Category: Apple

The Future We Were Promised

As I’m writing this, my son is downstairs watching YouTube videos. When we have dinner, he’ll stream music on an iPad, typing song titles into the app’s search box either from memory or from a list we’ve written down (at his insistence) on paper. He’ll eat while stimming, except for when he takes a dance break.

There’s no app, drug, or device that’s going to transform my son or his interactions with others. And that’s just fine. He’s doing great and anyone who chooses to listen, who chooses to put in a little work, can meet him where he is.

→ The Verge

The First Trillion Dollars is Always the Hardest

In its first 10 years, the iPhone will have sold at least 1.2 billion units, making it the most successful product of all time. The iPhone also enabled the iOS empire which includes the iPod touch, the iPad, the Apple Watch and Apple TV whose combined total unit sales will reach 1.75 billion units over 10 years. This total is likely to top 2 billion units by the end of 2018.

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The revenues from iOS product sales will reach $980 billion by middle of this year. In addition to hardware Apple also books iOS services revenues (including content) which have totaled more than $100 billion to date.

This means that iOS will have generated over $1 trillion in revenues for Apple sometime this year.

→ Asymco

The Inside Story of Apple’s $14 Billion Tax Bill

The Maxforce concluded that Ireland allowed Apple to create stateless entities that effectively let it decide how much — or how little — tax it pays. The investigators say the company channeled profits from dozens of countries through two Ireland-based units. In a system at least tacitly endorsed by Irish authorities, earnings were split, with the vast majority attributed to a “head office” with no employees and no specific home base — and therefore liable to no tax on any profits from sales outside Ireland. The U.S., meanwhile, didn’t tax the units because they’re incorporated in Ireland.

Interesting detail about the secrecy surrounding the process of collecting such documents :

Three weeks after the Senate hearing, Lienemeyer’s team asked Ireland for details of Apple’s tax situation. The Irish tax authorities soon dispatched a representative carrying a briefcase filled with a bundle of bound pages. The Irish could have simply sent the material via e-mail, but they were cautious about sharing taxpayer’s information with the EU and have a ground rule to avoid leaks: never send such documents electronically.

→ Bloomberg

Apple Is Selling You A phone, Not Civil Liberties

Let’s start with an important fact that Apple elides in its statement: Apple engineered this problem and it did so intentionally. In the wake of the Snowden leaks, Apple specifically decided to encrypt material end-to-end and at rest by default on the devices it manufactures and to not maintain any ability to decrypt material unless users specifically gave it the power to recover that material. It boasted about this decision and used it as a marketing weapon against its competitors. Reasonable people can argue about whether or not Apple did so for good reasons and whether or not doing so was the optimal way for the company to enhance the cybersecurity of its users. But the simple fact remains that Apple used to have the capacity to comply with warrants, and now it cannot without a certain amount of reengineering. And that was a matter of its own choosing made despite repeated warnings from the government that this choice would cause substantial problems for law enforcement, national security investigators, and public safety.

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FBI and Justice Department officials, we think, can be forgiven if they’re a touch cynical about all of Apple’s elaborate legal argumentation and suspect that this all just masks what appears to be Apple’s genuine litigating posture towards the government: You can’t make us do anything, because we are immensely politically powerful, our CEO is on the phone with the President regularly, we are too big and way too cool to fail, and people around the world like us more than they like you. So what about that dead woman in Louisiana? Sorry, but bringing her killer to justice—and preventing his or her future violence—just isn’t as important as the data security of our devices. And about protecting people from ISIS? We’ll help out if it’s not too much trouble, but don’t ask us—ever—to do something that will make us look bad to the ACLU, even if there’s a very good legal argument that you can.

→ Brookings

The Most Important Apple Executive You’ve Never Heard Of

At the center of all this is Srouji, 51, an Israeli who joined Apple after jobs at Intel and IBM. He’s compact, he’s intense, and he speaks Arabic, Hebrew, and French. His English is lightly accented and, when the subject has anything to do with Apple, nonspecific bordering on koanlike. “Hard is good. Easy is a waste of time,” he says when asked about increasingly thin iPhone designs. “The chip architects at Apple are artists, the engineers are wizards,” he answers another question. He’ll elaborate a bit when the topic is general. “When designers say, ‘This is hard,’ ” he says, “my rule of thumb is if it’s not gated by physics, that means it’s hard but doable.”

→ Bloomberg Businessweek