Expensive Signage

In the Apple Store product information is now displayed on iPads. Whether the questions concern a $2,000 computer or a sub-$200 music player, the customer obtains answers from a dedicated page on the adjacent iPad. Although the marketing advantages of an interactive display are readily apparent, it is nevertheless a little startling to see a $500 tablet hawking $150 iPods, like painting a Corolla billboard on the side of a Lexus.

Apple has a stellar history of many more marketing hits than misses, so we're not second-guessing this one. After all, the potential iPod customer may enjoy playing with the tablet so much that he walks out with an iPad instead.

Steve Unplugged

The highlight of last night's All Things Digital conference was an interview and Q & A session with Steve Jobs. Shown below is the Wall Street Journal's enraptured ("90 minutes of Steve Jobs unplugged, a really bravura performance") Alan Murray. One irony is that the online WSJ uses Flash, which won't play on the iPod, iPhone, or iPad.



Steve Jobs is the champion surfer who first identifies which wave to catch, then rides it higher and faster than anyone else. What amazes is that Apple repeats its success over and over in different industries with different products. iPad sales are already phenomenal with two million sold thus far and could well reach 5.5 million by year-end. iPad shipments are likely to outstrip sales of the Macintosh in 2010.

To me the most fascinating segment was Steve Jobs' discussion about television, an industry in which many companies and technologies are jockeying for position. Steve's protestations that Apple TV is simply a "hobby" seems a little strained. Apple's rockstar CEO can't be putting this much thought into television without having something up his sleeve.



Steve Jobs was cheered when he said that he hoped that news organizations would stay in business because of the iPad. He said, "I don't want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers." Ouch.

Hey, Steve, the professional newsgathering organization USA Today called you a "foot."

Dr. Evil* Would Be Impressed

Apple’s astonishing rise from the ashes of tech irrelevance has been chronicled endlessly. The story about Apple’s growth has become the story, pushing aside reviews of the shiny new iPad (hard to believe it was introduced only three weeks ago) and even the prototype of the new iPhone that was left accidentally (?) in Gourmet Haus Staudt, a Redwood City bar. With only a few minor stumbles Apple has churned out hit after hit (iBook/MacBook, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad) year after year. Meryl Streep or the New York Yankees have been known to top last year’s performance, but try doing it every year for 13 years.

Logic says defying gravity can’t continue. Organizations reach a certain size, and growth has to slow, at least that’s what they used to teach in B-school. Apple is now the most valuable company in the Bay Area, leaving in the dust such titans as Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Intel, and Google.

With the total value of its publicly traded stock at $224 billion [update: on Wednesday, April 21, 2010, the day after the earnings announcement, Apple is $235 billion], up 107 percent from a year ago, Apple now has a market capitalization greater than all but two companies in the United States, Exxon Mobil and Microsoft.

But the talk has really gotten frothy when people start projecting a $1,000 price for a stock that closed at $259 today. One analyst was willing to be quoted on the $1,000: does he realize that Apple’s valuation would be close to one trillion dollars!?!


I’m going to head down to Gourmet Haus Staudt for a few cold ones.

*Movie quote: (Number Two: 'Dr. Evil, wouldn't it be easier to use your knowledge of the future to play the stock market? We could literally make trillions!') "Why make trillions when we could make... billions?" - Dr. Evil, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me [okay, it was really funny in the movie]

iThud?

Engadget liveblogs the unveiling of the iPad--yes, that's the name of Apple's long-awaited tablet. The features and navigation are similar to the iPhone.

The iPad's 9.7" high-resolution screen makes photos, videos, and web pages look gorgeous. To boomers with failing eyesight and phalangeal dexterity the iPad is a huge improvement over the iPhone and iPod. The virtual QWERTY keyboard lets touch typists input much faster than the two-finger method used on cellphones. The 10-hour battery life is adequate for the vast majority of plane flights. The new e-reader and iBooks store threatens not only traditional dead-tree publishing but also Amazon's Kindle and its competitors. No word on cost yet.

[Update on cost: the price ranges between $499 and $829, depending on memory and whether the pad is equipped to accommodate a data plan. The 3G connection offered by AT&T is $14.99 - $29.99.]

Photos from Engadget.

To generations reared on visions of techno-utopias, no real-world product could possibly have lived up to the tablet hype. So I'd expect the detractors to come out of the woodwork in the next few days.

However, the iPad's got enough cool unique stuff that I might pick one up this summer. Of course, by then my iPhone 3G contract will have expired and I hear that the iPhone 4G might be available.....

Thank You, Steve

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life." -- Steve Jobs

It’s rare that a business item that’s not related to the financial meltdown makes the front page, but Steve Jobs’ medical leave-of-absence from Apple is one such story. Steve Jobs transformed a left-behind tech company to one that is the leader of the pack. He redesigned Macintosh computers with color and rounded shapes, upended the digital music industry with iTunes and the iPod, opened Apple stores when the bricks-and-mortar model was supposedly passé, and became the cellphone leader with the iPhone in 2007. Meanwhile Apple continued to pour resources into the Mac, the OSX operating system, and its user-friendly software, and the Mac’s market share grew in a PC-centric world.

As longtime buyers of Apple products and often forlorn investors in its stock, we are astounded by the company's decade-long reversal and ascent in fortune. Great-men-of-history skeptics say that we give too much credit to individuals (e.g., they might say that the Allies would have been victorious without Churchill and Roosevelt), but it’s clear to this observer that Steve Jobs changed the history of technology.

For self-interested reasons we hope that Steve Jobs returns to Apple, but whether he does or not, we wish him recovery and happiness. Thank you, Steve. © 2009 Stephen Yuen

Ticket to the 21st Century

iPhone and Ferry Building

It was time to pick up my ticket to the 21st century. After work on Tuesday I hurried to the San Mateo Cingular office to pick up my new iPhone.

Quick reactions:

It allows me in good conscience finally to trash my three-year-old Samsung cellphone handset and five-year-old brick of an iPod. (The iPhone may pay for itself just through the savings on the wear and tear on my pants pockets.) But I don’t like the fact that the iPhone can’t link to our four-year-old Mac because the Mac’s operating system isn’t current. I don’t feel like being strong-armed into spending over $100 on OSX 10.4, so I’m using the Windows version of iTunes.

3G capability enables me to browse the Web wherever there is ATT cellular service, not just at Wi-Fi access points. I can check my e-mail on the train, which I can’t do with my laptop computer.

The touchscreen interface is intuitive, but I’m still having a lot of trouble thumbing text and e-mail messages on the tiny virtual keyboard (I’m composing this little commentary on a regular computer.)

Criticism of the phone’s 2MP camera falls on deaf ears. I’ve never had a phone with a camera before.

Battery life will be a problem. Leaving the iPhone on all day---and it's not even playing music--appears to drain most of its power. I know there are ways to save the battery, such as lowering the brightness on the screen, turning off 3G, etc. but I’d like not to have to be fiddling with the settings all the time.

And oh, yes, POTS (plain old telephone service) seems to function well. Reception is clearer than on my old phone.

A promising start to what I hope will be a beautiful relationship.

Shiny Apple

Our two-year-old iMac G5 is trouble-free.

A good example of an organization that is both effective and secretive is Apple Computer. We have been Apple devotees since 1981, and a sizeable part of our garage has been devoted to storing equipment (Apple III, Mac LC, Mac clones, plus manuals, software, and peripherals) that is long obsolete.

In the early 1990’s we made a small investment in Apple stock in the forlorn hope that we could recover a few of the many dollars we had spent on Apple’s premium-priced products. But the company and the stock continued to drift, the value of our shares was halved, and Apple seemed destined to follow Osborne Computer, Digital Equipment, and Prime Computer into the slagheap of electronics history.

Ten years ago founder Steve Jobs returned and transformed the company from a dying niche-player in personal computers to a leading-edge design, entertainment, and electronics powerhouse. iBooks, Powerbooks, operating system (OSX) updates, iMacs, and, of course, iPods and iTunes flowed out of Cupertino in an unending stream of innovation and style. This week’s announcements of the iPhone and iTV marked Apple’s full-fledged foray into communications and video entertainment, areas in which its efforts had heretofore been modest.

Steve Jobs is famously mercurial, autocratic, and idiosyncratic, but he has made nary a misstep in producing hit after hit. His value to Apple was made evident when the stock plunged to the low 80’s a few weeks ago when there was a possibility that he would have to step down due to a stock options backdating scandal. Now that it appears that Steve Jobs was not at fault, and in the wake of the product announcements, the stock closed at $94.62 yesterday. As an owner of Apple stock, I say give him whatever he wants. He is one CEO who is underpaid.

Apple stock has slightly outperformed Google's over the past two years.

[Note: Steve Jobs may dominate multi-billion industries, but he’s been stymied for six years in his effort to rebuild his house. Here in San Mateo County, we don’t care who you are or how much money you’ve got.]
© 2007 Stephen Yuen

Another Thing to be Afraid Of

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (link requires registration) ran an article on the potential danger of hearing loss from prolonged use of iPods and other portable music players. When imprudent young people crank up the volume, the hair cells in the inner ear could be damaged (no, pops, the hair growing out of your ears is not what we’re talking about here).

There are two ways that noise exposure leads to hearing damage. Brief exposures to extremely loud sounds, like gunfire, can cause permanent damage. But consistent exposure to even moderate-level loud sounds wears out the hair cells in the inner ear, which are responsible for acute hearing abilities. When these cells are damaged by noise exposure -- like a loud concert -- they typically recover after two days of rest. With repeated exposure to loud sounds, however, the hair cells' ability to recover weakens. Eventually the hair cells die, leading to permanent hearing loss.

The researchers determined that the exposure limit for safe headphone listening is one hour a day with the volume no higher than 60%. If you listen for more than an hour, you should turn the volume below 60%. Another informal rule of thumb: If you have to remove the headphones to hear people talking to you, it is too loud.

Chart courtesy of Wall Street Journal.

Soon to come as night follows day: warning labels on earbuds and iPods.

Rueful Observation

Despite my most earnest efforts, the iPod resisted all attempts at resuscitation. It would emit whirring and clicking sounds until the battery was depleted. The pesky folder-with-exclamation-point icon wouldn’t go away, and although various websites said it was a software problem, it sure sounded like something was wrong with the disk drive. The person who is never wrong asked me how long I had spent diddling (technical term which means spending hours working on a problem that a trained professional could fix in 10 minutes) with the iPod. I shaved my estimate: “About eight hours.” I flashed back to my auditing days when I wouldn’t charge my clients for all the time I spent diddl--- uh, performing research. “Why don’t you get a new one? You can afford it.” Note the subtle appeal to the male ego: scrapping a $400 piece of equipment is nothing to a distinguished gentleman of means. But that would also mean kissing off the $30 I spent on the battery, not to mention the time spent pursing my lips and sighing. She just doesn’t understand. I took it to the Apple Store. The bearded wizard at the Genius Bar (Apple’s designation for the technical help desk…cool, huh) shook the iPod, turned it on, and raised it to his ear. “It’s the disk drive,” declared the genius. He input the serial number into the terminal and gave me the bad news. The warranty expired last year, and the fix would cost $250. Apple wouldn’t even bother repairing it, he explained, they would just give me a new unit, albeit last year’s model. My crestfallen expression stimulated his pity, and he jotted down the name of a company who would do repairs. For $29 iPodResQ sent me a box with prepaid overnight round-trip shipping to its Kansas office; diagnosis of the problem was included in the price. I wrapped the iPod in the foam packing material and deposited it in the DHL dropbox. iPodResQ confirmed that the 30-gigabyte drive was fried (another technical term) and offered to install a new one for $190. My self-help urges had long since abated, so I agreed to their terms--actually spending a few more dollars for a drive with larger capacity. The iPod has been functioning smoothly during the past week, and normalcy has returned to our household. No moral, dear reader, just the rueful observation that I still make mistakes deciding when to trade off money for time. © 2005 Stephen Yuen