Was this week's iPhone launch a case of "nothing to see here, please move along"?

Ever since Steve Jobs' death - and even before it - clouds of disquiet have been cluttering the otherwise perfect blue skies above Silicon Valley.

The world's technology children have been growing increasingly restless and the tea parties to launch new Apple products have become somewhat more rambunctious. Technology's seemingly bullet-proof upstarts, who hooked a generation of consumers on their sugar-rich digital snacks, have left them addicted and in need of greater highs. However, to stretch this analogy painfully further, many Apple addicts have grown agitated and jittery, as the highs have worn off quicker each time something new has come along.

It wasn't that long ago that Jobs launched the iPad and totally disrupted the PC, telecommunications and networking industries simply by performing the by-then time-honoured Apple trick of doing something someone else has already been doing, but doing it better and making it cool.

But that was early 2010. In tech terms, a lifetime ago. It's now the critical final third of 2013. This week's launch of the iPhone 5S may have been - in classic, 1990s technology 'arms race' terms - a step up in terms of horsepower, and the iPhone 5C may be smart tactical marketing - but, to be blunt, so what?

Financial markets have reacted in much the same way, but whereas the Apple fanbase has been disappointed by the lack of sexy new toys, investors have been disappointed by Apple's apparent reluctance to lower its prices to gain entry into the Asian markets they so desperately need to penetrate to beat Samsung and their Android brethren.

Herein, then, lies the frustrations of being a corporate player trying to balance sex appeal with good family finance management. It was only April 2012 that headlines declared Apple, once close to bankruptcy and dismissed as niche, to be the world's most valuable company, worth more than $600 billion.

This was, remember, little more than six months after Jobs' death, an event that brought the turtle-necked deity further adulation, but also sharp concerns about the company his successor, Tim Cook, would be taking over.

By September last year Apple's share price topped $700, but in the year since it has sunk as low as $385, with about $230bn wiped off the company's value, before recovering to the mid $500s. By Wednesday this week, it was at $467.

Working for a company whose share price is in single digits, to be into triple digits would be a luxury. But given Apple's metoric rise from computer manufacturer-of-choice for creatives, to today's consumer electronics behemoth, a stock price topography like that of the last year makes for uncomfortable viewing.

Welcome, then, to life at the very top. Such a scale of financial fortunes is the stuff of Greek gods chucking mountains at each other. Only a company like Apple can reveal successive quarters of eye-watering profits and telephone number-length revenues, and still have investors wiping large chunks off the company's value because of a lack of exciting new baubles for the Christmas tree, as they did last year.

The iPhone 5S and 5C are hardly revolutionary, despite what Tuesday's press event was at pains to point out. Fast phones exist, ranges of coloured phones exist. The 5S, with it's 64-bit capability will either appeal to the speed freaks who simply want the best, or to the gamers happily screwing their eyes on the iPhone's now relatively small screen. Perhaps the enhanced camera might prompt swapouts from existing iPhone 5 and older iPhone 4 owners, or maybe the fingerprint recognition will draw out paranoid urbanites.

There's no question that these new phones are intended to crowbar open Asia for Apple. But they are also Apple's 'new' phones for the rest of the world. How many iPhone 5 owners do you know, since Tuesday, to have said "meh" at the idea of queuing on September 20 to trade up?

In Asia they have a different job convincing people to get in line. Clearly Apple know where they need to plug gaps (it's no coincidence their "special event" on Tuesday was streamed live to journalists in Beijing, Shanghai and Tokyo, as well as in Berlin). Apple's brand is notably weaker in Asia, where Samsung is more consistently appreciated. My suspicion has been that the weeks, even months of apparent leaks about iPhone 5 components have been also to whet Asian appetites, collectively the world's largest smartphone market (with China far and away the single biggest).

For those in Apple's strongest geographies (drop a pebble in the pond that is Silicon Valley and watch the ripples permeate outwards) the reaction to Tuesday's hardly-a-surprise announcements has been muted. This audience holds the highest expectations that, when the company stages a press event, it should actually rain gold, and not just gold-coloured phones.

Call me greedy, like an unsatisfied child on Christmas morning, but what else? Where was the screen size variation to challenge Samsung? Where's the new iPad and iPad Mini? What else does Apple have in the innovation tank?

One slide during Tuesday's presentation said it all: it was meant to show off the speed evolution of the iPhone, but in the process simply showed how the iPhone evolution cycle has slowed down. Whereas Apple were quick to refresh and update the first iPhone, intervals between later models have grown larger. At the same time, Samsung and the Android fraternity have busied themselves with all manner of devices.

Tuesday's launch may well have been a tactical affair, but the company shouldn't forget - even if it appears to be doing so alarmingly quickly - what built their phenomenal financial position: it was the sprinkling of fairy dust that its former CEO - together with the influence of Sir Jony Ive - applied every time he walked out on stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and elicited genuine gasps of surprise, time after time, of something new, something different and something desirable.

iWatch, iWonder

News this week that Apple is apparently developing an 'iWatch' has sent the blogosphere - or at least that part which devours everything and anything that comes out of the Cupertino, California, company - into a right tiz.

Not content with getting worked up about the next iPhone(s) and iPad(s), Applewatchers have been handed a tasty teaser of the possibility of a wrist-borne 'i' device. According to the New York Times, Apple is believed to be developing a digital watch which uses a special, flexible glass that would enable the device to wrap around the wrist, much like the Nike+ FuelBand device does today.

The FuelBand tracks the physical activity of its owner, uploading the information wirelessly into a smartphone. It's an extension of the training shoe-fitted Nike+ sensor device that Nike and Apple launched a few years ago that synced information with iPod Nanos.

It's not a stretch, then, that Apple could be combining features of their fourth-generation Nano - the square one with the touchscreen - with the FuelBand concept. For a start, that Nano could be easily turned into a wrist accessory by just adding a dedicated strap and case combo. Nanos, going back to the original, have been highly popular with joggers and fitness fanatics, and there have been plenty of sweat-proof Neoprene cases and armwraps to go with them.

What remains to be seen is whether the iWatch will also include a phone. For years, technology dreamers have talked about 'wearable' electronics, with phone-watches regarded as the Holy Grail. While the idea of walking around like Dick Tracy with your wrist clamped to your ear may have been exciting in the 1930s, the practicalities are somewhat different.

A phone in a device the size of a wristwatch is technically possible, but before we get too carried away, remember the debacle over the iPhone 4? Apple's siting of the internal antenna was the root of that problem, improved partially by the addition of $1 rubber bumpers, and solved altogether in the iPhone 4S and 5.

For it to work in a Nano-sized device would require an effective antenna - which would require Apple's miniaturisation experts to put in some extra hours of developing it.

Then there is the fashion statement it would make: we quite rightly accused early adopters of housebrick-sized mobile phones of being utter tools for lugging those things around (though their saving grace was that their batteries didn't last long enough for any lasting damage to credibility. A wristwatch phone would be a different matter.

For now, however, the sensible expectation is that an iWatch will simply be a sports watch extension of the iPod family, that combines the Nano and FuelBand in a single device, with either Bluetooth connectivity or a simple audio jack for headphones.

Will it sell? Sounds like a gamble to me, but there have been signs coming out of Cupertino that new Apple CEO Tim Cook holds an interest in developing health and wellbeing devices or, at the very least, apps for the iPad and iPhone that can play a greater part in consumers taking better care of themselves.

The odd thing is that with the core (ho-ho) of Apple's strategy being the mobile 'i' devices like the iPhone and iPad - designed to consolidate as many applications as possible on a single platform - it will be interesting to see how Apple would go about selling a device with such a relatively narrow scope as an iWatch. But then, Apple have been able to sell snow to the eskimo before, so why not something else no one really needs, but will go and buy in any case?

Yahoo’s next?

The Californian municipality of Sunnyvale might sound like it should be a bucolic, Norman Rockwell ideal of rural America, but in fact the closest thing it gets to daisy-strewn meadows are the perfectly manicured lawns of the technology giants headquartered in the community, which sits at the heart of Silicon Valley.

Covering 24 square miles of the south-west corner of the San Francisco Bay, it is the second largest city in the Valley, with more than 141,000 residents, with another 100,000 on top coming in each day to work there.

According to CNN Money, Sunnyvale is America's seventh best city to find affluent single people with 30% of its mariable population unmarried and an average annual household income of $110,276. It boasts two golf courses, 20 parks, 26 schools, 51 tennis courts and 315 restaurants, with 10 major hotels to put up visitors.

Terri Hatcher - onetime Lois Lane, former Bond girl and, most recently, kook single mother of Wisteria Lane – was born there, Apple co-founder Steve ‘Woz’ Wozniak grew up there, and the fictional Cyberdine Systems of the Terminator films was based there.

For the most part, Sunnyvale resembles much of the Valley landscape: corporate campuses stretched out over land that, not so very long ago, were cherry orchards or farmed other produce, until the semiconductor came along. On its Bay shore, is the part military airbase Moffett Field. You can’t miss it as you storm (or crawl, depending on the time of day) past on the 101 freeway, as it contains a giant dirigible hangar, built in 1931 to house the US Navy’s new airship. Next door is a large Lockheed plant which makes missiles and God-knows-what. Somewhere within Moffett's perimeter NASA still develops rocket fuel, or something like that.

Early in 2001 I was apartment hunting in Sunnyvale. Driving around, I passed the shiny edifices of digital behemoths like Palm and AMD.

I was a technology tourist, gawping in much the way regular tourists 400 miles to the south in Los Angeles were passing the gates of the Hollywood dream factories. Eventually I came across the headquarters of Yahoo Inc.

11 years ago Yahoo were, arguably, as big in terms of the web and technology reputation, as anyone else in the Bay Area – Apple just down the Sunnyvale-Saratoga Road in Cupertino, Cisco in Milpitas, Intel in Santa Clara and Oracle up near San Francisco. In more ‘global’ terms, Yahoo held reputational parity with Microsoft or AOL, which had merged with Time Warner the year before to create a media powerhouse at the outset of the online boom. But it was the sight of the Yahoo offices which, more than any other nameplate I saw that Sunday morning which brought home to me the significance of moving to America to live in Silicon Valley.

Roll forward to 2012 and the technology landscape has changed dramatically. Apple is no longer just the cool company it was in 2001 but the world’s most profitable company. Yahoo, in 2001 and at the tail end of the Silicon Valley boom of the 1990s, was still regarded as a major online “destination”. It still is - with 700 million users worldwide and remains the fourth most popular website in America.

However, it has lost its lustre to other places on the web: 18 years after Jerry Yang and David Filo founded Yahoo, Facebook commands more than three times the amount of ‘eyeball’ time. A progressive decline in visitors to Yahoo has been reflected by a $5 billion decline in advertising revenue and a $15 stock price that is a far cry from the $118 it once reached during the digital boom time. As destinations go, Yahoo has been more Margate than Malibu.

Another major reason is Yahoo’s noisy neighbour, Google, based in the adjacent ‘city’ of Mountain View. In 2001, Google was just an emerging rival in the Internet search market, having been founded three years before by Stanford University graduates Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Today there is very little, it would seem, that Google doesn’t do, which is why 37-year-old Marissa Mayer is a prized acquisition, being poached from Google to become Yahoo’s new CEO.

Though she has just become the company’s third CEO in the space of a year (Scott Thompson left in May amid accusations of ‘creativity’ with his CV, while F-bomb dropping Carol Bartz departed noisily in September 2011), Mayer’s appointment has been seen as a good thing for Yahoo.

"A lot of people did not believe that Yahoo could get someone of the caliber of a Marissa Mayer," Standard and Poor's analyst Scott Kessler told Reuters, remarking on her pedigree. Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, said, perhaps through gritted teeth: "Yahoo has made a good choice and I am personally very excited to see another woman become CEO of a technology company. Best wishes to Marissa and Yahoo!”

Much, already, has been made of the fact that Mayer is female (and pregnant), and that she joins an "elite" club of the likes of Meg Whitman at Hewlett-Packard, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and IBM's Virginia Rometty. But the more interesting detail is in her background.

Mayer is a product developer and was Google’s ‘employee #20’, a credit that gives her considerable bragging rights, having been in at the ground floor of Google when it was still just a good idea, rather than the diverse leviathan it is today. Her engineering expertise - not to mention her public skills at being Google's 'Steve Jobs' - has also led to speculation that her focus will be on developing new online products, rather than just extending content services. Content has never been Yahoo’s weakness – it is still a very valuable web property, with a news service that continues to generate plenty of traffic.

Yahoo, today, lacks the more dynamic applications of Google and Facebook, appearing to be somewhat two-dimensional in comparison to the thought-through integration of Google’s Street View (which Mayer was responsible for), for example.

It is something that has not been lost on Mayer, who started work in her new job on Tuesday: “My first order of business is to meet with the senior leadership team and get a product road map," she said, on Monday evening, aiming to make Yahoo "even more innovative and inspiring in the future.”

Beyond that, she will have to reverse the company’s financial trend, especially in attracting advertisers currently spreading their money around the “multi-platform” players that have grown up around Yahoo. That means making Yahoo not only an interesting, passive destination, but one that is rich and compelling, and relevant to social media - and that means developing mobile applications.

Even in the current economy, innovation is still the name of the game in Silicon Valley. There is no shortage of venture capital money sloshing around to invest in start-ups that, like Instagram, can be sold for a fortune to a Facebook to add even more value to the “end-user experience”.

Yahoo’s engineers have – if they have been around long enough – witnessed a decade of their local neighbours going past them on the Internet’s financial freeway. Mayer needs to generate the belief, internally, that Yahoo can be an equal player again, and one of the brands that puts – not that just historically put – Sunnyvale on the map.

He's got a lot of Eminence Front

Ever since Dylan went electric, pop music has been riven by a supposed rift between, well, not many people, actually, and those who have a passionate belief that music's life and soul rests not at the top of the charts but deep in the weeds. As much as I personally think that X-Factor and its excremental clan have all the artistic merit of toothpaste, there are those who believe with equal advocacy that music can be only regarded as valid if it is racked in the converted milk crates of an independent record shop or squeezed into the corner of a pub by a progressively-minded landlord pursuing his belief in promoting live music.

Taking at least one foot out of the stirrups of my own high horse, if there is one good thing to both the TV "talent" shows and the continuing existence of independent music outlets, it's that they are both still, in their own way, promoting the idea that becoming a musician is a sound aspiration that you can actually make a living out of.

The fate of the independent record shop comes into sharp focus this week in the UK with the opening of Sound It Out, a documentary by film maker Jeanie Finlay about Sound It Out Records, the very last record shop open in her native Stockton-on-Tees in north-east England.

Premiered earlier this year at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, this "accidental" film, as Finlay calls it, has been acclaimed, both for its depiction of smalltown English life, but also for its championing of the independent vinyl retailer - and the genuine eccentrics you're likely to meet there.

It is, says Finlay, "A distinctive, funny and intimate film about men, obsession and the irreplaceable role music plays in our lives. High Fidelity with a Northern accent." Shops like Sound It Out Records are dying at an alarming rate of 30 a year. This is partly due to the general decline in ownership of music in physical formats, but partly because a loophole in VAT has allowed the big online music retailers to operate offshore, VAT-free and offering cheaper retail prices (and without the overheads of a bricks-and-mortar operation).

"I’ve confirmed what I always suspected," she adds, "it’s so much more than just music and records. Vinyl holds memories and maps the soundtrack of people’s lives. You probably can’t remember when you downloaded an MP3 but I bet you can remember where and when you bought your first single, or the LP you fell in love to. People gravitate to the shop for a number of reasons, for [manager] Tom’s expertise, for the music he stocks and to just simply hang out in a place where they fit in."

Earlier this week, Pete Townshend - The Who's principal songwriter, windmilling guitarist and perennial Mod - delivered the inaugural John Peel Lecture, in itself a tribute to the legendary DJ who was as much a curator of the sort of music you'll find in Sound It Out Reords as radio personality playing it.

Peel, Townshend argued, represented a behaviour under-served today by mainstream radio's reluctance to abandon formula and go off range in the way the late DJ did. Peel played what either intrigued him, amused him, moved him or provided the perverted satisfaction of baffling and challenging the listening audience in equal measure.

"Peel was not a musician," Townshend said. "He was a listener, a patron of the arts, a broadcaster with almost no censorial mandate or agenda. He only played what he thought deserved to be played. I don't think it always mattered that he himself liked it. In China in Chairman Mao's day he might have been sent to prison if only for being the first to play Jesus and Mary Chain, the Undertones or the Proclaimers – all of them were a little bit political, but also radical and outspoken."

The lecture wasn't however, meant to eulogise Peel but to raise the flag - hoisted so often in recent years - about the new digital music culture and its impact on musical income, creativity and the somewhat hippyish ideals of what he called "John Peelism" - i.e. the free love of any form of music without condition. Sounding dangerously Luddite for a musician who has always been fascinated by new technology (the arpeggiated and synthesised organ on The Who's Won't Get Fooled Again was well ahead of its time), Townshend hypothesised that in the iTunes era online music services were simply providing a distribution and royalty collection model which was denying artists essential services.

"Music publishing has always been a form of banking," Townshend argued, "but – in cooperation with record labels – active artists have always received from the music industry banking system more than banking." He said that by essentially acting as nothing more than a brokerage for music, services like iTunes were denying artists the ecosystem that they would have traditionally been a part of, with labels and publishers providing editorial guidance, financial support, creative nurturing, manufacturing, publishing, marketing, distribution and royalty payments.

It is certainly true that with the disappearance of legendary impresarios like Ahmet Ertegun, and the replacement of music-minded record company CEOs with lawyers, investment bankers and similar forms of besuited chinless wonder who might consider Michael Bublé cutting edge, new artists today might lack the patient tutorage their ancestors enjoyed in the pre-digital era.

Today, Townshend said, the iTunes only offered a distribution and royalty collection platform. Taking his banking analogy, you could agree that the High Street bank - where a friendly (or unfriendly) bank manager might offer you a personal approach to managing your finances  - has disappeared, and that banking today revolves around an impersonal experience of ATMs, direct debits and online banking whereby there is little human or emotional involvement.

Hiding behind the semi-fictional persona of "the inner artist", Townshend laid into Steve Jobs (annoyingly and, I suspect, quite deliberately pronouncing his name as the Biblical "Jobes"), branding  iTunes a "digital vampire", a headline-friendly provocation if ever I've seen one.

Apple - and iTunes - came up with a workable model for online content distribution. It may not be entirely equitable to the artists, but I'd vouch that there were never any record labels or music publishers who designed contracts to be philanthropically beneficial to the artist.

This is not the first time, however, that iTunes has come in for criticism from an artist: AC/DC still refuse to distribute their music via the service on the grounds that it caters for people who want to download individual tracks rather than complete albums. One American blues-rock legend I ran into last year complained to me that the process of negotiating a distribution agreement with Apple is frustrating, to the extent he felt that he was being offered one of those "it's this or nothing" deals.

But for others, more pragmatically, they consider it to be an essential distribution mechanism, "a no brainer", another artist recently told me. It's there, people use it, you get money from it. Job done. As Michael Corleone famously told his brother Sonny: "It's not personal. It's strictly business". Pop music has always had its hardball types, and Apple is no different to any record company or music distributor that has come before. You still need to promote an album, you still need to perform live, you still - for the time being - need to have the means to sell CDs via High Street retail outlets.

The worry is that today, the music industry as a whole appears to have forgotten what it was that turned music into the predominant youth culture of the late 20th century. At least Steve Jobs, the archetypal Baby Boomer with his love of The Beatles, got it and did something about it. The music industry, frankly, took too long to embrace the digital age. When labels like EMI were still farting around appointing 'Executive Vice-Presidents of Digital Development' simply to "explore" the potential for digital music distribution, illegal file-sharing services were already in their prime and the horse was so far out of the stable that the stable door hinges had rusted away.

In branding iTunes a vampire, Townshend diminished attention for the more interesting argument of his thesis, that iTunes should do more to promote new artists. In this, I couldn't agree more. If I am to reluctantly give up the Saturday afternoon pleasure of browsing the racks of my local Sound It Out Records for browsing with a mouse (actually, it's now an Apple Trackpad), then at least do something to editorially draw my attention away from the FMCG brands like Coldplay and create attention for the emergent and the interesting. To Townshend's point, iTunes needs its own John Peel, someone who's curatorial mind can see potential whereas others might only see a long haul with limited return. Peel, while he bludgeoned on with patronage of bands like The Fall - such was his whimsy - had also been unafraid of championing the likes of Pink Floyd, The Faces and Roxy Music when they were regarded as either too avant-garde or simply unfashionable in their earlier years.

Rock stars - especially wealthy ones, pontificating over the inequalities of the "Wild West frontier", as Townshend somewhat anachronistically referred to the digital domain - will always appear to be arguing a fairly thin position. Although he "doesn't give a shit about money", as The Who's principal songwriter, his well-appointed mansion in East Twickenham (in a street backing on to where I used to live, if you must know) has been paid for by the likes of me buying original Who albums and then, in moments of weakness, buying them all over again when the box sets and digital remastered versions emerge.

I admire his passion for championing the need for iTunes as another element of the music distribution landscape to do more to keep the wolf from the door of those struggling to get on or up the ladder. But in the outcome, Townshend's lecture came across as no more than another old head bemoaning the march of progress.

Oddly enough, there's a box set containing a remastered Quadrophenia heading for your local record emporium. Just in time for Christmas.

Why Apple is, for now, up in the clouds

The age of instant gratification hasn't been helped by Apple. Every time they launch a shiny new bauble, we want it now. Actually, we want it yesterday, and can't come to terms with the fact it won't be available until next week.

Steve Jobs, bless him, is to blame for this "I want it, and I want it now" mindset. The medicine shows he performed to announce his latest iElixir were always slick productions of front-of-cloth magic. Usually we were enticed by the wares he had to offer.

In June he told us: "We are demoting the PC and Mac to just be a device and moving the digital hub centre of your digital life to the cloud." This came more than ten years after he declared the Mac to be hub. That's progress for you.

The day before Jobs' death, Apple unveiled iCloud - the latest incarnation of its 'storage-in-the-sky' philosophy (predated by iTools, .Mac and MobileMe) - promising an end to the apparent frustration we experience to keep our music, videos and photos synchronised on the myriad devices we now own.

Personally I've never had a problem with keeping one set of albums on my iPhone and videos on my iPad, as I rarely - if ever - want to watch a movie on my phone, and only listen to music on the iPad when I'm sat on a plane or a train. And I'm quite happy keeping the variety of music different on both.

But when Apple finally launched iCloud, plus upgrades to iTunes and its iOS platform to accommodate it, the Apple fan community rushed like lemmings to download it all. Here the first wave of vexation wafted in, for it took - I kid you not - the entire night to download and update both the iPhone and the iPad. Furthermore, I still needed to connect these devices to a Mac to transfer the new software. This was, Apple told us patronisingly, the last time we'd need to physically hook up these devices to a computer.

Then it became apparent that most of my paid-for apps were missing on the iPhone, along with most of my recently purchased albums on iTunes. Not to worry, Apple assured us, as visiting iTunes and the App Store would enable me to download everything. Laboriously, app-by-app, album-by-album, and even song-by-song. Having spent an entire night acquiring the applications in the first place - and this via a relatively fast home Internet connection - I still needed a second evening getting back stuff that had been on my devices to start with!

This may sound like curmudgeon but the expectation of any Apple product is that it should just work. It's what has made us such slavish Apple devotees. They have a knack for making something you might not have considered important, indispensably good.

Now, I'm happy to say, it's all sorted. My initial fears about how iCloud would work when you have a storage disparity between iTunes content living on a Mac (my MacBook Air has a 128Gb hard drive which is stuffed full), and the smaller capacities of the iPhone and iPad (32Gb each), have been allayed by the fact that the much-vaunted automatic synchronisation can be controlled. 

I am, though, left with the feeling that the absence of a USB cable between phone, tablet and PC is only a marginal improvement. Before, I ripped a CD, then hooked up my iPhone and there it would be, emporter, as the French might say. Now I need WiFi. Something presumptuous there.

I still don't have a huge need to keep everything synchronized on every single Apple device I own, but perhaps that's just me and the compartmentalised manner with which I regard the iPhone, iPad and MacBook I use.

True, the photo synchronisation is a very smart aspect of iCloud: take a picture on your iPhone and it's instantly shared with your other Apple devices.

All this, however, does make the assumption that you have either access to WiFi, or an accommodating 3G mobile provider. Carriers are increasingly imposing data limits on downloads and uploads, which raises questions about how viable a ubiquitous service like iCloud will be as such economies increase. And clearly you won't want this to be active when taking pictures on holiday.

The iCloud story is not yet finished, either. To come is iTunes Match, with which for a fee, Apple will miraculously scan the iTunes library on your home computer and 'add' the same songs to your iCloud content, regardless of how this music was acquired in the first place.

On this I remain sceptical: when you have somewhere over 1000 albums on a hard drive as I do, of which some are not widely available commercially or came off the front cover of a music magazine, I doubt very much that iTunes Match will be able to find them. More worrying is that as the service is based on your paid-for storage capacity, to maintain this wonderful idea will cost $25 a year on top of the additional iCloud storage you need to buy from Apple to accommodate it - and that could cost up to $100 a year for a maximum of 55Gb more (which is not enough, clearly, for all the content I might be storing in the iCloud).

There is much to like about iCloud's intentions. It can be a minor annoyance when you download the Bombay Bicycle Club's new album to your Mac on a Saturday and forget to add it to your iPhone before heading off to work on a Monday morning. But it is only a minor annoyance.

The cloud story is not yet ready for prime time. True, relying less on huge and breakable hard drives to store your content (that's right - you own it, you paid for it) is a good idea. But, like Google's idea of running laptops on cloud-based apps, it assumes that we're always on, and always connected.

When I can't get a decent 3G signal in the centers of London and Paris, let alone find a WiFi hotspot that doesn't cost an arm and a leg for just an hour's time online, the idea of ubiquitous access to content is still somewhat far-fetched. For now at least.

Walt Disney or Willy Wonka?

One of the many memorable moments in Steven Spielberg's E.T. prequel-of-sorts, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, is the sight of Roy Neary, Richard Dreyfuss' character, going mad and sculpting a flat-topped mountain out of mashed potato.

This was, we later found out, because aliens had planted the image of the very real Devil’s Tower in Wyoming in Neary's mind and were calling him - and others – to assemble there.

I was thinking about this last Tuesday, just as the media - and I don't just mean the technology media - were getting excited about Apple's latest press event. Not knowing why (though they presumed it was the launch of the iPhone 5) they dutifully assembled at Apple's very own Devil's Tower, 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California.

In the end there was no close encounter with anything other than a housekeeping update on what has made Apple the second-largest private company in the world (i.e. "We've sold lots of stuff, and Android is pants"), and that the iPhone 4 was to get a faster chip, a better camera and be offered as the iPhone 4S. Motoring experts will know that this approach is akin to putting 'Go Faster' trim on an existing Ford Fiesta to sell off inventory prior to a new model being launched.

The task of landing this non-news fell to Tim Cook, the company's new CEO who had, during Steve Jobs' various periods of medical leave, proven himself to be a steady-as-a-rock understudy. Since Jobs stepped down as CEO in August, Cook had eased the concerns of investors and employees alike. So, with the Apple obsessives entering overdrive and tech news websites offering Tweet-by-Tweet "live" coverage from the event - as if this made any more difference than more considered, consolidated coverage later - Cook, supported by assorted Apple upper managers, sought to make his mark.

The verdict was that, while Cook may be a worthy CEO, he is no Steve Jobs. 48 hours later, the copious outpouring of tribute and comment from journalists, peers and consumers at the news that Jobs was dead, underlined the point that there will probably only ever be one Steve Jobs.

Whatever your view about him, whether you saw him as the Da Vinci, the Walt Disney or even the Willy Wonka of his time, there is no doubt that the almost hard to take in explosion of media coverage marking his demise spoke volumes. People have likened it to the deaths of John Lennon or Elvis Presley. Actually, its volume has probably been closer to that which followed Princess Diana's passing. She was 'The People's Princess', but Steve Jobs was, we all know, just a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who, like many others in the Palo Alto and Mountain View districts, co-founded a computer business in a garage. Less than 30 years later - with most of the growth within the last decade - he'd turned it into a global corporate behemoth, not just a technology giant.

I'll spare the whole chronology - you'll have read it anyway in great detail since Thursday. The bottom line is that Jobs' ascendance to world-revered icon - credited with single-handedly transforming global culture through little more than silicon, software, good industrial design and an uncanny knack of knowing how to make existing technology both easier to use and desirable to those who'd otherwise be indifferent towards it - took just 13 years.

The original iMac presented the foundation: it challenged the idea of what a home computer not only should look like, but what it should do, and even who should own it. Add in easy-to-use software for otherwise professional applications like movie editing, add in connectivity for digital cameras, and the digital lifestyle for the non-geek was ready to go. Think back to that moment in 1998 when the iMac appeared in all its fruity-coloured versions, and then speed through the arrival of the iPod, iTunes, more iMacs, iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad to the iPhone 4S, and you see something which can only be regarded as breathtaking. This is the same company which, in 1998, was regarded as a niche player with a tiny market share.

Apple's progress, from once bankruptcy-threatened cult-in-waiting, to the world's eighth most-admired brand and a company with more cash than the US Federal Reserve can only be credited to one man. No matter what contribution Jonathan Ive's brilliant design has made, Phil Schiller's smart marketing or Tim Cook's solid operational management as COO, not to mention the tireless involvement of countless engineers and anonymous assembly-line workers in China, Apple today - the phenomenon that Apple has become - is down to Steve Jobs.

His instinct, as to what you and I as consumers would want, was the key. There were PCs before the iMac; there were MP3 players before the iPod; there were tablet devices before the iPad; there was music management software before iTunes. Jobs made them both attractive, aspirational and desirable, but also made them indispensable. Even when he apparently reluctantly opened iTunes up to the Windows PC, he was - like extra-terrestrial telepathy - planting the seeds that would hold consumers dependent on the Apple brand for their next generation of MP3 players and, eventually, mobile phone.

We all know the iPhone is lousy as a phone, but we make allowances because it does so much more which works well, which makes it satisfying to use - even fun - and has clearly been thought through, inside and out, inception to consumption. The Apple environment is a clever one - the blog post I write as a note on my iPhone over breakfast, is enhanced on the iPad while I fly across the Atlantic, to be rendered and published using the MacBook on arrival at the hotel. Pity me for having shelled out three times for the same functionality, but in having the vision and shear bloody mindedness to insist he knew what we'd happily fork out for in the pursuit of our digital lifestyles, Steve Jobs was an unparalleled genius - magician, vaudeville showman and street corner dime-bag pusher rolled into one.

What happens next for Apple is down to others. It's Jobs' legacy for them to enhance, maintain or ruin. If nothing else, the 13 years since he unveiled that very first iMac have been remarkable, breathless and deliciously good fun to have witnessed and, let's face it, bought into. At a premium, of course.

Steve Jobs

1955-2011

Situations Vacant

During a recent viewing of The Bourne Ultimatum I lost count of the number of times somebody in CIA collar-and-tie barked out the phrase: "People, we have a situation here". Each utterance prompted deskbound underlings to look up from the keyboards they'd hitherto been furiously stabbing away at.

Quite why, in the 21st century, people in thrillers are still typing anything baffles me: the computer mouse has been around for 47 years, but apparently the only way to demonstrate Really Important Stuff Being Done Really Urgently On A Computer is by typing stuff frantically.

But I digress: in the last 24 hours, no doubt, "situations"have been declared in the boardrooms and business development meetings of Samsung, Google, Motorola and the unfortunately initialled RIM. For Steve Jobs - no less - has finally announced the iPad 2. It is, as people in this business are inclined to say, a "gamechanger". Much like its predecessor.

At his press conference yesterday, Jobs let the figures do the talking: 15 million iPads sold in the nine months from its launch last April, pulling in a handsome $10 billion in revenue. Not bad for one product category alone. You just have to look across the aisle on your next flight or your next rail journey to see  how much the iPad took off. It does seem like everyone has got one.

At Mobile World Congress recently, Ben Verwaayen, CEO of my new company, noted that during a panel discussion at January's World Economic Forum, he looked down onto the front row of the audience, and eight out of the 10 fellow CEOs he saw were nursing iPads. That might say more about CEO remuneration, but Verwaayen's point was important: this was a product that didn't even exist 12 months previously.

The challenge facing Google Android and all the other tablet manufacturers is breaking Apple's 90% market share in the tablet business, especially now the bar has been set higher still. Featurewise, iPad 2 doesn't offer any real surprises: front and back FaceTime cameras bring it up to par with the Samsung Galaxy device, and the addition of more horsepower to run memory-heavy multi-tasked applications was always on the cards.

The improved performance, in particular, will enable the iPad 2 to run dedicated versions of iMovie and Garageband. This, in itself, is big: the idea of shooting and editing a high(ish) quality resolution movie, or recording an entire album on the iPad is a delicious extension of the so-called 'digital lifestyle' Apple and Microsoft coined in the heady early days of convergence.

As usual, however, the talk is quite rightly about Apple's design: thinner than a magazine and weighing just over a pound, the iPad 2 is a marvel of minimalisation. Having recently taken ownership of an 11-inch MacBook Air, I've struggled to go back to any portable computing device which can't fit into an A4 envelope. The iPad 2's thin design completes this transformation, taking the tablet tantalisingly close to a laptop or netbook in what it can do.

The one genuine surprise during yesterday's press event was the appearance of Steve Jobs himself. Barely days after Apple investors were nervously circling vulture-like over the company's succession plans while Jobs was undergoing further treatment for cancer, he bounded (relatively speaking) onto the Moscone Center stage in San Francisco declaring "I wasn't going to miss this one."

The enthusiasm and the drive was there for all to see. And therein lies the concern about Apple's future: Apple IS Steve Jobs. The passion with which this übergeek rattled off the iPad 2's statistics and then cheekily declared that its competitors were "flumoxed" about what to do next was a huge statement of vitality - even if it was contrived. Whether he didn't personally want to miss the event, or whether his investor relations team didn't want him to, this was vintage Jobs. And you can see why some people really you have a situation.

Has Apple gone from darling to demon?

I'm not sure what the statute is on a blog post's length, but for this one, I'll confess up front to making this a lengthy discourse on something that's troubling me: is everything OK with Apple?

Last month's launch of the iPhone 4 turned out to be a larger-than-usual seismic event in the Apple chronology. It came with foreshocks and aftershocks which continue to generate acres of newsprint - yes, that quaint old thing - examining and exfoliating Apple and its messianic CEO Steve Jobs.

Given that Apple's own epicentre, Cupertino, lies almost on top of the fault lines than run the length of California, it's ironic that the company has been the source of more tectonic activity in the consumer landscape than any other in the last 12 years or so. Few are as admired and revered amongst myriad industries as a shining example of How To Do It Right. However, the tsunami of think pieces and op-ed that has followed the iPhone 4’s arrival must have given even the most seasoned Apple PR reason to reach for the painkillers.

As with all Apple launches, the noise began long before anyone had parted cash for product: but more than normal, there was the somewhat heavy-handed hue-and-cry over the alleged 'theft' of a prototype. The hullaballoo was enriched further by murky tales surrounding the phone's Chinese manufacturer. Then, no sooner had the first handsets been snapped up by the customary snake of people outside Apple Stores than the first murmurings of disquiet emerged over the phone’s reception quality. All this led to the sound of Apple masticating on humble pie as Jobs admitted: "Of course we're human, of course we make mistakes”, followed by a giveaway of $1 rubber bumpers to fix the problem.

At the same, hastily convened press conference, a clearly flustered Jobs opined that: “We're not perfect. We know that, you know that.” The trouble is, many believe Apple IS perfect, or at least, has perfected the art of revolution to the extent that it positively mass produces game-changing products.

For the last two decades I’ve watched Apple with awe and amazement, not to mention a little pride. Like the Dylan fan who maintains he liked Bob before he went electric, I’ve seen Apple evolve from a vendor of nice but expensive professional computers for professional creatives, to the world’s largest technology company by value. When, as a journalist, I first sat before an Apple word processor 23 years ago, I had little idea that by the turn of the century I’d be buying into an Apple-shaped 'digital lifestyle'.

In buying an original iMac - my first ever personally purchased computer - I became hooked like a dime bag addict on the Apple proposition, becoming drawn into a world of seemingly endless creative possibility. It appeared to be pretty groovy in Apple's domain of digital self-expression.

That first 'Blueberry' iMac was a genuine revolution - forged by the brilliant design simplicity of a Londoner called Jonathan Ive and Steve Jobs' geeky bravado. It not only laid the cornerstone of consumer technology for the following decade, but a core element of culture, too. Creative types bought up the funky blue icon in their thousands; Adland and Cool Central became peppered with its cheerful lines and near-perfect proportions. It dared to be shown off, not hidden away under a pile of blankets in the spare room.

Most importantly, it simply wasn't a computer. It was a "digital hub". And it made it OK to like technology. It brought an acceptance to technology ownership comparable with the renaissance we football fans went through in the mid-90s thanks to Nick Hornby and Britpop (Heysel and Hillsborough, you might recall, made admitting to being a football fan an acute form of social suicide). No sooner had football replaced property prices as the dinner party discussion du jour, than people were openly admitting to making iMovies without fear of a public stoning for being so uncool. Apple's digital hub had triggered a perfect, bloodless revolution.

Now, as Thomas Jefferson said, every generation needs a new revolution. Apple, clearly felt one revolution wasn't enough, however, and no sooner had it turned the letter 'i' into the prefix of the modern era, it tore up the rule book yet again with iTunes. Rarely had a software launch been delivered with such pizzazz and baby-boomer knowing. Compressing music into audio files was not new, and nor was turning a personal computer into a digital jukebox. But just as the iMac made the computer attractive and simple to own for mere mortals (rather than those with an advanced engineering PhD), iTunes made a subtle but significant difference to the idea of digital music management.

When iTunes launched in early 2001, I had just moved to Silicon Valley. I appreciated good quality hi-fi. I appreciated the difference speakers, cabling and amplifiers made to the enjoyment of music, but not, you understand, to the extremes of those heads who profess a love for the smell of vinyl in the morning. File sharing and early MP3 players like Diamond's Rio and Creative's Nomad, were, to my dinosaur mind, the preserve of the Tuesday lunchtime Science Club. I just didn't relate digital music to the musical experience I knew and loved, which began with opening a packaged disc, studiously pouring over the sleeve art and notes, and then putting needle to groove or CD to 'play'. iTunes made it more acceptable, novel and convenient and, well, fun.

Apple's next revolution came even sooner: the iPod’s launch in October 2001 was a muted affair. Coming just five weeks after 9/11, America was numb and the world still dazed. Really, you couldn't have picked a worse time to chirpily offer "1000 songs in your pocket". Naturally it generated the usual wave of excitement in the technology world, despite it being an audio product made by a computer company, and therefore not all that good. The despondency of the times, though, didn't make allowance for the Apple effect.

Got the iMac? Bought into the lifestyle? Then your experience won't feel complete without one. So I had to have one. Apple's narcotic brand appeal worked its wonders again. I had to have an iPod. Just as I had to have a Nano. And a new iMac to service them. And then another Nano with video. And a new MacBook. And an iPhone. And I will want an iPad (when it gets a video camera, note to Product Development Dept.). Oh, and don't forget all the accessories - the Bluetooth keyboards and mice, the docks and headphones, the power chargers and...finish the list yourselves.

"Cocaine," Robin Williams once brilliantly reflected, "is God's way of saying that you're making too much money." It's easy to draw the same opinion of the Apple junkie. Like coke, Apple products will give you an inflated sense of your own cool while blowing a hole the size of Lake Geneva in your bank balance. It’s also easy to regard Apple as a religion, with Steve Jobs some black turtleneck-clad Messiah. He's not.

There are those who dote on Jobs' every word, who queue for days outside San Francisco's Moscone Center to hear his keynote, and who line up through fair weather and foul to own the subject of his latest announcements. This doesn’t a religion make. Apple is just a very clever company. Driven by fanatical focus to delivering experiences from a relative handful of product lines and platforms, each conforming to a unique and singular view of what people want or aspire to owning.

Long before it became the giant it now is, Apple was frequently dismissed as an exclusive irrelevance, with their computer products struggling to break out of a market share of less than 5%. There were those who dismissed Apple, unwisely as it turned out, on the basis that it’s a PC world and get used to it. Now who’s laughing: Apple, now valued at $237 billion, has eclipsed Microsoft’s market cap and is second only to Exxon in America’s corporate league table.

Apple’s dominance of what you and I enjoy doing most – enjoying music and movies, taking pictures, surfing the net and engaging with our fellow human beings – is undeniable. And credit to them for doing so, for coming up with products so brilliant and so exciting that even opening the packaging of an iPhone or iPod is virtually an erotic experience.

There is also plenty of innovation left in the tank. Will the iPad and iBooks service do for publishing what the iPod and iTunes did to music? My view is 'yes'. Most major record companies were taking the Canute approach to online music until the iTunes model convinced them otherwise. The publishing industry has been doing the same. It all sounds very familiar…

So why should I worry that Apple might be losing it? After all, its handling of the iPhone 4 issue was a fiasco, but hardly a PR disaster, or “a BP” as it’s now known.

If anything, it’s added a degree of humanity to the company. Apple certainly isn’t losing its business, and despite his grumpy press conference on July 16, Steve Jobs certainly won’t be losing that much sleep. What lets Apple's reputation down is things like the secrecy around Jobs’ health issues. The PR diffusion may have maintained share price stability, but it struck a discordant note in Apple’s otherwise resplendent shine.

Apple is still, though, exceeding expectations. In the second quarter of 2010 it earned $3.25 billion profit from almost $16 billion in sales. It sold 8.4 million iPhones in the year to June, a 61% increase on the previous 12 months. And despite the ‘Attennagate' furore, it still sold well over two million iPhone 4s in its first month on the market. The iPad – Apple’s latest revolution - has already sold over 3.3 million pieces in its first three months on sale, and continues to be on back order with a promise of "weeks" before shipping to eager owners.

Such numbers are the making of sniping, envy and suspicion – just look what happened to Microsoft. And while my glasses may appear to have a rosey tint, one has to acknowledge that Apple's products simply ARE good. Its consumer loyalty has been justifiably earned by coming up with stuff that works better and looks better than anyone else's.

Recent events may suggest a blemish on the shine, and it may only be a matter of time before Apple's cocky swagger is knocked asunder by an issue more damaging than how to hold a phone. But for now, all the time it continues to create desirable consumer experiences like the iPhone and the iPad, Apple can still do no wrong.

As Jobs himself commented: "I look at this whole 'Antennagate' thing and say 'wow'. Apple's been around for 34 years. Haven't we earned the credibiity and trust from some of the press to give us a little bit of the benefit of the doubt?". He’s got a point.