I thought everybody already knew that this is how Apple operates?

From the BBC:

Apple has apologised after facing criticism for admitting it deliberately slows down some ageing iPhone models.

The company now says it will replace batteries for less and will issue software in 2018 so customers can monitor their phone's battery health. Some customers had long suspected the company slowed older iPhones to encourage customers to upgrade.

I know very little about this stuff, but that is their whole business model and I always suspected that they did it.

The clincher for me was after I bought my second Mac Mini in 2013 (or thereabouts), the bloody thing didn't have a CD/DVD drive, the 'genius' in the shop told me that Apple didn't make external CD/DVD reader/writers but I could just buy any generic one and plug it in.

So I bought a Samsung device for £40 which worked absolutely fine... until it stopped working a year or two later. I went back to the shop and the 'genius' told me that Apple now made external CD/DVD reader writers and Mac Minis were no longer compatible with the generic ones, so I had to buy an Apple one for about £80.

That's the clever bit about Apple - it doesn't just sell software (market largely cornered by Microsoft) or hardware (highly competitive with slim profit margins), it does both and they are interlinked in such a way that once you set off down the Apple road you are pretty much stuck on it for ever.

So much so, that there aren't any rival MP3 players any more. Well, there are of course, but they are all crap. Believe me, I tried to wean myself off IPods a year ago and I tried about three others which all went back to the shop after a couple of days and I ended up buying another IPod (good old Currys, with their "don't ask, don't tell" returns policy!). "

That Apple tax bill raises all sorts of interesting topics...

1. Apple's $200 billion "offshore" cash pile is largely money which they have magicked offshore tax-free and dare not touch because it will trigger a US tax bill if they repatriate it to the USA, for example in order to pay dividends.

2. For clarity, Apple's accounts show that the cash pile has not been lent back to other companies, it is invested in "marketable securities".

3. The Faux Lib fuckwits from the TPA/City AM axis have a bizarre notion that it would be better to get rid of corporation tax entirely and replace it with a tax on distributions. This would be full of loopholes; administratively unworkable; overlooks the basic point that corporation tax does not really touch reinvested profits (reinvested profits are called expenses, FFS, so they come off profits before they are taxed, duh); as well defeating the whole object. This is what Apple already have - the result being they do not make distributions out of this spare $200 billion at all (and the tax advisers, lawyers and corrupt politicians make a handsome turn), so from the shareholders' point of view, that money might as well not exist in practical terms.

3. The accounts also show that Apple's net profit margin is a startling 25% of net sales (after VAT and so on). This is five times higher than a normal manufacturing business, as Apple are protected by patents. Also, although computer hardware is a competitive, low margin business, software is a natural monopoly even if not protected by patents and Apple sells hardware and software as a bundle. This was IBM's big mistake of course, they should have taken on Bill Gates and his little friends as employees, or at least insisting on an exclusive licence, rather than just using Microsoft software and allowing Microsoft to sell it to all and sundry. That way, IBM would still be world number 1 in computers (like they were twenty or thirty years ago).

4. Such a high profit margin is evidence of quasi-rental income. As we know, rental income can be taxed at very high rates to no ill effect. Seeing as Apple can pay the EU's back tax demand out of this spare cash, it won't actually make any difference to them.

5. Apple are wailing that the tax bill "will have a profound and harmful effect on investment and job creation in Europe." This is complete nonsense. Payroll taxes have a harmful effect on jobs; taxes on investment have a harmful effect on investment (and the UK actually only has one tax on investment, and that is the element of Business Rates that relates to the building). A tax on super-profits i.e. rents has no particular effect at all.

6. What is strange is that the EU says that Apple should repay Ireland €13 billion avoided tax. That 'tax' was never Ireland's in the first place. If Ireland hadn't come up with their stupid rules, Apple would not have channelled so much money through there in the first place. Assuming it hadn't channelled it through some other tax haven instead, Apple would have either paid higher taxes in the various European countries (where products are sold), in the USA (where products are designed) or in China (where products are manufactured).

7. So while €13 billion seems reasonable, compared to the $9 bn "fine" which the USA imposed on BNP Paribas for some trumped up charge or compared to the likely corporation tax on the European notional share of the $200 billion untaxed money, that €13 billion ought to be divvied by between each European country, the USA and China (i.e. where the tax would have been paid absent the Irish shenanigans) in some rough and ready ratio.

8. Finally, while I am a Brexiteer and je ne Bregrette rien, I have often said fair play to the EU (or any national government) for taking a firm line with large multi-nationals who take the piss on tax, despite what Newsthump says.There's no point even trying to draft clever tax laws, they will always circumvent them. So we might as well just ask them for regular large payments and have done with it, call it a 'market access fee' in EU-speak

I've been Predicting this for a few years

From The BBC:

Apple has reported the slowest growth in iPhone sales since the product's 2007 launch and warned sales will fall for the first time later this year.

The US tech giant sold 74.8 million iPhones in its fiscal first quarter, compared with 74.5 million a year ago.

Apple said revenue for the next quarter would be between $50bn (£34bn; €46bn) and $53bn, below the $58bn it reported for the same period a year ago.

This would mark Apple's first fall in revenues since it launched the iPhone.

The smartphone is pretty much done. I've got a HTC One that is nearly 2 years old, and there's nothing compelling about any upgrades to it. So, the phones are pretty much a mature tech, like PCs and cars and bicycles. Yes, they'll be minor improvements, but the big changes are done. It's like how cars are a bit more efficient over where they were in the 80s, but that's nothing like the leap from the 1950s.

It also means that there's a ton of cheap, capable phones now. The Moto X is a great phone for £200. OK, not as good as an iPhone 6, but for most people they'd see what it does and declare it good enough. Can Apple keep on selling £500 phones if the £200 ones are good enough?

Apple and Malls

From the Wall St Journal:

Apple draws so many shoppers that its stores single-handedly lift sales by 10% at the malls in which they operate, according to Green Street Advisors, a real-estate research firm. That gives Apple the clout to negotiate extremely low rents for itself relative to its sales, while creating upward pressure on prices paid by mall neighbors who might not benefit from the traffic.

In the past, malls typically operated according to a straightforward bargain. Department stores that anchored the ends of the malls either owned their own stores or paid almost nothing aside from fees to maintain common spaces in exchange for drawing much of the traffic, while specialty retailers in the smaller spaces between the anchors typically paid the bulk of a mall’s rent.

Apple has upended that model by using its bargaining power to pay no more than 2% of its sales a square foot in rent. That compares with a typical in-line tenant, which pays as much as 15%, according to industry executives.

Nothing new exactly, but just part of the Eiffel Tower/café near the Eiffel Tower thing of how rents work…

"Apple releases U2 removal tool"

From the BBC:

Apple has released a tool to remove all U2 music from its customers' iTunes accounts six days after giving away the latest U2 album for free.

Some users had complained about the fact that their devices were silting up with old U2 songs which they had never quite got round to deleting, and were prompted to finally get round to doing this when Songs of Innocence was automatically downloaded to their devices.

It had not been immediately obvious to many of the account holders how to delete U2's entire back catalogue. The US tech firm is now providing a one-click removal button.

It is rumoured that the tool will be updated to include the option to also delete all Coldplay tracks.

"Apple to release iWatch"

From The Evening Standard:

Apple is to release a pioneering smartwatch when it unveils the new iPhone 6 next month, according to reports...

The watch, which is rumoured to have a 2.5in screen, is expected to use Apple's latest iOS 8 operating system and will be wearable in the style of a normal wrist watch. It is believed the watch will feature the company's HomeKit function, meaning users could be able to control lights and open and close garage doors at the touch of a screen in their house...

The gadget is also expected to be compatible with Apple's Health app, allowing users to monitor their worsening levels of fitness, brought on by the very fact that its wearers are too f---ing lazy to even get out of their armchairs when they want to turn the lights on or off.

Gondor Skypes for Aid

Faster than lighting beacons, I guess.

If anyone's got a better headline, shoot...

There's an app for that.

From Cybercrimesunit.com:

A woman who tried to unlock a stolen iPhone unwittingly took her own photo. An app on the phone then automatically sent the photo to the owner, who called the police.

The app, identified by some media outlets as iGotYa, can only be installed on jailbroken [wot?] iPhones. iGotYa takes a picture of anyone who tries to unlock it, maps their location and then sends the information to the owner in an email.

That’s exactly what happened in this particular case, Sussex Police said, with an iPhone that had been stolen from the Coalition nightclub in Brighton, East Sussex, earlier this month. Police have released the picture of the woman who might have stolen the phone.

Ah, these precious iPhone owners with all their fancy technology, don't they know they can be outwitted with a couple of simple items which you can buy at any hardware shop or might even have lying round the house?

1. Some black insulation tape to stick over the lens or lenses on the iPhone so that it can't take your picture.

2. You then place the iPhone on a hard surface and give it a sharp blow with a normal household hammer to disable the chip. Then turn the iPhone over and smack it on the other side as well, just to be sure.

There, they'll never track you down now!

Yeah! Apple rocks!

The solution to all yesterday's "issues" came to me as I lay awake fretting last night, namely buy an external CD/DVD reader/writer, which I snapped up for a very reasonable £39.99 at Curry's-PC World (I'm not going to spend another penny in an Apple Store, not ever again, ever). It's USB powered so you don't need to faff about with yet another power cable.

The system graciously allowed me to re-load Office for Mac (version 2008) and will allow me to make MP3's from audio CD's using iTunes. All I need to do now is install Neo-Office (which I have used to create lots of charts and stuff) and I'm back where I was four days ago.
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UPDATE: now I set it all up nice and new, I've a nasty feeling that there was nothing wrong with the old Mac Mini, it was just the monitor that was on the blink (I must have been using it for seven years or so, maybe longer?), as it keeps shutting down again (it was fine earlier on). I'll throw another £70 into the bottomless pit of Curry's-PC World tomorrow and see what happens.

Apple can f- off, seriously.

My old Mac Mini, with which I had always been very happy, from the word go, had slowed down a fair bit sine I bought it nearly five years ago and yesterday it started seriously crashing.

Fair enough, I thought, I'll not begrudge Apple their pound of flesh, I'll just buy a new one. The assistant sold me a new one happily enough, that's when the problems started.

I'll not bore you with the details, but here I am six hours later further back than this morning. The new Mac Mini doesn't even have a f-ing CD drive, you're supposed to magically sync it with your old Mac Mini (which is on the blink) only to do that I need to be able to plug my screen back into the old one, but the VGA-to-old Mac adapter wasn't quite compatible with the old Mac-to-new Mac adaptor that came in the box, as a result of which various things follow:

1. The old VGA-old Mac adapter is buggered beyond recognition (there were four extra pins which got bent out of the way) and once the two adaptors had been forced into line, didn't work anyway.

2. I wasted another hour going back to the Apple store to buy the correct VGA-to-new mac adaptor.

3. Having got the screen to work, I realised that the new Mac mini doesn't have a CD drive, what's the bloody point of that, it's like buying a new car and discovering it doesn't have a steering wheel?

4. Not an issue, trills the booklet, you can magically transfer everything from your old Mac to your new Mac, provided you install some software or other on the old Mac first. Fair enough, but having buggered the VGA-to-old Mac adaptor (see step 1 above) I can no longer plug the screen into the old Mac.

5. I'm particularly peeved about the new Mac mini not having a CD drive, as I told the man in the shop that the only software I needed to install was Mac Office which I had on a CD. He could have f-ing well mentioned that the CD was no good to me any more. Or pointed out that the fancy adaptor thingy was about as much use as a missing sock.

6. For the past five years I have been blithely telling people how great Apple computers and iPods are, but never again. My tip: buy the cheapest laptop you can find, plug in a keyboard and mouse (cost you a tenner at places like Comet), keep all your files on an external hard drive and when the laptop goes on the blink, just chuck it in the bin and start again.
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UPDATE: Thanks for all your comments re USB and so on, but file-document storage is not a problem, I have always saved everything I ever created on an external drive, so my last seventeen years' work is on a Porsche 2 TB hard drive which works fine, it's just updating the software (primarily Mac Office) and sticking in CDs and creating MP3's that's going to be difficult. I guess I'll have to double up and buy a CD reader device thingy.

iQuit

iPod niggle

I noticed a few weeks ago that there were certain songs on my iPod (they showed up in the list of 'songs' from the main menu, for example and played as normal) which you couldn't access via the list of 'artists' from the main menu because the 'artist' just didn't show up.

I correlated this back to certain albums (the last couple of NOW albums, if truth be told) and the way to fix this appears to be to choose the original song in iTunes on your main computer, click 'get info', untick the box saying 'part of a compilation' and then 'sync' your iPod again. Which is a bit of a grind if you have to go through each individual song on the suspect albums and untick the box each time - there doesn't seem to be a way of telling iTunes that a compilation album is not actually a compilation album, but hey.

iPatch

I've learned something new today.

Man Widdicombe explained to me how to take screen shots using a Mac. You press shift and 'apple' (or 'command', it's the key with the little symbol that looks like a square with a circle at each corner) and 4, and you then highlight the area you want to include. The resulting png ends up in a folder called 'Desktop', so sort that in date order to find the newest and Bob's your uncle.

Just to show I can do it, here's what his 'blog looks like:

Agglomeration Of The Decade

From The Evening Standard:

Five years ago it was the West End's “cashmere alley,” a tired collection of Scottish knitware shops, airline offices, high street chains and faux “England-land” heritage stores.

The arrival of the Apple Store - the first outside America - exactly half a decade ago today - has transformed Regent Street into one of Europe's leading retail shopping destinations with an enviable and growing collection of global brands. Retail experts say the arrival of Apple - where takings are a remarkable £60 million a year - acted as a catalyst that allowed Regent Street to throw off its spinsterish image as Oxford Street's tartan clad maiden aunt...

Even in the depths of the recession Regent Street has no empty space “from Circus to Circus” and only 2000 sq ft on its northern stretch, Mr Shaw said. That gives it an overall vacancy rate of 0.03 per cent compared with 4.5 per cent across the West End as whole and 11 per cent nationally.

The “Apple effect” has also had a dramatic impact on rents, which have risen around 25 per cent since then compared with 0 to 10 per cent in the West End as a whole. While rents, which range from around £275 to £450 per square foot are still at a discount to Oxford Street, the gap is closing...

OK. Breathe in, relax, breathe out, think ...

Apple operates in a free-ish market, it looked at the cost/benefit of various locations for its new shop and went for Regent Street, invested a shedload of money in refurbishment, fancy glass staircase etc. This attracts more shoppers, so at first, tenants of surrounding shops benefit as well. So more stores want to open up there, so the landlord can put up the rents, by 25% (if the article is to be believed).

The less profitable shops can't keep up with the new rents and go out of business, and other, more profitable shops (who generate sufficient profits to be able to afford the new, higher rents) move in. Which attracts more shoppers, so rents get nudged up a bit more etc.

As a result of all this, by the time Apple's lease comes up for renewal, they'll find that their rent has gone up by fifty per cent, in other words, they'll have the privilege of paying over the odds to be near people who are themselves paying over the odds to be near Apple, and so on ad infinitum.

Seriously, which party has benefitted most from Apple's decision to move there while putting in least effort? It's a simple question with a simple answer, you just have to be honest.

Bose SoundDock

Having gone over to The Dark Side a year ago, I decided it was time to try and kick-start the consumer led recovery and have splashed out £150 on one of those Bose iPod docking station thingies:
I'm no sound-quality-obsessive, but I'd rate it absolutely awesome. Bass and drums are punchy to the point of being insistent, yet the whole sound still has a wonderful clarity and you hear all sorts of instruments in a song that you'd never noticed before. And like all small hi-fi systems, it sounds louder and better the further away you are from it.

The only downer is, it doesn't have a headphone socket, but hey.

Battle of the formats

I finally got round to having a cool radio/CD/MP3 player installed in the car (£90 including fitting at Halfords, very efficient) and slapped in a CD with 200 MP3 tracks on it. Hurray! Only some of them didn't play. Boo!

Why? Because a recent update to iTunes has reset the default in Preferences/Importing from 'MP3' to 'AAC', which won't work on a player set up to play MP3's on a CD. So what you have to do is go back into iTunes/Preferences/Importing and reset it from 'AAC encoder' to 'MP3 encoder'. And then delete all the AAC ones from iTunes and stick all your recent CD purchases in again and redo them as MP3, *sigh*.

That's that fixed, next.

Mac Mini

I took it out of the box twenty minutes ago, and now I'm up an posting again.

The screen looks a bit fuzzy; you have to type in SHIFT+2 to get the @ symbol; and I haven't plugged in my external hard drive yet (heck knows what will happen then), but hey, it would appear to p*** all over that Microsoft-based PC rubbish.