The answers: hell no, meh and hell yes, respectively.

Oh – and Apple destroyed the most bullish of estimates for what seems like the 20th quarter in a row. Seriously, Street: when are you guys going to get a fucking clue?

Highlights:

Revenue: $15.7 billion (vs. $14.75 billion predicted)

Earnings: $3.25 billion or $3.51/share (vs. $3.11/share predicted)

iPads: 3.27 million units sold (tough for analysts to blow that one since Apple has been announcing sales)

Macs: 3.47 million units sold (vs. 3.2 million predicted)

Lowlights (courtesy of WSJ Marketwatch):

Francisco Jeronimo, a mobile analyst with IDC, said Tuesday that the antenna issue may still impact results for the fourth fiscal quarter. His firm’s research indicates that 66% of current iPhone owners were delaying their upgrades until a solution was announced.

My research indicates that IDC is a shill rag and 66% of Francisco Jeronimo’s family thinks he’s a jackhole. I don’t know the compensation basis for IDC analysts, but being right is not among them.

Just goes to show despite the efforts of frothing media putzes and characteristically clueless analysts, Apple just keeps printing money.

So what could be the holdup? I mean, the app exists for the iPad; it’s essentially the same port. These announcements are usually followed by a product in relatively short order. What could be responsible for the delay?

Unlimited. Data.

You see, there’s a shitload of iPhone users out there (present company included) that didn’t think a $5/month savings on their AT&T bills was worth it – especially when 3G streaming media options were in still their infancy.

There are 14 million Netflix subscribers and over 35 million iPhone users. This is in no way scientific, but while monitoring my Netflix stream on my laptop, the smallest pull I could achieve was about 250kb/second. If this is even close to what an iPhone app would pull, AT&T’s network would be toast.

AT&T may be stonewalling until more people switch to capped plans or new users join (unlimited data is no longer an option for new accounts); it may have no intention of allowing the app it at all. I don’t believe the company is in any position to allow its network to be jammed up any further and that’s exactly what Netflix on the iPhone would do.

The good:

-It runs on all current Apple devices. As a bonus, it tweaks Adobe, who is constantly dropping the Hulu name as the major reason iOS devices need Flash. Suck it, Narayen.

-Most content is in 720p

-There’s a lot of network TV to watch?

The bad:

-Still has ads. Seriously.

-It’s a little less than a basic cable subscription and $9.99/month more than over-the-air HD. A basic Netflix account will give you streaming access to one metric buttload of movies (as current as the “Surrogates” vintage) and season after season of TV shows (including BBC content) for a buck less a month. It’ll also give you access to first-run DVD titles by mail.

Now you may have guessed that I’m not a huge network TV guy. Maybe it’s because I like swearing too much. Maybe it’s because seeing Meredith Grey’s terrible complexion in HD combined with her incessant on-screen whining is a recipe for an instant aneurism. I also understand that this is the Future of Television (bold to denote major scary paradigm shift) and therefore the networks have to price this as aggressively as they can get away with before they back down to something that a rational person would pay. But $9.99 ain’t it. Also, with regard to including advertising in your pay service model: get fucked.

I do appreciate your tweaking Adobe, however. So there’s that.

Mike Elgan is a veteran FUDster. We know this because he writes for Computerworld. Roughly Drafted Magazine’s Daniel Eran Dilger awarded Elgan the prestigeous Zoon Award for “…his disingenuous, desperately sensationalist, and outrageously disgusting (Apple) misinformation campaign.”

Elgan’s take on the “yes, but” appeared in Macworld, of all places (note TMA’s prescient observation about lousy guest pieces). Entitled Why iPad Owners Need a Kindle Too, Elgan shares a number of compelling reasons why owners of a device that does 10 times what a Kindle does – still needs a Kindle. And by compelling, I mean puzzling. I don’t link to retards, but Mike’s “reasons” group nicely into themes, which make rebutting them easy.

Why I Don’t Take My iPad to the Beach (1. Reading in the Sun, 2. Overheating, 3. Security)

If you’re at the beach reading an eBook and you’re not under an umbrella, you’re a moron. If you’re at the beach reading an eBook, you’re probably still a moron.

Availability (6. Book Availability, 7. Magazine Availability)

6. There’s a Kindle app, so all of Amazon’s shitty dead-media replicants are all available on the iPad.

7. Reading black-and-white copy of old-fart cracker magazines like The New England Journal of Medicine and Foreign Affairs on your Kindle < reading magazines for people under 80 in color. The legitimate beef he could have mentioned – the retarded magazine app price points – is not mentioned. This is also classic apologist: leaving a legitimate Apple knock on the table when there’s a far less credible, but sensational point to be made.

Issues that Exist Only in Mike Elgan’s Bizarro Universe (4. Reading before Sleep, 5. Battery Life, 8. Weight, 11. Multitasking)

4. “…reading on a Kindle will probably help you sleep better.” I really can’t do it much better. Ladies and gentlemen: Mike Elgan.

5. My single-purpose device’s 2 weeks of charge beat your color, multi-purpose device’s 12 hours! As an aside, you don’t get 2 weeks of continuous use from a Kindle, but you do get 12 hours continuous use from an iPad.

8. You know people are reaching in their advocacy when they’re citing their devices 10 oz. weight advantage. It also assumes you’re using it exclusively as a reader, which I hope to god you’re not.

11. Macworld is one of those the 3 websites on the planet that doesn’t allow the cut-and-paste of their content. I’d give them props if this were to discourage people from easily dismantling their contributors’ embarrassing articles, but I actually think it has something to do with “Intellectual Property”. So to give readers the full flavor of Elgan’s logic, I’m going to have to quote #11 manually:

There are a surprising number of situations where two devices are better than one. If you’re a writer of any kind, it’s nice to have source material on the Kindle as you write on the iPad. If you’re watching TV on the iPad, you can also skim a newspaper on the Kindle. If you’re a fan (sports, movies – whatever), it’s great to watch something on TV (World Series, Oscars, Lifetime dramas, etc.) and look up trivia and facts on Wikipedia or the Internet in general or in your own book collection with the Kindle – without interrupting the show.

So…buy a Kindle if you don’t know how to use cut and paste on the iPad or must always have 2 simultaneous channels of data plugged into your head. “OMG – THIS REMAKE OF BURNING BED WAS MADE FOR CONNIE SELLECA! WHAT WAS THAT SUPERHERO SHOW THAT SHE WAS IN?!!”

Mike Elgan is a Sociopath (9. Multiple Users, 10. Peace)

You need a Kindle because you’ll be relentlessly hounded to share or speak about your cool device with others. I guess Apple should forget re-upping sold-out supplies of the iPad in the tri-State area; Mike just brought the wood, yo!

Non-Features FTW (12. Auto-reader, 13. Mobile broadband)

12. “I’ll just plug my Kindle into the speaker system and let the computer voice read to me and my 14 cats”. OK, I made up the part about the cats. I think.

13. You mean I don’t have to pay to check my email, watch YouTube clips, stream music from my house…wait…you mean I can only use Whispersync to buy shit?

By the end of the article, I had an epiphany. I think don’t think Mike is advocating buying 2 devices, although you’d think that by reading the title of the article. These aren’t reasons to buy a Kindle when you already have an iPad; they’re justification for keeping a Kindle once you have an iPad.

So I guess this article is actually taken from Mike’s prep for the conversation he had with his wife about buying an iPad. Glad to see it worked out for him.

• Specialty calculators: “Hey, how much should we tip this waiter?” “Lemme whip out my 9.7 inches and find out”
• Magazines at $5 a pop: Seriously – you people in print media are starting to look less like a group with your heads in your asses and more like an industry that has an assisted-suicide deathwish. I can get paper copies of your rags for half the price. I’m not saying it needs to be free, but the content and the price need to bear some relationship. Snap out of it.
• Too much network-dependence: If I need to pull my content down with every opening of your app, you failed. The majority of iPad owners have Wi-Fi devices; even if 3G users become a majority, most of them won’t be of the unlimited bandwidth variety. Trust me: iPad owners will gladly trade disk space for the ability to use your app offline.

There’s a couple reasons why this is a big deal. First, this is a device with a very limited release. Although it’s not explicit in the announcement, the timing of it suggests that the majority of the devices sold were WiFi-only (3G iPads shipped starting at the end of April).  The iPad is also currently only available in the U.S., further limiting the number of potential sales. Secondly, the iPad is not a subsidized device like the iPhone 3G and 3G(s) was/is. People are shelling out a minimum of $500 for one. To sell a million of these devices is pretty amazing.

Of course, if you ask stolen property purchaser tech blog Gizmodo to assess the milestone, they’re a little more conservative with their praise:

“Not bad for a giant iPhone. The question, really, is how well it’s still selling next month, now that all of the early adopters and Apple nerds have theirs.”

Yes – that’s the real question. How many more millions of units will you sell next month, or the month after that, or whenever your “disappointing sales” can provide us with the link-bait we require to make money?  WHEN WILL YOUR SUCCESS FLAG?!

Well, now that Apple’s iPad has sold more than a million units in less than a month in only one country, M$ has decided to make me look like a genius by “leaking” to Gizmodo that it was time for Courier to give up the ghost.

"I wanna show you something - it's my shocked face."

I have to give them credit: Classic Redmond would have dragged the charade on for another year before burying it. Guess they figured spending another half a million on a “concept video” that had zero impact on Apple’s real product in the same space was wasteful. It’s not like Microsoft is any stranger to setting money on fire.  Aside from losing billions every quarter trying to push consumer electronics that no one wants, they periodically burn haybales of capital on some of the worst advertising in the business. Using that criteria, axing Courier qualifies as one of the most sensible marketing decisions Microsoft has made in the last decade.

So while the comment sections of Gizmodo are aghast with shock and mourn the premature death of a device that no doubt would have changed the face of mobile computing – even though it never had a corresponding presence in the physical universe – the sane among us knew there was a better chance of being mauled by a polar bear and a regular bear in the same day than of the Courier seeing the light of day.

“The power plug is the bigger, uglier old-style plug, not the new small, square one you get with iPhone.

It’s because the iPad draws more charge. For that 10+ hour battery. Dickhead.

The box it comes in is oddly thick, given Apple’s penchant for thinness. Most of the box is just air, and that part is below the device. Weird.”

It’s the exact same thin: air ratio as the iPhone 3GS packaging. Dickhead.

Fucking gems, Paul. If you read the bottle, it’ll tell you not to try and double up the dose you missed.

After the devastating critique of Apple’s power brick heft and packaging weirdness, he concludes that “Anyone who believes this thing is a game changer is a tool. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is.”

Don’t apologize, Paul. To people who know tech, your first impression is pretty much the same as the 2nd, 3rd, 56th and last impression people have of you. In the pantheon of “people who get paid to write shit about tech”, you’re a caricacture – on a good day. You’re a shill for fail. At least you could be like Lyons and throw a laugh in once in a while.

I came around on the iPad roughly 2 weeks before SJ’s presentation, when it became obvious to me that a tablet computer from Apple was going to be a big deal. I followed some developers’ blogs and heard the cool stuff they were planning for the device. Then I saw Jobs’ presentation. The device’s implications for how we consume content was going to be big.

The pre-launch reviews on Thursday from the Pogue/Ihnatko/Mossberg Apple trinity were as swoon-tastic, as you’d expect. Apple also expanded their review unit program to a couple of other publications, with a couple of surprises. Bob Levitus (Houston Chronicle) and Stephen Fry (Time Magazine) got “Lifetime Appreciation” units (I assume Stephen got his before Time announced their iPad magazine pricing). Ed Baig from USA Today got the generic newspaper unit; Xeni Jardin from Boing Boing repped the edgy, hip publication. Tim Gideon from PC Magazine got one, a move I like to call “Smell the Glove, Bitches”. Some dude from theroot.com also got one. I can only assume some kind of Wonka lottery was held and he won.

So like several other mortal Apple bloggers, I bit the bullet and pre-ordered in mid-March. UPS taunted me up until the morning of April 3rd, showing my unit in China when I went to bed on the 2nd. But in the wee hours, my iPad made its way through Customs at EWR. Brown came through for me, as I imagine it did for Ballmer and Bezos when they read the reviews.

Dateline: 10:09 AM: Fistpump

Hello World! I own your face!

There’s about 10,000 other blogs who will rattle off the specs of the iPad, so I’m not going to go through the effort of copying and pasting someone else’s work. I’m going to assume you’re up on the device and likely lost if you happen to be reading my blog.

Here’s some of the things that surprised me about the device:

1. The keyboard. I hope to explode some freetard’s head by saying this: I can type 90% as fast on the iPad’s on-screen keyboard as I can on my MacBook or on an Apple wireless keyboard. I suspect some of this is because the keyboards are spaced similarly. What I do know is that the biggest obstacle for me – and a lot of people – to have the iPad serve as a laptop replacement is the quality of the keyboard.

2. Native Apps. There’s a few apps that showcase the iPad’s potential. Because I’m kind of a science nerd, I downloaded The Elements (it’s huge; be patient). Suffice it to say, if I had this app in 1988, I would have aced Chemistry. The intro song alone is worth the price of the app. It also showcases how absolutely stunning the iPad’s IPS screen is. Netflix was good enough to get me to reactivate my cancelled account. It is liquid awesome.

2b. Non-native apps. In the “slight frustration” column, 30 of the apps I had on my iPhone would not transfer to my iPad because they were not Universal (which in this case means runs on the iPhone/iPod Touch and the iPad). I had assumed that all apps would run in “1x” or “iPhone-sized” mode right out of the box on the iPad. Not so. Out of the ones on my iPhone 3GS (approximately 1 metric shitton of apps), 1Password Pro, Facebook and 2Do are the ones that currently work for me.

–UPDATE 4/8: What I previously attributed to an issue with apps transitioning from the iPhone to the iPad was actually caused by Pogoplug. Long story short: having your iTunes Library (where your synced apps are) reside on a Pogoplug-connected drive is asking for trouble. If anyone knows a way to consistently make this work, I would love to hear about it in comments. Anyway: mea culpa. All apps I have downloaded from the app store or have since synced from my iTunes library (since i moved it locally) have successfully run in “1x/2x” mode.–

I assume a flood of apps will be updated in the next 48 hours to run on the iPad. Some developers may use this as an opportunity to optimize the program for the iPad’s additional real estate and possibly add features. It will be up to individual developers to decide if, when they make their apps compatible, they will charge anything additional for additional functionality.

3. The battery. I didn’t bother to charge the device before whaling on it, because I do not possess one ounce of restraint. The battery showed 92% pre-whaling. Starting at 10:30am, I commenced downloading a couple pages of apps (which I would argue chew through battery faster than video), and basically ran through every downloaded  or transferred app I could shove onto it. It’s 8pm now, and it’s still showing a 35% charge. I’m not going to say I ran this thing bumper-to-bumper running video the whole time, and the device did slip into sleep a few times, but for my use case, the battery performance was well into “holy shit”.

As I paw the iPad more, I’ll be sharing my observations/frustrations/snarky commentary with my tens of readers.

AT&T
Sigh. Multiple choice question. You own a beleaguered wireless network. You’ve gone on record a few times bitching about Apple’s smash hit devices as being the root cause of your shittiness. What do you do?

A. Offer a modest apology to your consumers for spawning stupidity that carries the message “you use too much bandwidth, so you’re creating your own problems” and get to work fixing your shit.

B. Restructure your rate plans to punish evil content hogs while allowing people who use less to pay less.

C. Serve as the exclusive carrier for Apple’s next smash hit device, whose millions of additional customers using a device that’s even MORE data-intensive will further constipate your already piss-poor network.

Congratulations, dickheads.

B&M Book Publishers
For all of those that thought they were going to get $9.99 eBooks on a device that actually did more than read books, sorry. Apple’s eBooks are going to cost more, news of which obviously resulted in a deafening bitch chorus from people who thought they knew the exact value of electronic versions of books and. thought that publishers were happy with the current Amazon pricing.

Apple has zero obligation to preserve anyone’s pricing model, so people blathering on about “defending the consumer” should go out and bang a woodchipper. Apple did, however, have a very good reason to do what it took to line up publishers prior to the iPad’s announcement. This requires them to charge more for eBooks. I would contend that it’s because Apple has far less leverage than Amazon and publishers were pissed about the deal they were forced into by Amazon in order to get into the eBook business. Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan thinks Apple did this purposely to screw over Amazon with publishers. I’m sure Apple didn’t mind that Macmillan started the avalanche of publishers willing to take Amazon to the woodshed shortly after eBook prices for the iPad were announced, but to assume that the prices were purposely meant to put heat on Amazon is…well…actually pretty consistent with what I’ve come to expect of that shitshow.
The market will decide what people are willing to pay for an eBook. It all comes down to price x units, people. Neither variable means more than the total.

Print Media

Apple knee-capped music sharing sites by offering a viable pay alternative. Print media, which is on a similar path to irrelevance, is losing to free alternatives loaded with eye spam and shoddy content. Everyone who values good journalism is losing out as a result. If Apple can make create a way for newspapers and periodicals to showcase their content, they may be able to create a pay-per issue and/or subscription model that actually works. Whether the Times realizes it or not, this is their best chance for survival.

You

If you listen to some of the more prominent asshat tech blogs whoring themselves out for hits, you may think that Apple’s newest device is intended solely to line Cupertino’s pockets and lock people into the iTunes ecosystem. Apple’s business model is to lock in customers by providing the best computer and consumer electronics experiences – period.  The real winners with any major Apple release are consumers who benefit from devices that make it easier to access and enjoy their content, surf the web and do their jobs.  It’s really that simple, folks.