Making another trip around the rumor mill is the suggestion that Apple is moving torward becoming their own mobile service provider with full intentions of being able to subscribe iPad and iPhone customers directly.
The only difference with the news this time around is it is being given legs by Whitney Bluestein, a veteran wireless industry strategist who can offer some credibility to this idea.
Apple is generally known for having great customer service. For example, it’s long been a policy to replace accidentally broken devices with new ones, and getting a repair under Apple Care is usually a simple and hassle-free task.
Apple’s top notch customer service has earned it the number one spot in Vocalabs phone help quality study, which Vocalabs attributes to its refusal to outsource its North American phone help.
With Apple’s release of their financials for the first quarter of 2012, stock prices have soared to 10% above their value pre-announcement (helping Apple to regain a little ground lost in the days leading up to the earnings report). As analysts expected, the news was all good with a reported $39.2 billion made with a net quarterly profit of $11.6 billion (up from $24.7 billion and net quarterly profit of $6 billion from the same quarter last year), not to mention the company’s reported assets totally over $151 billion with $110 billion in cash reserves (which they have announced they will dip into in order to start paying its investors a dividend).
“He who hesitates is lost,” particularly if he planned to go to this year’s über-popular Apple Worldwide Developers Conference and has yet to get a ticket.
According to CNET the event sold out in less than two hours after it was announced! The speed at which developers snapped up tickets bests last year’s previous record when the conference sold out in a still rapid 10 hours.
Microsoft has a reputation for very expensive licensing and they have reinforced this by way of “a new optional add-on to its Software Assurance (SA) volume licensing agreement — called a Companion Device License (CDL).” This means that customers wanting to access corporate desktops remotely using their non-Windows-based mobile devices, like the iPad, will now come with an additional cost. For those who acquire one of these new licenses, up to four personal devices will be covered for remote access.
It’s looking like iPhoto ’12 will be released for the Mac sometime this summer, taking a lot of cues from the recently revamped iOS version of the app. Expectations are that the new version of the image editing software will come complete with retouching functions and easy transfer of photos between any devices that are running iPhoto. It would also make sense that the new version would move to iCloud support, away from the currently available MobileMe publishing options.
Apple is finally fighting back and defending themselves following allegations from the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission suggesting that Apple had misled consumers when they announced that the new third generation iPad is compatible with 4G networks. The basis for these claims seemed to surface when people started discovering that the new iPad could not connect to Australian 4G networks.
Apple has turned the finger back at the source, arguing that the problem is actually that Australia’s networks are mislabeled and not truly “4G”.
In Apple’s official statement, the computer company indicates that the new iPad is labeled in accordance with the accepted industry and regulatory use of the “4G” descriptor.
The world has been watching this seemingly bizarre lawsuit launched by Proview Technology against Apple. The bankrupt Hong-Kong based manufacturer of computer displays has maintained that they rightfully own the trademark to the iPad name and that Apple is in direct violation of that assertion. They have tried just about everything to get soemthing out of Apple’s considerable wallet, including an attempt to ban the import and export of iPad devices from China.
Lucky for them, Apple seems interested in making this go away.
We’ve heard a lot of strange things coming out of Google’s corner of the earth lately, not the least of which is a statement from their CEO, Larry Page, indicating that he really wasn’t sure Android was a critical asset for his company. Sure he feels it is “very important” but only because it is “ultimately a vehicle for Google services like ads, not an end into itself.”
Page doesn’t stop there. He goes on to explain that the reason Google created Android was because early smartphones couldn’t seem to run Google services properly. I am sure those who are supportive of the operating system will be delighted to know that those who created it really have no visible respect for the platform and see it only as a delivery device for their other services (most of which are measurable failures).
Most people assume that the primary reason for building the iPad in China is to take advantage of inexpensive labor. This may be true in part but another significant factor is the lack of strict environmental regulations (China currently ranks 116th out of 132 countries on Yale’s 2012 Environmental Performance Index rankings).
Apple, along with publishers Macmillan and Penguin Group, look like they will pursue trial rather than settlement in the lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice against Apple and five of the “big six” book publishers.
Yesterday marked the first hearing in Manhattan Federal Court since the DOJ’s anti-trust division filed a law suit last week that accused Apple and the book publishers of trying to impede Amazon’s ability to discount books by colluding to fix e-book prices.
How clean is your cloud? That’s what activist group Greenpeace asked in a new report that explores the energy choices of the fastest growing IT companies and how much energy is used by the rapidly expanding online world.
Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo were among the 14 companies that Greenpeace took a look at, and each of these companies utilizes multiple data storage centers, which consume the energy equivalent of 180,000 homes.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin has issued a warning that there are “very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world.” His warning comes with expressions of great concern that these same forces are working against the principles of openness and universal access that the Internet was founded on three decades ago.
Furthermore, Brin does everything short of calling his competition un-American in an effort to make them out to be the bad guys while painting a white cape on Google’s back.
As the certified Queen of the Post-Its, my life seems to be overrun by tiny, sticky notes written to remind about a seemingly endless series of tasks, projects and errands. These notes cover my desk, my calendar, my checkbook, my fridge–heck, sometimes they even cover my iPhone and iPad.
Now, with this updated version of the Remarks app, perhaps I can at least clear a few of those notes off my iPad screen–if not from my desk, calendar and fridge, too.
Tech nerds and lovers of good design have long comprised two large segments of the Apple fan base. News that Phillippe Starck, the French concepteur devin, is collaborating with Apple on a “revolutionary” product may bring on fits of ecstasy amongst members of the latter group.
Apple Insider reports that Starck announced these plans on the French Info radio show. Le Figaro printed his remarks. The translation suggests that Starck could not divulge much information about the new product, citing Apple’s “religious cult of secrecy.” Just what the new product will be (iTV? iPhone 5? mini iPad?) remains under wraps, but Apple will release it within the next 8 months.
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