Under openly gay CEO Tim Cook, Apple has done a lot to forward gay rights. A year ago, the company stood up against homophobic legislation going through Arizona and organized a company-wide march in San Francisco’s annual gay pride parade.
All in all, Apple’s one of the most gay-friendly companies you can work for. So here’s a shocker for you: When Apple figured out it had accidentally hired someone with a history of anti-gay activities, it quickly severed contact.
As rumors that Apple is making a self-driving car rev up, a peek under the hood of the company’s famed Industrial Design studio reveals a crew of talented automobile designers.
An interest in futuristic cars is embedded deep within the DNA of Apple’s vaunted design team. Working under Jony Ive, Apple employs designers who worked on several fantastic concept cars, including a fabric-covered BMW that shifts shape depending on speed.
Ive has long been obsessed by cars. (He has quite a stable.) As a teenager, Ive wanted to be a car designer. He visited a U.K. design school that specialized in automotives with a view to studying there, but he found the other students too weird. They were making “vroom vroom” noises as they sketched. Instead, he went to Newcastle Polytechnic (which has since been renamed Northumbria University).
A look at other key members of Apple’s design team, and at a super-secret research-and-development facility planned for the company’s new campus, offers a few clues about how Cupertino might go about producing innovative and unconventional cars.
Apple is turning away developers who try to submit apps with guns in their screenshots or icons. But this isn’t a case of Apple introducing new rules to the App Store, so much as it is one of the company finally enforcing rules that have been there all along.
It’s hard to truly understand Apple’s astronomical size until you put things into context. With $178 billion in cash as of last quarter, you can start easily comparing the company to the gross domestic product (GDP) of large countries.
In fact, Apple would be the world’s 55th richest country right now, according to the latest data from World Bank.
Tim Cook made a big stand for climate change yesterday by announcing Apple’s plan to invest $850 million in a solar farm that will power the company’s Cupertino campus as well as all retail operations in California.
“We know at Apple that climate change is real,” Cook said yesterday. “Our view is that the time for talk is past and the time for action is now.”
Apple has already put its money where its mouth is by powering all data centers with renewable energy, but the Monterey solar farm is the biggest thing Apple’s ever done in renewable energy, and breaks the record as the biggest-ever solar procurement deal for a company that’s isn’t a utility.
Unlike Apple, which is more comfortable (and lucrative) than ever with its business strategy, here in 2015 Samsung is having a bit of an identity crisis. Is it a freedom-fighting Internet of Things company making smart refrigerators and connected TVs? Is it a Xiaomi competitor, turning out cheaper smartphones than ever for the developing Indian market?
Like a deer in headlights, the company seems to be skittishly veering from one idea to the next, without any real understanding of what it needs to do to once again be competitive.
Of course, there is one idea that has worked for Samsung in the past, and with its mobile division falling on hard times, that strategy seems to be one the South Korean tech giant is more than happy to return to: copying Apple.
Boom! That’s the sound of AAPL stock hitting yet another all-time high Tuesday, making Apple the first $700 billion company in history.
Microsoft made history in 2000 when it became the first company to close at $600 billion, so this feat must make Tim Cook and the entire Apple team incredibly proud.
The Rumor: Apple is negotiating with networks on a Sling-TV type of service.
The Verdict: Definitely. In fact, we've been hearing this same rumor for about two years now. It looks like the biggest hurdle for an Apple TV update is the company just doesn't have the relationships with content providers, like Dish and others do.
It’s time for another weekly dose of all the great stuff from our intrepid news hounds and reporters within the digital confines of Cult of Mac Magazine.
Buster has the lowdown on eight of the hot new features in Apple’s upcoming Photos for Mac, and he also takes a good long look at the mysterious vans owned by Apple that have been spotted around the San Francisco area. If you need to protect your precious new iPhone, Stephen drops a video spotlight on five cases you’ll want to consider for your fancy Apple smartphone. Rob digs deep into a new digital comic — companion to the Midnight Star video game — and how the award-winning team brings the game world to life. Jim drops in on a hip retro gaming shop in Portland, too, coming back with some stunning pictures of this old boys (and girls!) club.
All that and more in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine – check out our top stories below, and then click on through to get your own copy for free.
Apple and Tesla are in the midst of an intense bidding war for each other’s employees, according to Bloomberg. Tesla has so far poached more Apple staffers than any other company at 150, and Apple has tried to unsuccessfully lure Tesla’s people with big paychecks.
Tesla’s obsession with stealing Apple’s talent is mainly due to one man: Elon Musk.
Apple’s retail stores are one of Cupertino’s crown jewels, and the envy of pretty much every tech company out there. A new rumor suggests that online retail giant Amazon might soon be looking to replicate Apple’s success with its own line of brick-and-mortar stores. But how will they get them? By buying up old Radio Shack stores and rebranding them.
The fate of GT Advanced Technologies’ failed sapphire plant in Mesa, Arizona, has been decided. After committing to repurposing the 1.3-million-square-foot facility, Apple revealed today that it will invest $2 billion in making it a global command center for all of its cloud networks.
The company plans to have 150 full-time employees based in Mesa to operate the center once it’s built, and there will be an accompanying solar farm to power the facility with 100% renewable energy.
One of the most interesting things about Apple’s continued expansion into China is going to be watching how it tweaks its marketing to target a country Tim Cook has claimed will soon be Apple’s biggest market.
Ahead of Chinese New Year on February 19, Apple has debuted a new ad in China, updating it’s warmly-received U.S. ad “The Song” for a new audience. Both ads tell the story of a young woman who uses a combination of their Mac and GarageBand to record a duet featuring their grandmother’s voice from the past.
As with virtually every ad Apple has ever put out, the message is less about technology for its own sake, and more to do with how it can be used to enhance the life of individual users.
You can check out and compare both versions of the ad after the jump:
This week: Apple has its best quarter ever, Apple Watch is coming in April and the best parts of the iOS 8.1.3 and Yosemite 10.10.2 updates. Plus, Disney considers a reboot of the beloved Indiana Jones movies, and then things really go off the rails in Facts of Life, a new game where we mix real facts with fake ones, then guess which is which!
Our thanks to Varidesk for supporting this episode. With models starting at just $275, Varidesk is a high-quality, inexpensive way to get started with a standing desk. And you should absolutely check them out, because moving to a standing desk will change your life.
Read on for full show notes.
Apple’s got more money in the bank right now than you or I could ever make if we were giving thousands of lifetimes. Due to tax laws, however, most of it is kept overseas — a not unusual business practice for major multinationals, although that hasn’t stopped it earning Apple a ton of bad press.
Two U.S. senators have a plan to bring the money back to the United States, though — along with similar (smaller) cash piles held by other tech giants like Microsoft and Google.
And for once it’s a plan we think Cupertino might actually be happy to consider.
Yesterday, Apple announced that it had a monster quarter. In Q4, it sold 74.5 million iPhone sales to go along with $74.6 billion in revenue and $18 billion in profits. Not only that, but it broke the record for the most money made by any corporation in history.
Having a hard time figuring out how to quantify numbers like that? Check out this incredible visualizer.
At least one of the big boys is planning on developing an app for the Apple Watch. eBay has posted an ad listing, looking for a developer to help them come up with a bidding app for Cupertino’s new smartwatch.
When Apple releases a major update like yesterday’s iOS 8.1.3, it’s usual for the company’s coders to fix (or, in other words, break) all known jailbreak exploits.
Not so surprisingly, the latest update is no different. It fixes several exploits that are necessary to run the iOS 8.1.2 jailbreak. But in a classy move, at least Apple gave a hat tip to the jailbreak team for calling their attention to the exploits.
Apple took the top spot for smartphone sales in China last quarter for the first time in the company’s history, reports financial research firm Canalys.
To accomplish the stunning feat, Apple leapfrogged Samsung, Huawei, and Xiaomi, thanks to the sales of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Apple is also selling more iPhones in China now than it is in the United States, even though the iPhone costs nearly double its nearest competitor. Canalys credits this to Apple tapping into trends like larger screens and LTE.
Apple is set to announce record-breaking earnings tomorrow for its 2014 holiday quarter. Apple projected making $63.5 billion to $66.5 billion in revenue, but Wall Street’s consensus is that the company will blow past its own guidance and report revenue closer to $68 billion.
That’s about $20 billion more than Google’s last three quarters of revenue combined.
Growth will likely be fueled by strong iPhone sales, although the Mac is also projected to reach record sales.
Update: Downplaying reports about the size of its impending layoffs, IBM says it will let go of only “several thousand people,” not the much-larger number reported by Forbes. We’ve updated this story and its headline to reflect IBM’s statements.
Things aren’t going well for IBM. Six months into its partnership with Apple, Big Blue is reportedly preparing for the largest corporate layoff in history.
After nearly three years of quarterly revenue decline, IBM is preparing to ax a staggering 111,800 employees, according to Forbes. Saying it does not respond to “ridiculous” rumors, IBM says the layoffs will be much smaller than that. How the layoffs will affect the company’s business with Apple remains unclear.
Now that Google has pulled Glass off the market, for the time being at least, we’re left with a handful of questions that can’t be easily answered — even by a face-mounted computer.
Questions like, “What went wrong?” And, “What didn’t go wrong?” And, perhaps most enlightening of all, “How would Apple have gotten Glass right?”
While Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior VP of worldwide marketing, was not a fan of Glass, we’re certain Cupertino could have found success with a head-mounted wearable. Here’s how.
Apple has provided the official City of Cupertino website with a new photo, showing progress on the new, so-called “Spaceship” campus. And it’s starting to look like a thing of a beauty.
After a number of delays in production, and a seemingly endless search for a leading man, Aaron Sorkin’s upcoming biopic about Steve Jobs has finally started shooting, at the garage where Jobs and Wozniak founded Apple back in 1976.
In a curious example of international geopolitics influencing the App Store, developers who have registered iTunes accounts in the Crimea are being told to stop using all Apple software, and destroy any materials related to it. Why? It all has to do with the United States imposing sanctions against Russia.
