Apple has, for the very first time, released a report of its suppliers. There are 156 suppliers listed in the PDF the company published (available here), including big names like Sony, Intel, Samsung and Foxconn (also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co.), which dragged Apple’s name into the light over questionable labor practices, when fourteen of the company’s workers plunged to their death at the Foxconn factories in 2010.
Since then, the company has been under increased scrutiny, with critics saying it should to be more transparent about the working conditions throughout its supply chain. Today, Apple appears to have answered its critics’ calls. → Read More
Apple has built a search engine for apps. It’s called iCloud – or more technically, it’s one aspect of the overall iCloud service. Using it, you can search through every app you have installed on your iOS device or have ever purchased in the past. And it’s available on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch right now.
The average smartphone user has 64 mobile apps installed on their mobile device. I’m ahead of the curve. I have around 400. It’s pushing nearly 7 GB of storage. Granted, many of these apps were installed for testing purposes only – they aren’t used daily by any means. But my real problem is that I’m not inclined to remove apps I don’t use. They just sit there on the phone, abandoned, languishing on the back screens. I could delete them, but I don’t. You know…just in case.
But the promise of iCloud, as I see it, is that these apps can disappear from the iPhone’s homescreen, but never have to fully disappear from reach. They can be recalled through a simple search. → Read More
For most of the ten years I’ve been coming to CES, every presentation, every booth, has had one goal: to create an ecosystem in order to encourage consumer lock in. Year after year, presentation after presentation, someone has come out to show how the phone will connect to the fridge which, in turn, will connect to the TV. And year after year, they failed.
Until now.
Samsung, and to some extent the other vendors, have finally cracked it. For most of the past few years they’ve watched as Apple ran circles around them in terms of media sharing and remote control. Obviously Apple’s systems have been limited to iPod/iTunes/iPad/Mac but Samsung, a major player in both the white goods and the mobile markets, can now have it all. → Read More
Apple has always been bullish when it came to supporting education, and that trend continues with the announcement of an education event on January 19 at New York’s famous Guggenheim Museum.
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MG Siegler argues that if you sold your Apple stock last October, right after the company’s Q4 2011 earnings report, you are an idiot and/or a moron. After all, Apple’s stock price closed at $398.62 on October 19, and it closed at $422.4 last Friday (a respectable 6 percent bump).
So selling your Apple stock that day was idiotic, right?
Maybe, maybe not.
Flamebait headlines aside, for all we know you could have been selling Apple stock you acquired back in 2000, in which case I daresay you were a true visionary. Of if you spent the money to buy your kids and spouse some nice Christmas gifts, or treated yourself to that plane ticket to Cambodia or whatever.
Reality is that, yes, Apple stock was oversold that day, but I’ll be damned if I’m calling anyone an idiot over doing it if I don’t know what you did with the money. → Read More
On October 19 of last year I wrote a post entitled: If You Sold Your Apple Stock Today, You’re An Idiot. Because their Q4 numbers missed Wall Street expectations, Apple’s stock dropped over 5 percent on that day, to close below $400-a-share after hitting an all-time high just days before. My argument was that it was the Wall Street expectations that were horribly flawed, not Apple’s actual performance. And the stock would recover quickly as a result leading up to their Q1 earnings, which even Apple was predicting would be a blow out.
Reading the comments on that post — which I love to do — you’d think I was saying something insane. When the stock fell to $363 right after Thanksgiving, a few remembered the post and once again pointed out the irrational insanity of this fanboy. But then a funny thing happened yesterday. Apple’s stock closed at a new all-time high. → Read More
From Vannevar Bush to PageRank, the World Wide Web was built on hypertext, the notion that any morsel of information can link to any other. But that was always only a dream, and a rapidly-dissipating one of late.
Nowadays even Web links are likely to terminate at warnings, paywalls or registration screens. Anil Dash rages that “Facebook is gaslighting the Web” with its treatment of content outside Facebook. Jon Mitchell and Jamie Zawinski complain that Google Plus will “mess up the Internet” for its treatment of content outside Google+ff (and Zawinski adds “they just ripped off this model from Tumblr.”) Google’s Tim Bray, in turn, is irate about single-page JavaScript sites breaking the web.
Meanwhile, six months ago, according to Flurry, time spent using mobile apps surpassed web consumption. You can link out of apps easily enough — clicking on a phone number to open a dialer, or a hyperlink to open a Web page — but it’s very difficult to reliably link in to an app. → Read More
It’s no secret that smartphone and tablet OEMs are looking toward quad-core processors to power their next-generation doodads, with Apple’s oft-rumored A6 chipset being one of the most anticipated. According to 9to5Mac, snippets of code in the beta version of the iOS 5.1 update tacity confirm that a quad-core A6 will soon grace Apple’s new iDevices.
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Are you ready for CES? I know I am. The PR emails are flowing in and I’m going to respond to every single one of them. I can’t wait to hear about Samsung’s social media stuff. And Vizio’s new thingy. I can’t wait to get my hands on that one thing made by those guys who did that other thing last year that no one bought. It’s gonna be fantastic. So pumped.
…
No, I’m not going to CES. I’ve never been to CES. I doubt I’ll ever go to CES. Why would I? → Read More
iMessage is awesome, right? Since iOS 5 came out I’ve been telling all my friends and family (who, ironically, aren’t what you’d call tech savvy) to update and start sending messages for free. It’s super fast, I tell them, and your messages will be blue! Thrilling, to say the least.
There’s just one problem:
If you switch to an Android device from an iPhone (with iMessage activated), anyone who’s previously been sending you iMessages will no longer be able to send you texts. This is because there is apparently a bug with the iMessage system that doesn’t deactivate iMessage, even after you’ve switched your phone number to another device. → Read More
Elan Microelectronics, a Taiwanese chip and touch screen maker, says it has received $5 million from Apple in a patent infringement lawsuit settlement arranged out of court. This was first reported by Taiwanese media and later by Reuters.
In addition, Apple and Elan agreed to “exchange authorizations” to use each other’s patents, according to a statement from the Taiwanese chip designer. → Read More
There’s a problem with the idea of an iTV, rumors of which have been sloshing about for a long time, but with greater intensity since Steve Jobs’ biography hinted at one. Unlike an Apple TV, an iPhone, an iPad, or other devices, an Apple TV wouldn’t be tied to a Mac, and it wouldn’t take advantage of iTunes the way those devices do. It’ll be related, of course, but it doesn’t promote the “hub” idea that drives iPhone owners to buy Macs, Mac owners to buy iPhones, and all the other crossover purchases that interweave the Apple ecosystem.
Instead, it would be an Apple-designed window into content that Apple has very little control over. And while you can bring a new idea to the TV space, as set-top boxes and Google TV have, you can’t make the TV space play nice. Google learned that the hard way. And it looks like Apple may be facing a similar challenge. → Read More
Apple this morning announced that its massively popular smartphone, the iPhone 4S, will be available in China and 21 additional countries on Friday, January 13.
According to Apple CEO Tim Cook, that means the iPhone 4S will shortly be available in a total of 90 countries.
It also means the phone will indeed launch in China before the Chinese New Year (January 23), which is sort of the equivalent of Black Friday in the United States.
Put differently: ka-ching. → Read More
After a decade of iPods, Apple’s little white charging cable seem to be pretty much everywhere these days. Open a random drawer, there one will sit. Ask a pack of strangers, “Hey — anyone got an iPhone cable?” and half a dozen will be thrown your way. At this point, it’s almost hard to not be within reach of one… until you actually need one. Then the damned things seemingly don’t exist.
Looking to make sure no iThing owner is ever caught out-and-about without a charging cable in tow is the Cord-On-Board, a (rather cleverly named) shock-resistant iPhone case with a 9.5″ charging cable tucked inside. → Read More
When we first introduced the Siri clone Iris, I figured that would be the last of the outright Siri-alikes. I was wrong. Programmers are taking advantage of less experienced users and creating apps that are downright insulting to the average intelligence.
One app, called Siri for Android is a hard link to Google’s voice controls while another, called Speerit is a Korean clone that purports to connect to Apple’s servers (which is untrue). → Read More
Apple will be holding a product event later this month in New York, Kara Swisher is reporting, and we’ve confirmed independently with a source.
According to the source the event will not involve any hardware at all and instead will focus on publishing and eBooks (sold through Apple’s iBooks platform) rather than iAds. Attendance will also be more publishing industry-oriented than consumer-focused. → Read More
Have you been wondering which mobile browser is the fastest of late? It would be an understandable thing to pontificate, seeing that Android takes the cake when it comes to LTE support, iOS has the class-leading dual-core A5 chip on its side, and Windows Phone’s IE mobile browser is basically a beast. It’s a worthwhile question, to say the least.
Luckily MyNokiablog noticed a YouTube video uploaded by user 359gsm, in which the iPhone 4S, the Lumia 800, and an iPhone 4 (running iOS 4.3) are put through the ringer. The specific definition of ringer: Browsermark, Speed Reading, Sunspider, Acid3, and HTML5 tests. → Read More
2011 was the year of Android. A little over a year ago Andy Rubin tweeted that 300,000 Android devices were being activated each day. In January we reported that Android had surpassed iOS in terms of US smartphone market share. In June Android’s activations-per-day reached 500,000; this month they hit 700,000. That’s more than double the rate at which it was spreading when it overtook iOS.
By comparison, UBS estimated in December that Apple would sell 30 million iPhones in 4Q 2011. Sounds like a lot, until you realize that Android devices — almost all of which are phones, as Rubin’s numbers don’t include Kindle Fires or Nooks — are being activated at a rate of five million a week, or 65 million in a quarter. In other words, Android phone sales were probably close to double Apple’s during the quarter in which Apple’s flagship iPhone 4S was released. I expect Apple outsold Android at Christmas, given that they boasted this year’s three most wanted gifts, but Android will make up that difference in a few short weeks.
How did this happen? Certainly not because Android is better. Almost no one disputes that Apple’s user experience is superior. Thanks to Android’s horrific fragmentation problems, the Android version that developers write apps for – 2.2, which was released in May 2010 – is distinctly inferior to iOS 5. The iPhone 4S is a fantastic high-end phone, the 4 a terrific mid-level one, and the 3GS still a respectable player in the free-with-contract market. So why has everyone gone Android? → Read More
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…
Those words seem to encapsulate Apple’s 2011 perfectly. The year saw the company both became the most valuable company in the world and lose its founder, savior, visionary, and leader.
Earlier, Erick published his roundup of the bigger stories and themes in tech this year. Topping that list is the passing of Steve Jobs, a story so big that it far transcended typical tech news. But even without that sad news, 2011 was all about Apple. There was certainly enough news to constitute its own roundup. So here we go. → Read More
comScore has just released its latest numbers regarding the mobile landscape here in the U.S., finding that Samsung is still the top OEM with a 25.6 percent marketshare, up just .3 percentage points from the three month period ending in August.
Meanwhile, Apple’s price drop on the iPhone 4 along with the introduction of the iPhone 4S has taken its share of the market from 9.8 percent to 11.2 percent.
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