So when it was announced that outspoken billionaire Carl Icahn had invested millions of dollars in Apple stock, and the stock was “extremely undervalued,” in a Tweet no less, the price predictably rose. This was after being in the doldrums for months, on the theory that Apple has had its day in the sun, and it was time for Samsung and other companies to take over.

Of course, it doesn’t seem to matter that Apple is, by percentage at least, more profitable than Samsung. It doesn’t matter that another company that seems to always get a pass on Wall Street, Amazon, rarely shows much of a profit. The financial community seems to take Amazon’s financial model in stride, yet the vaguest indication that Apple might not be doing as well as before starts a freakout.

Of course there’s yet another element in recent days that may have made some investors feel better about Apple, and that’s the promise of a September 10 media event where the new iPhone is expected to be introduced. Not that Apple has announced any such thing, but it appears that some journalists have gotten advance word, and that’s enough to make it seem credible.

Continue Reading…

A popular joke, and maybe it’s not so funny, is that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is a classic definition of insanity. If we take that concept literally, what can you say about Microsoft? After all, the company has been touting tablets for years, and has failed every single time.

At first, Microsoft depended on OEMs to get the job done, but much of what they accomplished, if that’s what you call it, was to tack a touch-sensitive screen onto a note-book, add the stylus, and charge you a lot more for the privilege. That didn’t go over so well, except in some vertical markets, such as physician’s offices.

Now when Apple released the iPad, a very different concept, more in tune with the image of a tablet you saw on, say, Star Trek: The Next Generation in the 1980s, Microsoft’s response was — the Surface. They cobbled together a version of Windows 8 for the ARM processor to get the first Surface to market. They even spent hundreds of millions on advertising, or so some published reports suggest. The ARM version failed, and the costlier Pro variation, using a regular Intel x86 processor, didn’t do much better. In the end, Microsoft took a $900 million inventory write-down because of unsold product in the last financial quarter, and cut the price. Yet total sales were less than that number, leading to estimates in the 1.5 to 1.7 million range since the Surface was first released in October of 2012.

Over the months, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer essentially made excuses about the Surface. First, it was meant as a “design point” to influence OEMs as to the future direction of a Windows 8 tablet. Later, the company gave excuses about sales being modest or somewhat in line with expectations, before Ballmer admitted the Surface hadn’t done so well.

Worse, the Surface comes across as little more than a slimmed down PC note-book, making a huge deal of the sometimes optional physical keyboard. So you end up with a touch-sensitive netbook, and it’s not that netbooks went anywhere after the initial flurry of sales. Once customers realized they were junk, they stopped buying. Of course, the iPad’s arrival helped hasten the departure of the netbook.

In a sense, then, Microsoft continues to believe in Windows everywhere, year after year, with little prospect that extending the market to mobile devices will succeed. Well, Windows Phone seems to have an improving market share, and if BlackBerry is sold off for the parts, there will be even less competition for a third player to get a piece of the handset and tablet market. But this isn’t what Microsoft planned.

Of course, when you talk about repeating unproven ideas, the news media isn’t innocent. Most of the time, it’s concentrating on one idea, however wrong or one-sided, and repeating it forever. In the Apple universe, for example, there’s Antennagate, the supposed scandal, in 2010, involving the iPhone 4, where you could easily kill reception if you held it the “wrong way.” This so-called death grip was allegedly the result of a poorly designed antenna system. Yet other smartphones exhibited similar effects when held in ways that covered their antennas. Even though YouTube videos, and the ones that Apple briefly posted, demonstrated how other handsets were impacted, the media very largely ignored the facts. Consumer Reports ignored them too and chose not to recommend that iPhone.

With the next model, Apple went to a superior system, a diversity antenna where the best signal is selected from two antennas. This is similar to what you find on the family auto’s rear window. No more complaints, but it’s not as if the iPhone 4 was defective.

Apple continues to be attacked for the flawed release of Maps for iOS 6. Yes, there were some irritating problems, particularly with the Flyover feature, where 3D pictures of some locales were melted together, or just plain wrong. Locations and turn-by-turn directions were also sometimes wrong. But Apple has fixed many of these problems, and continues to expand the mapping team. Yet some members of the media pretend the problem still exists in all its glory, and seems to ignore the ongoing issues with incorrect directions crafted by Google Maps.

Of course, being consistent is another problem with the media. Since last year, various commentators and financial analysts have been pouncing on Apple for not innovating enough. They seem to believe that the company has to overturn a market every other week to remain credible. They continue to forget that six years passed after the iPod came out before the iPhone arrived, and it was another three years before the iPad’s debut.

However, Tim Cook has put himself in the hot seat, promising great stuff from Apple starting this fall and continuing through 2014. The first evidence of how well he will fulfill that promise will evidently arrive with an expected iPhone media event on September 12th. Will there be a new entry-level model, which some have called an iPhone 5c? And even if the response to the next generation of iPhones, and iOS 7’s launch, is spectacular, what will Apple do next? The expected iPad and Mac refreshes aren’t going to be enough to satisfy folks who hope for more.

At the same time, what has Samsung delivered that’s at all different other than an overpriced OLED flat panel TV? I’m just wondering.

When the Control Center feature was first announced for iOS 7, you were reminded of the Android solution, which puts a number of system setting toggles in the Notification panel. The purpose was to ease the drudgery of dealing with such basic functions as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. You may want to turn them off, for example, to increase battery life, but you don’t want to have to go through menus and submenus to do such a simple thing.

All right, that makes sense. But the Android version is highly imperfect. When you pull down Notification to check a message or a status report, it’s just too easy for a wayward tap to turn off the wrong thing. The end result may be an unexpected and sometimes exasperating problem. So one day, the synced bookmarks in the Chrome browser on my Samsung Galaxy S4 vanished. I had to go through a couple of settings panels to figure out that Sync was off. A wayward tap, no doubt. Once I toggled it on with another tap, I got my bookmarks back.

Of course, losing one’s bookmarks because of such a silly error of this sort, deliberate or otherwise, makes little sense. At worst, the bookmarks simply shouldn’t sync if that feature is turned off. They should not just up and vanish. You wonder about the Google developers who make it work that way.

Apple’s solution for iOS 7 is to put them in a separate Control Center. Rather than a catch-all Notification Center, you have another place to go, and thus the chance of error is reduced. So maybe Apple was influenced by Android, but they found a way to do it better.

iOS 7 also has a solution for people who neglect to update their apps. I know I’ve seen App Store icons sporting high numbers of waiting updates. With the new mobile OS, you’ll be able to receive your updates automatically in the background, timed to arrive for maximum battery efficiency. So you don’t have to worry about forgetting, and using an older version of an app that may not work the way you like. Of course, there’s the side effect of not having control over the updates you receive; maybe you want to hold off on some. And, yes, Android lets you receive app updates automatically, but you still have to go through a manual process to receive a system update; not that they are ever available.

The biggest annoyance to me on any smartphone I’ve used is handling the removal from your pocket in a comfortable and reliable fashion, particularly when you are receiving a phone call and are rushing to answer. Unless the handset is in lock mode, it’s almost too easy to tap the wrong thing and lose the call. Carelessness? Maybe, but I’d think the designers and engineers at Apple and Google could devise a more fail safe method. After all, to some people, the cell phone is the only phone.

On the Mac I’ve already covered some minor irritants, such as Apple’s decision to hide the user/library folder and the silly workarounds. One of our loyal readers reminded me there’s a “secret” way to do it in OS X Mavericks, assuming that method is retained in the final version. It’s almost akin to offering a feature on a need to know basis.

A more serious quibble on the Mac, though, is the way the Open/Save dialogs are set up. They haven’t changed much over the years since OS X arrived. Yet there is an elegant solution out there, Default Folder X from developer Jon Gotow. He essentially puts the dialogs within a fancy overlay, allowing you to perform Finder-style functions, such as renaming and trashing a document. It also rebounds to the last-used or saved document, which greatly simplifies navigation when you’re dealing with loads of files and folders. And, no, I have only covered a tiny bit of the overall enhancements.

Now Jon has been at this game since the 1990s, and Apple hasn’t adopted any of these oh-so-logical features. I expect that Default Folder X sells most to power users, but Apple should pay attention, write Jon a large check and integrate this utility into OS X. Even better, give him a well-paying job with stock options.

This isn’t to say that OS X doesn’t need a better way to manage your stuff. iOS has divorced itself completely from the traditional file system, although it lurks there below the surface. That may be an extreme solution. Maybe Apple will move OS X towards a middle-of-the-road approach of some sort, allowing power users full access to all the files and folders they want, but shielding a lot of it from regular people who just want to find their stuff without the extra baggage.

The real issue about OS X Mavericks, however, is that it’s just an incremental update. Based on the published details from Apple and developer reaction, there are loads of useful improvements. But the fundamentals haven’t changed very much. There may be an OS XI or something revolutionary being considered for the future of the Mac, but I don’t expect it to be just another version of iOS.

So the conventional wisdom, such as it is, has it that Apple is being forced kicking and screaming into building a lower cost iPhone. Although the top-of-the-line model is relatively inexpensive on a subsidized postpaid carrier contract (the one you pay when you get a bill), it’s a huge jump if you have to pay it all at once.

Of course, wading through the morass of junk that passes for tech journalism these days isn’t easy. Some commentator’s, such as Macworld’s “Macalope,” specialize in handling the fact-checking chores. But the hooved one’s influence appears mostly confined to the choir, as the same falsehoods continue to be repeated by people who should know better. It’s almost as if some of those Apple skeptics are reading from the same playback.

Sure, there are many legitimate criticisms that can be made about Apple. Check these columns, and reader comments, and you’ll find plenty. With so much authentic material out there, why make things up?

The fact of the matter is that Apple has lower-cost products everywhere. You can buy an iPod for $49. The iPad mini starts at $329, and there are even iPad 2s to be had if you want a larger tablet but don’t want to pay $499 for the entry-level fourth generation model. The Mac mini is relatively affordable, and you can buy an iPhone 4 free with a contract. But it’s also a model that first arrived in 2010, and so much has changed.

In recent months, the less expensive iPhones have taken an increasing share of the market, particularly as Apple continues to move into countries where disposable income is less. But the unlocked purchase price, roughly $450 in the U.S., is a big climb for an old model. What’s Apple’s solution?

So there are growing reports, and photos of alleged prototypes, which appear to indicate that an iPhone 5c, 5M, or Lite model will flesh out the low end of the product line beginning next month.

I won’t dismiss all the photos of cases and parts as being faked. That’s not unusual, though even the supposedly knowledgeable tech pundits are saying that Apple will eschew difficult assembly schemes and go plastic to keep costs down. Since most of you probably put your iPhone in a case anyway, to protect it from damage, there’s little harm done. A plastic Samsung Galaxy smartphone hasn’t hurt sales, despite the criticisms from some reviewers.

Taking plastic, and filling it with less powerful parts would, so they say, allow Apple to offer the handset — let’s call it iPhone 5c to be consistent — to be offered free with standard carrier subsidy plans, and around $400 or so retail. One report says as little as $300, which would still be a stretch compared to some of that cheap Android junk out there. But this would be the genuine iPhone, and you wonder what Apple might remove.

There is that claim, from an analyst I shall not name, that Apple will not support Siri. But even the iPhone 4s offers Siri, and that feature is a cornerstone of Apple’s mobile strategy. Indeed, Siri has already begun to show up in the family auto, so a decision of that sort would seem shortsighted, one that would involve cheapening a product more than is expected from Apple.

In short, I fully expect all iPhones introduced next month to include Siri, period. I might be wrong, but if I am, I would only blame Apple for being too aggressive with cost-cutting. Well, I can be egotistical too.

Would a cheaper iPhone cannibalize sales from the next-generation model, presumed to be the 5S? Sure, but that is already happening. The iPad mini takes sales away from the full-sized iPad, and the iPad takes sales away from Macs. But Apple would prefer you buy something from the company rather than nothing, so they accept cannibalization. They’d rather see customers ditch Windows and Android and other platforms, and if a lower-cost but still high quality iPhone helps, so be it.

Understand that nothing about the next iPhone, the configuration, or the possible existence of a cheaper model, has been confirmed. Apple has said nothing about the prospective media event, although that would appear to be a given in light of the fact two respected Apple watchers — AllThingsD and The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple — have confirmed it. They have great track records for such things.

I also expect that Apple will not hold off a cheaper iPhone until later in the year. The expectation of such a gadget arriving at a later time would likely depress sales. But you will probably not hear anything about the next iPad or a Mac refresh. There are no doubt some new Macs in the pipeline, but they will arrive with press releases. Or maybe there will be something special to herald the debut of the Mac Pro, since it is such a major change, and Apple will use that occasion to update the rest of the lineup and announce the release of OS X Mavericks.

As for me: I would actually consider an iPhone 5c; if not for me, for the Mrs. She isn’t so concerned about the latest and greatest hardware, so long as everything just works.