The Occasional Blargh

Business Insider:

Here's today's statement: "Pre-orders for iPhone 5 have been incredible ...  We’ve been completely blown away by the customer response."

Last year Apple's statement was part of bigger press release. This year's  statement wasn't a press release, just two sentences given to certain news outlets.

Gizmodo:

Apparently emails are rolling out to some iPhone-buyers explaining that despite what they heard before, they won't actually have to wait the two weeks after all; they'll get their iPhone 5 on release date just like they'd hoped.

Played like a ... you know. Right, Jim.

I’m wondering if the folks who are rewriting the reports from Apple about the unprecedented demand for iPhones realize how much each one of them is like the Stradivarius in the picture over there.

I am also curious as to how many people have noted, at least, that demand has been building by almost one quarter by folks waiting for the yearly refresh that usually comes out in June or July. (Remember how with last quarter the number of iPhones shipped came in on the low end of expectations, rather than exceeding it as folks have come to expect.)

Then again, some folks have decided they’d rather be played on by Apple than by others.

For what was a mythological problem, Apple is offering actual hard cash to deal with it, albeit not very much. If you bought an iPhone 4 before Friday, you can soon again request a free bumper or ask for $15. It's more of a moral victory for the claimants than anything else. Anyway, I do have an ulterior motive for bringing up this bit of news. Some in the Apple press has since converged on a version of the tale where the big bad media blew up a common and minor defect into a huge scandal to bully Apple, possibly out of an anti-Apple bias. In other words, Gene Steinberg is still mad at Consumer Reports. What’s the story as of last week, Morning Glory? (Emphasis mine)

A notable example is the curious way in which they handled the alleged “Antennagate” scandal, involving the original iPhone 4 and the possibility that you could kill reception with what became known as a “death grip.” Despite all the visual evidence that a similar phenomenon could be easily duplicated on other phones when held in somewhat different ways, CR decided that only the iPhone 4 was at fault and, despite getting the highest numeric rating in a smartphone feature, still wouldn’t recommend the product.

Well, I guess the statement can be considered technically accurate, as practically strangling other phones is a somewhat different way to hold a phone as compared to the way Apple illustrated to people as to how to hold the iPhone 4.

Erik Wemple finds it curious that The New York Times’ invitation to Apple for Mountain Lion seems to have gotten lost in the mail.

An exclusive, of course, cuts two ways. Payoff for the recipient and pain for the shunned. Heading up the latter camp is the New York Times, arguably the most aggressive pursuer of Apple-related news on the planet. The paper has a hulking tech pod to evaluate its products and has dug deeply into the business of Apple via its iEconomy series.

And in the process, the paper has come up with a shovelful of human suffering. This story on an Apple facility in China includes this explosive graph:

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

Hard-edged reporting of that sort carries a price when it comes to a company like Apple. You may not be on the short­list the next time the company debuts one of its products.

He notes that The Daily ✪ still has its preferred access.

This deserves longer comment, but not for Marco’s sake, but for Daniel Jalkut. But the short of it is, Marco don’t know economics.

Digital distribution may eventually do away with the purchase and shipping of paper, the printing presses; it may do away with the costs of producing the books and sending them to the customer. It’s not, however, goint to cut the costs of having all of those writers who have to write, editors to edit, photographers to photograph and those ancillary costs like travel. lodgings, food, etc. And that’s just the costs incurred by the individual journalists -- who’d like to get paid for this as well as to be paid so he can eat, clothe him or herself and not have to live in a tent somewhere. And that doesn’t get into the overhead of the magazine itself (not related to moving paper around).

But then again, I pay for cable television. Yet those cable channels show me ads, too. I watch movies in theaters sometimes. There are commercials. Then there are trailers, which are more commercials. Then there’s the movie which may have product placement within it.

But Marco don’t know economics. Is he willing to pay $30 for a magazine app for a ad-free experience?

Note 1: It’s adorable how many commenters at Red Sweater have the mistaken assumption that the magazine reader is the main customer. Maybe they are all as naive as ✪ in believing that only Google sells to advertisers who reads/uses Google.

Note 2: Digital distribution doesn’t remove all overhead. It just changes some. Who gets to pay for the bandwidth to push out that app to you? Apple isn’t. This, despite the fact they pocket 30% for just providing the storefront.

Update 1: This is just sad.

Update 2: This gets more awesome!

This part has actually left me flummoxed. Marco went on this rant about the existence of advertising in a paid digital magazine without having a frame of reference whatsoever. Now, I did not know how much The New Yorker in print costs, (According to a quick internet search, it is $4.99, and they charge the same for the iPad app.) but I already knew that whatever it was, it’s not enough to cover the costs of producing the magazine. Thus, the print edition has advertisements.

He wrote the following...

Ignoring what content and apps “should” cost, and despite knowing that this is a very good magazine, this felt expensive.

...except he didn’t know how much the contend should cost at all. This was his frame of reference:

Most entire apps (including mine) cost $4.99 or less, once, and this magazine is $4.99 for just one issue.

“Most entire apps”... I’m going to take the example of Arment’s app Instapaper. It looks like a one-man operation, but I’ll assume a team of ten. He just makes Instapaper. There’s been 4 major versions in three years. I will not claim it is easy, or not a full time job. But maybe 10 people making an app with four major updates (though probably continuous minor updates) in 10 3 years.

(Ed: Dumb typographical error on my part.)

Now, I had a copy of Vanity Fair by my side. I was counting the people in the masthead, because I wanted to continue this in a fuller post later, but the tweet above irked me so. In fact, I did not finish counting the people in the masthead. When I stopped my count, I was at thirty people. I’ve only counted about one-fifth of the masthead of Vanity Fair. That means there’s likely a hundred people, and probably more working on Vanity Fair.  In this copy of Vanity Fair, there was twenty-some-odd articles in this magazine. In this month’s issue. They’ll have to do this again for next month; produce twenty-some-odd articles. And again next month. And then again next month.

Now, I’m using Vanity Fair because I don’t have a copy of The New Yorker on hand, but I doubt The New Yorker is much smaller.

Now, let’s compare that again to Marco Arment’s one app, sold at $5 maybe to pay a team of one to ten people. Now, is that really comparable to what The New Yorker has to do every single month. And yet, they still sell it to you and me for $5. The only reason they can even get away with that lunatic pricing is because there are some advertisements to pay the freight of the cost of producing that magazine.

Update 3: I learn The New Yorker is a weekly, not a monthly. That probably alters the equation to be even less in favor of Marco Arment’s argument.