Daniel Eran Dilger points out that despite what everyone said, the iPhone 5c has done pretty well:

Speaking to analysts during Apple’s Q2 earnings conference call, chief executive Tim Cook stated that 69 percent of iPhone 5c buyers were new to iPhone, while 60 percent had switched from an Android phone. For the cheaper iPhone 4S, the ratios were even higher (although the sales volumes were much smaller): 85 percent were new to iPhone, while 62 percent switched from Android.

“Flop” was some sort of crypto-pundit code for “didn’t sell as many units as the iPhone 5s or as many as Apple expected.” Yet, it sold better than the iPhone 4S at the same price point from the previous year, which none of them seemed to understand.

There were rumors late last year that Apple would discontinue the iPhone 5c in the next update cycle. I really doubt that will happen. Would they bring back the iPhone 5 as the low end product? The 5c is doing better than people said and I think the having the plastic model at the low end makes even more sense, so I don’t see it being discontinued.

John McDuling at Quartz:

Amazon shares have had a terrible start to 2014. And today, it’s gotten a lot worse.

Shares of the online retail behemoth are down about 9% today alone. They’ve fallen 23% in 2014, compared to roughly flat performance for the S&P 500.

So, it’s after year 17 investors start wondering when you’re going to make a profit?

(Via Glenn Fleishman)

Electronista details Tim Cook’s explanations for why iPad sales were down.

Cook, however, said that at the time Apple was fulfilling a backlog of iPad orders and thus sold a lot of units to “the channel” — resellers and distributors — which pumped up sales figures. This year, sell-in inventory (to partners) went way down, while sales remained basically the same, making it look like Apple had sold far fewer iPads than it did.

Sell-through to end users — a figure that Apple is alone in the industry in reporting — was actually 17.5 million units, down about three percent from the year-ago quarter. The difference means that iPad sales were actually at the high end of what Apple was expecting, rather than “a miss” as some analysts had expected.

Cook has reasonable explanations for why it’s not as bad as it looks and I believe the iPad business is still solid. But it’s something to keep an eye on for upcoming quarters.

Like we weren’t going to watch iPad sales in upcoming quarters.

Seán Byrne found a strange behavior with some html files he was storing on OneDrive: it was injecting Office tags into them.

(Via TJ Luoma and Jordan T-H)

Nilay Patel at The Verge:

Massive companies like AT&T and Comcast have spent the first two months of 2014 boldly announcing plans to close and control the internet through additional fees, pay-to-play schemes, and sheer brutal size — all while the legal rules designed to protect against these kinds of abuses were struck down in court for basically making too much sense.

I’m fortunate enough to live in one of the small pockets of the country where there is a choice (Tacoma has its own broadband) but what a depressing situation.

John Gruber rightly notes what a disappointment the Obama administration has been on net neutrality.

Some quick take-aways based on Apple’s press release and numbers from Macworld:

• Record 2nd quarter revenue
• Profit up
• Margin up
• Strong iPhone sales, up 17 percent
• Weak iPad sales, down about 18 percent
• Mac sales up 4 percent

The company will also be conducting a 7-for-1 stock split along with further share repurchases.

Mary Jo Foley:

Derrick Connell, a Microsoft Corporate Vice President in charge of the Bing Experiences team, said over the weekend in a hosted Q&A session that Microsoft is “now done with the (Scroogled) campaign.”

Great news everyone! Those mugs are now collectors items.

Hopefully another smart move by Satya Nadella and another sign that Mark Penn’s influence is waning.

Pretty interesting. No longer do you have to have a developer account. I hope this is restricted to later more stable builds. Personally, I don’t install anything but final releases on what I laughingly call my production systems. My wife, of course, is still on Mountain Lion because she likes to murder me in my sleep when I change her MacBook too much.

Hopefully this will be a positive change and even make final releases more solid and not just an opportunity to grouse about things people don’t like or how an early release deleted all their kitty gifs #applefail.

Writing for Wired,

These HBO Go ads with young adults watching sex scenes with their parents are deviously brilliant.

My wife saw Boogie Nights in the theater with her mother. I can’t even imagine.

(Via Michael T. Rose)