Since there are rumors still going around of a possible 13" iPad Air, I thought a picture showing a 13" Surface Pro 3 would help give some perspective.
In the photo, from bottom to top, is a Microsoft Surface Pro 3, an iPad Air, an iPad mini, an iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6 and an iPhone 5.
I've never liked Mikes "theories" because most of them end up wrong. I had to stop listening to Tech News Today after Tom Merrit left because there was no common sense in his round table discussions.
Apple decided it needed to sell over-the-ear headphones and separately sell better earbuds than those that ship with the iPhone.
Apple spends $3 billion so they can make headphones? I'm pretty sure they could have bought a company that sold a better quality product for less. Beats are popular because of the Brand they have established, not because the product is awesome.
Apple reasoned that no matter what, they couldn't beat beats in the market.
Why would they need to? I don't think Apple has a huge vision to get into headphones. You stick apples name on the brand and they loose all of the Google and Windows people. Like it or not, Apple products sell to Apple fans. If they want to get non-apple people to buy their products, they need a new, younger brand image. Beats provides this. If anything, Apple will brand their new wearable line up as beats to sell to non-apple fans along with iPhone fan boys. Which I am one.
Apple couldn't fathom the idea of having a minority market share in something as central to Apples identity as music hardware.
What? What music hardware? The iPod? The thing that's had plummeting sales for the last half a decade? Maybe he means the AppleTV? The side project Apple doesn't care enough about to allow developers on it or improve the hardware so it's not slow as snails trying to race? Both of these items already have minority market share in the music device industry. Both of which have the sole purpose of playing content from iTunes.
Apple has the iOS devices now, which tunnel traffic into the iTunes stores, but I'm pretty sure they sell more in the App Store than they do in the iTunes Store. Apple has hardware that spread across a wide range of market shares. All of which in some way tie back to iTunes. Minority market share in the headphones space isn't their concern. They were never in that market to begin with.
Apple bought Beats to prevent the company from being perceived as a loser in a major music hardware category.
Sigh. They would be considered a loser because they never entered the headphone market? Pretty sure that wasn't their concern. So Beats bringing in $1B a year (not sure if it's revenue or profit) but Apple brings that in almost weekly now-a-days. They didn't buy them to get into a headphone market and make $1B per year. They wanted the brand and executive talent.
No matter what Apple will dominate the market
Doubtful, Beats will dominate. Apple will probably not get involved. They wanted the executives for record deals and getting Apple solid content deals for iTunes. The play was a longevity play. They wanted the brand, not the product and they wanted the executives. Pure and simple. It's well known that Apple is trying to beef up their store in an effort to fight off other streaming services. Bringing two extremely credible people in the music industry into Apple will help iTunes secure better content deals. It's about growing their iTunes Store and associating it with a hip young brand. Not selling headphones.
So I have resumed ignoring Elgan and his posts. There's this post, then his push that Google+ is the future of blogging and his push that people should give up privacy and just accept that Google glass users taking pictures of them when ever they want is acceptable. His credibility with me has pretty much fell off the face of earth.
Cook admits that Apple could have built its own subscription service and headphones, but he sees Beats as offering far more than that thanks to "incredible" and "creative" people — particularly Iovine and Dre.
I think this is the primary reason they bought Beats. Apple has steadily been loosing "street cred" in the music industry. Most labels see Apple as a thread now-a-days and provide better deals to their competitors like Amazon and Google. By bringing two major record industry figures under the Apple umbrella, they can try and rebuild trust with the music industry.
I've had iOS 7 on my device since it was released to developers last June and I really have got to liking the background fetching feature added to it. I have several apps that make use of it and in some cases, allows me to not even use the app.
For instance, I have OneDrive on my devices for the sole purpose of wirelessly uploading all of my photos and videos to OneDrive (I'll save why OneDrive & not Flickr for another post) and syncing to my computer. This lets me move them in to aperture when I am ready. Never have to plug my phone in, nor open OneDrive on my phone. It just does it in the background for me.
My podcast app is always up to date with the latest and greatest podcasts which is nice and in most cases my RSS reader is updated before I open it.
This is probably my favorite feature of iOS 7.
Today I brought home my iPad Air and immediately began the process of setting it up and restoring it to the back up I had performed on my iPad mini in the morning. The restore completed and it began downloading all of the apps from the App Store. This is where things kind of take a turn for the worse.
I needed to leave for work, so I left which put all of my downloads on pause. When I arrived at work, I connected to my iPhone via tethering so that I could access the internet on my iPad. About 30 minutes later my iPhone had died. I couldn't figure out why it had died so quickly, but I plugged it in to charge anyway. I noticed while the phone was charging however that most of my apps had finished downloading. Evidently the iPad considers tethering to be a form of Wifi and decided to resume downloading my apps over cellular. So my phone was drained and shut off as a result.
When I turned my phone back on, it would never acquire a cellular signal. At first I thought it was just an issue with T-Mobile, but the signal did not return after 3 hours. I got home and checked my wife's cell service and discovered that her iPhone did not have any issues. Something was up with mine. So I tried to go in to the Cellular settings, but each time I attempted to the iOS Settings.app would crash. The device would randomly acquire an LTE signal for about 15 seconds, then the OS would hang momentarily and loose the connection. It would then resume "Searching" for an extended period of time (up to 15 minutes) before repeating the whole process again.
I reset the network settings and that did not seem to fix it, and that's when I decided to blow away my phone. I wanted to see if it was a software issue or if my phone had fried its cell chip due to pulling down all of those iPad apps over an extended period of time. I was greeted with a "Please disable Find My iPhone" message when I tried to erase my phone, due to having Find My iPhone enabled. That's when I realized it was not just cellular, but communication in general. Wifi was no longer working nor bluetooth. After calling and speaking with Apple briefly, I put the phone in to DFU mode and was able to circumvent the Find My iPhone requirement. I blew away the phone, restored from my last back up and everything seemed to work fine afterwards.
Moral of the story? Don't let your iPhone die out. Shut it off properly before the battery runs out!