Shipping an unfinished iPad competitor seems to be par for the course

by Seattle Municipal Archives

InfoWorld reviews RIM BlackBerry PlayBook: A useless, unfathomable train wreck
[Via MacDailyNews]

“It’s been half a year since Research in Motion unveiled its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet based on the QNX operating system. This week, RIM began shipping the 7-inch tablet,” Galen Gruman reports for InfoWorld. “After spending a couple days with the final product, it’s clear that the PlayBook is a useless device whose development is unfinished.”

“I knew the prerelease reviews were negative, and I had my own concerns after seeing a PlayBook demo in January,” Gruman reports. “But even those didn’t prepare me for the profound disappointment that is the PlayBook. Why did RIM bother shipping it?”

[More]

The picture above illustrates non-Apple tablet makers. Jobs has quoted Gretsky by saying he skates to where the puck will be, not where it is. RIM, and others, seem to be following the puck around in a frenzy, not really knowing where it is going. That does not sound like a winning strategy.

Motorola shipped the Xoom promising that it would upgrade it to the needed capabilities some months in the future. No one bought an unfinished product.

Now RIM is doing the same thing. Why send out something that is only a poor copy of last year’s iPad? At least Samsung went pack to the drawing board rather than come out with a porrly thought out copycat.

By the time RIM actually comes out with something reasonable, their brand may have been destroyed in the market place.  As the reviewer said: “instead of a world-class performer, we got the homeless guy who plays air guitar in front of the mall.”

Ouch!

Why you might not want the latest iPhone

Sorry, wrong number
[Via I, Cringely]

I was in Los Angeles last Friday for TV meetings and lost my iPhone 4. It was on my belt and suddenly it wasn’t. Then in one of those deja vu experiences I noticed that I was only steps from an Apple Store, so I went inside to trace my iPhone using the Where is my iPhone? app. But my iPhone was nowhere.

Understand it was fully-charged and I had been using it less than 10 minutes before. My phone was nowhere to be found.

Sadly the kids at the Apple Store knew far too well what had happened because they hear the story every day. My phone was most likely stolen straight from its clip on my belt by a professional iPhone 4 thief. The moment it was grabbed from my belt the thief handed it to an accomplice. Within a minute the phone was powered-off and untraceable. They didn’t want my data, just my iPhone.

An iPhone 4 can go for $300 in China. They replace the SIM card, spoof the MAC address or sell it for use on a network that doesn’t care. The street price in L. A. for my phone is $100. An industrious criminal can grab several phones per day.

[More]

They are waiting in line to get iPad2 to send to China for $400. An iPhone 4 gets $300. As someone said, it’s amazing more of the iPhones do not fall off a truck in China before they even get here.

Since I have an iPhone 3G no one wants my phone. And I never carry my phone on my belt because it can be ‘lost’ so easily. Out of sight, out of mind. They can’t steal it if they do not know I have it.

I am planning on getting an iPhone 5 though so i might have to do something. Perhaps someone can sell cases that make the iPhone 5 look like an iPhone 3GS.

Something to remember about cloud services

Amazon server outage disables portions of Reddit, NYT, ProPublica sites
[Via Boing Boing]

A problem with Amazon’s cloud services today caused outages affecting portions of sites including Reddit, the New York Times, ProPublica, and others.

[More]

Never put anything on them that you can not afford to lose access to, even though rapid access from anywhere is their main selling point.

A child’s laughter makes us all feel better

DOG vs. BUBBLES
[Via Boing Boing]

[More]

Why do the pros get paid, with this failure rate on Apple analysis?

by Molly DG

Apple’s 92% earnings windfall: The bloggers nail it, the pros miss by a mile
[Via Brainstorm Tech: Technology blogs, news and analysis from Fortune Magazine » Apple 2.0]

The shortfall in iPad sales was one of the few categories the Street called correctly

Click to enlarge.

The Wall Street analysts who get paid to cover Apple (AAPL) got some things right.

Several predicted Apple’s total revenue for the second fiscal quarter of 2011 within a few hundred million dollars. And their tendency to underestimate Apple’s unit sales served them well in the iPad category.

But when it came to the number that matters most — the bottom line: earnings per share — it was the amateurs, once again, who nailed it and the pros who blew it.

In our ranking of the best and worst analysts for Q2 2011, which lists them by how accurately they predicted Apple’s revenue and EPS, the amateurs took 13 of the top 15 spots.

The bottom 32 spots were all held by professionals working for banks and brokerage houses. Taken as a whole, the numbers they sent their paying clients were off by a margin (11%) more than four times as big as those generated by the guys who do it for free (2.5%).

The bloggers weren’t quite as prescient as they have been in past quarters. None of them foresaw that what COO Tim Cook called “the mother of all backlogs” would hurt iPad unit sales so badly. And as a group they overestimated Apple’s total revenue for the quarter. It was a Wall Street professional, Caris’ Robert Cihra, whose revenue estimate was closest to the mark.

But as a group, the professionals have nothing to be proud of, as the distribution of green (for good) and red (for bad) squares in the chart below the fold shows at a glance. 

[More]

Goldman Sachs was the worst. But see, in the rarified world of finance, you get to keep your job when you get the numbers wrong and fail to provide accurate advice. apparently that is what you are paid to do.

Meanwhile, those who do it for free are more accurate. Perhaps there are pressures and incentives on the professional advisors that prevents them from providing accurate numbers.

You think?

Maybe some of those people who made a ton of money based on what the amateurs wrote would send a little amount of money their way to show some appreciation?

It’s a bug not a feature

by whologwhy

Andy Ihnatko on iOS 4’s Location-Tracking Log
[Via Daring Fireball]

Best piece I’ve seen on the “consolidated.db” location-tracking log:

A few reality checks, lest I inadvertently do a Glenn Beck number on all of you, here:

• This database isn’t storing GPS data. It’s just making a rough location fix based on nearby cell towers. The database can’t reveal where you were…only that you were in a certain vicinity. Sometimes it’s miles and miles off. This implies that the logfile’s purpose is to track the performance of the phone and the network, and not the movements of the user.
• A third party couldn’t get access to this file without physical access to your computer or your iPhone. Not unless you’ve jailbroken your iPhone and didn’t bother resetting its remote-access password… or there’s an unpatched exploit that would give Random Person On The Internet root access to your phone.
• It’s pretty much a non-issue if you’ve clicked the “Encrypt iPhone Backup” option in iTunes. Even with physical access to your desktop, a no-goodnik wouldn’t be able to access the logfile.

[More]

These are all god points to indicate that this is really a non-issue. Anything Apple is always good for a few page hits.

But Gruber at Daring Fireball, who has a lot of ears in the system, also said that the file seems to be a cache file that was written to be as a temp file for location data. It just appears someone forgot to write the part to erase this cache so it just slowly builds up with data this is really not useful for much.

as is often the case – for just about anything – there is nothing nefarious here, just human error.

Could this be Apple’s reason for its cash hoard?

Is Android responsible for Apple’s deep market discount?
[Via asymco]

At last night’s closing price Apple was trading at a P/E of 16.3. Excluding cash that ratio was at 13. On a conservative forward basis (my estimates) the stock is priced at less than 10 times next twelve months’ earnings.

These figures show a remarkable pessimism that has persisted around Apple for years. It was slightly, but not much, worse during the great recession. It persisted whether the company was growing at 30% of, as now, 95%.

There are many hypotheses about why Apple’s earnings and growth are considered worthless. They come and go with the whims of the age: recession, elitist, luxury branding, health issues, macro “headwinds”, earthquakes, phantom competition.

Lately it’s become fashionable to blame Android. That’s a curious thing to me, because Android has been discussed at length here and it has been shown to be, for the time being, benign. Apple has not “lost sales” to Android as it has been selling all it can produce. In some ways it’s been a boon as a co-belligerent against non-consumption.

The argument that the discount is in effect because of the future of Android has one first strike against it: the fact that the market does not often discount the distant future. Capital markets are notoriously incompetent in spotting disruptions and often reward those who are failing right up until the bitter end.

But let’s take the “Android hypothesis” (i.e. that Android is causal to Apple’s share price) seriously and analyze it. How could the impact be measured?

[More]

After reading the entire post, the logical thing would be for Apple to buy Goggle. Fundamentals would indicate that the $170 billion purchase would generate $300 billion in value for Apple. SOunds like a good deal.

Apple has said it is holding onto the money in order to make strategic purchases. Could this be the one?

(Of course, such a purchase would probably not be allowed due to regulatory issues but it is a nice rebuttal to those on Wall Street that say Apple is hampered by Android.)