Our good pal Tim Cook and his merry band of Apple geniuses are 30 minutes away from taking the stage at the Mothership. It’s a ton of stress presenting at an Apple keynote, but Tim Fortune Cookie has been relaxing in his golden lair, sharping his claws, and waiting to announce the seven new iPhone colors, including his favorite, goooooooold!
We’ll be liveblogging the entire event, so get ready for an avalanche of Apple news as Cook and the gang unleash the iPhone 5C and iPhone 5S upon the world.
While Apple has been getting dominated by Android in terms of the sheer number of smartphones sold, iOS users have still managed to capture the lion’s share of worldwide mobile web share company, but it looks like the size of their pie is shrinking.
According to the latest survey from NetApplications, iOS’s worldwide mobile web share has dropped 11% since August of 2012. While iOS is still at the top with 54.9%, Android has risen from 20.9% in August 2012, to 28.1% in August 2013.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is one to shy away from sharing his opinions on the state of Apple, but rather than giving a speech on the advice he would impart to Tim Cook, Woz recently shared his Apple product wishlist, which includes wearable computers and bigger displays.
During a recent interview with Reuters, Woz says that he wants Apple to make an iWatch that is as complete in functionality as the current iPhone. The wishlist also includes larger screens on the iPhone, more customizations, and a happy room full of Dreamers thinking up how to change the world with a product that you wouldn’t call a phone.
Famous billionaire investor Carl Icahn took to Twitter this afternoon to announce that he and his new buddy Tim Cook are going to be meeting up for dinner in September to talk about Apple’s stock buyback program.
According to Icahn, Tim believes in doing the buyback, but the two giants are going to talk about the “magnitude” of it later to see just how much cash can be wrung out of AAPL.
Icahn made a lot of noise last week with claims that AAPL stock is extremely undervalued. AAPL shares shot up quickly after Icahn’s tweet last week, but his tweet this afternoon seems to have less of an effect on the stock. AAPL is down -3.83 and trading at 498.53 a share today but NASDAQ has been down part of the day, so maybe we’ll see a jump when things get back to normal.
In a new profile of Apple CEO Tim Cook, Reuters spends time painting the two-year veteran of Cupertino’s top spot as deft, methodical, and tough. While he has earned a reputation as more of a delegator and less of a diva than Jobs was, the sources in the article say that he is still a focused CEO who expects results.
A person familiar with Tim Cook’s meeting style said “He could skewer you with a sentence. He would say something along the lines of ‘I don’t think that’s good enough’ and that would be the end of it and you would just want to crawl into a hole and die.”
AAPL shares rose 5.6% in value today after word came out that billionaire investor Carl Icahn thinks the company is ‘extremely undervalued.’ The stock was trading above $493 a share after 3PM ET today — a nice $26 jump up from the stock’s closing price on Monday.
Icahn revealed on Twitter that he spoke briefly with Tim Cook today about the company’s future and that he’s decided to make a large position with Apple:
2013 is, so far, what might be considered a year of regrouping for Apple. The company has seen huge success in the PC, smartphone and tablet markets, but it’s also pushed those about as far as they can go: Incremental improvements, not revolutions, are what we can expect for the Mac, iPhone and iPad from here on out. Meanwhile, the next big thing — the iWatch, the iTV, whatever — is still on the horizon.
To outsiders, it looks like Apple has stalled. Far from it. You only need to look at the changes Apple is making with iOS 7 to see that Cupertino isn’t standing still, and the company has signalled that it is committed to the future of OS X for at least the next 10 years. That said, all the products Apple is set to announce next month — the iPhone 5S, the iPhone 5C, the iPad mini 2 and the iPad 5 — are just sequels to what it’s already done.
People are getting impatient for the next major Apple revolution. And it’s not just outsiders. A new report suggests that Apple’s own board of directors is “deeply concerned” about Cupertino’s perceived slackening in the pace of innovation.
With a new story concerning the extraordinary lengths the U.S. Government is seemingly taking to spy on its citizens’ digital lives hitting the news every day now, President Obama met Apple CEO Tim Cook and a number of other tech executives to discuss government surveillance.
Despite the cornucopia of different smartphones available to consumers, the battle for global smartphone domination comes down to just two companies: Samsung and Apple.
Samsung posted record results in Q2 and even though a new iPhone hasn’t been announced, Apple still managed to beat Wall Street’s iPhone sales estimates last quarter, leaving Nokia, HTC, LG, and all the other major OEMs with nothing but table scraps to feast on.
Tim Cook with Miao Wei, the head of China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology
With competition around the iPhone at an all-time high, Apple could use a huge boost in sales numbers, so Tim Cook made another visit to Beijing this week to recruit the world’s biggest mobile carrier, China Mobile, to bring the iPhone to its network.
China Mobile Chairman Xi Guohua was on hand Tuesday to meet with Cook, and according to the Chinese firm, the two discussed ‘matters of cooperation’ between the two companies, which means they were probably talking about how much money they’d both make if China Mobile sold the iPhone 5C.
This week on the ‘ol CultCast: why Google’s new Chromecast is great for us Apple fans; the 5S might be the biggest S-upgrade ever; Apple’s earnings make a low-cost iPhone look likely; how to best connect your iDevice to your car stereo; the Dev Center gets hacked; and then, Tim Cook sings Barbie Girl!
Have a few laughs and get caught up on this week’s best Apple stories. Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the audio adventure begin.
Thanks to Bitcasa for sponsoring this episode. Show notes up next.
Apple has acquired Locationary, a small Canadian startup that crowdsources location data, according to a report from AllThingsD. Apple has refused to comment on its plans for the company, but the acquisition will undoubtedly help improve Apple’s widely criticized Maps service.
Apple’s CEO wants to sell more iPhones, but only in his stores. The iPhone is Apple’s cash cow with its high profit margins, and it creates a “halo effect” that causes customers to buy other Apple products.
Less than 20% of iPhones are currently sold in Apple Stores, and Cook won’t stand for it. Despite the fact that 80% of customers buy their iPhones elsewhere, 50% bring them into the Apple Store to get serviced. If Cook wants the sales/repairs ratio to improve, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done.
Tim Cook and co. have claimed that the Apple TV is just a hobby device, but that hasn’t stopped it from dominating the TV streaming box industry.
A new report from Frost & Sullivan claims that Apple TV now accounts for 56% of the worldwide IP streaming devices market and its nearest competitor, Roku, isn’t even close.
Apple CEO Tim Cook is on the list of guests expected to attend the annual Sun Valley conference in Idaho this week.
The conference is held by New York-based investment bank Allen & Co., and hosts over 300 industry leaders participate in panels on politics, business, tech and more over a four day period. It’s basically a place for some of the most powerful business people in the U.S. to figure out how to become more powerful as they hangout and try to strike up business deals.
Apple is close to securing a deal that will bring Time Warner Cable subscribers access to their cable television service through the Apple TV, according to sources with knowledge of the company’s plans, who have been speaking to Bloomberg.
The two companies are expected to announce the deal “within a few months.”
According to its investor’s page, Apple, Inc. will conference call with investors on July 23, 2013, discussing its financial performance for the fiscal third quarter of 2013, which ended June 30.
The call will be live streamed on Apple’s web page for anyone to listen in, and should cover revenue and sales figures. We can expect to hear from Tim Cook, CEO, and probably Peter Oppenheimer, CFO of Apple, both explaining the current performance as well as making some sort of financial forecast for the coming quarter, Q4 2013.
Apple has been under heavy scrutiny the past few months for its tax practices and off-shore cash pile, but the criticism that Apple isn’t paying enough taxes isn’t likely to stop thanks to a new report that claims Apple paid zero corporate tax in the United Kingdom last year.
According to a report from the Financial Times, Apple was able to avoid paying corporate taxes in the UK last year by using tax deductions from share awards to employees that basically offset the amount of taxes Apple owed through September 2012, all of which is completely legal.
AAPL shares have dropped below $400 in early morning trading on Monday. The DOW and NASDAQ both opened to big losses as they dropped 220 points and 53 points.
Top Apple executives get really good stock compensation as an incentive to stay with the company. In the past, stock awards have typically been granted by Apple’s board on a restricted basis, meaning that a certain number of shares is set aside to be given years down the road. The obvious incentive is that the executive does well and helps Apple succeed so that the stock is cashed in for more than when it was granted.
Tim Cook was awarded 1,000,000 restricted shares in Apple when he became CEO, but the shares weren’t tied to Apple’s overall health as a company. He would get them all over time as long as he stayed at Apple—whether the stock value bottomed out or rose exponentially.
A recent update to Cook’s stock compensation—at what appears to be his own request—changes the terms to focus on Apple’s actual performance. If Apple doesn’t perform well under Cook’s tenure, millions of his own dollars are on the line. His stock is currently worth around $413 million.
If you haven’t already watched Apple’s WWDC keynote, it’s probably because you just haven’t found the time. At just under two hours long, it’s not something you can just slip into your day. But you can now watch it at your leisure on any of your electronics devices because Apple just uploaded the entire thing to YouTube.
Jony Ive didn’t even make an appearance at the WWDC keynote last week, but that didn’t stop his name from spreading all over Twitter and Facebook, thanks to his influence on iOS 7’s new parallax UI.
A report from the people at ViralHeat shows that Jony Ive had the most social media mentions of anyone at Apple, including CEO Tim Cook. Sir Jony Ive had 28,377 mentions across Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, while Tim cook was mentioned 20,919 times.
Not only did Jony get more attention on social media, the comments about him trended more positively than those about Cook (72% positive for Ive, 64% positive for Cook)
Last week, a story about the NSA’s top-secret PRISM program broke. According to leaked documents, PRISM is a program in which the NSA is directly able to survey all data stored on the servers of pretty much every tech company under the sun, including Apple.
Steve Jobs used to take care of Apple’s biggest product unveilings prior to his passing in 2011, and since then, they’ve been shared around among the top company executives. Scott Forstall handled everything iOS, but his departure from Cupertino last year left the door open for someone else.
At WWDC on Monday, Craig Federighi, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, took to the stage to present iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks, and he’s now being hailed the perfect frontman for Apple, with developers, fans, and even investors impressed by his pitch.
Don’t have enough time to sit at your computer and watch all two hours of the WWDC keynote? Well you can take it with you on your iPhone or iPad now.
The WWDC 2013 keynote was just made available in iTunes. You can download the video straight to your device as a podcast, but with a run-time of 1 hour and 58minutes, the file is pretty big, so make sure you’re on a Wifi connection. Here’s the download link.
