By Graham K. Rogers

Apple Matters

You can tell how bad this is by the Joy of Tech cartoon put out this week.

In Forbes, Tim Worstall points out that Charles Duhigg and David Kocieniewski claim Apple paid 9.8% but,

This really is the most gargantuan ignorance on their part. The $3.3 billion has nothing, nothing at all, to do with the $34.2 billion: something which any accountant at all could have told them. . . .

and provides a link to a report which was produced by a pressure group called the Greenlining Institute. That 9.8% was their figure and the NYTimes guys may have missed (deliberately or otherwise) or ignored this and other important points that Tim Worstall brings to the reader's attention. He ends page 1 of his article . . . "Which is obviously clear and present nonsense, entire argle bargle of which at least the newspaper should be ashamed."

Among comments on the second page, Worstall writes, "Appalling, ignorant, calculation cobbled together by small time think tank. Two weeks later it is stated as simple fact in the newspaper of record."

My original link for this was MacDaily News who also have some strong criticism of the NYTimes. Tim Worstall also wrote another version -- which is much more fun -- for the Register. Also writing about the same erroneous approach is Arik Hesseldahl on All Things Digital, who had 6 years earlier written about Apple's Nevada operation. He takes the NYTimes writers to task for suggesting Apple are doing something illegal and for the comments they included about the funding of a community college mentioned in the article: a different set of funds, so totally unaffected and another example of NYTimes fudging the facts. You really cannot trust the traditional news sources at all these days, can you?

I also find myself again in agreement with Rush Limbaugh as he takes the NYTimes to task for the use of the Greenlining report (above) as well as several other good points. A full transcript of his comments is available from MacDaily News. Pixobebo chimed in too with the point that Apple and a lot of other companies are doing nothing illegal over their tax payments and comply with the codes and laws as laid down. If there is something wrong with that, the legislators are the ones to blame.

Talking of legislators, Darius Dixon on Politico -- they have a great iPad app -- reports that Tom Coburn, who is Republican Senator for Oklahama, is said to be livid about the NYTimes report on Apple. Not livid that they got so much wrong, but livid that Apple appears to be avoiding the paying of taxes. If you leave the a loophole, their accountants are going to use it. And if most of Apple's money is made out of the US, they are perfectly correct not to repatriate it if they think the tax rate (35%) is too high. In an article on AppleInsider, Mikey Campbell also reports on the Senator's comments and looks at some of the points he made concerning the need to rewrite the tax code (good) and is quoted as being "livid about the situation" which is a little different from the Politico, ". . . livid about that." Indeed, the Senator's comments are much fairer when read here and he apparently recognises the wrongness that the tax codes embody: "Let's make it transparent. And let's make it fair."

Mikey Campbell also mentions a Fox News report that was critical of the NYTimes reporting.

But the newspaper of record has a habit of doing this sort of thing with Apple. The fallout from the Foxconn report, which Apple was already taking steps to address before the NYTimes peppered Mike Daisey's lies with some ideas of its own and presented them to the world, is still ongoing with Reuters trying to make something out of nothing by including two unrelated points in a report (Foxconn workers at an unmentioned Microsoft factory, plus Apple's profits), while Greenpeace keeps blaming Apple for the pollution woes of the world.

Others are just as happy to take up the causes, as we read in the Independent on Monday in a report by Martin Hickman, who writes that a responsible investment research service Eiris (yes, who?) rate British bus companies ahead of Apple and Google for global-sustainability. And the reason, "the poor conditions of the Chinese workers who assemble Apple's iPads and iPhones". All very odd as last year, Eiris (who are connected with the FTSE) named Britain as the "dirty man of Europe" according to Terry Macalister in the Guardian; now suddenly their buses win accolades?

However, to be fair, Apple's data center is going to consume a lot of power and the power company admits this. Or did. Mother Jones has found that while Apple intends to use solar power, Duke Energy pulled the information from its site. Rather than targeting Apple, Mother Jones and others like Greenpeace need to pressure Duke. It is absurd to suggest that if Apple speaks, Duke will magic the problems away; and also absurd to suggest that somehow Apple could find another power supplier in the area. They do not grow on trees. As the article tells us at the end, no one knows what Apple will do as it expands.

However, Bloom Energy, are reported by Martin LaMonica to be starting work on a new plant in Delaware where its Bloom boxes will be made. These will be used to supply fuel cells for Apple's data center which will have 4.8 megawatts worth of fuel cells powered by biogas using a chemical reaction to make electricity. You know, clean energy and all that. Anyone seen Mad Max 3?

Going back a week or so, we were reminded of the "Apple is doomed because it equals Sony" thesis put forward by George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research, which was widely reported. Jean-Louis Gassée has an extended comment on this and explains why he feels that Colony was so wrong. As Gassée has actually seen inside Sony, he debunks what Colony writes: "there was no "post-Morita" decadence at Sony. The company had long been spiritually dead by the time of the founder's brain hemorrhage."

After the Australian regulators had a close look at Apple's claims about what is and what is not 4G when it comes to the iPad, so the Brits are casting an eye in the same direction, Rory Cellan-Jones reports for the BBC.

Back in Australia, however it is reported that the authorities are to have a look at pricing of downloads, with Apple and Microsoft being mentioned in the article by Jon Russell on TNW. I had a look at the top 5 in Thailand which are Angry Birds Space HD ($2.99), Infinity Blade ($0.99), iPhoto ($4.99), Ski Safari ($0.99) and Birzzle Pandora HD ($0.99). In the US Store, these are identically priced. In Australia, all of the apps are identical except for iPhoto which is $5.49, although not having an account there, I cannot say if this is US or Australian dollars. Whichever it is, the price is clearly not the same. Adobe is also mentioned in the article and the prices in Thailand are often far higher than in the US.

Apple has been rolling out more services this week round the world with iTunes Match coming to Italy, Greece, Portugal, Austria and Slovenia we read in an item by Chris Oldroyd on iMore. On TNW, Matt Brian reports that the next stage in the iPad release will take place soon when the device goes on sale in Taiwan. China? Nothing yet: ask Proview.

We mentioned last week that some developers had had their WWDC tickets cancelled and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth as well as some justified anger. Bryan Chaffin reports on the MacObserver, that some of the tickets have now been reinstated.

While we are on developers, it was reported by a number of sources, including Mikey Campbell on AppleInsider that Apple is urging the developers to start registering with Apple for Developer IDs in readiness for the Gatekeeper launch.

There was a shock when Ron Johnson left Apple and went to J. C. Penney, but having done a great job with Apple's stores, he was keen to repeat the success (and by all accounts, staid J.C. Penney is looking up these days). MacDaily News links to an item that discusses Johnson's new work and also to a presentation that has more than a hint of Steve Jobs to it.

While Apple loses some execs, it picks up others and MacNN reports that a Yahoo! exec, Jessica Jensen, has been poached to work on Apple's iAds.

We keep hearing scare stories about malware on Macs although the incidence is rather low. Peter Cohen on The Loop reports on a frustrating weekend with Sophos Anti-virus software. He wanted to try it out and find out for himself. It did find malware, but most of it was in "Gmail, specifically. In the junk bucket." Why the Junk? Apple's filtering algorithms had sorted the malware. Some may get through, but it is rarer and rarer, and still needs the help of someone with an Admin account to install. But Mac users are not so easily fooled, are we?

Oh dear, I almost wept when I read the headline on the Register. Caleb Cox reports that a boy of 11 urinated on a cart of MacBooks and broke them all. There was no reason given for the act.

If you have any documents on the iWork cloud remember this is to be closed by Apple on 31 July this year and any files still there then will be lost.

There were no updates for my Mac this week, but lots of iOS updates, including all the iLife apps I have: GarageBand, iPhoto and iMovie. I also see that the useful imaging app, Halftone has another update. The Financial Times has decided to kill its iOS apps and is moving to HTML5 Steven Sande reports on TUAW.

Half and Half

While there have been problems with Java on OS X, it has really been Apple's fault some say, but Tim Cook's actions (perhaps inactions) have pulled off a feat that Steve Jobs could not do Woody writes on InfoWorld: Oracle has agreed to step in and take charge of Java updates.

With Apple profits hitting another peak, the owner of Foxconn that makes many of the products, Hon Hai Precision, is reporting lower profits. The report on BBC Business does mention products other than those from Apple, but Hon Hai has a massive portfolio so trying to link the fall with Apple, Microsoft and other tech companies may not give a full picture.

Murdochs making the News

While the Leveson Inquiry has yet to report, and the job of a Minister of the Crown is on the line right now because of alleged connections between him and James Murdoch, a parliamentary committee has issued a report which I first heard about on the BBC News Tuesday evening. In the report, there were words like "wilful blindness" (Rupert), "wilful ignorance" and a "lack of curiosity (James) -- even after he had signed off on £700,000 -- "indefensible behaviour" (Rebekah Brooks) and serious questions about the veracity of some evidence other players presented to the MPs. The report ended, "We conclude, therefore, that Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company" (John Hall, Independent)

Now what the BBC failed to mention in the report I saw was that several of the committee members (the Conservatives) refused to sign off on that last point because they felt it was not within the remit of such a committee. Nonetheless, they seem to have agreed with all that "wilful" stuff.

What is more interesting, apart from what else is to come from other reports and other inquiries, is the way the US regulators will take this. The woolly Brits are fairly hands-off when it comes to regulating companies, but the Americans are likely to take this far more seriously. While certain of the middle to top players could be facing prison sentences, or at best hefty fines, the top men may not be the top men for all that much longer.

There was more on this and a copy of the 125-page report on a Huffington Post article (Jack Mirkinson) and other useful links at the end. This story is still ongoing.

It will not be a surprise to me -- he always does this when he does not get his own way -- if Murdoch hits back. He will probably castigate the committee, particularly the Labour members, and one by one we may be shocked to find each of them has secrets they wish they did not have. How these might be discovered, if they exist at all, is anyone's guess.

Thanks to the Register, I have downloaded the report myself and I am able to put a link to it it here.

Other Matters

On InfoWorld, Woody from Phuket, has some interesting comments on the investment.

With the Google v. Oracle case going to a jury, which will have to consider how honest Google has been over some of the presentation of evidence, particularly the Lindholm emails (and indeed Lindholm himself), there is more news concerning the Google Street view case that raised a lot of heat when it was discovered that Google was sucking up a lot more than just the basic data when it did the rounds. Steve Lohr and David Streetfield in the NYTimes suggest that this included "personal data from potentially millions of unsuspecting people". With Google and the FCC unwilling to identify the engineer who wrote the code, the article names him as Marius Milner who has a lot of background in wifi engineering. The idea that it was a rogue engineer, which was Google's original ploy (shades of Java and Lindholm above?), was put to rest by the information that several higher level Google personnel signed off on this.

The Thai government has (at best) put the schools tablet project on hold for the moment, but in Egypt a similar project, but for university students, also using bottom of the market devices, has also had a number of snags. They are to use 10,000 locally made devices but not much else is known, Nancy Messieh on TNW reports.

Nothing really to do with IT at all, but I was so interested by the research on music trends reported by Aaron Souppouris on The Verge, that I feel compelled to include this if only for the University of Dublin diagrams that are used to explain how trends in music start and are transmitted geographically.

Local Items

Compare then the approach of the Singapore Straits Times who are forming a readers advisory panel to help shape the content.

Also locally, S.P. Somtow made a plea for someone to edit his Wikipedia entry, which claims he wrote Aida.

Late News

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.