Alan Williams

A Look At Apple Since The iPhone Launch

iPhones are not expensive smart phones. A free Blackberry was offered by Verizon during the first week of iPhone sales. Free Blackberry verses a $500 iPhone. After you add in the cost of the minimum 2 year contract required for both phones, the total cost for the two phones over 2 years was the same.

On top of that, a 2 year old, used Blackberry sells for less than $10 on E-bay. A 2 year old iPhone will still be a Widescreen Video iPod and a WiFi enabled, hand held internet surfing device worth $150 to $200 on E-bay, just like other high end 2 year old iPods sold on E-bay, even if you don't use it as a phone.

That resale value makes the iPhone the least expensive of all smart phones by $100 to $200.

So much for the expensive iPhone myth.

Apple Shares Drop on iPhone Cutback Rumor

Like most fake Apple rumors, someone must have made a bundle on this one. Follow the money and you will find the person behind the fake rumor.

Another stock manipulation the SEC will not investigate. The SEC has a lot of splainin' to do, Lucy.

Was Verizon Really Wrong To Pass On The iPhone?

Yes, your iPhone sales forecasts were made by Apple's competition. They are way too low.

Let's not forget that the 10 to 20 million iPhone customers that AT&T will have by the end of 2008 will all be paying AT&T $20 per month for their, up to now, underutilized 2.5G data network.

At 20 million iPhone customers, that's 4.8 billion a year in revenue in 2009 that they wouldn't have had without the iPhone.

Verizon, a bigger control freak than even Apple is, could not agree to relinquish cell phone feature control, could not see the iPhone's potential, and screwed up big time. You'd think no one in upper management at Verizon had ever used an iPod or a Mac with OS X.

Big mistake. When they do the postmortem on Verizon's corpse, the iPhone will be mentioned by one and all.

Apple's iPhone: True Innovation

Like the iPod and competing MP3 players, iPhone resets the bar for cell phones. Like the iPod, Apple will continue to improve the iPhone. Unlike the iPod, Apple will be able to upgrade the first generation iPhone with software upgrades through iTunes. You want a landscape keyboard with every application, a vertical and/or horizontal scroll bar with the browser? It is all just a software upgrade away. The first version of the iPhone will renew itself and be current for years. Smaller, more affordable iPhones may follow.

One thing is for sure. If the competition does not take the iPhone threat seriously and innovate their way to equivalent ease of use, Apple's various iPhone models are going to grab a very large market share in a few short years.

Apple's Playing The EuroOperators For Fools

Some would say, as far as the consumer is concerned, that the mobile phone network operators have way too much power over both the handset manufacturers and the cell phone users. Handset innovation has definitely been stifled by operators turning off certain options and monetizing every aspect of the cell phone. How many cell phones have WiFi? That capability could have been in cell phones for a few years. Why can't you make and download your own ring tones? That capability has been available for a couple of years as well.

I say bravo to Apple for forcing their partners out of the cell phone consumer dark ages and giving cell phone users what they want, not what cell phone carriers want them to have. Apple is dragging the operators, kicking and screaming, to the holy grail of consumer sales, customer satisfaction.

Everyone will win in the long term.

iSuppli Sees 55% Gross Margin For Apple On 8 GB iPhone

I doubt Apple has spent much money on marketing. The world wide media, in it's every form, is doing their marketing for them. Every friend, family member and business contact of mine, that knows I use Macs, has asked me about iPhone.

R&D is another matter. Apple worked on the iPhone for 3 years. It's fair to say that most of their R&D budget for the last 2 years was spent, directly and indirectly, on the iPhone.

Apple won't really be making any money on the iPhone until well into 2008. Why no one, in their cost estimates, mentions R&D costs is beyond me. Are they trying to make the iPhone look overpriced?

Apple TV Isn't Perfect - But So What?

Everyone is ignoring the elephant in the room. What is the source for most of the music on the iPod? P2P music sites and the user ripping their own CD collection. Now where do you think Apple TV owners get their video? Bit torrents and ripping their own or rental DVD's.

Free, open source software can rip any DVD on any Mac or PC into about a 1 GB file that is playable on Apple TV. You store it in iTunes and stream it to Apple TV over your wireless network. It works and it looks as good as a regular DVD on a HD TV.

Once you've seen it play a ripped movie, you understand where Jobs is coming from. To bad he can't market, "Rip it, Store it, Watch it". He's trying to get the major movie studios on board. If the movie studios don't get with it, they'll miss the boat just like the major music labels did with music piracy.

Apple TV works so well I ordered another one for the second HD TV in our house.

National Gasoline Prices

Look, global warming advocates will cause a steep rise in the price of oil in the very short term with their carbon taxes. Mass transit will be the new auto industry in most of the countries of the world. The US will likely follow suit as soon as there is an administration change. Bullet trains and light rail transit will replace personal autos and short airline flights. In 20 years there will be no oil crisis because there will be damn few personal automobiles on the roads.

The sky is falling. Haven't you heard? The railroad industry is about to make a big comeback.

iPhone: Apple Making All the Wrong Moves

@ aerius,

The iPhone has a Unix OS that is capable of running a desktop computer inside of it. That OS X inside is capable of running very complex programs on the iPhone. Real games, Excel, Powerpoint and Word clones, the possibilities are endless. The Prada has a below average cell phone OS. The two phones are not the same.

@ Thomas Barta,

One Apple product that debuted overseas, in Japan, and died there, was the gaming console named Pippin. It didn't even have XBox's Japanese sales numbers.

@ Todd,

There are well over 100 million iPods sold so far. Almost every one of those iPod buyers would by an iPhone if they could. Most of them will, eventually. This is not a Microsoft phone we are talking about. The first generation iPhone will be very good. There is no need to wait until the third or fourth generation to get a very competitive product from Steve Jobs' Apple.
Another point, the iPhone may be thought of as a smart phone but it will appeal to all cell phone users because it is easy to use and it is also a video iPod.

Online Ad Bubble: aQuantive Deal Makes No Financial Sense For Microsoft

Given Microsoft's track record of running acquisitions, big and small, into the ground and having the said acquisitions virtually disappearing in 3 or 4 years, chances of anything but minimal return on this $6 billion investment are very low.

Is the SEC Giving Apple a Pass on Disclosures?

Here's a thought.

All of the Mac computer models use OS X and they form part of the computer and software side of the business. That's a no brainer.

iPods require iTunes software in order to operate. Many would say that the iPod would not be the hit it is if iTunes wasn't the best MP3 player support software on the planet. The OS that runs the iPod was mostly written by Apple. OS X will soon power the top end widescreen video iPods. iPods are driving the growing number of switchers from Windows to Mac computers. The whole iPod line could be put into the computer and software side of the business since they are so intertwined with it.

Apple TV is a computer that runs OS X. It is used as a set top box but it is a stand alone computer by anyone's definition. That sounds like part of the computer and software side of the business to me.

The iPhone will use OS X for it's operating system. It has a CPU, storage, input and output capabilities, a display, runs programs and games and the list goes on. It also needs iTunes software to run properly. It may be a cell phone but it's also an iPod, a camera, a PDA and a computer. A case can be made that the iPhone is also part of the computer and software side of the business.

The retail end is and should be separate.

Let's face it, the hardware in the every manufacturers' computers, phones and MP3 players is all from the same sources. The difference between Apple's products and everybody else's offerings is great design and great software.

Everything they make is part of their software business.

The iPhone: Apple's First Flop

The iPhone is also a widescreen video iPod. It plays movies. The 4GB model will hold 250 songs and 2 movies. The 8 GB model will hold 500 songs and 4 movies. Then there are pictures, slideshows, TV shows and video and audio podcasts. Do you understand why 2GB is not enough memory yet?

As for the purchase price, in two years, when you upgrade your iPhone, you will be able to resell your old iPhone for about 50% of what you paid for it, if the iPod and Mac resale markets are any indicator.

Apple sold 100 million iPods in the first 5.5 years. The iPhone sales will break that record.

Microsoft’s Open Source Claim: What Are These Patents Really All About?

This is just another scare tactic from Microsoft.

We are going to sue Linux Distributors so don't go switching away from Windows to desktop Linux and get caught in the crossfire.

Microsoft, through Steve Ballmer, has been openly accusing Linux users of patent violations, for 2 or 3 years now, without actually saying which patents have been violated. Since they have never disclosed the specific violations they have probably lost the rights to defend those patents in question.

Given the recent Supreme Court ruling on Software Patents, the patents were probably indefensible in the first place.

Apple's Leopard: End of the Desktop as We Know It?

Apple's design philosophy is, 'less is more'. Simplification is the name of the game at One Infinite Loop. Any changes Apple makes to the windows metaphor will make using a computer, with multiple open programs, simpler and easier.

In Redmond the mantra is, "Let's see how many different ways, to do the same thing, we can build into this puppy." They also think all end users are appallingly stupid. Why else would they repeatedly ask, "Are you sure you want to do this task?" Microsoft calls all these redundancies innovative, new features.

When Leopard is released, Microsoft will be embarrassed into improving Windows for real next time. That alone will be worth the wait.

Apple's iPhone and the Future of Qualcomm

bruce van nice,

Apple has sold over 100 million iPods. The iPhone is a cell phone, a camera, a hand held, WiFi equipped, internet browsing device, a hand held computer with a full fledged, Unix based, computer OS and, last but not least, it is the best video iPod ever made.

This iPhone is also a wide screened, video iPod capable of carrying and playing 2 to 6 full length feature films. Every happy iPod purchaser wants one. Jobs' prediction of 10 million iPhones sold by the end of 2008 is extremely conservative.

Get with the program. iPhone is not just a smart phone. It's much, much more and unlike all other phones, it will just work.