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.

Random News

Groovle has a very simple concept. Add a picture to Google's famous white page. TechCrunch reports. The only place the picture is added to is the homepage. The search results don't have it. Neat little trick but I don't think I will change my homepage anytime soon. Here's mine.

Nokia targets the people I mentioned before who would be angry about paying a $200 early adopters fee to get their iPhone.

On advertising and TV advertising.

Great article about porn from NY Mag. And a long article about cougars.

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.

Thursday Stuff

Thumb club:


Ridiculous tattoos. Some people watch way too much TV.

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.

Wednesday Roundup

Ever wish you could watch your toast as it toasts? Um... Me neither.

A new dot-com start-up is based on being Facebook before it opened up to non-college students.

How to market OJ's book.

A "Cops" breathalyzer.

Um... Dating advice? Stupid people? I am left without words...

Long Weekend Roundup

Learn how to breakdance

Seth Godin on how hard people really work, this just after the new report that the average American works 1,800 hours a year, which isn't really all that much, but it's a lot more than any other country. That actually works out to less than 40 hours a week, but if it includes unemployed people then it makes sense.

Mark Cuban finally says something I mostly agree with. Actually I agree with a lot of what he says, but not all of it. And some of it I vociferously disagree with.

The Sun, the big tabloid in the UK, just cut its cover price to try to keep its circulation up. Is the celebrity-worshipping-culture bubble about to pop? England has always been the mainstay of the celebrity-worship culture, the one place where the tabloids will always sell and the place where they are completely outrageous and sensational. Is this finally coming to an end? Will I still have to watch E News and VH1 reality shows with my wife or will a merciful end finally come?

I'm not a big fan of video games but to someone who is this might mean something.

This is kind of dark, but funny, from the Onion:


Missing Girl Probably Raped