As someone who seems to care far more about the perfection of the beautiful objects he creates than about the trappings of celebrity, one word you’d be unlikely to associated with Apple’s design guru Jony Ive is “vain.”
According to a story told by Ive at yesterday’s Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit that’s exactly the accusation that was once levelled at him by Steve Jobs, however.
Here’s why:
GT Advanced Technologies is apparently getting out of the sapphire production game, after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection at the start of this week.
As reported by Re/code and the Wall Street Journal, the beleaguered company is asking the court’s permission to “wind down” operations at its sapphire manufacturing plant in Arizona — and, yes, for those keep track, that does come less than one year after the company first announced its game-changing deal with Apple.
Microsoft has dropped its new Skype for Mac 7.0 update, which is now available as a free download. Requiring OS X 10.9 Mavericks or later, the update brings the popular voice and video calling service in line with the appearance of Skype’s iOS app for iPhone and iPad.
First of all Microsoft announces plans for a flagship Fifth Avenue Store to compete with Apple’s iconic glass cube, and now Amazon apparently wants to get in on the brick-and-mortar game, too.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon plans to open its first physical retail store in time for Christmas on Manhattan’s 34th Street.
While that might seem counter-intuitive for a company which essentially dealt the death knell to many brick-and-mortar stores, it’s designed to be an extension of the online experience — offering customers the ability to pick up orders placed online, or return and exchange products.
It’s likely that Tim Cook doesn’t exactly look forward to hearing from Carl Icahn, but it’s difficult to argue that the activist investor isn’t a massive cheerleader for Apple.
As promised, Icahn published his open letter to Tim Cook today and the big surprise (spoiler alert!) is that he feels his 45 million shares of AAPL stock are grossly undervalued.
In a message entitled “Sale: Apple Shares at Half Price,” Icahn explains why he believes Apple stock is currently trading at half its true value, instead claiming it should be priced at $203 per share — based on growth forecast for the next two years, alongside the company’s massive cash reserves.
How GT Advanced Technologies could have filed for bankruptcy, despite Apple’s best efforts to prop it up, is still something of a mystery — and it’ll stay like that if the company gets its way.
According to a Reuters report, GT Advanced has requested that the New Hampshire bankruptcy court currently overseeing its case put the kibosh on releasing key documents related to a “third party,” claiming that this would allow it avoid paying damages thanks to confidentiality agreements.
There have been reports of a sequel to this 1996 aliens-invade-the-world blockbuster going back years. Roland Emmerich even has a cutesy name for it: ID4-EVER. But will we actually see it? Amidst plenty of conflicting reports it’s still looking like a toss-up, although it would be great fun were it to happen.
Taking place two decades after the original alien invasion, this sequel could be a fun bit of speculative sci-fi about how the world would react in the aftermath of interstellar beings arriving to blow us all up. The original’s special effects still stand up today, but there’s no doubt that 2014-era CGI could help take everything to the next level.
Photo: 20th Century Fox
Massive demand for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus may have resulted in Apple’s eagerly anticipated 12.9-inch Retina iPad being pushed back to 2015, according to a new report in the Wall Street Journal. This chimes with August reports from Bloomberg claiming that the mythical iPad Maxi would arrive by early next year.
Apple reportedly planned to produce the larger iPad in mass volume starting in December, but had to put that idea on hold so its supply chain can fulfill iPhone 6 orders — particularly for the iPhone 6 Plus, which has proven more popular than even Apple expected.
Apple has retained its position as the world’s most valuable brand, according to the latest Interbrand’s Best Global Brands report. Last year Cupertino seized the No. 1 spot from Coca-Cola, a company 90 years older than Apple.
The report valued Apple’s brand at a whopping $118.9 billion, compared to the $100 billion it was valued at in 2013. In doing so it beat out Google, Coca-Cola, IBM and Microsoft, which filled out the remaining top five spots on the list.
Other tech companies which ranked highly on the top 100 list included Samsung (No. 7), Intel (No. 12), Cisco (No. 14), Amazon (No. 15) and Facebook (No. 29).
To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports about the death of PCs have been greatly exaggerated. Or they have for Apple, at least.
According to new numbers from market analysts IDC, Apple sold an impressive 4.9 million Macs in the third quarter of 2014, representing an overall increase of 8.9% year-over-year. What does that mean? In short, that Apple is now in the top five PC vendors worldwide based on number of units shipped.
Apple is throwing its name into the hat of big name tech companies trying to even the male-female ratio within high tech, by sending hundreds of its employees to recruit students attending this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference.
The three-day conference — this year celebrating its twentieth birthday — is dedicated to closing the gender gap that exists in technical jobs in Silicon Valley. It is named after Grace Hopper, a U.S. computer scientist who was one of the first programmers of World War II’s groundbreaking Harvard Mark I computer, and invented the first compiler for a computer programming language.
Other companies attending the conference include Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
Bullish activist-investor Carl Icahn is back again! In a tweet sent earlier today, Icahn noted that he plans to send Tim Cook an open letter tomorrow. The contents of this letter are unknown, but Icahn promises it will be “interesting,” to say the least.
Within hours of Apple seeding its second iOS 8.1 beta to developers, dev Hamza Sood has discovered several pertinent pieces of information related to Apple Pay — including the setup screen within the Passbook app, the setup screen in the iOS 8.1 setup, and the setup screen on the iPad.
Sood previously discovered references to Apple Pay in the first iOS 8.1 beta.
Want to pretend you're an Apple employee from the dark days before Steve Jobs made his return? These styrofoam and fiberglass signs hung from the east-facing side of Infinite Loop’s Building 3 between 1993 and 1997. They went under the hammer at British auction house Bonhams earlier this year, ultimately fetching $35,000.
Photo: Bonhams
Quanta Computer has reportedly started production on Apple’s ultra-thin 12-inch MacBook Air notebooks — although production challenges may mean that it doesn’t hit shelves under after Christmas.
Citing sources in Taiwan’s supply chain, the Digitimes report states that the new MacBook Air is slimmer than both the existing 11.6- and 13.3-inch models, and may well sport Retina displays.
This ambitiously slim form factor is pushing component makers to the limit, however, and currently yield rate is not satisfactory, which has resulted in low output. It is hoped that this will increase from November onwards, although this may not be enough to see the notebooks arrive for the holiday season.
The iPad may be more popular than ever among young people, but according to one analyst that same level of excitement doesn’t carry over to the forthcoming Apple Watch.
In a research note to clients, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster describes reaction to the Apple Watch among teens as “tepid,” despite the fact that Apple remains an incredibly popular brand.
According to Munster, interest in the Apple Watch actually fell over the past year — starting out at 17% interest from teens in spring, and lowering to 16% just prior to Apple’s September 9 unveiling of its wearables device.
New details have emerged about the surprise bankruptcy protection filing of GT Advanced Technologies, a.k.a. the company that was supplying Apple with its sapphire.
As per the Wall Street Journal, Apple agreed to lend GT Advanced a total of $578 million to help get its large sapphire factory in Arizona up and running, only for Cupertino to withhold the final $139 million payment it was due to make, for reasons which aren’t yet clear, but likely relate to the company’s failure to deliver sapphire to Apple’s satisfaction.
Nestled among the vintage globes, surgical drawings and reflecting telescopes at Bonhams New York’s upcoming “History of Science” auction are spectacular several Apple-related goodies.
Most impressive of all of these is an Apple 1 motherboard, circa 1976. Described as being in “superb overall condition,” this is the first computer ever built by Steve Wozniak under the Apple banner, prior to the far more successful and mainstream Apple II.
Only 200 units of the Apple I were ever made, although just 63 are thought to still survive — and only 15 of these are documented as having worked since 2000.
This is one of them.
The idea that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus would have a sapphire display was one of the most widely reported errors leading up to the unveiling of Apple’s next gen iPhones.
But while plenty of time was spent discussing the possibility, very few people made any money through the speculation — except for Tom Gutierrez, CEO of sapphire manufacturer GT Advanced Technologies, which just filed for bankruptcy protection.
According to the Wall Street Journal, one day before Apple revealed its new iPhones wouldn’t feature sapphire screens after all, the boss of the struggling company cashed in more than 9,000 shares of GT stock for an average price of $17.38 — bringing in a total of $160,000.
Since February this year, Gutierrez has sold close to 700,000 shares in his company, valued at more than $10 million.
It’s official: kids love the iPad more than they do Oreo cookies. According to the “2014 Young Love” study — an annual survey carried out by leading youth and family research firm Smarty Pants — the iPad beat out 255 other brands (including Disney, Nickelodeon, Toys”R”Us, McDonald’s and YouTube) to be named the #1 brand among children aged 6-12.
The survey was conducted among a representative sample of U.S. households, with a total of 256 consumer brands evaluated as part of a three-month study of 6,661 children and their parents. Scores were based on a composite scale of 0-1,000 based on brand awareness, love, and popularity.
The top ten brands can be seen below:
AT&T has a confirmed that it suffered a data breach back in August, carried out by one of its own employees.
The now-former employee accessed personal information relating to an unspecified number of users (thought to be in the region of 1,600), such as their Social Security and driver’s licence info, along with customer metadata — including time, duration and destination of phone calls.
There are few Apple fans more enthusiastic than actor, author and TV presenter Stephen Fry, who even dedicates whole chapters of his autobiography to describing the impact the Macintosh had on his life. Fry was in Cupertino for the unveiling of the iPhone 6, 6 Plus and Apple Watch last month. Thoughts from the ever-eloquent thesp? “Want, want, want; drool, drool drool.”
That about sums it up.
Photo: Stephenfry.uk
Call it pent up demand for a larger-screen iPhone if you want, but the phablet-sized iPhone 6 Plus is proving a whole lot more popular than even Apple thought it would.
That’s according to a new report, citing sources from the upstream supply chain, which claims that Cupertino is adjusting its supply ratio for the 6 Plus and 4.7-inch iPhone 6 to account for the unexpectedly massive number of people ordering the 5.5-inch model.
The sources note that iPhone 6 shipments are set to be 3-4 million units lower than originally anticipated, with the production orders instead being directed toward producing more units of the iPhone 6 Plus.
1974's MITS Altair 8800 was the personal computer that started it all for a generation of techies. It was hardly the most accessible machine to ever come out of a garage, however.
Photo: classiccmp.org
The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus may be killing it in terms of demand, but that’s just because they’re the hot new devices on the market, right?
Not according to industry sources, who claim that chip orders for iPhone 6 and 6 Plus devices have already exceeded 50 million units for the first quarter of 2015.
In real world terms, what that means is that Apple is forecasting that the iPhone 6 won’t slow down its sales domination one bit after the holiday season, since the Q1 2015 chip order is just as strong as the one for Q4 2014.