Everyone’s favorite digital rights crusaders Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have just released an annual report, ranking the biggest companies in tech for who does the best job protecting your data from being rifled through by the Federal Government.
Google’s really good about it. Apple? They’ll give away all your emails and data if the government just breathes on them, and they won’t bother telling you about it either.
The patent war between Apple and Samsung has no end in sight. After Apple won a landmark victory against Samsung for patent infringement last summer to the tune of about $1 billion in damages, the court later deducted $450 million from what Samsung owes Apple. The California judge presiding over the case, Lucy Koh, said that the jury miscalculated what the damages should be for the 14 included Samsung devices.
All of the various charges and reexaminations being thrown around mean that Apple and Samsung will be heading to trial in the U.S. again not once, but twice in the coming year.
Apple and Samsung will again go head to head in court this November after presiding Judge Lucy Koh called for a new trial to recalculate the damages awarded by a jury last August. The move comes after Judge Koh cut $450.5 million from the $1.05 billion originally awarded to Apple due to uncertainty over the jury’s findings.
Consumer Reports, the popular magazine and website for figuring out what consumers think about all sorts of products and services, just published its annual reader survey on computer tech support.
Apple not only claimed the top spot in the list this year, beating out all other computer manufacturers, it got an even better score than it did in last year’s survey.
Last week, Apple announced its plans to return $100 billion in stock to investors over the next few years. The increase more than doubled Apple’s original capital return program of $45 billion. Quarterly dividend payments also increased 15%, or $3.05 per common share.
Apple may have a huge cash pile, but even the world’s most valuable company will have to go into debt to finance a return program of this size. It’s the first time Apple has borrowed since 1996.
It looks like Microsoft has been taking a sneaky peek at Samsung’s guide to marketing. Rather than touting new features or specifications in its latest Windows Phone commercial, the company has taken to bashing the competition instead.
The minute-long clip sees Apple face off against Samsung during a massive wedding brawl as the two companies trade insults over smartphones.
Apple’s not expected to show much at WWDC that isn’t software. Tim Cook himself pretty much precluded seeing any major updates to Apple’s hardware line until fall. That doesn’t mean, however, that Apple won’t bump the specs of some existing Mac models, and it’s now expected by one of Apple’s more reliable activists that Cupertino will do just that, unveiling upgraded MacBooks across the line at the beginning of June.
With all the brouhaha over the 2-minute sell-out of Apple’s upcoming World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) this June, it’s not too surprising that the Cupertino-based technology company has taken a few steps to support those developers who weren’t able to get a ticket to the popular event.
Apple has already decided to offer video of the WWDC sessions, and has contacted some developers who were unable to get a ticket due to the online ordering system overload.
Today, however, in a post on its News and Announcements for Developers page, Apple has announced that there will be a traveling tour, dubbed Tech Talks, making its way to various cities around the country, perhaps like the ones held in 2011 for the launch of iOS 5.
Although it’s been almost over a week since the carnage of the Boston Marathon Bombings and the related manhunt and shootout came to a close, but there are still a lot more questions than answers about what happened and why.
A new report from Boston.com, though, has filled in some of the blanks in regards to the three hours on April 18th in which the Tsarnaev brothers carjacked a Mercedes driven by a 26-year-old Chinese man… and it looks like an iPhone app helped save his life.
Android may have the edge over iOS at the moment, but by 2015, there’s a chance Apple’s platform will have stolen the crown. And it’s all thanks to customer loyalty.
According to new research from Yankee Group, iPhone owners are more loyal to their devices and therefore less likely to stray to competing platforms. There’s a large percentage of Android users, however, who have plans to switch when it’s time to upgrade their smartphone.
While smartphone have really taken off since Apple launched the iPhone back in 2007, believe it or not, traditional feature phones have remained the biggest sellers worldwide. That was until the first quarter of 2013, when smartphones out-shipped feature phones for the first time ever.
Of the 418.6 million cellphones sold during the first three months of the year, 51.6% of them were smartphones, according to new figures from IDC.
WWDC 2013 is already proving to be Apple’s most popular event ever. After opening ticket sales for the event a mere two minutes ago, Apple has already sold out.
Cult of Mac’s John Brownlee was trying to get a ticket. He says: “I started refreshing ten minutes before WWDC, and when the tickets went live, I was instantly hit with an error message when trying to login on multiple browsers. So many people were slamming the WWDC ticket page, Apple’s login system just keeled over. By 10:02AM PDT, all the tickets were totally gone. Unless you got lucky, you didn’t even have a chance.”
Apple announced the dates of WWDC 2013 yesterday, but tickets didn’t go on sale until 10AM PDT this morning. That’s a new one for Apple: usually, tickets for WWDC are available immediately upon the announcement of the dates for the conference. This system, however, has been criticized by many developers, especially those overseas, who never even had a chance to get a ticket.
It’s hard to imagine they liked this year’s free-for-all any better. Apple has got to come up with a better system for WWDC. May we suggest a lottery for 2014?
(Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared on Medium, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and Evan Williams’ new publishing platform.)
Usually during Apple’s quarterly earnings calls, you have to read between the lines to guess what Apple’s really thinking. On Tuesday, all you had to do was read the actual lines, because Cupertino was remarkably candid for a change: there was no way that the Apple of 2013 could match the numbers of the Apple of 2012, but “new product categories” — like the iWatch — were going to blow the roof off the house in 2014. In the meantime, Apple needs investors to be patient… and they’re not above paying them off to make it happen.
Samsung warned us that its Apple Store clones were on the way, and this week they’ve begun popping up in Best Buy stores across the United States. Dubbed “Samsung Experience Shops,” the locations give customers the chance to get their hands on Samsung smartphones, tablets, laptops, and other devices so that they can try them out before making a purchase.
Apple submitted a new proposal, dubbed Submittal 6, for it’s super futuristic circular spaceship campus in Cupertino. The revision includes new details like bike and pedestrian paths, enhancements to street areas, and parking spaces for the huge project, which is behind schedule and $2 billion over budget. The current move-in estimate is in the summer of 2016, a date that continues to show up in the lastest revision.
Apple’s iOS isn’t customizable like Android. To get to the core of the operating system, very talented hackers have to create what is called a jailbreak. One of the brightest and most prolific minds in the jailbreak scene has been Nicholas Allegra, better known as “comex.” Allegra created JailbreakMe, a web-based jailbreak tool that was used to crack multiple version of iOS throughout the years.
But for the past couple of years, Allegra has been quiet in the hacking community. The reason for his code of silence is the company he’s been working for. Apple hired him as an intern last year, and he left in October after failing to reply to a company email.
Now Allegra is going to bat for the other team. Yesterday he announced plans to intern at Google. He’ll start in a few weeks. One would assume he’ll be working on beefing up security for Android, but he ruled out the possibility on his Twitter. ” I don’t like it enough to ever want to hack it,” he said.
Source: Forbes
In a pessimistic note on Silicon Alley Insider, Jay Yarrow points out the obvious: we’re in an unprecedented drought since the debut of the original iPad when it comes to major Apple hardware releases and keynotes. When WWDC finally rolls around, it will have been 230 days since the last Apple event, the launch of the iPad mini, fourth-gen iPad and new iMac. That’s pretty much unprecedented, almost double the previous delay between the MacBook Air and iPad 2 (132 days). And, as you can see, the extreme delay in releasing a new event pretty much directly corresponds to Apple’s share price.
Not good, and as Tim Cook basically said explicitly during yesterday’s earnings meeting, it’s unlikely that we’ll see any new products at WWDC either.
Source: Business Insider
Amazon is reportedly ready to take on the likes of the Apple TV and Roku with a set-top box of its own, presumably some sort of Kindle Box.
Sprint has this morning reported its financial results for the first quarter of 2013, and they show yet another loss for America’s third-largest carrier. The company announced a $643 million net loss on $8.79 billion revenue, though it did manage to generate a positive operating revenue of $29 million.
Sprint sold 5 million smartphones during the period, 1.5 million of which were iPhones.
Apple has just announced the numbers for a quarter that most on Wall Street have declared to be doom. Apple has comfortably beat Street estimates, but still posted their first decline in year-over-year profit margins since 2008. What does it mean?
To help you make sense of Cupertino’s business this quarter, here’s a breakdown in easy-to-read chart form of everything from the growth of Apple’s revenues, profit and profit margins, to the rise and fall of Cupertino’s various product empires.
We even have a comparison of how Apple did this quarter compared to how Wall Street prediced Apple would do.
Apple has released its financial results for the second fiscal quarter of 2013. The Cupertino company reported $43.6 billion in revenue and a net profit of $9.5 billion. That translates to earnings of $10.09 per diluted share.
Wall Street has been incredibly pessimistic towards Apple in recent months, but today’s results for revenue managed to surpass even the more bullish claims. Apple’s estimates for the next quarter are even more conservative with $33.5-$35.5 billion in revenue. The main problem with today’s results is that profit shrank compared to a year ago for the first time in ten years.
“Our teams are hard at work on some amazing new hardware, software, and services and we are very excited about the products in our pipeline,” according to Apple.
Press release with more sales figures and details below:
Google has allegedly purchased Wavii, a small natural language parsing startup, according to a report on TechCrunch. Wavii ended up going to Google for “more than $30 million” after a bidding war with Apple.
Wavii’s technology and talent will reportedly be integrated in Google Now and the Knowledge Graph, Google’s experimental division that is working on the future of search.
Although PC makers are feeling the pinch, Intel actually posted a surprisingly decent quarter yesterday. But Intel’s still feeling a big pinch from ARM, which is just showing explosive growth, shipping 35% more ARM-based chips (like, yes, Apple’s A-series SoCs) than it did a year ago.
The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) has officially ruled in favor of Apple against Google’s Motorola Mobility in a patent case that began in 2010. The last patent Motorola was using to sue Apple for infringement has been ruled invalid by the ITC.
Motorola sued Apple for allegedly violating six of its patents three years ago, and today’s patent was the last of six patents to be thrown out of court. If Motorola would have proven Apple’s infringement of this particular patent, the ITC could have possibly blocked sales of certain iPhone models.
Earlier today, we reported that the Wall Street consensus was that Apple’s profit in this last quarter probably shrank for the first time in a decade, and that results will be even more dire next quarter, with iPhone sales units being extremely low.
But Wall Street’s pessimism in regards to Apple is, as usual, nuts. For Apple to perform as low as Wall Street thinks it will next quarter, Apple would have to show zero growth in the iPhone market compared to the same spring quarter a year ago. This would rank it as one of the smartphone industry’s worst disasters ever. Which is crazy, because Apple’s selling more iPhones than ever.
