Tag Archives: Apple

Performance Priced

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Dark Drama Iris

Many years ago, I worked for the second largest computer company in the world. The company was Control Data Corporation or CDC. For a brief time it was second only to IBM in the world of computers. It is gone now, consigned to the dust bin of history. Enough time has passed that even some successor firms have also passed-on. Digital comes to mind. Even garage upstart Microsoft is starting to look long in the tooth, compared to today’s modern titans of Silicon Valley. One of these garage bands for whom the blush is still on the rose is Apple. Under the tutelage of the late Steve Jobs, innovative products like the iPhone and the iPad have powered Apple to record profits. However, record profits or even innovative products are no life insurance policy in the breakneck world of computer technology. CDC had both of them then, but look at it now.

Back in the day, selling computers, or “pushing iron” as it was called, wasn’t a simple process. The machines were big, expensive and arcane. Salesmen, and they were mainly men, sold the computers one at a time. Half-a-dozen machines could count for a very good year. The number of options available, the complexity of the product, and the constant evolution of the industry led to a business model called performance pricing. Simply put, if machine A could perform the task twice as fast as machine B, then machine A was priced at twice that of B. This model worked well, so long as no one peeked behind the curtain.

Sometimes midlife performance upgrades were made. When no one was looking, a technician would flip a well hidden switch and then look busy for an hour or so. CDC made a lot of disk drives and we figured out how to convert cheaper 20 MB drives to more expensive 60 MB drives. [Yes, this was a while ago.] This was accomplished by low-level reformatting the drive. They were all the same hardware, they were just formatted differently. They were all performance priced. You got what you paid for.

I was thinking about a modern application for the kind of performance pricing of computer equipment. The iPhone comes to mind. Each model comes in several variants. The sole variation is the amount of internal storage that the device has. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to make just one kind? The trick of low-level formatting of hard-drives, to size the amount of storage, was an industry standard. At the time, we were making 2/3 of all the drives. Back then disk drive platters were all the same size; software formatting determined the amount of available memory. In the iPhone storage is solid state, but the old principles still apply. For example, extra sectors are made, to replace sectors that go bad. Firmware normally controls the allocation of this storage. Why not have the firmware also control the amount of storage available to the customer. If you’ve priced USB storage, you know that 8/16/32 GB doesn’t cost anywhere near the $100s that Apple charges for it. Why not just build one device and build the extra hardware cost into your pricing model and save on manufacturing costs? I realize that it says how much storage it has on the case, but you are already committed to two colors of skins. Another 3X is a modest bump in cost, for a lucrative opportunity for Apple to up-sell their most popular product.

These business practices might seem nefarious to some, but they are not. Streamlining production costs save all customers money. If you ever bothered to read your Apple license agreement, then you would realize that you have already concurred with this too. Like Control Data’s competitors, Apple’s are not fooled by any of these shenanigans. They are already scheming to take advantage of this or any opening, and maybe take Apple down too.

iPhonology

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A prostitute solicits a young man, “For fifty dollars, I’ll let you talk to me about your iPhone.

Apple’s stock rose over 6%, to almost $450, a record high, after it reported its most recent earnings. CNN was putting a target price on Apple of $666, or the number of the devil. No one who knows me, would call me an Apple-phile, but I do love my iPhone. This dichotomy, love the product, but hate the company, would present difficulties for some, but not me. I am prepared to condemn Apple, all of its products, even the iPhone, just not my instance of this device.

Let me first dispense with the rest of Apple’s product line. I’m a PC and I am proud of it, the Mac and its ilk are just overpriced versions of the same product. All of Apple’s innovations were actually stolen from Xerox, which was too stupid to squash the upstart Apple. Ridley Scott’s famous 1984 Macintosh commercial was great, but it fingered the wrong villain. He should have implicated Apple, today’s Big Brother. Let’s segue now to Apple, via the iPhone.

“NPR’s “This American Life” recently showcased, Mike Daisy and his monologue, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”. Check it out. Mr. Daisy, a self-professed Apple-phile, learned of an iPhone that was sold with photographs on it, taken in its factory, in China. These pictures led him on an odyssey, to China. Exercising his own brand of investigative journalism, he uncovered many examples of labor abuse, child labor, blacklisting and unsafe working conditions, to name a few of the offenses that he cataloged.

Daisy’s similarities to Michael Moore, both physically and in journalistic temperament I found unmistakable. The second half of the “This American Life” show does some fact-checking that shows that Apple has corrected many of these abuses. This went only part way to assuage the guilt of an iPhone owner, such as myself.

A Conversation with Siri

Piling on with Apple’s sins, there is its recent debacle, when it attempted to market the iPhone in China. Riots ensued and all sales were soon suspended. Those iPhones were retailed for $800, four times what I have paid for any iPhone. All this in the country of its manufacture.

I have lambasted Apple, but what about its customers? Just like Latin American drug kingpins couldn’t survive without their American drug users, neither could Apple survive without its sycophants. You, the American Apple customer are just as guilty as Apple is of unfair labor practices, etc.

Then there are the injuries that iPhone owners perpetrate upon the rest of society. Case in point, was the recent, much publicized incident at a performance of the NY Philharmonic Symphony. The iPhone’s marimba ringtone went off in the middle of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9. Sure other cell phone users have disrupted a myriad of other performances, but have any of those phone users been dressed down in public, by the conductor?

I want to come clean with you, the reader now. I am a Microsoft Secret Ninja (MSN). I report directly to Mr. Gates and have been working to combat the international Apple conspiracy for many years now. An Apple a day, keeps the doctor away? Don’t believe it, it is all propaganda. They can have my PC, when they sieze it from my cold dead hands, and about my iPhone? I’ll have to text you on that one.