By Graham K. Rogers

Opening Gambit:

Apple Stuff

What helped push this even more was the point that IBM discovered: iOS online purchases were many times larger than the other devices that are used, including Android, Nook and Amazon, with Barnes & Noble beating the Kindle: a device sold at a loss because of the sales it would generate. Or not as it turns out.

One of those looking at this was Paulo Santos on Seeking Alpha who sees darker days ahead for Google. He writes, "Android sees much lower usage than iOS, and much lower usage than expected given its market presence."

Another point that many analysts -- the guys that investors pay to tell them where and when to invest -- have just missed is the total context in which Apple's profits sit. Felix Richter on Statista compares the 2012 profits with those of a number of other companies and shows just how far ahead Apple is: $41.7 billion profit on $156.5 billion revenue. Richter adds that "the combined net profit of Microsoft, Google, eBay, Yahoo, Facebook and Amazon was $34.4 billion. Apple alone made $7 billion more" (my italics). Combined, for heavens's sake.

I cannot find it now, but I saw someone report on a call to consider a break up of Apple. That has appeared on the horizon before and is usually an analyst desperate to appear relevant.

All those analysts were looking for the next big thing, dissatisfied with the pause for breath after iPhone 5, Mac mini, iOS, new iMAcs (see below) and MacBook Pro retina versions. Apple is stagnating, APPLE IS DYING. . . .

Not really of course as the record sales would prove. To some. However, Christopher Breen on MacWorld has a sideways look at the situation as it appears now and suggests that the "next big thing" is happening and he uses a 4-year old to prove it. Like a young friend of mine who sat down at my Mac and managed to teach himself how to make movies in 3 days, Breen illustrates the way the new tech of the touch screen is so natural to all of us, that the mouse (which I hate -- I use only trackpads with gestures) is old hat.

In a rather unacademic survey, almost anecdotal, Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports that Gene Munster and a team of helpers stood outside an Apple store for 8 hours and watched a Microsoft store for a couple of hours as well. One of the points noted was that customers bought an average of 11 iPads per hour, but not a single Surface was sold while the Microsoft store was being watched. Another report on this mini-survey appeared in an item by Neil Hughes on AppleInsider.

This all adds to that "death spiral" idea that we discussed on Monday this week and which has also been picked up by Anthony Wing Kosner, on Forbes. He starts with that death spiral that Jakob Nielsen wrote about, and takes this a lot further with the use of Catastrophe Theory. The use of this mathematical theory to examine a company like Microsoft was rather interesting and could be applied in a number of other situations. He hopes that this doom scenario is not going to face Redmond for a number of reasons; but after I read it I wondered, rather impishly, "will we ever arrive at the situation where Apple offers Microsoft $100 million to keep it afloat?"

While we are on iPads being preferred, it was reported this week by Tim Eaton in a Texas online source (Statesman.COM) that each lawmaker's office in the Texas Legislature will get two iPads and each committee will get one. This is about development, not about toys, which is the excuse given for not using such devices in Thailand. My source for this was MacDaily News.

Another iOS point appeared Tuesday evening with the news from Adam Satariano on Bloomberg that Eddy Cue had apparently fired, pushed out or let go, "Richard Williamson, who oversaw the mapping team". There may be more fallout from the management changes that happened at Cupertino recently.

As expected after the weekend was news that a developer release of the next update to OS X, 10.8.3 has been seeded to developers. Several sites had this including Steven Sande on TUAW. Sam Oliver on AppleInsider reports that there is support in the developer update for AMD Radeon HD 7000 graphics which he suggests gives a hint of a new Mac Pro. More information in the article of course.

There was an interesting (and valid) comparison put out this week by Kirk McElhearn on MacWorld who looked at Apple's own Dictate and Dragon Dictate by Nuance. Neither comes out of it as better than the other although each does certain tasks well.

Now here is a novel idea for the future: it is reported, by Victoria Slind-Flor on Bloomberg, that Apple is working on automatic resizing of text. There is a patent being filed for a system that scales the content depending how close to a reader's face it is.

I mentioned a week or so ago a friend in Indonesia who was trying to improve the performance of his Wi-Fi network and I had forwarded a couple of useful articles. A link on MacDaily News this week also took me to another interesting item by Jordan Merrick on MacTuts+ (seriously - it is short for "tutorials") who provides some more, useful suggestions.

It had been rumoured that the iMacs announced recently were to be delayed until the new year, but Peter Kafka reports on All Things Digital that Apple will start shipping one of its new, ultrathin iMac models later this week with the other to follow (as planned) next month.

Half and Half

Despite (or perhaps because of) its supposed "death spiral" Microsoft is to start charging customers more for certain types of licences it is reported on MacDaily News (who also have some useful comments). The suggestion is that this will drive them to the Surface, but if Redmond were ever to examine street economics, this is the approach of Thai restaurants when customer numbers begin to drop. Instead of making economies, or improving the product (including uninterested staff) up go the prices. The result is that within a few weeks, there are even fewer customers and then the inevitable happens and another shuttered restaurant adorns the side of the road. Another report on this comes from Steven Sande on TUAW.

And despite what the critics say, Microsoft reports that 40 million licences for Windows 8 have been sold. Mary Jo Foley is at pains to point out that it is not clear what "sold" means and she also includes a comment from Tami Reller, chief marketing and financial officer for Windows who claims (against what has been reported in many sources) that "users are finding Windows 8 "easy to understand and embrace"" (like in a bearhug?). And you get all this for $39.99 (OS X is $19.99 for its un-confusing single version).

There have been stories this week that Facebook Gifts will be expanded to include iTunes gifts, according to a number of articles, including one by Donna Tam. It is all somewhat academic here as when I tried the Gifts link on my Facebook account, I was told, "Coming soon."

We have been reading ad nauseam about Apple and Samsung patent disputes, but in the background, Ericsson has also been trying to get Samsung to treat its own claims about patents seriously for a couple of years. Now Ericsson has started proceedings Charlie Osborne reports. It seems that Samsung had previously licensed Ericsson's patents in 2001 and renewed terms in 2007, but licenses have now expired and Samsung refused to renew. What happens here may well affect certain cases Apple is fighting with the S.Korean behemoth.

Other Matters

I am actually a touch sympathetic when I read about Samsung and labour violations in China. As Apple found, but was not allowed to forget no matter what was done, it is not the easiest thing in the world to deal with these problems for a variety of reasons. And not many people are interested in actually hearing that something is being done, they are more interested in the initial allegations, even when the truth is somewhat less exciting. AppleInsider reports on some of the steps that Samsung is taking, but insists that no child labor violations occurred, but they did find, "several instances of inadequate practices at the facilities."

I am a little less sympathetic with the report that Samsung rewarded a developer for Gun & Blood which appears to be a rip-off of an iPhone game, Overkill. Needless to say, the developer Craneballs is less than overjoyed. My link for this was The Loop.

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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.