The most expensive and complicated things we have to create and shoot are kitchens. From both an environmental and time point of view, we don’t want to have to ship in all those white-goods from everywhere, shoot them and then ship them all back again. And unfortunately, kitchens are one of those rooms that differ very much depending on where you are in the world. A kitchen in the US will look very different to a kitchen in Japan, for example, or in Germany. So you need lots of different layouts in order to localise the kitchen area in brochures. Very early on we created around 200 CG exchanges versions for 50 photographed kitchens in 2008, with the products we had - and I think everyone began to understand the real possibilities.
IKEA trained its photographers in 3D modelling and its 3D artists in photography. This was something I didn’t expect from a flatpack furniture company.
Two supply chain sources said display panel production suffered a setback after the backlight that helps illuminate the screen had to be revised, putting screen assembly on hold for part of June and July. One said Apple, aiming for the thinnest phone possible, initially wanted to cut back to a single layer of backlight film, instead of the standard two layers, for the 4.7-inch screen, which went into mass production ahead of the 5.5-inch version.
Every year, it is reported that Apple is facing production problems with new products. With Apple’s relentless push to adopt new technologies at immense scales, like the single-layer backlight mentioned in this case, it’s not really that surprising that they frequently have issues. However, as long as Apple is equipped to deal with such problems (that they must expect), there isn’t really a “problem” at all. Given the iPhone’s consistent release cycle, I think you can say that it is true.
Ahead of Apple’s new iPhone event on September 9th, Thailand’s National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (that nation’s version of what we know in the U.S. as the FCC) has approved two new iPhone models for sale in the country. The approval was confirmed on Twitter by the country’s Secretary General for these matters, and a local report indicates the model numbers for two new devices: A1524 & A1586.
The model identifiers are puzzling. The current 5s and 5c goes up to A1533 and A1532. It would make sense for the the device labelled ‘A1586’ to be somehow next-generation (as it is significantly beyond the 5s and 5c identifiers). The specification of the A1524 model number is much less obvious. Painting by numbers, as it were, the A1524 should closely resemble an iPhone 5c.
Gurman speculates that the model number could represent variants of the iPhone 5s and 5c, such as antenna tweaks, which probably makes the most sense.
“Apple and Samsung have agreed to drop all litigation between the two companies outside the United States,” the companies said in the statement. “This agreement does not involve any licensing arrangements, and the companies are continuing to pursue the existing cases in U.S. courts.”
A bit random timing for this to come about, but I suppose it is a good thing for all this to end. It’s slightly strange to me how the two companies continue to fight in the US though. Assumedly, the US is the market with the highest number of affected devices, making it worthwhile to continue chasing royalties and such.
Let’s hope this doesn’t flare up again in two months, when Samsung and Apple inevitably steal from each other for their wearable products. From what I can see, this agreement doesn’t preclude that from happening.
From ISPs I have spoken with, they tell me Apple has put a massive amount of capacity in place, with many saying that Apple has more than 10x the capacity they are using today, all ready to go.
Based on my calculations, Apple has already put in place multiple terabits per second of capacity and by the end of this year, will have invested well more than $100M in their CDN build out.
I don’t believe Apple expands capacity by an order of magnitude merely for future-proofing reasons. Adjustments to user growth happen gradually, not in one burst. My guess would be that this is for video content tied in with some new Apple TV (or iTunes Movies) initiative. Bitrates for high-definition video content are high enough to explain such increases in CDN bandwidth potential.
Unread for iPhone has earned a total of $32K in App Store sales. Unread for iPad has earned $10K. After subtracting 40 percent in self-employment taxes and $350/month for health care premiums (times 12 months), the actual take-home pay from the combined sales of both apps is $21,000, or $1,750/month.
Considering the enormous amount of effort I have put into these apps over the past year, that’s a depressing figure. I try not to think about the salary I could earn if I worked for another company, with my skills and qualifications. It’s also a solid piece of evidence that shows that paid-up-front app sales are not a sustainable way to make money on the App Store.
You have to be efficient with your time to make good ROI’s on the App Store. I think that is a much more important than what app pricing model you choose. Betting on apps of incredibly large scale means you bear proportionately more risk, with the possibility of no return whatsoever. If you want to maximise your profitability, make small apps that do a few things well. The amount of effort you put into an app has very little to do with how much of the market will buy it. This means that making big apps exposes you to substantially more risk, which is not fairly counterbalanced by significantly higher earnings potential.
In my opinion, you make money on the App Store by selling small things — it’s very nature is a bitesize marketplace. This is how you maximise your effective hourly wage. This doesn’t mean you have to turn around crap. You can still output quality pieces of software. Pour your heart into something for a short while (a month, maybe three), then ship it. Make your easy money (the first couple of weeks of sales). Iterate until interest dies away. Work on something else. Repeat. If something becomes a smash hit, then by all means develop it.
Unread is the complete opposite of this, it’s a beast of an app. It took Sinclair a year of development time. As a result, Unread faced massive risks when it finally shipped. Recouping months of development time is a lot more painful than recouping weeks of work. Sometimes you will get lucky, often you won’t.
I made Writing Aid in under a month, on and off. Thankfully, it sold well and produced a fantastic sales to hours ratio. Imagine a scenario where it didn’t do that well. I would have essentially wasted a month of work … but that is a hell of a lot better than wasting a year of work. You hedge your bets by moving fast and moving on.
Sinclair is annoyed that he formed a band and made a (well received) album that doesn’t earn enough for him to live a life as a rock star. I think indie devs should make songs, not albums.
TechCrunch has learned that Apple has made another acquisition, one that it is using to boost its e-books effort and “beat Amazon at its own game.” It has bought BookLamp, a startup based out of Boise, Idaho, that developed big data-style book analytics services.
I’m not quite sure what ‘beating Amazon at its own game’ entails, but from the outside, iBooks has always seemed like a runt in the litter. Apple pays as much attention to books as they do podcasts, yet they push iBooks as a mainstream operating system feature. Crucially, books costs money. Users expect more from stuff that they pay for and today Apple doesn’t really deliver.
One little known fact is that the iBooks app was developed very late in the iPad cycle. What was demoed in January 2010 was built in the last couple months of 2009.
Kamcord, the SDK that lets iOS developers offer gameplay recording and sharing functionality, is today launching a redesigned community iOS app while announcing some impressive new milestones for the service.
Kamcord’s Eric Edelman tells me the company is doing “greater than 1% of YouTube’s upload volume now,” which means it’s uploading more than 1 hour of gameplay videos every minute. In total the platform is now at 14 million videos uploaded by users accounting for a 4x growth in share rate and up 9M videos since May. It’s also now in over 340+ mobile games, up from 200 mobile games in February when it launched official integration for Unreal Engine developers on both iOS and Android.
Twitch announced a competing SDK in March, although it doesn’t seem to have anywhere near the adoption that Kamcord has attained. It’s just another example of mobile being an equaliser for new entrants and incumbents. Twitch may be the largest video streaming platform for desktop games, but it hasn’t been able to translate that into mobile streaming dominance.
With up to 12 hours of battery life, an incredibly thin and light design, and fast all-flash storage, what’s not to love?
This is a really cool video. It’s closer to an iPod commercial from a decade ago than anything Apple has done recently. I think part of the brilliance stems from the fact that the ad focuses on the stickers, an accessory Apple doesn’t even sell. The laptop is almost an afterthought, a given. It states ‘we are on top’, in a way that doesn’t feel boastful or brash.
To substitute for a physical gift card, iTunes Pass installs a new pass inside of the iOS Passbook application. The Apple Store employee can scan the pass in order to immediately apply the credit to the Apple account. Users can install the iTunes Pass feature in Passbook on the main screen in the iPhone iTunes Store app. This enhancement is Apple’s second first-party use of Passbook. Apple previously opened up the ability for Apple Store gift cards to be stored in Passbook.
This feels like something Passbook should start with. Everyone with an iOS device has an iTunes account, so everyone can get some form of utility out of this pass. It would stop Passbook from being empty by default.
“We have pushed back our estimated time of iWatch mass production from late-September to mid-/ late- November. We also lower our forecast of iWatch 2014 shipments by 40% to 3mn units,” Kuo wrote in today’s report. The analyst claims the push back is due to more complex hardware and software engineering in this first generation Apple product category.
Kuo also provides some tidbits as to what he is expecting the device to feature:
Flexible AMOLED display
Sapphire coated display cover
Higher waterproof standards
New system-on-a-chip components
Kuo is probably the most accurate ‘analyst’ there is for Apple’s product pipelines. Although the headline of this report is about timing (mid November rather than October), I’m more interested in what Kuo has to say about iWatch features. The release window is basically known at this point: September, October or November.
As such, I am happy to see that Kuo thinks waterproofing is a focus for the product. For me, I want to be able to do washing up without having to take the watch off my wrist for fear of it breaking.
Apple has made significant enhancements to its upcoming Health application for iOS 8 in the latest beta of the new iPhone operating system. Most notably, the Health application can now utilize the iPhone’s own M7 motion tracking hardware for data sourcing.
The Health app’s Steps counter tab can now report steps without connecting to any third party applications or hardware devices. Because this feature likely uses the M7 processor, an iPhone 5s is required to get the steps data directly from the device.
Although this helps to justify the app’s permanent existence on the Home Screen, rather than a deletable option, Health still remains an obtuse mess. Everything isn’t very human. It’s confusingly technical.
You click on the Steps chart, for example, and it takes you to a table view of individual step entries. What is this purpose of this screen for end-users? Users can’t parse that list into anything meaningful.
Moreover, every nutrition category has an ‘Add Data Point’ option. This is equally stupid. People don’t know this information. Humans need sensors to tell this information. Having a manual input option is useless and only encourages cheating: I can tell Health.app that I walked a billion steps and it doesn’t complain. In fact, even the label of the option (“data point”) is uninviting and unnecessarily technical.
Right now, Health.app feels like a backend portal for iWatch debugging rather than the consumer-facing fitness and wellbeing dashboard it should be.
The new iMac makes much more sense at scale. Many schools and businesses don’t need fast computers, they just need many computers with current warranties and support agreements that can perform basic tasks for a few years until they’re replaced. You only save $200 on one of these systems; you save $20,000 if you’re buying 100 of them. That’s why Apple has, in the past, offered these cut-down, cheaper iMacs primarily to educational institutions—they’re one of the few places where these make any economic sense (one could also argue that buying standard PCs would save even more money, but Macs and OS X are often preferred or required in higher education).
I get the ‘bulk-buy education cost-saving’ argument. There’s nothing wrong with Apple offering an iMac at cheaper price points. What I think is wrong here is that Apple was too stingy; the $1099 configuration has disproportionately poorer performance for the cost savings it offers.
“It doesn’t look too good,” Lee Sang-hoon, Samsung’s chief financial officer, told a group of reporters at the company’s Seocho headquarters, when he was asked about second-quarter results. A company spokesman confirmed the remarks.
A CFO doesn’t say something so blunt this haphazardly. How bad can Samsung’s performance be?
Now that we’ve had time to teardown the new iMac, unlike the $1,299 iMac, we found this iMac has the memory soldered to the motherboard removing any possibility of adding additional memory. Users will be permanently locked in to the 8GB of memory, as there is no Apple factory upgrade option.
It literally is a MacBook Air with a 21 inch display; soldered ram, integrated graphics, mobile CPU. The standard configuration lacks an SSD, though, which means the Air is probably faster than the iMac in a lot of cases.
I really don’t get this machine. You take on a lot of compromise to save $200.
