More about Apple

Techland at Time has a couple of article about Apple; the first by Tim Bajarin, the president of Creative Strategies Inc., a technology industry analysis and market intelligence firm in Silicon Valley, about Apple TV:

In 1992, while I was overseeing the largest multimedia computing show in New York City for a big publishing group, I was asked to meet with senior executives of one of the major television networks. In my opening comments at this show, I had mentioned that I thought one of the major benefits of things like delivering expanded media content on a compact disc would be to eventually launch an era of content-on-demand. And one of the examples I gave was the idea that someday, people would be able to call up television shows on demand and view them at will.
Now, remember that this was before the Internet as we know it today, and nobody was even thinking about new forms of media distribution. In fact, everything we were discussing at the show was very PC-centric. But one of my jobs is to look at technology and visualize its impact over a period of time and try and figure out how it could eventually impact consumers.
A lot of television executives attended this show and, consequently, I was invited to meet with some executives at one of the major networks to explain my thinking about content on demand. As I spoke to these executives, it became clear to me that while they were interested in the future, they did not want to embrace anything that would disrupt their current business model. The idea of giving customers more of what they wanted through an “on-demand” format was taboo, and if it did not increase the quarterly bottom line, they wanted no part of it.
However, to their credit, they saw that what I shared was worth thinking about, and they soon created an executive position, called something like VP of Digital Content. It was so long ago I can’t remember the exact title of the job description, but this person was chartered to find out about the digital world and recommend how this company could or should deal with its potential impact on their business. So, for the next three months, I got quite an introduction to the television business and its business models and, more importantly, how risk-averse they were and how much they feared change.
Looking back over the last twenty years and thinking about how different the world of television is today, I am actually amazed at how much progress the television industry has made on this issue. But to get to the point today where each of the networks use the Internet to deliver some of their top shows, they had to understand that the Internet is just a medium for delivering their content, and that consumers will continue to want these shows on demand anytime and anywhere.
While they are starting to embrace the Internet as a vehicle for distribution, they are still doing so reluctantly. If they had their way, they would keep total control of distribution for themselves and drive their viewers only to their dedicated sites for viewing their shows. But the Internet has forced them to open up a bit. Little by little, they are doling out their top shows to dedicated partners who they trust to help them keep some semblance of control so that they can maximize their earning potential and, if possible, try to keep their customers within their network family as much as they can.
However, in this world of digital content, they are now realizing that, while they ruled the roost in the world of broadcast television, they have become just another channel among thousands of channels that consumers can choose for viewing video content. But what they don’t seem to get is that, in this digital world, they will need new distribution partners and they will not have as much control over them as in the past. And I also don’t think they really understand the idea that people want to have access to that content anytime, anywhere and on any device they own.
Enter Apple, who, if the rumors are to believed, has been calling on the executives of all the networks and trying to cut deals with them for Apple’s new television initiatives. And I am hearing that they are resisting Apple’s partnership offers as Apple wants to pay them next to nothing to carry this content, and they fear that Apple will do to them what it did to the music industry.
Now, I don’t know what type of deals Apple is offering the networks, if any at all. But I do know one thing: Apple could become one of the most powerful video network distribution companies in the future, and to not embrace what Apple is doing could be very painful for the networks.
The reason is simple economics. While we don’t know exactly what Apple is doing in this area of video distribution yet, we have history to look at for some clues. For example, when Apple initially introduced the iPod and the iTunes store, it opened the door for music artists to have millions of potential customers. But over a ten year period, Apple made it possible for that music to be played on iPods, iPhones, and iPads.
To date, the company has sold over three hundred million iOS devices, which music artists can leverage to sell content just by using Apple’s own music distribution vehicle. Add an installed base of at least forty million Mac users and in total there are over 350+ million Apple devices alone tied to the iTunes distribution medium. Now add the Windows PCs that also have iTunes, which we believe is more than fifty million, and that’s quite a lot of people Apple could deliver next generation video content to in the future.
Also, look at Apple TV. While many people think of this idea of being a physical television, they miss the real point of what I believe Apple is doing. At the core, I believe the company is moving towards becoming a powerful distribution network for video. And while I do think Apple will have a cool TV set someday in its product mix, the reality is that every iOS device and every Mac and every PC with iTunes on it will become an “Apple TV.”
That means that for these networks— and any other of their video channel partners— Apple will deliver to them well over 350+ million potential customers immediately once Apple’s television distribution network gets turned on. And, given Apple’s history, you can expect that the Apple TV experience, whatever form it takes, will be elegant, easy to use, and perhaps even revolutionary in the way people access and use their services across all of these devices.
The mistake the networks could make is to not see Apple as this massive vehicle for distributing their content, and instead see them as having to be their partner for making money and relying on Apple for high margin revenue. That is the business model of the past. The new business model that I believe will emerge is to find ways to get eyeballs to view the content, and then get creative in the ways they make money on that property.
Of course, they could tie advertising to it, but they could also offer games tied to the content, sell merchandise tied to the content, and give special prizes tied to the content, for instance. Instead of resisting Apple, or perhaps Google or Amazon— who I believe will create similar video distribution networks— they need to embrace them as vehicles to get their content in front of these eyeballs and find creative ways for mining revenue from their digital customers.
I have no doubt that Apple is going to become one of the most powerful video distribution networks by nature of its existing customer base— a consumer base that is added to continually. The company has sold fifty million iPads so far and will sell at least another fifty million this year, turning every one of them into a potential Apple TV. I know the networks would like to keep control of their distribution, but in the world of digital, those days are gone. The sooner the networks see things like Apple’s new distribution vehicle as a critical way to get their content to the masses quickly, the sooner they can fine tune new business models to take advantage of this new era of video content that’s on demand, anytime, anywhere, and on any device.

and this, about the iPhone:

In 1989, I wrote a piece in one of my internationally syndicated columns about a mobile computing concept that was very modular. Back then, portable computers were pretty bulky and heavy and having to lug them around the world with me was a pain. That led me to think about what future portable computing might look like, and I took a stab at this idea of a modular approach to personal computing.
In hindsight this was ridiculously wishful thinking on my part more than anything else since the technology at that time wasn’t even advanced enough to make the then-current portable computers smaller and lighter, let alone modular.
At the heart of this vision was the idea of having a lot of screens available in my work and home. I envisioned these screens as being displays that my modular computer would plug into wherever I was. The most far-out thing I wrote about was the idea of the back seat of every airplane having a screen and the bottom side of the tray would be a keyboard. In my model, there would be somewhere for my “modular brick” (as I called it) to connect to this screen and keyboard and instantly make them “my” computer.
The key to this idea was that the brick would have a processor, an operating system, my own customized user interface and all of my files and data. That meant that I would always have my own personal computer with me everywhere I went and I would just plug it into an available screen and keyboard. Of course, this also meant that a large infrastructure of screens, keyboards, and standardized I/O ports would need to be available everywhere. In the end, this vision was absurd for its time, and even today would be hard to pull off.
Interestingly, however, we already have modular computing of sorts today. It comes in the form of our laptops, where we have our own operating system, customized interface and all of our personal files. When I get to my office, I connect my 13-inch MacBook Air to a 27-inch screen, and use a wireless mouse and wireless keyboard. In this case, my MacBook Air is kind of a “brick” in that it just sits there providing the processing power, operating system, user interface and access to all my files.
But what if we could have that same kind of modular functionality in a “brick” that fits in your pocket? A very small device that houses a powerful processor, operating system, custom user interface and data files– a device that can be docked into a multitude of screens that are accessible around the office, school, home, shopping malls, and other places.
As far out as this seems, I believe this is exactly the vision Apple has for the future of the iPhone.
If you’ve used an iPhone in an audio docking system you may have already thought of this idea. I was recently in a rented home in Hawai'i where the entire home’s audio system was hooked up to an iPod dock. And if you’ve ever used Apple’s AirPlay, you kind of have a glimpse of how the iPhone and the iPad can use wireless technology to share images and video.
One of the key technologies Apple has created that would help facilitate part of this is their 30-pin connector. While it has 30 pins, only about two thirds of them are actually used for synching, charging, and audio/video output. In essence, Apple has future-proofed this connector so it could be used for a lot of other functions in the future.
One interesting example of this would be for an iPhone or iPad to be able to someday drive very high-resolution video monitors. Today it can only power basic VGA monitors. I recently saw technology from Corning’s Fiber division that consists of a fiber cable that can be twisted, knotted, and even stepped on with no loss of high-speed transmission. And these cables can carry data at speeds well over a hundred gigabits per second. If this can be commercialized with the proper I/O connection points in place, it would have major ramifications for computing at all levels. But it could really enable something like the iPhone to become a modular device driving full PC functionality via various docking systems tied to all kinds of available screens, even very high resolution ones. This, of course, is a futuristic view but the technology is there to make this happen in the very near future.
Another current roadblock to making this modular concept work today is the processor itself. Although we are making great strides in low voltage processors that still deliver great performance, we will need very high speed mobile processors with extended graphics functions to make this modular vision work. However, if you look at NVidia’s current Kal-El Tegra chip with it 4+1 multiprocessor core, you can see that they are actually heading in this direction. And Qualcomm’s quad-core Snapdragon chip could provide similar power to a smartphone for this purpose. And of course, we expect that Apple is working on their own mobile ARM chips that map this direction too. I suspect that within two to three years we will have mobile chips that could drive this modular approach forward.
Another interesting example of this modular screen connection would be in a car. All the car would have to have is a basic screen and, in Apple’s case, a dock with the 30-pin connector tied directly to it. That would mean that all you need to do is plug your iPhone into this car’s dock and the screen on the dash would become your full personal computer, with added functionality tied to things like hands-free navigation maps, traffic info, and more. And you’d have access to all of your apps and files via this screen, useable while the car is parked, of course.
Or perhaps you’d have a “dumb” screen in your refrigerator that would get all of its intelligence from the iPhone. Or maybe the work area on your desk at home would contain only a large screen and keyboard and you’d just dock your iPhone to have instant access to a full-fledged PC.
Of course, things like the iCloud will make it much easier to keep your personal user interface and data available across a lot of “smart” screens, but this modular approach could be interesting for consumers in that the iPhone could bridge the gap between local content and cloud-based content in a much more mobile fashion. And since your smartphone is always with you, you would have the equivalent of a full PC at your disposal all the time.
Could other smartphones become modular as well? Sure, and in some ways, the Asus Transformer Prime and the Motorola Atrix are a nod to this idea. But Apple has a jump on them with a future-proofed connector, and their competitors would need to settle on new high speed I/O ports and connectors to be adopted in all of their smartphones to make their own modular ecosystems work. Apple appears to have quite an edge on any competitors who would want to do something like this, given the fact that the 30-pin connector is now on all of their devices.
As far fetched as this might sound, the concept of a smartphone as a modular computer has a lot of legs. And I know of quite a few people in various industries who are thinking this concept out now. But I believe that Apple has had this idea in their sights for some time, thinking about how the iPhone could serve as the heart of a future modular computing model. And given what they have already done with the iPhone and iPad with their connector ecosystem, they could clearly be the first to flush it out and capitalize on this idea well before their competitors can.

and this, about tablets:

What is a tablet and who needs one anyway? Are tablets a fad and will they soon fade into irrelevance like Netbooks? Will tablets replace traditional PCs? Is there a tablet market, or just an iPad market? I hear there and other questions raised from industry executives as well as many in the media on a regular basis. There are a range of opinions all over the place on this great tablet debate and I hope to add some perspective to the conversation below.
My firm’s analysis of the market suggests that the overall tablet industry is growing at a rapid pace. We estimate just over fifty million tablets will be sold in calendar 2011, and around a hundred million in 2012. At Creative Strategies, Inc., we believe that the majority of those will be iPads and there are some key reasons why.
The first can be attributed to the early market momentum of the iPad. When we look historically at how products get adopted, history generally favors the market leader. As products mature and consumers are experiencing ownership with a new product category, they generally go with the safe bet, and right now that’s the iPad. The iPad is by far the best general purpose tablet on the market and at the moment it commands the most consumer mindshare when considering a tablet purchase.
However, the tablet is a maturing category. This is a very important point to understand. Although technology products overall are being adopted more rapidly in mature markets, the products themselves still go through their own maturity process.  Tablets are no exception, which is why many consumers will look back at these early days and think of the iPad as the first tablet computer.
But a new wrinkle in the debate that’s come to light recently relates to the Amazon Kindle Fire and the Barnes & Noble Nook. Both of these products have been reviewed in view of the iPad, which is the wrong approach. In reality, the Kindle Fire and Nook tablets are interesting to the market, because they’re not trying to compete with the iPad. Rather, both take a more specific use case approach. What I mean by this, is that the Fire and Nook were built with things like e-reading, and content consumption in mind.
The root of this understanding comes from one of the best technology industry books ever written by Clayton Christensen called The Innovator’s Dilemma. In his book, Professor Christensen brilliantly explains how consumers “hire” products to get jobs done. That job can be writing, reading, producing, creating, etc., but the point is that there are tasks and jobs to be done that products fulfill. The Kindle Fire and Nook were built for specific jobs, whereas the iPad was built to be more general purpose, similar to a PC.
As this market matures and the tablet category evolves, consumers will refine for themselves which jobs a tablet fulfills. In that process the role of the tablet in consumers’ lives will flesh itself out. I don’t believe tablets are a fad and will find a very important role in the life of the global consumer.

and the second by Matt Peckham about having to wait (bummer) for your new iPad:

If you ordered one of Apple’s new iPads hoping to beat the store crowds, you may wind up waiting longer than you expected: demand for Apple’s latest whiz-bang tablet has reportedly outstripped supply, pushing back the new iPad’s ship date. Apple says it’s sold out of the tablet worldwide, and that even preorders will have to wait until after the tablet’s official launch date to get their hands on one.
The new iPad debuts on 16 March, but Apple now says preorders placed through its website in the U.S. and Canada won’t ship until the following Monday, 19 March. And if you try to preorder now, still five days from launch, Apple’s website says your order won’t ship for ”two to three weeks”. The kicker: Apple had promised the tablet would be available by 16 March to customers who preordered online.
There may be hope for a lucky few. Some customers are claiming they’ve received emailed that their orders have already shipped. (Say it with me: “a bird in the hand…”)
If you still want a shot at grabbing a tablet on Day One, you could always brave the legendary store lines. I’d say something about finding an Apple Store in a covered mall, where it’ll be warm and dry, but since this is the winter that wasn’t, anywhere will probably do. I get the sense this launch is going to be especially frenetic though, with early sellouts all but guaranteed, so don’t be shocked if you find folks are pitching tents and settling in with mini-DVD players the night before.
Or you could just trawl sites like eBay for one, where some are trying to pass the new iPad off for as much as $3,000, and hope your seller has the inside track on securing their “day one” availability claim. Paying more for new technology to establish day-one bragging rights is generally foolish, of course. Imagine the buyer’s remorse people who drop three or four times what the iPad’s actually worth must feel a week or two after, when supply catches back up to demand.

and the third by Harry McCracken about the launch of the newiPad:

Apple’s product launches may be the most obsessively-covered media events on the planet— presidential press conferences possibly excepted— but that doesn’t mean people understand them.
Actually, as I mulled over the new iPad event and its implications, I’m struck by how little of the conventional wisdom about these rollouts feels like wisdom. Much of it is crude, out of date, or just plain wrong. Including some of my own assumptions.
So here are seven things that a lot of people seem to believe they know about Apple’s events. The more attention you pay, the less they ring true. I think of them as, well, mythperceptions.
Conventional wisdom: Apple is astoundingly good at keeping its secrets secret. Everybody knows that Apple goes to absurd lengths to prevent anyone from knowing about its product plans until it’s ready to reveal them at an event like today’s bash. Except it’s now the norm for most of the raw facts about new Apple hardware to leak ahead of time. A rational observer who knows which reporters to trust can usually figure out the gist of the news a day or three ahead of time.
The major points about the new iPad? It’s got a Retina display, LTE, a better camera, and a faster chip, and the case design and battery life are holdovers from the iPad 2. All reported by reliable sources in recent days.
I’m not saying that Apple has lost its capacity to startle. As far as I can tell, nobody figured out ahead of time that it was planning to announce OS X Mountain Lion last month. But if you assume that these Apple events are interesting because they’re jam-packed with surprises, you’re not doing your homework.
Conventional wisdom: Apple events are always amazing. The original Mac was amazing. The iPhone was amazing. Possibly the first iPod and the first iPad. And I do recall my eyeballs popping out of my head when I saw the impossibly tiny original iPod Nano.
Most of the new Apple products announced at these events, however, are revisions to existing products. And revisions are rarely amazing, even if they, like the new iPad, sport multiple major improvements. And even if Steve Jobs was prone to treating routine updates as epoch-shifting breakthroughs.
Conventional wisdom: Apple events are always disappointing. I’ve liveblogged or otherwise covered most of Apple’s product events over the last seven years or so, and the emotional curve of liveblog commenters is remarkably consistent: They arrive burbling over with excitement, but when the event is over they declare themselves sorely disappointed. (Disclaimer: One of the few I missed was the original iPhone launch— although even that managed to displease some crabapples.)
When I liveblogged the first iPad unveiling, one commenter said he or she was horribly underwhelmed. "$499 for a netbook — no way," carped another. One made a hundred dollarbet with nobody in particular that the iPad would flop. A well-known analyst who attended my coverage was slightly more upbeat, but he said it would be a “tough sell” and declared it a double, not a home run.
Why do so many people say they’re so unimpressed by Apple events? It’s a combination of several factors. The assumption that every event is going to be awe-inspiring sets the bar impossibly high. The tendency of major details to leak ahead of time eliminates the surprise factor. The fact that Apple never gives every single person every single feature they want ensures that everybody has something to carp about. (Some of our commenters today were up in arms about the absence of Siri on the new iPad.)
Another issue: The way most people learn about these products— through text-and-still-image liveblogs like, um, ours, supplemented by specs and stats on Apple’s site— just isn’t a great way to judge Apple products. More than almost any other tech company, Apple makes things that are hard to judge from a distance. It’s like the company said in the tagline on the invite it sent out to journalists for this event: “We have something you really have to see. And touch.”
Conventional wisdom: Apple events are all about new hardware. No, no, no. Hardware is interesting only to the extent that it’s a container for interesting software. The most impressive thing at today’s event may have been something that’s theoretically a footnote: the inventive new version of iPhoto. And iOS 6, whenever it’s announced (probably at WWDC sometime this summer) will likely be a bigger deal than the new iPad, even though the coverage of it won’t be quite as over-the-top.
Conventional wisdom: Apple announces bleeding-edge technology at its events. One of the last-minute rumors about today’s launch was that the new iPad would feature “tactile pixels” using technology from a company called Senseg. But, for all of Apple’s creativity, it’s careful and conservative in some ways. The new iPad’s Retina display— an existing technology pushed to its boundaries in service of a more elegant experience— is more typical of the company than anything weird and freaky.
Conventional wisdom: If Apple doesn’t announce radically new products at these events, it’ll collapse. In the first eighty days after the original iPad’s release in April of 2010, Apple sold three million units of the radically new device, and it moved 14.8 million iPads by the end of the year. That was enough to startle almost every alleged Apple expert.
So how many iPads did Apple sell in the final quarter of 2011, when the current model was the not-radically-new iPad 2, which had already been on the market for months? 15.4 million.
Every data point I know suggests that, when Apple products get comfortably familiar, it doesn’t hurt sales, it helps them. There are a lot of folks out there who get more excited by familiar products than they do by disruptive newcomers.
Conventional wisdom: Without Steve Jobs, these events will stop mattering so much. Sadly, the events once known as Stevenotes will never be called that again. And the moment that one of these non-Stevenotes fails to bowl you over, it’s tempting to wonder if the Reality Distortion Effect has been deactivated, reducing Apple’s product launches to mere press conferences presided over by executives who aren’t Steve Jobs and never will be.
But for an event that didn’t have Steve Jobs, the new iPad event was far more reminiscent of a classic Stevenote than you might expect. All of the presenters onstage made their points clearly and concisely. The demos worked without hitches. The level of polish was high, and I assume that an immense amount of preparation went into every moment. It’s remarkable how rare all of that is at tech-industry events, and how effective it is at promoting a new product such as this one.
For all these reasons and more, I tend not to trust first impressions about Apple events, especially when they involve doom and gloom.

Rico says he's gonna have to wait for his iPad, anyway, because he doesn't have the money yet...