Corporate

Highlights from Tim Cook’s Goldman Sachs talk

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated January 28, 2019

As announced yesterday, Apple CEO Tim Cook is speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Interactive Conference in San Francisco. Right on schedule, he began discussing topics of interest at 7.15am Pacific, 10:15am Eastern time, just after the markets open. Originally scheduled at 4:15pm Eastern, Cook's segment was shifted so he could be whisked more than 2,000 miles to Washington DC to sit beside Michelle Obama for the President's State of the Union address.

Apple is streaming its chief executive's remarks live on its Investor web site and should post the full audio shortly after the event. If you don't have the time to sit through the whole thing, we've got you covered with the most interesting bits and pieces from Cooks' presentation...

Sprint sold record 2.2M iPhones during the holiday quarter

Ed Sutherland ∙ February 7, 2013

U.S. carrier Sprint, the latest wireless provider to offer the Apple iPhone, announced Thursday it sold a record 2.2 million during the holiday fourth-quarter. A total of 6.6 million iPhones were sold for all of 2012, according to the company. Despite complaints of losses due to high subsidies, the iPhone has improved Sprint's ability to attract new customers.

The company said 38 percent of iPhone buyers during the fourth quarter were new subscribers. That's just slightly below the 40 percent of iPhones purchased by new customers throughout the entire year, according to the firm...

WSJ: competition forcing Apple’s PR to work ‘a little harder to get its message out’

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated June 13, 2016

There used to be a long-standing joke about Apple's public relations department that it was the least demanding job in Silicon Valley. It was almost as if Apple's PR bunnies were only required not to return calls from journalists and disregard email inquiries from various media outlets. Couple this inaccessibility and Apple's penchant for dreaming up shiny gadgets people lust after with the infamous culture of secrecy and you have a winning formula for a kind of coverage other companies would die for.

But the times they are a-changin', to paraphrase musician Bob Dylan, Steve Jobs favorite songwriter. The Wall Street Journal fittingly reported Tuesday that Apple's public relations team now has to work a little harder to get the message across, a tell-tale sign that competition is heating up. Hit the jump for more tidbits and my own insight on how Apple owns the media...

Dell eats the humble Apple pie: returns the money to shareholders, goes private

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated February 27, 2017

Asked to comment on the hole the then nearly bankrupt Apple had gotten itself into, Michael Dell famously said back in 1997 that he’d “shut the company down and give the money back to the shareholders.”

Fast forward fifteen years and Dell’s founder and CEO is giving the money back to his own shareholders as the company he built goes private amid widening losses as the global PC market experiences a severe slump.

What goes around comes around.

Michael Dell should have known better by paying attention to Steve Jobs's advice: it indeed is best not to mess with karma...

Samsung doubles down on the stylus, goes into bed with Wacom

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated January 28, 2019

And just like that, Samsung of South Korea buys a five percent stake of the stylus maker Wacom in a transaction valued at $58.2 million. Samsung of course is riding high on the popularity of its pen-based Note devices and Wacom suggests that Samsung with this acquisition is aiming to incorporate its stylus tech into Galaxy smartphones and tablets.

Note that Wacom also makes digital pen accessories for iPads and Mac-compatible digital tablets that are popular with professional designers and illustrators. I'm holding my breath for an Apple-made stylus because pen-based mobile devices are gaining traction, in spit of Steve Jobs disdain for the stylus...

Confirmed: Apple’s new R&D center going live this summer in Shanghai

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated October 12, 2018

Earlier in the month, the major Chinese web portal Tencent claimed Apple was looking to establish a research and development center in Beijing and last week Cnet China corroborated the story, but noted that the rumored six-story facility with over 100,000 square feet of space is actually going up in Shanghai. Today, a new report from another Chinese news site give us more in way of details...

Exxon surpasses Apple’s market cap, becomes most valuable corporation

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated January 26, 2016

Despite Apple's record holiday quarter earnings, investors continue to punish the Apple stock which has took quite a beating since Tuesday's earnings report. As the stock continues to slide, Apple on Friday hit a new 52-week low, becoming worth less than Exxon Mobil and ceding the top spot to the oil corporation.

As of this writing, Exxon Mobil was worth about $1 billion more than Apple. Though Apple was briefly ahead, Exxon has reclaimed the lead. The situation is changing by the second so we'll have to wait until the end of trading today to see who emerges victorious...

Apple CEO praises employees for their ‘incredible hard work and focus’

Christian Zibreg ∙ January 24, 2013

Following up on yesterday's record fiscal 2013 first-quarter earnings release (which, unsurprisingly, has failed to impress Wall Street), Apple CEO Tim Cook issued an email to employees last night. The internal communiqué congratulates employees on their performance as Cook thanks everyone on their "incredible hard work and focus" that has resulted in 75 million iDevice sales during the holiday quarter.

He also announced Apple will be holding a Town Hall meeting today at 10am Pacific time and invited employees to submit questions via AppleWeb. Cook, like his predecessor Steve Jobs, holds Q&A sessions with employees following quarterly earnings to discuss business, strategy and the future. We'll be keeping a close eye on today's meeting to fill you in with interesting tidbits throughout the day...

Verizon activates 6.2M iPhones in Q4 2012, but quarterly loss doubles

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated June 13, 2016

Carrier Verizon Wireless Tuesday morning posted results for the 2012 holiday quarter. The numbers don't look good: the company posted a huge loss of $1.93 billion, despite adding a "record-high" 2.1 million new subscribers on smartphone penetration of 58 percent.

Even though quarterly revenues increased 5.7 percent to as much as $30 billion, Verizon reported negative EPS of a whopping $1.48, blaming the decline on pensions and costs associated with Hurricane Sandy. In a conference call with analyst, Verizon's finance chief confirmed that iPhone activations hit 6.2 million units out of 9.8 million smartphones, or 63 percent. This was the first quarter with full three months of iPhone 5 sales on the Verizon network...

Apple looking to establish research and development center in Beijing

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated October 12, 2018

Apple CEO Tim Cook recently visited China, his second trip to the 1.33 billion people country in past twelve months. He met with China Mobile, the world's largest carrier with 700 million subscribers, to discuss that long-sought iPhone deal, visited Apple stores and attended meetings in Beijing with officials.

But there was one more thing on Cook's agenda as a new report out Tuesday has it that Cook told government officials that his company plans to establish a research and development center in Beijing, home to Asia's largest Apple Store...

Apple’s legal chief joins ski resort board

Ed Sutherland ∙ January 14, 2013

Who knew Apple's legal honcho was also a ski bum? Bruce Sewell, the iPhone maker's General Counsel and Senior Vice President, becomes the latest Apple executive to join an outside board of directors.

In Sewell's case, he was named Monday to a chain of ski resorts, Vail Resorts, Inc. Trust me, we were flabbergasted as well.

Sewell, described as a "lifelong skier" who also participated in ski patrols between college and law school, is likely more known for his legal expertise away from the slopes. After losing in a dust-up between Intel and AMD, he joined Apple, where he made real Steve Jobs' call for 'thermonuclear war' against Google's Android...

Anobit founder on pressures at Apple: everything has to be amazing

Christian Zibreg ∙ January 9, 2013

Apple snapped up Israeli startup Anobit, a fabless designer of flash memory controllers, in December 2011 for a reported $390 million. It was a typical acqui-hire, a talent-related acquisition, that brought Anobit's engineers under Apple's wing to improve the efficiency of flash storage in its products.

For the first time since the transaction, former Anobit CEO Ariel Maislos, who left Apple last month for personal reasons, has shared a few juicy details on what it's like to be working for the man and how Apple goes about its engineering process...