Everybody knows about Steve Job’s famous intentions to go thermonuclear on Android if necessary, but it seems that current CEO Tim Cook wasn’t necessarily on the same tactical page. According to Reuters, unnamed sources with knowledge of the situation say that Cook was opposed to suing Samsung when the trouble started brewing, because Samsung was such a big parts supplier for Apple. More »
Apple is a company known for zealously guarding its secrets, and unsurprisingly so because every time the iPhone or iPad is launched, it’s usually a big deal, at least until recently when leaked components revealed the actual device. In any case Apple has also been known for keeping mum regarding rumors, usually avoiding commenting on them but it seems that under the guidance of Tim Cook, perhaps Apple’s PR is starting to become a bit more open. A report by the WSJ has recently revealed that Apple’s PR department has started to get a bit more proactive, sending out more press releases in the past month than they have in the previous months.
At the same time, Apple communications staff have recently sent reporters more favorable third-party reports about the company, including a study predicting that by 2014, Apple will be as accepted in the enterprise as Microsoft is today. Apple, and indeed virtually all its competitors, send reporters favorable studies from time to time. But the five reports Apple has sent since the start of the year, mostly related to mobile market share, represent more than recent months.
The report also suggests that the reason Apple’s PR is starting to open up more these days is because they realize that competition is heating up (or has already heated up, depending on how you look at it) and that perhaps keeping mum most of the time isn’t really the way to go. We’re not sure what this could mean, but it’s interesting to see Apple start to change things up a bit.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Evad3rs Shares Some Information On How Their Jailbreak Works, Siri For Mac Could Appear In OS X 10.9 According To Job Listing, 
This week Apple’s Tim Cook made no effort to hide his excitement over the success Apple has had over its first fiscal quarter of 2013, letting investors know that it’s largely because of the products of 2012 that this good time for the company is driven into the future. Back when Cook promised us big things in 2012 early last year, we saw new iterations of essentially every product Apple had on the market, along with a couple new ones to boot. Cook’s affirmation here at the beginning of 2013 could very well mean big things for the company through the next 12 months as far as production goes – just as long as the supply chain Apple relies on doesn’t get in the way.
Two points were spoken of more than once in the earnings call this week, one of them the fact that this was a record-breaking quarter for Apple in the amount of mobile devices they sold (running iOS) and the overall revenue they generated. The other was the notion that they’d have sold much, much more if they had the supply chain support they needed, especially in regards to the iMac and the iPad mini. Besides dismissing supply chain rumors, Cook also spoke about how well Apple was doing, and how prolific they are right this minute (and into the future).
“Apple is in one of the most prolific periods of innovation in its history. We rely on the same spirit and drive that brought the original Mac and other revolutionary products like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad into the world.” – Tim Cook
Over the past year, Apple has released two new iPads (one of them the iPad mini), refreshed iMacs, Retina MacBook Pros, and the iPhone 5, not to mention new versions of both of their operating systems (mobile and desktop) as well as their full family of in-house developed apps. Apple continues to sell an increasing number of devices each year, so we must (in a basic way, at least) assume that they’re going to continue to push the envelope using their current blueprint for success.
We may very well see revised versions of everything all over again, with upgrades to the internals of every product that sold monumentally well last year and refreshes of the products that didn’t. The iPhone will likely stay the same size, as will most of the products you see on the shelves today – this year’s boosts will more than likely be included in the casings of 2012. The technology will improve and change in 2013 for Apple, the industrial design may well stay largely the same.
Then if we keep seeing Apple succeed with devices that sell extremely well (like we have for many moons), what’s to stop them from continuing their upward climb? The manufacturers that are responsible for creating the hardware that makes up the products Apple designs and sells. If Apple continues down the path they’re on now, they very well may be set to start diving into their own manufacturing as some of their top competitors do – and it may be the best way for them to continue rocketing forward past 2013. As it stands, the cards are turning as we speak.
After Apple’s 2012, a “prolific” 2013 could shake the industry is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Yesterday Apple announced new record results for their financial Q1 2013 including sales of iOS devices as well as overall revenue, and with those announcements came an invite from Tim Cook to employees for a town hall meeting being held this morning. This town hall meeting will likely be extremely similar to the meeting held last year at this time after the company released its 2012 Q1 financial results, question and answer session included. At the moment we’re not entirely sure if we’ll be seeing the results of this session or if it will be closed-door employees-only in the end.
This meeting will, on the other hand, be broadcast live throughout the Apple Cupertino campus as well as other Apple employee locations. This way as many Apple employees as possible can see the session and enjoy the large group hug that they’ve earned upon creating this record-breaking quarter. The full email, according to unnamed employees sending the mail into 9to5Mac, came through last night after the earnings call.
Team, We’ve just reported another record setting quarter, thanks to everyone’s incredible hard work and focus. We sold over 75 million iOS devices in the holiday quarter alone, which is a testament to the strength of Apple’s innovation. Please join me for an employee communications meeting tomorrow at 10 a.m. Pacific time in the auditorium of De Anza 3.
We’ve created a space on AppleWeb where you can submit your questions in advance, and we’ll do our best to answer as many of them as we can during the meeting. The meeting will be broadcast live throughout Cupertino and at many other Apple locations.
Please check AppleWeb for details.
Tim
Employees are able to send in questions before the event and answers will likely be made available based on their importance to the event – though live, we must expect, one way or the other. Apple’s earnings call included a Q and A session that revealed several interesting points including those surrounding the supply constraints in the iMac as well as the iPad mini, this accounting for less sales than Apple feels it would have been capable of otherwise.
Have a peek at the timeline below to see every bit of detail from the financial report released yesterday as well as the Q and A that followed. Let us know if you’re expecting anything fantastical from the Town Hall meeting that’s occurring today, and be sure to stay tuned to our sizable Apple hub as well through the future!
Apple employee town hall meeting letter sets the tone is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
This week the folks at Apple have revealed their full Q1 2013 earnings report complete with a new record for revenue in the first quarter. This includes revenue of $54.5 billion for the quarter as well as a net quarterly profit of $13.1 billion USD, this being a lovely set of results comparatively as well as on their own with last year’s revenue and net quarterly profit coming in at $46.33 billion $13.06 billion respectively. It may be the iPhone that we see as the star here, as compared to the already monstrous 37 million units sold in the first quarter last year, the 47.8 million sold reported today seems rather fantastic.
Apple made it clear that, as Tim Cook put it, “We’re thrilled with record revenue of over $54 billion and sales of over 75 million iOS devices in a single quarter.” As the margins continue to push iOS in as the dominant product Apple offers up, the results are plain to see: mobile is driving Apple’s growth right here and now. Apple’s record results today include both their highest quarterly revenue and their highest net income ever reported.
Apple showed iPhone sales to be bursting forth with 47.8 million iPhones sold in this one single quarter – that’s a record for one quarter, mind you. Compared to last year’s 37 million sold in Q1, Apple’s release of the iPhone 5 is being shown as a guiding light. Apple also showed a new record amount of iPads sold in a quarter with 22.9 million units sold – this is also busting out compared to last year’s Q1 with 15.4 million units sold.
Interestingly it seems that both the Mac and the iPod‘s units sold are going downward rather than up, this showing off how mobile is taking hold with connected devices – we want to be online and we want to have our connections made easy, it would seem. Apple’s Mac sales this quarter added up to 4.1 million compared to 5.2 million one year ago this quarter, while iPod sales added up to 12.7 compared to last year’s Q1 total at 15.4 million.
Stockholders are being rewarded this quarter once again with a cash dividend of $2.65 per share of Apple’s own common stock. With $23 billion dollars in cash flow from operations built up over the quarter as well as cash from short and long term investments adding up to $137.1 billion (up $16 billion from the quarter before this one), Apple still appears to be swimming in money.
Apple announced that they’d be changing their approach to guidance, as well. In this case changing guidance means for Apple that while they, in the past, have been reporting “conservative” point estimates, they’ll be more on-point through the future. With plans for estimates reflecting what Apple “believes they can achieve” rather than what they had “reasonable confidence” in achieving, we may be seeing slightly more perfectly adjusted predictions from them in the future, starting with what they’ve suggested today. Apple is projecting between $41 and $43 billion in revenue for Q2 of 2013 as well as a gross margin between 37.5 and 38.5%.
We’ll be seeing Apple continue to take massive chunks of the market through the future, but with something so simple as a projection for a quarter that’s less spectacular than the one we’re in now, we’ll see the company’s stock slide ever so slightly – even if it’s just today. At the moment we’re seeing Apple stock falling around 10.47% in after-hours trading. Expect this to leap up again tomorrow morning once the dust has settled.
Stay tuned to our massive Apple hub through the future and check the timeline below this paragraph to see all the Apple results from this afternoon!
Apple Q1 2013 Round-up: record revenue and 75 million iOS devices sold is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Apple had a great first quarter of 2013, but the company hasn’t forgotten about the few rough spots from the year prior. One of these rough spots was the launch of Maps, which came with the roll out of iOS 6. Despite a few stumbles, Apple is looking forward, with Tim Cook saying today in the company’s earnings call that Apple is constantly improving Maps, and that it won’t stop until the service lives up to “our incredibly high standards.”
As far as usage goes, Cook didn’t get into specifics, instead only saying that Maps usage is much higher than it was before the launch of iOS 6. It would seem that more and more users are willing to give Maps a chance as we move forward, with Cook promising that more improvements to the service will come as we work our way through 2013. Google has since launched an iOS version of its own Maps service, giving Apple more of a reason to strive to continually improve its own offering. Competition, as they say, is only a good thing for consumers.
Cook also pointed to the fact that Apple has been constantly making improvements to Maps since iOS 6 launched. We heard during the call that Apple has some impressive stuff in the pipeline, so perhaps that includes more features for Maps? We’ll just have to wait and find out, but at least we know that Apple will keep working on it as 2013 marches on.
Apple had a record-breaking quarter in terms of iPhone and iPad sales, thanks in large part to the new iPhone 5 and iPad mini. With those releases and the positive consumer reaction, there’s even more reason for Apple to always be improving its app offerings. Stay tuned, because 2013 might just prove to be a pretty big year for Apple as far as software is concerned.
Apple talks iOS Maps improvements, user base is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Emails that were sent between executives at Apple, Google, and Intel show that there was a real financial benefit to refrain from poaching employees from each others’ companies, according to Judge Lucy Koh, who recently led the trial between Apple and Samsung. The CEOs from each company; Tim Cook, Eric Schmidt, and Paul Otellini, will be required to appear before the judge and give a deposition.
During a hearing earlier today, US District Judge Lucy Koh ordered the three CEOs to four hours of questioning each, pertaining to the pacts that the three companies entered in to not recruit one another’s employees. Currently, the three tech companies are trying to avoid a class action lawsuit by employees, and Koh’s job is to decide whether the lawsuit is worthy enough to proceed as such as lawsuit.
If the case is escalated to class action status, the damages could be high for the three companies — possibly around hundreds of millions of dollars, according to the attorneys of the plaintiffs, and it’s said that the employees have some killer evidence that the three companies wouldn’t have a chance of fighting.
Originally, the lawsuit was settled in 2010, and it accused the three companies — along with Intuit, Pixar, and Genentech — of creating non-poaching pacts with one another. However, a civil lawsuit was filed by several employees right afterward, who claim that their salaries were wrongly lowered because of the agreements, and Judge Koh is currently in the process of deciding whether or not to escalate the lawsuit. Stay tuned, as we’ll no doubt see a lot of action come out of this.
[via AllThingsD]
Image via Flickr
Apple, Google, Intel CEOs ordered to discuss no-poaching deal with judge is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Tim Cook is visiting China for the second time. Although the details of Cook’s visit, according to Apple spokeswoman Carolyn Wu, are not available (whatever that means), Reuters is reporting that the Apple CEO has meet with China Mobile Chairman, Xi Guohua, on Thursday to talk about “matters of cooperation.” In an email statement, China Mobile spokesman Li Jun wrote, “In the morning, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook visited China Mobile’s headquarters. China Mobile’s Chairman Xi Guohua and Tim Cook discussed matters of cooperation.” It is important to note that Apple has yet to strike a deal with China Mobile, considered as the largest mobile carrier in the world in terms of subscribers – roughly around 700 million. (more…)
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: The Radius iPhone 5 Case Is As Minimalist As It Gets, New iTunes App Store Submission Policy Could Help Cut Down On Scams,
China is Apple‘s fastest growing iPhone and iPad market, with the company recently opening several retail stores in the nation. In December, Chinese consumers bought in excess of 2 million iPhone 5 handsets within three days of its launch there. Now the company’s CEO Tim Cook has taken his second trip to the nation, where he is presently in talks with both partners and government officials.
Earlier today, the Minister of Industry and Information Technology Miao Wei met with Cook. The two are reported to have talked about the smartphone industry in general, as well as trends in innovation, followed by a discussion on Cook’s part specifically about its developments in China, according to the Chinese agency’s website.
An Apple spokesperson in China, Carolyn Wu, offered this statement. “Tim is in Beijing meeting with government officials and partners. China is an important market for us and we look forward to continued customer excitement and growth here.” She would not, however, say whether Cook is meeting with China Mobile, as many suspect is the case.
Although China is a fast growing market for Apple, analyst state that Apple needs to get on board with China Mobile, the nation’s most-used carrier, if it wants to thrive in the market long term. Presently, Apple is partnered with the two lesser carriers in China, China Unicom and China Telecom, but is said to be caught up in revenue issues with China Mobile. Apple has been in talks with the carrier for four years.
[via Reuters]
Apple’s Tim Cook is in China on iPhone business is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Apparently Eric Schmidt isn’t the only high-profile tech titan traveling abroad at the height of CES 2013. Apple Chief Executive Officer, Tim Cook, is also going beyond borders and is visiting China for the second time in less than 10 months. The leader to one of the top technology companies in the world today met with China’s head of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to discuss the growth of the information technology industry in the country, as well as global mobile communications, and Apple’s business in China. (more…)
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Trade In Value Of A Broken iPhone 4S Is Apparently The Same As A Near-Mint Galaxy S2, Boy Pulls Train’s Emergency Brakes After iPhone Falls Out The Window,
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
