Social Pain Processed Like Physical Pain

Taking two Tylenol turns teens' tortures tolerable? New research into the similarity of the processing of social injury and physical injury may explain why some victims of bullying and social isolation react (that is, overreact) with high-level violence. Do they feel they must act in self-defense in the same way as if in physical jeopardy?

Interesting stuff.

iPhone Clobbers Competition in Japan

Apple's bid for global smartphone domination (sorry, Mr. Ballmer) has some support in the iPhone's success with the notoriously picky Japanese gadget consumers, garnering nearly half (46%) of all smartphone sales.

Interestingly, this follows a trend of Japanese warming to cheaper foreign gadgets during the economic downturn. The high-end iPhone isn't exactly the sort of inferior goods one would expect to blossom when folks are short of cash, though. Brand-conscious Japanese consumers remain picky about quality even as they pay more attention to price, and that the iPhone should benefit from this trend says good things about the case in favor of the iPhone's price/performance ratio. The increased share in handsets should also give Apple a chance to build international software sales -- the apps really make the phone sing, and Japanese will want them as much as anyone else. Given Apple's platform's technical advantages in international competition, this promises to offer some durable advantage if established.

WinMo Installed Base Lags iPhone's

Ballmer, who has been quite public in his assertions about the limits of Apple's potential as a competitor, can eat his hat. The installed base (not just current sales, but all phones in use) of iPhones in current use now exceeds that of Windows Mobile smartphones. Thus, despite years of pre-iPhone sales to build its user base, Microsoft has lost not just sales but the installed base battle to a competitor it once derided as too expensive to buy and as useless to business users due to its user interface.

Apple's Delayed iMac: Demand or Defect?

Although NPD claims delays are the product of outsized demand and not defects, first-hand retailer reports of defects make the issue seem muddier than NPD (or likely Apple) would have us believe. Having myself been bitten by a faulty board on a G5 iMac, I'm perfectly willing to believe the new iMac has some parts with an unexpectedly high fail rate.

On the other hand, my i7 iMac rocks the casbah.

Dell's Supply Chain Broken?

Dell, a commodity vendor that once led the field in supply chain management, now seems to be having trouble fulfilling orders this holiday season.

How the mighty have fallen.

Meanwhile, Apple -- once described as "indifferent" to selling iPhones in Korea -- opened iPhone sales to strong demand and presently can't supply Korea with enough of them; moreover, Apple has apparently taken control of AT&T's subscribers through its network-backed applications that deliver applications and music to the iPhone.

Dell Suffers Budget Box Blues

Dell, a commodity box maker lacking durable competitive advantage, has suffered what Jaded Consumer predicted: price competition leading to crushed margins. As Dell has scaled down its component expenses, though, it's suffered a quality problem: warranty costs have blossomed even as retail prices collapsed. Apple, by contrast, is using its high ASP to support highly-reliable product shipment. Thus, even though Apple's historically stable and relatively high average sales price has declined, it's profit has increased.

The lesson? First, it's an illustration of the price paradox: cheap things often aren't. Second, it's an illustration of the value of product differentiation. There are doubtless other lessons to learn, among them not to count Apple out.

On Comercial Apple POS Systems

Earlier mentioned here previously, Apple's internally-developed, intended-only-for-itself POS system (to replace the handheld POS system running atop Windows Mobile, from which the Apple Store is migrating) has some external demand. Also addressing this demand is a company started by Twitter's founder, who offers a card-swiping dongle and payment support systems, on which it presumably would make a cut as a transaction middleman.

Should Apple buy the dongle-maker? I think not.

The dongle may work, but I think Apple's shell-cum-reader is slicker, easier to get in and out of holsters, and capable of being expanded better (ie, Apple could release a holster that's also a barcode scanner, or simply adapt Wil Shipley-like tech (e.g., Delicious Library) to use the camera as a bar code scanner. The choice of WiFi vs G3 connection (and iPhone v iPod Touch) in Apple's solution is nice, as it allows folks to distribute POS devices that aren't necessarily also the users' phones -- or to allow salespeople to attach the shell (while at work) to their own phone to do work -- or to deploy LAN-only iPod Touch devices.

I highly suspect that Apple's billions in credit card transactions place it in a position not only to process third parties' transactions alongside its own, but to BECOME a major transaction processor if it wants. Hmm. Transaction processors need big datacenters, don't they? Didn't Apple buy a big datacenter location?