Bits Blog: For PC Makers, the Good News on 2013 Is That It Is Over

‘Smart TVs’ Are Next Bet for Makers as Sales Languish

Crisp, high-definition TVs as big as 50 diagonal inches can be had for a few hundred dollars. Why bother upgrading or paying more for a fancy new one? Many people don’t. And if you spend much of your time watching streaming video on a tablet or phone, paying for a better TV seems even more pointless. So for several years now, TV sales have been lackluster.

Electronics manufacturers, though, are not losing hope. And at the 47th International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, scheduled to open on Monday, they will show how they intend to attract more customers. In many cases, it will be by offering so-called smart TVs that can connect to the Internet and run apps.

“Consumers are telling us they’re more interested in connected” televisions, said Benjamin Arnold, an analyst at the NPD Group, the research firm.

For example, at the show, Roku, the manufacturer known for making set-top boxes that include Netflix streaming, will announce designs for integrating its streaming media service directly into television sets. Two Chinese manufacturers, Hisense and TCL, will make the first products based on the designs. Roku, which is based in Saratoga, Calif., will show six television set models at the show with its service built in, said Anthony Wood, the company’s chief executive.

Mr. Wood says Roku is in a position to make a smarter television than others in the industry. He said most TV set makers do not have the resources to make smart televisions with a broad selection of content, partly because many media companies do not want to create versions of their apps for all the different smart TVs on the market. By contrast, there are already more than 1,200 apps available for Roku, including HBO Go, Netflix, Vudu and others, he said.

“Our strategy is to be the dominant platform on the big screen,” Mr. Wood said in an interview.

Samsung, the No. 1 TV manufacturer in the world, is also bullish about Internet-connected TVs. This year more than 75 percent of Samsung TVs will be smart TVs, said Joe Stinziano, an executive vice president for home entertainment at Samsung Electronics America.

But Samsung, like other television makers, is covering its bases by also trying to grab consumers’ attention with flashy new features for the old-fashioned set. The manufacturers have been introducing these kinds of features for a while now to little avail; last year’s crop of sets offered the ability to watch content in 3-D and included screens with quadruple the pixels. Yet shipments of sets last year were down, and with little content to watch, 3-D TVs are a failure so far.

In the United States, sales of Ultra HD TVs in the 12 months that ended in November accounted for less than 1 percent of overall sales of televisions 40 inches or larger. Nonetheless, this year, Samsung is emphasizing curved high-definition TVs, including a high-end 105-inch Ultra HD TV with a curved display.

The slightly concave screen cuts down on reflections from ambient lighting, like the ceiling lights in a living room, for example. It also allows people who are sitting off to the sides, away from the central sweet spot, to get a better viewing experience, Mr. Stinziano said.

“Your eye is curved and this TV is also curved,” he said. “It’s a much more natural feeling.”

Other TV makers like LG, Panasonic, Sharp, Toshiba and Sony will also showcase their big-screen Ultra HD TVs at the electronics show this week.

Out of all the TV makers’ tricks, smart TVs appear to be gaining some traction. In the year that ended in November, 22 percent of televisions sold in the United States were Internet-connected TVs, compared with 11 percent in the previous year, according to NPD.

Bits Blog: The ‘Other’ Server Makers Are Gaining Ground

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Asia Chip Makers Stand to Benefit From Move to Cut-Price Gadgets

Manufacturers, including Toshiba and SK Hynix, are poised to reap the rewards of soaring demand for cut-price tablets and smartphones in China, the world’s biggest smartphone market, and the emergence of Chinese mobile device makers like Huawei Technologies.

At the high end of the spectrum, demand for gadgets armed with ever-greater memory capacity will bolster chip sales even if the market for relatively expensive handsets does not see the kind of rapid growth it has in the past.

All of this, combined with reduced investment since 2011, means the prices of dynamic random access memory and NAND memory chips have started to rise, and chip makers are enjoying the most bargaining power they have had in years.

“Chip makers are reaping the benefits of curtailed investment of recent years just when demand is exploding,” said Hong Sung-ho, an analyst at I’M Investment & Securities.

Chip makers had little bargaining power until early last year as Apple and Samsung were the sole major buyers of the NAND chips used in mobile devices. The two global heavyweights focus on the high-end market and they are now struggling with slowing growth as this profitable segment nears saturation.

China is driving the industry’s rapid shift to cheaper smartphones, helping chip makers broaden their customer base. Additionally, the growth of Chinese smartphone makers like Huawei, ZTE Corp. and Lenovo is threatening to weaken the dominance of Apple and Samsung.

About 70 percent of China’s smartphone shipments are sold at 1,000 renminbi, or about $160, or less, while 10 percent are in the 1,000 to 3,000 renminbi range. Supercheap tablets costing less than $100 are also soaking up supply.

“The size of the Apple order was a big price swing factor, but now demand from Chinese manufacturers is more than offsetting this volatility,” said the HMC Investment Securities analyst Greg Nho.

Prices of DRAM chips, used mainly in computers, have leaped nearly 90 percent so far this year even as PC sales have plummeted, while the market for NAND memory chips has tightened.

Outside of China, demand for NAND chips is increasing as consumers need more memory capacity to play high-quality video and music on higher-priced gadgets.

“In the old days, we only took a few photographs. Now we take videos as well, at potentially higher resolutions,” said Damian Thong, director of research at Macquarie Capital Securities in Tokyo. “I actually think the opportunity for NAND flash is enormous still.”

For example, HTC’s flagship smartphone, the HTC One, has NAND memory capacity of 64 gigabytes, four times more than that of most other high-end models.

The second-largest NAND manufacturer, Toshiba, said Tuesday that it would expand a production facility in Japan with an investment of nearly ¥30 billion, or $300 million. Samsung, the world’s leading producer of the chips, is building a $7 billion NAND plant in China.

Micron Technology, which is looking to complete the acquisition of the bankrupt Japanese chip maker Elpida Memory before the end of August, plans to increase investment in 2014 as it integrates with the Japanese company.

But even as some chip makers bolster investment for the first time in years, few believe the market is heading for a glut. Indeed, memory chip makers’ total capital spending this year is set to decrease by 2.6 percent to $12.3 billion, according to HMC Investment Securities.

Most manufacturers are keeping investment to a small scale as they prepare for the arrival of three-dimensional chip engineering, a major technological leap from the current planar structure.

Mr. Thong, of Macquarie, said demand for NAND chips would continue to outstrip supply, even with the new production facilities in the pipeline.

“Memory prices and memory profitability will remain high for the next 12 months,” he said.

Samsung has become conservative in recent years, a departure from its traditional approach of keeping rivals at bay by not allowing profitability to get too high.

“By creating an oversupply situation, Samsung was able to keep memory competitors weak,” Mark Newman, a research analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, said in a report Tuesday. “Today, however, that strategy of lower memory chip prices actually just helps Samsung’s handset and tablet competitors. Samsung is thus becoming highly motivated to generate memory shortages and high memory pricing.”

Samsung is the world’s top NAND chip maker with about 38 percent of the market, followed by Toshiba, which has a 28 percent share, and SK Hynix, with 13 percent.

Bits Blog: Smartphone Makers Pressed to Address Growing Theft Problem

Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press George Gascón, San Francisco’s district attorney, center, along with Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman of New York, second from right, at a press conference Thursday to announce the formation of the Secure Our Smartphones initiative.

1:16 p.m. | Updated This post was changed to include the name of the company that estimated the total cost of cellphone theft.

Seeking to curb a nationwide increase in smartphone thefts, New York’s attorney general and San Francisco’s district attorney on Thursday announced an initiative to push the industry to develop technologies that will discourage theft and dry up the market for stolen devices.

The new group, the Secure Our Smartphones Initiative, will include prosecutors, political officials, law enforcement and consumer advocates from over a dozen states. The co-chairmen will be the New York attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, and the San Francisco district attorney, George Gascón.

Mr. Gascón and Mr. Schneiderman were scheduled to meet Thursday afternoon with representatives from Apple, Samsung, Google’s Motorola unit and Microsoft, which have about 90 percent of the smartphone market.

“It is totally unacceptable that we have an epidemic of crime that we believe can be eliminated if the technological fixes that we believe are available are put into place,” Mr. Schneiderman said.

The coalition is encouraging manufacturers to equip all smartphones with a “kill switch.” When consumers reported to providers that their cellphone had been stolen, the phone, like a stolen credit card, would be rendered inoperable.

“For the thieves who would steal them,” Mr. Schneiderman said, the phones would be “nothing more than a paperweight.”

The loss and theft of cellphones cost consumers over $30 billion in 2012, according to a recent study by Lookout, a San Francisco mobile security company. About 113 smartphones are lost or stolen each minute in the United States and, according to the Federal Communications Commission, cellphone thefts account for 30 to 40 percent of all robberies nationwide. In New York City, the thefts increased 40 percent last year alone.

“The industry has the moral and the social obligation to fix this problem,” Mr. Gascón said. “There are very few things that can be fixed with a technological solution, and this is one of them.”

Apple said on Monday that its next mobile operating system, iOS7, to be released in the fall, has a new feature called Activation Lock that will help to thwart theft. An Apple representative was not immediately available to comment.

Though he did not specify how the coalition would make manufacturers comply with its demands, Mr. Schneiderman said, “The stakes here are very high and we intend to pursue this with every tool in our toolbox.”

New York Asks Smartphone Makers to Help Prevent Thefts

Mr. Schneiderman will announce on Monday that he has sent letters to top executives of Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung seeking information from their offices about security protections, and asking for their cooperation in working on new measures to reduce theft.

He said that he was asking the companies to meet with lawyers from his office to discuss the issue and that he was inviting company officials to work with his office to develop new antitheft measures in consultation with a mobile security company, Lookout, which is advising his office.

“This is a multibillion-dollar industry that produces some of the most popular and technologically advanced consumer electronic products in the world,” Mr. Schneiderman said in a statement.

“Surely we can work together to find solutions that lead to a reduction in violent street crime targeting consumers.”

The attorney general’s action is the latest sign of increased attention to what some have described as a national epidemic of smartphone theft, often called “Apple picking.”

Some law enforcement officials have complained that carriers and handset makers are not doing enough to combat thefts, since they can stand to profit from the sale of replacement phones.

The sale of cellphone handsets brought in $69 billion in the United States last year, according to the market research firm IDC.

The problem has been particularly acute in New York City, where the police and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that crime would have declined in 2012 had it not been for a surge of thefts of devices like iPhones and iPads.

The New York Police Department aggressively pursues cases involving the theft of Apple devices and works with Apple to track down the pilfered devices.

And nationally, the Federal Communications Commission and the wireless phone industry are forming a central database to track stolen phones and prevent them from being reused.

In the letters, sent on Friday, Mr. Schneiderman cited a number of violent confrontations in New York that centered on cellphones, including a fight over an iPhone on a Queens subway platform in February in which three people were stabbed, and the fatal shooting of a Bronx man in April 2012.

Mr. Schneiderman also referred to various marketing claims made by each company about the security features of their phones, and expressed doubts about whether the products are living up to those claims.

His office said he had jurisdiction to get involved in the matter because New York State law empowered him to enforce statutes barring deceptive trade practices.

Disruptions: How Deal Makers Put a Value on Start-Ups - Disruptions

Annie Tritt for The New York Times Otis Chandler and his wife, Elizabeth Khuri Chandler, the founders of Goodreads, a social media site that recently sold for a reported $150 million.

I have a vision of how suitors decide how much to offer for a start-up they want to buy. Several executives go into a conference room. Each scribbles a number on a piece of paper and places it in a hat. Then the chief executive pulls out a number, and there it is.

It might sound like a stretch, but given the seemingly random and sometimes nonsensical amounts for which start-ups with no revenue, or no users, or even no product are bought, I might not be far off.

But let’s say there is a logical way to value a company. During Bubble 1.0 there seemed to be — at least sometimes. Tech start-ups were valued by the number of eyeballs they attracted. When Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo for $5.9 billion in stock in April 1999, it was estimated that the company paid $10,000 per user.

Today, when eyeballs mean much less, how do start-ups with no revenue come up with a valuation? Well, it depends on a buyer’s reason for wanting the company.

One of the growing forms of acquisitions is an acqui-hire, in which a company is bought for its talent.

“If the company has no revenue and no users, then it comes down to the price of each engineer, which on average ranges between $750,000 to $1.5 million per person,” said Sam Hamadeh, chief executive of PrivCo, a firm that follows privately held companies, who noted that such acquisitions were up 91 percent from a year ago. “Facebook certainly pioneered and popularized this phenomenon as it made acquisitions to essentially snuff out competition.”

An investor report released by PrivCo in late March found that 12 of the acquisitions by Facebook last year were of this type. Often Facebook integrated the engineers and then shut the newly purchased company. The report also found that Twitter had acquired eight companies to get their engineering talent. Yahoo, Google, Apple, LinkedIn and Airbnb have also done transactions just for engineers.

Given Mr. Hamadeh’s estimate, we can begin to guess at a start-up’s value if it’s clearly an acqui-hire. If a company has 10 employees, no revenue and no users, it could be worth about $15 million. Throw in the cost of some office equipment, shutting down the technology and paying back investors, and it’s valued at $30 million.

Chris Dixon, a general partner at the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, said in an interview that although some of the recent start-up acquisition prices might seem high, many are amortized over four years, which makes some deals seem more rational. “If you’re paying $1 million per engineer in an acqui-hire, that’s split up over four years and ends up equaling the salary of other engineers in the Valley,” he said.

But some of these transactions have people scratching their heads — like that of Summly, a news-reading app built by a 17-year-old with two employees, which Yahoo bought for a reported $30 million last month. As Emin Gün Sirer, an associate professor at Cornell, noted, Summly didn’t use any unique technology and has only a couple of employees.

When a company has users and it is a straight-up product acquisition, the numbers can be more difficult to figure out. Amazon recently purchased Goodreads, a social media site built around sharing books, for a sum said to be $150 million. Mailbox, which had not properly begun, sold for $100 million last month to DropBox. And, of course, there is Instagram, which was bought for $1 billion.

Thomas R. Eisenmann, a professor at the Harvard Business School, said that when companies weren’t being acquired just for their talent — like Goodreads and Instagram — three possible calculations were used to determine a valuation. The first requires exploring how much time and effort it would take to build the product from scratch and attract new users. The second is potential cash flow.

The third is “in the realm of, ‘What number do we need to put on the table to convince the management and investors to part with their dream?’ ” he said. “Often, they end up somewhere in the magic middle.”

Of course, all of this math starts to fall apart when a start-up receives an exorbitant amount of press and exposure on social networks. Then suitors become irrational, making the price people are willing to pay seem as if it were plucked out of a hat.

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

Antivirus Makers Work on Software to Catch Malware More Effectively

Consumers and businesses spend billions of dollars every year on antivirus software. But these programs rarely, if ever, block freshly minted computer viruses, experts say, because the virus creators move too quickly. That is prompting start-ups and other companies to get creative about new approaches to computer security.

“The bad guys are always trying to be a step ahead,” said Matthew D. Howard, a venture capitalist at Norwest Venture Partners who previously set up the security strategy at Cisco Systems. “And it doesn’t take a lot to be a step ahead.”

Computer viruses used to be the domain of digital mischief makers. But in the mid-2000s, when criminals discovered that malicious software could be profitable, the number of new viruses began to grow exponentially.

In 2000, there were fewer than a million new strains of malware, most of them the work of amateurs. By 2010, there were 49 million new strains, according to AV-Test, a German research institute that tests antivirus products.

The antivirus industry has grown as well, but experts say it is falling behind. By the time its products are able to block new viruses, it is often too late. The bad guys have already had their fun, siphoning out a company’s trade secrets, erasing data or emptying a consumer’s bank account.

A new study by Imperva, a data security firm in Redwood City, Calif., and students from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is the latest confirmation of this. Amichai Shulman, Imperva’s chief technology officer, and a group of researchers collected and analyzed 82 new computer viruses and put them up against more than 40 antivirus products, made by top companies like Microsoft, Symantec, McAfee and Kaspersky Lab. They found that the initial detection rate was less than 5 percent.

On average, it took almost a month for antivirus products to update their detection mechanisms and spot the new viruses. And two of the products with the best detection rates — Avast and Emsisoft — are available free; users are encouraged to pay for additional features. This despite the fact that consumers and businesses spent a combined $7.4 billion on antivirus software last year — nearly half of the $17.7 billion spent on security software in 2011, according to Gartner.

“Existing methodologies we’ve been protecting ourselves with have lost their efficacy,” said Ted Schlein, a security-focused investment partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “This study is just another indicator of that. But the whole concept of detecting what is bad is a broken concept.”

Part of the problem is that antivirus products are inherently reactive. Just as medical researchers have to study a virus before they can create a vaccine, antivirus makers must capture a computer virus, take it apart and identify its “signature” — unique signs in its code — before they can write a program that removes it.

That process can take as little as a few hours or as long as several years. In May, researchers at Kaspersky Lab discovered Flame, a complex piece of malware that had been stealing data from computers for an estimated five years.

Mikko H. Hypponen, chief researcher at F-Secure, called Flame “a spectacular failure” for the antivirus industry. “We really should have been able to do better,” he wrote in an essay for Wired.com after Flame’s discovery. “But we didn’t. We were out of our league in our own game.”

Symantec and McAfee, which built their businesses on antivirus products, have begun to acknowledge their limitations and to try new approaches. The word “antivirus” does not appear once on their home pages. Symantec rebranded its popular antivirus packages: its consumer product is now called Norton Internet Security, and its corporate offering is now Symantec Endpoint Protection.

“Nobody is saying antivirus is enough,” said Kevin Haley, Symantec’s director of security response. Mr. Haley said Symantec’s antivirus products included a handful of new technologies, like behavior-based blocking, which looks at some 30 characteristics of a file, including when it was created and where else it has been installed, before allowing it to run. “In over two-thirds of cases, malware is detected by one of these other technologies,” he said.

Europe Fines Electronics Makers $1.92 Billion

Senior managers at some of the world’s largest electronics companies often used those meetings, mostly in Asia, to fix the price of picture and display tubes for televisions and computer screens, the top European antitrust regulator said Wednesday.

Joaquín Almunia, the E.U. competition commissioner, said he would levy fines totaling almost €1.5 billion, or $1.96 billion, on seven companies involved in the two cartels, which operated for a decade until 2006. Combined, the fines amount to the largest single penalty for price fixing ever imposed by the commission.

The action follows a spate of similar cases in the glass and display sectors, where bulky cathode ray tubes have been supplanted by technologies like liquid crystal display and plasma that allow manufacturers to build far more compact monitors and screens.

Mr. Almunia imposed the strongest penalties on Philips Electronics of the Netherlands and LG Electronics of South Korea.

Mr. Almunia said at a news conference that the cartel activity began in the late 1990s, when the market was still strong for cathode ray tubes, and lasted until 2006 even as that market declined, allowing the conspirators to continue generating strong returns for a technology that was rapidly becoming outmoded.

“The companies were trying to manage through collusion the decline in the market for these kinds of tubes,” Mr. Almunia said. “The undue profits that the companies derived from the collusion may even have artificially slowed down the transition to the more modern products like LCD and plasma displays.”

Excerpts of minutes from meetings held by the cartel members obtained during the investigation showed the efforts they made to fix the market for the older technologies, according to commission officials.

“Producers need to avoid price competition through controlling their production capacity (of flat types in particular),” one excerpt read. Another noted that “mutual cooperation is required to deal with an expected economic downturn” in the second half of 2002.

One of the “greens meetings” took place at the Palm Garden Golf Club and was followed by a “Top Management” meeting in the Terengganu room of a Marriott Hotel, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation who asked not to be named because of the legal sensitivity of the case.

The person gave no further details about the location or the meeting. But those details suggested that the conspirators played and ate during the day at a luxury golfing resort near the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur that is equipped with a driving range, infinity-edge swimming pool and tennis courts.

In addition to the “greens meetings,” there were “glass meetings” for lower-level managers, the name probably related to the glass structure of the cathode ray tubes, officials said. They were held in Asia and in European cities including Glasgow, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam and Budapest, commission officials said.

The cartels “feature all the worst kinds of anti-competitive behavior that are strictly forbidden to companies doing business in Europe,” Mr. Almunia said. There had been “serious harm” to producers in Europe and to consumers, he said, since the cathode ray tubes had accounted for up to 70 percent of the price of screens.

The commission’s antitrust division can fine offenders up to 10 percent of their annual worldwide sales, and the fine on Wednesday exceeded the previous record of almost €1.4 billion, which was imposed in 2008, for a car-glass cartel.

But unlike regulators in the United States, the commission has no criminal enforcement powers and cannot prosecute or seek to jail participants for anti-competitive offenses. Many lawyers say that remains a shortcoming of the European system.

Digital Domain: Cellphone Cases Can Imitate Their Makers - Digital Domain

Some devices, like my Android phone, a Galaxy Nexus by Samsung, have a back cover that slides off and a battery that pops out. And when evaluators at iFixit, a Web site offering do-it-yourself repair manuals and parts, disassembled Google’s new Nexus 7 tablet for a “teardown” review, they found that it was easy to open and repair.

In iFixit’s video review, the narrator describes how the battery can be replaced without unscrewing a single screw. She is moved to declare, “The sustainability-geek inside me wants to hug Google for this.”

Other vendors — Apple, would you please take a bow? — make products that are designed to keep users out. The case on my wife’s iPhone 4 is closed with screws of Apple’s own devising that require a special screwdriver.

IFixit offers a tool kit for replacing those screws with standard ones. It mischievously markets this as a “Liberation Kit.”

It isn’t surprising that Apple, the epitome of the closed organization and overlord of the iPhone’s tightly controlled software ecosystem, would design screws that, in effect, serve as locks. And one can see how it would be in Apple’s interest to make it hard for users to extend the life of older models — it’s a way to encourage the purchase of the newest, greatest Apple stuff.

Google, which until now has not done much in consumer electronics hardware with its own brand name, is positioning itself as a conspicuous alternative to Apple, in design as in other aspects. As long as Apple embraces closed systems — and closed cases — Google can take advantage of an opportunity to be the un-Apple and to open up.

Using components that are easy to recycle is one way to score points for selling an environmentally friendly product. Apple’s products rank high in that regard, says Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit. But Apple doesn’t want its users to service its devices, he says. So it scores lower in another important aspect of being “green”: extending a product’s useful life by making it easy to repair.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

In January, Sprint announced a “sustainable design” effort, in partnership with the environmental unit of UL, the independent testing and certification group. Sprint encourages all of its partner manufacturers to submit their handsets for evaluation of the “repairability and recyclability” of the devices. Those that attain a certain number of points will be designated as “certified” or, greenest of all, “platinum.”

Lois Fagan, Sprint director of product development, says, “We have a self-imposed goal that at least 50 percent of our portfolio of new phones in 2012 will be certified.”

Consumers who want to know which phones are the easiest to repair won’t get much guidance from UL Environment. It will say only whether a device has earned its “certified” or “platinum” designations. It does not say what points were earned for any particular criterion, like ease of removing the external enclosure or the battery, or availability of replacement parts. Nor does it disclose which handsets fail to earn enough points to be certified.

The ability to remove the battery is especially important to frequent phone users, because the original battery may not last the two-year commitment required in a standard contract.

Apple says its iPhone battery is designed to retain up to 80 percent of its original capacity after 400 full charge and discharge cycles. For phones out of warranty, it offers a battery replacement service for $79 if you send the phone to its repair center; shipping costs are extra. (Being without one’s phone is an inconvenience not reflected in the price.)

IFixit provides an alternative. It sells replacement batteries and the necessary tools and offers its free online repair manuals, prepared by fellow users. A replacement battery for the older iPhone 3G model is only $14.95, and there’s no painful parting with the phone in the process.

According to Mr. Wiens, iPhone batteries aren’t hard to replace, with the right screwdriver, available online. “Under five minutes; no technical skills required,” he says.

Even replacing the glass on an iPad 3 can be done by amateurs, he contends, but guidance is needed: “I have a pile of iPad 3s that we broke while trying to learn how to repair them. Last week we finally broke the code.”

IFixit offers manuals covering computers, cameras, game consoles and household appliances, too; its credo is “repair is recycling.”

Hooman Morvarid, president of

CellularDR.com, a repair business that handles phones from many manufacturers, says the most frequent problem he sees is broken glass, followed by a broken LCD screen that sits behind the glass. Increasingly, he says, the glass and LCD are fused together in a way that makes them impossible to separate if one or the other is broken. “So phones are actually becoming more expensive to repair,” he says.

The more that designers of mobile devices avoid fusing parts together, the easier they are to repair. And the repairs most likely to be undertaken are those we can do ourselves.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Digital Domain: Cellphone Cases Can Imitate Their Makers - Digital Domain

Some devices, like my Android phone, a Galaxy Nexus by Samsung, have a back cover that slides off and a battery that pops out. And when evaluators at iFixit, a Web site offering do-it-yourself repair manuals and parts, disassembled Google’s new Nexus 7 tablet for a “teardown” review, they found that it was easy to open and repair.

In iFixit’s video review, the narrator describes how the battery can be replaced without unscrewing a single screw. She is moved to declare, “The sustainability-geek inside me wants to hug Google for this.”

Other vendors — Apple, would you please take a bow? — make products that are designed to keep users out. The case on my wife’s iPhone 4 is closed with screws of Apple’s own devising that require a special screwdriver.

IFixit offers a tool kit for replacing those screws with standard ones. It mischievously markets this as a “Liberation Kit.”

It isn’t surprising that Apple, the epitome of the closed organization and overlord of the iPhone’s tightly controlled software ecosystem, would design screws that, in effect, serve as locks. And one can see how it would be in Apple’s interest to make it hard for users to extend the life of older models — it’s a way to encourage the purchase of the newest, greatest Apple stuff.

Google, which until now has not done much in consumer electronics hardware with its own brand name, is positioning itself as a conspicuous alternative to Apple, in design as in other aspects. As long as Apple embraces closed systems — and closed cases — Google can take advantage of an opportunity to be the un-Apple and to open up.

Using components that are easy to recycle is one way to score points for selling an environmentally friendly product. Apple’s products rank high in that regard, says Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit. But Apple doesn’t want its users to service its devices, he says. So it scores lower in another important aspect of being “green”: extending a product’s useful life by making it easy to repair.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

In January, Sprint announced a “sustainable design” effort, in partnership with the environmental unit of UL, the independent testing and certification group. Sprint encourages all of its partner manufacturers to submit their handsets for evaluation of the “repairability and recyclability” of the devices. Those that attain a certain number of points will be designated as “certified” or, greenest of all, “platinum.”

Lois Fagan, Sprint director of product development, says, “We have a self-imposed goal that at least 50 percent of our portfolio of new phones in 2012 will be certified.”

Consumers who want to know which phones are the easiest to repair won’t get much guidance from UL Environment. It will say only whether a device has earned its “certified” or “platinum” designations. It does not say what points were earned for any particular criterion, like ease of removing the external enclosure or the battery, or availability of replacement parts. Nor does it disclose which handsets fail to earn enough points to be certified.

The ability to remove the battery is especially important to frequent phone users, because the original battery may not last the two-year commitment required in a standard contract.

Apple says its iPhone battery is designed to retain up to 80 percent of its original capacity after 400 full charge and discharge cycles. For phones out of warranty, it offers a battery replacement service for $79 if you send the phone to its repair center; shipping costs are extra. (Being without one’s phone is an inconvenience not reflected in the price.)

IFixit provides an alternative. It sells replacement batteries and the necessary tools and offers its free online repair manuals, prepared by fellow users. A replacement battery for the older iPhone 3G model is only $14.95, and there’s no painful parting with the phone in the process.

According to Mr. Wiens, iPhone batteries aren’t hard to replace, with the right screwdriver, available online. “Under five minutes; no technical skills required,” he says.

Even replacing the glass on an iPad 3 can be done by amateurs, he contends, but guidance is needed: “I have a pile of iPad 3s that we broke while trying to learn how to repair them. Last week we finally broke the code.”

IFixit offers manuals covering computers, cameras, game consoles and household appliances, too; its credo is “repair is recycling.”

Hooman Morvarid, president of

CellularDR.com, a repair business that handles phones from many manufacturers, says the most frequent problem he sees is broken glass, followed by a broken LCD screen that sits behind the glass. Increasingly, he says, the glass and LCD are fused together in a way that makes them impossible to separate if one or the other is broken. “So phones are actually becoming more expensive to repair,” he says.

The more that designers of mobile devices avoid fusing parts together, the easier they are to repair. And the repairs most likely to be undertaken are those we can do ourselves.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Digital Domain: Cellphone Cases Can Imitate Their Makers - Digital Domain

Some devices, like my Android phone, a Galaxy Nexus by Samsung, have a back cover that slides off and a battery that pops out. And when evaluators at iFixit, a Web site offering do-it-yourself repair manuals and parts, disassembled Google’s new Nexus 7 tablet for a “teardown” review, they found that it was easy to open and repair.

In iFixit’s video review, the narrator describes how the battery can be replaced without unscrewing a single screw. She is moved to declare, “The sustainability-geek inside me wants to hug Google for this.”

Other vendors — Apple, would you please take a bow? — make products that are designed to keep users out. The case on my wife’s iPhone 4 is closed with screws of Apple’s own devising that require a special screwdriver.

IFixit offers a tool kit for replacing those screws with standard ones. It mischievously markets this as a “Liberation Kit.”

It isn’t surprising that Apple, the epitome of the closed organization and overlord of the iPhone’s tightly controlled software ecosystem, would design screws that, in effect, serve as locks. And one can see how it would be in Apple’s interest to make it hard for users to extend the life of older models — it’s a way to encourage the purchase of the newest, greatest Apple stuff.

Google, which until now has not done much in consumer electronics hardware with its own brand name, is positioning itself as a conspicuous alternative to Apple, in design as in other aspects. As long as Apple embraces closed systems — and closed cases — Google can take advantage of an opportunity to be the un-Apple and to open up.

Using components that are easy to recycle is one way to score points for selling an environmentally friendly product. Apple’s products rank high in that regard, says Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit. But Apple doesn’t want its users to service its devices, he says. So it scores lower in another important aspect of being “green”: extending a product’s useful life by making it easy to repair.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

In January, Sprint announced a “sustainable design” effort, in partnership with the environmental unit of UL, the independent testing and certification group. Sprint encourages all of its partner manufacturers to submit their handsets for evaluation of the “repairability and recyclability” of the devices. Those that attain a certain number of points will be designated as “certified” or, greenest of all, “platinum.”

Lois Fagan, Sprint director of product development, says, “We have a self-imposed goal that at least 50 percent of our portfolio of new phones in 2012 will be certified.”

Consumers who want to know which phones are the easiest to repair won’t get much guidance from UL Environment. It will say only whether a device has earned its “certified” or “platinum” designations. It does not say what points were earned for any particular criterion, like ease of removing the external enclosure or the battery, or availability of replacement parts. Nor does it disclose which handsets fail to earn enough points to be certified.

The ability to remove the battery is especially important to frequent phone users, because the original battery may not last the two-year commitment required in a standard contract.

Apple says its iPhone battery is designed to retain up to 80 percent of its original capacity after 400 full charge and discharge cycles. For phones out of warranty, it offers a battery replacement service for $79 if you send the phone to its repair center; shipping costs are extra. (Being without one’s phone is an inconvenience not reflected in the price.)

IFixit provides an alternative. It sells replacement batteries and the necessary tools and offers its free online repair manuals, prepared by fellow users. A replacement battery for the older iPhone 3G model is only $14.95, and there’s no painful parting with the phone in the process.

According to Mr. Wiens, iPhone batteries aren’t hard to replace, with the right screwdriver, available online. “Under five minutes; no technical skills required,” he says.

Even replacing the glass on an iPad 3 can be done by amateurs, he contends, but guidance is needed: “I have a pile of iPad 3s that we broke while trying to learn how to repair them. Last week we finally broke the code.”

IFixit offers manuals covering computers, cameras, game consoles and household appliances, too; its credo is “repair is recycling.”

Hooman Morvarid, president of

CellularDR.com, a repair business that handles phones from many manufacturers, says the most frequent problem he sees is broken glass, followed by a broken LCD screen that sits behind the glass. Increasingly, he says, the glass and LCD are fused together in a way that makes them impossible to separate if one or the other is broken. “So phones are actually becoming more expensive to repair,” he says.

The more that designers of mobile devices avoid fusing parts together, the easier they are to repair. And the repairs most likely to be undertaken are those we can do ourselves.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Bits Blog: Some Ultra Disappointments for Computer Makers

The numbers are in from the PC industry’s main scorekeepers — the research firms IDC and Gartner — and it looks as if one of the great growth hopes for the industry, ultrabooks, again failed to deliver.

On Wednesday evening, both IDC and Gartner reported that worldwide PC shipments fell 0.1 percent in the second quarter from a year ago, a poor showing for an industry that has been searching for a growth stimulant. As in the past, there are a bunch of factors accounting for the stagnation of the PC business, including consumers who seem far more enamored with getting the latest smartphones and iPads than they are with buying PCs.

Both Gartner and IDC singled out the thin laptop category known as ultrabooks for failing to lift the business. These devices were the PC industry’s answer to Apple‘s MacBook Air, the superslim aluminum notebook that has been a strong seller. Intel, the chip maker whose products power most Windows PCs, plowed a fortune into the development of technologies useful for ultrabooks to encourage its PC customers to make more of the computers.

PC companies then did so, turning out a wide variety of Windows-based ultrabooks with thin cases and shiny metallic shells. But the public hasn’t warmed to the devices yet, in part because they remain expensive.

“Ultrabooks have not yet produced a significant rise in volumes – in part due to anticipation of improvements such as Windows 8, which is expected later this year, but also due to pricing,” IDC said in a news release Wednesday on its PC forecasts.

If ultrabooks don’t take off soon, the PC industry may have to look elsewhere for a jolt.

Now for the details:

Both Hewlett-Packard and Dell lost significant worldwide market share. In the United States market, where both companies appear to be losing share to Apple, overall PC shipments fell 5.7 percent, according to Gartner. Apple, however, managed to gain in units as well as market share in the United States.

Despite the setback, H.P. continued to be the world’s top supplier of PCs, with 14.9 percent of the market, Gartner said. But this was a 12.1 percent drop from a year ago, when H.P. shipped 14.8 million PCs, which gave it a 16.9 percent share of the market, 2 full percentage points higher than the new number.

Gartner attributed the drop in part to the turmoil around H.P.’s stop-and-start restructuring of its PC division over the past year, and aggressive cost-cutting in the enterprise business by China’s Lenovo.

Lenovo came in second in worldwide shipments, with 12.8 million PCs shipped, or 14.7 percent of the market, Gartner said. This was a 14.9 percent increase from its 12.7 percent share a year ago. Acer was third, with 9.6 million PCs shipped, or 11 percent of the market, up from 9.3 million a year ago.

Dell’s market share dropped 11.5 percent, Gartner said, as it shipped 9.35 million units over the last quarter for a 10.7 percent share of the market. Dell was off from a year-earlier number of 10.6 million machines, or 12.1 percent of the market, Gartner said.

Purchases of PCs in the United States, the most mature and wealthy market for the machines, was 15.9 million units. In the second quarter of 2011, the United States market had 16.9 million PC shipments. Gartner said most of the drop from a year ago was because of poor consumer demand, along with lower demand from government and educational institutions. Not only are consumers attracted to other options, like tablets, Gartner said, but vendors are starting to stock more alternative products and services. That loss of retail shelf space could make life even more difficult for PC makers.

H.P. was the top supplier to the United States market, shipping about 4 million machines, a 25 percent market share. In the second quarter of 2011, H.P. shipped 4.6 million PCs, for a market share of 27 percent. Dell was second in the United States, shipping 3.5 million PCs, a 21.7 percent share of the market. Dell’s market share slipped 9.5 percent, from 22.6 percent of the market, or 3.8 million machines, a year earlier.

While Apple did not even rank among top suppliers worldwide, in the United States market it was the only company to see an increase in market share compared with a year ago. Apple was the third-largest supplier of PCs in this country, shipping 1.9 million machines over the quarter, or 12 percent of the market. A year ago it shipped 1.8 million machines, or 10.8 percent.

Among other markets, Europe, the Mideast and Africa had a 1.9 percent increase in units, to 25.1 million machines. The Asia-Pacific PC market grew 2 percent, to 31.8 million PCs shipped. Japan, which is broken out separately, rose 2 percent from a year earlier, to 3.9 million PCs. Latin America fell 1.7 percent, to 9.3 million units.