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Apple Leaves Journalists Jonesing
Hodejo1 writes "Apple traditionally has big product announcements in the early spring, so around February both the mainstream press and the tech blogs began to circulate their favorite rumors (the iWatch, iTV). They also announced the date of the next Apple event, which this year was in March — except it didn't happen. 'Reliable sources' then confirmed it would be in April, then May and then — nothing. In withdrawal and with a notoriously secretive Apple offering no relief the tech journalists started to get cranky. The end result is a rash of petulant stories that insist Apple is desperate for new products, in trouble (with $150 billion dollars in the bank, I should be in such trouble) and in decline. The only ones desperate seem to be editors addicted to traffic-generating Apple announcements. Good news is on the horizon, though, as the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference starts June 10th."
This was in evidence last night, as Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke to the press at the All Things D conference. Cook's statements were mostly the sort of vague, grandiose talk that gets fed to investors on an earnings call, but it's generating article after article because, hey, it's Tim Cook.
^ that is all
A good example to watch.
A successful company, ahead of its markets, does not need a new product every 6 months.
Journalists, on the other hand, do need news.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Apple seems to be more about the rumours and the stories about their products nowadays, more so than being about their product innovations. Makes me think of 'C' list celebrities, who are really famous for being famous rather than for anything substantive that they might actually do
Just a rumor, but I heard it's the iBlender, which will revolutionize kitchen appliance. But will it blend itself?
Hey, *you* try taking over a cult sometime, buddy! You hand people their Kool-Aid and all they can do is complain that Ascended Father would have sweetened it more.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
They are stuck with a bunch of odd resolutions and encouraged developers to target them all directly, resulting in debacles like the black bars when they went widescreen.
I have to kind of chuckle because, well, Android...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Android was designed with the potential for arbitrary screen resolutions from the outset, in contrast Apple pretended fragmentation was an Android problem rather than accept the reality that fragmentation is a necessary fact of progress (because for progress to occur, hardware has to change).
The net result is that with iOS you often end up with programs where they either just zoom in and create a pixelated wreck of your lovely retina display, or they just use up an absolutely tiny fraction of your total screen space.
That's what he's referring to, Apple's complete lack of foresight and the horrible mess it leads to if developers don't update their app each time Apple has a screen change.
Tell that to Apple's shareholders.
They don't care much about the money in the bank, but about the new money to be made.
Except they can't get to a lot of that money because it's held offshore and if they bring it onshore they'll lose an awful lot of it in taxes.
What use is the $102bn they hold offshore if they refuse to bring whatever is left of it post-tax into the US when there's little of value that makes sense to invest in in the countries they're holding said money?
Unless they plan on moving their HQ and all their talent to Ireland and such or just accept the tax deduction and bring it into the US (or another country) then it's completely useless. There's nothing in Ireland worth spending $46bn on that will also allow them to recoup the cost.
They are stuck with a bunch of odd resolutions and encouraged developers to target them all directly, resulting in debacles like the black bars when they went widescreen.
I have to kind of chuckle because, well, Android...
You didn't really read gp's post, right?
Google told the Android developers a long time ago that they should prepare their apps for a variety of resolutions and DPIs.
Apple on the other hand told their developers that they can expect fixed resolutions, and are now struggeling with the fact that they have different resolutions, different DPIs and different aspect ratios.
WTF is Jonesing ?
Are they drinking poisoned cool ade? (Rev Lim Jones)
Speaking in a deep voice? (James Earl Jones)
Singing Tenor (Tom Jones)
I'll admit I wasn't born in the USA, but English (English) has been my main language for over 50 years
What's Apple famous for again? Yup, they are famous for being famous.
...Until they release a TV with a kinect-like interface running iOS. And then Sony's PS4 and the Wii U crashes and burns, (which is sort of already happening...sales on the Wii U are very poor and Sony's electronics wing isn't doing well either), while everyone is playing Angry Birds on their new Apple TV platform and we get umpteen-million articles about the "New Console Wars," which are now between Microsoft and Apple.
Well that and popularizing the graphic user interface everyone uses in the first place.
And for having a pretty decent Unix-based operating system while Ballmer drives Microsoft off a cliff.
And for designing the first mp3 player that the mass-market embraced.
And for ushering in the change from feature-phones to smartphones.
And for creating an earthquake in the tablet market such that in the future it is predicted more tablets will sell than PCs.
But yeah...they are just famous for being famous...
Of course then a couple years will go by and people will forget all of history and again claim that Apple is just famous for being famous. Such is the cycle of Slashdot.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
You're an idiot. The most expensive MBP w/Retina display is $2799.. I'm sure you could make it $3000 if you added a bunch of options... Certainly not "mid-range". The cheapest MBP w/Retina display is $1199; just slightly more than your $500-$1000 PC laptop... At the local clearance outlet, I see a similarly configured ASUS, on special, for $699, limit 2 per customer, while supplies last...
Sure, you can make any point if you're willing to outright lie...
Not a fanboi; I'm largely indifferent about Apple and I hack linux kernels for a living..
Yeah, I think fundamentally the problem is that Android always made it clear hardware was going to be different between devices, whilst Apple spent a few iterations pretending you could just write for the first few iterations with very few differences, until you couldn't.
Effectively many early Android apps were built to work with different resolutions, iOS apps weren't and so it meant Apple had this scenario where they had a whole app store full of apps not built to support anything other than 320x480 then all of a sudden along comes the iPad and the iPhone 4 and the app store is full of apps not designed for their respective resolutions resulting in the massively letter boxed/tap to double size hack for those apps that didn't get updated.
I agree this doesn't preclude the fact that bad developers can still fuck up on any platform of course though as you quite rightly point out, but ultimately Apple should have been honest with themselves (and with developers) from the outset - that they weren't going to stick at 320x480 forever. Had they done this there would be no need for said aforementioned ugly hack.
There was no technical reason why the iPad couldn't have just zoomed iPhone apps to near-fullscreen automatically. The reason it doesn't is that Apple wanted to encourage people to think about how to use the extra resolution rather than just expand the screen. The result is that you get a lot of iPad apps that take advantage of the extra room on a tablet vs. a phone, compared to many Android "tablet" apps that are just blown up versions of the phone interface.
The henchmen also didn't drink the kool-aid. Whose henchmen were they? You still think they were his?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Okay, I'll toss one out just for fun: I think the smart money is on an iPhone 5S announcement on June 10th, which will be a minor speed bump, and the new Mac Pro will wait until one of Apple's short-notice-press-conferences in the fall. I have no evidence for the Mac Pro speculation, other than what Cook has publicly stated about their timetables... but I have anecdotal evidence for the iPhone 5S: According to Sprint employees that I spoke to just yesterday, supplies of the current iPhone 5 are starting to dry up. (They couldn't find me the 64GB models at all... I ended up settling for a pair of 32GB models that they had shipped to the store.) When Apple starts to close off the supply chain for a given product, that's usually a good indicator of an impending replacement, and if memory serves, previous reports have suggested that Apple can flush almost their entire supply within about a week. With the WWDC just around the corner, that seems about right to me.
To any tech journalists upset that Apple isn't spoon-feeding them product news: Get out. Just leave the business. Please?
Seriously, if you don't know to do your own digging for a story or don't want to, you're in the wrong line of work. And there are plenty of other people who would gladly take your place.
You contradict yourself. First, you rightly point out that there will be fast years and slow years, and that people forget history in the slow years with their silly predictions of apple's doom.
You then forget history yourself when you bring up pointless bs about their stock price. Seriously, zoom out the stock chart to show the last 5 or 10 years, and you will see in context that the drop of $300 is merely correcting an anomaly. From 2009 to 2011, aapl had sustainable growth. Then in 2012 there was a crazy rise followed by a subsequent correction. The loss of $300 per share was a loss of imaginary value, and it has leveled off over the last couple of months anyway. Plus, the value of aapl is so at the mercy of the whims of the mutual funds and "analysts" in the short and medium term that it will take years to see what effect Cook himself will have had on the stock in the first place. Cook was just as responsible for the $300/share boom in the first half of 2012 as he was for the $300/share crash in the second half of 2012. Not much at all.
Apple never hints at its products ahead of time. There was no 'hint' of the iPhone 4. Or 4s. Sure, people expect Apple's upgrade cycle now, but they never hint at anything. The secrecy of Apple is legendary.
Market share, from a business perspective, is only relevant insofar as you can make money off of it. A joke, to illustrate:
Two guys buy a truck full of watermelons. They pay $5 a watermelon, and rush to the market to sell them. They sell each watermelon for $4, hugely undercutting all the other sellers at the market. They quickly sell out of watermelons, and excitedly go and count their take. They recount the money a few times, and eventually realise that they LOST money on the deal. The first guy turns to the second guy and says, "I told you we should have used a bigger truck!"
Android's marketshare is big, but only Samsung makes any real money off of it, and their margins aren't as big as Apple's. Apple makes 70% of the profit in mobile devices. (Samsung makes most of the rest of that 30%.)
It may be that Apple's marketshare will keep dropping--maybe just because the market is getting bigger, but it's possible that their year-on-year sales numbers will drop as well--and so the iPhone might not be the most profitable thing they do anymore in the coming years. But they're good at breaking into new markets with new devices, and $100 billion in the bank, regardless of where it's officially kept, buys a lot of time. (That's why they issued a bond recently, incidentally. They can take on massive debt and people will buy it and make interest off of it because they know Apple is good for it. That money is SOMEWHERE, even if it isn't here. An Apple bond is a really safe investment.)
It's somewhat reasonable to be worried ... if you are an investor. No one else should much care. So ignore all the journalists who are not business/financial in nature.
Historically, Apple has an approximately 6 month announcement cycle which corresponds to biannual major public events, one for developers in the fall, and one for everyone else in the spring. At these events, it alternately announces its new desktop/laptop hardware, and then its new iDevices.
This is one of the few times they've missed their spring announcement in almost a decade; the last time was when Tiger slipped shipping for over six months, and that coincided with a claim of a new 18 month development cycle which lasted only one release cycle. This was actually occasioned by some major management screw-ups internally, coinciding with the first major drop-off in Steve's health.
Apple has been pretty religious about keeping to this schedule, even through the power shift in 2008/2009 when the taller Oompa Loompsa realized they were more or less in charge of the steering wheel of the chocolate factory, should they want to fight each other to steer.
The iPhone 5 was more or less a fizzle. They're selling OK, but the difference in aspect ratio, made for economic rather than design reasons, combined with the maps change and other changes resulting from non-renewal of contracts with third party vendors, including Google, made it probably the worst launch for an iDevice and an iOS release in Apple history. Technologically, they are a step away from design being the goal in a design/cost tradeoff, and a step backwards in system software.
Mountain Lion sold well, but only because they dropped the upgrade price to practically nothing. It was a more or less bug fix release for things that should have never been released in Lion in the first place, and the "Game Center" was a non-feature (no games), and the "Message Center" was moving iOS features into a desktop OS, which makes sense for some of them, but when Facebook integration failed to materialize, even in updates, it's potential utility went down.
It's pretty clear I called the code on the patient way too early myself, but given that it's hovering at around 60% of its high of about 8 months ago, I'd say it was a matter of "when" not "if" the product pipeline would be drying up.
To find a decent pc laptop with discrete graphics is more like 1000 dollars. I've shopped them and anything that isn't junk is close to a grand. A lot cheaper than Apple but not anything like the silly 300 dollar laptop you mention. There isn't a single Apple computer with a celeron processor not to mention the crappy lowend AMD processors. The main reason there isn't is that Apple doesn't want to compete in the lowend market. People end up with a piece of shit computer after spending 6 or 7 hundred dollars that is slow as hell thanks to the crapware installed on it and hate the damn thing. They see an Apple user happily using his expensive macbook with no problems and asks how he likes it. The Apple guy of course brags about his expensive toy and guess what? Another convert. Never mind the guy could have bought a shit hot HP laptop for 1500 dollars that is better than the 1500 dollar Apple, he's now convinced Apple is better because of his experience with the shitty walmart acer. Of course to get full enjoyment from the HP he'd have had to wipe the drive and install Arch Linux but he's got no idea that option even exists. Windows 8 by itself will sell tens of thousands of expensive, overpriced Apple laptops. I wonder if the pc makers have noticed there is no crapware on Apple's computers? The dumb asses are crippling their own products.
It would seem reasonable that Apple and Intel, two giants in tech industry, would partnership with Intel's new Haswell chipset. It is well known that Intel wants to compete more in the "mobile" computing markets. Apple has a solid foothold in the market and can benefit Intel greatly but putting Intel chips in all of their new products. If Apple has the "next big thing" planned already then they may also be waiting for June 3rd/4th to make any announcements following Intels expected unveiling of their new chipset designed primarily for the mobile markets. If this is the case then Intel will start the hype, Apple will build on the hype, ?, profit.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle