News tagged ‘POI’

Analyst Brian Marshall with International Strategy & Investment Group claims that apple may finally pay its shareholders dividends, despite the company’s long resistance. Most investors do not believe Apple will initiate a dividend policy in 2012, but if the company will, it may gain an additional $4 billion in investments.

At the moment the current Apple’s CEO Tim Cook is reorganizing the company, so he may probably make an effort to optimize capital structure and start paying dividends Apple’s shareholders. Brian Marshall believes that Apple could "easily" implement a dividend yield of 250 base points, amounting to about $2.40 per quarter.

Apple’s previous CEO, Steve Jobs, didn’t support the idea of dividend distribution and preferred to invest in strategic opportunities such as last year purchase of Siri (Apple paid about $200 million).

"We strongly believe one or more strategic opportunities will come along we're in a unique position to take advantage of," the late Apple CEO said in 2010. "We don't let the cash burn a hole in the pocket or make stupid acquisitions. We'd like to continue to keep our powder dry because we think there are one or more strategic opportunities in the future."

Digitimes is now reporting that Apple have ordered a small number of components for a 15-inch ultra-thin notebook that Apple is said to start shipping this month with mass shipments set for the beginning of March 2012.

Upstream suppliers of Apple have recently started shipping a small volume of components for a 15-inch ultra-thin notebook model from Apple in November and the device could be either MacBook Air or just a thinner MacBook Pro. The new MacBook is expected to appear as early as the second quarter of 2012, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.

It remains unclear whether the final version of the 15-inch laptop will be marketed as a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro. Rumors related to the new Apple’s notebook have been circulating since July, when we reported that Apple was finishing up work on a new ultra-thin laptop, and at the end of October it was rumored that Apple was finishing a “test phase” and the new machine was nearing the production. The Mac maker is also rumored to be developing a 17-inch ultraportable MacBook, though such a machine was not mentioned in Tuesday's report.

Back in February, Appleinsider reported that according to people familiar with the matter, Apple appears poised to move its MacBook Pro lines more toward the MacBook Air next year. So it is likely that the new Apple’s notebook will feature a SSD rather than HDD, similar to current MacBook Air models, and would forego an optical drive.

MacBook Air ships with either a moderately fast SSD from Toshiba or a significantly faster drive with an updated controller from Samsung. But some people want to have even faster drives. And SSD from OWC called Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G can provide them with faster speeds.

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Appleinsider obtained an email that was reportedly a bug report where the company confirmed that it currently has "no plans" to support its Siri personal assistant feature on older devices and would keep Siri as the iPhone 4S exclusive feature. Some analysts view Siri as the main selling point of the newest iPhone, so it would be quite irrational to provide support for Siri on older devices in first months of iPhone 4S sales.

"Engineering has provided the following feedback regarding this issue: Siri only works with iPhone 4S and we currently have no plans to support older devices," the email read.

But it is not surprisingly, when Apple introduced Siri last month, the company made it clear that the feature was exclusive to the iPhone 4S alone. There were some speculations that Siri might require faster processor implemented in the iPhone 4S, but a hack we reported about denied that fact and show that Siri works on the iPhone 4 also quite well.

Despite the fact that iPhone 4 was launched last month, it seems that consumer Interest in the newest Apple’s smartphone is still increasing. Chris Whitmore with Deutsche Bank polled about 30 Apple retail stores and found out that between 85 percent and 90 percent of stores polled are experiencing stock-outs of the iPhone 4S.

"Apple employees are directing customers to make an online appointment (first come first serve) for next day pickup at nearby Apple retail stores as stocks appear to be refreshed daily at most locations," Whitmore said.

In-store Apple representatives advice customers to order the iPhone 4S on Apple's website between 9 p.m. and 12 p.m. Now most number of iPhone 4S units is sold via reservation, leaving a very little stock for customers who want to buy the device at a store.

Whitmore believes strong demand for the iPhone 4S both in America and abroad shows that supply remains the only factor in determining how many handsets Apple will sell this quarter. He has forecast sales of 28 million iPhones during the holidays, but admitted that number appears "increasingly conservative."

Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, admitted to the U.S. Senate antitrust subcommittee that Siri, voice assistant, could threaten his business and could supplant Google's search engine. Schmidt even went so far as to call Siri a "Google killer" and Apple's "entry point" into the search engine business.

On the contrary, Android chief Andy Rubin doesn’t believe that phones should be assistants and doubted whether people should communicate with their phones. But Schmidt denied his opinion, citing a recent study that shows that "Android operates on only 34.1 percent while Apple’s iOS runs on 43.1 percent."

Schmidt also downplayed Google's role in the search engine market, instead attributing it to hard work and luck.

"I would disagree that Google is dominant," he said after senators asserted that Google is approaching a monopoly. "By investing smartly, hiring extremely talented engineers, and working very, very hard (and with some good luck), Google has been blessed with a great deal of success."

Apple awarded 1 million stock shares to its seven executives rewarding them for hard work over the fiscal year when the company for the first time earned more than $100 billion.

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Despite Apple has seen sequential decrease in iPhone sales in the third quarter of 2011 as customers waited for the iPhone 4S launch, the company again raked in more than half of the profits produced by the largest mobile phone manufacturers over the quarter, according to a research report (via Forbes) by analyst T. Michael Walkley.

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Businessweek gives an interesting view on Apple’s supply chain and how the company managed to streamline operations in it to get a competitive advantage. According to many interviews with executives at suppliers, former employees, management experts who familiar with the Apple’s operations, the company has created a closed ecosystem where it exercises full control over nearly every operation of the supply chain. Apple is known for its management of operations and much of this credit going to company’s CEO Tim Cook.

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Yesterday we reported that Apple senior vice president for retail Ron Johnson left Apple and took CEO position at J.C. Penney. And Apple has been still looking for his successor. Cult of Mac now claims that Steve Cano has been promoted to the position of senior vice president for retail.

Apple’s new retail boss boss isn’t just some suit, though. He’s one of the first retail employees Apple ever hired, a California surfer dude who has climbed from the sales floor to the very top rung of Apple management.

According to our source, Apple is replacing Johnson with his long-time lieutenant, Steve Cano.

Cano began his career at Apple ten years ago as manager of the Palo Alto retail store, then he open the SoHo store in New York City, last seven years he worked on Apple's international retail efforts.

But Apple denies appointment of Cano. The company has said that the search for a replacement for Ron Johnson continues.

The iPhone Dev-Team has updated RedSn0w with support for jailbreaking iOS 5.0.1 beta which was recently released for iOS developers. (UPDATE: iOS 5.0.1 released)

RedSn0w 0.9.9b8 recognizes 5.0.1 beta and you don't have to "point at 5.0 IPSW" any more. Since the IPSW isn't public, you'll still need to provide it once to redsn0w (Extra -> Select IPSW).

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The Bookseller reports that Steve Jobs’ authorized biography by Walter Isaacson easily became the most popular book in the States and United Kingdom during its first week of availability. For example, in the United States the book sold 379,000 copies.

Despite being on sale for just six days in the US, Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography is already the 18th bestselling book of the year. It sits one place ahead of John Grisham's The Confession (Dell) and one place behind Rick Riordan's The Son of Neptune (Hyperion) in the year-to-date BookScan US bestseller list.

As we reported, Amazon had previously announced that the book was poised to become the best-selling book of 2011 despite a release late in the year. And we will probably be able to watch a film adaptation of the autobiography soon, because Sony Pictures has already acquired the movie rights to the book.

Two months has already gone since the moment when Tim Cook was appointed Apple’s CEO. The Wall Street Journal decided to take a look at his management strategy and found out some differences between his style and that of Steve Jobs.

In recent weeks, Mr. Cook has tended to administrative matters that never interested Mr. Jobs, such as promotions and corporate reporting structures, according to people familiar with the matter. The new chief executive, 50 years old, has also been more communicative with employees than his predecessor, sending a variety of company-wide emails while addressing Apple employees as "Team," people close to the company said.

Cook made significant changes in Apple’s education division. As a result the division was divided into marketing and sales divisions and then reintegrated with the company's broader arms focused on those aspects of the business. Another corporate-level change is recently-announced charitable matching program that calls for Apple to match employee donations up to $10,000 per year, a change from the Jobs who was reportedly against giving money away. Cook seems to recognize quickly expertise and achievements of his employees, and ready to promote them, such as with the promotion of Eddy Cue.

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Net Applications have published its latest data on web traffic from mobile devices, which show that Apple’s iOS took advantage of iPhone 4S launch and continuous iPad momentum to reach a 60% share of mobile web traffic. During October iOS has accounted for  61.64% of the web traffic.

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Low battery life is one of the major issues for early iPhone 4S owners who constantly searching answers on Support Communities forum. Thus far Apple has remained silent about the matter. It appears that the problem is also affecting some iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4, suggesting that it is rather a software defect than a hardware problem.

iDownloadBlog reports on interesting remedy that helped some users to improve the battery performance. The Setting Time Zone feature in iOS 5 appears to cause excess power consumption as the device repeatedly detect user location to set the time zone. To turn off this functionality, open Settings App, go to Location Services, System Services and disable the Setting Time Zone function.To make your iPhone last more, you may also want to switch off Diagnostics & Usage and Location-Based iAds in this menu.

Apple offers this advice to improve battery life of your iPhone:

“Be sure to go through at least one charge cycle per month (charging the battery to 100% and then completely running it down)”.

Macworld’s mentions launching a system diagnostic app in order to pinpoint which unnecessary processes are running in the background and discover the cause of rapid battery drain.