When the iPhone 4S was announced and was shown not to be LTE capable, a lot of the tech press and blogosphere were up in arms that this was going to damage Apple, since both Android and Windows Phone 7 were rolling out lots of models that were 4G/LTE capable. Apple was doomed™!

Well, not so much. So far Apple hasn’t been hurt in the least by not having LTE on the iPhone 4S. (LTE stands for “Long Term Evolution,” and is a faster and more efficient use of cellular bandwidth. It’s not exactly the same thing as 4G, but it’s close, and the terms are often used interchangeably.) They sold 37 million iPhones in three months, or about 5 phones per second, surpassing the birth rate of the world.

So why hasn’t Apple gotten into the LTE game? There are a number of reasons, from the relative scarcity of the proper chipsets, to the fact that those chipsets aren’t yet optimized for the iPhone form factor, and the fact that LTE still doesn’t have a lot of coverage compared to 3G (and outside of the United States, where the bulk of iPhones are sold, there is even less coverage).

But the primary reason may be Apple’s overriding insistence on maximizing the quality of the user experience. One of the biggest achievements of the iPhone in all its iterations was an incredible battery life. The executives at RIM (the maker of BlackBerry phones) flat out refused to believe the iPhone could get the battery life Jobs claimed when he unveiled it.

What does this have to do with LTE/4G? Take a look at the chart below, and all will be clear.

Apple is perfectly willing to sacrifice a bit of speed in order to maximize the battery life. That’s Apple’s priority. Other manufacturers, trying to create a differentiation with their products, are pushing LTE/4G phones for those who want them.

So far it looks like the competitive advantage goes to Apple. They will have to get on the LTE bandwagon sooner or later, and I’m guessing they’re working hard right now to find the right balance between performance and battery life for the upcoming iPad 3 and iPhone 5. I’d be surprised if the iPhone 5, at least, wasn’t LTE capable, but that’s all going to depend on the engineering. If battery life is not where Apple wants it, they’ll wait another year, regardless of the outcries from the tech press that such a move will Doom™ them.

From Bloomberg:

In looking ahead to the second quarter, Apple forecast revenue of about $32.5 billion and profit of $8.50 a share. That compares with average analysts’ predictions for sales of $31.9 billion and profit of $7.96 a share.

Except for the period that ended in September 2011, when customers put off iPhone purchases in anticipation of the 4S, Apple’s profit hasexceeded analysts’ projections in every quarter for at least six years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The quarterly results mark the first time Apple’s revenue topped Hewlett-Packard’s, underscoring how the company’s focus on sleek, touch-screen mobile devices has rearranged the technology industry’s pecking order.

Apple’s net income exceeded total revenue at Google (GOOG), Apple’s largest rival in mobile operating systems, for the period.

“Those numbers are just unimaginable,” said Michael Obuchowski, chief investment officer at First Empire Asset Management, which has $4 billion under management, including Apple shares. “It’s still an extremely well-managed company and they are showing that the product pipeline is sufficient even now to generate growth rates that are unrivaled.”

Read the rest here. The largest quarterly revenue ever posted by a technology company. And this in the quarter that saw the debut of the “disappointing” iPhone 4S and the rollout of Amazon’s Kindle Fire, which was supposed to take a healthy chunk of the iPad’s dominance. (The iPad grew 111% from the same quarter the previous year.)

Apple’s continued success is simply stunning.

From Ars Technica:

Apple to announce tools, platform to “digitally destroy” textbook publishing

Apple is slated to announce the fruits of its labor on improving the use of technology in education at its special media event on Thursday, January 19. While speculation has so far centered on digital textbooks, sources close to the matter have confirmed to Ars that Apple will announce tools to help create interactive e-books—the “GarageBand for e-books,” so to speak—and expand its current platform to distribute them to iPhone and iPad users.

Along with the details we were able to gather from our sources, we also spoke to two experts in the field of digital publishing to get a clearer picture of the significance of what Apple is planning to announce.

So far, Apple has largely embraced the ePub 2 standard for its iBooks platform, though it has added a number of HTML5-based extensions to enable the inclusion of video and audio for some limited interaction. The recently-updated ePub 3 standard obviates the need for these proprietary extensions, which in some cases make iBook-formatted e-books incompatible with other e-reader platforms. Apple is expected to announce support for the ePub 3 standard for iBooks going forward.

“When you think about what Apple is doing… they are selling tens of thousands of iPads into K-12 institutions,” MacInnis told Ars. “What are they doing with those iPads? They don’t really replace textbooks, because there’s not very much content on offer,” he said.

Don’t expect that content to come directly from Apple, however. “Practically speaking, Apple does not want to get into the content publishing business,” MacInnis said. Like the music and movie industries, Apple has instead built a distribution platform as well as hardware to consume it—but Apple isn’t a record label or production studio.

But what Apple does provide is industry-leading tools for content production, such as Logic or Final Cut Pro, to help create content. The company also produces tools like GarageBand or iMovie that make such production accessible to a much wider audience.

Will Apple launch a sort of GarageBand for e-books? “That’s what we believe you’re about to see,” MacInnis told Ars (and our other sources agree). “Publishing something to ePub is very similar to publishing web content. Remember iWeb? That iWeb code didn’t just get flushed down the toilet—I think you’ll see some of [that code] repurposed.”

I’m still not sure if this means it will be easier for independents and self-publishers to get published on the iBooks platform, though. Will Apple still require independents to get their own ISBN for each book (which cost more than $100 each), or will they provide their own the way Amazon and Barnes & Noble does? Will you have to use a Mac, which is currently a requirement to use their iTunes Connect publishing portal? And the bigger question is, why, when Apple came last to the e-publishing game, have they made it harder for writers to get content on their platform?

The iBookstore itself also needs a lot of work. It’s serviceable, but that’s about as charitable as I can be. It’s “customers also bought” recommendation logic is poor compared to Amazon’s or Barnes & Noble’s. It really needs an end to end overhaul. Whether or not that’s part of this announcement remains to be seen.

Read the full article here.

The Apple event I previously discussed (hoping it was related to Apple making it easier for indie writers to publish their works on the iBookstore), now seems to be an education/textbook event. That’s not to say that there won’t be changes to iBookstore policies announced, but it is looking less likely.

There’s not much known at this point, but what few details there are you can read about at The Loop.

I just posted that Apple’s scheduled January press event in New York City would focus on competing head to head with Amazon by making it easier for self-published writers to get their works onto the iBookstore without having to go through an aggregator like Smashwords.

It seems that belief might be premature. According to Fox News’ Clayton Morris:

• This event will focus on iTunes University and Apple in education
• I learned of the event back in September when it was originally scheduled for late Fall in New York but it was eventually postponed.
• The event will be in New York rather than in the Silicon Valley because New York is more centrally located for textbook and publishing.

I have no problem with Apple going after the the education and textbook market, which is in dire need of an overhaul (as is higher education in general). But I hope that’s not all there is to this event. If they want to compete with Amazon for the self-published and indie market, they need to do a lot of work on their own platform first. Right now they simply aren’t competitive. The publishing process is too difficult, and the store itself is lacking polish and an ability to find related books that might interest readers. Amazon is fantastic at this, in a way that iTunes only wishes it could be (I don’t hate iTunes the way some do, but it’s a cumbersome mess compared to Amazon).

Guess we’ll find out in a few weeks.

The mysterious event Apple is holding later this month just got a little less mysterious.  They are apparently going to make it easier to self-publish books through their iBookstore application.

Apple is going to be holding an exclusive event in New York city later this month to possibly launch a new program for their iBooks and Publishing platform. Sources close to the matter have told us that they intend on launching a new digital self-publishing platform to get peoples content into the iBookstore. This is a huge step forward for Apple to compete with Amazon (DTP) and Barnes and Noble (Pubit).

One of the only ways to get listed into the Apple iBookstore if you are an independent author is to go through a 3rd party such as Smashwords. They assign you a free ISBN for choosing them and they will submit your books to iBooks and tons of others.

Apple will be taking a cue from the new Amazon program that gives indie authors an incentive to publish exclusively with them. There is no details yet on the actual semantics of the program and how it will work. One has to wonder on the revenue share system they will employ to be competitive with other mainstream self-publishing systems. The one thing we were told is that they will use the EPUB format and make it very easy for people to convert their documents or existing books to comply with their format.

My self-published mainstream novel Life Line is in the iBookstore (as well as Amazon Barnes & Noble, and the Sony ereader store), but I published it directly with Apple rather than Smashwords. To do so you need (a) a Mac and (b) your own ISBN number, which costs about $100. It’s a little more cumbersome than publishing with either Amazon or Barnes & Noble, so I’m also hoping that they manage to streamline and simplify the process. At the very least they should either rescind the requirement to have an ISBN for each book you publish, or provide some way for writers to easily obtain one through the iBookstore publishing process at a reduced cost.

Read the full article and comments here.

Showing once again that tech pundits have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.

Apple’s iPhone 4S has broken the previous single day pre-order record of 600,000 set by the iPhone 4. According to Apple, the iPhone 4S has been pre-ordered over one million times in just 24 hours.

One million phones in a day. Pretty impressive, I would say.

Apple releases a new phone with some serious hardware boosts and even more impressive software upgrades (Siri is almost scary cool), but because the outside isn’t different, it was thought to be “disappointing.”

Sales to consumers would beg to differ.

The 4S upgrade path followed the 3G-to-3GS upgrade path. Keep the same form factor for two years, but seriously bump the internal hardware and software. Next year we’ll see an iPhone 5 with a new form factor, just in time for the original iPhone 4 buyers to get it once their two year contract expires. (Count me in that group.)

Read the full story at The Loop.

The word genius is thrown around a lot these days (too much, in my opinion). But what, exactly, is it?

There are different ways of measuring it. IQ scores are the simplest, with ranges between 140 and 180 considered to be “genius.” But that’s also the least satisfying explanation. Someone could have a genius IQ and accomplish nothing more than a person with a lower IQ. And there’s nothing wrong with that. A person with a genius IQ might be perfectly content to spend his or her days as an accountant, or auto mechanic, or painting watercolors for fun.

So what is it?

I think geniuses are those who see the world in fundamentally different ways than the rest of us. (And yes, I know I’m dangerously close to Apple’s famous “Think Different” slogan, but they chose it for a reason.)

I can’t fathom how someone like Isaac Newton saw the world. No matter how much I try, my brain simply isn’t capable of that kind of radical thought, of truly grasping and understanding not only some of the concepts he created, but how he came to them in the first place. Or how Einstein saw the world, or Stephen Hawking still does see it. It’s beyond me.

Then there’s Steve Jobs. He was undoubtedly a genius. He saw opportunities that didn’t yet exist and made them real, almost by force of will alone. Xerox PARC created the first graphical user interface for computers, along with the mouse, but that was just a lab experiment, and Xerox upper management had no idea what to do with it. They needed to sell copiers, and a mouse or GUI wasn’t going to help with that.

Jobs saw how it could change the world, how he could use these technologies to bring computers to everyone.

And then he did it.

I could go on and on about the crazy things he did that almost always worked (and a few memorable ones that didn’t), and that’s just with technology. I won’t get into how he bought the Graphics Group from George Lucas in the mid 1980s for $10 million and turned it into Pixar, the most successful movie studio in history. Or the way he completely revolutionized music players with the iPod. Or music buying with iTunes.

I mean, it’s insane how successful Jobs was.

Then there’s the iPhone. The iPad was in development way back in 2003 or 2004 (Apple takes their time to get things right — competitors who are scrambling to catch up and rush half-baked products out the door only to watch them crash and burn in the market place should take note), but the technology wasn’t ready yet for what Steve envisioned for a tablet computer, so it was continually refined but not brought to market.

At one point, however, when he was playing with the glass,  he said, “You know, this would make a great phone.”

That is genius.

How could he look at a large piece of glass and metal and think, “this would make a great phone”? How did he make that intuitive leap? It’s an indefinable flash of insight that’s really impossible to explain. I doubt Steve himself could have adequately explained it to anyone else. He just looked, and saw something the rest of us never would have envisioned.

Think about what phones were at that time. BlackBerry, Palm, Nokia, and Motorola ruled the world. Flip phones and nascent smart phones and phones with small screens but large keyboards crammed with buttons. That was the cutting edge in cellular hardware.

Steve replaced them all with a small rectangle of glass. And it changed the world.

He will be missed.

Excellent video overview of how Siri works in the everyday world. This is seriously cool technology. It’s too bad the idiots in the market are punishing Apple stock this afternoon. While this isn’t the first digital assistant, it certainly seems to be the best thought-out and easiest to use (two things Apple brings to the table in spades).

Check it out here, or by clicking the screenshot below.

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse has made it clear that his company needs the iPhone. He recently stated that the number one reason Sprint subscribers switch to another carrier is to gain access to the iPhone. One of the persistent rumors surrounding the launch of the iPhone 5 (or 4S, or whatever it/they are going to be called) is that Sprint would finally be given access to the iPhone.

It seems they are. In a big, big way.

The Wall Street Journal broke the news earlier that Sprint is spending $20 billion on iPhones over the next couple of years, which buys around 30 million phones. Upping the ante, Boy Genius Report is saying that this is an exclusive deal with Sprint for the iPhone 5, and that AT&T and Verizon are locked out until early 2012.

I’m calling shenanigans on that. No way in hell is Apple going back to exclusive relationships with any carrier. They don’t need to. Sprint is desperate for the iPhone (so is T-Mobile, but that’s another story). Considering how many iPhones Apple sells, 30 million of them over a couple of years really isn’t that many. Certainly we don’t need any ridiculous explanation about exclusivity to explain this purchase.

Ah, the smell of iPhone rumors in the morning.

Tomorrow all will be revealed.