Here we go again. Before bed (I’m writing this gone midnight, because I need help), I checked into the BBC and saw a slightly odd standfirst on the Apple Q2 earnings article:

Latest profits for the computer giant Apple beat most hopes with a 113% rise in iPhone sales—but iPad sales disappoint.

From what I can tell, iPad sales have been insanely swift over the past few months, but, no, there it was in grey and white (the BBC doesn’t like contrast in its text): the sales ‘disappoint’. Clicking through, there’s a little more detail:

Apple’s figures were not uniformly positive. It sold 4.69m iPad tablet computers in the quarter, below expectations.

Clearly, I’m an idiot, because 4.69 million iPads sold seems pretty damn good to me (and Apple commented: “We sold every iPad 2 we could make”). So whose expectations were these sales below? Our chums the analysts, of course—those happy campers who pull whatever figures they fancy out of their arses, and then yell at Apple for being rubbish when the company fails to match their pie-in-the-sky estimates.

If you care, CNN Money provided an exciting overview of analyst analysis (i.e. guesswork) regarding iPad sales. The range was from 8.8 million and bottomed out at 5 million. This is, presumably, why Apple selling 4.69 iPads is somehow ‘disappointing’ and ‘below expectations’, despite the fact any competitor selling anywhere near that many tablets in a quarter would be cause for a year-long celebration.

Update: it’s also worth noting that these are the exact same analysts that initially predicted doom and gloom for the iPad, suggesting Apple would sell about 17 in total, if it was lucky. As The Macalope said to me on Twitter:

Apple disappointed the analysts who suck at estimating.

A really nice article by Ben Brooks on the most important benchmark ‘bullet point’ in computing rapidly changing in recent years.

Years back:

Growing up there was really only one bullet point on computers that I cared about: clock speed. I knew that the faster the CPU, the faster the computer. This drove my buying decisions […] for many years

And now:

Battery life is the new benchmark—it’s the first thing that I look at on any new piece of hardware. We can now, finally, make the reasonable assumption that both the hardware and software is fast enough on most devices—so now what matters is portability

I largely agree. I think there will always be people who consider chip-speed, RAM and other technical aspects of a device of paramount importance, but they will continue to diminish in number. However, while computers and mobile are mostly ‘fast enough’ and ‘powerful enough’ for a typical user’s requirements, you can bet most people would bite your arm off if you could double the battery life of their tablet, smartphone or laptop tomorrow.

What on Earth Happened to BlackBerry, by Farhad Manjoo over at Slate Magazine, nicely sums up why RIM’s having trouble coming to terms with the current era of mobile technology:

When they talk about RIM’s strengths, the company’s leaders like to point to their “CIO friendliness.” The trouble is, being friendly with CIOs doesn’t matter as much as it used to. Nowadays people don’t ask the tech guy which mobile gadgets pass muster. Instead, tech guys look to employees to decide which gadgets to support. RIM’s strategy—to infiltrate companies as a first step to becoming a mass-market hit—has been eclipsed by the Apple approach, which is to infiltrate schools and homes, and then hope that regular people nag their IT guys to let them use iPads at work, too.

Those bastards at Spotify are coercing people into paying for music, rather than getting a musical moon on a stick for free, the bastards. In Upcoming changes to Spotify Free/Open, the greedy swines rattle on about setting fire to your free account, and quite literally punching you in the face until you cough up for a subscription.

Spotify CEO Jens Ivantyourmoneysson said:

We’ve got this deal with record labels that involves hiring a combination of ninjas and boxers. The ninjas will sneak into your house at night and let in the boxers, who will punch you in the face until you agree to a subscription.

Sitting in his underground lair, watching his gigantic Spotify ROCKETODOOM being created, stroking a white cat, he then continued:

If you don’t do this, you’ll have a broken nose and we will also curb your listening habits. You’ll now only be able to play a track for free up to five times; on the sixth, it will spray salt into your eyes, your computer will explode and we’ll send round the boxer again. You’ll also be limited to ten hours of free Spotify listening per month, but we will aim to ensure you get unlimited punches to the face.

When asked by a journalist about how Spotify could do such a harrowing thing to users who’ve supported Spotify since the start by launching the app and listening to music, for free, with only the occasional interruption from advertisements, and doing nothing else, but doesn’t this smack of pure greed, and won’t people just go back to piracy now, and, you know, I was going to get a paid account—honest—but I’ve now changed my mind because of your evil plans, Ivantyourmoneysson quite literally exploded on stage.

A subsequent joint statement from all major record label CEOs read:

Hahahahahahaha!

One of the things that bugs me about iOS is Apple’s real-world design. It makes some of its apps akin to real-world items, and so you get a leather-bound calendar for iCal or a virtual book for iBooks. The idea is to presumably assist people in how to use something by providing something they recognise.

The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t really work. Virtual items with virtual controls don’t perform like their real-world counterparts. You don’t have a scrolling panel in a real calendar, for example. The design often doesn’t follow through to the details either, which is particularly apparent in iBooks. That app sits its ebooks on top of an image of an open book, but the image never changes as you read, never updating the number of pages beneath the one(s) you’re viewing. Therefore, what could potentially have been a useful indicator of where you are in any particular volume becomes detrimental (because the eye makes the assumption you’re not making progress, and iBooks then has to provide an alternate—software-oriented—progress bar), and iBooks therefore manages to feel less book-like than Kindle. Amazon, of course, does away with design garbage, instead just giving you the content and a few ways to adjust how it looks (in terms of font styles).

A further problem is addressed by Ben Brooks at The Brooks Review. In Don’t Mimic Real-World Interfaces, he talks about how instead of realism, software designers should be striving to take full advantage of the power of computers, providing new solutions to problems, rather than aping ones built in the real world decades ago.

Ask any person who has used Soulver for Mac or iOS if they think Soulver was difficult to figure out—it is leaps and bounds better than any other calculator app, yet it doesn’t look like any other calculator app. It took me all of two minutes to figure out how to work the app and to realize just how much better it is. What Soulver did was not try to replicate the beloved HP 12c, instead they rethought what a calculator app was to be—and how it should be designed if it is only made for use on a computer, from day one.

It is what calculators would have been if they were invented at the same time computers were, instead of what we have with most calculator apps.

I totally agree with this. Soulver is a fantastic app, like a ‘back of an envelope’ that does the sums for you. Instead of being a virtual calculator, it’s a little bit spreadsheet, a little bit text editor, and quite a bit of power under the hood that you can choose to use or not. If you’re a beginner, you can simply paste lists of values (such as a shopping list of items and prices) from emails and other documents into the main pane and it’ll work out a total (without you having to laboriously remove related text, which also removes the context from your calculations). If you’re happy going deeper, you can work with operators, currency conversion, and mathematical functions. You might argue that Soulver lacks that initial point of recognition (“This is a calculator?”), but it enables you to do commonplace calculations a lot more quickly than you can in typical calculator apps for Windows, Mac and iOS.

In a related article, Brooks also looks into iCal and its resolute desire to stick with real-world conventions and simulated paper, rather than rolling in more dynamic design ideas from GTD apps that would benefit everyone. Given the absolutely hideous iCal UI (Ars Technica) in one of the latest Lion builds, I don’t suspect anyone at Apple shares Brooks’s opinion, nor his taste.

(One possibility, of course, is perhaps the design is intentionally hideous. There’s a full-screen button on the new iCal, to make it a proper full-screen app, in the same manner as iPhoto ’11. If people are so offended and distracted by the torn paper and horrible fake-leather toolbar, perhaps they’ll be more likely to explore the new mode.)