Connie Guglielmo, Forbes Staff
I cover the people and technology driving Silicon Valley
Keeping you in the loop on some of the things happening around Apple this past week.
• Hardware update. Apple announced that the head of hardware engineering, Bob Mansfield, is going to retire and that he’ll be replaced by Dan Riccio, vice president of iPad hardware engineering, in several months. The hardware engineering team is going to keep reporting to Mansfield until he leaves. Mansfield joined Apple in 1999, when it acquired Raycer Graphics, where he was VP of engineering, Apple said. He’s led Mac hardware engineering since 2005, iPhone and iPod hardware engineering since 2010, and iPad hardware engineering since the tablet was introduced — which makes him kind of an important person at the company. However, Apple CEO Tim Cook made a point of noting that his replacement, Riccio, who joined Apple in 1998 as VP of product design, has contributed to most of Apple’s hardware during his tenure. “Dan has been one of Bob’s key lieutenants for a very long time and is very well respected within Apple and by the industry,” added Cook. “Our hardware engineering team is the best engineering team on earth and will not miss a beat during the transition.”
• Thermonuclear war on hiatus? Remember how Steve Jobs’ told biographer Walter Isaacson that he thought Google was guilty of “grand theft” when it released the Android mobile operating system to challenge Apple’s iOS for the iPhone and iPad? And how Apple was ready to launch a “thermonuclear war” to defend its patents against smartphone makers like HTC, Samsung and Google? While Apple CEO Tim Cook has said repeatedly the company will continue to fight to protect its intellectual property, it seems like it can play nice too. That’s why iPhone and iPad users will now find Google’s Chrome browser — a rival to Apple’s Safari browser — at Apple’s App Store. (And as of this writing, Chrome is the top free app on the App Store.) Google is also offering a version of Google Drive — its cloud-based service for storing documents, photos, music, videos etc. and a rival to Apple’s iCloud — for iOS users. Frenemies?
• Podcasts go out on their own. Delivering on some recent rumors, Apple released a standalone Podcasts app that makes it easier to subscribe and listen to podcasts (instead of having to access them out of iTunes). Podcasts are prerecorded audio and video shows you can subscribe to and stream episodes or download and listen to them offline. Here’s how Apple describes the new app in iTunes: Podcasts app is the easiest way to discover, subscribe to, and play your favorite podcasts on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Explore hundreds of thousands of free audio and video podcasts from the Podcasts Catalog, and play the most popular podcasts, organized for you by topic, with the all-new Top Stations feature. Another new feature: a Sleep Timer to “automatically stop playing a podcast while listening in bed.”
• iTunes Plays in Asia. You couldn’t tell it from the press release, but Apple’s news that it was opening a dozen new iTunes stores in Asia was notable because it’s the first major push in the region since it opened its iTunes stores in Japan in 2005. The new iTunes stores — selling music and movies for the most part — are in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Macau, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. Of course, Apple fans in those countries already have access to the App Store, which offers more than 650,000 apps in 155 countries. How many countries does iTunes operate in? Apple couldn’t tell me (why, I don’t know). By my count, it’s about 50. Still no word on iTunes in China, Apple’s largest market. And in case you’re wondering, sales of music-related products and services accounted for about 6 percent of Apple’s sales in 2011 — or about $6 billion.
• Apple to take another gamble on Reno. Apple is looking to build a data center for its iCloud service and set up a purchasing center in Reno, Nevada, as part of a $1 billion investment it is making there over the next decade, according to the Reno Gazette Journal. (Reno, the paper noted, is also home to Apple’s Braeburn Capital subsidiary, which does investments and is part of its tax planning strategy, as the New York Times reported in April.) While Apple has plans to build data centers in other states, including Oregon, Steve Hill, the director of the Nevada Office on Economic Development, said Apple “wanted to come to the Silver State to diversify its locations as well as to capitalize on Reno’s vicinity to Cupertino, Calif., the home of Apple’s headquarters — about a four-hour drive away.” Nevada also lured the company with $89 million in tax breaks, including an 85 percent drop in the personal property tax for 10 to 30 years, which if approved, will make Apple’s effective sales tax rate will be less than 1 percent, according to the Reno Gazette Journal.
• Apple retail employees, by the numbers. As part of its iEconomy series, the New York Times took a deep dive into Apple’s retail stores. All sorts of interesting numbers to be found — including that the average tenure of a retail employee is 2.5 years, that they make about $25,00 a year and that store employees each brought in $473,000 in sales for the company last year. Should Apple pay its employees more since Apple is making so much thanks to their efforts? Should retail employees expect that working in retail will give them a career path to corporate jobs at Apple? Should they get an annual bonus (since they don’t get commissions) for selling so much stuff? Apple said it’s recently given retail employees a raise, though it declined to provide specifics. As for overall working conditions in its retail ops, here’s what Apple had to say: “Thousands of incredibly talented professionals work behind the Genius Bar and deliver the best customer service in the world. The annual retention rate for Geniuses is almost 90%, which is unheard-of in the retail industry, and shows how passionate they are about their customers and their careers at Apple.” Here’s a question for Tim Cook: would you recommend your family or friends work at the retail store? And if yes, for how long?
• It’s not the iPad 3, but still. Apple didn’t name the third iteration of the iPad the iPad 3 — instead calling it simply ‘iPad.’ But that hasn’t stopped the company from claiming that it should be the owner of the www.ipad3.com domain, according to Domain Name Wire. Apple has filed a case with the World Intellectual Property Organization asking that the domain name be transferred to it from its current owner, a company called Global Access in Isle of Man which iPad3.com was registered in Jan. 2010.