“Slow Train Coming”, the artwork from the cover of Bob Dylan’s album. Photo by Logos: the Art of Photography on Flickr.

The cover of Bob Dylan’s album “Slow Train Coming” shows people literally laying a railway just ahead of a train which is, in theory, a-comin’. Just very slowly. The European Commission’s antitrust decision against Google is just such a train. A €2.42bn train. Big, but deathly slow.

(If you need any background about the EC and Google and why this all matters, I wrote about it in 2015. Slow train.)

TL;DR:
• Google has been squashing rival shopping sites since mid-2006;
• the EC was alerted in summer 2009 after many efforts by sites to get responses from Google failed;
• do we seriously think Google’s going to change its behaviour?
• why isn’t Foundem getting a slice of the fine?
• antitrust moves too slowly in the modern era

The European Commission’s fine of €2.42bn on Google has been just like that train: a damn long time coming. The original complainant, the “vertical search” site Foundem, first noticed something funny happening to its position in search results back in 2006: it was being penalised for no apparent reason.

The penalty (search) box

Foundem was the brainchild of Shivaun and Adam Raff (it really is like their child, and they are brainy; I’ve met them on several occasions as this antitrust case has inched its way through the system). By this time the site was only six months old, focussed on what it saw as a gap – or at least growing niche – in the market: “vertical search”, comparing one specific product, rather than “horizontal search” as practised by Google and Bing (and many also-rans). You can probably think of other “vertical search” sites: Kelkoo was very big at one point. There’s also one called Amazon, though at that time it did a lot of the fulfilment as well; Foundem would find results from other shopping sites, so that it was like a meta-search engine. Amazon, at the time, wasn’t, though as it has become more of a marketplace rather than a fulfilment company that description is increasingly accurate.

But for Foundem in June 2006, this was remote. It had been hit by an algorithmic search penalty which hit lots of vertical search companies. It filed “reconsideration requests” to Google, which it says the company ignored.

(See the timeline for yourself at Foundem’s site.)

In August 2006 it was hit by an “AdWords Penalty”: this suggested that “landing pages” people arrived at were such low quality that it would have to pay much more to be able to buy an AdWord (Google advertising position). How much more? It was raised, they say, from about 5p/click to £5/click.

It’s summer 2006, and as the Raffs put it in their timeline, “Foundem was excluded from Google’s natural and paid search results, both of which are essential channels to market for any internet-based business.” That would be near enough a death penalty for any consumer-facing business; fortunately they found other outlets, such as powering shopping searches on magazine websites for IPC, Bauer and others.

The Raffs kept lobbying Google for reconsideration, and kept being brushed off; meanwhile Google launched Universal Search (integrating Google Maps and Google News and YouTube results into a box at the top which favoured Google products and pushed rival services further down the search rankings).

In December 2008 a TV show named Foundem the UK’s best price comparison site. Google meanwhile didn’t relent on its penalty against Foundem’s position in search results.

Finally, in July 2009 Foundem had its first meeting with the EC’s DGComp – the arm of the European Commission which investigates antitrust cases.

Eight years and more of hurt

That’s almost exactly eight years ago. It’s taken absolutely ages for the EC to act on this, giving Google plenty of time to tighten its grip on the business, and even for the whole search landscape to shift – from one where the desktop has primacy to one where many searches begin on mobile, inside apps.

There’s lots of applause today from Europeans about the fact that Margethe Vestager didn’t give up on this case, and that a record fine has been imposed (and that if Google doesn’t alter its behaviour in 90 days, the daily fine will be eye-watering). “Better later than never, but seven years have been still an eternity for some market players, in particular European SMEs [small and medium enterprises],” to quote the MEPs Ramon Tremosa I Balcells and Andreas Schwab.

There’s the usual eye-rolling from a number of American observers, who say “which AMERICAN company will be next?”, and ignore the fact that the Federal Trade Commission’s investigation in 2011/12 discovered that Google’s own user testing found that people preferred seeing other vertical search engine results in the organic search results; and also ignore the fact that DGComp fines all sorts of European companies for antitrust and cartel actions of all flavours. (The decision before Google was fining three car lighting system producers over cartel behaviour.)

Also, for those eye-rolling American (and other) readers: European antitrust doctrine differs in one very significant way from the American flavour. In the US, if you use a monopoly in one space to take over another but consumers benefit overall, there’s no case to answer. This was why the FTC dropped its case (on a 4-0-1, ie one abstention, no opposition) decision. Scroll down in that FTC release to “search bias” where it says the introduction of Universal Search “could be plausibly justified as innovations that improved Google’s product and the experience of its users.” A bit milquetoast, that recommendation.

In the EU, however, the question is whether antitrust stifles competition, not what happens to consumers. This refusal to consider “consumer surplus” infuriates and astonishes a significant number of American observers, but it’s how it’s done here.

But, but, but. I very much expect that Google will appeal this before the 90-day deadline, and that this will mean it doesn’t yet have to change its behaviour, nor pay the fine. Do you think that this might be a long-drawn-out process which will grind interminably through the courts, during which Google won’t change how it displays results? I do.

Meanwhile Foundem and all the other vertical search companies which the EC is ostensibly protecting have been almost crushed. If there were any justice, they’d be getting a slice of the fine. After all, companies which report cartel action either get some payment, or (if they’re part of the cartel) let off some of the fine.

Slow train, now arriving

This is the reality of antitrust: in technology especially, the dominance of these companies and the power of their networks means that the decision comes too late to help those who were originally affected. It was certainly the case with Microsoft and Netscape; it’s clearly the case here. Who knows how big Foundem and Kelkoo and all the others might have been if Google hadn’t been able to use its dominance in straight search to annexe the vertical search space?

Some would really like the fine to have teeth. Tremosa i Ballcells commented: “When it comes down to the fine, I always said: first, you pay the fine and, then, you restore competition and the level playing field like it was the case with Microsoft. I believe that the fine should be retroactive for each year since the beginning of the wrongdoing by Google. This fine is far from the theoretical fine of 10% of Google annual revenues. The fine should be multiplied by the number of years since the start of the damage to competitors. Moreover, the behaviour of Google since the SO [Statement of Objections] and from today should be taken into account as well. Time helps monopolies, not SMEs.”

The argument of course is that antitrust actions serve to make the dominant company change its future behaviour: a fine of that size, and the threat of continuing fines, and particularly the tedious legality of it all, burdens the company’s decision-making process so that its executives all act as though someone suggested they play on the electrified railway when the idea of moving into “adjacent” business comes up. (It certainly worked with Microsoft.)

This will be the real acid test of the EC’s action: will it make Google’s internal culture change? We won’t know the answer to that for some time. Slow train coming.

The photo is apparently taken airside at Baghdad Airport; the paper says “The Islamic State is right in your home”. Source: Twitter.

The decision by the US and UK to ban carry-on electronics of various sorts from a number of countries in the Middle East has brought out all sorts of unthinking reactions. Trump is driving a lot of people stupid, which is a pity.

An example of the unthought-through reaction is this article at PC Mag, where Sascha Segan says

The DHS notice doesn’t give any evidence of specific threats leading to this new ban, which will go on indefinitely. It doesn’t explain why a bomb can explode in the cabin but not the cargo hold, or why travelers but not airline employees are affected. While it has a 30-question FAQ about the ban, most of it is meaningless weasel words adding up to “trust us.” The more you think about any aspect of this ban, the less it makes sense from a security perspective.

Not to pick on Segan particularly; variations of this article, in hot-take form, were all over the web when the news broke on Monday (US ban) and Tuesday (UK ban).

However, it’s worth remembering – as if you hadn’t had plenty of reminders recently? – that the intelligence services have access to more information than you do.

Liquid memories

Remember the liquids ban of summer 2006? It was imposed out of the blue, and threw airports, airlines and security into near-chaos. Wikipedia has a good summary of why it was introduced: British police (perhaps helped by intelligence services) had uncovered a plot to blow up a plane in mid-air, using liquid explosives in soft drink bottles. In all, more than 20 people were arrested; nine were eventually tried, and seven found guilty of conspiracy to murder.

Now, with that in mind, when the governments of not one but two countries impose sudden bans on the transport of potentially explosive things, you might think that people would take it seriously. There was one occasion when a would-be mass murderer ignited a bomb on the passenger deck of a plane out of Somalia – after apparently being handed the explosives by a ground worker. In a fabulous demonstration of karma, he was sucked out of the hole he’d made in the fuselage, and the plane landed safely. Subsequently, 20 ground staff in Somalia were arrested.

There are suggestions that this latest ban has been under discussion for a couple of weeks, in fact. That’s how intelligence works: gather data, consider risks, act.

The number of people complaining that “it’s just another version of the [Trump] Muslim ban” can’t be thinking clearly. The original “Muslim ban”, as a reminder, included Syria, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen.

It didn’t include the ones in the US ban: UAE (which includes Dubai), Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, or Morocco. The UK ban includes Tunisia too.

It should be pretty obvious, even if you think Trump is a fool, that this isn’t his idea. It has come from intelligence agencies who are worried about the possibility of a mid-air explosion.

You can see why Islamic State and similar terror groups might want to do something now. IS is being gradually crushed in Mosul, which means that its fighting force is dwindling fast. Its revenues are dwindling too, because its sources – illicit oil sales, “taxes” on the populations it oppresses, and ransoms – are all being squeezed. Lower revenues means less money for weapons and less opportunity to control territory, and the caliphate suddenly looks a lot less attractive.

(None of this is Trump’s doing either. He doesn’t have a “30-day plan to get rid of Isis”. He has no plan, other than “ask someone else to do it and bluster”.)

IS’s oil income has been plummeting as Turkey in particular has cracked down on illicit sales, and the price of oil itself has fallen considerably since IS got its big break.)

Losing the fight

Which brings us to terror groups wanting to make a splash. Simple way: get airside, put a bomb on board. Or whatever. The photo at the top was sent to me by a source on Twitter who watches this stuff. It was originally tweeted by a Twitter account @poihhp – since suspended. I can’t find any data on the account (age or followers) though the lack of responses to it suggests it is pretty new. As the photo caption above says, the paper seems to say “The Islamic State is right in your home”, and claims to have been taken at Baghdad International Airport.

I’ll admit that my ability to read Arabic is nonexistent (I relied on Bing Translate and my source’s slightly better translation). But that looks like a form of the IS flag scribbled on the right-hand side of the paper. They’re holding it in their right hand. I can’t identify the airlines that the two aircraft are from – they don’t seem to be Turkish Airlines or Iraq Airlines. There’s a list of airlines which go through Baghdad International. I can’t identify them from that either.

It’s possible this is a fake, or a jape. But it feels like there’s something authentic there. And remember: you didn’t know why the liquids ban was introduced in 2006, and you probably thought that was stupid too. (The arrests weren’t announced.)

But it turned out not to be. The reasons behind the carry-on ban are likely to be the same.

Apple Music: also on Android. Photo by tualamac on Flickr.

Apple announced on Wednesday that it now has 20 million subscribers to Apple Music after just 18 months – which feels like pretty good progress. Apple Music is also the only meaningful Apple service that’s also available on Android, as Apple tries to spread itself cross-platform.

Why is Music on Android as well as iOS? Because it’s not a distinguishing feature. Unlike Apple’s iMessage or its App Store, both of which are exclusive to Apple, and whose features are unique to it, you can already get lots of music services on both iOS and Android – Spotify, Tidal, Deezer, Google Play Music, Amazon Music and so on. (Not many, if any, of them are making money, but leave that aside.)

For Apple, every additional subscriber to Music is a bonus; it’s all money. The ones on Android are potential converts to iOS, where there’s more money to be made selling them iPhones, iPads and Macs, but time spent on Music is time not spent on Spotify, its principal rival, so that’s a benefit to Apple. App development costs aside, which are comparatively small, Android is a benefit. Additionally, if someone with an iPhone gets a Family Plan (allowing five people to use the same account; a Family Plan only counts as one subscription in Apple’s total), those five could include Android users.

So how many of those 20m are on Android? I’ve been tracking the stats on Google’s Play store for Apple Music downloads since its launch, including the download range and the number of 1-, 2-, 3-, 4- and 5-star reviews.

There are two things we need to work out: how many downloads there have been, and how many of those have resulted in subscriptions.

Download power

To estimate the number of downloads, I track the definite waypoints – when it passed 5,000, 50,000, 500,000, 1m, 5m – and the number of reviews against them.

The process is very standard across all apps: to begin with comments come quickly, so that almost every download prompts someone to review (about every 27 downloads, someone left a comment up to the 500,000 mark) which then tails off (only one in every 100 downloads prompted a comment by the 10m download mark). You can thus model how the number will change; and so even when you’re in the vague space between waypoints, you can estimate the number of downloads. (I’ve used this technique to calculate Android Wear downloads; it was accurate about when it would hit the 5m mark by a few weeks in a two-year timeframe.) The R-squared value is the correlation, which runs between 0 and 1: closer to 1 is nearer exact correlation.

Based on that, I calculate that this week Apple Music on Android hit 12.75m downloads. (It passed 10m around September 6.) It’s adding about 230,000 downloads per week, at a rate that seems to be holding pretty steady.

But downloads aren’t subscriptions. Apple Music offers a three-month trial period, after which you have to pony up. Clearly, some people will drop out. But what proportion of those who download it stay on and subscribe?

One subtlety here: the three-month trial means that strictly, we should ignore the downloads made in the past three months, since none of them will have qualified to become subscribers yet. (Downloads made to join a Family Plan don’t count as subscriptions.)

So the figure we’re looking at is from 6 September – which just happens to be when Apple Music hit the 10m download mark.

Star quality

Here’s an obvious way to estimate that: look at the high-quality reviews. It seems logical (Captain) that five-star reviews indicate people who are really happy with the service. Four-star reviews are people who are pretty happy, but find some hassles with it.

By the time you’re down to three-star and below, I think you’re talking about people who aren’t impressed and won’t be staying.

Although people don’t become subscribers until three months have elapsed, I think you can include recent ratings, since those could come from people who have become subscribers. (We don’t know what prompts people to review an app.)

So what do the ratings show? At present, five-star reviews are about 44% of all reviews; four-star ones, 11%. That ratio has been pretty consistent; five-star reviews have been at least 38% of all, and average 42% over the life of the app. Four-star reviews go down to 10%, and average 11%. (I don’t know what the average is across all apps on Google Play.) In fact, the data shows a gradual improvement in how the app is perceived, according to the reviews.

Based on this information, we can get some useful minima and maxima.

10m downloads, five-star users subscribe: 4.4m Apple Music subscribers on Android

10m downloads, four- and five-star users subscribe: 5.5m subscribers

12.75m downloads, five-star users subscribe: 5.61m subscribers

12.75m downloads, four- and five-star users subscribe: 7m subscribers.

I’d suggest the useful range is probably the 4.4m-5.5m one.

(One confounding caveat: we don’t know how many of the eager reviews come from people who downloaded it because they’re part of a Family Plan. I can’t think of a simple way to evaluate this unknown.)

Phoning home

If we accept those numbers, it suggests there are 14.5m-15.6m Apple Music subscribers on iOS.

What does that mean in the context of how many phones are out there?

There are about 550m iPhones in use, according to Neil Cybart. And there are around 1.2bn Android phones in use. (Apple Music is available in China, so it can run on phones there.)

This implies quite low penetration for Apple Music: about 2.5% on iPhones, and about 0.3%-0.4% on Android.

Then again, given that Spotify’s last published figure (in September) is 40m subscribers, and it is also available on both platforms, it’s clear that it’s just difficult to get people to sign up to these services. Given how many people Spotify has been available to in multiple countries, it has only been able to convert about 1% of the total available internet population during its life. It seems like getting people to sign up to music streaming really isn’t easy at all. So if you’re an Apple Music or Spotify subscriber, you’re very much in the minority.

Even though Apple’s progress in a short time looks strong compared to Spotify’s over the same period, it’s an open question how big the total addressable market is here. Are we just crossing over from the early adopters to the broader audience who will jump on streaming? Or is it going to struggle to break through? These are still open questions.

This isn’t an Android Wear watch, but there are similarities. Photo by David Lee King on Flickr.

Once upon a time there was a Big Software Company, and it wrote some Software for a Task, and that Software could run on Devices made by Other Companies. However, the Big Software Company didn’t want to get into the Devices business in any serious way; it much preferred to let the Other Companies deal with the (low-margin) hardware side of business, and stay principally on the high-earning Software side. (The Big Software Company did make some hardware, but it really didn’t make much money on it. In fact it even made a loss at times.)

Meanwhile Apple also began offering a thing for the Task, competing with both the Big Software Company and the Other Companies’ Devices. Except that Apple wrote its own software and built its own devices, which meant that it could extract profit from whichever part of the value chain it could, and subsidise the bits that weren’t profitable by its end pricing. If writing Software was a cost (which it is), it could make up for that by screwing down suppliers by buying up in volume, or raising prices subtly. The relationship between the Big Software Company and the Other Companies didn’t allow for that dynamic.

Pretty soon, Apple dominated sales of devices dedicated to the Task. This didn’t please the Big Software Company, which decided that the Other Companies needed someone to show them how to do it properly, and set about building its own Devices using its own Software to do the Task.

At this, the Other Companies looked askance at the Big Software Company, and essentially told it to go screw itself.

Not a moment too Zune

Reading this, you may – if your memory is long enough – have thought “oh, it’s the story of Microsoft, the MP3 makers, the iPod and the Zune.” And that story certainly fits. Microsoft wrote the Windows Media Player and controller software, which then had to synchronise with the music stores and with the music players made by OEMs, all with the intention of giving the customer the most delightful experience.

The reality was rather different – it was so hard to keep all the software and hardware synchronised that you never knew who to blame. Did your player not work because the OEM had been lazy in implementing Microsoft’s software, or because Microsoft had somehow screwed things up?

There was also the problem of marketing and advertising: despite having a powerful brand, Microsoft couldn’t really favour one OEM over all the others, so they all had to fight for themselves. You got different devices, different sizes, and no clear story about what to do.

Apple, meanwhile, came through the middle, launching into the MP3 player market just as it was ready to expand (in 2001, when MP3 was big on the desktop but not in the pocket) with a clearly identifiable design and really easy-to-use software. (Yeah, yeah, I know, you hate iTunes. Believe me, there was a time when it wasn’t overloaded.)

The rise of the iPod left other MP3 makers floundering; they just couldn’t get traction, because they couldn’t have a single message (they needed to differentiate themselves from each other) and they often didn’t update in sync. Apple, meanwhile, ruthlessly exploited advertising gaps, celebrity endorsement and an interested media (which ran endless “iPod killer” stories, the first in October 2002 – it was attached to a Creative Technologies player).

This went on from 2001-2006, by which time Microsoft decided that it had had enough of these messups – Steve Ballmer, then CEO, was particularly annoyed by Apple’s dominance – and so it made its own, the Zune. The project started in March 2006 and launched in November that year. You can guess that the timing wasn’t fortuitous; the Zune arrived as the MP3 player market was going into decline. It’s often overlooked that in the same January 2007 video where Steve Ballmer dissed the iPhone, he also talked up the prospects of the Zune:

(Jump to 1’00” for the iPod discussion)

(You can read more about the whole Microsoft/Windows Media/iPod/Zune debacle in my book Digital Wars. Also has chapters about search, smartphones, tablets and China. UK Amazon paperback, UK Amazon Kindle, US Amazon paperback, US Amazon Kindle, iBooks.)

Not only but also: Android Wear

However, you could read the above story and replace “Microsoft” with “Google”, the Task with “smartwatches”, and all the OEMs with… the OEMs who have struggled to sell Android Wear watches.

And it is a struggle. Last week, Android Wear finally passed 5m downloads on Google Play. As I understand it (from sources), each download is an activation of an Android Wear device.

Here’s how the download figure, using the waypoints on Play, has progressed since the release at Google I/O 2014, when all the attendees got one:

Android Wear downloads, definite waypoints; the polynomial fit is pretty good, according to the correlation coefficient (R-squared: 1 = perfect correlation, 0 = none).

That’s actually quite encouraging: it seems to suggest that after a slow start, sales are just beginning to take off.

And now here’s how it looks if you also include the number of reviews for the app on Google Play. The trend there suggests that reviews led downloads – that is, the ratio of reviews to downloads wasn’t steady, and has shifted down, so that over time fewer people who download the app leave a review. (I use that approach in my modelling to estimate download growth.)

Android Wear downloads, and reviews left on the app page. (Some data for reviews missing.)

So, 5m sold in 115 weeks (just under 30 months). Here’s the problem, though: those 5m have been divided up between LG, Motorola, Huawei, Asus, Acer and the various other bit players in the Android Wear space.

Enter the Watch

But that’s before we consider Apple’s offering here. Apple doesn’t release official figures for individual sales of the Watch (“competitive reasons” is the line, and they’re sticking to it). According to Canalys though in its first two quarters of availability – April-October 2015 – it sold 7m. That was probably split 4m + 3m, given the estimates for a 4m first quarter.

And for the Christmas quarter, estimates (again, necessarily) put sales at 5.1m. And then for the first quarter of 2016 they were estimated (again) at 1.5m – a long way down, for certain, but not surprising for something which isn’t a necessity (like, say, a phone in the modern age) but more of a gift. A bit like iPods used to be, in fact.

So that takes us to 13.6m by March. Since then there have been two more quarters – well, we’re nearly through September. In the second, Apple was reckoned to have sold another 1.6m amid a widespread decline in smartwatch sales. Probably sales during this current about-to-end quarter have been similar, or even lower.

That’s a total so far of around 16.5m in five quarters. Those aren’t iPad-style numbers – that achieved 28.7m sales in its first five quarters – though it’s better than the iPhone (6.1m) over the same time from launch. (The iPod did 0.6m in its first five quarters, but they were different times.)

Here though is where Apple Watch/Android Wear starts to look like iPod/MP3 players. Apple gets all the revenue from the Watch, and it controls the software, and it decides how it’s going to move the business along. That’s why Apple’s trajectory looks a lot stronger at present:

On cumulative sales, Apple Watch is outpacing Android Wear by a substantial margin.

By contrast the Android Wear OEMS don’t even get to personalise Android Wear; they just make the product, and still have the software support costs (those driver updates don’t write themselves) without getting any sort of side benefit. It’s not even as if using one model ties people to that brand of phone; interchangeability is the model with Android, unlike Apple. For the consumer who wants to pick and mix, it’s fine, but as a business model it brings some pain.

That’s clearly why, as Roger Cheng found out at CNet (by the shocking tactic of Asking People), the big Android Wear OEMs are going to hold fire for now:

LG, Huawei and Lenovo’s Motorola unit will not release a smartwatch in the waning months of the year, the companies confirmed to CNET. While LG launched a watch in the first half, it’ll have been more than a year since Huawei and Motorola offered an update on their wearables.

That marks a reversal from last year, when all three companies launched Android Wear smartwatches at the early September IFA trade show in Berlin in what was supposed to be a resurgence of the platform. At this year’s show, Chinese maker Asus was the only major tech company to return with a new Android Wear watch.

That’s perhaps a bit discouraging, since aside from chip companies, you’d struggle to see other OEMs in the big list on the Android Wear site:

Not many of these are selling Android Wear watches as their primary business. Or even secondary business.

According to Wareable, there are somewhere between 10 and 21, perhaps 24, Android Wear watches to choose from. (Its guide is pretty handy.) You can also get an idea of pricing, which tends to be around £200; again, that’s quite a bit less than Apple’s Watch used to be, though since the introduction of the new version the price for last year’s model has fallen to £269.

Altogether, Android Wear vendors have taken in a total of 5m x £200 = £1bn ($1.3bn). That’s spread across multiple vendors – let’s assume four of them – over 30 months. It’s not a great return on investment; it’s about $10m per month each, or $120m per year. Apple, in the meantime, has probably taken in $350 x 16.5m = $5.7bn.

(Sanity check: Tim Cook said Apple was second only to Rolex in watch revenues for 2015, and Rolex did $4.5bn in sales in 2015, and the sales estimate above is 12.1m; at $350 each that’s $4.2bn. That’s also ahead of Fossil, which did $3.2bn. So this all fits with what we know.)

This is the inherent weakness, for a device that needs to be personal, in the modular business model: OEMs can’t control enough of the story around it. Samsung’s decision to go its own way with Tizen looks sensible; its use of the watch bezel for a control is an inspired little bit of UX.

See you zune?

In the face of indifference by the OEMs, though, what’s a Big Software Company to do? Well, perhaps what Big Software Companies do: roll its own. Google is said to be working on not one but two Android Wear watches of its own, set for release very soon. One is big and one is smaller, and it’s reported (by Android Police) that the larger one will have LTE connectivity as well as GPS and a heart rate sensor, and be a “do-all device that will allow Google to demonstrate Wear’s most robust capabilities, including the announcement at Google I/O that Android Wear 2.0 will support standalone apps”.

The smaller one, meanwhile, won’t have LTE or GPS and maybe not even a heartrate sensor. Price unknown.

If they’re going to happen, then they’ll come with the October 4 announcement of the new Pixel phones. Google has already indicated that it’s going to try to move beyond the Nexus line (something which has occasionally annoyed its Android OEMs; that’s part of why the Nexus phone line has never been big in sales terms). Perhaps it has decided the same for smartwatches. I guess we’ll find out zune enough.

Phil Schiller introducing the iPhone 7/Plus in San Francisco. Yes, but why “7”? Photo by tuaulamac on Flickr.

Yes, Apple launched new phones the other day. Yes, there isn’t a 3.5mm headphone jack – which will cause varying amounts of trouble for people and accessory makers. There are “AirPods” to buy ($159, or £159 – even with VAT that doesn’t make sense on the exchange rate front).

We know too that Apple faces challenges: the premium smartphone market is saturated, so that pretty much all sales now will be to people who are replacing an existing smartphone; and Apple only targets the premium end, since even the iPhone SE (which does have a 3.5mm headphone hack, and a 16GB model) starts at $350, which is the lower limit of what analysts call “premium”.

But there’s a subtler question around this iPhone. And it’s this: why does Apple call it “7”? Sure, they’ve moved things around, and redesigned this and tweaked that (oh, yeah, headphone jack has gone). This is known as a “refresh” in the business.

The MacBook. Who can tell which year they’re from? Only the colour indicates that the right-hand one isn’t from 2015. Photos by tuaulamac on Flickr.

So why do we have a number for this product, and yet when the MacBook line had a refresh earlier in 2016, that wasn’t called “MacBook 2” – or even “MacBook 3”, as there was one back in 2010?

Similarly, the expected and long overdue refresh of the Mac Pro isn’t going to be the “Mac Pro 2”; nor is the MacBook Pro line going to get a “MacBook Pro 9”, given that there have been eight iterations already since the line was introduced in February 2011.

On its face, this is puzzling. Apple wants people to upgrade their hardware – that’s where vast amounts of its revenue comes from – and with the iPhone, it signals to people that there are new models available through the numbering system, and also through the colours available. (In 2013, the 5S came in a “gold” colour; in 2015 there was the new “rose gold”.)

By contrast, the PCs come with very little variation in appearance – you have to be quite nerdy to spot the difference between a 2012-vintage model MacBook Pro and the 2015 one, say. Though the MacBook does come in multiple colours, and the “MacBook 2” added rose gold as a colour option. (Hence above we know the right-hand one is a 2016 model.)

Colour as a “novelty” signal has long been a favourite for Apple: remember the original iMac, in “Bondi blue”, where the colour range then expanded – signalling how much newer your model was – until it went mad with the Dalmatian range. Of course if the numbering system were used for the iMac, we’d be up to something like “iMac 20” by now, what with all the variations of the 1998 teardrop, the lampstand, and now the flat-panel version.

Yet the more you look across the product range, the more peculiar this choice of numbering only for phones becomes. It has even been dropped for the iPads; where we used to have iPad 2, 3, 4, and then “iPad mini”, and then Air and Air 2, we now just have iPad Pro and iPad Air. (And mini. Not sure how long that will survive. It’s something of an “iPod touch for the iPad range”.) There’s the Apple TV. Can you tell them apart? Only by size. They don’t get “Apple TV 4”. Airport Express? Airport Extreme?

And how about the iPod? That didn’t get numbers – though it did get descriptors as the range grew (“Classic”, “mini”, “nano”, “shuffle”, “touch”). The changing design was itself sufficient differentiation, perhaps.

Here’s another example from a saturated market: cars don’t get numbers. They get names. There’s the Ford Focus, the Vauxhall Zafira, the Chrysler Plymouth, and so on. Ah – except as John Dodds points out, BMW uses numbers for its ranges (BMW 3 series, 5 series). Hmm.

Note, by the way, that the Watch is getting a “Series 2” moniker, and also new materials and colours. But the descriptors (“Edition”, “Sport”) have been abandoned.

What’s in a name and a number?

What do we conclude? Perhaps those more steeped in marketing will provide a better analysis, but it feels to me as though there’s an urgency in using numbers to name a product: it immediately dates the old one and give the new one a sense of being right here, right now. (Except – odd detail – you won’t find the phone number on the phone itself. Nor is it even displayed in or on the phone. The back of the iPhone used to show the memory; now it doesn’t even do that.)

Why not do the same on the PCs then? It’s not that there’s suddenly a temptation to slide past a lengthening upgrade cycle; Apple used to upgrade them every six months or so like clockwork, but recently has become less interested in doing so. But it didn’t have a number or even descriptor for its PCs back when it was pushing new ones out.

Add in the fact that it’s almost impossible to differentiate between the iPhone 6/6S/7 (and 6+/6S+/7+ – except the latter has dual cameras) except if they’re in unusual colours, and you have a conundrum. Apple attaches numbers to these products in its marketing; yet there’s none on the devices themselves. Perhaps it’s to help people pretend that they have the latest when in fact they don’t; the “unashamedly plastic” 5C sold comparatively poorly (against expectations if Apple had simply continued the iPhone 5, which is what the 5C actually was inside) perhaps because owning one indicated to the world that you didn’t have enough money to buy the top-end new model, the 5S, and that you hadn’t had it the year before either (because you’d have had the 5).

So if the phones don’t have the numbers, why does the marketing? Possibly it’s just to do what marketing should: make you aware there’s a new product. Even if you can’t tell which one other people – or even you – are using. (Do you know which model of phone you have? This might be indicative of how susceptible you are to this marketing method.)

The only other question is: when will Apple stop numbering its iPhones? Will the 2017 version, being the tenth anniversary edition, be the “iPhone Edition” or some such? Once you’re on this thing, it seems unlikely to stop – but I can’t wrap my head around the concept of 2020 rolling around and the “iPhone 9” being unveiled while a few weeks later one of the PCs gets an update that makes it autonomously intelligent with VR, and yet it’s just called “the MacBook”.

(From an idea on Twitter by Joe Asbridge – thanks Joe. Told you I’d write it up eventually.)

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Lenovo’s Yoga Book: is this the new face of tablet computing? Not quite. Photo by bjtechnewsphotolibrary on Flickr.

I went to IFA in Berlin last week (courtesy of Harman Kardon; they have some interesting stuff I’ll write about presently) and during my time there got a chance to look at Lenovo’s new Yoga Book, which has attracted some interest.

(Here’s the TL;DR: it’s an interesting design, and it’s great that Lenovo is at least thinking of different ways to approach tablet design. But in the end it’s a short-term feature that doesn’t actually offer anything over other designs.)

Lenovo has a gigantic stand there, with the Motorola brand now limited to a little island in the middle of it. There were no smartwatches on view. There was a lot of space devoted to the Yoga Book.

Book your place

How to describe it? The photos mostly do it justice. If it were a laptop, you’d say it was very thin. There’s a hinge, and a tablet-style 10.1in display which is touch-sensitive, and then there’s a basalt-black lower (or side) slab which is where the keyboard would be in a laptop.

The Yoga Book’s “basalt slab” lights up to show an illuminated keyboard; otherwise it’s black. Photos by bjtechnewsphotolibrary on Flickr.

But rather than having moving keys, this lower part is just black – until you press a lit virtual button at the top right, which turns on the underlights (backlights isn’t right) to a virtual keyboard.

That is, indeed, impressive. Seeing the keyboard light into life is one of those “technology delight” moments. There was nothing, now there’s something! And you can type on it, as accurately and quickly as on any hard-surface virtual keyboard. (I can type pretty fast on them, and spent a little while proving it to myself on one of the Yoga Books.)

That isn’t quite all that the basalt slab can do: it’s also touch-sensitive, so that you can draw on it using a normal pencil or pen, though it might be advisable – as the photos show – to do that with a piece of paper in between. Great! You can copy your drawings that you made on the back of napkin into whichever drawing app you’re using. (I did not test this. No napkins to hand.) But I did see it being demonstrated plenty on the stand.

The screen itself is also touch-sensitive, in the same way as an iPad or any Android or Windows tablet. That’s because the Yoga Book is both of the last two – it can dual-boot, into Windows or Android or more precisely, either: you can buy a Windows version or Android one. (It doesn’t seem to be dual-boot.)

Here’s the thing, though. What else can the basalt slab do? Nothing. It can’t light up and display more content. It just does a keyboard. (I assume it can do different keyboards, according to language, though I didn’t check this.)

What’s the problem this solves?

So the basalt slab is nice, and it has a “delight the potential buyer” element. But let’s ask: how much better off are you with this than with, say, an iPad Pro with a detachable keyboard (or any iPad with a Logitech or similar attachable keyboard)? Or a Surface Pro?

The Yoga Book has one thing those don’t:
• you can alter the viewing angle for the screen to any angle, including bending the keyboard underneath the screen so that you have a tablet stand at any angle.

And that’s it.

But, but, but, you say: what about all the writing on the basalt slab?

OK, what about it? How is it better to be able to write with a pencil at one remove from the screen itself (rather like using a Wacom tablet) than being able to write directly onto the screen with an Apple Pencil or Surface stylus? I puzzled about this for a while, but I really cannot see any scenario where anyone but a serious artist would want this function. If you occasionally need to get some handwritten content into an app, get something that accommodates a Pencil/stylus. Or, hell, just take a picture of it and draw over it in an illustration app. (Apps such as Procreate make this easy.)

Target market

Lenovo does seem to be targeting the “real artist” slice, judging by its promo material (from the link above):

Draw with the included Real Pen that detects 2048 levels of pressure—capturing subtle nuances of every stroke. No need to worry about batteries; the Real Pen works without ever needing a charge. You can even be more creative by using two hands: one on the screen to select tools, pan, and pinch-to-zoom the other hand using the Real Pen to draw on the Create Pad.Best of all, you can see your creations come alive on the display – unlike most tablets, where your hand blocks the display as you draw.

Ah yeah – the Real Pen costs £43. (Apple’s Pencil costs £79, and doesn’t say how many pressure levels it detects.)

You can draw on the basalt slab with the Real Pen. But why would you, rather than just drawing directly onto the tablet screen? Photos by bjtechnewsphotolibrary on Flickr.`

Perhaps is the basalt slab giving tons more battery life? Apparently not: Lenovo talks of 13 hours’ battery life on Android, which is tablet-ish but not “oh wow that’s utterly incredible, did you do that by hiding the battery in the basalt slab, wow”; though for the Windows tablet it suggests 15 hours, which is a lot more impressive for a Windows tablet.

When you look at it like this, the basalt slab looks less like a “really clever thing” and more like “yeah, it’s a touch-sensitive display that doesn’t display anything but black and white keys”, which is a good way to keep costs down. (Windows developer Mike Hole points out that it’s a bit like the dual-screen Acer Iconia tablet – which he describes as “very niche and flat keyboard [is] a no-no”.)

For all that, the Yoga Book retails for £430 in the UK, which is substantially more than the other two tablets here, which go for £130 and £180. Lenovo’s problem has been that it couldn’t break out of the Android tablet morass, which led it to lose money on them. So the Yoga is a clever move in that regard.

That’s the real problem that it solves: making money in the tablet market.

But is the Yoga Book a breakthrough in tablet design, bringing us dazzling new possibilities? Afraid not. It’s neat, but after a while you realise that the innovation is sustaining, not disruptive.

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