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.
In April 2015, Apple introduced its new Retina Display MacBook with a new “butterfly” keyboard design. Some critics didn’t like its shorter key travel, but complaints really began to snowball as its mechanism was adopted across Apple's other notebook models. Today it's regarded by some as a major problem, but journalists describing the problem don't seem to really know what that problem actually is, and are misleading users with their reports based on fact-free claims
Apple has announced a new crop of MacBook Pro models with Intel's newest 8th and 9th generation Core processors and is addressing concerns with its ultra slim butterfly keyboards with new enhancements to substantially reduce issues users may experience with stuck or unresponsive keys.
During the legal battle between Apple and Qualcomm that threatened to delay 5G-capable iPhones, Huawei mockingly announced to the media that it could supply Apple with its own 5G modems. But now the tables have turned: Qualcomm is established as an iPhone supplier while Huawei has to scramble to deliver devices without leading chips from Qualcomm, Qorvo, Xilinx, Intel, and a variety of other suppliers of U.S. technology.
It was so hard to contain the excitement of having #OfficiallySwitchedtoAndroid that even a media influencer working for T-Mobile forgot to actually use the BKK OnePlus 7 Pro she was "crazy in love with" and instead tweeted out her new device relationship status from her iPhone.
Apple has worked to make user privacy and data security primary features it promotes in its products and platforms. So why is the company porting its new TV App to smart TVs and streaming devices from Samsung, Amazon, LG, Roku and others that are notorious for spying on users and collecting data about their viewing behaviors? Here's a look.
It once seemed necessary that Apple's iTunes worked on Windows PCs, and it wasn't surprising that the Apple Music app was delivered for Android phones. But in the world of smart TVs, Apple's first port to a larger outside platform isn't to Android. It's to Samsung's Tizen, an OS created specifically to rival Android as a platform that Samsung and its partners could use without Google's rules. Here's why.
As movie downloads and rentals shift to streaming subscriptions, Apple has to maintain the relevance of its iOS, tvOS and macOS platforms in being able to play popular content. But why did it start from scratch in creating Apple TV+ rather than simply using its huge pile of cash to snatch up Netflix?
Apple's announcement of series of original new content projects for its upcoming Apple TV+ subscription service raises two questions: why would Apple want to be in that business, and why didn't it just acquire Netflix, the established leader in that space?
When Google decided to stop rebranding its partners' Androids as Nexus models and launched its own Pixel phones three years ago, it targeted the camera as its best hope for standing out in a crowded, competitive smartphone market. That strategy failed in 2016, 2017, and in 2018. This year, Pixel 3 sales are even worse. Now, Google is back with a Nexus-priced phone in a market being devastated by even cheaper commodity.
Apple's investment of hundreds of millions of dollars into Apple Arcade is not only one of the biggest bets it has ever made to draw attention to iOS, but is certainly also its largest effort yet to promote video gaming in particular. Take a look back at the history of gaming on the Mac to see why it is necessary.
Video games have long been literally the center of attention in the App Store, so Apple's prospects for finding Arcade subscribers among its installed base of over 1 billion iOS devices is pretty straightforward. But can Apple Arcade spread the wealth of iOS' developer attention to its other platforms, meaningfully driving new interest in gaming on Macs and Apple TV? Here's a look at the future of macOS and tvOS games.
Apple Arcade and related Services are intend to fuel sales of new hardware by attracting new customers and prompting upgrades. But is it realistic to expect that Apple can drive sales growth for iPhone as overall smartphone growth stalls or even contracts globally? Pundits like to say that iPhone "is over" and that Apple has to run out and discover a new hit product. But there's wrong, here's why.
Apple has built a very strong position in mobile gaming in its iOS App Store. With Apple Arcade, it is working to create a new pipeline of fun, original, attractive, exclusive games, without ads and where privacy is protected. How will this impact Android and Google Play?
Xiaomi took the unusual step of reporting its smartphone shipments for the March quarter, which it issued in response to phone shipment data it said was "inaccurate and unfair, and deviates from our actual performance in terms of shipment of smartphones." Apple neither reported iPhone units nor took issue with IDC's data, despite its shipments clearly being undercounted by a margin more than twice as large
All of Apple's recently unveiled Services—and most of its existing Services business—are essentially software: useful applications of hardware that help drive hardware purchases in addition to generating revenue on their own. Take a look at what these strategic new Services actually mean for Apple and its installed user base, starting with Apple Arcade.
IDC is one of the market research companies that confidently reports quarterly shipments, market share and growth figures for PCs, smartphones and other products with an implied accuracy down to the tenth of a percentage point. But the company's latest figures are "highly inaccurate" to the point of "embarrassing," according to well regarded analyst Neil Cybart of Above Avalon.
Over the past few years, Apple has increasingly directed analysts' attention to its growing revenues from a segment it calls Services. However, it's common to hear even Apple's happiest of customers frown at the idea, which is often cynically portrayed as an effort by the company to wring even more money from its premium hardware buyers. But the reality is that Services are largely software—and Software Sells Systems.
