Up until the WWDC keynote this week, I was convinced that Apple simply didn’t understand the cloud or how to use it to share content conveniently across devices, but they surprised me on Monday with new ways to bridge the gap between iOS and OSX.

Among the changes you’ll see when you upgrade to OSX Mavericks later this year is a keychain that stores all of your security credentials across devices, whether iOS or OSX. As you can do with Amazon Kindle books, your books will now sync across devices and you can open an ebook on any device, and you will open it where you left off with any markups carried from device to device.

In addition, OSX now has a new powerful tagging feature, which is another step away from the folder/file cabinet metaphor we’ve been using across operating systems for years and toward a more free-form type of organizational structure. You can create tags on the fly and they sync across all your devices, so if you search for a tag on OSX all the files you have tagged with with that identification, whether in iCloud or on your hard drive will appear in the results.

What’s more, Apple finally introduced web versions of the programs in the iWork suite giving you any time, any device, any OS access to these programs. You can even use them on Windows machines and you can open and edit Microsoft Office documents inside iWork programs online.

The latter was a key missing link for Apple and it gives workers access to these programs and lets those users who prefer to escape Microsoft Office or avoid Google Docs to continue to work in the Apple system online and share files with co-workers who use Office.

For Apple of course, it keeps users who may be using iOS devices at work on their system regardless of the machine they may use for their desktop work.

These are just some of the connections Apple is allowing you to make across devices and it’s been a long time coming. Up until now, iCloud has been mostly confusing to me. I can’t use it in the sense of backing up my hard drive. I can save files from certain applications to iCloud, but I can’t drag and drop a bunch files onto iCloud as I can with Dropbox, Box or Google Drive.

I never got the sense until this upgrade that Apple got the cloud or really took it seriously.  And it’s been a bit baffling to me given they opened that massive data center in North Carolina in 2010 and they’re working on another one in Oregon. Obviously they have plenty of cash to invest in a cloud infrastructure, but up until this week’s announcements, they never really took advantage of all that capacity.

I’ve never actually understood their cloud strategy at all. You can’t for instance in Mountain Lion access iCloud from Finder (at least as far as I can tell). You can store your iTunes library in iCloud and in fact, it tends to offload large swatches of your library by default. This often requires you to download a file before listening to it. This has two drawbacks. First of all, if you’re someplace you can’t download the file such as an airplane without WiFi, you can’t listen to the song. Second of all, maybe you just want to listen to the song, but you don’t want to download it and have it take space on your hard drive. Why can’t you simply play it from the cloud and leave it there?

I’m not sure Apple has answered these problems in iOS 7 and OSX Mavericks, but at least it has taken a big step toward using its massive cloud infrastructure to share content between iOS and OSX devices –and that is a huge step in the right direction.

Photo Credit: Apple

Apple needs to innovate to sustain growth.

I’ve been studying a lot about disruption recently, and one thing is clear. Everyone gets disrupted eventually –and in the digital age the likelihood is accelerated dramatically. So it should come as no surprise that after more than decade of dominance, Apple is facing disruptive forces in several of its product lines.

What will be interesting to watch is how Apple reacts to that unusual position, and if they can continue to innovate in an increasingly hostile environment.

It’s no secret that investors have lost favor with Apple as the stock price has gotten whacked over the last several months, even though evidence from their earnings call this week shows a company that’s still very strong, but getting squeezed on its margins. The focus for many was on the fact that Apple had a reduced year over year profit for the first time in memory, even though its sales figures were actually up year over year.

Apple is still selling product like nobody’s business (literally), selling 37.4 million iPhones in the quarter compared to 35.1 million a year ago. As for iPads? They sold 19.5 million iPads during the quarter, compared to 11.8 million a year ago.

All in all, by just about any measure it was still a healthy quarter. Would you rather have sold almost 38 million iPhones or 4.4 million Lumias? Just saying.

Meanwhile sales of Macs were flat, but as CITEworld editor Matt Rosoff pointed out on Twitter, flat is a whole lot better than the precipitous 14 percent drop for desktop PCs in the first quarter.

The trouble with eye-popping numbers is that it’s hard to sustain year after year, and this especially true as more and more interesting devices compete for our attention. As James Kendrick wrote this week on ZDNet, Apple needs to get its game on in the smartphone race because the iPhone is beginning to look a little dowdy compared to its competitors.

Steve Jobs is not walking through that door.

Same is true for the now venerable (that’s polite for having been around a long time) iTunes. As BusinessWeek reported, iTunes is facing pressure on a number of fronts, especially from streaming services like Spotify (a personal favorite) and rdio. While iTunes changed the music business when it came out, the iPod, which drove that part of the business, is a device that’s well past its prime and people aren’t as interested in owning music anymore. The article quoted, Ted Cohen, a recording industry consultant, who put it this way: “It’s no longer about individual tracks, it’s about access,” says Cohen. “The concept of buying music at 99¢ a song is becoming irrelevant,” Cohen told BusinessWeek.

Overall though, Apple still appears to be a healthy company, but what they can’t do is rest on their past successes and think they can continue to produce at the same level. Sustaining the kind of growth they’ve been on is not easy and probably unprecedented. To continue to grow with shrinking margins, they will need to expand the product line in new directions while updating popular products like iTunes and the iPhone to appeal to the changing tastes of the marketplace.

Tim Cook hinted that there would be new products and services coming in the Fall and throughout next year. I can’t imagine sitting still and getting complacent, but they cleverly plucked low-hanging fruit with the iPod, the iPhone and iPad; recognizing that nobody to that point had done a good job with these products.

Finding similar areas to exploit moving forward is going to be harder, but if Apple hopes to sustain its growth trajectory, it needs to start innovating and fast.

Photo Credit 1: Dick Thomas Johnson on Flickr. Used under CC 2.0 Share Alike/Attribution license.

Photo Credit 2: thetaxhaven on Flickr. Used under CC 2.0 Share Alike/Attribution license.

Apple still has plenty of brand clout, as lines last week at the release of the $99 iPhone 5 showed.

I was chatting with a friend regarding Tiger Woods before The Masters this past weekend, and about how we were both rooting for him to do well — even though truth be told, I’m not much of a golf fan. When he was on top, it probably wouldn’t have been the case. Seems we love to hate the top dog, which might be what’s happening with Apple these days.

Seems everyone is quick to look for any sign that Apple is decline. But there’s perception and feeling and there’s reality and as much as the press seems to be hell bent on hating Apple, people just keep buying their products in dizzying numbers.

And if you wanted proof that Apple still has some brand clout, consider that on Friday, T-Mobile began offering iPhone 5s for $99 and saw lines, yes actual lines, outside their retail stores.

Apparently even T-Mobile didn’t expect this. As Wayne Rash reported in eWeek, the stores were unprepared for the popularity of the offer and just a bit overwhelmed. Apparently, they hadn’t dealt with the passion of Apple buyers before.

What those lines proved was the Apple brand still has plenty of reach and people are still willing to wait in a long line to get the Apple product. Samsung may cleverly make fun of those lines in their ads, but the fact is people have so much brand loyalty when it comes to Apple, they are willing to do that and if the T-Mobile experience is any indication, that still hasn’t changed.

Yet, people want to believe Apple is in decline in the worst way, the same way they wanted to see LeBron James and Tom Brady and so many other successful atheletes taken down a notch. Once they win, it’s human nature to want to give someone else a chance.

So now, it seems Apple is the brand everyone loves to hate because it’s so successful. But if it’s true that the youth market is the leading indicator of product popularity, consider that Business Insider reporting this week on a Piper Jaffrey survey of teen mobile buying habits, found 48 percent of teens currently own an iPhone and 62 percent (that’s almost two out of three) plan on buying one when they purchase their next phone. Just 23 percent want an Android according to the Piper Jaffrey survey.

All of these numbers suggest that perhaps, Apple is doing just fine after all and and the perception that it’s in decline could be more wishful thinking than actual fact. It may be indeed that Apple can’t keep up with the growth trajectory its been on these past several years  as more competition enters the market and margins get squeezed as the markets mature, but even the strongest Apple hater would have to admit the company is still doing pretty well.

If people are willing to stand in line for iPhone 5s long after they were released, and if rumors are right, not far ahead of the next release, the brand still has some cache even though a lot of you probably wish it would just go the way of Tiger Woods.

Photo Credit: (c) Can Stock Photo

Tablets have passed PC sales by a large number and the age of the tablet is here. Photo Credit: (c) Can Stock Photo

The age of the tablet is upon us. The Guardian reports that Tim Cook, speaking at the Goldman Sachs Conference yesterday shared one piece of data that summed it up best. Last quarter Apple sold 23 million iPads, while HP — the world’s largest PC maker — sold 15m PCs.

What’s more, Cook told the audience he didn’t care if the iPad sales were eating into his desktop and laptop computer sales because the future market potential for tablets was so huge, it didn’t matter.

“The projection is that this is going to triple in four years – that’s 375 million, more than the number of PCs being sold around the world. The tablet is attracting people who have never owned a PC, and people who have owned [PCs] but it wasn’t great in the experience,” The Guardian quoted him as saying.

If you doubted the ascendancy of the tablet, these numbers illustrate that it’s happening right now probably faster than anyone believed it would. When I write about these types of changes, I get comments from old-school IT pros who scoff at the idea that a tablet could replace a PC. ‘You won’t someone using an iPad to design a car,’ they tell me.

And they’re probably right. Just because the tablet is overtaking the PC, it doesn’t mean that they are full out replacing every one. If HP sold 15 million PCs last quarter, surely that’s still a big number. But tablets have proven to be able to do a lot of tasks, we used to use PCs for or schlepped our laptops along.

And Apple isn’t alone in the market of course. Microsoft is trying its hand at the market, the same one where BlackBerry, HP and others have tried before and failed. Many believe Microsoft’s hybrid approach may be attractive to corporate workers, but the jury is still very much out on that one in spite of reports of selling out the Surface Pro upon release last week. Amazon is selling a fair number and there are a number of other Android tablet makers such as Samsung that appear to be doing doing quite well — to the extent we can know of course.

Cook was skeptical of projected market share numbers that get bandied about by various firms, and which supposedly show his company’s market share dropping under 50 percent. That’s because as he points out, his is the only company that’s actually announcing the number of units sold. But if you’re selling the kind of volume Apple is selling of these devices, you have to feel pretty good about your market position, regardless of what IDC, Gartner or Forrester has to say about it.

If Microsoft does sell 200 million units as a Forrester report projected recently, it could be at the expense of Apple, Google or Amazon or could be part of what appears to be an expanding tablet market where there is certainly room for more than one dominant player.  I’ll go on record as saying I’m skeptical about the 200 million number — and I’ll believe it when I see it.

For now, whatever brand you prefer — and it’s entirely possible you have different tablets for different roles — it’s clear that the age of the tablet is here, and while the PC is not going extinct any time soon, its days of dominance might be behind us.

Cloud storage has gotten so ridiculously cheap, it’s hard to see why you wouldn’t be using it.

We are in a golden age of cloud storage. We can buy unlimited backup on BitCasa for $99 a year or 10 GB for free. There’s also Dropbox and Sky Drive and Box and Google Drive  and iCloud and Amazon — all offer a varying amount of free space and attractive pricing packages if you want more.  There are so many options for such low prices, it boggles the mind.

You want local storage, you say? We can get a 2TB portable drive for around $100. .

Like everything else in technology this march to cheap storage has been steady. My first PC had a 20 MB (that’s megabytes, folks) hard drive.  Today, I have a 4GB thumb drive on my key chain — one of those that’s just the USB connector and a rubber cover. I recently bought a light-weight 1 tb portable drive that fits in the palm of my hand for $99. It still blows my mind that this little thing holds a terabyte.

Yet even with the low cost of local storage, we never seem to have enough do we? Whether we are an individual or an enterprise, we always seem to fill whatever capacity we have.

I have been buying computers for a long time and each time I’ve bought one, the hard drive had ever  more capacity, and I would think — I’ll never fill up that much hard drive space — only to find I did. I’m sure many IT pros have thought the same thing with their storage arrays. There must be some kind of law like Moore’s Law around chip capacity that we will always fill whatever hard drive capacity we have.

That’s the beauty of the cloud. It’s like that old Jay Leno Dorito’s ad — “Don’t worry. We’ll make more. ” It will always scale for you. You don’t have to worry about it because the cloud provider does. I know personally I have at least half a dozen cloud storage accounts. My stuff is spread across the digital heavens because it’s so darn cheap.

Just this week, Bitcasa came out of Beta with a new storage product that provides unlimited storage for $99 a year. I find it hard to believe they can continue to offer unlimited storage for so little, but for now, that’s the price. What’s more, it has client-side encryption, so they have no idea what’s on there and claim there’s no way for them to know — even under threat of subpoena.

Even the most paranoid among us has to like that.

So sure at 2TB for $100 you could back up some stuff and have it locally where it can never be at the mercy of ‘The Man’ –whether the government or the service provider — but when you can get unlimited encrypted storage for $99 a year, that’s gotten to the point where it’s pretty darn hard to resist. And you can get your files anywhere from any device , as well as  mark files for offline access if you know you’re not going to have a WiFi connection.

It’s the golden age of cloud storage. You would foolish not take advantage.

Photo Credit: (c) Can Stock Photo

But these two organizations seem to have a lot more in common than their recent success. Much like Apple, The Patriots experienced a lot of failure before their current 12 year run of success. Then they made a key move at the top hiring Bill Belichick as head coach in 2000. Apple made the key move bringing back Steve Jobs in 1997. In both cases, with a demanding and highly intelligent leader at the the helm, the organizations thrived.

Now many years later, success has spawned success. For the Patriots it’s been 10 division titles,  7 trips to the AFC Championship game, 5 trips to the Super Bowl, 3 Super Bowl Championships. For Apple, it’s been one home run after another. First the iPod, then the iPhone, then the iPad.

These two organizations both demand excellence from their employees. They both value silence and neither one gives the opposition an edge ever. They are tight-knit and well managed and they have a methodology and they stick to it because it works.

Just this week, their paths crossed once again when the Patriots made it to another AFC Championship game and  were beaten soundly by the Baltimore Ravens, and Apple released their quarterly earnings report and the stock market punished them in spite of good, but not good enough numbers. Both organizations have achieved something few do, but when they came up short, the backlash was swift.

After the Patriots lost last weekend, the level of vitriol on social networks was palpable. Some people were happy to stomp on New England and take glee in their loss.

Same goes for Apple. They sold a record number of iPhones, yet it wasn’t as many as Wall Street had hoped. Suddenly, Apple is simply another technology company, nothing special. All that success and all that cash and people get sick of hearing how great the products are and how many they sell. Enough already! They want them to fall from grace. They wish for it, and when they fail, they take great glee.

And let’s face it, neither is a terribly likable organization. Belichick is often surly with the press. Jobs was secretive and paranoid (and reportedly downright mean to people). Cook is definitely more likable, but the organization remains closed and tight-lipped with him at the helm. When there was an issue with the iPhone 4 antenna, Jobs suggested people were holding it wrong. People don’t like that kind of answer, any more than they like Belichick snubbing an opposing coach during the post game handshake or telling a reporter “It is what it is.”

Yet, in spite of this, each of these individual leaders, and organizations have had an uncanny way of taking good personnel and wringing out every last bit of talent from them to build a product and a brand that exudes success and greatness.

Perhaps, it’s just human nature to want such successful entities to fail, but instead of wasting our time hating the insanely great, maybe we should step back and see what got them to this point — a leader with keen vision and uncanny motivational skills and employees with a desire deep in their bellies to reach the apex every time.

Photo Credit Jobs/Cook: thetaxhaven on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons SA license.
Photo Credit Brady/Belichick: Andrew Choy on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons SA license.

As mobile devices usage continues to rise, we see PC sales decline.

We’ve seen all the signs lately that the PCs days are numbered and mobile and cloud, well they’re the cat’s meow, the BMOC, the big dog.

Oh , you’ll still see PC skulking around, showing up at parties and being annoying, but in 2012, we seemed to make a clear transition from desktop to mobile. Even Microsoft has seen this coming. Hence the rush to the cloud, the emphasis on mobile and the even the release of a Microsoft branded tablet with more coming.

We’ve all heard that Windows 8 PC sales have been slow. NPD reported at the end of November that Windows 8 sales were sluggish as were PCs and laptops in general with notebooks down 24 percent and desktop sales down 9 percent.

Granted it was early days, but Preston Gralla writing on his Computerworld blog after the holidays found that Windows 8 sales were still in the doldrums, and Gralla referenced a variety of sources reporting essentially the same bad news with lagging sales — and some computer manufacturing executives were beginning to express frustration at the lack of Windows 8 PC and laptop sales.

I trust that it has nothing to do with the quality of Windows 8. Whether you love it or not doesn’t have much to do with the lack of sales. It’s because the sales have shifted to mobile devices. In Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report this year, one telling slide was # 25, which showed in the fourth quarter of 2010, smartphones and tablet shipments surpassed PC and notebook shipments for the first time — and are expected to skyrocket in the coming years, while PC and notebook shipments will remain flat. Go have a look, it’s pretty telling. I’ll wait.

What’s even more telling is the next slide which predicts that sometime this year, the installed base of mobile device users will surpass the installed base of PC and Netbook user for the first time. Those two slides tell the tale of the changing demographics in technology usage (in case you needed a picture of what’s become obvious to just about everyone).

That not enough for you? How about this little data point then? Apple reported recently that it surpassed 40 billion total downloads in the App Store  since inception with almost half of those coming in 2012 and 2 billion in December alone. The App Store now has an astonishing 775,000 apps now. There are simply a lot of idevices out there and people appear to love to download apps.

And it’s not just Apple. ReadWriteWeb reports that Google, the other mobile behemoth, and its Google Play Android store is growing even faster and could pass a million apps before Apple does.

All this data seems to agree that mobile is ascending and PC is waning. This doesn’t mean we’ll stop using PCs or that the PC will go the way of the dinosaur, at least for the near term, but it does mean the PC will have less and less use in our lives, and as that is going to have an impact on traditional PC software like Windows and Office for the desktop. It’s a mobile world and the traditional PC is just going to have to get used to it.

Photo Credit:

(c) Can Stock Photo

iPads numbers may be dropping, but iOS users are much more likely to shop online than Android ones.

Mirror on the wall, which mobile platform is the most lucrative of them all? If you believe IBM it is iOS. As for Android? It’s not even close.

IBM published an infographic via Kara Swisher from All Things Digital on Sunday with all kinds of interesting Black Friday data. Overall online sales were up 20.7 percent over last year. Mobile shopping data accounted for 16.3 percent of all online shopping with 58.6 percent of that coming from the mobile phone and 41.4 percent coming from tablets.

When it comes to shopping online, iOS shoppers are much more likely to use their devices to shop than their Android counterparts. iOS accounted for 18.7 percent of mobile device traffic, while the entire Android platform accounted for just 5.5 percent. iOS was particularly dominant on the tablet where it accounted for 88.3 percent of overall traffic.

Surprisingly, the Kindle platform which has been designed specifically to be a front end for shopping on  Amazon accounted for just 2.4 percent of overall mobile retail traffic coming in behind the Nook which had 3.3 percent.

While Amazon’s tablet strategy might not have been working as drawn up, it had to be happy with the overall traffic reports as Experian reported it was the number one online shopping destination on Black Friday with over 25 million visitors and comScore reported that Black Friday shopping online hit a billion dollars for the first time.

What makes this data even more surprising is how much Android dominates in the mobile phone market. According to comScore’s September mobile marketshare numbers, Android was in control with 52.5 percent of the overall mobile phone market. Apple was in second place with 34.3 percent.

And while the iPad continues to dominate the tablet market, IDC reports its overall numbers have dropped dramatically this year falling to 50.4 percent in the third quarter, down from 59.7 percent last year.

In spite of these numbers, however, iOS users seem to be more likely for whatever reason to use their devices to shop. The big shock in all of this is not that Apple is dominating in this area, but that Android and particularly Amazon (which is running a form of Android) is so far behind.

Interestingly, the New York Times reports that brick and mortar retailers are trying to lure shoppers back to the store using smartphone apps to help shoppers plan their shopping experience before they arrive at the store, and even help find an open parking space — but if you want to avoid the madness that is Black Friday altogether, nothing beats the comfort of your living room.

Conventional thinking would suggest that once Amazon produced a low priced tablet, it would fly off the shelves and would give Amazon an additional advantage in online shopping, and when you combine this with Android’s overall marketshare numbers, it would suggest that Android would at least hold its own. Yet IBM’s numbers how a paltry 5.5 percent across the entire platform.

I’m not sure what this says about operating system choices, but perhaps it speaks to overall usability and how likely people are to use a device on iOS versus Android.

With so many tablets, consumers could be faced with too many choices.

We’ve got big tablets and small ones. We’ve got iOS, Android and Windows. We’ve got so many choices from so many manufacturers, it’s hard to keep up with the bevy of announcements. I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling a bit confused by the choices and I’m sure I’m not alone.

And it looks like by the end of this week, we are going to have a couple of more tablet entries to think about. It appears we will finally see the long-rumored 7 inch iPad announced tomorrow and Microsoft is having its Microsoft Surface with Windows RT coming out party on Friday. Meanwhile, there are rumors of a 10 inch Google Nexus tablet by the end of the month.

It’s enough to make your head spin, and I’m a journalist paid to keep up with all of this. I can only imagine how consumers must feel right about now.

Let’s start with Apple. We aren’t even sure that there is going to be an iPad Mini (or whatever Apple calls it) tomorrow, but it sure looks like it. And if it happens, it will finally put an end to months of speculation that Apple has been working on a smaller iPad or a larger iPod Touch (depending on how you look at it).

The irony of Apple making a 7 inch tablet is clear. As Charles Arthur points out in the Guardian, Steve Jobs trashed the idea of smaller tablets during a 2010 earnings call. That Apple is making one now could mean it recognizes a market opportunity when it sees it, or without Jobs’ council or browbeating, it is listening to the marketing department instead of engineering.

Then we have Google’s march into the hardware market.  I’ve made it clear in this space in the past that I don’t think highly of this approach. That’s because I believe Google succeeds when it spreads its software to as many devices as possible, and when it sells hardware it undercuts its resellers. That said, I’ve looked at the Nexus 7 tablet and I enjoyed using it for the short time I played with it at my local Staples, but I’m not convinced that Google should be pushing the Android brand with its own Google-branded hardware.

Which brings us to Microsoft, which takes its long awaited stab at the tablet market starting later this week. Of course, we’ve been hearing about this thing for months too, and this week, Microsoft finally becomes a player in this space for better or worse. Much like Google, I don’t think Microsoft necessarily should be selling Microsoft-branded tablets and undercutting their resellers, but they are and they are yet another choice on the shelf.

For the record, Microsoft Surface with Windows RT doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and I can’t be the only one confounded by this Windows RT branding. Why have a pro and consumer version? The confusion only grows because apparently you can’t use Office on Windows RT tablets. While Microsoft may want emulate Apple by selling hardware, it hasn’t followed Apple’s lead when it comes to keeping the product line streamlined and clear.

I haven’t even mentioned Amazon, but mostly because I don’t truly see consumers bringing Amazon devices into the enterprise for work.

Regardless, the tablets are coming and there is little we can do, but sit back and wait for the dust to settle. Before you get too excited though, think back a year or so to when RIM released the PlayBook and HP released the TouchPad, both to a similar level of hype and fanfare we are seeing now. Then think about what happened to them. Which company will join them?  Time to place your bets and mine sticks firmly with the market leader until somebody proves otherwise.

Photo Credit: morrissey on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

While Apple takes hit after hit in the press for the iPhone 5, it doesn’t seem to have any impact on sales.

Man, lot of anti-Apple talk this week. Less than a week after Apple began distributing the first iPhone 5s to throngs of waiting customers, the press has been less than flattering banging on a variety of issues.

An Op-Ed columnist in the New York Times wondered if Apple had peaked. The Guardian did a feature on prominent Apple mistakes throughout history. Tristan Louis on TNL.net. asked if Apple was transforming into Microsoft, another once-dominant company that lost its edge.

For all of that, Apple had a pretty nice weekend. According to multiple reports the company sold more than 5 million phones in just the first weekend. To put that into perspective, that figure exceeded the most iPhones ever sold in the first weekend by more than a million phones. The only thing that held them back from selling more appears to be supply issues (which if you recall they also experienced with the iPhone 4). I went into my local AT&T store the other day and was told to expect a three-four week late.

It’s hard to see those numbers as anything but positive, yet BusinessWeek reported that indeed some analysts were “unhappy” with the numbers because they didn’t meet whatever lofty estimates they had made. Meanwhile stock prices fell on iPhone supply issues.

I can tell you right now that there isn’t a smartphone manufacture on the planet that wouldn’t have been thrilled with those numbers for a quarter, never mind a weekend. It’s completely ridiculous to me that stock prices would drop after a performance like that.

But that’s not the entire story. First, there were reports of chipping on the black iPhone 5 — not quite on par with antenna-gate on the iPhone 4 — but a big deal to people who dished out big bucks for their iPhones. And Apple SVP Phil Schiller’s response that the chipping was normal was not exactly comforting or in line with Jony Ivey’s video of how carefully the iPhone 5 was supposedly manufactured.

Then of course, there’s the whole fiasco that is Apple Maps. Apple Maps by all reports is not remotely ready for prime time. A Mobile Industry Review blog post found the maps program defies the notion that Apple products just work. Meanwhile, Wayne Rash at eWeek found the mistakes in Apple Maps to be almost comical (unless you really needed the directions to actually get somewhere) and David Gewirtz at ZDNet wondered if Apple Maps was so bad it might actually result in someone getting killed as a result of the bad directions — calling the mapping program an “epic failure.”

He wasn’t alone. Writers were running out of adjectives to describe how bad this program was. But lest we forget, Google Maps isn’t perfect either folks. Anyone who has ever used it knows this, as this classic, xkcd cartoon nicely illustrates.

That said, it’s not my job to defend Apple, but it seems that for all the ink being spilled over the iPhone 5, the only aspect of all this that ultimately matters is if it affects the bottom line, and until we see some righteous anger from consumers, it’s nice fodder for discussion, but it doesn’t seem to have much impact on Apple itself. And until it does, all the fuming in the world, whether justified or not, isn’t going to matter.

Photo by  thetechbuzz on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.