Making its way among the crowded coverage of the alleged iPhone 8, there are reports that may confirm some of my expectations about the Apple Watch.

Now I’m not about to take most rumors seriously. While some are certainly based on genuine sources, such as product leaks in Apple’s supply chain, and others on background leaks by Apple executives, others appear to be made up of whole cloth. It’s very much about wishful thinking.

Indeed, you can take a few genuine rumors, based on facts, and turn them into something bad for Apple merely by exaggerating a few tidbits of data.

So it may well be that ramping up production of an all-new product will involve some level of fits and starts to fine-tune the process. Those missteps can combine to create the impression that Apple is confronting serious production delays that will result in late delivery. But it’s also true that high demand for a new Apple gadget may turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, resulting in a backorder situation. Consider the iPhone 7 Plus. Apple claims it misjudged the level to which demand would skew towards the larger iPhone with its dual-camera system, so it was backordered for months.

Now the Apple Watch is regarded as an underachiever. People like them, but don’t always love them, and they aren’t embracing them near as fast as they bought iPhones and iPads, but if you look at the first two years of iPhone sales, you might think differently. Still, the critics regard the Apple Watch as a huge failure.

Of course, facts sometimes have a nasty habit of getting in the way of conventional wisdom, so the truth about Apple’s smartwatch is more nuanced. So maybe it hasn’t taken off as quickly as some might have hoped, or expected, but Apple claims steady growth, that the Apple Watch is the best selling smartwatch on the planet.

Unfortunately, industry surveys usually lump them with wearables, even cheap wristbands, and thus the Apple Watch is third in the market. Take that Apple!

It might help if Apple were to reveal actual sales figures, but estimates that are based on checking the totals in Apple’s “Other Products” category might be fairly close to the mark. They appear to reveal that over 30 million have been sold since the product debuted in the spring of 2015. Another sets it at 31.5 million. Either way, that’s not too shabby. It’s more than twice as much as recent estimates for the Amazon Echo. But the press loves the Echo, and often dismisses the Apple Watch.

So is there something that Apple can do to make the product really take off in a big way? To Apple, 30 million over two years doesn’t seem to be an awful lot. but to put this in perspective, in recent years, annual Mac sales have been in the 20 million range.

Now one key shortcoming of the Apple Watch is its dependance on your iPhone. No iPhone, and you might as well not buy Apple’s smartwatch, even though it still retains some fitness functions. It’s really an accessory, not the main gadget, but that may be poised to change.

With the Series 2 Apple Watch, it gained GPS, just a small step in the untethering process. The big step, however, is including a cellular radio. While the Apple Watch might still rely on the iPhone for some functions, that big step would make it far more independent. To some people, it might be their sole device, shades of Dick Tracy.

So several stories are starting to come together that appear to make the idea credible. One is a report sourced at Bloomberg that an LTE radio is in the works. In a Twitter post, developer Jeffrey Grossman says he discovered code in that infamous HomePod firmware to reveal the possible presence of a SIM inside an Apple Watch. Well obviously a future Apple Watch.

Now that HomePod firmware has already revealed perviously undisclosed features of the rumored iPhone 8, such as the ability to take 4K videos at 60 fps with both the front and rear cameras. And don’t forget facial recognition, which may or may not replace Touch ID.

So should we take those Apple Watch rumors seriously? Well, one of my friends and colleagues, ComputerWorld’s “Apple Holic,” Jonny Evans says yes, and he’s nobody’s fool.

In a recent blog, Johnny says, about Apple: “The company knows the days of the smartphone are numbered, and it is widening its platforms to provide the foundations for the next-generation of the connected age.”

So is the Apple Watch its potential replacement or successor? I suppose that’s possible, except when you need a larger display. But consider all the things an Apple Watch with LTE could do without a nearby iPhone. You could talk to Siri, use Maps for directions; most anything that can be done with a cell phone. It may also mean that you’ll be able to place and receive phone calls.

Other reports suggest that the LTE radio’s functionality will be closer to that of the iPad, without the ability to take calls — well unless they are beamed to it from an iPhone.

Now assuming Apple follows the same practice as the iPad, the Apple Watch’s retail price may be poised to climb by a similar degree, by $130. But I suspect the mythical Apple Watch Series 3 will come in two forms — with and without LTE. You won’t have to pay for it unless you want it.

Is this a potential reality? I suppose if Apple can tame the cellular radio not to use significantly more power than the Apple Watch without it. Or they develop a way to get a lot more battery life out of the unit, so losing a little won’t be a big deal.

Maybe we’ll know more next month. Or maybe it will take another generation before the Apple Watch becomes totally self-sufficient. But even without cell phone capability, Apple still has a product that is, by any normal estimate, far more successful than the critics want you to believe.

To most people, the “fake news” phenomenon is a symptom of the contentious 2016 political campaign in the U.S. Some bloggers discovered they could earn lots of clickthrough ad money by focusing on false content that pandered to one campaign or the other. Posted on Facebook and other social networks, it was often a matter of having a provocative piece linked and retweeted to soon reach tens of millions of people.

Closing the barn door proved difficult, if not impossible. Even if a story is clearly false — and I’m not going to dwell on the political byplay — people will believe it if it meets their expectations or fears. Sometimes, if you want to refute a story, one questionable response is not to bother with the facts, real or false, but just label it “fake news.” The message is crystal clear.

So how does fake news relate to our little corner of the world?

Continue Reading…

With iPad sales on the rise — at least for a single quarter — I wonder about Apple’s plans for its future. I wonder about Apple’s plans to penetrate different markets to expand its reach. Mostly, I wonder if Apple plans any variations on the current design to give it more potential.

Now the current variation on the original iPad theme is the iPad Pro. But the main changes has been to make them more feature-rich. They include a better display, faster processor, and the display sizes are now unique to these models: 10.5-inches and 12.9-inches. The classic 9.7-inch version is confined to a legacy design based on the iPad Air, and some current parts.

At $329, it’s also the bargain iPad, and a great way for people with older models to upgrade to something current and save some money. It’s also useful for school systems since it’s not terribly expensive.

But will it stem the erosion of Apple’s market share in education? At one time, years back, perhaps the biggest Mac penetration was at school systems. As an example, I remember visiting the tech person at the main headquarters of the Scottsdale, AZ Unified School District in the 1990s.

It was a first class computer lab, where they set up hundreds and hundreds of educational Macs to be deployed at individual public schools. It was also a working example of a terrific way to boost the Mac market, as students learned their computing schools on an Apple product, and one hoped they’d take those schools into the working world.

Of course, the working world used Windows, so maybe it didn’t help so much, at least then. It wasn’t terribly helpful that Apple didn’t cotton to the enterprise.

These days, school systems are cash-strapped. I won’t get into the political ramifications or the causes. That’s how it is, and it means that Apple has more difficulty moving Macs into such systems. Even the cheapest MacBook Air, the 11-inch model now consigned strictly to the educational marketplace, is too expensive. Many school systems are using Chromebooks running Google’s Chrome OS.

When you can buy a notebook computer for maybe $200 or so, it’s hard to justify paying several times that amount — even allowing for large quantity discounts — on a Mac.

Apple has certainly made progress with the iPad, with one million being sold to school systems during the last quarter. It’s a hopeful sign, but not much more. So while grade school children might find an iPad suitable, as they get older, a more traditional notebook computer will be better, particularly when they have to type reports and other homework assignments.

So how does Apple comptete?

Or is the educational market a place where Apple might keep a limited presence, but it won’t be the good old days anymore?

One possible solution I came up with on this weekend’s edition of The Tech Night Owl LIVE is what I call the iPad Hybrid. It’s probably a foolish product name, but you’ll see where I’m going over the next few paragraphs.

So you can outfit any iPad with a keyboard case. Apple’s Smart Keyboard uses the custom connector on the iPad Pro. But in each case, the keyboard is subpar, partly due to limited key travel. So it has a mushy feel. Whether typing on fabric or plastic, I cannot go near as fast or as accurately as on a regular keyboard.

This layout also reveals the shortcoming of a 2-in-1 PC, where you use the touchscreen for navigation. It’s an awkward reach, and I often wonder if it was possible to affix an iPad keyboard with a touchpad to act as a working notebook. Sure, Apple would have to enable such features in iOS, but that should be no big deal once the concept is accepted.

So as it stands, the iPad-as-notebook is a clumsy substitute for the real thing. It exists in this gray area where the need for a touchscreen is uncomfortable, and the keyboard feels awkward. All right, I realize some of you are perfectly happy with such a layout.

But what about putting an iPad in a real detachable notebook case? In other words, it becomes a 2-in-1 computer that runs iOS and serves as an iPad and as a true notebook alternative.

When fully assembled, the iPad Hybrid works as a traditional notebook in every way. The keyboard has the traditional feel of a MacBook, with a genuine touchpad. You could literally use it in a way similar to a Mac except for running iOS. Now that iOS 11 will sport some Mac-style multitasking features, plus the Files app, it would make for a competitive alternative for school systems.

How much will it cost? I would think that Apple would charge $499 for the educational version and perhaps $599 if it were sold through regular retail outlets.

It may seem like a foolish idea, but putting a keyboard case on an iPad is already taking you in that direction. Why not go all the way?

Will it help boost Apple’s prospects at school systems? Well, it would make for a reasonably affordable upgrade to the iPad, and it wouldn’t require learning a new OS. It would be the logical extension of the regular user experience. It might just work. Or it might just be a silly idea that Apple would never consider seriously. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which.

For the past four years, you might have regarded the iPad as a gadget whose time had come and gone. After several years of amazing growth, sales didn’t just flatten, they fell. Every single quarter, sales were lower than the previous year’s quarter.

But Apple persevered, and during quarterly calls with financial analysts, where Apple talks about its revenue and prospects, Tim Cook would restate his optimism about the product. But I joined others in regarding it us just corporate spin. Cook was merely trying to deal with a bad result, although you must admire Apple’s perseverance.

At least iPads continued to generate high profits, and the tablets stayed ahead of the pack. Compare that to Microsoft, which has allowed new products and corporate divisions to sustain huge buckets of red ink for years, hoping that things will turn around.

So even in the dark days, the iPad made plenty of money. No wonder Apple kept it going, and it does seem that the optimism is beginning to pay off.

I suspect things began to turn around for the iPad with the introduction of the 12.9-inch iPad Pro in 2015; it was clearly designed for productivity. The Apple Pencil accessory was clearly designed to ease the process of drawing on screen, but the combo, along with a 9.7-inch iPad Pro, failed to boost sales. Or maybe they kept sales from dropping further.

Now one of the reasons given for the iPad’s falling sales was a longer-than-expected refresh cycle. While people will routinely replace a smartphone in two or three years, there wasn’t much of a compelling reason to replace a much older iPad. Sure, the newer model may be thinner, lighter, faster, but what it does is mostly the same. Well, at least until the iOS leaves it behind.

So what did Apple do in 2017 to end the iPad sales drop? Was it all about promotion, compelling new models, or maybe — pricing?

Earlier this year, amid expectations that a 10.5-inch iPad Pro was in the works, Apple quietly released a refreshed model, based on the 9.7-inch iPad Air. It had an A9 processor and other enhancements, giving it pretty decent benchmarks. It also strayed far from the usual price structure, starting at $329 for the 32GB model. Suddenly, millions of users of older iPads had a relatively inexpensive way to upgrade to something with most of the latest technologies. You can list what it didn’t have, but for most people it probably didn’t matter.

At the WWDC in June, two new iPad Pros arrived, including that mythical 10.5-inch version. The demonstration of iOS 11, now available as a beta for developers and public beta testers, offers more multitasking features and a Files app that provides Finder-like functions. So it appears that Apple has used the Mac as the inspiration to make the iPad a more productive tool.

Very important, also, is how the new mainstream iPad evidently influenced the average retail price. So it went down from $490 to $435 in the June quarter, no doubt the impact of the cheaper model. It meant that total revenue was up just 2%, whereas unit sales rose 15%.

Does that signal a trend towards the cheaper iPad, or just the result of the delayed replacement cycle? Since the new iPad Pros only arrived in mid-June, it may take another quarter or two to judge their impact on sales and average prices. But it stands to reason that, if people love their iPads, eventually they’ll want to buy new ones.

The iPad Pros are certainly oriented more towards people who want to use them for productivity. Despite the superior display, watching a Netflix video will be just fine on the regular iPad.

If the replacement cycle is finally here, it does mean that, each year, more people will want to buy new iPads, reflecting the rapid sales run-up for the first three years. But don’t forget that average retail prices actually didn’t change all that much from the previous quarter. It was more significant only if you compared it to last year.

So I suppose we’ll see.

As for me, I’m still far from ready to use Mrs. Steinberg’s iPad for much, except to help her solve a problem or to run an OS upgrade. I can certainly see intriguing possibilities for the sort of work I do, recording weekly radio shows and writing.

At present, there is no way to record The Paracast and The Tech Night Owl LIVE on an iPad. There is no iOS app that will even partly duplicate the features of Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack for macOS, which allows you to capture the audio streams from a number of sources and mix them into a single file. Or separate files.

So in my case, it’s a Skype connection for guests, and an outboard mic mixer in my home studio. If all my guests were here, I could probably find a way to pipe that audio into the iPad and use GarageBand or another audio app. But if an when Apple allows an app such as Audio Hijack to run on an iPad, I foresee fascinating possibilities, especially when it comes to remote recording sessions.

Apple has made some positive moves to advance the iPad platform. Customers are responding, so let’s see where it goes next.