Andy To is a rising creative with a poetic touch to video and quickly becoming a name to know.
His name is now on the mind of Apple CEO Tim Cook, who gave the young filmmaker a shoutout on Twitter for a short on life in New York City captured all on the iPhone XR.
Apple is back to being the world’s most valuable publicly traded company once again.
The company’s stock price has been rising steadily since Apple revealed its first earnings of 2019 last month. Worried investors ditched the stock at the beginning of the year due to slumping iPhone sales, but it just passed Amazon and Microsoft today, putting Apple back on top.
When Apple fires an executive, the company is rarely straightforward about the situation. Apple never puts out a press release stating plainly that the executive was canned. So Tuesday’s unexpected announcement that Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s head of retail, is leaving in April led many to suspect she was fired.
That’s because the announcement came as a surprise and seems rushed. She’s certainly not retiring or quitting to join another company. The press release phrase “new personal and professional pursuits” sounds like code for “canned.”
Apple tapped Deirdre O’Brien to be its new retail boss today in light of the news that Angela Ahrendts plans to leave the company.
While O’Brien may not be a household name to most Apple fans, she’s been with the company for more than three decades. From the days of Steve Jobs saving Apple from bankruptcy to watching Tim Cook leading the company to a first-ever $1 trillion valuation, O’Brien has seen huge changes during her tenure with the iPhone-maker. Now she’s set to be one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley.
Here are six things you didn’t know about the new Apple retail boss.
Longtime Apple retail boss Angela Ahrendts is leaving the company after reshaping Apple’s online and retail strategies over the last five year.
Apple revealed today that it has named Deirdre O’Brien as the new senior vice president of Retail + People. Ahrendts, who was once looked at as a possible successor to Apple CEO Tim Cook, is leaving the company for new personal professional pursuits.
Another alleged Chinese spy has been caught apparently trying to steal secrets from Apple’s mysterious self-driving car project.
The FBI reportedly arrested a Chinese national working for Apple the day before he planned to fly back to China with thousands of files on his laptop, including Apple’s intellectual property. He was reportedly planning to take all the info to a Chinese electric car manufacturer.
Tim Cook sounded confident about Apple’s future when he got on today’s Q1 2019 earnings call with investors this afternoon. Despite slumping iPhone sales and declining revenues, Cook told investors that his company is being managed for the long-haul instead of short-term gains.
Wall Street is already responding positively to Apple’s earnings report with shares trading up in after-hours trading. The company has 1.4 billion active Apple devices in the world, positioning Apple to continue raking in money as no other company can. However, today’s call revealed some new challenges Apple faces going forward.
Apple unveiled its earnings for Q1 2019 this afternoon and as expected, total revenue came in a lot lower than Apple originally predicted at the end of last year, with iPhone sales dropping 15%.
Thanks mostly to slumping sales in Greater China, Apple posted $84.3 billion in revenue, marking a drop from the $88.3 billion the company pulled in during the same quarter a year ago. Even though iPhone sales are struggling, Apple’s services are bringing in more money than expected, giving investors some good news.
Investors are eagerly waiting to see all the numbers from Apple’s 2018 holiday quarter during today’s earnings call. Based on early reports, some of the numbers might come in even lower than expected.
Gulp.
Apple already warned investors that iPhones sales during Q1 2019 came in lower than expected, mostly thanks to problems in Greater China. Even after lowering revenue guidance, the company still could pull out a few surprises. However, most analysts remain worried that the iPhone sales slump will continue into 2020.
Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri are set to get on the phone with investors at 2 p.m. Pacific today. Per usual, Cult of Mac will be here live-blogging all the action with up-to-the-minute analysis on all the important numbers.
Come join the fun:
When Apple unveils its earnings report for last year’s crucial holiday quarter, the entire world will be watching for signs of the company’s long-rumored impending doom.
Several factors will make Tuesday’s Q1 2019 earnings call Apple’s most important in years. Depending on how it goes, it could have an enormous impact on the company’s stock’s performance in 2019 and beyond.
Investors just received a worrying report about iPhone sales in China ahead of Apple’s pivotal 2018 holiday earnings report slated for Tuesday, January 29.
Apple warned investors earlier this year that iPhone sales in Greater China came in lower than expected. We’ll have to wait for the official numbers from Apple tomorrow, but according to data firm Canalys, total smartphone sales dropped 15% year-over-year in Q4 2018 with Apple taking one of the biggest hits.
Apple allegedly wants to tap into the booming gaming industry to boost its growing Services business. The company is reportedly planning to create a new subscription service for games and it’s already talking to developers about becoming a publisher for iOS games too.
Apple CEO Tim Cook took to Twitter today to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the Mac.
Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder and former CEO, unveiled the very first Macintosh on January 24, 1984. The machine had been teased in a now-famous Super Bowl commercial two days earlier.
“It changed the way we think about computers and went on to change the world,” Cook says.
Tim Cook was among the CEOs spotted having dinner at Davos with controversial far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro has made numerous comments that won’t have endeared him to Cook, such as telling an interviewer in 2011 that he would, “rather his son die in a car accident than be gay.” In another interview he said that he was, “proud to be homophobic.” He became president of Brazil in January 2019.
Some people love the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar. Other people absolutely hate it. Bottom line is that the thin OLED strip can work wonders — if you use it right!
Get our top 40 tips for making the most of the Touch Bar in this week’s free issue of Cult of Mac Magazine. Get it now from iTunes — hey, the price is right! — or keep reading for the week’s best Apple news, reviews and how-tos.
Tim Cook has called for “comprehensive federal privacy legislation” in the U.S. that would fight the “shadow economy” of data brokers. Cook’s comments were made in an op-ed for Time Magazine, published today.
This is just the latest example of Cook calling out companies which make their money trading in user data, often gathered without the full understanding of users of a particular service.
Apple spent $310,000 on Tim Cook’s personal security last year. That figure alone may be around 5x the median household income in the U.S., but it’s a bargain compared to the figures some tech companies spend keeping their executives safe!
Amazon and Oracle, for example, spent $1.6 million each protecting Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison. Google, meanwhile, spent $600,000 looking after CEO Sundar Pichai. All of those pale in comparison to Facebook, however — whose CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s security detail cost a reported $10 million.
Slumping iPhone sales have caused Apple to rethink its hiring strategies for certain division.
During an employee meeting earlier this month, Tim Cook was asked if the company is about to go on a hiring freeze. Cook reportedly responded that a total hiring freeze wasn’t a solution, the company would reduce hiring in some areas.
Tim Cook shared a story on Twitter, describing how an Apple Watch user potentially had his life saved when his wearable device warned of an irregular heartbeat.
Elissa Lombardo, who alerted Cook of the incident, said that her husband had owned his Apple Watch for just a couple of days before he was sent the alert. The Apple Watch revealed signs of atrial fibrillation and an elevated heart rate of 150 beats per minute — compared to a normal resting heart rate of 60 to 100bmp.
Apple reportedly replaced a whopping 11 million iPhone batteries last year — 10 times as many as anticipated.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has already cited this as one of the reasons why new iPhone sales are slowing. It is believed the company expected to perform between 1 and 2 million replacements under its heavily-discounted $29 program.
This week on The CultCast: Smart window blinds, smart plugs, smart lights, smart locks and now … the best televisions on the market. Apple just revealed big moves to bring HomeKit to all your favorite gadgets, and Cupertino is just getting started. In 2019, the smart HomeKit devices we’ve always wanted finally arrive. Plus: Tim Cook just let it slip — Apple’s got new services lined up for release this year, but what could they be? We think we might just know.
Our thanks to LinkedIn for supporting this episode. A business is only as strong as its people, and every hire matters. Head to LinkedIn.com/cultcast and get a $50 credit toward your first job post.
Former Apple CEO John Sculley agrees with Tim Cook that healthcare is a great area for Apple to move into. It may even, he suggests, “be the great legacy that [Cook is] talking about.”
Tim Cook recently made the comments about health in an interview with CNBC Mad Money host Jim Cramer. He said that health services may wind up being, “Apple’s greatest contribution to mankind.”
Slowing iPhone sales aren’t just bad news for Apple.
Foxconn, the company’s largest manufacturing partner, is also suffering as a result of weakening iPhone demand, with revenue for December falling 8.3 percent year-over-year.
It’s the first time Foxconn has experienced a drop in revenue in almost a year.
One of Facebook’s biggest critics is teaming up with Apple, which as it turns out, has also been one of Facebook’s biggest critics lately.
Former Facebook employee Sandy Parakilas has reportedly been hired by Apple. Instead of levying criticism at Facebook though, Parakilas has reportedly been hired to help Apple examine its own privacy policies.
Tim Cook took home $15.7 million in compensation for his role as Apple CEO in fiscal 2018, a 22 percent raise on his earnings the previous year.
The figure is approximately 283x the median Apple employee’s pay, which stood at $55,426. That average is more than Amazon’s $30,000 median, but significantly lower than Facebook’s $240,430 and Alphabet’s $197,000.