Even though most of the focus has shifted t the iWatch, people can’t seem to stop talking about Apple’s mythic HDTV, the iTV. Case in point: ahead of today’s iPad event, a Tokyo-based analyst has gone on record out of the blue saying 4K 55-inch and 65-inch iTVs are coming next year.
NPD DisplaySearch is one of the more reputable sources of supply-chain chatter there is, and they are currently making some bold predictions when it comes to Apple’s future iOS device line-up, from the iPhone 6, Retina MacBook Air, Apple HDTV and iWatch. Not only do they say that Apple is intending on announcing a retina iPad mini later this month (fingers crossed), but they say a larger iPhone is a certainty. In fact, they think every Apple display will improve across the board.
One of the problems that Apple has launching new iPhones in late September is that even though every iPhone release sells more than the release before it, they don’t actually bump Apple’s quarterly numbers as much as they could.
Why? Let’s take this year as an example. All signs point to the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C launching on September 20th, but Apple’s financial quarter ends on September 30th. That gives Apple just ten days to sell as many iPhones as possible to bump up their quarterly results. It’s the October – December quarter where Apple sees the most iPhone sales.
So how many iPhones can Apple sell in just ten days? According to Pacific Crest analyst Andy Hargreaves, a lot. He thinks Apple can sell up to 13 million iPhones before the quarter closes.
Almost half of the top 50 apps on iPad are unavailable or have not been optimized for competing devices that run Google’s Android operating system. That’s according to a new report from Canalys, which believes Google should be doing more to encourage top developers to build high-quality tablet apps for its platform.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster might be a bit of a laughing stock when it comes to the so-called Apple HDTV, but he’s still one of the go-to soothsayers for investors looking for an early heads-up on what Apple might do next. In a new report, Munster is making a rather strange claim: he says that Apple’s low-budget iPhone 5C will ship without Siri.
We love picking apart the stupid things analysts say, but Michael Gartenberg is a rare example of a veteran analyst who doesn’t make wild, ridiculous predictions about Apple. He has worked for the Gartner research group, and Apple has even used Gartner’s market share figures multiple times in its keynotes.
After spending most of his career covering Apple and other tech companies, Gartenberg is now batting for the other team. He has reportedly accepted a job on Apple’s own marketing team, and he now reports to Phil Schiller.
Jefferies & Co.’s Peter Misek is our favorite know-nothing analyst, having been proven hysterically, horribly wrong on about every major Apple prediction he’s ever made. He’s probably safe on this prediction, though: even Misek doesn’t think Apple’s going to surprise us with a new iPhone in June. But he’s still kind of an idiot, since it directly contradicts his own prophecies back in December.
In Apple’s latest earnings call, CEO Tim Cook was suddenly equivocal about whether or not Apple would do an iPhone with a larger display.
“Our competitors have made some significant tradeoffs in many of these areas to ship a larger display,” Cook said on the earnings call. “We would not ship a larger display iPhone while these tradeoffs exist.”
What that hints is Apple doesn’t have a larger screen iPhone in its pipeline yet, but they’re working on one, without any of the tradeoffs of the competition. (What these tradeoffs actually are in Apple’s mind are anyone’s guess.)
A new analyst report suggests that this larger screen iPhone will be the iPhone 6, and it will land in summer of 2014. This year, we’ll just have to deal with an iPhone 5S in a bevy of peacock fan of different color options.
Apple will announce its second quarter financial results at 5 p.m. EST today, and this could be one of the company’s most interesting earnings calls for some time. Wall Street has been less than optimistic about the Cupertino company’s recent performance, and some believe that Apple will post its first quarter of negative growth income for over a decade.
But some analysts are a little more positive. According to averages put together by Yahoo! Finance, Apple is likely to announce revenue between $41 billion and $43 billion for the second quarter, with margins between 37.5% and 38.5%.
I’ve been writing for Cult of Mac for almost three years now, and in that time I’ve covered some pretty farfetched Apple rumors. But the latest from Forbes comes with a whole new level of crazy.
“Some Wall Street sources close to some Apple executives” say the Cupertino company could be searching for a replacement for Tim Cook, it claims, before suggesting Cook could turn Apple into another Hewlett-Packard or JC Penney and insisting “Apple’s shine has faded” since the passing of Steve Jobs.
