Linked List: October 28, 2013

Monday, 28 October 2013

Interesting to me: in terms of revenue, iPad is only slightly ahead of Mac. (iPod is down to just a sliver.) A year ago, I’d have expected iPad revenue to be closer to iPhone than to Mac by now.

Apple Q4 2013 Results ★

Apple:

The Company posted quarterly revenue of $37.5 billion and quarterly net profit of $7.5 billion, or $8.26 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $36 billion and net profit of $8.2 billion, or $8.67 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 37 percent compared to 40 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 60 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

The Company sold 33.8 million iPhones, a record for the September quarter, compared to 26.9 million in the year-ago quarter. Apple also sold 14.1 million iPads during the quarter, compared to 14 million in the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 4.6 million Macs, compared to 4.9 million in the year-ago quarter.

It’ll be interesting to see whether iPad sales are flat because their popularity has peaked, or because people were waiting for the new models. My guess is the latter. Update: Sounds like Tim Cook thinks so too, saying on Apple’s quarterly conference call, “It’s going to be an iPad Christmas.”

‘Lazy’ Markdown Reference Links ★

This style seems a bit nutty to me, but I know the crew at TidBITS have sworn by it for years.

‘Cups of Water’ ★

John Lilly:

Sometimes people call Apple a hardware company, but that’s not quite right. Others have said they’re a software company, pointing out that it’s the quality of the software experience that really sets them apart, but that’s not quite right either. Having watched Apple for nearly 30 years now, and having worked at 1 Infinite Loop, I really think they think of themselves as a personal computing systems company and always have. They sell systems that work. Samsung, by contrast, sells hardware — they’re not as complete in their systems ambitions as Apple.

Regarding iPhone Touchscreen Accuracy ★

Nick Arnott, regarding the results of a robot-driven test that suggested the Galaxy S3 has vastly superior touchscreen accuracy to the iPhone 5S and 5C:

I haven’t been able to find official documentation on this, but I think this behavior is intentional compensation being done by Apple. Have you ever tried tapping on an iPad or iPhone while it’s upside-down to you, like when you’re showing something to a friend and you try tapping while they’re holding the device? It seems nearly impossible. The device never cooperates. If the iPhone is compensating for taps based on assumptions about how it is being held and interacted with, this would make total sense. If you tap on a device while it’s upside-down, not only would you not receive the benefit of the compensation, but it would be working against you. Tapping on the device, the iPhone would assume you meant to tap higher, when in reality, you’re upside down and likely already tapping higher than you mean to, resulting in you completely missing what you’re trying to tap.

There’s no doubt in my mind that iOS touch recognition is offset in this way. It is interesting, though, that the test results suggest that the iPhone has a built-in right thumb bias.

Update: A little birdie tells me they “don’t think there’s a right-thumb bias” in iOS. Could just be a problem in OptoFidelity’s testing, which is impossible to prove given the dearth of documentation provided about how the tests were actually performed.

Apple Presents Video About New Headquarters Ahead of Cupertino City Council Vote ★

Skip to around the 3:30 mark or so. Starts and ends with audio clips of Steve Jobs talking about the endeavor — to my recollection, this is the first time since his death that Apple has used his voice or image.

Exploring the New iWork for Mac File Formats ★

Interesting post by Nick Heer, looking into the new iWork document formats. The big change is that most document data is now spread across a series of small binary files, as opposed to the single XML files the iWork app used previously.

Drew McCormack, following up on Heer’s piece:

The post concludes that it is unclear why Apple would take this apparently backward step.

I don’t know for sure, but I think I can take a pretty good guess at why they have done it. It has nothing to do with being malicious, or trying to stop people seeing into the document’s format, and it has everything to do with iCloud and iOS devices.

And for good measure, Michael Tsai on the file sizes and document read/write performance of Numbers 09, Numbers 13, and Excel 2011.

How to Avoid Big International iPhone Data Charges ★

Good advice from Jason Snell.

‘Repetition Is the Death of Magic’ ★

Jake Rossen scored a rare interview with Calvin and Hobbes author Bill Watterson:

You can’t really blame people for preferring more of what they already know and like. The trade-off, of course, is that predictability is boring. Repetition is the death of magic.

Interesting to think about that in the context of the seemingly growing spate of complaints about the familiarity and predictability of Apple keynotes.

20th Century Headlines Rewritten to Get More Clicks ★

1955: “Avoid Polio With This One Weird Trick”.

‘iPad Square’ ★

New episode of my podcast, The Talk Show, featuring special guest Dan Frommer. We analyze last week’s Apple announcements: the event itself, the new iPads, new MacBook Pros, the controversial new iWork suite, and more.

Brought to you by three great sponsors:

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How Times Change ★

An excerpt from John Buck’s Timeline, on the announcement of QuickTime at WWDC in 1990:

Casey announced that QuickTime would allow the Macintosh to be the premier platform for digital media, and in doing so pre-empt Microsoft’s release of multimedia extensions to Windows 3.0.

In his own summary at the conference, John Sculley promised:

…the next generation of breakthrough applications will be on the Mac.

Sculley did not mention that work on QuickTime had not even started.

Announced with just a name.

With iWork, Apple Walks It Back Before Moving Forward ★

Matthew Panzarino, writing at TechCrunch:

Lots of folks are getting all worked up about iWork being “dumbed down,” but it feels like a reset to me. I can see this playing out pretty much like Apple’s recent Final Cut Pro X re-thinking. That app was introduced in a radically simplified and streamlined form that caused immediate outcry. Over time, Apple has steadily added back features that were missing from the early dramatic redesign of the pro video-editing suite. A handful of mishandled decisions like pulling the old version of FCP too soon caused unnecessary friction there, but recent updates to FCPX have made it a very viable choice for professionals again.

The most telling thing about Apple’s expectations for this version of iWork: when you upgrade, it leaves your existing copies of the iWork 09 apps in place.