Predicting what products Apple will roll out next is a cottage industry so robust it has its own ecosystem of devoted news sites, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t signal in all the rumor noise. Here, based on the leaks that have come out already, are the products that are most likely to constitute the “surprises” that CEO Tim Cook alluded to in yesterday’s earnings call.
Apple CEO Tim Cook just said something at once unsurprising and totally amazing. Asked on the company’s earnings call how Apple is planning to tackle China, he said, “We’ve seen a significant interest in iPhone 4 there and have recently made it even more affordable, to make it more attractive to those first-time buyers.”
Apple CEO Tim Cook just said on the company’s earnings call, “We acknowledge that our growth rate has slowed… from the exceptionally high levels we experienced in 2012.” The one thing that kept revenues from dropping even further? Record revenue in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, the only region of the world where Apple’s revenue grew from last quarter.
It’s just a couple of hours after the AP’s Twitter account was hacked, sending markets into a tizzy with a false report of violence at the White House. But we already know, through tidbits offered by the AP itself, how it happened.
In February, we told you that ARM holdings, the company that designs the chips that power just about every smartphone and tablet on the planet, had one of the best quarters of any technology company, ever—and this quarter, they’ve gone and beaten those results.
The Twitter account belonging to the Associated Press was just hacked and used to tweet that there were explosions at the White House. Markets immediately reacted accordingly, with the Dow dropping 144 points before recovering in minutes, demonstrating the power that such hacks have.
IBM is in talks to sell a portion of its business that builds servers—those fast computers that live in data centers and power the internet—to Chinese PC manufacturer Lenovo, reports the Wall Street Journal. The report makes sense: In 2005, Lenovo acquired IBM’s PC manufacturing business, and remains the provider of some of the hardware that IBM sells through to clients.
There’s a lot to chew on in the just-released, previously secret transcript of a conversation between Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and Google board chairman Eric Schmidt—the two talked about everything from Bitcoin to Assange’s “crazed” female visitors. (Though Schmidt acknowledged in his new book that he spoke with Assange, the full transcript of their conversation had not previously been released.)
In looking at Intel’s most recent quarterly results, it’s easy to simply say, Well, the PC is dying, and that’s been devastating to the company’s revenue. But that misses an important point: Intel’s server business is doing well. It’s the only part of the company that’s both growing and contributing materially to the bottom line.
Microsoft’s current business model is inertia. And it’s a surprisingly good one: Despite free-fall in demand for PCs, analysts are expecting that when Microsoft announces earnings after markets close tomorrow (April 18), the company most closely identified with the PC will report a jump in revenue from a year ago, from $17.42 billion to $20.54 billion.
Intel’s quarterly results, expected after markets close today, April 16, are by all estimates going to be as bad or worse than Intel’s last quarter—and for all the same reasons. The only way to describe the overall trend in Intel’s revenue is dismal. Intel is starting to resemble other technology giants—think BlackBerry—for which stagnating revenue was a warning sign that the company’s fortunes were about to fall off a cliff.
What is the texture of a disaster? What are the earliest moments of grief, masquerading as shock?
This morning’s announcement by satellite TV provider Dish Network—an also-ran to more-successful competitor DirecTV—that it wants to buy America’s 3rd-largest mobile carrier, Sprint Nextel, for $25.5 billion, should come as no surprise. Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen has been courting seemingly every second- and third-tier US mobile carrier, including MetroPCS, T-mobile and Clearwire.
If you’ve got money you can afford to lose and a penchant for gambling, there’s no better time than now to plow that cash into bitcoin, the alternative currency that plunged in value over the past two days after hitting astronomical highs.
In January, the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), the trade group of US investor-owned utilities, released a singularly amazing report that the press missed at the time, says David Roberts at Grist. The report is a blueprint for the financial collapse of the North American utility industry—and all of it at the hands of solar panels.
By June or July of this year, according to Andy Price of Green Revolution Cooling, something strange will be announced by at least two of the companies that own the hundreds of thousands of computers that make the internet possible. In out-of-the-way locations, these companies—whose identities Price won’t reveal but, he says, are on a par with Facebook, Amazon and AT&T—are doing bizarre things to their infrastructure. Specifically, to their servers, the high-powered PCs that store, retrieve and process all the data on the internet and comprise the physical structure of the “cloud.”
Anyone who has an interest in the future of computing and mobile should consider the following developments:
If you’re an American who bought bitcoins at around $80 less than a month ago and sold them today for around $237, congratulations! You may be on your way to accidentally committing tax fraud. That’s because you’ll run afoul of authorities if you don’t report what you made on bitcoin as capital gains, the same way you report gains made on most assets sold at a profit, argues Karl Denninger, who is sometimes credited as one of the founders of the Tea Party movement.
For the first time since the depths of the Great Recession, the the total value of materials consumed by all the world’s makers of microchips was down—2%, to $47.11 billion. But that’s just one of the stories told by data from the annual tabulation of the total value of materials consumed by all the world’s makers of microchips, compiled by industry association SEMI.
One look at the market for bizarre, hybrid phone-tablet devices, which includes Phablets, PadFones, Gigantophones and other lexicographic monstrosities, suggests that smartphones—or at least their owners—are beset by an existential crisis. All of us want truly portable computing, which would suggest smaller is better. But we also want big screens in order to properly enjoy the content that we’re all so addicted to having at hand.
So Facebook is reportedly about to unveil a phone, built by struggling Taiwanese handset maker HTC, that has been modified to put Facebook and its various services in the foreground. Facebook has been working on this for years.
Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist—that means he studies how to assure that people are happy and productive at work—an exceptionally generous person, and, according to a long profile of him in the New York Times, easily the most productive researcher in his field. These things are linked.
If you want to know how to make money on mobile apps in China, you should probably look at how Hollywood makes money on its films in that country. The parallels are uncanny: In movies, it’s action films that do best; in apps—or more specifically games—it’s the same. Simplicity, a conspicuous absence of plot, and lots of violence and/or explosions are, it seems, the DNA of popular entertainment.
Google has begun alerting the “winners” of its #ifihadglass contest (that’s “If I had Glass,” as a hashtag) that they will soon have the privilege of forking over $1,500 for a gadget that, by Google’s own admission, will by 2014 retail to the public for much less than that. But that’s the price of being a (really) early adopter. (On the off chance you’ve missed it, Glass is Google’s entrée into the exciting world of face-based computing.)
