Apple CEO Tim Cook is fulfilling another Steve Jobs vision

BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) — Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who died in 2011, was a tough act to follow. But Tim Cook seems to be doing so well at it that his eventual successor may also have big shoes to fill.

Initially seen as a mere caretaker for the iconic franchise that Jobs built before his 2011 death, Cook has forged his own distinctive legacy. He will mark his ninth anniversary as Apple’s CEO Monday -- the same day the company will split its stock for the second time during his reign, setting up the shares to begin trading on a split-adjusted basis beginning August 31.

Grooming Cook as heir apparent was “one of Steve Jobs’ greatest accomplishments that is vastly underappreciated,” said long-time Apple analyst Gene Munster, who is now managing partner of Loup Ventures.

The upcoming four-for-one stock split, a move that has no effect on share price but often spurs investor enthusiasm, is one measure of Apple’s success under Cook. The company was worth just under $400 billion when Cook the helm; it’s worth five times more than that today, and has just become the first U.S. company to boast a market value of $2 trillion. Its share performance has easily eclipsed the benchmark S&P 500, which has roughly tripled in value during the past nine years.

But it hasn’t always been easy. Among the challenges Cook has faced: a slowdown in iPhone sales as smartphones matured, a showdown with the FBI over user privacy, a U.S. trade war with China that threatened to force up iPhone prices and now a pandemic that has closed many of Apple’s retail stores and sunk the economy into a deep recession.

Cook, 59, has also struck out in into novel territory. Apple now pays a quarterly dividend, a step Jobs resisted partly because he associated shareholder payments with stodgy companies that were past their prime. Cook also used his powerful perch to become an outspoken advocate for civil rights and renewable energy, and on a personal level came out as the first openly gay CEO of a Fortune 500 company in 2014.

Apple declined to make Cook available for an interview. But it did point to 2009 comments Cook made to financial analysts when he was running the company while Jobs battled pancreatic cancer.

Asked what the company might look like under his management, Cook said that Apple needs “to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make.” It has doubled down on that commitment, becoming a major chip producer in order to supply both iPhones and Macs. He added that Apple would resist exploring most projects “so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us.”

That laser focus has served Apple well. At the same time, though, under Cook’s stewardship, Apple has largely failed to come up with breakthrough successors to the iPhone. Its smartwatch and wireless ear buds have emerged as market leaders, but not game changers.

Cook and other executives have dropped hints that Apple wants make a big splash in the field of augmented reality, which uses phone screens or high-tech eyewear to paint digital images into the real world. Apple has yet to deliver, although neither have other companies that have hyped the technology.

Apple also remains a laggard in artificial intelligence, particularly in the increasingly important market for voice-activated digital assistants. Although Apple’s Siri is widely used on Apple devices, Amazon’s Alexa and Google″s digital assistant have made major inroads in helping people manage their lives, particularly in homes and offices.

Apple also has stumbled a few times under Cook’s leadership.

In 2017, it alienated customers by deliberately but quietly slowing the performance of older iPhones via a software update, ostensibly to spare the life of aging batteries. Many consumers, though, viewed it as a ploy to boost sales of newer and more expensive iPhones. Amid the furor, Apple offered to replace aging batteries at a steep discount; later it paid $500 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over the matter.

Apple has also faced government investigations into its aggressive efforts to minimize its corporate taxes and complaints that it has abused control of its app store to charge excessive fees and stifle competition to its own digital services. On the tax front, a court ruled in July that Apple did nothing wrong.

Cook has turned the app store into the cornerstone of a services division that he set out to expand four years ago. At the time, it was growing clear that sales of the iPhone -- Apple’s biggest money maker -- were destined to slow down as innovations grew sparse and consumers kept their old devices for longer.

To help offset that trend, Cook began to emphasize recurring revenue from app commission, warranty programs and streaming subscriptions to music, video, games and news sold for the more 1.5 billion devices already running on the company’s software.

After doubling in size in less than four years, Apple’s services division now generates $50 billion in annual revenue, more than all but 65 companies in the Fortune 500. Ives estimates Apple’s services division by itself is worth about $750 billion -- about the same as Facebook currently is in its entirety.

That division could be worth even more now had Cook done something many analysts believe Apple should have done at least five years ago by dipping into a hoard of cash that at one point surpassed $260 billion to buy Netflix or a major movie studio to fuel its video streaming ambitions.

Buying Netflix seemed like within the realm of possibility five years ago when the video streaming service was valued at around $40 billion. Now that Netflix is worth more than $200 billion today, that idea seems off the table, even for a company with Apple’s vast resources.

Associated Press

Steve Jobs was right: Smartphones and tablets killed the PC

I got an iPad Pro recently, and I’ve fallen madly in love with it.

This was unexpected. I’ve had iPads before, but like a lot of people, I hadn’t found them to be very useful. Tablets were good for surfing the Web and watching Netflix, but they’ve always been dogged by the charge that you couldn’t get a lot of work done on them.

Apple’s latest iPads are different. Not only can you get work done on them; in many ways they’re productivity dream machines. Today’s iPads are powered by custom-designed processors that are faster than the chips on some of the Macs Apple makes, and the iPad’s separately sold keyboard is better and more durable than the accursed, falling-apart mess of a keyboard that Apple is shipping on its much-maligned current line of laptops.

Apple unveiled a new 16-inch MacBook with a revamped keyboard on Wednesday, good news for the many Apple lovers who’ve been grumbling about the company’s lackluster slate of recent Macs. But I think the iPad is already beginning to eclipse the traditional personal computer. In the four months I’ve had this latest model, the iPad Pro has eaten into the time I spend on my phone and my old-school laptop and desktop. Among other things, I now research and write just about every column using an iPad (I still compose many first drafts by speaking into my headphones, but I’m an odd duck).

I thought I had gotten out of the gadget-reviewing business for good last year. Since the smartphone had gobbled up everything from cameras to music players to portable gaming systems, I declared the whole field of gadgetry dead. But just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.

The history of the iPad is a story about consolidation, focus and the power of scale in the tech business. It’s a story about how thoroughly one company, Apple, has dominated the entire hardware business this decade. And it is also, really, a story about the only thing that mattered in tech in the 2010s — the smartphone — and the way that one device became the gravitational center of the entire tech business, shaping every market in the industry, and much of the non-tech world beyond it.

The iPad has always been freighted with great expectations. Although the iPad was unveiled in 2010, three years after the iPhone, development of the iPad predated development of the phone, and Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, always seemed to have his heart in the tablet.

In one of his last interviews before his death in 2011, Jobs declared the iPad to be the future of computing. “PCs are going to be like trucks,” he told journalists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg — meaning the traditional Mac and Windows machines would still be around, but like big rigs, they’d be used by a small set of power users for a dwindling set of specific, high-power tasks. The “cars” of the tech industry, as Jobs saw it, would be phones and tablets.

For a while, he was only partially right. The iPad sold well at launch, but after a few years it hit some hurdles. After Jobs’s death, Apple left the iPad to languish, and did something similar with the Mac.

Meanwhile, something amazing happened with the iPhone and the many Android-based copycat phones it inspired. In the 2010s, smartphones became more popular, more powerful and more profitable than anyone in the tech industry thought possible. Within a few years, their sales and usage eclipsed that of PCs, and for much of the decade they were the fountain of most new consumer innovations across the technology industry. Smartphones made Uber and Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok possible. Smartphone cameras began to surpass stand-alone cameras, turning much of culture and society into a meme-soaked playground where visual media matters more than text.

The smartphone also altered the business dynamics of the tech industry. When the iPhone came out, Apple was just one of many successful hardware companies in the world. But the smartphone decimated a host of phone brands (remember Nokia? Motorola?), and as smartphones gained more power, they began making life impossible for a slate of hardware startups, from GoPro to Jawbone.

On the strength of the iPhone, Apple began capturing a greater and greater slice of the tech hardware business; although it didn’t sell a majority of units, its commitment to the high end of the market allowed it to make the bulk of profits. In the last quarter of 2017, according to one estimate, Apple made 86 percent of profits in the smartphone industry.

Apple’s dominance came despite the fact that the company made some big mistakes and was late to many big innovations. Samsung, not Apple, invented huge-screen phones. Apple’s Mac line was plagued by delays and dead ends, including a 2013 redesign of the Mac Pro that looked like a trash can and proved just as useful. And on the iPad, for many years, Apple just seemed to fall asleep. The iPad’s stylus and keyboard-forward design? Microsoft did it first on the Surface.

Yet none of this mattered. Because of its hold on the smartphone business and a very sticky software ecosystem that users found hard to leave, Apple has been able to incorporate many innovations pioneered elsewhere and sell its customers on a series of peripheral billion-dollar businesses, including the Apple Watch and AirPods.

And ultimately, it’s the ecosystem that explains why I can’t stop raving about the iPad. When it came out, the big knock on the iPad was that it was just a big phone; today, that’s what I love about it — like the Watch or AirPods, the iPad feels intuitive and natural to me because it works just like the device I use most often, my phone.

Like a phone, in most scenarios I find the iPad to be faster, more portable and easier to use and maintain than any traditional PC I’ve ever owned. The iPad’s limited screen space and emphasis on full-screen apps also makes for fewer distractions than on a traditional personal computer. The iPad, like my phone, lets me log in to my bank using my face; the Mac, in 2019, doesn’t even have a touch screen.

The iPad still can’t do everything a laptop can, and I still have to log in to a “real” computer sometimes. I had a long chat recently with Dan Seifert, the deputy editor of the Verge, who uses an iPad every day on the subway but often finds the device infuriating.

“For someone like me, who’s been using a desktop operating system for a long time, there’s a lot of built-in conventions that I’m used to that can be frustrating,” Seifert said. In particular, the iPad doesn’t work with antiquated work flows that are built for PCs. Say you need to log into your company’s bespoke publishing system or expense program? It’s possible those won’t work on your iPad — at least not yet — because they were built for much older devices.

But Seifert agreed with me that many of these uses are a special case. He still uses PCs because often, in Jobs’ parlance, he needs a truck. Most people, however, don’t need trucks, and few of us will need them in the future. Seifert isn’t teaching his kids how to use desktop operating systems like the Mac or Windows, and neither am I.

It took longer than he expected, but Steve Jobs was right. Over the past decade, for most people, in most use cases, phones killed the PC. To get work done, now you just use a big phone — which Apple happens to call an iPad.


2019 New York Times News Service

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Trump takes swipe at Apple for ditching iPhone home button

President Donald Trump took a swipe at Apple chief Tim Cook with a Tweet lamenting the removal of the iPhone home button.

"To Tim: The Button on the IPhone was FAR better than the Swipe!" he tweeted Friday.

Trump switched from an Android mobile to an iPhone in March 2017, the same year Apple dropped the physical home button from its top models.

This earlier shift seemed to be the target of presidential ire, rather Apple's latest iPhone 11 release in September.

It is not the first time Trump has cast a critical eye over the tech giant's design choices.

"I cannot believe that Apple didn't come out with a larger screen IPhone. Samsung is stealing their business. STEVE JOBS IS SPINNING IN GRAVE," he tweeted in September 2013.

It also comes after a gaffe in March when he referred to Cook as "Tim Apple".

Trump later claimed the naming was deliberate and a "time saving" measure.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Taking the cue from Steve Jobs, Bill Gates on digital addiction

MANILA -- There is a growing Silicon Valley buzz and it does not have anything to do with a new gadget, App, or any software or hardware.

It seems more and more leaders sitting in the recognized technology capital of the world are starting to realize that analog is the way to go, at least when it comes to raising their kids.

It’s ironic that the work they are most proud of, and continues to push to reach all four corners of the globe, are banned within the four walls of their respective homes.

This buzz is not really new, as seniors from Google, Intel and Microsoft, have long ago admitted that they send their children to schools that do not allow computers in classrooms.

A year before he passed away, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs told The New York Times in 2011 that he did not allow his kids to use the newly-released iPad. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”

Tim Cook, who took over the reins at Apple after Jobs dies, told The Guardian: “I don’t have a kid, but I have a nephew that I put some boundaries on. There are some things that I won’t allow; I don’t want them on a social network.”

Four years earlier, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates capped his kids’ screen time when his daughter started developing an unhealthy attachment to a video game in 2007.

Speaking to the Mirror in 2017, Gates shared: "We don't have cell phones at the table when we are having a meal, we didn't give our kids cell phones until they were 14 and they complained other kids got them earlier."

He added: "We often set a time after which there is no screen time and in their case that helps them get to sleep at a reasonable hour."

It would seem these men knew the dangers of exposing their children to technology at a young age as far back as 10 years ago, and yet how many of us today are taking their cue?

FROM WARINESS TO CONSENSUS

Featuring interviews with Silicon Valley technologists and parents, a New York Times report on October 26, 2018 claimed the wariness of years ago has turned into a regionwide consensus. They are now saying that the benefits of using digital as a learning tool are overblown, and worse, the risks for addiction as well as stunting development too high.

Brad Huddleston, author of two best-selling books on the subject, Digital Cocaine: A Journey Toward iBalance and The Dark Side of Technology: Restoring Balance in the Digital Age, clued in to the digital addiction problem as early as 12 years ago when he saw how some youth were using MySpace, a social networking site many call the predecessor to Facebook. He was recently in Manila to warn parents and educators of the dangers of screen time, not just too much but any amount of screen time.

While it was his first visit to the country, Huddleston’s online check showed that the Philippines ranks top of the world in social media use and that’s a red flag we all need to watch, young and adults alike.

“I can tell through social media that your country is right in line with other countries who use technology to a great extent,” he said. “I am aware of your growing economy and of course, technology plays a huge part in any corporate setting. Therefore, the Philippines has to tackle the same unintended consequences produced by the hyper-use of technology as all the other countries, richer and poorer.”

Huddleston was one of the keynote speakers at the first Global Homeschool Conference at the SMX Convention Center Taguig which promised to showcase the latest digital trends in the world of education. Yet while addressing over 1500 attendees, Huddleston’s first advice to parents: “Do not allow children under the age of 12 to use technology. This includes using technology for “educational” purposes. I realize that by saying this, I risk being uninvited to many conferences. So be it. Many of the technology executives and employees in Silicon Valley live by this rule in some form. The reasons are obvious.”

Edric Mendoza, president of Homeschool Global who organized the conference, said: "Huddleston’s views on the damaging effects of digital are both relevant (applicable to every individual and family who use screens) and reliable (based on latest neuroscience research). When we came across his book, we instantly realized we need to invite him to the Philippines.”

According to Huddleston: “The internet has now penetrated numerous developing countries. Because the world is connected to the same “pipe” known as the Internet, the resulting problems created by this relatively new medium are generally the same around the world.” And these problems are quite alarming, especially the three that Huddleston highlighted.

Digital Addiction Consequence #1 ADHD. “This condition has increased 800 percent in the past 30 years. The Internet is just over 30 years old. In my opinion and global experience, the clear majority of this 800 percent is digitally induced. It is true that some children are born with attention deficits, but that number is extremely small. The dramatic increase is being caused by hyperstimulation from digital devices.”

Digital Addiction Consequence #2 Multitasking is a myth. “Neuroscience has proven beyond all doubt that the brain is a sequential processor, unable to pay attention to more than one data stream at a time yet, schools often encourage this practice. Because of multitasking as a lifestyle, brain stress is at an all-time high and cognitive abilities are decreasing.”

Digital Addiction Consequence #3 Depression, anxiety, and self-harm. “These are the top symptoms of digital addiction. These very real conditions that result from misusing digital technology will often hamper a child’s ability to concentrate on school work.”

Time to check your holiday shopping list
While listening to Huddleston, I mentally checked my holiday shopping list which included new gadgets for family members. They have since been replaced by analog items that hopefully will stem our own digital addiction.

Huddleston argues for a digital detox but for many "wired" families who may not find if this easy, begin with "intentional."

"The first scientist and clinical psychologist, that I studied, Dr. Archibald Hart, spoke a lot about being 'intentional.' Being intentional means that we literally measure the amount of time we spend on technology (almost no one does this). Perceptually, we think we spend just a few minutes checking email, social media, etc. but when time is measured intentionally, we find that technology has in fact consumed large quantities of our time."

Ideally, your road will begin with intentional and end with detox, and for Huddleston: "Detox means stop. Parents tend to believe their child is the exception. But it’s not about balanced use. It’s not even 'okay to use on Saturdays.' Detox means stop.”

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Apple-1 computer fetches $375,000 at auction

SAN FRANCISCO, United States -- An Apple-1, a rare model of the first computer produced by the now-iconic tech firm, fetched $375,000 in an auction this week, according to Boston-based RR Auction.

The computer was among 175 of those sold by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak from their production in a garage in Silicon Valley in the early days of Apple in 1976 and 1977.

The model originally went for $666.66 when it was sold by the Byte Shop computer store in Mountain View, California in the 1970s.

Jobs and Wozniak initially designed the Apple-1 as a bare circuit board to be sold as a kit and completed by electronics hobbyists, but Byte Shop owned Paul Terrell agreed to buy 50 if they were fully assembled and did not require soldering by the buyer.

According to RR, the computer sold this week was restored to original running condition in June and included the original Apple-1 board, a cassette interface, keyboard and other equipment.

The selling price was far from a record, however: another Apple-1 computer went for $905,000 in 2014.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Remember your 1st Gen iPhone?

When it first came out, the iPhone didn't change this techie's life or his view of the world. And that was a good thing. On the occasion of the iPhone's first decade and the recent introduction of its latest iteration, we republish this essay from 2008, the year Apple launched its first smartphone model—or what was then being tagged "the Jesus phone," the one that will save us all. 


Last January, Steve Jobs said he was going to reinvent the phone and I couldn't believe the amount of hype that surrounded it. Google "Apple iPhone" and you'll get 160 million hits ("Nokia phone" gets you 57 million). Bloggers have even dubbed it the "Jesus Phone" like it was the Second Coming. I've had my iPhone for two months and it hasn't changed my life. It's just a cellphone. It's actually less of a phone than you're used to. It doesn't do MMS. It won't let you forward messages or send and receive business cards. It won't even let you use your favorite song as your ringtone. But I'm still using my iPhone for the very reason I wrote earlier. It hasn't changed my life.

That's what the iPhone, and Apple, is all about. It's been two months now and I still haven't read the manual, not one of its 18 pages. Yet every day I have no problems syncing my calendar, checking my email, the weather or even my friends on Live journal. I can't say the same for all the other phones I've owned, including the Prada phone that Apple was rumored to have copied. The iPhone joins the list of Apple stuff I use not because it's revolutionary, or worse, cool, but because it's all about me. That's the secret of Jobs' success. He knows that beyond cutting edge design, it's about understanding how people do and use things.

He hasn't met me but, years back, he gave me a one-button mouse for my Apple Ile just so I wouldn't have to read a manual to figure out whether to click the left or the right button. Now, he's giving me a phone with a keyboard that pops up only when i need to type, that knows if I've turned it sideways and rotates the screen accordingly. He knows me and yet he doesn't. Jobs didn't give me a 140 page manual to learn how to use the iPhone like Nokia did with their N95. Instead he made the iPhone smart enough to figure out exactly what I want to do and adjust to the way I do things. I don't get anything more than I need, when I need it. Nothing complicated. Nothing unnecessary. Nothing life-changing. Instead of spending a day reading a user manual, I have more time to think about more important things in life like, how to fill up the 17 billion cells in a Microsoft Excel 2007 spreadsheet (that's 1.1 million rows and over 16,000 columns).

source: news.abs-cbn.com

LOOK BACK: Apple's road to a $1 trillion enterprise

SAN FRANCISCO -- Launched on a shoestring budget in a Silicon Valley garage more than four decades ago, Apple survived a near-miss with bankruptcy before soaring to a trillion-dollar market value on Thursday.

The California-based company born of a friendship between Steve Wozniak and the late Steve Jobs is credited with giving rise to smartphone lifestyles and "apps" for nearly everything.

Here are some of the milestones in Apple's history:

April 1976: Jobs, Wozniak and Ronald Wayne create Apple Computer to sell an eponymous computer hand-built by Wozniak. The company is incorporated the following year.

January 1984: Apple heralds the arrival of its first Macintosh computer with a "1984" television commercial directed by Ridley Scott portraying a bold blow struck against an Orwellian computer culture.

September 1985: Jobs leaves Apple after a power struggle with chief executive John Sculley. Wozniak also departs.

1990s: Competitive pressure from lower-priced personal computers from Microsoft running on Windows software, and some failed products, puts a financial squeeze on Apple, which cuts staff and changes top executives.

September 1997: Jobs returns as chief executive as the company teeters near bankruptcy. Microsoft helps Apple survive with a $150 million investment.

August 1998: Apple releases the all-in-one iMac computer.

October 2001: Apple unveils the iPod and opens its first real-world shops.

April 2003: Apple opens its online iTunes store for digital content, pricing music at 99 cents per song for iPods.

June 2007: Apple unveils the iPhone.

July 2008: Apple launches the online App Store to sell applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. 

January 2010: Apple introduces the iPad.

October 2011: Jobs, 56, dies after battling pancreatic cancer, having turned over command of Apple to Tim Cook earlier in the year.

September 2014: Apple introduces the Apple Watch.

June 2015: Apple Music streaming service launches including internet radio from Beats, a startup Apple bought the prior year in a deal valued at $3 billion.

January 2016: Apple announces that more than a billion of its devices are in use around the world.

August 2018: Apple surpasses $1 trillion in stock market value.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Apple hits historic $1-trillion stock market valuation

SAN FRANCISCO—Apple Inc. became the first $1-trillion publicly listed US company on Thursday, crowning a decade-long rise fueled by its ubiquitous iPhone that transformed it from a niche player in personal computers into a global powerhouse spanning entertainment and communications.

The tech company's stock jumped 2.8 percent to as high as $207.05, bringing its gain to about 9 percent since Tuesday when it reported June-quarter results above expectations and said it bought back $20 billion of its own shares.

Started in the garage of co-founder Steve Jobs in 1976, Apple has pushed its revenue beyond the economic outputs of Portugal, New Zealand and other countries. Along the way, it has changed how consumers connect with one another and how businesses conduct daily commerce.

Apple's stock market value is greater than the combined capitalization of Exxon Mobil, Procter & Gamble and AT&T. It now accounts for 4 percent of the S&P 500.

One of three founders, Jobs was driven out of Apple in the mid-1980s, only to return a decade later and rescue the computer company from near bankruptcy.

He launched the iPhone in 2007, dropping "Computer" from Apple's name and super-charging the cellphone industry, catching Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., Samsung Electronics and Nokia off guard. That put Apple on a path to overtake Exxon Mobil in 2011 as the largest US company by market value.

The Silicon Valley stalwart's stock has surged more than 50,000 percent since its 1980 initial public offering, dwarfing the S&P 500's approximately 2,000-percent increase during the same almost four decades.

During that time, Apple evolved from selling Mac personal computers to becoming an architect of the mobile revolution with a cult-like following.

Jobs, who died in 2011, was succeeded as chief executive by Tim Cook, who has doubled the company's profits but struggled to develop a new product to replicate the society-altering success of the iPhone, which has seen sales taper off in recent years.

In 2006, the year before the iPhone launch, Apple generated less than $20 billion in sales and net profit just shy of $2 billion. By last year, its sales had grown more than 11-fold to $229 billion — the fourth highest in the S&P 500 — and net income had mushroomed at twice that rate to $48.4 billion, making it the most profitable publicly listed US company.

One of five US companies since the 1980s to take a turn as Wall Street's largest company by market capitalization, Apple could lose its lead to the likes of Alphabet Inc. or Amazon.com Inc. if it does not find a major new product or service as demand for smartphones loses steam.

(Reporting by Noel Randewich Editing by Nick Zieminski)

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Steve Jobs' pre-Apple job application could fetch $50,000 at auction

LOS ANGELES - A job application filled out by Steve Jobs more than four decades ago that reflects the Apple founder's aspirations to work in technology and design will go up for auction next month.

With an estimated value of about $50,000, the one-page application from 1973, complete with spelling and punctuation errors, lists his name as "Steven jobs" and address as "reed college," the Oregon college he attended briefly, Boston auction house RR Auction said on Thursday.

Under a section titled "Special Abilities," Jobs wrote "tech or design engineer. digital.—from Bay near Hewitt-Packard," a reference to pioneering California technology company Hewlett-Packard.

The document but does not state what position Jobs was applying for. Jobs and friend Steve Wozniak founded Apple about three years later. Jobs died of cancer in 2011 at the age of 56.

Though Jobs responded on the form that he had a driver's license, he said his access to transportation was "possible, but not probable." Next to "Phone:" he wrote "none."

The document will be part of a pop culture sale by RR Auction that will take place between March 8 and 15.

Two other Jobs items will appear in the same auction - a Mac OS X technical manual signed by Jobs in 2001, valued at $25,000, and a signed 2008 newspaper clipping, valued at $15,000, with a photo of Jobs and a headline that reads "New, faster iPhone will sell for $199."

The auction will also feature an original fingerprint card from Jimi Hendrix's 1969 arrest in Toronto on drug charges, signed by the late rock musician, which is valued at $15,000.

It will include a love letter from the late British singer Amy Winehouse to her husband Blake Fielder-Civil. In addition to the text, the one-page Winehouse letter features a sketch of a baby crocodile surrounded by hearts.

"Do nothing 'til you hear from me handsome, I need your arms around me so I can inhale, open my eyes, breathe my heart's breathe out," the letter reads, in part. It is valued at about $4,000.

Winehouse died of alcohol poisoning in London in 2011 at age of 27.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Will 'iPhone X' live up to Steve Jobs' visionary promise?

MANILA - When Apple founder Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone in 2007, he brandished the metal and glass slab as a "revolutionary" device that "changes everything."

On Tuesday (early Wednesday in Manila), a new iPhone will be unveiled at a theater named after the late technology visionary. But leaks and reports point to a smartphone that is playing catch-up rather than blazing the trail in an increasingly saturated market.

A display that wraps around the entire front of the screen and wireless charging are among the rumored headline features of the top-tier device, which will reportedly called iPhone X and cost $1,000. Such features have long been available on handsets that run Google's Android software.

The first iPhone debuted with Blackberry and Nokia dominating the market, when consumers used their handheld computers primarily for e-mails.

Jobs hyped the first generation iPhone as a 3-in-1 device that combines its iPod music and video player, a phone and an "breakthrough internet communications device."

"Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything," said Jobs, who was dressed in his signature jeans, sneakers and black turtleneck.

"Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone," he said.

STYLUS? YUCK

The full touch-screen iPhone was nothing like the Blackberrys of 2007, whose main selling point was a physical keyboard that allowed power users to type emails on the go.

Jobs famously mocked the stylus used in smart devices that preceded the iPhone.

"Who wants a stylus? You have to get them and put them away and you lose them. Yuck," Jobs said.

"We are going to use the pointing device that we are all born with We have 10 of them," he said.

The "multi-touch" display that allowed users to navigate the device using finger gestures was revolutionary at that time and Apple also blazed the trail with its application store on the second-generation iPhone, the iPhone 3G.

Apple was also the first to tout camera capabilities in a smartphone with 2011's iPhone 4s, a metal and glass sandwich that also came with Siri, a voice-controlled digital assistant that came half a decade ahead of Google's Assistant and Amazon's Alexa.

In 2013, Apple debuted Touch ID to allow iPhone users to unlock their devices and make online payments using their fingerprints.

FALLING BEHIND

Subsequent upgrades however had Apple catching up with rival Android manufacturers.

The screen size of 2012's iPhone 5 was increased to 4 inches from 3.5 inches as Android screens got bigger.

A 5.5-inch "Plus" model was added alongside a 4.7-inch version in the 2014 version, iPhone 6. Rival phones, at that time, had stretched screen sizes to as big as 6 inches in frames that are smaller than the largest iPhone.

In 2015, Apple introduced the Pencil to allow users to sketch on their iPad tablets, notwithstanding Jobs' disdain for the stylus.

Samsung had long touted the S-Pen stylus for its Galaxy Note line, whose latest version, Galaxy Note 8, was launched last month.

The rumored wraparound screen on the "iPhone X" was started last year by Chinese Xiaomi's Mi Mix last year and brought to the mainstream earlier this year by Samsung's Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus.

Data from market tracker Counterpoint showed that Chinese manufacturer Huawei overtook Apple as the world's second biggest-selling smartphone maker in the June to July period.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Steve Jobs' widow takes stake in Atlantic magazine

WASHINGTON - An organization led by the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs announced Friday it was taking a majority stake in The Atlantic, a prestigious 160-year-old cultural magazine.

The Emerson Collective, founded and run by Laurene Powell Jobs, agreed to a deal that includes the flagship magazine, digital properties, the events business, and consulting services.

Atlantic Media chairman David Bradley will continue to hold a minority stake and retain other properties in the group which include the online news site Quartz and National Journal Group.

Bradley will also continue to run The Atlantic for at least the next three to five years, after which Emerson may acquire his stake under the deal, a statement said.

"What a privilege it is to partner with David Bradley and become a steward of The Atlantic, one of the country's most important and enduring journalistic institutions," said Powell Jobs in the statement.

"The Atlantic was co-founded 160 years ago by a group of abolitionists including Ralph Waldo Emerson, who is a primary inspiration for our own work at Emerson Collective."

Bradley said separately in a letter to staff: "Against the odds, The Atlantic is prospering. While I will stay at the helm some years, the most consequential decision of my career now is behind me: who next will take stewardship of this 160-year-old national treasure? To me, the answer, in the form of Laurene, feels incomparably right."

Founded in Boston as the Atlantic Monthly, the magazine has been known as a literary and cultural publication. It published writings of Mark Twain as well as Martin Luther King Jr's 1963 defense of civil disobedience in "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

Bradley acquired the magazine in 1999 from magnate Mortimer Zuckerman and later moved its headquarters to Washington.

The Emerson Collective created by Powell Jobs, 53, works on education, immigration reform, the environment and other social justice initiatives and has investments in film and television production companies as well as nonprofit journalism organizations.

She and her family have an estimated net worth of some $20 billion, according to Forbes magazine, largely from shares in Apple following the 2011 death of Steve Jobs.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Apple's iPhone turns 10, bumpy start forgotten

Apple Inc's iPhone turns 10 this week, evoking memories of a rocky start for the device that ended up doing most to start the smartphone revolution and stirring interest in where it will go from here.

Apple has sold more than 1 billion iPhones since June 29, 2007, but the first iPhone, which launched without an App Store and was restricted to the AT&T Inc network, was limited compared to today's version.

After sluggish initial sales, Apple slashed the price to spur holiday sales that year.

"The business model for year one of the iPhone was a disaster," Tony Fadell, one of the Apple developers of the device, told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday. "We pivoted and figured it out in year two."

The very concept of the iPhone came as a surprise to some of Apple's suppliers a decade ago, even though Apple, led by CEO Steve Jobs, had already expanded beyond computers with the iPod.

"We still have the voicemail from Steve Jobs when he called the CEO and founder here," said David Bairstow at Skyhook, the company that supplied location technology to early iPhones. "He thought he was being pranked by someone in the office and it took him two days to call Steve Jobs back."

The iPhone hit its stride in 2008 when Apple introduced the App Store, which allowed developers to make and distribute their mobile applications with Apple taking a cut of any revenue.

Ten years later, services revenue is a crucial area of growth for Apple, bringing in $24.3 billion in revenue last year.

NEW MODEL

Fans and investors are now looking forward to the 10th anniversary iPhone 8, expected this fall, asking whether it will deliver enough new features to spark a new generation to turn to Apple.

That new phone may have 3-D mapping sensors, support for "augmented reality" apps that would merge virtual and real worlds, and a new display with organic LEDs, which are light and flexible, according to analysts at Bernstein Research.

A decade after launching into a market largely occupied by BlackBerry and Microsoft devices, the iPhone now competes chiefly with phones running Google's Android software, which is distributed to Samsung Electronics and other manufacturers around the world.

Even though most of the world's smartphones now run on Android, Apple still garners most of the profit in the industry with its generally higher-priced devices.

More than 2 billion people now have smartphones, according to data from eMarketer, and Fadell, who has worked for both Apple and Alphabet, sees that as the hallmark of success.

"Being able to democratize computing and communication across the entire world is absolutely astounding to me," Fadell said. "It warms my heart because that's something Steve tried to do with the Apple II and the Mac, which was the computer for the rest of us. It's finally here, 30 years later."

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Apple hires secret team for treating diabetes- CNBC

Apple Inc has hired a team of biomedical engineers as part of a secret initiative, initially envisioned by late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, to develop sensors to treat diabetes, CNBC reported citing three people familiar with the matter.

The engineers are expected to work at a nondescript office in Palo Alto, miles (km) away from the corporate headquarters, CNBC said. (http://cnb.cx/2nGgn9P)

Apple was not immediately available for comment.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Tech breakthroughs take a backseat in upcoming Apple iPhone launch

SAN FRANCISCO - When Apple Inc. launches its much-anticipated 10th anniversary iPhone this fall, it will offer an unwitting lesson in how much the smartphone industry it pioneered has matured.

The new iPhone is expected to include new features such as high-resolution displays, wireless charging and 3-D sensors. Rather than representing major breakthroughs, however, most of the innovations have been available in competing phones for several years.

Apple's relatively slow adoption of new features both reflects and reinforces the fact smartphone customers are holding onto their phones longer. Timothy Arcuri, an analyst at Cowen & Co, believes upwards of 40 percent of iPhones on the market are more than two years old, a historical high.

That is a big reason why investors have driven Apple shares to an all-time high. There is pent-up demand for a new iPhone, even if it does not offer breakthrough technologies.

It is not clear whether Apple deliberately held off on packing some of the new features into the current iPhone 7, which has been criticized for a lack of differentiation from its predecessor. Apple declined to comment on the upcoming product.

Still, the development and roll-out of the anniversary iPhone suggest Apple’s product strategy is driven less by technological innovation than by consumer upgrade cycles and Apple’s own business and marketing needs.

"When a market gets saturated, the growth is all about refresh," said Bob O’Donnell of Technalysis Research. "This is exactly what happened to PCs. It's exactly what happened to tablets. It's starting to happen to smartphones."

Apple is close-mouthed about upcoming product features, but analysts and reports from Asian component suppliers and others indicate that high-resolution displays based on OLED technology -- possibly with curved edges -- are likely to be part of the anniversary phone. A radical new design is not expected, according to analysts.

Some of the anticipated new technologies, notably wireless charging, remain messy. Samsung Electronics Co Ltd phones, for example, feature wireless charging but support two different sets of standards, one called Qi and the other AirFuel.

Apple recently joined the group backing Qi. But there are still at least five different groups working on wireless charging technology within Apple, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

As to 3-D sensors, there is already one hiding in the iPhone 7. The front camera features what is known as a time-of-flight sensor, which helps it autofocus and is used in numerous phones including the Blackberry, according to TechInsights, a firm that examines the chips inside tech devices.

That sensor could be upgraded to a higher-resolution version that could handle 3-D mapping for facial recognition, said Jim Morrison, vice president at TechInsights.

Some analysts also speculate the company could remove the phone's home button, placing it and a fingerprint sensor beneath the front display glass, based on patents the company has filed.

SLOW GROWTH

Global smartphone sales were up only 2.3 percent to 1.47 billion units in 2016, according to IDC. Many carriers in the United States have stopped subsidizing phones, causing phone buyers to think harder about their next purchase.

Apple will likely make a heavy marketing push around the phone’s 10th anniversary. “IPhone set the standard for mobile computing in its first decade and we are just getting started. The best is yet to come,” Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said in a statement Jan. 8, the date the iPhone was announced by then-CEO Steve Jobs in 2007.

In 2015, the last year it disclosed the figure, Apple spent $1.8 billion on advertising, up 50 percent from the year before and nearly four times the $467 million it spent in 2007 when it first released the iPhone.

And the company continues to excel at selling higher-priced phones. Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri attributed the most recent quarter's record-setting 78.3 million iPhones sold to the iPhone 7 Plus, which for the first time included a new dual camera feature not found in other models.

The iPhone 7 Plus tops out at $969 with memory upgrades and a jet black finish. O'Donnell of Technalysis Research believes that with the next iPhone, Apple might even introduce a $1,000-plus “ultra-premium device for the real Apple-crazed folks out there who want to stand out."

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Apple channels Steve Jobs with 'spaceship' campus

SAN FRANCISCO - Inside the original Macintosh computer, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs inscribed the signatures of his team, revealing his deep concern for even the hidden features of his products.

His last work – Apple Inc's \sprawling new headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. - will be a fitting tribute: a futuristic campus built with astonishing attention to detail. From the arrangement of electrical wiring to the finish of a hidden pipe, no aspect of the 2.8 million-square-foot main building has been too small to attract scrutiny.

But constructing a building as flawless as a hand-held device is no easy feat, according to interviews with nearly two dozen current and former workers on the project, most of whom would not be named because they signed non-disclosure agreements.

Since Apple unveiled its plans in 2011, the move-in date has slowly receded: Jobs' initial projection was 2015, but this spring now seems most likely, according to people involved in the project. A lengthy approval process with the city contributed to the delay.

Apple has not revealed the total price tag, but former project managers estimate it at about $5 billion - a figure CEO Tim Cook did not dispute in a 2015 TV interview. More than $1 billion was allocated for the interior of the main building alone, according to a former construction manager.

For all the time and money sunk into the project, some in the architecture community question whether Apple has focused on the right ends. The campus is something of an exception to the trend of radically open offices aimed at fostering collaboration, said Louise Mozingo, a professor and chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at U.C. Berkeley. Its central office building – a massive ring of glass frequently likened to a spaceship – could be a challenge just to navigate, she noted.

"It's not about maximizing the productivity of the office space, it's about creating a symbolic center for this global company," she said. “They are creating an icon.”

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment for this story.

WORLD'S LARGEST PIECE OF CURVED GLASS

Tech companies have long favored generic office parks, which allow them to lease and shed space through booms and busts. Jobs’ unveiling of what's formally known as Apple Campus 2, months before his death, marked a new chapter in Silicon Valley architecture.

When completed, the campus will house up to 14,200 employees, according to the 2013 project description. The main building – which boasts the world's largest piece of curved glass – will be surrounded by a lush canopy of thousands of trees. Little remains from the cement-laden campus Apple acquired from Hewlett-Packard, though the iPhone maker preserved a century-old barn that remained intact as the land passed from tech giant to tech giant.

But what was most striking to those who worked on the project was Apple managers' insistence on treating the construction of the vast complex the same way they approach the design of pocket-sized electronics.

Apple's in-house construction team enforced many rules: No vents or pipes could be reflected in the glass. Guidelines for the special wood used frequently throughout the building ran to some 30 pages.

Tolerances, the distance materials may deviate from desired measurements, were a particular focus. On many projects, the standard is 1/8 of an inch at best; Apple often demanded far less, even for hidden surfaces.

The company's keen design sense enhanced the project, but its expectations sometimes clashed with construction realities, a former architect said.

"With phones, you can build to very, very minute tolerances," he said. "You would never design to that level of tolerance on a building. Your doors would jam."

The project, which generated about 13,000 full-time construction jobs, took a toll on contractors. The original general contractors, Skanska USA and DPR Construction, left after work began, which construction experts called a rare development for a project of such scale. The reasons for the departures are unclear, and neither Apple nor the firms would comment.

FAITHFUL TO DESIGN PRINCIPLES

Apple's novel approach to the building took many forms. Architect German de la Torre, who worked on the project, found many of the proportions - such as the curve of a rounded corner - came from Apple's products. The elevator buttons struck some workers as resembling the iPhone's home button; one former manager even likened the toilet's sleek design to the device.

But de la Torre ultimately saw that Apple executives were not trying to evoke the iPhone per se, but rather following something akin to the Platonic ideal of form and dimension.

"They have arrived at design principles somehow through many years of experimentation, and they are faithful to those principles," de la Torre said.

Fanatical attention to detail is a key tenet. Early in construction, Apple managers told the construction team that the ceiling - composed of large panels of polished concrete - should be immaculate inside and out, just as the inside of the iPhone’s audio jack is a finished product, a former construction manager recalled.

Thus, each of the thousands of ceiling panels had to win approval from both Apple's in-house team and the general contractor, once at the shop and then again at the construction site.

"The things you can’t see, they all mattered to Apple,” the former construction manager said.

One of the most vexing features was the doorways, which Apple wanted to be perfectly flat, with no threshold. The construction team pushed back, but Apple held firm.

The rationale? If engineers had to adjust their gait while entering the building, they risked distraction from their work, according to a former construction manager.

“We spent months trying not to do that because that’s time, money and stuff that’s never been done before,” the former construction manager said.

Time and time again, Apple managers spent months perfecting minute features, creating a domino effect that set back other parts of the project, former construction managers say.

Signage required a delicate balancing act: Apple wanted all signs to reflect its sleek, minimalist aesthetic, but the fire department needed to ensure the building could be swiftly navigated in an emergency.

Dirk Mattern, a retired deputy fire chief who is representing the Santa Clara County Fire Department on the project, estimated he attended 15 meetings that touched on the topic.

"I’ve never spent so much time on signage," he said.

LIKE A PAINTING

When Apple tapped general contractors Holder Construction and Rudolph & Sletten to finish the main building in 2015, one of the first orders of business was finalizing a door handle for conference rooms and offices.

After months of back and forth, construction workers presented their work to a manager from Apple’s in-house team, who turned the sample over and over in his hands. Finally, he said he felt a faint bump.

The construction team double-checked the measurements, unable to find any imperfections – down to the nanometer. Still, Apple insisted on another version.

The construction manager who was so intimately involved in the door handle did not see its completion. Down to his last day, Apple was still fiddling with the design - after a year and a half of debate.

When construction wraps, the only fingerprints on the site will be Jobs'. Workers often had to wear gloves to avoid marring the delicate materials, said Brett Davis, regional director of the District Council 16 union for painters and related crafts.

"It's like a painting that you don't want to touch," he said. "It's definitely going to be something to see, if they let you in."

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Smartphone revolution blazes on as iPhone turns 10

LAS VEGAS -- The smartphone continues to change the world a decade after the debut of the iPhone, even as Apple is under pressure to come up with a new wonder.

The iPhone -- introduced by late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007 -- set the stage for mobile computing and an entire industry revolving around it.

The handsets built on successful iPod digital music players and featured touch screens at a time when the smartphone market was ruled by BlackBerry devices with keypads.

Jobs billed his smartphone approach as blending liberal arts, design and technology.

What was not obvious at the time was how iPhone's focus on apps would send people rocketing along a path to tweeting, Snapping, Pokemon Go, live streaming video, and more.

"Apple gets credit for the apps that brought the mobile computing platform to your pocket," Gartner analyst Brian Blau told AFP at the Consumer Electronics Show that ends Sunday in Las Vegas. "Today, it is hard to make a consumer electronics product without (internet) connectivity."

Smartphones are even playing a big role in the virtual reality trend, with people using handsets as screens inserted into headsets for exploring fantasy realms.

Apple does not attend CES. But its trend-setting power is felt here from cars boasting "infotainment" systems that synch with iPhones, to smart-home networks controlled by mobile apps and rival smartphones mirroring iPhone features.

"The iPhone changed the world because mobile computing is now part of everyone's daily life," Blau said.

Altered landscape

The iPhone, in a way, was a seed around which the consumer electronics industry has crystalized, according to Maxwell Ramsey of mobile phone news website phoneArena.com.

"It's pretty remarkable what it did," Maxwell said of the iPhone. "We are still riding that wave from 2007. No doubt about it."

Putting the internet in people's pockets, and on tablet computers, has profoundly changed the way people watch films, get news, socialize and work.

Insiders at the CES trade show cited the iPhone as the main impetus for the revolutionary shift to mobile computing lifestyles.

"It turned the industry on its head," Maxwell said at CES. "It figuratively destroyed a lot of companies, and changed the landscape."

The iPhone powered Apple's money-making machine, but sales began to decline last year in the increasingly saturated and competitive smartphone market.

Missed targets

Apple chief executive Tim Cook and other top executives saw their compensation for 2016 cut because internal income targets were missed, according to a filing Friday with US regulators.

"The two financial measures used to evaluate executive performance under our annual cash incentive program, net sales and operating income, declined from our record-breaking 2015 levels," Apple said in the filing.

"These results were below the target performance goals."

Apple reported net sales of $215.6 billion for the fiscal year, with an operating income of $60 billion, the filing indicated.

Cook's pay will tally $8.75 million as compared with $10.3 million in 2015. His base pay jumped to $3 million from $2 million.

Apple's profit in the quarter ending September 24 slumped on a widely expected drop in iPhone sales, but gains in services offered optimism on company efforts to curb dependence on its smartphone.

Apple is to release performance figures for the recently ended quarter on January 31.

Apple has been working to make more money from services and apps.

The iPhone maker said its App Store had its busiest single day ever on New Year's Day, capping a record-breaking holiday season for the online shop.

Since the App Store launched in 2008, developers have earned more than $60 billion from software creations tailored for Apple devices, according to the company.

Meanwhile, eyes are on Apple for its next "big thing" in the face of worry that the company lost its innovative mojo with the passing of Jobs in 2011.

Rumors of projects in the works include a self-driving car.

"I think they will have a next big thing," analyst Blau said. "But the future of the company will rely on smaller innovation. And there is nothing wrong with that kind of a business."

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Original Apple computer sells for $365,000 at auction

NEW YORK - A fully operational Apple computer that company co-founder Steve Jobs sold out of his parents' garage in 1976 for $600 sold for $365,000 at Christie's on Thursday.

The Ricketts Apple-1 Personal Computer, named after its original owner Charles Ricketts, is the only known surviving Apple-1 documented as having been sold directly by Jobs to an individual from the Los Altos, California family home, according to the auction house.

The price fell shy of Christie's estimate of $400,000 to $600,000 and was far less than the $905,000 paid by the Henry Ford organization in October for one of the computers. Fewer than 50 original Apple-1s are believed to be in existence of the few hundred originally produced

Also at the sale, Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, with the help of various foundations and private donors, bought a Bacchic figure supporting the globe by 17th-century artist Adrien de Vries for $27.9 million, well in excess of the sculpture's pre-sale estimate of $15 million to $25 million.

The Rembrandt Society, the BankGiro Loterij, VSB fund, Mondriaan Fund and others helped fund the purchase.

"It follows the trend of masterpieces achieving outstanding prices," said Jussi Pylkkanen, global president of Christie's and the auctioneer for the sale.

One of the expected highlights of the auction, which Christie's dubbed the Exceptional Sale, was withdrawn at the 11th hour when the estate of Joan Fontaine, who died aged 96 a year ago, pulled her best actress Oscar for the Alfred Hitchcock film "Suspicion" from the sale of her collection.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

How much did Apple's CEO earn in 2013?

SAN FRANCISCO - Apple Inc CEO Tim Cook earned roughly the same in 2013 as in 2012, but lost part of his performance-based stock award during a year in which intense competition and margin pressure bludgeoned the iPhone maker's stock.

Cook took home $4.25 million, including a base salary of $1.4 million and a performance bonus of $2.8 million, roughly on par with 2012, the company said in a preliminary proxy statement on Friday.

But he gave up about 7,100 shares tied to an annual performance-dependent award, based on shareholder returns from Aug. 24 of 2012 to Aug. 25, 2013. Apple's stock lost a quarter of its value over that one-year period.

The company also advised shareholders to vote down a resolution by activist investor Carl Icahn, who proposed the iPhone maker buy back $50 billion worth of shares in fiscal 2014. It was the first time the company had publicly voiced its response to Icahn's demands.

Apple argued on Friday it has already returned $43 billion in dividends and share repurchases over the first six months of its roughly $100 billion capital return program.

The "dynamic competitive landscape and the company’s rapid pace of innovation require unprecedented investment, flexibility and access to resources," Apple said in advising shareholders to reject Icahn's proposal.

Known for decades of strong-arm tactics, including proxy fights, Icahn has repeatedly made it clear that his proposal is not a sign that he stands against Apple's management. The billionaire has discussed the issue with Cook in past months, arguing via tweets that a buyback of as much as $150 billion is within the company's means and would prop up its stock.

STRAIN

Since taking over from the late Steve Jobs, Cook has steered Apple in a more investor-friendly direction, including the establishment of one of the industry's biggest capital return programs.

Apple's board in 2012 granted Cook an award of one million restricted stock units (RSUs) - one of the largest pay packages for an executive in a decade, intended to signal its confidence in Cook in the wake of the late Steve Jobs.

The award vests annually, but part of the grant depends on shareholder returns versus a basket of Apple's corporate peers, including Cisco Systems Inc and Google Inc.

But Apple has come under increasing strain from rivals like Samsung Electronics 005930.KS and Huawei in key markets, while Amazon.com Inc and other manufacturers are using Google's Android software to launch competing tablets.

Apple's profit and margins slid in the September quarter despite selling 33.8 million iPhones. Sources have said demand for the $100 cheaper, brightly hued iPhone 5C has severely lagged sales for the top-tier 5S, spurring concerns about the iPhone's market positioning and its ability to compete with a growing profusion of lower-cost rivals.

This month, it finally secured a deal with China Mobile after protracted negotiations, a deal that should enlarge its footprint in the world's largest telecoms market.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Review: Unloving, uninvolving 'Jobs'

"Jobs" is a partial life story of iconic founder of Apple Steve Jobs, how he founded his company, lost it and got it back. In between, we see what an arrogant anti-social guy Jobs actually was. This was a far cry from the Steve Jobs who was so lovingly adulated after his recent death.

I do not know if it was because Steve Jobs, the man, is not exactly a good movie biopic subject, or was it Ashton Kutcher's fault for not being able to bring the man out? Yes, Ashton had his distinctive walk, stance and mannerisms down pat, so maybe the way it was written was the problem. Everything just felt so shallow. Even made-for-TV films (which this one felt like) could have told this story better.

One glaring instance of poor storytelling was the side story about his daughter Lisa. When he first found out that his girlfriend was pregnant, he did not acknowledge paternity. But somewhere in the second half, Lisa was a teenager living in his house! So what happened in between?

In contrast, the character of Steve Wozniak, Jobs' technical genius partner, was very vividly portrayed by Josh Gad. Woz was a well- developed character in his own little arc even if he was not the central character.

It was good to see former lead stars Dermot Mulroney and Matthew Modine on the big screen again, though the characters they played were dry corporate types, no big emotion nor action in their acting. But they were still able to deliver well enough in their unsavory roles nevertheless.

They assumed a lot that the audience already know about the difference between Apple 1, Apple 2 and Mackintosh, such that these were not explained clearer. I am sure the younger audiences were waiting for the iPhone, the iPad or Steve's fight with cancer to be shown, but alas, these recent developments were not even mentioned.

The movie is so dry and uninvolving. I did not get drawn to be interested to know more about him. The episodes of his life jump around so much without logical continuity. The supposedly inspirational ending came out of nowhere, not having anything to do with the ongoing story at that point. It completely had no impact, which was a pity. 3/10

This review was originally published in the author's blog, "Fred Said."

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Can Tim Cook lead Apple to new heights?

Cook leads a quiet cultural revolution

SAN FRANCISCO - Shortly after signing on as chief operating officer at Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg was looking to connect with people in a similar role – No. 2 to a brilliant and passionate young founder. She called Tim Cook.

"He basically explained nicely that my job was to do the things that Mark (Zuckerberg) did not want to focus on as much,” Sandberg said of the 2007 meeting that lasted several hours with the chief operating officer of Apple Inc.

"That was his job with Steve (Jobs). And he explained that the job would change over time and I should be prepared for that.”

While Sandberg has enjoyed a steady run at Facebook, it is Cook's job that has changed radically since then. Now, the man who was handed one of the more daunting tasks in business – filling the shoes of the late Steve Jobs and keeping Apple on top - may himself need a spot of advice.

Two years into Cook's tenure, Apple is expected to unveil a redesigned iPhone next month. It will be a key moment for Cook. The company he inherited has become a very different creature: a mature corporate behemoth rather than a scrappy industry pioneer, with its share price down 5 percent this year, despite a recent rally. The S&P 500 is up about 15 percent this year.

A transition was, perhaps, inevitable after an astonishing five-year run in which Apple's headcount tripled, its revenues rose over six-fold, its profits grew 12-fold, and its stock price jumped from $150 to a peak of $705 last fall.

But it's been painful for some.

It is unclear whether the spread-sheeting-loving, consensus-oriented, even-keeled Cook can successfully reshape the cult-like culture that Jobs built. Though Cook has deftly managed the iPhone and iPad product lines, which continue to deliver enormous profits, Apple has yet to launch a major new product under Cook; talk of watches and televisions remains just that.

Some worry that Cook's changes to the culture have doused the fire - and perhaps the fear - that drove employees to try to achieve the impossible.

CAN NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST?

Cook is known as a workaholic who guards his privacy closely. People who know him well paint a portrait of a thoughtful, data-driven executive who knows how to listen and who can be charming and funny in small group settings.

Lisa Cooper, who went to high school with Cook in Robertsville, Alabama, and remains a friend, still laughs at memories of Cook staging prank photos for the school yearbook and crooning "The Way We Were" to her in class.

In the day to day at Apple, Cook has established a methodical, no-nonsense style, one that's as different as could be from that of his predecessor.

Jobs' bi-monthly iPhone software meeting, in which he would go through every planned features of the company's flagship product, is gone.

"That's not Tim's style at all," said one person familiar with those meetings. "He delegates."

Still, he has a tough side. In meetings, Cook is so calm as to be nearly unreadable, sitting silently with hands clasped in front of himself. Any change in the constant rocking of his chair is one sign subordinates look for: when he simply listens, they're heartened if there is no change in the pace of his rocking.

“He could skewer you with a sentence,” the person said. “He would say something along the lines of 'I don't think that's good enough' and that would be the end of it and you would just want to crawl into a hole and die.” Apple declined to comment on Cook or the company for this article.

Cook's fans say that his methodical manner doesn't get in the way of decisive action. They point to the Apple Maps fiasco, in which Apple replaced Google's mapping product with its own on the iPhone and it quickly became clear that Apple's maps were not ready for prime time.

Apple initially downplayed the glitches by saying Maps was a “major initiative” and they were “just getting started.” But behind the scenes, Cook bypassed Scott Forstall, the mobile software chief (and Jobs favorite) who was responsible for maps, and tasked internet services honcho Eddy Cue with figuring out what exactly happened and what should be done.

Cook had a lot of questions, and the episode also prompted him to fast-track his thinking on the future direction of the critical phone and tablet software known as iOS, a person close to Apple recounted.

Cook soon issued a public apology to customers, fired Forstall, and handed responsibility for software design to Jony Ive, a Jobs soul-mate who had previously been in charge only of hardware design.

“The vision that Tim had to involve Jony and to essentially connect two very, very important Apple initiatives or areas of focus – that was a big decision on Tim's part and he made it independently and very, very resolutely,” said Bob Iger, CEO of Walt Disney Co. and an Apple director.

Still, employees report some grumbling, and Apple seems to have taken note, conducting a survey of morale in the critical hardware engineering unit earlier this year.

“As our business continues to grow and face new challenges, it becomes increasingly important to get feedback about your perceptions and experiences working in hardware engineering,” Dan Riccio, Apple's senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, wrote to his team in February in an email seen by Reuters.

Some Silicon Valley recruiters and former Apple employees at rival companies say they are seeing more Apple resumes than ever before, especially from hardware engineers, though the depth and breadth of any brain-drain remains difficult to quantify, especially given the recent expansion in staff numbers.

“I am being inundated by LinkedIn messages and emails both by people who I never imagined would leave Apple and by people who have been at Apple for a year, and who joined expecting something different than what they encountered,” said one recruiter with ties to Apple.

Still, the Cook regime is also seen as kinder and gentler, and that's been a welcome change for many.

“It is not as crazy as it used to be. It is not as draconian,” said Beth Fox, a recruiting consultant and former Apple employee, adding that the people she knows are staying put. “They like Tim. They tend to err on the optimistic side.”

SOCIAL SIDE

There does seem to be, under Cook, a new willingness to admit mistakes and a more open approach to problems such as poor working conditions at Chinese contract manufacturers.

“On the social side, the only way for Apple to make a difference in the world in a broad way is to be - I believe strongly - is to be totally transparent," Cook said earlier this year at what was, paradoxically, a closed-door talk at his business school reunion.

"When you do that, you make a decision to report the bad and the good, and we hope that by doing that, that it puts pressure on everyone else to join."

Under pressure from investors, Cook not only agreed to share more of Apple's $150 billion cash hoard with shareholders, he voluntarily tied his own pay more closely to stock performance.

Yet critics wonder whether Cook's stated commitments to transparency and workers' rights really amount to much. Cook set up the global manufacturing system being criticized, and the company and its CEO remain highly secretive about matters large and small. Conditions at some Chinese factories have improved —Apple now tracks and reports hours of a million workers to avoid illegal overtime - but allegations of unfair working conditions continue to be made.

Apple has also come under scrutiny over its tax structure, under which it has kept billions of dollars in profits in Irish subsidiaries so as to pay little or no taxes. Cook defended the policy, which is legal, at a Congressional hearing in May.

Shareholders, meanwhile, are focused on the bottom line, and the next big product launch. A sharp drop in China revenue in April-June underscores the challenges Apple faces in its second-largest market as the technology gap with cheaper local rivals narrows and as Samsung Electronics keeps up a steady stream of new models across all price ranges.

Cook got a vote of confidence this month when activist investor Carl Icahn disclosed he had amassed a large position in Apple stock.

Bob Iger, the Apple director, said Cook had taken on "a very, very difficult role given the person that he's succeeded and the company he's running."

"I think he's done so with a deft hand, a strong sense of himself," said Iger, who himself long toiled as the number two to a celebrated CEO, Michael Eisner. "With that comes a real self-honesty that he is who he is, and not what the world expects him to be, or what Steve was. And I like that."

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com