On January 31st, Apple will reveal earnings for the December 2016 quarter, amid expectations for record sales. Why are expectations high? Well, because Apple’s own quarterly guidance, which tends to be conservative, pointed in that direction, with revenue expected between $76 billion and $78 billion.

If Apple meets those expectations, it should be sufficient even if the sales increase is only slightly ahead of the year-ago quarter. But Wall Street will look to its own numbers, and rate Apple on how well they match. Beating the Street is a huge deal even if their figures have little or nothing to do with reality.

Apple will also be compared to Microsoft, which evidently did better than the market expected, and it’s clear that the two companies will be compared even though there’s only a small overlap. After all, it’s not that Apple charges for its operating systems or sells gaming systems.

Continue Reading…

We’re just days away from getting the hard numbers from Apple on December 2016 quarterly sales. From Apple’s guidance, which tends to be quite conservative, the company stands to show a slight increase over the previous year. This would represent a welcome change from last year, where the first-ever sales drop for an iPhone occurred. That was the iPhone 6s, which I suppose wasn’t regarded as much of an upgrade to the iPhone 6.

Now the iPhone 7 was also regarded as a fairly tepid upgrade considering the case didn’t change much. The loss of the headphone jack was supposed to be a huge impediment to sales, but there’s little evidence that it changed things all that much. Apple’s decision to supply a wired headphone and an adapter dealt with most issues. The sole problem involved people who want to listen and charge at the same time, which requires a somewhat costly adaptor.

In any case, the star of the show appeared to be the iPhone 7 Plus, with two cameras and a digital Portrait Mode that is the focus of some of the flashy TV ads. It was real close to Christmas before orders and shipping times came into alignment, and this appeared to be the result of the fact that Apple didn’t anticipate its demand. Or it may have partly been due to the fact that it is harder to build them, and thus it took longer to ramp up production in sufficient quantities.

Regardless, tech pundits and Wall Street analysts are having their say. Some of the chatter is reasonable, based very much on the fact that Apple isn’t into missing its own estimates. They might miss Wall Street estimates, but that may also mean that the estimates themselves were not reasonable.

Some projections, though, seem rather less sensible, such as one in a major business publication that I shall not name.

While the article does predict increasing sales, and that’s nothing special, there are the usual cautions and fear-mongering. So there’s the theory that many of those sales were for the previous year’s model, the cheaper one, since customers evidently aren’t tempted by high-end gear.

I won’t dispute the fact that the iPhone 6s is a perfectly good smartphone and the changes in the newer model may not be sufficient to justify paying $100-120 more. But over the usual 24-month installment/lease deal, it doesn’t represent more than a few dollars more for each payment. Don’t forget, the iPhone 6s is the one that didn’t do so well. It was the first iPhone whose sales didn’t match the previous year’s model, so why would it suddenly catch fire? So people could save a little money.

Now the article doesn’t actually list the actual price differences between the iPhone 6s and the iPhone 7. As a result, despite higher sales, average sale prices allegedly declined, assuming this theory is true. This would allegedly be bad news for Apple even if more units were actually sold. Go figure.

But don’t forget the apparent high demand for the iPhone 7 Plus, the fact that it was backordered for weeks. Does that coincide with lower demand and a preference for the previous year’s model. I mean, if customers wanted the lowest price possible for an iPhone, they could have settled on a smaller display and purchased the iPhone SE, which starts at $399.

The article’s main slant, in suggesting that people preferred the cheaper iPhone, is based on the assumption that existing smartphones are good enough, that the changes in the iPhone 7 series weren’t sufficient to entice people to pay more for one. Instead of buying an iPhone 6s in 2016 when it was the top-of-the-line, they waited for a new model to replace it and thus benefit from a lower purchase price.

I suppose that’s possible for some customers, and it may well be that people upgrading from, say, an iPhone 5 or an iPhone 5s, might be perfectly content to have the older product, since it still represents a sea change for them. Having the latest and greatest is less important than having something that meets their needs and will deliver excellent service for another two or three years.

Overall, that may also explain why people tend to keep their tech gadgets for longer periods, although wireless carriers are still trying to push you towards the two-year cycle. Even though those two-year contracts have largely been phased out, they have been replaced by plans that let you buy the handset of your choice on some sort of credit plan, and, and if you pay a little more per month, you can exchange the one you have for a newer one every 12 to 18 months with no financial penalty.

But if anything, that might be an incentive to buy the latest model, and stick with the upgrade cycle. It also locks you in to a single carrier.

That’s quite unlike personal computers and tablets, where people hang onto them for several years without feeling they are suffering from inferior performance or reliability.

Obviously any prediction about iPhone sales is only current until January 31, when Apple will reveal the truth. You’ll want to pay attention to total iPhone revenue, and the average selling price. If the latter goes down, the naysayers in that article were right. If it stays the same or increases, the optimistic expectations fueled by the apparent high demand for the iPhone 7 Plus will have been been shown to be on the money.

I might be dead wrong, but I’ll go with the latter.

If you can believe recent sales estimates from Gartner, Mac sales over the past year fell about twice as much as the average for PC sales. This may be particularly disconcerting, since Apple has long claimed that the rate of growth of the Mac has exceeded the overall PC market. That was mostly true until the last year;

Some suggest Mac sales are dropping because Apple has lost interest in the platform, even though it delivers revenue of over $20 billion per year. To most companies, that would be an extraordinary amount of money, but it’s perceived as relatively tiny compared to the iPhone. But what about the iPad, where revenue was slightly less in the September quarter?

Well, you’ve got me there. There hasn’t been an iPad update since spring, when a 9.7-inch version of the iPad Pro was launched. iPad sales have been consistently on the down side for a while, so is Apple also ignoring that product?

When it comes to Macs, it is true that sales did not decrease as much for other PC makers. They were actually slightly higher for Dell. But there’s not much in the way of real innovation among the largest PC box makers. It’s mostly the same old stuff they’ve sold for years, with up-to-date parts, so it’s not as if there something altogether new about their PCs.

All right, maybe Microsoft is doing something different. Take the Surface Studio, which is an all-in-one desktop  sporting a 28-inch touchscreen display on a flexible arm that be manipulated in an almost infinite number of ways. Supposedly this will be a boon for artists and CAD, and it’s true this machine has gotten pretty good reviews overall. But at a starting price of $3,000, it sits far above the entry-level price of the 27-inch iMac with 5K Retina display. That’s Apple’s nearest potential competitor though, of course, there is no touchscreen and there never will be.

At least Microsoft appears to be trying to do something to advance the state of the art, or at least expand its concept of a PC with touchscreen. It’s hard to see whether such a specialized device as the Studio will be flying off the shelves, but I suppose there’s the possibility Microsoft will move a decent number of them to power users, and thus earn high profits in the same league as Apple.

Does Apple have a response?

Well, Apple will give us the old refrigerator and toaster oven metaphor, that touchscreens aren’t appropriate for a personal computer. Apple’s solution is the Touch Bar, a key feature of the Late 2016 MacBook Pro that puts an OLED touchscreen in place of the traditional function keys. Call it function keys on steroids if you like, but it means that you need not raise your hands onto the screen for any input functions. So maybe they care about muscle strain?

The long-term success of this scheme may be a great unknown, but surveys of Mac sales indicate that Apple managed to grow its market in the December quarter. So it may well be that the dearth of new models earlier this year had its impact. But I wonder how many people who buy Macs are plugged in to news of the latest and greatest models. Or it may be that the new MacBook Pros were — despite all the controversy about the higher price, the features, battery performance and all — so compelling that customers were anxious to buy them.

If that’s the case, will new the promised Mac desktops this year — and perhaps a 2017 version of the MacBook — continue to fuel sales from customers who were sitting on the sidelines waiting for something new and different? What sort of differences does Apple need to make anyway? Or are customers happy enough with Windows 10 not to consider a Mac switch as readily as they used to.

Another possibility is that some businesses who avoided buying PCs because of all of the Windows 8 flaws were willing to accept Windows 10 as business ready. That would boost purchases of gear from companies for whom Macs are not on the radar, or where Macs occupy only a small portion of the total number of computers in use.

I suppose it’s a lot easier to suggest that the Mac is flailing and that it’s back to niche status after sitting in the number four or five position on the global market for a while. No doubt the future trends of PC sales will remain in flux, and Apple’s share will also vary from quarter to quarter.

It’s easier to suggest Apple is in trouble. But most PC makers have faced falling sales to one extent or another. Overall, according to Gartner, global PC shipments have declined for the last five years. During most of those years, Apple managed small increases for the most part. The days of stellar growth are long gone, and for most, it’s going to be downhill from here on. But the pace is still relatively slow, despite the fact that loads and loads of smartphones and tablets have, to many, replaced PCs entirely.

As to Apple, actual figures will be released on Tuesday, January 31st. Even if the sales increase is confirmed, it’ll probably take another quarter or two to see if this represents a trend.

It’s a sure thing that Siri is not the perfect personal assistant. Far from it, and the errors it makes can be mighty frustrating. It goes to show how much work Apple has to do in order to make Siri really useful for more people.

Now in the greater universe of tech gear, Siri is often compared, often unfavorably, to such competitors as Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana and Google Voice (and Google Assistant). The excuse or explanation is that Apple needs to reduce its privacy standards, so customers give up more of it in exchange for a more responsive digital assistant.

But some simple instructions ought to be recognized without going through hoops or allowing Apple to grab ahold of some of your personal information.

So take a perfectly ordinary example. My wife uses her iPad as an alarm clock. She instructs Siri to set an alarm for a specific time each morning. It changes from morning to morning, and more than likely she’ll turn it off and program a totally different alarm for half an hour later. Maybe she should just set them all in advance, 30 minutes apart, but let me continue.

Barbara turns off the alarm each time. That can take a bit of extra work as I’ll explain shortly. She doesn’t manually look over the Clock app to see how many inactive alarms are there. When I check them out, I see dozens.

So the logical solution would be to ask Siri to just delete all of the inactive alarms, right? Now perhaps it works for you just fine. But it doesn’t work for me, and it doesn’t work for her. Most of you know what my voice sounds like, since I host two nationally syndicated radio shows and have been in the radio business for decades. My wife’s voice reveals a modest Brooklyn accent, but is trained and well modulated. So one would think Siri would have no problem understanding such a command

When I try, Siri provides a list of the alarms, and asks which ones I want to delete. I can define it as the ones that are turned off, the ones that are inactive, the ones that are not being used. It doesn’t matter how I express that instruction. Siri remains similarly obtuse. The sole option that appears to work without specifying individual items is to delete them all, active or inactive.

The same is true or my iPhone, and I’m taken through the same set of frustrating steps.

Now deleting all of Barbara’s alarms is not such a big deal. After all, she sets up a new one every day, even if they are a few minutes apart. My alarms collection is more specific, and changes on the weekends. Without going into unnecessary detail, let me say that I need to wake up twice on Sunday mornings to upload the network distribution of my radio shows to the server for download via iTunes and other podcast aggregators. So I do not feel the need to remove them all and start over just to allow Siri to remove inactive alarms. How is that taking advantage of a digital assistant?

Perhaps there’s a magic formula that would work, but the user shouldn’t have to adapt in some strange way to Siri’s peculiar tastes. This, to me, appears to be a super simple command that ought to be obeyed without question. Can’t Siri detect the difference between an alarm that’s switched on, and one that’s switched off?

But I do understand why many people find Siri little more than an annoyance with only modest usefulness. I do not have enough experience with the competition to compare accuracy and the ability to manage contextual requests. Supposedly Siri got better with recent iOS releases. Certainly individual app developers can now use it, but I’m not at all convinced it’s much better, or any better, in most respects.

Forgetting Siri’s shortcomings — and I grant that depends on the user — I have another complaint that is more disturbing.

So when the alarm is triggered, a simple tap on Stop should dismiss it. Only on the two iPhones on which I’ve tested it — and iPhone 6 and an iPhone 7 — I usually have to press fairly hard on the touchscreen for the command to be recognized. Sometimes it requires repeating that tap a time or two. This appears to be the only touch command that is more difficult to activate than it should be. Sometimes it even goes into Snooze mode, which means it’ll fire again unless turned off.

All this just to use the iPhone as an alarm clock.

Now my wife has an old clock radio — bought in the early 2000s — that she used to use for its main purpose, getting her up in the morning on time. It works consistently and predictably unless there’s a power outage. The alarm is either an irritating buzz, or a selected radio station. It’s the same sort of clock radio I’ve used for years, and it cost maybe $15 or so at Walmart.

Maybe there’s something to be said about being old fashioned.