Roger Stringer

Apple has announced that this year’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference will be held online due to the ongoing spread of the coronavirus. Scheduled to be held on an unspecified date in June, it will feature a “completely new online experience” that includes both Apple’s traditional announcement keynote and developer sessions.

This June, WWDC20 brings a completely new online experience to millions of talented and creative developers around the world. Join us for a fully packed program — including Keynote and sessions — to gain early access to the future of Apple platforms and engage with Apple engineers. Dive into an exciting learning experience and discover how to create your most innovative apps yet using the latest Apple technologies.

Stay tuned for details on the web, by email, and in the Apple Developer app.

Not really surprised at this point as everything is getting cancelled thanks to covid-19.

CNN Business:

The company behind the once-popular live mobile trivia game is shutting down, CNN Business has learned. HQ will part ways with 25 full-time employees. When HQ launched in 2017, its first game HQ Trivia quickly attracted millions of people across the world who stopped whatever they were doing twice a day to play the game on their smartphones. The company was profiled by The New York Times and its original host Scott Rogowsky became a household name, appearing on programs like NBC’s “Today” show. 

But over the next year, the game’s popularity faded and its parent company was hit with a series of setbacks.

The company grappled with internal turmoil, including the death of HQ cofounder Colin Kroll, who died in December 2018 from a drug overdose. CEO Rus Yusupov said in a company-wide email on Friday that “lead investors are no longer willing to fund the company, and so effective today, HQ will cease operations and move to dissolution.”

[…]

Yusupov also disclosed that the company had hired a banker “to help find additional investors and partners to support the expansion of the company.” He said the company had “received an offer from an established business” and was expected to close the deal on Saturday, but the potential acquisition fell through. 

In recent months, HQ tried to expand its audience by launching new products, including a photo challenge game in December called HQX. 

“Since Colin and I founded the company, we really set out to develop this network of live interactive shows on mobile phones,” Yusupov told CNN Business at the time.HQ generated millions in revenue through brand partnerships and in-app purchases — a feat few young consumer tech companies could boast of in their early years.

It worked with big-name brands such as Nike and Google and partnered with NBC, ABC and CBS to promote their programs. HQ’s sponsored show for Warner Bros’ “The Lego Movie 2” was nominated for an Emmy. (Warner Bros. and CNN are both owned by WarnerMedia.)But HQ wasn’t immune from financial woes.

The company laid off employees in July 2019 and other staffers left. HQ raised $15 million at a $100 million valuation in March 2018. The company had previously raised $8 million.

Sam Byford, for The Verge:

Nintendo had its strongest Switch quarter ever this holiday season, moving 10.81 million units to reach a total of 52.48 million sold as of the end of 2019. That means it’s now overtaken the Super Nintendo Entertainment System to become Nintendo’s third best-selling home console of all time behind the Wii and the NES. The 16-bit SNES was released in 1990 in Japan and the following year in North America, achieving a total of 49.1 million units sold worldwide.

[…]

Nintendo’s Switch hardware sales are up about 15 percent year-on-year, which the company attributes partly to the launch of the cheaper Switch Lite while also noting the December launch in China — though that’s unlikely to be a major factor yet. The 3DS, meanwhile, is now officially a non-factor with just 260,000 consoles sold even in a holiday quarter.

Ben Thompson, writing at Stratechery:

Steve Jobs stepped onstage 10 years ago today to introduce the world to the iPad. It was, by his own admission, a third category of device that sits somewhere between a smartphone and a laptop. Jobs unveiled the iPad just days after the annual Consumer Electronics Show ended in Las Vegas and at a time when netbooks were dominating personal computing sales…

Apple had an answer to the netbook: a 9.7-inch tablet that allowed you to hold the internet in your hands…Apple was also looking to create a third category of device that was better at certain tasks than a laptop or smartphone. The iPad was designed to be better at web browsing, email, photos, video, music, games, and ebooks. “If there’s going to be a third category of device it’s going to have to be better at these kinds of tasks than a laptop or a smartphone, otherwise it has no reason for being,” said Jobs.

[….]

It’s tempting to dwell on the Jobs point — I really do think the iPad is the product that misses him the most — but the truth is that the long-term sustainable source of innovation on the iPad should have come from 3rd-party developers. Look at Gruber’s example for the Mac of graphic designers and illustrators: while MacPaint showed what was possible, the revolution was led by software from Aldus (PageMaker), Quark (QuarkXPress), and Adobe (Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat). By the time the Mac turned 10, Apple was a $2 billion company, while Adobe was worth $1 billion.

There are, needless to say, no companies built on the iPad that are worth anything approaching $1 billion in 2020 dollars, much less in 1994 dollars, even as the total addressable market has exploded, and one big reason is that $4.99 price point. Apple set the standard that highly complex, innovative software that was only possible on the iPad could only ever earn 5 bucks from a customer forever (updates, of course, were free).

[…]

The situation has improved slightly since then, primarily with the addition of subscription pricing for apps. Still, that is far inferior from a customer perspective to the previous “Pay for Version 2” model that sustained developers on the Mac for decades; we never did get upgrade pricing or time-limited trial functionality for regular paid apps.

Instead, as Apple is so wont to do, it tried to fix the problem itself, by making the iPad into an inferior Mac.

[…]

To be fair, would that we all could “fail” like the iPad; it was a $21 billion business last fiscal year, nearly as much as the Mac’s $26 billion. That, though, is why I did not call it a failure: the tragedy of the iPad is not that it flopped, it is that it never did, and likely never will, reach that potential so clearly seen ten years ago

Go read the rest of the post, Ben covers quite a lot and makes several good points.