Update: The video has already been removed, but I’ve replaced it with a cached version.
We now know what Pharrell Williams’ payment was for his advance gold Apple Watch Edition: Promising to not laugh at Tim Cook, Eddy Cue, and Phil Schiller’s “dad dancing” moves during yesterday’s live concert at Apple’s Cupertino HQ.
File this under “unbelievable,” but according to reports from the Bay Area, multiple black vans owned by Apple have been spotted driving around San Francisco with a fancy camera array on top that may indicate the company is developing a self-driving car.
The vehicles have also been spotted in Brooklyn and could be designed to create a competitor to Google Street View. But after looking at the camera array, which is much different than Street View cars, some experts are convinced it’s a self-driving car prototype.
Get a look at the vans in the video below:
Apple will be holding on to its top executives until at least 2019, if the granting of new stock options by the Apple board has anything to do with it.
Angela Ahrendts, Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi, CFO Luca Maestri, VP of hardware engineering Daniel Riccio, lawyer Bruce Sewell and COO Jeffrey Williams all received stock grants potentially valued at a total of $27 million, based on the high closing price of AAPL stock Thursday.
Tim Cook, Phil Schiller and others who knew him have made public comments commemorating Steve Jobs, who passed away three years ago today.
Cook sent out two tweets, quoting Jobs from his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address as saying, “You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.” In the second message he said that he was in Grand Canyon National Park, backpacking and “thinking of SJ and his many gifts to the world.”
Five top Apple execs — including Tim Cook and Phil Schiller — unloaded $143 million AAPL shares as part of a 10b5-1 planned sale, according to a new report from Barron’s.
Cook sold 348,425 Apple shares for $35,250,297, while Schiller dropped 348,846 shares for $35,256,000.
Other Apple higher-ups who did the same include CFO Luca Maestri, who sold his entire direct holdings for $1,631,286; Jeffrey E. Williams, senior vice president of operations, who raked in $35,233,446; and Bruce D. Sewell, general counsel and senior vice president of legal and government affairs, who made $35,393,915 on the deal.
We love it when Apple live-streams its keynotes so that we can watch along with those lucky enough to have gotten an invite, but yesterday’s was nothing short of a disaster. It was down more than it was up, and it made Tim Cook and Phil Schiller sound like Chinese girls. But if you missed anything, you can now catch up on-demand and uninterrupted.
Tim Cook and company brought down the house at the Flint Center in Cupertino, and while investors haven’t reacted positively, Apple fanboys are still trying to recover from the hurricane of incredible new products Apple just announced.
The Apple Watch, big iPhones, Apple Pay and even some new software features were previewed at Apple’s first fashion-forward event. But there were a couple of disappointments hiding in the dark corners of the Flint Center as well. Like, where was the talk about the Apple Watch’s battery life? And why is there no sapphire glass on the iPhone 6?
Here are the biggest disappointments from today’s Apple keynote:
As expected, the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus offer more screen space, with 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch screens respectively.
The exciting thing?
Apple has pulled off a major engineering miracle: they’re also thinner, faster and smarter than their older cousins — and you don’t have to be richer to get your hands on one. You’ll also be able to use these phones as wallets and health trackers, marking a huge advance in how smart our phones really are.
When Tim Cook started off the keynote by saying “Today, we are pleased to announce the biggest advancement in iPhone,” we were slightly wary of the hyperbole as journalists should be. But after getting a good look at the two new iPhones, we couldn’t agree with him more.
Bring on the ice, ice baby!
Tim Cook has gladly accepted Phil Schiller’s challenge to douse himself with a bucket of ice in order to get out of a $100 donation to ALS charities. Only instead of doing ice bucket challenge from the comfort of a beach chair, Cook made a party of it while Apple employees got turnt up with at the beer bash celebration for Diversity week.
Take a look:
If you’ve been on the Internet at all over the last few days, you’ve probably heard about the Ice Bucket Challenge. The idea is simple. Someone challenges you online to dump a bucket of ice water all over your head. If you choose not to do so within 24 hours, you are asked to donate $100 to a charity to fight Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
Speaking as an observer, I can say conclusively that the Ice Bucket Challenge is best when accepted by buxom 19-year-olds in string bikinis. But watching Apple’s Senior Vice President Of Marketing dumping a bucket of ice water on his head? Definitely a close second.
Apple today officially welcomed Beats Music and Beats Electronics to its family, along with Beats co-founders Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, following its $3 billion takeover back in May.
“Music has always held a special place in our hearts, and we’re thrilled to join forces with a group of people who love it as much as we do,” reads an announcement on Apple.com, while those buying products from the Beats website will now be routed through the Apple Store.
If there’s one thing we learned during the World Cup (other than ze Germans are relentlessly brilliant machines), it’s that Beats has some of the best damn marketing on the planet, and Apple really, really needs its help.
After getting tossed around by Samsung in the marketing ring the past few years, the NYPost reports that Apple is looking to Beats co-founder Jimmy Iovine to help it reignite its marketing magic, even if it means cutting ties on its 30-year partnership with TBWA.
No one makes commercials like Apple. Or no one did, until the last year or so when everyone from Samsung to Google has caught up to Cupertino’s marketing genius.
In a move to retake its marketing crown in 2014, Apple is thinking different than partnering with a traditional advertising agency by assembling its own massive internal marketing team, according to an AdAge report, and it could rival the world’s top firms that have been around for decades.
After months of anticipation and countless rumors, Tim Cook and his merry band of Apple fellows are about to take the stage at San Francisco’s Moscone West to reveal the latest offerings coming out of Cupertino. It’s time for the Worldwide Developers Conference.
We’ll be covering the WWDC action here all morning with news and analysis on everything like iOS 8, OS X 10.10, Healthbook and whatever other goodies the mothership has prepared. The keynote starts at 10 a.m. Pacific, so bookmark this page and keep it open for a tidal wave of Apple news and insights.
Nearly three years after Steve Jobs’ death, Apple’s keynotes have become pale imitations of their former glory. The last major keynote — November’s introduction of the iPad Air and Retina mini — was a major international snoozefest.
Utterly devoid of excitement, it served only to stoke the pervasive rumors of Apple’s lack of innovation after Jobs (which aren’t true, but nonetheless).
It’s time for Jony Ive to take over.
24 hours haven’t even passed since Apple announced it scooped up Dre’s bass-loving headphone company but that’s not stopping the Dr. and Iovine from busting out an encore to their most successful headphones yet.
This morning Beats revealed its replacing its popular Beats Solo headphones with the new Beats Solo² that not only offer better sound, they’re the most Apple-like set of cans we’ll see before Jony Ive gets his team on them.
Phil Schiller took to the stand yesterday for the second day of Apple’s latest patent trial with Samsung.
Schiller mostly rehashed the same defense he used when the two companies met in court last November, also over a patent dispute — namely that Apple was the company which took the risk developing the iPhone, and that Samsung’s copying has hurt the company.
“I believe it has caused damage for Apple in the marketplace,” Schiller said. “It has caused people to question some of the innovations we’ve created and Apple’s role as the innovator. That challenge is made harder in the copying.”
Phil Schiller and possibly Scott Forstall are expected to make witness appearances for the next round of the Apple v. Samsung trial, when the two companies return to court in California in late March.
As Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Schiller was the highest-profile witness to take the stand during the first jury trial in the patent case between Apple and Samsung in August 2012.
According to Phil Schiller, merging the OS X and iOS operating systems would be a “waste of energy.”
Schiller was giving an interview with MacWorld on the eve of the Mac’s thirtieth anniversary. Asked about the chances of such a convergence, Schiller had the following to say:
Today Apple’s Phil Schiller tweeted a link to Cisco’s 2014 Annual Security Report. The biggest takeaway from the report is that mobile malware is becoming much more prevalent on Android vs. any other platform.
Cisco has calculated that 99% of malware targeted Android last year. 71% of Android users came into contact with web-related malware while iOS only saw a 14% encounter rate. Last year, Schiller tweeted a link to another security report that said 79% of malware targeted Android in 2012.
Via: @pschiller
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8Le9wvoY00
It’s sometimes easy to forget just what a paradigm shift the tablet computer — and specifically the iPad — represents. Well, Phil Schiller just reminded us by tweeting a link to Apple’s latest “Life on iPad” campaign.
Since Apple won a $1 billion lawsuit against Samsung for patent infringement last summer, both companies have been fighting to determine how the ruling will actually unfold. In March of this year, the presiding judge for the case subtracted $450 million from what Samsung owed Apple due to the jury’s miscalculations for damages.
The Apple vs. Samsung retrial kicked off earlier this week in California court, and Apple requested an additional $380 in damages from Samsung on top of the $600 million already owed. Samsung believes it should only have to pay Apple $52 million for infringing on five patents related to the iPhone.
Today Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of marketing, took the stand in court to talk about the iPhone’s importance to Apple, calling it a “bet-the-company” product. He also got pretty snarky about Samsung copying Apple.
Schiller began his testimony by recounting the original iPhone’s launch and the product’s success to date. He expressed frustration that Samsung started making phones that looked just like the iPhone after Apple started seeing success in the smartphone market. Schiller said he was “quite shocked” when he first saw the Samsung Galaxy. “My first thought was, ‘They’ve copied the iPhone.'”
These first few years of the iPhone’s existence have been “an incredibly important time” for Apple, said Schiller. And Samsung’s infringement has made it “harder for us to get new customers and bring them into our ecosystem.” The iPhone is Apple’s biggest money-maker by far. “At this point, it’s fair to say that most everyone at Apple works on iPhone,” said Schiller from the stand. “It’s our biggest product.”
While being cross-examined by Samsung’s lawyers, Schiller gave off a little Jobsian snark with his responses:
Schiller on Samsung gaining while other android makers lost share. “One is copying. the other are not copying… as much.” #icourt
— Ina Fried (@inafried) November 15, 2013
Samsung atty shows Schiller a Samsung device and Schiller says – “I can’t tell from here. It looks like an iPad to me.” #icourt
— Shara Tibken (@sharatibken) November 15, 2013
The retrial is expected to close next week.
Via: CNET
Image: AP
Apple packed a lot into one hour and 20 minutes today, with announcements about OS X Mavericks, Macbook Pro, Macbook Air, Mac Pro, and the stars of the show: iPad Air and Retina iPad mini. We think that this is about an hour and 18 minutes too long to watch, though, so we’ve condensed it to around 90 seconds.
Here is the Apple iPad Air and iPad mini keynote, right from Yerba Buena, in just 90 seconds:
How good is the iPhone 5s camera? Good enough for National Geographic. And Apple’s own Phil Schiller is getting braggy about it on Twitter.
Apple and Samsung are headed back to San Jose on November 12 to clash again over the retrial of their billion-dollar patent lawsuit that Apple won in 2012, and it looks like Scott Forstall might be coming back to testify as a witness for Apple.
The jury originally rewarded Apple $1.05 billion in damages, but after finding some errors in the awards, Judge Lucy Koh has cut $450 million from Apple’s award. Samsung and Apple filed a joint pretrail statement that listed the potential witnesses that might be called and both Scott Forstall and Apple’s marketing chief, Phil Schiller appeared on the list after both were witnesses at the orignal trial, before Forstall was fired.
