Alex Heath - page 59

Apple has just announced it’s best quarter EVER, but the stock is taking a pounding on Wall Street.

Apple announced earnings for the first fiscal quarter of 2013: $54.5 billion and a net profit of $13.1 billion. But the stock is down more than 4% in after-hours trading because Wall Street is worried that Apple’s phenomenal growth is slowing. Don’t you love how a record-breaking quarter is still considered an “ouch?”

Apple was expected to report decent numbers despite the public’s perception that Apple’s streak of runaway sales of iPhones and iPads is plateauing. AAPL has been falling due to a number of factors, including analysts’ low predictions for the next March 2013 quarter. Apple is printing money, but not fast enough for Wall Street.

There have also been reports that Apple has cut back supply orders for the iPhone due to weakening demand, but iPhone sales are still up from 30 million last quarter.

Here are some of the key points from Apple’s Q1:

What do you get when you combine a highly anticipated iPhone app with a fascinating link to a senior executive at the most valuable company on earth? You get Mailbox and Adam Cue, a software engineer working on the hyped email app that’s going public soon. Cue works at Orchestra, the app development company behind Mailbox. You may recognize Adam’s last name because it also happens to be the last name of Eddy Cue, a longtime Apple senior executive who now oversees all of the company’s internet services, including email.

While this doesn’t mean that Apple will acquire Orchestra’s Mailbox app, it’s interesting to note the connection between the two companies.

Siri wasn’t always baked into iOS. It started out as a standalone iPhone app that launched in the App Store almost three years ago. Three weeks after it went live to the public, Apple showed interest. Siri was bought by Apple a few weeks later for hundreds of millions of dollars. The personal assistant was then reborn in the iPhone 4S in October 2011.

Many don’t know the fascinating history behind Siri, like the fact that it started as a research project for the U.S. Defense Department, or that Steve Jobs personally spearheaded the acquisition. Apple is lucky it swept in when it did, because Siri was almost made a default app on Android.

When Steve Jobs debuted the iPad back in 2010, he probably didn’t realized that the tablet would one day be used by Orangutan Outreach in zoos around the world. The Smithsonian’s National Zoo has adopted the “Apps for Apes” program, a totally nonfictional initiative that hooks monkeys up with shiny iPads.

Zookeepers let the orangutans play with different iPad apps and the zoo “hopes to connect its orangutans with those at other zoos using video conferencing platforms.”

Apple will announce its quarterly earnings for the 2012 holiday season tomorrow, and investors are nervous. The company’s stock has been on quite the roller coaster ride since its $700 high back in September 2012. AAPL is now trading right around $500, which is the lowest it has been in more than six months.

Recent reports have said that demand for products like the iPhone is faltering. That’s why it may come as a surprise that Wall Street expects Apple to have its best earnings report ever tomorrow. So is it a good time to sell AAPL? Now may actually be the best time to buy.

Apple has put up some marketing material for Valentine’s Day, February 14th. “There’s more than one way to say I love you,” and to Apple that means iPad. There are no actual product discounts for Valentine’s Day, so don’t get too excited. Apple suggests that you send your sweetie a new iPod with some gift wrapping. You can also get iOS devices custom engraved with all kinds of cute, cuddly messages. Gross.

Source: Apple Store

At the end of last year the blogosphere got all excited about Mailbox, an upcoming iPhone app that promises to reinvent the way you do email. Developed by Orchestra, the app is finally coming in a few weeks, and it will be totally free. Demand has been so huge that everyone won’t be able to use Mailbox the day it launches in the App Store; you’ll need to activate it separately.

When you are finally able to download Mailbox in the App Store, a message will show you how many people are in front of you in line. A code will be texted to your iPhone’s phone number that gives you access to start using the app. It may seem unnecessary, but the folks at Orchestra are trying to guarantee that their servers stay up and running as more and more users jump on. Mailbox’s servers compress incoming emails so they arrive faster than normal on your iPhone.

AMD has made two big re-hires, one being Wayne Meretsky, a former technical lead for OS X at Apple. Another is Charles Matar, a former employee who went to Qualcomm and has now been made AMD’s vice president of System-on-Chip Development. Both men bring chip design expertise, which AMD sorely needs if it hopes to remain competitive with the likes of Nvdia.

Meretsky worked on the Mac back in the 90s, and he is now AMD’s vice president of Software IP Development. This isn’t the first time AMD has hired from Apple’s talent pool.

Over the weekend, a rumor from overseas claimed that Apple will announce a 4.8-inch iPhone “Math” alongside a 4-inch iPhone 5S. But it didn’t stop there; the same sources also said that a third iPhone model with a 12-megapixel camera is set to debut “before Christmas” this year. Sounds farfetched, to say the least.

What seems like a good bet for Apple’s 2013 iPhone plans is the prospect of a less expensive model geared towards emerging markets like China. According to a new rumor today, Apple is readying two 4-inch iPhones for 2013 with in-cell display technology. But what about the iPhone Math?

You’ve probably seen stills of Ashton Kutcher dressed up in 1970s Steve Jobs attire, and that’s because he’s playing the former Apple CEO in a new biopic called jOBS. His co-star, Josh Gad, is playing co-founder Steve Wozniak. The film is premiering at the Sundance Film Festival and then hitting theaters in April.

The annual Macworld/iWorld conference kicks off later this month. Kutcher and Gad will be giving the opening talk, entitled “Playing Steve and Woz.”

Skitch used to be my go-to Mac app for annotating images. Now I just use OS X’s Preview to get basic editing done in a pinch. As a blogger, I frequently deal with screenshots and images for posts. Sometimes you need to draw an arrow or draw attention to a certain part of an image. There’s never really been a good tool to do so, until Napkin.

Created by the guys at Aged & Distilled, Napkin is a new app in the Mac App Store that aims to help you with “concise visual communication.” If you’re a creative type, then this app should be in your tool belt.

Lala was the pioneer in online music streaming before services like Spotify and Pandora really took off. If you Googled a song pre-2009, a Lala link was the first result. Founded in 2005, Lala underwent some business model changes until it became a full-fledged music streaming site. A partnership with Google’s Music Beta and good connections with the record industry allowed Lala to grow and gain attention from bigger tech companies.

It made sense for Apple to buy Lala in December of 2009. Lala.com was shut down in May of 2010, and Apple has since introduced products like iTunes Match. When Lala was bought, we all knew that Apple had paid around $80 million for the small startup. Now the inside story of how the deal was reached over dinner at Steve Jobs’s house has surfaced.

Siri is already pretty smart, but Apple wants to take her to the next level. An Apple job listing out of Cupertino calls for a “uniquely creative individual to help us evolve and enrich Siri, our virtual personal assistant.”

“Siri’s known for ‘her’ wit, cultural knowledge, and zeal to explain things in engaging, funny, and practical ways,” says Apple. “The ideal candidate is someone who combines a love for language, wordplay, and conversation with demonstrated experience in bringing creative content to life within an intense technical environment.”

Several months ago Black Pixel released the Kaleidoscope 2 for Mac beta. Today the app has been officially released in the Mac App Store and on the web.

Kaleidoscope 2 is a powerful app that compares text, images, and folders in OS X. It’s intended to improve your workflow by helping you quickly review and merge changes between files and folders.

Hearst and Apple have partnered in Newsstand to bring 22 of Hearst’s magazines exclusively to the iPad before any other digital or retail channels. This means that new issues of magazines like Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Elle, Popular Mechanics, Seventeen, and more will be available in Newsstand days before anywhere else.

For a game that’s been downloaded over 170 million times and spawned countless ripoffs, the sequel to Temple Run came as a complete shock. The smash-hit endless runner started sneaking into App Stores around the world yesterday, and it went live in the U.S. late last night. Imangi Studios, the small company behind Temple Run, had no promotional material or teasers leading up to the release.

But now that Temple Run 2 is here, fans of the original can sprint, jump, slide, and fall through a new and improved world. With zip lines, new power-ups, characters, and a mine cart, Temple Run is better than ever.

Apple products are expensive, and they’re especially expensive in China, a country where Foxconn workers can’t afford the iPhones they make. To help make its devices more affordable for Chinese customers, Apple has started offering payment plans that range from 6-24 months. The plans are available for purchases between 300 yuan to 30,000 yuan, or about $48 to $4,825.

The 6-12 month installments are offered with 0% interest, while a 2-year payment plan comes with a 8% interest charge. Customers must be using China Merchants Bank to participate.

We know that Apple’s product roadmap for 2013 will consist of new iPads, iPhones and Macs. That’s nothing new. Apple is always working on new stuff, and if 2012 is anything to go by, we’re about to see an onslaught of new products.

Martin Hajek is a successful designer, and his work has been featured multiple times here on Cult of Mac. His iPad mini and iPhone 5 concepts from last year were spot on, and Hajek has published renderings for the less-expensive ‘iPhone mini’ that Apple reportedly has planned for later in 2013. Some think the seventh-gen iPhone (‘iPhone 5S’) could come in multiple colors, and it will probably look a lot like the 5.

Hajek also has some great renderings of what the iPad 5 may look like should Apple tweak the design to look more like the iPad mini.

Apple has issued a new developer beta of OS X 10.8.3. The update comes after a long line of betas for the next version of Mountain Lion, and today marks Apple’s seventh release to devs.

Another beta build was seeded last Tuesday with no major changes, and today’s update looks relatively minor as well. Apple always asks dev to focus on testing with certain aspects of OS X, and today’s beta is mainly focused on WiFi issues. (Apple is rumored to incorporate faster 802.11ac wireless into future Macs, coincidentally.)

The newest version of Mountain Lion should be available to the public any day now. We’ll be staying on the lookout for 10.8.3 to drop.

Source: Apple

AT&T has been dancing around its FaceTime restrictions for several months now. Before iOS 6 even went public, it was discovered that the carrier would block FaceTime calls over a cellular connection at its own discretion. AT&T later confirmed that users would have to be on one of its new shared data plans.

Public outcry caused AT&T to then backtrack and extend the feature to anyone with a tiered, traditional data plan and a LTE device. That still didn’t cut it. Now AT&T has updated its policy again, and subscribers with grandfathered unlimited data plans are the only ones still left out in the cold.

The recent departure of John Browett has left Apple searching for a new senior executive to lead its retail division. Internally, Apple has had a couple of execs who could fit the bill. One of the top contenders, retail VP Jerry McDougal, has now left Apple for personal reasons.

McDougal’s replacement will be VP of Finance Jim Bean, according to an official statement provided by Apple.

Awhile back we showed you a great concept for a redesigned iOS Notes app. The concept was part of Cult of Mac reader and designer Adrian Maciburko’s iOS 7 “Crystal Interface” idea. Now Maciburko has shared a redesigned Game Center interface that does away with the skeuomorphism in iOS 6. No more woodgrain or felt textures.

Rumors of a cheaper, budget iPhone have been picking up steam in recent weeks. After the infamous Digitimes reported that Apple was gearing up to launch a low-cost iPhone later this year, mainstream publications like The Wall Street Journal chimed in with their own confirmations. Apple is “weighing retail prices of $99 to $149” for the unannounced device, according to Bloomberg.

Now Digitimes is saying that Apple could use plastic instead of metal or glass to cut costs for this new “entry-level” iPhone.

NEWSFLASH: Teens don’t want the iPhone! Parents beware! The Microsoft Surface and Samsung Galaxy phones are the new “it” things! Apple has lost its cool factor!!!

That’s what the Buzz Marketing Group, an organization that seeks to provide  “lifestyle and buzz marketing services for brands seeking to attract teen audiences,” wants you to think. You may have recently seen some headlines from big sites saying that teens think Apple is uncool now.

As my British boss Leander Kahney would say, that’s absolute bollocks.

Apple just sent out a press release confirming that cellular models of the iPad mini and fourth-gen iPad will officially go on sale in China this Friday, January 15th. During a trip to China last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed that WiFi + Cellular models of the company’s newest iPads would arrive this month. The WiFi-only versions went on sale December 7th, a little over a month after U.S. sales began.