Maccast 2013.08.06 - #456
Opening
Sponsor: BusyMac
- BusyCal
- BusyCal has been my “default” calendar on the Mac for years. The transition from Apple’s Calendar app was seamless and I never looked back
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Introduction
DOJ Proposed eBook price fixing Settlement
- Key points in the proposal
- Apple must terminate its agreements with the 5 publishers involved. (Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers L.L.C., Holtzbrinck Publishers LLC, which does business as Macmillan, Penguin Group (USA) Inc. and Simon & Schuster Inc)
- Must “refrain for five years from entering new e-book distribution contracts”
- Must not “serve as a conduit of information among the conspiring publishers or from retaliating against publishers for refusing to sell e-books on agency terms”
- Must not enter contracts for music, movies, TV, or games, that will increase prices for competitors
- Must allow other e-book retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble to provide links from their e-book apps to their e-bookstores for two years (on iPhone and iPad)
- Must appoint an external monitor to ensure that Apple’s internal antitrust compliance policies are sufficient to catch anticompetitive activities before they result in harm to consumers
- Apple is in the processes of appealing the ruling.
- Apple’s response in their opposition brief, “Plaintiffs’ proposed injunction is a draconian and punitive intrusion into Apple’s business, wildly out of proportion to any adjudicated wrongdoing or potential harm.”
- If they lose their appeals, what are the ramifications for Apple if the courts approve these recommendations?
- Doesn’t this in essence perpetuate Amazon’s defacto monopoly power over the e-book market?
Obama veto on Apple product ban
- Vetoed by Obama
- The ban would have applied to AT&T versions of the iPhone 4 and 3GS, the 3G models of the iPad and the iPad.
- the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) criticized the use of sales bans (rather than monetary compensation) as a means of executing patent infringement – as it in effect harms rival products and companies and does not promote a competitive trading environment.
- Verizon’s head lawyer, Randal Milch, published a plea in the Wall Street Journal calling for the veto.
- The first time since 1987 that the President of the United States has interfered with a decision from the ITC.
- The decision has been said to be a win for protecting the concept of Standards Essential Patents
- ITC commissioner Dean Pinkert had filed an opinion saying that in essence Samsung tried to force Apple to license the company’s non-essential patents in order to get a standards-essential patent license from Samsung.
- Commenting on the case to The WSJ, former FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said, “When a company agrees to license what is known as a standard-essential patent at fair and reasonable terms, it shouldn’t be able to ban importation of a product into the United States simply because it wants a better deal.”
Mansfield on “special projects”
- Apple splitting up his old executive duties
- Dan Riccio, senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, will manage the antenna design teams. He already leads Mac, iPhone, iPad and iPod engineering
- Jeff Williams, who, as Senior Vice President for Operations, will manage Apple’s special projects engineering team
- So what is Mansfield actually doing if not managing?
- iWatch and Apple television projects?
- Rumors of Apple wanting to develop their own Mac processors
The ‘numbers’ game
- I spoke on a recent Maccast about this AppleInsider piece that looked into how the media and analysts like to get “creative” with headlines and numbers
- AppleInsider follow-up piece on tablet numbers
- Why does the industry like to get so bogged down in numbers, especially marketshare?
- I feel the general trends that they show can be interesting and tell part of a story
- The trouble is when they are used to try and tell a single story.
- The latter seems to happen more these days than the former.
- IDC concludes that in tablet shipments for Q2 2013, Android now holds a 62.6% market share and Apple holds a 32.5% market share.
- Breaking it down though, Apple still has 32.5%
- Samsung 18%, ASUS 4.5%, Lenovo 3.3%, Acer 3.1%
- But there is 38.8% “Other”, what the heck is “other”. I can only assume forked Android, like Amazon Kindle, and also a large portion “White label”.
- The “other” was actually 17.5 million units. More than Apple sold in the quarter.
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The App ‘new world order’
- Another concept I threw out in the latest Maccast
- Based on two pieces:
- Craig Hockenberry surveyed 575 developers and found 95% are working on upgrading their apps for iOS 7 and that 52% said they would only be supporting iOS 7.
Google Chromecast
Closing
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Special thanks to all my sponsors:
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