Survey suggests strong demand for Apple’s AirPods, and some math

Written by

Bank of America Merrill Lynch (the corporate and investment banking division of Bank of America) ran a survey to get a sense of the public’s AirPod and Apple Watch purchase intentions.

From Business Insider’s writeup of the survey:

12% of U.S. consumers surveyed by Bank of America Merrill Lynch say they intend to purchase AirPods, apparently on the strength of Apple’s marketing, given that few people have actually seen and tried them out.

This is a very bullish sign for Apple, says BAML. “12% of the US installed base could lead to up to an incremental $3bn in revenue,” writes the analysts.

John Gruber, from his analysis:

Not 12 percent of iPhone owners. 12 percent of consumers. For a product that Apple has merely announced, but not yet even started advertising. That’s huge.

As per usual, Gruber’s writeup is worth reading.

Some math:

$3B / $159 = 18.9M

This tells us that it will take 18.9 million AirPod sales to generate $3 billion.

18.9 / 12% = 157M

This tells us that it will take a total population of 157 million for 12% to generate $3B in sales.

There are about 90 million iPhone users in the US (Please ping me if you know a more precise number), so clearly Gruber is right about that. There are about 125 million US households (again, ping me if you have a better number), which dovetails nicely with 157 million total consumers.

With this math in mind, go read Gruber’s take on the survey, including his thoughts on the Apple Watch projections.

Apple Music teases new show, The 411, with Mary J Blige interviewing Hillary Clinton

Written by

Apple Music tweeted a teaser video, with Mary J Blige introducing her new show, exclusively via Apple Music and iTunes. The show, called The 411, will be released tomorrow, September 30th.

I find it interesting to watch Apple experiment with new content models. As they build critical mass, I’d expect Apple to coalesce their offerings into a series of Apple TV channels.

Safari home page changing to Apple start page

Written by

When I fired up my Mac this morning, my Safari home page had changed to Apple’s start page. I asked around and this appears to be happening to other folks as well.

This is certainly good marketing for Apple, as every new Safari page opens as an ad for iPhone 7, Apple Watch, etc. But I set my home page up the way I wanted it. Not sure if this is an intentional move on Apple’s part or, perhaps, just a bug, a reset of the home page. But it happened without my installing anything new on my computer. And it is happening to others, though not to everyone.

If this happened to you, please ping me on Twitter.

Interesting.

Shake Shack founder integrates Apple Watch into new restaurant

Written by

Daniela Galarza, writing for Eater:

NYC restaurateur, Shake Shack founder, and millionaire Danny Meyer is having a good week. He’s invested in a home-cooked food delivery start-up, introduced paid parental leave for all of his employees, and today almost single-handedly made the Apple Watch — a very expensive trophy gadget at best — relevant.

Trophy gadget? Um. No. But to continue:

When Meyer’s 30-year-old Union Square Cafe reopens in Manhattan next month, every floor manager and sommelier will be wearing an Apple Watch. And when a VIP walks through the front door, someone orders a bottle of wine, a new table is seated, a guest waits too long to order her or his drink, or a menu item runs out, every manager will get an alert via the tiny computer attached to their wrist.

This is a new use case for Apple Watch, an interesting idea. If it lives up to its potential, no reason this won’t spread to other restaurants and make the Apple Watch a standard element in restaurant systems.

Apple, Pink Floyd, and an iconic flying pig

Written by

As we mentioned yesterday, Apple is moving their UK headquarters to leased space in London’s iconic Battersea Power Station.

If the name Battersea Station doesn’t immediately summon an image, take a look at this Wikipedia page.

With that image in mind, jump over to this album cover from Pink Floyd’s 1977 release Animals.

Note the flying pig on the album cover. That’s not just a drawing, but a real inflatable pig:

Photographs for the cover of Pink Floyd’s Animals album were taken in early December 1976. For the photo shoot, an inflatable pink pig, made by the Zeppelin company, was tethered to one of the southern chimneys.

The pig broke free of its moorings and rose into the flight path of London Heathrow Airport to the astonishment of pilots in approaching planes. The runaway pig was tracked by police helicopters before coming to ground in Kent. Whether the pig escaped, or was released on purpose to increase publicity, is not known.

The flying pig has long been part of Pink Floyd culture, making its appearance at many concerts, and even flying again over Battersea Station in 2011 to celebrate the album’s 35th anniversary.

Personally, I love this link between Apple and such an iconic rock album.

iOS Safari, Android Chrome, tweaked to enable video autoplay

Written by

Jack Marshall, writing for The Wall Street Journal:

Apple Inc. and Google made tweaks to their popular mobile web browsers recently to enable video content to play automatically in web pages, provided audio is muted.

The changes could result in a boost in mobile video consumption for online publishers if they allow their videos to play automatically, and it could unlock new revenue opportunities as a result.

For marketers, the tweaks will enable them to automatically play video content when potential customers visit their websites.

Autoplay means you consume your data plan simply by visiting a site. Some sites hide the video, making it invisible, and others place the video at the bottom of an article, ensuring you’ll need to scroll through the entire article to get to that elusive pause button.

It’s unclear how consumers will react to having videos play automatically on mobile webpages. Some industry observers suggest Facebook’s introduction of autoplay video in its News Feeds has, perhaps, helped people acclimatize to the idea.

But, in addition to potentially being distracting to some web users, autoplay videos could also increase the amount of data people consume through their wireless plans, potentially resulting in extra data charges.

“If you’re visiting a lot of sites with autoplay video then the bandwidth bill will be coming after that,” Mr. Wijering said.

Terrible.

Bloomberg: Apple stepping up plans for Amazon Echo-style smart-home device

Written by

Mark Gurman, writing for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is pressing ahead with the development of an Echo-like smart-home device based on the Siri voice assistant, according to people familiar with the matter.

Started more than two years ago, the project has exited the research and development lab and is now in prototype testing, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing unannounced Apple projects. Like Amazon Inc.’s Echo, the device is designed to control appliances, locks, lights and curtains via voice activation, the people said. Apple hasn’t finalized plans for the device and could still scrap the project.

There were breaths of a rumor that this device would see the light of day this year, but they faded away. I’d like to see a device like this as a living room or kitchen information anchor, well integrated with iOS and macOS. The key is to make sure only one device responds when you trigger it with “Hey, Siri”.

iPhone speakers, battery life, and the marketing of wireless

Written by

Ryan Jones noticed an interesting change with Apple’s reported battery life specs.

First, take a look at the image in this tweet.

Note the focus on wireless with the iPhone 7, a word not found in the same iPhone 6s and 6s Plus specs.

From Ryan’s tweet:

Stereo speakers crush battery.

1 hr playback > 10%. Possibly why Apple changed the battery life specs to “wireless”.

Interesting. Clearly, onboard speakers will always chew up more iPhone battery than wireless headphones.

Why? The iPhone speakers are consuming the onboard battery, while the wireless headphones draw from their own batteries, not counting against the battery life measurement for the iPhone itself. There is a nominal drain for Bluetooth communication, but that’s not nearly as big a drain as driving the speakers.

100 greatest TV shows of all time

Written by

Most lists are hit or miss. This one is definitely heavily stacked with hits. Two shows I would have added to the list? Star Trek: The Next Generation and Get Smart. That said, I really enjoyed this format, laced with videos to give a taste of each show.

Still a walled garden, but with more doors

Written by

Dieter Bohn, writing for The Verge:

iOS 10 moves some of your stuff around a little and makes other stuff look a little different, but fundamentally it acts very much like what you’re used to underneath those new notification bubbles and 3D Touch gimmicks.

But layered underneath those cosmetic changes are some features that push your apps even further, beyond just their icons, into various corners of the operating system. It’s easy to look down your nose at Widgets and iMessage stickers, but when they’re combined with extensions, you begin to see a system where you have access to information from ESPN, Weather, Uber, and much more, all without opening those apps at all. It’s like Android’s widgets, but with a developer ecosystem that might actually be incentivized to support them.

Interesting point. Apple is slowly opening doors into that famously walled garden, enriching the information at its core, making for a better experience for users.

With all the complaints about the iPhone and iOS, I think it’s worth spending a few minutes thinking about how far we’ve come, how much richer our current experience is, warts and all, when compared with the slow and relatively plain experience of years past.

My 2 cents? Apple is right to step very slowly, even if it means Siri can’t immediately tell us what time the Emmys are on. Think bigger picture. Take small, precise steps, release into the wild, measure, learn from your mistakes, rinse and repeat. We’re getting there.

Reuters: Japan’s antitrust watchdog considers action against Apple, carriers

Written by

Yoshiyasu Shida , writing for Reuters:

Japanese regulators are considering taking action against Apple Inc over possible antitrust violations that may have helped it dominate the nation’s smartphone sales, government sources said, a move that could hit the company’s profit margins in one of its most profitable markets.

In a report published last month, Japan’s Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said that NTT Docomo, KDDI Corp and Softbank Group were refusing to sell older surplus iPhone models to third party retailers, thereby hobbling smaller competitors.

This seems more about resellers than Apple. But:

Apple was not named in that report, but two senior government sources told Reuters that regulators were also focusing on Apple’s supply agreements with all three carriers.

Under those deals, surplus stock of older iPhones is kept out of the market and sent to overseas markets, such as Hong Kong, according to industry sources.

It’s all so tawdry.

Music theory for nerds

Written by

If you are new to music theory and have a technical bent, this is an interesting introduction, one that lays some important foundations, especially if you have any interest in songwriting. It’s written as a non-musical engineer digging in to the science behind music and discovering the mathematics that ties everything together.

Don’t let the science bog you down. Intervals, scales, and modes are the key concepts here.

iPhone 7 display technology shoot-out

Written by

Dr. Raymond M. Soneira, DisplayMate:

At first glance the iPhone 7 looks almost indistinguishable from the 2014 iPhone 6 and 2015 iPhone 6s. Actually, the displays are the same size and have the same pixel resolution. But that is as far as it goes… The iPhone 7 display is a Truly Impressive major enhancement and advancement on the iPhone 6 display… and even every other mobile LCD display that we have ever tested… note that I hand out compliments on displays very carefully. And for those of you thinking of Emailing that we got hand-picked units, the iPhones were purchased retail from Verizon Wireless.

The iPhone 7 got extraordinarily high scores, and this from someone who really knows display tech. Read the post for the details, but this is one area in which the iPhone 7 is hands down the best in class.

Apple looks to open first store in Samsung’s backyard

Written by

Jonathan Cheng, writing for the Wall Street Journal:

Apple Inc. has made inquiries about opening its first retail store in South Korea, in a signal that the technology giant may be looking to step up competition in smartphone rival Samsung Group’s backyard.

Apple looked at sites across the street from the Samsung’s longtime headquarters in Seoul, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Cupertino, Calif. company, which is Samsung Electronics Co.’s biggest rival in the mobile-phone market as well as a major customer of its smartphone components, is looking at locations near the South Korean company’s own three-story global flagship store in Seoul’s upscale Gangnam neighborhood, the people said. The company has sent retail executives to South Korea in recent months to check out potential sites for the store, they said.

The people warned that Apple’s plan hasn’t been finalized and a store opening could take about a year.

If this is an intentional leak, really well timed.

The New York Times’ dark, dark Messages review

Written by

Amanda Hess, writing for the New York Times:

Apple built an empire on hermetically sealed systems with sleek, minimalist designs. Nowhere was its strategy more evident than in iMessage, the company’s instant messaging system that offered a free, elegant chatting solution exclusive to Apple devices. Until last week, that is, when Apple updated its software, cracked open iMessage and allowed the ephemera of the outside internet to seep in.

And:

These features mimic the aesthetics of the open internet, which is obsessed with nostalgia and is not exactly subtle. But they can’t replicate the feeling of collecting digital miscellany in our travels across the internet, remixing the material and sending it along to friends who might appreciate the find. The programmatic iMessage sucks the spontaneity from the experience. It standardizes the strange.

And:

Mostly, this thing feels like Facebook. A new class of iMessage apps — yes, apps within an app — lets chatters play Words With Friends, send money through Square or make dinner reservations on OpenTable, all right within the chat window. It feels like iMessage is trying to swallow the rest of your phone.

And:

Each tap into the iMessage world sends you further away from your chat bubbles and deeper into Apple’s labyrinth of special features. Follow the path to its inevitable conclusion, and all of a sudden, you’re no longer talking with your friends. You’re shopping.

I struggle to understand the relationship between the New York Times and Apple. I have long been a Times reader, but its Apple coverage often veers far from objectivity. Articles like this feel like the result of an agenda-laden editorial meeting.

Where’s the balance?

Apple buying McLaren would make perfect sense

Written by

Jordan Golson, writing for The Verge:

An acquisition would give Apple a small but significant carmaker that has enormous amounts of technological expertise in building drivetrains, vehicle control systems, and navigating complicated supplier-OEM relationships. McLaren also has significant experience working with advanced materials like carbon composites, aluminum, and carbon fiber.

It’s a small but important firm, best known for its sports cars — it sold 1,654 road cars in 2015 — and its Formula One team. But the company is much more than just a car manufacturer. The 5,000 employees of the McLaren Technology Group work across six different divisions including automotive, racing, marketing, and as an automotive supplier for race teams and high-end performance cars.

McLaren has quietly been growing its consulting division as well. McLaren Applied Technologies works with firms across a number of industries — both automotive and otherwise — to provide R&D and technology expertise behind the scenes. McLaren is privately owned and one of the smallest independent carmakers, making an acquisition logistically simpler.

I am a big fan of McLaren and of Formula One. McLaren represents automotive state of the art, one of the few firms with the technological prowess to compete at the Formula One level, no easy task. Formula One lays out strict regulations for the design of every competing car, and changes those rules every season, requiring competitors to redesign a race car, sometimes from scratch, every year.

On the flip side, McLaren makes and sells vehicles you can buy (if you’ve got the wherewithal) and drive on the street. They’ve got invaluable experience with the automotive supply chain, and they have the kind of industry relationships that an Apple auto effort would benefit from.

I’ve long said supported the notion of Apple buying Formula One, en toto, purely as a brand play and investment. But buying McLaren makes even more sense. They’d have cherry picked just the right player, a rising star in the Formula One world with an old school brand.

David Pogue walkthrough of the new Messages interface

Written by

The tone of this walkthrough is very beginner, but bear with. Spend 5 minutes with Pogue and you’ll quickly get your arms around all the major new features that come with the new iOS 10 Messages rewrite.

California Supreme Court votes to review a libel case over negative Yelp reviews

Written by

Paresh Dave, writing for the LA Times:

The California Supreme Court agreed to review Yelp’s objection to a decision ordering it to strip the Internet of comments posted about a San Francisco law firm.

The law firm owner, Dawn Hassell, sued Ava Bird, the disgruntled former client who allegedly posted the reviews — and lower courts agreed that Yelp should be forced to remove them.

And:

To the frustration of many plaintiffs’ attorneys, the Communications Decency Act has long freed online publishers from liability for user postings on their websites and apps. But many technology experts say the Hassell case may be the biggest threat yet to the immunity.

The appellate court found that no liability was being placed on Yelp, and thus the ruling didn’t go against federal law. Instead, as the “administrator of the forum” where defamatory speech existed, Yelp bears the responsibility of removal, the court said.

Experts in technology law say they’re optimistic that the California Supreme Court will spike the order against Yelp.

If this decision goes against Yelp, it will certainly impact crowd sourced rating and comment sites. Bigger pockets will be able to sue unflattering comments into submission. Chilling.

Why the Mona Lisa is so famous

Written by

[VIDEO] Did you know that 80% of visitors to The Louvre are there to visit the most famous painting of all time? How did the Mona Lisa get to be so famous? Fascinating video.

iPhone scratches and aging gracefully

Written by

Thomas Ricker, writing for The Verge:

The wood on the stairs in my newly renovated house is starting to divot and wear under heavy use. At first — for the briefest of moments — I was annoyed as I imagined my daughter’s “princess heels” and my son’s football cleats plodding up the steps in violation of our strict no-shoes-in-the-house policy. Then I remembered Starck’s lesson. The subtle scarring I see is created by the process that transforms a house into a home; imperfections forged by my children, themselves transforming into adults. Those stairs, disfigured as they are, fulfill their purpose of supporting my family on their daily journey through this world. Now when I look at the stairs I see a beautiful story.

He also quotes from this 2011 essay on design by Remy Labesque, a defense of well-worn gadgets:

Aging with dignity is a criteria designers should recognize in their efforts. I’m thinking of a future when products are designed not for the brief moment when they are new, but for when they have been aged to perfection.

We’ve got a table in our house that my wife and I bought when we got married, our first major purchase together. It’s a fine piece of furniture and has served us as our kitchen table for many years.

The surface of the table is well worn, scarred by sharp edges. An imprint of a phillips screw from a carelessly placed box, a patina of paint and sparkly glitter, and countless gouges from children and cats, mar the table’s surface. But I would argue that those imperfections make the table, give it a distinct well-worn beauty, and in no way take away from the iconic look of the table design.

Take a look at the images at the top of Labesque’s Frog Design post, the one showing both a well-worn iPhone and a similarly worn Canon point-and-click camera. Which wears its patina of wear better? To me, no question, that iPhone, with all its scratches and imperfections, is still a thing of beauty.

John Gruber on the iPhone and iconic design

Written by

Just after the September 7th iPhone event, Farhad Manjoo wrote a piece for the New York Times titled, provocatively, “What’s Really Missing From the New iPhone: Cutting-Edge Design”.

An aside: I complained about the Times coverage of that event here.

In his direct response, Gruber walks a very reasoned line, focused on the meaning of design. A fascinating read.

At its core:

Here’s the genius of the black and (especially) jet black iPhones 7. In a very seductive way, they look like something new and desirable. And at the same time, they are instantly recognizable as iPhones. That is what Manjoo and similar-minded I’m-bored-with-Apple’s-designs don’t get. With a highly successful product and brand, new versions need to strike a balance between familiarity, the foundations of the brand, and hot newness. The bored-with-Apple crowd just wants the hot newness.

Absolutely right. Iconic design requires recognizability. A Porsche, an Eames lounge chair, and an iPhone are all iconic designs, all instantly recognizable.

That jet black finish is hot newness, but wrapped around an iconic design.

Read Gruber’s post. It resonates.

Six Colors macOS Sierra review

Written by

Jason Snell and Dan Moren pulled together a terrific walk through of macOS Sierra.

One tiny nit, concerning Siri:

Activating Siri brings up a floating window with an audio waveform, and then displays the results of your query in that same window. (You can choose what microphone Siri uses, and whether Siri speaks its results aloud, in the new Siri pane in the System Preferences app.)

When Siri returns answers to your requests in that floating window, that’s not the end of the story. You can drag and drop, or copy and paste, results into other apps, Many results also come with a plus icon in the top right corner, allowing you to pin them to the top of the Today view inside Notification Center.

And:

This leads to a few uncomfortable situations. Even Apple’s demos show off that if you say something like, “search the web for pictures of old computers,” it will provide you with an awesome collection of images—any of which you can drag anywhere and drop into something like a document or presentation.

My 2 cents here, this is a web issue, not an Apple issue. You could make the same issue with a simple Google Images search. Your copyright obligations have not changed.

Note also that Jason did have sporadic issues unlocking his Mac using his Apple Watch. Not sure if other folks are having this problem but, for me, the Apple Watch unlock has been bulletproof. The only time it fails is when I turn Bluetooth off on my phone or my Mac, both of these BT connections are required for this chain of unlock to work.

But I digress. Read the review. It’s worth your time. Jason and Dan are terrific writers and the review is both informative and incredibly easy to absorb.

Tumblr brings Live Photos to the web

Written by

With the teaser headline, What happens next? Click and hold to find out!, Tumblr brought Apple’s Live Photos format to the web.

Whenever you see that famous Live Photo icon, click and hold to make them swing.

Tumblr was the first third-party app to support Live Photos—you could even GIF ’em. Now we’re the first to support them on the web. And! We’re open sourcing the javascript library for any webmaster to use: GitHub and npm.

Also interesting:

We’re also working on an Android version for you.

How to create a bootable macOS Sierra USB drive

Written by

Mihăiță Bamburic talks you through the process of downloading the installer from the Mac App Store and either using Disk Utility and Terminal to create a bootable Sierra USB drive, or using 3rd party utility DiskMaker X to do the same. Worth having one of these drives around.

Apple consolidating Luxembourg operations to Cork, Ireland

Written by

From Apple’s email this afternoon:

As of September 25, 2016, iTunes S.à r.l. will complete its merger with Apple Distribution International in Cork, Ireland and will relocate its business from Luxembourg to Cork in early 2017.

Apple has been operating in Ireland since 1980 and now employs nearly 6,000 people. As we continue to expand our operations in Cork, we are moving our iTunes business there and will support content stores for more than 100 countries from our campus at Hollyhill.

This move was originally announced back in June. From this 2012 article in the New York Times:

Luxembourg has just half a million residents. But when customers across Europe, Africa or the Middle East — and potentially elsewhere — download a song, television show or app, the sale is recorded in this small country, according to current and former executives. In 2011, iTunes S.à r.l.’s revenue exceeded $1 billion, according to an Apple executive, representing roughly 20 percent of iTunes’s worldwide sales.

Obviously, that information is dated, but it gives a sense of the importance Luxembourg operations have to Apple. Not clear how this will impact Apple’s current tax negotiations with the European Commission.

Apple’s jet black iPhone 7 Plus perfect storm

Written by

In yesterday’s Barrons blog:

The most bullish note today is from John Donovan and Steve Mullane of BlueFin Research Partners, who had written on the topic a week ago.

The authors today write that Apple is “frantically asking component suppliers to pull in deliveries in a mad rush to deliver incremental iPhone 7 units by year end,” citing higher-than-expected for the new device.

From the referenced BlueFin report:

Demand for the jet black model has been red hot, with speculators in China paying as much as $2,300 according to our checks. Last week we mentioned an almost TMZ-like reporting environment surrounding the Samsung Note 7 saga. The videos of autombiles catching fire while airports and TSA posting warnings about the Galaxy Note 7 will not fade from consumers memory anytime soon, in our view. AAPL is primed to swoop in and take full advantage and is pressuring the entire component base in an effort to ensure product is at the ready.

Samsung’s stumble, the double camera, and a hot new jet black finish created a perfect storm for Apple.

CNET’s ultimate Apple iPhone quiz

Written by

Ultimate? No. But interesting? Yes. I found a few of these questions to be challenging. And one of the answers was just plain wrong. See if you can spot the error. It’s me being picky, but I think you’ll agree the proffered answer is technically wrong.

Update: There are actually two errors. One was obvious and current, and one goes back a ways. Head over to the comments for the reveal.