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Reality Absorption Field: The iPad triple
General: Conan! What is best in life? Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women. --Conan the Barbarian, 1982 A key reason for Apple's success has been that it has been more concerned with the customer experience than in trying to jostle for competitive position per se. Nonetheless, it has been striking to see how many of Apple's strongest PC competitors from its dark days have been struggling so mightily as of late. The Compaq and Gateway brands are all but gone after being swallowed up years ago by HP and Acer. Dell, with which Apple has had a particularly nasty history, has left the public market. And Microsoft is reeling from dwindling PC sales and a painful transition to a touch-enabled Windows. Only Lenovo seems to have much momentum. The iPod had a huge impact on the music industry, but it wasn't much of a factor for most device companies. (An exception was Sony, which had owned the portable music franchise with Walkman.) As Reality Absorption Field described in detail, many of the companies that entered the digital media player market had much more significant businesses in PCs or TVs and weren't threatened by Apple's little white toy. The iPhone -- while far more devastating to Apple's competitors -- was quite straightforward. After years of denying its relevance, companies such as RIM and Nokia scrambled to device responses to the iPhone, leaving them with OS options that represented a small slice of the market. Other feature phone giants such as Motorola and LG now have a sliver of the Android market, as does HTC. All have been massively outspent in marketing by Samsung, the only feature phone-era handset maker (and really only other handset maker besides Apple) to flourish since the iPhone's launch. The iPad, though, has had a profound albeit less direct effect on the PC industry, and one in which Apple has had an unlikely accomplice: Android. As one would expect, Apple's pricing on the iPad Air and iPad mini are at or near the top of the range for their size. They have kept a healthy distance from the Mac, but have cut more deeply into the price range of Windows notebooks. As was shown during the netbook era, PC makers can -- at least for a short time -- tolerate going even lower, but Android tablets have wiped out all chance of that. Walmart now offers 7" tablets running Ice Cream Sandwich for $69 (or less). Tablets may not be able to do everything people want a PC can do yet. For one, some people aren't ready to give up the keyboard and would rather not fiddle around with Bluetooth. Since early 2011, ASUS -- which retreated from Windows RT -- has offered its Transformer series of Android tablets that tuck neatly into docking keyboards. Now, the idea is being adopted by PC stalwarts such as HP with its Slatebook X2 and Lenovo with its IdeaPad A10 using a hinge inspired by its Yoga Windows products that won't be offered in North America. How long will it be, though, before we see the idea knocked off by low-balling brands at Walmart? There are already snap-on Bluetooth keyboard covers for the 7" Galaxy Tab and Nexus 7 that cost about $25. PC makers are flailing. The Windows 8.1 experience on x86 remains fractured. Windows RT lacks key apps. Both are profit-protecting paradises compared with Android. Then there are Chromebooks, which offer a clean, simple and streamlined Web experience as long as you're online. Cut off connectivity, and different services can behave quite differently. Are Apple's competitors "confused" as Tim Cook asserts? Maybe they have a sense of where they want to go, but the path that they're on now is proving a bumpy road. Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research, a research and advisory firm focusing on consumer technology adoption. He shares commentary at Techspressive and on Twitter at @rossrubin.
Reality Absorption Field: Peering into the crystal apple
photo by carl.lacey2 | flickr Should auld iQuaintance be forgot and never brought to mind? Last year was a landmark year for Apple that saw significant leadership changes. Tim Cook has committed to preserve Apple's culture and seems committed to many of its fundamental tenets -- high-quality products, owning the customer experience, product secrecy and innovation that matters to the mainstream. But Cook has also vowed not to run a museum and has noted Steve Jobs' urging to do what is right and and not what the legendary Apple co-founder would have done. As we head into 2013, there are three classes of predictions one can make about the company and its products. Playing it safe The new year will almost certainly see revisions to OS X and iOS. Facing competition against a relaunched Google Maps on iOS, Apple Maps will see meaningful improvements. There will be a new iPhone even if it continues Apple's emerging pattern of sticking with a case design through one revision. And while one can debate the merits of a spring versus fall launch for the next iPad, it's all but certain that it will appear sometime within 2013 along with at least one more go-round for the iPod line. We also know that the first Macs to be made in the USA in many years are coming soon, presumably in 2013 -- and potentially in Apple's small form-factor desktop if the latest round of rumors prove true. Going out on a limb As one digs down a layer of specificity, there are a few areas that seem like reasonable extensions of current trends. Many believe we'll see an iPad mini appearing with a Retina Display and NFC may come to the iPhone or the whole Apple product line. As one arrives at the airport from which to board a flight of fancy, of course, there is that old Apple television set trope, so breathlessly anticipated that Tim Cook's mere repetition that it is an area of keen interest sets the rumor mill into overdrive. Connected to any discussion of an Apple television set is that the company would package up a television service to compete with cable or, alternatively, partner with leading pay TV providers much as did with cellular carriers for the iPhone. And as long as you're dipping into new subscription or freemium Apple services, there's the Pandora-like radio service rumor. Once, having an operating system provider offer pay TV seemed far-flung, but Google is now doing just that in Kansas City, and Nokia seems to have finally found a viable way to differentiate its music experience with Nokia Music. Then there's the even more far-flung notion that Apple might mash up the MacBook and iPad in strange ways such as an ARM-based MacBook, a touchscreen MacBook, or (if one purchases a first-class ticket on the flight of fancy) a Surfacesque keyboard-equipped iPad. The unexpected One way Apple could certainly benefit from all these rumors is if they all serve as a smokescreen for something completely out of left field. It is hard to believe that the iPad was introduced only in the beginning of 2010. Of course, prior to that, the iPhone was introduced in 2007 and the iPod in 2001. It may be a little early for a brand new product line from Apple. On the other hand, the company is investing more in R&D than ever. If Apple doesn't surprise and delight customers with a new product category in 2013, customers wil be counting on it to find other ways to do so. ---- Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Opinions expressed in Reality Absorption Field are his own.
Tim Cook: my first-person impression of Apple's new CEO
After yesterday's news, I was originally going to title this post "Relax. Apple's new CEO Tim Cook is gonna do just fine." I was going to push back on the conventional wisdom that nobody can lead Apple as Steve Jobs has with facts about how Tim Cook has stepped in multiple times to help Apple navigate the roughest economy in at least a generation with stunning success. I was going to write about how Tim Cook is considered by many to be an operational genius and a fair but tough negotiator. I was going to write how he came from Compaq and IBM before that. I was going to write about all that. But you can read his history anywhere. Everyone is writing about him now. So instead I'm going to tell you about the first time I met Tim Cook and why, from that day forward, I have never once worried about Apple post-Steve Jobs. I was in my third year of a five year stint with Apple the first time I met Tim Cook. Steve Jobs had made waves earlier that year with his Stanford commencement speech, where he discussed his cancer diagnosis; Wall Street and the tech industry were still worried sick about who could possibly lead Apple when Jobs no longer could. I knew one thing for sure: it wasn't me. In the grand scheme of things at Apple, I was nobody important. I was just a sales guy that had flown out to Cupertino with other sales people one September for the annual sales conference. And though my numbers were great, I knew that I was replaceable -- just like most employees at large companies can be replaced. I could leave Apple tomorrow and the company would be just fine. I was no Steve Jobs. No matter what your position is in the company, however, from intern to executive staff, it's always great being on Apple's campus. You see cool things, meet interesting people, and have some great food (and a few good games of volleyball) to boot. But on this particular day we were herded into one of the meeting rooms you sometimes see when Apple holds smaller press events on the campus -- the auditoriums with the projector screen the size of one you'd see in a 1950s movie theater and a stage with a small podium with some metallic stools near the front. On this day there were about 300 sales guys and their managers in one such auditorium watching presentations from the iLife project managers about what the latest iteration of Apple's digital lifestyle suite was going to deliver. Though the presentations were interesting, you could see everyone in the room fidgeting a little as if they were restless. You see, we had been notified that Steve Jobs' #2 man, COO Tim Cook, might be dropping by for a visit. The day went on as we explored the new iLife suite; then, sometime halfway through the iDVD presentation, a woman who worked for Apple who I had never seen before entered the auditorium and simply announced, "Excuse me. Three minutes!" There was a shuffling on stage and the project managers halted their presentation as a murmur ran through the room. The woman who had spoken loaded something from a USB drive onto the Mac behind the podium. Three minutes later (to the second) Tim Cook entered the auditorium, flanked by his entourage. Cook walked down the steps and onto the stage. The room was completely silent. And it remained that way for maybe half a minute as Tim Cook slowly took a few steps back and forth. He shuffled the presentation remote around in his hand. He looked out at us and smiled, but still didn't speak. Then he clicked a button on the remote and a large image of a padlock appeared on the screen behind him. "The details of everything we talk about after this slide changes stay in this room," he said in that Southern drawl some of you may be familiar with if you've ever heard him speak on one of Apple's financial conference calls. At the time I had never heard his voice before, and it was such an odd contrast to what you expected to come out of a Silicon Valley executive's mouth. "It stays with Apple. With us," he said. It wasn't a threat. It wasn't an order. The "us" he spoke of, the tone he used, conveyed a sense of kinship. It showed the confidence and trust he had in every single Apple employee packed into that auditorium. We were Apple and Tim Cook appreciated us for that. Even though it's been five years since I worked at Apple and my NDA has long since expired, I'm not going to divulge the specific details he talked about, but I do want to relate the experience. During his time on stage, Cook spoke to us about numbers and metrics, about Apple and the state of the tech industry as a whole. He spoke in that long drawl at a controlled pace, but that drawl and pace had nuance to it that conveyed passion in slow tones. Then Steve Job's #2 guy did something many corporate higher-ups never do. He stopped speaking and asked to hear from us -- from the front-line sales people at Apple. He wanted to hear our questions and ideas. And that's when I found myself raising my hand and the next thing I know Tim Cook pointed at me and smiled. "Yes. You, please," he said. And as I was getting ready to speak I caught my boss out of the corner of my eye. He was sitting about five seats away from me in the auditorium and wore a nervous look on his face. And I knew that if he could have spoken to me in confidence then, my boss would have muttered, "Don't you ask him a foolish question! Don't you know who this is? He doesn't have time for silliness! He is a Very Important Person!" I ignored my boss's look as much as I could and asked Cook what he thought about the direction of a certain software company whose products were closely tied to the Mac; about their lack of support for certain applications Mac users were clamoring to have. Cook's answer was detailed and thorough, and everything he said about the company in question, every prediction and outlook, ended up coming true in the two years that followed. But the fact that he was dead right about the future of that company wasn't why I remember his answer to my question so well. It was because he took his own sweet time answering it. Tim Cook is one of those rare people who stop and think before speaking. Standing in the same room with him I realized that he's comfortable with silence as long as that silence is productive and appropriate. He's not like other tech execs who ramble almost immediately and incoherently at any question lobbed at them, as if doing so will convince others they know everything about everything. Tim Cook is a person who has confidence in his position as a leader, sans ego. Ego doesn't take pauses. It's rapid-fire. And it's that confidence and lack of ego that allows him the time to examine the issues and questions at hand, no matter how lowly or silly others may think them, and address them appropriately. But Cook's confidence, his answer to my question, and his knowledge about the industry isn't why I left the auditorium that day pitying the people on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley who were needlessly worried sick over who would lead Apple. I left the auditorium that day knowing the post-Steve Jobs Apple would be fine because of the way in which he addressed me -- the sales grunt. My boss's worried glances were for nothing. For Tim Cook there are no dumb questions. When he answered me he spoke to me as if I were the most important person at Apple. Indeed, he addressed me as if I were Steve Jobs himself. I know that's a big statement to make, but that's what it felt like and I've spoken with others who have told me the same thing. One just has to experience it to fully understand it, I suppose. His look, his tone, the long pause was evidence enough that he genuinely gave thought to the concern I brought up. And that's the day I began to feel like more than just a replaceable part. I was one of the tens of thousands of integral parts of Apple and it was Tim Cook's raw leadership ability, confidence, and subtle charisma that made me realize that. No one can ever replace Steve Jobs, the man, the genius. But Apple is not only Steve Jobs, no matter what anyone thinks. Apple is the interns and executive assistants; it's the retail employees and the designers; it's the marketing and PR departments, it's Scott Forstall and Jonathan Ive; Bob Mansfield and Phil Schiller; it's the dozens of other names you see on all those Apple patents that we talk about every week. Apple is not any single one of these people. It is the sum of them all, run by a leader who possesses enough wisdom to know that everyone in the company matters, that everyone's concerns are valid and deserve attention. Tim Cook is such a leader. So relax everyone, will ya? I said it yesterday, but I'll repeat it again. Apple is one of the best-run companies on the planet and it's got years of growth ahead of it due to the incredible talent assembled by Jobs and Cook. People are not going to stop buying iPads and iPhones because Steve Jobs is now only the Chairman of Apple and not its CEO. And other companies are not going to suddenly make killer products that make Apple's look like last year's castoffs. Tim Cook has the reins firmly in hand; I only wish others who doubt me could spend two minutes in the same room with him. Apple's got the right CEO to carry it into the post-Steve Jobs era, and the company will continue to thrive.
Publishers' choice: Will the iPad be the hero or villain of the comic book industry?
Music piracy rose to epidemic levels at the beginning of the 2000s (although, according to Wired, those days are now over). There were many causes of this growth in piracy -- high speed internet access, easy-to-use P2P software -- but perhaps the biggest accelerator of music piracy was two-fold: the emergence of devices that allowed us to easily copy and then consume music (namely CD-burners, and then MP3 players) away from the computers we downloaded them on, and the reluctance of the record industry to embrace new technology. In other words, once people had the hardware for consuming digital music, the record industry failed to give listeners the digital music they wanted at a reasonable price and in an easy-to-access centralized location. The same factors that lead to mass music piracy are now in place to disrupt another flavor of media -- comic books. The excitement and media attention around Free Comic Book Day yesterday shouldn't deceive anybody about the fact that there's trouble around the corner. Why is the comic book industry set for a piracy tipping point? After all, people have been able to illegally download comic books on the Web for years. Why should it suddenly accelerate? One factor: the iPad. Before the launch of the iPad, people who illegally download comic books read them on their computers -- compared to a printed comic book, a decidedly inferior experience. However, with the advent of the iPad and the tablet form factor that closely mimics a comic book, Apple's tablet is liberating illegal comic book downloads from the computer monitor and allowing them to be consumed in a much more appealing and natural way. I first noticed this last year when I was talking to a friend who was complaining that his local comic shop was out of a specific issue of a comic book he wanted. I suggested to him that he buy it through Marvel's iPad app. However, Marvel's app didn't offer the issue in question. That's when another friend asked what issue the first friend wanted. The next day, friend #2 emailed him a CBR (Comic Book Archive) file containing a pirated copy of not only that issue, but every Marvel comic that shipped that week.
Ken Jennings talks about losing to Watson, being human after all
In a piece for Slate titled "My Puny Human Brain," former-Jeopardy-greatest Ken Jennings talks briefly through his experience playing against IBM's Watson. If you were hoping for some sour grapes, you won't find it here, but Ken gives a great insight into what it feels like to be an underdog human up against a PR darling supercomputer. "Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It's very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman." Ken wraps it up on an uplifting, humans-are-going-to-be-alright-after-all note, and we seem to have something in our eye...
Today is just another day I will forget
When Apple teased "Tomorrow is just another day. That you'll never forget" on their home page yesterday I hoped it was going to be something really cool -- like cloud-based iTunes or a subscription iTunes service. When the news began to leak out that the event was the Beatles coming to iTunes finally it was cool, but a day I'll never forget? Nope. Don't get me wrong, it's great to finally have the Beatles on iTunes, but Apple, lets keep this in check. For $149 and the click of a button it's nice to get all of the Beatles tracks from iTunes if I want them, but most Beatles fans had the band's entire discography ripped when MP3s started going mainstream back in 2001. Heck, hardcore fans probably had their tracks encoded at such high levels in Ogg Vorbis or FLAC that they needed a separate hard drive just to contain their Beatles tunes (and if they don't yet, Amazon will help them out -- today they lowered their Beatles Stereo Box Set to only $129). Seven years ago a Beatles/iTunes announcement might have earned the "never forget" slogan, but not today in 2010. And while it's only been three hours since the release, the iTunes Store music charts confirms that this isn't the earth-shattering news it was made out to be. Not one Beatles song has cracked the Top 10 list yet, while a new song from Katy Perry or the Black Eyed Peas usually shoots up the charts within minutes of being released -- and without taking up 40% of the real estate on the iTunes Music Store homepage or the front page of Apple.com like the Fab Four has. I also want to point out that for all the hoopla over today's "event" one thing that could have made it somewhat memorable is a Beatles-branded iPod touch. If a band-branded iPod is good enough for some guys from Dublin, surely a group of four lads from Liverpool deserve one too. Beatles: glad to have you on iTunes. Apple: I've already forgotten something you said I wouldn't. Wish I could remember what it was...
