Company / division: Apple
The Next iPhone Could Put 15,000 Repair Companies Out of Business – Motherboard (Mar 8, 2017)
This piece reminds me of the analysis iFixit always does when a new iPhone comes out, giving each phone a “repairability” score and generally hammering iPhones and other similar devices for being hard for ordinary people to repair. Those always strike me as being so fixated on this one aspect of a device that they often sound as if they take it as a personal affront that these devices are tough to fix, as if Apple and other vendors had somehow set out to spite them. This piece has somewhat the same tone, and again acts as if Apple has no object in mind in designing its Touch ID and Secure Enclave than thwarting third parties’ attempts to repair iPhones. It’s worth noting that Apple doesn’t void warranties on devices fixed by third parties unlike lots of other manufacturers, which has to be the strongest possible indication that it doesn’t object in principle to the practice. Rather, it designs the Secure Enclave and Touch ID to be as secure as possible, a level of security which has risen over time and made it possible for earlier iPhones with Touch ID to be hacked in a way newer ones can’t be. This is central to Apple’s commitment to the privacy and security of its phones, and any impact on third party repair is purely incidental. Apple likely doesn’t even consider the impact on third party repair shops, but it certainly doesn’t deliberately set out to make their lives harder.
via Motherboard
Wikileaks Could Still Release CIA Hacking Tool Code – USA Today (Mar 8, 2017)
Though the CIA leaks from Wikileaks earlier this week are worrisome in their scope and bad news for the vendors whose devices and platforms have been compromised, there’s at least some comfort in the knowledge that these tools have at least theoretically been subject to due process in the past. However, Wikileaks claims that it has the code for the hacking tools themselves and is debating releasing that code, which would make it available to any hacker who wanted to use it, dramatically increasing the potential for misuse for hacking regular individuals. Again, Apple has said (and Google also confirmed this evening finally) that most of the vulnerabilities have already been patched in recent versions of their respective software, so that should be some defense. But as I’ve said already this week, what a vindication of Apple’s refusal to cooperate with the FBI a year ago over hacking an iPhone.
via USA Today
Apple says it’s already fixed many WikiLeaks security issues – USA Today (Mar 8, 2017)
I suggested this was the case in my coverage of the leak yesterday, but Apple has now issued an official statement to that effect as well. I would guess Apple is still digesting all the information leaked – there’s a lot of it – but it has said that most of the vulnerabilities outlined have already been patched in the latest versions of its software, and fixes for the rest should be coming soon. Samsung has also issued a statement on its TV vulnerabilities, but it’s far less reassuring – it only says it’s aware of and is looking into these hacks. In fairness, though, the Samsung hack appears to require a USB stick plugged into the TV to install it, which means that if you’re a victim you likely have far bigger things to worry about than your TV listening to you – this isn’t a large-scale remote hack that would affect the population as a whole.
via USA Today
No, WikiLeaks Didn’t Just Reveal That The Government Has Access To Your Secure Messaging Apps – BuzzFeed (Mar 7, 2017)
This is one of those stories where lots of publications are rushing to publish the most frightening headline without doing their reporting first, so kudos for BuzzFeed here for debunking right away one of the big tropes that’s doing the rounds. There’s nothing about secure messaging apps being compromised in the documents – rather, devices have allegedly been compromised, and of course once a device is compromised everything on it is too. However, even those claims of devices being broadly compromised are being disputed by some security experts – see here, for example. And Business Insider also argues that those on the latest version of iOS (79% on iOS 10 and another 16% on iOS 9) are safe from all the exploits listed. I suspect there will be lots more to come here, and as usual being on the latest version of Android is a lot harder than on iOS so the same protections don’t necessarily apply, but everyone should be trying to understand first, publish second when it comes to this data dump. And of course all this just reinforces arguments Apple and others have made about not trusting the government with back doors for encryption and the like.
via BuzzFeed
Survey Suggests Apple Devices Growing Rapidly in Enterprise (Mar 7, 2017)
The link here is to the PDF of a report from Jamf, which makes Mac management software for enterprises and educational organizations. It naturally has an incentive to push Mac adoption in the enterprise, so it’s worth noting that context, but the findings are broadly in line with what I’ve seen elsewhere. Some key figures: 91% of enterprises use at least some Macs, while 99% use iPhones or iPads; 74% of organizations have seen an increase in Mac adoption; 44% of companies offer employees a choice of Mac or PC, and at IBM for example 73% of employees want to use a Mac as their next computer. The survey of IT decision makers also has majorities saying Macs are easier to manage, configure, secure, and support than PCs. The enterprise is critical to Apple’s future growth given increasing saturation of global smartphone and PC markets, and already accounts for around 10% of revenue. Enterprises providing Macs, iPhones, and iPads as options for employees is therefore a key enabler of future growth here, and Apple’s recent deals with IBM, Cisco, SAP, and Deloitte are all part of its push to make Apple device adoption by companies easier and better.
via Jamf (PDF)
The desktop PC is finally cool – The Verge (Mar 6, 2017)
I’m pretty sure this headline is using the term PC in its narrower sense, and it could therefore read more specifically: “The Windows desktop PC is finally cool” because I’d certainly argue iMacs have been cool from the beginning. But this also feels part of a broader shift in the fortunes of Windows PCs – for years they seemed the utilitarian counterparts to the various members of the Mac line: often uglier, bulkier, with shorter battery life, harder to use, and all the rest. But that’s really changed in the last couple of years: with help from Intel (and perhaps a bit of a nudge from Microsoft’s own Surface line) Windows PCs have finally started to be really competitive in pure hardware terms with the Mac. That’s a sea change, and it means the competition between Mac and PC is now as much philosophical as it is about performance – there’s no clear edge in hardware for either side, and which platform you choose will be about the respective approaches to subjects like platform integration, touch interaction, and services instead. But of course none of this is happening in a vacuum – this resurgence of the Windows PC is coming just at at time when Apple seems to have taken its foot off the gas for a while with regard to the Mac, and especially the non-iMac desktops. And that raises the stakes significantly. Apple has so far said lots about its commitment to the Mac, but only followed those words up with action in the MacBook Pro line on the hardware side and the professional apps on the software side. For now, it’s asking a lot of people to trust that more is coming, but I’d say the urgency for those changes and updates is growing all the time.
via The Verge (see also this pair of posts from BI over the last couple of days – I certainly don’t agree with all of what they say, but they’re emblematic of the narrative developing at the moment)
Apple’s U.K. Suit Against Qualcomm Adds to Global Patent War – Bloomberg (Mar 4, 2017)
Just a quickie here – Apple has now sued Qualcomm in the UK too, on top of its existing suits in China and the US. There’s not a lot more detail in this article or, apparently, in the court filing itself, but the thrust of the UK case seems to be the same as in the other cases already filed.
via Bloomberg
Apple looking to buy TV shows and studios – Business Insider (Mar 3, 2017)
There’s not much in this report to suggest that Apple is actually interested in buying a studio, and indeed Imagine strongly refuted reports to that effect recently after those reports surfaced. Reports that Apple wants to acquire TV shows, on the other hand, are a lot more plausible – it’s already bought or commissioned a couple for Apple Music, and I could see it doing more of this, especially if it’s finally getting serious about building its own subscription TV service. The comments in here about the confusion over who’s leading the negotiations are a bit more worrying – if they’re true. Eddy Cue obviously does oversee the overall effort here as head of Apple’s content business, but he might well delegate some of the actual negotiations to other team members, and Jimmy Iovine in particular is known to have good relationships in the content industry. Recent reports about the change of leadership over Apple TV hardware suggested that Pete Distad was going to be taking the lead on these negotiations, and his name isn’t even mentioned, so there do seem to be a lot of people involved here. Hopefully Apple is clearer on this than some of those it’s approached seem to be.
via Business Insider
Wearables grew 16.9% in Q4 2016, Fitbit still first but Xiaomi is gaining – VentureBeat (Mar 2, 2017)
The numbers here look about right, but what a far cry from the forecasts of the wearables market we saw a few years back. I recently wrote a piece on the state of the wearables market, in which I argued there are really three important sub-markets within wearables: the Apple Watch in its own category, dedicated fitness trackers (in which Fitbit dominates in western markets and Xiaomi in China), and Samsung’s various devices, many of which are bundled with smartphone purchases and therefore thrive on a rather different business models from the others. These IDC numbers largely back that up with market share numbers, but also reinforce the point I made in that article about how the market has fallen short of its theoretical potential and largely stopped growing. It can still grow, but the offerings need to get much better and broader in their appeal, and to some extent we also need the technology – especially in components – to catch up with the vision here.
via VentureBeat
Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms – New York Times (Mar 2, 2017)
This trend has been a long time coming, with Google becoming very aggressive about getting deeper into schools in the last few years, and having quite a bit of success, while Apple has lost ground despite some good enhancements to its own education offerings, including the Swift Playgrounds app. Apple used to have an outsized share in education thanks to the simplicity of both using and managing its devices, but Chromebooks have some of the same simplicity and manageability benefits at a much lower cost, and are starting to displace products like Macs and iPads in schools. And the education market is much more important than the relatively small amount of revenue it generates in the overall context of the tech industry, because it influences the devices and services kids will continue to use as they grow up. A kid reared on Macs and iPads in school will likely continue to use them when she goes to college, but one raised on Chromebooks and Google Apps will favor those when he graduates. This battle is by no means lost for Apple, but it needs to continue to up its game if it’s to claw back some of that lost share.
via New York Times
Apple will not change charging cable on iPhone 8, Ming-Chi Kuo says – CNBC (Mar 2, 2017)
This didn’t take long – Ming-Chi Kuo, who is the best-sourced Apple financial analyst out there, has debunked the report that the next iPhone will replace the Lightning port with USB-C. I said yesterday that this felt like a 50/50 report in the first place – logical as an eventual step, but not necessarily imminent, and it appears that we can now lay it to rest. Kuo does say that the other end of the cable might be USB-C, and that the new iPhones will support fast charging, something competing Android devices have had for some time.
via CNBC
Apple’s Next iPhone Will Have a Curved Screen – WSJ (Feb 28, 2017)
This report is written by a reporter in Tokyo rather than the US, suggesting that it’s a firm in the Japanese supply chain which is the source of the data. The headline doesn’t seem to be specifically supported by any of the actual reporting in the article, though – the article itself mentions that OLED can be bent into curved screens, but then only says that Apple has placed orders for OLED screens without confirming that it actually intends to use a curved screen. And of course, OLED screens have been reported for at least some of the new iPhones for ages now. I’m still very skeptical about the $1000 price point this article repeats, however. The other major point from the article is that Apple will replace Lightning with USB-C for the port on the new phones. I’m not as skeptical on this as some, but I don’t think it’s a certainty either. Between wireless for headphones and potential wireless charging, the port will just become a lot less important over the next few years, so at some point it doesn’t matter all that much what technology that port uses. There would be a certain symmetry, too, in abandoning the Lightning port after five years, just as Apple abandoned the old 30-pin connector after the first five years of the iPhone. Apple clearly isn’t wedded to particular ports or technologies for nostalgic or other reasons, and is willing to make changes where the upside outweighs the downside. And there’s a frustration right now to having to buy a whole new cable to charge your brand new iPhone from a brand new MacBook, which could be resolved somewhat by standardizing on USB-C. So I see the logic here, especially in making this change in the context of a big upgrade to the device, and I think this change may be inevitable in the long term, but it could easily be a year or two out still.
via WSJ
Warren Buffett more than doubled his holdings in Apple in 2017 – CNBC (Feb 27, 2017)
I’ll keep this brief – as I’ve argued previously, what happens with stock prices (and purchases of stocks) is at best a secondary indicator of what’s going on with a company, and at worst an entirely separate game that’s more about confidence in a stock than the company itself. Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway are slightly different animals though – he’s notoriously conservative and long-term in his thinking about his investments, and only recently made his first tech investment in IBM, which is about as blue chip as they come. So the fact that he’s added Apple to his holdings and then doubled his stake recently is worth noting for the fact that even someone as conservative as him sees a long time upside in owning Apple stock. More interestingly, he’s invested on the basis of seeing how real people feel about the Apple products they own, which Apple itself also argues is one of the most important metrics you can look at when it comes to predicting its future.
via CNBC
Apple and SAP Enterprise Partnership Launching First App in March – Mac Rumors (Feb 27, 2017)
Apple and SAP today announced that the partnership they first unveiled last year is beginning to bear real fruit. Last year, they had announced plans for an SDK, a training academy, and some sample apps from SAP itself designed to show third party developers what could be done. All of those things have now made enough progress at this point to justify a second announcement about imminent launches and progress made since. Several of the elements of what the companies announced originally are going to be available in the next few weeks, and all that should help SAP’s enterprise customers and their partners develop better iOS apps that tap into the SAP back-end. This is part of Apple’s broader push into the enterprise over the last few years, something that’s critical for squeezing additional growth out of an increasingly saturated smartphone market in mature economies. But it’s also a good reminder that the announcements Apple makes in the enterprise space are very different from its usual product announcements – they’ll take at least months to come to fruition, and in many cases will take even longer after that to deliver really meaningful results – this is a long game.
via Mac Rumors
Apple, tech leaders will side with transgender youth in upcoming Supreme Court case – Axios (Feb 24, 2017)
This is a nice scoop for Ina Fried, who just moved from Recode to Axios. But more importantly, the news itself is a significant escalation of the comments several tech companies made this week about the Trump administration’s policy on transgender students and bathrooms in schools. This would now be the second time in as many months that several major tech companies find themselves on the opposite side of a high profile legal case from the new administration. What a massive turnaround from those first weeks after the election, when tech companies seemed afraid to say anything negative about the new US government.
via Axios
Apple and Google condemn Trump’s decision to revoke transgender bathroom guidelines – Recode (Feb 23, 2017)
This issue feels like it’s attracting a lot less attention than the immigration executive orders from a few weeks back, but that doesn’t mean that tech companies aren’t weighing in all the same. This article has comments from Apple, Google, and Salesforce opposing the administration’s actions, but John Paczkowski of BuzzFeed has been tweeting commentary from a number of other companies today including Facebook, IBM, and Dell. Unlike the immigration bill, where at least part of the rationale for opposing the administration was business related, this argument is being made entirely in moral terms, echoing some of the opposition to North Carolina’s “bathroom bill” last year. That’s interesting territory for big public companies to wade into – something we discussed on the Beyond Devices Podcast two weeks ago.
via Recode
Cellebrite director says firm now doing ‘lawful’ extraction of data through iPhone 6 – AppleInsider (Feb 23, 2017)
This is the same firm that was recently hacked, supposedly exposing some of the tools it uses to crack iPhones, and now it’s boasting that it can crack iPhone 6 models in addition to the earlier models it has long been able to crack. I’ve still never seen any kind of official commentary on the hack of Cellebrite itself, but if that really did happen the fact that the company is getting ever better at hacking iPhones while leaving itself open to hacking should be worrying to lots of people. And if US law enforcement is still regularly paying Cellebrite to do this work without ensuring that it is able to keep the hacks secure, then it shares part of the blame by funding this work which ultimately puts regular users at risk.
via AppleInsider
Video Pros Moving From Mac to Windows for High-End GPUs – Daring Fireball (Feb 23, 2017)
I’m linking to this piece from John Gruber rather than the source because he highlights the key point here, which is that for some creatives with high-end computing needs, the current Mac lineup isn’t cutting it anymore, and they’re switching to Windows. When the new MacBook Pros came out late last year, there was lots of complaining from the developer and creative communities about the computers being underpowered, with no recent updates to the Mac Pro either. I’ve written about this, and think there are two separate things going on: firstly, Apple’s base is about so much more than power users at this point, and it has to focus on the majority not the tiny minority; and secondly, it’s very hard to know how representative these one-off anecdotes are of the broader picture. Are lots of creatives really abandoning the Mac, or is it just a handful who are getting lots of attention because they reinforce a narrative? I wish someone would do some kind of representative survey here – I only have my own anecdotal evidence to go on, which is that most video creatives are sticking with Mac for now, but again it’s not representative.
via Daring Fireball
Spotify expands its push into original content with new podcasts – TechCrunch (Feb 23, 2017)
It’s becoming increasingly clear that original content is going to be an important part of differentiation in the streaming music space going forward, between Spotify’s earlier video content and now several new podcasts, and Apple’s focus on Beats 1 radio and its TV shows. The difference is, of course, that Spotify has a free tier, where this original content will also be available, while Apple will restrict its TV shows to paying subscribers. For Apple, the cost isn’t that big a deal – it has a much bigger company to fund such investment – but for Spotify such additional costs will push it yet further away from profitability without any big direct revenue benefit.
via TechCrunch
U.S. iPhone users are spending more on apps – Axios (Feb 22, 2017)
Here’s the second item on apps from Axios today. Whereas the first was about Pokemon Go, this one is about App Store performance in general, and shows that average spending on the App Store continues to rise in the US. That spending is dominated by games, a long-standing trend, and the game spending is likely in turn dominated by in-app purchases. For now, this is great for Apple and its partners: IAP is growing, and that in turn is driving App Store and Services segment growth, something that’s critical to Apple’s growth narrative. However, I continue to find the IAP model troubling – it exhibits characteristics of addiction and relies on a very small number of players paying huge amounts per month. That works as a business model, but it feels predatory and I’d love to see game developers come up and popularize new ways to pay for games – so far, we’ve seen one or two companies do this successfully including UsTwo’s Monument Valley, but Nintendo’s attempt to find a different model with Super Mario Run has been disappointing from a revenue perspective. Still lots of work to be done here.
via Axios