Apple Becomes World's Biggest Maker of Computers, Thanks to iPad - NYTimes.com


Excerpt:

The company thatproclaimed the “post-PC era” — Apple — is now the biggest maker of PCs in the world.

That conclusion comes by way of Canalys, a research firm that has tacked against conventional wisdom in the tech analyst world by insisting that sales of iPads and other tablets belong in market share tallies for the computer industry. And so, as Canalys itself predicted in November, robust holiday sales of the iPad catapulted Apple ahead of Hewlett-Packard to make it the top PC company in the fourth quarter.

The 15 million iPads and five million Macintoshes that Apple sold during the period accounted for 17 percent of the approximately 120 million PCs shipped during the fourth quarter, Canalys said. The firm said tablets — Canalys calls them “pads” — accounted for 22 percent of total PC shipments during the fourth quarter, with Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook included.


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After the Birth of the iPod and the Death of the TouchPad, What Next for Rubinstein? - Forbes


Excerpt:

Father of the iPod, killer of the floppy

Despite this setback, Rubinstein casts a long shadow. Although often credited with the creation of Apple’s groundbreakingly compact and simple iPod, it is worth remembering that he got that job as a result of his work on Apple’s personal computing products. Hired before Jobs’ re-elevation to the CEO position, but on Jobs’ recommendation and after working with him at NeXT, Rubinstein was responsible for simplifying the hardware range and producing the candy-coloured, highly covetable G3 iMacs that pushed Apple back into the spotlight.

Jony Ive headed the industrial design team, but two of the boldest decisions, which came to define not just the iMac but also the direction of personal computing, came from Rubinstein: forsaking what became legacy ports in favour of USB, and the removal of the 3.5″ drive. Gutsy in themselves, these choices turned out to be prescient: after a necessary period of complaint, this became the new normal. The single Thunderbolt port and disdian for optical media of the modern MacBook Air follows a direct line from that decision – as the hermetic design and proprietary connector of the iPhone and iPad follows Rubinstein’s iPod model and ecosystem.


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A Mobile Wallet: Cash, Credit, Or ... Cellphone?

Google already offers a way to pay for lunch or groceries using its "Google Wallet" on an Android phone — cell providers and banks aren't far behind with payment systems of their own. Analyst Gilles Ubaghs talks about how coupons and convenience might persuade customers to make the switch. - More at http://www.npr.org/2012/01/27/145990092/a-mobile-wallet-cash-credit-or-cell-p...


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Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class - NYTimes.com

Excerpt:

When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke,President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

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Apple’s iPad and the Human Costs for Workers in China

Excerpt:

In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers — as well as dozens of other American industries — have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.

However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.


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iPhone & iPad sales off the charts

Why Wedding Photographers’ Prices are “Wack”


Excerpt:

Earlier today my friend and fellow photographer posteda link to a craigslist ad from a woman in Seattle looking for a wedding photographer. The woman was upset because she thought that $3,000 for a wedding photographer was “wack” because all we do “is hang out at a wedding taking tons of photos and editing them” and that we are “making so much money its crazy.”

I first read this post earlier today while I was running errands and my head almost exploded. I immediately started drafting a horribly mean and punishing response in my head, but by the time I got home, I realized that this is probably a common misconception and that maybe I should try to explain why photographers charge what we do for our work.

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IDG: 91% of IT and business professionals use iPad for work

http://m.bgr.com/2012/01/16/idg-91-of-it-and-business-professionals-use-ipad-...

Excerpt:

On Monday, research firm IDG published a global survey examining Apple’s tablet in the business world. The survey found that 91% of IT and business professionals used their iPads for work, even though only a quarter of the devices had been supplied for corporate use. Like consumers, business professionals use the device for media consumption, but they use their devices on the road far more frequently than anywhere else. Some 79% of IT professionals said they always use their iPads on the road and 54% use the device at home. IDG notes that the iPad hasn’t really prompted the majority of IT and business professionals to abandon any other devices, however, with only 12% saying that their iPad has completely replaced their laptops and just 6% saying it has supplanted their PCs. However, 72% said they were using their notebooks less because of the iPad, with 83% of corporate users describing themselves as being loyal to Apple’s device.

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A Mobile Wallet: Cash, Credit, Or ... Cellphone?

Google already offers a way to pay for lunch or groceries using its "Google Wallet" on an Android phone — cell providers and banks aren't far behind with payment systems of their own. Analyst Gilles Ubaghs talks about how coupons and convenience might persuade customers to make the switch. - More at http://www.npr.org/2012/01/27/145990092/a-mobile-wallet-cash-credit-or-cell-p...


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Kindle Fire teardown puts build cost at less than $3 above retail price - Computerworld

http://m.computerworld.com/s/article/9222016/Kindle_Fire_teardown_puts_build_...

Excerpt:

As is the case with most tablets, the display and touchscreen are the biggest costs in the latest estimate, adding up to a rounded total of $87. The memory, processor, wireless LAN radio and other peripherals cost $64.45, while the cost of the battery was put at $16.50. The case was $14.40 and the box contents were $3.25.

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Apple, aided by an iPhone frenzy, doubles quarterly profit to 13.06b

Apple Sold More iPads Than HP Sold PCs - John Paczkowski - News - AllThingsD


Excerpt:

Here’s a metric worth noting: Withthe monstrous quarter it reported today, Apple surpassed Hewlett-Packard in PC sales and revenue. Apple sold 15.4 million iPads and 5.2 million Macs in its first quarter. That’s more than 20 million personal computing devices. HP’s PC sales for the fourth quarter were 14.7 million, according to Gartner. Which means Apple’s iPad sales alonesurpassed HP’s PC sales, as Apple Insider first noted.

Now, to be clear, Gartner’s figure doesn’t include the ill-starred TouchPad. But sources familiar with HP’s build plans say the initial TouchPad order came in somewhere between 1.8 million and two million units. So, even if HP had sold every TouchPad it built, it wouldn’t have matched Apple.


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Data spike for iPhone 4S


Excerpt:

Reuters reports on a new study from mobile network consulting firm Arieso showing that iPhone 4S users consume twice as much data as iPhone 4 users, with new features such as Siri driving the increased demand.

IPhone 4S users transfer on average three times more data than users of the older iPhone 3G model which was used as the benchmark in a study by telecom network technology firm Arieso. 

Data usage of the previous model, the iPhone 4, was only 1.6 times higher than the iPhone 3G, while iPad2 tablets consumed 2.5 times more data than the iPhone 3G, the study showed.

The spike in data usage for iPhone 4S users is likely not fully explained by the debut of Siri on the device, as a study by Ars Technica conducted soon after the device's launch revealed an average of 63 KB of data used per query. With even high-use users reporting making an average of fifteen queries per day, that would equate to approximately 30 MB of usage per month if all queries were performed over cellular networks. 


As noted by ZDNet, other factors such as iTunes Match, iCloud, device speeds, larger photos, and "new toy syndrome" are also all likely contributing to the increased data usage. 

Data usage has become a major area of concern for carriers as they seek to deal with the surging demand from smartphone users that are growing rapidly in number and in their demands for content. While a number of carriers such as AT&T and Verizon launched the iPhone with "unlimited" data plans, most carriers have now switched to tiered data plans for new customers as they seek to encourage more modest data consumption and extract additional revenue from the heaviest data users. 

Consequently, customers have had to become more aware of their data usage needs as they determine which data plan to sign up for in order to avoid what can be significant overage charges.


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Data spike for iPhone 4S


Excerpt:

Reuters reports on a new study from mobile network consulting firm Arieso showing that iPhone 4S users consume twice as much data as iPhone 4 users, with new features such as Siri driving the increased demand.

IPhone 4S users transfer on average three times more data than users of the older iPhone 3G model which was used as the benchmark in a study by telecom network technology firm Arieso. 

Data usage of the previous model, the iPhone 4, was only 1.6 times higher than the iPhone 3G, while iPad2 tablets consumed 2.5 times more data than the iPhone 3G, the study showed.

The spike in data usage for iPhone 4S users is likely not fully explained by the debut of Siri on the device, as a study by Ars Technica conducted soon after the device's launch revealed an average of 63 KB of data used per query. With even high-use users reporting making an average of fifteen queries per day, that would equate to approximately 30 MB of usage per month if all queries were performed over cellular networks. 


As noted by ZDNet, other factors such as iTunes Match, iCloud, device speeds, larger photos, and "new toy syndrome" are also all likely contributing to the increased data usage. 

Data usage has become a major area of concern for carriers as they seek to deal with the surging demand from smartphone users that are growing rapidly in number and in their demands for content. While a number of carriers such as AT&T and Verizon launched the iPhone with "unlimited" data plans, most carriers have now switched to tiered data plans for new customers as they seek to encourage more modest data consumption and extract additional revenue from the heaviest data users. 

Consequently, customers have had to become more aware of their data usage needs as they determine which data plan to sign up for in order to avoid what can be significant overage charges.


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iPhone closes in on the all of Android


Excerpt:

TechCrunch writes of the latest report from NPD, covering U.S. smartphone sales in October and November of last year. The data, which begins right about when the iPhone 4S was released, shows a dramatic increase in market share for the iPhone. The jump, from 26% in Q3 2011 to 43% in October and November, is due in-part to pent-up demand for the next iPhone following the pushback of the "iPhone 5" from the traditional June release cycle. As a result, iPhone share is unlikely to remain quite so high going forward, but the gain is nonetheless impressive. 



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Michelle And Barack Obama: A Powerful Partnership

No way! Jodi and I were co-editors-in-chief of our high school yearbook back in 1992. Look at her now!

New York Times Washington correspondent Jodi Kantor interviewed more than 200 sources, including White House aides and friends of the Obamas, to paint a portrait of the first family's life inside the White House. - More at http://www.npr.org/2012/01/10/144324472/michelle-and-barack-obama-a-powerful-...


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The Web OS is Already Here…

http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1441 

Excerpt:

The Web OS is already here… it’s just not what you thought it would be. Web technologies are currently powering content and interactions across multiple devices effectively turning the most popular native applications into Web browsers. The end result is a widely distributed and used Web-based operating system. Just not the one you imagined.

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Behavioral Change: What Vietnam Taught Us About Breaking Bad Habits

I found the following story on the NPR iPhone App:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/01/02/144431794/what-vietnam-taught-us-about-breaking-bad-habits?sc=17&f=1001

What Vietnam Taught Us About Breaking Bad Habits
by Alix Spiegel

- January 2, 2012

It's a tradition as old as New Year's: making resolutions. We will not smoke, or sojourn with the bucket of mint chocolate chip. In fact, we will resist sweets generally, including the bowl of M &Ms that our co-worker has helpfully positioned on the aisle corner of his desk. There will be exercise, and the learning of a new language.

It is resolved.

So what does science know about translating our resolve into actual changes in behavior? The answer to this question brings us — strangely enough — to a story about heroin use in Vietnam.

In May of 1971 two congressmen, Robert Steele from Connecticut and Morgan Murphy of Illinois, went to Vietnam for an official visit and returned with some extremely disturbing news: 15 percent of U.S. servicemen in Vietnam, they said, were actively addicted to heroin.

The idea that so many servicemen were addicted to heroin horrified the public. At that point heroin was the bete noire of American drugs. It was thought to be the most addictive substance ever produced, a narcotic so powerful that once addiction claimed you, it was nearly impossible to escape.

In response to this report, President Richard Nixon took action. In June of 1971 he announced that he was creating a whole new office — The Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention — dedicated to fighting the evil of drugs. He laid out a program of prevention and rehabilitation, but there was something else Nixon wanted: He wanted to research what happened to the addicted servicemen once they returned home.

And so Jerome Jaffe, whom Nixon had appointed to run the new office, contacted a well-respected psychiatric researcher named Lee Robins and asked her to help with the study. He promised her unprecedented access to enlisted men in the Army so that she could get the job done.

Soon a comprehensive system was set up so that every enlisted man was tested for heroin addiction before he was allowed to return home. And in this population, Robins did find high rates of addiction: Around 20 percent of the soldiers self-identified as addicts.

Those who were addicted were kept in Vietnam until they dried out. When these soldiers finally did return to their lives back in the U.S., Robins tracked them, collecting data at regular intervals. And this is where the story takes a curious turn: According to her research, the number of soldiers who continued their heroin addiction once they returned to the U.S. was shockingly low.

"I believe the number of people who actually relapsed to heroin use in the first year was about 5 percent," Jaffe said recently from his suburban Maryland home. In other words, 95 percent of the people who were addicted in Vietnam did not become re-addicted when they returned to the United States.

This flew in the face of everything everyone knew both about heroin and drug addiction generally. When addicts were treated in the U.S. and returned to their homes, relapse rates hovered around 90 percent. It didn't make sense.

"Everyone thought there was somehow she was lying, or she did something wrong, or she was politically influenced," Jaffe says. "She spent months, if not years, trying to defend the integrity of the study."

But 40 years later, the findings of this study are widely accepted. To explain why, you need to understand how the science of behavior change has itself changed.

Outsourcing The Control Of Behavior

According to Wendy Wood, a psychologist at University of Southern California who researches behavior change, throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s scientists believed that if you wanted to change behavior, the key was to change people's goals and intentions.

"The research was very much focused on trying to understand how to change people's attitudes," Wood says, "with the assumption that behavior change would just follow."

So researchers studied how to organize public health campaigns, or how to use social pressure to change attitudes. And, says David Neal, another psychologist who looks at behavior change, these strategies did work.

Mostly.

"They do work for a certain subset of behaviors," Neal says. "They work for behaviors that people don't perform too frequently."

If you want, for example, to increase the number of people who donate blood, a public campaign can work well. But if you want them to quit smoking, campaigns intended to change attitudes are often less effective.

"Once a behavior had been repeated a lot, especially if the person does it in the same setting, you can successfully change what people want to do. But if they've done it enough, their behavior doesn't follow their intentions," Neal explains.

Neal says this has to do with the way that over time, our physical environments come to shape our behavior.

"People, when they perform a behavior a lot — especially in the same environment, same sort of physical setting — outsource the control of the behavior to the environment," Neal says.

Outsourcing control over your behavior sounds a little funny. But understand consider what happens when you perform a very basic everyday behavior like getting into a car.

"Of course on one level, that seems like the simplest task possible," Neal says, "but if you break it down, there's really a myriad set of complex actions that are performed in sequence to do that."

You use a certain motion to put your key in the lock. And then physically manipulate your body to get into the seat. There is another set of motions to insert the key in the ignition.

"All of this is actually very complicated and someone who had never driven a car before would have no ability to do that, but it becomes second nature to us," Neal points out. "[It's] so automatic that we can do it while we are conducting complex other tasks, like having conversations."

Throughout the process, you haven't thought for a second about what you are doing, you are just responding to the different parts of the car in the sequence you've learned. "And very much of our day goes off in this way," Wood says. "About 45 percent of what people do every day is in the same environment and is repeated."

Environment's Key Role In Behavior

In this way, Neal says, our environments come to unconsciously direct our behavior. Even behaviors that we don't want, like smoking.

"For a smoker the view of the entrance to their office building — which is a place that they go to smoke all the time — becomes a powerful mental cue to go and perform that behavior," Neal says.

And over time those cues become so deeply ingrained that they are very hard to resist. And so we smoke at the entrance to work when we don't want to. We sit on the couch and eat ice cream when we don't need to, despite our best intentions, despite our resolutions.

"We don't feel sort of pushed by the environment," Wood says. "But, in fact, we're very integrated with it."

To battle bad behaviors then, one answer, Neal and Wood say, is to disrupt the environment in some way. Even small change can help — like eating the ice cream with your non-dominant hand. What this does is alter the action sequence and disrupts the learned body sequence that's driving the behavior, which allows your conscious mind to come back online and reassert control.

"It's a brief sort of window of opportunity," Wood says, "to think, 'Is this really what I want to do?' "

Of course, larger disruption can also be helpful, which brings us back to heroin addiction in Vietnam.

It's important not to overstate this, because a variety of factors are probably at play. But one big theory about why the rates of heroin relapse were so low on return to the U.S. has to do with the fact that the soldiers, after being treated for their physical addiction in Vietnam, returned to a place radically different from the environment where their addiction took hold of them.

"I think that most people accept that the change in the environment, and the fact that the addiction occurred in this exotic environment, you know, makes it plausible that the addiction rate would be that much lower," Nixon appointee Jerome Jaffe says.

We think of ourselves as controlling our behavior, willing our actions into being, but it's not that simple.

It's as if over time, we leave parts of ourselves all around us, which in turn, come to shape who we are. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

To learn more about the NPR iPhone app, go to http://iphone.npr.org/recommendnprnews

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This Is When to Worry About Your CEO (BRK-B, MT)


Excerpt:

There are a lot of things we could say about former MF Global (OTC: MFGLQ) CEO Jon Corzine. If we were to ask thousands of former MF Global customers -- who, as a group, are missing $1.2 billion after the broker's epic collapse -- most of those things probably wouldn't be fit to print on a family-friendly website like The Motley Fool.

However, there is one thing we can say for sure and don't have to censor: Jon Corzine didn't need MF Global.

As a former chairman of Goldman Sachs, a former U.S. senator, and the former New Jersey governor, Corzine had an impressive resume that could have opened any number of doors for him -- most of them plenty lucrative and not terribly challenging on a day-to-day basis. Corzine was also already a very wealthy fellow. He had enough to spend roughly $100 million financing his political ambitions and according to OpenSecrets.org, he was the third-richest senator in 2005, with a net worth that may have been as much as $250 million.

To reiterate, if Jon Corzine's path had never crossed MF Global's -- heck, if Corzine was never a CEO, chairman, or other key executive anywhere ever again -- the 64-year-old would have likely lived out the rest of his days very comfortably.

There are a lot of directions we could run with this, but what I want to focus on is what stock market investors can take away from it.

Just one metric
Back in 2009, Fool co-founder Tom Gardner wrote an article titled "How I Find Great Stocks." Right at the outset of the article, Tom wrote something that really stuck with me. He said that if he had to choose just one metric to base his investment decisions on it wouldn't be growth, price-to-earnings ratio, return on equity, or balance sheet cash. Here's what he wrote:

The metric is straightforward, easy to find (just look at a company's 14A filing), and it doesn't require any math or investing experience to interpret. You'd be amazed by how closely correlated it is with stock market success, and yet it is still overlooked by the majority of investors. You MAY have guessed it ... my metric of choice is insider ownership.

How did Corzine stack up on this metric? At the peak of his ownership, Corzine had $3 million invested in MF Global, which equated to roughly 0.24% of the company's outstanding shares. To put that in perspective, for somebody with a more modest $250,000 net worth, that ownership stake would equate to around a $3,000 investment. That's certainly enough to be bothersome if lost, but hardly the type of investment that would cause our fictional investor to be especially cautious and conservative.

But it goes even further than just the money. Beside the fact that his buddy Chris Flowers' investment fund had an investment in MF Global, Corzine didn't have any strong connections to the company. He didn't found the company, nor did his family. He didn't come up through the MF Global ranks. The futures business wasn't even what Corzine focused on when he was blazing a trail through Goldman Sachs. In other words, Corzine was simply a hired gun who had the opportunity to make some money and burnish his reputation without really putting much on the line.

Into the scrum
So how can investors use this in choosing stocks? Building on what Tom said in his 2009 article, it's a good idea for investors to evaluate who's running the company in question and what they've got on the line.

On the one hand, with a CEO who founded the company and has most of his net worth tied up in his ownership stake, there's a much higher likelihood that the decisions he or she makes will be with an eye toward outcomes that all shareholders can cheer. On the other hand, a hired-gun CEO like Corzine who doesn't have any ties to the company, or much to lose, should bring extra scrutiny from investors.


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