The Success of Apple’s Retail Division

One of Apple’s greatest achievements is the success of their 324 retail stores, spanning several countries and employing 30,200 employees who are, on average, paid much more than their competitors. Becoming an Apple Employee isn’t easy, but those who are hired on as a “blue shirt” come to enjoy a past-paced product environment and challenging rewards with health benefits and company perks based on the stores’ target success. With 2,500 positions open in retail, Apple is still looking to add Geniuses, Creatives, and managers to help customers and sell product on their show floors, and it’s Shareen Pathak from FINS who comments on Apple’s success in this space.

According to people familiar with the operation, the Fifth Avenue store employs one staff member for every 20 square feet of retail space. That’s one staffer every few feet. All a shopper has to do to get help in an Apple store is reach out and touch someone.

The employees, under strict NDA and ready to serve potential customers, are offered a relatively healthy amount of pay for their hard work. Geniuses on average make $18 dollars an hour, with the helpful blue shirts earning around $16 dollars an hour as they guide customers to new products, show them how to use services, and make sales. In comparison, Pathak writes that a Best Buy Geek Squad Agent on average only makes $12 an hour. Part of Apple’s success is that while work can be demanding, employees are motivated and expected to work hard and sell the Apple experience.

In the first two fiscal quarters for 2011, Apple’s retail division has already earned $7.04 billion in revenue of Apple’s $51.41 billion, in comparison to Pathak’s figure of $10 billion in retail of Apple’s $60 billion at the end of September, 2010. The retail division is on track to nearly double the revenues earned by 2012, after Apple’s Peter Oppenheimer announced a billion retail customers have visited the Apple Store on April 20th, 2011.

From the glass entrances to the Glowing Apple above the double doors, to updated iPad experience and the employees who are ready to help you at moment’s notice, Apple’s retail stores offer a level of convenience and friendliness that big retail chains just can’t match. It’s well worth your time to read the rest of Pathak’s writeup on how Apple hires, how valuable employees are to the company, and just how hard they work to make the whole system operate as a well oiled machine.

[via FINS, Fiscal Q1 2011, Fiscal Q2 2011]

Disney Won’t Be Part Of iCloud Launch

Amidst the rumors leading up to Apple’s iCloud and iOS 5 announcements scheduled for Monday, June 6, at the WWDC keynote, Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger said in an interview at All Things Digital’s D9 conference that the company won’t be part of Apple’s iCloud “launch” next week. Whilst it’s still unclear whether iCloud will be publicly available on Monday, or be announced as a closed beta for developers, Iger showed his appreciation for “digital lockers in the sky” that will allow users to store content in one place and access it anywhere at any time.

Kara: Are you part of the Apple iCloud launch next Monday?

Iger: No. But on lockers and clouds in general:

Ability to have your content online, accessible all in one place, that’s a better user experience. Believe that impediments to people buying things include storage: You don’t have room on your hard drive to store all this stuff, and you don’t want to throw it out.

(From Wired’s Steven Levy): Cloud makes more sense if you can move your stuff to different platforms, and different devices. Are you demanding that?

A: We haven’t made any deals yet. But we’re definitely focused on interoperability. We need to demand that.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is the largest shareholder in Walt Disney, and the company was among the first ones to support the iPod video when it first came out. iCloud was rumored to include movies and TV shows alongside songs from iTunes by the official launch, though recent rumors and reports have focused on the music aspect of the service, failing to provide additional details on video and other media content Apple will distribute on its new platform.

Video interview is available here.

Rumor: New Time Capsule To Run iOS, A4/A5 CPU

A series of reports surfaced earlier this week suggested stock for AirPort Express, AirPort Extreme stations and Time Capsule units was running low at several Apple retail locations in the United States, with a separate source confirming to us that Apple Stores in Canada have seen similar shortages for Express and Extreme devices. Speculation arose quickly claiming that Apple could release new versions next week, during WWDC, with an announcement likely set for Monday’s keynote. Amidst the rumors, many pointed at the Time Capsule receiving an important update to enable advanced caching functionalities for software updates – the Time Capsule would recognize known devices on a network, check for software updates available, download them in the background, and later seed them to all devices in a few seconds without having to wait for a download process. Others also speculated this caching feature would allow users to store portions of iCloud media locally to avoid streaming delays and pauses between songs or movies.

In a separate report, Ars Technica briefly mentions [via MacRumors] the new Time Capsule could run the A4 or A5 chip alongside iOS – perhaps a modified version much like the second-generation Apple TV.

The source didn’t mention any new functionality for Apple’s AirPort Extreme base station, but it is possible to connect an external USB drive to those devices, which then function similarly to a Time Capsule. It seems likely that Apple could enable updated AirPort Extremes to do similar caching when an external drive is connected.

Our own source tells Ars that the revised hardware is believed to be built around Apple’s own A4 or A5 processor, and will run iOS much like the most recent Apple TV model.

A Time Capsule running iOS and capable of caching content for other devices would certainly open to the possibility of iPhones and iPads connected to iCloud but also deeply tied to the local network to increase streaming speed (thanks to cache) and overall quality (higher-quality songs could be cached locally as snippets so iOS devices wouldn’t take long to fetch the remaining portions).

Speculation also suggests an iOS-based Time Capsule could be used for a much broader set of functionalities such as serving content to Apple TVs or enabling additional options in Lion’s AirDrop – though it also needs to be considered that, by making these possible features exclusive to the Time Capsule (and, say, not a server app running on a Mac), users would be forced to purchase a $299 device (current Time Capsule 1 TB) to enjoy all the potential of iCloud and iOS 5.

Developers: Tweetmarks Will Keep Your Twitter Clients In Sync

I’ve tried several Twitter clients over the past three years; some of them were iPhone apps with no Mac counterparts, others were Mac apps that found their way to iOS with smaller, more affordable versions. After the iPad came around and companies like the The Iconfactory and Echofon showed that it was possible to create a “Twitter ecosystem” outside of Twitter’s official applications (which also happen to be available on the Mac, iPhone and iPad), users like me started wondering whether it was possible to achieve the long-awaited dream of a continuous client – an app that always remembers where you left off, and allows you to start reading (in our case, tweets) again in the same position across devices, through the cloud. For Twitter clients, the concept is simple: if you’ve already read tweets from 3 hours ago on your Mac and then you pick up my iPhone, you shouldn’t see those tweets again.

Echofon has tried to implement this, with results far from perfection. Echofon’s unread sync isn’t always reliable, and when switching devices I often find the app picking the wrong spot in the timeline or automatically scrolling to tweets I’ve already read. Still, the idea is there: as users switch devices, the position of the “last read tweet” should be maintained with online sync.

Manton Reece, developer of Tweet Library for iPad at Riverfold Software, wants to offer developers who are building Twitter clients a solution to easily keep timelines in sync using Tweetmarks. Tweetmarks is a service that runs in the cloud and can be implemented to keep the last-read tweet in sync across apps and devices. With documentation available here, the developer explains:

I’ve already showed it off to a few developers, and if you’re writing a Twitter app I’d love for you to support it too. It will be baked into the next version of Tweet Library.

There are still some unknowns (especially around whether I will need to ask for help to cover hosting costs), but I wanted to launch it now before WWDC so that other Twitter app developers meeting at the conference can give me feedback on the service. Tweetmarks has actually been running for months, and when an opportunity came along this week for a new logo (thanks Alex!), I knew it was past time to finish documenting the service and get it out.

The concept is simple, yet nobody until now managed to pull it off with a system that’s reliable and unobtrusive enough to work “like magic” across platforms and different devices or computers. Developers who are interested in the project can learn more about it here and, personally, I’d love to see a new version of Twitterrific with such a feature (alongside live streams, but that’s another story). If you build and sell Twitter clients for a living, we strongly recommend checking out Tweetmarks for your next multi-platform update – the continuous Twitter client may start right here.

Android and iOS Continue To Dominate In US Smartphone Market

Apple has continued making gains in the US mobile and smartphone market according to the latest comScore ‘Mobile Subscriber Market Share’. Surpassing RIM, Apple jumped to being the fourth largest OEM with a share of 8.3% of the US market. Samsung remains number one with 24.5% of the market, followed by LG and Motorola.

In terms of smartphone operating systems in the US, Google’s Android leads the pack with 36.4% of the market, an increase of 5.2 percentage points over the three month period. Whilst Apple’s iOS, is still in a solid second place, and grew its share by 1.3 percentage points. RIM continues its slide, falling another 4.7 percentage points and Microsoft also managed to see its market share fall by 1.3 percentage points.

Meanwhile in terms of usage, more US consumers ar using web browsers (up 2.1 percentage points), downloading applications (up 2.4 percentage points), playing games (up 2.5 percentage points) and using social networks or accessing blogs (up 2.7 percentage points).

[Via comScore]

Currencies for Mac Makes Conversion Simple, iOS-like

Being based in Italy, I have to deal with currency conversion on a daily basis. Most of my digital purchases are made on US websites, and either for work or personal purposes, more often that not I find myself going through my credit card billing statement to re-convert expenses from Euro to United States Dollars. As you can imagine, being able to easily and accurately convert currencies in seconds in the first place has become an essential part in my workflow. Currencies, a new app by Edovia released today on the Mac App Store, aims at making currency conversion super-simple from the OS X menubar with an interface design heavily inspired by iOS apps and multitouch.

In fact, Currencies for Mac comes from an iOS counterpart already available in the App Store. The app has been “converted” using The Iconfactory’s Chameleon engine, which allows developers to port the UIKit – the framework used to write apps for the iPhone and iPad – to the Mac. We’ve seen another example of Chameleon in action before, Carousel for Instagram. In a similar fashion, Currencies looks like an iPhone app inside an iPad popover menu running in the Mac menubar – a mix of interface schemes and devices that’s actually fun to use and once again hints at where the Mac platform is going. In the next few years, when Macs will be touch-enabled and even more similar to iOS devices, we’ll look back at this transition period, OS X Lion, iOS 5 and Chameleon.

Currencies is very easy to use. One click on the menubar icon, and the app becomes visible to reveal two tabs for the currencies you’d like to convert. To type, you can either use the on-screen keyboard or your Mac’s one. To change currencies, hit the symbol and select a new one from the list – the design is nice and elegant. That’s it. The app has some preferences to choose a keyboard shortcut and a refresh time –  the app relies on Yahoo for its conversion rates, supports 130 currencies and dots / commas for decimal separation.

Should you buy Currencies when your web browser takes seconds to open a currency converter and do the job for free? There’s no doubt you’ll be just fine converting units on a website like Yahoo Currency Converter or Xe.com, but if you care about good design, usability and are intrigued by the whole concept of iOS apps running in the Mac’s menubar, you should give Currencies a try. Go download the app here at $2.99 – you can find the iPhone version at the same price here.

CCleaner Coming To The Mac, First Beta Available Now

CCleaner, widely praised amongst Windows users, is making its way over to the Mac, with a first beta release available now. For those who are unfamiliar, CCleaner has been a Windows application that lets users easily delete and clean up their computer of temporary files, caches and other files that clog up their computer’s space, with many also using it for privacy, clearing out their browser data.

Being the first beta release, the OS X version has far less features than the current Windows version does. Nonetheless it still includes the core features of removing caches, cookies and history from either Safari or Firefox as well as clearing out the Trash, Recent Files and Servers and the Temporary folder.

Piriform, creators of CCleaner have said that they plan to release a full version within a few months, so expect more beta releases soon with support for more applications and more cleaning features. You can download the first beta release for OS X here.

[Via Lifehacker]

Apple Thanks Apple Store Employees In Tenth Anniversary Poster

Apple didn’t openly celebrate the tenth anniversary of its retail stores except for using the occasion to role out iPads as an interactive “smart sign”. However it has been noticed that in the back-end of stores, Apple has sent a tenth anniversary poster. The poster is almost philosophical in its review of the past ten years of Apple stores, highlighting the successes, failures, trivial facts and lessons learnt.

Jump the break for a recreated version of the poster, or head to ifoAppleStore for a transcribed copy of the poster. Otherwise, here are some highlights that we thought were interesting:

We’ve learned that a 32’6” transparent glass box can stand tall even among the giants of the Manhattan skyline.That when glass becomes as iconic as the Fifth Avenue Cube, it can also become the fifth most photographed landmark in New York City.

We’ve also learned that getting these details perfect can feel like trying to move a mountain. Sometimes two. But in the end, the effort is worth it. Because steel, glass, and stone can combine to create truly unique and inspiring spaces.

We’ve learned that a visit to the Genius Bar can fix more than just computers. It can also restore a customer’s relationship with Apple

We’ve found that when we wear black T-shirts, we blend in. And when we wear too many colors it’s confusing. But blue shirts are just right. We’ve also learned that it takes precisely 4,253 stitches to embroider the Apple logo on those blue shirts. And we even figured out which direction the stitches should go in.

As beautiful and iconic as our stores may be, the people who create and staff those stores are what matters most. So on this 3,652nd day we say think you to very single one of you. We say thank you to thosewho were there on the first day, to those whose first day is today.

[Via MacRumors]

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