Readers are reporting they can no longer buy an iPhone 4. Supplies are sold-out, but even more telling the Apple stores can’t even predict when they’ll have product to sell. This strongly suggests Apple has halted production and is going for a hardware fix. Not surprisingly, this unavailability hasn’t been noted yet in the press [...]

It’s been a while since I’ve written about Cringely’s (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour, but that’s not because we weren’t working hard on the project.  In fact the effort of cutting 400+ companies down to 24, then setting-up a tour to visit them all, has been far harder than lazy-old-me ever expected it to [...]

Dave Miller, a very smart electrical engineer from New Zealand who is lucky enough to spend his days doing private research on gravity, has a theory about how Apple is handling the antenna problems on its iPhone 4 that have been getting so much attention in the blogosphere and even in the general press. You [...]

Last time we looked at Apple’s conversion from a computer company to a phone company that also makes computers. We considered why Apple doesn’t give a damn about enterprise sales, which explains their embrace of third-party enterprise components like Microsoft’s Exchange Server. Now we’ll look closer still at what plans — if any — Apple [...]

In January, 2007, just days before announcing the iPhone, Apple Computer dropped the word “computer” from its name. Pundits noted the passage though it didn’t seem like much at the time. But we were wrong. Apple had consciously and very deliberately entered a whole new era without our even noticing. It was a change toward [...]

Accidents happen to the best of companies.  It is how those companies respond to big industrial accidents — how they learn and change as a result of those lessons — that shows the quality of an organization.  One of the many readers to comment to me this week on BP’s situation in the Gulf of [...]

Readers reacted strongly to yesterday’s column about how to use Google AdWords/AdSense to punish BP through its web advertising effort aimed at influencing public opinion. Rather than respond through the comments I think this subject warrants a column of its own because I’d rather address the AdWords/AdSense click fraud aspect of the subject and leave [...]

Financier George Soros became famous for breaking the Bank of England. You can do the same thing right now to BP and help clean oil-covered birds in the process. Soros’s gambit took place on September 16, 1992. At that time there was a huge spread between British and German interest rates which ought to have [...]

BP — the company accepting responsiblity for the current environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico began as Imperial Oil, became Anglo-Persian Oil with its discovery of vast reserves in present-day Iran, then Anglo-Iranian, then British Petroleum, and now just BP — a huge multinational company that includes two of John D. Rockefeller’s original Standard [...]

Tomorrow’s column will be all about BP, the Gulf oil spill, and doom-and-gloom, but today we’re getting ready for the Startup Tour, which begins a week from Monday. In addition to choosing the 24 companies to visit, these days see me still seeking a single corporate sponsor for the Tour, itself. So if your company [...]