Steve Jobs must have known this was in the works.
Asked again last month why he hadn’t built a 3G iPhone, Apple’s (AAPL) CEO replied that he was waiting for a chipset that would allow him to deliver 3G speeds with something close to the eight hour talk time the slower EDGE-based iPhone gets now. “Hopefully we’ll see that late next year,” he said.
He may not have to wait that long. In what could be a preview of the next-generation iPhone, chipmaker Broadcom (BRCM) announced yesterday that it had begun sending manufacturers samples of an integrated device it’s calling a “3G Phone On a Chip.” The chipset’s features read like an iPhone hold-out’s wishlist. They include:
- a 3G baseband transceiver supporting download speeds of up to 7.2 megabits per second
- Bluetooth 2.1
- an FM radio receiver
- an FM radio transmitter (for car stereo playback)
- multimedia support for a 5 megapixal camera
- 30 frames per second video with “TV out”
- support for EDGE, HSUPA, HSDPA, and WCDMA
It doesn’t do GPS, Wi-Fi or windows.
While Broadcom did not offer battery life estimates, it does describe the chip as “extremely low power.”
The BCM21551 was delivered to manufacturers in small quantities yesterday will be available in bulk for $23 apiece. This is one chip Jobs may be tempted to hoard, because if Apple doesn’t buy it, its competitors surely will.
Or not. In an oddly time piece, Blackfriar’s Carl Howe, who is usually pretty well plugged in to Apple, today published his five reasons why Apple’s iPhone Doesn’t Need 3G. Latency, he says, is more important than bandwidth. Besides, he adds, high bandwidth radio networks are more error prone. Hmmm.
For more on the Broadcom chipset, see Eric Bangeman’s piece in Ars Technica.
Written by Philip Elmer-DeWitt on October 16th, 2007 with no comments.
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That green glow around Apple (AAPL) didn’t last long. Only three days after the company gave over the front page of its website to proclaim itself “bursting with pride” over boardmember Al Gore’s Nobel, the environmental activists at Greenpeace have attacked Steve Jobs for failing to make his cellphone as green as his competitors’.
In a slick video posted on YouTube (and pasted below the fold), the organization paints Jobs as a hypocrite for promising a “greener Apple” but failing to take the minimal steps that Nokia and Sony Erikson took to earn a higher rating in Greenpeace’s Guide to Greener Electronics. After earning cheers from Greenpeace last May, the company has actually slipped a few notches on the organization’s green meter.
It’s difficult for nonscientists to judge how benign or dangerous the traces of brominated fire retardants in the iPhone’s antenna or the phthalate plasticisers in the white headset really are. But by failing to perform the due diligence that would have told the company what its competitors were doing about those components — or to match the “take back” recycling programs that have earned Nokia and Sony Erikson high marks with European greens — Apple has left itself open for another round of negative environmental agitprop.
Written by Philip Elmer-DeWitt on October 15th, 2007 with no comments.
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With only two weeks to go before the release of OS X Leopard, the fifth major revision of Apple’s (AAPL) flagship Macintosh operating system, AppleInsider today published the sixth entry in its comprehensive Road to Leopard series — and at Apple’s insistence pulled two earlier posts offline.
Written by Prince McLean, the nom de plume of a systems programmer who clearly knows his stuff, the series not only describes with text and screen shots the key innovations coming in Leopard, but it takes pains to place them in the history of graphical user interfaces as they evolved from Xerox Parc, through Lisa and the first Macs, Systems 8 and 9, Next and the previous versions of OS X. The Commodore Amiga even makes a cameo appearance.
The series is so good that Apple’s legal staff has stepped in, demanding through cease-and-desist orders that parts of the first two entries be removed. AppleInsider has taken them temporarily offline while they are being redacted.
[UPDATE: The first two posts are back up in heavily redacted form.]
If you’re interested in what’s in store for you when Leopard finally arrives, you might want to archive the other posts before key sections disappear. Here are the links:
Written by Philip Elmer-DeWitt on October 12th, 2007 with no comments.
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Next week, Daniel Lyons, a.k.a. the Fake Steve Jobs, steps out of character to start a three-city book tour to promote Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs (A Parody) [Da Capo Press; $22.95]. That means hard-copy versions of the book — galleys of which have been floating around reviewers’ offices for more than a month — will start to arrive in bookstores, where loyal readers of FSJ’s website can see for themselves how the fake Apple (AAPL) CEO’s online persona translates into print.
The good news is that this is not just a compilation of FSJ’s online posts, although some of his best set pieces — including Hillary Clinton shaking down the Silicon Valley VCs for campaign cash and Yoko Ono insisting that iTunes list the band as “John Lennon and the Beatles” — appear in the book more or less intact. This is, by and large, an original work of fiction, with lots of new material and something resembling a plot — with a beginning, middle and end.
The bad news — which struck this reader at about page 31 — is that this is not really a novel either, with three-dimensional characters who live in a fully-realized fictional world. It was on page 31 — when Jobs, devastated by the possibility that the options backdating scandal might cost him control of his company, goes home, smokes some pot, and calls his house manager at her boyfriend’s house to come over and make him a mango smoothie — that it occurred to me that the real Steve Jobs doesn’t live alone. He lives in a real house with a real wife and real children. And he probably doesn’t have the luxury of getting stoned, dropping acid, running off to San Francisco with his friend Larry Ellison to shoot paintball guns at the homeless, or any of the other reckless things FSJ does on a whim in this book.
For whatever reason — perhaps the pressure of writing a novel on deadline on top of his regular online posts and his day job as an editor at Forbes — the challenge of bringing Fake Steve Jobs convincingly to life was too much for Lyons. Instead we get what is in effect a 248-page blog entry populated by paper-thin characters who just aren’t that funny. It’s a lesson in how literary tricks that made for truly brilliant short-form writing can grow lame when played again and again at book length
The novel also suffers from the timidness of Da Capo Press and its libel lawyers, who have shorn Lyons of one of the features that made his blog must-reading among Silicon Valley insiders: his willingness to skewer real computer industry executives, from Microsoft’s Bill (”the Beastmaster”) Gates to Sun’s Jonathan (”My Little Pony”) Schwartz, without pulling any punches. With the exception of Ellison, almost all the identities in Options have been fudged, turning what might have been a razor sharp parody into a coy roman a clef.
It’s been a tough few months for Danny Lyons, between his outing by the New York Times and the rush to get this book out on schedule. The best part is that none of it seems to have slowed his online output — or his willingness to call ‘em like he sees ‘em. His Sept. 3 rant against the TV Networks is as good as anything he’s written to date — and as smart a critique of the broadcast industry as you’re likely to read anywhere.
Written by Philip Elmer-DeWitt on October 11th, 2007 with no comments.
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Drilling down into Apple’s (AAPL) recent string of boffo quarterly reports, analyst Toni Sacconaghi Jr. of Bernstein Research finds both strength and vulnerability in Steve Jobs’ relentless pursuit of high-margin computer sales.
In his second report since Bernstein initiated coverage of Apple (see here for the first one), Sacconaghi notes that:
- Apple’s global PC market share has increased in 10 of the last 11 quarters,
- unit sales have grown 28% or better in each of the last four quarters
- U.S. notebook sales have been particularly strong, accounting for 47% of Apple’s Mac unit growth and 52% of its revenue in Apple’s most recent quarterly report.
But amid all that good news, he sees risks ahead for Apple investors. It’s tempting, he says, to look at Apple’s slim 3% slice of the global market for PCs and assume that Jobs can easily grow his Mac business at least two fold in the next five years or so — an assumption that helps explain the high multiples in Apple’s current share price.
But if you look at the high-priced markets Apple chooses to play in, says Sacconaghi, you see that it already has a surprisingly dominant market share — without much room for growth.
Take, for example, the market for the most expensive notebook computers. Dividing notebook price ranges into fifths, or quintiles as the statisticians call them, Apple already has a 29% share of the U.S. market for notebook computers in the highest quintile — up “stunningly,” notes Sacconaghi, from 8% three years ago. In the consumer and education market (i.e. excluding business computers), Apple share of the top quintile notebook market is nearly 46%.
While other PC makers have been lowering their average selling price, Apple has been steadily increasing its price premiums relative to the rest of the market — great for keeping profit margins high, but not so good for growing market share.
“Accordingly,” Sacconaghi concludes, “we believe Apple faces a trade-off in its Mac business over the next 2 - 3 years: either lower price (and margin percentage) to sustain share gains, or retain its current price premiums and face slowing unit growth.”
Below the fold, a graph from the Bernstein report showing the rapid growth in Apple’s share of the premium notebook market from 2000 to today.
Written by Philip Elmer-DeWitt on October 11th, 2007 with no comments.
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Steve Jobs must have known this was in the works.
