Linked List: January 31, 2017

Tuesday, 31 January 2017

Rene Ritchie: ‘It’s Time to Admit Apple Watch Is a Success’ ★

Rene Ritchie:

It could be that there is no real “Smartwatch market”, just an Apple Watch market. Much like there’s no real “tablet market”, just an iPad market. Since it’s such a new product category and most of the existing products are still bound to phones, it could also simply be too soon to tell.

I think we should stop talking about “smartwatches” and just consider Apple Watch a “watch”, period. In September, Apple claimed watch revenues second only to Rolex. How can it not be considered a hit at this point?

A Loose Theory on the Continuing Cooling of iPad Sales ★

Marco Arment:

The quarterly results are in and Apple’s doing fine overall, but the iPad really isn’t, with another year-over-year decrease in sales.

Apple and commentators can keep saying the iPad is “the future of computing,” and it might still be. But we’re starting its seventh year in a few months, and sales peaked three years ago.

What if the iPad isn’t the future of computing?

What if, like so much in technology, it’s mostly just additive, rather than largely replacing PCs and Macs, and furthermore had a cooling-fad effect as initial enthusiasm wore off and customers came to this conclusion?

This is my loose theory on iPad sales:

The peak years (2013 and 2014) were inflated because it was an untapped market. Steve Jobs was right, there was room for a new device in between a phone and a laptop, and the iPad was and remains an excellent product in that space. But people don’t need to keep buying new iPads. I think the replacement cycle is clearly much more like that of laptops than that of phones. This was not obvious to me at the time, but it seems obvious now.

In short, in 2013 and 2014, there were a lot of people who wanted an iPad who didn’t own anything like an iPad. There aren’t as many people in the market for iPads today. For one thing, many of them already own an iPad that continues to satisfy their needs for the role it plays in their life.

The other factor is that the conceptual space between phones and laptops has shrunk. iPhones have gotten a lot bigger, and MacBooks have gotten thinner and lighter. With bigger iPhones and super-thin MacBooks, the iPad stands out less. That trend isn’t going to reverse.

And let’s put iPad sales in context: they’re shrinking, they’re less than one-fifth those of the iPhone, but they’re still 2.5 times the unit sales of the Mac.

Six Colors: Apple’s Record Quarter by the Numbers ★

As usual, insanely fast turnaround on visualizing Apple’s quarterly results.

LG UltraFine 5K Display Can Become Unusable When Near a Wi-Fi Router ★

Zac Hall, writing for 9to5Mac:

The problem is UltraFine 5K Display becomes unusable when positioned within 6.6-feet of a router. I discovered this issue after purchasing my own UltraFine 5K Display last week and thinking something was defective with my hardware.

Right out of the box, UltraFine 5K Display was hardly usable as it would consistently disconnect and even freeze my MacBook Pro which made it unusable for work on Thursday and Friday. Connecting it to my MacBook Pro consistently resulted in needing to reboot my machine to continue working. […]

After testing UltraFine 5K Display in another room without issue, I contacted LG customer service and explained that my monitor works in one room but disconnected in another room without suggesting to support that the problem could be the router.

Support responded by recommending I use the monitor away from a router as they can cause performance issues with this monitor.

On last week’s episode of The Talk Show, I relayed a similar anecdote from a DF reader. This is not isolated, and having your Wi-Fi router near your desk is surely a common situation.

What makes this particularly frustrating is that it almost certainly would not be a problem if Apple had designed its own (first-party) display enclosure.

Apple’s Q1 2017 Results ★

Back to growth:

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2017 first quarter ended December 31, 2016. The Company posted all-time record quarterly revenue of $78.4 billion and all-time record quarterly earnings per diluted share of $3.36. These results compare to revenue of $75.9 billion and earnings per diluted share of $3.28 in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 64 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

Year-over-year unit sale changes, from Apple’s data summary:

iPhone up to 78.3 million from 74.8 million.
iPad down to 13.1 million from 16.1 million.
Mac up slightly, to 5.4 million from 5.3 million.
“Services” are up significantly, percentage-wise, to $7.2 billion in revenue, from $6.1 billion a year ago.

iPhone, Mac, and services are strong. iPad sales aren’t a disaster, but continue to slide. The year-over-year revenue numbers are telling (Q1 2017 / Q1 2016, in billions):

iPhone: $54.4 / $51.6
iPad: $5.5 / $7.1
Mac: $7.2 / $6.7
Services: $7.2 / 6.1

A year ago, iPad revenue was greater than that from Mac and services. Now, iPad has fallen behind both.

Windows 10 ‘Cloud’ ★

Mary Jo Foley:

So what, exactly, is Windows Cloud? A version of Windows 10 streamed from Azure? Another new Windows 10 subscription plan, in the vein of Windows 10 Enterprise E3/E5? The dreaded (and still nonexistent) Windows 365?

None of the above, my sources say.

Windows 10 Cloud is a simplified version of Windows 10 that will be able to run only Unified Windows Platform (UWP) apps installed from the Windows Store, my contacts say. Think of it as being similar to the version of Windows 10 formerly known as Windows RT or the Windows 8.1 with Bing SKU.

Windows 10 Cloud is meant to help Microsoft in its ongoing campaign to attempt to thwart Chromebooks with a simpler, safer, cheaper version of Windows 10, my contacts say, though Microsoft is unlikely to position it that way (publicly).

For all of the success of the iPhone, iPad, and Mac in recent years, Chrome OS is more of a threat to Windows than anything the industry has ever seen. The low-end of the market has always been the main source of oxygen for Microsoft’s “Windows everywhere” strategy.

Super Mario Run: $53 Million in Revenue ★

James Vincent, writing for The Verge:

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, the company says the game has been downloaded more than 78 million times worldwide, with more than 5 percent of players paying to unlock its full content. (That’s $10 in the US.) It’s an impressive conversion rate in for mobile industry, especially considering the game’s high price. Titles that charge a dollar or two usually only achieve a conversion rate of less than 5 percent, a Tokyo-based games analyst told the WSJ.

So far, Nintendo says Super Mario Run has bought in revenue of ¥6 billion or around $53 million. It’s a decent achievement, but still doesn’t deliver the impact the company was looking for. Nintendo chief executive Tatsumi Kimishima said he’d hoped the conversion rate would be in the double digits.

Not a bad start.