Linked List: April 18, 2013

Thursday, 18 April 2013

Taking Apple Private: Makes Sense but Nobody Has the Money 

Matt Yglesias:

The current trajectory Apple is on, in terms of both share price and management strategy, is toward some kind of eventual management buyout scenario. But we’d need to walk another several hundred billion dollars down this road before that became feasible.

Yours truly, back in February:

Before Cook initiated the dividend last year, in the back of my mind I always wondered if “going private” was not the reason for Apple’s plan to just hoard its profits. Sort of “fuck you” insurance against Wall Street. (Even with the dividend, though, their cash continues to grow at an impressive rate. It’s sort of a token dividend.)

Legally, I think it’s impossible. A pipe dream. But culturally, Apple as an institution does seem better suited to being a privately held company.

According to Yglesias, I was wrong that it’s a legal problem. It’s simply a matter of time, if Apple continues to accumulate massive amounts of cash and its stock price remains so depressed on a P/E basis. (How low has Apple’s valuation dropped? As of today it’s lower than Dell. Wall Street thinks Dell has a brighter future than Apple.)

Headline of the Day: CNN Money: ‘Verizon iPhone Sales Tumble 33 Percent’ 

True, comparing this quarter to last quarter. But last quarter was the holiday quarter, and the iPhone 5 was brand new. Year-over-year, Verizon iPhone sales grew by 25 percent.

First Real-World Usage Figures Suggest Chromebooks Are Struggling 

Ed Bott:

In its first week of monitoring worldwide usage of Google’s Chrome OS, NetMarketShare reported that the percentage of web traffic from Chromebooks was roughly 2/100 of 1 percent, a figure too small to earn a place on its reports.

The first Chromebooks went on sale in June 2011, nearly two years ago. In the run-up to the launch, ZDNet’s own Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols called the Chromebook a “Windows killer”, predicting that “Microsoft is facing real trouble” in the market for desktop PCs.

My take all along: Who wants a computer that runs nothing but a web browser?

What a Windows 8 U-Turn Will Mean for the PC 

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes:

Many PC OEMs are dissatisfied with what Microsoft has done with Windows 8 and the way the company has handled the negative response to the operating system. Privately, one OEM source told me that Microsoft is “destroying” the PC industry, while another claimed that Windows 8 has “handed over millions of customers to Apple.”

Other than that, though, how do the OEMs like Windows 8?

‘Amazeballs: Live From Úll 2013’ 

Recorded in front of a live audience at last week’s Úll conference in Dublin Ireland, this week’s episode of The Talk Show features very special guest Michael Lopp. Topics include: Ron Johnson’s stint as CEO at JC Penney, Apple’s lack of new products so far this year, the design of tech conferences, and the toughest job in Las Vegas.

Brought to you by two great sponsors:

Triage 1.0 

Triage is an iPhone email client (iCloud, Gmail, Yahoo, and generic IMAP) by Southgate Labs, meant for just one thing: flipping through your inbox and marking messages as either (a) done with it, don’t need to see it again, archive it; (b) I can just peck out a quick reply right here on the phone and be done with it; or (c) I’ll deal with this one later, leave it in my inbox marked unread, but don’t show it to me again in Triage. It’s a perfect name for the app.

I got a sneak peek at it back in February when I was in New Zealand for Webstock, and started beta testing it soon thereafter. Since I’ve been using it, I’m more caught up on my email than I have been in years. A bargain at just $1.99.