The news that Apple has filed a patent application on a technology for tethering rechargeable devices (like iPods) to particular chargers caused a perceptible rise in this blogger’s blood pressure. The idea is that the device will only allow its batteries to be recharged if it is connected to an authorized charger. But Ed Felten has some characteristically measured thoughts about the idea — for example it’s utility as an anti-theft measure — so I’ve calmed down.
Category Archives: Apple
Skin deep
If, like me, you’re slightly irritated by the smugness of the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads, then you’ll enjoy this.
Thanks to Tom for pointing me to it.
Make your own iPhone — right now!
Impress your friends! Confuse your enemies! Make geeks envious! No electronics knowledge needed. Just cut out and stick it together.
Thanks to Gerard for the image.
For those with stronger stomachs, iFixit.com has taken an iPhone apart, like this:
Why, you ask, would anyone want to do this with a perfectly gooe new iPhone. Well, here’s one reason why:
The dismantled — and in some cases, permanently busted — iPhones revealed one of Apple Inc.’s closely guarded secrets: The names of the companies that supplied the chips and other electronic components for the highly anticipated device.
The findings sent all but a few of the component makers’ stocks higher Monday, the first day of trading since the iPhone — a combination cell phone, music player and wireless Web browsing device — went on sale in the U.S. Friday evening for as much as $600 a pop.
The parts makers stand to profit handsomely if the iPhone proves popular over time. Apple itself has set a target of selling 10 million units worldwide by 2008, gaining roughly a 1 percent share of the cell phone market.
iPhone: the madness continues
Er, iPhone Recipes.
iFever spreads online
Ho, ho! The Daily Torygraph reports that…
Apple’s frenzied US launch of the long-awaited iPhone has spread to the internet, where fans are now willing to pay up to four times the retail price.
The iPhone was rolled out across America amidst huge hype on Friday evening, and the devices are now commanding up to $2,000 on eBay.
Americans began queuing for the latest gadget, which combines a mobile phone, music player and web browser in one, up to five days before its launch.
Although Apple has declined to comment on the number of iPhones it sold over the weekend, analysts have estimated that up to 200,000 were sold in the first day…
Hmmm… I just looked on eBay.com and the first iPhone I found was an 8GB model which went for $730 plus $15 for shipping. That doesn’t seem too much of a mark-up for an allegedly ‘frenzied’ market.
Technolust
This morning’s Observer column…
A new spectre is haunting the planet – technolust. We psychiatrists define it as the self-indulgent craving for attractive gadgets offering at best only marginal improvements over older devices but inducing fleeting, orgasmic, smug superiority in their possessors.
Technolust was thought to afflict only a small minority of the population – generally investment bankers with more money than sense and pony-tailed geeks with neither. But developments in the US have led scientists to fear that the condition is reaching epidemic proportions and affecting people regarded as immune to infection…
Five Reasons Not to Buy an iPhone
At last! Some critical thinking. It comes from Brett Arends, who’s the guy who got into trouble with the Cult of Jobs a while back for describing Apple as “the world’s only publicly traded religion.” Long may he prosper.
That iPhone thingy
David Pogue of the New York Times has made a witty video about it. Many broadcasters would be pleased to have made something as funny.
So, who makes the iPod?
(And who makes most money from it?) There’s a fascinating article by Hal Varian in today’s New York Times summarising the findings of a detailed investigation by three University of California (Irvine) researchers into the making of the iPod. Excerpt:
the researchers examined the major components of the iPod and tried to calculate the value added at different stages of the production process and then assigned that value added to the country where the value was created. This isn’t an easy task, but even based on their initial examination, it is quite clear that the largest share of the value added in the iPod goes to enterprises in the United States, particularly for units sold here.
The researchers estimated that $163 of the iPod’s $299 retail value in the United States was captured by American companies and workers, breaking it down to $75 for distribution and retail costs, $80 to Apple, and $8 to various domestic component makers. Japan contributed about $26 to the value added (mostly via the Toshiba disk drive), while Korea contributed less than $1.
The unaccounted-for parts and labor costs involved in making the iPod came to about $110. The authors hope to assign those labor costs to the appropriate countries, but as the hard drive example illustrates, that’s not so easy to do.
This value added calculation illustrates the futility of summarizing such a complex manufacturing process by using conventional trade statistics. Even though Chinese workers contribute only about 1 percent of the value of the iPod, the export of a finished iPod to the United States directly contributes about $150 to our bilateral trade deficit with the Chinese.
Ultimately, there is no simple answer to who makes the iPod or where it is made. The iPod, like many other products, is made in several countries by dozens of companies, with each stage of production contributing a different amount to the final value.
The real value of the iPod doesn’t lie in its parts or even in putting those parts together. The bulk of the iPod’s value is in the conception and design of the iPod. That is why Apple gets $80 for each of these video iPods it sells, which is by far the largest piece of value added in the entire supply chain.
Those clever folks at Apple figured out how to combine 451 mostly generic parts into a valuable product. They may not make the iPod, but they created it. In the end, that’s what really matters.
The full research report is available as a pdf from here
OS X statistics
Steve Jobs let slip some interesting data in his Keynote to the WWDC 07 conference. It is that 90 per cent of the 20 million Mac users in the world are on the current (Tiger) or last-but-one (Panther) version of OS X. He claimed that this was unique in the history of the PC industry. Wonder what the corresponding breakdown for Windows is…