period. Today’s New York Times has a big report on the human costs of that commercial success. In one way, of course, this is an old story (and it’s not just about Apple, either — dozens of other successful Western technology companies are also exploiters of Chinese labour), but the NYT investigation is more extensive than I’ve seen before, and therefore more troubling.
In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers — as well as dozens of other American industries — have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.
However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.
Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.
It’s a long report. Worth reading in full.
Those who are salivating about Apple’s new tools for creating iTextbooks ought to first of all have a read of this.
For nearly two years, Apple has wooed digital book publishers and authors with its unconditional support of an open, industry-leading standard. (The EPUB standard is managed by the International Digital Publishing Forum [IDPF], of which Apple Inc. is a member.)
With last week’s changes, Apple is deliberately sabotaging this format. The new iBooks 2.0 format adds CSS extensions that are not documented as part of the W3C standard. It uses a closed, proprietary Apple XML namespace. The experts I’ve consulted think it deliberately breaks the open standard.
I’m inclined to agree. Like Mr Bott, I see this as a variant of Microsoft’s old strategy of “embrace, extend and extinguish”.
