Linked List: January 2, 2019

Wednesday, 2 January 2019

Apple’s China Problem Redux 

This Ben Thompson column from May 2017 is worth a re-link given today’s no good very bad earnings warning, which Tim Cook made clear was almost entirely about slow sales in China:

That, though, is a long-term problem for Apple: what makes the iPhone franchise so valuable — and, I’d add, the fundamental factor that was missed by so many for so long — is that monopoly on iOS. For most of the world it is unimaginable for an iPhone user to upgrade to anything but another iPhone: there is too much of the user experience, too many of the apps, and, in some countries like the U.S., too many contacts on iMessage to even countenance another phone.

None of that lock-in exists in China: Apple may be a de facto monopolist for most of the world, but in China the company is simply another smartphone vendor, and being simply another smartphone vendor is a hazardous place to be. To be clear, it’s not all bad: in China Apple still trades on status and luxury; unlike the rest of the world, though, the company has to earn it with every release, and that’s a bar both difficult to clear in the abstract and, given the last two iPhones, difficult to clear in reality.

By Thompson’s logic the iPhone X should have done well in China, because it looked new, and the XS/XR would disappoint in China because they didn’t. And, well, here we are.

Apple does make great hardware — hardware so good that to some extent it sells itself. But the core of Apple’s platforms are the OS’s — the software, not the hardware. I’d much rather run MacOS on a ThinkPad and iOS on a Pixel phone than run Windows on a MacBook Pro and Android on an iPhone XS. If the appeal of iPhone in China is only or even just mostly about the hardware — because the software that matters is WeChat (or anything else that is cross-platform), not iOS and its native exclusive ecosystem — then China is never going to be a consistent market for Apple. It could be (and remains today) a lucrative market for Apple, but if all that matters is the hardware, Apple products are going to fluctuate sales-wise in China in ways they don’t in any other country.

Bob Einstein Dies at 76 

Erik Pedersen, writing for Deadline:

Best known to today’s viewers for playing the serious, often surly but always hilarious Marty Funkhouser on “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, Einstein was a foil for its creator-star Larry David. He appeared in nearly two dozen episodes of the series dating from 2004 to the most recent season.

Einstein’s younger brother, actor-director Albert Brooks, tweeted today, “R.I.P. My dear brother Bob Einstein. A great brother, father and husband. A brilliantly funny man. You will be missed forever.”

Super Dave Osborne was one of my favorite bits in the 80s. He was one of the best recurring guests on Late Night With David Letterman. He played Super Dave so straight — I always wondered how many people never realized it was a spoof.

Things I learned today: Albert Brooks is Einstein’s younger brother, and Albert Brooks was born “Albert Einstein”.

‘How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump as an Icon of American Success’ 

Fascinating piece in The New Yorker by Patrick Radden Keefe:

“The Apprentice” was built around a weekly series of business challenges. At the end of each episode, Trump determined which competitor should be “fired.” But, as Braun explained, Trump was frequently unprepared for these sessions, with little grasp of who had performed well. Sometimes a candidate distinguished herself during the contest only to get fired, on a whim, by Trump. When this happened, Braun said, the editors were often obliged to “reverse engineer” the episode, scouring hundreds of hours of footage to emphasize the few moments when the exemplary candidate might have slipped up, in an attempt to assemble an artificial version of history in which Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip decision made sense. During the making of “The Apprentice,” Burnett conceded that the stories were constructed in this way, saying, “We know each week who has been fired, and, therefore, you’re editing in reverse.” Braun noted that President Trump’s staff seems to have been similarly forced to learn the art of retroactive narrative construction, adding, “I find it strangely validating to hear that they’re doing the same thing in the White House.”

10 Years as a Cable Tech 

Lauren Hough, writing for The Huffington Post:

For 10 years, I worked as a cable tech in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. Those 10 years, the apartments, the McMansions, the customers, the bugs and snakes, the telephone poles, the traffic, the cold and heat and rain, have blurred together in my mind. Even then, I wouldn’t remember a job from the day before unless there was something remarkable about it. Remarkable is subjective and changes with every day spent witnessing what people who work in offices will never see — their co-workers at home during the weekday, the American id in its underpants, wondering if it remembered to delete the browsing history.

Mostly all I remember is needing to pee.

Really enjoyed reading this piece.