Linked List: July 20, 2011

Wednesday, 20 July 2011

Lion is the eighth landmark new-big-cat-name release of Mac OS X in a little over ten years. There’s a pattern to these releases. Rumors, anticipation, release. Many things have changed in the interim. Apple’s industry stature, the size of the Mac user base, the relative position and importance of the Mac in Apple’s overall product lineup, the App Store.

But one thing has stayed the same: John Siracusa’s splendidly deep, obsessively detailed, spot-on accurate reviews of each release. Lion, happily, is no different.

(But from the things-that-have-changed department: this time you can buy Siracusa’s Lion review as a $4.99 Kindle book. (And make no mistake — it’s book-length.) Use that link and Siracusa himself will get an extra kickback from Amazon.)

Apple Launches Business App Store for Volume Purchases ★

Enterprise software sales, Apple-style.

Speaking of Giving Money Back to Apple Shareholders ★

Verne G. Kopytoff, reporting for the NYT:

As one example of its success, Apple turned its tablet into a $6 billion business in the quarter. That is twice as big as Dell’s entire consumer PC business.

From the Claim Chowder Hall of Fame, circa 1997:

And at the Gartner Symposium and ITxpo97 here today, the CEO of competitor Dell Computer added his voice to the chorus when asked what could be done to fix the Mac maker. His solution was a drastic one.

“What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders,” Michael Dell said before a crowd of several thousand IT executives.

Bottom Ten Westerns ★

Armin Vit:

Rather than try to one-up their selections I’m going to one-down them. Herewith, then, are the Top Ten Worst Westerns. Observations inside.

You can tell he’s right on most of these, from the posters alone.

Stuart Carlton on Apple’s Cash Hoard ★

Stuart Carlton:

Richman’s wrong here. Using cash to buy back stock is an excellent way to increase shareholder value, assuming that the stock in question is undervalued. If a stock is undervalued, each dollar of buyback creates more than one dollar of value. It’s like buying dollar bills for, say, 75 cents. There is a good argument that AAPL is undervalued right now. If so, buybacks would create shareholder value.

The problem with the MSFT and RIMM buybacks was that the companies were buying back stock that was overvalued. The problem wasn’t the strategy (buybacks), but the execution (buying back overpriced stock).

Makes sense. I.e. Apple should buy back Apple stock for the same reason any investor should buy Apple stock: it’s a good investment.

Update: To be clear, I’m not saying I think Apple should do a buyback. I’m just saying I agree with Carlton that Apple, with an undervalued stock today, would be in a different (better) position if they were to do a buyback today.

MG Siegler: ‘The MacBook Is Dead. Long Live the (New) MacBook Air.’ ★

He likes it:

Everything I loved about the last iteration of the Air holds true here as well. The battery life is excellent. Apple says the 13-inch model should last 7 hours during regular web usage, I’ve been seeing just shy of that after heavy usage. (The 11-inch model is said to get the same 5-hour battery life as the previous iteration.) Thanks to the Flash storage drive, the machine boots up in roughly 12 seconds. And it awakens from sleep instantly. Standby mode is still up to 30 days with this battery.

Matt Richman on Apple’s Cash Hoard ★

Matt Richman on the common refrain that Apple needs to spend its cash on stock buybacks and shareholder dividends:

No. As Horace Dediu pointed out, when technology companies institute stock buybacks, they don’t create a lot of shareholder value, if any at all. Microsoft has spent a little more than $97 billion on buybacks since 2004 and its share price has gone up less than 10%. Over the last 10 years, it has spent over $170 billion on both buybacks and dividends while MSFT has gone down 19.92%. At the same time, networking giant Cisco has returned $50.7 billion to shareholders since the beginning of 2004 while its share price has dropped 35.58%. Additionally, RIM’s stock price has plummeted 21.16% since it announced a share buyback program less than 30 days ago, on June 16th. Though other factors certainly could have played a part in the depreciation of the share prices of the aforementioned companies, using cash for stock buybacks and dividends clearly isn’t the best way to increase shareholder value.

‘The Product Has Not Been Sold’ ★

Those “smart cases” for the Galaxy Tab? Too big a knock-off even for Samsung.

$10 says the only “mistake” was putting a Samsung logo on the packaging.

‘Insurance, Loans, Mortgage’ ★

Analysis by the SEO hucksters at WordStream of the most profitable keywords for Google AdSense. Their pie chart is an atrociously bad infographic — the total pie doesn’t correspond to Google’s total ad revenue, but rather to the total revenue from just the top 20 keywords.

But it’s fascinating to me that Google makes so much of its money from spammy words like “insurance”, “loans”, “mortgage”, “attorney”, “credit”, and “lawyer”.

Lion Recovery ★

Essential knowledge for all Mac users:

OS X Lion includes a new feature called Lion Recovery that includes all of the tools you need to reinstall Lion, repair your disk, and even restore from a Time Machine backup without the need for optical discs.

This is how you can troubleshoot and reinstall Lion without a DVD or USB stick installer. Yes, in August, Apple is going to start selling Lion on USB sticks. But I think most of us really will be able to get by without them. That’s why the USB stick installers are going to cost $69, a $40 markup over the App Store download. Apple wants us to go download-only.

Scrollvetica ★

Scrollvetica is a free app from my friend Jim Correia, which he wrote while using the developer seeds of Lion:

If you spend part of your time living in the future, with default Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad settings, you may find it difficult to switch between the future and the present and maintain any sort of input device sanity.

Scrollvetica is a simple hack which inverts all scrolling events on Snow Leopard such that the effective scroll direction is in the direction of finger movement.

My number one Lion tip: No matter how wrong it feels, stick with the new trackpad scrolling direction. Give it a week. At first it will drive you far crazier than you expect, but then you’ll get used to it.

I tested the Lion seeds on my secondary Mac, a then-brand-new-but-as-of-today-not-so-new 11-inch MacBook Air. The inverted trackpad scrolling drove me nuts. But after a week or so, it felt right. If you’re going to be using both Lion and Snow Leopard for now, running Scrollvetica on Snow Leopard will help you switch.

(There’s also Scroll Reverser, a free app from Pilotmoon that pretty much does the same thing. And if you’re stuck using Windows, maybe this will work for you there.)

A Princely Sum ★

Remember way back yesterday afternoon, when Apple released another quarter of blowout financial numbers? Here’s a bit from Horace Dediu on Apple’s ever-growing cash hoard.

Really, just go to the Asymco home page and read it top to bottom. It’ll make you smarter. Seriously, just look at this piece from Dediu analyzing how he vastly underestimated the number of iPhones Apple would sell last quarter:

So we are witnessing a pivotal moment in the product’s strategy. By slightly lifting off the gas in terms of product cycle, Apple actually set the iPhone loose. The imposition of a yearly cycle on the product coupled with unlimited demand caused it to be artificially constrained.

I.e., the evidence strongly suggests that by not releasing a new iPhone in June, Apple sold more iPhones.

Joshua Allen, Writer for Hire ★

If your problem is that you need not a good writer but a great one, your problem is now solved.

OS X Lion Server on the Mac App Store ★

$50 add-on to Lion.

Safari 5.1 ★

Snow Leopard release of the same new version of Safari as in Lion. Don’t let the .1 fool you, this is a major release. Not sure why it’s a manual download/install only, instead of an automatic software update for Snow Leopard users. Maybe that’s coming soon?

Update: A few hours later, and it’s now rolling out via Software Update.

Top Ten Westerns ★

Jim Coudal’s list of top ten westerns, in response to his re-linking to Mike Royko’s list in a classic 1997 column.

I’ll go with, unordered: Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (maybe the only trilogy where each successive film was better than the last), Rio Bravo, The Searchers, Unforgiven, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Once Upon a Time in the West. Lots of overlap with Jim’s list, unsurprisingly, but I’ve got the whole Leone/Eastwood trilogy and he doesn’t. The only one on my list made in my lifetime is Unforgiven, and most of the movies in spots 11-20 could easily slip into my top ten, depending on my mood.

iWork 9.1 Update ★

Free update for the iWork suite:

Adds support for Mac OS X Lion, including:

Full-Screen

Resume

Auto Save

Versions

Character picker

These are significant new features — the iWork apps now take advantage of the best new stuff in Lion.

Jim Dalrymple Talks to Apple Executives About Lion and Today’s New Mac Hardware ★

Jim Dalrymple:

With the release of the new MacBook Air came the demise of the white MacBook. Apple said it made sense after seeing the trends of its customers.

“One of the things we saw is that the MacBook Air was simply more popular than the MacBook,” said Moody. “It does more in half the weight and in half the volume.”

The one advantage the white MacBooks had over the Airs is that hard drives store more data than flash drives. That’s it. Hard drives are going the way of the dodo, though.

A new Mac mini was also released with faster processors, and surprisingly to some people, no optical drive. Apple said the popularity of the Mac App Store helped with that decision.

“We found that the majority of customers don’t use the optical drive on a regular basis,” said Moody. “Things are changing. The primary use for the optical drive was to install software, but the Mac App Store provides a more efficient method for doing that.”

Optical drives are the new floppy drives.

Counterfeit Apple Stores in China ★

Amazing.

Love That New OS Smell ★

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is on the App Store.