Talkingapple's List: 55

• • talk about the ambiguity of his letter 

  • talk about what Apple would be without him
    think about presentations without the guy
    I don't think it would be the same, I think it would be worst
• Team,
   
   At my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health. I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company.
   
   I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for all of Apple's day to day operations. I have great confidence that Tim and the rest of the executive management team will do a terrific job executing the exciting plans we have in place for 2011.
   
   I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can. In the meantime, my family and I would deeply appreciate respect for our privacy.
   
   Steve

• f you go back at least 14-16 quarters, Apple has reported during the last week of the month in every one of those reporting periods.
• At a minimum, plans must have been drawn at least since mid-December and maybe even earlier.

• , has been as reticent to acknowledge his sexual orientation as he has his prowess in overseeing the company supply chain.
• famously quiet and collected person
• Cook grew up in Robertsdale, Alabama, the son of a retired shipyard worker. He earned a Bachelor's degree in industrial engineering from Auburn University in 1982 and an MBA from Duke University in 1988.
• Cook's "unflappable" demeanor may have been what sealed the deal with Jobs. "Steve is very focused on people he can connect to emotionally," a recruiter present at the meeting later said.
• He is said to keep an exhaustive catalog of details of Apple's operations in his head and expects his charges to do the same. "I've seen him shred people," a former colleague told Fortune in a lengthy 2008 profile. "He asks you the questions he knows you can't answer, and he keeps going and going. It isn't funny, and it's not fun."
• Cook is described as a workaholic who begins emailing his underlings at 4:30 am each morning
• The COO prides himself on being the first into the office and the last one out.
• At IBM, he volunteered to work in the factory on Christmas and New Year's day.
• Cook is not known as a product visionary or for shepherding projects through Apple's rigorous development pipeline. For those sorts of tasks, Jobs' heir apparent is design chief Jonathan Ive

• Cook is also not known as a compelling public speaker, which is probably why marketing chief Phil Schiller has handled the unveiling of new Apple products during Jobs' past absences.

   
• "not a real social person...He just never seemed that interested in other people.

  • another reason for Apple not to get involved with social networking

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• He is responsible for all of the company's worldwide sales and operations
• service and support in all markets and countries

  • again, one of Apple's strong points
• management of Apple’s supply chain

  • Apple has one of the tightest stock control in world. a week or so.

  • this is one of the main reasons Apple came to it's knees in early 90's. Too much stock etc.
• eads Apple's Macintosh division
• Cook was vice president of Corporate Materials for Compaq and was responsible for procuring and managing all of Compaq’s product inventory.
• Cook also spent 12 years with IBM
• manufacturing and distribution functions for IBM
• Cook serves on the board of directors for Nike, Inc. and the National Football Foundation.
• • talk about other execs

  • At Apple since 98, right after Jobs return

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• ut now we've got some concrete information from reliable sources
• will sport a new screen technology that is akin to (though not the same as) the iPhone 4's Retina Display and will be "super high resolution"
• device will remain at 10 inches but will now feature both front and rear cameras (not a huge surprise)
• our sources say with near certainty that the device will have a dedicated SD slot built in

  • I Don't want a card slot. I want everything wireless. Just find a way of doing it better.
    That would go against everything Apple wants on an iPad - simplicity. Explain
• new iPad will feature a dual GSM / CDMA chipset produced by Qualcomm and will mark Apple's shift away from Infineon as its chipset maker to Qualcomm for all of its mobile devices
• dual-mode
• iPhone 5 -- a completely redesigned handset -- which our sources say is on track for a summer launch
• total rethink from a design standpoint and will be running atop Apple's new A5 CPU (a Cortex A9-based, multi-core chip).
• CDMA / GSM / UMTS baseband processor -
• : Apple is at work on the second generation of its redesigned Apple TV, which will include that new A5 processor
• ranking out 1080p video "like running water." It's likely that the A5 will make it into the iPad 2 as well, but we have yet to confirm that.

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• Chinese accessory supplier is floating a new "iPad 2nd generation" case differing from previous designs shown at CES, with port openings that appear to be designed to accommodate a new SD Card slot and a new port consistent with the size of a mini DisplayPort jack.
• • The mini DisplayPort sounds bogus as well. the push is for wireless. Who uses that stuff anyway? 

  • The one thing Apple wants to avoid is file managers. this would require one. unless an app could automatically search for all the file types it can read and only present those. Still think it's unlikely.

• A more practical approach would simply be doubling the resolution of the current iPad (1024x768) to 2048x1536 at a 260 DPI.
• Version 1.1 of Apple's iBooks
• bookmark icon i
• t, however, also included one additional version labeled "iPadx2". Sure enough, this is exactly double the resolution version of the iPad icon and is distinct from the other versions
• Apple has since removed this extra artwork in subsequent versions of iBooks.
• See the Wood Tile@2x.png below. It’s current dimensions are 1536x800 pixels. For comparison, the previous Wood Tile.png in iBooks 1.1 was a mere 768x400 pixels.

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• 2048x1536 is an incredible number of pixels -- 3,145,728 of them,
• That's only 17 percent less than the 27" iMac or 27" Cinema Display
• 52 percent more pixels than a 50" 1080p television screen!

  • that's why we say the iPad is not an expensive device for what it offers. Apple could be charging a lot more and still be unmatched
• it places greater strain on the graphics chipset to drive the screen, which makes that more expensive, too;
• • if they are going to increase pixel density on iPad, this is the easiest way to do it. Otherwise developers would be in pain.
• If Apple used some intermediate resolution for the iPad 2, then all existing iPad apps would have to be scaled by some awkward factor by the hardware,

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• • Citing upstream component makers, Taiwan's DigiTimes reported Thursday that the iPad 2 will feature a resolution of 2048 by 1536, which would be quadruple the total pixels of the iPad.
• We opened up the camera shutter images and the size is 1024 x 768, which is the same resolution as the current iPad.

• iPad will include a proximity sensor, which would automatically lock and unlock the touchscreen device when a cover, attached to a case, is placed over or removed from the display.
• The mention of a proximity sensor was discovered in the iOS 4.3 beta this week by blogdoiphone.com.

• • this is to be going in to a SoC with an A9 based arm processor

  • The most likely configuration of Apple's next custom chip is reportedly  two SGX543 cores to work as one, offering around four times the capability of the previous A4 in graphics and video tasks.
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  • • Faster video processing could also enable Apple to upgrade the iPad and iPhone 4 from VGA-style component video output to the more modern HDMI, which is already used by the new iOS-based Apple TV
• older PowerVR SGX535 GPU since the iPhone 3GS,
• MacRumors reported Friday that references to the next-generation PowerVR SGX543 have been found in the iOS 4.3 beta.
• The SGX543 can push 35 million polygons per second at 200 Mhz and 1 billion pixels per second and is capable of handling Apple's OpenCL standard. The GPU also supports multi-core configurations.

  • another hint that we will have a dual core processor in next iPhone and iPad

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• This feature will not be enabled in iOS 4.3 for customers, but we are providing this preview to gather input on how these gestures work with your apps.

  • that tells me they are just polishing up a buttonless iPad 2

• "Photo Stream uploads and stores the last thirty days of your photos on MobileMe and downloads them to all of your devices,"

  • no movies at the moment
• The new Photo Stream feature appears to make MobileMe Gallery sharing automatic, apparently enabling users to automatically share all their photos as they take them
• It appears the feature will also allow a user to keep his or her own devices synced via the cloud, so that recent pictures snapped by an iPhone would also appear on the user's iPad, for example.
• There's also hints that the service may offer hooks for third party developers to use, enabling them to take advantage of the automatic media sync and sharing features just as they are now able to tap into MobileMe contact and calendar data sync
• FaceTime and PhotoBooth apps for iPad, as well as including a Camera app to take advantage of the rear facing camera, which has been anticipated for some time.

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• detailed blog posting that the groups involved in developing the HTML5 video distribution standard "are at an impasse. There is no agreement on which video codec should be the baseline standard."

  • stupidest thing I's heard in long time. Couldn't even describe it as byest. It's absolutely false
• The HTML5 working group members finally agreed to disagree; rather than defining Ogg Theora or H.264 or anything else as the "baseline" codec for video served via the HTML5 video tag, they left the decision up to the market

  • Not to forget the battle with the heavy and proprietary Flash that seamed to be heading the right way 

  • guess what, they have voted. And everybody wants to support iOS devices. Now they're just making it harder.
    
    Now that finally we had a winner Google comes along and says: wait, let's forget about the decades it took us to finally pick a standard codec and use this one instead. It's slower than H.264 and more closed than Ogg Theora, but who cares. 
• all of the major browsers added the ability to play H.264 video apart from Firefox
• However, the vast majority of Firefox users are running on Windows or Mac OS X, both of which already supply licensed code supporting H.264 video playback
• Google has aspirations of shifting the world to Linux, in mobile devices with its Android OS and among netbooks and low end PCs with its upcoming Chrome OS. If this happens, the tiny market share of Linux among consumers will suddenly matter.

  • that's why this is scary! Imagine this, then add up all of youtube video, Chrome OS and Android without support for H.264
• • Google must also know this, but it isn't afraid of running into patent issues because it isn't directly earning any money selling anything that might infringe upon those patents. If Google's Android oversteps patents held by Nokia or Apple or Microsoft (and it allegedly has), those companies won't sue Google, they'll sue HTC and Motorola and other Google licensees that are using Android to sell their hardware (as they already have).

  • talk about table

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• ; Google announced it will be supplying plugins for Safari and Internet Explorer.

  • Is that not what all of us want to get rid of?
• WebM is worthless on existing mobile devices, most of which can't even install a plugin to play WebM content.
• lack of commercial viable WebM encoding tools
• e. Google may be professing support for open ideals, but its real motivation is to conduct its advertising business without paying to use the technology other companies have already invented. In doing so
• • Even if you take the argument they they just want an open codec, then I would argue that H.264 is owned by so many competing companies that that point becomes mute. Cause all devices you buy are going to support it and this will drive innovative ideas to be concentrated in one coded: H.264
• If Android can't play H.264, it won't push vendors to jump through hoops to encode for WebM or the poorly performing mobile version of Flash. It will push smartphone users to abandon Android.

  • Will this be the case?
    Chrome is different because you have to go and download chrome.
    Will Google win this?

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• quarter profits rose more than 77% to $6 billion
• or more than $2 billion above consensus estimates
• ecord revenue of $26.74 billion

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• Mac sales were a record 4.13 million for the quarter, with portables leading the way, accounting for $3.7 billion in revenue on sales of 2.9 million
• Mac sales almost 8 times IDCs estimate for world average, fueled by strong sales of MacBook Air and MacBook Pro

  • 23% increase year over year 

  • has been like that for the last 5 years
• "If this is cannibalization, it feels pretty good."
   
   Apple still has a low share of the PC market, so cannibalization isn't a concern to them. "The other guys lose a lot more. And we have a lot more to win because of that."
• iPhone sales were a record 16.24 million, amassing $10.5 billion in revenue for Apple during the quarter.

  • r, Apple has now surpassed Nokia to become the world's largest mobile phone maker in terms of revenue

  • Apple sells more iPhones each year than there are cars sold worldwide.
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  • • Approximately four children are born worldwide each second, so that's one iPhone for every two people being born into this world today.

    • Apple sells over two iPhones every second of every day
• The iPhone grew in sales 86 percent in the December quarter
• Apple continues to have sizable backlog and could have sold more if they could have manufactured them faster
• Have sold more than 160 million iOS devices to date
• Apple's sales of 7.3 million iPads accounted for $4.6 billion in revenue during the first quarter of fiscal 2011.

  • iPads already account for 7% of all PCs shipped in the quarter

  • well over the number of Macs.
    14.8 iPads sold in 2010 
• iPod sales for the quarter were 19.4 million, representing $3.4 billion in revenue. Compared to 21 million in the year-ago quarter.
• iPod touch grew 27 percent year over year, and accounted for more than 50 percent of iPods sold.
• Apple's retail sales accounted for about $3.5 billion in the quarter, nearly doubled -- increased 95 percent from a year before.
• • Apple now has $60 billion of cash

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• Tim Cook revealed that the company had entered into long term component supply contracts worth $3.9 billion over the next two years.
• "similar to flash agreement, focused in an area that we feel is very strategic," but said he would "prefer not to go into more details about what specific area it's in, but it's the same kind of thinking that led us to those deals."
• • could be displays. Batteries?

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