Linked List: February 15, 2012

Wednesday, 15 February 2012

Christa Mrgan on the Evolution of Piezo ★

I’m a sucker for these illustrated design-process stories.

There Are Now Over 100 Million iCloud Users ★

Matthew Panzarino, on Cook’s Goldman Sachs appearance:

He also announced that its syncing service iCloud now has over 100M users. Just last month, Cook said that the service had 85M users, making this a growth of 15M users in 21 days.

Maybe this just correlates with the number of new iPhones and iPads sold over the past three weeks, but even if so, it shows that Apple has been successful at getting users to sign up for iCloud. It’s not just early adopters who rushed to sign up when it debuted — it’s millions of new users every week.

The S&P 499 ★

Speaking of Apple’s effect on market indexes:

Earlier this month, Jonathan Golub, the chief U.S. equity strategy at UBS AG, caused a stir among his clients by publishing two versions of his regular quarterly earnings update: one for the companies that make up the S&P 500, and another for what he calls “S&P 500 ex-Apple.”

“In two and a half years, I haven’t got as much response as I did to that note,” Mr. Golub says.

Kind of reminds me of the “non-iPad tablet market”.

Apple, Cisco, and Dow 15000 ★

Adam Nash:

Of course, being who I am, I went home and built a spreadsheet to recalculate what would have happened if Dow Jones had decided to add Apple to the index instead of Cisco back in 2009. Imagine my surprise to see that the Dow be would over 2000 points higher.

In real life, the Dow closed at 12,874.04 on Feb 13, 2012. However, if they had added Apple instead of Cisco, the Dow Jones would be at 14,926.95. That’s over 800 points higher than the all-time high of 14,164 previously set on 4/7/2008.

Can you imagine what the daily financial news of this country would be if every day the Dow Jones was hitting an all-time high?

Interesting to think about — but it’s really more of an argument against using the Dow as a measure of the whole market than an argument that Apple should have been included.

Transcript of Tim Cook’s Appearance at Goldman Sachs Technology Conference ★

Regarding Apple TV:

Apple doesn’t do hobbies as a general rule. We believe in focus and only working on a few things. So, with Apple TV however, despite the barriers in that market, for those of us who use it, we’ve always thought there was something there. If we kept following our intuition and kept pulling the string, we might find something that was larger. For those people that have it right now, the customer satisfaction is off the chart. We need something that could go more main-market for it to be a serious category.

No hint from Cook, though, whether he thinks Apple has figured out what that “something” could be.

Note too how Cook emphasizes the centrality of iCloud to Apple’s strategy for the coming decade.

‘Insanely Simple’ ★

Ken Segall:

I’ve written a book.

Something tells me you won’t be surprised when I tell you it’s about Steve Jobs and Apple. But this book is different. Really.

That’s because (a) I had a unique vantage point to some pivotal events in Apple history, and (b) this book focuses on one thing alone — the core value that has driven Apple since the beginning.

I’m greatly looking forward to this.

Samsung’s Galaxy Note Is the Most Useless Phone Jonathan Geller Has Ever Used ★

Jonathan Geller:

The phone is too big. You will look stupid talking on it, people will laugh at you, and you’ll be unhappy if you buy it. I really can’t get around this, unfortunately, because Samsung pushed things way too far this time.

Hard to believe how much promotional effort Samsung and AT&T are putting behind this thing.

Samsung’s Super-Sized Galaxy Note ★

Abdel Ibrahim and Jon Dick:

After just days with a Galaxy Note, my forearms have never been so toned, and my apartment’s never been so bare. Is it a tablet? Is it a phone? It’s everything.

iOS Apps and the Address Book: Who Has Your Data, and How They’re Getting It ★

Dieter Bohn, The Verge:

Stated simply: any iOS app has complete access to a large amount of data stored on your iPhone, including your address book and calendar. Any iOS app can, without asking for your permission, upload all of the information stored in your address book to its servers. From there, the app developer can either use it to help find your friends, store it in perpetuity, or do any number of other things with it.

Over the course of the past day, we have been using the method explained by Arun Thampi (who discovered Path’s privacy violation) to investigate several dozen popular iOS apps. Our findings should bring both comfort and concern to any iPhone user — and to be frank the work of doing a similar investigation on Android and other platforms remains to be done.

Makes me wonder whether any apps are playing similar shenanigans on the Mac, where most apps still have unfettered access to all your data. (I say “still” because this is one of the problems that app sandboxing is meant to mitigate, but few third-party Mac apps are sandboxed yet.)

Apple: Access to Contact Data Will Require Explicit User Permission in Future Version of iOS ★

John Paczkowski:

“Apps that collect or transmit a user’s contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines,” Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr told AllThingsD. “We’re working to make this even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release.”

I think this was inevitable.

iOS ’86 ★

This is fun, but the font should be Geneva 9, not Chicago, and the industrial design of the phone is all wrong. Should have looked like a little Apple IIc, or maybe something like this.