Apple’s announced its third-quarter results, and they make for grim reading. Apple only managed to post revenue of $15.7 billion and a net quarterly profit of $3.25 billion. This came in part from Apple selling a mere 3.47 million Macs during the quarter, which in itself represented a pitiful 33 per cent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. With certifiable, deranged analysts expecting Apple to post profits of $900 trillion, the company’s all-time record revenue and earnings increase of just 78 per cent looks miniscule by comparison.

Additionally, Apple reports that 3.27 million iPads were sold during the quarter. “iPad is off to a terrific start,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs, ignoring the fact that crazed, deluded, stupid analysts had predicted Apple would sell 3.27 million iPads per day and is therefore well behind targets set by these self-important idiots who don’t have a clue and yet get paid huge sums of money to write all sorts of garbage about Apple that never comes to pass.

Elsewhere, since analysts also predicted iPad would be a failure and that Apple would only sell eight units in total, the 3.27 million figure is extremely worrying, since it means eight people now somehow own over 400,000 iPads each and likely won’t have the money or space for any more, which will therefore impact Apple’s Q4 results.

AAPL was up 2.57% today, on the back of the results, but Lenovo was up more at 2.66%, proving that Apple doesn’t know what it’s doing and should really learn from the Chinese company who [SUB: PLEASE ADD SOMETHING ON LENOVO HERE—WHO THE HELL ARE THOSE GUYS ANYWAY?]

On Twitter yesterday, I posted this:

BBC ‘rip off’ in perspective: licence fee = £2.80/wk (for TV, radio, websites). New Times paywall = £2/wk (for two websites).

I had two reasons for doing so. First, it shows that the BBC offers great value compared to supposed ‘direct’ commercial alternatives; secondly, it shows costs compared to a service from a company driven by Rupert Murdoch, the BBC’s main critic.

Predictably, responses have been split. The tweet got retweeted by a bunch of people and also ended up on Twitter’s home page for a while. Others have been angered by what I wrote, noting that you aren’t ‘forced’ to buy the Times Online if you want to read a newspaper, whereas you are ‘forced’ to fund the BBC if you want to watch Sky.

Two responses of my own to this common argument:

First, I equate the BBC to a public service that just happens to be very similar to commercial products. This happens elsewhere in the UK for funding things of cultural significance, such as museums. I’m ‘forced’ to fund museums I’ll never visit, but nonetheless have to pay to visit ones I’m interested in. Rather than stomping my feet about the unfairness of it all, I got over it in about a nanosecond, realising that the funded museums are there for the good of the country and are essential to the UK’s cultural landscape, providing what more commercial enterprises cannot or will not. I believe the BBC is the same.

Secondly, a lot of people are getting taken in by spin, which is mostly coming from Rupert Murdoch and his right-wing media lapdogs. They argue that the BBC is bloated and offers poor value, and the public is starting to lap this up. The thing is, this is total bollocks. The ad-free BBC, with its four main stations, radio and websites, is excellent value compared to commercial competitors.

However, Murdoch doesn’t really care about the ‘value’ of the BBC anyway. He just wants to see the BBC reduced to nothing, because then more people will be reliant on Sky for quality programming; he and his media cronies also dislike the BBC because it has the audacity to offer a relatively impartial stance when it comes to news, unlike Sky’s output that’s alarmingly tending towards the garbage you see on the likes of Fox in the USA.

So even if you don’t care for BBC content, realise that it needs to be there. And if you do care for it, now would be the time to say so to ensure its survival.

We all know the Tories hate the BBC, because they hate anything that’s not privatised. However, due to the public not realising the value the BBC offers, the ‘slow death of the BBC’ stance is now taken by pretty much every political party.

Jeremy Hunt, the incumbent culture secretary, has now suggested the licence fee could “absolutely” fall next year, using the excuse of the UK’s “very constrained” financial situation. (Source: MediaWeek.)

I realise some people are irked about paying for the BBC, but let’s put things in perspective. £145.50 is about £12 per month, or 40p per day. That’s less than the price of a newspaper, half a typical candy bar, or a third of a cup of coffee. It’s less than BT charges me for line-rental alone. It’s only 80p more per week than The Times is charging for online access to its two websites. And yet for your 40p per day/£2.80 per week BBC fee, you get a bunch of ad-free TV stations, ad-free radio (including Radio 6, which, as recent events show, has no effective competition at all), and an ad-free (if you’re in the UK) website, including decent, reasonably impartial news coverage.

Reducing the licence fee will force the BBC into terminal decline. Some will argue removing the BBC will improve competition, but it won’t. Rupert Murdoch already effectively drives everything else in this area, and so you’ll merely see increasing competition for advertising, leading to more dumbing down of content and increasingly advertising-led/advertising-friendly news. People will then pine for the “good old days” of the BBC, but by then it’ll be too late.

If you don’t want the BBC beaten to a bloody pulp, write to your MP. Alternatively, use the 38 Degrees site to speak out against BBC cuts and convince Vince Cable to stand up to Rupert Murdoch.

The BBC News website got a redesign this week. Naturally, lots of people hate it, but that’s because people hate change. I’m largely on the other side of the fence, and, objectively, the BBC’s mostly done a good job: the site content has room to breathe, the space-wasting left-hand nav strip has been ditched, there are no rounded corners, and although the amount of home-page content hasn’t been reduced, the design feels less cluttered. (That said, as Adam Banks wryly noted on Twitter, White space is like the comma: you have to put it in the right places, not just sprinkle around.)

However, I do wonder how much testing the BBC did across platforms. On my Macs, article body text is significantly less legible than it was previously. Delving into the style sheet, it seems the corporation’s centred on Helvetica Neue in grey for most of its text (falling back to Arial for anyone who doesn’t have this installed—in other words, anyone but Mac users). This is baffling, since Helvetica Neue is designed for print design, not the screen; and while Panic sometimes uses the font on its website, it’s doing so for what’s effectively a read-once advert, not many thousands of news articles. (Crucially, Panic also has the text in black, not a mid-grey, thereby hugely increasing readability.)

The BBC News redesign is therefore a great example of single-point of failure in web design. It looks great, the layout works, and even the headings look good. It only falls down when you start trying to read an article—but unfortunately for the BBC, that’s the main point of a news site’s existence.

In April, Steve Jobs was asked about multitasking in iOS 4. “In multitasking, if you see a task manager… they blew it. Users shouldn’t ever have to think about it” was the Apple CEO’s reply.

Unfortunately, I’m increasingly thinking Apple blew it. I’m actually coming round to iOS multitasking in terms of a concept—I really like being able to flick between Safari and Twitter, and especially between Photos and the excellent Pastebot—but I now often enter the task manager and have to think about multitasking.

I suspect the problems are RAM-based, stemming from me having an iPhone 3GS, and playing games. Videogames push iOS hardware like nothing else and are notoriously RAM-hungry. On my iPhone, I’ve noticed performance issues after installing iOS 4, with many games becoming jerky. Sadly, other apps are randomly affected too. Instapaper almost entirely froze last night, and it took about three minutes to get back to the home screen and open the multitasking tray. On removing a few ‘frozen’ apps, everything returned to normal.

This would be fine if it wasn’t for the fact I can’t always do this. I’m getting about one freeze per day on my iPhone 3GS right now, which means in the past week it’s frozen more times than it did over the first six months of usage. I would do a full system restore, but Apple provides no reliable means to restore app data, and I don’t want to lose progress in my installed games.

I’m hoping iOS 4.0.1 is on the way soon and will fix this problem (perhaps by closing long-inactive apps), because it’s a pity that the most robust ‘computer’ I’ve owned is now behaving like a somewhat flaky PC.