Hot on the heels of Tuesday’s big keynote, Apple is set to unleash its final earnings report of 2018 on Thursday, November 1. The report will give investors their first glimpse into how well the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max are selling.

Apple shares are trading up again today after climbing Tuesday, signaling that Wall Street is pretty optimistic about Apple’s ability to rake in the cash. Tim Cook and Apple CFO Luca Maestri are set to get on the phone with investors at 2 p.m. Pacific today — and there are some key areas investors will be watching intensely.

October 12, 2011: Apple launches iCloud, a service that lets users automatically and wirelessly store content and push it to their various devices.

iCloud’s arrival marks the end of Apple’s “digital hub” strategy — and ushers in an age of inter-device communication and non-localized files.

Despite Apple’s denials, it’s “highly plausible” that secret spy chips could have been planted on the company’s servers, said a former Apple hardware engineer.

Anna-Katrina Shedletsky, who spent nearly six years at Apple helping build several generations of iPod, iPhone and Apple Watch, said spy chips could have been slipped into the design of servers used for Apple’s iCloud services, as alleged in a Bloomberg Businessweek story.

“With my knowledge of hardware design, it’s entirely plausible to me,” she said. “It’s very highly plausible to me, and that’s scary if you think about it.”

Update: Apple and Amazon both issued lengthy statements Thursday concerning the Chinese spy chip allegations. We updated this post to include those statements.

Apple denies that Chinese spy chips infiltrated its iCloud server hardware after claims that motherboards used by Apple, Amazon and dozens of other tech companies contained microchips used for surveillance purposes.

Cupertino insists the story is “wrong and misinformed.” Apple also says Chinese spying had nothing to do with the company’s decision to cut ties with a supplier.

iOS 12 adds a great new feature in the Photos app. Now, when you share a photo, you can choose to copy a link to that photo, and share that instead. This is a lot like sharing a file from Dropbox. You can even copy a link to a whole slew of files and share them by sending a single URL.

Shared photos are stored in iCloud, and the link is accessible to anyone that has it, for up to a month. Let’s see how it works.

Apple came out with a new beta for its Shortcuts app that will be released to the public as part of iOS 12 and in the latest build, you can finally take advantage of iCloud syncing.

This is the fourth beta build of Shortcuts and it contains some pretty major changes that make it even more useful for iPhone and iPad users.

August 4, 2008: Steve Jobs acknowledges mistakes in launching MobileMe, spinning Apple’s bungled cloud service rollout as a learning opportunity.

“It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store,” Jobs writes in an email to Apple employees. “We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.”

The latest phishing scam targets iCloud users, trying to scare them into installing malicious software on their iOS devices.

Some users have received emails recently that push them to fake Apple Support websites. Once there, the sites prompt them to call “Apple Care” because their devices are supposedly “locked for illegal activity.” Here’s how to avoid the scam.