Apple

Good from now until Thursday. One time bonus, up to $200 ($20 bonus).

This is a little bit of a wander, so please bear with me. All of this is in appreciation.

First things first, I grew up in New Jersey, and as is the law, I am a lifelong fan of The Boss, Bruce Springsteen. I know that I am far from alone in this.

Bruce is winding down his career, just wrote his bestselling memoir, the excellent Born to Run. Bruce also created an intimate one-man-show, Springsteen on Broadway, which sold out every single performance of its entire, just-concluded, run.

Sadly, I was unable to make it to see the show. A missed opportunity that, a bucket list item for me. But Netflix worked with Bruce to create a movie of the show. It is truly wonderful, a soulful gift to his fans who couldn’t make the show.

If you are a fan, this is not to be missed. If you wonder what all the hype is about, this should answer the question. The real magic of Springsteen is seeing him live. And not just for the music, but for the storytelling, the preacher side of Bruce, the showmanship of it all.

OK, moving on. So the headline above talks about grabbing people out of the audience to perform. Meaning, an established artist has someone in the audience (likely pre-vetted, but unrehearsed) come up and perform with the star.

This happens far more than you might think. So much so, that Casey Newton pulled together this thread showing examples of this in action:

https://twitter.com/caseynewton/status/1074361409012621313

One of the videos from this thread fits this Loop post just perfectly. Bruce and a kid from the audience singing “Growing Up” (embedded in the main Loop post). Don’t miss the part in the middle where the kid plays along and Bruce talks about the lesson he learned about getting his first guitar. And that selfie at the end. What a moment.

Enjoy!

Reuters:

Apple Inc , facing a court ban in China on some of its iPhone models over alleged infringement of Qualcomm Inc patents, said on Friday it will push software updates to users in a bid to resolve potential issues.

And:

Earlier this week, Qualcomm said a Chinese court had ordered a ban on sales of some older Apple iPhone models for violating two of its patents, though intellectual property lawyers said the ban would still likely take time to enforce.

A ban would have cost Apple many millions of dollars, as well as damage to its brand in China. This story is still unfolding.

Apple:

Cupertino, California and Austin, Texas — Apple today announced a major expansion of its operations in Austin, including an investment of $1 billion to build a new campus in North Austin. The company also announced plans to establish new sites in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City and expand in cities across the United States including Pittsburgh, New York and Boulder, Colorado over the next three years, with the potential for additional expansion elsewhere in the US over time.

Check out this map, showing Apple’s projected US employment by 2022:

And this map, showing Apple’s current US employment numbers/distribution:

The mind reels at this success story. Especially when you think back to that comment (please tweet at me if you can find a link for this) Michael Dell made about buying Apple for couch cushion money.

Got some great advice a long time ago. In a nutshell, avoid shoulda, coulda, woulda. As in, I shoulda bought Apple stock when it was $12 a share, pre-split.

But it is fun to imagine what a $10,000 investment back at the IPO would be worth now (by my math, about $4.3 bmillion).

Gotta love this Steve Jobs quote, courtesy of MacDailyNews:

I saw a lot of other people at Apple, especially after we went public, how it changed them. A lot of people thought they had to start being rich. A few people went out and they bought Rolls-Royces, they bought homes, and their wives got plastic surgery. I saw these people who were really nice, simple people turn into these bizarre people. I made a promise to myself: I said, ‘I’m not going to let this money ruin my life.

You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s humorous, all the attention to it, because it’s hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that’s happened to me in the past 10 years.

I was worth about over $1 million when I was 23, and over $10 million when I was 24, and over $100 million when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important. I never did it for the money.

UPDATE: First things first, wow was my math off!!! Check the comments for the details, but $4.3 million, not $43 billion. But still.

Also, with thanks to @moeskido, here’s a link to an article about Michael Dell walking back that “shut down the company, return the money” comment.

New York Times:

The millions of dots on the map trace highways, side streets and bike trails — each one following the path of an anonymous cellphone user.

One path tracks someone from a home outside Newark to a nearby Planned Parenthood, remaining there for more than an hour. Another represents a person who travels with the mayor of New York during the day and returns to Long Island at night.

Yet another leaves a house in upstate New York at 7 a.m. and travels to a middle school 14 miles away, staying until late afternoon each school day. Only one person makes that trip: Lisa Magrin, a 46-year-old math teacher. Her smartphone goes with her.

An app on the device gathered her location information, which was then sold without her knowledge. It recorded her whereabouts as often as every two seconds, according to a database of more than a million phones in the New York area that was reviewed by The New York Times. While Ms. Magrin’s identity was not disclosed in those records, The Times was able to easily connect her to that dot.

And:

At least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location services to get local news and weather or other information, The Times found.

And:

More than 1,000 popular apps contain location-sharing code from such companies, according to 2018 data from MightySignal, a mobile analysis firm. Google’s Android system was found to have about 1,200 apps with such code, compared with about 200 on Apple’s iOS.

This is a riveting read. And there’s an amazing embedded graphic that takes you on a virtual map travel, following Ms. Magrin’s travels. (Note that the NYTimes didn’t dox her, she allowed the Times access to her data.)

From this Reddit post:

Instead of allowing apps all-or-nothing access to your GPS location, Apple should allow for a granular spectrum of access that the user chooses. This could go deeper and also be on a time- and location-based factor too. So instead of just “Allow or Don’t Allow Access to Location,” after which you’d have to go into the settings to change, there should be the ability to choose between exact GPS location, zip code (or the country’s relevant postal code), county, state, and time zone.

Apple already beefed up its privacy protections by adding “Only while using the app” as an Location Services icon in an iOS update, but it’s time to go further. In addition to the different degrees of location specificity, there should also be an “Allow once” option for situations where the user wants to allow it now but not necessary have that become the Location Services setting for the app that then requires opening up Settings and digging into the app’s preferences to change it.

And from this Motherboard article from Jason Koebler:

It’s not just Facebook: Android and iOS’s App Stores have incentivized an app economy where free apps make money by selling your personal data and location history to advertisers.

And:

The apps on your smartphone are tracking you, and that for all the talk about “anonymization” and claims that the data is collected only in aggregate, our habits are so specific—and often unique—so that anonymized identifiers can often be reverse engineered and used to track individual people.

Some have made the suggestion that users should just turn off Location Services (Settings > Privacy > Location Services). But this is an overreach. Location Services has real value. It lets you find misplaced devices, find people who share their locations with you, lets useful services know when you are nearby.

It’s the misuse of this data, the exporting it as a source of revenue that, in my opinion, is the setting Apple should expose. To me, this is the missing setting:

Settings > Privacy > Location > Allow my data to be exported

And who would ever check that checkbox? Certainly not me.

Jake Swearingen, The Intelligencer:

From roughly 2007 until 2013, the smartphone market grew at an astonishing pace, posting double-digit growth year after year, even during a global recession.

And:

Smartphone growth began to slow starting in 2013 or 2014. In 2016, it was suddenly in the single digits, and in 2017 global smartphone shipments, for the first time, actually declined — fewer smartphones were sold than in 2017 than in 2016.

And:

In 2017, per the International Data Corporation, global shipments of smartphones declined year-over-year for the first time in history. In 2018, IDC says the same thing happened in the U.S. market.

And:

Some manufacturers and analysts may hope that flat sales in the developed world could be offset by strong sales in other markets. Fat chance. The markets where smartphone saturation hasn’t set in yet — such as India, Southeast Asia, pockets of Latin America, and Africa — are different than the markets that fueled the first decade of smartphone growth. “In those markets, there are extremely competitive devices down near the equivalent of $200,” says Stanton. “It’s becoming a real battlefield, but it’s a low-margin business and consumers down at the those price points tend to be not very brand-centric. That really plays into hands of a few really hyperaggressive brands of smartphones, most of which are coming from China.”

But what about Apple? Can they continue to defy gravity?

While the rest of the smartphone market worries about commodification and what each brand will need to do to gain or defend market share in a world where smartphones are like cars, Apple stands alone. “Apple has a different set of options available to it,” says David Yoffie, a professor of international business at Harvard Business School who also sits on the board of HTC. “They have this extraordinary user base that allows them to do things other firms could never get away with.”

All of this is the lead-up to a very interesting analysis of Apple’s gravity defying potential. Good read.

John Gruber:

You can say $40 is too much for an iPhone case, but I’d say Apple’s $40 clear case is easily worth twice as much as the $20 clear cases I’ve tried. If I bought an XR and wanted to use a case, this is the case I would buy. It’s so good it makes me wonder why Apple doesn’t make clear cases like this one for the iPhone XS and XS Max.

High praise. Puzzling that it took so long to get to market. Is it the material science involved?

Washington Post:

You can’t put a price on loyalty. Just kidding, it’s $1,000.

And:

For some perspective, we charted out the past few years of prices on a few iconic Apple products. Then we compared them with other brands and some proprietary data about Americans’ phone purchase habits from mobile analytics firm BayStreet Research.

What we learned: Being loyal to Apple is getting expensive. Many Apple product prices are rising faster than inflation — faster, even, than the price of prescription drugs or going to college. Yet when Apple offers cheaper options for its most important product, the iPhone, Americans tend to take the more expensive choice. So while Apple isn’t charging all customers more, it’s definitely extracting more money from frequent upgraders.

And:

Not everything Apple has gone up in price: An entry-level iMac and iPad have gotten cheaper since 2014, though in both cases the company has since added a new higher-end (and higher-price) “Pro” version to its lineup.

This piece is full of interesting data. Be sure to stop and process the graphics. And keep reading. One core point that struck home for me:

Most technology products are commodities that go down in price over time. Apple has worked very hard not to become a commodity.

And that’s it exactly. It’s become harder and harder over time to distinguish all those Windows laptops and Android phones, one from another. Apple continues to pour R&D dollars into ensuring the uniqueness of its products.

If people stop buying into the Apple ecosystem, if Apple Stores stop being so crowded, that’d surely shift Apple’s pricing strategy. As is, seems like Apple has their pricing strategy well tuned.