This Week's Sponsor:

1Blocker

A Cleaner, Faster, and More Private Web Experience

Posts in links

Are Existing iPhone Owners Buying The Verizon iPhone?→

Are Existing iPhone Owners Buying The Verizon iPhone?

Marco Arment makes the case for non-record initial Verizon iPhone sales due to the fact that the device is mostly selling to existing iPhone owners coming from AT&T. Why the analysis? Because Instapaper’s numbers in the App Store haven’t gone under the usual increase of a new product release / major update / holiday season:

And my sales haven’t noticed. Ranks have held nearly constant, but so have volumes.

Assuming the correlation is approximately sound, this can be explained by three possibilities:

- Very few Verizon iPhones have been sold. I don’t think this is likely.
- Verizon iPhone owners are buying very few apps relative to other iPhone owners. This also seems unlikely.
- Most Verizon iPhones have been sold to existing iPhone or iPod Touch1 owners, who therefore already own most or all of the apps they want. This seems like the most likely explanation by far.

Assuming the analysis is correct, I guess we’ll see a lot of Verizon iPhone sales when contracts are up in June. Also in June: iPhone 5, quite possibly available on Verizon as well. This summer is going to be interesting for U.S. carriers.

Permalink

Confessions of an Apple Store Employee→

Confessions of an Apple Store Employee

Things like this are always interesting and worth a reading session in Instapaper. An anonymous Apple Store employee talked to Popular Mechanics, detailing some of the little known facts about Apple’s retail environment. Some juicy bits below.

About product launches:

We are completely in the dark until they do a keynote speech. We have no idea what is coming and are not allowed to openly speculate.

On MobileMe’s popularity:

We’re supposed to sell AppleCare product support with just about everything, and honestly, those aren’t that hard to sell, since they aren’t a bad deal. But we’re also supposed to push MobileMe, and that’s really hard to sell. Nobody ever sells it.

The weird part about Apple’s philosophy:

Sometimes the company can feel like a cult. Like, they give us all this little paper pamphlet, and it says things like—and I’m paraphrasing here—“Apple is our soul, our people are our soul.” Or “We aim to provide technological greatness.” And there was this one training session in which they started telling us how to work on our personality, and separating people into those with an external focus and an internal focus. It was just weird.

Read the full interview here.

Permalink

iOS Game Developers - Is $0.99 Too Low?→

iOS Game Developers -  Is $0.99 Too Low?

Interesting discussion over at Pocketful of Megabytes. The author concludes:

So is $0.99 really too low? Well, yes and no. It’s not too low, because that’s where it needs to be for games in this ruthless and uncharted territory to prosper (and because consumers love cheap goods), but it is too low because it inaccurately depicts the worth of a game’s contents. Without higher profits, money cannot be spent on improving the overall quality of the content found therein. Low profits mean low budgets and low budgets mean cheaply-made apps… the price tag is low out of necessity. It’s not ideal, but we’re stuck with it.

With $0.99 apps you attract more customers, but hard work is undervalued. On the other hand it is true that you never know what app you’re going to buy (no trials), but we also have to consider Apple’s 30% cut on those .99 cents.

So here’s an idea. What if Apple discontinued the $0.99 price tag, and automatically raised all prices to $1.99 – thus making it the lowest price point? Perhaps a more feasible business model for indie developers?

Would that stop you from buying the next Angry Birds or Trainyard?

Permalink

Why The 4-inch iPhone Screen Won’t Happen This Year→

Why The 4-inch iPhone Screen Won’t Happen This Year

In a great “Doing the math” post, Chris Rawson at TUAW outlines the single reason why the next iPhone won’t get the rumored 4-inch screen:

Apple could work around that issue by slightly increasing the iPhone 5’s width, but there’s another problem. If Apple increases the screen size to 4” but retains the same 960 x 640 pixel dimensions, the PPI (pixels per inch) value drops to about 289 ppi – well below the iPhone 4 Retina Display’s 326 ppi, and just barely at the threshold of a “Retina Display” level of quality. To maintain 326 ppi, the pixel dimensions on a hypothetical 4-inch, 3:2 screen must increase to the neighborhood of 1080 x 720, plus or minus a few pixels.

App developers would then have three sets of resolutions to support for the iPhone instead of two, and scaling from 960 x 640 to 1080 x 720 wouldn’t be anywhere near as simple as the pixel-doubling that got developers by in the early days before they were able to scale apps up from 480 x 320 resolution.

Apple doesn’t want to lose the appeal of the Retina Display, and on other other hand they can’t come up with a third resolution a year after the introduction of the iPhone 4. That would be hell for third-party developers.

Whole post is a must-read. Check out all the numbers here.

Permalink

iPhone 4 Best Mobile Device At Mobile World Congress→

iPhone 4 Best Mobile Device At Mobile World Congress

Judges’ comments:
Great screen, sharp design, fantastic materials, and phenomenal ecosystem for app developers. In a tight race, the iPhone 4 built on the success of its predecessors to set the pace for smart phones.

A few notes about this particular 2011 Global World Award:

* The only other phone that stands out from 2010 would be HTC’s Evo.
* Say what you want about Apple’s 30% cut in the App Store, but it’s leagues beyond the Android Marketplace.
* Apple isn’t even at this event.

No handset looks or feels better in the hand than the iPhone 4. Congratulations Cupertino.

Steve Jobs also won personality of the year in 2010.

Permalink

“Apple Doesn’t Understand The Internet”→

“Apple Doesn’t Understand The Internet”

Nadav Savio on the differences between Google and Apple:

It’s been said that Google doesn’t get ‘social’ and, though I think that is vastly overstated, there is truth there. Similarly, I’d say that Apple doesn’t understand the internet. Well I have a simple theory about it. There’s a cliché that everyone’s greatest strength is also their greatest weakness, and I believe that applies as well to organizations as to people.

Take Apple. They make amazing, holistic products and services and one of their primary tools is control. Fanatical, centralized control. Control over the design, over the hardware, over the experience. And that’s exactly the opposite of the internet, which is about decentralization and messy, unfiltered chaos.

It sounds good in theory, but the more I think about it, the more I don’t get the connection between the Internet and Apple as a company. Apple is not a web company. They make hardware and the software that runs on it. They make money out of hardware that, yes, is connected to the Internet. But the Internet as a service, not as a “population”. So where’s the line between “Apple doesn’t understand” and “unfiltered chaos”?

Maybe Apple doesn’t understand the people on the Internet, or they simply don’t care enough.

Permalink

Replacing Flash Storage With The Cloud→

Replacing Flash Storage With The Cloud

Speaking of streaming for media through MobileMe, Chris Foreman at Ars Technica makes a good point:

Relying solely on the cloud, whatever the particular method, ignores the reality of wireless networks. Even in major cities, wireless data connections are not 100 percent ubiquitous. There are areas where connections are tenuous or nonexistent—suddenly, if you have zero bars, you would have zero data. As frustrating as it might be when you drop a data connection when trying to access a webpage, we believe the experience would be far more frustrating if your device became effectively useless anytime you went deep inside a large building, down into a basement, or on the subway.

While WiFi can help mitigate the problem somewhat, there’s still the issue of how quickly data usage rates would skyrocket if a potential iPhone nano streams all its data from the cloud. Part of the alleged reasoning behind Apple releasing an iPhone nano is the ability to offer a lower-priced device, possibly without a contract. But what benefit would this lower-cost device offer consumers if it required them to pay yet higher monthly data bills?

Ars’ report is more geared towards the recent rumors of an iPhone nano with no internal storage at all (which is incorrect anyway, as a minimum storage for the OS must be provided – you can’t “stream” iOS), but the problem remains: if Apple is moving to the cloud, then we’re all becoming dependent on always-available, reliable and “fast enough” internet connections. That’s why I believe a caching system for offline access will be needed in order for this to work properly for everyone.

The Spotify apps already do this and it’s great. You stream music, but you can save songs in your device’s cache for when you don’t have a 3G or WiFi connection available. Sure, cache can grow huge in size and waste space, but at least you’re sure you always have full access to your files.

Permalink

Delegate OmniFocus Tasks with Sparrow→

Delegate OmniFocus Tasks with Sparrow

Don Southard created an AppleScript that sends tasks from OmniFocus to Sparrow:

Sparrow updated a few hours ago and brought with it basic support for AppleScript. I wanted to test it out and see what they included so I whipped this very basic script to delegate a task in OmniFocus by sending an email with details about the task using Sparrow.

Very nice. How long until someone figures out a solution for the other way around? Because I would love to export Sparrow emails as OmniFocus tasks.

Update: Ben Brooks shares an updated version of the AppleScript that works with Mail.app and also embeds a link to the OmniFocus task in the message.

Permalink

The Untold Story Of The First Mac→

The Untold Story Of The First Mac

Aza Raskin shares a memo from his father Jef Raskin, one of the creators of the original Macintosh. An interesting tidbit about the vision of an integrated system, already growing at Apple back in the 80’s:

There were to be no peripheral slots so that customers never had to see the inside of the machine (although external ports would be provided); there was a fixed memory size so that all applications would run on all Macintoshes; the screen, keyboard, and mass storage device (and, we hoped, a printer) were to be built in so that the customer got a truly complete system, and so that we could control the appearance of characters and graphics.

Full document is available here, and it’s a must read. Thirty years ago, designers and engineers at Apple were already thinking about issues like software fragmentation and user’s ability to tinker with a device.

Permalink