The Tapbots guys have created what is essentially Tweetbot for App.net. It looks fantastic, and will almost certainly encourage me to use the service more. There’s also almost no chance that they’ll have to shut down on the whims of the service.
Monday morning, Snappli posted the results of a study of user traffic they’d done which suggested that only 4% of their users were using Apple Maps once per day. Not only did I doubt their numbers were representational of an actual 1-in-25 user base, I questioned how they managed to acquire such data:
Due to the word choice, I am left with the impression that they’re measuring the number of users opening up Maps on their iPhones. But if that is the case and they’re able to isolate individual launches of the app, that seems like a glaring abuse of reasonable expectations of privacy.
It looks like this hunch was correct. In an update posted to Snappli’s blog, they note that they weren’t just measuring data usage:
We were keen to provide visibility into actual usage rather than anecdotal evidence. To that end, we were looking to see if we could detect any anonymized traffic from the Apple Maps app on any given day. We were not looking at the total amount of data used by the app. Our goal was to measure popularity, not how data hungry the app was, nor the impact of vector graphics.
This still doesn’t sit right with me. It may be anonymous, but my location going through yet another third-party’s servers seems wrong.
Jennifer LeClaire for Sci-Tech Today:
We turned to Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, to get his take on the rumored iPad Mini.
Why bother?
“The 7-inch tablets are all about content — books and movies,” Enderle said. “Unlike the 10-inch class of tablets, where people expect to do productivity tasks on the device, the 7-inch is just for consumption. The killer apps are pretty much already on the Kindle and the Nexus 7, which is going to make it much tougher for Apple to break in.”
Yeah, it’s not like the iTunes Store sells, uh, content.
He told us something that you normally couldn’t say about Apple: The company is a little late to market with its product.
“The Kindle Fire was the tablet that really got people looking at the sevens to begin with, followed by the Nexus 7,” Enderle said. “Any way you look at it, Apple is either months or almost a year late to the market with this.”
Enderle says it’s going to fail.
Should be a hit.
Marco Arment, back in July:
If Apple were to launch a $200–300 7.8” iPad, they’d probably sell a ton of them for the holiday season — which means they’d need to start ramping up production pretty soon, if not already. If they were doing that, we’d probably see legitimate-looking parts leaked from the supply chain by now, but as far as I know, we haven’t.
Well, the production line seems to be ramping up because the parts Ukrainian iPhone got their hands on look legitimate. They report that the touch screen they got their hands on does not use in-cell touch technology, meaning it’s likely a 7.85″ display with the same pixel density as the iPhone 3GS, but with in-plane switching. I’d bet heavily on a 16 GB model with WiFi starting at $249, with LTE and higher-capacity models also available at the usual price differences. Black and white models will be available and, judging by the pictures, the black model will have a black anodized aluminum back, similar to the iPhone 5’s.
Why would Apple do a smaller iPad? It’s worth noting that they have no pressure at the high end:
Now, just over half, 52%, of tablet owners report owning an iPad, compared with 81% in the survey a year ago. Android-based devices make up the bulk of the remaining tablet ownership, 48% overall, dominated largely by the Kindle Fire. Two in ten, 21%, own a Kindle Fire, 8% the Samsung Galaxy, and the rest, a mix of others. (These numbers match very closely with sales data which put the Apple iPad at 61% of world sales, Android devices at 31% and Windows at 4%.)
This survey was also conducted before the introduction of Google’s Nexus 7 or Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD.
The vast majority of non-iPad sales are going towards smaller, low-cost Android tablets. If Apple can convince some of these people to pay just $50 more, they’re going to dominate in that market, too.
I also think Apple’s choice of naming is going to be interesting. The going name is “iPad mini”, but some people have tossed around the possibility of it being marketed as the “iPad Air”. I doubt that, for the simple reason that I see it as a name “reserved” for their line of computers1.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s merely offered as another size option, as Apple offers two MacBook Air sizes without additional branding suffixes. As of October 26th, you’ll be able to buy either a 10″ iPad for $499, or an 8″ iPad for $249.
In a similar vein, the MacBook Air wasn’t launched as a MacBook Nano. ↥︎
Om Malik, in a post with the apt URL slug /color-airtime-time-to-die-damnit/:
If Color’s Bill Nguyen boasted about the $41 million he raised from Sequoia Capital, then Airtime talked about its $33 million in funding, celebrity launch event and bold claims that sounded hollow from day one.
For now, Airtime wants to be a next generation Skype! Sure, and I want to be a latin lover.
I wrote about Color last year, and it hasn’t progressed since. Airtime is using the same business strategy of a weak solution to a problem nobody has. The capital that both of these startups have raised is mind-boggling, though.
Gary Shteyngart:
You, American Airlines, should no longer be flying across the Atlantic. You do not have the know-how. You do not have the equipment. And your employees have clearly lost interest in the endeavor. Like the country whose name graces the hulls of your flying ships, you are exhausted and shorn of purpose. You need to stop.
If it weren’t so obviously frustrating for the parties involved, this would seem like a cartoonish nightmare.
Well this is certainly unexpected. While I’m not the biggest GY!BE fan, I’m looking forward to some new stuff from the post rock pioneers.
In their review of the iPhone 5, Consumer Reports claimed the following:
The claimed improvements of the iPhone 5 in handling low-light shots were not apparent in our tests. In overall quality, both still and video images shot in low light on the iPhone 5 were of comparable quality to those shot on the iPhone 4S, though they did appear a little “cooler,” with a bluish hue.
To anyone who read any other iPhone 5 review (or has had the opportunity of shooting in low lighting conditions with one), this is baffling. The improvement from the 4S is noticeable.
I fired off a quick email to Consumer Reports asking if they would be willing to share the test photos. Their response was a clear “no”:
Consumer Reports does not share with the public any test data or criteria that is not published in our Reports. All information remains proprietary, and will only be shared with the manufacturer of the products we test (and only information relevant to their own product and not that of any competitor is shared.) In this way we remain free of any appearance of impropriety.
On the contrary, I think it would be proper to post comparison photos in what is purportedly a review. Marco Arment said it well a year ago:
A product as complex and multifaceted as a modern smartphone is beyond Consumer Reports’ ability to rate in a way that’s useful to most buyers.
This morning, Snappli, a service I’d never before heard of, posted to their blog that the number of iOS 6 devices using Apple’s new Maps has dropped to absurdly low levels:
- 64% of Snappli users have migrated to iOS 6 within the last few weeks (UK and US)
- Before the upgrade to iOS 6, 25% of Snappli users were viewing Google Maps at least once a day
- Once they moved to iOS 6, that immediately went to 35% of users using Apple Maps
- However, over the next 5 days that drops down to 4%
- Summary: before iOS 6 1 in 4 people were using Google maps at least once a day. After iOS 6: 1 in 25 using Apple maps and falling.
A drop from 35% of users to 4% would indeed be a massive blow. But that number seems fishy. For one thing, it’s only representative of people who use the Snappli service, which is a sort of proxy compression utility that reroutes all your traffic through Snappli’s servers. They promise they won’t peek, so why wouldn’t you trust them with your credit card number, date of birth, and nudie pictures?
But later today, competing service Onavo posted an interesting article (hat tip to The Beard) wherein they note that Apple’s vector tiles in the new iOS Maps app use far less data than the static images of yore:
Our data experts performed an identical series of activities on Google Maps and Apple Maps that included searching for several US cities, addresses and airports and zooming in and out to locate specific locations. On Google Maps, the average data loaded from the cellular network for each step was 1.3MB. Apple Maps came in at 271KB – that’s approximately 80% less data! On some actions, such as zooming in to see a particular intersection, Apple Maps’ efficiency advantage edged close to 7X.
The pedants at Hacker News would probably prefer if I clarified that by Google Maps, they mean the iOS 5 Maps app. Google has had similar vector tiles for a while now, but Apple wasn’t allowed to use them.
At any rate, this suggests that the new maps app draws far less data than the old one. It gets better, too. According to Guardian writer Charles Arthur1, the new app is astonishingly good at caching data:
That was certainly my experience earlier this week in Korea, where on a visit to Samsung I had an iPhone running iOS 6 which had no data contract. One evening I looked at the overview of North and South Korea (it turns out Apple’s Maps offer more detail than Google does for North Korea; the latter’s is just a white blank). The next day, with zero data coverage, we were taken on a coach trip to a Samsung production facility.
The phone tracked our entire journey, with street-level data including the names of shops, all the way. And all the way back. And then, later, out to the airport. All that, without getting a single extra drop of data.
Reduced data does indeed seem to explain a precipitous drop in apparent maps data usage as recorded by Snappli. John Gruber seems to agree that this makes more sense.
But this doesn’t explain the wording of Snappli’s post. See, they claim that they’re measuring app usage, not app data usage. And in this case, that minor phrasing makes a big difference. Note these three bullet points:
- Before the upgrade to iOS 6, 25% of Snappli users were viewing Google Maps at least once a day
- Once they moved to iOS 6, that immediately went to 35% of users using Apple Maps
- However, over the next 5 days that drops down to 4%
Due to the word choice, I am left with the impression that they’re measuring the number of users opening up Maps on their iPhones. But if that is the case and they’re able to isolate individual launches of the app, that seems like a glaring abuse of reasonable expectations of privacy.
Let us assume, however, that they’re measuring data usage in the aggregate. This doesn’t explain the sharp increase in use followed by a massive decline. What might explain this is a vast user base trying 3D maps for the first time, which uses much more data than street maps (or even satellite imagery). But they don’t say that.
If Snappli is measuring data usage in a bulk form, that means that their wording is off in a big way. If, however, they are measuring the app usage in a more finely-grained way, that seems like a gross violation of privacy expectations.
I really should start an offshoot of this blog featuring all the people I mention with two first names. ↥︎
Apple doesn’t do social networks well. In fact, companies that don’t devote their entire time to social networking tend to fail at it. Look at Google Buzz or Google+—neither of these is used to anywhere near the extent of their competitors. This isn’t a slight against Google, by the way, but a comparison to illustrate that building a social network is hard, and requires a company’s full attention.
Dalton Caldwell:
Two important properties of a successful software platform are:
- A financially sustainable business model that can support both the platform and 3rd-party developers.
- Aligned financial incentives between the platform, users and developers.
History shows us that when these two properties are absent from a developer ecosystem, Bad Things can happen. It is because of these fundamental beliefs about what makes a social platform successful and sustainable that App.net was created.
Good incentives for developers, which should, in theory, be good for users. I’m still not sure if most people are willing to pay $50 to share their status. In hindsight, I wouldn’t pay $50 because I don’t think that’s the kind of value I’m getting out of App.net. Yet.
Scoopertino’s Tim Cook sounds Canadian.