Linked List: July 22, 2008

Tuesday, 22 July 2008

Sort of Like Goldilocks but With Keyboards Instead of Porridge ★

I think Tim Bray has a good point here: the numeric keypad on a full-size keyboard takes up more space than it’s worth to most people, but Apple’s smaller wireless keyboard goes too far by getting rid of the regular arrow keys, home/end, and page up/down.

Font Conference ★

The best joke is the Courier New one.

BusinessWeek on Steve Jobs ★

Arik Hesseldahl:

After the earnings call last night I talked with a source who is close to Apple and who has in the past proven very well informed on the concerns of Apple senior management. This source told me with near-certainty that Jobs’ cancer has not returned.

Excellent news.

MacJournals on Apple’s Accounting Methods ★

Speaking of detailed MDJ coverage of Apple financials.

Steve Jobs ‘Health’ Issue Just Gets Curiouser and Curiouser ★

A measured piece by Jim Goldman regarding the rumormongering regarding Steve Jobs’s health, specifically an Associated Press report on yesterday’s conference call that read, “Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, did not join the conference call with investors as he commonly does, prompting an analyst to inquire about his health. Jobs survived pancreatic cancer.”

Goldman writes:

You see, Jobs is never on the company’s earnings call. Never. Ever. And anyone covering this company knows it. And anyone investing in the company should know it. And that’s why that sentence in the AP story is so troubling, and so factually off base.

That’s not quite true, though. Jobs has participated in a handful of these analyst calls over the last decade — but only when there is extremely bad news to report. (MDJ publisher Matt Deatherage, who covers these calls in more detail than any other reporter in the industry, put the number at three — three calls in 11 years — in a post to the MacJournals-Talk mailing list yesterday.)

(Via MacDailyNews.)

A Ringtone Tragedy ★

When will the menace of music piracy end?

Also: Free ringtones!

Regarding Margin-Reducing ‘Product Transitions’ ★

There’s an awful lot of pants-wetting this morning regarding Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer’s repeated references during yesterday’s quarterly analyst call to a “significant product transition that can’t be discussed today”. This product transition is one of the reasons Apple specified for their 31.5 percent gross margin guidance for their next quarter (compared to the 34.8 percent gross margin they reported yesterday for the just-completed June quarter).

Oppenheimer also said:

“We are working to develop new products that contains technologies that our competition will not be able to match. I cannot discuss these new products, but we are very confident in our product pipeline.”

This sort of statement isn’t exactly unprecedented. A year ago, Oppenheimer said pretty much the exact same thing:

Finally, Oppenheimer said, there will be a “product transition I can’t get into.”

A “product transition” that reduces profit margins in the interests of building market share could mean nothing more than price cuts, like, say, for the iPod Touch.

Nokia N810 Portable Internet Tablet ★

Nokia’s N810 “Internet Tablet” sounds a lot like the web tablet TechCrunch has set out to make: it runs an OS based on Linux and has a Gecko-based browser and Skype. It has an 800 × 480 pixel 4.1-inch screen, and sells at Amazon for $380. I’m sure TechCrunch won’t have any problem making a device with a much larger screen that sells for $100 less.