Apple: the new Microsoft

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From today’s NYTimes.

Apple said on Tuesday that its net income rose 78 percent last quarter, driven by strong sales of the iPhone, the iPad and the Macintosh line of computers.

The results show that Apple is continuing to outpace its competitors in its three major lines of business: computers, phones and tablets. And Apple would be selling even more iPhones and iPads if it could keep up with demand.

“More and more, people’s lives are dependent on desktop and mobile computing,” said Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray. “People realize that and are willing to pay up for it, and Apple is capitalizing on that.”

Apple executives said they were pleased with the results, which topped Wall Street’s forecasts.

“IPad is off to a terrific start, more people are buying Macs than ever before, and we have amazing new products still to come this year,” Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, said in a news release.

Apple sold nearly 3.3 million iPads in the quarter. Consumers gravitated to higher-priced models of the tablet, helping to create a new segment of Apple’s business that generated revenue of $2.1 billion.

With 8.4 million units sold, the iPhone remains Apple’s biggest and most profitable business, generating $5.3 billion in revenue in the quarter. Most of the sales were of the iPhone 3G and 3GS, since the iPhone 4 went on sale June 24, just three days before the quarter’s end.

And Apple sold 3.47 million Macintosh computers, the most ever in a quarter, dispelling fears that the iPad would hurt those sales.

“Apple was scared that the iPad would cannibalize sales of Macintosh computers,” Mr. Munster said. “That’s not happening.”

Apple said its net income rose to $3.25 billion, or $3.51 a share, a 78 percent jump from a year earlier. Revenue rose 61 percent, to $15.7 billion…

Just to emphasise the point, the market cap of Apple today is $229.2 billion. Microsoft’s is $223.3 billion.

Quote of the day

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“You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap around women for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You knows guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway, so it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them”.

General James N. Mattis, newly-appointed Head of US Central Command and therefore General Petraeus’s Commanding Officer.

The quotation comes from a speech he made at a San Diego Forum in 2005 and reported in today’s Herald Trib.

Encouraging, ne c’est pas?

Time for knitting

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From designboom:

“‘365’ is a knitting clock created by german designer siren elise wilhelmsen. according to wilhelmsen, time is a concept which unites us all, making it the lowest common denominator. on the one hand, time appears to be a as physical phenomenon, logical and easily divided into the past, present and future. on the other hand, time can be viewed very subjectively. how long a minute, an hour or a year takes can depend on how time is experienced in different situations. however, this does not alter the fact that a day has 24 hours, one hour
has 60 minutes and one minute has 60 seconds.”

Apple’s coming shitstorm

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If you weren’t immediately struck by the patronising ‘Listen with Mother’ tone of Apple’s initial response to the iPhone 4 antenna problem, then have another look. Are you sitting comfortably?

The iPhone 4 has been the most successful product launch in Apple’s history. It has been judged by reviewers around the world to be the best smartphone ever, and users have told us that they love it. So we were surprised when we read reports of reception problems, and we immediately began investigating them. Here is what we have learned.

To start with, gripping almost any mobile phone in certain ways will reduce its reception by 1 or more bars. This is true of iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, as well as many Droid, Nokia and RIM phones. But some users have reported that iPhone 4 can drop 4 or 5 bars when tightly held in a way which covers the black strip in the lower left corner of the metal band. This is a far bigger drop than normal, and as a result some have accused the iPhone 4 of having a faulty antenna design.

At the same time, we continue to read articles and receive hundreds of emails from users saying that iPhone 4 reception is better than the iPhone 3GS. They are delighted. This matches our own experience and testing. What can explain all of this?

Eh? No wonder Dave Winer thought it had been written by a comedian:

When I read their first public response on July 2, the one that said the problem was the meter measuring the strength of AT&T’s signal, I couldn’t believe this was meant to be taken seriously. It’s the kind of story The Onion might have written on a bad day. Or Jon Stewart. That a corporate PR team wrote this says how unseasoned their people are. That they thought this answer was going to satisfy anyone says how out of touch they are with the world they are in.

Dave’s point is that instead of just being a Plucky Little Company Apple is now just Another Big Corporation. Like Microsoft. Like Google. Like BP.

The Reality Distortion Field bubble is about to burst. Their run as the Exceptional Company is about to end. And they’re going to be the last ones to figure it out. And it’s going to be the ugliest shitstorm you’ve ever seen.

Why will it be so ugly? Because Apple’s hype has been steadily inflating since 1997 when Steve Jobs returned, and it’s never taken a dip. They’ve risen from being written off to being worth more than Microsoft.

It’s also going to get ugly because we’re fed up with corporations. It was remarkable that there were no ads for oil companies on the World Cup broadcasts (at least the ones I watched). Can you imagine listening to a pitch from Exxon or BP saying they are working for our energy independence, or to clean up the planet or all the other lies they were telling us while they were taking huge unnecessary risks with the ecology of the oceans? They’re smart enough to know now is not the time to be spouting bullshit at us.

It will be ugly because Apple is going to let it get ugly. Because unlike the oil companies they have no experience with PR disasters… Apple has no concept of what’s it like to be disbelieved, untrusted, seen as an American corporation and nothing more.

Apple’s free ride by the mainstream media is also long overdue for termination. What I found surprising, nay borderline nauseating, was the soft treatment Steve Jobs received at his press conference about the iPhone 4 antenna problem last Friday. Any half-sentient reporter ought at least to have called him out on his disgraceful ploy of claiming that, hey, all smartphones have reception problems. Apart from the intellectual shoddiness of this, it also contradicts the First Axiom of the Reality Distortion Field: Apple is Different. Not any more, it isn’t. It’s just another big corporation.

Invasion of the Jabscreeners

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Wonderful column by Charlie Brooker about the iPhone, er Jabscreen.

Several times over the last year I've attended meetings which started with everyone present gently placing their Jabscreen face-down on the table, as though commencing a futuristic game of poker. It wasn’t rehearsed, wasn’t planned, it just happened; a spontaneous modern ceremony.

There’s something inherently nauseating about the sight of a roomful of media types perched reverentially around their shiny twit machines, so each time it happened, a vague discomfort would hang in the air until, in a desperate bid to break the tension, someone would mumble a sardonic comment about the sinister ubiquity of the Jabscreen, likening it to a scene from Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. This would in turn prompt a 25-minute chat about apps and gizmos and which level of Angry Birds you’re stuck on. Sometimes there wasn’t much time for the meeting at all after that. But never mind. You could all schedule a follow-up on your Jabscreens…

Will we lose our App-etites?

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This morning’s Observer column.

Google has launched a new online tool that may eventually make you wish you’d never been born. It’s called App Inventor, and it’s a kind of DIY kit that will allegedly enable non-techies to build applications for Android smartphones. “To use App Inventor,” says Google, “you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires no programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behaviour.”

There’s a nice video that illustrates this point. It opens with an attractive young woman and her cat, who’s walking all over her computer keyboard. So she takes puss on to her lap and sets to work…

The Royal & Ancient Rabbit

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Today is the opening round of the 2010 British Open. It’s being played at St Andrews, site of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club, and tiresomely billed by the media with mock-reverence as “the home of golf”. Until this morning, their commentary was dominated by speculation about whether Tiger Woods’s swing has recovered from his various extra-marital flings. But now we have a new hero — Maurice Flitcroft, the worst golfer ever to compete in the championship.

I have to confess that I’d never heard of him until Radio 4’s Today programme had an item pegged to a newly-published biography with the lovely title The Phantom of the Open. Naturally, I went straight to Wikipedia, which has an interesting entry on him.

It describes him as a “chain-smoking crane driver” from Barrow-in-Furness in Lancashire who also claimed to be a stunt diver. “I toured with a revue, and I used to jump into a tank on the stage, I was a stuntcomedy high diver. The revue used to tour all the country and I would dive into this tank. It wasn’t all glass, just the front so the spectators could see what was going on under the water.” His golfing fame stems from conning his way into the qualifying round for the 1976 Open by pretending to be a professional golfer. He wrote off to the R&A for an application form. This required the applicant to state whether he was an amateur or professional golfer. If the former, then he would be required to state his club handicap. But of course Flitcroft wasn’t a member of any club, and so he ticked the ‘Professional’ box and sent it off.

He went round in 121 — 49 over par and the worst score in the history of the tournament. One reporter memorably described it as “a blizzard of double and triple bogeys marred only by a solitary par”. He was christened “The Royal & Ancient Rabbit” (a ‘Rabbit’, in golfing parlance, is an incompetent player who hacks his way around the course, rarely if ever getting even close to a par).

Predictably, the R&A — as reactionary an assembly of Establishment boobies as ever wore blazers, and an institution that makes White’s look like the Bauhaus — was Not Amused, and so tried to ban him from further championships. But according to Wikipedia he entered several more times under pseudonyms: Gene Paceky (as in paycheque), Gerald Hoppy and James Beau Jolley.

How is the Internet changing the way we think?

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This is a topic that is much on what might loosely be called my mind, because it plays a significant role in my upcoming book. So it’s not surprising that I was struck by George Dyson’s intriguing answer to the question:

In the North Pacific Ocean, there were two approaches to boatbuilding. The Aleuts (and their kayak-building relatives) lived on barren, treeless islands and built their vessels by piecing together skeletal frameworks from fragments of beach-combed wood. The Tlingit (and their dugout canoe-building relatives) built their vessels by selecting entire trees out of the rainforest and removing wood until there was nothing left but a canoe.

The Aleut and the Tlingit achieved similar results—maximum boat/minimum material—by opposite means. The flood of information unleashed by the Internet has produced a similar cultural split. We used to be kayak builders, collecting all available fragments of information to assemble the framework that kept us afloat. Now, we have to learn to become dugout-canoe builders, discarding unnecessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within.

I was a hardened kayak builder, trained to collect every available stick. I resent having to learn the new skills. But those who don’t will be left paddling logs, not canoes.

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