512 Pixels

The Verge’s Micah Singleton:

There goes another one. AOL is shutting down The Unofficial Apple Weblog, better known as TUAW, sources familiar with the situation tell The Verge. The company — which is also shutting down its gaming site Joystiq — is in the midst of a major reorganization, and is cutting back on media properties it deems as underperforming. TUAW’s run comes to an end on February 2nd.

AOL is spiraling, and there are about to be another round of Apple writers on the job market because of it. I’ve got friends caught up in this. Sad day.

Joe Rossignol at MacRumors:

A number of iTunes Connect developers have turned to Twitter and tipped us off about an ongoing issue where users are being shown someone else’s session after attempting to login into their own account. MacRumors has been able to duplicate this issue, which appears to be widespread and has been going on since at least 8 AM Pacific.

Thankfully, developers are getting “unable to process request” errors and are then redirected to their own account if any action is requested while logged into to the incorrect account.

Man, old iOS looks crazy now, doesn’t it?

The highlights:

• $74.6 billion in revenue
• 74.5 million iPhones sold
• 21.4 million iPads sold

Insane. Don’t miss Jason Snell’s charts. That revenue one is mind-blowing.

Changes are coming to how Apple reports is earnings, as Josh Lowensohn at The Verge explains:

One big change this quarter is that Apple is no longer reporting its iPod unit sales. As of this quarter, Apple now lumps them into a new “other products” category that also includes the Apple TV, Beats headphones, and soon the Apple Watch.

This week’s show is a big one:

Five years later, Federico, Myke and Stephen re-visit Steve Jobs’ announcement of the original iPad.

In the spirit of the 30th episode of The Prompt, this show takes a look at Steve Jobs’ original keynote in which he announced the product.

Oh, and this guy makes an appearance.

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Weird naming aside, this update packs a punch:

• Resolves an issue that might cause Wi-Fi to disconnect
• Resolves an issue that might cause web pages to load slowly
• Fixes an issue that could cause Spotlight to load remote email content when this preference is disabled in Mail
• Improves audio and video sync when using Bluetooth headphones
• Adds the ability to browse iCloud Drive in Time Machine
• Improves VoiceOver speech performance
• Resolves an issue that could cause VoiceOver to echo characters when entering text on a web page
• Addresses an issue that could cause the input method to switch languages unexpectedly
• Improves stability and security in Safari

10.10.2 can be downloaded from the Mac App Store now.

This week five years ago, the original iPad was introduced. While the core experience of the iPad is more or less the same today, the hardware had come a long way in half a decade:

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Specification	2010 iPad	iPad Air 2
Height	9.56 in	9.4 in
Width	7.47 in	6.6 in
Depth	0.5 in	0.24 in
Weight	1.5 lbs	0.96 lbs
FaceTime Camera	N/A	1.2 MP
iSight Camera	N/A	8 MP
Battery	10 hours	10 hours
Resolution	1024x768	2048x1536
PPI	132 ppi	264 ppi
Clock Speed	1 GHz	1.5 GHz
Cores	1	3
RAM	256 MB	2 GB

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Having an original iPad next to an iPad Air 2 shows just how far Apple’s come. While the numbers above show the weight and thickness changes, the difference in the bezels alone make the original iPad feel older than it is.

While the iPad Air 2 is a good bit thinner than the original iPad, becuase of the original’s curved back, it’s only apparent when the devices are photographed face-up. In fact, the entire iPad Air 2 is as thick as the sidewall on the original iPad.

Thickness and weight aside, the basic recipe for iPad hardware hasn’t changed much. Sure, the 30-pin Dock Connector and rotation lock switch are gone and the iPad picked up TouchID last year, but looking at these two devices side-by-side, it’s hard to believe there have only five years have passed between them.

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Several developers have recently shared information about their sales, including the company behind Saved, a budget tracker for the iPhone.

While Saved’s numbers are far smaller than some recently shared figures, Allen Ding’s bit about the first version of app jumped out at me:

Just one problem. We just didn’t make any money. The conversions sucked. The app sucked. The business model sucked. I don’t really know. And I was still answering all these support emails. In multiple languages. I tried everything. Hundreds of emails to friends. Display Ads. More Ads. Sponsorships. But nope. Nada. There just wasn’t any traction.

That moment when you open up your sales figures after launch day and see that you’ve made $2.10 on the first day, and $6.40 on the second – that is when your world comes crashing down. You’ve never seen an App Store spike this blunt.

Depsite that, the team recently launched version 2.0 of the app to a level of success not enjoyed by the initial app.

When I think about the App Store, it’s easy to just think about the hits — the apps that make good money off the bat and are enjoyed by a wide user base. The truth is, however, that the App Store is full of people working really hard to see their dreams fail to take flight the way they were hoping. It’s sobering, but I think it should make the victories all the sweeter.

Mind-blowing stuff.

With Amazon Prime on sale today for just $72, I realized just how much the service has been in the news recently, and how hard it can be to explain to someone just what Prime is.

The core of Amazon Prime is made up of five features:

• Fast shipping
• Prime Instant Video movie and TV streaming service
• Prime Music with unlimited streaming and cloud storage
• Prime Photos - Amazon’s cloud photo management solution
• Kindle Owner’s Lending Library - Access to 50,000 Kindle books available for free rent

The list of five above isn’t everything that comes with a Prime membership. There’s also Amazon Lightning Deals, Prime Pantry, Amazon Elements and more.

There’s also Amazon Mom which is basically a Prime Membership with 20% off diaper subscriptions, 15% off baby registery items and member-exclusive coupons.

Then there’s Amazon Student, a Prime membership aimed at college students who are looking for deals on textbooks. Notably, it comes with a six-month trial period, far beyond the 30-day trial for normal accounts.

The company also has a tendency to throw in a membership with devices like the Fire Phone. Since the Fire family of products has a tendency to be not-so-good, the fact that they basically exist to get people to join Prime is painfully transparent at times.

It’s all very confusing, and my guess is that most users are like me and basically only use their Prime membership for the shipping benefits.

This confusion is made worse when Amazon adds or pulls features from the Prime without much warning. Recently, the company canned its mobile wallet program and its Amazon-branded diapers. Prime members can get $100 off the Amazon Echo, if they are granted an invitation to purchase it.

The confusion around Prime is a symptom of a larger problem, I believe. Amazon’s device lineups are clear enough, but they way they are presented can be confusing. (Hell, just look at the URLs I’ve linked to in this article. Even finding them all was a pain.)

These devices all exist to further the Amazon ecosystem, and at the heart of that is Prime. In some ways, the service feels like Amazon’s main product, with everything else it does revolving around it.

If that approach sounds familiar, it should, as its taken from Google’s playbook. Google’s core business may appear to be search, but their money comes from display ads on those search results. While the company has services that don’t show ads (think Google Drive), all of them work in tandem to keep consumers in the Google ecosystem, where ads can be shown.

(I’m not judging Google on this point, mind you. This website and my business make their money on advertising. I don’t have a problem with ads adjacent to content.)

Amazon isn’t an advertising company, but they do sell Prime will the same vigor as Google pushes its ads. The company is trying to make it add value to every other product it other offers. There’s nothing Amazon offers that isn’t made better by a Prime membership.

If Prime’s goal was to bring the masses to Amazon’s door, its done its job. While the company doesn’t release numbers, estimates have Prime reaching between 20 and 50 million members. This has led to some problems, however. Here is Wired’s Marcus Wohlsen, discussing Prime’s price increase in 2014:

Even if Amazon does raise Prime’s price to cover those increased costs, it may still lose money. Shipping losses are growing by a rate of nearly one-quarter year-over-year, and Amazon is spending almost twice as much on shipping as it charges, writes Colin W. Gillis, director of research at BGC Financial. The proposed Prime price hike won’t cover that deficit, Gillis predicts. “While raising Prime pricing and pitching ‘drone delivery‘ solutions make good headlines, shipping losses remain a burden on profits.”

If that’s true, I don’t begrudge my Prime Membership jumping to $99 a year, as I save more than that in shipping each year.

And that’s the point of Prime, I suppose. To keep me looking at Amazon first when it comes to shopping. While that makes sense to me, Prime is so much more than shipping, and at the end of the day, I think Amazon should be doing a better job at pitching that. The shotgun approach currently in use leads to confusion and can be downright overwhelming at times.

However successful Prime has been for Amazon, I think clear communication about what it offers would only be beneficial to the company and its users.

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Joe Caiati. Joe works as an IT professional in New York City. He maintains a weblog called dot info and calls Twitter his second home.

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Apple has gone through a cultural change. Yosemite and iOS 8’s tight integration was a large indicator of that. When Forstall and Browett were ousted, Apple promised an increase in collaboration throughout its teams. Many didn’t know exactly what that was going to be, but it’s become clear that Tim Cook wants less compartmentalization and more interactivity between all Apple channels – including retail.

I used to work in a flagship Apple Store in New York City as a Mac Genius. I started there during the Cook era and have seen the ways Apple corporate has changed their interactions with its retail employees. Many of my co-workers, who had been there longer than I, didn’t have much to say about Jobs and retail. He’d occasionally visit a store or two, but those visits were brief and he didn’t address employees in a manner that Cook has. There are some Apple retail positions that afford you the opportunity to spend time in Cupertino, but you are explicitly told not to interact with Apple’s top-staff unless they approach you. During my time at Apple, corporate came to us.

There’s enough stories out there to know that if you were able to meet, let alone have an encounter, with Steve Jobs then you were one of the lucky few. In one instance, Jobs asked someone I knew to pass him a fork at Apple’s Cafe Macs in Cupertino and that person will never forget it. That allure has carried over to Cook, but now that he has settled in as Apple’s CEO, the differences between him and Jobs have become more defined. Cook seems more comfortable with the press’ attention focused on him.

In Cook’s short time as CEO, he’s done a number of appearances for the media and Apple employees. His on-screen interviews with Brian Williams and Charlie Rose are among the many off-screen interviews he’s given to the press. He isn’t afraid of talking about himself either.

Cook has paid unannounced visits to the store I worked in more than once. One night in November 2012, he and Phil Schiller walked right through the front doors and started touring the building (my store had three floors). Little did we know, they were touring the NYC stores looking at shooting locations for Cook’s interview on Rock Center. I wasn’t working that evening – which bummed me out – but a few days later when they shot the interview, they decided to use my store for the sit down portion. I’m glad I was there because that was the day I met Tim Cook.

Instead of sneaking out the back entrance after the interview concluded, Cook was kind enough to walk back down the spiral staircase and throughout each floor. I remember my encounter with him vividly. I was in the back section of the first floor and I saw him walking down the staircase to leave. He then stopped to greet some employees and customers towards the entrance.

I flat-out ran over to him, kind of interrupted his conversation with a customer (oops) and said, “Tim!” He looked to his right, we shook hands and I said “It was an honor” to meet him in which he smiled and said something to the effect of “It’s so nice to me you.” in his slow southern accent. Minutes later, Katie Cotton shuffled him off to a black SUV parked outside. It was a small interaction, but one I’ll always remember.

Since then, Cook has gone on to do more employee meet and greets, but he hasn’t been the only one. Angela Ahrendts has paid visits around the world to retail stores. Weeks before I left Apple, she came into my store (she’s really tall in person.) Having her spend as much time in the retail environment is key. I’d wager Cook has been a big encourager of that. After the Browett debacle, Apple can not afford another leadership fault.

While Apple retail has been stronger than ever over the past years, there is a big challenge ahead. The stores keep getting busier and the Genius Bar wait times are getting longer. The introduction of a new product category – the Apple Watch – will require a fundamental change in their retail layout and processes.

You will most likely see some growing pains as the Apple Watch launches across retail stores. Handling how you are going sell, have people try-on and customize a (potentially) $10,000 watch will be a new initiative unlike any other of Apple’s previous products. The Genius Bar’s initial repair strategy for new products is to replace the device if it’s defective or damaged, but I’m curious to see how they will handle issues in the future. The repairability of the Apple Watch remains to be seen, but it would seem costly to replace gold watches entirely if something breaks.

Putting the Apple Watch aside, the retail operation – as a whole – could use an overhaul. The stores have always felt a bit awkward to navigate. Apple used to try to give visual cues like different colored shirts to identify employee positions, but now with everyone unified in blue, you have to just approach whoever is available to try to get help – and that person may not even be the right employee to assist you. I’ve seen that all-too-familiar look on customers faces who feel lost and frustrated because they have no clue how to purchase something or check-in for an appointment. A retail re-thinking would be welcomed.

Apple is facing a time where keeping their culture consistent throughout the company is paramount. Ahrendts has been communicating more often with the retail staff and Cook is making sure the divide between retail and corporate doesn’t segregate. Though, with more stores always on the horizon, their struggle will be making their retail employees feel valued – all fifty-thousand of them.

By next year this time, you may see a whole new side of Apple retail.