Apple’s Most Back-Ordered New Product Is Not What You Expect
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OAKLAND, Calif — Apple this month unveiled an array of new gadgets: more powerful MacBook laptop computers, AirPod wireless headphones with longer battery life and HomePod Mini speakers in three more colors.
But a different and unheralded Apple release is garnering so much interest that it has become the company’s most back-ordered new product: a $19, 6.3-by-6.3-inch cloth to wipe smudges and fingerprints off screens.
The cloth, imprinted with the Apple logo in the corner, is made with “soft, nonabrasive material” to clean the screens of iPhones, iPads and MacBooks “safely and effectively,” according to the product page. The listing adds that the Polishing Cloth — capital P, capital C — is “compatible” with 88 different Apple products. For most U.S. shoppers, shipment is delayed until Jan. 11, at the earliest.
Charging $19 for a piece of cloth about the size of two stacked dollar bills is bold even by Apple’s standards, a company whose legions of loyal customers are conditioned to stomach steep prices. An Apple-branded set of four wheels to “improve mobility” for the Mac Pro, the company’s most expensive desktop computer, is priced at $699, for instance.
But the Polishing Cloth stands out because it is far more expensive than widely available alternatives. MagicFiber, a popular brand of microfiber cloth that uses ultrafine fibers to clean glass without scratching the surface, offers a pack of six for $9 on Amazon.
“You have to give them credit for the chutzpah to charge $19,” Walter Gonzalez, president and founder of Goja, the parent company of MagicFiber, said of Apple.
Even so, the price has not stopped Apple fans from rushing to be early adopters.
Albert Lee, 47, a director at a consulting firm in New York, said he bought the cloth at an Apple Store on Tuesday. He was picking up a new MacBook Pro, a high-end laptop computer, when the Polishing Cloth caught his eye. He bought four and then posted a picture of his bounty on Twitter.
“It’s just a point of sheer excess,” Mr. Lee acknowledged, calling the splurge an impulse buy of “the most elite cloth.” He added: “I just spent $4,000 on a laptop. What’s another $19?”
On Twitter, the cloth has been fodder for jokes and even a parody account since Apple quietly put it on sale on Oct. 18. Later that week, when Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, posted a tweet promoting a new retail store in Turkey, Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, needled him by replying, “Come see the Apple Cloth” with a trademark logo.
(Mr. Musk’s company is also not shy about testing the strength of its brand and the fealty of its customers. Tesla’s website offers a company-branded “handblown” decanter for $150 and a $60 umbrella with an “ergonomically designed handle.”)
Technically, the cloth is not a new product. Apple had previously provided it free for customers who bought one of its high-end monitors, Pro Display XDR. The $5,999 display has a special type of glass that reduces glare, but may scratch if wiped with a conventional cloth. Apple said it designed its own cloth for that special glass and decided to sell the product separately when some customers asked to buy extras.
An Apple official said in an interview, based on the condition that The New York Times not quote or identify her, that the company was not surprised by the demand for the Polishing Cloth. The official said the cloth was very effective and had been designed to be special, including a custom light gray color. Apple said the cloth was made of a nonwoven microfiber but declined to elaborate.
Federico Viticci, editor in chief of MacStories, a website dedicated to Apple news and apps, said he initially thought the Polishing Cloth was a joke.
“I’ve been cleaning my iPhone screen and my iPad screen with the cloth that comes with my eyeglasses or my T-shirt, or a paper towel like normal people,” he said.
But Mr. Viticci, who is based in Italy, said he ended up buying the Polishing Cloth because “I kind of realized the meme potential here.” His tweets about the product have since gotten hundreds or thousands of likes and retweets, with subscribers to his site asking for exclusive cloth photos.
Patrick Tomasso, 32, a Toronto-based YouTube creator of tech and photography-related videos, said he also thought that Apple charging $25 Canadian dollars for the cloth was “ridiculous” since many tech products include a microfiber cloth free.
But when he noticed that it was not shipping until next year, he said he got a “bit of FOMO” — fear of missing out — and quickly snapped up two sheets from a nearby Apple store. As a spoof, Mr. Tomasso then made an “unboxing video” of himself opening the “most revolutionary Apple product.”
In the video, he noticed that the Polishing Cloth’s color looked different in person — more gray, less white — and that there was a big crease in the middle that might need to be ironed.
His assessment? It’s a nice cloth worth maybe $5.
“I probably would not buy it again but I like the fact that I own one,” Mr. Tomasso said. Then he paused and added, “But I hate that I like that I own one.”
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The New York Times Pulls Out of Apple News
The Times said Apple News did not align with its strategy of building direct relationships with paying readers.
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By Kellen Browning and Jack Nicas
The New York Times said on Monday that it was exiting its partnership with Apple News, as news organizations struggle to compete with large tech companies for readers’ attention and dollars.
Starting on Monday, Times articles were no longer appearing alongside those from other publications in the curated Apple News feed available on Apple devices.
The Times is one of the first media organizations to pull out of Apple News. The Times, which has made adding new subscribers a key business goal, said Apple had given it little in the way of direct relationships with readers and little control over the business. It said it hoped to instead drive readers directly to its own website and mobile app so that it could “fund quality journalism.”
“Core to a healthy model between The Times and the platforms is a direct path for sending those readers back into our environments, where we control the presentation of our report, the relationships with our readers and the nature of our business rules,” Meredith Kopit Levien, chief operating officer, wrote in a memo to employees. “Our relationship with Apple News does not fit within these parameters.”
An Apple spokesman said that The Times “only offered Apple News a few stories a day,” and that the company would continue to provide readers with trusted information from thousands of publishers.
“We are also committed to supporting quality journalism through the proven business models of advertising, subscriptions and commerce,” he said.
The news business has had a complicated relationship with Silicon Valley for decades. Companies like Google and Facebook have decimated newspaper advertising sales and disintermediated news sites by positioning their own platforms as one of the main ways that people can consume news.
Yet when Apple created a news app in late 2015, promising to work with publishers to help them build a business, many news executives were cautiously optimistic.
Unlike other tech companies, Apple didn’t compete with news sites for ad dollars. And Apple adopted an approach that was antithetical to how its Silicon Valley peers handled the headlines: It allowed only mainstream news organizations in the app, and humans, not algorithms, ranked the top stories.
Apple’s aggressive promotion of Apple News on iPhones has given it an audience of roughly 125 million monthly readers, making the app one of the world’s most widely read news sources. But advertising in the app has generated little revenue for news organizations. For any subscriptions sold in the app, Apple also takes a 30 percent cut.
Last year, Apple introduced a new way for publishers to make money: Apple News Plus, a subscription service inside its news app that offers access to hundreds of publications, which typically have digital paywalls, for $9.99 a month.
Apple told publishers that the service would deliver customers they wouldn’t otherwise get. But many publications would be undercutting their own prices, and they would have to share half of the Apple News Plus revenues with dozens of other news organizations. Apple took the other half for itself.
Still, many publishers took the gamble, including The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times and Condé Nast, which publishes The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Wired. Months after its debut, many publishers were underwhelmed by the sales, according to Digiday, a digital media news site.
Executives at The Times passed on Apple News Plus and later reduced the number of articles it supplied to Apple News. In an interview with Reuters last year, Mark Thompson, The Times’s chief executive, warned other news organizations about the risks of teaming up with Apple.
“We tend to be quite leery about the idea of almost habituating people to find our journalism somewhere else,” he said.
The Times said last month that its total subscribers had topped six million. Revenue has been rising from digital subscriptions, even as the company grapples with an advertising downturn brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.
The Times has long had a complex relationship with the large tech companies. It has experimented with working with Facebook, including on an effort called Instant Articles several years ago.
But The Times stopped producing Instant Articles for the social network in 2017, saying it wasn’t getting enough revenue. Now Facebook pays The Times to feature its articles in the news tab on Facebook’s app, the company’s latest effort to work with the news industry. Times articles also appear in Google News, which sends readers to publishers’ websites, unlike Apple News, which generally keeps readers on Apple’s app.
In her note to employees, Ms. Levien said that exiting the partnership with Apple News was not expected to have “a material impact” to The Times’s business and that the company would work with Apple in other ways, including on apps, podcasts and hardware.
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The Chip That Could Transform Computing
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For decades, the chip-making giant Intel reigned as one of the most technically advanced companies in Silicon Valley.
It was Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore who famously predicted that computer chips would keep getting unimaginably more powerful. And it was Intel’s products, the x86 line of microprocessors at the heart of just about every personal computer, that turned Moore’s prophecy into a governing “law” of tech. The promise that every year, Intel’s new chips would be much faster than its old chips set the rhythm for advances across the entire industry.
But somewhere in the past decade, Intel lost the plot. It was blindsided by new trends — the rising utility of graphics processors, the widespread adoption of mobile devices — and beset by a series of embarrassing operational delays. Even more surprising than Intel’s slippage has been which company has come to succeed it as the pacesetter of processors. Meeting with employees early this year, Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s incoming chief executive at the time, was reluctant even to speak the enemy’s name — according to The Oregonian, he jokingly referred to the new chip champion only as “a lifestyle company in Cupertino.”
Cupertino, Calif., of course, is the home of Apple, whose focus on design, aesthetics and usability has often left it vulnerable to Gelsinger’s implication that its products are more fashionable than capable. But last month, Apple unveiled laptops built around its own custom-designed processors, the M1 Pro and M1 Max, that have rendered such digs completely ridiculous.
Early reviews for Apple’s new machines have been so rapturous — “the most powerful laptops we’ve ever seen,” “dramatically better than they have any business” being, “just generally absurd” — that I worried I’d only be let down when I got my hands on one and it proved to be as frustrating as all computers inevitably are.
I have not been let down. I’ve been bowled over. I’ve been using a new MacBook Pro with Apple’s fastest new chip, the M1 Max, for about two weeks, and I can’t remember the last time a laptop has wowed me like this. Actually, I don’t think a laptop has ever really wowed me, because it’s just a laptop.
This ridiculously fast laptop, though, got me thinking expansively about what’s to come. Over the past several years, some in tech have worried that Moore’s Law has been running out of steam. At some point soon, experts theorized, microchips would begin to hit fundamental physical limits that would make further performance gains extremely challenging. And because processors are essentially the engines of computers, their impending limit implied an eventual limit on the usefulness of computing, too.
I called up several experts to ask what Apple’s innovation tells us about the future of computing. The short answer: We still have a way to go before hitting a wall.
The M1 chips make laptops as powerful as some of the fastest desktops on the market yet so efficient that their battery life beats that of just about any other laptop. The chips portend a future absolutely saturated with computing power — with extremely powerful processors not just in traditional computers and smartphones but also in cars, drones, virtual-reality machines and pretty much everything else that runs on electricity.
How Apple achieved these gains is an interesting business and technical story. In 2008, about a year after Apple released the first iPhone, it purchased a small semiconductor start-up to build specialized chips for its phones. For many years, Intel’s chips were made primarily for stationary machines like servers and personal computers. To hit their top speeds, Intel’s processors had to draw a lot of electricity and created a lot of heat. But Apple’s most important products are mobile, powered by batteries, so chugging a lot of power wasn’t ideal. Its chip designers had to take a starkly different approach. Rather than maximize raw power, Apple aimed to build chips that were optimized for power and efficiency.
The technical ways Apple has achieved this combination will sound like geeky gobbledygook to anyone unschooled in semiconductor theory. Broadly, though, Apple’s systems use a lot of specialized processing units and are optimized to run more operations “out of order,” a technical term that basically means they can execute more code simultaneously.
The result is something like the difference between a muscle car and a Tesla. The muscle car achieves high speeds with a huge engine that burns a lot of gasoline. The Tesla can hit even higher speeds while consuming less power because its electric motor is inherently more efficient than a gas engine. For years, Intel was making muscle cars; Apple’s big innovation was to build the Tesla of computer chips.
Apple also benefited from enormous economies of scale. Because the iPhone is one of the most profitable products ever sold, the company could afford to invest billions in a custom chip operation — and then to repurpose its iPhone chips for the iPad, the Apple TV and now the Mac.
Apple’s investments have helped spark a new race in the chip business. Intel is investing $20 billion on new chip-making plants, and other chip manufacturers — Samsung and TSMC, which manufactures processors for Apple — are collectively investing hundreds of billions of dollars to increase capacity.
If I sound a little too giddy about microchips, it’s because there hasn’t been much breakthrough technical innovation in the tech business for years. Facebook is off ruining democracies, Google just keeps sucking more money out of ads, and each new iPhone is just incrementally better than the last.
Apple’s processors feel genuinely new. For better and worse, they will dramatically improve the capabilities of our devices in the next few years. Today’s fastest phones are more powerful than computers from just a few years ago; Andrei Frumusanu, who covered Apple’s new processors for the tech-news site Anandtech, told me that he expects Apple will be able to keep pushing similar gains at least through the next decade.
And other tech companies will spend heavily to catch up. After seeing what Apple has done, Frumusanu said, “everyone’s just freaking out.”
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