The Mac Professional's Resource
Apple has revealed that many of the Enterprise-class functions on the iPhone are Exchange-friendly. This is great news for companies which have Exchange servers, but it doesn’t address the standards-compliant ways it seemed that Apple was approaching to satisfy some of these demands prior to this surprise announcement.
Whither Darwin Calendar Server and CalDAV for Calendar Sharing? What of extending IMAP for To-Do Tasks and Notes? IMAP IDLE for “push?” How about MacOSX Server’s Open Directory for Contacts?
Hopefully, come June, we’ll find that the hooks into all of the mobile applications which allow ActiveSync support have analogs for configuring them to get data from CalDAV, IMAP and Open Directory.
— Tom Ierna
Last night marked the 80th edition of the Academy Awards, but more importantly, it was the first time any Oscars had been awarded since the introduction of the iPhone. The iPhone made it’s debut yesterday at the Academy Awards when Jon Stewart pulled out his iPhone to watch Lawrence of Arabia, and even turned it sideways, commenting it looked better in wide screen. The iPhone wasn’t the only bit of trendy consumer electronics featured on the stage, however. Later in the evening, Stewart played the Wii with August Rush star Jamia Simone Nash.
We know the Lawrence of Arabia thing was a gag, but if Stewart really was watching the movie, he would have had to rip it from the DVD, as it is not yet available on the iTunes Movie Store. Otherwise, it was a nifty bit of product placement for Apple. During other segments, when showing footage of writers working at their PowerBooks, the Apple logo was edited out, and that can only mean one thing – new MacBooks coming soon! OK, so that may not be the best indicator of an impending hardware update, but of all the reasonings given for a product refresh, it is not the worst. Close, but not the worst.
In other news, Steve Jobs received his own little shout out as Brad Bird thanked TSO durings his acceptance speech for winning Best Animated Feature with Ratatouille.
— Joe Fahs
Last month we mentioned that we were not too concerned about the 1.4 million “missing” iPhones. One analyst, who we dubbed Toni Sacc went so far as to say that Apple might have stuffed the channel with phones to pump up its sales numbers, much like console makers do. The press, who apparently couldn’t sit back and think about this issue for more than 30 seconds, picked up on this, and suddenly the iPhone was a big disappointment. We have always maintained that there are areas where the iPhone can improve, but we still believe it is a very strong product overall.
Over the last few weeks, news outlets have changed memes. No longer is Apple stuffing some Area 51 warehouse with half a million iPhones. Instead, people talk about the iPhone black market. BusinessWeek interviewed the creator of TurboSIM and even the New York Times wrote an article about it.
Suddenly, 1.4 million bootleg iPhones is not really a stretch of the imagination. Of course, the story doesn’t stop there. Over at Seeking Alpha, Todd Sullivan describes the “real” problem with unlocked iPhones, namely that Apple is not receiving any revenue from AT&T or other official carriers when they are purchased to be unlocked. We have no real problem with Todd. It is troubling that he mentions that Apple cut component orders, not because it is a sign of slowed growth, but because the article he links to states Apple’s reduction in component is largely expected because they don’t expect to sell as many products after the holiday quarter.
While Apple’s loss of AT&T revenue might hurt the bottom line initially, the success of the iPhone is partly based on how large of an ecosystem Apple can form around the product. Apple really only loses when nobody is buying iPhones at all.
— Joe Fahs
As the news media focuses in on Super Tuesday and what all of those in-play delegates mean for the fortunes of the free world, Apple decided to sneak in a few updates to their lineup, adding a 16GB iPhone and 32GB iPod Touch. These updates are nice and show that Apple probably bought a generous portion of flash memory, but I think people would rather see the price come down than the storage going up.
— Joe Fahs
During Steve Jobs’ keynote, we had some questions about Apple’s iPhone numbers. After all, saying Apple sells 20,000 iPhones a day is stretching the truth a little — a large portion of those were sold during the first week. Still, from the amount of iPhones we see every day, there is no reason to believe that Apple is missing its sales targets… or is there?
Toni Sacconaghi of Bernstein Research is trying to figure out what happened to 1.4 million iPhones. That number comes from the discrepancy between the number of iPhones Apple has said it sold and the number of iPhone activations AT&T claimed for the quarter. Toni Sacc (writing Sacconaghi multiple times is going to get annoying and I miss the Sopranos) estimates that even if 20% of iPhones were purchased to be unlocked, that still leaves almost 700,000 uncounted for.
So, are the analysts on to something, or is this another case of Apple trying to kick people when they are down? Toni Sacc says that 20% of iPhones going to people SIM unlocking their iPhones is a “generous” number because the iPhone 1.1.3 jailbreak has been out only a few days. But anybody who follows the iPhone knows people have been trying to hack it since the first day. And in AT&T’s Q3 conference call the company estimated at least 15% of iPhones were being sold to be unlocked. Back in those days, hacking the iPhone was a much more dedicated affair, and the device was still new.
The process to unlock the iPhone is much easier these days, so we wouldn’t be surprised if the percentage of people buying one to unlock it has gone up significantly in the last three months. The percentage of people unlocking iPhones would have to hover around 30%, but we know there is a a huge black market in China as well as Singapore, India and a lot of other places. And, even though the iPhone has been officially blessed in several places in Europe, the exchange rate still benefits people who buy them here in the United States. All of those numbers add on to the “unofficial” sales numbers.
It is possible that Apple has a huge warehouse somewhere with a million iPhones, or they were counting units shipped to stores, but not yet sold (a method the video game console manufacturers like). We surely wouldn’t be surprised to see another iPhone price drop before the end of the year; some say a price cut is imminent. I am not going to buy into this conspiracy just yet, but I’ll definitely keep listening to what Tony Sacc has to say, and maybe that is what he really wanted in the first place.
— Joe Fahs
In the ongoing security pissing match between lovers of OS X, Windows, and Linux, many often cite OS X lesser installation numbers as a reason for a relative lack of exploits. The “security through obscurity” theory postulates that all of those hackers coming out of the Eastern Europe, Asia, and the like would rather focus on a big target than a little one. Oh, there are plenty of proof-of-concept viruses and exploits out there, but their effectiveness in the wild is thing for debate.
Well, with hopes of nearly 10 million sales in the first 18 months and ubiquity in pop culture, the iPhone is decidedly not obscure, so I guess there is no surprise that Information Week tells us iPhone has its first trojan. Sounds scary right? Well, not so much. To use the Trojan, one needs to download a file and install it manually on the iPhone. For the vast majority of people who get their iPhone updates through Apple’s official channels, this doesn’t affect them. What it does mean is that the lazy iPhone hacker should only jailbreak his iPhone from a trusted source. As of this post, the website offering the download is offline, so maybe Apple has figured out how to be obscure again.
In other news, Opera software announced that the Opera browser is coming to the iPhone. If you’ve used the iPhone, you know that the built-in Safari is a great browser, but we welcome the choice of Opera as well, since it has always proved to be fast on any other mobile device and as long as iPhone users are stuck with EDGE data rates, they can use all the help they can get.
— Joe Fahs
As Apple prepares to report on its first quarter results in a couple of weeks, expect to hear a lot of things about iPhone and iPhone sales. Many say that Apple is looking good to meet their sales targets 10 million units by the end of 2008 having sold nearly 5 million handsets so far.
In order to meet its targets, Apple is relying largely on growth in new markets, including Europe and Asia. The iPhone has been on sale in Europe only a few months, and its success depends largely on who you ask. In early December people touted that the iPhone was doing better than expected but by the end of the month, some outlets reporting iPhone sales failed to meet their projections, at least in the UK. In France, the iPhone sold 70,000 units in line with projections, but almost half of those were in the first week.
Apple may still meet its projections, but if the iPhone is going to be continued success in world markets, there will probably be some changes needed after the initial contracts run out. Partnering with AT&T in the US made sense because consumers here are used to being locked into one carrier. In Europe, where people are used to plugging their SIM cards into whatever device they think is necessary, and where some countries outlaw locked phones, things are a little different. I think Apple could have gone into Europe without exclusive carriers, but without the same Apple Store infrastructure, they needed some sort of incentive to get their products on retail shelves.
The other big problem with the iPhone is the price. Although the iPhone price is similar to competing smart phones, various things conspire to make it a lot less of a good deal in most of Europe. In France, the price of 399 Euro would equal $589. In the UK, the price is equivalent to $531. To get an unlocked phone will run you even more. Yes, straight currency conversions are not a particularly good judge, and non-US customers pay the Apple Tax on all of their products, but with more handsets available from more carriers in the EU, they might have to change their strategy.
— Joe Fahs
Over the holiday break, rumors began to fly about a new Apple iPhone update which would bring along several feature enhancements including a customizable home screen and the “Locate Me” quasi-GPS built into the Google Maps application. Since the original story came from a web site that did not have much of a record within the Apple rumor game, some people were skeptical, at least until more comprehensive video proof started to come out.
Since I have been a big wimp about hacking my iPhone, I am excited for a lot of this new functionality despite the glaring lack of proper MMS. Users of modified iPhones are already bracing for the update to break everything once again. Apple has promised to release a full SDK for the iPhone later in the year, so there is hope that the update-and-pray cycle will come to an end eventually.
— Joe Fahs
Recently, many users of Intuit’s Quickbooks software for Mac were bitten by a software bug that resulted in the complete loss of data in some users’ desktop folders. There have been varying reports on the severity of the bug, but it is another in a long line of security and functional concerns in various Intuit products for the Mac. This wouldn’t really bother us that much, but Bill Campbell, Chairman and former CEO of Intuit, still sits on Apple’s Board of Directors.
Yesterday, Intuit announced they would be releasing an iPhone friendly version of Quicken to the masses as part of its Quicken Online product. Quicken Online will be web-only, so there should be an almost zero chance that they can do damage to your iPhone, but the good folks at Intuit tend to surprise us with their feats of ignorance, so won’t be taking any bets, even with those odds.
— Joe Fahs
Last week, with little fanfare, Apple released GarageBand 4.1.1. Along with the usual promises of stability improvements, the update now allows users to create their own custom ringtones. Any song in GarageBand can be the source, so anything GarageBand will play can now be used on your iPhone, including songs from your iTunes library. Users on the Internet were surprised to learn Apple has allowed you to create ringtones from songs they have purchased from the iTunes Music Store. With this feature available, anybody who shells out for iLife doesn’t need to pay Apple an extra dollar to convert a song from their Library into a ringtone.
One can only imagine how long it will take for the RIAA to complain, but many phone manufacturers have allowed custom .mp3 and .wav ringtones for years, so we’re happy to see the iPhone finally catch up in that regard. Who knows, maybe MMS messages will be next.
— Joe Fahs