Tag: apple

Apple, Samsung want your dabs

Posted on October 13, 2014 by - News

fingerprintFingerprint sensing technology has been with us for some time. But it seems that smartphone and tablet giants Samsung and Apple want to promote it a little bit more.

Research outfit IHS said the fingerprint sensor market will grow to be worth $1.7 billion by 2020.

The number of handsets and tablets using fingerprint sensors will total 1.4 billion units – four times the number of the 317 million units that will ship by the end of this year.

While Apple has been at the forefront of fingerprint sensing to date, other vendors are going to pick up the baton, said IHS. Samsung hasn’t yet got to the starting gate but is expectedto do so as soon as it finds a smaller rectangular sensor.

But while fingerprint sensors will have their vogue, swipe sensors will continue to exist, particularly in lower end smartphones.

One important element that will push adoption of fingerprint sensors are financial companies – companies like Mastercard, Visa and Paypal think they will be ideal for mobile payments.

Fingerprint sensing was first pioneered by Japanese banks but saw the sunset when there were several incidents of gangsters chopping off the fingers of victims to access accounts at ATMs.

Apple sued by sapphire firm

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

blue-appleStyle company Apple has had a writ from Taiwanese firm Tera Xtal, claiming it has infringed its patents.

According to the Taipei Times, Apple used patented technology to put sapphire substrates into cameras used in iPhones. Apple, of course, doesn’t manufacture these things but uses a supply chain to make them.

A company representative told the newspaper that it had taken action against Apple because of its large sales volume, but that this won’t be the end of the matter.

She said that it’s entirely possible that lawyers may be put on other manufacturers’ cases, including giant Korean companies Samsung and LG.

Tera Xtal wants to extract $9.88 million in damages if it’s proved that Apple has in fact breached its patents.

The company is also contemplating taking legal action against firms in other jurisdictions.

Apple could be worth double

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

two-applesA man who owns rather a lot of shares in the fruity cargo cult Apple, claims that they are undervalued and wants them to go up a bit.

Billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn said Apple) shares could double in value if it used its $133 billion cash pile in a buy back scheme.

In an open letter to Apple’s board, Icahn said Apple was dramatically undervalued in today’s market, and the more shares repurchased now, the more each remaining shareholder will benefit.

Icahn who said he would be hanging on to his own stock out of any repurchase claimed that Apple stock should be trading at $203.

“At today’s price, Apple is one of the best investments we have ever seen from a risk reward perspective, and the size of our position is a testament to this. This investment represents the largest position in our investment history,” Icahn wrote.

Icahn urged Apple to buy back as much as $100 billion in stock and said he hoped other investors would also press for a buyback.

In June Apple split, its stock seven for one and in April it raised its share repurchase authorisation to $90 billion from the $60 billion announced a year earlier.

Shareholders did not seem that impressed. Apple shares rose less than one percent in early trading to $101.49 but slipped to $100.84 later. The stock has gained 25 percent since January.

Icahn owns 53 million shares and is one of the iPhone maker’s top 10 investors so he will get back a huge amount if the share price doubles. Needless to say he has been urging the company to buy back more shares and raise its dividend.

We would take all this with a pinch of salt. In his letter, he said he expects the Apple Watch, the company’s first new product category since the iPad in 2010, to boost the company’s growth and suggested that television is another large opportunity for the company, which is more than anyone else believes.

Apple has long signaled it will not be pressured into making hasty decisions. On Thursday, spokeswoman Kristin Huguet declined to comment directly on Icahn’s letter but said “We always appreciate hearing from our shareholders.”  We are sure she does.

Apple’s bendy turkey now faces hair-gate

Posted on October 8, 2014 by - News

appleIt looks like Apple’s reputation for design success is hair today, gone tomorrow.

Already the iPhone 6 range has had to deal with the fact that its aluminium frame can be bent but now has to deal with the fact that its design pulls out the hair on your head and beard.

Twitter users have made #hairgate a rising social media trend.

The problem happens where the aluminium meets the glass which has a space which is ideal for catching hair and pulling it out.  If only there was a company which was famous for its design which did not make such basic mistakes.

Apparently Apple fanboys are divided as to whether treat #beardgate as a separate trend, or simply as a subset of #hairgate. Other Applefans cannot grow a beard and don’t care.

Apple has been refusing to comment about it. However, if its press office had been required to handle the Black Death it would have waited six months before claiming that it only affected a small number of people.

Apple’s silence is fuelling a range of gags. The Twitter account of the Atlanta International Fashion Week speculating that it may be an elaborate plot against hipsters for whom facial hair has become de rigeur. Another user tweeted: “Congrats, Apple, for finally getting hipsters to shave”.

Gillette posted: “Your phone may be smarter than ever, but leave the shaving to the experts.”

The tame Apple press is rushing to quote the standard Apple fanboys in denial posts instead.

“I have iPhone 6. Doesn’t bend and doesn’t snag hair. Who thinks up these things? Apple haters? Competitors?” tweeted John Wooten.

After all, who wants to be the idiot who spent a fortune on a phone so poorly designed it bends and rips your hair out. Only a complete moron would do that – so it is better to pretend you bought a great product, claim it is perfect and people will not laugh at you.

Apple’s design for an iWatch was also mocked by Swiss Watch Makers which said that it looked like it had been designed by a first year design student.

Apple to lose Siri to Samsung

Posted on October 3, 2014 by - News

Anovità-apple-2013pple could lose the core technology behind its voice-command assistant Siri to its rival Samsung.

Siri is the product of SRI International, a research lab that has created many technologies and biosciences products. The digital assistant was spun out as Siri which Apple acquired in 2010, but the voice recognition engine is provided by Nuance Communications.

In June, Nuance and Samsung began merger talks, and everything “slowed” due to “complexities”.

Now it appears that the talks are back on and Nuance  redeemed $250 million in 2027 convertible notes to save a  future acquirer around $50 million from a debt-to-share conversion.

If Samsung buys Nuance, then Apple is in trouble. It would not want to buy the outfit because it is too expensive for what it would get and Jobs’ Mob would get all sorts of businesses like health care and imaging it does not want.

Samsung on the other hand could lap that side of the business up.  It already has a small healthcare business, and it would get access to 450,000 clinicians, 10,000 healthcare institutions, 50 percent of radiology reports and 98 percent of most connected hospitals.

If Apple had not done so much to hack off Samsung, maybe the outfit would have let it buy a licence, however after all the court cases this is not likely to be the case.

Tablet market is all shook up

Posted on October 2, 2014 by - News

ipad3Apple and Samsung are going to have to fight hard to keep their place as leaders of the tablet pack.

Because, according to market intelligence firm ABI Research, other vendors including Asus, Lenovo and Amazon are fighting hard for third place and creeping up on the leaders.

These emerging vendors are set to experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.8 percent between 2014 and 2019.  Lenovo, for example will ship 21 million tablets by 2019.

Samsung saw a 35 percent decline in growth between Q1 2014 and the second quarter, while Apple saw a 19 percent decline.

In the first quarter, Apple and Samsung had a hefty 72 percent of the marketplace but their combined market share dropped to 66 percent and that’s the way things are headed.

In fact, ABI Research thinks that advanced and mature markets are experiencing a stall in growth, partly because tablets don’t need replacing every few years like notebook PCs.

Smartwatches to steal the day

Posted on October 2, 2014 by - News

fobwatchThe jury is still out on whether smartwatches will storm the market but if one research outfit is to be believed, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

IHS, a market research company based in the USA, says revenues for smartwatches will be worth around $300 million this year and predicts a rise of 80 percent annually for “at least” four more years to come.

IHS claims the market will be worth around $23 billion by 2023, with shipments of 800 million units – compared to 54 million this year. Those optimistic figures are fuelled by the belief that we’ll see better resolution and colour displays in years to come.

Sweta Dash, who analyses displays at IHS, believes that fashion will drive sales.  “Wearables are best viewed as functional fashion accessories rather than as electronic goods.  Because the fashion accesory market is determined by design rather than by simple function, wearable products such as smartwatches must be adapable to various forms including squares, circles, or even ovals.”

Battery power is important too.

But Dash sounds a word of caution in what otherwise is a very upbeat report.  “Smartwatches and smart glasses from Google and others are not completely ready for mainstream consumer adoption.” They’re all expensive and won’t make them mass market until prices drop.

Chinese snoop on iPhone protesters

Posted on October 2, 2014 by - News

apple fanboysThe Chinese government appears to be cracking down on Hong Kong protesters who use an iPhone or iPad.

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a computer virus that spies on Apple Inc’s iOS operating system for the iPhone and iPad, and they believe it is targeting pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.

Dubbed Xsser, the software can steal text messages, photos, call logs, passwords and other data from Apple gear.

Researchers with Lacoon Mobile Security uncovered the spyware while investigating similar malware for Google Android operating system last week that also targeted Hong Kong protesters.

Lacoon Chief Executive Michael Shaulov said that Xsser is the most sophisticated malware used to date in any known cyberattack on iOS users.

It is not clear what the Chinese government hopes to learn from an Apple fanboy’s account, there is just so much you can learn from a complete Coldplay collection and an undeletable U2 album.

It is unclear how iOS devices get infected with Xsser, which is not disguised as an app particularly as Apple claims that its software is super secure.

The code used to control that server is written in Chinese. The high quality of the campaign and the fact it is being used to target protesters suggests that it is coming from a sophisticated attacker in China.

“It is the first time in history that you actually see an operationalized iOS Trojan that is attributed to some kind of Chinese entity,” Shaulov said.

Lacoon said on its blog that it is possible the attackers might have deployed the Trojan in other places, in addition to spying on pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.

“It can cross borders easily, and is possibly being operated by a Chinese-speaking entity to spy on individuals, foreign companies, or even entire governments,” they said in their bog.

 

Internet Explorer still popular, shock

Posted on October 2, 2014 by - News

shockData gathered by Net Applications has revealed that despite the domination of press by its rivals, Microsoft Internet Explorer is still the world’s most popular browser.

Microsoft’s product accounts for almost 60 percent of the market and it does not appear to be going away anytime soon.

Chrome, which is IE’s main rival, has been expanding its reach and has grown to 21 percent up from 19 percent just a month earlier. That growth has mainly been at the expense of Firefox, which now accounts for only 14 percent, down from around 20 per cent a year earlier. Finally, Safari is holding steady at the five percent mark while other browsers are also slowly declining in usage.

Internet Explorer IE 8, which is the default browser in Windows 7, has slowly gained users and now accounts for over 22 percent of the market.

Newer versions of the browser, such as 10 and 11 have declined in numbers. IE 11, the current browser version only accounts for 17 percent.

As Internet Explorer 12 coming as part of Windows 10, formerly known as Windows 9, Microsoft may soon find itself in a situation where it’s desperately trying to get its users to upgrade.

Also it is telling that the impact of mobile browser use is negligible – both Apple and Chrome do not seem to benefit much from a “mobile effect” on the figures.

 

Samsung tablets up, Apple iPads down

Posted on October 1, 2014 by - News

cheap-tabletsA report from ABI Research said that sales of branded tabets such as those from Samsung and Apple only grew by 2.5 percent in the first half of this year.

The report said that sales of Apple iPads fell by 13 percent while sales of Samsung tablets grew by 26 percent year on year.

Jeff Orr, an analyst at ABI Research, said: “The roller coaster ride from the leading two tablet vendors has market watchers looking to other vendors to create sustainable growth. All eyes are on Lenovo as it is one of the few to demonstrate consistent growth over the past year.”

But there is some good news for Intel. It is showing progress towards the goal it set itself of 40 million devices using its microprocessor in 2013. Orr described 2014 as the “tipping point” for Intel’s mobile stategy.

”Forty million units is only a minor dent in ARM’s domination of tablets, though Intel is quickly becoming a formidable applications processor architecture competitor,” Orr said.

Tame Apple Press claims Bendgate is a conspiracy theory

Posted on October 1, 2014 by - News

truthDesperate to keep Apple afloat after it released a phone which was easy to bend and break, the Tame Apple Press is actually releasing stories claiming it is all a conspiracy theory “on a par to 9/11.”

BGR  insists that all the videos  you see where the phone is being bent are all doctored, just like the moon landings.  If you are dumb, enough to think that Americans walked on the moon then you are stupid enough to think an iPhone bends, apparently.

It was especially sure that this video, which bends the iPhone 6 Plus so easily that we actually do have a hard time believing the device wasn’t doctored somehow beforehand.

Another video made by Lewis “Unbox Therapy” Hilstenteger’s original video was a fake because of time discrepancies. The time shown from earlier in the video before the phone was bent is later than the time shown in the video after the phone was bent.

However Hilstenteger said that he had to reshoot part of the video because of glare problems, but that is just what “they want you to think.”

BGR reports that fans think that Samsung has hatched an international conspiracy so vast that it’s paid lots of YouTube users to fake bending their iPhones in the exact same way.

To be fair, BGR does say that “obsessing over the nuances of the bent iPhone 6 Plus [videos] in the same way conspiracy theorists obsess over grassy knolls and moon landing videos” is nutty. However, the question is why are the Tame Apple Press unable to accept that Jobs’ Mob made a design flaw?

Why would respectable technology magazines actually try to bury the news that a phone is faulty instead of warning its readers about the problem. So far there is a lot of empiratic evidence that the iPhone6 and iPhone 6+ is structurally weak and susceptible to bending.  It is fairly clear that the conspiracy is not to tell lies about Apple, but to bury the truth which is already out there.

Apple suffers more iCloud woes

Posted on September 30, 2014 by - News

stormNot satisfied with a security hole which allowed 4Chan users access to minor celebrities’ porn stashes, the Fruity Cargo cult Apple has some more problems with its cloud.

According to MacRumours there is a serious bug with the “Reset All Settings” option in iOS 8, causing users who activate the feature to lose all of their iWork documents stored in iCloud Drive.

Using the “Reset All Settings” option under General –> Reset has caused documents to be permanently deleted from iCloud Drive.

The “Reset All Settings” option explicitly says that “No data or media will be deleted,” which means that Apple was lying when it told users they were safe. It is meant to reset all user preferences to the default out-of-the-box settings not kill the documents.

MacRumours tested the bug and found that “Reset All Settings” deleted all iWork documents stored in iCloud Drive on the iPhone and on iCloud.com.

“After allowing time for syncing to a Mac running OS X Yosemite, all of the documents disappeared from that machine as well. Preview and TextEdit documents, which cannot be accessed on the iPhone, remained untouched on the Mac,” the magazine said.

Apple is no longer shellshocked

Posted on September 30, 2014 by - News

tim-cook-securityApple has finally released updates to protect Mac OS X systems from the dangerous “Shellshock” bug.

The osxPatches are available via Software Update, or from the following links for OS X Mavericks, Mountain Lion, and Lion.

What is amazing is the amount of time that Apple has taken to get the patch to its users. Given that it was given a patch by open sources weeks ago.

Sources within Apple suggest that the company did not want to trust any outsider when it came to the patch and ordered its software engineers to come up with a version of its own. This resulted in a long delay.

It was also not helped by Apple claiming that it was invulnerable to the Shellshock bug.

“With OS X, systems are safe by default and not exposed to remote exploits of bash unless users configure advanced UNIX services,” an Apple spokesperson said last week, adding that the company is “working to quickly provide a software update for our advanced UNIX users.”

Shellshock has been built in to every version of bash since the system’s inception in 1989. A remote attack, nefarious users could potentially issue commands to an affected computer with the intent of gathering information modifying system files and more.

Mac owners running Mavericks can download the 3.4MB patch through Apple Support website, as can users operating Mountain Lion and Lion. For Mountain Lion, the fix comes in at 34.3MB, while the Lion download clocks in at 3.5MB. Alternatively, the patch is available through Software Update.

China clamps down on iPhone smugglers

Posted on September 29, 2014 by - News, Products

gala_appleApple is not set to launch its iPhone 6 family in mainland China for a while, but that’s just created a smuggling racket as crooks try to cash in on demand for the devices.

According to the Taipei Times, crooks are selling imported iPhone 6s for as much as $3,000 – but authorities have made several seizures of the machines in the last week.

Some have tried to import the iPhones by using speedboats into mangrove swamps while others have taken the more direct route of stuffing their suitcases with contraband Apple phones.

The same report said that “hundreds” of devices had been taken from passengers who sought to import a phone without declaring them.

Greed for Apple iPhones is apparently so high that authorities are suggesting that people despise rather than envy those who have one of the overpriced devices.  The Taipei Times report is here.

“iPhone clone” faces cloning problems

Posted on September 29, 2014 by - News

OrphanBlacChinese phone maker Xiaomi, which faces continual attacks from the Tame Apple Press for daring to make a phone similar to Apple’s, is facing a cloning problem of its own.

Chief Communications Officer Li Lei at Xiaomi said that it was wrong that Xiaomi was an iPhone clone and the outfit created a masterpiece from scratch.

Where Xiaomi is similar to Apple is that it has a strategy of selling single models in large quantities.

“That is why Xiaomi products give such impression,” added Li. “We release very few models a year. As everyone knows iPhone 4 and 5, everyone knows Xiaomi 3 and 4.”

Li said that Xiaomi’s strong points were that its products reflect Chinese users’ unique characteristics or experiences. That is the same to other Xiaomi electronic products, including mobile phones.

Ironically Xiaomi’s biggest problem is knock offs. It has launched its products in the Philippines, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Taiwan. It plans to advance into 10 more countries within this year.

“The biggest problem of a fake is that it cannot guarantee the quality and also taints reputation of Xiaomi. Consumers may complain ‘How come a Xiaomi product is in poor quality,’ and give poor evaluation on Xiaomi products,” Lei said.

Of course, the Tame Apple Press thinks that is just one giant karma boomerang which they are praying is returning to bite Xiaomi.