In J.D. Power’s 2016 Smartwatch Device Satisfaction survey, Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) new smartwatch was the only device in the category earning five out of five of the J.D. Power’s “Power Circle” ratings. Second-place Samsung earned just two of five Power Circle ratings.
It is common practice to add the top two boxes, which demonstrate satisfaction with the product, in customer satisfaction ratings. When doing so, we arrive at a 97 percent customer satisfaction level for the Apple Watch.
The survey, to an expanded panel of customers, shows that Apple Watch owners are, for the most part, still satisfied with their watches, to the tune of 96%.
Apple shipped 4 percent to 8 percent fewer Mac computers during the second quarter of 2016, compared with a year earlier, according to new estimates from two research firms – even while some of its bigger rivals managed to find growth in the PC business.
This is a notable turn from the past few years when PC sales were slumping while Mac sales were relatively healthy and growing, even if only modestly:
Apple enjoyed eight consecutive quarters of year-on-year Mac sales increases before posting a 4 percent drop in units sold during the last three months of 2015. That was followed by a 12 percent drop in the first quarter of this year.
Another take is from these guys (to whom I am usually hesitant to link):
Apple’s line of Mac computers is not selling as well as it used to and the company needs to launch a new laptop in order to turn the business around.
The prescription to “launch a new laptop” is likely valid, sort of echoed on a recent episode of The Talk Show by John Gruber and Marco Arment when they discussed the lack of updates to several models, especially the Mac Pro.
I’m not sure why Apple has been waiting so long to refresh their better computers. Maybe they underestimated demand for the new MacBook, their lower-end consumer grade models, which they focused on early this year and last. Even a company as large as Apple does not have unlimited bandwidth to work on all these things at once, I suppose. Rumors of a new MacBook Pro with an “OLED display touch bar” above the keyboard are bouncing around now, so maybe something is imminent.
In early 2015, before the launch of the watch, Quartz ran a similar survey, asking iPhone owners if they planned to buy one. Only about 5% of owners thought it very likely they’d buy a watch in the next 12 months. A little over a year later, not too much has changed: Only about 8% of those surveyed this time said they owned an Apple Watch.
So… now 8% of those surveyed are interested in buying an Apple Watch, up from 5% over a year ago. Despite it likely being a $6 billion business, “still no one wants to buy an Apple Watch.”
When Apple refused to unlock a cellphone used by one of the San Bernardino terrorists (and owned by his public employer), many in the tech industry came to the company’s defense. They argued, in effect, that they shouldn’t be forced to cooperate with a search warrant for one of their products, even though failure to comply could put more innocent lives at risk.
And:
Google, Facebook, Snapchat and WhatsApp are all working to increase encryption in ways that will make it impossible for the courts and law-enforcement officials to obtain their users’ data. They argue that if they are forced to comply with government requests for data, terrorists will simply choose open-source encryption apps instead.
Bloomberg continues, framing this in terms of only one side of the issue:
Yet Apple responded to the investigation with a troubling announcement: In the future, phones will be designed to prevent even Apple from opening them, just as the makers of some messaging services have already done. Such a move would be an unprecedented rejection of public authority and a potentially catastrophic blow to public safety. The prospect of criminals and terrorists communicating with phones beyond the reach of government search warrants should send a shiver down the spine of every citizen.
Yes, anyone can use existing technologies to encrypt communications. But by ignoring the other aspect of this, which is that, um, anyone can use existing technologies to encrypt communications (including personal data, banking, resisting oppressive regimes, etc.), all of us have security we can actually trust. This has huge benefits for society.
It is indeed a double-edged sword. And when that is the nature of any heavy topic, it is one of the hardest concepts for people to accept. It’s truly damned-if-you-do-or-don’t.
I believe Bloomberg is sincere and thinks that the need to spy on potential terrorists outweighs the interest society has to rely on encryption. But what is Bloomberg offering specifically in terms of how to move forward? Not a damn thing. And the general concept he argues is to trust the government and effectively live without encryption, which is another step to becoming a police state.
But merely the recognition from Congress that it needs to learn more before making any decision on the thorny topic of encryption represents progress, says privacy-focused Cato Institute fellow Julian Sanchez. “That may be the most hopeful sign. The dangerous thing is to be… too ignorant to recognize your own ignorance,” he says. Now, he says, “there seems to be willingness to learn, rather than an insistence on getting to what they ‘know’ is the right outcome.”
In my opinion, one of the biggest problems in society is the polarization that is occurring because people can choose what they want to believe, largely stoked by electronic media, aka The Internet. From Wired, “Benghazi Report Shows the Internet Is Killing Objectivity”:
It is the beauty and the tragedy of the Internet age. As it becomes easier for anyone to build their own audience, it becomes harder for those audience members to separate fact from fiction from the gray area in between. As media consumers, we now have the freedom to self-select the truth that most closely resembles our existing beliefs, which makes our media habits fairly good indicators of our political beliefs.
People on the left and the right always want to rush to proclaim how the other side is wrong, corrupt, stupid, untrustworthy, whatever. How many people will actually read this 800-page report? How many will read that as well as previous findings? How many have even a little knowledge of military operations to understand what options were feasible, what intelligence could have been clear and what may have been unclear, the timeline, the geographical and logistical issues involved, etc.? Then, how many will try to sift through all of that and actually try to determine where responsibility for this tragedy lies? My guess is almost no one has because it actually takes effort and time. Yet everyone in the media and on your favorite social networking site will talk endless shit about it.
We should feel comfortable voicing an informed opinion. But an uninformed opinion is irresponsible. We should have no qualms admitting that we don’t know enough to comment on something when we have not done the research.
You need a break from everything else today. Peruse the historical badasses at the Adventure Journal, a group that is, by the way, well-populated with women adventurers. For example, Emma Gatewood, three-time Appalachian Trail thru-hiker, sixth person and first woman to complete it, whose first time was in 1955 when she was 67 years old:
I would never have started this trip if I had known how tough it was, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t quit.
