I finally got round to watching the TechCrunch TV video interview with Steve Wozniak, where he shares his last conversation with Steve Jobs and also provides some insight into Apple’s future. Woz sometimes gets lambasted by the press, in part due to his seemingly ‘un-Apple’ engineer-focussed worldview. Too often, I’d say he’s misquoted or his words are taken out of context. In the linked video, he showcases that he has one thing that could be hugely beneficial to Apple: empathy with Steve Jobs.

Interestingly, Woz says the last conversation he had with Jobs was about him maybe coming back to Apple, because Woz understood the technical things. Woz’s response:

Knowing who’s telling the truth and what people really want and how they think and what products they like and not like—that is worth so much more.

But his understanding of these things backed by his technological knowledge is a reason why Woz could make for an interesting sounding board at Apple. He worries that with Jobs gone, Apple could lack a single person who would keep things simple and beautiful, eventually going the way of Sony. And he points at a couple of stumbles in the recent iPhone 4S event, where Apple spent some time talking about dual-core processors and the ‘split antennae’. Woz argued Jobs would typically simplify or remove such references, instead focusing solely on what’s really important to the device’s users. His main point about the technological aspects:

They matter to engineers.

But not to anyone else.

To be fair to Apple, the previous event played out with the senior teams knowledge about Jobs’s health and that he was dying. Coupled with this also being the team’s first event without Jobs’s involvement, it would be crazy to not cut Apple a little slack. It takes time to get things right, not least when you’ve had such a strong presenter and figure leading your keynotes for many years. But the next keynote, whenever that happens (best guess: the next iPad, some time in 2012) will show whether there’s cause for concern in terms of Apple’s razor-sharp focus and direction. If the event concentrates on what you can do with the device, that will be encouraging: if it has a Retina display and it talks of its beauty; if the device is simply ‘faster’ and ‘more powerful’. But if there’s too much talk of technology, of processors, of RAM, and of the other things that really don’t matter to anyone not of a technical bent, perhaps it’d be time to let Woz have a once-over of those presentations before they happen, so the engineer can remove all the engineer stuff.

Update: TechRadar reports that Al Gore says Jobs was “against leaving a legacy at the company of trying to second-guess what he would have done”, citing issues at Disney where people would ask what Walt Disney would have done. His argument: “Follow your own voice.” That’s fair enough, and I certainly don’t disagree that people at Apple should follow their own mind and not be slavish to the past, and they should certainly never be nostalgic. However, there’s nothing wrong with sanity-checking whatever you’re doing against how Jobs would have presented it. Getting excited about new technologies or concepts that Jobs didn’t care about (gaming, say) could be a fine thing; but banging on about complex technology in a keynote because that’s your passion and your voice—that’s when you should be asking what Steve would have done and react accordingly.

Apple: We’re going to make $LOTS!

Analysts: We predict Apple is going to make $UNICORN!

Apple: Uh…

Time passes…

Apple: We made $LOTS plus!

Analysts: *NOUNICORNSADFACE*

Very little time passes…

AAPL down over five per cent.

So, Apple is making money hand over fist, and bettered its own guidance, but it fell short of whatever figure analysts dreamed up (MG Siegler provides insight into the main error analysts made), and so Apple’s results are disappointing and its shares have been hit. In case you’re wondering, here’s what disappointment looks like in the world of Apple financials:

• Quarterly revenue of $28.27 billion (up from $20.34 last year)
• Quarterly net profit of $6.62 billion (up from $4.31 billion last year)
• Gross margin was 40.3 percent (up from 36.9)
• 17.07 million iPhones sold (21 per cent unit increase)
• 11.12 million iPads sold (166 per cent unit increase)
• 4.89 million Macs sold (26 per cent unit increase)
• 6.62 million iPods (27 per cent unit decline)

So, bar the iPod’s inevitable decline (although with half the iPods sold now being the more expensive iPod touch, unit sales aren’t as important as income in that sector), Apple’s doing quite well, unless you’re say, a numbskull analyst or tech hack who believes the words and figures coming from analysts rather than the actual figures.

Meanwhile, in what’s, surprisingly, not another reality altogether, Yahoo! managed to announce a 26 per cent fall in earnings and watch its shares rise, because the fall wasn’t as bad as investors had feared.

In conclusion:

• Be hugely successful but not as successful as idiot analysts think you might be, with little justification for their idiot figures: SHARES GO BOOM!
• Be a crap, directionless company without focus, but don’t screw up quite as much as people think you will: SHARES GO FWEEEEE!

*96 headdesks*

Apple’s sold four millions iPhone 4S units to date (i.e. in one weekend)—more than Windows Phone has managed in a year. That clearly smarts for Paul Thurrott, he of Supersite for Windows fame:

There’s a long-running joke that Apple’s fans would buy anything the company sold, no matter the quality

— he began, setting up the article in totally unbiased fashion.

But this past weekend, the joke became reality when the Cupertino consumer electronics giant sold 4 million units of a smart phone, the iPhone 4S, which even its most charitable supporters have described as an evolutionary update over its predecessor.

Evolutionary is bad, folks! Everything should be revolutionary, just like all those Android and Windows Phone devices!

“iPhone 4S is off to a great start with more than four million sold in its first weekend—the most ever for a phone and more than double the iPhone 4 launch during its first three days,” said Apple senior vice president Philip Schiller in a prepared statement. “iPhone 4S is a hit with customers around the world, and together with iOS 5 and iCloud, is the best iPhone ever.”

Schiller’s comments are apt, as the iPhone 4S’s hardware appears to be nothing special:

Which, by extension, means the iPhone 4 was nothing special either. And so a much faster version of it with superior features is only selling because deluded idiots are being deluded by Apple-flavour delusions.

It features exactly the same form factor

Apple in “not changing the form factor every time it releases a new device” shocker!

as its buggy predecessor,

The one that wasn’t, in fact, buggy, but had the same antennae issues as every other smartphone. Issues that, incidentally, are reportedly dealt with in the new update.

the iPhone 4S, with the same small screen

That everyone seems to like, apart from hacks who favour other operating systems.

and an updated version of its Apple-designed CPU.

To which I’m surprised Thurrott didn’t say “smells of wee”.

Of course, Apple’s fans are more interested in spending money than they are with facts.

This chestnut is now so old that it’s fossilised. Well done, Thurrott! APPLE USERS ARE IDIOTS, SEE? THEY DON’T LIKE FACTS! THEY JUST SPEND MONEY FOR SHINY SHINY! Right.

TechRadar bungs up a balanced, positive, in-depth review of the iPhone 4S, but, on page 5, gnnhhhh:

Oh, and let’s not forget our favourite refrain for an Apple iPhone review – the lack of Flash video. We’ve no idea how Apple has managed to survive all of these years without adding in some kind of Flash support, but those little error boxes strewn all over the internet still grate a fair bit.

HTML5 video support is built into the iOS browser, but that’s still a long way from being an oft-used video format for the web, so iPhone 4S users will have to put up with a substandard internet performance compared to their Android counterparts when it comes to web video.

The browser in iOS 5 has superior JavaScript performance to that on Android. From a usability perspective, it’s also superior. Also, the majority of web video is now HTML5, and so while you do get those blank boxes now and again, they’re becoming less common. Oh, and many Android devices choke so badly on web video that it’s like watching a slideshow. But even on those devices that manage to play web video acceptably, I’m not sure we’re really talking about “substandard internet performance” compared to Android. On balance, the pros and cons cancel each other out.

Still, now Microsoft’s nixed support for Flash and other plug-ins in Windows 8’s Metro version of Internet Explorer, Flash’s days as a broad internet presence are numbered. Increasingly, it looks like the tool will become like Director, an authoring environment for rich media and games. Whether that’ll be enough to stop people bitching about next year’s iPhone still not including Flash support in its web browser (the horror!) remains to be seen.

A couple of weeks back, the Tap! app went live. I had nothing to do with it, so I got the same experience as everyone else on grabbing it and downloading a copy. It’s hard for me to not be a little biased (given that I’m a contributing editor to the magazine), but I think it’s all kinds of lovely, with a great UI, issue pricing that’s way cheaper than buying the printed mag, and components that take advantage of the medium (such as video previews of games).

Now iOS 5 has arrived, Future Publications has made a big deal about its 50+ Newsstand-compatible apps, and the reviews have been flooding into the App Store. They’re so diametrically opposed that they would be comical if they weren’t so utterly depressing. Take Tap!, for example. At the time of writing, it has eight reviews on the UK App Store. These break down as follows:

5/5: Four

1/5: Four

The negative reviews appear to be one general grievance (a guy who likes the app but, for whatever reason, hates the content), and a lack of demo content (which I think is a fair point—and I imagine that will arrive soon for those mags that don’t yet have it). I’m not sure the latter warrants a 1/5 review, though, instead of a letter to the mag itself, and the sad thing is, these are the best of them. Trawling through Future’s other app reviews and you stumble across a slew of entitled ‘reviews’, complaining that—gosh!—someone downloaded a free app and yet they then had to pay actual money for magazines! One particularly inane review complains that since they bought an iOS device for hundreds of pounds, they should damn well get free magazines! (Just like when I bought an expensive new TV, I automatically got free DVDs and Sky+ forever. No, hang on…) Others simply whine that when an app says ‘free’, it should mean ‘free’, despite in-app purchase being for a long time now a major part of the iOS app ecosystem. In perhaps the worst example, someone who clearly has an axe to grind against a certain publication lets loose with a spew of almost libellous garbage.

I posted about this subject on Twitter yesterday, and despite it being a Sunday there were plenty of replies. Some sided with me (“The app is free, the content isn’t. How hard is that to understand?” complained a friend of mine who works on the iPad version of a major newspaper), whereas others said that labelling an app as free cements an expectation that it isn’t something that you should end up paying for. One guy suggested these kinds of apps should be badged in a different manner, with ‘subscribe’ instead of ‘free’, although it would obviously be down to Apple to implement such a solution and could cause further confusion with mag/newspaper apps that enable you to buy single issues rather than enforcing a subscription.

The thing is, I’ve seen these problems dozens of times before when working on iOS games. Almost every time a dev drops the price of a game to free, the 1/5 reviews flood in. Some complain that the game “doesn’t work”; others whine when the game has IAP to add extra content; many just moan for the hell of it.

But that’s the problem with ‘free’: anyone can review, because anyone can download an app, without making any investment whatsoever. Typically, when people have paid money for something, they are more considered. And in making an app something other than free, you filter out the idiots. I’m not sure what the solution is for mag apps. I’m sure Future Publishing (and others in a similar situation) did a ton of research before deciding on the ‘free app and paid content’ model, realising what the risk would be. But I wonder if a lowish app price (say, £1.49) that bundled the current issue would be beneficial from a feedback standpoint. Of course, that isn’t necessarily beneficial for the consumer, because you’re ‘forcing’ them to buy the current issue, even if they don’t want it. But as is often the case, consumers en masse don’t always know what’s good for them and so end up with inferior solutions; I wonder if that’ll be the case in the medium term with mag apps, especially if the negative reviews keep flooding in.

Update: on the ‘free issue’ front, Ian Betteridge writes: “Mens Health has really suffered: they got lots of 1/5’s for “no free issue!” when there’s quite clearly a free (old) issue.”

Update 2: On Tap! specifically, read editor Christopher Phin’s response in the comments below.

Update 3: Tap! now has a free sampler edition, featuring content from the October issue.