Category Archives: Apple Inc

Steve Jobs

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This is not a recounting of all that Steve Jobs has accomplished, the ways in which he has forever altered the trajectory of our world. You can find plenty of such tributes on the web.

Today, I merely want to say thank you to Steve Jobs for the huge and enduring impact he has had on my own life.

The first computer I bought was a original Macintosh back in 1984. I never looked back. Every single computer I have owned since then has been from Apple — all the way to my current sheer delight, a MacBook Air.

I did make one brief detour back in the 1990′s and purchased a Gateway PC. It was not a replacement for my Mac, but an addition. I had agreed to write a cross-platform book and needed the Gateway to do the PC side of the book. I hated every minute of it. I sold the computer within a year and withdrew from my book contract.

In this century, my love affair with Apple products extended beyond computers to iPods and iPhones and iPads. [The Macworld Expo where Steve introduced the iPhone is still the most amazing fall-off-my-chair event I have ever attended.] Again, I never considered buying any competing device. It was Apple or nothing.

For me, like for so many others, Apple products were unlike any other purchase. I didn’t simply buy an Apple computer, I established a relationship with it. It became a member of our family. I recognized a spark in the design of Apple products that was missing from the competition, no matter how things might have stacked up on a spec sheet.

My passion for Apple products eventually blossomed into a satisfying and enriching career writing about Apple. It began with writing magazine articles and eventually extended to books and websites.

I bled six-colors, as they used to say back when the Apple logo sported a rainbow.

I say all this because I am certain that, without Steve Jobs at Apple’s helm, none of this would have happened. The products that I so admire would never have been created without Steve to oversee their development. Whatever else might have filled their place would have been far less exciting. They would never have ignited the passion that led to my career as a technology writer. The arc of the past four decades of my life has been altered by Steve Jobs more than any other person outside of my immediate family. For this, I will be forever grateful.

I didn’t agree with everything Steve did. In recent years, I have been especially critical of Steve’s positions regarding control of the App Store and jailbreaking of iOS devices. Regardless, with Steve in charge, I remained confident that the big decisions would be in the best interest of Apple and its customers. Put it this way: I’d much rather have a CEO that created an iPhone that disallows jailbreaking, than someone who would have never created the iPhone in the first place.

I am one of the lucky ones. I have been able to live the advice Steve Jobs gave at his 2005 Stanford commencement address:

“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

I found it, Steve. Thanks to you.

Steve Jobs died today. There are no words that can express the sorrow I am now feeling. The world was a better place because Steve Jobs was in it. Life goes on — as it always does. But the world will never seem quite the same again.

Imitating Apple is a Losing Strategy

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Note: I wrote the initial draft of this column prior to the announcement of Steve Jobs’ resignation. The point of this article seems even more pertinent now. In particular, I believe Apple’s success is likely to continue even without Jobs at the helm.

The story of the iPhone’s success is now almost a cliché. Sure Android phones have outpaced the iPhone for market share. But the iPhone 4 is still the single most popular smartphone (even though it’s over 14 months old) and it’s surely the most profitable. Equally compelling, the iPhone has forever changed smartphone design. Almost every smartphone available today bears a striking resemblance to the iPhone — beginning with a stylus-free touchscreen. Prior to 2007, there were no such touchscreen smartphones of any design.

The story of the iPad’s success follows a similar path — except it goes even further. None of the iPad’s competitors have gotten any significant traction as yet. Not even Android-based ones. RIM’s Playbook tablet is going nowhere fast. HP’s TouchPad went down in flames within weeks of its release. The iPad continues to dominate the market with around a 90% share. As the current joke goes, “There is no tablet market. There’s just an iPad one.” The iPad is not only a success in comparison to other tablets, its reach extends to the market for desktop/laptop PCs. iPad sales continue to soar as PC numbers (except for Apple’s) flatline. If HP exits the PC market, Dell will be the lone surviving U.S. manufacturer of PCs (other than Apple).

None of this is a surprise at this point. If you follow technology news, you’ve heard variations of these statistics for months. What is a bit surprising (at least to me) is that there is a third act to this play: The MacBook Air. It too has become a huge competition-stomping success. As pointed out by Jason Cross in a recent PCWorld article: “This year’s fourth-gen [MacBook Air] is proving to be the must-have laptop of the year. For every laptop manufacturer not named ‘Apple,’ the race is on to make new super-thin and super-light laptops.”

This idea that “the race is on” highlights a critical point that helps explain why Apple is succeeding where other companies flounder: Every one else is racing to catch up with Apple (with the possible exception of Android smartphones). For Apple’s competitors, this is a doomed strategy from the start. True, Microsoft managed to pull this off with Windows back in the 1990s, but the market is far different today. Even Microsoft has been unable unseat Apple’s iPod as the dominant MP3 player (and let’s just skip over their Kin smartphone humiliation). On top of all of Apple’s hardware success, the iTunes Store remains the number one source for purchasing music.

Apple competitors will never win if their essential strategy is to wait for Apple to come out with the next ground-breaking game-changing product — and then take a year or more to scramble to imitate it, eventually releasing a product that is inferior to what Apple is selling.

What the companies ought to be doing is developing their own new products, hopefully coming out with something so different and innovative that Apple has to play catch-up with them. The problem is that Apple’s competitors don’t seem to operate in a way that allows for this possibility. As Jason Cross wrote: “If you want to make the product that everyone else compares their product to, you have to go outside the envelope. You have to take a risk to build something nobody has told you they want, because they don’t know they want it yet, and then you have to invest in it and stick with it until you get it right.” This idea is really a variation of a famous Steve Jobs dictum: “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” That’s what Apple does: Takes the risk and builds the products it believe customers will want, even if the customers don’t know it yet.

Too many companies are afraid to take these big risks. They seek products that offer incremental improvements at best, rather than looking to shake up the market. Instead of asking “How can we deliver a product that blows the competition out of the water?” they ask “How can we market a product that will give us an edge, however slight, over our nearest competition?” This is a recipe for remaining in Apple’s shadow. Rather than leading in bold new directions, they play follow the leader.

If companies truly want to compete with Apple they should strive to imitate the corporate culture that allows Apple to make great products, not the products Apple makes.

What I Learned at the Apple Store Today

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I was at the Grand Opening of the new Apple Store on 4th Street in Berkeley today. Hard to believe that, until now, the city of Berkeley (with one of the biggest and most renowned universities in the world) has been without an Apple Store. At last, this oversight has been corrected.

There was an impressively long line outside the Store by its 10:00 AM opening. Several hundred people by my estimate. The line had dissipated by around 11:15, but there were still t-shirts remaining to be given away when I left at 11:30.

I didn’t buy anything. But, while inside the Store, I did learn two intriguing nuggets of information:

Don’t buy Apple’s $69 OS X Lion USB Thumb Drive. The Apple Store webpage for the Lion USB Thumb Drive states: “When you install OS X Lion using the USB thumb drive, you will not be able to reinstall OS X Lion from Lion Recovery. You will need to use the USB thumb drive to reinstall OS X Lion.”

The reason for this limitation is that Recovery HD, before allowing you to reinstall Lion, checks with Apple’s servers to verify your computer’s eligibility. Unless you purchased Lion from the Mac App Store, the verification will fail.

What if you want both an Internet-free Install Lion thumb drive and the ability to use Recovery HD to reinstall Lion? Apple’s “official” solution is to purchase Lion from the Mac App Store ($29) and buy a Lion USB Thumb Drive. This will cost you $69 + $29 = $98.

But there is a far cheaper solution. Buy the Mac App Store version of Lion and make your own 5GB or larger USB Install Lion thumb drive, using a simple procedure detailed on numerous web pages (such as this Macworld article by Dan Frakes). Assuming your thumb drive costs $10, your final cost is $39 — saving you $59 over Apple’s official route.

Are these two approaches really identical? That is, is there anything you get by buying Apple’s Lion USB Thumb Drive that you miss by going the do-it-yourself route? Nope.

I asked an Apple Genius at the 4th Street Store about this specific question. His reply: “That’s an interesting way of looking at it. And you’re right. They are the same.” I had assumed this was the case and others I had asked confirmed my assumption. Now I had an Apple Genius confirming it.

So…if you want a Lion USB thumb drive…make one yourself from the Mac App Store download of Lion. Not only will you save money, you’ll bypass the limitation on using Recovery HD. The Apple Store Genius didn’t exactly make this recommendation. But it’s surely what he implied. [By the way, the Berkeley Store didn’t have any of the drives in stock, even if I had wanted one.]

How to disable the iPad Home button. This was my first time in an Apple Store since Apple began placing iPads next to each Mac (as well as other products) on the Store’s tables. These iPads display the basic specs of each adjacent product. You can tap buttons along the bottom of the screen to get further information about the product or even request a sales associate to come over and assist you. Very slick. It’s obviously a lot more expensive than having a paper spec sheet next to the products (as used to be the case), but heck Apple has the cash to afford this.

Interestingly, what you can’t do is get to the Home screen by pressing the Home button on these iPads. The function has been disabled. This makes sense. Apple wouldn’t want customers to be able to exit the display, so the iPad is placed in a “kiosk mode.” The question is: How did Apple do this?

I asked an Apple employee if I could enable this kiosk mode on my own iPad and, if so, how would I do it? He replied that it was indeed possible but “If I told you how to do it, I would have to kill you.” He was smiling when he said it, but that’s really what he said.

So I didn’t actually learn how to do this trick at the Apple Store. But my visit did start me on the path to learn how. As it turns out, you needn’t put your life in danger to accomplish this goal. However, you will need to jailbreak your iPad — and install IncarcerApp (as covered here). I’ve tried the app and it works exactly as advertised. To activate and deactivate the lock feature, you use the Volume Up/Volume Down buttons.

In the Apple Store, the iPads were encased in plexiglass which (as I recall) prevented access to the Volume buttons. So I imagine the Apple Store iPads work in the same or similar way. Still, I assume Apple has their own (non-jailbreak) way of accomplishing the lock. But (as the Store employee said) they’re not revealing what it is. Too bad. I bet many iPad owners would find a use for this feature if Apple officially offered it.

The iPad Pro

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Question: Does the iPad 2 need better specs to better compete with the other tablets on the market?

Answer: First off, this is a trick question. Most of the promised iPad competitors aren’t on the market as yet. There are the Android-based Motorola Xoom and Galaxy Tab (neither of which have really reached the end of their gestation periods as yet). And that’s about it. We’re still waiting for the tablets from HP and RIM and presumably others.

Even so, I expect the answer to be “No.” Apple has argued (successfully in my view) that what matters most is not who has the fastest processor or greatest amount of RAM or largest higher-definition screen. What really matters is which platform delivers the better overall experience. That’s why, as pointed out in a PCMag article, Apple doesn’t even list the megapixel size of the iPad’s cameras — or tell you how much RAM is installed.

If the iPad’s screen resolution is good enough to be stunning, if its speed is adequate for all that you do — a small deficit of specs won’t affect purchase decisions by today’s consumers. Plus, there is all that the iPad can do that its competitors can’t…starting with working as an iPod for your music and continuing with the unmatched collection of apps in the App Store.

Add to to all of this the fact that “he who gets to dominate the market first typically stays first” — even when late-coming competitors offer marginally better products. According to some reports, Apple had as much as 100% of the tablet market in 2010 and can be expected to hold on to most of that share in 2011. Unless a competitor comes up with a “game-changing” device, don’t expect any of them to successfully challenge the iPad. I know some people will point out that Android has taken a lead in market share in the smartphone arena. But this is different. There are no two-year phone contracts with tablets and they are not linked to a specific carrier. In fact, I suspect the majority of iPad buyers don’t even get a 3G model. Android devices will have a much tougher time gaining share here.

Finally, as I argued in a User Friendly View column (and as echoed by a New York Times analysis), a key — perhaps the key — factor that gives the iPad 2 an unbeatable edge is its lower price. When you can get the caché of Apple (who usually extracts a premium for its products) and spend less money than on a competing device, why consider anything else?

Yes, I’d like to see the iPad 2 have better cameras (the ones included now really suck and are not at all what I expect from Apple). And sure, Apple could throw in a bit more RAM. Oh, and how about a Retina Display? But are the lack of these features going to get me to consider buying something other than an iPad? No way. And I’m far from alone. Just ask all the people who still can’t get an iPad because demand has far outstripped supply.

The iPad Pro

All of that said, trying to accurately predict the future in the technology universe is ultimately a fool’s errand. The time may yet come when Apple will feel compelled to compete on specs. Assuming that time comes, how might Apple fight a spec war without sacrificing the iPad’s price advantage?

To get the answer, Apple need look no further than its laptops: The MacBook and the MacBook Pro. Why not make a similar distinction for the iPad: The iPad and the iPad Pro?

The iPad 2 (and its successors) would remain the iPad and maintain a starting price no higher than $499. The iPad Pro would offer all the features that might otherwise give the competition some advantage — and sell for about $150 more.

Developers might have a few problems making sure their apps are compatible with both lines of iPads. But I don’t expect this to be a major hassle. Otherwise, it should be smooth sailing.

In one move, Apple can claim to have both the least expensive tablet and the most feature-packed one. Game. Set. Match.

P.S. Some have predicted that an eventual “iPad Pro” will be a combination of the MacBook Air and the iPad. To me, that’s a different animal, separate from what I am considering here.