Fascinating article by Jean-Louis Gassée in which he describes how Apple, a newcomer to cellphones, successfully moved carrier revenues to itself.
We wuz robbed
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Tag Archives: Apple
A liar (doesn’t) speak
Here is a recording of the Mike Daisey silences in last week’s retraction of his story telling on This American Life.
Does someone who told the truth have such difficulty responding to questions?
(via The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century)
Related articles
- Mike Daisey’s “Truthiness” (blogs.sfweekly.com)
The real Foxconn
Tim Culpan, writing for Bloomberg, has posted a detailed article describing a decade of efforts investigating Foxconn in China. He calls for a discussion about the reality, which he has seen and reported on personally.
In general, he believes that the workers at Foxconn want to be there, are not underage, and actually want more overtime, not less. Real the entire article.
Here is a taste:
Mike Daisey claimed to have come across 12-year-old workers, armed guards, crippled factory operators. We saw none of that. And we did try to find them. Nothing would have been more compelling for us and our story than to have a chat with a preteen factory operator about how she enjoyed (or not) working 12-hour shifts making iPads. We didn’t get such an anecdote.In our reporting, as “Inside Foxconn” detailed, we found a group of workers who have complaints, but complaints not starkly different from those of workers in any other company. The biggest gripe, which surprised us somewhat, is that they don’t get enough overtime. They wanted to work more, to get more money.* * *Rather than forced labor and sweatshop conditions, workers told of homesickness and the desire to earn more money-two impulses that seemed to drive each other for workers planning to go home once they’d earned enough. The homesickness had been alleviated, somewhat, by more Foxconn-led extra-curricular activities, with one worker elated to share that “now I have a girlfriend.” And the drive for money satiated, somewhat, by a large pay raise a few months prior.
Related articles
- Foxconn: Media not going ‘far enough’ in Daisey controversy (electronista.com)
Three million new iPads
Apple announced today that it has sold 3 million new iPads, a record launch for the iPad line.
Oh, and by the way, Apple closed over $600 today for the first time.
Disclosure: I am long AAPL.
Apple’s cash
Apple has announced a conference call this morning at 9am to discuss the decisions it has made regarding its nearly $100 billion cash hoard. No hint in the announcement on what it will do. Could be a dividend. Could be a plan to take the company private. Could be an acquisition. Time Warner? Dropbox? Amazon? Comcast? Verizon? Who knows? Or will the announcement be a statement that Apple will keep the cash for now?
Disclosure: I am long AAPL.
Apps for the new iPad
If you have a new iPad, you might want to check out this directory (iTunes link) of applications that take full advantage of the new HD iPad display.
Smartphone satisfaction survey
Which smartphone won JD Power’s semi-annual survey of smartphone satisfaction for the seventh consecutive time? Guess.
Fabricated claims against Apple and its suppliers (updated x5)
One of my favorite radio programs, This American Life, has retracted a previous show highly critical of the manufacturing done in China by Apple’s suppliers. The show was based on a show written and performed by Mike Daisey, who is critical of Apple. The show was the most popular online episode in TAL history, with 888,000 downloads and 206,000 streams. And it is also the most popular podcast ever downloaded in iTunes.
From a statement posted on the This American Life website by Ira Glass:
I have difficult news. We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China – which we broadcast in January – contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth. This is not a story we commissioned. It was an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s acclaimed one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” in which he talks about visiting a factory in China that makes iPhones and other Apple products.
The China correspondent for the public radio show Marketplace tracked down the interpreter that Daisey hired when he visited Shenzhen China. The interpreter disputed much of what Daisey has been saying on stage and on our show. On this week’s episode of This American Life, we will devote the entire hour to detailing the errors in “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory.”
Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast. That doesn’t excuse the fact that we never should’ve put this on the air. In the end, this was our mistake.
The full statement is worth a read and I assume that this week’s episode will be important to listen to. The seriousness with which This American Life is dealing with this discovery shows real integrity on the part of Ira Glass.
Daisey’s response, which seems to admit that what he says is not always factually acccurate:
I stand by my work. My show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity.
This sounds more like an admission of falsehood than a claim of truth.
Update: Here is the story from Marketplace, the PRI program that discovered the truth.
Update 2: Scrambling for the exits in an undignified manner: here. And here is the New Times’ explanation to the Wall Street Journal:
On Friday afternoon, the New York Times removed a paragraph from an opinion piece Mr. Daisey had written for the paper’s website. The paragraph recounted a story from Mr. Daisey’s monologue, in which he met a man with a hand “permanently curled into a claw”—an account that “This American Life” said was also false.
“We asked him questions and talked about his travel. We took him at his word,” said Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy. The Times, which had separately published a series of its own articles about Apple’s factories, said it stood by those. “We do something very different. Our standard is a journalistic one.”
Update 3: From the original This American Life program transcript Ira Glass says:
When I saw Mike Daisey perform this story on stage, when I left the theater I had a lot of questions. I mean, he’s not a reporter, and I wondered, did he get it right? And so we’ve actually spent a few weeks checking everything that he says in his show.
So much for checking. Marketplace did the real checking.
Update 4: Whatever the truth, customers continue to flock to iPads with today’s launch.
Update 5: This is what the New York Times says about an op-ed penned by Daisey that it published on October 6, 2011, the day after Steve Jobs died.
Questions have been raised about the truth of a paragraph in the original version of this article that purported to talk about conditions at Apple’s factory in China. That paragraph has been removed from this version of the article.
“Questions have been raised”? No questions have not been raised, Mike Daisey has admitted he lied for dramatic effect. Whenever the New York Times lapses into the passive tense, you know they are backtracking yet refuse to acknowledge the truth. The fact is that questions have not been raised. Rather, falsehoods have been discovered.
Related articles
- This American Life retracts Apple/Foxconn story (kottke.org)
- Whoopsie Daisey: NPR This American Life episode on Foxconn’s iPad factories ‘partially fabricated,’ retracted (tuaw.com)
- Is Mike Daisey a fraud? Why yes, yes he is (edibleapple.com)
- NPR: Mike Daisey’s theatrical piece on Foxconn workers’ plight is mostly theatrics (9to5mac.com)
- “This American Life” says report on Apple labor “partially fabricated” (gigaom.com)
- This American Life Retracts Mike Daisey’s Piece On Foxconn For “Significant Fabrications” (techcrunch.com)
- Mike Daisey: Another Low Down Lying Rotten Dirty Scoundrel (zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com)
Reviews for the new iPad
The new iPad is released tomorrow, Friday. And the embargo on full reviews of the product those testing it seems to have lifted. Here is a sampling:
… because the new iPad looks largely the same at the iPad 2 from an industrial design perspective, many were lulled into believing that Apple was getting complacent. Let me be clear: the new iPad is a huge technological leap forward. It has by far the best screen I’ve ever seen anywhere and it’s something I can hold in my hand and touch and use for 10 hours at a time.
Remember a few years ago when everyone was using CRT monitors with resolutions of 800-by-600? They needed to be plugged in and to sit on a desk with plenty of room behind it. And they weighed upwards of 30 pounds. Think about that when you hold this new iPad.
And think about the days — again, just a few years ago — when most people connected to the Internet via dial-up connections. Speeds were 14.4 kbps or 56 kbps and required a phone landline. This new iPad will connect to the Internet all over the United States at speeds faster than my current broadband connection. And it can do that for about 9 hours without being recharged.
Technology is amazing, and this new iPad is amazing. Also amazing: the only company competing with Apple right now in this particular space is Apple.
Apple’s iPad could be described as a personal display through which you see and manipulate text, graphics, photos and videos often delivered via the Internet. So, how has the company chosen to improve its wildly popular tablet? By making that display dramatically better and making the delivery of content dramatically faster.
There are other changes in the new, third-generation iPad — called simply “iPad,” with no number, which goes on sale on Friday at the same base price as its predecessor, $499. But the key upgrades are to those core features — the 9.7-inch screen and the data speed over cellular networks. These upgrades are massive. Using the new display is like getting a new eyeglasses prescription — you suddenly realize what you thought looked sharp before wasn’t nearly as sharp as it could be.
The Verge has a written review and a video review:
Butt-Head Astronomer
Check out this letter from a new (at least to me) website called Letters of Note. I had heard this story before, but in a slightly different context. Do note that Steve Jobs was not at Apple at the time this occurred.
Tech quote of the day
Q: What are your goals when setting out to build a new product?
A: Our goals are very simple – to design and make better products. If we can’t make something that is better, we won’t do it.
Q: Why has Apple’s competition struggled to do that?
A: That’s quite unusual, most of our competitors are interesting [sic] in doing something different, or want to appear new – I think those are completely the wrong goals. A product has to be genuinely better. This requires real discipline, and that’s what drives us – a sincere, genuine appetite to do something that is better. Committees just don’t work, and it’s not about price, schedule or a bizarre marketing goal to appear different – they are corporate goals with scant regard for people who use the product.
– Sir Jonathan Ive, Senior Vice President, Industrial Design at Apple, in an interview at the London Evening Standard.
Off the charts
Statement from Apple, Inc.:
Customer response to the new iPad has been off the charts and the quantity available for pre-order has been purchased. Customers can continue to order online and receive an estimated delivery date.
Disclosure: I am long AAPL.
iPhoto for iOS
I have been playing around with the new iPhoto for iOS app for a couple of days now. It is very, very powerful and yet easy to use. Note: it does not run on the original iPad.
Ars Technica has a thorough review here. Excerpt:
The app has a lot more photo tweaking capability than you might expect from first blush, including fully non-destructive editing that can be selectively undone. It also improves a bit on the standard Photos app’s organization, and greatly enhances sharing options. More importantly, for $4.99 you get a photo editing tool that can, in many ways, out-Photoshop Adobe’s own Photoshop Touch.
Related articles
- Hands-on with iPhoto for iOS (tuaw.com)
- How to beam photos using the iPhoto app (geek.com)
Media nirvana? (updated)
The new iPad (3rd generation) was launched this week at one of Apple’s always-effective marketing events. The new iPad looks great, has some powerful improvements, and will attract huge sales. But the new iPad hardware and software is only a part of Apple’s plan for 2012.
The last words spoken by Tim Cook at the launch event were as follows:
Only Apple could deliver this kind of innovation, in such a beautiful, integrated, and easy-to-use way. It’s what we love to do. It’s what we stand for. And across the year, you’re going to see a lot more of this kind of innovation. We are just getting started.
I take Tim Cook at his word when he says Apple is just getting started. The rest of the plan will be executed by early fall. Apple will roll-out iOS 6 (already in field testing) and Mountain Lion (available to developers now). iCloud will be improved and stabilized by then as well. Read the Tim Cook quotation above once more and you can see that all of these developments clearly are headed in one direction: complete, elegant, and easy to use integration of all Apple hardware devices, including computers, iPad (and iPad’s most important accessory, Apple TV), and iPhone.
Apple is building the integration one piece at a time. An example of the integration already completed is iPhoto for the iPad. Coupled with the iPad hardware, iPhoto is a sleek touch-based application for creating beautiful photos using powerful effects and easily sharing them via photo presentations (called Photo Journals) that display the photos and related data and which are shared with friends via iCloud with the touch of a button.
Further evidence is the newly added ability to re-download movies previously purchased in the iTunes store that Apple rolled out Wednesday. It is actually not completely rolled out because two movie studios (20th Century Fox and Universal Pictures) are not yet included in this feature. But you can bet they will be soon. And the goal here is to allow customers to purchase movies once and access them anywhere anytime forever without having to manage where the data is stored or how to back up the media. Nice.
But gaps in complete integration remain. An example is today’s absence of AirPlay on Macs. AirPlay (coupled with iCloud) is and will be the core feature that actually provides the integration and it must be on all Apple devices to complete the process. And, sure enough, a key feature of this summer’s Mountain Lion release is that it will add AirPlay to the Mac, eliminating this critical gap in the overall integration plan.
All of this integration and software development is, I think, the foundation for an even bigger breakthrough for Apple. Apple’s goal is to deliver to customers, by the end of this calendar year, an always-available media stream including TV, movies, music, and books. Customers will be able to purchase media once and access it anywhere anytime on any (Apple) screen they own without having to manage where the data is stored or how to back up the media. Imagine being able to tell Siri to show Hugo on the TV in the den for the kids, and the Red Wings hockey game on the TV in the living room for dad and his friends. No remote control, no TV channel searching, just speak your wish. And customers will be able to create, edit and publish their own media as well from any device, anywhere.
I believe that this effort will be huge a success for Apple this year, even though it won’t be completed immediately. Apple’s huge cash hoard will allow it to succeed in getting the media deals it will need, once all the Apple technology is in place and deployed. And Apple is the poster child of disruptive businesses. Finally, I think that only Apple has the financial and technical chops to pull something like this off. Simple, elegant software that “just works” is the key and no company on earth does that as well as Apple.
And that is what Tim Cook was saying at the iPad launch event this week.
2012 might be a bad year on the Mayan calendar. But 2012 will be a huge year for Apple.
Update: According to the Wall Street Journal, Fox and Universal movies will be made available shortly in iCloud due to agreements, in process but likely to occur, with HBO. It seems that things are beginning to fall into place.
Disclosure: I am long AAPL.
The new iPad
If you read nothing else about Apple and the new iPad today, read this.
Disclosure: I am long AAPL.