Category Archives: Apple

Remembering the first ‘Killer App’

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This morning’s Observer column:

Tidying my office the other day, as one does at this time of year, I came upon a shabby, brown, dust-covered, A5 plastic ring binder. It was the kind of thing one throws into a skip without a moment’s hesitation. Except this wasn’t something to throw away, for embossed on the spine of the binder was “VisiCalc”. Inside was a 5.25in floppy disc and a glossy manual. And as I stood there looking at it I had one of those epiphanies that James Joyce was so keen on. I was suddenly transported back to late November 1979. I had bought an Apple II computer on a research grant – the more expensive 32k model, which had an external disk drive. An academic colleague who was on sabbatical at MIT had sent me a postcard saying that he had seen an Apple II running some weird software for business planning that was driving people wild. So I asked him to get me a copy and it arrived via FedEx.

VisiCalc was the world’s first spreadsheet program. It was written by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston and came from an insight Bricklin had one day while attending Harvard Business School….

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The new sun in the tech universe

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This morning’s Observer column:

The Christmas holidays are the time of year when different generations of the family gather around the dinner table. So it’s a perfect opportunity for a spot of tech anthropology. Here’s how to do it.

At some point, insert into the conversation a contemporary topic about which most people have strong opinions but know relatively little. Jeremy Clarkson, say. There will come a moment when someone decides that the only thing to be done to resolve the ensuing factual disputes is to “Google it”. Watch what happens next…

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So even Apple can’t break into my iPhone?

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Hmmm… I wonder. This from SiliconBeat:

Apple says it would be burdensome — and mostly impossible — for it to unlock people’s iPhones upon the request of law enforcement.

In a legal filing this week, the iPhone maker answered a question posed by U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein, who had been urged by federal prosecutors to force Apple to unlock an iPhone. Orenstein said last week that he would defer ruling until Apple let him know whether it’s feasible to bypass an iPhone’s passcode.

Here’s the meat of Apple’s response, which comes amid law enforcement officials’ growing frustration over tech companies’ increased privacy and security efforts:

“In most cases now and in the future, the government’s requested order would be substantially burdensome, as it would be impossible to perform. For devices running iOS 8 or higher, Apple would not have the technical ability to do what the government requests—take possession of a password protected device from the government and extract unencrypted user data from that device for the government. Among the security features in iOS 8 is a feature that prevents anyone without the device’s passcode from accessing the device’s encrypted data. This includes Apple.”

The new Holy War — and its collateral damage

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This morning’s Observer column:

The novelist Umberto Eco wrote a deliciously insightful essay in 1994, in which he argued that the Apple Mac was a Catholic machine, in contrast to the PC, which, he argued, was clearly a Protestant device. How so? Simply this: the Mac freed its users/believers from the need to make decisions. All they had to do to find salvation was to follow the Apple Way. When the Mac was launched, for example, a vigorous debate broke out among user-interface geeks about whether a computer mouse should have one or two buttons. Some were critical of the fact that the Macintosh mouse had only one button. But when queried about this, Steve Jobs – then, as later, the supreme pontiff of the Church of Apple – was adamant and unrepentant. Two buttons would undermine the rationale of the Mac user interface. He spoke – as his Vatican counterpart still does – ex cathedra, and that was that.

In contrast, Eco pointed out, the poor wretches who used a PC had, like the Calvinists of yore – to make their own salvation. For them, there was no One True Way. Instead they had to choose and install their own expansion cards and anti-virus software, wrestle with incompatible peripherals and so on. They were condemned to an endless round of decisions about matters that were incomprehensible to them but on which their computational happiness depended.

Spool forward 21 years to today and nothing much has changed, other than that the chasm between computational Catholics and Protestants now applies to handheld computers called smartphones, rather than to the desktop machines of yore…

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Ad-blocking and the future of the Web

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This morning’s Observer column:

There is, alas, no such thing as a free lunch. What’s even more depressing is that there is no such thing as a free internet service. Most people nowadays probably understand that in relation to, say, social networking services, if the service is “free” then the users (or, more precisely, their personal data) are the product. But this also applies to stuff that you haven’t signed up for – websites that you browse, for example. The site may be free to view, but there’s often a hidden cost.

One part of that cost comes from surreptitious tracking of your browsing habits by outfits that sell that information to advertisers. (If this is news to you just install the Ghostery browser extension to see who’s monitoring your browsing.) The other cost comes from ads that are placed on a webpage either directly by the site owner or as the outcome of a real-time auction that goes on in the depths of the internet.

And as the web has evolved, and more of our lives conducted online, internet advertising has steadily increased. It’s now at the stage where it’s really annoying…

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iPhone economics

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iphone_costs

Apple will pay about $234 for the parts used in every iPhone 6S, according to estimates from Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

The biggest part of that cost is $127 for semiconductor pieces, including $36 for the various cellular radios, $25 for the new 64-bit A9 processor, $22 for various sensors (fingerprint, NFC, and so on), and $20 for 64GB of flash memory. Other core components like the screen, camera, and battery will add up to $73, and the other stuff (like the case) will add another $33. The older models are cheaper for Apple to make, as the cost of their components has come down over time.

An unlocked 64GB iPhone 6S has a starting retail price of $749, but that doesn’t mean Apple is making gross profits of $515 in profit on each phone — there are also manufacturing and distribution costs.

Source

The hardware that breaks the commoditisation rule

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Insightful column about the iPhone phenomenon by Farhad Manjoo: The nub of it is this:

In many fundamental ways, the iPhone breaks the rules of business, especially the rules of the tech business. Those rules have more or less always held that hardware devices keep getting cheaper and less profitable over time. That happens because hardware is easy to commoditize; what seems magical today is widely copied and becomes commonplace tomorrow. It happened in personal computers; it happened in servers; it happened in cameras, music players, and — despite Apple’s best efforts — it may be happening in tablets.

In fact, commoditization has wreaked havoc in the smartphone business — just not for Apple. In the last half-decade, sales of devices running Google’s Android operating system have far surpassed sales of Apple’s devices, and now account for the vast majority of smartphones in use.

For years, observers predicted that Android’s rising market share would in turn lead to lower profits for Apple (profits, not market share, being the point of business). If that had happened, it would have roughly approximated the way the Windows PC industry eclipsed Apple’s Mac business. “Hey, Apple, wake up — it’s happening again,” Henry Blodget, of Business Insider, warned in 2010. And again in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.

None of those predictions came true. While the iPhone’s sales growth slowed in 2013 and 2014, it rebounded to near-record levels later last year, and its profits have remained lofty.

Instead of killing Apple, commoditization caused something stranger — it hobbled Apple’s main competitor in the smartphone business: Samsung, which until last year was gaining a creeping share of the profits in the smartphone business. At its peak in mid-2013, Samsung was making close to half of every dollar in the smartphone business, according to the research firm Canaccord. (Apple was making the other half.)

But the rise of low-end, pretty great Android phones made by Chinese upstarts like Xiaomi — and the surging popularity of Apple’s large-screen iPhones — put Samsung in a bind. In July, Samsung reported its seventh straight quarter of declining profits.

Yep. The reason why the Apple phone defies the commoditisation rule is that it’s not a standalone device, but part of a highly-functional (and useful) ecosystem. That’s why iPhone users who hanker after, say, Samsung’s or Sony’s latest phone think twice before making the switch: do they really want to leave the comfort and ease of the Apple ecosystem. And Apple has just made joining that ecosystem easier — by releasing an Android App that allegedly makes it simple for Android users to take their data etc. across to their brand new iPhones! Given the amount of money Apple makes from the iPhone, it does now look set to become the world’s first trillion-dollar company.

iWatching

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iWatch

I bought an Apple watch a few weeks ago. “It’ll take a while to get used to it”, a friend said to me, and he was right. My expectations were low, based on previous experiences with so-called smartwatches, which were generally flaky. But because I have a policy of not writing about stuff that I don’t actually own, I bought the cheapest, and, as I thought, the least ostentatious, version of the Apple device.

And…?

Well, it grows on one. The battery life is better than I expected (and it charges quickly). The interface works. Most importantly, the linking with the iPhone is really seamless. What infuriated me about, say, the Pebble watch, was the flakiness of the ‘notifications’ system. It turns out that the main reason I want a smartwatch is so that it stops me having to take my phone out of my pocket all the time. The Pebble failed miserably in that regard, whereas the iWatch is excellent for that. When a message comes in, all it takes is a glance to identify the sender — and therefore to know whether it needs attention or not.

Apart from Quentin’s commentary, the most insightful comments on the watch that I’ve come across are by Ben Evans. For example:

Reading the Watch’s launch reviews, I sometimes got the sense that the tech press was writing about it as though the luxury goods industry didn’t exist and that the luxury press was writing as though technology didn’t exist: no-one spends money on things because they’re just nice and no-one buys things that don’t last forever. The gold version brought this out best – a tech product that’s $10,000 but has the same spec as the $350 one – heresy! And a gold watch that probably doesn’t last a lifetime – again, heresy! But all rules can be broken with the right product – that’s how progress happens. Meanwhile, the irony is that it’s not actually the gold that’s the luxury but the software – that tap on the wrist telling you to turn left. In a sense, the gold case is an accessory to the software in the same way that the strap is an accessory to the watch.

Spot on. Smartwatches are unlikely ever to be ‘must-have’ devices. They are luxuries.