Linked List: April 24, 2012

Tuesday, 24 April 2012

Tim Cook Spells Out the Rapid Growth of Apple’s iPad ★

Brian X. Chen, writing for the NYT Bits blog:

Apple sold 11.8 million iPads during the quarter, more than double the number it sold last year. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, helped put this in perspective during the company’s earnings call. “Just two years after we shipped the initial iPad, we sold 67 million,” he said. “It took us 24 years to sell that many Macs, and five years for that many iPods, and over three years for that many iPhones.”

Love This Karl Denninger Guy ★

Remember Karl Denninger? The guy who back in September 2010 called for shorting AAPL and going long on RIM? He had a well-timed piece this morning:

That’s called market saturation and it was inevitable. Even with the “4S” the spurt was short-lived and now it appears the fanboi game has run its course. Worse is that it appears that only 21% of AT&T’s activations were new customers.

Apple is due to report this afternoon and if you can find the math that supports the expected numbers on iPhone sales given the reports from the two carriers in front of their numbers I wish you luck. Apple is “expected” to sell ~35 million iPhones this last quarter.

Well, we have 7.4 million between the two largest US carriers reported thus far.

Where did the other 27.6 million sales come from?

Hmm, let me think about this. Boy, this is a real head-scratcher. Wait, almost got it… tip of my tongue…

Oh, yeah. The entire rest of the world. That’s it.

HTC Posts 70 Percent Profit Drop ★

The AP:

Taiwan smartphone maker HTC Corp. reported a 70 percent drop in first quarter profit as it faces keener competition from Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. HTC said Tuesday that profit amounted to 4.5 billion New Taiwan dollars ($152 million) from revenue of NT$68 billion in the three months through March. Revenue was down 35 percent from a year earlier. […]

HTC chief executive Peter Chou said the company’s biggest challenge has come from Apple’s iPhone 4S launch that took up the lion’s share of leading U.S. mobile operators’ handset purchases.

Man, imagine how much trouble HTC would be in if the iPhone 4S weren’t such a disappointment.

11.8 Million iPads Sold ‘Something of a Disappointment’ ★

Ina Fried, writing for some website:

But, when it comes to Apple, those sales were actually something of a disappointment. On average, Apple was expected to sell closer to 13 million iPads last quarter, the first in which it has sold the New iPad, as the latest model is known. […]

Apple sold three million new iPads in just the first weekend. That led some analysts to conclude Apple might be able to sell as many as 12 million of the new models during the quarter.

So on the one hand, we can consider that 11.8 million iPads sold is an increase of 151 percent year-over-year. 151 percent growth in a product segment in which every major player in the industry — from Amazon to Google to Microsoft to Intel to Samsung — is racing to gain as big a foothold as they can.

But on the other hand, we can compare 11.8 million iPads sold to the guesses of a bunch of Wall Street analysts. Let’s do it that way.

Apple Q2 2012 Results ★

Apple PR:

The Company posted quarterly revenue of $39.2 billion and quarterly net profit of $11.6 billion, or $12.30 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $24.7 billion and net profit of $6.0 billion, or $6.40 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. […]

The Company sold 35.1 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 88 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 11.8 million iPads during the quarter, a 151 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 4 million Macs during the quarter, a 7 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 7.7 million iPods, a 15 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter.

Decent growth for the biggest company in the world. Net profit is up 94 percent from a year ago. Not bad.

Neue Haas Grotesk ★

Speaking of type design history.

The Design of a Signage Typeface ★

Ralf Herrmann, on the design of his (excellent, to my eyes) signage typeface Wayfinding Sans Pro:

So I set off, driving thousands of miles across Europe to explore the legibility of these signs and typefaces, first hand. Once I even ended up in a holding cell at the border crossing to Norway, because the customs officers just wouldn’t accept that someone would drive all over Europe simply to take photographs of traffic signs.

Skype for Windows Phone Is Basically Useless ★

Matthew Miller, ZDNet:

Skype 1.0 for Windows Phone lets you make Skype video and voice calls over 3G and WiFi, search for and add contacts, and make calls to landlines. However, no one can call you via Skype unless you have the app open and running on your phone. Unlike Android and iOS, Skype needs to be your active app in order to receive calls as there is no background functionality at all in the app.

Microsoft should just buy Skype so they can make sure the Windows Phone version is top-notch.

What? Oh, yeah…

Tor/Forge E-Books to Go DRM-Free ★

Tor:

Tom Doherty Associates, publishers of Tor, Forge, Orb, Starscape, and Tor Teen, today announced that by early July 2012, their entire list of e-books will be available DRM-free.

“Our authors and readers have been asking for this for a long time,” said president and publisher Tom Doherty. “They’re a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in perfectly legal ways, like moving them from one kind of e-reader to another.”

Hope this is the start of a trend.

iPhone Sales Numbers From AT&T ★

Eric Slivka, reporting for MacRumors on AT&T’s quarterly numbers:

Consequently, AT&T’s 4.3 million iPhone activations likely corresponds to approximately 75% of its total smartphone sales of 5.5 million units for the quarter.

Even more impressively, the continued trend toward smartphone adoption means that the iPhone is representing a growing proportion of total phone sales (smartphone and non-smartphone) at AT&T. The carrier notes that smartphones represented more than 78% of its total phone sales to postpaid customers, meaning that the iPhone accounted for roughly 60% of AT&T’s total phone sales to those customers during the quarter.

The iPhone accounted for a majority not just of AT&T smartphones sold, but all phones.

Estimates for Apple’s Q2 2012 Financials, Coming Later Today ★

Estimates are all over the map on iPhone sales.

Microsoft Comparison Chart of Cloud Storage Services ★

Has any company in history had more of a love affair with feature checklists than Microsoft? These must appeal to some people, but the appeal of post-PC computing is ease-of-use and obviousness — a feature checklist can’t convey any sense of these things.

(You’ll never guess which cloud storage service gets the most checkmarks in the list.)

Introducing Google Drive ★

Sure, I trust Google to index the contents of all my files. Why not?