Company / division: Apple
Traditional PC Market Was Up Slightly, Recording Its First Growth In Five Years as HP Recovered the Top Position – IDC (Apr 11, 2017)
This is an impressive rebound for the traditional PC market, which IDC had expected to continue to decline in Q1 but actually grew for the first time since 2012. One of the explanations, though is higher shipments that didn’t necessarily translate into sales, as companies locked in component inventories, so it’s not strictly speaking sales growth. However, it’s worth watching for whether this turns into a longer-term recovery for PC sales or just a temporary blip – my money is still on a long-term decline. When it comes to the individual vendors, Lenovo appears to be struggling despite a pretty decent recent history in PCs, which will further add to its woes given the collapse of its smartphone business over the last year or so. HP did very well, at least on paper, and it will be interesting to watch its next earnings release for signs of what drove the 13% growth it saw. Apple also seems to have done well, continuing the recovery it’s seen since launching new MacBook Pro models late last year. The other big story continues to be the decline of the “other” category as the top five or six vendors continue to scoop up more and more market share and growth, dooming the rest to declines much more severe than the market as a whole.
via IDC
Apple Said to be Working on its Own Power Chips – Bloomberg (Apr 11, 2017)
Apple is apparently working on its own power-chip technology, and has hired 80 people in this area, according to a financial analyst firm’s report. Even that report says that Apple won’t be ready to make its own before 2019, and yet its current primary supplier Dialog has seen its stock drop significantly today as a result of this story. On top of last week’s Imagination Technologies news (and arguably the ongoing Qualcomm lawsuit too) it’s easy to draw the conclusion that being a supplier to Apple is tough. I’m sure that wouldn’t be news to any of Apple’s existing suppliers, who have always been pushed hard and squeezed for margins, but I’m also sure no company would turn down the opportunity to be part of Apple’s supply chain over these worries. However, these recent events certainly suggest that customer diversity is warranted for those serving Apple, because it has a stated intention of controlling the key elements of its technology stack, and that trend only goes one way over time.
via Bloomberg
Qualcomm Files Response to Apple Lawsuit (Apr 11, 2017)
Qualcomm has now officially filed a response to Apple’s lawsuit over anticompetitive practices and breach of contract, including both answers to the specific allegations in the suit and a number of counter-claims. One of the main counterclaims is that, by “inducing” regulators to look into Qualcomm, Apple breached the companies’ “Cooperation agreement” and therefore was no longer entitled to certain payments it had received previously. The document further alleges that Apple made many false statements in the course of both its own suit and the discussions it had with regulators, and tried to insert itself into relationships between Qualcomm and other Apple suppliers. Perhaps most interestingly, Qualcomm brings to light something which was covered in the press at the time but didn’t get much attention: the allegation that Apple deliberately hamstrung the Qualcomm chips in the iPhone 7 such that performance would be consistent with those models that had Intel modems, and then prevented Qualcomm from talking about it. On the face of it, that allegation has nothing to do with the broader allegations, but it’s an area where Apple’s public reputation could be vulnerable, and I’m guessing it’s been included in the suit to garner more attention than Qualcomm would get through focusing on the patent and other issues alone.
via Qualcomm (full document here (PDF))
Jay-Z quietly removes catalog from Apple Music and Spotify as Tidal continues fight for exclusives – 9to5Mac (Apr 7, 2017)
Jay-Z, one of the owners of the Tidal music service, has apparently pulled all his solo music from both Apple Music and Spotify, though without any kind of official explanation or much fanfare. In theory, it’s likely that he’s trying to reinforce one of the original value propositions of Tidal, which was that its artist-owners would provide exclusives for their music, though in practice most of the owners have continued to license their music to other streaming services, which have far bigger subscriber bases. Tidal has struggled financially, and recently got something of a lifeline from Sprint, but it may have decided that it needs more exclusives to drive interest and subscriber numbers. I’m not convinced it’s going to do all that well on that basis given that the vast majority of the global music catalogue is still available on other services, but this is yet another sign that exclusives – whether temporary or long-term – are one of the few sources of differentiation to streaming music services, whether or not that’s good for their subscribers.
via 9to5Mac
For The First Time, Apple Drops Below Microsoft In J.D. Power’s Tablet Survey – Fast Company (Apr 7, 2017)
This is symbolically hugely important, because these are just the kind of stats that Apple likes to roll out on earnings calls and so on to highlights the strength of its products, far more so than market share or other statistics (though it often focused on percentage satisfaction rather than rankings per se). As the article makes clear, though, even though this is the first time Apple has dropped behind Microsoft, it’s not the first time it’s been beaten, as Samsung did so earlier. As is often the case with these rankings, you end up wishing the data were a little more transparent. For example, Microsoft apparently beat the iPad on Internet connectivity despite the fact that iPads offer 4G LTE as well as WiFi, which makes me wonder to what extent the ratings reflect the expectations people have of particular brands. In other words, are people pleasantly surprised that the Surface does certain things well, whereas others would expect the iPad to do those things well and therefore give it lower scores? Adjusting for those expectations would be tough, and I doubt JD Power does so. I also wonder to what extent Surface owners self-select into a much more narrow set of use cases for which the Surface is uniquely well suited, whereas the iPad is more of a general purpose device used by a far wider range of use cases, not all of which by definition it’s designed for. At any rate, it’s worth keeping an eye on this over time. Some of the other commentary in the article here is a little overblown – one thing is for certain: iPads massively outsell Surface computers of all shapes and sizes, so any idea that Surfaces are somehow displacing iPads in large numbers is nonsense.
via Fast Company
Apple’s Clips app offers promising & fun editing features, but confusing & difficult UI – 9to5Mac (Apr 6, 2017)
Apple announced the Clips app a couple of weeks ago along with the new iPad and other announcements, and when I commented on that announcement I said the proof would be in the pudding with regard to how well the app performed. We now have reviews (and the app itself is out now too), and it looks like a bit of a mixed bag. The app looks clever, with some nifty new features, but it looks like it may suffer from the same problem as some other Cook-era Apple product releases, in that it seems like it may try to do too much, and therefore can be confusing to use. Here, as with the Apple Watch, Apple Music, and other recent efforts from Apple, it looks like it may have been better served by starting simpler and adding functionality over time. The real test will be whether we start seeing Clips-generated videos showing up in a big way on Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook, because since this app lacks its own social features the output needs to be shared elsewhere. I still suspect, as I said in my first comment, that this is a better fit for the older Facebook generations than the Snapchat and Instagram generation, but we’ll see.
via 9to5Mac
Australian regulator sues Apple alleging iPhone ‘bricking’ – Reuters (Apr 6, 2017)
This piece is sadly short on details and on comment from Apple, so we have to read between the lines a little bit to see what’s happening here. My guess is that this lawsuit from the Australian competition commission concerns Apple’s practice of disabling phones which have had their screens tampered with when that process involves the Touch ID sensor and its associated secure enclave. Apple does this in order to preserve the security of that system, but to an end user or repair shop it just looks like Apple is trying to keep the repair business to itself. Some US states have been pushing right-to-repair laws to deal with this kind of situation, and Apple has been pushing back, arguing that there are security issues at stake. The problem is that Apple often charges a lot more for either AppleCare or the repair itself than third parties, so the optics are bad even if the reasoning is sound. I suspect Apple is going to be dealing with a lot more of this kind of thing, and this Australian case will be an important test of how effectively Apple is able to fight its corner.
via Reuters
Apple fans, Android world scramble to patch Broadcom’s nasty drive-by Wi-Fi security hole – The Register (Apr 6, 2017)
There are two interesting things here, both worth discussing briefly. Firstly, Broadcom, which provides chips for many popular smartphones including the iPhone, has a vulnerability in its WiFi element which can be hacked, allowing a way into the device. Apple issued a patch this week to deal with the issue, and Android vendors will be working to close the vulnerability too, though there’s no specific timeframe yet, highlighting yet another challenge with Android’s fragmented ecosystem. The second thing that’s interesting here is that the vulnerability was discovered by Google’s Project Zero team, which is set up to discover and fix vulnerabilities like this, and has been doing great work lately doing just that, including on non-Google devices like the iPhone. Vulnerabilities like this are always worrying, and it’s great to have Google out there with what seems like a strong team detecting these and notifying vulnerable vendors so they can patch the issues.
via The Register
Apple Pay Promised to Make Plastic Obsolete. Then Came Wary Shoppers, Confused Clerks – WSJ (Apr 5, 2017)
It’s been clear from the very beginning that Apple Pay was only going to get so far as long as most retailers didn’t support the technology. Mobile payments are a tough habit to get going when it only works occasionally, and when there’s significant uncertainty about whether it will work at a given retailer, and both are certainly the case right now. As such, I would guess that many iPhone owners have either never tried it or tried it once or twice only to stop using it because it’s rarely available as a payment mechanism. Compounding the problem is the fact that, though the EMV liability shift drove adoption of new payment terminals, and many of those terminals have NFC capability, but Apple Pay support is switched off because retailers favor other methods of payment. As such, even the widely-recognized contactless payment symbol present on many terminals is no guarantee of availability. Ultimately, unless acceptance rates at retailers rise considerably, adoption by users it going to continue to be a long, slow slog.
via WSJ
Apple Plans New iMacs for Pros Later in 2017, New Mac Pros in 2018 (Apr 4, 2017)
A few years back, Tim Cook said Apple was doubling down on secrecy, and he’s largely kept to that promise since then, being as secretive as ever about Apple’s future product plans. However, that all changed this week with the announcement of future plans for Apple’s Mac line, an attempt to address vocal dissatisfaction and worry among a small but important community of Mac users. There are several key points here. First, Apple reinforces a point I made a while back, which is that true “pro” users are a small minority of Apple’s Mac base, and those who require Mac Pros are an even smaller minority. These pros are no longer the core constituency of the Mac, which instead is mainstream users. However, they are vocal, and they’re important because they’re disproportionately influential as a result, and Apple has underserved the upper echelon of these pro users, those for whom a maxed-out iMac or aging Mac Pro isn’t enough. This is an unusual concession from Apple that its Mac Pro strategy has been on the wrong track and that it’s boxed itself into a corner (something I’ve suspected for a while), and that it is belatedly trying to get back on the right track, which will take time. On the other hand, those maxed out iMacs and even MacBook Pros are actually enough for many pros – I have several family members who do video editing for a living and they all use iMacs rather than Mac Pros, and I found the MacBook from late last year perfectly adequate for using professional video editing software. But Apple’s statement this week is a sign that it doesn’t want the worrying and griping to go on, and that it needs to both make a more specific commitment to the future of the pro Mac line and to those high-end professional users. That’s a good thing, because it’s a concession that it has made mistakes and will now look to rectify them. This has been one of very few areas where there have been legitimate worries about Apple and its strategy, and fixing this should help to neutralize somewhat the Apple is Doomed narrative.
via Daring Fireball
Veteran Apple Designer Leaving — The Information (Apr 3, 2017)
Christopher Stringer was that rare thing at Apple: someone working in design not named Jony Ive that people had actually heard of and seen speak on Apple’s behalf, mostly because he was a witness in the long-running Samsung-Apple court case. But he was also a veteran at Apple, there for 21 years, and part of the small Industrial Design team which has been a cohesive unit for a long time. Twenty-one years is a long time to be with any company, and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary I’m inclined to ascribe this to someone who’s spent half his career in one place wanting a change of scenery. But of course he’s one of a number of senior Apple people who have left recently, and so it’s easy for a narrative to form here. So far, I’m unconvinced that the recent departures represent anything more than normal turnover among very talented teams in a fairly flat organizational structure, but it’s worth continuing to watch this trend for signs that there’s something more going on.
via The Information
Apple wants to sell HBO, Showtime and Starz in a single bundle – Recode (Apr 3, 2017)
Apple has been reported to be working on some kind of subscription TV service for years now, and yet nothing has ever come to fruition. Meanwhile, Amazon has gone ahead and quietly built a fairly interesting set of TV service components under the Amazon Channels banner. That set of components includes the big premium channels mentioned here (HBO, Showtime, and Starz, as well as Cinemax), but also lots of more niche channels including several targeting particular genres or international content. If Apple wanted to build a similar service, I’m sure the pay TV providers would be amenable, and the big sticking point would probably be pricing for such a bundle: Amazon charges the same rates for the three channels as Apple does on a standalone basis at the moment, with the exception of Showtime ($9/month vs. Apple’s $11/month), but Apple would want to provide some kind of bundle discount. To take a step back for a minute from this specific offer, it’s worth thinking about trends in online video at the moment. Whereas one of the big trends we’ve seen so far is one of disaggregation, with these premium channels and others offering standalone apps and services, people want aggregation, both for the price and convenience benefits of bundling, but also having a single user interface for consuming this TV content. With its new TV app, Apple has such a user interface, and I’d expect it to try to add more and more channels into that interface over time. Beyond Apple, I suspect this kind of aggregation will be a big theme this year across providers.
via Recode
Apple GPU Supplier Imagination Tech Says Apple Plans to Build its Own GPU in 1-2 Years (Apr 3, 2017)
This already feels likely to be one of the biggest news items of the week (incidentally, you can now use the Like button below to vote for this post if you agree – the posts that get the most votes are more likely to be included in my News Roundup Podcast at the end of the week). There have been ongoing reports that Apple would like to build more of its own in-house technology, and GPUs have seemed at least a candidate given that Apple was said for a while to be mulling an acquisition of the company, and has been bringing Imagination Tech employees on board since the deal didn’t go ahead. The GPU obviously has a number of existing applications, but GPU technology has increasingly been used for AI and machine learning, so that’s an obvious future direction, along with Apple’s reported investment in AR. Apple’s ownership of its A-series chips (and increasingly other chips like its M and W series) is a key source of competitive advantage, and the deeper it gets into other chip categories, the more it’s likely to extend that advantage in these areas. This is, of course, also a unique example of Apple making a direct statement about a future strategy (albeit via a third party): as Apple is IMG’s largest customer, it had to disclose the guidance from Apple because it’s so material to its future prospects – the company’s share price has dropped 62% as of when I’m writing this.
App Annie: Android to top iOS in app store revenue this year – TechCrunch (Mar 29, 2017)
This App Annie analysis is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, it’s one of the first times I’ve seen anyone attempt to quantify the whole Android app ecosystem including the third party app stores, which are a factor globally but particularly important in markets like China, where Google Play basically doesn’t exist. That provides a much better view of the whole ecosystem, but of course Google only benefits directly from the part it controls, which is Play. Secondly, though, the forecast that this ecosystem combined will surpass Apple’s app ecosystem by the end of the year is striking because the Android user base has been much larger than the iOS user base for years, and only now is the app ecosystem (on this more inclusive basis) starting to rival Apple’s. That, in turn, is a symptom of just how completely Apple has dominated the premium users within the smartphone market, those who are more likely to pay for content and apps. But all of this is also a great refutation of the idea that apps are somehow dying or about to be replaced with something else – the sheer growth numbers here are astonishing.
via TechCrunch
Apple Extortionists Seemingly Trading Media Exposure for More Accounts – Motherboard (Mar 28, 2017)
This story has been somewhat misreported, although this article does a decent job. It appears a hacking collective is claiming to have lots of username / password sets for iCloud accounts, though it appears that the source of the data is a hack of some other site or sites rather than any of Apple’s own. That breach then seems to have allowed the hackers to take iCloud.com email addresses and the passwords used on other sites and use them to access iCloud services as well. In other words, this isn’t an Apple hack at all, and is only effective because people are reusing passwords on multiple sites. Using two-factor authentication and unique passwords is therefore still the best defense against this kind of thing, although Apple still has to deal with the headache of both false claims and threats from this hacking group.
via Motherboard
Apple just made a historic and risky change to all iPhones — and you probably didn’t even notice – Business Insider (Mar 28, 2017)
Apple this week pushed iOS 10.3 to iPhones and iPads, and although there were various other headline features, the big under-the-hood change was the upgrade from Apple’s historical HFS+ file system to the new Apple File System trailed a while back at WWDC. That this upgrade went off seemingly without a hitch is remarkable given just how disruptive it might have been to devices and the apps that run on them, and given that Apple has had one or two buggy iOS releases in the last couple of years, including one that bricked a lot of phones. I suspect Apple deliberately rolled this update out off the usual big annual schedule because people tend to adopt these point releases more slowly, so that if something did go wrong it could pull it before it did too much damage. But Apple is also benefiting these days from the extensive developer and public beta programs, which get its releases into many more hands (and onto a wider range of devices used for a wider range of tasks), which likely helps iron out some bugs before they ever get to wide release. But it’s arguably been underappreciated this week just how big a change this was and how flawlessly Apple seems to have executed on it. That’s a good counterpoint to some recent suggestions that Apple’s quality control around its software has suffered lately.
via Business Insider
Apple Files its Supplier Responsibility Report for 2016 (Mar 27, 2017)
Apple has filed its Supplier Responsibility Report for last year, and it shows decent progress on several fronts. This BuzzFeed piece ties the report into a broader picture of planned deregulation in this area by the Trump administration, and notes that Apple has both opposed that deregulation and pledged to continue to report on its own efforts even if the regulations go away. Conflict minerals are a complex area of Apple’s supply chain, not least because it doesn’t deal with many of the suppliers directly, but also because many operate in parts of the world which have little regulation or transparency over the conditions under which minerals are mined. But it sounds like Apple is making progress around cobalt, one of the areas in which it was accused of not doing enough last year, and in other areas too.
via BuzzFeed (you might also find this episode of the Beyond Devices Podcast interesting, as we discussed conflict minerals in some depth)
After the London terror attack, a top U.K. official says Facebook needs to open up WhatsApp – Recode (Mar 27, 2017)
This is a worrying (though not altogether unexpected) resurfacing of the arguments from early 2016, when the FBI was trying to get into an iPhone owned by one of the San Bernardino shooters. In this case, UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd (whose role has no direct counterpart in the US, but is responsible for domestic law enforcement and counter-terrorism among many other things) has made calls for WhatsApp to “open up” and specifically referred to encryption. That’s because WhatsApp was allegedly one of the apps used by the terrorist behind last week’s attack in London, though there’s no evidence yet that he used it to plan the attack or coordinate with others. The bigger issue, as with last year’s Apple-FBI fight, is of course that once the government can get in, there’s no guarantee others won’t use the same methods, whether that’s because of hacks like the one that hit Cellebrite a few weeks ago, or exposures of government tools like the Wikileaks CIA hack. Encryption is a fact of life at this point, and essential for secure communication and protection of privacy for millions of law-abiding users, and no government back door can solve the law enforcement problem without also compromising that essential function. And the Rudd quote in the closing paragraph of this story suggests she doesn’t actually understand the FBI-Apple situation at all, which is not surprising from a government official but worrisome nonetheless.
via Recode
Apple and Facebook join race to build augmented reality glasses – Financial Times (Mar 27, 2017)
There’s not a ton here that’s new about Apple and Facebook’s efforts, but the article does share some new details about Magic Leap, which is said to be getting ready to launch this year at a price point north of $1000. As I’ve said before, for all the complaints from Magic Leap that people are underestimating its technology, until it actually shows more than a few hand-picked people, those complaints are unreasonable. This is a company that has massively hyped its own product (including releasing rendered rather than actual footage) while refusing to share any actual details about its product. There certainly are people (some of them investors) who appear to be very impressed by it, but not until it launches will mainstream tech reporters and others know whether the product lives up to the hype. In the meantime, other companies like Apple and Facebook are ramping up their efforts, and even though Magic Leap may well beat them to market, it’s a small company with no brand recognition, and it will have to blow people away en masse if it’s to take a meaningful lead in the market when it launches.
via FT
Apple Patent Filings Show an iPhone-Powered Laptop – Tom’s Guide (Mar 23, 2017)
These things do the rounds from time to time, and it’s always worth remembering that very few of the things Apple acquires patents for actually make their way into its products. Like any sensible company that does lots of research and development work, Apple comes up with lots of ideas and patents many of them, in part for defensive reasons, but that doesn’t mean it has any plans to bring them all to market. As this article points out, this particular invention seems to fly in the face of several things Apple has said it won’t do. However, I do think we’ll see more attempts in the coming years to use smartphones and potentially eventually smaller devices like watches to power the various other gadgets around us, serving as identification devices and pulling in data and profiles from the cloud on external displays and so on. So even if I’m not convinced we’ll see this particular implementation from Apple any time soon, the overall concept isn’t totally unrealistic.
via Tom’s Guide