Horace Dediu:
This analysis helped me conclude the Apple Watch overtook the historic “peak iPod” which occurred in the fourth quarter of 2007 at $4 billion. My Watch revenue estimate was $4.2 billion in the fourth quarter of 2018.
[…]
Looking forward to the next quarter, I am expecting a 51% increase y/y for Wearables and 24% growth in Watch. This results in a Watch revenues about $5.2 billion and non-Watch $5.7 billion. Now if we assume $1.7 billion for non-Watch-non-AirPods (i.e. Apple TV, HomePod, Beats, iPod, other) then this quarter AirPods will have overtaken peak iPod.
Update (2020-01-08): Kevin Rooke:
Imagine a startup with $12 billion of revenue, 125%+ YoY revenue growth (two years in a row), and Apple-esque gross margins (30-50%). Without knowing anything else about the business, what would you value it at? $50 billion? $100 billion? More?
That’s Apple’s AirPods business, the fastest-growing segment of the world’s most valuable company.
[…]
This is what AirPods revenue looks like compared to some of the world’s top tech companies. AirPods make as much money as Spotify, Twitter, Snap, and Shopify combined.
Neil Cybart (Hacker News):
AirPods revenue does not exceed Spotify, Twitter, Snapchat, and Shopify revenue. It’s not even close either.
[…]
Not surprisingly, nearly every financial metric found in this screenshot is wrong. The assumptions about AirPods sales mix are wrong too.
Update (2020-01-10): Jason Snell:
So when you read about Tim Cook emphasizing Services and Wearables to financial analysts or in a quick interview on CNBC come January 28—this is why. In less than half a decade, Services and Wearables have gone from afterthoughts to a third of Apple’s business.
AirPods Apple Apple Watch Business iPod
Joe Rossignol:
Apple plans to launch a high-end iPhone without a Lightning connector in the second half of 2021, according to a new prediction from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. The device will supposedly offer a “completely wireless experience,” suggesting that Apple is not switching to USB-C, but rather dropping the port entirely.
Jason Snell:
Yes, Qi charging is a thing. I have two Qi chargers. But when you need to charge fast, wires are more effective. And when you’re out and about, how do you charge your iPhone if there’s no charging port? Are we meant to replace our external battery packs and USB chargers in cars, airports, and airplanes with inefficient Qi chargers that waste power that should be going straight to our phones?
[…]
Wireless CarPlay support was announced years ago, but the truth is, most CarPlay units still require physical connectivity to function. It’s hard to imagine Apple releasing an iPhone that is incompatible with a majority of cars, especially since it’s very hard to replace in-car entertainment systems and most people won’t buy a new car just to work with their new iPhone.
Previously:
iOS iPhone Lightning Power Qi Charging
Jack Dorsey:
Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. 🧵
twitter was so open early on that many saw its potential to be a decentralized internet standard, like SMTP (email protocol). For a variety of reasons, all reasonable at the time, we took a different path and increasingly centralized Twitter. But a lot’s changed over the years…
First, we’re facing entirely new challenges centralized solutions are struggling to meet. For instance, centralized enforcement of global policy to address abuse and misleading information is unlikely to scale over the long-term without placing far too much burden on people.
[…]
Finally, new technologies have emerged to make a decentralized approach more viable. Blockchain points to a series of decentralized solutions for open and durable hosting, governance, and even monetization.
Dave Winer:
I advocate something different, Twitter already has the bugs and scaling issues solved for a global notification network. Let’s add a few APIs and create a new universe. It’ll happen a lot faster with much better results imho.
[…]
Had they proposed such a standard when they were starting Twitter, no one would have cared, and it would have had a chance of working. Now it’s a huge industry with lots at stake and lots of entities that would like to keep it from standardizing.
Loren Brichter (via John Gruber):
What’s the downside to letting the Twitter API as it stands be v1.0? Let third parties implement it, clients could connect to any compatible service, communication between services would evolve as needs evolve, you end up with something designed naturally (see HTML5 vs XHTML).
Manton Reece (Hacker News):
Twitter isn’t necessarily interested in decentralizing content or even identity on their platform. Why would they be? Their business is based around having all your tweets in one place.
Rather, it sounds like they want to “outsource curation to shared protocols” and not have to deal with the messy stuff.
Nick Heer:
This is a spitball at this stage — barely more than a napkin sketch. There might be something to show for it, sometime, in some capacity, but there’s a lot of buzzwords in this announcement without any product. That suggests a high likelihood of vapourware to me.
Previously:
Bluesky Twitter Web Web API
Anil Dash (Hacker News):
We don’t even notice it anymore — “link in bio”. It’s a pithy phrase, usually found on Instagram, which directs an audience to be aware that a pertinent web link can be found on that user’s profile. Its presence is so subtle, and so pervasive, that we barely even noticed it was an attempt to kill the web.
[…]
With billions of people using the major social platforms, and the people who remember a pre-social-media web increasing in age while decreasing as cultural force on the internet, we’re rapidly losing fluency in what the internet could look like. We’re almost forgotten that links are powerful, and that restraining links through artificial scarcity is an absurdly coercive behavior.
Instagram Web
