Category: Silly Pundits

The kids these days with the iPhones! I tells ya!

Every time the Macalope tries to get out of the business of jousting at silly pundits, he gets pulled back in.

The horny one was determined to ignore Tom Kaneshige’s InfoWorld piece entitled “A new etiquette for the iPhone generation”. Really he was. He ignored it when he saw it in InfoWorld’s daily email blast. He ignored it again when he saw it has been reposted by InfoWorld’s sister publication, Macworld.

But then someone emailed it to him and instinct took over.

Stupid antelope genes.

Armin Henreich’s infamous “I Am Rich” iPhone application—a $1,000 ruby-red screen saver—was pulled from Apple App Store shelves months ago, but its message still resonates loudly.

Really? With who? Other than jackass tech journalists.

Now the iPhone, the tech symbol of the “in” crowd, is on the verge of crossing the line into AIG-like excess and arrogance.

Hey, everyone! We’re getting a bailout and a taxpayer-funded trip to a spa! Whoo-hoo!

“I’m not sure, under the current economic conditions, that it’s a great statement to make,” says Rob Enderle, principal analyst of the Enderle Group. “You may not want to flash it.”

Are you suggesting, Tom, that we take advice on what kind of personal statement to make from this man?

Or really any kind of advice?

C’mon, Tom. Not every iPhone user can suddenly take up golf. For starters, there aren’t enough tee times.

Maybe you’re new around here so the Macalope will just let you know that quoting Enderle in a piece about Apple is tantamount to scrawling on the top of said piece “I AM SO PHONING THIS IN” next to your byline in crayon.

From “my apps are cooler than your apps” contests…

The Macalope must have missed this contest. Anyone know what he’s talking about here?

…to “sent from my iPhone” e-mail footers…

Yeah, it’s a good thing no other smart phones have those!

cough – Blackberry – cough

…people love showing off their iPhones.

Yeah, what is up with that?! My god, people! Get a phone you’re embarrassed of! Tuck it away in the closet! Bury it in a mason jar under your porch!

NEVER SPEAK OF IT AGAIN.

Traditional cell phones and iPods already audibly isolated people in their own little worlds, and iPhone’s visual carnival pushes that isolation further.

Wait, wait, wait. Which is it, Tom? Are we loud-mouthed show-offs who insist on pushing our gaudy iPhones on everyone we meet on the street, or are we quiet introverts, leading lonely, isolated lives, shunning all human contact for the warm glow of technology? It can’t be both, dude.

The visual nature of the iPhone can be a big distraction. Will consumers, walking around with their heads down as they play a game or look at a map on the iPhone’s mini-screen, collide with each other like pinballs?

Will these iPhone-using kids wander onto our lawns and summarily decline to get off of them?

Last month, a train engineer in Los Angeles was allegedly text messaging on his cell phone moments before he crashed into a freight train, killing 25 people, including himself.

That settles it! From now on, only the Amish will drive our nation’s trains!

Wait…

Look, this kind of trite, bullshitty article gets trotted out every so often by lazy-assed writers (or, in fairness to Kaneshige, writers with lazy-assed editors) who dourly want to warn us of the perils of the printing press cotton gin horseless carriage phonograph television…

Oh, fuck it, you get the point.

Just stop it.

Is this a joke?

Wired’s news feed teases Adam DuVander’s Webmonkey piece on the so-called “Apple tax” thusly:

It’s no secret that Apple’s computers cost more than PCs with similar specs.

Well, when you put it like that, it must be true!

But Apple’s disclosure of its sales figures and estimated market share at a press event Tuesday raises new questions about exactly how much money the company is making off each new Mac purchase.

And new questions mean new jackasstic answers! Enough teasing! Let’s get to the piece.

The concept, which has merit, is that Apple’s computers cost more than PCs.

Does it have merit? Of course! Adam just said so!

Just how much? Apple hinted at the number in its event today:

Retail share: 17.6 percent market share of unit sales.
Revenue share: 31.3 percent of retail sales.

In other words, where one in five computer sales is an Apple, these account for one of every three dollars spent. Apple has more share of the revenue because its computer cost more.

Cost more than what? Cost more than similarly configured machines as Adam says (remember, the teaser promised we’d be talking about similarly configured machines)? No.

No matter how you crunch the numbers, they imply that Apple charges at least 50 percent more than other manufacturers, maybe even twice as much.

Good lord.

They do not. How would that even be possible? Don’t you think people might notice that? What the numbers show is that Apple competes at the high end of the market and has no presence in the low end of the market.

Are you kidding us, Adam? Are you kidding us, Wired?

Not.

Paul Thurrott attempts to make lemonade from Zune lemons.

Yesterday Paul Thurrott welcomed the news that Microsoft had sold it’s millionth Zune, proudly declaring that it’s “not doing all that horribly.”

Thurrott, who does not hesitate to rail against those who point out the Mac’s market share gains, thinks nothing of pimping this piece of Microsoft marketing tripe. Sadly for Thurrott but humorously for us, a funny thing happened on the way to writing the original piece he links to and, well, turns out it’s wrong. Microsoft is gonna probably have sold a million Zunes. Someday.

Even if it had been true, however, Thurrott’s post is an escapade in jackassery.

Of course, Apple sells several million iPods a quarter, so there’s still some ground to make up.

“Some ground.”

This, incidentally, is also what Thurrott calls the land mass between Hungary and Mongolia. We call it the Russian Steppe. He calls it “some ground”.

No one’s really sure why he does this. He just does.

Now, the Oxford American Dictionaries (better known to Mac users as “Dictionary”) defines “several” as “more than two but not many”. The Macalope will leave it up to his intelligent and fabulously sexy readers to decide if last quarter’s 10.5 million or the previous quarter’s 21 million can accurately be described as “several” million.

But still. Not too shabby.

Well, actually, no, still rather shabby.

Microsoft is a notorious channel stuffer, so that might explain why while the company can claim to have “sold” 1 million Zunes you, like the horny one, might not have seen anyone actually using one outside of a CompUSA sales associate killing time before he’s downsized.

Thurrott makes a point of noting in his retraction that Apple only sold half that number in its first six months. Indeed.

Which is amazing considering the size of the overall market at the time and and that the iPod was effectively being sold only to Mac users as it didn’t ship with software for Windows until July of 2002 (see Wikipedia’s iPod entry).

Look, it is much harder to break into the digital music player market now than it was in 2001. But this is also Microsoft we’re talking about. They can practically force retailers to take as many as they tell them to. Is 10% of the hard-drive based market really anything to crow about? Great, it looks like they’ll make their target, albeit probably by stuffing the channel. But the Zune doesn’t have “some ground” to make up. It still has to prove that it can be anything more than a distant second in a subset of the market.

Are you still talking about that?

Information Week writer still ponders the iPhone’s January announcement.

Information Week’s Brad Kenney asks of Apple’s decision to reveal the iPhone six months in advance: Strategic Misstep, Or Supreme Confidence?

Uh, are those the only choices? (Hint: noooooooo.)

First of all, consider the name. At the time of the Macworld announcement, San Jose-based Cisco Systems owned the exclusive rights to the term iPhone…

Yes, believe it or not, Kenney wants to party like it’s January, 2007!

News flash, dude: Cisco settled! It’s over! Time to live in the now!

By giving such a long (it’s been almost six months and still no iPhone) time lag…

Yeah! Where the hell is that damned phone?!

Oh, wait, that’s right. It’s still May.

…Apple has not only allowed excitement to dim but has also negatively impacted iPod sales in the interim.

Yeah, because now nobody’s talking about the iPhone! Everyone’s into lol cats!

And were you talking about these iPod sales? The sales that were up 24% from last year? Are those the sales you’re talking about?

Huh?

Huh?

Because, you know, not so much.

The brightness of Jobs’ iPhone spotlight inevitably meant that quite a few consumers were left in the dark concerning [the Apple TV].

Which the company had already grandiosely announced back in September at its own special event.

Now, look, Apple could have hacked up the Macworld keynote and spent some time on the Mac and some time on Apple TV and some time on the iPod and some time on the company’s lol cat strategy. But the iPhone is arguably the biggest Apple product announcement in the last twenty-three years and Jobs clearly poured his heart into this thing. Give the man his hour and a half.

In a letdown, however, Kenney then pulls the rug out from under his arguments.

Despite what was widely characterized as bad timing by Jobs, the iPhone’s unique intuitive interface, rich feature set and undeniable cool factor paired with Apple’s pre-loaded customer loyalty means that, so long as Apple’s product developers remain at the top of their game, no amount of marketing missteps can keep this new Apple product from getting eaten up by the market.

Lame.

C’mon, Brad! Don’t string the Macalope along like that and then get all goo-goo eyes for Apple at the end!

Yes, some of the slower analysts have said it was somehow a mistake, but let’s look at what it gained Apple.

  • The iPhone announcement completely stole the thunder from CES.
  • Discussion of the iPhone took some of the heat off Apple over subsequent revelations about the options scandal.
  • The announcement silenced the non-stop speculation about when/if/could the company make a phone.
  • As iPod sales growth as leveled off, the announcement answered the question of where the company expects its growth to come from in the future.

Now, Brad, surely some of this must have occurred to you. Funny you didn’t see fit to mention it.

iTunes doomed!

Forrester all wet.

Roughly Drafted has a marvellous piece on the latest nonsense about video downloads. It quotes the geniuses at Forrester thusly:

“Television and cable networks will shift the bulk of paid downloading to ad-supported streams where they have control of ads and effective audience measurement.” McQuivey wrote. “The movie studios, whose content only makes up a fraction of today’s paid downloads, will put their weight behind subscription models that imitate premium cable channel services.”

This is so stupid it hurts the Macalope’s furry head.

Forrester’s fallacy is in not realizing that iTunes downloads are not a replacement for broadcast or cable television.

They’re a replacement for DVD sales.

Yes, iTunes downloads are different in that you don’t have to wait months for the DVDs to ship and they don’t feature the extras the DVDs do. But they are alike in that you can time-shift your viewing, you can repeat your viewing as often as you like, they’re portable to a variety of devices (albeit Apple-only except for iTunes on Windows) and, most importantly, there is no advertising.

It’s as if Forrester doesn’t know that people go to Target every day and buy DVDs of TV shows and movies.

Ad-supported content online is the replacement for broadcast and cable television and these two things are not the same.

It seems like every year some brilliant think-tank issues a bone-headed report that says ad-supported X will replace its for-fee equivalent.

And it never happens.

Because people hate ads.

iFlop?

Seeking Alpha sets the bar a little low.

Ah, Seeking Alpha’s Todd Sullivan. It’s appropriate that your head shot shows you standing in a forest which you likely cannot see for all those damn trees.

The iPhone: Apple’s First Flop

Apple’s first flop? Wow, you really are quite the student of Apple, aren’t you. The Macalope is sure we’re going to be treated to some top-notch analysis.

I do not want to have to turn off my music to get a phone call.

“I do not want to be able to hear the people I’m talking to.”

Well, OK. Seems a little strange to the Macalope, but different strokes for different folks. (Note to Sullivan: the iPhone automagically lowers the music volume when you get a call.)

If I am driving my family in my car and we are listening to the iPod, having to turn off the music to answer my phone becomes a major hassle.

So…

You want to listen to music while you’re talking on the phone while you’re driving your family down the highway.

Well, Mr. Father of the Year, please tell the Macalope where you live so he can make sure to never, ever drive around there.

All of have cell phone agreements [sic] and have a cancellation fee. This varies from $100 to $150 dollars. This price need to be added to the costs of the iPhone for those who want it right away or it will cause a lag in initial sales. This lag will allow cell competitors to create their own, cheaper versions to compete, hurting future sales.

It needs to be added to the cost for those who aren’t already Cingular customers who feel compelled to switch to the iPhone right when it comes out. Which is one of the reasons Apple went with the largest carrier.

A $599 phone will not gain mass acceptance no matter what it does…

Like a monkey typing on a keyboard, you’ve finally typed something that’s true.

…especially when people can still get its functionality from their existing devices.

Yes, the price sensitive people will continue to buy a cheap phone and an iPod shuffle and call it good. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a whole other group of people who want one device and are willing to pay for it. Is the latter group as large as the former? Certainly not. But that does not mean it doesn’t exist.

Give us a 2GB capacity so we can put our favorite stuff on it and listen when we want, cut the price to $299 and you may have something.

Todd, keep your pants on. iPhone nano. 2008.

You know, maybe the iPhone isn’t for you. The Macalope himself is not a Mac mini guy. That doesn’t mean he can’t see that it has value to a great many people.

Also, the exclusive deal with AT&T Inc. (T) was not a very bright idea.

So says you.

Well, dear reader, never fear. The Macalope has a lovely tonic for Sullivan’s jungle fever that addresses that very issue.

Why Apple’s iPhone Is Not The Next iPod.

Additionally, Apple has limited itself by committing to Cingular, which has a customer base of about 60 million. It is notable that 55 per cent of those polled in the ChangeWave survey expressed satisfaction with their existing cell phones — indicating no intention of switching networks.

[Macworld editorial director Jason] Snell points out that that doesn’t necessarily mean Apple made a mistake however. It would have been impractical for the company to try to launch the iPhone independent of an established service provider. Had it done so, Jobs and his team would be faced with creating different versions of the phone to fit the capabilities and structures of different networks.

Indeed.

And Sullivan, in his rush to apply the flawed “all-in-one” analogy, fails to point out the ground-breaking benefits of the iPhone as a platform.

“What the iPhone potentially does promise is to make the features that most people don’t use on their phones — web browsing, more advanced kinds of messaging, email, music playback, etc — far easier to use,” states [Macworld’s Chris] Breen.

Quite so. It seems like some people might actually pay for having that functionality actually be usable.

It might help you find your way out of the woods.

Time for an intervention

Full release of Tiger at WWDC? Son, are you high?

Now, the Macalope himself has sniffed a little Leopard glue in the past. But he’s been clean and sober for four months and he’s here to scare MAC.BLORGE.com’s Triston MacIntyre straight!

Jeff Gamet at the Mac Observer said, “When a product reaches the technological feasibility state, Apple typically ships it shortly thereafter.”

That being said, if both items, as Apple said, are “technologically feasible” and Apple is on schedule for its June release of the iPhone, couldn’t Leopard see an earlier release?

What if Apple was planning all along to postpone the release, only to shock the world by throwing an amazing release of iPhone after displaying the final production of Leopard at WWDC?

Triston, just say “no”!

The Macalope knows that Steve Jobs is a diabolical marketing genius, but he’s not insane, and “We’ll announce we’re delaying Leopard and then we’ll look like heroes when we don’t!” is just nuts.

Also, before you kids “get your freak on” or whatever you call it these days, you should meet a little friend the Macalope likes to call “Mr. Google”.

Search on “technological feasibility” and “SEC” and the third entry is from the very same Mac Observer, which quotes Apple’s report to the SEC on Tiger’s release thusly:

Tiger achieved technological feasibility following its public demonstration in August 2004 and the subsequent release of a developer beta version of the product.

Tiger’s eventual release date?

April 29, 2005.

OK.

Triston?

Give the Macalope your keys.

Or at least your keyboard.

How about "10 Things We Hate About List-Based 'Journalism'"?

PC World’s 10 Things We Hate About Apple is a dud.

Well, PC World decided to go ahead and publish its 10 Things We Hate About Apple (tip o’ the antlers to Andrew Kramp via email) but included an accompanying 10 Things We Love About Apple piece.

You can read their explanation of the decision here where they say it’s all just a joke.

As far as these craptacular lists go, this one is really not that offensive — most of the complaints are factual and, therefore, rather minor. And like the rest of these craptacular lists it’s exceedingly banal.

Right off the bat it seems PC World can’t even come up with 10 as number 1 and 2 are about basically the same thing: Apple’s secrecy.

Number 3 — Apple’s jibe at Windows when it shipped virus-infected iPods — is spot on, but number 4 — we don’t like words that start with a small “i” — really scrapes the bottom of the barrel.

Number 5 — where’s the Blu-Ray? — well, blah, blah, blah, where are my 18 flash card ports, blah, blah, blah, where’s my DVD RAM drive, blah, blah, blah. Number 6 starts off OK — the hockey puck mouse was unforgiveable — but degenerates:

Don’t forget the Shuffle audio player, whose lack of a screen or other discernable navigation aid Apple has successfully spun as a “feature.” (Yes, we know that the Shuffle is wildly popular–and yes, we’d still rather buy a player that can tell us what it’s playing.)

Ah. “We know the shuffle is wildly popular and is being imitated by the other vendors in a desperate attempt to claim the scraps of market share that might be left, but we don’t like it.”

Sort of like “We know that cupcakes are tasty treats that are enjoyed by young and old alike across the globe, but we don’t like them.”

Whatever.

Numbers 7, 8 and 9 have some truth to them while playing a little loose with certain facts but, really, this list is so mundane the Macalope’s having a hard time really caring at this point.

Number 10 is the silliest but is in territory that’s been so well covered already that there’s no point going over it again.

You can give credit to PC World for not resorting to base Enderle-ism and just making things up, but the list is so yawn-inducing that what it really shows is that there just isn’t that much to complain about.

So…

Why make a list?

Information Weak

Apple due for a fall? So says lazy journalist.

InformationWeek’s John Soat’s got 10 Indications Apple’s Headed for a Fall! (Tip o’ the antlers to Gene Moreau via email.)

Aaaaaiiiii! Say it isn’t so, John!

It’s list time! The list is a journalist’s best friend–easy to write and very popular online.

Well, at least you’re being open. So, you’re lazy and you’re trolling for hits. Good to know.

Let’s forge on. Tell the Macalope: why is Apple headed for a fall?

10) The same reason the Dow won’t stay at 13,000–gravity.

That, John, is effectively saying the same thing as “evil spirits”. Boy, you really are feeling lazy today.

And, unfortunately, the rest of the list isn’t much better.

9) Just about everyone who might possibly want an iPod has one.

Well, yes, iPod sales growth is tailing off, so it’s a good thing Apple makes other products. They also have this thing coming out called the iPhone. You might have heard about it. It was in all the papers. At least the ones where the journalists don’t fall back on lists all the time.

8) Apple hasn’t refreshed its computer line in a few years.

A few years? OK, most of the lineup hasn’t been refreshed since mid-2006, but the Mac Pro just got eight cores. That ain’t too shabby.

7) When an online impersonator of the CEO is more interesting than the CEO himself, that’s not a good sign.

Now you’re just making things up. Sure, we all love Fake Steve, but is he really more interesting than real Steve? If real Steve had a blog, whose do you think would be read more?

6) Apple opened seven stores last quarter, for a total of 177 worldwide, and a third store is planned for Manhattan. Are there enough thin, cool, good-looking young people in the world to staff them?

Ha-ha! Ahhhh…

C’mon. Tell the truth. You couldn’t come up with 10 real problems. Maybe these list things aren’t that easy. Or you’re even lazier than you think.

5) Everyone is getting tired of those “I’m a Mac … And I’m a PC” commercials.

Well, some people are. Like Bill Gates. The Macalope bets he’s real tired of them.

4) There’s increasing speculation the iPhone will flop.

Uh, yeah, but Steve Ballmer’s opinion isn’t exactly unbiased.

3) Windows Vista is better than it’s getting credit for.

Yes. So is broccoli. Don’t expect a rush on it.

2) That pesky stock options backdating thing won’t go away.

1 out of 10. Monkeys could do better.

1) I just bought an Apple iMac, which carries with it my personal version of the Sports Illustrated cover curse.

Ah, so the whole thing is just a build-up to a joke about your poor personal buying record?! Awesome!

Grrr…

Mac sales down! Vista to blame?!

Short answer: no.

As a teacher of the Macalope’s liked to say, “There are no stupid questions, Macalope. Only stupid people.”

Which brings us to eWeek’s Joe Wilcox who asks Did Vista Sap Mac Sales?

“Sap Mac sales”? What conference call were you listening to?

After a year of gains, Mac shipments declined during Apple’s fiscal 2007 second quarter. Is Vista a reason?

Mac shipments declined? What? No, they didn’t. They were up 36%.

Sequentially, overall Mac shipments declined 6 percent, as measured in units and dollars, between Apple’s fiscal first and second quarters.

Oh, fer…

Not the old “quarter to quarter” crap again. C’mon!

And the “years of gains” part isn’t even correct and Wilcox’s own chart shows that. You know, if you’re looking at sequential quarters — apart from asking yourself why on God’s green earth you’re doing that — you might want to actually look at the data before you make generalizations.

“Years of gains”? No. Mac sales declined slightly a quarter ago and, duh, more significantly… exactly one year ago!

But Wilcox has apparently only just heard of this “cyclicality” of which we speak.

The word from analysts: No impact. The declines are seasonable, and typical for Apple and less than fiscal 2006 second quarter.

Uh, you know, Joe, you can actually do that calculation yourself. You don’t need to call some fancy high-paid analyst. Just get the ol’ slide rule out and let ‘er rip!

What’s funny about Wilcox’s piece is the underlying “Uh… no…” tone in all the quotes he gets.

“I wouldn’t read too much into a sequential decline,” said David Daoud, manager of IDC’s personal computing and PC tracker programs.

You can almost hear Daoud scratching his head and speaking… very… slowly…

This one is better, though:

“Sales always decline from [Apple’s] Q1 to Q2 because of seasonality,” said Stephen Baker, NPD’s vice president of industry analysis. “A better question would be if the sequential decline this year was more or less than the sequential decline last year.”

“Sales always decline this quarter, you numbskull, and, uh, your question sucks.”

Now, one might argue that Wilcox only asked a question and faithfully reported the answer.

So what’s wrong with that?

What’s wrong is that the question is so misplaced. Did he really think Apple’s results were a bad thing? How could he have missed the multitude of reports that Mac sales soared? How could he have missed Apple’s stock price ripping past 100?

Astounding.