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Monthly Archives: January 2012

Dixons boss John Browett hired to head up Apple retail

In a surprising and somewhat controversial move, Apple has confirmed Dixons CEO John Browett will be joining as new Senior Vice President of Retail in April.

Apple® today announced that John Browett will join the company as senior vice president of Retail, reporting to Apple CEO Tim Cook. Browett comes to Apple from European technology retailer Dixons Retail, where he has been CEO since 2007. Beginning in April, he will be responsible for Apple’s retail strategy and the continued expansion of Apple retail stores around the world.

“Our retail stores are all about customer service, and John shares that commitment like no one else we’ve met,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We are thrilled to have him join our team and bring his incredible retail experience to Apple.”

Think shopping in Walmart or Best Buy for electronics, if you want a vague idea of the kind of shopping experience you might get out of a visit to Dixons in the UK. Upselling of grossly overpriced warranties, cables and other accessories are usually the order of the day. These overwhelmingly negative comments from people in the UK familiar with the Dixons shopping experience will give you a good flavour.

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Posted by on January 31, 2012 in Apple

 

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A convenient leak

Apple CEO Tim Cook fired off a memo to employees late last week, hitting back at a toxic report in the New York Times about its unattractive relationship with suppliers in China.

In the communiqué fired off to staff, Cook rebuked suggestions the company simply doesn’t care about what goes on in China – stating the allegations were ”patently false and offensive” to Apple.

It was never expected Apple would publicly respond to the story published by the New York Times last week. The top company hierarchy only responds to public discourse in very exceptional circumstances. And a lot has been said about this particular story. So this conveniently leaked memo is probably the best way for them to get some kind of response out there for journalists to feed to readers.

The contents of the memo were naturally immediately seized upon by the world’s media, who were quite happy to tell Apple’s side of this unattractive story. I think it’s fair to say the leak would have delivered the most desirable outcome for Apple given the circumstances.

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Posted by on January 31, 2012 in Apple

 

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The human cost of Apple’s remarkable profitability

Apple posted astonishing figures when announcing their fiscal 2012 first quarter results on Tuesday. Hugely impressive numbers of iPhones, iPads and Macs were sold in the quarter, breaking all kinds of records, and helping the company generate $13.06 billion net profit on $46.33 billion quarterly revenue. Insanely great numbers for the Cupertino tech giant, exceeding almost all analysts expectations by a country mile.

iPhone sales up 128 percent on the same quarter a year ago. iPad sales increased 111 percent despite pressure from the Kindle Fire. Mac sales were also up 28 percent on the numbers from the same quarterly results 12 months previously.

In its press release, Apple boasted another impressive number – that it had managed to increase margins by more than 6 percent on the same quarter a year ago:

Gross margin was 44.7 percent compared to 38.5 percent in the year-ago quarter.

To put some of this in true perspective, the New York Times today ran a timely in-depth piece on Apple, its relationships with suppliers and the human price being paid in this celebrated story of incredible success:

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Posted by on January 27, 2012 in Apple

 

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How to manually delete backups on Windows Home Server 2011

Backups were broken on my Windows Home Server recently. To cut a long story short, the automated tools were not clearing out old unneeded data, and space on my backup drive was running critically low.

I tried deleting the old backups I no longer wanted from Dashboard but no space was being freed up. I tried manually running the cleanup tools multiple times but over 1 terabyte of space was still not freed up after the process had finished.

So I finally relented and decided it was time to rebuild my backups from scratch. Here’s how I did it:

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Posted by on January 26, 2012 in Windows Home Server

 

Exaggerating the truth

Reading the comments section on popular tech blogs always humours me. These kinds of comments almost always make an appearance whenever an article about Bill Gates, Microsoft, Steve Jobs or Apple is published.

Mac fanboy:

I was writing a longer post but Windows 7 crashed on my work computer. Again. I will NEVER buy another Microsoft product. Ever. Oops, blue screen!

Windows fanboy:

That’s strange. We’ve had Windows 7 running on over 2,000 office PCs for over two years, and I’m using it on my laptop right now, and none of them have ever crashed. Ever. Windows 7 is the best operating system ever made.

I’m happy to see the Mac vs. PC war lives on for some people.

 
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Posted by on January 26, 2012 in Apple, Microsoft

 

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