Horace Dediu

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How Apple is like the army [Cook book outtakes]

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Army badges and logos
Apple is a functional organization, like the army.
Photo: Mike McDonald, royalty-free image

Tim Cook book outtakes This post was going to be part of my new book, Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level, but was cut for length or continuity. Over the next week or so, we will be publishing several more sections that were cut, focusing mostly on geeky details of Apple’s manufacturing operations.

Apple is a functional organization. It’s not organized along business lines, split into divisions like the iPhone division, the Mac division and the Apple TV division, the way, say a company like Ford has the Lincoln division for its luxury cars, a trucks division, a parts division and so on.

Instead, Apple is organized around functions: design, hardware, software, internet services. In this way, Apple operates like the biggest functional organization on the planet: the military.

Apple suppliers’ stock price hit hardest by slumping iPhone sales

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Foxconn Wisconsin
The benefits of being an Apple supplier might be overrated.
Photo: Foxconn

Being an Apple supplier can be a curse as much as a blessing for some Chinese companies.

While earning Apple’s business can give a big boost to a company’s stock, a new study found that Apple’s suppliers saw their share prices drop significantly lower than Apple’s stock did during the recent iPhone sales slump.

New iPad Pro reminds us how far tech has advanced in 8.5 years

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Photoshop on iPad
It's amazing what 8.5 years will do!
Photo: Adobe/YouTube

Visually, the new iPad Pro brings back some of the design elements of the original 2010 iPad, especially noticeable with the flattened edges for the device. But how does it stack up in terms of computing power?

Frankly, it blows the original iPad out of the water — which is exactly what you’d expect from 8.5 years of Moore’s Law and engineering prowess. But some of the stats are pretty mind-boggling. Here’s how the 2018 iPad Pro measures up to the O.G. iPad:

Amazing numbers from WWDC 2018

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wwdc 20 million developers
Did you know that 20 million people are building apps for Apple devices?
Photo: Apple

With so much to digest during Apple’s big WWDC keynote on Monday, it was easy to miss some of the finer details.

You might be aware of every new feature coming to iOS 12 this fall. You might have memorized the changes to macOS, too. But did you know that more than 20 million people are now building apps for Apple devices, or that 10 billion Siri requests are processed every month?

Here are some fascinating numbers you probably missed during WWDC.

A stunning 2/3 of Apple devices ever sold remain in use

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Apple Customer Satisfaction
Customers keep using Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch
Photo: Cult of Mac

Apple’s devices don’t end up in the rubbish bin very often. In fact, an analyst determined that about 64 percent of iPhones, iPads, Macs and Apple Watches ever sold remain in active use.

This might be the most accurate way of measuring just how satisfied people are with Apple’s products. Far better than customer surveys!

Apple Watch spanks the Swiss watch industry for real

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Apple Watch Series 3
There's Apple Watch and then everyone else.
Photo: Apple

Apple Watch is absolutely dominating the traditional Swiss watch industry.

The latest reports on Apple Watch sales figures were released today and even though Apple hasn’t put out its own official numbers, it looks like Apple Watch outsold the entire Swiss watch industry combined during the last quarter of 2017.

iOS revenue to surpass $1 trillion this year

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iPhone 7
iOS sales are about to hit a major milestone.
Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac

Apple’s revenues generated from the iOS ecosystem will surpass $1 trillion sometime this year, according to one analyst.

By mid-2017, the company is forecast to have sold a whopping 1.2 billion iPhones, while collective sales of all iOS devices will surpass 1.75 billion units.

Apple looks poised to sell 21 million watches in first year

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Simple fitness trackers from Fitbit, Xiaomi and Garmin outsold Apple Watch during the third quarter.
Simple fitness trackers from Fitbit, Xiaomi and Garmin outsold Apple Watch during the third quarter.
Photo: David Pierini/Cult of Mac

Didn’t think the Apple Watch would catch on? Not everyone agrees, especially analysts who study sales projections.

Cupertino is on track to sell 21 million watches and rake in about $8.4 billion in revenue in the first 12 months of the Apple Watch, according to one of the hottest Apple analysts around. Not bad for a company that entered the wearables game late.

Apple could sell 320 million iOS devices in 2015

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Photo: Cult of Mac
Photo: Cult of Mac

Last year, despite the constant cries from naysayers that Cupertino had lost its edge, Apple blew past all expectations by shipping over 259.5 million iOS devices.

So how many iOS devices will Apple ship in 2015? According to one reputable industry analyst, a staggering 320 million iOS devices.

Why Apple’s IBM partnership was the biggest tech news of 2014

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Steve Jobs and IBM
A lot has changed since Steve Jobs flipped off IBM 30 years ago. Photo: Andy Hertzfeld
Photo: Andy Hertzfield

2014 will go down as one of the biggest years in Apple history. The stock hit record highs. The company’s first wearable was revealed. And Apple dropped $3 billion on its biggest acquisition ever. But of all the huge news Apple dropped in the last 12 months, nothing is likely to have as big an impact as the previously unthinkable announcement that Apple and IBM buried the hatchet and partnered up.

The move was significant not only for the historic aspect of the two rival tech titans uniting, but also for how it will impact all of us in the workplace. In his final note of the year, top Apple analyst Horace Dediu dubbed the IBM partnership “the most significant technology news of 2014.”

That may sound ridiculous considering how much hype Apple Watch is getting ahead of its release, but Dediu points to the first wave of apps created by the partnership. These offer an early indication of just how transformative the relationship could be. For the first time, enterprise apps are being designed for their users (the employees) rather than their employers.

Just take a look at the difference between IBM’s new Expert Tech app compared to the closest equivalent from Oracle, and see which one you’d rather work with:

Tim Cook’s 3-year report card at Apple: B

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Tim Cook onstage at the 2014 WWDC. Photo: Roberto Baldwin/The Next Web
Tim Cook onstage at the 2014 WWDC. Photo: Roberto Baldwin/The Next Web

Tim Cook stepped up as the CEO of Apple on August 24, 2011. The soft-spoken Southerner, who has worked at the Cupertino company since 1998,  had previously acted as interim CEO when Steve Jobs stepped down to battle cancer.

Cook’s ascent to the permanent CEO position marked a sea change for Apple. Once called the stage manager to Jobs’ star, he’s now running the show. After endless speculation about whether Cook’s rule marked the end of Apple or signaled a bright new era, going by the numbers, it looks like he’s earned a solid B.

Here’s a look at his first three years as the head of Apple, a job he got paid $4.25 million to perform in 2013.

What will Apple do with the poor, unloved iPhone 5c?

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Apple iPhone 5c advertisment in the Powell Street BART Station in San Francisco, CA. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
A colorful iPhone 5c advertisement brightens the Powell Street BART Station in San Francisco. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

In four months, Apple will reveal new iPhones. It’s as certain as the changing of summer to fall: Leaves die, kids go back to school, and the world gets a shiny new iPhone, delivered with love from Cupertino.

But when Tim Cook takes the wraps off this year’s version, what’s to become of the poor, sad, unloved iPhone 5c, still begging the world to caress its unapologetically plastic frame?

Will there be a sequel?

Top Apple Analyst Horace Dediu Calls ‘Jony Ive’ The Best Apple Book Yet

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Jony Ive book
Is this "the best book about Apple so far"? Read it and find out!
Photo: Portfolio

Jony Ive takes extra pains to keep his personal life private, but Leander’s book Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products shines a light in corners of Jony’s life and at Apple HQ that few have ever seen, especially when it comes to Apple’s design processes.

The book garnered praise from readers during its release last Fall, but we were super-giddy this afternoon to see that the world’s leading Apple analyst, Horace Dediu, just plowed through all 320 pages and says it’s the best book about Apple so far.

Over the last few years we’ve devoured Dediu’s insightful and intriguing Apple analysis on his site Asymco, but here’s what he had to say about the book:

Visualizing Apple’s Dinner Table Of Products [Chart]

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Screen Shot 2013-08-22 at 8.28.11 AM

Three years ago, Tim Cook very memorably said that although Apple was selling $40 billion worth of products every year (that number has since more than quadrupled), all of Apple’s products could fit on a dining room table. That amazing quote was slightly disingenuous — many of Apple’s products are virtual, and take up no physical space at all — but it still made a point: Apple chooses what it does so carefully that everything has its place. What Cupertino doesn’t do is just as important as what it does.

It’s all interesting food for thought, to be sure, but what if we took Tim Cook’s table metaphor and broke it down? For every foot of table, how much money does Apple make on each product?

Asymco: Apple-Made Apps Are What Make The App Store So Profitable

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Apps Made By Apple

Over at Asymco, noted Apple analyst Horace Dediu takes a moment to look at the iTunes App Store from the perspective of a “break even” model, a perspective that Apple has only recently started to discuss as perhaps more than breaking-even. Dediu notes that with the quintupling of growth of the overall beast that is iTunes (including music, video, and iOS app software), an analysis of Apple’s business practices as well as the App Store’s economy of scale suggests that Apple is doing quite a bit better than “breaking even.”

Asymco T-Shirts Show Off Apple’s Successes In Dorky Charts

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wpid-Photo-24082012-1507.jpg
Unlike a tattoo, these dorky t-shirts can be easily removed.

 

 

Last week I was in the tobacconist buying some Cuban cigars, and the girl in front of me was tattooed with an Apple logo. I got a crappy picture, but I snapped it out of horror rather than admiration.

Still, a tat is one thing. An Asymco T-Shirt, featuring a graph of, say, Apple’s increasing stock price, is another. These things are so dorky that they come out the other side being awesome.

 

Today, Windows Only Outsells Apple Products Two To One

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wpid-Photo-05072012-1310.jpg
Microsoft's once-unassailable lead has vanished

 

In its first year, the Mac sold just 372,000 units. PC clones were reaching two million units, or six times the amount of sales of the Mac. And things got worse from there, climbing to a vertiginous 60x by 2004.

Now, though, according to everybody’s favorite Apple analyst and Christopher Walken soundalike Horace Dediu, the gap has dropped to just 2:1 – if you count iOS in with OS X.

Android Growth Is Stalling In The US, While The iOS Juggernaut Charges On

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Android's scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to attracting new rubes.
Android's scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to attracting new rubes.

According to the latest data from comScore, Android might have peaked. Meanwhile, iOS is still going strong.

New smartphone users — individuals trading in their own feature phones for their first touchscreen, Android’s core constituency — are at their lowest level since 2010: just 300k new smartphone users a week in the last quarter, compared to 1.5 million in November.

It gets worse for Google. Android added the fewest number of new users than it has since 2009. It’s effectively an all-time low for Android growth, which, as Horace Dediu points out, equals four straight months of decline.

Apple Sold More iOS Devices Last Year Than All Macs Sold Ever

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The iPhone is almost off the chart, and despite strong Mac sales, iOS is easily beating it
The iPhone is almost off the chart, and despite strong Mac sales, iOS is easily beating it. Graph Horace Dediu/Asymco

It’s amazing what you see when you look closely at numbers, and super-analyst Horace Dediu of Asymco looks closer than most. Parsing some of Tim Cook’s keynote speech at Goldman Sachs earlier this week, he did some digging came up with the incredible graph you see above.

Idiot Investors Don’t Trust That Apple Can Keep Making Magic New Products

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Photo by triplefivedrew - http://flic.kr/p/6kQ6xS
Photo by triplefivedrew - http://flic.kr/p/6kQ6xS

When it comes to huge investors who buy mammoth blocks of Apple stock, there’s only one question: what have you done for me, lately? If you want to know why product launches are so important to Apple, it’s because the launch of a new product is critical to investors who believe Apple isn’t worth a plug nickel without its latest and greatest products.