Alex Heath - page 113

During today’s fourth fiscal quarterly earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook addressed the massive pile of cash that Apple has in the bank. As it turns out, about two-thirds of Apple’s available cash is currently held overseas.

Apple is known for being incredible conservative when it comes to spending. The company very rarely makes high-profile buyouts, and internal operations are streamlined for efficiency. Holding money offshore allows Apple to defer taxes until the money is brought back to the United States.

During today’s Q4 earnings call, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer talked about how “pervasive” iPhone rumors hurt Apple’s fiscal business. While nearly every product saw a significant increase in sales for the fourth fiscal quarter, the iPhone saw a lackluster 17.07 million iPhones sold. That’s 21% year over year growth. The iPad saw 166% year over year growth.

It’s typical for product sales to taper off right before a refresh, but this last fiscal quarter’s iPhone sales were even lower than what Apple expected. Oppenheimer blamed the rumor mill for hurting Apple’s fiscal business with regards to the iPhone.

Apple today announced its most recent quarterly earnings for the fourth fiscal quarter. Despite missing Wall Street projections for the first time since 2002, Apple saw incredible growth in multiple areas, including record-breaking sales for the Mac.

760,000 more Macs were sold than any other previous quarter. Apple CEO Tim Cook said that sales were largely fueled by MacBook Air and MacBook Pro sales, with growth in Asia also contributing to the Mac’s continued success.

There were rumors flying around months ago that Apple was looking to buy Dropbox. The popular cloud storage service has made a name for itself as one of the most relied-upon wireless sync solutions in the consumer market.

The rumors were true. Apple did want to buy Dropbox, so much so that Steve Jobs himself offered the startup a nine-digit acquisition offer. Dropbox said no to the offer, so Apple created iCloud.

Apple today announced its earnings for the fourth fiscal quarter, with $28.27 billion in revenue and $6.62 billion in profit. In Q4, Apple sold 17.07 million iPhones, 11.12 million iPads, and 4.89 million Macs.

This is the first time in years that Apple has missed its Wall Street predictions. However, Apple surpassed its own estimates of $25 billion for the fourth fiscal quarter.

You have to watch this to believe it, and then you probably still won’t. Benjamin Dowie threw together a quick series of iPhone 4S video footage and made a beautiful short film.

The iPhone 4S shoots 1080 HD video at 30 frames per second with advanced image stabilization technology. As you can see in the footage above, the camera in Apple’s newest smartphone is nothing to laugh at.

One of the most obvious features Siri lacks on the iPhone 4S is social network integration. Although Twitter is integrated into iOS 5, you still can’t tweet or update your Facebook account from Siri.

There’s actually an easy workaround to update Twitter and Facebook with Siri on your iPhone 4S.

Apple is now selling the iPhone 4S by reservation-only in the US and Canada, meaning that you’ll need to reserve a unit by 9 PM for pickup the following day. This indicates that iPhone 4S stock is running low, and Apple wants to ensure that customers are able to walk out of the store with an iPhone 4S in-hand.

The “How to Buy” page on Apple’s website has been updated with information regarding this change in policy. The two options are buying online (with a 1-2 week shipping estimate), or reserving for pickup at a local Apple Store.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHjX7LlS7OY

What’s better than an iPhone 4S? An iPhone 4S in space, of course! Final Cut King from YouTube sent two iPhone 4S’s to space and obtained footage of the voyage.

“We launched 2 iPhone 4S phones with a weather balloon to go up to 100,000. We put one of the iPhone 4S’s on an interval photo timer app and the other on video mode. We used s Spot GPS tracker (though I would not recommend it because it only tracks in 15 minutes increments).”

(Tip: Ask Siri to “Beam me up Scotty” on your iPhone 4S)

Celebrities and industry leaders have come out of the woodworks over the last couple of weeks to pay tribute to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. His passing has spurred dozens of anecdotes from those that have come into contact with Jobs throughout the years.

Famous singer/songwriter John Mayer is known for loving Apple products. He has taken the stage at Macworld multiple times to help introduce products like Garageband. As it turns out, Mayer developed a personal friendship with Jobs years ago.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-OnZCywaII

The same developer that originally ported Siri to the iPhone 4 has created another video showing more progress. Developer Steven Troughton-Smith has been working to port Apple’s new Siri technology to older iOS devices.

In the first video, Siri was unresponsive and sluggish on the iPhone 4, mainly due to the fact that the phone’s GPU was disabled. Now the Siri port has been improved to run smoother and more fluidly on the iPhone 4.

In case you didn’t know, today is apparently “Steve Jobs Day” in the state of California. Governor Jerry Brown recently tweeted that today, October 16, is now known as Steve Jobs Day. The golden state celebrates Jobs’ legacy.

A great way to take part in the new holiday would be to tune into the Discovery channel tonight to watch the Mythbusters special, “iGenius: How Steve Jobs Changed the World.”

Siri is the intelligent assistant that comes with the iPhone 4S. You simply hold the iPhone’s Home button and speak your question or command — Siri does the rest.

While the obvious benefit of Siri is the handsfree aspect of voice technology, you can actually edit your Siri conversations the good old fashioned way with your keyboard.

Photo Stream is a feature in iCloud that allows Apple users to wirelessly sync photos and video between multiple devices. The service lets you take a picture on your iPhone or iPad 2 running iOS 5 and have it uploaded automatically in the background to your Photo Stream folder. That folder is then made available on all of your devices that are logged into iCloud, including iPhoto on your Mac.

There currently isn’t a way to individually delete photos from Photo Stream, but there is a way to completely reset Photo Stream and start over.

Today Sprint announced that the iPhone’s launch on its network resulted in the carrier’s best day ever in sales. Apple announced its partnership with Sprint to offer the iPhone 4S and 8GB iPhone 4 last week.

After today’s launch day, the iPhone has given Sprint more sales than any product ever on its network.

Fared Adib, Sprint Product Chief:

“Sprint today reported its best ever day of sales in retail, web and telesales for a device family in Sprint history with the launch of iPhone 4S and iPhone 4. We reached this milestone at approximately noon CT/1pm ET. The response to this device by current and new customers has surpassed our expectations and validates our customers’ desire for a truly unlimited data pricing plan.”

Rumors suggested for months that Sprint and Apple would partner for the next iPhone launch leading up to last week’s announcement.

Sprint offers its customers the unique option of purchasing an unlimited data plan with the iPhone.

AT&T also announced a record number of iPhone activations for today’s iPhone 4S launch.

AT&T announced Friday, October 14 that it saw a record number of iPhone activations on its network. The iPhone 4S was made available to US customers on AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint this morning.

The carrier confirmed to BGR:

“As of 4:30 pm ET today, AT&T had already activated a record number of iPhones on our network – and is on-track to double our previous record for activations on a single day.

These record volumes may produce slower activations for some customers, though our systems continue to run at record levels.”

Despite the fact that many were unable to activate their new iPhones on AT&T today, the carrier still calls the iPhone 4S its “most successful iPhone launch” to date.

AT&T alone was responsible for 200,000 of the 1 million worldwide pre-orders that were placed last Friday.

Apple has been on a software rollout spree lately. iCloud and iOS 5 were both released to the public this past Wednesday alongside a slew of other app releases and updates.

Some of this week’s releases have also caused significant problems for many consumers. Certain iCloud customers have been experiencing faulty connectivity since the product’s launch two days ago. Luckily, Apple offers a way to check iCloud’s status from the web.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbPpeXP5GdE&

The folks at iFixyouri have put together a brief iPhone 4S teardown that shows you how to disassemble and repair your new smartphone. They also have a separate video that shows you how to replace the screen on the iPhone 4S.

iFixit recently did its own teardown of the 4S as well, and it was learned that the device has 512MB of RAM and a new 3G chipset (among other additions).

As 9to5Mac notes, you may want to have the mute switch ready when playing this video. Not sure what the makers were thinking with the song choice.

US carriers — specifically AT&T — have been buckling under the weight of hundreds of thousands iPhone 4S activation requests today. Since the 4S went on sale worldwide this morning, many customers have been trying to activate Apple’s newest handset to no avail.

While Sprint and Verizon activations seem to being going smoothly, AT&T has been failing all day.

If you can’t activate your iPhone 4S on AT&T, we’ve got a few tips to help get your 4S up and running.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd7taHnHzcg

Jeff from iDownloadBlog is one of the lucky few to have not one, but three iPhone 4S’s running on all three US carriers.

The above video demonstrates the speed differences between AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint on the iPhone 4S. As you can tell, Sprint is painfully slow while AT&T and Verizon seem to have very similar speeds.

Apple touts the iPhone 4S as having HSDPA “4G” speeds on AT&T, but many have found that data speeds on AT&T are barely faster than Verizon’s network.

Also, if you can’t activate your 4S today, you’re not alone. AT&T specifically has been falling apart under the crushing weight of the 200,000 pre-orders that were delivered for its network today.

Sprint has finally chimed in to end the confusion about whether or not the carrier will unlock the iPhone 4S for customers. In a statement given to Macworld, Sprint clarified that the iPhone 4S will indeed be unlocked at first, but a SIM lock will be “pushed to the devices shortly after launch.”

Reports from earlier this week said that Sprint’s iPhone 4S would come with an unlocked micro-SIM that would allow customers traveling internationally to insert another SIM from any GSM carrier. This would allow customers to avoid roaming charges.

Apple released Newsstand as one of the many new features in iOS 5 yesterday. Newsstand delivers subscription content from publications that have partnered with Apple in the App Store.

You can learn more about Newsstand here, but this time around we’re going to learn how to put Newsstand in a folder on iOS 5.

With the iPhone 4S now available on AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint, many consumers are wondering which carrier offers the best deal. New customers have lots of options on the table for selecting an iPhone 4S. There are also customers considering moving to a new carrier once their current contract expires.

AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint all offer competing voice and data plans for the iPhone 4S that make it difficult to decide on which carrier to choose. Let’s try and figure out which carrier offers the cheapest plans for US iPhone 4S customers.

The updates just don’t stop! Apple also updated its iMove, Remote, and Find My iPhone apps today with iOS 5 support and new features.

Remote 2.2 brings iOS 5 compatibility and “additional stability and performance improvements.” iMove 1.2.2 offers iOS 5 compatibility and added support for video imported from external cameras. Find My iPhone 1.3 lets you find a Mac via GPS and receive an email when a registered device comes back online after being lost, all thanks to the magical powers of iCloud.

You didn’t think you could possibility update so much software in one day, did you?

Apple basically updated every piece of software it makes today, in case you haven’t noticed. Following the release of OS X Lion 10.7.2 with iCloud integration, Aperture and iPhoto for the Mac have also been updated.

Aperture 9.2 and iPhoto 9.2 both bring iCloud integration and iOS 5 compatibility to Apple’s two photography apps.