Set Your Jackass Dials to Nine

Barry Randall, writing for the WSJ’s MarketWatch:

And if you think that the built-in fingerprint reader on the new iPhone 5S means something, well, it doesn’t. For years I followed Authentec, the company Apple bought to acquire this fingerprint technology. Using a biometric solution like fingerprint recognition was going to go mainstream any day now. Any day now. Until it wasn’t. It turns out, passwords work just fine. And they never have a smear of peanut butter on them to stymie the fingerprint reader.

OK, sure.

Like the PC business before it, I think the handset hardware business is moving toward a zero-margin, loss-leader existence, where the customer experience is defined by software and systems often controlled by others. Tim Cook should ask Michael Dell how that transition has turned out.

A writer for a Wall Street Journal publication just suggested that Tim Cook, CEO of the most-profitable personal computer maker in the world, call Michael Dell to find out how the PC business is going. OK, sure.

★ Wednesday, 18 September 2013