Apple is a unique company in that even if you break down its individual lines of business and view them as distinct from the whole, it can still be regarded as immensely successful in a number of different areas. As a hardware company, it’s a success; as a software and services provider, it’s a success; and as a retail chain, it’s a success. And Apple’s physical retail presence shows such steady upwards growth that it, rather than any product, could be the site of the company’s greatest innovation over the next few years. Speaking at a Goldman Sachs investor conference on Tuesday, Cook went into detail about Apple’s retail plans, addressing the growth and success of the company’s stores , as well as plans for expansion and changes to their deployment strategy for 2013. Asymco’s Horace Dediu visualized the numbers shared, charting the progress of key metrics like store openings, store visitors international distribution and more in a blog post yesterday. One of the most important metrics Dediu tracked is depicted in the graph representing store visitors vs. stores open. After initially expanding their physical presence more quickly, and averaging fewer visitors, attendance quickly cut up and for the past two years, stores have been averaging around 1 million for every location open. Apple’s strategy this year involves not only opening new locations, but closing existing ones and replacing them with larger outlets, which should make for an even higher visitor-to-store ratio in the future if trends continue. In terms of money invested in Apple’s retail efforts, we see a trend that could result in much more of the kind of innovation I alluded to earlier. The Asymco chart for spend on “Property, Plant and Equipment” shows a huge recent spike in money committed to “machinery, equipment, and internal use software,” as opposed to normal, steady growth for land, buildings and improvements to said facilities. Since late 2009 when we begin to see the curve start to trend upwards more sharply, Apple has introduced its own iPod touch-based check out and inventory system (replacing a legacy version based on Windows CE hardware), moved to iPad-based information consoles, changed the structure of its stores to de-emphasize checkout and highlight Genius and One-to-One customer interaction, launched self-serve EasyPay shopping for customers, introduced in-store pickup, and just generally changed the way the world thinks about brick-and-mortar stores. No big deal. Remember too that Apple’s retail leadership has been somewhat in turmoil recently. Apple’s SVP of Retail Operations Ron Johnson, largely credited with much of the retail division’s creation and success, left the company back in June of 2011 . A search for his replacement ultimately resulted in the controversial hiring of Dixons CEO John Browett in January 2012, after a six-month search. Finally, John Browett was dismissed from that role in October 2012, after less than a year on the job. Apple is still looking for a replacement for Browett. Apple is making commerce more invisible, and yet winning more shopper dollars. It may seem like lack of a clearly defined top man in retail would lead to uncertainty, but Apple Retail had its best year ever in 2012 amid all these shakeups, and CEO Tim Cook said that the retail locations in particular have helped the iPad enjoy its runaway success since launching in 2010. Cook talked about the label of “retail” not being sufficient to describe what Apple is building with its stores, and more and more, that’s becoming true. Just like the company tries to hide elements like the file system in iOS, or deliver CE devices that aren’t upgradeable or modular, opting instead for a smooth, appealing and user-friendly outward appearance, it’s also taking commerce out of the store experience as much as possible. And yet as a reward it’s winning more customer dollars. You can measure innovation in terms of a revolutionary new smartphone, or a dramatically different PC design, or you can measure it in the aggregate effect of a sustained effort to change an age-old practice. Apple’s retail efforts are the latter kind, and its spending patterns suggest there’s plenty more of that to come.
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Apple’s Retail Strategy Proves That If They Build It, You Will Come (And Spend)
Google’s philanthropic arm, Google Giving , has awarded a grant to the Raspberry Pi Foundation to fund 15,000 U.K. schoolchildren to get their very own Raspberry Pi micro computer to learn to code . The size of the Google Giving grant has not been disclosed but the Foundation describes it as “generous”, and the Model B Pi, which the kids will be getting, retails for $35 — so taken at face retail value the grant is worth $525,000. Announcing the award in a blog post today, the Foundation revealed Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt spent the morning with Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton at a local school in Cambridge, U.K. teaching kids about coding — and doubtless geeking out over the details of building a $35 micro computer . The Foundation said it will be working with Google and six U.K. educational partners to “find the kids who we think will benefit from having their very own Raspberry Pi”. The six partners are CoderDojo , Code Club , Computing at Schools , Generating Genius , Teach First and OCR . As well as helping the Foundation identify the lucky kids who will get free Pi, they will also be providing additional help and support. For example, OCR will be creating 15,000 free teaching and learning packs to go with the Raspberry Pis. The Foundation added: We’re absolutely made up over the news; this is a brilliant way for us to find kids all over the country whose aptitude for computing can now be explored properly. We believe that access to tools is a fundamental necessity in finding out who you are and what you’re good at. We want those tools to be within everybody’s grasp, right from the start. The really good sign is that industry has a visible commitment now to trying to solve the problem of CS education in the UK. Grants like this show us that companies like Google aren’t prepared to wait for government or someone else to fix the problems we’re all discussing, but want to help tackle them themselves. We’re incredibly grateful for their help in something that we, like them, think is of vital importance. We think they deserve an enormous amount of credit for helping some of our future engineers and scientists find a way to a career they’re going to love. More than one million Raspberry Pis have been sold since launch , although it’s not clear how many of those have gone to kids — as the Pi has been especially popular among the enthusiast adult maker community. 
Barnes & Noble has put up an excellent fight over the past few years against the rising tide of digital competitors like iPad, Kindle Fire, etc. But it would seem that the bookseller has still come up a bit short, as the Wall Street Journal reports that the company has plans to shut down nearly 20 stores per year over the course of the next decade. Just last week, we learned that B&N had a rough holiday sales season with a 10.9 percent sales decrease over last year’s holiday season. Barnes & Noble currently has around 689 retail stores in operation, but the cuts would eliminate around a third of those stores, leaving the total somewhere between 450 to 500 stores. However, Barnes & Noble’s Mitchell Klipper, who delivered the news to the WSJ, explains that less than 3 percent of B&N stores lose money. Still, shutting down stores is expected to strengthen B&N’s hardware business, including the Nook HD and Nook HD+, which has been a growing focus at the company. In the face of such a digital shift, it would appear that the bookseller expects its brick-and-mortar business to become more and more of a liability over the coming years. 
maijc writes “Computer activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide yesterday in New York City. He was 26 years old. Swartz was ‘indicted in July 2011 by a federal grand jury for allegedly mass downloading documents from the JSTOR online journal archive with the intent to distribute them.’ He is best known for co-authoring the widely-used RSS 1.0 specification when he was 14, and as one of the early co-owners of Reddit.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader writes “Today China continued rolling out the future of high speed rail by officially unveiling the world’s longest high-speed rail line — a 2,298-kilometer (1,428-mile) stretch of railway that connects Beijing in the north to Guangzhou in the south. The first trains on the new route hit 300 kph (186 mph), cutting travel time between the two cities by more than half.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Hugh Pickens writes “Richard Anderson reports on BBC that despite stringent carbon emissions targets in Europe designed to slow global warming and massive investment in renewable energy in China, coal, the dirtiest and most polluting of all the major fossil fuels, is making a comeback with production up 6% over 2010, twice the rate of increase of gas and more than four times that of oil. ‘What is going on is a shift from nuclear power to coal and from gas to coal; this is the worst thing you could do, from a climate change perspective,’ says Dieter Helm. Why the shift back to coal? Because coal is cheap, and getting cheaper all the time. Due to the economic downturn, there has been a ‘collapse in industrial demand for energy,’ leading to an oversupply of coal, pushing the price down. Meanwhile China leads the world in coal production and consumption. It mines over 3 billion tons of coal a year, three times more than the next-biggest producer (America), and last year overtook Japan to become the world’s biggest coal importer. Although China is spending massive amounts of money on a renewable energy but even this will not be able to keep up with demand, meaning fossil fuels will continue to make up the majority of the overall energy mix for the foreseeable future and when it comes to fossil fuels, coal is the easy winner — it is generally easier and cheaper to mine, and easier to transport using existing infrastructure such as roads and rail, than oil or gas. While China is currently running half a dozen carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects — which aim to capture CO2 emissions from coal plants and bury it underground — the technology is nowhere near commercial viability. ‘Renewed urgency in developing CCS globally, alongside greater strides in increasing renewable energy capacity, is desperately needed,’ writes Anderson, ‘but Europe’s increasing reliance on coal without capturing emissions is undermining its status as a leader in clean energy, and therefore global efforts to reduce CO2 emissions.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Lytro is on a roll. After launching manual controls just last month, the company today release a real treat. The Lytro desktop software just received an update that brings two new features into the mix: perspective shift, which slightly adjusts the perspective of the camera after the picture’s been taken, and living filters. Best of all, these new features work with previously taken Lytro photos. And just when you had finally wrapped your head around a picture changing focus after it’s been taken… In case you’re late to the game, Lytro launched a brand new type of camera which captures an entire light field, rather than one plane of light, allowing for interactive images which can change focus with a single click. This was magical enough in itself, but the company promised that with this disruptive technology would come even more creative benefits: changing focus was just the beginning. Today, the company delivers on that promise with not one, but two, new features. The first is shifting perspective, and it’s certainly the most important. One of the main reasons our eyes sense a third dimension besides length and width is the fact that we’re always moving slightly. These slight movements communicate with our brain to mark that the computer is closer than the coffee table is closer than the tv is closer than the wall. It’s basic stuff, to the point where it’s so obvious you’d never think about it on your own, but Lytro has found a way to integrate it into its software. This means users can not only change focus of the photo, but swivel it around to check out the perspective. All you do is hold click and move around within the frame. On the iPad, the experience is even better, as Lytro has used the gyrometer to control the perspective shift based on which way you tilt the device. It’s only a slight shift in perspective, the same shifts you make standing, walking, or looking around a room, but it’s a fundamental part of establishing distance and depth. This is possible on exsiting photos thanks to the sheer amount of data embedded in each photo taken by a Lytro. There’s enough data for the company to keep building features for a long while on the software side, and they prove with this update. The second new feature is called Living Filters, and it’s essentially adding photo filters but on steroids. For example, Black and White is actually called “Film Noir” and it leaves just the slightest bit of color in a photograph. It’s with this color that you know the girl on the left is a red head and the girl on the right is a brunette. Other filters like Carnival (think fun house mirror) and Line Art (which is like a cartoon drawing) are more on the fun side, while Crayon (for example) brings a professional grade quality to photos by letting you choose which parts of the photo are in color and which fade to black and white. What’s important is that no matter the filter, all the images maintain the same interactivity. To meet demand, Lytro amped up distribution in a huge way. The company’s previous backlog of orders has been fulfilled entirely, so if you order a Lytro today on Amazon, it would arrive tomorrow — something the company couldn’t previously state. The update is available for all Lytro users in the desktop software, but once you’ve enabled the update and opted in to perspective shift for your library (which is undoable), all photos you’ve taken (even existing photos you took months away) will be enabled for perspective shift whether you’re in the software, on the web, or in a Facebook newsfeed. 
Apple’s iPad mini seems to be a success , and that has attracted the criminal element’s attention. According to the New York Post , a shipment of Apple’s iPad mini, numbering 3,600 devices and with a total value of $1.5 million, was taken from JFK airport from the same location that a group stole $5 million in cash and $900,000 in jewelry in 1978. The thieves apparently only got a fraction of their total target, since they had to leave three pallets behind when an airport worker returned from dinner and questioned their actions. Before that, however, they had already managed to grab two full pallets, which still adds up to $1.5 million in goods as mentioned above. Police suspect an inside job, but no suspects have been apprehended as of yet. The iPad minis had just reached the U.S. from Apple’s assembly partners in China, and were destined for delivery across the U.S. Apple is known to be shipping out its first batch of LTE iPad minis this week, so it’s possible this shipment was part of that rollout. If so, it’s possible that means 3,600 expectant Apple fans are going to be disappointed, but Apple could also very theoretically redirect stock destined for store shelves to make up the difference. The whole job was reportedly pulled off by just two guys. Fencing the stolen goods might be difficult, since posting an ad on Craigslist for 3,600 iPads might look a little suspicious, but it’s still a remarkable take for a couple of guys who apparently just drove a truck to the airport. 
After having seen its mug plastered all over the internet in the days leading up to its release, actually playing with LG and Google’s new Nexus 4 seemed a bit anti-climactic. I mean, when you’ve seen a device like that cracked open and posed for your pleasure , it felt like there wasn’t much I didn’t already know about the thing. Oh how wrong I was. The first thing I noticed when I picked up the Nexus 4 is how remarkably sturdy it feels. Despite being an LG device, the Nexus 4 doesn’t really feel like one — it’s far more solid and slab-like than the plasticky handsets that the company has churned out in the past. This may sound weird, but I once I picked it up and got a feeling for its heft, I couldn’t resist the urge to tap the thing on the table a few times just to see how it held up (the answer: quite nicely). Turning the thing over reveals the funky patterned finish that reflects light we’ve seen before, and it catches and reflects light in some interesting ways. To be honest, it seems a bit too flashy for a Nexus device (previous Nexus phones were largely free of visual flair), but that’s just me picking nits. I get the feeling that Nexus aficionados will either love or hate the way the Nexus 4 looks, and for now I’m caught right in the middle. Speaking of looks, the Nexus 4 (as you’ve probably already heard) runs Android 4.2 , which doesn’t too far from the aesthetic seen in Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean. You can check out a more detailed list of tweaks and additions here, but one change threw me for a bit of a loop — the app launcher now sports five columns of apps instead of the customary four. Meanwhile, the Nexus 4’s display represents a big step forward from the one seen in its predecessor. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Galaxy Nexus to bits, but the Pentile sub-pixel configuration meant icons and text didn’t appear as smooth as I would’ve like. Thankfully, the Nexus 4’s 4.7-inch 720p IPS panel rendered colors brightly and accurately, but I think my eyes have grown accustomed to the way colors pop on AMOLED panels. That’s all well and good, but how does the thing run? Well, it’s always tough to judge a phone’s performance after only playing with it for a few moments, but the whole thing — from swiping through pages of widgets and apps to scrolling through long lists of emails — was as snappy as you would expect from a top-tier Nexus handset. Of course, we’ve got LG’s Optimus G to thank for that since both devices share the same 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor and 2GB of RAM. To trot out a well-worn Android cliche, the experience was downright buttery, and I’m really looking forward to really putting this thing through its paces. I’ll refrain from making sweeping judgments for now, but the Nexus 4 managed to make a strong impression during the few brief moments we shared together. Expect a deeper dive into Google’s newest Nexus phone later this week after I’ve had some serious playtime, but in the meantime enjoy the rest of these photos.