​I had written Tuesday about one possible reason that Apple’s (AAPL) Mac Pro is in the state that it’s in. Like everyone else, Ben Thompson was sharing his own Mac Pro theory on The Talk Show with John Gruber this week. He theorizes that there must have been some kind of design flaw inherent to the Mac Pro that made it impossible from a financial standpoint to put any more money into that iteration. This would have resulted in a loss so large that even Apple couldn’t swallow it.
 
I have no problem with Ben’s theory since it fits the circumstances. But if this is what happened, it started me thinking about how organizations react to disasters. I mean big disasters. Like the space shuttle blowing up, aspirin killing people, or phones setting people’s houses on fire. Because how you bounce back from a disaster is ultimately what makes or breaks an organization. 

According to Patently Apple, more and more evidence is coming out that Apple is looking at the next major step in the iPhone evolution. Foldable screens. I’ve written recently about how this might impact the iPad.

But I continue to be amazed at all the Apple writers in the echo chamber who continue to spout the party line that the iPhone doesn’t need to get any thinner. Yes it does. Otherwise you can’t have a foldable phone that is comfortable in your pocket. 

​Apple has some of the brightest minds in the tech world pontificating on what people really want from their iPhones. Do they want intelligent assistance via Siri? Do they want to play games? Do they want to watch and share videos? Do they want to social connection via social media and texting apps?
 
Apple needs to do some hard thinking on this topic, because people can’t ask for something that doesn’t exist yet. But not only do they need to make a list of what people will want in their iPhones they also need to rank those items. Which brings me to my point. How high on the list does intelligent assistance rank? 

​Regardless of who is sitting in the Oval Office, computer companies always maintain at least some manufacturing presence in the United States. That’s because there are two very large and very important customers who make it worth their while. Those would be the American Military and the Government of Israel. 

This guy may be on to something. Writing for TechCrunch, Adam Singolda puts forth the proposition that driverless drones may actually be the real leap forward that changes the status quo. 

It sounds like Apple’s Jimmy Iovine has let the cat out of the bag regarding Apple’s (AAPL)  desire to get into original content. That’s great but I’ve been having a hard time coming up with reasons why Apple shouldn’t just buy Netflix. Outside of the $60 billion price tag anyway. 

In Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs he recounts the famous story about how Steve Jobs described the mission of Apple(AAPL). They were creating a “bicycle for the mind”. Tools that expedited the creation of work and sharing of knowledge. And now with the invention of the iPhone we have minds being joined and connected in ways we could have never imagined only ten years ago. Apple may be a world class manufacturer of devices but Apple has always been in the information business. 

​Chris Lattner’s jump from Apple(AAPL) to Tesla is surprising. That’s like leaving NASA to go work for a company that makes horse saddles. As I had written yesterday, the whole self-driving car thing is wildly overblown. Autonomous vehicles and electric powertrains are lipstick on a very mature pig. Regardless of what Peter Thiel thinks, the real exciting things in tech in the future will be outgrowths of the smartphone market, because moving information, not pounds, is where the value is.

​Self-driving vehicles are going to be a welcome advancement in decreasing the cost of moving people and things, but they aren’t going to be the radical revolution that many may think.  I’m looking forward to them, but my expectations are modest. That’s in stark contrast to almost everyone who thinks that autonomous vehicles will usher in an age of unbelievable change in how we live our lives or how our cities are structured. 

​It’s been reported that Apple’s main iPhone manufacturing contractor is planning to fully automate their assembly plants. This is great news for the iPhone on the cost front because Apple/Foxconn would never invest in this new machinery if there wasn’t a clear cut financial benefit to the bottom line. But on the other hand, it’s investments like this that further push companies like Apple to spend more and more focus on their high-volume products to the detriment of their smaller ones. 

​For years a trusty Moleskine notebook has been my constant companion as I roamed the halls of business. Even if I was lugging along a corporate issued laptop, I always preferred to hand write notes during meetings. I've always found writing them out much more effective than typing them. I can type faster than I can write, but writing notes isn't about speed. It's about organizing ideas on paper. That might mean quick bullet points, circling various words, large letters, or even small pictures and diagrams. 

​I had talked yesterday about how the Amazon Echo is like those GPS units that people used to buy for their car. Emphasis on “used to buy”. People decided that they didn’t want to worry about another device that didn’t integrate into their car or phone. The same argument applies to Alexa.

​In this hilarious shoot out between Amazon’s Echo and Google Home it looks like Alexa suffers a TKO almost as quick as Ronda Rousey last week. It’s not even close. Kudos to Glenn Beck and crew for this on-air comparison. I couldn’t believe all the time he spent on it.  

​When it comes to next year’s iPhone, headliner features like an AMOLED screen, wireless charging, or a bezelless glass form get all the attention. But none of those are at the top of my list. 

A lot of people forget that many of the attributes of the Apple Store actually originated with Gateway and their Country Stores. The whole idea of having a proprietary showroom where you could demo your computers and have classes to teach your customers how to use them was a Gateway thing.