Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Apple on the iPad and iPhone (Will the iPad Save the Newspaper Indutry?)

“It was a phenomenal quarter that exceeded our expectations all around, including the most successful product launch in Apple’s history with iPhone 4,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a release.

Apple executives held a post-earnings conference call. Here are some snippets from WSJ:
Apple has a lot of cash on hand. For this quarter, cash plus short- and long-term marketable securities was $45.8 billion, up $4.1 billion in the past three months. What does Apple plan to do with this cash? "Preservation of capital," [Apple CFO Peter] Oppenheimer says...

An interesting tidbit about the iPad: "It is not following a typical early-adopter curve and then taking a long time to cross into the mainstream."...

A lot of people focus on cannibalization when it comes to the iPad and other Apple products, but Apple suggests that it might actually encourage people to buy other Mac products. Plus, "if it turns out that the iPad cannibalizes PCs, then I think it is fantastic for us because there are a lot of PCs to cannibalize," Cook says. In other words -- PCs that Apple doesn't make...
For the first time, I spent some time with the iPad and found it fun. But I can't use it for business because you can't copy text or links.

Which leads me to ask, "Was the ability to copy, left off because of processing space considerations, or was it left off for strategic purposes?"

Once the iPad develops any sort of critical mass, I can see Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch teaming up to provide an iPad only version of a newspaper. Murdoch hasn't had luck with his paywalls, but I don't think he is through experimenting. Both would just love for the iPad to be the answer for the newspaper industry. It's a long shot, but time will tell.

3 comments:

  1. spelling error alert - industry

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  2. It appears the newspaper industry "problem" is about competition not about delivery techniques. So the ipad is unlikely to save the old newspaper business. Its more likely to facilitate its replacement. The newspaper business has been in a downtrend for decades because anybody with a keyboard and a printer can produce a newspaper. The competition is fierce.

    Murdoch is searching for that balance between quality and price and if he stays responsive to the consumer he will probably find it eventually.

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  3. Which leads me to ask, "Was the ability to copy, left off because of processing space considerations, or was it left off for strategic purposes?"

    Really, this is what you ask yourself ? About the company that wants to get customers to pay 20 € for fullscreen playback capabilities in quick time (Leopard 10.3) ?

    So how about some calculations. A letter is represented by a byte or two bytes if unicode is used. So a sentence with 200 words of 20 letters each encoded in utf-16 would take 20 * 200 * 2 Bytes = 8000 Bytes. Compare that to the 256 Megabytes applications can use and the conclusion is clear.

    Apple products are a rip of. People buy apple products because of the warm feeling of buying some avantgarde product. It's like voting for Hopey Changey.

    Same or worse bullshit in a nice package. Produced by sweatshop workers and delivered by snake oil salesman.

    ReplyDelete