Linked List: May 3, 2016

Tuesday, 3 May 2016

Follow Apple’s Suppliers 

Bloomberg’s Tim Culpan has an interesting bull take on iPhone sales — their two major Taiwanese suppliers, Hon Hai and Pegatron, took their stock hits months ago and have now leveled off:

The short-interest chart hints at what’s really going on. Bearishness on stocks of both suppliers peaked in January and February, with the 159 million shorted shares of Hon Hai on Feb. 16 being the highest in at least five years. […]

A wise investor would avoid making decisions based only on such correlations. But it’s worth at least asking why the companies that rely the most on Apple seem nonplussed by the bad news out of Cupertino.

(That’s the modern informal nonplussed, of course.)

If You See Slowness, They Blew It 

Nilay Patel:

Here’s the problem with the Apple Watch: it’s slow.

It was slow when it was first announced, it was slow when it came out, and it stayed slow when Watch OS 2.0 arrived. When I reviewed it last year, the slowness was so immediately annoying that I got on the phone with Apple to double check their performance expectations before making “it’s kind of slow” the opening of the review.

Posit: The things on Apple Watch that people actually like and use are the things that aren’t slow (notifications, activity tracking and goals, Apple Pay, complications, maybe Glances) and the things that are slow are the things people don’t use (apps, especially). Apple should have either cut the slow features from the original product, or waited to launch the product until all the features were fast.

I would vote for launching when they did, with the slow features cut — there is value in what Apple Watch already does well.

Apple’s Plan for Refurbished iPhones Is Rejected in India 

Speaking of Apple and India, here’s Saritha Rai, reporting for Bloomberg:

India has rejected Apple Inc.’s request to import and sell refurbished iPhones to the world’s second largest mobile population, a telecommunications ministry official said Tuesday.

The U.S. company’s application has been turned down, the official said, asking to not be identified, citing official policy. Apple has been seeking permission to import and sell used phones to court price-conscious consumers with a similar proposal rejected in 2015 by the environment ministry.

Apple’s new phones are too expensive for most Indians, and they’re not allowed to sell cheaper refurbished iPhones.

Apple’s Prospects in India 

Roopesh Chander:

I think Tim Cook’s outlook on the Indian market is a little too optimistic.

Firstly, iPhone sales in India were never really hampered by the unavailability of LTE (or 4G as they call it here in India). Anyone who can afford an iPhone in India has access to a fast broadband internet either at home or at work, probably both. The LTE rollout speeded up only this year here in India (earlier, only one network operator, Airtel, offered LTE), but LTE support is a standard feature among high-end devices being sold here for a while. At present, LTE is supported by even sub-$150 devices from big brands. The spread of LTE in India is not going to suddenly make iPhones more desirable, nor is there any significant upgrade cycle coming because of LTE. […]

Third, India is indeed looking a bit like how China was in 2005 in terms of GDP per capita, but India has far less number of people who can afford an iPhone than China does. The addressable market for Apple in India is tiny, and is growing quite slowly. Of that, those who can afford the current year flagship will constitute a minuscule number compared to China.

Under-Promising and Over-Delivering 

Shira Ovide, writing for Bloomberg:

Here’s what Cook didn’t say: 1) Apple has been misjudging its own business, and that makes it tough to believe what executives say; and 2) The company failed to prepare investors for an inevitable slowdown in growth — even if that slowdown proves temporary. If one duty of public company executives is to under-promise and over-deliver, Apple has flopped in that job.

This is fair and astute criticism of Cook and Apple’s executive team. The problem isn’t the drop in iPhone sales so much as forecasting them accurately.

Michael Nunez, reporting for Gizmodo:

But if you really want to know what Facebook thinks of journalists and their craft, all you need to do is look at what happened when the company quietly assembled some to work on its secretive “trending news” project. The results aren’t pretty: According to five former members of Facebook’s trending news team — “news curators” as they’re known internally — Zuckerberg & Co. take a downright dim view of the industry and its talent. In interviews with Gizmodo, these former curators described grueling work conditions, humiliating treatment, and a secretive, imperious culture in which they were treated as disposable outsiders. After doing a tour in Facebook’s news trenches, almost all of them came to believe that they were there not to work, but to serve as training modules for Facebook’s algorithm. […]

That said, many former employees suspect that Facebook’s eventual goal is to replace its human curators with a robotic one. The former curators Gizmodo interviewed started to feel like they were training a machine, one that would eventually take their jobs. Managers began referring to a “more streamlined process” in meetings. As one former contractor put it: “We felt like we were part of an experiment that, as the algorithm got better, there was a sense that at some point the humans would be replaced.”

If news curation can be automated, there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. Progress in the industrialized world has always involved previously labor-intensive jobs being replaced by automated machinery. We’ve gotten to the point now where some of this work is white collar, not blue collar, and some journalists seem offended by the notion. Their downfall is their dogmatic belief in not having a point-of-view, of contorting themselves to appear not to have a point of view — which, as Jay Rosen has forcefully argued, is effectively a “view from nowhere”. The irony is that machines don’t have a point of view — they are “objective”. Over the last half century or so, mainstream U.S. journalism has evolved in a way that has writers and editors acting like machines. They’ve made it easier for themselves to be replaced by algorithms. Most readers won’t even notice.

I do two things here at DF most days: find interesting things to link to, and comment on them. An algorithm may well beat me at finding interesting links. My job then, is to be a better writer — smarter, funnier, keener, more surprising — than an algorithm could be. When I can’t do that, it’ll be time to hang up the keyboard.

Update: Kevin van Haaren:

@gruber Computers algorithms aren’t objective they reflect the point of view of their creators. It’s a reason diverse teams should make them.

I didn’t mean to imply otherwise, but this is a good point. What I’m saying is more If what you do can be replaced by a robot (whether hardware or software), it will happen — and modern U.S. news journalism’s brand of “objectivity” feels algorithmic.

The App Store Educational ‘Discount’ 

Michael J. Tsai has a collection of links regarding the App Store issuing refunds to educational customers after years of using hundreds of copies of an app.

Luma Loop 3: Special Edition 

I’ve been a happy customer of Luma Loop camera straps for years — it really is one of the nicest, most rugged, most comfortable pieces of kit I’ve ever owned. Every single detail is considered, and this new special edition model sounds even better. Once I got used to the over-the-shoulder style, I could never go back to wearing a traditional around the neck strap for an SLR-sized camera.

Climate Scientists Tell Jimmy Kimmel: ‘Why Would We Fuck With You?’ 

Great piece on Jimmy Kimmel last night.