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When we consider what caused Apple to make the Mac successful again, there are a couple of theories. For John Gruber, it is the superior quality, Mike Arrington points to the Internet as the great leveler, and Dave Winer chimes in with lack of malware. All of these are important factors, and they allowed for a lot of consumers to switch to the Mac.

But I believe that we underestimate the importance of the Intel switch with the corresponding Windows compatibility. It is what has allowed many people to opt for a Mac without giving up on their legacy software, especially for programmers wanting to try out iOS. There is a huge saving in complexity if you need only one computer, and so the ability to run all but the most graphical demanding Windows applications in a virtual machine in parallel to Mac programs is a huge bonus.

I believe this has greatly accelerated the supply of iOS programmers, and this halo effect together with the Mac App Store had quite a positive impact on the supply of native Mac apps.

With the rise of the at cost phones and tablets from the Android camp, Florian Müller wonders whether Apple is doomed unless it can impose a lot of differentiation through the enforcement of patents.

Apple has two important advantages compared to the Android camp: the app store and the great quality of the hardware. The app store is important for serious use, as you need good applications to get some work done on the device. This is still a very strong point for Apple. Even though Android is catching up in the number of apps available, they are not yet catching up in app quality. And this is not surprising as the Apple App Store is still making developers a lot more money than they can on Android. Add to this that it is much easier to support the entire Apple ecosystem, and I do not see that Android will be catching up soon.

The hardware quality is a different advantage that is very difficult to overcome for the competition. This is not that cannot build them, but that they lack the DNA for tasteful design. Apple in addition has huge margins which they can use to innovate while the competition gets slowly starved off funds. Many people regard them as overpriced, but apart from the iPhone they are not selling at a huge premium, in fact their large economies of scale allow them to price their offerings quite competitively. Their relatively high prices are the result of a refusal to skip on quality, and it leaves them in a pretty good position as the high end tech brand.

The opening Android has is almost exclusively by price, and it is only in phones where the large margin of the iPhone leaves Samsung an opening to compete at the quality end of phones. Everyone else needs to reduce product quality to be able to undercut Apple, and this is a huge problem. The only individual phone that has even come close to iPhone sales levels is the high end Galaxy S III, which is only a bit cheaper, and I believe this shows that phones are cheap enough that people are willing to pay a premium to get the best possible experience.

Apple might eventually be forced to reduce their 50+% margins on the iPhone to a more reasonable 30%, this would correspond to a price drop from 700$ to 500$. The Nexus 4 was priced at 300$, without LTE though, so the question is whether Apple could maintain a 150$ premium on its phones. I believe that many people will prefer a higher quality handset that lasts well for one more year, for the same total cost, to repeatably replacing junk. Also we must not forget that phones are cheap, that the premium for an iPhone is only about 300$, or 12.50$ per month for 24 months. This looks like a very reasonable price to pay for getting the best experience for a device you use hours every week.

The real problem that can break Apple is the web revolution, which causes nearly everybody to move their data into the cloud as a convenience to ensure that all our different devices have the same data, as well as to facilitate better sharing with other people. Apple will always be at a disadvantage here as their way to make money is to create the best devices, and their instinct is to restrict their services to users of their devices. Google has much better web service offerings and Apple has so far not been able to provide something matching. Ironically, even Microsoft is much stronger in web services than Apple. In general, iMessages is their most successful web offering, but the app store is really breaking at the seams, and should be rewritten.

There are similar problems with the iCloud offerings, they seem to not work right all the time, with the risk of data loss. Also they are not very useful for collaboration.

After a long wait and a lost package my dock has finally arrived. It looks beautiful.

With my trusty old iPhone 4, it works very nice, especially the low friction connector ensures that I can easily take it out with one hand. It is designed to allow you to use it with the iPhone in a case, so there is a 5mm margin to each side. This means that without a case the iPhone looks a bit lost on the dock, it looks much better with a bumper attached. The bumper however ever so slightly increases the distance to the dock receptor in the iPhone, which means that slight movements caused by interacting with the iPhone in the dock can displace it, and cause it to loose the connection. This doesn’t happen with a pure iPhone, the connection is then very robust.

Unfortunately, the current iPhone 5 adapter uses the original lightning cable, which has too much friction for one handed operations. So 5 users need to wait until their search for a better solution is successful.

There is constant speculation that Apple will introduce a cheaper basic version of the iPhone to address more of the market, and to fend of price competition from Samsung. As Apple seems to be doing just fine with the old phones, it would only make sense as a way to get rid of the old dock connector, and switch the entire lineup towards the lightning adapter.

How would Apple differentiate such a phone from the main phone? Until now it has used the available memory as the key differentiator, and it could do that with a cheaper version as well. The iPod touch also has a slower processor, as well as a slightly worse back camera than the iPhone. I doubt they would skimp too much on materials and the screen, as they are what sets the Apple brand apart. After all they have never chased the volume market in computers, and the health of the app ecosystem is excellent, so there is no need to chase volume to get more developers to their platform.

Currently Apple is able to charge more than 100% profit markup on the iPhone, and this gives them a lot of room to reduce prices for a basic model and still turn a decent profit. What I do not expect the basic model is to be cheap, more a different take on the iPhone, maybe the robust phone? Still elegant, but tougher, heavier ( like iPhone 4 heavy).

I do not believe that Apple will cut its margins on the phone too drastically, and definitely not at the price of quality. You use your phone simply too often to be willing to endure quality compromises, and in the developed world people earn enough to support a $100 surcharge every few years to get the quality you want.

Based on iPad mini as well as iPod Touch prices, a $350 iPhone is easily achievable, possibly even $300. The question is what kind of pricing pressure it would cause on the main model. Say it would be the current Touch with phone radios ( no LTE) added. Should they also provide a 32GB option for $400, I can see 60% switching from the 5 to this model. After all it would match or best the 4S in everything but the rear camera.

The iPad mini is close to what I expected from it, apart that it is sold as a full featured lineup. I suspect only the base models with 16 GB will sell well, given the lack of a Retina display. It has a nice new use in its much improved portability compared to the full iPad, and I have a feeling that it could become very popular as a companion on the go.

I am surprised that the iPad 2 is still in the lineup, is Apple selling off old stock, or are they required to keep it there to honor some contracts? The iPad mini would be a better buy if you need to look after your money, and the Retina display is just too big an update to ignore for $100.

The camera connection kit now comes with cables, and is split into two separate purchases. So it will be more expensive, and also have more bulk. Not a nice change, as the old connector was small enough to fit into an SD card pocket in your camera bag, and cables have a tendency to break. I wonder whether Apple is worrying about the stress when people put SD cards into the reader while connected to the iPad.

How long will Apple wait before they reduce the price they ask for more flash memory? On the MacBook Pro it is $2 per GB, with the iPads $6 or $3 per GB for memory that has a good deal worse performance. This leaves the door open for competitors to undercut Apple on price.

Tomorrow Apple is widely expected to introduce a smaller form factor iPad. I assume it to be engineered with cost reduction as the main goal, while keeping the requirements of schools in mind. I expect Apple to want to use the A5 processor with it, and this means that it will not have a retina display.

The prices need to be competitive with the 7″ Android tablets, so I assume that there will be two models, one with 8GB memory for $249 and one with 32GB for $299, and maybe a 64GB model for $379. I am not sure about wireless, I find it unlikely that it will be supported, given the high prices of data plans, and the focus on costs. It might be added once the line will have a retina display as well.

I expect it to have similar capabilities to the current iPad, with the same camera modules as the iPod Touch. I would not be surprised if Apple would provide more color choice than black and white with this model.

With iOS 6, Apple has introduced a new advertising identifier. You can still opt out of using it: Open the Settings app, go to General, then About, then Advertising, then set the option Limit Ad Tracking to ON. This works on the iPhone as well as the iPad.

More background can be found at Business Insider.

With the new iPhone I get the feeling that we are nearing the good enough stage for iOS. Unlike previous phones, there was not one feature limited to the 5, essentially everything will be available to an owner of the 4S as well.

The user facing improvements are small, and they make the phone come close to perfection:

• the screen now has better colors, and will roughly match the new iPad
• it is larger, but now has clearly reached the limits of what can be comfortably reached with one hand,
• It has a somewhat better camera, but they are not showcasing the improved low light performance, which would be its main benefit. And the 4S already had a camera that would almost always pick the right color balance.
• They give prominent placement to their new AirPods, and do not include them with the older iPhones, even though the much cheaper iPod Nano does get them.
• There was no new app that would showcase what amazing new things you can do with all the extra processing power of the phone

Together this means that the phone is now finally close to good enough, and especially with the transition to a new dock connector I believe that people will now buy their next iPhone expecting to keep them for an extra year or two before they feel compelled to upgrade.

The one area where the phone could be better is in a more regular support of LTE. This will be important for the future as carriers will over time remove support for plain GSM and replace it with LTE. So the decision whether to buy the iPhone 5 will come down on whether it supports the LTE frequencies important to you. For the US it is a resounding yes, for Europe it is pretty much a no given the lack of 800 and 2600 MHz support. Especially the lack of the 800 MHz band is annoying, as it is most widely deployed where there is no 3G yet.

I expect the adoption of the 5 to be excellent in the U.S., as under the guise of family plans there is a strong price war brewing. The smartphone rate of $35 on family plans are just $840 over two years, of which 40+% would go to Apple in the form of a device subsidy, and people will want to take carriers up on the subsidy as the lack of cheaper, non-subsidized options means that you are simply throwing money away by not upgrading.

The situation in Europe is different, as the carriers offer equivalent plans without device subsidy for up to 25€ per month less, removing the subsidy inducement. This means Europe will be an interesting test case to see whether the iPhone is really good enough, with its economic troubles, the lack of carriers effectively subsidizing the iPhone, and one common standard making it easy to use your handset with the competition after your main contract has expired.