Tag: apple

Microsoft and Google rake in billions in AI craze

Posted on January 31, 2024 by - News

Tech giants Microsoft and Google have splashed out on generative AI, with their cloud computing arms seeing a surge in demand as clients fork out for the pricey computing power that fuels the technology.

Microsoft has raced ahead in the AI game, pumping money into ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and pushing AI across products while others lag.

The company said sales soared to $62 billion for the October to December period, up 18 percent year-on-year and above the $61.1 billion expected by analysts.

The AI frenzy has helped Microsoft overtake Apple as the world’s biggest company by market value at more than three trillion dollars. The company’s share price is up  70 per cent from a year ago.

Microsoft’ resident Software King of the World Satya Nadella said  “We’ve moved from talking about AI to applying AI at scale.”

Punters are still refusing to take their tablets

Posted on November 8, 2023 by - News

Global tablet shipments declined by 14.2 per cent year-over-year in the third quarter of 2023, totalling 33.2 million units.

According to some figures created by IDC beancounters,  Chromebooks contracted in the third quarter with shipments totalling 3.5 million units and marking a year-over-year drop of 20.8 per cent.

IDC number crunchers think the Chromebook market may have some resilience due to a pending refresh in the education segment and available budgets within government spending.

PC sales may have bottomed out

Posted on October 10, 2023 by - News

Sales of PCs have continued to decline during the third quarter but may have gone as low as they can, according to the number crunchers at IDC.

IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker says that the downward spiral for PC shipments continued during Q3 as global volumes declined 7.6 per cent year over year, with 68.2 million PCs shipped.

Demand and the global economy remained subdued, while PC shipments increased in each of the last two quarters. This slowed the rate of annual decline indicating that the market has bottomed out.
PC inventory is better than it has been for a while with less stock on hand.

Toughest EU rules hit Big Tech on Friday

Posted on August 23, 2023 by - News

On Friday, Big tech vendors will face the toughest regulation of online content since the arrival of GDPR.

The Digital Services Act (DSA) forces companies to more aggressively police digital content and protect online users from disinformation and hate speech or face heavy fines.

Technology law professor Suzanne Vergnolle said the DSA is part of a bigger strategy to give more power to individuals, to the regulators, to civil society.

“It is another step towards more accountability,” she told AFP.

Apple tries to trademark Apple the fruit

Posted on June 20, 2023 by - News

There might be prior art going back to the Garden of Eden but the fruity-cargo cult, Apple honestly believes that it owns the trademark to all apples everywhere.

In Switzerland, the Fruit Union Suisse uses a symbol of a red apple with a white cross – the Swiss national flag superimposed onto an apple. The group has over a hundred years of history and is now worried it may have to change its logo due to Apple’s insistence on trademarking fruit.

Apple has made similar demands to IP authorities around the world with varying degrees of success because authorities in Japan, Turkey, Israel, and Armenia have previously caved to the tech giant’s unreasonable requests and mighty briefs.

Apple finally purges Intel from its Mac Pro

Posted on June 6, 2023 by - News

Fruity cargo cult Apple has purged Intel chips from its Mac Pro PC and has the whole lot running on its homemade silicon.

Apple began replacing Intel CPUs in its Mac lineup in 2020 with custom Arm-based chips designed in-house. Three years later, the company’s entire lineup of Macs is powered by homegrown M-series chips, including its MacBook Pros, MacBook Airs, iMacs and Mac Minis.

With its higher spec and “cheese grater” design, the flagship Mac Pro could not use Apple silicon and had to stick to more traditional Intel hardware.

At its WWDC 2023 event client device giant said it had come up with the M2 Ultra, which combines two M2 Max chips on a single die to deliver double-digit performance boosts over the M1 Ultra.

Jigsaw buys some more corner pieces in Apple market

Posted on April 12, 2023 by - News

Jigsaw24 has picked up service and repair specialist Amsys to bolster its position in the Apple market for media and entertainment customers.

For those who came in late, Amsys is one of the largest Apple repair and servicing specialists in the UK, with a history that spans three decades.

Jigsaw24’s chief operating officer David Dudman said: “This acquisition and the addition of the Amsys team will significantly increase Jigsaw24’s repair capabilities and bolster our technical expertise while providing Amsys with the financial security of a company with a turnover of £169 million.”

Microsoft winning the AI race

Posted on February 13, 2023 by - News

Microsoft and OpenAI have a first-move advantage in the exploding market for AI chatbots, according to Daniel Ives, managing director and senior equity research analyst at Wedbush Securities.

Through its early and continued backing of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, Microsoft is “leading so far” in the “Al arms race,” he wrote

Last week, Vole and Google held product events this week about their respective chatbot plans, Google’s event for its forthcoming Bard chatbot was “underwhelming,” according to Ives. Additionally, a Google ad for Bard, which featured an inaccurate piece of information served up by the chatbot, was “an absolute near-term gut punch to Google’s Al credibility,” Ives wrote.

Cognizant snaps up Mobica

Posted on January 25, 2023 by - News

IoT software engineering services provider Mobica was snapped up Cognizant a few weeks after Cognizant hired former Infosys veteran Ravi Kumar S as its new CEO.

Mobica’s is a Microsoft IoT edge solutions partner, is part of chipmaking vendor ARM’s partner ecosystem, and works with Apple.

The buyout will push Cognizant’s IoT-embedded software engineering capabilities and provide clients with a broader array of end-to-end support to enable digital transformation.

Onecom snaps up IMS

Posted on January 13, 2023 by - News

Onecom has snapped up IT services provider IMS Technology Services.

The deal adds more than 600 customers to Onecom’s books, the Vodafone, Microsoft, Google, Mitel, Samsung, Apple, Gamma and Five9 partner said.

Onecom’s revenues increased by over 80 per cent to reach £169 million in calendar 2021 primarily due to its aggressive M&A strategy. Founded in 2002, it has been backed by mid-market private equity firm LDC since 2019.

OneCom CEO Martin Flick said the acquisition builds on OneCom’s mission to extend its geographic footprint and technical capabilities.

Apple continues to snub channel at its own cost

Posted on November 22, 2022 by - News

While Apple claims to be trying to install serious hardware in corporations, it is hamstringing its own efforts by ignoring the channel.

On its fourth-quarter earnings call, Apple CFO Luca Maestri revealed that Apple’s enterprise business grew “strong double digits” in its fiscal 2022, picking out Cisco’s Mac programme as a case study for its progress here.

However senior director analyst at Gartner, Ranjit Atwal, said that Apple’s share in the enterprise PC market as “creeping up” and not becoming the market player that it believes.

Apple admits it has no excuses for gender imbalance

Posted on September 28, 2022 by - News

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook told the BBC that there were “no good excuses” for a lack of women in the tech sector.

Just 35  percent of Apple’s staff in the US are female, according to its own diversity figures for 2021.

Cook told the BBC that he sees it as a “cop out” when firms blame their lack of progress on a shortage of women with computer science qualifications.

Cook said there are “no good excuses” that prevent the tech sector from employing more women.  Although he did not seem to be able to explain the lack of diversity at Apple.

The Apple CEO thinks that coding courses should become a compulsory part of education in schools so everyone is equipped with a “working knowledge” of how coding works and how apps are made.

“We have to fundamentally change the number of people that are taking computer science and programming.”

 

Apple slows hiring and research as star sets

Posted on July 20, 2022 by - News

Fruity cargo cult Apple is slowing down hiring and spending next year and is blaming the economic downturn for punters no longer wanting its shiny over priced goods.

Apple said the move will not impact all teams and is not a company-wide policy and Jobs’ Mob is still planning an “aggressive” product launch schedule in 2023. It just wants to do it on the cheap with as few staff as possible to maximise profits.

The company, which invented the rounded rectangle, is cutting back on research and development, we guess it is because it has invented everything already.

IDC fears PC and tablet slump

Posted on June 9, 2022 by - News

Beancounters at IDC said COVID-19 lockdowns in China, the war in Ukraine and global inflation are slowing demand for personal computers and tablets.

The firm expects global shipments to decline 8.2 percent year over year in 2022 to 321.2 million units shipped. Tablets are expected to fall 6.2 percent in 2022.

Apple gives up on servers

Posted on May 19, 2022 by - News

Fruity and nutty cargo-cult Apple has finally given up on servers and effectively ended its long history of poor networking technology.

MacOS Server pre-dated Mac OS X by a year, launching initially in 1999. One of its main feature was Open Directory, which launched within Mac OS X Panther Server. It was a poor man’s version of Microsoft’s Active Directory and was designed to manage Macs, user accounts, and any settings on Mac-based networks.

It was part of the life of publishers and newspapers which remained Mac based even when common sense suggested they would be better off with something that did not fall asleep on press day or slow to a crawl when a page needed saving.