It’s hard to take projections from industry analysts seriously. If you believed some of their projections, Windows Phone would soon overtaking the iOS as the second most popular mobile platform on the planet. And, of course, Apple would be relegated to near-irrelevance once again except for a few million diehards who loved to pay more for pretty things. I haven’t begun to consider the recent purchase of Beats Electronics for $3 billion, which has loads of detractors, but you get the picture.

Indeed when current surveys disagree by big percentages — so Apple has negative Mac sales growth in one and positive Mac sales growth in another — it’s hard to take any of it seriously. Yet a lot of big corporations pay these alleged industry analysts the big bucks to deliver this nonsense, so I wonder if I’m not in the wrong profession. I know nothing about industry analysis, but I surely can do better than these fools. It’s not that you have to pass a state exam to hang out an industry analyst shingle.

So in the spirit of observing the incompetents once again, I took note of two reports. One suggests that tablets will take over from traditional PCs come next year, while another suggests that Microsoft’s Windows growth curve will resume, mostly because businesses were forced kicking and screaming to upgrade because Windows XP is no longer supported.

Now I understand the “serves ’em right” factor, which is that a business depending on a nearly 13-year-old OS should have known better. You can include the IRS on that list, since they were recently forced to pay for extra support for missing the XP deadline, claiming it would cost some $30 million to upgrade everything to Windows 7. Considering the USA’s tax collectors are under budget constraints, maybe that’s understandable, but private companies are in the same boat.

So the theory goes that there will be a rush to upgrade to a newer version of Windows, and you can be assured businesses will by and large avoid the Windows 8 disaster. But it’s also true that Windows 7 is a far more reliable place to be, so it makes sense that IT people will choose that alternative, although it might also require buying new PCs to deal with heftier system needs. That’s what the PC industry is depending upon, of course, since it creates the potential for perhaps hundreds of millions of sales. But it’s also possible they’ll cobble together some upgrades for the older PC boxes to continue to work efficiently with the new OS. We’ll have to see.

Certainly Microsoft’s long-delayed decision to give up on Windows XP seems perfectly sensible from a profit-and-loss standpoint both for them and the PC industry. But it’s also true that some companies, who are already embracing a “bring your own device” philosophy, may just buy Macs instead. Or they will choose iPads, which dominate the business world. Neither step augers well for PC makers, but if Microsoft can sell new Office 365 subscriptions or regular user licenses for Office as a result, that’s a good thing. After all, it costs less to support their software on Apple’s platforms.

But the Windows upgrade cycle, if it does restore growth to the industry, will surely be temporary. Once companies have rushed to ditch XP, kicking and screaming of course, the sales will die down. And it’s an open question how many Windows users will simply give up on the platform for good.

Meanwhile, it remains an open question whether Microsoft can devise a long-term solution to this dilemma. The new Surface 3 is basically being marketed as just another slim and light PC, in the spirit of an Ultrabook. It has a touchscreen, but is not the same as an iPad or Android tablet. Indeed, it’s a refashioned throwback to the original Windows tablet scheme, that of a note-book with a touchscreen that worked mostly with a stylus. Indeed, our former family doctor used one of those devices, a big clumsy thing that actually slowed down the process of gathering and recording patient information. Well, at least the Surface 3 is smaller.

Microsoft’s biggest dilemma is what to do about the next major Windows upgrade, which one assumes will be Windows 9. Will it continue in the spirit of the interface formerly known as Metro, or continue the migration back to the desktop interface? If the latter, how will touchscreens be dealt with? Indeed, Microsoft has yet to release a touch-savvy version of Office, even though there’s a perfectly good one already available for iPad. Of course, they started the iPad version from scratch, rather than depend on the baggage of the past.

By evidently discontinuing the ARM-based versions of Surface, Microsoft is giving up on a market of hundreds of millions of devices. Whether iPad sales are flat or have resumed the growth curve the last quarter or this one, it’s still true that combined sales in that space are in the tens of millions per quarter when you factor in Android and Amazon’s modified Android gear. Does Microsoft expect you to abandon your passion for tablets and return to a Windows convertible? Hardly likely.

So maybe the surveys are right. Maybe Windows PCs will grow a tad next year. But it may not signal a long-term trend, which doesn’t auger so well for the industry unless there’s a huge strategic change. And I haven’t considered the remote possibilities that customers will embrace the PC anew.

Despite a rising stock market price, and improving industry evaluations, Apple is still perceived as the beleaguered company. Every new product that is intended to compete with an Apple offering is a “killer.” Just the other day, in fact, I read something claiming Samsung was going to release an “iPhone 6 killer” this fall.

Yet it’s also true that, on a single model basis, Apple continues to outsell Samsung by a decent margin. True Samsung sells more handsets overall, but with loads of models, most of which are cheap feature phones or basic smartphones sold at prices that pretty much preclude a decent profit or any profit. It’s a “volume is everything” approach that doesn’t really help a company’s bottom line, and it’s not Apple’s way.

Indeed, just about every “killer” has failed to slay the dragon. Each and every one gets some play in the tech media, or in some lame-brained financial analysis of Apple’s prospects. Apple will invariably be exhorted to wake up, smell the roses, and build cheaper gear or gear with more features to fight the coming competitive deluge.

Continue Reading…

Predictably, when Samsung first announced the flagship Galaxy S5 smartphone earlier this year, there were the inevitable comparisons between the Samsung and the iPhone 5s. This was the ultimate, inevitable battle to the death or whatever. So how did Apple stack up with the latest contender?

Well, on the surface, probably not so well based on specs alone. Starting with a 5.1-inch display, 1.1 inches larger than the one on the iPhone, the Samsung had a processor with a higher clock speed, more cores, and a camera with more megapixels. Onboard RAM was also higher, but I won’t bore you with the raw details.

You see, at the end of the day, based on surface specs alone, the Galaxy S5 must be far superior to the 5s. But was that true?

It turns out, of course, that raw specs don’t count. It’s a well known fact that iOS is more efficient than Android, even though smartphones with the latter may deliver roughly comparable performance. But it requires the brute force technique to make the hardware more powerful to compensate; one of the hallmarks of the next Android OS, known as “L” is more efficiency, thus promising superior performance. We’ll see.

Besides. Apple builds its own customized chips, though still based on the ARM architecture, and thus specs don’t really count in the real world. It’s all about how well the products perform when running regular apps.

So Apple still manages to stay at or near the top of the heap with real comparisons. But since the specs seem to tell a different tale, and favor the competition, you’ll see all these match-ups without context. When the expected iPhone 6 arrives, perhaps in less than three months, you’ll see how it stacks up against the Galaxy S5 and whatever newer hardware Samsung and other handset makers devise by then. But until actual benchmarks and usability tests are run, it won’t mean very much except for meaningless bragging rights.

Of course this is nothing new. Consider all those Mac versus PC comparisons of old. These days, it’s more about price than specs, because Macs and Windows PCs are basically using mostly the same hardware nowadays, and the software bundle doesn’t get a lot of play.

But before Apple switched to Intel in 2006, you had all those inevitable PowerPC versus Intel comparisons. Intel almost always boasted higher clock speeds, particularly on those hot-running Pentiums of old. So could a 3GHz processor really be slower than a PowerPC with a rating one third that high?

Apple said yes, and would produce benchmarks, usually with multiplatform apps, such as Adobe Photoshop, to demonstrate how the PowerPC chip was really superior. You can bet that Windows fans created the myth that Apple cooked the books and that the tests were fake.

While you can argue that Apple deliberately chose tests that would exploit the capabilities of their hardware, there was nothing strange about the test methodology. At the time, they revealed all to the media, along with canned test files showing how specific Photoshop filters ran. Indeed, when I ran the test under the fairly normal circumstances Apple posed at the time, I was able to essentially match their results.

When I published those tests, you can bet that PC fans piled the criticisms upon me. But I never made an effort to discuss the issue of whether these seemingly normal tests were somehow suspect. They didn’t seem to be, but it was also true that Intel continued to overcome the inefficiencies of their chips, while the PowerPC stagnated. This explains why Steve Jobs decided that Apple must go Intel, and the transition was smooth. It was even smoother than the original migration from the old Motorola 680×0 chip to PowerPC, and I was around in those days as well.

Forgetting the numbers and how they were calculated, the main issue was that the other side invariably accused Apple of cheating. They wouldn’t admit that Microsoft ever cheated — and they did as history demonstrates — only that Apple could never possibly claim equality or superiority. The Mac was overpriced an underpowered, and thus any claim to the contrary must be a lie. Facts didn’t matter!

Of course, benchmarks are common in many industries. For cars, you want to know that your vehicle can go from zero to 60 miles per hour (or the metric system equivalent) faster than your neighbor’s. It doesn’t matter that the published tests are done with professional drivers who may run the test over and over again to trick the vehicle into accelerating a little faster. At the end of the day, if the pickup is good, particularly when going up a mountainous road at normal driving speeds, it doesn’t matter. The car that accelerates to 60 in eight seconds is only a whisker faster than the one that accomplishes the same feat in seven seconds — or even six. As fast as you can say one-one-thousandth once or twice, so does it really matter?

It’s a reason why I opted for a standard engine rather than the less-reliable turbo engine last time I bought a car. The difference didn’t make enough of a difference to matter, and the somewhat superior gas economy with the less powerful engine was a real plus.

Yes, specs can matter if there’s a drastic, clearly defined real world difference. Otherwise, it’s mostly idle conversation.

There’s a common meme in the tech and financial media that Apple’s mid-priced iPhone 5c was an embarrassing failure. This was no doubt buttressed by the statement from Tim Cook last January that the projected sales mix was off for the December 2013 quarter. This meant that more copies of the iPhone 5s were sold, and fewer copies of the iPhone 5c.

Thus a failure.

Now the design scheme behind the iPhone 5c was obvious. Rather than sell the previous year’s iPhone 5 at a lower price, Apple put the guts and some minor hardware enhancements into colorful plastic cases. Plastic is supposed to be cheap, but Apple managed to make it elegant. Regardless, it was clear from the very first day that you could easily get one, but, at the start, getting the top-of-the-line iPhone 5s was more difficult. That was the start of the belief that the cheaper iPhone must be a failure.

Indeed, some media and industry pundits said Apple priced it too high. Wasn’t this supposed to be a cheap iPhone? But that honor went to the older iPhone 4S, which is, to this very day, still in Apple’s product lineup, although it will probably vanish by fall.

In any case, the presumed failure of the iPhone 5c was yet another alleged example of Tim Cook’s supposedly failed leadership at Apple. Would Steve Jobs have done that? Or would he have simply put the iPhone 5 on sale for less? But the real question is whether the 5c received higher sales than simply selling the previous year’s model. If it did, it was no doubt successful.

So came a commentary from commentator Daniel Eran Dilger, in AppleInsider, which revealed the iPhone 5c had actually smoked competing smartphones from Android and other mobile platforms. This wasn’t the first time Daniel had provided evidence that a failure wasn’t a failure after all, and that the belief that the 5c didn’t do well was nothing more than a myth.

So comes a report about research data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, which reported that, in a survey covering UK customers, the 5c actually outsold Samsung’s flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S5, in May. Lest we forget, the iPhone 5c came out last September, but the Samsung was released in late April of this year, thus being the new kid on the block.

All right, there was one silver lining for Samsung, which is that 17% of those buying their smartphones had switched from the iPhone. That’s a huge headline, although it ignores the fact that the movement in the opposite direction is more than twice that. But that’s just a typical example of how the media plays it backwards with Apple.

Now there may be a number of reasons why those 17% left Apple. It may have been an individual problem with a particular device, dissatisfaction with the iPhone or Apple’s ecosystem, a matter of getting a cheaper handset from another company, or perhaps they wanted a larger screen. Indeed, one reason suggested for Apple deciding to make larger iPhones in the next cycle — and the rumors mention 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch versions — is to attract customers lost because the screens aren’t large enough.

I suppose there are many possibilities, but these figures aren’t terribly new. The movement in Apple’s direction has always been way higher than the other way around, but far too many members of the media do not consider context in running stories of this sort. A lost Apple customer gets far more weight than a lost Android, BlackBerry or Windows Phone customer.

Thus, when a certain high-profile tech columnist switched to Android last year, it was a huge deal. However, the changes forthcoming in iOS 8, which includes full support for third-party keyboards, will evidently cause that columnist to return to the Apple fold. We’ll see.

The fact of the matter, though, is that the claim that the iPhone 5c was unsuccessful is simply not borne out by the facts. Maybe it didn’t sell as many units as Apple expected, but that’s actually a good thing from a profit and loss standpoint, because it generally means more sales of the 5s. This still doesn’t mean the 5c will remain in the product lineup this fall. Apple may have other strategies, but it’s also true that this particular iPhone has been more successful than industry analysts claim.

When it comes to switchers, however, it really doesn’t seem that Apple is losing more customers than usual. Without asking detailed questions, and that’s not typically being done in these surveys, it’s hard to know the reasons for their decision. I also expect that, to many smartphone customers, platform loyalty doesn’t mean all that much. Perhaps their use of a smartphone may largely be limited to email and Internet, and they don’t have large numbers of apps. So jumping from one platform to another may not be so big an issue. If a dealer has a special price, and they need a smartphone, they’ll take what’s available.

You see, we live in a bubble that doesn’t always conform to the real world. But the fact is that the iPhone 5c is clearly not a failure, and lots more people move to the iPhone than the other way around. Only in an alternate universe would that be bad news.