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Apple & Industry News Headlines
CBS News: The move would return the iPhone 5 to its summer release schedule. To the ire of anxious customers, the iPhone 4S was not released until October 2011.
A June release would be in line with a previous report by 9to5Mac that Foxconn, the company responsible for manufacturing Apple devices, is gearing up for production of the iPhone 5. Sources inside Foxconn claimed iPhone 5 prototypes have been circulating around the factory.
CBS News: Why do American jobs end up in China? The supposed answer in an anecdote: the late Steve Jobs summons his senior lieutenants and holds up the iPhone prototype. It's due to be shipped to stores in not much more than a month. He points out that the plastic screen has been scratched by his keys. "I won't sell a product that gets scratched," he says, according to a recent New York Times story. "I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks."
“After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China,” the Times reports. “If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.” The next sequence reads like a montage in some 1920s film about industrial production. Within days, a Corning Glass plant in China is turning out big sheets of toughened glass, which are shipped to a nearby Chinese plant to be cut into iPhone panes. The small panes are trucked to a Foxconn factory complex eight hours away.
DailyTech: Just when Samsung seems to have a bit of luck in Australia with the ongoing patent war, Apple comes along and throws more patent claims on the table.
According to Samsung, Apple recently expanded its patent claims against the South Korean company's Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia. In fact, Apple went from having a patent bid that involved three patents to one that had widened to 278 claims consisting of 22 patents and 10 products.
Macworld: Apple publicly names its overseas suppliers. A New York Times article blasts working conditions there. CEO Tim Cook angrily rebukes the charges in an internal memo. Consumers call for a boycott of Apple products.
Sound familiar?
Americans go through a series of hand wringing about overseas labor practices every few years. I remember covering this very topic in the late 1990s when apparel giant Nike was getting wrung over the coals for perceived child labor violations in its Indonesian factory.
GigaOm: Apple’s iPad is still the tablet market leader in terms of sales, despite gains by Android devices like the Amazon Kindle Fire, and a recent survey of tablet user satisfaction suggests it’s well-poised to stay in the lead. The iPad’s customer satisfaction is through the roof, according to a ChangeWave report, while Amazon’s Kindle barely exceeds the satisfaction level of the rest of the tablet pack.
Seventy-four percent of survey respondents said they were “Very Satisfied” with the iPad in an earlier November survey, while only 54 percent said they were “Very Satisfied” with the Kindle Fire in the January survey. The average of Very Satisfied customers for all other tablet devices combined was 49 percent. Why the 20-point gap between the iPad and Fire? It came down to what many users seemed to feel were missing features, according to ChangeWave.
BBC: Apple has pulled several iPad and iPhone models from its German online store after Motorola Mobility enforced a patent injunction against its rival.
The move follows a December ruling that Apple had failed to license one of Motorola's wireless intellectual properties.
ZDNet: The 10.7.3 update is recommended for all OS X Lion users and includes general operating system fixes that improve the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac including fixes that:
- Add Catalan, Croatian, Greek, Hebrew, Romanian, Slovak, Thai, and Ukrainian language support
- Address issues when using smart cards to log into OS X
- Resolve issues authenticating with directory services
- Address compatibility issues with Windows file sharing
Wall Street Journal: Here's a familiar story: Founder dies, the critics rush in. The previously worshiped genius—well, he had flaws of moral character. He was selfish and exploitative. His creations came at a dear price and might have hurt some people badly. Now the tyrant is gone, so let's tear his legacy apart.
While alive, Jobs had a Teflon coating superior to that of most CEOs. Options backdating scandal? Gregory Reyes, ex-CEO of Brocade Communications, went to prison for it. Not Mr. Jobs. Lack of top managers or board directors that are not white men? Sorry, that was a worry for lesser CEOs, not Mr. Jobs.
AppleInsider: A new Japanese report has clarified earlier claims of an Apple event in February with the cryptic details that Apple will hold a "Strange" event in February and a Special Event to launch the third-generation iPad in early March.
Macotakara claimed last month that Apple would hold an event in February to unveil the so-called "iPad 3" and iOS 5.1, citing both an Asian supplier and a source in the U.S. However, blogger Danbo has now corrected the original claim as only telling a "half-side of truth."
PC World: Apple is now the world’s third-largest phone maker by shipments and market share, according to a study from the International Data Corporation (IDC). Only behind Nokia and Samsung, Apple took the third spot globally from LG, up from the fifth spot last quarter.
The iPhone 4S propelled Apple to third place in the fourth quarter of 2011, ahead of LG and Chinese vendor ZTE, with particularly strong sales in the U.S. and Japan, IDC said. Apple reported last month that it sold 37 million iPhones during the holiday quarter, a record for the company. Sales were up 128 percent from 2010. Apple’s iPad is also the leader of the tablet market.
USA Today: The sizzling rate at which e-books are growing suggests that digital textbooks almost certainly will be the norm when your kids' kids are in school. What we don't know is how quickly a transition to a mostly all-digital textbook education system might happen, how it could affect the way students learn, and which companies will be leading the charge.
Wall Street Journal: Facebook Inc. filed for an initial public offering Wednesday that could value the social network between $75 billion and $100 billion, putting the company on track for one of the biggest U.S. stock-market debuts of all time.
The company hopes to raise as much as $10 billion when it begins selling shares this spring, said people familiar with the matter. Potential buyers got their first look at its financials Wednesday, which showed the company produced a $1 billion profit last year from $3.71 billion in revenues. The company derives 85% of those revenues from advertising, with the rest from social gaming and other fees.
PC Magazine: Research firm Canalys is reporting that Apple surpassed Hewlett-Packard in the fourth quarter of 2011 to claim the title of top PC maker – but the company is once again counting tablets as PCs.
Canalys said 120 million PCs were shipped globally last quarter, up 16 percent from the same time last year. Of those, 15.43 million were Apple iPads and 5.2 million were Macs, accounting for 17 percent of the total, Canalys said.
Wall Street Journal: Apple Inc. Tuesday named John Browett, chief executive of U.K. high-street store chain Dixons Retail PLC, as head of its worldwide retail operations in the first external senior management appointment made by new Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook.
Browett, who has led the struggling high-street store chain since 2007, will become Apple's Senior Vice-President of Retail. He replaces Ron Johnson, who left Apple last year to become CEO of U.S. clothing retailer JC Penney, and will be responsible for Apple's retail strategy and its continued expansion worldwide, the company said.
SlashGear: Apple has pushed out a “significant” update to its Final Cut Pro X video editing app for OS X, adding multicam support for up to 64 angles, boosted chroma-keying, enhanced XML for better third-party integration, and Thunderbolt support for peripherals. Final Cut Pro X v10.0.3 – a free update for existing owners of the $299.99 software – can automatically synchronize up to 64 video clips or photos using audio waveforms, time/date or timecode, even if the formats and frame sizes/rates are different. Then, the Angle Editor allows users to quickly jump between angles in the resultant Multicam Clip, cutting as they go.
AppleInsider: Apple on Tuesday announced the release of Final Cut Pro X v10.0.3, a significant update to its new professional video editing application that attempts to address some of the gripes customers had with the initial makeover of the product less than a year ago.
CNN: Foxconn denies the reports that working conditions are like what the Times describes. Apple refuses to comment on the record, but a leaked e-mail from CEO Tim Cook to all Apple employees says the company is committed to worker safety and that it takes all those claims very seriously.
So knowing all that, should we be concerned about where our iPhones and other gadgets come from and how they're made? Or is the human cost so far removed from us here in the United States that we're willing to look over it in favor of whatever fancy new touchscreen gadget Apple releases next?
PC Magazine: Who needs Apple? Actually, the exhibitors at this week's MacWorld-iWorld Expo do, even if the profit-gobbling mothership hasn't deigned to show up for several years.
These days more than ever, Apple is all about Apple. The company still plays nice with its app developers, by and large, but scarcely acknowledges the vibrant ecosystem of case designers, keyboard dock makers, external storage drive suppliers, and all the other firms that thrive in the churn of the consumer electronics giant's colossal wake.
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Ars Technica: Apple CEO Tim Cook has reportedly called recent reports on Apple's attitude toward its supply chain "patently false and offensive" in a new e-mail sent internally to Apple employees. Cook's remarks came the same day The New York Times published a lengthy feature about the "human cost" of our iPads, iPhones, and other gadgets. That report, based on sources and interviews conducted by the Times, made the assertion that many of Apple's executives are willing to look the other way when it comes to unsafe conditions and worker abuse because of the pressure to keep gadget costs down. Apple declined to comment for the Times story.
Wall Street Journal: The additional flexibility announced Thursday is likely to raise fears that Twitter's commitment to free speech may be weakening as the short-messaging company expands into new countries in an attempt to broaden its audience and make more money.
But Twitter sees the censorship tool as a way to ensure individual messages, or tweets, remain available to as many people as possible while it navigates a gauntlet of different laws around the world.
MSNBC: Riding on the popularity of the iPhone 4S released in October, Apple became the world's No. 1 seller/maker of smartphones in 2011's final quarter, shipping 37 million iPhones and overtaking Samsung for the top spot, according to a recent report.
According to Strategy Analytics, smartphone shipments all over the world "grew 54 percent annually to reach a record 155 million units" in that fourth quarter, led by Apple, which saw a 128 percent increase.
InformationWeek: At two years old, the iPad has won over many critics and proven that it's more than just an information consumption device. It may not be the weapon of choice for crafting 3-D graphics or writing application code, but it has become a vital workplace asset and has proven itself as tool for many types of content creation.
AppleInsider: Apple has surpassed HP in both computer unit sales and revenues for the first time, taking the top spot sooner than expected on record sales of iPads. Rather than losing sales to low priced tablets, Apple said it would "continue to innovate like crazy" in the tablet arena.
Apple reported record quarterly sales of 15.4 million iPads and 5.2 million Macs, giving the company over 20 million sales of dedicated personal computing devices (distinct from its sales of more than 37 million phones). Gartner reported HP's worldwide sales for the fourth quarter to be 14.7 million, while Lenovo and Dell sold 12.9 and 11.6 million units, respectively.
InformationWeek: Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, said in a statement he was thrilled, and promised more exciting products are coming. CFO Peter Oppenheimer also said he was thrilled in a conference call for investors.
Cook attributed Apple's success to "the breathtaking customer reception" of the company's products. Here are a few of the relevant numbers.
CNNMoney: The upside Apple posted for the December quarter was beyond all of our most bullish scenarios, especially for iPhones and iPads. Most importantly, it seems momentum can continue given low channel inventories and demand in China. We look forward to several new product cycles this calendar year including a new line of iPads, an iPhone 5, and new Macs. In addition, we may hear more around a potential dividend and Apple's entry into the TV business during CY12 as well. With all of these drivers, Apple remains our top pick in the sector.
AppleInsider: Analysts on Wall Street were blown away by Apple's blistering holiday 2011 quarter, and promptly revised their estimates even higher following the news.
Apple's first quarter of its fiscal 2012 was so good, analyst Brian Marshall called it "the perfect quarter." Other analysts weighed in with descriptions including "supersized," "exceptional" and "iDominance."
San Jose Mercury News: The workaround avoids Google's recent major change to its core search business, which it dubbed Search Plus Your World. A user signed in to a Google account now receives personalized results based on that user's network of friends -- including personal photos, status updates and other content shared on Google+, the Mountain View company's new social networking feature, or Google's photo-sharing service, Picasa.
Forbes: Apple is now the world’s largest buyer of semiconductor components, according to new data from Gartner.
The company has jumped up two spots on the list, ahead of Hewlett-Packard and Samsung, which ranked as the top two a year ago.
PC Magazine: Since the Thursday launch of its revamped iBooks app, Apple iOS users have downloaded more than 350,000 e-textbooks, while Cupertino's new iBook Author platform had more than 90,000 downloads from the Mac App Store, according to one analyst report.
"Apple['s] textbook launch is off to a very strong start, with more than 350,000 textbook downloads," Trip Chowdhry, managing director of equity research at Global Equities Research, wrote in a Monday note to investors. "Apple's decision to launch with introductory textbooks is a good decision as more than 50 percent of [the] textbook industry revenue comes from the sales of introductory books."
AllThingsD: Yesterday, before he jetted off for a glam trip to the tony World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Fortune magazine’s Adam Lashinsky met me at San Francisco International Airport to talk about his new book, “Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired — and Secretive — Company Really Works.”
An expansion of a well-read article that Lashinsky wrote for the publication last year, the book debuts tomorrow from Business Plus, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.
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