Linked List: April 13, 2009

Monday, 13 April 2009

iSuppli’s Estimate of iPod Shuffle Component Prices ★

BusinessWeek’s Arik Hesseldahl takes yet another of iSuppli’s component price estimates of an Apple product at face value:

All told, the cost of the shuffle’s components, the headphones, and the packaging it ships in comes to $21.77, according to iSuppli’s estimates. That’s about 28% of the device’s retail price.

But then:

The device’s so-called passive components — capacitors and resistors — are unusually small. Known by their numeric label 01005, which in electronics shorthand describes their dimensions in millionths of a meter, they’re about the size of a grain of salt and cost fractions of a penny each. But they’re half the size of what had previously been considered the smallest device of their type, those labeled 0201.

So these components are half the size of anything seen before but iSuppli knows exactly how much they cost? I wrote about iSuppli here back in July 2007, wherein I pointed out that Apple releases its profit margins in legal filings every quarter, and those margins have ranged between 25-30 percent for almost a decade — nowhere near the jaw-dropping profit margin estimates from these iSuppli reports.

Update: I should clarify. My main gripe with these iSuppli estimates is how they get promoted in the press as anything close to accurate estimations of Apple’s profit margins. They may well be accurate estimations of “component prices”, but that’s not how it gets reported. And Apple’s actual profit margins, albeit not on an individual product basis, are a matter of public record.

Update 2: Those 01005 capacitors are apparently neither new nor hard to find.

Ah, Sweet Hypocrisy ★

Digg co-founder Kevin Rose, on-air during a taping of the Diggnation podcast, seems upset to find another website framing that of his show.

Is It Time to Rename ‘Digital Piracy’? ★

Stephen J. Dubner on the Freakonomics weblog:

In light of the recent spate of Somali pirate attacks (here’s one interesting long view, and here’s another), I wonder if it’s time to start calling “digital piracy” something else.

We don’t need a new word: bootlegging is already apt.

iTunes Music Price Changes Hurt Some Rankings ★

Glenn Peoples from Billboard runs the numbers on how iTunes’s new variable single pricing has affected sales rankings. In short: top tracks that remain $0.99 moved up, tracks that jumped to $1.29 moved down.

Birdhouse — A Notepad for Twitter ★

Birdhouse 1.0 is now available at — err, on — the App Store for $4. It’s a notepad for Twitter by Adam Lisagor and Cameron Hunt. It’s not a full-on Twitter client — it is instead very specifically a Twitter posting client. A fussy, precious concept to be sure, and the result is a wonderfully fussy and precious app.

Even if you’re already not interested in the app itself — if you’re sitting there thinking to yourself, “Man, draft tweets is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard”, or if you don’t even use Twitter — at least watch the demo/introductory movie, which, I dare say, is the finest example of the form made to date. Note, for example, the reflection of the trees on the iPhone trim during the screencast sections. Think about how much thought went into the app based on how much thought went into this swell little movie.

And if “Sandwich Dynamics” isn’t the best name of a new software company this year, I’ll eat my hat.

Phillies Announcer Harry Kalas Dies at 73 ★

Harry Kalas, the voice of NFL Films and Hall of Fame announcer for the Philadelphia Phillies, dead at 73. I can’t imagine watching a Phillies game without hearing him call the game — his voice is more a part of the Phillies brand than the color red.

Bad News for HTC Means Bad News for Microsoft ★

Bad numbers from HTC last week:

Taiwan smartphone maker HTC on Monday posted a 30 percent dip in its first-quarter earnings, as the economic crisis sapped demand for the company’s feature-jammed mobile phones.

That’s bad news for Microsoft, if you recall this bit we learned in February:

At Microsoft’s press conference yesterday at Mobile World Congress, if you tied two threads together, you learned a very interesting fact about HTC, one of the company’s closest handset makers — the Taiwanese company is responsible for 80 percent of Windows Mobile phone sales.

I’m sure Microsoft can fix this with a few commercials about the high “Apple tax” that applies to iPhones, though.

EBL DiggBlock ★

DiggBar blocker for TextPattern, by Eric Limegrover.