Buoyed by expectation-defying earnings, Apple Pay, and an apparently insatiable demand for the iPhone 6, AAPL stock closed Wednesday at a new all-time split-adjusted high of $107.3.
Apple was trading at $92 at the time of the 7-to-1 split, which means that its current value is up by more than 10% since the division earlier this year. According to Google Finance, Apple ended the day with a market cap of $626 billion, and $629.67 billion as per Yahoo Finance.
Eddy Cue thinks 2014 will be the best product pipeline Apple’s had in 25 years, and according to the company’s latest filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Cupertino is certainly pouring enough money into R&D to back him up.
Apple increased spending in research and development 36 percent year-over-year in Q3, with an extra $425 million being funneled into R&D in the last quarter alone.
If you’re shopping for a new iPhone wallet case, you’ll be hard pushed to find one as suave and as strongly-built as the Fulki Pocket for iPhone 5 and 5s. Handmade from thick, belt-grade Italian leather, it’s the kind of case that’ll still be looking good and going strong long after the iPhone you slip into it has died out.
The Fulki Pocket is designed to provide your iPhone with protection from scratches, scrapes, and bumps at almost every angle. It also has a small pocket that’ll carry your credit card or some cash, and the v-shaped cutout in its top edge will allow you to grip your iPhone with your thumb and forefinger when you’re pulling it out of the case.
The Fulki Pocket is available in tan, coffee, and cognac colors, and it’s priced at €85 ($116). It’s pretty pricey, but it’s worth it.
As you may have seen in our previous post on Apple’s fourth quarter (Q4) financial report, the Cupertino company has beat out Wall Street expectations this quarter, showing off a revenue of $37.5 billion with a hefty 7.5 billion profit to go along with it.
To help you make sense of Apple’s business this quarter, as well as some general trends of the last five years, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to put together some charts in an easy-to-read format to show you how the numbers break down, from revenue and profit margins to how many devices Apple is selling, to how much money it’s making from those sales.
Let’s take a look at some of the numbers in visual form, and see what we can take from it.
Spendee looks like the kind of finance-tracking app I might actually use: It’s dead simple, great looking and works great with cash. It even has a nice flat design that’ll be at home in iOS 7 – although that icon will have to go — it’s 100% Forstallian.
Apple’s share price has steadily been falling for some time now, and earlier this week it dipped below $400 a share for the second time this year. Meanwhile, Google’s has been on the rise. As a result, if you take away all the cash the two companies have sat in the bank and just look at their enterprise value, then Google is worth more than Apple for the first time ever.
I’m strictly a cash-only kind of guy. I like my purchases to be anonymous, I like to deprive the credit-card companies their slice of the transaction, and above all I like the feel of the greasy, germ-laden slips of paper in my fingers. 1
However, I recognize that sometimes you just don’t have any cash. Like when you’re supposed to be splitting the dinner bill and your friend ends up paying yet again because you “don’t want to split this fifty.” Well now your sorry payment-dodging days are coming to an end, my friend. Why? Square Cash.
I don’t know if you have kids or not, but one of the more difficult things to keep track of, at least for me, is their allowance. Yeah, you might say, just write it down on a piece of paper or something. While that may seem to have merit, it rarely works out in my family. Let’s say my son gets $5 every two weeks for allowance. That’s a $5 bill I need to have each and every week.
Honestly? It never works out that way. So we tried using a calendar, on which I created a repeating event, set for every two weeks, figuring we could just count it up when he needed something. Well, that didn’t really work out, either. We’d be at a store, and he’d want something, and it’d be some non-multiple of five, and we’d try to remember to write it down, and so on.
Suffice it to say that I am doing a poor job at helping my kid keep track of his allowance, and an equally poor job of prepping him for real life money management.
So imagine my joy when I saw Allowance Manager for iOS, a Universal app that basically does what we need: tracks allowance on the iPhone or iPad. Win!
“We’re very proud to end a fantastic fiscal year with record September quarter results,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook in today’s fourth quarter earnings report. “We’re entering this holiday season with the best iPhone, iPad, Mac and iPod products ever, and we remain very confident in our new product pipeline.”
While Apple didn’t see a ‘blowout’ quarter this time around, things are still looking very good for the Cupertino company. Apple is still the most valuable company on earth, and its flagship products are seeing crazy growth in sales. We’ve collected all of the big numbers from today’s earnings call:
Tweetbot just dropped on the Mac App Store today, and perhaps the most surprising thing about it is the price. At $20, it’s significantly more expensive than most social networking clients. The thing is, it’s important not to see the number and instantly start making comparisons. You need to look at the price and ask: does this app provide 20 dollars worth of value? Judge it by that standard, and it doesn’t seem so expensive after all.
Denominations is an iPhone currency converter app that is actually useful. No, it doesn’t offer a slew of options, nor does it even look particularly swish or fancy. But it is dead easy to use, and this will make it just about the best conversion app around when you actually need it.
Apple’s victory in its patent trial against Samsung is already a few hours old but the shock of the damage tally is still hard to shake off. The final figure of $1,049,393,540.00 is a staggering rebuke of Samsung’s design and manufacturing process and may force the company toward more original ideas.
The completed jury verdict form, released late Friday night and attached below, reveals the Korean company maybe never really had a chance to win the case.
There’s always been a stigma around Apple products that they’re really just made for rich people. Almost all of Apple’s machine’s cost well over $1000, and the iPhone and iPad are two of the most expensive products in their categories.
Some people say only rich people can afford Apple products, and maybe they have a small point. A recent report shows that Apple is the company of choice for users whose net worth is more than $100,000, and it just become more popular the more money you earn.
I used to work as a the sole waiter in a restaurant where the cash register consisted of a wooden cigar box and a solar-powered Casio calculator. I’m an honest chap, and the chef was also the owner, so it worked just fine. But times have changed, and now there exists a modern alternative to our old cedar box. It’s called the Cashbox and it is fashioned from beautiful bamboo varnished to look like a hideous high-school craft project.
Earlier in this day, we reported on a New York Times piece in which the paper claimed that Apple was using a variety of measure to avoid paying U.S. income tax. It turns out that the Times based key pieces of its information on a study that had been discredited two weeks prior.
The data used by the Times included a report by the Greenlining Institute, which made errors in computing Apple’s supposed tax rate at 9.8% for the 2011. The data used by the report effectively compared Apple’s 2011 profit with taxes paid by the company for profits in 2010 and drew unfounded conclusions as a result.
Over the weekend, the New York Times ran another in its series of exposes about Apple. This one focused on Apple’s complex mix of offices and subsidiaries located throughout the world and the U.S. that allow the company to keep large portions of its more than $100 billion in low-tax states and countries.
The report comes after the paper’s expose on working conditions within Foxconn, the contractor that Apple uses to assemble most of its products and calls by politicians and members of the media for Apple to move more of its manufacturing and money to American soil.
Some folks just aren’t all that great with money. For some it’s because it’s just not something that’s fun to do. They have all the knowledge and understanding, but it just a boring bit of drudgery that they can’t be bothered to give it the care and attention it deserves. Perhaps if it was more fun to deal with, it’d make things a whole lot easier – and better.
Enter Cult of Mac Deals…and Toshl Finance Pro.
This simple and intuitive web-based application (and mobile app) is a personal financial assistant that, believe it or not makes finance fun. It helps you note down your expenses and income, and plans your finances with detailed budgets so you can be on-top of every penny. And Cult of Mac Deals has an offer for a one-year license of Toshl Finance Pro for only $10 – which is worth more than every penny.
A new Israeli start-up on the scene named ZooZ has founded a new SDK, which allows developers to implement an in-app payment system into their apps easier. To get the system implemented, all developers have to do is add three lines of code into either an Android or iOS app, which will then get things rolling. From there, customers who would like to purchase something from within the app can use Paypal or a credit card with ZooZ’s system. Check it out:
We’ve all seen news reports on the TV when stock markets take a nosedive. The footage is always the same: traders looking in despair at screens full of red rectangles, each one representing a falling stock.
Those magical digital rectangles are no longer for traders only. Now you can play with them yourself, in a $4.99 iOS app called StockTouch.
What if Apple launches the iPad 3 tomorrow and it doesn’t ship for another week and a half? The company could lose almost $1bn in sales. Here’s how:
Square, the iOS credit-card company, wants to replace lame old cash registers with sleek iPads sporting its little square white credit card-reading dongle. The new Square Register app for iPad aims to do just that.
What do you do when you’re sitting on a mountain of cash and have a labor condition crisis that has resulted in terrible PR? Give your employees a couple more dollars and hope that satisfies everyone, duh! Apple’s manufacturing partner, Foxconn Technology Group released a statement today that they have raised the wages of their Chinese workers by 16-25% this month. This is the second time wages have risen for Foxconn employees, but the first pay raise still didn’t resolve criticisms over Apple’s labor conditions.
Apple has always been notoriously tight-fisted when it comes to spending. As the world’s most valuable technology company by a long shot, there’s a ton of pressure on Apple to acquire competition and flaunt its $100 billion cash reserve.
At the Goldman Sachs Conference today, Cook noted that Apple has spent billions on acquisitions, in the supply chain, retail, and company infrastructure. “But yes, we still have a lot,” he said.
Apple has posted its 2012 proxy statement for investors. In the document, Apple reveals the compensation that its executives earned last year alongside more background information.
Notable facts from the document include CEO Tim Cook’s 2011 compensation, totaling an impressive $376,180,000.
It’s that time of year again. Not the holidays — I’m mean yeah, sure it is, but that’s pretty obvious. No, it’s the time of year when we drive ourselves (and others) a little crazy running around trying to find gifts at the last minute. Especially those pesky stocking stuffers — the little gifts that fill in the gap between “it’s Christmas? Geez, I completely forgot” and “honey, I bought you a Lexus.”
