As concerns grow over China’s economic situation, and perceived slowdowns, Apple looms front and center. A hefty portion of the company’s growth in the past year has been pegged on sales of new iPhones — and Macs for that matter — in that country. Indeed Apple’s stock price nosedived even faster than the overall stock market recently over such concerns. It took a statement from Tim Cook, to a TV financial host no less, to set things right. Of course, it also brought about a few demands for investigation because Cook may have spoken out improperly, although he has done that before.

So you can imagine that there was a lot of anticipation ahead of the release of Apple’s fourth quarter financials. Fears of sales in China were clearly paramount when the stock dropped on Monday, but it mostly recovered Tuesday, ahead of the news. Whether things will grow better or worse may depend on one’s expectations.

On the surface, it would appear that Apple has weathered most concerns.

Indeed, profits rose 31% based, in part, on continued strong iPhone demand in China. According to Apple, 48.04 million iPhones were sold in the September quarter, which was a tad short of analyst estimates of 48.72 million units but still 22 percent over last year’s 39.27 million. Of course, analyst estimates are seldom based on reality. Regardless, it so happens that the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus were only available for two business days during that quarter, so sales of the new models could not have had a significant impact. Just as important, China sales are up 99% year-over-year. So much for Wall Street skepticism.

Typical of their usual disconnect, CNET described iPhone sales which, as you see above, were only slightly behind estimates, as “ho-hum.” If Samsung reported similar sales growth for Galaxy smartphones, I wouldn’t be surprised to see CNET call it stellar and the company unstoppable.

In addition, Apple reported that 30% of iPhone sales went to Android switchers. This figure was no doubt helped along somewhat by the recent release of an Android app, Move to iOS, which eases the process of transferring your stuff from Google’s platform to Apple’s, and locating apps to replace the ones you’ve been using. I wonder how many went the other way, but that doesn’t seem to have been a significant factor so far.

Overall revenue was $51.50 billion, an increase of 22% from last year’s $42.12 billion. Net income rose from $8.47 billion last year to $11.12 billion this year. Earnings per share rose to $1.96 from $1.42 last year, and this was partly attributed to the company’s aggressive program to repurchase shares. This is somewhat better than analyst estimates, which indicated that Apple would report earnings of $1.88 a share on revenue of $51.1 billion, In other words, it should be a good thing.

Despite claims from the usual offenders who deliver preliminary estimates, that Mac sales were down, they actually increased, slightly, to 5.7 million, an improvement of 3 percent over the previous year. The result bucks a trend towards falling PC sales. It also justifies Apple’s ongoing investments in the platform.

It came as no surprise that iPad sales didn’t impress. In keeping with the overall downward trend, some 9.8 million were sold, a drop of 20 percent over last year. Whether the arrival of the iPad Pro will change things is doubtful, since it may not be a mass market success. Besides, the iPad Pro won’t be on sale until November, which means it’ll probably have minimal impact for the current quarter.

Now I suppose it’s always possible that more people will consider upgrading their old iPads at long last. Apple, at least, continues to remain bullish on the product despite the sales setbacks. But it wo with tablet sales. Perhaps the deal with IBM to push the iPad to the enterprise will eventually bear fruit.

As to Apple Watch sales, the best they could offer was that “sales of Apple Watch were up sequentially and were ahead of expectations.” What expectations? This is the sort of question that wasn’t asked during the quarterly conference call with financial analysts, although it’s pretty clear from the statement that there would be no further illumination on the matter.

For now, it will only fuel speculation that the Apple Watch is not doing so well, which is why sales figures aren’t being disclosed. It’s also true that Apple continues to add dealers to carry the smartwatch. Still, even the most pessimistic estimates indicate that the Apple Watch is doing way better than competing products, but it may take a year or two to judge its potential. Remember the iPad did remarkably well out of the starting gate in 2010. By 2014, sales began to dip.

For the current quarter, Apple estimates revenue between $75.5 billion and $77.5 billion and gross margins between 39 and 40 percent. This is fairly close to analysis predictions, but those analysts were expecting worse, which may mean that Apple’s stock price will rise regardless.

Of course, in a world where a tiny profit from Amazon is enough to cause its stock to soar, we are beyond he point of expecting rational outcomes.

Just the other day, I read an article about a new feature in iOS 9 known as App Thinning. It’s basic function is to limit the resources of an app to what’s needed on your device. So your iPhone 6s will download a slightly different version of an app than your iPad Air 2. The latter is, of course, optimized for a larger display, so it hardly makes sense to download content you’ll never need. It also means that you’ll save space, and this is particularly helpful if you have one of those 16GB models.

This plays out in a more sophisticated fashion on the new Apple TV. With tvOS, initial app downloads are limited to 200MB. That may not seem to be sufficient, and, on the surface, it doesn’t leave much flexibility to install fancy games and other apps that have lots of things to do and thus require far more resources. Apple’s solution is to push that extra data on demand, meaning that parts of an app will be download in the background ready for use as needed. But unused resources, such as the early steps in a game when you’ve advanced to higher levels, will be unloaded. Discarded.

It all sounds so neat, what could possibly go wrong?

Well, for one thing, it’s the speed of your Internet connection. Not everyone has 25 megabits, which is the minimum broadband speed in the U.S. according to the FCC. So what may take seconds to prefetch in one home or office, may take long minutes elsewhere. Remember that the Apple TV will be available in a number of locations where Internet speeds are uncertain and sometimes unreliable. One assumes the system is smart enough to begin to retrieve the data you need before you actually start to use it, but we’ll know more after the fourth generation Apple TV ships and customers have a chance to run a variety of apps on it.

Indeed, I wonder how many of you are even getting the Internet speeds you’re paying for.

There’s a published report that New York state’s activist attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, is investigating Verizon, Cablevision and Time Warner Cable to determine whether they are charging customers for faster broadband speeds than they actually deliver. The initial requests include the testing that these ISPs have done to verify their claimed speeds.

But there’s already a possible excuse for poor broadband speeds, which is that speeds might suffer when your ISP is connecting to long-haul carriers, such as Cogent Communications and Level 3. They are the intermediaries in this connection setup, moving traffic to and from your ISP. If things fall down where one of these companies picks up the load, even if you have a valid 100 megabit connection, the sites that pass through those carriers will be real slow.

Doesn’t that sort of let the ISPs off the hook? After all, it may not be their service that’s not delivering the goods. Well, except for the fact that they should be taking the responsibility to work with intermediary providers to make sure you are getting all the speed you ordered.

It reminds me of a problem I had with CenturyLink a couple of years ago. I had a sweetheart deal for a year or two, a real low price for a connection where I routinely benchmarked speeds between 40 and 50 megabits. I was only promised 40 mbps. I should have been happy, but whenever I tried to send and receive files from one of our web servers, hosted by iWeb of Montreal, I was lucky to get a tiny fraction of the advertised download and upload speeds. Sometimes traffic moved along at dialup speeds.

I had iWeb check my server, and they sent me stats that demonstrated that everything was working properly in the datacenter at the point where the connection was being handed off to their upstream providers.

Over the next few weeks, I went through several levels of support at CenturyLink. They each asserted that my online connection was robust, and that the advertised speeds were met and exceeded. But when the connection was handed off at either end to Cogent, things went downhill. I went so far as to open a service ticket with Cogent. It appears that there was a sort of traffic dispute with CenturyLink that apparently resulted in traffic throttling. Obviously I was not the only one to be impacted, but my complaint had gone up to the legal department at CenturyLink. In the end, each side blamed the other, but I had the promise from CenturyLink that they would try to help.

A few days later, I ran another speed test from the server, and was delighted to see everything moving at full clip. When I ran a traceroute to and from the server, I discovered that the traffic was now moving from CenturyLink to Tata Communications rather than Cogent. Tata, which has a worldwide carrier network that competes with Cogent, just happens to be a division of the same India-based company that builds Land Rovers and Jaguars.

Regardless, my connection problems were solved, but I can see where such issues are not uncommon. The ISP is off the hook, because their traffic is moving at the proper speed. And, as you see, the intermediate carrier may, in turn, blame the ISP when slowdowns occur.

Aside from this conflict between CenturyLink and Cogent, my broadband experience in Arizona has been mostly positive. Both CenturyLink and Cox usually deliver speeds that mostly meet or exceed the advertised levels. From time to time, the signal does slow down, particularly during the evening when lots of people are flooding their Internet connections with computers, smartphones, tablets, game consoles, and video streamers

But it’s a good thing the authorities in New York state are holding an ISP’s feet to the fire. Unfortunately, not everyone benefits from speeds of 100 megabits, one gigabit, or even higher. But as more and more of you depend on a reliable online hookup, speeds are only one factor. There’s also the bandwidth cap. If your new Apple TV is regularly downloading up to 2GB of data as app resources are swapped, and that’s the maximum according to current tvOS guidelines, how long will it be before you have consumed a few hundred GB and hit or exceeded your ISP’s bandwidth limits? That is the potential Achilles heel of App Thinning, and I wonder how Apple plans to handle it. Or maybe Apple will just sit back and let customers sort things out with their ISPs.

I’ve long had a love/hate relationship with Apple’s approach to input devices. When Apple introduced small trackballs on the very first PowerBooks, I generally carried a standard mouse with me for comfort. I never took to trackballs, and I spent a year with one of the original Kensington TurboMouse. I tried real hard, after being told by friends that it was the best way to avoid carpel tunnel syndrome. Eventually I returned to a traditional mouse. My wrists remain relatively healthy.

Over the years, I’ve tried various so-called ergonomic mice from Logitech and other companies, but I hit the sweet spot with Apple’s Magic Mouse. The design was clever, putting a tiny trackpad on the surface, so you can make finger gestures. Scrolling and switching back and forth among web pages was seamless, and my wrists took to it real fast. Indeed, whenever I’ve returned to one of those Logitech mice when the Magic Mouse’s batteries ran out, I found the overall feel and movements to be awkward and rough. Apple’s mouse was slick and smooth, but clearly that wasn’t enough for our favorite fruit company.

That takes us to the Magic Mouse 2, introduced last week with Apple’s iMac refresh. At $79, it’s $10 more than the original, but what do you get to justify the higher price tag? A good question.

Continue Reading…

When rumors first arose that Apple planned to incorporate a retina display in the 27-inch iMac, I wondered what sort of price penalty it would entail. It’s one thing to pack those extra pixels into an iPhone, an iPad or a 15-inch MacBook Pro. I speculated it would cost several hundred dollars more for the big iMac, and I suppose I was more or less correct with the original late 2013 iMac with 5K Retina display. It debuted at $2,499.

But Apple also enhanced the guts of that computer, with a faster processor, more powerful graphics, and a 1TB Fusion Drive. You add that to the package, and you see that the additional price for the 5K display was at most $200 or so. Within a few months, Apple cut the price by just that amount, and added a 5K display to the previous high-end standard configuration, at $1,999.

This month, Apple democratized the 27-inch iMac by making 5K displays available across the board with no increase in price. That, plus a wider color gamut and Intel Skylake processors, means what you spent last year gets you much more value this year. That’s typical for Apple, but having a 5K display for no extra cost is just the icing on the cake.

I would expect that reviews of the new iMacs would focus heavily on picture quality, plus the advantages of the Skylake chips in benchmarks. What do you get that’s better than the previous model? That’s ripe for testing, to explain to readers why they should buy one.

But one particular review, from a major online publication, had to find something to complain about. What? Well, because a 5K display is too niche, and Apple should not have discontinued the model with the standard display.

I’ll let you take a deep breath.

Now the publication in question has a curious review philosophy, which is to almost always have something as a negative. That often forces the reviewer to force the issue, come up with something that has little or no practical value.

So we have a situation here where Apple is giving you, in effect, the 5K display free on all 27-inch iMacs compared to the previous model. Why should that be a negative?

A fair criticism might be that Apple ought to sell a version of the 27-inch iMac without the Retina display for a lower price. So instead of $1,799, what about $1,699 or $1,599? Would customers be willing to save a hundred dollars or two and give up on that amazing display?

I suppose Apple may have considered offering a non-Retina configuration, but I rather expect the audience wouldn’t be all that large. I’m just guessing, but I’d rather think people who are used to paying $1,799 for the big iMac would be delighted to get a 5K display for the same price. But that’s just me.

In any case, the real comparison is with PC all-in-ones. When you make that comparison, you find it’s the impossible dream. I’m not aware of any Windows PC that actually has a 5K display — or a 4K display for that matter. You find them in note-books, and there are 4K and 5K high-resolution displays. But most of the latter are priced in the same range as the iMac, which comes complete with a powerful personal computer. So much for people who complain that Mac prices are too high.

But Apple’s Retina display revolution isn’t over. There are still some cheaper versions of the 21.5-inch iMac that have the standard display. The MacBook Air is also still available with the standard display, and as Apple sells more and more Retina displays, I presume they will manage to incorporate them in a near-future version of Apple’s cheapest note-book without any price premium.

Over the next few weeks, there will be plenty of reviews of the new iMacs, both sizes, and I would hope they’ll focus on the actual advantages and shortcomings of these products. So the biggest criticism you can probably make of the 21.5-inch model is that you cannot upgrade RAM. Maybe Apple’s customer surveys show that very few people care, but is it worth saving a few dollars per unit to inconvenience customers?

And what about the hard drive? If you must replace one, it’s a messy process to disassemble recent generations of iMacs, since the screen is held to the chassis with adhesive. Yes, I realize you can assemble and disassemble if you show care, with proper instructions. And service people do it all the time, but I’d think Apple is smart enough to devise a relatively seamless way to pop off a rear cover, and open everything inside to a potential upgrade. It may go against the original concept of the all-in-one Mac in 1984, but I would hope Apple will consider the consequences of making these products so hostile to users who might want to add more memory and more storage without going through pain and agony.

That, you see, is a legitimate criticism. Complaining about paying nothing extra for a fancy display is just plain silly.