It has been rumored for several years, and last week, Amazon announced their first foray into the smartphone business. But unlike existing Kindle products, it is not being sold at or near cost. Instead the Fire Phone costs very much the same as the iPhone 5s and the Samsung Galaxy S4, which portends a decent profit. When […]

When The New York Times claimed, in that controversial hit piece on Tim Cook, that he took over after the death of Steve Jobs, I realized the writers were out of touch. And that was before reading much else. It’s not that they haven’t covered Apple for years, but they could hardly fail to notice […]

To some, Apple’s new announcements at the WWDC represented a coming of age for the company under the leadership of Tim Cook. It’s certainly more open, considering that developers have a little more freedom to talk about prerelease software. So now they can actually discuss what they’re doing with outsiders, although they aren’t able to actually […]

Implicit in the WWDC keynote this week is Apple’s effort to reduce reliance on Google for search, and to answer the complaints about the lack of features by those who have adopted the Android platform. The most blatant example of the former was putting Bing search in Spotlight. The trend had started with Siri, and it’s […]