Truly, the Macworld that we know from the past is long gone. What is left, by the looks of what’s in the Moscone Center West this weekend, is the remnants of a once-unique empire of desktop computing software.

I’m not even bemoaning the loss of Apple, long-departed even before Steve Jobs died. What is striking is how much mobile dominates the booths on the expo floor, as well as the talks offered upstairs. The largest, liveliest section of this year’s show is Appalooza, where three out of every four kiosks — you can’t call ‘em big enough to be booths — hawk and explain iOS apps. I’d like to be able to say that iOS is a unique enough environment to justify a user conference full of its technology. But many of the vendors here also sell Android versions of their apps.

This was not the case in the olden days when Apple wasn’t a mobile computing company with a desktop legacy. A Mac application was built sleek and easy and beloved by a wee minority of the computing world. Now an “app” is available to more than a third of the world, and more than half of the planet’s tablet users.

For quite a few years the expo floor has been crowded with companies that want to sell a wrapper for your mobile Apple device. They have now been joined by a device insurance company, a booth where you can sample non-dairy cheese product (tasty!) and a glut of accessories to push power into your mobile devices in a dizzy array of designs. One company was selling a $229 device which, with the help of $4 disposable pucks, takes water and turns it into enough power to charge an iPhone about one and a half times.

Yes, there are still companies selling things like a replacement for the ill-conceive iWeb, or the impressive array of microphones for any Apple device from Blue, or a weather program which has both desktop and iPad releases, each distinct.

But to spend to Macworld without a dedicated interest in an iPhone or an iPad would be like attending the Super Bowl to see the halftime show. At least this year’s event dropped the booth girls (svelte models) that stirred up sentiments at the 2012 conference.

With a torrent of analyst Q&A grilling ended yesterday afternoon — after the record sales of $54.5 billion in 90 days’ time, profits of $13.81 a share, and iPhone/Pad sales of 70.9 million devices — Apple’s stock sank $63 a share today. At a casual calculation, the company saw more than $60 billion in market capitalization drain away.

With sales and earnings and growth tossed to the winds of worry, there seems to be no number that will generate a story other than “Apple is weakening.” Not an increase in profits to a record level, or a jump in revenues to the same. iPad sales, at 22.9 million, were just 100,000 tablets short of the analyst estimates. This is called a “miss,” even while the sales outstripped every other tablet 2:1.

The coverage is being couched in terms of analyst estimates, and they need to protect their “phoney-baloney jobs,” as Mel Blanc’s Governor said in Blazing Saddles. Today’s fallout from the wiseguys’ reports were great news for the analyst clients who want to climb on board the stock at $450, I suppose. There’s been too much hype to withstand the “knock-em-down” counterpunch that always follows a brilliant run-up of anything.

TechCrunch said the numbers of sales and profits for “its fiscal Q1 2013 financials, are a sight to behold.” The markets beheld a reason to follow the smell of baloney. Apple beat estimates for profits —  the element that affects the future R&D for users of its products — by 26 cents per share. That’s nearly a quarter-billion dollars extra in earnings that the analysts didn’t expect. Still a stock to sell, apparently. It traded at twice its usual daily volume today.

One hidden issue is the lack of new iMac shipments, but that doesn’t seem to have hurt those top-line numbers. Operating margin decline is an concern, too, a measure of the cost in the future to create those rising profits. The estimate of the cash reserve on hand at Apple is more than $100 billion. And the latest quarter delivered $13 billion in profits. These numbers are so outrageous that it reminds me of the quote from Citizen Kane. Kane’s been told he’s losing $1 million a year on publishing the Enquirer. “You’re right. I lost a million this year. I expect to lose a million next year. At that rate I’ll have to close the Enquirer – in about 60 years.”

Apple could deliver record, quarterly earnings for almost two years just on the strength of its cash on hand — and sell nothing at all. But you can expect the machine to outpace itself by another 7 percent this quarter, by Apple’s now-cautious estimates.

So there’s not much wrong with a company still making the best product in the market and raking in billions in profits for shareholders. Contrast it with HP — trading at $17, with analysts forecasting a breakup and terminating dividends. Likely for the former, sketchy on the latter. But that’s a 13-cent a share dividend. And Apple’s paying more than $2 a share, right?

Question for the crowd: How can Apple rake in 50-70 percent of the world’s smartphone profits and still be branded a weakened mobile company? Extra slices of the analyst baloney, perhaps? Read the rest of this entry »

Later today Apple will release its quarterly results for the period that ended on Dec. 31. The part of the business press that wets its finger and sticks it into the finance winds to forecast has their guesses out there already. But they’re only as good as the amount of airtime, column inches (print, gad!) or webpages devoted to the details.

The problem with studying stock behavior as a marker for a company’s prospects is that it reads only every other word of the message. As an example, Hewlett-Packard struggled to stay above the $12 per share mark during the same Apple quarter we’ll hear about today. This week the stock is up to $17. That’s nearly a 50 percent increase, lifted on the waters of nothing technical or business-like at all. Investors stopped hearing bad news, and HP looked like a great value at $12.

The every-other-word that technology reporters on TV overlook is the mechanics of trading stock. Why is Apple trading at around $500 a share, when four months ago it was flirting with $700? One reasonable explanation lies in how big investors trade Apple shares. Over at Daring Fireball, Apple watcher John Gruber pointed to a report at Seeking Alpha that large institutional investors who’d sold options on Apple’s stock back in the summer stood to profit by billions if AAPL closed at $500 or under on Friday.

Yep, the stock closed precisely at $500. And it had nothing to do with how well the iPhone 5 is selling, or the cost to manufacture the phone, or the rise in popularity that might be concocted out of the tea leaves of Android sales reports. Just a few quarters ago, one of the Android tablet makers had to admit they were counting shipments (unsold but transported units) as sales. A public correction flowed from the company’s Korean headquarters.

As a customer of business solutions from Apple, you should care how well the company is doing on the stock market. And there’s no doubt that individual retirement funds have taken a hit since the summer if they hold AAPL. But it’s irresponsible and lazy journalism to ignore how stock buying works, just because you only have less than three minutes to say something interesting about the most profitable company in the smartphone industry. By Gruber’s research, Apple earns 75 percent of all the phone profits in the world.

It’s probably not doing that with a phone that’s “more expensive to make” and “might not be selling as well as the last iPhone.” Be patient enough to wait for Apple’s government-controlled reports on iPhone 5s, later today, before you decide if the company’s product balloon has already hit its cloud ceiling.

There’s a bigger story in the offing today, about a smaller part of the Apple product empire. Building its latest iMacs has become an unfixed problem that’s hurting sales of its desktop business. Read the rest of this entry »

Consummate.

That’s the most concise word to apply to the Otterbox line of protective cases for Apple’s tablets and phones. The market’s iPad mini cases are now making their debut, and 180 of them are on display for sale at the Dr. Bott website. But Otterbox is a cut above all that. They sport near-indestructible materials, tight and skilled fit around the iPad 2 and the iPhone 4S we use here at Bites HQ. We don’t understand how a mobile business pro could carry a tablet or phone through a workday without some protection. Otterbox now has mini iPad cases ($69.99) that mimic the consummate cousins already offered for smaller and larger iOS devices.

That’s consummate as in “showing a high degree of skill and flair; complete or perfect.” We were given a Commuter grade iPhone case for our 4S early this year, and it’s scarcely come off of the phone in that time. Only a few headphone-related jacks made me tug off its top, and the case was easily reset afterward. Essential.

Their iPad cases came in two flavors, from the commuter-class Reflex with its ride-along stand and rubberized gasket protection, to the Defender case that has claimed its place on the iPad 2 since March. It’s got a front-glass protection shield that is lightweight and snaps off and on with ease. Unlike an iPhone, the iPad seems to demand more serious plastic outerwear for trips from office to client site.

Otterbox didn’t rush out its full line of cases for the iPad mini, and that’s not a surprise. This is a company with attention to detail, patience to get a design right, and product durability that will demand a higher-grade manufacturer to meet those standards. Consummate.

If the worst thing you can say about a communications app is that it won’t run under Snow Leopard, that’s speaking high praise. To put it another way, Dragon Dictate 3 is good enough to get me to prepare for the serious leap onto the back of Mountain Lion.

The new iPads are on the way to the market now, and in a matter of weeks you’ll be able to use the fastest, sharpest and best-featured tablet in the market.

But not if you’ve bought an iPad 3 this spring. That $500 purchase is going to have to satisfy a user in your company, at least for a few years. If your company is doing well enough to afford any other procurement plan, good for you. But that’s a short list.

To be very clear, the iPad 3 gets a short family life. No whining about short-cycle upgrades.

Because some springtime iPad buyers are feeling duped, they’re complaining about the six-month gap. Some of them just have themselves to blame. What we heard from analysts and senior editors was the iPad 3 wasn’t worth the upgrade purchase. Just an initial buy. I followed that advice myself, even though the iPad on my lap is an iPad 1. Pretty creaky on the web by now, with all the lollapalooza splashed onto webpages by 2012.

But some senior editors need copy, and seem to have a personal axe to grind about their purchase. Roger Cheng at CNET wrote a column that tossed rocks at Apple for upgrading their product. Sooner than he expected, I guess. This time through, I got luckier.

And that’s all it is: luck. When to purchase, and how long your buy will retain its relative value, is almost impossible to predict. We’re terrible predictors as a species anyway. But it’s clumsy, really, to double back on your own advice.

Way back in the dark ages of March, Cheng didn’t think there were compelling new features of what he calls a “now obsolete” iPad 3. “The new iPad doesn’t boast many new features, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t sell like gangbusters.”

But the Apple gangbusters got him. Perhaps some of you, too. One friend of mine who’s running a travel agency bought his iPad 3 on the day the 4 was announced. Really unfortunate. At least he didn’t take the lumps that come from buying technology at the worst possible moment. If you bought an iPad 3 this month, Apple will take it back for a 4.

I waited and passed, based on advice like that at CNET. Those like me now get a better iPad for the same price, just by following up on that counsel. Apple’s got to keep moving up features and value for tablets. I read that in many a March article.

Holding back on upgrades, in an era where Samsung can rip off Apple designs and get tapped with a paltry $1 billion judgment, is not smart. Tablets are taking the place of laptops now. Samsung could care less. It never made an impact on laptop sales. Apple cared a great deal and thought about it. Then it decided to devour its own products. Right down to iPads released this year.

Tough sledding this time. But no reason to whine. There’s one weak solution if this churn makes you boil. Buy a cheap Android tablet. Vow never to buy Apple again. Then wait awhile, until the Android-iens do the same churn on you.

This time I got lucky. I might feel burned owning an iPad 3. But I wouldn’t whine. Not if I was following my own advice. Buy the iPad 4, if you’re buying an Apple tablet. You’ve read it here, where you won’t read any whining next year. Business takes these kinds of lumps all the time.

I set up my first Apple TV over the past weekend and learned about a great free resource for business news, included on the device. I also learned that everything Apple makes is faster at downloading content that you purchase.

The Apple TV, version 3 and the size of a hockey puck, arrived on the market this spring sporting a faster chip inside, HD enhancements plus a few new information resources. One pleasant surprise to me was Wall Street Journal video reports, streaming and free via the dead-simple channel changer interface off the Apple TV home page.

Streaming content, whether it’s from YouTube, Netflix or WSJ, is the fastest way to get whatever you want to see onto your flatscreen TV. It’s especially worthwhile to do this if you’re in recreation mode, where the new 1080p HD is supported by version 3′s Apple TV. Netflix hums nicely and arrives in HD.

Painfully slower: viewing anything you’ve purchased via Apple’s iTunes store. It makes no sense, but you endure a wait of 20-30 minutes while a movie or TV show downloads — even if you’ve bought it and stored it on a Mac in your home. The reason why is that Apple’s shipping the TV with just 8 GB of flash memory. That’s right: The amount of memory that your camera maker wouldn’t dare ship you on an SD card in the box.

Your average TV show comes in at about 2-3 GB, and a movie is right around the same size. Not much elbow room there, and there’s no file storage controls on the TV. So Apple’s decided that your $99 Apple TV doesn’t need to know about more than one episode at a time. Forget that marathon where you and your sweetie hunker down on a weekend to watch all 9 Downton Abbey episodes. Unless you’ve got the half-hour in-between each one to spare. The cut-rate storage and control design is one reason why Apple’s still got to call the TV a hobby. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a rollicking time for mobile office app users. In the earliest days of the iPad, just two years ago, little more than Pages was on the tablets to allow for document creation. Today there’s not only a way to create using familiar Microsoft tools, but a private cloud network built to ride inside of long-time vendor Quickoffice apps.

Quickoffice’s Connect is a new multi-device, cross-platform mobile productivity app+service that the vendor says “provides seamless document access, editing, saving and sharing experience across all devices and platforms, whether offline or online.” For example, a user with an iPad, an iPhone for personal use, and a Windows PC — as well as a Dropbox account — can leverage Connect for document needs.

Because the service operates from inside the newest Quickoffice HD app, it lets you search across mobile devices, computers, and multiple cloud storage depots for documents. Quickoffice says Connect provides “fluid mobile productivity and collaboration experience across platforms.”

This is an important advantage in the new, bountiful world of mobile document creation. Apple tried this with iWork.com, but recently cut off that beta service that could sync documents built on iPads with desktop workstations. It’s crazy to think that the omnipresent Microsoft Office will now run on iPads, using the brand-new free app CloudOn. But nobody knows how CloudOn is going to survive for free. Quickoffice has set up Connect with a way to pay — very important to surviving as a reliable document resource.

In mobile computing, Quickoffice says, “less is frequently more. It’s a snacker kind of experience, not a full meal.” You can drive Microsoft Office on an iPad, yes — but it doesn’t take long to realize how slowly that responds. And a lack of response time on a touch interface is pretty deadly. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s not to like about something as simple as the Fujitsu Snap S1100? This is a compact device with a scan-a-page at a time slot and so little tweaking needed you can just treat it like a willing assistant which gets paper off your desk.

Document scanners will become essential once your business gets digitized. Your strategy might start with a steel fireproof filing cabinet for storing contracts, spec sheets, or articles yanked out of paper publications. The S1100 does this effortlessly for us. You just plug it into a powered USB port, install the low-maintenance software to control it, and then open the front door and scan. Once scanned, any document can be reproduced. No copier required, and you can reproduce in two-side duplex once you’ve got a PDF file.

It does a lot less good to have any scanner that takes up plenty of space on a desk. The ScanSnap S1100 is just 9 inches wide and 1.5 x 1.5 thick and tall. It tucks right under an iMac screen for storage. Its software does all you’ll need, adding pages one at a time for a complete PDF file, or creating a jpg of a photo you want to move from paper to digital. Set and forget, really.

We ran the software under Snow Leopard’s OS, so didn’t stumble through the few extra steps needed to operate it under Lion. TiDBits’ editors found a snarl or two, but so many businesses haven’t touched Lion yet. It works with Lion, if that OS is already plunked onto your Mac. Read the rest of this entry »

A Retina Display-caliber screen sharpens the new iPad

Apple introduced what it’s calling “the new iPad” (no number appended) at a media event today. The device arrives with the same 9.5-inch form factor and at the same price as its iPad 2 predecessor. There isn’t a great reason to upgrade from an iPad 2 if you’re looking over the features of today’s new iPad. Apple will be shipping the product on March 16, and orders began today. There are more models than ever now of the iPad, considering the wireless data and storage combinations.

The iPad 2 is a solid enough choice that Apple will continue to manufacture and sell it, but at prices that have now dropped $100. Frankly, this is the best news of greatest interest to business users who’ve eyed a tablet. The sharpest design for a tablet in the market now costs $100 less. That means $1,600 plus tax now gets you four iPad 2s instead of three. Apple has a useful comparison chart at its website for the newest and iPad 2 models.

The 4G capabilities of the new iPad aren’t going to make a difference to anyone but users in the two dozen cities where 4G is available. Verizon and ATT remain the only 4G providers for iPad connectivity. There’s a new 5-megapixel camera on the reverse of the new iPad, to give users the same ability to shoot HD video as the iPhone 4S. Beware: HD video and photos take up a lot more space than SD, and so storage for a new iPad probably ought to be added beyond the stock 8GB.

The new iPad starts at $499 for the base wi-fi model. It adds the ability to dictate text from its on-screen keyboard, but no ability to use the beta-status Siri assistant. It’s .03 of an inch thicker than the iPad 2, so some cases are not going to work with the newest model. It depends on how tight a fit your existing case offers.

We’ve worked with an iPad since it was first available in 2010. Today’s rollout with the A5X  chip and more internal memory is an upgrade that will only make obvious sense to a user who’s pumping work through complex apps: voice and handwriting recognition, or video editing, or GarageBand composing, or photo manipulation. The first iPad-ready version of iPhoto is also shipping today, as is iOS 5.1.

The New iPad launch has the feel of an event similar to the later launches of the Space Shuttle: remarkable compared to the technology that surrounds and preceded them. But still, an introduction that will raise far fewer pulses than iPad 2, or the original 2010 revelation.