Category: Nostalgia

Mostly claim chowder.

AiriPods

The Apple Watch is now bigger than the iPod ever was. As the most popular watch of all time, it’s clear that the watch is a new market success story. However it isn’t a cultural success. It has the ability to signal its presence and to give the wearer a degree of individuality through material and band choice but it is too discreet. It conforms to norms of watch wearing and it is too easy to miss under a sleeve or in a pocket.

Not so for AirPods. These things look extremely different. Always white, always in view, pointed and sharp. You can’t miss someone wearing AirPods. They practically scream their presence.

For this reason wearers, whether they want to or not, advertise the product loudly. Initially, when new, they looked strange, even goofy. But the product’s value to the wearer overcame any embarrassment and for those courageous enough to wear them, they became a point of pride. As all things distinctive enough, the distinction rubs on the user and that distinction begets new users and new distinction, and so on. So now we have a bona fide cultural phenomenon.

I have both my son and parents angling to get these things. I have not seen this universal appeal recently, even for the watch. You have to explain the watch. The AirPods explain themselves. The only thing which AirPods do remind me of is the original iPod. The iPod-and-white-earbuds had a similar signal/function ratio. Looks distinctive, works well, nails the job to be done and is self-describing. The “iconification” of white was the phenomenon of its decade.

One wonders how much of this behavior is by design or, more precisely, engineered by designers. Did Jony Ive’s team plan on users “flexing” with their AirPods? Did they make them distinctive on purpose with the stalks pointing down vs,, for example, wrapping around the back of the ear for a more discreet look? Was it just good luck and the form followed function? It’s hard to imagine that taste could be engineered but here we are.

Whether planned or not, the newest AirPods offer a functional upgrade with no visual upgrade. This is noteworthy because whatever they got right with the original design they decided not to mess with it. You can’t tell if someone is wearing the newest AirPods or the originals.

As far as the added functionality it is typical Apple: faster connections due to a new chip, longer talk time, longer listen time, voice-activated Siri and wireless charging. Broadly speaking they are just better in ways that need to better and not better in ways they are good enough.

The product is part of the “wearables” category at Apple which includes watch and is growing almost 50%/yr. and not from a small base either. The following graph show the history of the segment since 2009 (before the iPod peaked).

As can be seen, Wearables and Home segment grew out of the iPod segment, through “Other” products and is now almost double what the iPod used to be alone.

It should be noted that the AirPods can be paired directly with the Apple Watch and used independent from the iPhone. If not from this point alone, culturally the iconic white AirPods and jewel-like Apple Watch embody the spirit of the iPod.

 

Just in Time

The iMac launched May 6 1998, exactly 20 years ago. It is not the most significant computer to ever exist. It was a clear descendant of the original Mac which established the “all-in-one” desktop computer category. That category, to which it still belongs, is a modest segment. The last time Apple reported portable sales separately was in late 2012 when the desktops/servers and pro systems combined made up only 20% of all Mac sales by units. If iMac were 10% of Mac sales, it would represent about 2 million units in 2017.

Desktops evolved into laptops and personal computing evolved into pocket  computing. Becoming more personal means more intimacy and this is leading to wearable computing. There is more beyond that to be sure.

But the iMac is a historically significant machine. It allowed Apple to start on a new trajectory. It did this by first offering a financial lifeline. Sales of Macs, which were at the time the only source of revenues for Apple, increased from 2.7 million to 3.8 million a year. This at a time when Windows PCs were shipping about 100 million units. That was enough to ensure survival. Today Mac units are five times higher while Windows PCs are about 2.5 times higher. The following graph shows the impact of iMac on the Mac’s trajectory.  Continue reading “Just in Time”

Face Time

Since the iPhone launched 10 years ago, 1,253,000,000 units have been sold.1 Given that they don’t last forever, we can assume that only the most recent units sold are still in use. If we measure just the units sold in the last 3 years, the total is about 663 million. Rounding down, we can say that there are perhaps 650 million iPhones in use.

Repeating the exercise for the iPad but extending time in use to 4.5 years, gives a population or install base of about 240 million.

That’s a total base of 890 iOS million units, well below the 1 billion total “active devices” Apple reported in January 2016. The difference can be filled by Apple Watch, Apple TV, iPods and Macs.

Apple also reports that the iPhones get unlocked 80 times per day. That figure was also reported in early 2016. We don’t have a figure for the iPad but I’m going to take a guess of 15 unlocks per day on average. Feel free to argue about these figures in the comments below.

Now, if each of these iOS devices would be unlocked using a 4-digit PIN, the time to bring them into use would be about 2 seconds. Expanding to a 6-digit PIN would probably increase that to perhaps 2.5 seconds (accounting also for failures due to input errors.)

Moving to 6 digits, although more secure, would add friction and hence time to the unlock process. This reminds me of the story of Steve Jobs arguing that decreasing boot times for the Macintosh would save lives. I wondered what would be the savings in time for speeding up the unlock process.

It turns out that, based on the installed base numbers, moving to the more secure 6-digit code would add 2.8 billion hours to the total time to unlock the world’s iPhones and iPads. That’s 321,000 years of waiting added for every year of use.

Fortunately we got Touch ID to replace PIN entry and the time to unlock the iPhone/iPad has decreased to perhaps 1 second, saving 5.6 billion hours of unlock time vs. 4-digit PIN.

Now we have the prospect of Face ID which promises to be faster still. Of course, it won’t be available on all iOS devices for some time, but if it that base of 890 million iOS devices were to migrate to Face ID and if it took a mere 0.5 seconds to unlock, Face ID would save nearly 8.5 billion hours of time that otherwise would be spent typing unlock codes.2

That’s almost a million years.

That’s 12,500 lifetimes.

I’m glad to see Steve’s ideas continue to motivate Apple engineers.

 

 

  1. This includes the current quarter that ends in 4 days [↩]
  2. Given this methodology one wonders how much time is spent using, rather than just unlocking, iOS devices. I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader. [↩]

A small-screen iPod, an Internet Communicator and a Phone

Apple is now the biggest watchmaker in the world, overtaking Rolex during the last quarter. This achievement happened less than two and a half years after Apple entered the watch market. Rolex, on the other hand, was founded in 1905, 112 years ago at a time when watches were the avant-garde of technology. Given this revelation of sales, we can test the estimates I put forward on the Apple Watch sales, shown below:

We know that Rolex produces about 1 million watches a year and we also know that Rolex had sales of $4.7 billion in 2016. The average revenue per watch1 was therefore about $4,700.

My estimate has been that Apple sold about 15 million Watches in the last 12 months at an average price of about $330. This puts the Apple Watch revenue run rate at $4.9 billion, indeed above Rolex.

They may be slightly high but the news makes me feel quite comfortable in my methodology. Note also that within the last quarter Apple said sales for the Watch increased by 50%. This is also reflected in my estimate of 3 million in Q2 vs. ~2 million for 2016 Q2.

Overall, about 33 million Apple Watch units have been sold since launch and they generated about $12 billion in sales. Coupled with a 95% customer satisfaction score, altogether, this has been a great success story. But only 2.5 years in, it’s still act one.

To understand the long term trajectory, it’s important to qualify this product as part of another, larger story. The Watch, even with LTE, is an accessory to the iPhone. It still cannot be activated without it. Even the coverage plan is an extension to an iPhone plan. The company is careful to address it as a companion product.

But how long will that last?

Continue reading “A small-screen iPod, an Internet Communicator and a Phone”

  1. Includes services such as repairs [↩]

Defining the 21st Century

The iPhone is the best selling product ever, making Apple perhaps the best business ever. Because of the iPhone, Apple has managed to survive to a relatively old age. Not only did it build a device base well over 1 billion it engendered loyalty and satisfaction described only by superlatives.

To summarize I can offer two numbers:

1,162,796,000 iPhones sold (to end of March 2017).

$742,912,000,000 in revenues. $1 trillion will be reached in less than 18 months.

But more important than any of these quantifiable measures of success are the unquantified accomplishments. These are the changes we note only when flipping an A/B switch on a decade. The changes ushered by the iPhone have been as momentous as those of the Ford Model T. Or those of electricity, telegraph, radio or TV.

These are epoch-making technologies. They shape the fiber of society and the definition of quality of life. They obsolete entire economies and change the balance of political power. They shift the center of gravity of society.

To glimpse the change you only need to observe how we shifted how we spend our time. The fact that 2 billion people are using Facebook every day. That the device is looked at for 2 hours a day. That it’s unlocked 80 times a day. That it holds almost all our memories and our conversations and all our secrets. That it created new modes of communication and destroyed others, ancient and respected.

That it substituted communications, entertainment, and interaction. That swiping became the most used human gesture. That we communicate with photos and not with words. That, like the voice call, transportation now comes to us rather than we to it. That it can answer to our voice. That we can never be lost again. That it makes us all publishers.

That all this happened while the product itself was always perceived as fragile, vulnerable, copyable, doomed to early demise. That imitators outnumber it 10 to 1. That it somehow found ways to become better even though we exhaust what we can ask of it.

For all these reasons I believe that future historians will point to the iPhone as the technological product that defined the 21st century. Much will follow from it and it may become something altogether different but it set humanity on a new course.

Gravity

Apple is doomed. So are you. As mortals we are used to the idea of death. We do not dwell on it even though it’s inevitable. We do know that we’ll die but what we don’t know is when we’ll die. That certainty/uncertainty makes us, more or less, do everything that we do. And so we carry on. But companies die too. And when they die is also a mystery but it’s not at all clear that their inevitable demise determines what they do. If you think you’re immortal you may live dangerously. Perhaps as a result they live shorter lives than we do.

Life expectancy for humans has been rising but for companies it has been declining. Even more curiously, the richer you are the more likely you are to live longer but the wealthier a company, the more likely it is to keel over at any time. The longest lived small businesses live over 1000 years but the longest-lived large business is probably the East India Company that made it to the ripe age of 274. But that was before 1800.

In the modern, industrial era there are very few corporations that survived over a century and the Fortune 500 shows a turnover in inhabitants that resembles that of a plague-infested medieval inner-city. In contrast to their conservative, geriatric organic owners, synthetic companies are more likely to behave like live-fast, die-young punk rockers.

So it’s no surprise that Apple, at age 40, is seen as being well past its sell-by date. And yet it seems to be saying, somewhat faintly, “I’m not dead yet”. By generating more cash than can be comprehended by human observers and by controlling assets that are well beyond the means of many countries, they (it?) is confusing us with its persistence.

The confusion is exhibited in the following graph which shows the crises in confidence by that wonderful reflector of human perception–the stock market. By voting millions of times a day, the market shows us with great precision the totality of human emotion with regard to an asset. That emotion turns rapidly negative on Apple with surprising frequency.

Screen Shot 2017-03-16 at 2.32.03 PM

There have been over 8 bouts of collapsing confidence (exhibited by 40% drops in value) for Apple’s shares. Consider the latest where we’ve seen a 40% drop followed by 57% increase in share price over the last 12 months. 57% might not seem extraordinary for a small company but for the world’s largest market capitalization with the corresponding colossus of cash that it straddles, the robustness of brand and the loyalty of customers, the mind boggles.

The same thing happened in 2012 and 2008 and as far as I can tell the company has not changed one iota during that time. The same people, mostly, are in charge. With the same mission statement, and even the same product line. The resources, processes and priorities–the only determinants of the essential value of a firm–have not shifted.

One could try to suggest that even if Apple is unchanged, the world around it has changed. But if anything the world has come to match Apple’s own view: more mobile vs. fixed, more design vs. generic, more integrated experiences vs. more modular DIY.

The ethos of Apple is rigid so why is perception about the company so fickle?

If the graph above reflects perception about a constant entity then perhaps it charts how the world has changed rather than how Apple has. Perhaps perception revolves around a center of gravity far heavier and permanent. Perhaps the tug-of-war between fear and greed reflects more upon us that it does upon the object being observed.

The most popular product of all time

The following is a list of the best-selling products across several categories:

Car model: VW Beetle 21.5 million
Car brand: Toyota Corolla 43 million
Music Album: Thriller 70 million
Vehicle: Honda Super Cub 87 million
Book Title: Lord of the Rings 150 million
Toy: Rubik’s Cube 350 million
Game console: Playstation 382 million
Book series: Harry Potter Series 450 million
Mobile Phone: iPhone 1 billion

The iPhone is not only the best selling mobile phone but also the best selling music player, the best selling camera, the best selling video screen and the best selling computer of all time.

It is, quite simply, the best selling product of all time.

It is that because it is so much more than a product. It is an enabler for change. It unleashed forces which we are barely able to perceive, let alone control. It changed the world because it changed us.

And it did all that in less than nine years. One has to wonder what it will enable in the next nine.

The one where I offer stock tips

Let’s say I offered you the option to invest in a monopoly or in a hit-driven company whose survival depends on always finding the next big thing? Which would you invest in?

Before you answer, let’s say I offered you the option to invest in a person who has a large inheritance or a person who is poor but is hustling for any opportunity. Whom would you invest in?

Before you answer, let’s say I offered you the option to invest in real estate of a city which depends on a stable, capital-intensive manufacturing base or one where they make nothing but movies. Where would you buy land?

Each of these reflect the same choice: stability vs. instability, the known vs. the unknown.

Historically, capital has always gone toward the stable and away from the unstable. Wealth has gone the other way.

Onward.

 

Peak Cable

Paying for TV has been a curious consumer phenomenon. There was a time when TV was free to consumers. It was delivered as a broadcast over-the-air and paid for either by commercials (US mostly) or by taxes on viewers (Europe mostly). The consumers were delighted with the idea as it was far better than radio and radio was delightful because it was far better than no radio.

The process of convincing consumers to pay for something that used to be free was quite interesting. The first benefit to be articulated was that the quality of the picture would be much better. It would, in essence, be noise-free.1

The second benefit was an increase in the number of channels. VHF and UHF television would cover about three and 5 channels respectively while cable could offer dozens, many specializing on specific types of content like the Home Box Office (HBO) offering movies and ESPN offering sports only and MTV music videos and CNN news only.

The third benefit was fewer (or no) commercials for some of the channels. This was especially valued by fans of movies whose interruption by commercials was often detracting from the immersive value and continuity of the cinematic experience.

These benefits were very attractive during the 1980s, to the extent that about 60% of US households adopted cable. An additional group later adopted satellite-based pay-TV as the technology became reasonably cheap.

Screen Shot 2015-03-19 at 2.29.06 PMThese benefits were priced modestly but as the quality and breadth of programming increased, prices rose. An average cable bill of $40/month in 1995 is $130 today2. Some of that revenue went into upgrading the capital equipment in use (the plant) and some into paying for the higher production values. Yet more went to the sports leagues and their players whose business models increasingly depended on broadcast rights.

Continue reading “Peak Cable”

  1. This was in fact the birth of cable TV: a shared antenna for a community in an  electromagnetic shadow [↩]
  2. a 6.1% compounded rate of price growth vs. a 2.4% rate of inflation [↩]

Conversations with Apple’s brand

According to Folkore, in 1981 Apple took out a two page ad in Scientific American which explained that whereas humans cannot run as fast as other animals, a human on a bicycle is the fastest species on earth.

Jobs had made the observation that a computer was “a bicycle for the mind” earlier, in 1980, at a time when the decision to purchase a computer was driven by an intellectual curiosity and justified as an improvement or assistant to the intellect. It was to make the lighten the labors of our intellect.

Apple brand at the time as an appeal to the intellect via a humanistic argument. A more emotive positioning of a tool, but a tool nonetheless. This positioning evolved throughout the 80s and 90s into an “intersection of technology and the liberal arts.”

We can see how the conversation with the potential buyer was along the lines of appealing to the intellect while offering a humanist sweetener. Humanizing the product allowed it to be accepted into a world that feared the complexity and awkwardness of such a machine.

During the 2000s, with the ascent of iPod, the conversation shifted to prioritizing  the emotions more than the intellect. The products had to appeal to those who wished to express and enjoy products of emotional value. Products like music and videos and the output of the arts rather than the sciences. The brand became emotional rather than intellectual. It created an aesthetic, and become culturally iconic.

During the 2010s, with the ascent of iPhone and the emergence of the Watch, the brand speaks a language of instinct, leaving intellect and emotion as secondary or tertiary voices. Instinct is visceral, lust-inducing. It seems to short-circuit any of the rational. Non-rationalism does not mean irrational. It just skips right over the head and heart and hits the gut.

One could argue that during these three decades, the organs the brand was engaging in conversation shifted from the mind to the heart and then to the glands. Those glands which release hormones and are directed by non-rational neurons. The evidence of the conversation would be in resulting products causing pupils to dilate, breaths to be quickly drawn and skin temperatures to rise.

The brand therefore has managed to move from a rational, to a neurological, to an endocrine response.

The curious thing is that during these shifts, Apple’s entry into new biological spheres of influence has been largely unchallenged. I suspect this is because emotional or instinctive products are appealing due to their lack of rationalized value. In other words, what makes a product hormonally appealing is a lack of intellectual appeal1. Apple can enter into the world of lustful appeal while lustful brands can’t enter into functional appeal.

This is a classic asymmetry which perhaps no other brand can pull off.2

  1. and vice-versa in many cases [↩]
  2. The reason is complicated but stems from the firm having been built to execute nothing but home runs. By shunning portfolio theory, Apple can wander into new categories far from its biological home grounds. [↩]