With Apple’s latest quarterly financial results out in the open, the graphs of how Apple is doing compared to previous quarters come courtesy of Six Colors, who publish the graphs themselves in six colours. 68% of Apple’s Q1 2016 revenue came from the iPhone, which should give you some idea of how important the mobile device is to Apple’s bottom line, and while growth in other areas isn’t completely insane, Apple is still in a very good position, financially.
There’s no doubt that Apple already makes more money than it’s possible to comprehend, but to put it all in perspective, a tweet on Twitter points out that Apple’s profits approach similar numbers to the annual net income of the US Federal Reserve — you know, the people that actually print money. Granted, a lot of Apple’s profits will be outside of the US, which might be why foreign exchange rate fluctuations attribute to a $5 billion loss, more than Facebook’s quarterly revenue.
Apple CEO Tim Cook had a few notes for investors after Apple’s latest financial results were announced, and iMore has a transcript of what was said on the call, both from Cook and Apple CFO Luca Maestri. Interestingly, Cook said he doesn’t think VR is some niche, instead being “really cool as has some interesting applications”.
Apple also revealed that it now has over one billion active devices, counted by the number of devices that connected to Apple’s servers in the past three months. But if there was one negative to take away from Apple’s insane financials, it’s that the company expects a decline in iPhone sales next quarter. It’s the first time Apple has predicted a decline in iPhone sales, and if the iPhone sells less than 61.2 million units between now and March, will be the first time iPhone sales have declined year-on-year since the device’s release in 2007.
Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has predicted the iPhone 7 Plus will likely have a dual-lens camera, that may be based on Apple’s acquisition of LinX Imaging last year. Dual-lenses would mean a reduction in camera size, while allowing for better light sensitivity and much better low-light image quality. Kuo is also expecting the larger-sized iPhone to come in single and dual-camera versions, further fracturing Apple’s iPhone lineup.
Meanwhile, 9to5Mac is predicting a March event from Apple which will see the announcement of new iPad hardware. What’s expected to be the successor to the iPad Air 2, the smaller-screened iPhone 5se, and whatever Apple decides to do with new Apple Watch hardware. It seems like a lot of stuff to be announcing all at once, but Apple’s got plenty left in the tank for the rest of the year.
Reports of Safari crashes on both iOS and the Mac spread like wildfire yesterday, with the search suggestions feature to blame for crashing. Something must have broken server-side, but it looks like the issue has been resolved as of earlier this morning. A separate crashing issue due to a malicious website was also resolved by Apple, at least on the OS X side of things.
Call me an analyst and pay me a six-figure salary, because it looks as though I correctly called the somewhat predictable release of the second betas of iOS 9.3 and OS X 10.11.4 to members of Apple’s public beta testing team.
In a move that seems somewhat odd at first but makes perfect sense once you understand why, Apple has updated OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard for better compatibility with the Mac App Store. After all, Snow Leopard is still your only path forward to further OS X upgrades on older hardware.
MacStories tells us about new storage integrations within Office for iOS apps, which means you can open documents from Box, Dropbox, or OneDrive in order to have your documents synced across all your devices.
Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2016/01/thursday-night-news280116/