[Frankrush1]

Hi, spotted some typos in McLean's article; "iPhone sale srose" and "carriers have not choice but to pay up".

Anyway, I don't let that cloud my view of the professionalism\worth of her piece.

She is basically saying that iPhone sales could reduce to such a degree that the companies earnings will be reduced by say about 60% of what they are today (hence a comparable drop in share price). That is, since iPhone sales are (as she said - have not checked) about 66% of profits for the company, iPhone sales should be treated as being practically zero, for company valuation purposes. She does not mention the other products that make up the balance of the companies profits (e.g. iPad) so I assume she does not expect (declining or not) sales of these to contribute to the decline to the $200 per share price, rather that is all they will have left.

The iPhone achieved over 50% market share in the last quarter in the US for the first time.

This does not square with the (predictive) model of the analyst she linked to under the word vicious. Being near the end of a Mathematics and Statistics degree, I was not impressed by this analysis; rubbish in rubbish out. Not sure she understand what she was linking to.

In a nutshell she thinks, on balance, that there is a reasonable enough possibility to state, in public, in print, that Apple's iPhone business will disappear (soon\very soon), and that the company should be valued, today, accordingly.

On this basis I doubt the professionalism\worth of her piece.

[krventh]

Up here in Canada, Future Shop has the surface pro on the front page with the tag line

Power. Full.

Maybe they're going with the lack of free space being a feature?

[grovbergian]

"Presumably he thinks people were complaining that Microsoft was dishonest about the amount of space on the device, but that’s not it at all."

Not trying to be a jerk here, but yes there were plenty of people making exactly that argument, Marco Arment being a perfectly crommulent example.

[tbutler67]

Quote

markbyrn said
Surface Pro: An expensive thick heavy tablet that you can transform into a clumsy laptop. Which people are doing now with a thin, much slower, no digital pen, iPad... Heck, I would still consider it if it were bigger to accommodate a larger battery. Could you imagine what Apple could do with such a device?

Fail miserably? Like I suspect the Surface (both versions) is going to?

How's that ModBook doing, eh?

No, I think Apple got it right with the iPad. If you're going to do a tablet, you *do a tablet* - not some kind of compromised crap that isn't a good tablet, isn't a good laptop, and in fact isn't really good at much of anything.

I respect AnandTech's technical cred and their integrity, but I think they've got the geek blinders on. I've noticed that technogeeks typically are more in love with the idea of a gadget, without caring about how well it actually works. If it's capable of doing something, particularly something that wasn't done before, that's good enough - even if it can't actually do it *well*. This is not a predilection shared by the average user - you know, the ones that bought more than 20 million iPads last quarter.

If it's too heavy, thick and bulky to hold comfortably, has miserable battery life, and requires a keyboard cover (with a terrible trackpad) to run most of its apps, it's a lousy tablet; at that point, why not get that MacBook Air? It doesn't actually require a huge flat area to set up on (just the Smart Cover requires about as much space as the Air does, without counting the Surface+kickstand behind it, and that's without considering all the time I spend using one on the couch). It has a better keyboard, and a MUCH MUCH better trackpad. And it's a well-designed all-one-piece, compared with the Rube Goldberg contraption that's the Surface.

Fair disclosure: I'm one of the people who thought for many years that Apple would never come out with a tablet, and argued against it at every opportunity. But that's because I pictured something like the Surface, or the decade's worth of tablet failures on the Windows side - not something like the iPad, which is a tablet done *right*.

[tbutler67]

Quote

"Presumably he thinks people were complaining that Microsoft was dishonest about the amount of space on the device, but that’s not it at all." Not trying to be a jerk here, but yes there were plenty of people making exactly that argument, Marco Arment being a perfectly crommulent example.

Yep, and all of the ones I saw were responding to people doing direct price/value storage comparisons between the Surface and the iPad. "Look, it's only $200 more than the comparably-sized iPad, and..." Except that over half that space is already taken on the Surface, when it isn't on the iPad; if you're comparing the amount of usable space, the 'comparably-sized iPad' is the 32 gig model. Putting a Surface Pro 64 in charts next to the iPad 64 is, yes, more than a little misleading.

(And since I suspect standard Windows apps will fill up that drive a lot faster than iPad apps do, I think you could make the argument that even this comparison is too generous to the Surface Pro. [I'm not sure how the size compares to applications-formerly-known-as-Metro; anyone have some figures there?])

[ingus]

tbutler67, on 12 February 2013 - 09:37 AM, said:

Quote

markbyrn said
Surface Pro: An expensive thick heavy tablet that you can transform into a clumsy laptop. Which people are doing now with a thin, much slower, no digital pen, iPad... Heck, I would still consider it if it were bigger to accommodate a larger battery. Could you imagine what Apple could do with such a device?

Fail miserably? Like I suspect the Surface (both versions) is going to?

How's that ModBook doing, eh?

No, I think Apple got it right with the iPad. If you're going to do a tablet, you *do a tablet* - not some kind of compromised crap that isn't a good tablet, isn't a good laptop, and in fact isn't really good at much of anything.

I respect AnandTech's technical cred and their integrity, but I think they've got the geek blinders on. I've noticed that technogeeks typically are more in love with the idea of a gadget, without caring about how well it actually works. If it's capable of doing something, particularly something that wasn't done before, that's good enough - even if it can't actually do it *well*. This is not a predilection shared by the average user - you know, the ones that bought more than 20 million iPads last quarter.

If it's too heavy, thick and bulky to hold comfortably, has miserable battery life, and requires a keyboard cover (with a terrible trackpad) to run most of its apps, it's a lousy tablet; at that point, why not get that MacBook Air? It doesn't actually require a huge flat area to set up on (just the Smart Cover requires about as much space as the Air does, without counting the Surface+kickstand behind it, and that's without considering all the time I spend using one on the couch). It has a better keyboard, and a MUCH MUCH better trackpad. And it's a well-designed all-one-piece, compared with the Rube Goldberg contraption that's the Surface.

Fair disclosure: I'm one of the people who thought for many years that Apple would never come out with a tablet, and argued against it at every opportunity. But that's because I pictured something like the Surface, or the decade's worth of tablet failures on the Windows side - not something like the iPad, which is a tablet done *right*.

Well... being a technogeek myself, I got one, and it's everything I want of a tablet. The battery life is borderline acceptable, and it's a compromise I can live with. Since I like this unit, I suspect an OSX based device would be better.
That's not to say that those that like the iPad are wrong, but it's not for me. Different strokes for different folks.

This post has been edited by ingus: 12 February 2013 - 03:04 PM