The smartphone homescreen is among the world’s most valuable digital real estate. App-makers’ fortunes are often tied to how many active users they can attract and retain, so getting on your homescreen—where you’ll potentially see their icons dozens of times per day—is the holy grail.
It’s too early to tell what long-term effects Apple’s new, bigger-screened iPhones—the 6 and the monster-sized 6 Plus—will have on its shaky iPad tablet business. But according to Pocket, the popular service for saving web articles to read later on your phone, the new iPhones are already taking screen time away from iPads.
Americans have been cooking Thanksgiving turkeys for more than 100 years. But it’s only the last few when a radical innovation in turkey preparation has started to become mainstream: “Spatchcocking,” or removing the backbone and flattening the turkey. This process—also known as butterflying, and common for preparing chickens—reduces the roasting time for a turkey from roughly three hours to around 45 minutes. Freeing up both oven and host, it’s a complete Thanksgiving game-changer.
The story of Apple’s now-bankrupt sapphire venture in Arizona is full of drama: The Wall Street Journal’s Daisuke Wakabayashi reports at length (paywall) on some of the challenges and disappointments that Apple and its partner, GT Advanced Technologies, have dealt each other.
The star of indie rock band OK Go’s latest music video—now approaching 14 million YouTube views—is a small, curious-looking vehicle. The Honda Uni-Cub, currently under development in Japan, is a “personal mobility device” the company hopes will someday be a common sight in settings as wide-ranging as airports and libraries. OK Go simply calls it “the future chair.”
TOKYO—Toshiba, the Japanese technology conglomerate with a lineage dating back to the 19th century, is looking for growth in a whole new way. In a sterilized clean room about 35 miles outside of Tokyo, where Toshiba used to make floppy disks in the 1980s and 90s, the company is now starting to grow thousands of lettuce plants as it expands into indoor agriculture.
When Slack launched in February, it was hardly the first chat/messaging service aimed at corporate users. But thanks to smart product decisions, the right mix of features, and good marketing, it has become one of the fastest growing.
It didn’t take long for me to get used to Apple’s large new iPhone 6 Plus. After more than a month of everyday use, it has become even more of the pocket computer I’ve always wanted. A few thoughts:
Apple CEO Tim Cook is a notoriously tough operations executive. He was, of course, the company’s chief operating officer for years, and Apple’s market-leading hardware execution, efficiency, and supply chain all prove his worth. “Tim’s a tough negotiator,” AT&T Mobility chief Glenn Lurie said in a recent Businessweek story.
No Facebook fatigue here: The company’s user base continues to grow even larger, and more of its members are signing in each day than ever before.
Wall Street is giving Twitter a hard time—shares are down 8% in after-hours trading—as its user growth continues to slow. Twitter reported 281 million monthly active users (MAUs) at the end of the third quarter, up 23% year-over-year. But user growth is slowing: Twitter’s 13 million additional MAUs last quarter is its second-lowest total in two years.
A photo I took of my CVS receipt—emblematic of bad product thinking—accidentally went viral on Twitter over the weekend.
Amazon’s Fire Phone isn’t selling. The company said today “it would take a $170 million charge ‘primarily related to Fire phone inventory valuation and supplier commitment costs’,” Recode’s Jason Del Ray reports.
Microsoft pitches its Surface Pro 3 as “the tablet that can replace your laptop.” But it seems that people aren’t craving such a device.
Apple’s Mac business, now 30 years old, just had its best three months in history. Apple shipped 5.5 million Macs last quarter, up almost 1 million units—a 20% increase—from the year before.
Apple Pay, the company’s new mobile payments service, launched yesterday with several large retail partners, including McDonald’s and Whole Foods, and key iPhone apps, including Uber and OpenTable.
Apple’s iPad business was the lone drag in its otherwise strong earnings report today. iPad sales last quarter dropped 13% from the previous year, to 12.3 million, their third straight quarter of decline. The iPad, which once looked like it could become an iPhone-sized pillar for Apple, represented just 13% of the company’s sales last quarter.
The numbers: Good and improving. Apple’s September-quarter results were better than expected—showing overall strong performance, except for the already struggling iPad business.
Apple launched its mobile payments service, Apple Pay, today in the US. It has the chance—if successful—to become the first mainstream mobile payments service in many markets. We’ve assembled what we think will be common questions (with answers) about Apple Pay—and its potential implications for Apple, its users, and the world of payments.
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he famously pared down the company’s sprawling product line. Since then, Apple has done a pretty good job keeping things simple. It’s rare for two Apple products to overlap much, whether in utility or price.
Perhaps the most interesting news about Apple’s new iPad Air 2 tablet is buried at the bottom of one of its marketing pages: It will come pre-installed with a new “Apple SIM” card instead of one from a specific mobile operator. (Credit to Julien Theys for noticing this.)
Apple’s iPad event is just getting started, but CEO Tim Cook started off with a quick update on the iPhone, which is Apple’s most important product and business by far.
Apple will likely unveil modestly new iPads and perhaps a new iMac today at an event in California. Here’s how to tune in:
Apple is putting on another one of its trademark product-announcement events today at its headquarters in Cupertino, California. Unlike last month’s unveil—a huge gala where the company showed off new iPhones, the Apple Watch, and an awkward moment with U2—today’s keynote, the last of the year, should be much more low-key in every way.
