All posts tagged ‘Apple’

The first customer who bought the Apple iPhone 4 shows the device as store staff greet him at new Apple Store during the launch of the device Saturday, Sept. 25, 2010 in Shanghai. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

With a single phone, Apple became one of the world’s top five mobile handset vendors in the third quarter, surpassing Rim’s line of Blackberries and knocking Sony Ericsson off the list.

Nokia easily retained the top spot with nearly one-third of the world’s market share but its growth is slowing, according to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. Nokia and Samsung together still own half the market. Among the leaders only LG shipped fewer phones in the quarter, during which IDC said the market grew 14.6 percent — the fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth.

Apple only has 4 percent of the world’s market share, but it only makes one phone, unlike all of its competitors. And on the strength of the iPhone 4 rollout in 17 countries (and despite “antennagate,” IDC notes) its year-over-year unit growth nearly doubled — pushing it past Rim and knocking Sony Ericsson out of the top five for the first time since IDC started its tracker in 2004.

Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, October 28, 2010

In what should be a surprise to nobody, IDC says smartphones are the growth area of the handset business — they expect it to increase by 55 percent this year.

“The entrance of Apple to the top-5 vendor ranking underscores the increased importance of smartphones to the overall market. Moreover, the mobile phone makers that are delivering popular smartphone models are among the fastest growing firms,” Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker, said in the IDC press release. “Vendors that aren’t developing a strong portfolio of smartphones will be challenged to maintain and grow market share in the future.”

When Jeff Bezos belittled the Nook’s lending feature in a New York Times interview, he probably didn’t anticipate that Amazon would embrace the exact same limitations less than a year later.

Otherwise maybe the Amazon CEO might not have bought into an unfortunate Holocaust reference.

But here we are a scant 10 months later, and Amazon is touting that later this year you’ll be able to lend Kindle e-books. For only two weeks. Only once. And you can’t read the book while it is on loan. Just like the Barnes & Noble Nook, which was launching last Christmas with those limitations, when Bezos scoffed at B&N in an interview with the Times‘ “Questions For …” column:

[Times] Barnes & Noble claims on its Web site that the Nook has several advantages over the Kindle — for one thing, a Nook book can be lent to friends. You can forward the text to another user.

[Bezos] The current thing being talked about is extremely limited. You can lend to one friend. One time. You can’t pick two friends, not even serially, so once you’ve loaned one book to one friend, that’s it.

[Times] You have to pick just one person? What are you saying? It’s like “Sophie’s Choice”?

[Bezos] It is “Sophie’s Choice.” Very nicely done.

It’s easy to tease, but the serious matter here is that neither the Kindle nor the Nook allow book owners to lend their e-books in any reasonable sense of the word. Amazon and B&N are allowing them to give it a one-time-only, two-week furlough. Not even a Netflix-like “as long as you like” policy. Not even to competing devices (format incompatibilities notwithstanding). And just plain forget about giving “your” e-book away, or reselling it — things that you can do with any of your only-slightly-more-expensive print editions.

In other e-book news, Barnes & Noble unveiled a color version of its Nook e-reader Tuesday in New York. Gadget Lab’s Tim Carmody covers the Nook Color announcement.

Yes, I get it. Cripples are undoubtedly “inspired” by publishers. Amazon goes out of its way to tweak them about lending — as it has mercilessly about pricing and availability of digital editions: “… not all e-books will be lendable – this is solely up to the publisher or rights holder, who determines which titles are enabled for lending.”

But this is lipstick on a pig. Bezos spoke the truth a year ago, and now Amazon is content merely to match mediocrity. This may actually say a lot about the Nook’s bite of market share or the impact of Apple’s iBooks versus the Kindle, about which the company has never disclosed sales figures.

Amazon is an innovator and is on a tear in the market, but on this issue I must quote Dick Cavett, who once said of John McCain’s selection of a certain vice presidential candidate: “He aimed low, and missed.”

Follow us for disruptive tech news: John C. Abell and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also:

• Amazon Sells More E-Books Than Hardcovers
• Macmillan’s Amazon Beatdown Proves Content Is King
• Amazon vs. Apple Be Damned: Publishers Pine for Universal E-Book Format
• Behold ‘The Amazon Effect’: Now Murdoch’s Gunning for the $10 E-Book
• Streaming Wars Heat Up: Now Amazon Reportedly Is in the Hunt
• Amazon Don’t Need Your Stinkin’ Books (Updated; Actually, We Do)
• Is Apple Actually Pushing for the $10 iPad E-Book, After All …
• Panacea or Poison Pill: Who Gets to Decide About $10 E-Books

Condé Nast is adopting an all-Adobe strategy to create its tablet publications, switching gears on magazines that had been developed using in-house technology in favor of the approach pioneered by Wired magazine and then adopted by The New Yorker.

The media company (which also owns wired.com) had sanctioned two approaches before there even was an iPad. The decision announced Monday, at MAX, Adobe’s annual worldwide conference in Los Angeles, means that the home-grown technology that had been used to create digital editions of GQ, Glamour,  and Vanity Fair will be abandoned. There was no immediate word with what issues the conversions would occur. Condé has also developed three iPad apps that are not per se tabletized versions of print magazines: Gourmet Live, Style and Epicurious.

“The innovative work our in-house team at Condé Nast Digital did made us first to market with replicas on iPhone and iPad and has allowed significant learnings,” Condé Nast President Robert A. Sauerberg, Jr. said in a statement. “Our team considered many factors to ensure we had a platform that could be continually enhanced to meet the needs of our consumers and distributors.”

The Adobe approach seemed destined to prevail for two big reasons. Wired’s initial issue was well received by the tech and media press, and sold 105,000 single-issue copies — far surpassing any other Condé digital property (at least) before or since. And, Apple relented on its initial decision to bar the use of re-purposing tools like Adobe’s Creative Suite to create digital editions using the same raw material magazines use to create their print editions, instead of requiring original coding in approved computer languages.

Follow us for disruptive tech news: John C. Abell and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also:

• The Wired Tablet App: A Video Demonstration
• Condé Nast Adds 4 Titles to iPad Initiative
• Video Demonstrates Wired’s Concept iTablet App
• Size Does Matter When It Comes To Tablets, Newspapers Fear …
• New Yorker’s Remnick Says He Won’t Censor to Make Apple Happy …
• New Yorker iPad App Debuts, in the Style of Wired
• New Yorker’s Remnick Says He Won’t Censor to Make Apple Happy …
• Apple’s Relaxed iOS Developer Rules Barely Help Adobe

Google is famous in programming circles for redefining words to suit its ideas.

Take “beta,” for example. Most of us take it to mean buggy, pre-release software that’s “mostly working, but still under test.” But Google uses the word to refer to a product that’s ready for general use but is subject to “regular updates and constant feature refinement.”

Now it’s happening again over the term “open.”

Andy Rubin, Google’s Senior Director of Mobile Platforms who oversees Android, gave a similar semantic shuffling to the word “open” in response to a slam by Steve Jobs. The Apple CEO stirred up a hornet’s nest of angry Android developers this week when he suggested, in a lengthy diatribe during an Apple press event, that Google’s mobile operating system was not really “open.”

Rubin responded by sending his first ever tweet, posting the code necessary to download the Android source and compile it on your PC and calling it “the definition of open.”

But whether Android actually qualifies as “open” in the purest sense is up for debate, since downloading and compiling code alone does not make a piece of software open. Bruce Perens, who coined the term “open source” and has been working on its behalf ever since, is suspect of Rubin’s definition.

“The fact that you can check something out and compile it doesn’t mean you have the right to use it,” Perens tells Wired.

In the software world, “open” can be defined around three core traits: a license that insures the code can be modified, reused and distributed; a community development approach; and, most importantly, assurance the user has total freedom over the device and software.

The Android OS is, in strictly legal terms, open source. Android is released under the Apache 2.0 software license, which allows anyone to use, modify and redistribute the code. But while it might meet the letter of the law, Android falls short on the other two points.

It’s the lack of community-based development that Android’s critics say makes it no more “open” than Apple’s locked-down, decidedly not-open iOS model. As Perens says, “most open source projects [include] instant access to changes as they are made … and an open door for anyone to participate.”

Unlike major open source projects like Firefox or the Linux kernel, you can’t see what’s happening behind the scenes with Android, nor can small developers contribute to the project in any meaningful way. Google typically releases major updates to Android at press conferences, not unlike those Apple uses to show off new iPhone features.

Once the code is released, Android developers can download it and do what they want with it, but they have no way of seeing what’s happening behind the scenes every day. If you want to know how Firefox changed last night — however esoteric those changes may be — you can study the changes on the Mozilla site. The same is true of the Linux kernel, Open Office and nearly every other open source project with a website.

It’s not true of Android. While Android may have the legal licensing to qualify as open source, it utterly fails on the equally important issues of transparency and community.
Continue Reading “Is Android Open?” »

The maker of the iPad, iPhone and iPod could soon become the country’s most valuable public company.

One day after Apple reported a blowout quarter, one tech journalist is suggesting it’s just a matter of time before the Cupertino company topples Big Oil to become the largest public company in the United States.

Right now the top spot is owned by Exxon, which is worth about $330 billion. Apple is worth about $290 million and has been climbing steadily, up 64 per cent over the past 12 months — and about 188 percent since the first generation iPhone went on sale in June, 2007. (Wall Street is selling on yesterday’s news, driving down Apple’s stock a bit today, but the overall trend is up — way up.)

Guardian tech editor Charles Arthur makes a sound case that Apple could pass Exxon, in an article published hours before Apple reported Q4 earnings of $20 billion.

Momentum is on Apple’s side. Even though oil companies will remain huge for a long, long time, Exxon is in a business with diminishing returns. Throw in a little “you ain’t seen nothing yet” magic dust — imminent Verizon iPhones, for one — and this is a game nobody could really blame you for playing in a Silicon Valley parlor.

“Though at the end of last week, the gulf in valuations seemed large — Exxon’s $331bn, against Apple’s $274bn — the gap has been closing for more than a year,” Arthur writes. “Even if [last night's] results are not enough to propel Apple to the top spot, many on Wall Street think it is just a matter of time. Its profits will get another boost in January when Apple will begin selling iPhones through the largest network, Verizon, as well as AT&T, its partner since 2007.”

Of course there is big, and then there is Big. Apple passed Microsoft as the largest tech company by market cap five months ago, but in the last reporting period still lagged the Redmond Giant a tad on revenues. Compared to Exxon, Apple’s revenues are a drop in the oil drum  — $20 billion in the most recent quarter to Exxon’s $92 billion.

There may have been little more benefit than bragging rights when Apple passed Microsoft to become second overall in market cap. But taking the top spot has real rewards — and risks.

Shareholders may have a better case to insist that Apple return at least some of its $50 billion cash mountain in the form of a dividend, something CEO Steve Jobs is still resisting, especially as the prospect of a rising stock price seems more difficult to sustain value.

On the other hand, fund managers would have to buy up Apple shares to rebalance their portfolios — which would likely giving a further boost to Apple shares, at least in the short term.

Follow us for disruptive tech news: John C. Abell and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also:

• Apple: The Microsoft of Mobile?
• Apple Passes Microsoft as World’s Largest Tech Company
• Apple Is the New Microsoft, Part 2 (Updated)
• Apple Is Not the New Microsoft. And, Yet …
• Microsoft Buying Adobe Would Solve ‘The Apple Problem’ For Both …
• The Dogs of War: Apple vs. Google vs. Microsoft

Apple on Monday announced a trifecta of enormous Mac, iPhone and iPad sales during its fiscal fourth quarter, resulting in revenues topping at $20 billion.

The company reported a fourth-quarter profit of $4.31 billion — up from $2.53 billion profit earned in the year-ago quarter. Revenue was $20.34 billion .

“We are blown away to report over $20 billion in revenue and over $4 billion in after-tax earnings — both all-time records for Apple,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a press release. “IPhone sales of 14.1 million were up 91 percent year-over-year, handily beating the 12.1 million phones RIM sold in their most recent quarter. We still have a few surprises left for the remainder of this calendar year.”

Apple said it sold 3.89 million Macs during the quarter, a 27-percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter; 14.1 million iPhones, representing 91 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter; and 4.19 million iPads during the quarter (with no year-ago quarter to compare it with, given its April launch.)

Not surprisingly, the iPod music player (which does not include the iPod Touch) is seeing shrinkage with 9.05 million units sold, an 11 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter.

In a rare appearance, Jobs joined the conference call to discuss Apple’s competitors, namely Google. Responding to Google’s characterization of the iPhone as a closed platform, Jobs said Android’s “open” approach was “fragmented,” because Android-powered smartphones ship with different versions of the OS. That results in a confusing experience for both buyers and developers, he said.

“In reality the open-versus-closed argument is just a smokescreen to try to hide the real issue of what’s best for the customer: fragmented versus integrated?” Jobs said. “We see tremendous value in having Apple rather than users be the systems integrator. We think this is a huge strength in our approach versus Google’s.”

See Also:

• ‘New Creation’ Launch + Earnings = Big Week For Apple
• Apple Sells 5.2 Million iPhones During Record-Setting Third Quarter
• Apple Posts Record Profits, Sales for Holiday Quarter

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com