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The State Of iCloud-enabled Apps

Three months after the public launch of iCloud, I thought it’d be interesting to check upon the App Store and see how many developers have decided to enable iCloud integration for documents & data storage in their apps.

iCloud went live alongside iOS 5 and OS X 10.7.2 on October 12th, two days ahead of the iPhone 4S’ launch. In retrospect, iCloud’s public debut wasn’t without its issues and hiccups, but it was relatively smooth in the following days and Apple acted promptly to restore interrupted services for its users. Looking back, it’s just weird how many times iCloud Mail has been down, and continues to be unstable, whereas iCloud sync (for apps and data) has been fairly responsive and, at least on my side, always up. This says a lot about priorities, I guess.

In 107 days since iCloud went live, and 235 since Apple’s announcement at WWDC ‘11, it appears the majority of third-party developers are still considering whether or not iCloud is something worth investing their time – and customers’ money – or not. Those who have successfully implemented iCloud have done so in ways that require minimal user interaction, most of the times enabling sync capabilities through a single setting switch. Others have tried more complex solutions, often having to come up with separate tools to enable iCloud. Especially on the Mac, the fact that only apps sold through the Mac App Store can be directly integrated with iCloud isn’t helping developers who are still selling apps both on Apple’s App Store and their own website. Overall, there seems to be a shared trend among developers choosing to wait for Apple to clarify specific aspects of iCloud sync, improve the platform and fix some bugs that may prevent certain applications from being iCloud-enabled without requiring a major restructuring of the codebase on their end. Turning an iOS or Mac app into an iCloud-enabled app hasn’t turned out to be the 1-click process many, including me, wrongfully assumed when iCloud was previewed at WWDC last year.

Every app has its own way of storing local documents and user data. Some apps prefer keeping the original source of a document intact, say a .txt file, whilst others may apply their own file format to store documents and data internally in a proprietary database or multiple files, such as Evernote’s take on XML. There are pros and cons: keeping a universal file format such as plain text gets you more benefits in data portability; writing your own database structure allows you, as a developer, to do things exactly the way you want. What does this mean for iCloud?

Without getting too technical (also because my knowledge on the subject can only get you so far before I suggest you go read the developer documentation), the developers I’ve talked to explained that in the way iCloud syncs file, there may be some incompatibilities with apps that are based on complex databases and libraries. Apps that simply want to sync .txt files across multiple devices might be easier to port to iCloud, but then again there are always some aspects to consider such as conflicts, renaming a file, or getting a timestamp for the modification date when multiple devices are accessing iCloud. That’s not to say implementing iCloud is technically impossible for apps that are based on libraries, and not easily exportable files: below, I’ve collected some examples of apps that do just that, and quite cleverly too. However, getting to enable iCloud and make it reliable enough so that all kinds of apps can work with it without frustrating the user (who, in theory, never has access to the inner workings of iCloud) while at the same time providing the functionalities he or she expects. Read more

The Apple Of Gaming

A great piece by Craig Grannell at Revert To Saved about the current state of Nintendo:

For a long time, I considered Nintendo the Apple of gaming—a company that cared about the details and about the right things (fun, excitement, enjoyment). Nintendo’s problem these days is that Apple is now the Apple of gaming—and the Japanese veteran needs to fight back, perhaps borrowing some of the tricks used by the plucky American upstart.

Yours truly, two months ago:

It’s always about the games, ultimately, but the hardware matters, too. More importantly, integration of hardware and software matters, and with my iOS gaming background I think Nintendo still has to get this right. Using the 3DS after years of iPhones and iPads feels strange because I’m dealing with a device that’s pretty capable spec-wise, yet doesn’t show the same amount of attention to detail, integration and flexibility that my iPhone has. I can play Angry Birds on my iPad, quickly look up a webpage, send an iMessage to my friend real quick and then effortlessly come back to the game. I challenge you to do the same on the 3DS with that joke of Internet browser and “suspended” software on the Home screen.

The problem with Nintendo is that for the longest time they thought only geeks and iPhone nerds were paying attention to App Store games, replacing their handhelds with iPads and iPods. It turns out, previous Nintendo customers are actually moving to mobile platforms – I’ll throw Android in the mix as well – for all their gaming needs. Blame changes in society, blame the recession, blame the advancements in graphics processing that made Infinity Blade II possible – mobile gaming is very much real, albeit immature, and Nintendo failed to forecast just how much of an impact it would have on its business. Shame on them for being so stubborn. Now they are paying the consequences, and will likely continue to pay until the Wii U comes out. To get a visual representation of what Nintendo is exactly facing, check out this chart by ngmoco’s Ben Cousins comparing Apple, Microsoft and Nintendo by revenue:

What’s next for Nintendo? That’s a question with no answer, really, as you can’t just know what the company’s up to without having some kind of inside knowledge of their secret plans. Rather, I’d start by proposing some ideas that might be worth considering at the light of iOS’ popularity in mobile games and the changes in consumer behavior:

- Ship a moden interface for managing a device: users don’t want to be treated like 3 years-old anymore. Make it accessible, flexible, elegant, fast. This is functional to the point below, which is:

- Make accessing, saving and managing digital content easier. Nintendo’s current solution is a joke – will Nintendo Network be any better? We shall see.

- Embrace social networking: let players link their Nintendo Network profiles to their Twitter, Facebook or Google+ identities, and allow them to interact with Nintendo content outside of Nintendo’s online platform.

- Create an ecosystem: make Nintendo Network the single marketplace for all kinds of Nintendo content. Drop regional restrictions and adopt an App Store-like distribution model with worldwide releases, price tiers, promo codes, developer pages. Unlike the App Store, drop user reviews and allow free trials. Let users rely on their Nintendo ID for all kinds of possible future Nintendo services.

- Drop resistive touch-screens: the future is multi-touch. Delay the Wii U if necessary to make it absolutely right.

- Don’t drop cartridges entirely, but embrace a digital distribution strategy that makes sense. Advise all developers to release digital versions of their games on Nintendo Network, and perhaps reward buyers of physical copies with free unlockable in-app extras. The goal is to achieve a win-win situation both if you’re buying digital or physical.

- Ditch friend codes. Because, seriously, why are we still using friend codes in 2012?

- Create fresh, innovative, strong new IPs while emphasizing the importance and value of historical brands. Fortunately, that seems exactly what Miyamoto is doing.

- Use cutting-edge hardware: let’s face it, people like to play Call of Duty and Uncharted these days. Whilst good graphics aren’t synonym of good games, they sure help in nurturing an ecosystem of variegate games – those who make presentation their selling point, and the ones that are more focused on gameplay with less impressive graphics. Angry Birds was possible in 2009, but that didn’t stop Apple from leap-frogging itself year over year with the A4 and A5. Make consoles that can stand the onslaught of the Tegras and A6s released every year.

- Ultimately, stay true to gaming. Users don’t want to read emails on their handheld or have Office on it. Internet-connected doesn’t mean PC-like.

This morning I retweeted three tweets by Zac Cichy:

I don’t know how Nintendo should implement these proposed changes in the next months, but I am sure these are ideas more than just a couple of bloggers agree with. The money just isn’t there anymore, and Nintendo needs to evolve before it’s too late.

[Nintendo Headquarters via David Offf]

The Problem With The iOS Home Screen

I’ve been thinking about the problems I have with iOS’ Home screen concept for years now, but I never fully grasped what was, exactly, that with time made using the Home screen – and thus the whole system of Springboard pages – clunky and annoying. Until it hit me earlier today, and suddenly everything started to make sense.

The iOS Home screen is conceptually broken. Not “broken” as in unusable, unstable or technically flawed. From an engineering standpoint, the iOS Home  screen works. The concept of the Home screen we interact with today is broken because the Home screen wants to be a real, physical, tangible surface while providing access to the gates of the intangible: apps. Apps are data, information, connectivity, presentation, media. Digital content isn’t tangible in the sense that it exists in a physical space, unless you count the atoms and the electrons and the bits that make using an app possible. But that’s a long stretch. The iOS Home screen is based on the concept that app icons are objects on top of it;  this has created a series of issues over the years.

Throughout the release history of iOS, Apple had to compromise and, I believe, implement functionalities the original Home screen wasn’t meant to support. First users wanted third-party apps, Apple waited, but eventually allowed developers to create software to install on an iPhone or iPod touch. Apps are the most important addition to the operating system to date, and they kickstarted the App Store revolution we’re witnessing. In allowing third-party developers to create apps, however, Apple essentially lost control over the display of objects on the Home screen – Apple may be able to check upon the inner workings of an app, but they can’t ban apps based on lack of taste in choosing an icon. And with that, developers were free to choose Home screen icons that don’t necessarily resemble real-life objects, thus breaking the metaphor of manipulating “badges on a table”, as I like to think of it. Have you noticed how almost every built-in, Apple-made iOS app has an icon that resembles a real-life object? The only exception? The App Store and iTunes icons. Which are marketplaces for digital content.

Apple states it clearly in the iOS Human Interface Guidelines:

When virtual objects and actions in an application are metaphors for objects and actions in the real world, users quickly grasp how to use the app. The classic example of a software metaphor is the folder: People put things in folders in the real world, so they immediately understand the idea of putting files into folders on a computer.

Think of the objects and scenes you design as opportunities to communicate with users and to express the essence of your app. Don’t feel that you must strive for scrupulous accuracy. Often, an amplified or enhanced portrayal of something can seem more real, and convey more meaning, than a faithful likeness.

Portray real substances accurately. Icons that represent real objects should also look as though they are made of real materials and have real mass. Realistic icons accurately replicate the characteristics of substances such as fabric, glass, paper, and metal, and convey an object’s weight and feel.

Later, users wanted multitasking and folders. Unsurprisingly, Apple gave them implementations of these features that look like objects, in this case objects with linen. Here’s where the situation gets more complex: folders and the multitasking tray, unlike app icons, actively interact with the Home screen, they don’t just sit on top of it. The way Apple designed them, the multitasking tray resides as linen below the Home screen, and folders are tiny containers with a linen background that expands atop of the Home screen. You can see how the entire concept of Home screen as a surface starts crackling under the design weight of  these features: is the Home screen a surface that has another layer underneath? Another one above as well? What do you mean I have music controls in the multitasking tray, too?

Most recently, iOS users began asking more vigorously for a better notification system, a unified reading environment for magazines, and widgets. Apple gave them Notification Center and Newsstand, but didn’t announce anything widget-related, at least for the Home screen. The Home screen, with iOS 5, got two new additions: a new layer, Notification Center, and a new default icon, Newsstand, which isn’t really an icon but it’s a folder with a different background and shelves.

As I said, I believe choosing the right approach to delivering new functionalities and keeping the original Home screen concept got trickier for Apple over the years. What started as a black background with a few default apps turned into a customizable area of hundreds of app icons with folders and multiple pages with a series of additional layers managed by the overly abused linen texture. But the seed of the broken concept can be seen way back into iPhone OS history: think about Spotlight and Springboard page indicators. What are they – how do they fit into the metaphor of a physical surface with objects on top of it? Surfaces don’t have search boxes and indicators. Notebooks have pages, but you have to flip them and turn them and touch them. Websites have search boxes, but they’re bits and lines of code.

If you follow my theory, you can understand how things start making sense from this perspective. You can’t move multiple app icons at once not because of some technical limitation, but because, I believe, in the original Home screen vision inspired by physics apps were meant as a single entity to manipulate, one at a time. On a table, you can’t “select” multiple buttons and pretend they’re all going to move as you touch only one. That doesn’t make any sense in real life. I could expand this concept to the entire skeuomorphism Vs. interface design, but I’ll leave that for another time. My concern right now is the Home screen, the first thing you see when you unlock a device, when you close an app, the place where you manage your apps, your content. There’s a lot of weirdness and inconsistencies going on in some Apple apps and interfaces, but the Home screen is the prime example of a user interface meant for 2007 which was subsequently patched and refined and patched again to accomodate new functionalities introduced in iOS (the same happened with the Home button). You could argue that some proposed features, such as widgets, haven’t been implemented yet because of technical constraints. It’s fair argument, and I’ll take it. Yet I think that, even if complex from an implementation standpoint, it’s the concept itself that makes widgets difficult with the current Home screen.

The problem Apple needs to overcome is that the Home screen tries to be a real object while providing access to the gates of the digital world. To reinvent it, Apple needs to tear apart the whole concept and rebuild it from the ground up.

Clear: An Interview With Impending’s Phill Ryu

When Phill Ryu (MacHeist team member) emailed me a few days ago to give me a preview of his upcoming iPhone app, Clear, I immediately said “yes” and eagerly started waiting for a TestFlight email to hit my inbox. I know Phill: he has good taste in design, knows that I like great apps, and he’s an overall nice guy that I had gotten to work with multiple times in the past for MacHeist. Phill hinted at the particular nature of the app; yet when the beta came, I felt the kind of surprise and delight in using Clear I hadn’t experienced, I believe, since the original Tweetbot beta. Clear is one of those apps that redefine interaction schemes and navigation patterns: like Tweetie’s “pull-to-refresh” and Tweetbot’s “swipe-to-load” before it, I’m sure Clear’s gestures to move between lists and add new tasks will change the way developers imagine todo list apps.

Clear is a simple todo list app. Without spoiling too much now – you can check out the app’s webpage here, and promo video below – let me just say that the way Clear handles task creation, completion and list management has been uniquely and cleverly built around the iPhone’s screen and the way we can interact with our devices. In fact, I don’t think Clear would be possible on any other platform – when Clear comes out in the next few weeks, you’ll understand why you often hear of things such as “iPhone features the smoothest animations” or “fastest scrolling”. Everything in Clear is delightfully tappable, scrollable, responsive to your fingers with visual cues and sound effects. Yet it’s so simple. I’ll leave my thoughts about the app for a proper review.

What’s also intriguing about Clear, interface aside, is the team behind it. Take a look at the studio’s page: those who have been around long enough in the Apple Community will instantly recognize names like David Lanham and Dan Counsell; Impending’s webpage also reveals Ted Bradley, Jay Meistrich, Raphael Mun, Jeremy Grosser and Josh Mobley worked on Impending’s debut. Clear itself was co-created by Phill Ryu, Dan Counsell and Milen Dzhumerov. That was enough to trigger my curiosity radar, and ask Phill to sit down for a (virtual) coffee to discuss Impending and Clear.

Check out my interview with Phill Ryu and Clear’s promo video after the break. Read more

2012, The Next iPhone, And LTE

The iPhone 4S, released in October, was supposed to feature LTE connectivity, at least according to some of the rumors that were floating around at the time. The device turned out to feature faster 3G downloads at 14.4 Mbps through HSPDA, which is an enhanced version of the 3G protocol that has been around for a while, but still isn’t as widely adopted as you would expect from a technology that Apple decided to use in a major iPhone upgrade. In Italy, for instance, few areas have access to HSDPA, not to mention HSPA+.

(Note: although commonly referred to as “4G” the current revision of LTE doesn’t meet the requirements for 4G connectivity yet. The LTE Advanced standard does conform to 4G requirements, but it’s likely that you’ll see the term “LTE” associated with 4G simply because it’s a major leap forward in terms of wireless connectivity)

Now, the debate as to whether Apple should have made the 4S an LTE iPhone or should have an LTE iPhone 5 this year is making the rounds again. Unlike previous debates, fortunately this time we have someone who’s trying to make some sense out of this and cut through the haze of rumors and theories to point out that, actually, it wouldn’t make much sense business-wise for Apple to implement LTE in the near term. Why? Because of all those 37 million iPhones Apple has sold in the quarter that ended on December 31, very few of them were sold in areas where LTE is available. Read: the United States, some parts of Denmark and Sweden, some cities in Canada, and Saudi Arabia. The “4G” rollout in countries other than the US is a slow process, and the ones mentioned above have a very small percentage of their spectrum covered by active LTE networks – they’re basically in the middle of initial testing right now. And even in the US, Chris Foreman assumes that whilst the major carriers have all implemented LTE or will start relatively soon, only half of subscribers would be covered in 2012, thus reducing the potential addressable market to 15% of iPhone customers worldwide. Why would Apple make an LTE iPhone for 15% of its entire customer base?

According to fourth quarter 2011 results, AT&T activated 4.1 million iPhones, while Verizon activated 4.2 million. Sprint would not disclose the number of iPhones it activated last quarter, but we feel safe in assuming that number is less than 4 million. Assuming Sprint was able to activate (perhaps a generous) 2 million or so iPhones, only a little over a quarter of iPhones were sold in the US. The other three-quarters, then, are sold in areas with practically no LTE coverage.

It goes deeper. You might argue that, yes, Apple could make an exception because they have made some in the past. But the WiFi-less 3GS and camera-less iPhone 4S were necessary modifications to get these devices on sale, otherwise they wouldn’t have gotten regulatory approval. It’s not like Apple is forced to implement LTE, especially considering the enhanced 3G still isn’t as widely adopted as the company hopes.

The LTE iPhone is primarily the result of months of speculation and countless rumors based on nothing. No evidence. Perhaps a few code strings here and there, but then again – go trust those code references these days. For all we know, the LTE iPhone doesn’t exist.

Or does it? A popular counterargument I often get is that Apple experiments with all kinds of new technologies in their labs; they take a look at new specifications and standards, and consider whether they should be worth investing more research and development resources for possible future implementations. I get it, and it’s entirely plausible that Apple engineers have at least looked at current LTE chips utilized by several Android handsets. But I don’t know how far they may have gotten into actually testing these chips, if only for verification purposes, at the light of Cook’s multiple remarks in the past about concerns regarding the effects these chips have on battery life. Those bigger screens Android makers tout in their commercials might be a requirement, rather than a feature. But I digress.

Another popular theory is that new LTE chips by Qualcomm, a component supplier Apple is already using, should become available in the first half of this year and, based on published specifications, allow device makers to considerably cut down on battery usage and required space. These new chips are smaller, consume less power and are made by a company Apple already buys components from. The next iPhone will have LTE! Not so fast. Read more

The Apple Community

I read this great piece by Stephen Hackett today, and while I was reading it I figured I’m often asked why I (and to an extent our team) do what I do every day. So here’s a brief explanation.

It’s about technology and getting to make a living out of writing for this community, the Apple community. Communities are made of people; in this case, the Apple community is made of developers, readers, fans of Apple devices, journalists, designers, PR guys – everyone who has at least some interest in following technology and the stuff Apple comes up with.

I don’t work for myself. I mean, sure, technically I do work for myself, but that’s not what gets me out of bed in the morning. I work for my readers. I work for the developers who come up with amazing solutions and ideas every day. I work for my team. Ultimately, I don’t work because I have to, but because it feels good to write about and for the Apple community.

“I do what I do” because I can provide for myself and my family thanks to what I love writing about – technology and software.

Because with the iPhone I have a world of information and data in my pocket; data that travels from a server who-knows-where in North Carolina, through a series of cables and pipes from the U.S to Italy, from another server to a cell tower, from a cell tower wirelessly to my device, and it turns into pixels I can see on a screen that, however, shows no pixels. When I stop to think about it, I still look at my iPhone with the amusement of a three year old kid seeing the night sky for the first time.

“I do what I do” because software is helping me make my life a little better. I can take photos and show them to my friends and archive them online. When I’m at the hospital, I can send text messages to my friends for free, in real-time, and feel good about knowing that someone on the other part of the screen is reading my words. With Rdio, I can listen to any song I want whenever I want, from any device I own, and tell my girlfriend she should check out the latest hit from Noel Gallagher. With Dropbox, I can write my articles on one device, pick them up again on another one, take a break and finish them up on a mobile phone that magically got the latest versions of those files over the air. Software is disrupting every industry it touches. I get to write about it, and even choose which app to use.

I write for the Apple community because in the past three years I got to know some amazingly talented and honest and caring people that, however, I’ve never met in “real life”. But isn’t this real life? What about having a team of four people around the world that greet you with “good morning buddy” every morning isn’t real? How could you exclude from real-life the works of developers who pour their souls into making a little piece of software – often just to make something work better for their customers – and are kind enough to tell you about it, in advance, with honest words and ready for any feedback you might have? Just because we haven’t shaken hands yet it doesn’t mean this, all this, isn’t real. Actual businesses are built every day on top of our community, ideas flourish and turn into projects with deadlines, projects that I will likely write about and share with other people that have decided to listen to what I have to say. The things we write, the feedback we give, the links we share – they do matter. Right now I’m writing this post on my iPad, in my living room, with my dad trying to understand how Gmail works. In a few minutes, these digital words will travel through a network, and end up on a website on a server somewhere in the United States. What’s not real about this, exactly?

“I do what I do” because I don’t think I’m better than anyone, but my words can make life slightly better for someone else. Maybe a developer who would really like to see his dream come true and hours of coding turned into an app anyone can see and use. Maybe a reader who needs help with his computer. Maybe someone who was having a bad day, but suddenly felt inspired in reading about Steve again. I don’t think the Apple Community is better than other circles of people who share a common interest. But I do believe we are better human beings because of it, because of what we decide to do to make even the smallest dent in the universe.

It’s easy to lose motivation though. Because the Internet allows for these kinds of communications that don’t require a physical confrontation or debate face-to-face, it’s easy to lose track of a conversation, misinterpret someone else’s words, or think a reader is “hating you”. Not that “online fights” and controversies aren’t real. They are very much so. But even when I’m reading about the latest Gruber-Thurrot (or anyone, really) blogging face-off, I like to think if they ever met “in real life” they would grab a beer together, look back at their “Internet fights” and say “Oh, screw it – what do you think of the latest iPhone?” with the enthusiasm of two people who are genuinely excited and passionate about technology.

Because, ultimately, it’s about the people. Even when we write about Google or Apple or Twitter and we imagine these big, faceless corporations in glass buildings “somewhere in California”, we’re actually writing about big corporations in glass buildings “somewhere in California”. But made of people. Of ideas. Of passion and genius and willingness to run a business successfully, to spread innovation and collaboration, to provide services that weren’t possible before. To show up every day because “it’s worth it”. Are tech companies greedy? Sure they are. But you have to believe there’s still a genuine, intact spark of passion in their core values. Otherwise they wouldn’t be here. Greediness alone doesn’t get you anywhere.

Which brings me back to the Apple Community. It’s easier to see what I’m talking about with the “smaller guys”, the indie developers and the bloggers. It’s easier to get to know them, work with them, maybe grab a beer with them and show them pictures of my kids someday, too.

And that’s why I do what I do.

“Our Next Big Insight”

From my iCloud overview in October, titled iCloud: The Future of Apple’s Ecosystem:

The problem Apple had to face in the past four years is that for millions of people iPhones and iPads have become substitutes to the PC. Over a third of iTunes Store content is now purchased on iOS devices, Apple’s Eddy Cue said at the Let’s talk iPhone media event last week. What started and was celebrated as the hub of the digital revolution became a burden for Apple as millions of customers began using iOS devices as their main devices. Apple was once again faced with a challenge: if people no longer want to use the hub and accept the trade-offs required to manage our digital lifestyle, where’s the new hub? And how will content be distributed in the ecosystem if there’s no visible hub to start with?

[…]

iCloud changes the way we interact with our devices. Ten years after the digital hub revolution led by the Mac and iPod, Apple’s ecosystem has evolved and turned into a variegate selection of notebooks, desktop computers, iPhones, iPods and iPads. iCloud goes beyond the simple function of a new digital hub: iCloud, built into iOS 5 and Lion, is the new soul of Apple’s hardware that unifies music, videos, photos, apps, books and documents. iCloud is a huge change for Apple’s ecosystem not just because of its new technology — it’s a new software paradigm that will deeply affect Apple’s devices and how we work with them in the next years. Ten years from now, when it’ll likely be time for another digital revolution, we’ll look back at 2011 and iCloud’s launch.

During today’s earnings call – in case you missed it, Apple today reported its biggest quarter to date – CEO Tim Cook seemed to agree with this vision. He said that “iCloud is more than a product, it’s a strategy for the next decade.”

What strikes me as remarkable about this statement isn’t the simplicity of the message alone, it’s how well it plays with Steve Jobs’ original Digital Hub strategy in retrospect. The way I see it, today’s comments from Cook about iCloud declared the historic Digital Hub officially dead, yet sounded amusingly familiar at the same time. That Apple is a product company that also happens to do business with services isn’t new – but listening to Tim Cook and Peter Oppenheimer discussing the results, the future projections, the customer feedback and overall strategy in a single conference call is enlightening in a way it provides insight into Apple’s core values. Products matter, but what customers expect to find around a product is equally important – the ecosystem matters. Every recent move from Apple can be seen as part of the iCloud big picture: the 4S with an amazing camera that shoots photos that are backed up online; iTunes Match and its cloud-based music library; content deals for Apple TV; iBookstore and Textbooks that are backed up to your iCloud account. And when you think about it with today’s numbers in mind, it all starts to make sense not just from a conceptual standpoint, but from a business perspective as well.

Apple customers are willing to pay for a superior user experience through a solid ecosystem. And Apple is betting on that.

The “strategy for the next decade” that we’re covering today is what, I believe, the majority of users will see as the operating system in 10 years. And if you need a quick recap as to why Apple moved on from the Digital Hub, let Steve remind you.

“We’ve got a great solution for this problem. And we think this solution is our next big insight. Which is we’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device. Just like an iPhone, an iPad, or an iPod touch. And we’re going to move the Digital Hub – the center of your digital life – into the cloud.”

Apple’s Q1 2012: Quarter Recap and Estimates

At 2 PM PT, Apple is set to announce its financial results for the quarter that ended on December 24th, 2011. According to several analysts polled in the past weeks and Apple’s own guidance for the quarter, Q1 2012 is on track to become Apple’s biggest quarter to date both in terms of sales (with expected record iPhone and iPad sales) and revenue. Until today, Apple’s most profitable quarter has been Q3 2011 with $28.57 billion revenue. Below, we’ve compiled a breakdown of Q1 2012 estimates with a recap of what happened during the quarter.

Estimates and Previous Quarters

During last quarter’s earnings call, Apple said they were expecting $37 billion in revenue and diluted earnings per share of around $9.30 for this quarter. As Apple’s guidance for future quarters is historically low and conservative, the already high projection of $37 billion led bloggers to speculate Apple’s Q1 2012 would be a blowout quarter; some analysts, on the other hand, usually don’t pay attention to Apple’s guidance as the company lowballs expectations for the upcoming quarter.

Analysts and bloggers polled in the past few weeks had different takes on what Apple will report later today. Some of them, such as Robert Paul Leitao, Horace Dediu and Navin Nagrani projected revenue above $44 billion with iPhone sales of 34-35 million units and iPad sales in the range of 13 million units; as we reported three weeks ago, Asymco’s Horace Diedu estimates that Apple will report earnings of $12.3 on revenues of $44.6 billion, with the street price aiming at $9.75 EPS on $37.99 billion. As Philip Elmer-Dewitt also noted, analysts’ estimates need to be taken carefully, as several of them were released after the previous quarter’s results, and were never updated reflecting changes that took place through the quarter (such as fluctuating iPhone demand and international product launches).

Fortune’s comprehensive list of estimates for Q1 2012 is available here.

As far as iPhone sales are concerned (in Q4 2011, the device accounted for 47% of Apple’s revenue), this quarter will see Apple finally providing some actual insight into the iPhone 4S’ performance on the market. The device is well-regarded as a success on various international markets and the United States, but the only real numbers Apple posted referred to the opening weekend. Predictions for Q1 2012 go as high as 35 million units sold (those would indicate cumulative sales for iPhone 4, 4S and 3GS, not just the iPhone 4S), with an approximate figure of 30 million units sold being shared the majority of analysts and bloggers.

According to Nielsen, the launch of the iPhone 4S had an “enormous impact” on smartphone owners:

Among recent acquirers, meaning those who said they got a new device within the past three months, 44.5 percent of those surveyed in December said they chose an iPhone, compared to just 25.1 percent in October. Furthermore, 57 percent of new iPhone owners surveyed in December said they got an iPhone 4S.

This morning, Verizon Wireless reported 4.2 million iPhone activations. Reuters wrote Verizon’s “business was hit by the high costs of sales of advanced phones such as the Apple Inc iPhone.”


In Q4 2011, Apple posted revenue of $28.27 billion, with 11.12 million iPads, 17.07 million iPhones and 4.89 million Macs sold. The company posted quarterly net profit of $6.62 billion, or $7.05 per diluted share. iPhone represented a 21 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter; iPod sales were down 27 percent from the year-ago quarter, and Apple reported the best iPad quarter to date with over 11 million units sold and a 166% increase over the year-ago quarter. In the year-go quarter, Apple posted revenue of $26.74 billion with 7.33 million iPads, 16.24 million iPhones and 4.13 million Macs sold. Read more

MacStories Reading List: January 15 - January 22

At MacStories, we strive to produce great content every day. From news to stories and app reviews, we care about quality content to deliver to you, our readers, with insight and our personal analysis every day. But we can’t cover everything. And there’s some great writing on the Internet that we often can’t link to in our daily coverage, if only because there isn’t much we can add to an already excellent article.

Today we are introducing MacStories Reading List, a weekly selection of great stories from Authors that you should read. Every Sunday, we’ll publish a collection of links that we think you should read, such as the ones below. A very simple format for the great writing that is happening in the Apple community.

Even better, you can subscribe to the Reading List in your favorite RSS reader or Instapaper. We have created an Instapaper account dedicated to the Reading List, so head over this link to get the Instapaper feed for the links we’ll post here every week. You’ll also be able to able to find us in Instapaper if you’re already following @macstoriesnet and linked the service to your Twitter account.

On behalf of the entire MacStories team, I wish you a good reading. - Federico Viticci

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World of Apple’s Alex Brooks reflects on his past few years of blogging, and ultimately decides that quality content, not the page views alone, is what matters. A must-read.

The site I want to read and will produce will post thoughtful commentary on Apple. The kind of commentary and prose that that’s sensible, articulate and adds value to a wider discussion happening across the internet. There are already a handful of sites just like this, authors who have in some cases taken grave risk to quit their day to day lives to produce content just like this. I value those sites, I enjoy reading their content.

- Reflecting on Change, Alex Brooks (@alexbrooks)

Every month or so an analyst comes out and claims the iPad can’t be included in the same market share numbers of PCs, and vice versa. Asymco’s Horace Dediu collects actual numbers and puts things in perspective, revealing the true effect Android and iOS devices are having on the PC market.

This last view corresponds to the data in the first graph (line chart). If iOS and Android are added as potential substitutions for personal computing, the share of PCs suddenly collapses to less than 50%. It also suggests much more collapse to come.

- The rise and fall of personal computing, Horace Dediu (@asymco)

How has the App Store third-party ecosystem evolved in the past four years? Is there still much of a difference between smaller developers who actually want to charge for their apps, and bigger studios that have adopted the “freemium” or in-app advertising models? App Cubby’s David Barnard has an insightful article from an indie developer’s perspective that’s worth reading and reflecting upon.

Ultimately, the users become the product, not the app. Selling users to advertisers and pushing in-app upgrades/consumables is a completely different game than carefully crafting apps to maximize user value/entertainment. It’d be a shame if the mobile software industry devolved into some horrific hybrid of Zynga and Facebook.

- Free and Low-Cost Apps, David Barnard (@drbarnard)

Wandering Coder’s Pierre Lebeaupin makes an excellent case for iOS needing some sort of file management system at this point. You can disagree with him, but it’s undeniable the majority of users who want to use iPhones and iPads in a professional environment are still working with documents, and iOS doesn’t offer a native, integrated way for easily managing and searching them.

Let us contrast that with another situation. My father is a high school teacher; for the last 20+ years he has been working using computers, preparing teaching notes, transparent slides to project, diagrams, tests and their answers, student average note calculation documents, etc. on his Macs (and before that on an Apple ][e). He shares some of these with his colleagues (and back) and sometimes prints on school printers so it’s not like he is working in complete isolation, but he cannot rely on a supporting infrastructure and has to ensure and organize storage of these teaching material documents himself. He will often need to update these when it’s time to teach the same subject one year later, because the test needs to be changed so that it’s not the exact same as last year, because the curriculum is changing this year, because the actual class experience of using them the previous year led him to think of improvements to make the explanation clearer, because this year he’s teaching a class with a different option so they have less hours of his course (but the same curriculum…), etc. Can you imagine him using solely an iPad, or even solely an imaginary iOS 5 notebook, to do so? I can’t.

- iOS lacks a document filing system, Pierre Lebeaupin (@wanderingcoder)

An amazingly detailed and in-depth overview of the iOS gaming scene with a series of post-mortems and sales figures for “blockbuster” and smaller iOS games. If you only read one article about mobile gaming this week, make it this one.

Eighteen months ago, when I left Ubisoft to start an independent game studio and focus on making my own games, I looked online a bit to get an idea of how much income I could expect to make as an indie. At Ubisoft I used to work on big AAA console games, and I had some figures in mind, but I knew they wouldn’t be relevant for my new life: $20M budgets, teams of 200 hundred people, 3 million sales at $70 per unit… I knew being an indie developer would be completely different, but I had very little information about how different it would be.

Angry Birds had taken off, Plants vs. Zombies was already a model, Doodle Jump was a good example of success, and soon after I started my “indie” life, Cut the Rope was selling a million copies a week. But except for what I call the “jackpots,” there were very few public stories or numbers on the web, and this meant we were a bit in the dark when we started SQUIDS. I have been tracking figures since then, and I’m writing this article to share what I’ve learned with my fellow indie dev buddies who might be in the same position I was, a year and a half ago.

- Money And The App Store: A Few Figures That Might Help An Indie Developer, Emeric Thoa

Dov Frankel explains how the iPhone’s mute switch and audio controls really work.

On the last episode of The Talk Show, Gruber and Dan Benjamin discussed the design tradeoffs at length. During the discussion, they mentioned that you can set the iPad’s volume level to 0, but you can’t with the volume buttons on the iPhone. I understand the difference, and it’s something it took me a little while to figure out, way back in the early days of the first-generation iPhone.

- Different Levels, Dov Frankel (@MrDov)

Last week, Apple unveiled its iBooks Textbooks project as the result of deals with major US publishers that have agreed to release digital versions of their textbooks in a new iBooks format. Brian Lam has an interesting interview with former Apple intern Joseph Peters, who might have fueled Apple’s interest in textbooks back in 2008.

In 2008, Apple had its iContest in its Town Hall building. The iContest is sort of an American Idol for great ideas that gives interns a chance to present their best thoughts to executives. Here, Joseph Peters and some friends outlined the idea of bringing Textbooks to iTunes, before the iPad even existed to the rest of us. They won a set of Macbook Airs for their idea.

- Open-Mindedness, Brian Lam (@blam)

Much has been said and written about Apple’s decision to make iBooks Author a proprietary file format that only allows for selling eBooks into the iBookstore. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber looks at the “issue” from Apple’s perspective.

Glazman looks at these new iBooks books and sees a nonstandard proprietary format. Apple looks at these new iBooks and sees layouts and design features that no other e-book platform offers today. One man’s nonstandard is another man’s competitive differentiation.

- On the Proprietary Nature of the iBooks Author File Format, John Gruber (@gruber)

Egg Freckles’ Thomas Brand looks back at Apple’s platform history and how the company has built its success on directly controlling the user experience in every possible way, from content sources to delivering software to the end user.

The iPhone may have been destined to become the world’s most popular smartphone due to the amazing multitouch technology it introduced, but Apple’s control over the iOS operating system, Xcode developer environment, and App Store distribution model have made the iPhone the central member of a new application ecosystem that can’t be beat.

Yesterday’s introduction of iBooks 2 and iBooks Author were significant announcements because they complete the platform pyramid Apple needs to enter the Textbook Market with the same control as its previous successes.

- The iBooks Platform, Thomas Brand (@ThomasBrand)

Macworld’s Serenity Caldwell follows up on Apple’s iBooks Author announcements and notes how authors welcome Apple’s entry in the digital publishing industry, but are still looking forward to a broader ePub-compatible publishing tool with advanced features, a polished interface, and Apple’s refined user experience.

It’s crazy that we have so few options after five years: The ebooks market is clearly making money. If Apple’s release of an authoring tool has shown anything, it’s that the demand is certainly out there. The publishing industry needs a Dreamweaver or Hype-type ePub application—one that won’t be limited by EULAs, or insistent on proprietary formats.

I’ve already written a wish-list for my perfect app; had I the talent, the skills, and the time to build it, I’d be half-tempted to try coding it myself. Silly, of course, but when it comes down to it, I just want to be able to make awesome ebooks. It shouldn’t take two weeks and six programs to create a book with images and interactive content.

- Holding out for an ePub hero, Serenity Caldwell (@settern)

Fraser Speirs, who knows a thing or two about iPad in schools, thinks that textbooks aren’t necessarily the future, but a way to get there.

Apple already revolutionized education when it invented the iPad. While iBooks textbooks are a bridge from the past to the future—and we do need a way to get to the future—they are not that future. If Henry Ford had been an educational publisher, his customers would have asked for electronic textbooks instead of faster horses.

- Apple’s announcements further iPad revolution in education, Fraser Speirs (@fraserspeirs)

How does Apple’s iBooks Textbooks initiative look from a teacher’s perspective? Kieran Healy’s post on the subject is insightful and detailed.

Apple’s proposed model would kill the used market, dead. The presentation emphasized that once you buy a book you always own it, and you can download it to any new devices you buy. But a corollary is that once you’re done with the book you can’t give or sell it to anyone else. So, at least initially, publishers can charge much less for their textbooks and make it up on volume. That’s fine by me if students end up paying less, though I immediately wonder whether the next step would be for publishers to modularize the books. Instead of your one giant Bio or Calc or Econ book for $14.99 rather than $129.99, you can have various shorter books available for the same price, but have to buy all of them over the course of a year or semester—like 19th century serial novels. This would likely be pitched to faculty as allowing for greater flexibility in curriculum construction, but again it’s the students who end up paying for the books.

- Apple for the Teacher, Kieran Healy (@kjhealy)