There’s little doubt that Apple has the most well managed supply chain in the world:

That mentality—spend exorbitantly wherever necessary, and reap the benefits from greater volume in the long run—is institutionalized throughout Apple’s supply chain, and begins at the design stage. Ive and his engineers sometimes spend months living out of hotel rooms in order to be close to suppliers and manufacturers, helping to tweak the industrial processes that translate prototypes into mass-produced devices. For new designs such as the MacBook’s unibody shell, cut from a single piece of aluminum, Apple’s designers work with suppliers to create new tooling equipment. The decision to focus on a few product lines, and to do little in the way of customization, is a huge advantage. “They have a very unified strategy, and every part of their business is aligned around that strategy,” says Matthew Davis, a supply-chain analyst with Gartner (IT) who has ranked Apple as the world’s best supply chain for the last four years.

What allows them to even do that is they are so focused around a few products and such a tightly unified company. If Apple was structured into basically autonomous divisions that made decisions based on what’s best for them, their operations strategy would be impossible. Apple is reaping the benefits of a focused company.

David Pogue reviews Windows Phone 7.5:

Now, if this phone had arrived before the iPhone, people would have been sacrificing small animals to it.

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I’m skeptical it’s going to work out, but regardless, best of luck to Chris Bowler with whatever it is he does next. You won’t meet a nicer, more caring guy.

Zach Holman:

Simplify. Don’t give your users the shit work.

Someone needs to make that into a poster.

Square just updated their Card Case iPhone app with a new feature: automatic tabs. Basically, you can now walk into stores that support Square and pay without ever taking out your phone or wallet. Pretty neat.

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Earlier this year, Norah Jones performed Neil Young’s “Tell Me Why.”

A lovely performance and tribute to one of the greatest musicians.

Mona Simpson’s eulogy for her brother:

We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

Just beautiful.

Apple is organized around functions, rather than divisions:

The result is a command-and-control structure where ideas are shared at the top — if not below. Jobs often contrasts Apple’s approach with its competitors’. Sony (SNE), he has said, had too many divisions to create the iPod. Apple instead has functions. “It’s not synergy that makes it work” is how one observer paraphrases Jobs’ explanation of Apple’s approach. “It’s that we’re a unified team.”
…
Specialization is the norm at Apple, and as a result, Apple employees aren’t exposed to functions outside their area of expertise. Jennifer Bailey, the executive who runs Apple’s online store, for example, has no authority over the photographs on the site. Photographic images are handled companywide by Apple’s graphic arts department. Apple’s powerful retail chief, Ron Johnson, doesn’t control the inventory in his stores. Tim Cook, whose background is in supply-chain management, handles inventory across the company. (Johnson has plenty left to do, including site selection, in-store service, and store layout.)

This doesn’t just mean that the best person is handling a specific task (like the photos in Apple’s online store)—it also means that the company is interwoven and has no choice but to work together. Rather than have engineering lay out the specifications for a new product, hand it off to the design department so they can create a design that meets them, and then hand it off to marketing, Apple instead integrates design, engineering and marketing from the beginning of the process.

There’s a lot to learn from Apple’s corporate and business strategies, but I think there is even more to learn from how the company’s organized. Apple is defining how companies must be organized and managed to succeed in this century.

Dan Frommer on why Apple has to sell a TV, and not just an accessory:

Apple sells complete experiences, not just devices.

That’s everything from the box it comes in to the status and emotion that owning and using one of its products provides.

There’s not much special about plugging an Apple TV box or Blu-ray player or game console into your HDTV, turning the TV on with one (obnoxiously complex) remote control, toggling over to the right HDMI input, and then resuming with the Apple remote.

Good argument. I’ve gone on record arguing Apple won’t release a television, but I do think Siri changes that. My argument was Apple couldn’t build a TV that’s iPod-better than current TVs, but with Siri (and the right content deals), they could.

It’s still a difficult business—TVs are too expensive for people to replace every few years, so the computing hardware included in it would be out of date on most people’s sets (which, after a few years, precludes new software updates), but I do think Apple wants to be in people’s living rooms long-term, and this might be the best way to do it.

Unless Apple’s going an alternate route, though, and gets exclusive content for its ecosystem (which is an interesting idea; imagine a TV show that’s only available from iTunes), this is all still going to depend on getting the right content deals. If they have enough TV shows and movies available, an Apple TV with Siri will be absolutely incredible. If they don’t, it’s not going to be so great.

HP is keeping their PC division after all:

HP today announced that it has completed its evaluation of strategic alternatives for its Personal Systems Group (PSG) and has decided the unit will remain part of the company.

“HP objectively evaluated the strategic, financial and operational impact of spinning off PSG. It’s clear after our analysis that keeping PSG within HP is right for customers and partners, right for shareholders, and right for employees,” said Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer. “HP is committed to PSG, and together we are stronger.”

All I can think of is a certain It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode: there’s so many twists, I can’t keep up.

I’m sure their Personal Systems Group employees are inspired to do their best work for HP now. What a mess.

From Steven Levy’s profile of Nest:

Though Fadell isn’t specific, he says that the company may offer more services, perhaps ones that bring more money to Nest. For the long-term, Nest plans to move beyond thermostats and exploit similar green opportunities in the way that only a tech company can. This particularly excites Nest’s investors.

“The Internet so far has been a collection of connected people. We think that the next step is connected devices,” says Randy Komisar, of Kleiner Perkins. “This could be the edge device that drives other things connected to the home.”

Nest can also be a model for another phenomenon: applying the skills of Silicon Valley to transform other seemingly mundane but nonetheless important objects.

I love this. They’re tackling something that we all assumed was boring, would always be boring, and there was nothing we could really do. And they’re turning it into something exciting.

Nokia showed off their first Windows phone, the Lumia 800, and it’s really nice. I hope it is as good as it looks and they sell a ton of them.

Jacqui Cheng reviews the new iPod nano:

I’ll cut to the chase: Nike+ on the new iPod nano was not particularly accurate for me on speed or distance, but the poor speed calculation is likely because of the inaccurate distance estimate. On the three runs I did with the nano, Nike+ over-estimated my distance by about 25 to 33 percent. In some cases, that added up to more than a mile of extra distance. The nano did keep the time correctly though—this is the easiest part, of course—but because of that, the data on how fast I ran was grossly over-estimated. (I sure would like to believe that I can put away 5 miles at 7 minutes per mile, but it just ain’t the truth.)

Too bad. If it was accurate, the new iPod nano would be even better for runners.

Michael Lopp:

A good ending, whether it’s a meeting, a presentation, or an article:

• Introduces itself, invites the audiences to the stage, and acknowledges receipt.
• Reminds everyone what was actually important.
• Says one more thing.