Back in September, I estimated that Apple would sell 200 million iPads by the end of 2012. It looks like I was a little too optimistic.

Apple just reported stellar quarterly results. However, iPad sales growth was not quite as strong as Apple’s initial sales seemed to indicate. Two years after introduction, the iPad is selling better than the iPhone did two years after its debut. But it looks like it may take one extra quarter for Apple to hit 200 million iPads.

Actual Results

• Apr to Jun 2010: 3.27 million
• Jul to Sep 2010: 4.19 million
• Oct to Dec 2010: 7.33 million
• Jan to Mar 2011: 4.69 million
• Apr to Jun 2011: 9.25 million
• Jul to Sep 2011: 11.1 million
• Oct to Dec 2011: 15.4 million

Estimated Results

• Jan to Mar 2012: 11.8 million (this was accurate)
• Apr to Jun 2012: 23.3 million (was 23.4 due to rounding differences)
• Jul to Sep 2012: 28.0 million
• Oct to Dec 2012: 38.9 million
• Jan to Mar 2013: 29.8 million (was 29.9 due to rounding differences)

Disclosure: I own AAPL stock.

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One of the things Josh covered was what should happen during the first 100 days (14 weeks) of a high-tech startup.

Week 1 — Research and choose business
Week 2 — Build financial model and development plan
Week 3 — Build pitch with screenshots and practice
Week 4 — Interview law firm, staff and advisers
Week 5 — Incorporate and setup shop with office space and equipment
Week 6 — Initial documents, books, hires and cap table
Week 7 — Create website and logo (do a trademark search)
Week 8 — Identify 10 to 20 potential investors and study who else they invest in
Week 9 — Practice the pitch and setup meeting with the least important investor
Week 10 — Interview, build product, pitch again
Week 11 — Interview, build product, pitch again
Week 12 — Interview, build product, pitch again
Week 13 — Interview, build product, pitch again
Week 14 — Interview, build product, pitch again

He recommended interviewing one potential employee every day. Pitching to the least important investor first lets you have a chance to practice in a situation where making a mistake isn’t as damaging.

I first met Josh just after publication of an article he wrote on how many angel investors in Utah were doing it wrong. The article, entitled “Poison in the Well”, in addition to having a great title, was direct and clear in its criticism. It was one of the reasons I later applied to work at Mozy.

For anyone who knows him, I think “direct and clear criticism” is a good phrase to describe what it’s like to work for Josh. His class was no exception. It was a great chance to learn from someone who’s been there and done it successfully.

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1. You don’t even realize there’s a game.
2. You start getting involved and it feels like a matter of life or death.
3. You realize that it’s a game and you play it with strategy.
4. You get bored with the game, because you’ve seen it before.

I’ve read Seth’s short article several times and wondered about myself. I’ve started to recognize these stages in the games that I “play” at work and home. Looking back, I see myself mostly in stage two: caring a lot about the outcome and stressing that things aren’t going well.

More recently, I see myself being able to step into stage three at times: not taking things so personally, being willing to change my behavior and conversation to be more effective. Stage three is certainly less stressful.

Occasionally, I’ve hit stage four and moved on. I felt like I’d learned all that I would and lost interest in continuing. Not giving up in frustration. More like losing interest in continuing to do something at which I already excelled.

Mostly, I wish for more than this. I’d love the passion and enthusiasm of stage two with the lower stress of stage three in a game that avoids the boredom of stage four. Marriage and family can be this way. Work has the potential as well, though the nature of corporations seems to work against it at times.

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Honestly, at that point, I’d just eyeballed the sales trends. As I opened up a spreadsheet, I really hoped my estimate would hold up. :)

The first iPad went on sale on April 3, 2010. Here are Apple’s official iPad sales numbers:

• Apr to Jun 2010: 3.27 million
• Jul to Sep 2010: 4.19 million
• Oct to Dec 2010: 7.33 million
• Jan to Mar 2011: 4.69 million
• Apr to Jun 2011: 9.25 million

At this point, we only have one year-over-year growth number for comparison. That’s fairly weak evidence on which to predict the future. But this is just for fun and games, right?

Assuming that the growth rate remains consistent, here is what iPad sales will look like:

• Jul to Sep 2011: 11.8 million (actual result was 11.1 million)
• Oct to Dec 2011: 20.7 million (actual result was 15.4 million)
• Jan to Mar 2012: 13.2 million
• Apr to Jun 2012: 26.1 million
• Jul to Sep 2012: 33.3 million
• Oct to Dec 2012: 58.4 million

192 million iPads by the end of 2012. Apple is selling every iPad they can make so these numbers may be limited by Apple’s ability to meet demand.

Put another way, here are the yearly totals:

• 2010: 14.8 million
• 2011: 46.4 million (actual result was 40.1 million)
• 2012: 131.0 million

That’s the beginning of a very fast growth curve. There are a few others who agree.

Apple will report their next financial results in mid-October. Then we’ll have two data points.

Disclosure: I now own some AAPL stock.

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On another note, if you are familiar with LDS culture I really recommend this hilarious set of jokes about “How Mormon is Mitt Romney”. The jokes could be equally applied to any LDS presidential candidate. :)

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Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

Learning to ride a motorcycle, working yourself out of a job, asking someone you don’t know out on a date, traveling overseas, braving TSA agents at the airport — there’s quite a rush to living life as a daring adventure.

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2. Possessions are harmful.
3. Slow down. Rushing is rarely worth it. 5. The moment is all there is.
6. When your child asks for your attention, always grant it.
13. You will miss a ton, but that’s OK.
14. Mistakes are the best way to learn.
15. Failures are the stepping stones to success.
16. Rest is more important than you think.
17. There are few joys that equal a good book, a good walk, a good hug, or a good friend. All are free.
19. The destination is just a tiny slice of the journey.
20. A good walk cures most problems.
21. Let go of expectations.
22. Giving is so much better than getting.
27. The world is full of distractions, but very few are as important as creating.
29. Don’t sit too much. It kills you. Move, dance, run, play.
33. Do less. Throw out the checklists and focus on what you love.
37. You’ll shy away from doing great things, from going on new adventures, from creating something new and putting it out in the world, because of self-doubt and fear. Do it anyway, because they are wrong.

The earliest comment I can remember my then future wife making is, “Giving is the best gift anyone can receive.” She’d bought someone else lunch on her own birthday. Her happy attitude was one of the main reasons I (eventually) asked her out.

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I’ve been wanting to test the performance of hosted DNS services that include at least one domain for free. Two years later, I finally got around to it. All tests were done with my own domain name.

Each test covered eight days (except Afraid, which I ended early after six). I would have preferred to run the tests concurrently over a longer period of time. If I missed anyone, please let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

I recommend Namecheap and ClouDNS. If you are willing to pay for DNS services, there may be faster and more reliable options. I’d love to try out easyDNS and DynDNS but neither have a free option.

UPDATE May 2011: Namecheap’s DNS service has recently experienced two outages: one due to a denial of service attack and the other caused by a misconfigured DNS entry at another registrar. Their service is relatively new, so I hope they handle these types of issues better in the future. I appreciate the honesty and openness with which they have reported these issues. ClouDNS is also experiencing intermittent downtime, but has not mentioned anything. END UPDATE

Here are the charts to give you a visual idea of the test results. Pingdom needs to allow customers to control the vertical scale. I’m just too lazy to make my own charts using their cool API. :)

Namecheap

ClouDNS

Moniker

ZoneEdit

GeoScaling

XName

DNS Exit

FreeDNS

Afraid

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A woman was walking down the street when she was accosted by a particularly dirty and shabby-looking homeless woman who asked her for a couple of dollars for dinner.

The woman took out her wallet, extracted ten dollars and asked, “If I give you this money, will you buy some wine with it instead of dinner?”

“No, I had to stop drinking years ago,” the homeless woman replied.

“Will you use it to go shopping instead of buying food?” the woman asked.

“No, I don’t waste time shopping,” the homeless woman said. “I need to spend all my time trying to stay alive.”

“Will you spend this on a beauty salon instead of food?” the woman asked.

“Are you nuts?” replied the homeless woman. “I haven’t had my hair done in 20 years!”

“Well,” said the woman, “I’m not going to give you the money. Instead, I’m going to take you out for dinner with my husband and myself tonight.”

The homeless woman was astounded. “Won’t your husband be furious with you for doing that? I know I’m dirty, and I probably smell pretty disgusting.”

The woman replied, “That’s okay. It’s important for him to see what a woman looks like after she has given up shopping, hair appointments and wine.”

:)

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Apple provided some early sample code for handling login items called LoginItemsAE. The code is complicated and does not work consistently for me.

CocoaDev has a page that talks about starting an application on startup. I agree that launchd user agents do not work well on 10.4.

If you no longer need to support 10.4, you can use the LSSharedFileList API that Apple introduced in 10.5 to manage Login Items. Information on that API does not yet appear in the official documentation, but you can find example code here and here.

As far as I know, Apple still does not provide a way to easily manage Dock items. I believe this is by design. The Dock is supposed to controlled by the user. However, I’ve found that users sometimes want an application to add or remove itself from the Dock for convenience.

Login Items

This code uses NSUserDefaults to modify the settings files for the user’s Login Items. If the System Preferences application is open, it must be closed and reopened to see the changes.

@implementation NSUserDefaults (Additions)

- (BOOL)addApplicationToLoginItems:(NSString *)path {
    NSDictionary *domain = [self persistentDomainForName:@"loginwindow"];
    NSArray *apps = [domain objectForKey:@"AutoLaunchedApplicationDictionary"];
    NSArray *matchingApps = [apps filteredArrayUsingPredicate:[NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"Path CONTAINS %@", path]];
    if ([matchingApps count] == 0) {
        NSMutableDictionary *newDomain = [domain mutableCopy];
        NSMutableArray *newApps = [[apps mutableCopy] autorelease];
        NSDictionary *app = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:path, @"Path", [NSNumber numberWithBool:NO], @"Hide", nil];
        [newApps addObject:app];
        [newDomain setObject:newApps forKey:@"AutoLaunchedApplicationDictionary"];
        [self setPersistentDomain:newDomain forName:@"loginwindow"];
        return [self synchronize];
    }
    return NO;
}

- (BOOL)removeApplicationFromLoginItems:(NSString *)name {
    NSDictionary *domain = [self persistentDomainForName:@"loginwindow"];
    NSArray *apps = [domain objectForKey:@"AutoLaunchedApplicationDictionary"];
    NSArray *newApps = [apps filteredArrayUsingPredicate:[NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"not Path CONTAINS %@", name]];
    if (![apps isEqualToArray:newApps]) {
        NSMutableDictionary *newDomain = [domain mutableCopy];
        [newDomain setObject:newApps forKey:@"AutoLaunchedApplicationDictionary"];
        [self setPersistentDomain:newDomain forName:@"loginwindow"];
        return [self synchronize];
    }
    return NO;
}

@end

Dock

The code for adding applications to and removing them from the user’s Dock is very similar. The differences include the domain, key, predicate and dictionary entry.

This code uses NSUserDefaults to modify the settings files for the user’s Dock. The Dock must also be restarted after making a change. The command “killall Dock” works, either programmatically or from the Terminal.

@implementation NSUserDefaults (Additions)

- (BOOL)addApplicationToDock:(NSString *)path {
    NSDictionary *domain = [self persistentDomainForName:@"com.apple.dock"];
    NSArray *apps = [domain objectForKey:@"persistent-apps"];
    NSArray *matchingApps = [apps filteredArrayUsingPredicate:[NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"%K CONTAINS %@", @"tile-data.file-data._CFURLString", path]];
    if ([matchingApps count] == 0) {
        NSMutableDictionary *newDomain = [domain mutableCopy];
        NSMutableArray *newApps = [[apps mutableCopy] autorelease];
        NSDictionary *app = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObject:[NSDictionary dictionaryWithObject:[NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:path, @"_CFURLString", [NSNumber numberWithInt:0], @"_CFURLStringType", nil] forKey:@"file-data"] forKey:@"tile-data"];
        [newApps addObject:app];
        [newDomain setObject:newApps forKey:@"persistent-apps"];
        [self setPersistentDomain:newDomain forName:@"com.apple.dock"];
        return [self synchronize];
    }
    return NO;
}

- (BOOL)removeApplicationFromDock:(NSString *)name {
    NSDictionary *domain = [self persistentDomainForName:@"com.apple.dock"];
    NSArray *apps = [domain objectForKey:@"persistent-apps"];
    NSArray *newApps = [apps filteredArrayUsingPredicate:[NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"not %K CONTAINS %@", @"tile-data.file-data._CFURLString", name]];
    if (![apps isEqualToArray:newApps]) {
        NSMutableDictionary *newDomain = [domain mutableCopy];
        [newDomain setObject:newApps forKey:@"persistent-apps"];
        [self setPersistentDomain:newDomain forName:@"com.apple.dock"];
        return [self synchronize];
    }
    return NO;
}

@end

If you need to manage both the Dock and the user’s Login Items. You can put all four methods into one category.

I consider this code to be in the public domain. Please feel free to copy and paste. And let me know if you find any problems or have suggestions.

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