Apple will start selling fully unlocked, SIM-free iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus models in the United States beginning tomorrow, January 6th, according to several sources. The unlocked iPhones will be available both via Apple’s physical retail stores and online store…
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster is famous for his annual prediction that Apple’s long-rumored television is launching next year, but this year he’s mixing it up a little, predicting instead that it will be launched in two years’ time.
Back in 2011, he predicted at the IGNITION conference that it would launch before the 2012 holiday season. Once it was clear that wasn’t going to happen, he predicted late in 2012 that it would be arriving in time for, yep, you guessed it, the 2013 holiday season. He clung to that one throughout the early part of last year, but has kept quiet on the subject this year – until now …
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Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty says that an analysis of Apple’s recent SEC filing strongly suggests that the company has not only made a big bet on the success of the iPhone 6, with large advance orders, but also that it is likely to launch the long-awaited iWatch this quarter.
The graph, obtained by Business Insider, shows the historical correlation between off-balance sheet commitments – the technical financial term for money invested in things like tooling, component purchases and manufacturing contracts – and quarterly revenue. Essentially, if you know how much Apple is investing in new products in one quarter, you can pretty accurately predict its revenue in the following quarter …
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Apple just might find itself shopping around for a new finance partner for its retail stores after Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes likened the company’s future potential to that of Microsoft.
Downgrading AAPL from a buy to a hold, Reitzes said that while he was excited by the iWatch and Apple television ideas as a consumer, he didn’t see either driving double-digit growth. Quoted by Business Insider, he said:
We look at a valuation analogy vs. Microsoft from 2000 to about 2010 and see no precedent that large-size tech companies simply start to broadly outperform again after a tough year or two if the law of large numbers is catching up to them and margins have peaked.
Ouch! Still, it appears his pessimism is not universally shared.
Offering somewhat of an answer to a very popular question among followers of Apple, new publication The Information is out with a report today offering a few interesting tidbits regarding Scott Forstall’s post-Apple activity.
Scott Forstall, the former SVP of iOS Software who was replaced by Craig Federighi under Tim Cook’s executive reorganization in late 2012, has reportedly been using his free time to advise startups, spend money philanthropically, and visit other countries.
Business Insider relays this message from the report:
Amir Efrati at new technology site The Information is reporting that Forstall spent the year traveling to Italy and South Africa. He also advised a few startups, and became more philanthropically involved, focusing on education, poverty, and human rights.
As for what’s next, Efrati doesn’t have any news, but he says VC firms like Kleiner Perkins and Andreessen Horowitz have stayed in touch, but Apple employees think Forstall’s next move will be starting his own company.
Forstall visited the UK in June, was in Zambia in early October http://t.co/3pPXUsurer
— Michael Steeber (@MichaelSteeber) December 9, 2013
While The Information’s report is somewhat vague, it reveals more details than the very private former Apple exec has let on in the past. Check out The Information to read the full report.
We discussed Tim Cook’s speaking at Duke’s Fuqua Business school on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of his MBA back in April. This weekend, Duke published insightful snippets of the remarks he made and they are incredibly insightful. Perhaps most interesting was Cook’s views on collaboration:
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Business Insider has gathered together a fun little collection of quotes by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates on each other, taken from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs …
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Adopting a move out of Google’s 20-percent time playbook, Apple has begun a program titled “Blue Sky” that gives select employees two weeks to work on a project not in their normal realm of responsibilities. Jessica Lessin of the Wall Street Journal shared the news on video (via Business Insider), where she said Apple’s two-week program is not as vast as the program Google offers. Instead, Apple’s program is a select amount of employees that get the free time.
Why would a company adopt such program? It gives employees a chance to work on something that interests them, in the hopes of spawning innovation. The program was created earlier this year under CEO Tim Cook, and it may signal an overall culture shift in the company. It will be interesting to see if any projects out of Blue Sky see the light of day, as many Google projects have.
There are many examples of flaws in Apple’s App Store review process. We know Apple is quick to reject apps that mimic the core functionality of iOS, such as Voice Answer, Find My Facebook Friends, or Airfoil, but those developers all made tweaks to their apps and were later accepted into the App Store. Perhaps a bigger problem is apps sneaking their way into the store as offensive or stolen content. We came across an example of each with two apps recently accepted into the App Store: Bulimia Duck (pictured above), which is a Yelp-like restaurant finder with an obviously offensive name, and Dragon Ball Z Jump, which is a hybrid of stolen IPs including Dragon Ball Z and popular iOS title Doodle Jump. These are just two examples of the type of apps making their way into the App Store every week.
Today, we get a bit of insight into what goes on behind the scenes during Apple’s review process. A former senior engineer at Apple, Mike Lee, talked to Business Insider about the app review team:
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5cL60TYY8oQ
Marketplace reporter Rob Schmitz is the second reporter ever to get an inside look at Foxconn, the manufacturing plant where Apple’s products are made. Today, Schmitz posted a video showing our first-ever look at the assembly process of an iPad as it goes down the assembly line at the Foxconn plant in Shanghai, China. It is interesting to look at how machines streamline some of the process. Schmitz also noted a few other interesting points, such as workers switching positions every few days while making $14 a day when first starting.
