Since 2012, Apple has been buying back shares at the extraordinary rate of around $10 billion per quarter. A year ago it picked up the pace to around $20 billion per quarter. After a reprieve in the March quarter, the company has resumed its buyback frenzy with its largest ever quarterly funding: $24 billion in the June quarter. Here's why.
Apple's reported operational expenses for research and development in the June quarter hit a new all-time high of $4.257 billion, well over twice the quarterly spending it reported in 2015. Apple's aggressive expansion demonstrates the company is building for the future even as its rivals retreat from tablets and smartwatches and fail to keep pace with Apple's aggressive OS updates and custom silicon work.
When Apple entered the smartphone market in 2007, it didn't do so to lose money making most of the world's smartphones as a public service. All these years later, a shocking number of analysts and reporters still seem to be confused about this.
Apple's continuing performance as a market-responsive, commercially savvy innovator is destroying feebleminded media narratives that seek to portray the company as helpless and befuddled. It also demonstrates that the real incompetence lies in bad reporting by sloppy journalists seeking to deliver titillating headlines rather than accurate, factual portrayals of the industry.
Microsoft is running a retro-styled advertising campaign tied into the new third season of Netflix's "Stranger Things" TV series, which is set in 1985. It promotes fake nostalgia for a romanticized Windows launch that in reality was only scoffed at as underpowered, poorly-architected vaporware at the time.
The magic behind Apple's subtlety flattering new FaceTime feature in iOS 13 beta 3 has incrementally developed across years of evolving software and hardware advancements, offering some interesting insight into how Apple uniquely charts out the future with its products.
The Wall Street Journal crafted the "Big Hack" of Apple clickbait: a high drama tell-all that insulted everyone at Apple, mocking its departing design chief, his boss, and the team that worked with him. As fictional drama it was Netflix-caliber entertainment, but to insiders it was so bad it was hard to finish.
As Apple prepares the release of iOS 13 and splits off the new iPadOS 13 for specialized mobile tablets, Microsoft's former chief executive Bill Gates mused this week that it would have been the "natural thing" for Microsoft to have been the "standard non-Apple phone platform." But he's wrong, here's why.
The news that Jony Ive is leaving his Chief Design Officer position at Apple has fueled predictable handwringing. But while Ive's three decades of work at Apple put him at the top of a short list of "the world's most famous product designers," the company isn't facing a "crisis of design," but rather an opportunity.
In perhaps the cutest application of machine learning ever, Apple has included algorithms in its latest computer vision framework to enable iPhone and iPad apps to detect your furry friends in images and determine if they are fancy feline or a good doggo.
Apple's macOS Catalina is another ambitious refinement of the Mac featuring a fundamental rethinking of iTunes and an infusion of fresh ideas from iOS: from Sidecar to Continuity Sketch to Screen Time, a whole new world of Catalyst apps from iPad, and many more features under the hood. But note: Catalina is still in beta!
I talked to lots of developers at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, from fresh-faced scholarship winners entirely new to WWDC to an experienced veteran who reported having first attended Apple's annual dev event back in 1991. The unanimous answer to “what’s the most exciting thing you saw this week?” was SwiftUI, hands down.
In a perfect demonstration of how careless writers seeking to advance a narrative can take a molehill of flawed data and create a mountain of fearsome clickbait, Axios just dug up IDC’s "embarrassing" smartphone data from the March quarter in an effort to portray Apple as doomed.
Project Catalyst is designed to enable many of the existing one million iPad apps to also work natively on the Mac in a way that's effectively indistinguishable from existing Mac software and transparent to users. At the same time, it's also expected to help fuel the supply of iPad optimized apps. Here's how.
Beyond its engineering labs and technical sessions, Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference also hosts a series of early morning exercise workouts for ambitious attendees. This year, its high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workout and 5K fun run have drawn incredible crowds of participants, most wearing an Apple Watch.
Leading up to its 30th Annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, Calif., Apple is channeling its unique hardware savvy to create a future that is powerful, premium, accessible to everyone, and private to yourself. And it's doing it alone, competing largely against much cheaper copies of its own work that are supported by surveillance advertising. Here's why that matters.
China's Ministry of Commerce has floated a retaliation plan intended to punish companies complying with the Trump Administration's Entity List ban on doing business with Huawei. That could have a profound impact on two of the largest software platforms licensed in China: Android and Windows, as well as broadly-licensed silicon intellectual property from ARM and Qualcomm.
According to a wide variety of analysts following Apple, the Trump Administration's trade war with China and its Entity Listing of Huawei is maybe somewhat bad for the largest Android producer in China--and perhaps even for Android, given that it has now lost its second largest licensee globally--but it's mostly just bad news for Apple, because both the state and people of China are going to respond by shunning Apple's products. That's wrong, here's why.
To enable purchases at merchants that don't yet accept Apple Pay, Apple designed its own physical credit card in partnership with Goldman Sachs and MasterCard, associating the Apple brand with a new set of "digital-first" credit features. It also features unique iOS app functionality with a strong focus on the privacy of your data.
Apple Card works just like any other Apple Pay account, but the software experience Apple is creating around it to enhance digital banking represents both a new Services venture for Apple and also an additional reason for its users to keep buying Apple hardware. That's why Apple is paying its customers to use it.
AirPods are emblematic of what makes today’s Apple work. It’s a competent technology product, but one that makes an emotional connection with you as you use it. And because they’re designed to be used often and for extended periods of time, they keep associating themselves with your happiness derived from using them, ingratiating themselves as trusted devices that recommend that you buy more gear from Apple in the future.
