Apple

Bloomberg:

Verizon Communications Inc. announced deals making Apple Inc. and Google its first video providers for a superfast 5G wireless service the company plans to launch in four cities later this year.

And:

With the introduction, Verizon will provide 5G customers either a free Apple TV box or free subscription to Google’s YouTube TV app for live television service, according to people familiar with the plan.

This partnership is a big, legitimizing win for Apple TV. But I’m still not sold on 5G.

5G has limitations. It requires major infrastructure, expensive network hardware to propagate the signal, meaning it will be prohibitively expensive to be able to serve rural areas, is ideally suited for dense urban areas.

Also:

High-frequency 5G radio signals are easily disrupted by rain and foliage and remain commercially unproven. But if successful, the technology could lead to as much as $200 billion a year in industry-wide development spending.

I have high hopes that some form of high speed wireless will eventually replace wired service, make broadband more widely available and, most importantly, bring competition to the marketplace, give consumers more choices.

John Gruber, Daring Fireball:

Here’s some interesting hiring news I’ve heard through the little birdie grapevine: Doug Field — who left Tesla in May after overseeing Model 3 production — has returned to Apple, working in Bob Mansfield’s project Titan group. Apple spokesperson Tom Neumayr confirmed with me only that Field has returned to Apple, but no one should find it surprising that he’s working on Titan.

Read Gruber’s post. Some fascinating and reasonable conjecture about Apple and a self-driving car of their own.

Imagine writing out some personalized instructions on how to use a piece of tech, say, for your mom or dad, instructions that strip away the complexity. Now take a look at the video in the embedded tweet:

https://twitter.com/mortenjust/status/1027183855692931072

This is a terrific use case.

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac, does a nice sum up of Apple’s response to official questions from the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

My favorite quote:

The customer is not our product, and our business model does not depend on collecting vast amounts of personally identifiable information to enrich targeted profiles marketed to advertisers.

That says it all.

Wonderful look at Apple’s iOS 12 rewrite of Books from MacStories’ Ryan Christoffel.

A personal note here: I have long purchased my books from Amazon’s Kindle Store, but this read, combined with my short-lived, unsatisfying dive into the Kindle Unlimited program has made me reconsider this habit.

One thing I look forward to, and not mentioned in the article, is the ability to share Apple’s Books with my family using iCloud Family Sharing. As a family, we often share books and we are already on this plan. [Amazon has something similar called Households, but it it is limited to two adults, so your kids will age out over time.] The family plan is a real boon for us. Something to consider.

One note on sharing from Ryan:

One thing Goodreads offers that Apple Books does not is a social component. An Apple Music-style social sharing feature would be a nice fit for Books, but there’s nothing of the sort here.

I love the idea here. I am constantly looking for new read recommendations, especially from friends who share my taste in books. And I see “reading the same book at the same time” as a very social activity, something rife with potential that rarely gets any treatment in the tech universe.

Nice backgrounder on Tim Cook from Emma Sims, Australia’s PC Authority. One highlight:

Under Cook’s stewardship, the firm has increased its donations to charity, something Cook has vowed to do himself; the CEO plans to donate his stock fortune in its entirety (thought to be in the region of $US120 million) to charity.

That’s commitment to one’s beliefs and yet another reason to admire Tim Cook.

[H/T Dman]

Mihir A. Desai, New York Times:

Sure, Apple produces innovative phones and laptops, but look inside its sleek exterior and you’ll find an elegant financial machine that has become the ideal for corporate America. Without investing significantly in hard assets, Apple spins cash and returns it to shareholders at a stunning rate. It’s difficult not to admire.

And:

Six years ago, the company owed no debt and had never undertaken a share buyback or paid dividends. Pressured by a shareholder revolt in 2013, it is now transformed.

And:

Apple has conducted its buybacks responsibly: It bought shares when they were relatively cheap, rewarding the patient shareholder. Other companies have not been so prudent, taking on debt to make ill-timed purchases of expensive shares rather than investing in growth opportunities. In some cases, they have done so simply to push up share prices so that management can meet goals for quarterly earnings or metrics that trigger compensation.

Good read. Apple is truly a remarkable company.

This is a fun read from Jean-Louis Gassée about Apple’s rise to the 13-digit club.

A few bits, just to whet your appetite:

While Apple employees deserve to bask in the market’s recognition of their good work, the thing that really counts is “making a dent in the universe”, as Steve Jobs memorably said. To name but a few, the invention of products such as the Macintosh, the iPod, and the iPhone; the creation of attractive and lucrative platforms for app developers (who deserve their own recognition for helping Apple reach the big T); an unrivaled supply chain management system… These are the things that have propelled Apple, occasional warts included, to the top of the industry.

And:

How did Apple get to $1T with such a poor price-to-earnings ratio (P/E)? As you no doubt already know, P/E is the result of dividing the share price by the earnings per share (EPS). The higher the ratio, the more willing investors are to pay a higher price for today’s shares, assured by the promise of substantially higher earnings (EPS) in the future.

This is where we get into some intriguing comparisons. Microsoft’s P/E is a solid 48 and Alphabet’s hovers around 50…but Apple’s is a meager 17. Caricaturing just a bit: “Apple still trades like a steel mill going out of business.”

Ah, Jean-Louis, always a pleasure making my way through your Monday Notes.

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.

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.