Some suggest change is good. Some talk of change you can believe in, but it’s a sure thing that you can’t rest on your laurels. Taking us to a certain “fruit company” that we all know about, some members of the media have begun to suggest that Apple needs to change (or fix) a few things going forward now that a new CEO has officially taken over.

One key suggestion is for Apple to have more of an open policy towards the press. Certainly this is understandable, inasmuch as Apple is notorious (or famous) for being secretive about company strategy and, in fact, new products beyond occasional carefully scripted press releases and media events. You know, for example, that over four million copies of the iPhone 4s were sold as of the first weekend on sale because of an Apple press release, but if sales were disappointing, there would have been no announcement.

One ongoing point of contention is the fact that Apple doesn’t just sit down and tell business customers about their future strategy. The enterprise doesn’t know, for example, if the truckloads of MacBook Pros they may purchase now might be replaced with a new model a few months hence. But, in fact, a little common sense indicates that Apple will generally upgrade Mac hardware right around the time Intel introduces a revised processor lineup. So it’s not as if the overall direction isn’t clear, even though individual product changes beyond new CPUs may still surprise and amaze us.

When it comes to the iPhone, Apple confounded the predictions by introducing the iPhone 4s four months later than many expected, and disappointed many, at least at first brush, because it looked the same as the model it replaced. But it’s not so simple.

As most of you know, Apple’s product upgrades tend to be incremental for a year or two, with revised components, followed by exterior revisions of one sort or another. That may not explain the alleged late arrival of the iPhone 4s, but there are some things to consider. One is that Apple didn’t promise when they’d release that product. Further, it may well be that the release depended on the availability of iOS 5, at least in part. It’s also possible that the chips that Apple required for their new iPhone weren’t ready in sufficient quantities for an earlier ship date.

Clearly the public wasn’t interested in the by-play that dominates the media. Sales remained high for the iPhone 4 in the quarter that ended in June, and more will be known about the fall quarter during Apple’s quarterly financial conference call with financial analysts, which is set for Tuesday afternoon. But early predictions are that iPhone sales were consistent over the summer as well.

But the biggest argument against a sudden change is that there is nothing wrong with Apple’s current product lineup or corporate communications strategy. It may not be what the tech media, or even the so-called mainstream media for that matter, wants, but it has been hugely successful for Apple.

Now when Tim Cook took over as “official” or permanent CEO of Apple in August, he said that Apple wouldn’t change, that their “best days” lay ahead. Remember, too, that Cook had been working as interim CEO for extended periods three times since Steve Jobs was first treated for pancreatic cancer, and Apple still continued to perform way beyond expectations. He’s already passed the test, and demonstrated to one and all that he’s up to the task of running Apple.

Of course, that won’t stop the media from expecting Apple to stumble and fall. But there are also published reports that next year’s iPhone, the rumored iPhone 5 with all-new casings, was the last major project shepherded by Jobs. Supposedly the rest of the crew managed the iPhone 4s development, and that’s cited as an excuse to explain why it may not be so significant an upgrade, even though the changes are in keeping with Apple’s long-term policy about product refreshes.

At the same time, I expect demands will grow for Apple to seriously alter corporate policies because their charismatic co-founder is no longer around, even though Jobs reportedly spent years instilling his vision and methods into the company by hiring and training a huge staff. There’s even an alleged Apple University that’s designed to teach the “Jobs Way” to new hires, so they can continue to execute successfully in his tradition.

On the other hand, this doesn’t mean that Apple won’t be able to switch gears should new marketing opportunities arise, or the industry changes. Apple will not only have to stay in front of the tech world when it comes to innovation, but understand when things aren’t working, or there’s an upstart competitor with a possibly better idea to deal with.

Assuming the tech industry’s growth path is pretty well set for a year or two, you may not see any changes in Apple for quite a while. When they occur, they might even be subtle, so you won’t be able to grok them until you take the long-term view. One thing you can be assured of, however, is that Apple, as usual, won’t do something because a competitor or industry analyst says they have to.

To understate the obvious, the iOS 5 upgrade must have been a huge undertaking for Apple VP Scott Forstall and his hardworking crew. They are to be congratulated for carefully crafting a useful set of changes and feature improvements and yet keep performance of your Apple mobile gadget at a high level.

Yes, I did encounter some glitches in performing the upgrade on an iPad 2 on Wednesday, but, after all is said and done, it appears Apple’s servers just weren’t ready to handle the load. That’s something hard to predict, and difficult to scale for, so I’ll cut Apple some slack. It’s not as if Amazon, Google, and certainly Research In Motion, are free of server problems.

I also have iOS 5 also running on a GSM iPhone 4, where the upgrade went smoothly. Just as a quick test, I worked on a friend’s iPhone 4s and, despite claims of stellar performance boosts, only sensed a modest improvement in launching apps, navigating through apps, and getting online. Then again, the friend has a Verizon Wireless account, which may account for Internet speeds that do not task the device’s limits.

Continue Reading…

Strange how Apple’s efforts to provide online services to you have fared over the years. Most of you probably don’t remember a bulletin board service called AppleLink in the 1980s, which was intended as a method for the company to communicate with resellers and service people. In 1988, they also developed a consumer-friendly version, AppleLink Personal Edition in partnership with Quantum Link, a company we know today as AOL. Well, Apple pulled out of the partnership the following year, and thus the service was rebranded as America Online.

In passing, I was one of the early AOL members, I worked for them as a paid forum moderator, and I still maintain an aol.com email address. But that’s a whole other story not particularly relevant to this commentary.

Well, some years later, Apple tried once again to get into the online service game, with something called eWorld, which was basically a more insular and basically reskinned version of AOL, which used the latter’s ecosystem. That, too, vanished after the service failed to garner a sufficiently large user base.

Segue to Apple’s second coming, with Steve Jobs in charge. In January, 2000, Apple launched iTools, meant as a modest bundle of free online services for Mac users that included that famous “mac.com” email address. But free didn’t stay free for terribly long. By July of 2002, iTools was rebranded as .Mac, a subscription service meant for users of Mac OS X. Having set up my email address right at the beginning, I was tempted to pay the $99 fee each and every year, through thick and thin.

Amid complaints about occasional network hiccups and flaky performance, Apple expanded the scope of .Mac to include users of Apple’s mobile products and, in fact, Windows. But you can’t put the word “Mac” in a more expansive service meant for people who may not even use Macs, so it was reborn in 2008 MobileMe. In passing, I find it curious that Apple, in rebranding its online services, seems to be pulling the same stunt as Microsoft when it comes to reintroducing failed products.

Well, if first impressions are important, MobileMe sure didn’t deliver on the reliability you expected from Apple. Server problems were legion, and, for a time, some members weren’t able to retrieve their email. Reports have it that Steve Jobs was very vocal in his displeasure over the situation.

But that’s not just Apple’s cross to bear. Wherever you look at cloud-based systems, you’ll find periodic outages. Google has had them, there are periodic failures at Amazon, and Research In Motion, which passes all email from a BlackBerry through their central servers, just experienced a severe outage this week.

Now it’s been widely reported that Apple’s MobileMe successor, iCloud, was given the personal attention of Steve Jobs in his last days. Clearly he didn’t wish for Apple to suffer another failure, but you have to wonder whether iCloud’s shaky beginning is just the start of a trend. Certainly I hope not.

It’s a sure thing that Wednesday was a messy time all around for Apple. Combine the introduction of iCloud, the Mac OS 10.7.2 bug fix update that supports iCloud, not to mention iOS 5, and you have the ingredients of major server nightmare.

Sure enough, reports of problems were legion. I know that my efforts to upgrade an iPad 2 to iOS 5 at first proved unsuccessful. Understand that, with iOS 5, the installer will first restore your compatible iPhone, iPad and iPod touch to factory condition, install the upgrade, then reload all your stuff. It’s a process that can take at least 15 minutes and likely more, depending on how much data you have and the speed of your broadband connection.

Well, in my case, I kept running into an “internal error” message every time the upgrade got to the restore stage. I went through this process four times, and soon discovered I wasn’t alone. A quick online search revealed reports that loads of Apple customers had the very same problem, or encountered some other curious error message. Now it’s likely the failure was, in part, due to the need to consult Apple’s clogged servers. Regardless, my eventual solution made even less sense. Instead of opting for an upgrade, I clicked Restore in iTunes on my late 2009 iMac. The dialogue I okayed offered a restore and upgrade in a single process, and I kept my fingers crossed.

Now I suppose five times was the charm in this case, as the iPad 2 went through the entire process without incident. But I’ll have to say about Apple’s mobile OS upgrade in another article.

I also ran into problems after migrating my MobileMe account to iCloud. Everything seemed to work, except for the email, which went down for hours at a time. Again, this is a clear symptom of overloaded servers, but, as I write this, email is back to normal.

I’m also skeptical as to whether iCloud and its sometimes confusing choices represents an improvement into the mediocre MobileMe. After all, Apple has already released over two dozen online documents about iCloud setup, features, and troubleshooting.

Also, I’m concerned about the fact that Apple has removed some of MobileMe’s sync features, which include Mail accounts, preferences, and even Dashboard widgets. Then again, these features tended to be flaky. In addition, although iCloud requires a Mac running 10.7.2, it’ll work fine with any relatively recent version of Windows after you install a special iCloud Control Panel. So in this case, Windows users are getting a better shake, whereas Mac users have to buy an OS upgrade or, if they have a Mac that can’t run Lion, or an application that won’t work with Lion, do without.

In the end, Apple’s iCloud gamble may indeed pay off. I hope it does, and I appreciate the fact that the basic services are free. But for now, color me skeptical.

If you’ve read the blogs, online news sites, or even your daily paper, you might believe that Apple builds nothing but iPhones and iPads. The media wonders whether the iPhone 4s, with the same exterior as the iPhone 4, will succeed despite being a minor upgrade, even though the nature of the upgrade is quite substantial in the scheme of things when you crack open the case and check inside.

But the real story is what’s happening to the Mac while all this is playing out.

In last week’s media event, Apple CEO Tim Cook reminded us that some six million copies of Lion have been downloaded since late July, approximately 10% of the current Mac user base. He did not mention just how many new Macs were sold with Lion preloaded. But even if you take the conservative approach and assume the number is between two and three million, allowing for an unknown number of older stocks of Macs still available as of Lion’s shipping date, it’s a pretty good number.

More to the point, although there have been pointed criticisms about the iOS-inspired eye candy, Lion seems to be a pretty stable release. After all, all Mac OS X upgrades have been released amid complaints. The new OS isn’t as good as the old one, they say, because of performance issues or persistent defects. It takes several maintenance updates for things to settle down, and, for some, it never settles down. A modest percentage of Mac users will stick with the older operating system, not just because of application or hardware issues, but simply because they have something that, for them, works, and there’s no reason to undergo the perceived agony of an OS upgrade.

Certainly, there are significant reasons not to upgrade to Lion, even if your Mac is suitable, and that means pretty much every model from late 2006 on, with a minimum of 2GB RAM. First and foremost is that nothing is broken about Leopard or Snow Leopard, so why upgrade? Further, if infusing elements of the iOS into Lion isn’t your cup of tea, that’s another argument against acquiring 10.7, although some of those features, such as scrolling in the opposite direction and hiding the scroll bars, are easily altered in System Preferences. But the biggest impediment of all that you need to use apps that never made it to the Intel transition that began in 2006. They require PowerPC support, and Lion no longer supports the Rosetta translation utility, making that impossible. So either upgrade the app, or find a replacement if there’s no upgrade. Or, of course, stay clear of Lion.

In Lion’s favor are loads of new features, including a better Finder experience, with extra display options, such as when a file was Last Opened or Added, which increases the flexibility in sorting your stuff your way. I like the improvements in Mail, where the ability to display a short preview of the text makes it easier to know which messages are important to you before you actually open them. Of course, this is something you could do already on an iPad, so that’s one iOS-inspired advantage that makes sense.

If you want to move your stuff to iCloud, you’ve no choice. You have to upgrade to 10.7.2, released Wednesday, along with installing the iOS 5 upgrade on your Apple mobile devices. The two updates are pretty simple, and Apple does warn you, before migrating to iCloud, what you lose when it comes to syncing your data. But there’s no going back, inasmuch as MobileMe is on the way out.

As to the Mac itself, clearly sales are showing no sign of slowing. A new survey from market research firm Gartner indicates that Apple sold some 2.3 million Macs in the U.S. alone during the June through September quarter, a record. Apple’s share of the U.S. market rose from 10.8% to 12.9%, which puts the company in a solid third position behind HP and Dell. And, of course, you have no doubt heard that HP still can’t figure out a workable strategy to make a decent profit from their PC division.

Bear in mind that the Mac’s growth curve remains pretty consistent even though Apple really hasn’t burned the airwaves with ads about their personal computing division. Those cute little Mac Versus PC TV spots are history, gone, forgotten. New Macs are most often introduced with a press release and an occasional media interview opportunity. The first announcements about Lion earned a special event, but a refreshed Mac seldom earns that level of promotion. The Macs just sell, and sell some more.

So you wonder about all the Lion critics. Did they just ignore the upgrade, or put off buying new Macs? Bear in mind that you cannot downgrade a Mac requires Lion with an older OS, although models that were introduced before Lion’s rollout can probably be reimaged with Snow Leopard.

As I’ve said before, my personal encounters with Lion have been highly favorable, particularly after switching off some of the iOS-inspired stuff. I don’t use Launchpad, although I do invoke Mission Control from time to time to create a new virtual desktop to smooth my workflow.

Some day, PC sales will really begin to decline as mobile alternatives take hold in greater numbers. The Mac’s decline is no doubt inevitable as well, although it’ll take a few years before you see that trend. Sure, some tasks are still done best on a full-scale personl computer, but other tasks are performed quite efficiently on an iPhone and an iPad.