via John Gruber. Lorraine Luk, The Wall Street Journal:

“The only hope for Apple and its sup­pli­ers is the pos­si­ble launch of a low-cost iPhone later this year, which may help the U.S. com­pany to gain mar­ket share in fast-growing emerg­ing mar­kets such as China,” said Capital Security ana­lyst Diana Wu.

Look at what Apple has done in the last 15 years. Does it look like Apple has been going after mar­ket share? No. Sure, Apple enjoys its mar­ket share grow­ing as much as the next com­pany, but for Apple it’s merely a side effect.

I don’t know whether Apple is work­ing on a low-cost iPhone or not, but Apple has made trans­par­ent its low-cost iPhone strat­egy since intro­duc­ing the iPhone 3G: With each new iPhone ver­sion the pre­vi­ous ver­sion receives a price reduc­tion. The iPhone 5, like all pre­vi­ous iPhones except for the orig­i­nal iPhone, started off at US$199*. When the new iPhone comes out the iPhone 5′s price will drop to $99. The low-cost iPhone? Seems obvi­ous: the $99 iPhone 5. And the iPhone 4S becomes the free iPhone.

One last point: Even if Apple’s exis­tence depended entirely on the iPhone why would a low-cost iPhone later this year be Apple’s only hope? I was under the impres­sion Apple was mak­ing a tidy profit from sell­ing iPhones.

* With a new two-year con­tract, of course.

Check out Oblivion 2013 Extensive Behind the Scenes Inside Look; it’s awesome.

via Marco Arment. Watts Martin:

The Apple of 15 years ago was just as con­trol­ling, arro­gant, and likely to overuse the word “mag­i­cal” in adver­tis­ing as the Apple of today, but now, they’re claim­ing they effec­tively rein­vented the smart­phone mar­ket and the tablet mar­ket. This is infu­ri­at­ing not because it’s trans­par­ent bull­shit, but because it isn’t: they have a pretty good case for those claims.

Seth Godin:

But when we’re dis­cussing our goals, our pas­sion and the way we inter­act with the cul­ture, it seems to me that what works is sig­nif­i­cantly more impor­tant than what’s new.

New for the sake of new is likely to turn out badly. Think Microsoft Windows Vista. Windows XP wasn’t new, it was actu­ally quite old, but it worked, as well as Windows could. Microsoft decided it was time for some­thing new and intro­duced Windows Vista. It had a lot of new in it, but it didn’t work very well.

As con­sumers we actu­ally need some­thing new once in a while, but the time between new things depends on design: Is it a clas­sic design that ages grace­fully? Or is it a trendy design that lasts but for a season?

If a com­pany is in the busi­ness of max­i­miz­ing sales in the short term going after fash­ion trends is prob­a­bly the right strat­egy. Trendy shop­pers like new and the more new you have the more they’ll buy. If on the other hand a com­pany is in the busi­ness of max­i­miz­ing prof­its in the long term research­ing and devel­op­ing some­thing that is new and works bet­ter is the right strat­egy. But as is always with mak­ing some­thing good it takes time.

Ken Segal:

More impor­tant, tack­ing an S onto the exist­ing model num­ber sends a rather weak mes­sage. It says that this is our “off-year” prod­uct, with only mod­est improve­ments. If hold­ing off on the big num­ber change achieved some great result, I might think oth­er­wise. But look what hap­pened with iPhone 5.

This model brought major changes: big­ger screen, bet­ter cam­era, greater speed, all on a thin­ner and lighter body. Yet its improve­ments were still dis­missed by many as “incremental.”

Marco Arment:

I agree: if Apple’s going to keep using sequen­tial num­bers (rather than feature-based names, like the sec­ond iPhone being named “iPhone 3G”), they should just give every model the next num­ber. The next iPhone should either be the iPhone 6 or the iPhone Something Else, not the iPhone 5S.

I agree with Segal that tack­ing on an S is no good, but I dis­agree the next iPhone should be called iPhone 6. To get away from both the per­cep­tion of incre­men­tal improve­ments and con­fu­sion as to what the num­bers after iPhone mean Apple should com­pletely do away with suf­fixes on the iPhone. The next iPhone and the one after that and the one after that ad infini­tum should sim­ply be iPhone.

iFixit: The Oculus Rift sports an Innolux HJ070IA-02D 7-inch 8-bit LCD fea­tur­ing a 1024×600 pixel for­mat, 300 nits, 800:1 con­trast ratio, 50% CIE 1931 NTSC color gamut, 170/170 view­ing angles, and an on/off response time of 35 ms.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt, Fortune:

The results of Piper Jaffray’s 25th bi-annual teen sur­vey came in Tuesday after­noon. Once again, it showed Apple to be the most desired brand among American teenagers who care about things like smart­phones and tablets, although Google’s Android did make some gains.

The Panasonic ZT60 will remain the best plasma TV the com­pany makes. Panasonic Display Vice President Kiyoshi Okamoto con­firmed to The Verge fur­ther plasma dis­play panel research and devel­op­ment will be no more.

Over the years a lot of my friends have sought my advice on what TV to buy. To make sure I give them the best advice I ask a lot of ques­tions. One of the ques­tions is, “Are you a sports nut?” If they answer yes, I rec­om­mend they pur­chase a plasma TV, a Panasonic plasma TV. A plasma TV has no detectable motion blur, a fea­ture money can’t buy on even the best LCD TVs. Sure, it con­sumes a bit more energy, but you can save a lot of money by going with a plasma TV over a high end LCD TV.

The end is near for plasma. It’s a bit sad. Even though Panasonic is divert­ing research and devel­op­ment toward OLED TVs, it will be many years before we see price/performance ratios close to plasma TVs. Panasonic will sell plasma TVs “into 2014 at the very least,” but if I were a sports nut, I’d make sure to grab the biggest ZT60.

The New York Times: Argentina, India, Poland, Russia, South Africa, and Ukraine, accord­ing to IDC.

Update 2013.03.30: This, as well as many oth­ers, was in response to Frank X. Shaw’s post on The Official Microsoft Blog tak­ing a pot­shot at Blackberry and Apple:

Windows Phone has reached 10 per­cent mar­ket share in a num­ber of coun­tries, and accord­ing to IDC’s lat­est report, has shipped more than Blackberry in 26 mar­kets and more than iPhone in seven.

Six of the seven coun­tries where Windows Phone shipped more than iPhone were men­tioned above. The 7th ‘coun­try’ is the “rest of cen­tral and east­ern Europe” includ­ing Croatia. South Africa, Ukraine, and the 7th coun­try each rep­re­sent less than 100,000 Windows Phone import units in Q4’12. That’s not a lot.

Windows Phone is impres­sive con­sid­er­ing it was designed from the ground up by Microsoft, but for Shaw to brag about some­thing that’s really about noth­ing is grasp­ing at straws. Admit growth has been under­whelm­ing and a lot of work still needs to be done. We don’t respond well to unfound boast­ing, but we do respond well to honesty.

*Selling: The offi­cial num­ber of imports into the coun­try. Who knows how many are actu­ally sold to end users.

via John Gruber. David Gelphman:

There was no way I was going to take the iPad with me unless Steve per­son­ally approved it.