By Dan Moren

January 31, 2019 3:10 PM PT

The Back Page: How to Recover from a Quarter of Bad iPhone Sales in 90 days

Tim, this is Dan.

Look, I know that the recent bad news about iPhone sales has maybe got you down. Perhaps your emoji have tended towards the sad lately. You might even not be sending messages with Fireworks or Confetti anymore. I get it. It’s only natural. But I want to let you know that we’re here for you in this tough time.

Moreover, I think we have some suggestions for you on how to turn these iPhone lemons into wine. I’m pretty sure that’s the saying. Take a frown and turn it inside out, I mean. You get what I mean.

Anyway, first things first: let’s look at the bright side. You still sold $52 billion worth of iPhones, which is definitely nothing to sneeze at, unless you are allergic to money ha ha. Ha ha. But I understand that it can be hard when everybody expected you to sell $5_3_ billion iPhones. After all that’s a whole billion dollars off. That’s a lot of money! More than I’ll make in at least one lifetime. Ha. Uh. Ha.

There are plenty of other bright spots, too. Services! You’re doing really good on Services, man. I know you don’t want to talk about new services, but I know what you’re doing, you silver fox. wink I mean, you’ve already got streaming music, so it’s a no brainer that streaming video and games are coming down the pike. Just give me a call when you get to streaming books, eh? Eh?

But I know that all of that doesn’t necessarily assuage your deep-seated anguish over this quarter’s results, so maybe take a break. Engage in a little retail therapy. Open twenty-seven new Apple Stores across the world. That always makes you feel better. Or pick up that something you’ve been wanting but felt that you couldn’t justify, like a new racing bike or Adobe. Maybe take a walk around Apple Park, enjoy the sunshine on your face and just be very careful not to stray beyond the perimeter.

The key is to not let one bad quarter get you down. You’ve still got so much ahead of you, from new iPads to a revamped Mac Pro to adding at least six more cameras to the back of the next iPhone. These are the kind of things that you want to stick around for. Don’t let the analysts get you down with their incessant questions and attempts to ferret out what you’re doing about iPhone price umbrellas or service cost parasols. Skeptics gonna skept, man. I’m here to tell you that you, Timothy Donald Cook, are gonna be just fine. Just make sure that next quarter—and I can’t stress this enough—you sell more iPhones.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

January 31, 2019 3:09 PM PT

Applications Folder: TV Time

Times of Confusion. The Platinum Age. Peak TV. These are all phrases used by Tim Goodman, chief TV critic at The Hollywood Reporter (and my fellow host on the TV Talk Machine Podcast) to describe the absolute flood of high-quality scripted television programming that’s inundating our eyeballs today.

Now let me complain about how my gold-and-diamond shoes pinch my toes a bit. There’s so much good TV that it can be overwhelming to figure out what to watch, and since so much of it drops in bingeable seasons (across multiple streaming services as well as traditional TV) it’s easy to lose track of what you’re watching and where you are in any given season.

After years of resisting the ridiculous idea of using an app to track my television viewing, I finally gave in and started using TV Time. (I use it on my iPad, but it’s also available on the web.) TV Time is far from perfect, but it’s gone a long way toward letting me getting back in control of what we watch. I can add shows I’m interested in, see when favorite series are due to return, and see at a glance what shows I’m currently watching (and where I am in any given season). When we’re done watching, I swipe to check the episode off of my to-do list.

Yes, this makes watching TV sound like work. But the watching isn’t the work! I love that there are so many great entertainment choices out there. I just need a system to track what I’m watching, and TV Time has been helpful on that score.

Here’s some advice you didn’t ask for: I highly recommend the practice of programming your own TV viewing, cycling through more than one show. We had a great time last summer pairing Amazon’s “Red Oaks” and “Mozart in the Jungle” and watching them as a back-to-back comedy block like the network lineups of the Must See TV era. After the comedies, we programmed a drama series. That gave us a two-hour TV lineup that we programmed ourselves, mixing comedy and drama and allowing us not to overdose on a single show binged in a few sittings.

I also recommend not watching too many shows at once, in the same vein as not recommending that you read a bunch of different books at one time. A few, especially of different types, seems appropriate. But late in December I realized we were in the middle of at least a half-dozen streaming seasons, and we didn’t have enough forward momentum in any of them. At that point I put a hard pause on one of my very favorite shows, “Travelers”, and decided to wrap up season 2 of “Patriot” (#sadspies) and season 3 of “Daredevil” before returning to “Travelers” or starting “Runaways,” another show I’d been anticipating for some time.

It feels a bit weird holding favorite shows rather than diving right into them, but I think I’ll enjoy them more by being patient and slowly moving them into my viewing rotation. Your mileage will vary, of course. But no matter what your approach, you might find TV Time to be a helpful app companion.

By Stephen Hackett

January 31, 2019 2:51 PM PT

The Hackett File: Exploring Huffduffer

I, like many of you I imagine, listen to a lot of podcasts. I may go several weeks without seeing a single episode of TV or a movie, but I’m get some podcast listening in almost daily.

Due to my job, I often myself listening to one-off episodes of random shows I am not subscribed to. My iOS podcast client of choice is Overcast, and it makes it fairly easy to download a single episode of a show without subscribing, but Huffduffer makes it even easier.

It’s easy to think about Huffduffer as “Instapaper for Podcasts.” Once you sign up, you gain access to a bookmarklet that you can fire when viewing a podcast episode’s webpage:

The bookmarklet will crawl the webpage and load in the title, description, MP3 URL and any tags it finds. Some podcast websites obscure the MP3 URL, so you may to do some digging around to find it, but the bookmarklet window lets you manually add data, which is great.

Once all the data is populated, click the orange button, and that episode will be added to your account.

Here’s where the magic happens. Every Huffduffer account generates its own RSS feed that you can plug directly into your podcast app of choice. This means that everything you add to the service, regardless of its source, shows up in your own personal “Huffduffer” podcast in Overcast, Pocket Casts, etc.

Because Huffduffer just needs an MP3 URL and some metadata, you can use it as a way to get any audio into your podcast player. For example, if you recorded a talk or meeting, you could upload that file to a server somewhere and feed it to the bookmarklet. It’s a great way to sideload audio into a podcast application.

Others online have built tools to get content into Huffduffer. My favorite is named “huffduff-video.” Paste a video link into the free website and after a little bit, the audio from the video will be in your account. I’ve used to this to listen to presentations I’ve found on YouTube several times, and it works quite well.

My only real complaint about Huffduffer is that it is also a social network of sorts. You can search for people, shows and tags, and the service will even show you what other people have added to their accounts. I’d love to have a way to make my account private.

[Stephen Hackett is the author of 512 Pixels and co-founder of Relay FM.]

By Jason Snell

January 31, 2019 2:50 PM PT

Next big thing

I held off writing anything for this issue of the Six Colors Magazine because I wanted to wait for Apple to disclose its most recent financial results. I know that for a lot of people, the financial results of a huge company are a bit of a snooze—and as someone who can’t and won’t invest in technology stocks, I get it.

But Apple is such a tight-lipped company that I find it intriguing whenever the company says anything in public, even if it’s a disclosure that’s more or less mandated by federal law. This quarter Apple has reduced what it discloses, by eliminating unit sales figures, but in exchange we all got to witness an awful lot of sturm und drang about falling iPhone sales. (If you were sleeping in early January, you may have missed Apple’s disclosure that the holiday quarter was worse for iPhone sales than it had anticipated.)

I have been writing about Apple since I was an intern at MacUser magazine in the summer of 1993. At no point in that time—not when it was about to go out of business, not when iPod sales were through the roof, not when the iPhone and iPad were announced, not when it became the first tech company to break a trillion dollars in valuation, and not now as it records some of the biggest quarters of revenue and profit in the history of capitalism—have there not been people actively wondering when gravity is going to kick in and bring this impossible company back to earth.

There are lots of reasons for that mindset. Here’s the cocktail-napkin summary: Despite its successes, almost no company is anything like Apple. Its competitors aren’t comparable. Tech, business, and financial journalism (as well as the investment world in general) are even more fanatical about conformity than our society at large. Why can’t Apple just be more like IBM, or Microsoft, or Dell, or Google, or Amazon, or Samsung? Things would be so much easier if it were, but it isn’t, and never has been.

What’s a force that’s even stronger than the world’s refusal to understand the rules by which Apple plays? Boredom. And boredom might be Apple’s biggest enemy right now. Not a week goes by when I don’t see someone’s facile analysis of Apple’s business that discusses its desperate need to find the “next iPhone.” Why does Apple need the next iPhone, and soon? (It doesn’t.) What are the real consequences of its failure to conceive of the next iPhone in the next year or two? (Boredom, because there won’t be anything new to write or talk about.)

Will there be a “next iPhone”, in the sense of a technological product category that goes from being nowhere to being in the possession of most humans on the planet in a decade? (And more to the point, a product category that creates a market with only a few major players and is extremely profitable?) On an infinite time scale, of course there will—never bet on the end of history, because if history really ends there won’t be anyone with opposable thumbs left to place bets. History just keeps on going. The smartphone will eventually seem outmoded.

But will that innovation happen in the next few years? And will it come from Apple? Almost certainly not. As someone who got his hands on a computer for the first time in the 1970s, and who started his career writing about computers, not technology, it’s a tough admission, but it’s impossible not to see the entire PC industry as just a precursor to the smartphone. The smartphone, with its power, ease of use, and connection to a fast digital data network, is among the most revolutionary product categories invented in the last century. These things don’t come into existence very often.

However, Apple’s lead in the smartphone world has paid off, giving it a large segment of a market that (while no longer growing) is profitable and will continue to sell in large numbers for years to come. The iPhone isn’t a growth engine on its own anymore, but it’s an annuity that puts cash in Apple’s pockets and creates customers to whom Apple can sell other stuff.

I’m not saying that Apple should stop inventing new stuff. It needs to keep pushing in all sorts of new areas, and it is. It’s been unafraid to take a run at expanding into unfamiliar territory such as services, it’s launched successful new hardware product categories (the Apple Watch is a hit product, despite it not being the next iPhone), and in theory it’s spending a lot of money investigating future product directions like augmented reality and autonomous vehicle systems.

Does today’s Apple have issues? It sure does, but failing to release the Next Big Thing in order to break industry observers out of their boredom is not one of them. As I compiled our recent Apple Report Card feature, it struck me that Apple is powerfully positioned in terms of hardware design, is lagging behind in terms of its software organization, and is perhaps stretched too thin in some areas where its desire for control outweighs its capabilities to provide meaningful value.

Today’s Apple is, in a way, a victim of its own success. Tim Cook’s biggest challenge as CEO is figuring out how to reinvent the way Apple works at a scale that is far beyond anything Steve Jobs ever saw—while not losing its status as a company that frustrates observers by refusing to behave like everyone else.