Opinions - page 9

Apple agreed this week to buy Israel-based PrimeSense for $350 million.

PrimeSense is best known for making the 3D motion-tracking technology inside Microsoft’s Kinect.

Does this mean Apple plans to make its own Kinect? Maybe. But I think Apple may be thinking about something far more interesting.

Yes, Apple maintains a press “blacklist,” a list of people in the media who are shunned and ignored — “punished,” as it were, for “disloyalty.”

“Blacklisted” reporters, editorialists and media personalities are denied access to information, products and events.

Once you’re on the list, it’s almost impossible to get off. (I’ve been on it for more than a decade.)

Here’s what everyone needs to know about Apple’s press “blacklist.”

This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine 

Architecture hasn’t really ever been considered too important in the brick and mortar-averse tech industry. It wasn’t all that long ago that digital utopians proclaimed physical geography dead altogether, with a vocal minority apparently pleased to leave the actual world behind them and embrace the cyberspace of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the technological breakthroughs of Silicon Valley have advanced almost inversely to the region’s architecture. In a brave new world of lush rolling hills and the always impressive San Francisco Bay, the most that the majority of companies have managed to come up with are drab industrial parks filled with two-story, cubicle-lined buildings.

The smartphone industry is dominated by two companies: Apple and Samsung. Absurdly, Canaccord Genuity recently reported that Apple and Samsung earn 109% of mobile industry profits.

(That impossible percentage results when the losses of competitors are factored in.)

Specifically, the research firm estimates that Apple earns 56% of industry profits and Samsung 53%. (Apple is actually further ahead of Samsung in profits than these numbers show, because some companies count tablet profits and others don’t.)

BlackBerry makes -4% of the profits (that’s negative four percent), Motorola -3%, and Nokia, LG and HTC each had -1%.

They’re weird numbers that don’t add up. But the point is that once again we learn that Apple and Samsung are making nearly all the money, some companies are making zero money and other companies are losing money.

But one of the dominant companies — Samsung — has a creepy approach to business, which is that they steal, cheat and lie apparently because the penalties of being unethical are far less than the rewards.

In the past three years, Apple has dared to be dull.

During Apple’s best years, between 2007 and 2010, Apple introduced the first iPhone and the first iPad, two world-changing products that now define the company (and bring in most of its revenue). These products, along with their touch interfaces and apps stores, were a shock to the industry.

That’s great, Apple. But what have you done for me lately?

Here’s one theory about how Apple works: The company finds a horrible content consumption experience. They figure out how the experience can be made wonderful. They work on the products until they’re ready, both from product quality and price perspectives. Then they ship it and spend the next few years refining and perfecting the original vision.

If that oversimplification about how Apple works is accurate, then Apple isn’t really in full control of when its groundbreaking new products ship. They have to wait for technology, such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), or for various industries to come around to making a critical mass of content deals.

In the past three years, every Apple announcement has been preceded by speculation and rumor that Apple would at long last announce an iWatch, an iTV set and other products that would signal a radical new product category for Apple. And every announcement ended in disappointment. Every announcement was about refinement of old products, rather than bold launches of new products.

Will Apple ever enter new markets again, including the ones perennially rumored?

I say they will. The fact that they haven’t shipped the long-rumored iWatch or iTV, for example, makes perfect sense from a readiness perspective.

In fact, I think the next three years will be twice as awesome as the iPhone-iPad years, in the sense that Apple will break into four new businesses. Why? Because the technology and content deals will fall into place during this time.

Here’s what I think is going to happen.

Don’t look now, but kids want iPhones for Christmas. Well, a third of them do, anyway.

A survey of 12- to 17-year-olds conducted by Ebates found that an iPhone tops the wishlist. One third — specifically 32% — of those surveyed want an iPhone. (Some 12% want a Samsung Galaxy phone.)

Ho, ho, hold on a second. Is this a good idea? Should children “own” wireless gadgets?

If not, why not? And if so, which one?

Well, I’m going to tell you.

Cloud computing giant Marc Benioff has praised hailed Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s new head of retail and online sales, as the “future Apple CEO.” Referring to her in a Tuesday tweet as “the most important hire Tim Cook has ever made”, Benioff’s toasting of Ahrendts has left analysts asking whether it is simply a show of support for Burberry’s outgoing CEO — or evidence that Benioff knows more than he is letting on, following disappointing fourth quarter numbers for Apple.

CNNMoney has hit out at Apple by saying that it should momentarily forget about its position as an acclaimed product manufacturer and instead “focus on its mediocre software.”

While acknowledging that Apple builds some of the most coveted laptops, tablets, and smartphones around, writer Adrian Covert nevertheless singled out the company’s suite of software applications as the “one dark cloud” which looms over Apple. Although apps like iPhoto, Pages, iCal and Mail are functional enough, Covert claims, better alternatives exist, while iTunes and defunct social network Ping are varying degrees of broken.

The term “planned obsolescence” has achieved negative connotations, but it originally referred to a long-standing tradition of changing designs to sell more products.

It was coined by the car industry in the 1930s to refer to annual model updates. Over the years, however, the term has taken on a darker meaning. But planned obsolescence is a good thing. It’s the driving force behind much innovation.

This morning, New York Times reporter Catherine Rampell accused Apple of breaking her old iPhone 4 with the iOS7 update, which made it unbearably slow. “It seemed like Apple was sending me a not-so-subtle message to upgrade,” she wrote in a piece entitled, Why Apple Wants to Bust Your iPhone.

According to Rampell, Apple is feeling the heat from Samsung, HTC and others, and is resorting to sabotaging older iPhones with a software update and force users to upgrade their hardware.

This is bullshit from every angle. The iOS7 upgrade isn’t obligatory, it’s voluntary, and pissing off customers isn’t a good way to keep them as customers. There’s no mention that Apple sold a record-smashing 33.8 million iPhones last quarter.

Truth is, Apple’s products are so far ahead of the curve, it’s a constant criticism leveled at the company: that it is a willing practitioner of planned obsolescence.

Apple’s product announcements used to be the most exciting events in technology. Nowadays they’re boring, awkward and cringeworthy.

What happened? 

Updates on the French and German versions of Amazon.com suggest a new, replacement Apple TV coming the day after this week’s Apple announcement — just in time for Christmas.

The prospect of a shiny new Apple TV product makes everyone think of a radical new Apple TV box with crazy new user interface options, or an actual Apple TV set, both of which people have been predicting for years.

And then that Scrooge MG Siegler comes along to say he’s hearing that the Big Apple TV Update has been delayed, and that maybe there will be a minor update to the existing product.

Whether something grander has been delayed or not, I think TV will be the most interesting product at the Tuesday announcement — not because of hardware, but because of a new software interface and new deals I think Apple will announce.

For years, home automation has been the exclusive province of the very rich or extremely technical.

Companies you’ve probably never heard of, such as AMX, Control4, Crestron, Elan, HomeLogic, Colorado vNet, Vantage and Zenpanion have provided the platforms and many of the fundamental products, while integrators took care of the installation and service for many people.

Or, very dedicated and technical DIY enthusiasts have cobbled together their own ingenious solutions.

Recently, the major phone carriers have gotten into the act, and rumors suggest Google, Apple, Microsoft and other consumer electronics companies are working on home automation.

The reason everybody’s jumping is that home automation is in the process of making a transition from “hardly anybody” to “pretty much everybody.” So everybody wants a piece of what will definitely be a massive new industry.

In five years, the majority of homes in the United States are likely to have significant home automation happening in their homes — voice-controlled thermostats, Bluetooth-unlocking door locks, lights on self-learning timers, automated pet feeders, doorbells that ring your phone rather than a bell in the house and much more.

The reason? Kickstarter, mostly.

Apple bought the Google Now-like app Cue this week. The reason has a lot to do with Apple’s strategy to out-Google Google in the coming war over wearable, and also the future of mobile.

Here’s why the Cue acquisition is really going to matter. 

FaceTime just keeps getting better. The recent addition of audio calls in iOS 7 is great news, right? Well, sort of.

There are plenty of apps in the App Store that let you make calls over your data connection rather than through the carrier’s phone network.

FaceTime audio calls are great — something that Google+ Hangouts have had for a long time. (Hangouts actually lets you add a voice call to a group video Hangout.) They enable free international calls, for starters. The protocols underlying FaceTime enable high-quality audio calls.

More importantly, they give users one more reason to get into the FaceTime habit.

Unfortunately, FaceTime has a fatal flaw. It’s still — inexplicably — an exclusive phone system for Apple customers to call each other. What kind of phone system is that?

There’s no question that the iPhone 5S and iOS 7 together make for the best phone ever made.

The din of offhand, dismissive criticism from the Android fan base that Apple never innovates should be silenced, at least for awhile, given that Apple now sells the only dual-tone LED flash; the only 64-bit mobile CPU; the only 64-bit OS; the fastest touch-screen performance phones by far; the only wide-scale deployment of Multipath TCP; and the only useful, usable and widely used fingerprint scanner ever placed on any consumer electronics device.

Yes, there’s plenty of petty grousing. And who knows what competitors will ship tomorrow?

But today, it’s clear that Apple rules the smartphone market.

The Android fan critics now also have to contend with a razor sharp, concise rebuttal to the cacophony of general criticism of Apple by Apple VP Craig Federighi: “New is easy. Right is hard.” He said that after referring to Samsung by saying that Apple “didn’t start opportunistically with 10 bits of technology that we could try to find a use for to add to our features list.” Ouch!

Unfortunately, iOS 7 is going to cause some huge problems that nobody is talking about yet, but will do when the unwanted bricking epidemic starts.

Apple disappointed Wall Street by announcing an iPhone 5C that isn’t cheap. As a result, Apple’s stock price took a hit.

That’s the polite way to say it. Let’s usher all the financial industry people out of the room so I can tell you the blunt truth. Ready?

Wall Street has systemic blind spots and institutional biases that make it incapable of appreciating where Apple is headed. And they demonstrated all that this week by focusing on all the wrong things.

In general, analysts were expecting a $400 iPhone 5C. But Apple announced one starting at $549 — not a budget or low-cost phone by any measure. Apple’s stock price dropped about 5% and stayed there.

Overemphasizing the wrong information — whether or not Apple would compete in the budget smartphone category — speaks volumes about Wall Street’s myopic, misguided and clueless understanding of consumer electronics and Apple’s role in it.

Here are the five reasons why Wall Street is wrong about Apple. 

Sir Jonathan Ive likes to recycle good ideas, as the Counternotions blog notes with the image above. The “Blue Dalmatian” iMac from 2001 is “separated at birth” from the brand new iPhone 5c.

Likewise, Jony Ive wanted the original iPhone to be a glass-and-metal sandwich with the antenna running around the middle. But his design and engineering teams couldn’t get the electronics to work. Everything was too new and untested. The design was shelved until things could be made to work, and it was reborn four years later as the iPhone 4.

Everybody likes whining about Apple. The company doesn’t innovate anymore, critics say. Their new phones are boring, the same old wine in a line of colorful new bottles. The “S” releases are always just tweaks of yesterday’s iPhone, and are not fundamentally different. Android phones dominate global market share, and have caught up to and zoomed past Apple in every relevant way.

The naysayers can say nay all they want: Apple’s iOS market share numbers are about to explode like an iPhone 5 plugged in with a cheap Chinese charger.

Apple was found guilty in July of conspiring with publishers to fix the price of eBooks. As punishment, Apple must delete existing contracts with publishers and negotiate new ones, one at a time to avoid new conspiracy. The government is also pushing for Apple to let Amazon and others sell their books from Apple’s iPhones and iPads.

The whole story is framed like this: Apple and publishers are the bad guys, conspiring against victim Amazon to screw readers out of reasonably priced eBooks. So government, the hero, steps in and sets it right. Everyone lives happily every after.

It sounds like a bad fairy tale. Unfortunately, the true story that nobody is telling is actually something of a Shakespearean tragedy.

Here’s the true and tragic story of how Apple ended up helping Amazon become the Mother of All Monopolies. 

Apple was found guilty in July of conspiring with publishers to fix the price of eBooks. As punishment, Apple must delete existing contracts with publishers and negotiate new ones, one at a time to avoid new conspiracy. The government is also pushing for Apple to let Amazon and others sell their books from Apple’s iPhones and iPads.

The whole story is framed like this: Apple and publishers are the bad guys, conspiring against victim Amazon to screw readers out of reasonably priced eBooks. So government, the hero, steps in and sets it right. Everyone lives happily every after.

It sounds like a bad fairy tale. Unfortunately, the true story that nobody is telling is actually something of a Shakespearean tragedy.

Here’s the true and tragic story of how Apple ended up helping Amazon become the Mother of All Monopolies. 

Apple is still moving forward to build its $5 billion, 176-acre campus Cupertino “spaceship” Campus 2 headquarters, expected to open in three years.

Critics have been attacking it since Steve Jobs first proposed it to the Cupertino City Council.

And since that poignant moment, which was Jobs’s last public appearance, the campus project has evolved and changed and, as I write this, the old HP buildings on the property are being demolished.

Here’s what we know about the spaceship campus so far, and also what the critics have been saying. 

The most vocal and active iPhone and Android fans scoff at the notion that Moto X is the new iPhone. But it’s true.

The iPhone used to represent the most elegant, innovative and fun-to-use smartphone for everybody. That status has now been taken by Motorola’s new “Google phone,” the Moto X.

The new Jobs movie hits Friday, August 16th in theaters. And it’s not going to be pretty.

The movie covers the life of the late Apple co-founder and CEO from 1971, before the founding of Apple, to 2001, when Jobs announces the iPod, thus setting the company on the path to glory and dominance.

You’re going to hate the movie. Here’s why. 

It feels like Apple is falling way behind. But I don’t think that’s true.

I believe Apple puts enormous brain power and good judgement into envisioning the Next Big Thing. It takes them a long time to get it to market. But once it’s there, they iterate to perfect the original vision.

In the year or two after Apple launches an iPhone or an iPad, everybody falsely believes Apple can do nothing wrong.

But then, as we get further away from the last launch and closer to the next one, everybody falsely believes Apple can do nothing right.

Completely separate and unrelated to false perceptions about Apple, Google lately has been on fire. And lately they’ve been kicking butt not only in their traditional role of algorithm-based Internet services, but also in Apple’s sandboxes—namely design and hardware.

Apple has never been the kind of company that copies out of a lack of vision. Nor have they avoided copying.

What’s great about Apple is that they develop an ultra-clear vision about how to maximize the user experience, then they make that experience happen regardless of whether the solutions have to be invented, copied or—most commonly—Apple’s own unique spin on something invented elsewhere.

There are many ways in which Apple should not copy Google. But there are six ways Apple should copy Google and, in doing so, make Apple a better company with better products.

I’ve written a lot about Apple’s ability to create new markets, which may be among its chief contributions to the world.

In several cases, from media players to multi-touch phones to tablets, others in the industry have tried to get a market going without success.Then Apple came along with a bold, killer information appliance and not only dominated the market, but created it.

I’ve notice a new trend lately: Now markets are being created based substantially on nothing more than the expectation that Apple will enter it with a killer product.