Apple’s CEO Tim Cook announced the Cupertino company will be donating to “relief efforts on the ground” due to those affected by Hurricane Ian as the storm pummels Florida. As usual, Apple did not disclose how much it will donate.
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With Earth Day coming later next week, Apple is once again promoting an interesting campaign. From now until April 22, the company will donate $1 to the World Wildlife Fund for every Apple Pay transaction made in Apple Stores, through the Apple Store app, or on its website.
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While Apple was able to meet the demand for its polishing cloth after weeks of shortages, we can’t say the same about all other products it launched in the past few months. As the company plans to report its Q1 2022 earnings this Thursday, Apple still has to catch up on manufacturing its products before launching new ones in the coming months.
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Fortune magazine has published its annual “Most Powerful Women” list, and Apple SVP of retail and people, Deirdre O’Brien, and VP of environment, policy, and social initiatives, Lisa Jackson, are among them.
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The Cyber Readiness Institute announced this week that Apple has joined as co-chair of the institute to invest in bolstering global small business cybersecurity education and protection. In a blog post, CRI welcomed the Cupertino company and its co-founder, saying they look forward to collaborating with Apple:
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A new report by NkkeiAsia says that iPhone 13 buyers are facing “longer-than-expected” delivery time due to the COVID-19 wave in Vietnam and the deployment of a new camera feature.
Although reports suggest that iPhone 13 camera parts get priority as Samsung orders fall below expectations, supply chains in Vietnam are struggling with constrained supplies of camera modules for the four iPhone 13 models as a significant number of its component parts are assembled in the country.
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Last week, in the Epic vs. Apple case, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers decided that Apple can no longer ban developers from using “buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing methods,” but she didn’t say Apple needs to lower its commission or that it could no longer charge its fee.
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One week since the #AppleToo movement started, it received nearly 500 reports from people across the company that mostly feels ignored by the human resources team. In a new interview, Apple engineer Cher Scarlett, who is the voice of the movement, has addressed the movement and the internal response from other Apple employees.
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Apple’s senior director of worldwide developer marketing, Esther Hare, talks about the Apple Entrepreneur Camp program in a new interview and the need for more women and Black developers in the community. In an interview with the Brazilian newspaper O GLOBO, Hare defends that “coding must be accessible to all people.” Apple Entrepreneur Camp program exists for a few years now and supports educational opportunities for Black students, people of color, and women.
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Apple Store in Covent Garden, London
With a long-running EU investigation into the legality of Apple’s tax arrangements in Europe still showing no signs of reaching a conclusion, the size of last year’s UK tax bill isn’t likely to help its cause. Apple’s latest accounts show that it paid just £12.9M ($17M) in UK corporation tax despite making an estimated £2B ($2.6B) profit in the country.
As the Mail Online notes, this is the equivalent of just two hours’ profits on its global sales …
This week Zac and Benjamin talk some Apple Watch fitness, the many upset AAPL investors, and an Apple Music revamp! The Happy Hour podcast is available for download on iTunes and through our dedicated RSS feed.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/262500351″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”150″ iframe=”true” /]
Having filed a prospectus today with the SEC, Apple plans to offer around $5 billion in bonds, following a 2013 bond offering of $17 billion, and a 2014 offering of $12 billion. While Apple’s corporate coffers stand at over $178 billion after its most recent record-breaking quarter, even thriving companies sometimes use bond offerings to fund projects, lessening tax consequences in the process.
Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs put together the offering, which Apple says will be used towards
repurchases of our common stock and payment of dividends under our program to return capital to shareholders, funding for working capital, capital expenditures and acquisitions and repayment of debt.
As noted by The Wall Street Journal, the bonds will mature in 5 to 30 years, with a 10-year bond offering a 0.95% greater return than government-issued Treasurys. Apple carries a Moody’s rating of Aa1, the service’s second-highest rating, suggesting that the investment is exceptionally low-risk.
Apple is gearing up to issue another bond offering this week, with a conference call with investors reportedly scheduled today, according to reports this morning from Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal. Apple hasn’t announced that it is holding an investor call today as of yet, but the announcement will likely be posted to Apple’s Investor Relations website if it is indeed happening. According to the WSJ, this bond offering will be the first from Apple to involve the euro currency:
The disconnect between Apple’s corporate performance and its stock value is something we’ve often commented on in the past. But rarely has the gap between the two been made more visually obvious than in a set of nine bar-charts published by Fortune, comparing Apple with Amazon and Google.
Judging from Merckel’s bar charts, what the market seems to be saying is that it believes Google and Amazon will keep growing indefinitely.
For Apple, it will believe it when it sees the next hit product.
The three ones above give the starkest illustration, while the complete set below give a fuller picture …
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Sums done by Moody’s Investment Services (via Bloomberg) confirm reports that Apple’s approach of borrowing the $100b needed to fund its stock buy-back and dividend plans will result in massive tax savings, estimated at $9.2B …
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The first stage of Apple’s plan to spend $100 billion in share buy-backs and increased dividends was completed yesterday as Apple sold $17 billion’s worth of corporate bonds – the world’s largest corporate debt sale.
Although Apple has a cash balance of $145b, much of this money is held in overseas subsidiaries, and Apple would have to pay tax on it to bring it back to the USA. It is cheaper for it to borrow the money instead …
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As we Tweeted earlier today, Apple has slashed its price of new base model MacBooks to a record low price: only $728. That is $271 off of retail and even $200 off of Amazon’s price. To get that price, Click here and visit the ‘Education Store’ link on the left.
Interestingly, Apple mentions that this is only a $100 savings, so perhaps a drop is in store for the retail version as well.
iTunes 9.0.2, a 93MB update, adds support for Apple TV software version 3.0, adds an option for a dark background for Grid View, and improves support for accessibility.
Update: In the "improves support for accessibility" column, you can also put "breaks Palm Pre sync again". It doesn’t, however, interfere with Jailbreakers.
You can change the background in the iTunes prefs like so:
It looks like the Snow Leopard transition is moving along pretty well, if our Google Analytics are any indication. A week after release, over 55% of you Mac users are using Snow Leopard (which includes PowerPC users who don’t have the option). The bleeding edge 9to5mac community is probably a little ahead of the rest of the world but the stat is still an extremely positive sign for Apple. For the rest of you (on Intel), get updating!
For the work week, it was still the most popular version of the Mac OS (below) garnering 50% of the logged machines.
In fact, (impressive!!) 10% of you were on Snow Leopard the day before it was released! That is some early adoption!
Update: We checked in for a few minutes but guess what? No bars on AT&T. Here’s the video that we missed.
Tonight, Apple will produce its first-ever live event streamed to the iPhone: a concert by the electronica band Underworld. Head to iphone.akamai.com or underworldlive.com to queue up. The show starts at midnight Eastern US time and the stream is free.
The broadcast is thought to be a test/showcase for Apple’s new HTTP streaming protocol which uses adaptive bitrates to deliver a continuous smooth stream in varying network conditions. "Varying conditions" are often the case when on 3G networks like AT&T’s. Speaking of which, don’t expect to be able to make a call during the show tonight if the word gets out (Retweet!).
Underworld’s Karl Hyde and Rick Smith profess to being huge Apple fans and recently released their entire catalog on iTunes. Apple is using partners at Inlet Technologies and Akamai to power tonight’s show.
Underworld – Born Slippy Nuxx
http://mediaservices.myspace.com/services/media/embed.aspx/m=4476241,t=1,mt=video
