MG Siegler is a general partner at CrunchFund and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. His focus is on Apple.
Prior to TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat.
Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where he worked in web development. He also writes at his own blog, ParisLemon, and tweets a lot.
He now lives in San Francisco.
In a few weeks, Apple will unveil the next generation iPad, John Packowski of AllThingsD confirms today. If history (and carrier code) is any indication, it should go on sale shortly after that. Maybe even just a few days later. And that’s interesting because it doesn’t give developers a lot of time to prepare. And they’ll want to prepare for the higher resolution “Retina” display that the device will pack.
The situation is similar to the Summer of 2010. That year at WWDC, Apple unveiled the iPhone 4, the first device to feature a Retina display. That conference took place on June 7. The iPhone 4 first went on sale on June 24 — two and a half weeks later. That timeframe allowed some developers to get their apps Retina-ready, but for many it took quite a bit longer. Again, this year, the window may be even more condensed. → Read More
Yesterday, Gizmodo ran a story about a supposed bug in iOS, specifically related to iMessage. The title: The Apple Bug That Let Us Spy on a Total Stranger’s iPhone. Essentially, Gizmodo got ahold of an iPhone that was receiving iMessages not intended for that phone. The fact that some of these messages were quasi-sexual in nature and that the phone belonged to a teenage boy made the story more salacious. But here’s the thing, fear mongering aside, this “bug” is something that is so convoluted that it’s almost not worth even addressing. Almost.
Here’s what happened: a kid was having trouble with his iPhone. His mother took that iPhone to an Apple Store. When there, an Apple Store employee screwed up. Rather than following protocol and using a test SIM to debug the phone (Apple has test SIMs in their stores for this exact purpose), he oddly used his own SIM. This essentially turned the kid’s phone into the retail employee’s phone. The employee probably thought this was fine since it would only be temporary while he fixed the phone. The problem — which one has to assume he didn’t realize — is that even after you take the SIM out of the phone, the pairing leaves behind an imprint of that SIM. In this case, the iMessage account. → Read More
When Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld in 1998, he did something unusual. For the first time in any presentation he had ever given, he ended with a slide reading, “Oh, and one more thing…” This phrase would of course enter the Apple lexicon in the subsequent years. But what was it that was hidden behind this first “one more thing”?
“Think Profit.”
You see, Jobs had just been named interim CEO in September 1997 after successfully pushing out the man who brought him (back) in, Gil Amelio. And he had good reason to do that: under Amelio, Apple had lost $1.04 billion in the prior year and was less than ninety days from being completely broke. Just a few months later, as he announced on stage, Jobs had the company back in black: a $45 million profit — the first profit the company had seen in more than two years.
→ Read More
$46.33 billion in revenue. It’s a number the biggest and best tech companies in the world can only dream to hit in a year. Apple hit it in one quarter. $13.06 billion in profit. It’s a number no tech company would ever aspire to in one quarter because it’s ridiculous. The only companies that have ever thought about such numbers are oil companies. And even then, only 3 of them have actually hit it. Ever.
Until yesterday.
I’ve already tried to give some context to the stunning Q1 2012 results that Apple posted. But the truth is that they’re still unbelievable. Perhaps the next step should be to figure out how they could post such numbers. → Read More
Simply looking over the numbers, it might be hard to wrap your head around what Apple just announced for their Q1 2012 results. A company this big is not supposed to be able to nearly double revenue year-to-year. Nor are they supposed to more than double profit. But Apple did both. The numbers are so big that they almost seem like they should be typos — especially coming after a quarter that was a “miss” (though we can now clearly see what a joke that “miss” was). So perhaps it’s best to point out some bigger numbers and to frame some of them in ways to make them easier to understand. That’s what all of Twitter seemed to be doing anyway during the earnings call this afternoon.
Apple’s profit of $13.1 billion was equal to their revenue in Q4 2010, as Jordan Golson notes. To be clear, that was just a year and a quarter ago. That’s how quickly Apple is growing.
→ Read More
As I watched Apple’s iBooks event in New York City last week, my mind began to race about the ramifications of such announcements. Everyone had a pretty good idea for weeks (or months if you read the Steve Jobs biography) that textbooks would be a focal point for Apple, but there wasn’t much thought given to what this would mean. During the event itself, I just kept thinking, “wow, Apple just incentivized every college student to get an iPad”.
Except, they didn’t. Not yet. → Read More
Today at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Apple held an event to talk about two key things: “Reinventing textbooks” and “Reinventing curriculum”. But perhaps lost amid the tentpole announcements (iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and the all-new iTunes U) were some subtleties of those products and Apple’s plans for the education space.
Among them: → Read More
With the deep inclusion of Google+ into Search, Google is tempting fate. We’ve been over this. A lot. And this story is going to continue for some time to come. It sure looks like Google is almost asking for an inquiry into potentially anti-competitive practices (and it’s coming). Which is insane. So the next logical question is why? Why is Google risking so much to do this?
My colleague Eric had a very interesting theory earlier. Maybe Google’s real motive is to get the government to also look into Facebook’s often-unfair practices with regard to their network ahead of their IPO. If social and not search is indeed the future, call this pre-subversion. And if there’s any shred of truth to this theory, more power to Google — it’s rather genius (though still extremely risky).
But the more likely answer as to why Google is doing Search+ is much simpler. At a high level, they believe social elements are going to be an extremely important part of search going forward. Given that the two biggest players in social, Facebook and Twitter, don’t give them full access to their data (Twitter used to but the relationship ended, Facebook never did), Google is doing the only thing they can in their minds to still get the data they need: bolster Google+. → Read More
On October 19 of last year I wrote a post entitled: If You Sold Your Apple Stock Today, You’re An Idiot. Because their Q4 numbers missed Wall Street expectations, Apple’s stock dropped over 5 percent on that day, to close below $400-a-share after hitting an all-time high just days before. My argument was that it was the Wall Street expectations that were horribly flawed, not Apple’s actual performance. And the stock would recover quickly as a result leading up to their Q1 earnings, which even Apple was predicting would be a blow out.
Reading the comments on that post — which I love to do — you’d think I was saying something insane. When the stock fell to $363 right after Thanksgiving, a few remembered the post and once again pointed out the irrational insanity of this fanboy. But then a funny thing happened yesterday. Apple’s stock closed at a new all-time high. → Read More
Are you ready for CES? I know I am. The PR emails are flowing in and I’m going to respond to every single one of them. I can’t wait to hear about Samsung’s social media stuff. And Vizio’s new thingy. I can’t wait to get my hands on that one thing made by those guys who did that other thing last year that no one bought. It’s gonna be fantastic. So pumped.
…
No, I’m not going to CES. I’ve never been to CES. I doubt I’ll ever go to CES. Why would I? → Read More
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…
Those words seem to encapsulate Apple’s 2011 perfectly. The year saw the company both became the most valuable company in the world and lose its founder, savior, visionary, and leader.
Earlier, Erick published his roundup of the bigger stories and themes in tech this year. Topping that list is the passing of Steve Jobs, a story so big that it far transcended typical tech news. But even without that sad news, 2011 was all about Apple. There was certainly enough news to constitute its own roundup. So here we go. → Read More
The past few days, there’s been a lot of talk about web browsers. The report that Google will be paying Mozilla close to one billion dollars over the next three years to ensure that their search engine remains the default for Firefox is fascinating for a few reasons. The biggest is that Google now makes a Firefox competitor, Chrome. And it got me thinking about Safari.
Remember Safari?
While Chrome has skyrocketed from 0 percent market share in August 2008 to over 25 percent last month, Apple’s web browser lingers somewhere between 5 and 8 percent, depending on what numbers you look at. While its growth seemed to stall out in late 2008/early 2009, Safari has been growing again since then. But it has been at a very slow, methodical pace compared to the Google browser. → Read More
Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open.
Every chance they get, someone from Google brings this up as a huge advantage of Android over rivals like iOS. Never mind the fact that a good percentage of the time it’s pure marketing bullshit — why exactly isn’t Google Wallet on Google’s own Galaxy Nexus device? — even when it’s true, there are some very real downsides. The user experience angle has been debated ad nauseam. More interesting is what we’re seeing now. A downside for Google.
Amazon’s Kindle Fire runs on Android, but nothing about it is Google’s Android. It doesn’t look like Android and it doesn’t feature Google’s own apps. That has to annoy Google, but something exposed the other day must truly piss them off: the Kindle Fire redirects all Android Market requests to Amazon’s Appstore. That includes all attempts to go to market.android.com even when the Fire’s accelerated browsing (routed through Amazon’s servers) is turned off. → Read More
You have to hand it to Google. They know that I prefer Apple products and have been generally critical of many Google moves in the past couple of years. And yet, they’re unafraid to give me their newest products to test out. To be honest, I’m not sure Apple would do the same. But I think this is a smart move on Google’s part. On one hand, they may get a negative review but they know that many will discount the negativity coming from me. On the flip side, if it’s positive: gravy train time.
Thus: my thoughts on the Galaxy Nexus. But before I begin…
Rather than do a full-on review — you’ve probably already seen plenty of those — and given that I now write an Apple-centric column for TechCrunch, I figured it was the perfect opportunity to continue my “An iPhone Lover’s Take…” series. For some background, here are my previous stories from the same angle on the Nexus One, the HTC EVO 4G, the Nexus S, a Windows Phone, and even the iPhone 4. → Read More
“Six months from now you’ll say the opposite. Because ultimately applications vendors are driven by volume. And the volume is favored by the open approach that Google is taking.”
That was Google Chairman Eric Schmidt speaking at LeWeb a couple days ago. Specifically, he was addressing a question from the audience wondering why most big application developers are still choosing to develop for the iOS platform first instead of Android.
First of all, if you haven’t watched Schmidt’s entire talk with Loic Le Meur yet, you really should. They cover a range of topics important to both Google and the broader tech space. Plus, it will avoid the small situation that arose yesterday when Schmidt was misquoted, making him sound much more arrogant about the Android platform than he actually was. → Read More
In my home office sits a 27-inch iMac with a secondary 24-inch LED Cinema Display attached to it. It’s a glorious vision of screen real estate.
And yet, I dread using it.
First world problem? It’s perhaps the definition of the term. But it’s true. I’m sitting here on a couch adjacent to my desk because I’d rather type this post on my MacBook Air. To be completely honest, I’d rather be using my iPad right now. But I must admit, it doesn’t come anywhere close to cutting it when it comes to typing more than a few dozen words. So for now, the MacBook Air exists as the pinnacle of personal computing in my eyes. → Read More
What exactly is a PC? That question is likely to become a hot topic over the next few years.
Originally, we thought of PCs as the Apple II or then the IBM PC. They were machines that had to sit on a desk because, while significantly smaller than a mainframe, they were still big and bulky. They had large monitors, boxy bases, and big keyboards. The original Macintosh attempted to make this footprint a bit smaller and the package more compact, but the IBM clones won the day. Windows won the day. PCs by Compaq and HP led to machines by Gateway and Dell. Boxy bases were joined by massive towers. Bigger seemed better. Small monitors were replaced by huge monitors. Then something changed.
While laptops had existed in various forms for years, by the mid 2000s, the prices, performance, and size made them viable “desktop replacements”. They were different enough from traditional PCs that they had their own name, and people thought of them differently. But eventually, as they started to dominate the market, people just began thinking of laptops as PCs as well. They were, after all, personal computers.
→ Read More
Like everyone else in the tech world, I’ve been reading Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography. Simultaneously, I’ve been reading the reactions to it. The one that seems to stand out above all others amounts to: “wow, Steve Jobs was a jerk”. Those who have followed Apple closely throughout the years have heard dozens if not hundreds of stories of Jobs berating employees. Isaacson’s book brings a handful of these stories to the masses, and it’s rubbing some people the wrong way.
Here’s the thing: the tech world could probably use more jerks.
I’ve been thinking about this since reading Robert Scoble’s post a couple days ago entitled “Why I’m treating startups more critically lately“. Depending on who you ask, Scoble is a lot of things. But I don’t think anyone would call Scoble a jerk. In fact, most would probably say he has the opposite problem. He tends to puff up startups into thinking they’re the best thing in the world. (A social network for your Roomba to take pictures of food? Brilliant! Game-changing!” — Okay, I exaggerate. Slightly.) That’s great. For five minutes. After that, reality often sets in. → Read More
Earlier today, my colleague Matt Burns wrote a post noting that most tablet makers may be largely failing because they’ve sold their soul to Android and are now just in the middle of a spec war, which no one can win. I’m gonna go one step further in that line of thinking: the spec is dead.
There have been a few key stories from the past couple of weeks that highlight this new reality. Barnes & Noble unveiled the new Nook Tablet. Consumer Reports looked at the iPhone 4S. And the first reviews came in about the Kindle Fire. → Read More
The year was 2008. I was at an event focused on mobile, sitting in on a roundtable discussion with several folks from key companies in the industry. One gentleman was from Adobe. The iPhone had launched the previous year, famously without any support for Flash. A lot of folks were up in arms about this — including several at this table. The guy from Adobe assured everyone: mobile Flash would be coming soon. And it was going to be wonderful. The notion that Apple wouldn’t include it on the iPhone because of performance issues was pure hogwash.
The same thing was said in 2009.
The same thing was said in 2010.
The same thing was still being said in 2011. → Read More
