Following the unexpected uncovering of Tim Cook’s high school photos, Apple has updated the official iPhone 5s page and iSight section to pay tribute to the company CEO’s gawky yearbook origins. Looking good, Tim!
Via: The wonderfully talented Michael Steeber
Apple may be great at making trackpads, but they are pretty terrible at making computer mice. On the positive side, though? Those mice make pretty great fashion statements.
Successor to Steve Jobs, BFF of Steve Wozniak, and all-around “creative genius” Kanye West had some harsh words for Tim Cook over the weekend.
Speaking/singing on stage at a Saturday night show in Newark, NJ, West blasted the Apple CEO for allegedly asking him to perform for free at an Apple event.
Getting Apple to dish on secrets is practically impossible, but if you’re looking for an inside line to one of the most powerful CEOs in tech, the house next door to Tim Cook just went on the market.
That’s right, even you could become Tim Cook’s neighbor, as long as you got a cool $2.8 million in the bank to drop on a condo.
Tim Cook has acknowledged that Apple has bought back $14 billion of its own shares over the past two weeks — reacting to an 8 percent decline in shares following the recent financial quarter results.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Cook admitted that he was “surprised” by Wall Street’s reaction to Apple’s last quarter, in which the company broke records by selling 77 million iOS devices over the holiday season.
Apple’s recent share repurchase is the largest of its kind for a company of Apple’s size over a similar timespan. During the past 12 months, Apple has bought back $40 billion of its own shares — part of a plan to repurchase a total of $60 billion. In the past two weeks Cook says that Apple bought $12 billion of its shares through an “accelerated” repurchase program, and a further $2 billion on the open market. Apple plans to disclose updates to its buyback program either next month or in April.
Apple is the fourth greenest tech/telecoms company — generating 85 percent of its power through green power sources — according to a new list published by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The recently published report compares the amount of power used by America’s top technology and telecom firms with the percentage that comes from renewable “green” resources, such as wind, solar, bio-gas and other options.
Tim Cook has made a journey over to Ireland this week to visit with staff at the company’s Cork offices. Along with addressing the 4,000 employees responsible for assembling the MacBook Pro, Cook also met up with the country’s prime minister, Taoiseach Enda Kenny today to talk about Apple’s presence in the country, and the Irish tax laws that help it avoid paying billions extra.
The Irish Prime Minister denied claims that the Irish government courts multinational companies like Apple to give them special deals on their corporate tax rate. According to a report from theJournal.ie, Edna Kenny said the tax issue came up during his conversation with Cook and told him they’re in discussions with the OECD about an international response, but the country’s statutory rate of 12.5% applies to all companies.
As part of Apple’s celebration of the Mac’s 30th anniversary, the company invited David Muir of ABC News to its Cupertino headquarters for a rare interview with CEO Tim Cook. A couple teaser clips have already aired, and the full special will premiere tonight on ABC’s World News With Diane Sawyer.
In the interview, Cook was joined by Apple executives Craig Federighi and Bud Tribble. Federighi is in charge of Apple’s software, and Tribble was a member of the original Apple Macintosh design team.
There are several juicy tidbits to be gleaned from the interview excerpts, including the confirmation that Apple’s new factory in Arizona will manufacture sapphire glass. Cook also shared his thoughts on the iWatch rumors, NSA, and more.
Carl Icahn’s relationship with Apple has been rocky ever since he became the company’s most loquacious investor last Fall. While ribbing Tim Cook publicly with one hand for not doing a bigger buyback, the other has been busy forking over fat stacks of cash for more and more AAPL shares.
This morning Carl went classic Icahn and took to Twitter again to complain about Cook and the Apple board not giving him and other investors more money with his proposed $50 billion buyback, while also announcing he’s been gobbling up AAPL shares faster than Jaws went after those guys on the boat:
After years of speculation — and some incredibly drawn-out contract negotiations along the way — China Mobile finally began selling iPhones today.
Tim Cook was in Beijing for the launch, where he handed out autographed iPhones to customers, alongside China Mobile Chairman Xi Guohua. Cook tweeted the following:
Soon after Tim Cook took over running Apple, we reported that he was following the example of predecessor Steve Jobs in terms of responding to customer emails.
Two-and-a-half years on, it seems nothing has changed.
After negotiating with the Federal Trade Commission for months regarding the use of in-app purchases in the App Store, Apple has reached a consent agreement with the agency, according to a company-wide email Tim Cook just sent employees.
Apple’s in-app purchases practices have frustrated regulators since debuting in the App Store back in 2009. In his letter to employees, which was obtained by Re/code, Cook says a host of complaints from customers led Apple to investigate its practices. Last year Apple emailed 28 million App Store customers regarding their in-app purchases and subsequently refunded more than 37,000 in-app purchases that parents claim were unauthorized. The FTC announced that Apple will refund $32.5 million to customers as part of the settlement.
The settlement also requires Apple to change its billing practices by March 31 to ensure customers give their informed consent before billing them for in-app purchases. Apple also has to add an option for customers to remove that consent at any time.
Cook says “it doesn’t feel right for the FTC to sue over a case that had already been settled. To us, it smacked of double jeopardy,” but the FTC’s deal isn’t going to require Apple to do anything extra, so they decided to sign it and move on.
Here’s the full letter:
It was widely reported in January that Apple was in talks to buy Waze, an Israeli startup with a hugely popular maps app. Waze was rumored to be asking Apple for $750 million. The same outlet that broke the acquisition rumor quickly backpedaled and said no such deal was taking place. Google ended up buying Waze in June for $1 billion.
And so goes the buyout game in Silicon Valley, a power play where tech giants like Apple and Google court hot startups with the hopes of adding them to their war chests.
Apple had its biggest year ever for acquisitions in 2013, with a record 15 smaller companies joining the fold. A dozen of them have now been publicly disclosed.
For an entity as secretive as Apple, examining the companies it buys is one of the only ways to peek into its future plans. When AuthenTec, a company that specialized in fingerprint readers and identification software, was purchased in July 2012, speculation immediately followed. What did Apple want with fingerprint sensors? The answer ended up being obvious, and the technology debuted in Touch ID in September 2013.
Often the outcome of an Apple acquisition isn’t so immediately apparent.
Historically, Apple acquires far fewer companies than its competitors. But the line is starting to blur. Google publicly bought three times as many companies as Apple in 2012 and not even twice as many in 2013. Apple bought more companies than Microsoft in 2013.
So what does all of this say about Apple’s future?
Tim Cook was paid $4.25 million in 2013, according to a regulatory filing reported by Apple on Friday.
This figure broke down as $1.4 million in salary, and a further bonus bonus of $2.8 million. Cook’s other compensation included $52,721 in company contributions to his 401(k) account, life insurance premiums, and vacation cash-out.
Tim Cook has talked about this being an “iPad Christmas”, but plain calling it an Apple Christmas might be altogether more accurate — as Apple surged to a 2013 new stock high following news of the recent China Mobile deal.
Apple stock gained 3.8 percent to end Monday trading at $570.09, reflecting what Creative Technologies analyst Tim Bajarin has called, “a huge deal for Apple.”
Although it hit several year highs over the past several months, Apple stock prices had been depressed for some of 2013 as investors appeared concerned regarding a supposed lack of innovation from the company.
More recently, share prices had wavered as nervous shareholders fretted that the long-reported China Mobile deal wasn’t happening as fast as they hoped.
Although analysts are still arguing over the long-term impact the China Mobile deal is likely to have, this strong year finish nonetheless bodes well for Apple in 2014.
Twitter, Facebook, and Google shares also finished strong after the day’s trading.
Source: San Jose Mercury News
Apple investors got their Christmas wish: The China Mobile deal, which could add billions of dollars to Apple’s revenue, has finally materialized.
The iPhone will be available to China Mobile customers beginning January 17, Apple announced Sunday, with pricing and availability to be released at a later date.
Yesterday the White House announced that President Obama would be meeting with a number of tech executives today about HealthCare.gov, the NSA, and how tech is converging the public and private sectors. Another topic of discussion ended up being Netflix’s popular House of Cards series, and apparently Obama is a fan.
While leaving the panel with the President and 14 other American executives, Tim Cook told a reporter that they had “a great meeting.”
The White House has announced that President Obama is scheduled to meet with a number of top-level tech executives in the industry tomorrow, including Apple’s Tim Cook. Topics of discussion will be the recent controversy surrounding the NSA’s phone surveillance, HealthCare.Gov, and ways the government can work with tech companies to grow the economy.
While accepting a lifetime achievement award from Auburn University, his alma mater, Apple CEO Tim Cook told of how The Ku Klux Klan, Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy shaped his passion for human rights and equality. “Growing up in Alabama in the 1960s, I saw the devastating impacts of discrimination,” Cook said in New York on December 10th. “Remarkable people were denied opportunities and treated without basic human dignity solely because of the color of their skin.”
He recalled childhood memories of watching crosses burn on neighbors’ lawns in Alabama. “This image was permanently imprinted in my brain and it would change my life forever,” Cook said. “For me the cross burning was a symbol of ignorance, of hatred, and a fear of anyone different than the majority. I could never understand it, and I knew then that America’s and Alabama’s history would always be scarred by the hatred that it represented.”
You can watch the full speech below the fold:
Michael Pallad, former VP of sales at Cumulus Media, has left the radio giant to oversee Apple’s ad sales for iTunes Radio internationally according to a report from AdAge.
Pallad joined Apple on December 2nd and has spent the last week getting oriented at the Cupertino Headquarters, but he’ll be pressed to get up to speed ASAP as Apple’s initial iTunes Radio ad deals are set to expire at the end of the year.
It’s our T-Day edition CultCast! This time: Jony Ive’s golden touch makes millions for charity; Apple teases underwhelming Black Friday deals; how Apple’s blacklist keeps bad press at bay; the new money in old macs; and we pitch our favorite Thanksgiving Day foods on our holiday edition Faves ’N Raves!
Have a few laughs whilst getting caught up on each week’s finest Apple stories! Download new and past episodes of The CultCast on iTunes or hit play below and let the audio enjoyment commence.
Thanks to lynda.com for sponsoring this episode. Learn at your own pace from expert-taught video tutorials at lynda.com.
Apple’s Industrial Design studio is one of the most secretive corporate locations in the world, where even some of the company’s own high ranking execs can’t get in unless Jony Ive wants them to. So with the ID group barred tighter than a nuclear lockdown, how does one go about getting secrets about the design processes at Apple for a book?
Bloomberg TV’s Emily Chang sat down with Leander on her show this afternoon to talk about some of the secrets he discovered about Jony Ive and the design team at Apple for his new book. Not only did The Gov dive into how hard it is to cover Apple, but he also dished on rumors he’s heard about Ive butting heads with top execs who have left Apple – and not just The Felt King, aka Scott Forstall – as well as how Tim Cook has become the ultimate peace keeper at Apple in contrast to Jobs diabolical ways of pitting execs against each other.
You can hear all the secrets in the video below:
Tim Cook caused quite a stir in the worlds of both tech and fashion earlier this year when he announced that Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts would be leaving the famous trench-coat maker to head up Apple’s retail divisions.
Ahrendts new position at Apple alone wields great power, but when you combine it with her incredible turn around of the Burberry brand, its no wonder many are starting to consider her one of the most powerful executives in the world, which is exactly why Fortune placed Ahrendts at #4 of its annual list of the top people in business.
She doesn’t take over at Apple until Spring 2014 but Ahrendts received the nod from the business mag for her work redefining Burberry’s brand and the subsequent 29% bump in the company’s stock price.
Here’s Fortune’s praise for Ahrendts:
He may feel more than comfortable publishing an open letter to Tim Cook calling for Apple to engage in an immediate $150 billion buyback of shares, but (vocal) activist investor Carl Icahn has said that he would never push Apple to buy Nuance Communications Inc., maker of the software that runs the Siri feature on Apple’s iPhones.
It was just last week that Cult of Mac was bemoaning the kind of consumer society we live in where we’re so desperate for the latest iPhone that Apple Stores have to be opened on Thanksgiving.
