[VIDEO] The news broke a few days ago that Sir Patrick Stewart was bringing Captain Jean-Luc Picard back to life in a new Star Trek series (details here).
I’m a big fan of SirPatStew, thrilled to see him continue this journey. Check out the video embedded in the main Loop post for that moment when he revealed the news to some of his biggest fans.
Before you read on, take a look at that headline. Turns out, it’s a play on words and a reference to Tim Cook. The article is from 2008 and offers the conjecture that the then relatively unknown Tim Cook might be a replacement in the event Steve was forced to step down.
The most influential promoter of Steve Jobs’ indispensability, of course, is Steve Jobs. But another person who is very much with that program is the one executive who has actually filled in for Jobs as CEO. That would be Tim Cook, Apple’s chief operating officer and its interim chief executive for two months in 2004, when Jobs was recovering from cancer surgery.
“Come on, replace Steve? No. He’s irreplaceable,” Cook said recently, according to a person who knows him well. “That’s something people have to get over. I see Steve there with gray hair in his 70s, long after I’m retired.”
Came across this on Reddit this morning, found it a compelling read, especially in trillion dollar retrospect.
Jack Nicas, New York Times:
For decades, the district south of downtown and alongside San Francisco Bay here was known as either Rincon Hill, South Beach or South of Market. This spring, it was suddenly rebranded on Google Maps to a name few had heard: the East Cut.
The peculiar moniker immediately spread digitally, from hotel sites to dating apps to Uber, which all use Google’s map data. The name soon spilled over into the physical world, too. Real-estate listings beckoned prospective tenants to the East Cut. And news organizations referred to the vicinity by that term.
And:
The swift rebranding of the roughly 170-year-old district is just one example of how Google Maps has now become the primary arbiter of place names. With decisions made by a few Google cartographers, the identity of a city, town or neighborhood can be reshaped, illustrating the outsize influence that Silicon Valley increasingly has in the real world.
And:
Yet how Google arrives at its names in maps is often mysterious. The company declined to detail how some place names came about, though some appear to have resulted from mistakes by researchers, rebrandings by real estate agents — or just outright fiction.
I find this amazing. The way I read this, the Google Maps team has the power to come up with new neighborhood names and make them official, all without consult.
Why is Google doing this? Is this an experiment in localized branding? Simple mistakes? As always, follow the money.
Terrific read, with contributions from core players such as Andy Hertzfeld, Woz, John Sculley, Tony Fadell, and many more.
Bloomberg:
In Bengaluru’s busy Madiwala neighborhood, a Poorvika Mobile World shop is plastered with posters for Samsung and Xiaomi and filled with inexpensive phones from brands like China’s Oppo and Vivo. Off to one side is a forlorn display stand with the iPhone 6, 6s, and X, the latter sitting upside down. Despite a zero-interest payment plan and cash-back incentives, Apple Inc. is lucky if the iPhones account for 25 of the 1,000 smartphones the store sells each month, says manager Nagaraja B.C., who goes by one name. “The average budget of a shopper is about 10,000 rupees,” he says, roughly $150. The iPhone SE, the cheapest Apple model, costs almost twice that. For $100, shoppers can get a Xiaomi Redmi 5A with a bigger battery, better camera, and greater storage capacity.
And:
For years, Indian consumers have complained that Siri can’t process their requests in local languages, they have no access to Apple Pay, and Apple Maps can’t give them turn-by-turn directions or identify points of interest.
Apple has long been the high-priced spread, with a focus on tapping the moneyed crowd. The first quote above implies that the pricey iPhone is not a financial match for this particular market. The second quote seems more a result of that mismatch.
Once Apple figures out how to build product that fits this market, once they see the potential revenue here, Apple will no doubt apply their resources to solve the localization problem.
[VIDEO] I love the title, well said, though that’s just a small part of a large, complex picture.
Two highlights:
“Steve Jobs created a loyalty with users that is unparalleled in the consumer technology world. What Tim Cook has done, he’s built a loyalty with shareholders,” Sculley said on “Squawk on the Street.”
And:
Whereas Jobs cultivated customer loyalty, based on incredible products, Cook used the Apple reputation to build a “brilliant business model,” Sculley said, adding that instead of inventing the best, new technology, Cook buys back stocks, hordes cash, and gives out dividends.
Read the article, watch the video (embedded in the main Loop post).
Lisa Brennan-Jobs:
I tiptoed into my father’s room, careful to step over the creaky floorboard at the entrance. This room had been his study, when he could still climb the stairs, but he slept here now.
He was propped up in bed, wearing shorts. His legs were bare and thin as arms, bent up like a grasshopper’s.
Segyu Rinpoche stood beside him. He’d been around recently when I came to visit. A short Brazilian man with sparkling brown eyes, the Rinpoche was a Buddhist monk with a scratchy voice who wore brown robes over a round belly. We called him by his title. Near us, a black canvas bag of nutrients hummed with a motor and a pump, the tube disappearing somewhere under my father’s sheets.
This is an excerpt from Lisa’s upcoming memoir, Small Fry. I struggled a bit to read it. Not because of the prose, which is excellent, but simply because Steve means so much to me and I’m reliving him leaving.
Rachel Slade, Medium:
Improbably, AlterEgo, the soundless, voiceless, earbud-less device he’d been working on for the last two years had become adept enough at reading his thoughts that he could use it to order an Uber without saying a word.
And:
Kapur wants to perfect a device that allows users to communicate with A.I. as effortlessly as one’s left brain talks to one’s right brain, so that humans can integrate the power of the Internet into their thinking at every level.
And:
One night, Kapur and his brother were testing the device in their Cambridge apartment. Kapur was wearing the device and Shreyas was monitoring the computer screen. They’d rigged the device to track signals in real time so that Shreyas could note the exact moment it picked up something, if anything.
It was getting late. Kapur had been speaking silently into the device for a couple of hours — having programmed it to understand just two words: yes and no — without any meaningful results.
Then Shreyas thought he saw something. A blip on the screen.
To me, this is the sort of device that Big Tech ought to be building, something that allows you to interface with your personal AI and with the world it connects to, all without saying a word, by purposeful thinking.
There are dangers, of course, as those ad companies do their level best to connect directly with your brain. But still, I find this fascinating.
Bloomberg:
Now the business founded by Steve Jobs and his pal Steve Wozniak in a Los Altos garage in 1976 truly stands alone. Apple Inc.’s market capitalization was a paltry $3 billion when Jobs returned to the wounded company in 1996, after it had acquired his startup, NeXT. Passing the $1 trillion mark a little more than two decades later puts an exclamation point at the end of a remarkable run of success—one that started with Jobs’s introduction of the iMac, iPod, iPad, and, especially, the iPhone, and was extended by his successor, Tim Cook, who now presides over the most valuable business in modern history.
And:
Jobs took the stage in January 2007, during a now legendary appearance at MacWorld in San Francisco, and said in his usual pugilistic style that smartphones “are not so smart, and they’re not so easy to use.” The iPhone, he told us, “works like magic.”
Terrific read, though one with its share of snark, like so:
Thus was Apple’s winning formula refined: slick, simple products with hefty price tags, accompanied by splashy press events, mesmerizing advertising, and the numbing repetition of words like “amazing” and “phenomenal.”
And:
While the iPhone has altered daily life so much that no one remembers life before it, Apple has also persuaded customers to embrace other inventions they never knew they wanted, such as connected watches that buzz and beep (to cure the distraction of the phone, Apple says) and wireless dongles that hang ridiculously from their ears.
Still, an interesting essay, lots of images of people staring at their phones.
Barbara Davidson, NetCredit:
The United States is a comparatively young country, but one with a rich and diverse history. From the ancient villages of New Mexico’s Pueblo people and the early Spanish settlers in Florida, to the Russian traders of Alaska and 19th-century missionaries in Utah, each of the 50 states has its own story to tell.
Bucket list for me. I’d love to visit every one of these.
Jack Nicas, New York Times:
In 1997, Apple was on the ropes. The Silicon Valley pioneer was being decimated by Microsoft and its many partners in the personal-computer market. It had just cut a third of its work force, and it was about 90 days from going broke.
And:
On Thursday, Apple became the first publicly traded American company to be worth more than $1 trillion when its shares climbed 3 percent to end the day at $207.39.
And:
Apple’s ascent from the brink of bankruptcy to the world’s most valuable public company has been a business tour de force, marked by rapid innovation, a series of smash-hit products and the creation of a sophisticated, globe-spanning supply chain that keeps costs down while producing enormous volumes of cutting-edge devices.
A nice little rags-to-riches appreciation piece from the New York Times.
I’ve bought Apple stock a few different times over the years, just trying to be part of the company to which I’d hitched my wagon. One particular investment sticks out.
Apple was valued at about $12 a share (I believe it was in the late ’80s or early ’90s) and their book value was about $16 a share. In other words, Apple had hit a moment in time where the shareholders valued the company as less than the value Apple would have if they completely liquidated all their assets.
What a turnaround.
Apple hit the magic trillion dollar market valuation yesterday, and Tim Cook sent out an email to employees in appreciation. You can read the whole thing here.
Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:
Apple on Tuesday reported that it sold 3.72 million Macs in its third quarter, which spanned April 1 through June 30, the fewest in any single quarter since it sold 3.47 million in the third quarter of 2010.
And:
There are a number of possible explanations for the decline, including consumers increasingly shifting towards the iPhone and iPad. Together, those devices accounted for 65 percent of Apple’s revenue last quarter, compared to just 10 percent for the Mac. Apple even markets the iPad as a computer replacement.
The bigger reason, however, may have been that nearly the entire Mac lineup was outdated last quarter. Beyond the iMac Pro, released four months before the quarter began, no other Mac had been updated since 2017 or earlier.
I find it no wonder that Mac sales are down. The only updated machines have been dogged by the keyboard reliability issue. As I said yesterday, I think the new warranty and anti-crumb membrane are enough to make me bullish on the new MacBook lineup.
The other Mac elements that need to line up here are the new Mac Pro and the Mac mini. The question is, does Apple truly care about the Mac as more than just a balance sheet line item?
Apple just killed the App Store Affiliate Program. Presumably, the goal there is to maximize services revenue.
Apple is holding fast to a paltry 5GB of iCloud base storage. Presumably, this goes to maximize services revenue as well.
Is this “maximize revenues” logic correct? Apple is not communicating any other message, even in the face of howls from their loyal base.
Is the Mac becoming an afterthought? Will we ever see a new Mac mini? How about a new Mac Pro? And what’s the status on the AirPower charging mat?
My two cents? I think Apple should come out and address all of this. I get playing cards close to the vest, but sometimes you need to let the troops know you feel their pain, give them reason to hope.
We’ve stuck with you through thick and thin. But more and more, the relationship is feeling more like financial calculation than shared passion. Just saying.
Chris MacAskill tells a wonderful story about General Magic and getting a device in Steve’s hands. Loved every bit of this.
Ran across this on Twitter (apologies for the lack of a hat tip, can’t find the original post).
Dan Luu:
I’ve had this nagging feeling that the computers I use today feel slower than the computers I used as a kid. As a rule, I don’t trust this kind of feeling because human perception has been shown to be unreliable in empirical studies, so I carried around a high-speed camera and measured the response latency of devices I’ve run into in the past few months. Here are the results.
Follow the link, check out the charts. Apple simply rocks at reducing latency.
Nick Heer:
My home computer in 1998 had a 56K modem connected to our telephone line; we were allowed a maximum of thirty minutes of computer usage a day, because my parents — quite reasonably — did not want to have their telephone shut off for an evening at a time. I remember webpages loading slowly: ten to twenty seconds for a basic news article.
And:
With an internet connection faster than I could have thought possible in the late 1990s, what’s the score now? A story at the Hill took over nine seconds to load; at Politico, seventeen seconds; at CNN, over thirty seconds. This is the bullshit web.
This is a tremendous read. I especially loved the take on AMP. Read it all the way to the end. Exceptional writing.
I just replaced my 2015 MacBook Pro with a brand new 2018 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. Lots has been written about Touch Bar over the last few years, so I’m going to focus on two things. [Jump to the main Loop post for the deets]
Marco Arment:
Sometimes, you just need Low Power Mode: the switch added to iOS a few years ago to conserve battery life when you need it, at the expense of full performance and background tasks.
There’s no such feature on Mac laptops, but there should be.
This is a fascinating read and this suggestion would be a perfect add to the System Preferences Energy Saver page.
[VIDEO] Steve is sitting on stage, taking questions from the audience of developers (video embedded in main Loop post).
The whole thing is great but, if your time is short, jump to 4:30, where the questions start. The first one, “What about OpenDoc?”, is a perfect opener. OpenDoc was a much ballyhooed architecture that Apple sold hard. When Steve came back, well, just watch the video.
Here’s a link to the transcript.
One little snippet:
Based on third party research estimates, the App Store generated nearly twice the revenue of Google Play so far in 2018.
Amazing to me how much money can be made, all while prioritizing privacy.
That’s a hell of a find.
Another earnings call, another excellent, detailed set of charts from Jason Snell.
Jump down to the section of Mac sales:
Mac sales were down 13 percent year over year, and revenue was down five percent. It’s understandable given the environment—the year-ago’s quarter saw new MacBook Pros being released in June, while this year they didn’t release until July, after Apple’s third quarter ended.
That last bit is critical. As you read the reaction to Apple’s earnings, you’ll no doubt run into the “Mac is doomed” take, based on the numbers released yesterday. But, as Jason points out, the new MacBook Pro lineup, with its third generation, membrane protected keyboard and Apple keyboard exchange program in place, kicked in after the 3rd quarter ended.
Too early for sales numbers on the new Macs but, I will say, I’ve been waiting for the keyboard brouhaha to resolve itself and this new warranty and anti-crumb membrane were enough for me to buy in. I bought my new MacBook Pro last week and I am really happy with it.
My experience, as well as chats with other folks I’ve spoken with who’ve also been waiting to buy a new Mac, makes me bullish. I think we’ll see a nice upward slope on the next set of Mac numbers. My 2 cents.
Apple put out a press release, highlighting a few numbers from 3Q2018 and offering some guidance for the fourth quarter.
A few links:
Apple’s official press release.
A condensed, unaudited, easy to read table showing revenue (in $millions) and unit sales (thousands) by region and product category.
Condensed, unaudited, financial statements (operations, balance sheets, cash flows).
A while back, on this episode of The Dalrymple Report, Jim and I argued about whether HomePod should be allowed to make phone calls. Bad news, Jim, looks like that day is coming.
Nice work from Will Hains.
Rene Ritchie does an excellent job digging through all the bits and pieces, pros and cons, that make up the new MacBook Pro. If you are considering a new machine, this is a worthwhile, detailed read.
What it’s like shopping for a new Mac at Best Buy. The slamming it down thing? Don’t try this at home.
Apple’s Q32018 earnings call is live at 2p PT / 5p ET this afternoon.
Here’s a link to listen in live.
Two reads that do a nice job setting expectations for the call:
And:
[VIDEO] Fan of the Yes song Roundabout? This is a wonderful video (embedded in the main Loop post). Rick Beato does what he does best, taking apart a song, piece by piece, exposing all the complexities and helping you appreciate Roundabout at a whole new level.
[VIDEO] Dave Lee started this whole thing, and this is him taking Apple’s new patch for a spin to see if things really are fixed (video embedded in main Loop post). Good results, thoughtful take on thinness and compromises.
One side note: The day before this patch hit, I tweeted about a Reddit take on thermal throttling. The Reddit take implied that the issue was an issue with the Voltage Regulator Module and not the CPU. This was the first take I saw that implied that this issue was fixable in software and not an Intel i9 issue, not a hardware heat sink issue (at least not completely).
The Reddit take has also been updated to reflect Apple’s patch. All very interesting. Glad this is resolved.