Apple

Although I have to admit that some of their products are pretty good I still dislike Apple as a company. I have an older 30 GB iPod, I guess they are calling it an "iPod Classic" now. The battery has always been problematic, I mostly use it in the car where it is plugged in to my outlet and the battery can usually last for the hour or two I am at the gym, though just barely.

It takes, on average, one and a half hours for the battery to go from full to half-empty and when the indicator says half-empty the iPod shuts itself down.

I have replaced iPod batteries myself before, and it is a relatively easy process, but I can't afford to buy a new one right now so prefer to not take any chances.

I know that Apple has a program where they replace the batteries. I call the local Apple store and they tell me that they do NOT replace batteries but I can "recycle" the iPod and get 10% off of a new one.

So then I call the Apple Tech Support. They tell me that they can in fact replace the battery, he tells me it will cost $59 + $7 shipping for a total cost of about $70. The guy then suggests that it would be better for me to just buy a new iPod than to repair the perfectly good one I have. He says that this iPod is old and may break soon. He suggests I trade in my fully functional 30 GB iPod for a refurbished 8 GB iPod Nano, which would only cost me $20 more than replacing the battery. And that I buy an extended warranty on the new iPod Nano.

Really Apple tech support guy? I should pay an extra $20 to get a new, tiny iPod Nano that barely has enough space to store my audio books? I have 80 GB of live concerts on my computer, I have to constantly swap them in and out of my iPod. That seems like a terrible idea to me.

I think after all of this I may just get a replacement battery and do it myself again. I could send it to Apple and have them do it but after hearing two separate people tell me that I should just spend a couple hundred dollars on a new iPod I don't really want to give Apple any of my money.

Apple iTunes and Windows

I hate Apple. Why can't they make products that work for me instead of making me work for them? Why do I have to switch my wireless carrier to use their phone? Why can't I just use iTunes to give them my money without having to upgrade my OS or use their hardware?

My specific complaint is with iTunes on Windows XP x64, a stable, usable platform that has been stable for years. The only 64 bit Windows OS Apple supports is Vista, which is an unstable mess of a failure. Microsoft has all but disinherited Vista.

Not only that but in order to try to buy a single stupid song I had to uninstall a hacked, but working version of iTunes to try to upgrade, which I did on the incorrect premise that Apple had maybe finally written a 64 bit version of their installer, spend hours trying to rehack the 8.1 iTunes installer before giving up in frustration.

Now I have no iTunes on my machine, Apple didn't get my $1.99 or whatever for the song. Luckily Winamp has written an application which actually works which allows me to manage my iPod without iTunes, as I was never able to get iTunes to recognize my iPod with my hacked installer.

Random Links from Yesterday

The Mac ads apparently are correct in many ways about how Mac users differ from PC users. Engadget analyzes this article.

Article on the Funded, the new website.

Google TV sucks ass.

Britney Spears photoshopped magazine cover.

NY Times trying to offload About.com for a small profit.

EBay changing fee structures again. With the prices like they are I don't know why anyone would use eBay when you have Craigslist for free.

Writers Strike

As the writers strike continues, actors are forced into less scripted stuff:



Incest on Gray's Anatomy? I've never seen it and have no plans to.

Someone else hates Apple! Although Fred Wilson does so for very different reasons than I do. And he actually buys their products. And not used on eBay.

Facebook gives a little on it's Beacon program.

Some girl from some reality show I have never seen who I have never heard of gives an interview which doesn't interest me in the least.

Ning, which I am familiar with, and Flux, which I have never heard of - a point by point comparison.

Random Stuff for Tuesday

real medical condition. I wasn't sure about the Alien Hand thing but sure enough, it is real as well.

A new site that sets you up on Crazy Blind Dates or something.

Barry Diller on CNBC explaining why he is spinning off everything, when he has been saying for years that he could get some sort of synergy out of it.

Some commentary on the writers strike.

Kill Buljo. A Kill Bill rip off.

Kick Scott Adam in the balls in Second Life. Yay. Second Life is sooo useful.





Open Social hacked within minutes of launch.

A different opinion on Apple. He makes some good points but I don't see it happening.

Financial Tips for those of us who don't reportedly own 30% of Facebook

Some common-sense financial tips, from theStreet.com.

Some thoughts on the Microsoft Facebook deal that is making huge waves today:

• Did Zuckerberg not want this deal?
  
• Microsoft took a 1-2% stake in Facebook for $240 million... Some tidbits of info about this.
• What exactly does a poke mean? Not being a regular Facebook user I am not exactly sure.
• Facebook downgrades its growth rate.
• If Zuckerberg does, in fact, own 30% of Facebook as has been reported, on paper he is now worth $5 billion. That must feel nice, but I can say from experience, it's horrible when you are worth a lot of money on paper and you don't cash out and end up with nothing. See an older post of mine for more details on this.
• I still hold by my belief that Facebook is going to crash when and burn when they are unable to turn their large user base into a large money base. While Apple reported such a good quarter last week, I think the stock is pretty much done with it's run. It's been down for the last two days. Want to hear something that will make you sick? I bought AAPL at $18 and sold it at $30 a few years back. Makes me sick to think about it, but not as sick as the above mentioned paper loss of 99% of my net worth.
• All of the above that is not from me is from Valleywag.
• And just in - Facebook is getting another $500 million from two hedge funds, bringing their take over the last two days to a hefty $750 million!
• And something about Facebook's value and growth... As a note, Facebook's users are growing at 2% a week - not active users, registered users. And as far as I know the revenue growth is pretty much non-existent.
• Some guy from Intel agrees with me.

In non-Facebook news:

• Google is once again being a little bit evil. Only like 2% evil or so but still...
• Sergey Brin tries to pass off the Facebook mess as something positive for Google. I don't think its positive for anyone except Mark Zuckerberg and the other early investors.
• Montage of Mark Cuban's all-too-brief stint on dancing with the stars.
  

More Crap

Some more commentary on the Apple iPhone numbers from last night.

From the NYT special on sleep today, a bunch of articles:

• Should kids sleep with their parents? My kid says yes, but I say no.
• The effects of sleep deprivation, which I know all too well, which is why I go to bed at 8:30pm every night. (Yes, I am old and boring and I am aware of that.)
• Do the elderly sleep worse? I say maybe not, but they sure sleep less. Getting up at 4am everyday... Insanity!
• Something about birds.
• Something about how sleep helps your memory.
• About how sleeping pills are huge rip-offs.
• About nightmares, what dreams mean, why we dream, etc.
  

Tom, everyone's favorite MySpace friend, is apparently doing a pretty common MySpace thing to do - lying about his age.

Natali del Conte - a somewhat cute tech vlogger, in a bloopers reel that really has no point, other than looking at her.

Some crazy Christian televangelist cursing up a storm:



Startup to kill junk mail.
An article about StumbleUpon, which apparently is a better version of Digg or one of those types of sites. And by article I mean half-assed weak attempt at a blog post.

Netflix profits are up... Which is odd because, while I still am a subscriber, I am strongly thinking of switching to Blockbuster. I love Netflix and I will feel like a traitor if/when I do switch; and I hate Blockbuster for being the Starbucks of movie rentals. But with Netflix if I want to watch a movie I have to put it on a list, wait weeks for it to come, and by the time it comes I don't want to watch it anymore, so it sits there for months delaying the next movie I really do want to see.

With Blockbuster I can exchange the movie in the store, and get the next one on my list. I'm doing a two week trial of Blockbuster and I've watched more movies than I have watched from Netflix in the last 3 or 4 months, maybe even longer.

Apple blows me out of the water

I've been saying how I don't see a big, bright future for Apple (AAPL) for quite a while now. Their earnings last night pretty much blew my theories out of the water. Honestly, I am very surprised. A few years ago no one had iPods and everyone wanted them. Today, everyone has one that wants one, or so I thought.

I thought that the iPhone would not sell as many units as projected and would be a disappointment, I guess I was wrong on that count as well - though the huge price cut very likely was what screwed me over on this call.

I stand by my position that AAPL is going to go down at some point, but just maybe Steve Jobs can keep pulling nifty little design tricks out of his bag and keep the customers fooled and the stock price high. Once Steve goes, forget it, Apple is as good as bankrupt.

But I have to hand it to (Real) Steve Jobs... Well played.

Update - Some articles from Valleywag on the Apple quarter:

• How well is the iPhone really selling?
• How many iPhones were sold with the intent to be bricked unlocked?

And unrelated, Wozniak on homeless cats... Poor kitties!

One Last Apple Update

It's not actual money Apple is giving back to people who paid the $200 "stupid tax" on their iPhones. It's $100 store credit. Like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs didn't get rich by writing checks.

Even More on Apple

Apparently NY Magazine shares some of my reservations about Apple and Steve Jobs. And Wired. Theirs is not so much about the company but also the whole iPhone repricing thing. And another one at Wired. Jobs is worth $4.9 billion so what does he care? Here is his interview on the subject...

Excerpt:

Q: Many people already have Beatles music on CDs. Will they really buy it online if they already own it?

A: I do expect them to, yes. That's been the case with other music, as well.

I own every Bob Dylan album ever, but I buy a lot of it on iTunes, because I guess I'm just too lazy to rip it from the CD.

Or maybe that's because the $9.99 for the album doesn't really matter much when you have $4.9 billion of them. It does for those of us who don't have billions.

Update - Apparently Apple agrees with everyone's complaining about the iPhone price cut. "We want to do the right thing for our valued iPhone customers," Jobs said. "We apologize for disappointing some of you, and we are doing our best to live up to your high expectations of Apple."

I still don't think Apple is in a good place. And I don't think Jobs feels at all apologetic about this whole thing. He's probably trying to count how many of his billions of dollars are going to be spent refunding the customers.

More on Apple

Just read an article in the WSJ about how Apple's price cut for the iPhone has "shaken investors." Apple got rid of the $499 model and lowered the price of the $599 model to $399. This will undoubtedly piss off everyone who waited in lines for hours and paid full price for something only to have the price reduced a few months later. And by "everyone" I mean the Apple fanatics that make up the core of Apple's market.

This move reeks of desperation. Eliminating the lower priced model makes sense, and reducing the higher priced one to the lower price could make sense as well. At least it could be rationally explained: the lower priced model wasn't selling so they eliminated it and reduced the price of the higher priced model to the lower price. But going lower than the lowest price just underlines how desperate Apple must be.

I really think that Apple is in for a big downturn.

Update - This news from yesterday was apparently Apple's big news that everyone thought would involve the Beatles catalog. They also announced the new iPod touch, which is essentially an iPhone without the phone. And a new iPod nano that doesn't have the shuffle "feature."

Is it enough to save Apple? I think not.

And some guy likes old Macs.

Apple News

Apple announced a new iPod or something today? I didn't even catch this in the news, I read it on a blog. I am very bored with Apple lately. Everyone I know (which is really just 1 person I ran into once) loves their iPhone even though I've heard not so good things about them, but the new iMacs seemed lackluster and once everyone has an iPod how are they going to keep selling them?

I know, I know... More and cheaper storage. I have a 15GB iPod and I can store about half of my MP3 library on it. A lot of the library is stuff I don't even like and have never and would never listen to. And a lot of it is 2-8 hour DJ sets, so it's a lot of music.

I think a 40 GB iPod would be about the most I would ever need. Maybe 60 GB. More than that? Who has that many MP3s that they actually listen to? I can see someone having more than 60 GB of music but listening to it all? Nope.

WiFi? The Firewire cable works just fine for me. It's probably faster than WiFi as well. I don't own any Apple stock but if I did I would have sold it after the iPhone news was released. I actually bought Apple at $18 a few years back, and sold it at $30 and then bought more at $90 and sold at $110 or something. If I'd kept the original stock I would have made a small fortune. But after I lost a large fortune in the dot-com crash I would rather take a profit than lose it all. So I set trailing stop-limits on most of my holdings. Better safe than sorry is my opinion, which means I should really be investing in bonds, which I am actually doing more and more.

Anyway, I digress. Apple seems boring. Maybe it's because I haven't been a Mac user in almost a decade now or maybe it's just me being cynical, but I think that Apple's time is up, and I would be shorting AAPL now.

Update - Apparently Jim Cramer disagrees with me. I would trust his opinion more than mine as far as financial markets and capital allocation are concerned, but I stand by my opinion. I'm not going to be buying AAPL but I'm not going to be shorting it either.

Update 2 - However it appears that the street agrees with me.