fedward, tumbling

Marco.org: Rambling about Verizon

Apple only has two options: either give up the mass market in the U.S. and accept slow growth in U.S. sales while Android undermines the iPhone’s base, or launch a CDMA 1X+EVDO Verizon iPhone very soon.

How soon is difficult to say: the sooner, the better. Technology is almost certainly not the limiting factor here — I imagine a CDMA iPhone 4 is ready to go, or close to it, today — so it’s a matter of other influences, such as product timing with the GSM iPhones, supply chain delays, or contractual issues with the carriers.

I have always assumed that Apple has, in fact, developed CDMA prototypes of every iPhone generation. This would be just like the switch to Intel processors, when it was revealed that they’d been doing concurrent builds for years. I don’t know what regulatory hurdles they have with the FCC in order to pull that off, but it just seems like the sort of thing they’d do.

I imagine the sticking point is Verizon itself, which likes to be the company playing hardball in any negotiation. Verizon presumably imagines that its position with the Droid is stronger than Apple’s position coming from AT&T, so I can’t imagine that a Verizon iPhone is a fait accompli except in pure hardware terms.

The people I know with Droids like them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t look longingly at iPhones too. Aside from the perceived superiority of the network, the only other advantage seems to be the full keyboard. My Droid friends all seem a little jealous of the quality of iPhone apps in general, but they’re still able to use apps despite the rough edges. And having hefted both devices I still prefer the form factor and concomitant virtual keyboard of the iPhone, and in DC I don’t actually have a problem with AT&T.

Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Tags: Apple Verizon iPhone Droid
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A Thought Experiment

Assume a component cost in the iPhone 4 of around $200 (+/-). We’ll know more when the inevitable teardown and analysis happens but previous models have all come in somewhere around $200 in parts at introduction, so I think this is a safe guess.

Figure in addition to the 600K in announced pre-sales that Apple will have enough supply on hand to sell through two million iPhones in the first week (not unrealistic, again, based on sales of previous models and apparent demand).

Then consider that those numbers only include sales in the United States, and that Apple will be launching the iPhone 4 worldwide. Even if Apple currently only has enough product in the channel to sell a mere half as many outside the U.S. as it will sell here, that’s still over half a billion dollars in capital going to the hardware manufacturing for this product launch.

Apple, a company that makes its money selling things, not just licenses, has no debt. It can self-finance a worldwide product launch that costs at least half a billion dollars and still have people complaining that it should have seen this coming.

I would argue that Apple did, in fact, see this coming, and chose to limit its capital outlay to something manageable. While they could have thrown more money at the problem, bringing additional factories online to produce iPhones is itself expensive and is money they wouldn’t get back. As long as they have enough capacity to make INSERT RECORD NUMBER HERE iPhones for the launch, the only people they have to satisfy, really, are themselves. As I’ve said here before, we should all get it wrong like Apple.

Tags: Apple iPhone money

“ A decade ago, when Steve Ballmer took over as CEO of Microsoft and Steve Jobs had recently reclaimed the CEO slot at Apple, Apple had a market cap of $16 billion and Microsoft had a market cap of $556 billion

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Okay, This Really Puts The Microsoft-Apple War In Perspective (via tbridge)

This doesn’t really tell us much except about the herd mentality of investors. Henry Blodget is an interesting writer, but I still believe any analysis of his to be suspect. Also, market cap merely tells us that a company is popular, not that it is well managed. It is important to look at revenue and earnings per share, not just market cap (Apple’s P/E ratio is much higher than Microsoft’s, and isn’t at a particularly healthy level). Microsoft still has a couple money-printing machines called Windows and Office, despite their failures to conquer new markets in the way Apple has.

If Microsoft could manage to turn its size and significant R&D budgets into growth in new markets, it has the potential to convert that size into a serious challenge. That they have continued to fail at that is still astounding. Apple is overvalued based on a string of successes taking over emerging markets (the iPod), revolutionizing existing markets (the iPhone), and, apparently, giving value to new market segments (tablets, non-computer computers, etc., as illustrated by the iPad). Microsoft should have been able to take over the gaming world with the Xbox 360 (their development platform is second to none, and they were first to market); instead they somehow lost the technology competition to Sony (despite the noted difficulties of developing for the PS3 platform) and the overall gaming market to the Wii (because the 360 wasn’t what the market actually wanted, it turned out). So now there’s yet another shakeup at Microsoft, which won’t help them take over any new markets any time soon.

Tags: apple microsoft market cap investing herd mentality
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Is this why Aperture is so unresponsive? I keep all my camera raw files in separate directories where I manually manage backups. I never have an image in fewer than two places, and periodically I sync to a couple other drives and clear things off of memory cards. I keep everything in the same folder hierarchy, though, so I don’t have phantom backups lying around somewhere, and I can always find images no matter where I am. This also allows me to roll masters off the hard drive in my MBP without really losing much in the way of convenience, because when I have my portable drive or I’m on the network at home I can relocate masters somewhat on the fly.

But! Whenever I try to import something now, I have to wait on the order of 5-10 minutes before the UI lets me start clicking around to find what I want to import. Two of those paths there are PhotoCDs, which were connected exactly once each. I think Aperture is trying to look for them even though they’re not mounted at all. I’ve also found a bug that may or may not be related, as if I let Aperture sit idle for too long it will lose its connection to all referenced masters … even the ones on my internal hard drive.

I’ve looked before, but yesterday I finally did the right kind of snooping and found this, then deleted the preference and relaunched Aperture. And zing! The UI doesn’t freeze up when I import new photos. We’ll see how long it lasts.

Anybody else had this problem with Aperture? Is it fixed in Aperture 3?

Tags: Aperture Apple slow screenshot

“ Closed system. This is the very opposite of what your customers care about. The percentage of your customer base who make a buying decision based on the openness of a system (in terms of system-level customisation options, use of open source software or otherwise) is vanishingly tiny. They’re very vocal, certainly, but commercially they’re irrelevant. Pandering to this segment will most certainly damage your penetration into the market. Be extremely wary about sacrificing large-scale appeal for the sake of a tiny but noisy technical minority. The tablet space is in no way designed for or aimed at such users.

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How to compete with iPad » Matt Legend Gemmell (via Neven Mrgan’s tumbl)

This nails one particular thing I hate about all the yammering on the internet, and not just about the iPad. “It doesn’t do X [which is important to me out of proportion to all other things] and therefore it sucks.” One: your opinion doesn’t matter to anybody but you (neither, for that matter, does mine, which is why I tend not to write things like this). Two: your opinion isn’t universal, and while you may think you speak for legions of potential customers, you really only speak for yourself. Three: get a sense of proportion (and maybe a life). Four: just shut up already.

The rest of the piece is quite good too. It’s all about developing a product as the best version of itself, not merely as the cobbled-together facsimile you can make from the parts you have lying around. Other companies can make hardware that would rival the iPad as an electronic device, but no other companies go to the extent Apple does in allowing form and function to shape each other. For a while there Nokia was pretty good at developing new phone products this way, but I think they’ve gotten off in the weeds of late.

I don’t know that there are any companies besides Apple that would both allow such a project to get anywhere internally and subsequently take it to market. Lots of skunkworks projects never see the light of day, and many companies are so invested in the culture of their own product lines that they’d never consider releasing a product that doesn’t look and function just like all their other products. Apple takes risks, and those risks pay off almost every time.

Tags: iPad Apple tablets computers

In Which I Don’t Get Hired By Apple

Not long after the Clarendon Apple Store opened, I applied for a job there. At the time I was in there every couple months, either with a display problem in my PowerBook G4 or an overheating problem in my G4 Cube. The process with the Cube had me convinced that I was somehow playing an unplanned game of Stump the Genius. I could get the computer to crash at home, but in several days of them leaving it on in a stress test they couldn’t duplicate the problem (in the end I determined that it was bad RAM that only failed when very hot). At the time I had a decent (but not spectactular) job and the idea of going to work for Apple was intriguing. I never heard anything.

Time passed, and like nearly everyone at my old company I got laid off. I found out through a contact that it was generally better to apply in person at an Apple Store, so I dropped by and spoke to the store manager — who took my resume and a paper application, but who said I should apply online as well. So I did. I still never heard anything.

A couple years later, after yet another layoff at yet another company, I revised my resume and submitted it again. Still nothing.

Keep in mind that all this time I’ve continued to buy and use Apple products, and still had the occasional game of Stump the Genius:

Why does my iPod sometimes skip the first song on an album?
Why does the FireWire port on my Mac mini randomly stop working?
Do I need to worry about how hot my MacBook Pro is running?

The resolutions to those problems are illuminating: