Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Reporting and the "news" that iPad sales are slumping

Forbes has an article today titled iPad Sales Slump As Android Tablets Soar by Ewan Spence.

  • Ewan cites IDC sales data.
  • Ewan describes Android advantages, such as the diversity of devices, lower cost options.
  • He argues that a cheap tablet is not pretty, but is functional, and that that is what most people want.  He says Apple is out of step with the rest of the market.
  • He argues that there are "other forces" tending towards Android and away from iOS.
Things not cited include who is making money making tablets.  Are manufacturers making money?  Cellular providers?  Google?  Android app makers (specifically from Android tablets)?

Others have other theories.  Mark Hibben of Seeking Alpha has a new article, (must be registered to read the whole thing) Why iPad Sales Will Recover In 2015.  This seems to run along the same lines as a detailed article on October 30th by Daniel Eran Dilger on Apple Insider, How Apple, Inc. went thermonuclear on Samsung, erasing Android's primary profit center.

I am surprised that statistics-generating companies like IDC can get away with ignoring articles like the Apple Insider article.  They are supposed to be performing analysis.  Part of analysis is looking at analysis from others.

IDC and Ewan Spence do not look at all the evidence.  There is a cherry-picking of evidence to lead to a conclusion, ignoring other evidence.  Mr. Spence does not acknowledge in any way the new breadth in the ipad line - a breadth that frankly I think is kind of crazy, but would think would quiet exactly the kind of feedback provided by Mr. Spence.

Where is the Macalope when we need him?

Saturday, November 1, 2014

More experiences with Yosemite and ios8

I have been working further with Yosemite and ios8.  I have found some features of interest to me, and learned a bit more about iphoto icloud options, and a bug.

First for the bug.  Now that I have SMS messaging available to me on my macbook pro, I am using it.  I texted a co-worker with some connectivity issue, and my message to his iphone went green, bypassing Apple's messaging infrastructure and going through as an SMS message.  Messages on my macbook pro showed an unread message from this specific message.  So I read the message.  It was marked read.  Then I went about my business and saw that messages showed an unread message.  It was that same message, which I read again.  This kept happening.  For at least a couple of days.  I see it is now marked read, perhaps after a reboot.  Annoying.

Next - iphoto icloud.  When I use iphoto, I have to attach an external drive.  I just do not have room on my internal drive for my iphoto library, which is around 180GB.  Thus I am interested in having my photos in the cloud if possible, hopefully both protecting my photos and removing my need to hook up an external drive to manage my photos.  With ios8 (or is it 8.1?) ios devices are ready for photos in icloud beta.  Apple has information at https://www.apple.com/icloud/photos/
It is not yet available for Yosemite -see more at imore: http://www.imore.com/photos-os-x-yosemite-explained

There are features I am not yet testing, but I am interested in looking at soon.  If you have family members with Apple ID's and you share with them, they could interest you.  You can can now share other icloud item types:

  • Reminder categories
  • Calendars
If you run the OS X Yosemite version or log in to icloud.com, these now have options to share!  I look forward to sharing calendars and reminder categories with my family.