The first iPhone was sold as your phone and iPod in one – which wasn’t a unique proposition in itself – but that mild convenience was hardly enough to justify its massive cost.

And when Steve Jobs debuted the iPad, he sold it as the perfect device for consumption – completely failing to anticipate its success as a creative, organisational and business tool.

In reality, Apple is not in the habit of making use cases for its products, beyond assuring prospective consumers that they are objects of desire.

Josh Dzieza in The Verge has even suggested that – in the case of the Watch at least – this is because the real use case undermines the role of Apple’s golden goose. But the truth is far more simple.

Apple has not given a strong use case for the Watch because one does not exist yet – but it’s confident one will soon.

A little bit of magic

Read this fantastic piece in Wired and you might begin to see how a wearable could play a part in someone’s day-to-day life. It details Disney’s $1bn development of the ‘MagicBand’, a relatively simple wrist-strap that houses a huge amount of potential for the company’s theme parks.

After a bit of planning on the accompanying app/website, visitors can use the bands to get access to their room, fast entry to rides of their choice and quick (and automatic) service at restaurants.

Customers can also link the band to a credit card, so it can be used to make purchases while in the theme park’s shops – while in the future Disney could even use the bands to locate specific guests and bring “experiences” to them.

By building the Watch, Apple is creating a similar system, only it’s designed for the wider world and it will be utilised by companies that can’t afford to spend ~$1bn developing their own.

If you think of the Watch being combined with Apple’s iBeacon – a low-powered device that can detect and perform certain actions with nearby iOS devices – you suddenly start to see its true potential.

For example, someone might enter a shop and – seeing where they are – the Watch might pull up the relevant shopping list for that location. The store’s app might notify the user of certain special offers available in store at that time, while the Apple Pay screen might automatically pop up once the user makes their way to the till.

Of course it doesn’t have to be all about the buyer/seller relationship – this kind of technology could be used to help tourists navigate a city, give the right people access to the right buildings/rooms and even allow for better planning based on the data flow generated.

If wearables become a mainstream hit – and that’s still a big ‘if’ – firms will to tap into them through inexpensive apps and create new, interesting ways for people to use them.

In other words, they’ll be the ones – not Apple – to develop the technology’s “use case”.

Few argued that, at 1.36kg and no more than 19mm thick, it was an impressive feat of engineering. But many pointed out that its middling specs made its $1,800+ pricetag absurd, while its lone USB port and lack of an optical drive meant its usability was severely hampered.

Seven years on, Apple has managed to kick of the exact same debate – this time around the new version of its mid-tier MacBook laptop.

Weighing just 900g and boasting a maximum thickness of just 13mm, the new MacBook is another fine example of Apple’s ability to maximise space.

Packed in amongst an array of batteries is a 12” ‘Retina Display’ screen, 256GB of SSD storage and 8GB of RAM – as well an interesting new keyboard, a new ‘taptic’ trackpad and some other bells and whistles (read: camera and speakers).

But in the process Apple has made what many would agree to be compromises – for example, the processor is just a 1.1GHz dual-core Intel Core M. At a starting price of $1,299, accusations of too-much-cost paired with too-little-power are being made once again.

Of course the success of the first MacBook Air proved that consumers are only marginally concerned about processor power. Far more important to them is convenience and portability – and, of course, style.

Apple has no reason to believe that this won’t also be the case with its new MacBook.

But even putting the price/power dynamic aside, many doubt that the new MacBook will have much appeal in light of another seeming compromise; that being the decision to reduce all wired connectivity – including the power cable – to one (USB-C) port.

This effectively means that people will need an adaptor if they want to plug in a regular USB device (even their little memory stick), if they want to use an external display or if they want to connect any two things at once.

Many say that the market is not yet ready for such a move, especially because USB-C is still in its infancy.

And they have a point; but Apple has long been adept at spotting a shift in the way people use their computers and adapting their product line before everyone else.

The first MacBook Air is a good example of that.

More than a few eyebrows were raised when that device shipped without a disc drive, but today that is a fairly common feature (or lack of a feature) in any company’s laptop line.

Apple saw that people were moving to USB and digital downloads, meaning their reliance on discs was diminishing rapidly. It took a punt and profited as a result.

With the new MacBook, they’re making a similar bet.

Apple sees that customers are becoming increasingly reliant on cloud services (i.e. iCloud Drive) to store and access their content. It sees wireless standards like Bluetooth and WiFi (and AirDrop) becoming increasingly common means of sharing files and connecting devices, and it reckons wireless will also become the norm for video and audio streaming (i.e. AirPlay).

With all that in mind, Apple is taking a punt and hoping that once people acquire a new MacBook, they’ll realise just how little they needed all of the ports on their old laptop.

(It’s no harm to their business model that the best way to ensure that, will be through the ownership of multiple Apple devices.)

MacBook vs MacBook Air

But even with that justification, there is still a bit of confusion about the MacBook – specifically its relationship to the existing MacBook Air range.

It has effectively stolen the emperor’s clothes, coming in thinner and lighter than its “little” brother, leading many to wonder why it didn’t replace – rather than supplement – the ‘Air’.

An answer to that may come in the next big product announcement Apple is rumoured to be making.

By all accounts, the company will take the wraps off a new ‘iPad Pro’ later this year as it seeks to arrest the decline in tablet sales while also increasing its courtship of the business market.

The device will be larger than the existing iPad Air, with a focus on higher-end and more work-focused use. Some have even suggested that it device will include some laptop-esque features – like a USB(-C?) port to make it more appealing to such users.

If such a device were to be a hit, it would almost certainly be at the expense of some of Apple’s laptop market – particularly those looking for an ultraportable that can be used for day-to-day tasks.

In other words, it would take another big bite out of the MacBook Air’s raison d’etre. And that’s the prism through which the new MacBook should be viewed.

With it, Apple has taken the concept of the MacBook Air to a new extreme and pushed it up the value chain in the process.

This leaves space for Apple to replace the ‘Air’ with a high-end, tablet/laptop hyprid iPad, without necessary losing too many of those who might still want the option of a dedicated, ultraportable laptop.

And it would hardly be the first time the company has tweaked its product line to make space for a new category. Just look at how it constantly shifted its iPod line-up over the years to make room for a new variant – and even how the square iPod Nano (which many users wore on their wrists) changed shape around the time Apple started looking into building a smartwatch…

As it points out, changing patterns of consumption makes it very easy for this type of content to be read as “real” news – even if the company behind it is upfront about its intentions.

Meanwhile, the demand on real newsrooms to do more with less – and at a faster pace than ever before – has also made it easier for those “real” news outlets to pick this content up, or at the very least use it as a foundation for fresh work.

And that’s not getting into the increased collaboration of news outlets with PR firms, be it through native advertising or other sponsored content.

It’s well worth a read if you’ve ever toyed with the idea of making radio packages/programmes, or even if you just want a better understanding of how Glass & Co make such compelling pieces.

Along with this it showed me a map highlighting my current location, my destination and my route of choice for getting there – complete with up-to-date traffic information so I could see how long the journey might take.

The thing was, I had never told Google any of this information – nor did I ask for a reminder of my clocking-off time.

I’ve never told Google my work hours, I’ve never told it where I work, I’ve never told it where I live and I’ve never told it my route between those two locations.

That is to say that I’ve never actively told it any of this.

What I have done, however, is switch to an Android phone for a few weeks while my iPhone is out of action.

During the set-up process I casually activated the Google Now feature, and thought no more about it until yesterday’s information.

However in doing so, I had given Google permission to monitor pretty much everything I did with the phone and present me with information based on what it “learned”.

With that in mind I can only assume that – via the GPS on my phone – Google had noticed me moving between these two locations every day of the week – generally at the same times – and “learned” that this was where I work and when I tend to finish up.

There’s no other way it could have figured it out, from what I can think – I don’t put my hours into Google Calendar, nor do I have them detailed in Gmail.

This bit of knowledge was almost certainly based on my movements alone.

I should say that this post isn’t necessarily here to bemoan the menacing hand of modern technology – I had to activate Google Now and should have known better than to be surprised by this result.

However, Google’s prompt has made me better appreciate the trail of information we passively leave behind us every day; well in excess of the obvious flash-points of public Facebook data and the Twitter feed.

It also made me better appreciate just how sophisticated computers are becoming at interpreting data and making fairly-accurate assumptions from there.

After my brush with Google Now’s cognitive reasoning I was about to turn the feature off to avoid a repeat performance, but I’ve since decided to leave it on – for now at least.

I currently using Google’s phone OS (until the iPhone is resurrected, at least), its mail and chat client, its search engine, its mapping software and (in work) its web browser.

I’m equal parts intrigued and terrified to learn what else it figures out about me.

On the surface it may seem like another fine piece of PR from the Californian company (and that’s because it is), but the reasoning behind the decision is far more nuanced than that.

While likely to remain relatively low-cost for some time, manufacturing in China is beginning to get more expensive. The middle class is growing and workers are beginning to unionise, which will ultimately lead to demand for higher wages there.

Coupled with this is a rise in distribution costs, which means that getting the finished products out of China and to consumers – more often than not in the US – is gobbling up more of Apple’s (very handsome) profit margin.

Apple’s decision to begin manufacturing a small amount of its products in the US is most definitely a toe-in-the-water tactic, but it is also a defensive manoeuvre that will give the company a head-start if (or indeed when) Chinese manufacturing loses its edge.

Doing it before anyone else does is the icing on the PR department’s cake.

Of course those optics of it are not to be sniffed at either – Apple will now be championed for creating jobs in the US and can soon vaguely state that it has “begun” manufacturing in the country. This is despite the fact that it will be one line in a product category that accounted for just 14% of the company’s revenue in Q3 2012.

Perhaps a more important political consequence, for a cold-eyed businessman like Tim Cook at least, will be the opportunity to sell products to the US Government (which requires that they are manufactured in the US-of-A).

Finally, having a manufacturing base in the US plays into the Apple desire for control.

Having a factory down the road means higher up-front costs but it also means product quality can be more easily monitored, which could reduce faults and – by proxy – returns costs.

It also allows the company to keep a closer eye on factory conditions, thus reducing the chance of Foxxcon-like scandals which are damaging to its coveted brand.

China will remain a manufacturing powerhouse for the foreseeable future, of course. However Apple’s decision is sure to make some people sit up and take notice.

Coincidently, when I interviewed PCH International’s Liam Casey (known as ‘Mr China’ for his work in helping companies get products mass produced in the country) at the 2012 Dublin Web Summit, the topic of rising costs in China came up.

He sees the demographics changing but said the country will ultimately remain the place to manufacture because the expertise, speed and scale to do so is there.

Despite today’s revelation it can be assumed that even Tim Cook agrees with this, at least as long as the iPhone, iPad – and the majority of Macs – are getting churned out from Chinese production lines.

A lot has also been made of the Obama campaign’s ability to use raw data (and online platforms) to its advantage.

This article, however, is the first time I’ve seen some real detail on exactly what that data machine looked like and what it achieved.

It’s a long piece – and it spends a lot of time looking at the personalities behind the programming – but for some really eye-opening stats skip down to the ‘what they actually built’ section on page 2.

Some choice facts and figures from there –

• 30,000 Reddit users registered to vote through Obama’s site after he did an AMA there
• The campaign used data from DVR boxes (akin to a Sky+ box) to target ads at viewers who had watched certain things, for example the TV debates
• They designed a Twitter tool that could calculate a user’s influence, cross-reference it with other data (like if they were in a battleground state) and target DMs accordingly
• Facebook fans were told if friends certain hadn’t voted and encouraged to get them to do so
• The campaign created a ‘quick donate’ function similar to make repeat donations as easy as buying from Amazon or iTunes

For the most part the speeches were interesting, though unsurprisingly they did not give the audience anything that it did not already know.

One aspect that did stand out for me, however, was Brian Fallon’s number-crunching on potential revenue models for Irish media outlets. I’ve already had a discussion with him on Twitter about the figures but I thought it might help to blog about too, as 140 characters just is not enough space when you are trying to question and make nuanced points.

Fallon’s figures

You can see the details of Fallon’s figures for yourself by skipping ahead to the 8m 25s mark on the video of his speech. Failing that, you can also read through his presentation, which has helpfully been made available online (the revenue figures can be found from page 19 on).

To summarise, however, Fallon suggests:

• Based on the average online readership of traditional media outlets like The Irish Times, RTÉ and The Irish Independent (all ~700,000 unique readers per month reading 35m pages – excluding mobile readership and, according to Fallon, international readers too) you could reasonably expect to generate revenue of €3.8m per year.
• Using the subscription price charged – and a similar conversion rate predicted – by The New York Times under its “freemium” model (5% of online readers paying ~€155 per year) these same sites could stand to generate €3.3m in revenue per year.

Fallon says this kind of revenue would be enough for an outlet like The Journal to employ 80 journalists.

To me, however, his numbers do not add up.

The freemium cliff

The “freemium” model used by The New York Times is relatively simple – allow users a limited amount of free access (initially the NYT allowed 20 monthly page views for free, now it’s just 10), after which they the a paywall and must subscribe or go elsewhere.

The theory is this allows a site to continue to draw in casual readers and make money from their page impressions, while also forcing people to pay up if they are heavy users of the site.

There’s no reason why it could not be deployed in an Irish context (bar RTÉ, in my opinion, which would be breaching its public service remit by going behind a paywall of any kind) but the problem is the readership figures currently enjoyed would become irrelevant.

Once you erect a paywall – freemium or otherwise – you will lose readers. The NYT lost 5-15% of its daily readership in the immediate aftermath of its move to freemium – meanwhile its page views declined by 30%.

It makes sense – if people cannot access more than 20 pages without paying then page views will drop. Many users will also decide to go elsewhere for their news altogether – you just have to hope there are more who decide to cough up for a subscription.

In an Irish context, a 30% drop in page views would mean 10.5m fewer pages read a month – a corresponding drop in revenue (based on Fallon’s figures) would bring that €3.8m of ad money down to €2.6m.

The chicken and the egg

The other problem I see in Fallon’s hypothesis is the application of big media outlets’ numbers to a smaller, low-cost outlet.

In saying that The Journal would be able to grow its team of journalists massively if it had revenue from readership figures akin to The Irish Times, The Irish Independent or RTÉ – coupled with subscription numbers relative to those aspired to by The New York Times – to me misses an important point.

Getting those kind of readership figures – and most importantly the kind of readership that will pay for access – costs.

The aforementioned big media outlets have the readership figures that they do for a number of reasons, not least because they have a large, broad staff that create the content that attracts so many readers.

In other words, to me, it’s not a question of “get X readers so you can employ Y journalists”, it’s the other way around.

When it comes to subscriptions I think having a breadth of unique, quality content is even more critical.

The NYT has a well-earned reputation for quality – in the last three years alone work published in the newspaper has received seven Pulitzer Prizes, for example.

It has enough breadth and depth that it can demand a fee from its readers and clearly there are plenty of readers who feel they are getting value for money from that arrangement.

With all due respect to The Journal I don’t think all that many of its readers would be as willing to pay up if it deployed a freemium model tomorrow. (I’d wager that staff and management within The Journal itself would agree with that – otherwise it would probably have done it already).

That’s not to say that having the kind of feature writers, correspondents, analysts, columnists, investigative journalists and multimedia journalists required to change that dynamic is not on The Journal’s roadmap; I can only assume it is.

However as any media outlet moves to build this kind of fully-fledged newsroom – even those with no legacy costs to worry about – it will quickly encounter financial demands beyond the journalist’s pay.

For example, a correspondent might incur expenses as part of their daily routine, which need to be covered. A multimedia journalist needs to be backed-up with good equipment (camera, mic, a computer, editing software etc) and perhaps even another body to film or edit. An investigative journalist needs time and resources to create a single story that might not come close to paying for itself in the short-term.

For that reason alone I don’t think it’s entirely fair to apply the audience stats of a big media organisation to the cost structure of a small operator – it puts too much emphasis on legacy costs and to some degree overlooks the investment required to build a loyal audience.

A note of optimism

That said I do think Irish journalism can be profitable in the online sphere and I also share Fallon’s optimism about the future of journalism, albeit, perhaps, for somewhat different reasons.

It’s clear that a realisation has hit the Irish media, something that The Journal can probably take some credit for. Traditional outlets are beginning to take the internet seriously, because they finally realise its importance to their surivival.

The Irish Times, for example, is starting to do some really interesting things online and seems to be moving away from the “print on your computer” mentality that has hampered the digital strategies of newspapers the world over.

The Journal too has shown what can be achieved in a short space of time with a low cost-base. I’m interested to see how it develops over the next 18 months, as I feel it is at an important juncture which will define the outlet for the foreseeable future if not forever.

I also think that the freemium model has merit and could be successfully applied to an Irish outlet; I’m not convinced that there is any that have hit the right note to pull it off just yet, though.

I’ve been trying on and off – with my limited coding abilities – to clean this up since the turn of the new year and I think I’ve finally gotten it all sorted. Most importantly Google seems to think so too.

This attack will at least partially explain why things have been so quiet around here lately. For a start the dodgy code seemed to break wordpress, meaning it was hard if not impossible to post anything even if I wanted. However I was also reluctant to do anything that might encourage readers to come to the site and, as a result, get some kind of virus on their computer.

That’s not the only reason, of course. Thankfully I’ve also been quite busy with “real” work, most significantly in the past month, and so things like this tend to get overlooked in favour of the instant satisfaction that Twitter brings.

I do hope to get back into the habit of posting here, though, even if it is just once or twice a week.

To start with I’ll put up some of the more interesting things that have kept me busy in the last few weeks. Expect that in the next day or so.