Apple said on Tuesday that profits in its most recent quarter were flat compared with a year earlier because of an economic slowdown in China and diminishing demand for new iPhones.
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Total revenue for the quarter was $84.3 billion, a 5 percent drop from a year earlier.
Sales of iPhones, following a global trend, have been leveling off for several years. Their revenue was $51.98 billion, a 15 percent drop from a year earlier. It’s harder now to offer more specifics on iPhone sales because Apple recently stopped disclosing how many units it sells each quarter.
If Apple is a company that’s in dire straits, as you might read about in some media reports, its executives certainly show no sign. They seem confident that Apple will weather the storm in China and that with some adjustments to how the iPhone is sold, it can bounce back—and all the while, its other product lines (and its subscription-services business) continue to grow rapidly.
Cook and Maestri sounded apologetic about Apple missing so badly with its financial forecast for this quarter, but beyond that, they sounded much more like executives at a company that just had its second-best financial quarter ever and walked away with $84 billion in revenue and $20 billion in profit. Nobody should set up a GoFundMe for Apple any time soon.
But put it all in one place, speed it up, and what you get is: “We are going to sell a bundle of other people’s TV shows and movies, and add our own, and make sure you can watch it anywhere you want.”
What we still don’t know: When Apple is going to launch all of this (but it should be this spring), how much they’re going to charge for it, and whether it will be its own product, or designed to be part of a much bigger subscription service (maybe it will come with Apple Music! Or an Apple News service! Or something else! Etc.
Cook says Apple is rethinking how it prices iPhones. It will no longer track the US dollar price exactly and instead set iPhone prices in local currency for each market.
He says the regions where iPhone sales were the weakest in their latest results were areas where currency fluctuations hit hardest. The company will be adjusting prices in some areas to bring them closer to what they were in local currency.
The more I examined the pricing, though, the more evidence there was that the latest Apple products are more expensive to make. Apple also appears to be under pressure to introduce more complex innovations to compete in the brutal technology market.
Take a look at the company’s gross profit margin, or the money it makes from products after the cost to make and sell them is factored in. If Apple’s gross margins are lower today even though prices are higher, that indicates the products cost more to make.
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Discounts for new Apple products are rare. But here are several methods to lower the cost of your next purchase.
A team of former U.S. government intelligence operatives working for the United Arab Emirates hacked into the iPhones of activists, diplomats and rival foreign leaders with the help of a sophisticated spying tool called Karma, in a campaign that shows how potent cyber-weapons are proliferating beyond the world’s superpowers and into the hands of smaller nations.
The cyber tool allowed the small Gulf country to monitor hundreds of targets beginning in 2016, from the Emir of Qatar and a senior Turkish official to a Nobel Peace laureate human-rights activist in Yemen, according to five former operatives and program documents reviewed by Reuters. The sources interviewed by Reuters were not Emirati citizens.
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Three former operatives said they understood Karma to rely, at least in part, on a flaw in Apple’s messaging system, iMessage. They said the flaw allowed for the implantation of malware on the phone through iMessage, even if the phone’s owner didn’t use the iMessage program, enabling the hackers to establish a connection with the device.
But calling your own phone number after starting a call with someone else is relatively rare, so it could have easily slipped through the cracks. Williams isn’t surprised a random person found it before Apple’s actual security team.
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“I think what they missed here was an opportunity to train their support staff and their social media staff on fast routing of security bugs, or potential security bugs to the right team,” she says.
For the next week, Michele Thompson, 43, tried to notify Apple of the flaw through a variety of avenues, many of which were dead ends.
"It was very frustrating getting them to respond," she said. "I get it. I'm sure they get all sorts of kooks that try to report things to them."
A corollary to this point is that while you may “trust” some big tech companies (say, Apple) more than others (say, Facebook), security bugs happen to everyone. Products made by companies with a track record of lax attitudes toward user security should absolutely be treated with caution. But products made by companies with a strong record on security can betray you, too. The more intimate access you grant a product, the greater that risk. Your smartphone is a security vulnerability that you carry around in your purse or pocket all day.
"Plaintiff was undergoing a private deposition with a client when this defective product breach allowed for the recording of a private deposition," he wrote.
"The Product was used for its intended purposes because Plaintiff updated their phone for the purpose of group Facetime calls but not unsolicited eavesdropping. Plaintiff suffered injuries."
Apple is launching 58 new Today at Apple sessions to beef up its in-store education offerings for people who want to explore Apple’s products. The sessions, which cover video, photography, accessibility, coding, music, health and more, are free to attend and available at all of Apple’s retail stores across the world.
[...] Throughout the day, Apple took us through sample Today at Apple sessions across Apple’s three categories: Skills, Walks and Labs. Skills are quick, thirty-minute sessions designed to teach you new techniques, Walks are actual physical walks with certain Apple products and services and Labs are 90-minute sessions where you create a project.
Desperate for data on its competitors, Facebook has been secretly paying people to install a “Facebook Research” VPN that lets the company suck in all of a user’s phone and web activity, similar to Facebook’s Onavo Protect app that Apple banned in June and that was removed in August. Facebook sidesteps the App Store and rewards teenagers and adults to download the Research app and give it root access in what may be a violation of Apple policy so the social network can decrypt and analyze their phone activity, a TechCrunch investigation confirms. Facebook admitted to TechCrunch it was running the Research program to gather data on usage habits.
Since 2016, Facebook has been paying users ages 13 to 35 up to $20 per month plus referral fees to sell their privacy by installing the iOS or Android “Facebook Research” app. Facebook even asked users to screenshot their Amazon order history page. The program is administered through beta testing services Applause, BetaBound and uTest to cloak Facebook’s involvement, and is referred to in some documentation as “Project Atlas” — a fitting name for Facebook’s effort to map new trends and rivals around the globe.
Facebook will end a controversial market research program that violated Apple developer guidelines in order to harvest user data from the phones of volunteers. The company said early Wednesday evening that the Facebook Research app, which offers volunteers between the ages of 13 and 35 monthly $20 gift cards in exchange for near-total access to the data on their phones, would no longer be available on iOS. It will apparently continue to be available for Android users.
As Apple's Reminders app stagnates year after year, third-party apps like Memento continue improving and offering designs that fit in well with modern iOS aesthetics. Today's improvements make Memento an even more appealing alternative for those ready to move on from Reminders, or who want the benefits of a third-party app without giving up the comfort of integration with Apple's ecosystem.
In September, members of Google's Chrome security team put forth a radical proposal: Kill off URLs as we know them. The researchers aren't actually advocating a change to the web's underlying infrastructure. They do, though, want to rework how browsers convey what website you're looking at, so that you don't have to contend with increasingly long and unintelligible URLs—and the fraud that has sprung up around them. In a talk at the Bay Area Enigma security conference on Tuesday, Chrome usable security lead Emily Stark is wading into the controversy, detailing Google's first steps toward more robust website identity.
This is something that I've always understood to be true during the early days: that Windows computers require a keyboard and, optionally, a mouse to operate, while Macintosh computers require a mouse and, optionally, a keybaord to operate.
Then the web came along, and nobody, not Microsoft nor Blackberry, has ever built a web browser that works well with only a keyboard.
If Apple continue to insist that a touch-screen laptop doesn't make sense, and that a pointing device for iPad Pro computers doesn't make sense, maybe Apple should spend a bit more of their R&D money to figure out how to make it easier for customers to operqate an iPad Pro when used as a laptop with a keyboard.
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Thanks for reading.