Posts tagged with "apple"

Apple Posts Letter On “Commitment to Customer Privacy”→

Apple has today posted a lengthy public statement on how they handle customer data following allegations of involvement in the NSA-operated PRISM surveillance program. In the letter, Apple reiterates that they don’t provide any government agency with direct access to their servers, and that only the “narrowest possible set of information” is provided to the authorities after a court order and an evaluation of Apple’s Legal team.

Apple writes:

From December 1, 2012 to May 31, 2013, Apple received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement for customer data. Between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in those requests, which came from federal, state and local authorities and included both criminal investigations and national security matters. The most common form of request comes from police investigating robberies and other crimes, searching for missing children, trying to locate a patient with Alzheimer’s disease, or hoping to prevent a suicide.

Apple also explains that they don’t mantain a “mountain of personal details about our customers in the first place”.

For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers’ location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form.

Apple’s letter is available here, and it’s linked directly on Apple.com’s front page as well.

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Apple Rolls Out Online Store Design Changes

Apple rolled out a series of design changes to its online Store overnight, bringing a cleaner, more subdued style for graphical elements and larger, image-centric spots for products and accessories.

The most notable change is the front page of the Store, which now eschews a sidebar to present a full-size view of products with varying sizes. The old design featured evenly-spaced thumbnails for Apple products and third-party accessories with two sidebars with additional navigation options and information; the new one employs larger images, retaining navigation for the main “Shop” sections at the top and in the footer. Interestingly, in the refreshed homepage launched today, the only image showing a Mac is the “Shop Mac” link at the top.

Design tweaks have also been rolled out in several other areas of the Store, such as the Accessories page. The old design relied on a main product list with small thumbnails and a sidebar containing clickable links on the left side; the new one takes a more visual approach with a landing page featuring larger tiles of products, a new sidebar on the right, and a larger grid for accessories in each category.

The Apple Store follows a series of recent design tweaks Apple brought to some of its products and services – notably, the company sent new iTunes promotional emails with a cleaner look and more focus on content yesterday.

For comparison purposes, we have captured screenshots of the old online Store design using the Internet Archive. You can view the full-size images by clicking the links below.

- Online Store homepage: old/new

- iPad Accessories page: old/new

Apple Hits 50 Billion App Downloads

As expected, Apple has hit the 50 billion app downloads milestone today. The countdown that the company launched two weeks ago was updated with a new “Thanks” image on Apple’s servers earlier today, which is now publicly available across Apple.com and the iTunes Store. On Apple’s website, there’s a new photo of an iPad running Paper by FiftyThree and displaying “Thanks” as a handwritten note; on the promotion’s webpage, Apple writes “50 billion app downloads. One really big thank you”.

Apple will award an App Store gift card of $10,000 to the lucky customer who downloaded the 50 billionth app, plus a $500 App Store gift card to each of the next 50 people to download an app.

In the past five years, Apple shared various App Store download milestones: three billion apps had been downloaded by January 2010; 10 billion by January 2011; 15 billion in July 2011; for the 25 billionth app download in March 2012, Apple awarded  Chunli Fu of Qingdao, China — who downloaded  Where’s My Water? Free — with a $10,000 gift card. Apple announced 40 billion App Store downloads in January 2013, with 20 billion of them in 2012 alone.

The iOS App Store opened on July 10, 2008. After 1770 days (4 years, 10 months, 5 days), 50 billion app downloads make an average of over 28 million apps downloaded each day (28.2 million). In January 2013, Apple announced 500 million iOS devices had been sold; assuming the number jumped to 560 million after Apple’s Q2 2013 results, that would make an average of 89.3 apps downloaded for each iOS device sold.

According to Apple, “the grand prize winner will be announced soon”.

There’s an Ad for That→

A good take by Harry Marks on the differences between Apple and Samsung ads. You know where I stand.

Towards the end, I especially liked this bit:

It’s been rumored that iOS 7 is going to bring a drastic overhaul to the UX, including a new home screen and enhanced features. This will inevitably bring a level of complication users haven’t had to deal with yet. Seeing as how this is Apple we’re talking about, I doubt these updated bells and whistles will be difficult to trigger, but there will most likely be a bit of a learning curve in the beginning. Every familiar paradigm starts out as something new and unknown.

I don’t know how much ads can be an effective teaching tool for users, but I agree: there will be a new learning curve, but some changes are necessary.

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Apple Reveals New “All-Time Top Apps” Following Countdown To 50 Billion Downloads

Alongside the countdown to 50 billion app downloads posted earlier today, Apple has also published a series of updated charts for the top downloaded apps of all time. Apple posted the same charts last year, after the App Store hit 25 billion downloads, and had done the same in January 2011 ahead of 10 billion downloads.

Apple’s charts of the Top 25 apps of all time provide a precious insight into the trends of the App Store for free and paid apps downloaded by iOS users on their iPhones and iPads. While the charts from 2012 and 2013 are largely similar in terms of presence of games and brands like Angry Birds and Facebook, there are some interesting differences worth noting.

Below, we have compiled the complete list of updated “all-time top apps”, alongside some notes about the differences from last year’s charts. Read more

Apple Posts Countdown to 50 Billion App Downloads

With its weekly App Store refresh, Apple has today launched an official countdown to 50 billion app downloads. Through a page available on iTunes, Apple explains that they will award an App Store gift card of $10,000 to the lucky customer who will download the 50 billionth app, plus a $500 App Store gift card to each of the next 50 people to download an app.

Apps have revolutionized the way we play video games, consume news, do business, educate, communicate, create art, and so much more.

The countdown promotion is open to entrants who are 13 years of age or older and are located in one of the 155 countries where the App Store is available. There’s a limit of 25 entries per person per day; Apple specifies that the live counter is for “illustrative purposes” only.

In the App Store page, Apple has also posted links to official rules and a guide to enter to win without a purchase or download, but the links aren’t live on Apple.com yet. We will update this more with more information as it becomes available from Apple.

Apple announced 40 billion App Store downloads in January 2013, with 20 billion of them in 2012 alone. For the 25 billionth app download in 2012, Apple awarded  Chunli Fu of Qingdao, China – who downloaded  Where’s My Water? Free – with a $10,000 gift card.

The State of Apple Rumors→

John Moltz:

It’s a weird time for those of us who’ve followed Apple rumors for years. (And I’m not the only one who has noticed.) At the risk of sounding like your prototypical hipster, today’s rumors just aren’t as good as they used to be. The devices that we hear whispers about now—a smartwatch, a television, a cheaper iPhone—seem lackluster compared to the rumored products of days past—products that, when they actually appeared, changed entire industries.

I think that a lot of this has to do with an increasing shift of rumors towards software: just in the past week, various people have spoken with their sources to detail what’s coming with iOS 7 and OS X 10.9. It is an exciting time to think about what Apple may do with an iOS redesign, better inter-app communication, iCloud improvements, and changes to core iOS apps that have basically stayed the same since iPhone OS 1.

On the hardware side, changes to existing product lines tend to be more incremental, often detailed well in advance by rumor sites, and even shown in photos of “leaked” components. But even with current products, there are interesting scenarios to talk about.

And as far as the smartwatch rumor goes, I don’t think that’s lackluster at all.

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Apple Q2 2013 Results: $43.6 Billion Revenue, 37.4 Million iPhones, 19.5 Million iPads Sold

Apple has published their Q2 2013 financial results for the quarter that ended on March 31st, 2013. The company posted revenue of $43.6 billion. The company sold 19.5 million iPads, 37.4 million iPhones, and  “just under” 4 million Macs, earning a quarterly net profit of $9.5 billion.

We are pleased to report record March quarter revenue thanks to continued strong performance of iPhone and iPad,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Our teams are hard at work on some amazing new hardware, software and services, and we are very excited about the products in our pipeline.

Apple added $12.5 billion in cash flow “from operations during the quarter”, ending the quarter with a cash balance of $145 billion.

Today, Apple has also announced they have doubled the capital return program:

 The Company expects to utilize a total of $100 billion of cash under the expanded program by the end of calendar 2015. This represents a $55 billion increase to the program announced last year and translates to an average rate of $30 billion per year from the time of the first dividend payment in August 2012 through December 2015.

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A Preview of the Apple Pop-Up Museum→

Stephen Hackett has a nice overview of the Apple Pop-Up Museum, “an exclusive collection of Apple products to be shown in Atlanta”:

At the end of the first hall, there’s a room that stands out. While the hallway is bright and colorful, this room is dark, with the entrance painted black. In sparse white letters above the door, it reads “The Wilderness.”

The Apple Pop-Up Museum will be exhibiting on April 20 and April 21. Admission is only $10 per day and $15 for both days. My only experience with exhibitions of old Apple computers was an Apple I that was put on display in my town last summer. If I lived near Atlanta, I wouldn’t think twice about buying a ticket.

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