New iPhone is no threat to the Flip camcorder
With the launch of the Flip video camera in May 2007, the camcorder market has never been the same. Flip brought video creation and sharing to the masses, which meant even more footage of cats riding skateboards. (We can’t thank them enough for that.)
Consumers embraced the convenience, simplicity, portability, and affordability of Flip’s “point and shoot” video camera. It has few buttons, records video on an internal chip, and uploads footage to a computer through a USB key that “flips” out of the camera. Software loaded on the device transfers clips seamlessly to the Web. Models start at $150.
Soon the device was grabbing market share from Sony (SNE) and JVC — more than two million of the cameras have been sold — and earlier this year networking giant Cisco (CSCO) snapped up Flip maker Pure Digital for $590 million.
But there’s a new rival on the scene: Apple iPhone 3GS, introduced in early June, boasts a video capture function. And some technophiles are asking if Flip’s days as the No. 1 pocket video recorder are numbered. More
MacBook back on top at Amazon
In a sign that should bode well for Apple’s (AAPL) earnings in its third fiscal quarter — which ended Saturday — the MacBook has clawed its way back to the top of Amazon’s (AMZN) bestseller lists.
The Mac, which once led the pack in the online retailer’s Computers & PC Hardware Bestsellers category despite its $1,000 to $2,000 sticker prices, had fallen behind the blistering sales pace set by netbooks like the Asus Eee and the Acer Aspire One, which sell in the $300 to $400 range.
By June 1, the bestselling Apple computer on the list — a white plastic MacBook — had been pushed down to the No. 14 position.
But netbooks have started to fall out favor recently — as witnessed by reports of return rates as high as 30% and an NPD study that found that 60% of consumers who bought them didn’t understand the difference between a netbook and a notebook.
Meanwhile, Apple announced on June 8 that it was refreshing its notebook line and lowering its prices. Result: its computers have become hot sellers on Amazon once again.
Apple’s entry-level 13-inch unibody MacBook, renamed the MacBook Pro, has been one of Amazon’s top 100 bestsellers for 20 days — basically since the moment it went on sale. As of Monday morning, it was the site’s No. 4 bestselling computer overall and No. 1 in the laptop category.
In fact, three of the top 10 and five of the top 20 bestselling laptops on Amazon are now MacBooks.
Apple is not the only beneficiary of what some see as growing consumer disillusion with netbooks. HP (HPQ) Pavilions, Toshiba Satellites and Samsung Mini Notebooks are also selling briskly online.
See also:
AMEX vs. Amazon; Macs vs. netbooks
Here’s a tale of two demographics.
If you list the five bestsellers in Amazon’s “Computers and PC Hardware” category today, you get five netbooks — three ASUS Eees and two ACER Aspire Ones. That’s been the story pretty much all year.
If you list the five most popular items in “Computers and Software” on American Express’s shopAmex site, you get four Apple (AAPL) products — three MacBooks, one Apple TV and one Sony (SNE) Blu-Ray player.
The first non Apple computer on the AMEX site is No. 17, a Dell (DELL) Inspiron. The first Apple on the Amazon list is No. 14, a white MacBook.
Why the difference? The Amazon site is open to everyone and tends to attract bargain hunters. The AMEX site is open only to card members, and although it advertises 30% discounts, it’s attracting a different sort of clientele — one that doesn’t seem to be put off by Apple’s premium pricing.
Here are those lists:
Amazon re-Kindles the iPhone
It took Amazon (AMZN) less than a month after the release of the second-generation Kindle electronic-book reader to put a free Kindle application on the iPhone App Store. It took another two months for it to fix the app’s second most annoying drawback (after the iPhone’s tiny screen): the hoops you had to jump through to buy new titles.
Amazon solved that problem Monday morning by launching a Kindle store “optimized” for the iPhone. Before if you wanted to buy a book for the iPhone, you had to get it from your Kindle (if you had one), or from Amazon via a computer, or from Amazon’s site as viewed through the iPhone’s browser — not a user-friendly experience.
Now iPhone users can buy directly from within the Kindle application through a new interface that works like an iPhone app should and doesn’t require a magnifying glass.
It’s no mystery why Amazon keeps showing the iPhone its love. The company hasn’t released sales figures for either the Kindle 1 and the Kindle 2, but according to press reports, it has probably sold 700,000 to 800,000 of the devices in their first 18 months.
Apple (AAPL), by contrast, has sold some 37 million iPhones and iPod touches.
And since Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has made it clear that he is far more interested in selling e-books than he is in selling Kindles, it makes sense for him to put his content on as many devices as he can — and to make reading that content as seamless as possible.
At the launch of the Kindle 2, Amazon VP Ian Freed said that the company was working hard to bring Kindle apps to a variety of existing smartphones, starting with the ones that offer the best reading experience.
Apparently that was the iPhone, because there’s no sign yet of a Kindle app for Research in Motion (RIMM), Android (GOOG), Symbian (NOK) or Mobile Windows (MSFT) phones.
UPDATE: iLounge’s Charles Starrett points out that there could be a small wrinkle in the Apple-Amazon relationship: By selling its e-books directly to readers, Amazon may have found a way to avoid the 30% cut Apple will start taking this summer when it opens the App Store to so-called ” in-app purchasing.”
The new Kindle store, writes Starrett, “appears to be a workaround to enable easy purchasing without Apple revenue sharing.”
See also:
Apple: Only good. Dell: Poor and very poor
Apple (AAPL) can take some satisfaction in the fact that it clobbered the Windows PC manufacturers in the customer experience survey released last week by Forrester Research (FORR) — but not too much satisfaction.
The fact is, the computer industry as a whole fared pretty badly compared with, say, retailers and hotel chains. And even high-scoring Apple was ranked 23 out of 113, trailing the likes of eBay, Costco and BJ’s Wholesale Club.
The full report, available here (free registration required), is revealing. Some 4,500 U.S. consumers were asked about their interactions with a wide range of companies — from airlines to banks to insurance providers — and rate them according to their usefulness, ease of use and enjoyability.
Barnes & Noble, which scored the highest overall, was consistently rated “excellent,” as were Amazon, Target and USAA, which provides financial services for the armed forces and their families.
Apple, in the final tally, was merely “good.”
Drilling into the full report, we see that Apple did manage to score an “excellent” in ease of use — although just barely. It scored a solid “good” in usefulness. But in enjoyability, it was only “okay.”
Not that any of the other PC manufacturers came close. Where Apple’s overall score was 80% — some might call that a B minus — Compaq, HP (HPQ), and Gateway ended up in D territory with between 63% and 66%. Dell (DELL) basically flunked with a “poor” 58% rating overall and a “very poor” 47% in enjoyability.
“I do think Microsoft’s software has a bit to do with it,” wrote the study’s author, Bruce D. Temkin. As a rule, he says, “consumers don’t distinguish problems with the operating system from problems with the PC manufacturer.”
“Bottom line,” writes Temkin, “the Windows ecosystem needs an extreme customer experience makeover.”
In the case of Dell, however, there was more going wrong than Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows. Temkin’s take: “Dell got so focused on operational efficiency that it lost sight of customer experience.”
But even Dell, at No. 93 on the list, looks pretty good compared with some of the Cable TV and Internet service providers. The ISPs are particularly well represented at the bottom of the list, with Time Warner Cable’s (TWC) Road Runner at No. 99, Comcast (CCS) at No. 105 and Charter Communications at No. 113.
Below the fold: the full list.
Apple stock is up 31 percent this year
The stock is not what it was in 2007, when it rose nearly 136% in the space of 12 months, but Apple (AAPL) is off to a good start in 2009.
From Jan. 2, when it opened at $85.88, to April 2, when it closed at $112.71, Apple has gained 31.24% — easily outpacing the Dow, which is still down more than 9% for the year.
So how is Apple doing relative to the stocks it’s most often compared with, the so-called “Four Horsemen of Tech”? As the chart below shows, it has so far out-performed Google (GOOG) and Research in Motion (RIMM), but paled beside Amazon (AMZN), which is up 48%.
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Apple is nothing if not volatile, but not matter what happens there’s no way that 2009 could to end up looking like 2008, when its shares fell more than 56% and its market cap dropped nearly $100 billion. Apple’s enterprise value today is $71 billion and $28.8 billion of that is in cash and negotiable securities.
Apple opened at $113.75 and was up more than 2% in early trading Friday.
The big mover Friday, however, was RIM, which opened at $58.13, up nearly 20% following Thursday’s surprisingly strong fourth-quarter earnings report. That pushes it ahead of Apple in the Four Horsemen chart, but still trailing Amazon.
Amazon's Kindle hits the iPhone
If there was ever any question that Amazon’s (AMZN) Jeff Bezos is more interested in selling books than selling Kindle electronic book readers, the answer showed up on the iTunes App Store overnight Wednesday: a free application to read Kindle books on Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone.
Given that there are more than 17 million iPhones in circulation and probably not more than a few hundred thousand Kindles, Amazon has, with a single stroke, vastly increased the size of its potential readership without necessarily boosting sales for its $359 reader.
The app, which you can download here, works pretty much as advertised. You can’t order books directly from the iPhone — you have to do that from a Kindle or through a Web browser. But once you’ve established that you have an Amazon account, the books you’ve ordered show up instantly — and wirelessly — on the screen, thanks to the magic of Amazon’s new Whispersync technology. If you’ve started to read a book on a Kindle, Whispersync is smart enough to remember what page you were on.
There are plenty of titles to choose from in the Kindle Books section of the Amazon store — more than 240,000, according to Amazon’s press release — although as you might expect, the list is heavily tilted toward current bestsellers (104 of the 112 titles on New York Times‘ list, most for $9.99 each).
At the store, you can arrange books by popularity (”The Shack” by William P. Young currently tops that list), customer review (Ron Paul’s “The Revolution”) or publication date (”Eye of the Beholder,” Jade Falconer).
But you get a better feel for the range of books available when you list them by price, high-to-low or low-to-high. The most expensive title is something called “Selected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems (Part 4),” which sells for $6,431.20. On the other end of the spectrum, there are pages and pages of books priced at $0.00, including Arnold Bennett’s “Sacred and Profane Love” and Hugh Dalton’s “With British Guns in Italy,” to name a couple at random.
The books are certainly readable on the iPhone, although I’m not sure anybody is going to make it through Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 944-page “Team of Rivals” (No. 16 on the Kindle bestseller list) on a 3.5-inch screen. The pages are formatted for Kindle, not the iPhone, which creates some unfortunate typographical effects. At right, for example, is what the preface page of Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father” looks like on the iPhone, with an ugly and unnecessary break in the word “preface.”
All in all, the reading experience on Kindle for iPhone falls somewhere between Google’s (GOOG) free iPhone Book Search app, with 1.5 million titles to choose from but minimal formatting, and Andrew Kaz’s $2.99 Classics, which offers only a dozen or so books, but each of them specially formatted for the iPhone screen.
And that’s probably as it should be.
See also:
Amazon's Kindle: Did Steve Jobs blow it?
Apple CEO Steve Jobs was pretty dismissive of Amazon’s Kindle electronic book reader when it first came out. “The whole conception is flawed at the top,” he told the New York Times a little over a year ago, pointing out that 40% of Americans make it through one book a year or less. “People don’t read anymore.”
The launch Monday of the Kindle 2 after 14 months of strong sales — as many as 500,000 units, according to one analyst (Amazon does not release sales figures) — has led some second-guessing among Apple watchers.
“Why don’t we own this market?” asked one investor on The Mac Observer’s Apple Finance Board (AFB). “Apple had ALL the elements here, the capacity to design, the money to market, and the distribution system already in place via the App Store and the iTunes Store.” (link)
It’s an interesting question, with an unsual twist. Although Apple and Amazon are both making white hand-held electronic devices these days, they come at it from very different directions.
Amazon (AMZN) is primarily an electronic retailer; it ventured into manufacturing with the Kindle to drive sales of titles from its huge online bookstore.
Apple (AAPL) is an electronics manufacturing company; it provides music, movies, apps and even some books on the iTunes Store primarily to drive sales of Macs, iPods and iPhones.
“The Kindle is a good product. Amazon is a good company,” wrote another commentator on AFB. “Notwithstanding that, the P/E disparity is staggering.”
He has a point. Check out the tale of the tape:
Apple is three times the size of Amazon and nearly four times as profitable, yet Amazon trades at 44.7 times earnings while Apple closed Monday at less than 20. And that’s not including the growing stash of deferred revenue Apple is squirreling away from sales of iPhones. (See Spotlight on Apple’s hidden revenue stream.)
Of course it’s not too late for Apple to get into the e-reader market, should its management team overcome its CEO’s skepticism about America’s reading habits.
Meanwhile, Amazon has signaled that it is willing, once some technical hurdles have been overcome, to let iPhone owners read the books in its electronic library — as long as they buy a Kindle first.
In fact, Jeff Bezos is convinced that anybody who tries to read a book on a smartphone will quickly see the virtue of a dedicated e-reader.
“If you are going to read for a couple of hours, you are going to have problems with battery life with a mobile phone, you are going to have eye strain and you are going to have problems with screen size,” he told the New York Times yesterday. “Reading is an important activity and deserves a purpose-built device.”
Amazon unveils the new Kindle 2
Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle has a skinny sister — the Kindle 2.
At a press conference Monday morning in Manhattan, CEO Jeff Bezos introduced a thinner, lighter and faster version of the company’s surprisingly popular handheld electronic book reader. The price is the same — $359 — and it goes on sale today for delivery in 15 days.
The new device looks very much like the old one, with these improvements:
- Thinner: 0.36 inches thick, 25% thinner than an iPhone
- Quicker: Turns pages 20% faster
- Longer lasting: 25% increase in battery life
- Better display: 16 shades of gray (was 4)
- Bigger memory: Stores up to 1,500 books
- Bigger vocabulary: Built-in 250,000 dictionary
- Better navigation: With a 5-way joystick
- More vocal: Able to read text aloud in a semi-robotic voice
- Less accident prone: The page-turn buttons are smaller and harder to hit by mistake
- More wired: New Whispersync technology (more below)
“We want the Kindle to disappear,” said Bezos before a packed audience in the basement of Manhattan’s Carnegie Library. “It’s designed so nothing interferes with that incredibly pleasurable mental flow-state you get into when you are reading a good book.”
Bestselling thriller author Stephen King read from new a short story — “Ur” — that is available, for now, exclusively on the Kindle. “I’m the entertainment,” he quipped.
The original Kindle allowed users to download books (standard price: $9.99) wirelessly from the Internet using a built-in 3G cellular modem.
The Kindle 2 goes one step further. The new Whispersync technology allows users to pause in their reading on, say, a Kindle 1, and pick up where they left off on a Kindle 2 and, eventually, on future wireless devices — a phrase Bezos left tantalizingly vague. Earlier reports suggested that the company’s electronic library of 230,000 books would be available on various cell phones including Google’s (GOOG) Android phones and Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone.
Ian Freed, VP for Kindle, said the company was working “as quickly as possible” to bring Whispersync to a variety of existing smartphones, starting with the ones that offer the best reading experience. He declined to give a timeframe.
Amazon has never released Kindle sales figures, nor would its spokespeople confirm analyst estimates that it has sold as many as 500,000 units of the original model. The company had trouble keeping up with demand through much of 2008, especially after Oprah Winfrey endorsed the device on national television, calling it “my new favorite thing in the world.”
Click here for the press release.
Five easy Apple charts
If a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s five grand worth of Apple (AAPL) news in charts and lists released over the past couple of days.
1. Web Brands. Apple scored No. 10 in Nielson Online’s ranking of the top Web brands based on the number of unique visitors each site drew in December 2008 — which isn’t bad considering Apple.com’s focus is so much narrower than the brands it’s up against, like Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Amazon (AMZN). (link)
2. Social Brands. The iPhone scored No. 1 — ahead even of its parent company at No. 3 — in the Vitrue 100, a new ranking launched this week by an Atlanta-based marketing company with a deliberately misspelled name. Vitrue’s list ranks blue chip brands by how often they get mentioned in blogs, photo-sharing sites and such social media entities as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter — presumably a measure of how large these names loom in the minds of an emerging category of early adopters.
3. Days to 1 Million. This comes from an Engadget reader named Noel F. who used published sales data to compare the rate at which the leading smartphones achieved the market penetration milestone of 1 million units. However, as Engadget’s Tom Ricker notes, this leaves out the important factor of geographical footprint at launch. The Google Android G1, for example, launched only in the United States. The iPhone 3G was released simultaneously in 21 countries. (link)
4. Volume vs. Revenue. CounterNotions’s Kontra uses data from GigaOm’s Jose Fermoso to demonstrate that what matters is not how many smartphones you sell, but how much you make on each sale. Unfortunately, both writers’ comparisons are a bit off since Apple’s Q1 numbers include revenue and earnings not just from iPhones, but also from Macs, iPods and other goodies.
5. Stock Price. Finally, a glance at Apple’s share price, which having suffered a thousand cuts in the past year finally picked up a little traction in the past two weeks.
