Connected, Episode 216: The Honking Powers the Vehicles→

The MacBook Air and Mac mini are alive, and the iPad Pro has taken a big step forward, but progress seems to come with larger price tags. The guys dive into all the news, after Federico reviews New York City.

This week’s episode of Connected is all about Apple’s Brooklyn event and my first impressions of the new iPad Pro. You can listen here.

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Apple Q4 2018 Results: $62.9 Billion Revenue, 46.9 Million iPhones, 9.7 Million iPads Sold

Apple has just published its financial results for Q4 2018. The company posted revenue of $62.9 billion. Apple sold 9.7 million iPads, 46.9 million iPhones, and 5.3 million Macs during the quarter.

We’re thrilled to report Apple’s best June quarter ever, and our fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Our Q3 results were driven by continued strong sales of iPhone, Services and Wearables, and we are very excited about the products and services in our pipeline.

Estimates and Expectations for Q4 2018, and the Year-Ago Quarter (Q4 2017)

Apple’s revenue guidance for Q4 2018 fell between $60 billion and $62 billion, with gross margin estimated to be between 38% and 38.5%.

Going into today’s earnings call, The Motley Fool reports that:

For the fiscal fourth quarter, Apple is expecting revenue of $60 billion to $62 billion, which would represent year-over-year growth of 14% to 18%. The company is also calling for gross margin of 38% to 38.5%, and operating expenses of about $8 billion.

Analysts’ consensus estimates are calling for revenue of $61.48 billion, up 16.9% year over year and near the high end of Apple’s forecast; earnings per share are being pegged at $2.78, rising 34.3% compared to the prior-year quarter.

In the year-ago quarter (Q4 2017), Apple earned $52.58 billion in revenue. During that quarter Apple sold 46.7 million iPhones, 10.3 million iPads, and 5.4 million Macs.

Graphical Visualization

Below, we’ve compiled a graphical visualization of Apple’s Q4 2018 financial results.

After the break, more charts and commentary on Apple’s Q4 earnings on Twitter:

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HomeRun: Quickly Trigger HomeKit Scenes on Your Apple Watch

HomeRun is a simple, elegant utility for triggering HomeKit scenes from your Apple Watch. Through a combination of color and iconography, HomeRun developer Aaron Pearce, who is the creator of other excellent HomeKit apps like HomeCam and HomePass, creates an effective solution for accessing HomeKit scenes from your wrist. It’s a user-friendly approach that’s a fantastic alternative for HomeKit device users frustrated by Apple’s Home app.

Apple’s Home app is hard to use on the Apple Watch. First, when you open Home on the Watch, it’s not clear what you’re seeing. Home presents a series of card-like, monochrome scene and accessory buttons that you scroll through one or two at a time. Although the app doesn’t say so, these are the favorite scenes and accessories from the Home tab of the iOS app. That makes the list customizable, which is nice, but the app should do a better job identifying where the user is in relationship to the iOS app.

Second, although you can rearrange your Home favorites to reorder them on the Watch too, you can only see two scenes or one accessory at a time. Depending on how many favorites you have, that limits the Watch app’s utility because a long list of scenes and accessories requires a lot of swiping or scrolling with the Digital Crown.

HomeRun avoids this by eliminating text and relying on color and iconography to distinguish between scenes. The app is also limited to triggering scenes, reducing potential clutter further. The approach allows HomeRun to display up to 12 scenes on a single screen of a 44mm Apple Watch compared to the two scene buttons that Home can display. If you set up more than 12 scenes, they are accessible by scrolling.

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October 30 Roundup: All the Little Things

Today’s Apple event at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House introduced new MacBook Air, Mac mini, and iPad Pro, but there were also a lot of small details revealed outside the keynote in press releases, on product webpages, and elsewhere. Below is a roundup of some of the most interesting details you may have missed.

The Event

iPad Pros

Apple Pencil

Macs

You can also follow all of our Apple event coverage through our October 30, 2018 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated October 30, 2018 RSS feed.

AppStories, Episode 85 – Personalizing Our iOS Setups→

On this week’s episode of AppStories, we talk about some of the ways we personalize and tweak our iOS setups, including wallpapers, widgets, control center, share sheets, app icons, and more.

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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

AppStories Episode 85 - iOS Personalization and Customization

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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

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Pixelmator Photo Is Coming to the iPad Later This Year

I use Pixelmator Pro almost every day on my Mac. A lot of the time, that’s for simple edits to screenshots, but I also use it for more complex layered images and editing photos. I’ve enjoyed the iOS version a lot too, but with the introduction of Pixelmator Pro on the Mac, development of the iOS version slowed. I still use the iOS app, but it’s in need of an update, which is why I was so pleased to see Pixelmator Photo teased at today’s Apple event in New York.

Pixelmator Photo will be out later this year. The app, which was first mentioned when Pixelmator Pro launched almost a year ago, is an iPad-only photo editing app that appears to closely follow the design of the Mac app and include much of its functionality too. In addition to being highlighted during Apple’s keynote today, Pixelmator Photo was on the iPads in the hands-on area after the event where Federico had a chance to try the app for a short time and was impressed.

Pixelmator Photo's image editing UI (right) is very similar to Pixelmator Pro's on the Mac (left).

Pixelmator Photo’s image editing UI (right) is very similar to Pixelmator Pro’s on the Mac (left).

According to the Pixelmator team’s preview webpage, the app:

features a collection of nondestructive, desktop-class photo editing tools, a set of stunning, machine learning-enhanced film emulation presets, a magical Repair tool to remove unwanted objects from your photos, support for editing RAW images, and more.

Pixelmator says the app will include non-destructive color adjustments including Levels, Curves, Hue & Saturation, Selective Color, and Black & White as well as Repair and Cropping tools. The app will also support RAW image editing and the ML Fix feature recently introduced in the Mac app. Machine learning will also be used to simulate analog film with a set of presets and power cropping suggestions.

Apple showed that it’s committed to offering pro-level hardware in the iPad line with the new 11 and 12.9-inch iPad Pros today. Apps are the other half of the equation, and it’s encouraging to see Pixelmator Photos announced along with Adobe’s Photoshop, and other apps that will take advantage of Apple’s new hardware.

You can also follow all of our Apple event coverage through our October 30, 2018 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated October 30, 2018 RSS feed.

The New 11” and 12.9” iPad Pros: My First Impressions and Hands-On

I just came back from the media event Apple held this morning in Brooklyn, during which the company announced major updates for the MacBook Air, Mac mini, and iPad Pro. Personally speaking, the star of the show was – unsurprisingly – the new iPad Pro line, with two new models featuring a stunning edge-to-edge display, an iPhone X-like gesture-driven interface, more powerful CPUs, and a more compact form factor.

We’re sharing more details about specs, new features, and prices in our dedicated overviews (you can find the iPad Pro, Mac mini, and MacBook Air overviews here, here, and here, respectively). In this post, I’m going to be sharing some quick first impressions about the new iPad Pros along with some notes and pictures I took at the hands-on area Apple set up after the event. Obviously, I will be sharing a lot more about the new iPad Pros over the next few days and weeks both on MacStories and AppStories.

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