Dan Frommer, writing for Quartz:

A big part of the iPhone’s success can likely be attributed to one decision: To finally offer it in larger sizes, matching the phones that Android rivals, such as Samsung and Motorola, have made for years. On Apple’s earnings call, CEO Tim Cook said the company saw a record number of new iPhone customers and more people switching from Android than for any of the previous three iPhone versions.

Of course, now that Apple’s met the demand for larger phones, it risks disappointing investors next time. Surely, nothing else can deliver such a big jump in sales? But perhaps the shift to larger smartphones will serve a secondary purpose. Paul Kedrosky, the financial commentator, theorized this week that Apple has created a “portability deficit”—i.e., big phones are cumbersome. This, Kedrosky posits, will prove helpful as Apple starts selling its new iPhone accessory, the Apple Watch, this April.

The portability deficit suggests that the larger the phone, the less portable. The title of Dan’s piece is “Maybe this is the real reason Apple made the iPhone bigger.” In other words, Apple made a larger phone to create the need for an Apple Watch.

I don’t know if I buy that, but I do think the Apple Watch addresses the portability deficit. Like a cell repeater, the Apple Watch helps get the message from your phone to your brain, washed through a more portable interface.

Over time, we’ll presumably be able to pack enough technology into a watch-size package that the phone itself will no longer be necessary.

M.G.Siegler draws an analogy between Apple and Big Oil:

With this latest quarter, Apple surpassed ExxonMobil in 2008, Royal Dutch Shell in 2008, and Gazprom in 2011 for the most profitable quarter in the history of business. The unifying theme? All oil & gas companies. All operating in a world before the recent collapse of oil prices.

The downside of explosive single product growth is dependence on that revenue. In a sense, Apple is painted in a corner, dependent on iPhone sales to maintain their growth.

In fact, Apple now has the best problem in the world: having unearthed the best business in history, the iPhone, there are seemingly few places left to dig for gold — or, perhaps more appropriately, oil.

If I was a betting man, I’d bet on Apple here. Time and again, they’ve proven adept at reinventing themselves, at catching the next wave before anyone even realized it was a wave or, perhaps more appropriately, before anyone recognized how large a wave it would be.

Read Siegler’s piece. It’s well written, thoughtful, and full of interesting links.

Marriott President and CEO Arne Sorenson explains the unexplainable:

> We have withdrawn our petition to the FCC on cybersecurity – an initiative we thought was the right thing to do. However, in the face of disagreement from both regulators and our customers, we see that the effort was doomed. > > This issue has been a complex one, and one that has opened Marriott to much criticism – the most painful of which has been the misunderstanding of our intentions. We wanted to protect the security of Wi-Fi use for conferences at our hotels – it had nothing to do with individual guest use of Wi-Fi or personal Wi-Fi hotspots. > > In fact, we have led the industry in offering millions of customers free Internet access. In October, we announced that Marriott Rewards Members – a membership that is free and open to anyone – would have free Internet when they book direct. That message has been drowned out by the noise with the FCC. > > Cybersecurity is a major concern across the business world and, certainly, in our industry, where guests and conference-goers rightly expect that any hotel-provided connection be secure. We are in a pitched battle against hackers who are at work daily trying to fool consumers – sometimes by setting up a Wi-Fi network that seeks to lure conference-goers into a site intended to steal passwords or other valuable data. To prevent that from happening and to further improve security measures, professionals like the one on this site link can be consulted.

To me, the logic is simple. If you care so much about the security of your guests, make internet access free for all your guests. All of them. The Marriott Rewards program is free, fair enough. And if you required guests to sign up to get free access, that would be reasonable. It gives you some level of (really, the illusion of, but that’s just a quibble) control over who is on the network. But if you take money from anyone, if internet access is a revenue line item for you, then you are simply blowing smoke.

My 2 cents.

Kirk McElhearn:

Could Apple be planning to bring ebooks back into iTunes? There was a logic to splitting them out, and releasing the iBooks app. This app serves three purposes:

• You can manage ebooks with it
• You can read ebooks with it
• And you can buy ebooks from the iBooks Store

But the iBooks app is the only part of the iTunes Store that isn’t in iTunes. And you can still purchase ebooks from iTunes; they just download into iBooks afterwards. It is a bit confusing having two storefronts, and two different interfaces. Add to that the fact that iTunes still manages your ebook syncing. So what’s the point of having another app?

Read on. He makes a pretty good case.

Macworld:

Go is about slowly-evolving strategies to surround the largest territory on the board. Each player, black and white, alternates placing stones on a board with a 19-by-19 grid. Building up territory, where the opposing player cannot get a foothold, each player attempts to enlarge his or her territory, and thwart advances and invasions by the opponent.

It’s easy to learn the rules of Go; it’s hard to become really good at the game.

Go is a fascinating game I’ve played (poorly) for years. If you’re looking for something different in your gameplay, check out the apps recommended in the article.

Pacific Standard:

Imagine your favorite musician, actor, filmmaker, or painter. Undoubtedly, each one grew up idolizing—emulating, even—their artistic heroes. As such, if you pay close enough attention, it’s not hard to see those influences permeating the artist’s work. But at what point does paying homage to source material become a swindle?

For young British crooner Sam Smith, that line was crossed last October when Tom Petty and songwriter Jeff Lynne noticed that Smith’s single “Stay With Me” was too reminiscent of Petty’s 1989 hit “I Won’t Back Down.” (It was announced on Monday that Petty now has a songwriter credit and will receive royalties.) While the two songs have eerily similar choruses, it raises an interesting question: Are artists in these scenarios always deliberately plagiarizing, or is there something subtler, perhaps subconscious, at play?

There have been many such cases. There’s the dispute over the origins of Stairway to Heaven. There’s the plagiarism lawsuit over the origins of George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord (which, by the way, is the last Beatles/ex-Beatles song to go to #1 on the Billboard charts in the UK – See the comments to learn why the change). And so on.

The linked article digs into some of the science behind all this:

There is, as it turns out, a known phenomenon, called cryptomnesia, where previously stored memories present themselves as original creations. We’ve all experienced something like this: You’re asked your opinion on a newsworthy subject and, perhaps unconsciously, find yourself parroting an op-ed you read earlier in the day.

Music is mathematical in nature. Every rhythm has its roots somewhere. Every chord has been played before. There certainly is originality in music, but the vast majority of musicians grow up learning to play music created by others. Those learned melodies and musical techniques form a foundation that cannot be unlearned. Translation: This sort of thing was bound to happen, and bound to happen again.

Back to the Sam Smith / Tom Petty song issue, here’s what Tom Petty had to say:

About the Sam Smith thing. Let me say I have never had any hard feelings toward Sam. All my years of songwriting have shown me these things can happen. Most times you catch it before it gets out the studio door but in this case it got by. Sam’s people were very understanding of our predicament and we easily came to an agreement. The word lawsuit was never even said and was never my intention. And no more was to be said about it. How it got out to the press is beyond Sam or myself. Sam did the right thing and I have thought no more about this. A musical accident no more no less. In these times we live in this is hardly news. I wish Sam all the best for his ongoing career. Peace and love to all.

Here’s a mashup comparing the Sam Smith and Tom Petty songs, side by side. [Hat tip Next Draft]

NBCNews:

The NFL experience is getting pretty high-tech — for everyone, that is, except players on the sidelines.

Russell Wilson might pick up a tablet on the sidelines in Super Bowl XLIX, but he won’t be able to use it to check his email, play “Angry Birds” or take a selfie. It’s a Microsoft Surface Pro 2 handicapped to perform one function and one function only: display photographs.

Specifically, photographs of previous drives. It’s a function that before this season was fulfilled by binders full of black-and-white photographs. (Microsoft reportedly paid $400 million for the privilege).

The NFL has really tightened the screws on allowing any other technology on the sidelines. Part of this is the money Microsoft paid, certainly. But part of this is to maintain a level playing field, to avoid giving a more tech savvy team an unfair advantage.

NFL coaches have an abundance of stats to pore through before big games. Having those same stats during the game, however, is a completely different animal.

Today, if a coach has the ball on fourth-and-two on his own 49 yard line with three minutes left in the game while trailing by a touchdown, he has to trust his gut and his staff’s research to make the right decision.

Good read. [Hat tip to Brother Stu]

Vox:

Super Bowl commercials are a big deal.

At a cost of about $4.5 million for a 30 second spot that’s often filled with celebrities, pop music, and special effects, advertisers are clearly willing to pay a premium to be a part of the big game.

Here are the 2015 Super Bowl commercials, listed alphabetically by advertiser. We will update this post throughout the weekend, as new ads are posted online.

I love the game and will watch it (GO HAWKS!) but also admit to enjoying the commercials, too.

John Gruber’s take on this post from Above Avalon:

First, in terms of iPhone operations and considering nothing else, Jeff Williams has clearly done an amazing job. Apple sold a record 74 million iPhones last quarter, and though the company doesn’t break that down by models for competitive reasons, everyone knows that a huge chunk of those were the brand-new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. They were supply-constrained on both models, particularly the 6 Plus, but only by a few weeks. Operationally Apple did an incredible job meeting demand for iPhones — they sold more than ever but were less supply-constrained than in the last few launch quarters. For context, in 2008, Apple sold a total 10 million iPhones for the entire year. All credit to the hardware, software, and product marketing teams for the fact that 74 million people wanted to buy an iPhone last quarter. But the credit goes to Williams’s operations team that there were 74 million units available to sell.

Jeff Williams, secret ops superstar. Read the rest of Gruber’s post for some thoughts on CEO succession. Great stuff.

Dave Verwer, writing for iOS Dev Weekly:

From what I can determine from the tweets, there was about a 30-45 minute period when people logging in to iTunes Connect were seeing other random accounts instead of their own. After that, iTunes Connect was shut down for about 4 hours before silently coming back up as if nothing had happened

And:

There was naturally lots of speculation on exactly what the issue was. I think the most likely is something I saw Padraig Kennedy speculate on, that what people were seeing was a staging/test system (maybe for Analytics?). However, even if the data was not editable it does appear to be real data, with real unreleased apps/app versions and real revenue (we’re seeing revenue information for another developer’s apps in AppFigures). Whichever way you look at it, this was a serious bug/issue.

Mistakes happen, but important to know what happened and why, more important to know the extent of the leakage. Was real data exposed? Hopefully, we’ll hear more about this from Apple.

UPDATE: Dave Verwer updated his post:

I’ve been in contact with AppFigures and it does seem that revenue was not leaked into AppFigures. We had another iTunes Connect account that had been added to the AppFigures account and we had not noticed these apps before (it’s on a big AppFigures account and we were checking for strange data this morning specifically after last night’s events). My apologies for not investigating this part of the above thoroughly enough before writing about it.

From Dave’s tweet to me: “The only bit I got wrong was to say that revenue was being reported to AppFigures.”

CNN:

Curious kittens exploding are the Internet’s new potato salad meets “Reading Rainbow” with a guest appearance by Veronica Mars, meaning this card game is seriously winning the hearts of Internet users and party game lovers alike.

“Exploding Kittens,” the card game dreamed up by video game designers Elan Lee and Shane Small and illustrated by The Oatmeal’s Matthew Inman, is now the most backed campaign in Kickstarter history, in terms of the number of backers, according to the crowdfunding platform. The card game has raised more than $4 million since its January 20 launch — far exceeding the initial $10,000 goal.

Here’s a link to the Exploding Kittens Kickstarter. They had me at The Oatmeal.

I get that it’s all about business performance, but still, this is sad. If AOL can still make most of their fortune from dial-up internet users, why couldn’t they find a way to fix this?

One response that stood out for me – On regret for something not done in his life:

I feel pretty stupid that I don’t know any foreign languages. I took Latin and Greek in High School and got A’s and I guess it helps my vocabulary but I wish I knew French or Arabic or Chinese. I keep hoping to get time to study one of these – probably French because it is the easiest. I did Duolingo for awhile but didn’t keep it up. Mark Zuckerberg amazingly learned Mandarin and did a Q&A with Chinese students – incredible.

Here’s a link to the Zuckerberg Chinese Q&A. Remarkable.

This looks really cool, I may buy one of these. It connects to your iPhone via Bluetooth and then you hold the hardware on the tuning peg of your guitar.

Zak’s own line of guitars, amps, and anything else audio. Count me in!

Atlas Obscura:

Around the world, there are trees that have been growing for a much longer period of time than famed arbors like Methuselah or General Sherman. Some of these beautiful ancients may not look like much — some appear to be mere saplings, compared to the gigantic redwoods.

Trees have always fascinated me. As a kid, I would climb the oaks in our neighbourhood and sit up there for hours. I still love walking among them and feeling their presence.

Om Malik wrote a great piece on the iPhone 6 Plus and also reflected on the upcoming Apple Watch and thoughts on Apple Pay:

It looks like Apple is going to ride the iPhone wave for a while, perhaps right through the launch of the Apple Watch, which I suspect is going to provide the big lift.

Agreed.

That said, I am not bullish on the watch, mostly because when I saw it, the software looked incomplete by a mile. It lacked that usual Apple software pop!

There is no doubt that when Apple introduced the watch, the software wasn’t ready. It’s ready now.

I wish Apple had spent more time making Apple Pay realize its true potential, because it could change how we purchase and thus define a new era for the company.

I believe they are, in the background. Typically, Apple will release something slowly and then it takes off. This is exactly the strategy I see Apple taking with Apple Pay—under promise, over deliver.

If you haven’t read the latest 10 stories or so on Daring Fireball, you have to do it now. It’s some of the greatest “claim chowder” ever.

When I first read this, I thought they were crazy, but this is pretty cool.

Apple Inc has taken the number one luxury gifting spot in China from designer goods maker Hermes International SCA, according to a Hurun luxury report on Thursday, reflecting the iPhone maker’s recent hot streak in the country.

Apple’s strategy for China is on fire.

iTunes U is a great Apple resource. This particular one is Stanford University’s iOS programming course.

Samsung Electronics reported overall Q4 operating profits of 5.29 trillion won ($4.9 billion)—a 36 percent year-over-year drop—but its Mobile division suffered a 64.2 percent drop in profits, falling from $5 billion in the year ago quarter to $1.8 billion in the December quarter.

Clearly there’s nothing wrong with the market since Apple just sold 74.5 million iPhones, so maybe people are finally seeing through Samsung’s shit.

Kirk McElhearn:

In Apple’s press release, CEO Tim Cook is quoted as saying:

“We’d like to thank our customers for an incredible quarter, which saw demand for Apple products soar to an all-time high,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Our revenue grew 30 percent over last year to $74.6 billion, and the execution by our teams to achieve these results was simply phenomenal.”

At the same time, Apple is sitting on $178 billion, much of it sequestered in offshore tax-shielded trusts.

With all this money, Apple could do something better than develop a new iPhone. I’m reminded of the famous question that Steve Jobs asked Pepsi CEO John Sculley in the 1980s, in order to convince Sculley to join the company:

“Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?”

This is solid food for thought. There’s no doubt that Apple continues to change the world. The question is, is Apple selling sugared water? Or is Apple bringing change for the better?

On the surface, Apple is just like any other business, building products and a top brand with the hope of making money. And they’ve certainly succeeded, on a massive scale.

Kirk asks, “Remember when Apple was going to change the world?”

Apple continues to change the world, again and again. As a young company, Apple worked out how to make personal computers easy to use. They took the PC market on another crazy ride when Steve Jobs returned, bringing out the colorful iBook and iMac. They then took on music, bringing the iPod to the market. They disrupted the smart phone market with the iPhone, added another big change with the iPad. Apple recently introduced Apple Pay which has the potential to disrupt the payment business. In April, we’ll see the start of another wave with Apple Watch.

Apple has changed the world, there’s no question about that. But is it all sugar water?

I get Kirk’s question. There’s no doubt that Apple is in business mode, in product design mode. They are not pouring money into solving problems in the same manner as Bill Gates, who takes on malaria, clean water, real human problems. But Apple is behaving in a way appropriate for a publicly held business. They are making decisions to benefit their shareholders.

As businesses go, they chart a pretty noble course. From Apple’s environmental responsibility page:

We continue to lead the industry in reducing or eliminating environmentally harmful substances, and we’re continually striving to make our products the cleanest and safest they can be.

How many companies care enough about the environmental impact of their products to put in the kind of effort Apple has put in to make their products safer?

How about Tim Cook continuing to speak out about gay rights and racism? How many CEOs stand up to shareholders when pressed for short term gain versus doing what’s best?

I think Kirk’s post is worth a read. And it certainly is fair for shareholders to ask what Apple is doing with their money. But I don’t think Apple is selling sugar water. To me, that’s not a fair comparison.

Apple’s star is rising as other luxury gift brands are falling.

Spending on gift-giving overall dropped 5 percent in 2014, after a 25 percent drop the year before, according to the Hurun Chinese Luxury Consumer Survey. Beijing has been cracking down on corruption and luxury spending among public officials, weighing down sales of premium liquor to handbags.

And:

“Travel retail continues to change the dynamics of luxury in China, with 7 out of 10 luxury goods bought by Chinese now being bought overseas,” said Hurun Report Chairman Rupert Hoogewerf.

Perfect storm for Apple. Traditional luxury gifts are being scrutinized and the market is looking overseas for new luxury options.

Jim, Shawn and our Special Guest, Dave Mark, talk Apple earnings, Swift programming, NAMM and “digital music”.

In the ad, the lost puppy returns home only to find that his owners have sold him using a website made with GoDaddy.

So now puppy mills are okay with GoDaddy. What’s wrong with this company?