Apple, China, and the Upper Middle Class; Apple Earnings; Apple Pay Coming to Best Buy

Good morning, A heads-up that there will be no Daily Update this Friday, May 1, as I will be taking the day off to go on a weekend trip with my family. On to the update: Apple, China, and the Upper Middle Class Apple had another record quarter, thanks primarily to China. I appreciated theSubscribe […]

Daily Update: The Samsung Galaxy S6, Samsung Pay, HTC: Industrial Design for Hire

Good morning, I apologize that this Daily Update is late; I’m actually posting from San Francisco, having just arrived on an overnight flight from Taipei. I’ll be up and down the West Coast for the next week, and plan on attending the Apple Watch event next Monday, so Daily Updates may be a bit irregular.Subscribe […]

Daily Update: Google Wallet, Softcard, and the Perils of Modularization

Good morning, I made a mistake in yesterday’s Snapchat post. Specifically, the excerpted email at the beginning was not written by Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel; rather, it was written by Twitter CFO Anthony Noto to Evan Spiegel. I greatly regret the error. On to today’s update about Google Wallet and, inevitably, Apple Pay: Google WalletSubscribe […]

Daily Update: FiftyThree and the App Store, Three Notes on China

Good morning, Surprise! Today’s update is not late. It’s also not my weekly article, as planned – that should be coming tomorrow. In addition, I’ll be off for Chinese New Year on Thursday and Friday. On to the update: FiftyThree and the App Store FiftyThree, a startup based in New York, is particularly important toSubscribe […]

The State of Consumer Technology at the End of 2014

While the modern computing era in many respects began with the IBM System/360 mainframe and further expanded with the minicomputer, normal consumers didn’t start encountering computers until the personal computer. And, while mainframes are technically still around (while minicomputers are decidedly not), what is unique about the PC is that it is very much still […]

Daily Update: The Silver Lining in Sony and Target, Iowa Launches Smartphone Driver’s License, Xiaomi Banned in India

Good morning, There have been some really great discussions on the Stratechery Forum over the last week. If you haven’t stopped by, do check it out. Please note, if you have login issues, make sure you use your member name, not email address on the login page. I’m hoping to address some of the siteSubscribe […]

Daily Update: Facebook’s Trio of Announcements, Apple Adds UnionPay, The Web Isn’t Dying

Good morning, I fell pretty drastically behind on both email and in processing rebates/credits over the last few days, so my apologies for any delays. I’ll be taking care of that this week. On to the update: Facebook Facebook Facebook There was a trio of noteworthy Facebook announcements over the weekend: Facebook is improving itsSubscribe […]

Daily Update: How Apple Pay Might Fail, Dropbox and Office, Amazon Prime Adds Cloud Storage

Good morning, Many of you have requested that I send Stratechery articles via email, just as I do the Daily Updates. I’m happy to announce that I will be doing just that from now on via the normal Stratechery email notification list. If you would like to receive Stratechery posts via email, please subscribe hereSubscribe […]

Daily Update: Why Apple Pay was Blocked, and Why it Will Succeed; Google Reorgs, Kind Of

Good morning, I appeared on This Week in Tech yesterday; I’ll post something on Stratechery in a bit, but for now you can access the episode here. On to the update: Why Apple Pay was Blocked, and Why it Will Succeed At this point I presume most of you have heard about CVS and Rite-AidSubscribe […]