iOS Devices

Apple’s lead manufacturer Foxconn reported a 13 percent rise in net profit to 106.7B new Taiwan dollars (US$3.5B) following record iPhone and iPad sales, reports the WSJ. More than 40 percent of the company’s revenue comes from Apple.

The news comes a few days after Apple supplier Pegatron reported a 22 percent rise in earnings.

Hon Hai’s results were underpinned by demand from Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple, which sold 51 million iPhones in its fiscal first quarter ended Dec. 28, 2013—up 7% from the same period the previous year […]

Apple also said it sold a record 26 million iPads in the quarter, compared with 22.9 million in the year-ago period …

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One of our favourite concept designers, Martin Hajek, has been busy again – this time with an iPhone 6 concept reminiscent of the iPod Nano design, commissioned by Dutch site iPhoneclub.

The iPhone 6 is widely expected to be launched in two different sizes, with Bloomberg and Nikkei specifically suggesting 4.7- and 5.5-inch sizes. Hajek’s design shows the 4.7-inch model, though thinner bezels and reduced casing top and bottom mean that the exterior dimensions don’t increase too dramatically.

Three of the images contrast the new concept with the iPhone 5s, shown in the gallery below … 
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Russian government officials have stopped using iPads in an official capacity, instead opting to use offerings from Samsung according to a new report by Business Insider. The new Samsung devices are custom, secured tablets designed to be used with the confidential information government officials often need to handle.

Russian officials have denied that the swap is an effort to stop supporting American companies following sanctions related to the Ukrainian crisis. It also doesn’t seem to relate to recent rumors that the US government had backdoor access to Apple’s iOS devices—a claim Apple has denied.

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I’m sure most of us have at some point had Windows- and Android-using friends ask us why we pay the ‘Apple tax’ – the price difference between an Apple product and what they perceive to be an equivalent competitor product.

A large part of the answer, of course, is that the competitor product isn’t equivalent at all. You can’t compare a MacBook with its premium materials, build-quality, high-spec components, screen quality and aesthetics with a low-end Windows laptop with plastic casing, low-spec innards and cheap and cheerful display. No more than you can compare an iPhone with a budget ‘droid. When you do genuine like-for-like comparisons with truly equivalent products, the Apple premium shrinks considerably.

But to get an accurate idea of the effective purchase cost, you also need to take into account both the replacement cycle and resale value … 
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A new report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, via Fortune, sheds some light on customer behaviour of how quickly people get their iPad, iPhone or Macs upgraded or replaced. For instance, iPhones have approximate lifespans of two years, tied closely to when people’s contracts end. If the phone is in good condition, rather unsurprisingly, most people replace their phones alongside their new contract. Macs stay around for up to four years before being swapped out for newer equipment. The report argues that iPad life cycles more closely resemble Macs than iPhones.

However, in the case of loss or damage, people are much more compelled to replace their iPhones than Macs or iPads. Eighty percent of people replace iPhones within just two days. For Macs and iPads, this stretches out a week or even more. Over a quarter of buyers surveyed said they would replace an iPad immediately compared to approximately 37% for iPhones.

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China Mobile announced that it sold 1.34M 4G handsets in February and that “most of them” were iPhones. China Mobile chairman Xi Guohua was relatively non-committal on the numbers.

It’s just been getting started for one or two months. So far it’s hard to tell how that will affect our business […]

We are happy with the progress as we are still building our 4G network and the coverage is only available in some major cities.

Analyst estimates of likely sales had varied widely. Most had predicted at least 15-17M sales a year in China as a whole, however, suggesting that 1M in a month on what is by far the country’s largest carrier may be somewhat lower than anticipated … 
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Earlier today, we predicted that Apple had plans to bring the previously-released fourth-generation iPad back into production to replace the aging iPad 2. As expected, the fourth-gen iPad is now available once again on Apple’s website, this time with only a 16 GB capacity.

Aside from offering the single capacity choice, there aren’t any changes to the device. This model replaces the iPad 2, which has been around since the days of the 30-pin connector. The newer version includes Apple’s custom dual-core A6X processor, a 5 MP iSight camera, and 1.2 MP FaceTime camera. (Press release below:)

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The South China Morning Post is reporting that the iPhone 5c, created by Apple to target growth markets like China, has hit only a 2 percent share of all iOS devices after four months, in contrast to the iPhone 5s with a 12 percent share and the original iPhone 5 with around 15 percent … 
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Seven years out from the original iPhone’s introduction, and four years past the iPad’s launch, Apple has found its next market ripe for reinvention: the mobile healthcare and fitness-tracking industry. Apple’s interest in healthcare and fitness tracking will be displayed in an iOS application codenamed Healthbook. I first wrote about Apple’s plans for Healthbook in January, and multiple sources working directly on the initiative’s development have since provided new details and images of Healthbook that provide a clearer view of Apple’s plans for dramatically transforming the mobile healthcare and fitness-tracking space…

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Researchers at Stanford University’s School of Medicine have developed two low-cost iPhone adapters that provide images of the eye that usually require specialist ophthalmology equipment costing tens of thousands of dollars. The university hopes that it will be useful both for primary care physicians in the U.S. as well as rural medical centres in developing countries.

The adapters make it easy for anyone with minimal training to take a picture of the eye and share it securely with other health practitioners or store it in the patient’s electronic record.

“Think Instagram for the eye,” said one of the developers, assistant professor of ophthalmology Robert Chang, MD … 
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As usual, the annual Pwn2Own contest featured many hackers targeting the latest operating systems and browsers from the major vendors, including Apple. Threatpost reports that the “Keen Team” focused Safari on Thursday and exploited it with relative ease.

The team took home a $40,000 bounty for their efforts on Safari, as well as a share in a $75,000 prize for co-engineering a zero-day Flash exploit. They say they will donate some of their winnings towards charities representing missing Malaysian Airplane passengers.

The group say that for Safari, they used two different exploit vectors. One vulnerability was a heap overflow in WebKit that enabled arbitrary code execution. The team then used this opening to use another exploit to bypass the application sandbox and run code as if it was user privileged.

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iOS 7.1 may have only been released this week, but it’s already got it’s own “gate”-worthy issue: battery life is abysmal. Reports on Twitter and Apple’s support discussion forums indicate that users are seeing significant drain on their batteries after installing the new update.

[tweet https://twitter.com/horwitz/status/444305435265220608 align=’center’]

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