Why Apple is Doing So Well

When Apple says it made $1.67B last quarter on almost $10B in sales I don’t have to look any further than my desktop to see why.  I’m working on a two month old MacBook Pro, I upgraded to an iPhone 3GS in July and I’m viewing my early 2009 model iMac using “Back to My Mac”.  Yes, it’s people like me that help Apple amass these huge numbers.  You know, fanboys.

OK, so Tex just outed himself.  Big deal.  Three years ago I would have never imagined myself admitting to such frivolous behavior, but since I switched, I find my appetite for new and shiny Apple toys grows more ravenous by the month.  It's almost like I'm afraid someone will have a faster Mac with a bigger screen.  Sort of a geek penis envy kind of thing, I guess.  With numbers like the ones Apple just reported, I’m obviously not alone.  I only account for 2 Macs and an iPhone.  That leaves 2,999,998 Macs bought by others and 7,399,999 other iPhone suckers.  What the hell is wrong with us?

Yes, my Macs and iPhone are beautiful.  Yes, they run extremely well and are very easy to use, but now I’m lusting for a new quad-core iMac and I don’t even need one.  WTF?

Someone please stop me!

I’ve always considered myself a sensible person but this irrational need for anything new from Cupertino is a character defect that has me puzzled.  Am I suffering from the same malady as the little old lady around the corner with 22 cats?  I don’t remember getting excited when Dell or HP “speed-bumped” one of their models, but when Apple does it I immediately start rationalizing reasons to postpone my daughters tuition payment and task the FedEx man with one more trip to China.

I know Apple is winning over people left and right.  Repeat zealots alone can’t possibly explain  these numbers, but any company would love to trade their fans for Apple’s.  Has anyone ever waited in line outside a Gateway store for anything?  (OK, once, but we were trying to get into the club next door.)  The point is, Apple generates endless press for something as silly as redesigning a $19 remote.  These media guys wouldn’t write about it if they didn’t think us lemmings were going to lap it up.  I’m beginning to wonder if its even possible these days for Apple to release a product that flops.  Sure, there was the LISA and Newton, but those were introduced a number of years ago.  Recently even the lame AppleTV seems to be a viable business.  While not a big seller in Apple terms, I’ll bet Roku would welcome so many units sold.

The good news (and for purposes of full disclosure):  Being an ardent capitalist pig, I bought AAPL at $73 a couple of years ago so I’ve more than made up for what I’ve spent at Apple stores.  That takes a little of the guilt away.  Ain’t capitalism great?

Wow!  I'm feeling better.  Funny how a big fat profitburger heals wounds.

PS: Suggestion to all fanboys: Take some time to make light of your behavior.  That way you’ll be laughing with everyone else.

The MacTexan Podcast is Almost Ready

The MacTexan Man CaveI've been producing a podcast for my church for the past three years and decided it might be fun to do one for myself.  Why the hell not?  Every other blowhard in the world seems to be doing it.  Why not me?

As you can see, all the hard/software is in place, just working on an intro and a few web loose ends.

More to come...

Simplest iPhone/iPod Touch Jailbreak Ever: blackra1n

I love my iPhone and iPod Touch.  They’re terrific right out of the box, but spending $20-30 on a few productivity and travel apps have made them a nearly indispensable part of my daily workflow.  I’m one to never be satisfied though.  The geek in me recognized early on just how powerful the underlying technology is and the Texan in me got really pissed when Apple wouldn’t let me use it to its fullest potential.  Jailbreaking my devices has been the norm since two weeks after I purchased my first-gen iPod Touch.  The thought of some California vegan telling me how I can and can’t use my computer is enough to make me want to hack my devices even if jailbreaking had no other benefit whatsoever.  Shove the warranty if necessary, I just want to do things my way.  But I’m not here to discuss philosophies.

I’ve been playing the cat and mouse game with Cupertino since version 1.0 of the iPhone OS and never have I jailbroken any iPhone as easily and quickly as I did with blackra1n.  I was going to post instructions, but that is really a waste of time.  If you can click one button while your iPhone or iPod Touch is attached to either a Mac or Windows machine, you can jailbreak your device in about two seconds.  No big downloads, no time-consuming restores, just reboot your device and the blackra1n app is installed.  Tapping it gives you the opportunity to install Cydia, Icy, Rock and other app repositories of your choosing.  From there, its the wild west; freedom from Apple repression.  Sick it to the man!

I know, it’s a little melodramatic, but fun nevertheless.

So far I’ve used blackra1n to jailbreak my iPhone 3Gs, my iPod Touch 2G, iPod Touch 1G and my daughter’s iPhone 3G.  None were jailbroken at the time and all were running the 3.1.2 OS.  Now, all my idevices belong to me again.  By the way, I donated $25 for the great tool.  If you like it, you should too.

It’s Easy to be “Green” with $25 Billion in the Bank

Apple has just shown what a bunch of tree-hugging, whale petting bleeding hearts they really are by resigning from the US Chamber of Commerce over its lack of support for “cap and trade” legislation, or have they? Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for saving our environment, but I just don’t see how “cap and trade” will do anything to further that goal.  In fact, the only ones I see benefiting from this are the companies managing this fictitious carbon credit market.  You see, carbon credits are man made and not a real commodity like gold, silver or oil.  The last company to trade in fictitious commodities was Enron and we all know how that turned out.  No, like most other well-intentioned environmental legislation, “cap and trade” only serves to make the lawmakers and cash flush companies feel better about themselves with little or no impact on the environment.  

Companies with lots of money support cap and trade because it gives them an advantage over less well funded ones.  Its estimated “cap and trade” (like Sarbanes-Oxley) could add as much as 5% to smaller company’s expenses while a well-capitalized company like Apple won’t even be able to hear the noise.  The smaller companies will have to pass these added expenses on to their customers in the form of higher prices, making them less competitive.  Apple can protest all it wants to, but the fact is, they could use their huge reserves of cash to amass mountains of credits and crush smaller competitors.  Once that’s done, I’m sure they’ll pass their “cap and trade” expenses along to us. 

Apple 1

Environment 0

Consumers -1

Snow Leopard Selling like Hotcakes? Duh!

Analysts are speculating Apple’s latest OS release, OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) is outpacing Leopard sales by a 2 to 1 margin in their opening two weeks. Apple hasn’t released any official sales figures, but guys that get paid for accurate estimates say Snow Leopard is quickly approaching 6 million copies sold compared to roughly 2.8 million copies of Leopard for the same period after its release.    Is this a surprise to anyone? Does anybody have any doubts why?
Snow Leopard is CHEAP! At $29 Apple is almost giving it away. I paid the same price to upgrade Quicktime to the "Pro" version over two years ago!  Buying the “Family Pack”  of five licenses (like I did) makes the price almost ludicrous.  I pre-ordered it from Amazon and got the reduced price of $43, making the price to upgrade a paltry $9 per machine. That's only nine bucks more than Ubuntu! I've paid more for crappy text editors.
It’s clear Apple doesn't see Snow Leopard as a profit center. So what are they up to offering "The world’s most advanced operating system” for less than ten bucks? I can think of a couple of motives.
1) Penetration.  With no real aesthetic reasons to upgrade to 10.6, users need some motivation to go to the trouble of installing a new OS.  At $29 or less, the question becomes, "Why not?"  I really wanted to get it running on my new MacBook Pro to see if it made my already ridiculously fast laptop even faster. Plus, I’ve had such a positive experience with the 64 bit versions of Windows (Vista & 7) I hoped I would see the same step change in Snow Leopard performance. That didn't happen, but I have to admit to being very pleased with the few tweaks Apple did to the UI and the extra hard drive space is always welcome.  I think there are some really big plans brewing in Cupertino that require the new architecture and I can't think of a better way to penetrate a market than virtually giving the technology away.
2) Distancing themselves from the PowerPC. With the move to Intel in 2005, Apple piled all its chips on the x86 & x64 architectures.  Now, the current Apple operating system won’t even install on the abandoned platform. Very shortly, PowerPC owners are going to feel really left out.  Especially if there are some hot software titles released in the near future stamped “Snow Leopard Only”.  PowerBooks and G5s will quickly become doorstops if some future releases of Photoshop or FinalCut won’t even install on them. One big philosophical difference between Cupertino and Redmond is the latter's reluctance to kiss old legacies goodbye. Apple, conversely seems to have little or no trouble telling its users that it’s time to move on. Nothing spurs sales figures like rendering a big chunk of technology obsolete.
Whatever their motives, Apple is succeeding getting Snow Leopard to the masses. I’m sure my guesses don’t even scratch the surface of their real plans. It is so unlike them to give something away unless it’s part of a larger plan for world domination (iTunes?). Whatever the reasons, we users win. For now.