It’s a day for giving thanks, here in the US, and a ton of iOS developers have decided to thank us all by putting their fantastic games on sale for the iOS platform. We’ve slogged through the sales out there for this weekend and put together a list of the best deals and sales on games we could find.
We’ll keep updating this post as we get more great gaming deals to send your way.
We’re still waiting for Tim Cook and Peter Oppenheimer to start today’s earnings call, but now that the closing bell has rung Apple just released its official financial results for Q4 2013. So far the numbers look pretty good with Apple beating analyst estimations for revenue and profit with $37.5 billion and $7.5 billion respectively.
Sorting through the pile of information and numbers Apple just gave us can make your head spin, so we’ve broken it down for you. Here are the most important numbers you need to know from today’s earnings:
Apple is set to announce its earnings in just a couple hours and while the company probably won’t say how many iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c units it sold specifically, research firm Localytics just released a report this morning claiming the iPhone 5s and 5c already account for 5.5% of all global active iPhones.
Remember how just a few months ago, Foxconn profits were slumping because — as the anti-Apple brigade hysterically shrieked — the iPhone 5 was a dud, and the iPhone’s meteoric rise in popularity was finally done?
Yeah, well, Foxconn just posted a 41 percent year-over-year increase in profit, driven by strong iPhone sales.
Android’s share of the worldwide smartphone market increased yet again during the second quarter of 2013, while the iPhone suffered a slight dip, according to the latest figures from IDC. But Research Manager Ramon Llamas is confident that Apple’s smartphone will recapture more users later this year when the Cupertino company launches the iPhone 5S.
After refreshing its iPad lineup in the fall last year, rather than summer, Apple set itself up to go through a June quarter without a new iPad launch for the first time since it was introduced in 2010.
With Apple’s Q3 2013 quickly approaching on July 23rd, analysts have already begun to make their iPad sales estimates, and to no one’s surprise, YOY growth has slowed to a crawl in Q3 2013.
Android has held a pretty sizable lead over the iPhone for a long time now, and in the United States, it would appear there’s little chance of that changing any time soon. But Apple’s smartphone is gaining ground on its rival, and it’s all thanks to T-Mobile.
Google’s YouTube apps for Android and iOS have helped the company triple advertising sales on mobile in the past six months, the company has said. Mobile ads now contribute an estimated $350 million to YouTube’s revenue, with around a quarter of the site’s 1 billion users accessing videos on smartphones and tablets.
Android and iOS managed to grab a whopping 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013, with a total of 199.5 million units sold worldwide. There are no prizes for guessing which of the two platforms grabbed the most market share.
Remember when people were wandering around idiotically saying the iPhone was a total failure in Japan?
Yup, pretty stupid, but it’s true that, at first, the iPhone didn’t catch on in Japan, and that was a problem for Apple, because Japan is the country where gadgets rule.
So what changed Apple’s fortunes in Japan? Women!
Want to know why Steve Ballmer wakes up in a sweat at night, screaming at the shadows and clutching his hogshead-sized heart? Look at this chart of year-over-year growth rates of Windows PCs since the iPad came out, put together by the ever nuanced Horace Dediu at Asymco. When the iPad debuted, it immediately killed the PC industry as we know it.
In fact, as Dediu makes clear later in his analysis, Microsoft’s doing so poorly in the PC market right now that even though the Surface was a flop, it’s still accounting for a third of all Windows revenues. Absolutely mind boggling.
Source: Asymco
Apple has reportedly stopped placing Mac component orders after overestimating demand and placing “aggressive” orders at the end of 2012. DigiTimes reports that suppliers haven’t received any information from the Cupertino company to indicate when orders may resume.
Apple’s making a big push in India, and it appears to be paying off. According to an article in The Times of India, Apple India’s revenue already rose by a factor of three last year, and analysts there expect the current brisk sales of iPhones to boost the company’s bottom line to over $1 billion in the current year.
While Apple does not disclose financials for the Indian sales unit, it does file with the Indian Registrar of Companies. In that filing, Apple reported a 431 percent rise in net profit this year, which the Times attributes to iPhone sales.
Apple’s U.S. Mac sales changed around 7.5% during the first quarter of 2013, according to research firms IDC and Gartner, but neither agree on whether they were up or down. While IDC reports that shipments were down 7.5% during January to April, Gartner sales that sales were up 7.4%. So who’s right?
Foxconn sales declined 19% during the first quarter of 2013, and “disappointing” demand for Apple’s iPhone is getting the blame, Reuters reports. Between January and March, the company’s sales totaled NT$808.97 billion ($26.96 billion), down from NT$988.24 billion ($32.99 billion) in the fourth quarter of 2012, and NT$1 trillion ($33.38 billion) a year ago.
Looking for a Retina iPad? Here’s a killer deal: Best Buy is having a clearance of up to 30% off third-gen iPads, meaning you can now buy a 16GB Retina iPad for less money than it costs to buy the entry-level iPad mini.
Apple is beginning to close the gap on Samsung over shipments of smart connected devices, which includes computers, smartphones, and tablets. The Cupertino company grabbed 20.3% of the market by the end of 2012, according to IDC, while Samsung just about had the edge with a 21.2% share.
Apple’s Mac sales have been in a bit of a slump lately thanks to issues with the production of the super skinny iMacs. Now that constraints have eased up a bit, sales are coming back strong.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster released a new research report today that covered Apple’s U.S. Mac sales from January-February 2013, and revealed that Mac sales are currently up 14% year-over-year.
There’s good news and bad news for both iOS and Android fans in the latest report from research firm IDC.
The good news (for Android) is that by the end of this year, Android will account for most of the tablets in the world, with a 48.8% marketshare to Apple’s 46 percent.
The latest data from Display Search suggests that the iPad mini is cannibalizing iPad sales, and that Apple won’t sell as many larger iPads this year as it anticipated. Generally speaking, self-cannibalism is something Cupertino’s okay with… but they may not like the taste in their mouths nearly as much this time.
Although you probably wouldn’t usually call it a PC, the iPad is a personal computer. And it’s currently dominating the PC market. During the fourth quarter of 2012, every one in six PCs sold was an iPad, according to research firm Canalys. When you include the Mac as well, more than a third of worldwide PC shipments during the holiday quarter were from Apple.
Apple stock took a battering this week when it was reported that the iPhone 5 wasn’t selling as well as the Cupertino company had expected it to, and it appears analysts aren’t going to let it recover just yet. JP Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz is now reporting that iPad sales won’t meet expectations due to supply constraints during the fourth quarter of 2012.
Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple has cut its iPhone 5 component orders by as much as half following “weaker-than-expected” demand for device. The news sent Apple’s stock price plummeting, but according to some analysts, there’s nothing to worry about. iPhone 5 demand is doing just fine, according to Sterne Agee’s Shaw Wu, and the component cuts are in no way related to poor demand.
Apple’s share price has plummeted this morning, following an earlier report that said the Cupertino company had cut iPhone 5 component orders due to weaker-than-expected demand. When the market opening on Monday morning, Apple stock dropped to $16.23, or 3.1%, to $504.07.
AT&T will announce its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2012 later this month, but the carrier has today confirmed that the quarter saw its “best-ever” sales of both Android and iOS devices. More than 10 million smartphones were sold during the three-month period, with an average of more than 110,000 smartphone sales a day.
