Reuters:

Shares in Samsung Electronics Co slumped more than 6 percent on Wednesday, wiping $10 billion off the electronics giant’s market value, on a report that Apple placed huge chip orders with troubled Japanese chip rival Elpida.

Taiwan’s DigiTimes, an online trade news site, reported that Apple recently placed large mobile dynamic random access memory (DRAM) orders with Elpida’s 12-inch plant in Hiroshima, Japan, securing around half the facilities total chip production. It cited unnamed industry sources in its report, which hit shares of major chip suppliers to Apple.

This highlights the bizarre relationship between Apple and Samsung, where in the consumer space they’re direct competitors (arguably even arch rivals — they’re the only two companies turning a significant profit in the handset industry), but behind the scenes in Samsung’s component supplier business, Apple is their most important customer. I suspect this is what investors are reacting to. It’s not about one order of DRAM; it’s about concern that Samsung is going to lose Apple as a component customer across the board.

Funny, too, that this would happen the day after Harry McCracken’s epic DigiTimes fact-checking piece. I question anything DigiTimes reports. I’d double-check if they told me today is Wednesday. But regardless of whether the report is actually true, it is true that Samsung’s stock price took a dive because of it.

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Casey Johnston, reporting for Ars Technica:

One developer can do business with nearly 4,000 distinct Android ROMs, according to data posted by the creators of OpenSignalMaps on Tuesday. […]

The developers logged 3,997 distinct devices, the most popular of which was the Samsung Galaxy S II. This figure was inflated quite a bit by custom ROMs, which overwrite the android.build.MODEL variable and cause those phones to be logged as separate devices. 1,363 types were logged only once, and while some were custom ROMs bucking the numbers, a good few were just massively unpopular devices — for example, the Hungarian 10.1-inch Concorde Tab.

The Hungarian 10.1-Inch Concorde Tab is my new favorite Android device name.

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iOS has evolved in a fairly predictable manner over the years. Apple has done a good job tackling the lowest-hanging fruit on the to-do list, year after year. They crossed off a lot of big obvious features over the first few years: third-party apps, cut-copy-paste, enterprise support, push notifications, better multitasking. Last year brought a few more: over-the-air software updates, cloud-based backups and wireless syncing, and a much improved notification interface.

Another good source for iOS feature predictions has been to survey the competition and identify the areas where iOS was lacking. Those items from last year, for example, were areas where Android was ahead.

iOS is by no means feature-complete. But it’s getting harder to identify the low-hanging fruit — the things you just know Apple has to be working on, not just the stuff you hope they are. The biggest one left is mapping. Today brings a report from 9to5Mac that Apple is set to switch the back-end data in iOS’s Maps app from Google to its own mapping services; John Paczkowski confirms it, quoting a source who claims the new Maps will “blow your head off”.

Here’s the thing. Apple’s homegrown mapping data has to be great.

Mapping is an essential phone feature. It’s one of those few features that almost everyone with an iPhone uses, and often relies upon. That’s why Apple has to do their own — they need to control essential technology.¹ I suspect Apple would be pushing to do their own maps even if their relationship with Google were still hunky-dory, as it was circa 2007. (Remember Eric Schmidt coming on stage during the iPhone introduction?) But as things actually stand today between Apple and Google, relying on Google for mapping services is simply untenable.

This is a high-pressure switch for Apple. Regressions will not be acceptable. The purported whiz-bang 3D view stuff might be great, but users are going to have pitchforks and torches in hand if practical stuff like driving and walking directions are less accurate than they were with Google’s data. Keep in mind too, that Android phones ship with turn-by-turn navigation.

What else remains hanging low on the iOS new-features tree, though? I can think of a few:

• Clever inter-application communication. Seems crazy that iOS, the direct descendant of NeXT, doesn’t have anything like Services, which were one of NeXT’s most touted features (and rightfully so). It’s also worth noting that Android has a pretty good Services-esque system in place, called “Intents”, and Windows 8 has an even richer concept called “Contracts”.

• Third-party Notification Center widgets. Like the Stocks and Weather ones from Apple — information at a glance, without launching an app.

• Third-party Siri APIs. Let other apps provide features you can interact with through Siri.

But that’s about it. And even the Siri API idea seems more like a “nice to have” feature idea than a low-hanging “Apple really has to do this sooner or later” idea. Again, I’m not saying Apple’s iOS to-do list is empty; I’m just saying the list of obvious they-gotta-do-it stuff is getting short.

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One year ago, HTC was flying high:

HTC reports that net profits blasted up to $504 million, a 197 percent increase from the previous year. Revenues were in the $3.5 billion range and the company shipped 9.7 million handsets, a 192 percent increase over Q1 of last year.

One month later, HTC announced support for open bootloaders:

“There has been overwhelmingly customer feedback that people want access to open bootloaders on HTC phones. I want you to know that we’ve listened. Today, I’m confirming we will no longer be locking the bootloaders on our devices. Thanks for your passion, support and patience,” Peter Chou, CEO of HTC.

I think it’s safe to assume that the “customers” and “people” who wanted access to open bootloaders did not include the executives at major mobile carriers.

Flash forward to one month ago. HTC is no longer flying so high:

Net income before tax in Q1 2012 was NT$5,551 million (approximately $180 million), while net income after tax came in at NT$4,464 million (roughly $151 million). That’s a staggering 70 percent decline compared to net profits the company booked in the same period last year.

As Horace Dediu so ably documents, HTC is not alone in seeing its handset profits dwindle. The difference between HTC and companies like Nokia, RIM, LG, and Sony is that, as of a year ago, HTC was still seeing its share of the industry’s profits rise. The others have, since 2007, mostly seen their share of the industry’s profits fall.

Which brings us to today, and HTC’s new flagship phone, the One X on AT&T:

Yesterday, MoDaCo noticed that the bootloader on the AT&T version of the HTC One X was locked and that HTC’s online tool for unlocking it didn’t work. We reached out to HTC on the matter, it it looks as though the smartphone will not be participating in HTC’s bootloader unlocking program. […]

It seems pretty clear that AT&T is behind the “restrictions” here.

I’d say it seems pretty clear HTC is now listening to a different set of “customers”.

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Alexis Madrigal, writing for The Atlantic, calls the 11.9 million iPads sold last quarter “The One Fly in the Apple-Earnings Ointment”:

So, let’s call attention to the one key area where Apple didn’t beat estimates: iPad sales. Analysts were estimating about 13 million units sold, although the range seemed to go from about 9 million to about 15 million units. Turns out that apple sold 11.9 million iPads in the last quarter.

That’s a ton of tablets and it’s a massive year-over-year increase, but we’ve been talking about iPads as if they were the future of computing. Yet in a quarter with a new iPad launch, Apple managed to sell 12 million units worldwide. I don’t want to overpredict based on one number, but I’ve had a nagging sense from my own spotty iPad usage that the devices may remain a luxury. They don’t quite replace your computer and they’re not as mobile as your phone. What if the incredibly enthusiastic, urban, travel-all-the-time iPad early adopters actually have very different needs from the broader mobile computing market? What if beyond the perfect world travelers, the price is just too high for what you get? What if the upgrade cycle is going to be much, much slower than for phones?

It’s a severe mistake to get this caught up in analyst predictions. You will miss the forest for the tree-growth projections. The difference between Apple having sold 12 million iPads versus 13 million iPads is, at worst, the difference between great and really great. In fact, I’d say it’s more like the difference between really great and really really great.

Think about how Tim Cook put iPad sales in context during Apple’s conference call yesterday:

“Just two years after we shipped the initial iPad, we’ve sold 67 million. To put that in some context, it took us 24 years to sell that many Macs, and five years for that many iPods, and over three years for that many iPhones, and we were extremely happy with the trajectory on all of those products.”

The original iPhone shipped at the end of June 2007. Two years (and a few weeks) later, Apple announced its Q3 2009 results. They sold 5.2 million iPhones that quarter. The very next quarter, Apple sold 7.4 million iPhones — at the time, the highest quarterly sales number for the iPhone to date.¹

Two years after shipping the original iPad, Apple just sold 11.9 million iPads. And that’s after selling 15.4 million iPads during the previous (holiday) quarter. Comparing those numbers to the iPhone circa 2009 is far more interesting and instructive than comparing them to the 13-million-unit analyst consensus.

Now, if a well-informed analyst truly had reason to believe Apple would sell 13 million iPads during the quarter and they only sold 12, it is fair to say that’s “disappointing”, insofar as 12 is less than 13. And perhaps, over the next year or two, Madrigal’s “nagging sense” will prove correct, and iPad sales growth will taper off.

But this 11.9 million unit quarter is anything but a sign of such tapering. And, according to Tim Cook (again, from yesterday’s conference call):

“But I’d also point out that the new iPad was supply constrained last quarter for the full three weeks or so that it was shipping and is actually still constrained.”

Which means Apple sold new iPads as fast as they could make them. If you believe this 11.9 million unit sale number deserves to be called “disappointing”, you should be disappointed only by Apple’s inability to manufacture them faster. Other than that, there simply is no bad news for Apple in these results.

In short, the evidence to date suggests not that the iPad is another iPhone-esque success for Apple, but that the iPad is an even greater success than the iPhone.

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Last week, after asking DF readers to report if they identified Macs infected with the Flashback drive-by attack and getting about a dozen or so positive responses, I wrote:

Via email and public Twitter replies, I’ve seen reports from about a dozen or so DF readers who’ve been hit by this. And they all seem like typical DF readers — sophisticated, experienced, if not downright expert Mac users. It’s not an epidemic, but it’s definitely real, and insidious.

On Twitter, Ed Bott gave me grief:

So @gruber says FlashBack is “not an epidemic, but it’s definitely real, and insidious.” Erm, 600K infections. Not an epidemic. All righty.

Which raises the question: What qualifies as an “epidemic”? Here’s a 2009 Slate story by Michelle Tsai and Brendan Koerner, regarding swine flu:

The CDC’s official definition of an epidemic is: “The occurrence of more cases of disease than expected in a given area or among a specific group of people over a particular period of time.” Since some diseases become more prevalent or lethal over time, while others become less severe, the CDC must adjust its statistical models to alter the definition of what’s truly more than expected.

Computer malware and human disease are an apples-to-oranges comparison if I’ve ever seen one, but that definition from the CDC strikes me as apt for malware. Evidence collected by several researchers consistently pegs the number of Flashback-infected Macs at about 600,000, which is about 1 percent of the total active installed base:

With 600,000 infections in a user base of 60-70 million, that means roughly 1% of all Macs worldwide have been hit by this thing, which is capable of downloading additional malware at will. […]

By comparison, the single largest Windows-based infection ever was Conficker. At its peak in 2009, it infected 7 million PCs, or about 0.7% of the total Windows installed base.

I’d say a Mac malware outbreak that is more common, on a percentage basis, than the largest-ever Windows infection¹ is without question more cases than expected, and thus, I was wrong: epidemic is indeed the right word. Cause for hysteria? No. But an epidemic? Yes.

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Good piece from Sebastiaan de With, riffing on my bit last week regarding the tension between simplicity and obviousness. But I gently disagree with this:

For now, there is a middle ground. It only takes one look at the changes in recent iOS and Apple app updates to see that Apple is actually beginning to use gestures far more widely throughout the system, as well as actively reducing chrome where the content is the most important thing — like the Camera app. Apple doesn’t, however, completely hide its UI and leave it up to the user to ‘discover’ it. With its user base so large and (largely) untrained, it simply doesn’t have that luxury. It has to start somewhere. Tap the camera icon on the ‘sliding camera’ home screen in iOS 5.1 to see what I mean. That’s Apple educating its users.

Apple has started using gestures more widely, but they’re not requiring them. (iPhoto for iOS being a notable and perhaps problematic exception.) That’s why I like the analogy that gestures are to iOS what keyboard shortcuts are to Mac OS — an alternative way to do something as a convenience for advanced users. The default, true way to do things should be visual. So, yes, you can switch between apps on the iPad with a four-finger swipe, or go to the home screen with a four-finger pinch, but users who don’t know about these gestures — which is to say most users — can do things the obvious way, by tapping the hardware Home button once, then tapping the icon of the app they want to open.

The sliding camera button on the iOS 5.1 home screen is a perfect example of Apple favoring obviousness over simplicity and even elegance.

First, consider the problem. Many, if not most, iPhone users now rely on their iPhone as their primary camera. Often when we see something we want to take a picture of, time is of the essence — the moment is fleeting. In iOS 1 through 4, it took too long to get to the Camera app from the lock screen, especially if you lock your iPhone with a numeric code (let alone if you lock it with a passphrase). Too often, by the time one unlocked their phone and then found and tapped the Camera app icon and waited for the camera to be ready to shoot, it was too late; the moment had passed.

Apple’s solution with iOS 5.0: a shortcut to the Camera app directly from the lock screen, which you can invoke without unlocking the phone. (When invoked this way, you have no access to previously-taken photos; all you can do is snap new pictures.) That jump-to-the-camera button wasn’t visible by default, however. When you tapped the Home or Sleep/Wake button to turn on the display, all you saw was the same old “slide to unlock” screen from iOS 1-4. To get the camera button to appear, you needed to double-tap the Home button while on the lock screen. I presume that Apple went with this design to preserve the utter simplicity and elegance of the lock screen — by default, there’s nothing but the “slide to unlock” button.

The problem with this design is that there was nothing obvious about double-tapping the home button to get the camera button shortcut to appear. It was not discoverable. Double-anything is generally problematic usability-wise — consider how many people you know who remain confused about single- vs. double-clicking mouse buttons on the Mac and Windows.¹ In fact, I did not discover this shortcut myself. I was excited about the feature when Steve Jobs mentioned it on stage at the WWDC keynote in which iOS 5 was announced. I installed the iOS 5 developer beta on my main iPhone soon thereafter. When I didn’t see the camera button shortcut on the lock screen, I presumed that the feature hadn’t yet been implemented in the first developer beta. Weeks later when the second beta shipped and I still didn’t see the jump-to-camera button, I asked a friend and then got the answer: you had to double-tap the Home button to reveal it.

I only found it because I knew it was supposed to be there. I suspect most iPhone users never found that button. So, in iOS 5.1, Apple changed it to an always-visible button on the lock screen. A reduction in elegance, but an increase in obviousness. To invoke the button, you must slide it upwards rather than simply tap it, for the same reason you must slide the unlock button rather than simply tap it: to avoid inadvertent invocation while the phone is in your pocket or purse. But if you do just tap on it, which is an obvious thing to try, you get a clever hint: the lock screen playfully jumps and bounces, suggesting visually that you can slide it upward. It’s not a gesture — you can’t swipe upwards from anywhere on the lock screen to invoke the shortcut — it’s a visual on-screen touch control. And it’s one of my favorite little touches from Apple in recent memory.

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