Opinion pieces are intended to provide interesting perspective on an Apple-related topic, and to be an entertaining read. They represent the opinions of their authors, and not of the site as a whole: this is the reason we don’t label them as editorials.
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Conversion apps feel like a design playground, with so much potential for uniqueness and variety in their interfaces. The trend has been towards multifunction, multi-purpose Swiss-army knife apps that attempt to cover a whole range of disparate measurements. In my experience, as a result of racing to add one more ratio to their feature list, the simplicity of these apps suffer.
Currency sidesteps this battleground entirely and, as the name implies, focuses solely on converting amounts of money. The app touts support for over 160 currencies from around the world, which was more than enough to satisfy my needs. The app surfaces a handful of common currencies at first launch, each accompanied with a beautiful representation of its respective country’s flag.
Predictably, AAPL’s brief dip below $400 yesterday is resulting in a lot of excited reporting in the press, but how much does it all really mean?
The 5.5 percent slide yesterday was a combination of two factors. First, yesterday was a bad day for the market as a whole, with broad selling across a range of US stock triggered by the government reporting slower growth in hiring than the market had expected (via The Economic Times) … Expand Expanding Close
Steve Jobs sits alone in a dark room, reading notes from a set of index cards and a MacBook Pro. The janitor walks in and tell him he should go to sleep. Steve replies, “Yeah, I will, I will. I just need to rehearse this keynote speech for tomorrow.” The janitor laughs. “That’s what you told me four hours ago!”
This is the opening scene of “iSteve,” Funny Or Die’s new Steve Jobs biopic-comedy. It’s also the closest thing to reality you will see over the next seventy-eight minutes.
Watching this movie felt a lot like using a PC. I spent half the time staring at the screen in utter bewilderment, and the other half desperately trying to figure out how something so void of any semblance of taste was actually OK’d by anyone at any level of the production.
Chief Executive Tim Cook’s third big hire after the short-lived Mark Papermaster (during Steve Jobs’ second leave) and unpopular John Browett is former Adobe CTO and Flash advocate Kevin Lynch, who will report to the SVP of Technologies Bob Mansfield. It would seem Lynch is pretty set up because Mansfield is set to retire next year and Lynch carries the same VP of Technologies title.
The hire seems to be a very interesting choice, however.
Lynch is a long-time Adobe veteran who came over when the company purchased Macromedia in 2005, largely for its Flash technology. Interestingly, Apple SVP Phil Schiller was the Vice President of Product Marketing at Macromedia, Inc. from December 1995 to March 1997. Lynch served as President of Macromedia Products and then as General Manager of Web Publishing from February 1996 to June 2000. The two likely spent some time together, although it was admittedly a decade and a half ago. Still, the relationship seems to be cordial.
Excellent #WWDC today — including collaboration by Adobe and Apple on Photoshop for Retina. Thanks for the nice call out @pschiller
On declining Mac numbers: Cook: “If you look at the previous year, our Mac sales were about 5.2M. The difference is 1.1… iMac were down by 700k units Y-O-Y…. There were limited weeks of ramping on these products (iMacs) during the quarter.” We left the quarter with significant constraints on iMacs. Our sales would have been significantly higher… Our channel inventory was down by over 100K units at the beginning of the quarter.
–Cook says market for PCs is weak… “we sold 23 million iPads, we obviously could have sold more than this because we could not build enough iPad minis to come into a demand balance… Im sure there was some cannibalization of Macs there.” If you look at our portables alone we were inline with IDC’s projections of market growth.
While not making enough iMacs for Christmas shopping was a significant and uncharacteristic operational misstep, it doesn’t account for the significant drop in Mac sales overall year-over-year and even sequentially. iMacs and desktops in general have been a declining component of the Mac market as MacBooks take over the space, so even a significant drop in iMac sales wouldn’t account for a 20-percent drop year-over-year and sequentially. Apple also released new Mac Minis and 13-inch Retina MacBook Pros in the quarter, and the rest of the Mac lineup (including the Mac Pro) was updated just a few months before the quarter began.
Cook rationalized why Macs weren’t even flat and are “inline with IDC’s projections,” even though Macs have outgrown the market for something like 20 consecutive quarters previously.
Without a major hardware change or drastic price cuts, it is hard to imagine Apple having another 5 million Mac quarter. It would seem that, like iPods a few years ago, Macs have peaked. Apple’s iPods were cannibalized by iPhones.
The good news is that Apple is cannibalizing its own Mac growth (as well as overall PC growth) with its own high-margin iPads—and lots of them. In fact, Macs now represent significantly less than 15 percent of the total of combined numbers (below and corresponding revenues).
Amazon has a small special Christmas gift for shoppers today: $2 in free music. Simply head here, click the Button and enter the Code “GIVEMP3S”. $2 will be automatically applied to your account. Use it to buy holiday music or send a small last minute gift to someone? MP3 Gift ideas here.
Opinion pieces are intended to provide interesting perspective on an Apple-related topic, and to be an entertaining read. They represent the opinions of their authors, and not of the site as a whole: this is the reason we don’t label them as editorials.
