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Apple Once Again Recognizes World AIDS Day In-Store and Online - Mac Rumors

Apple, not known for its partnerships with third-parties, is once again recognizing December 1st as World AIDS Day at Apple Retail Stores and on its website. Apple has also done something similar for the past two years.

Some stores, including several locations in the United Kingdom and the United States, are expected to color their Apple logos red for the occasion. A MacRumors reader sent in two images from the Regent Street store in London noting that the coloring process has already taken place in preparation for the store's opening today, as it is already December 1st in the UK.

Every day, 900 babies are born with HIV. (RED) works with companies like Apple to fight for an AIDS‑free generation by creating (PRODUCT)RED merchandise. A percentage of gross profits from the sale of those products goes to the Global Fund to help fund AIDS programmes in Africa. Since its introduction, (PRODUCT)RED has generated more than $215 million for the Global Fund — more than $65 million from Apple alone. You can help make an impact by purchasing a (PRODUCT)RED iPod or (PRODUCT)RED accessories for iPhone and iPad.

Apple sells a number of PRODUCT (RED) items where a percentage of the profits are donated to the Global Fund to fight AIDS in Africa. There are (RED) versions of the iPod shuffle, iPod nano, iPod touch, the iPad Air and iPad mini Smart Covers, the iPad Air Smart Case, the iPhone 4S Bumper, and the iPhone 5s case.

The move follows a special charity auction by Sotheby's to benefit Product (RED) last week, which involving the auctioning off of one-of-a-kind products designed by Jony Ive and Designer Marc Newson. Items included a red Mac Pro, a pair of solid gold Apple EarPods, a special edition Leica camera and a one-of-a-kind aluminum desk. In total, all of products auctioned off at the special event raised nearly $13 million.

Apple has also raised more than $65 million for Product (RED) since 2006.

Thanks, Lee!

A question: does anyone think that money can cure AIDS? AIDS stops when people stop committing indecent acts...just putting out there for people to consider. :)

Interesting, I'll tell my Uncle that got it from a blood transfusion to stop being so indecent.

You are scum.

I understand that people can get it indirectly. I apologize. To clarify, I was speaking of the original SOURCE of the disease.

Please, quit while you're behind. Thanks

Unfortunately most passing shoppers will think this has an association with Christmas, missing the point entirely.

A question: does anyone think that money can cure AIDS? AIDS stops when people stop committing indecent acts...just putting out there for people to consider. :)

You do know HIV is passed by body fluids regardless of you your judgement of indecency? I'm fairly certain getting a blood transfusion or being born to an HIV positive mother is not an indecent act.

http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/aids.html

Exactly the same way we stopped polio....

which was with a vaccine and countless thousands of people working together. How does RED promote AIDS vaccinations?

The so-called charity auctions remind me of the high school penny drives my old high school had. All the "little people" would scrounge up pennies while the rich kids' parents wrote checks for $100 (that they counted as 10k pennies). Within a couple of weeks those checks became $1000. It was basically a pissing contest for the rich people. The money allegedly raised for the school got lost along the way.

Product RED has spent more on advertising than they have received in funds. The vast majority of money in and out has been with little-known entities such as Apple and Nike. So while Product RED may be promoting a great cause on the surface, all they have done effectively is to raise the reputation of companies such as Apple and Nike who pay lip service to giving back.

If Apple honestly cared out of the generosity of their own hearts, they would have done more than donate less than 0.01% of their profit over the past 7 years to help that cause. And if Apple users really cared they'd buy a $200 tablet instead of the $500 iPad Air and donate the other $300 to charity. Let's face it, we're all posers now.

/soap box ranting

I understand that people can get it indirectly. I apologize. To clarify, I was speaking of the original SOURCE of the disease.

Eating meat from Monkeys is indecent?

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/06/0612_030612_hivvirusjump.html

It is now widely accepted that humans contracted HIV from chimpanzees, probably by butchering them for bush meat. The new findings thus show that humans are not the only primate species to acquire two different immunodeficiency viruses by cross-species transmission.

A question: does anyone think that money can cure AIDS? AIDS stops when people stop committing indecent acts...just putting out there for people to consider. :)

Exactly the same way we stopped polio....

A question: does anyone think that money can cure AIDS? AIDS stops when people stop committing indecent acts...just putting out there for people to consider. :)

I'm gonna be sad when we eventually cure AIDS and Apple stops making (RED) colored products :D

which was with a vaccine and countless thousands of people working together. How does RED promote AIDS vaccinations?

The so-called charity auctions remind me of the high school penny drives my old high school had. All the "little people" would scrounge up pennies while the rich kids' parents wrote checks for $100 (that they counted as 10k pennies). Within a couple of weeks those checks became $1000. It was basically a pissing contest for the rich people. The money allegedly raised for the school got lost along the way.

Product RED has spent more on advertising than they have received in funds. The vast majority of money in and out has been with little-known entities such as Apple and Nike. So while Product RED may be promoting a great cause on the surface, all they have done effectively is to raise the reputation of companies such as Apple and Nike who pay lip service to giving back.

If Apple honestly cared out of the generosity of their own hearts, they would have done more than donate less than 0.01% of their profit over the past 7 years to help that cause. And if Apple users really cared they'd buy a $200 tablet instead of the $500 iPad Air and donate the other $300 to charity. Let's face it, we're all posers now.

/soap box ranting

I never said anything about RED, I was responding to an ignorant comment. Vaccines will eventually be how HIV is stopped, but vaccines won't be enough as long as people think it is a morality problem.

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Microsoft, bored of bashing Apple, bashes Samsung - CNET

Look how substandard the Galaxy Tab is.

(Credit: Microsoft/YouTube Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)

If you're in business, you have to get used to criticism.

If you're in the gadget business, however, you're nobody unless Microsoft criticizes you.

What other conclusion can one reach after Redmond's assault on its various rivals?

There's the constant poking at the iPad's foibles. Then there's the sublimely gauche Scroogled campaign, which accuses Google of being little more than a malevolent dictatorship.

Samsung, though, has been relatively free of Microsoft's barbed fire. Until now, that is.

For Microsoft has chosen the Thanksgiving weekend to give thanks that its own Surface RT is so much more intelligent and useful than the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.

I'll admit I haven't seen an enormous proliferation of Tab 10.1s adorning coffee shops, holding cells, and public transport. So it makes for a slightly odd target for Microsoft.

However, Redmond wants you to be clear, should you be vacillating between a Tab and a Surface RT, that its machine is superior.

More Technically Incorrect

It has a full-size USB port, which allows you to do, well, full-size USB porting. The Galaxy Tab 10.1 has one micro USB port, which means you can't power and connect to an external device at the same time.

And then there's the need for connectors that you have to buy as extras.

Microsoft is looking to find any and every possible rational reason to persuade you that the Surface is all things to all people with computing needs.

Indeed, more ads targeting the Galaxy Tab appeared last week -- including a family sharing comparison similar to one of the most recent anti-iPad ads.

Sadly, the initial launch of Surface, with its embarrassing dancing teens and business people, continues to hamper progress.

When people don't have their emotions positively disposed to your brand, it's so much harder to persuade them that you're as great as you think you are.

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Our irony meter exploded: Apple moans ebook price-fixing watchdog is too ... - Register

Hybrid storage performance leadership

Apple has filed a court motion complaining that Michael Bromwich, the court-appointed antitrust regulator overseeing the fruity firm in the wake of its ebook price-fixing shenanigans, is too charging too much for his services.

"Mr Bromwich appears to be simply taking advantage of the fact that there is no competition here or, in his view, any ability on the part of Apple, the subject of his authority, to push back on his demands," said Cupertino's lawyers in a filing to the New York federal court, Bloomberg reports.

On the face of it Apple may have a point. In his first two weeks in the job, Bromwich has invoiced Apple for $138,432 for his services, including a 15 per cent surcharge because he's assigned the role to his consultancy business, rather than as part of his day job at law firm Goodwin Procter.

Apple's filing says this alternative billing structure is "seems slippery at best," seeing as how Goodwin Proctor trumpeted Bromwich's appointment in a press release on the law firm's website, which was "clearly meant to drum up more business," Cupertino's lawyers claim.

Bromwich is charging an hourly rate of $1,100, which the Apple filing says is more than it has ever been billed by a lawyer before. Bromwich is also hiring additional lawyers, at Apple's expense, to make sure it complies with court orders following the ebook pricing trial.

Back on July Apple was found guilty of conspiring with dead-tree publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster, to raise the price of ebooks. The plan was to break Amazon's hold on the market and boost revenues for Apple's iTunes store.

The US Department of Justice brought the trial, and initially asked for broader regulation of Apple's activities beyond ebooks, and for Apple to allow booksellers to offer media through their own iOS applications rather than forcing them to use iTunes and pay Apple a 30 per cent surcharge.

Apple objected, and Judge Denise Cote agreed with Team Cook: she ruled for much lighter enforcement of Apple's contracts, and said a regulator should watch the company for the next five years to make sure it's nice, not naughty.

Apple's new filing also complains that Bromwich is seeking to interview Apple's staff without them having a lawyer present as part of his role. The regulator also wants to keep the presiding judge in the case updated without having Apple's legal eagles present, something the company says would "impermissibly expand the scope of the monitorship."

Based on Bromwich's first two weeks of invoicing, that five-year appointment could cost Apple over $16m in fees, although it may be that the lawyer has been front-loading the early invoices to pay for costs of setting up a regulator position. Apple's 2013 net income was $37 billion.

Bromwich's consulting practice said he was out of the country and unavailable for comment. ®

Free Regcast : Managing Multi-Vendor Devices with System Centre 2012

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Apple iPad mini with Retina Display Review - Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows

Were cost no object, I'd tell you to buy an Apple iPad mini with Retina Display and call it a day: It features a gorgeous 4:3 better-than-HD screen that really works well in the mini-tablet form factor and is backed by the superior apps and digital media ecosystems. But cost is, of course, a daily reality, and Apple's too-high pricing puts this otherwise wonderful—near perfect, really—mini-tablet out of contention for most.

So why even review this device? After all, it could very easily have made the cut in Through the Cracks: Tech Products I'm Not Reviewing. Simple: Mini-tablets are hot right now, and everyone seems to want one. And the iPad mini with Retina display is absolutely among the upper echelon in this product category. In fact, if it wasn't for the price, it would stand alone at the top.

But before harping on the price—so negative!­—let's look at what Apple got right here.

The build quality is, as always, superb. Where the Windows and Android competitors show up with plastic of varying degrees of quality, the iPad mini is a unibody aluminum design with chiseled edges and metal buttons that just screams quality. And that's especially true when you examine the iPad next to virtually any other device. This one is night and day.

The performance is amazing across the board. You tap on something and it happens ... instantly. Battery life is of course superb.

The screen quality, likewise, is amazing, and the tiny device's 2048 x 1536-resolution makes for an impressive visual experience. And while this may be hard to grok at first, Apple did something very right with the display scaling: Instead of just "adding a row of icons" like it did with its iPhone 5x line of phones, the iPad mini with Retina display is just like every other modern iPad, with the same basic on-screen layout, just in a smaller size. The result, as Apple puts it, is a "concentration, rather than a reduction, of iPad." It's the right way to go for this kind of device.

As I noted in my "compete report" of iOS 7, I actually like Apple's new mobile OS just fine. Coupled with the biggest and best app store of any mobile platform and the stellar iTunes-based content store (which includes TV shows and movies, music, audiobooks, ebooks (through iBookStore), podcasts, and iTunes U-based educational material, and you've got a winner. Google Play Store is catching up, and Windows Store has years to go, but Apple's supporting ecosystem is still number one.

And then there's the iPad mini with Retina display's Achilles Heel: The price. It's ... problematic.

This device starts at $399 for a bare bones model with just 16 GB of storage and Wi-Fi connectivity, and you can spend $829 on one of these things if you just won the lottery or haven't yet come to grips with the evils of credit card debt. By way of comparison, a 16 GB/Wi-Fi version of the Google Nexus 7 is just $229, and a 7-inch Amazon Kindle Fire HDX (with ads removed) is $244.

So the iPad isn't just "expensive." It's expensive past the point of absurdity.

I'm willing to give Apple a price premium, just not that much. In this price range, $100 more than the competition is extortion, but I'd accept it. Anything over that ... is something else entirely. For the price of the cheapest iPad mini with Retina display, you could get a 32 GB Nexus 7 with LTE connectivity and still have $50 left over to buy apps, games and content. And that $399 Nexus 7 device would cost $629 in Apple form. Seriously?

Price isn't all that Apple got wrong on the iPad mini with Retina display, however.

Where the iPhone 5S includes the Touch ID fingerprint reader, a truly useful new feature (in a phone that is otherwise devoid of such things), the iPad mini with Retina display does not. (Neither does the iPad Air, and of course we can now safely predict that Apple's 2014 iPads will belatedly and obviously add this feature.) This is a big miss, especially for such a premium device: Once you've used Touch ID, having to repeatedly tap in a PIN to sign-in and your full iTunes password to approve purchases and so on—just seems old-fashioned and irritating.

Its speakers are ill-placed for stereo separation during games or videos, making all the sound appear to come from one side. Amazon's Kindle Fire HDX provides much better sound, especially for movies, where it creates a wonderfully spacial soundscape that emulates surround sound surprisingly well. The Nexus 7 does a better job of this as well.

In testing the iPad mini with Retina display, I was also reminded that Apple, alone among the Big Three platform makers—the other two being Google and Microsoft—charges a 30 percent vig on top of any third party online store purchases. So while many such providers have simply sucked it up, some big ones—like Amazon, with Kindle—have not because this charge would turn break-even sales into huge losses. So while the Kindle app on iPad is mostly excellent, there's no way to access the store, not even by a link to a web page. This isn't the case on any other platform, just iOS. On behalf of all the customers you share with Amazon, let me be among those to say: Thanks, Apple.

And while this may seem like a small thing, it amazes me that Apple hasn't figured out a way to prevent its once innovative Smart Covers and Smart Cases from leaving marks on the iPad screen. Anyone who spends several hundred dollars on an iPad mini is understandably going to want to protect this precious device, but Apple's own covers leave surprisingly visible linear streaks on the screen. They're really distracting and detract from what should be a luxury experience. It's like getting leather seats in a BMW any having them be ruined every time you use the seat belts.

If these complaints may seem like nits, then you're not expecting enough from a luxury product. Each in its own way undermines the quality of a device that could justify its high price by being truly excellent. By offering a Touch ID sensor only on a single iPhone model, Apple is denying users that purchase multiple products of a truly useful new feature. By forcing Amazon to pretend the Kindle Store doesn't exist, it's making iPad less wonderful of an ebook reader. And by marring the screens of ever device they protect, the Smart Cover and Smart Case just aren't that smart. It's too bad.

Apple users, of course, are used to putting up with this kind of thing. But if you're approach this from outside the bubble, at least know that the grass isn't always greener on the other side of that fence. Yes, Apple's devices are generally excellent, and the iPad mini is no exception. But you don't need to pay this much to get a great device. And we're at the point now with Android devices in particular, where the tradeoffs you need to make to "settle" for such a device aren't painful in the slightest. Mini-tabletslike the Google Nexus 7 and Amazon Kindle Fire HDX are much, much better values than any iPad. It's not even close.

Dell Venue 8 Pro, Google Nexus 7, Apple iPad mini with Retina display

Ultimately, the iPad mini with Retina display is a stellar device that just can't justify its too-high price tag, and I can't recommend something that is priced this far out of whack with reality. But if you can afford such a thing, you'll love it. At these prices, you pretty much don't have a choice.

For those of us living in the real world, the Google Nexus 7 is still the reigning champ in the mini-tablet class.

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Bowl-eligible Huskies, Cougars to meet for 106th Apple Cup - KOMO News

SEATTLE (AP) — For the last 10 seasons, the Apple Cup lacked an added relevancy because there was little at stake beyond pride. There were meaningful games during that span for one school or the other, but in those instances only one of the teams knew there was a bowl game in their future.

While it's a stretch to say Friday's matchup between Washington and Washington State has significant additional meaning with neither bound for a top-tier bowl, it marks a moment in the rivalry that could not be said for the past decade. It's the first time both the Cougars and Huskies are bowl eligible prior to the Apple Cup since 2002.

"It's never just another game with the Apple Cup," Washington State safety Deone Bucannon said. "It's a lot bigger than just a game. It's tradition."

A win for Washington (7-4, 4-4 Pac-12) would finally get the Huskies off the seven-win plateau they've found themselves stuck on for the past three seasons and keep alive hopes for a nine-win season that would show significant improvement in coach Steve Sarkisian's fifth season.

If the Cougars (6-5, 4-4) could pull the upset as 16 ½-point underdogs it would be their second three-game win streak of the season, improve their standing in the hierarchy of Pac-12 bowl selections and show a four-win improvement from Year 1 to Year 2 under Mike Leach.

"For them to walk off the field Friday after the Apple Cup, if we can get to that eighth win that they know they improved this program," Sarkisian said. "Because sometimes for them, it's quantitative. They look at the stat of wins and losses. I can tell you today we're a better football team than we were a year ago at this time. But a win Friday, I think for so many people justifies, 'OK, they are better.' And maybe for our players, quite honestly."

Here are five other things to watch as the Cougars and Huskies meet for the 106th time:

FORGET THE COLLAPSE: Washington would like to forget how last year's Apple Cup ended, as the Cougars staged the biggest rally in the history of the game coming back from 18 points down in the fourth quarter to win 31-28 in overtime. It's a sour memory for the Huskies brought up more than a few times this week.

HUSKIES QB QUESTION: It's still unclear who will get the start at quarterback for Washington. Keith Price would like to get the nod in the final home game of his career, but is still trying to overcome an injured right, throwing shoulder suffered two weeks ago against UCLA. Redshirt freshman Cyler Miles started last week at Oregon State and played well in what he was asked to do, throwing for 162 yards and a touchdown.

Price wants to start his final home game but said he doesn't want to be selfish and play if he could be hampering the team.

"Everything I do I feel like I'm a starter," Price said. "Anything less than that is definitely disappointing."

KEEP CONNOR CLEAN: Keeping Washington State quarterback Connor Halliday clean has equaled success for the Cougars offense. Last weekend against Utah, Halliday was not sacked for the first time in his career and the result was an efficient performance with four touchdown passes and no interceptions. Halliday was asked to shuffle around to keep plays alive, but it marked just the second time this season and second time in the past two seasons the Cougars didn't allow a sack.

Thanks to better protection and smarter decision making, Halliday has gone 97 consecutive pass attempts over the past two games without throwing an interception.

SANKEY'S RECORD PURSUIT: Before the season ends, Bishop Sankey will likely be Washington's all-time leader in single season yards rushing. But getting the record against the Cougars would be more meaningful as it would come in 12 games, the same amount Corey Dillon needed to set the mark in 1996. Sankey is already No. 2 on Washington's list with 1,575 yards and needs 121 yards against the Cougars to set a new single-season mark.

Sankey ran for 179 yards and three touchdowns last week against Oregon State but the game got out of hand so early that Sankey gave way to backups. The Huskies finished with three 100-yard rushers for just the second time in school history.

OPPORTUNISTIC DEFENSE: When Washington State is able to force turnovers, they often get taken back the other way for scores. The Cougars returned two interceptions for touchdowns last week against Utah, the fourth and fifth time this season Washington State's defense has scored a touchdown. Getting a defensive or special teams score might be the Cougars best chance at pulling the upset.

"They've got an opportunistic secondary who if you throw them the ball, the ball gets tipped, they intercept it and then they run it for a touchdown," Sarkisian said. "So they provide a great challenge for us and they've made really good strides."

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Apple's iPhone, iPad used to place over 80% of mobile sales on Black Friday - Apple Insider

By Daniel Eran Dilger

Apple's iOS products not only represented a large chunk of U.S. Black Friday sales, but where also used to place the vast majority of mobile purchases.

A series of regular reports by IBM's Digital Analytics Benchmark group, tracking a "digital analytics platform that tracks millions of transactions and analyzes terabytes of raw data from approximately 800 retail sites nationwide," profilied the week's shopping by mobile users.

IBM highlighted that buyers' use of mobile devices for shopping was up 9 percent over last year, and that mobile devices now account for 37 percent of all shopping traffic and 21 percent of online sales.

In general, smartphones drove twice as much traffic as tablets, but tablet users actually placed 1.5x as many sales, accounting for 13.2 percent of online purchases compared to just 7.8 percent for smartphones.

However, when breaking down those numbers by mobile platform, IBM reported that iOS devices accounted for more than 4.5 times the total sales of Android or over an 80 percent share of mobile-oriented sales (above), with 17.3 percent of all online sales occurring on an Apple mobile device versus just 3.75 percent on Android products.

IBM stated that iOS users also spent an average of 18 percent more per order: $131.34 versus $111.35 for average Android sales.

Apple's iOS devices also made up 26 percent of all overall mobile traffic, compared to just 11 percent for Android. Microsoft's Windows Phone, BlackBerry and other mobile platforms didn't represent enough activity to mention.

The leading share of online shopping grabbed by iOS users parallels the 84 percent share of tablets claimed by iPad in Chitika's web analytics, the leading share taken by iOS in app developer's revenue seen per download, and the over 80 percent usage stats reported among education and enterprise users.

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The Very Best Apple Black Friday Deals In The US - Huffington Post

Black Friday is one of the few -- if only -- days of the year when Apple acts like a normal retailer. So as in years past, the electronics maker is offering one-day deals to kick off the holiday shopping season.

But instead of price cuts on iPads and MacBooks, as Apple has done on Black Fridays of yore, it took a different tack in the U.S. this year. Apple is including Apple Store Gift Cards valued between $25 and $150 with the full-priced purchase of various products. You can see all the deals on the company's website, but we've listed out the very best Apple Black Friday deals below.

Some things, though, haven't changed. As was the case in 2012 and in 2011, Apple is offering absolutely no deals on its best-selling product: the iPhone.

But here is what Apple is offering:

iPads

• iPad Air : Get a $75 gift card with every purchase. Starts at $499.


• iPad Mini : Get a $50 gift card with every purchase. Starts at $299. Deal only available with non-Retina display models.


• iPad 2 : Get $50 gift card with every purchase. Starts at $399.


• 
  

MacBooks and iMacs

• MacBook Air : Get a $150 gift card with every purchase. Starts at $999.


• iMac : Get a $150 gift card with every purchase. Starts at $1,299.


• MacBook Pro with Retina display : Get a $150 gift card with every purchase. Starts at $1,299.


• MacBook Pro without Retina display : Get a $150 gift card with every purchase. Starts at $1,199.

iPods

• iPod Touch : Get a $50 gift card with every purchase. Starts at $229.


• iPod Nano : Get a $25 gift card with every purchase. Starts at $149.

Apple TV

• Apple TV : Get a $25 gift card with every purchase. Starts at $99.

Accessories

• Nest Learning Thermostat (second generation) : Get a $50 gift card with every purchase. $249.95.


• Beats by Dr. Dre Studio Over-Ear Headphones : Get a $50 gift card with every purchase. $299.95.


• Nike+ FuelBand SE : Get a $25 gift card with every purchase. $149.95.


• GoPro HERO3+ Video Camera : Get a $50 gift card. $399.95.

And that's not all. Check out all the deals here.

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Biz Break: Apple stock hits highest prices of the year on Black Friday - San Jose Mercury News

Today: As shoppers rush stores to grab the newest devices, Apple (AAPL) shares hit their highest prices of 2013. Also: eBay (EBAY), Amazon shoot higher.

The Lead: Apple hits highest stock prices of 2013 amid hopes for 'iPad Christmas'

While Apple has remained the most valuable company in the world for most of 2013, it's been a tough year for the company on Wall Street. As the end of 2013 nears, however, the Cupertino tech giant appears to be finding favor with investors, who pushed its price to heights unseen since the first trading session of the year Friday.

Apple shares sold for as much as $558.33 and closed Friday's shortened trading session with a 1.9 percent gain at $556.07, representing intraday and closing highs for the year to date. The new highs arrived on Black Friday, the traditional kickoff for holiday shopping, and could signal that investors believe Apple will have its third consecutive record-breaking winter quarter.

"Apple products should be the holiday gift of choice this year," ISI Group analyst Brian Marshall told USA Today. "The company has a great product cycle currently, the stock is cheap and we expect $600 within the next several months."

Other analysts seem to agree, with the average price target for Apple clocking in at $586.62, according to Marketwatch's average of 54 analysts covering Apple, with 43 of those analysts offering the equivalent of a "Buy" rating.

"Apple is best positioned in the tech world to benefit from this holiday season, starting with Black Friday," Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Brian White, who has a $777 price target on Apple, told The Wall Street Journal.

Apple did not offer its traditional Black Friday discounts on purchases this year, instead giving customers gift cards for future Apple purchases. Other retailers did offer discounts on some products, however, and reported that they were sparking heavy interest from consumers: An eBay executive told CNBC that an iPad was selling every second on the San Jose company's marketplace as of midnight, and both Wal-Mart and Target reported that iPads were selling well at their retail outlets.

In addition, users who have already purchased Apple mobile products were relying on the devices to shop Friday. An IBM Benchmark study released Friday showed that iOS was driving 450 percent more online commerce than Android devices, and Apple users were making larger average purchases.

Apple has established record sales during the holiday shopping quarter each of the past two years, so it will take a monster three months of sales to increase revenues again this year; Apple expects to record revenues of $55 billion to $58 billion, which would top last year's $54.5 billion. Profits could be a different story, however, and if Apple posts lower earnings than last year's winter quarter, it would be the fourth consecutive quarter of year-over-year profit declines.

Apple's inability to show continuing earnings growth has been a major factor in its stock slump so far this year, but CEO Tim Cook has promised an "iPad Christmas," and the company launched new iPhones and new iPads in time to make his hopes for a strong holiday season a reality. Still the company faces challenges on price with a wave of inexpensive Android tablets hitting the market and Google (GOOG) rushing its cheap Moto G smartphone to market.

In other Apple news, the company said in a court filing that a monitor appointed by a judge in the e-books price-fixing case is charging too much for his services, including a surcharge the filing called "unprecedented in Apple's experience." Apple also disagreed with the amount of access the court-appointed monitor, Michael Bromwich, has requested and objected to meeting between Bromwich and the judge in the case, Philip Elmer-DeWitt reported.

SV150 market report: eBay, Amazon enjoy strong gains on Black Friday

The Dow Jones industrial average and Standard & Poor's 500 dipped slightly thanks to weakness just ahead of the bell in Friday's short trading session, but tech stocks gains as the Nasdaq industrial average and SV150 clocked increases of 0.4 percent and 0.5 percent, respectively.

eBay enjoyed solid gains as investors bet on the e-commerce giants as early returns from online Black Friday shopping were positive. The San Jose e-tailer gained 2.5 percent to $50.52 as online sales followed the brick-and-mortar path and pushed into Thanksgiving Day: IBM Benchmark reported online sales increased nearly 20 percent on Thanksgiving Day this year from last year, and ChannelAdvisor reported that eBay's sales grew 26.2 percent from Thanksgiving 2012. Black Friday started off even better for eBay, with sales increasing nearly 35 percent in the early going, ChannelAdvisor reported, suggesting that shortages of popular items like the next-generation consoles and certain toys could be pushing traffic to eBay's resellers. Rival Amazon.com also had a strong Black Friday on Wall Street, hitting record highs and gaining 1.8 percent to $393.62.

Facebook gained 1.1 percent to $47.01 as its Instagram photo-sharing service set a usage record for the second consecutive Thanksgiving, though the San Francisco company did not provide as much detail as it did in 2012. Social-media rival Twitter also enjoyed gains on Friday, increasing 1.6 percent to $41.57 after Wunderlich Securities analyst Blake Harper predicted "a record number of shopping-related tweets" for the service on Black Friday and broke down some of its attempts to amplify advertising related to television.

Headed the other way was Sunnyvale security company Fortinet, which announced after the bell on Wednesday that its chief financial officer is departing. Fortinet suffered the largest percentage loss on the SV150 Friday, dropping 12.9 percent to $17.10 as analysts lamented the loss of Fortinet CFO Ahmed Rubaie, whom Raymond James analyst Michael Turits noted "was well-liked by the Street from his prior stint at Ariba and was seen as a strong hire for Fortinet."

Up: SolarCity, eBay, Advanced Micro Devices, Apple, Twitter, Facebook,

Down: Thoratec, Fortinet, Yelp, Google, Intuitive Surgical, SunPower

The SV150 index of Silicon Valley's largest tech companies: Up 7.13, or 0.5 percent, to 1,440.09

The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index: Up 15.14, or 0.37 percent, to 4,059.89

The blue chip Dow Jones industrial average: Down 10.92, or 0.07 percent, to 16,086.41

And the widely watched Standard & Poor's 500 index: Down 1.42, or 0.08 percent, to 1,805.81

Check in weekday afternoons for the 60-Second Business Break, a summary of news from Mercury News staff writers, The Associated Press, Bloomberg News and other wire services. Contact Jeremy C. Owens at 408-920-5876; follow him at Twitter.com/jowens510.

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Apple Black Friday 2013 deals - The Verge

Apple has just updated its online store with a host of Black Friday deals and, unlike those in Europe, US customers will have to make do with gift cards included alongside various full-price purchases. We've included a list below — but remember, other retailers will be dropping real prices on Apple products today, so follow our StoryStream to find the best deal.

iPads

• iPad Air: from $499 with $75 gift card




• iPad mini (non-Retina display model): from $299 with $50 gift card




• iPad 2: from $399 with $50 gift card

Macs

• MacBook Air: from $999 with $150 gift card




• MacBook Pro with Retina display: from $1299 with $150 gift card




• MacBook Pro: from $1199 with $150 gift card




• iMac: from $1299 with $150 gift card

Others

• Apple TV: $99 with $25 gift card




• iPod touch: from $229 with $50 gift card




• iPod nano: $149 with $25 gift card




• AirPort Extreme: $199 with $50 gift card




• AirPort Time Capsule: $299 with $50 gift card

Accessories

• Nest Learning Thermostat: $249.95 with $50 gift card




• Anki Drive Starter Kit: $199.95 with $25 gift card




• Nike+ FuelBand SE: $149.95 with $25 gift card




• GoPro Hero3 camera: $399.95 with $50 card

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Apple Retreats to the Suburbs - Bloomberg

Apple Inc.’s stunning new Campus 2 in Cupertino, California, will be one of Steve Jobs’ lasting legacies when completed in 2015. For better or worse, he was thinking differently to the end, striving for geographic self-sufficiency even as many other high-technology enterprises across the country were starting to return to city life. Will this approach, and the complex that embodies it, renew Apple’s culture of excellence or retard it?

Costing an estimated $5 billion and covering 175 acres, with 2.8 million square feet of office space for 13,000 employees, the doughnut-shaped building designed by Norman Foster may be the ultimate in green architecture. But the 700 newly planted trees that will surround it are dual-use foliage. According to a planning document, Apple’s goal was to achieve “the security and privacy required for the invention of new products by eliminating any public access through the site, and protecting the perimeters against trespassers.” Apple rejected plans for trails around the periphery, and a Los Angeles Times reporter claimed harassment by Apple security while journalists were on what was still public property.

Swinging Pendulum

Apple is almost alone in its retreat from the street grid. In fact, the trend has been to shed suburban centers and migrate to academic neighborhoods in cities. Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche Holding AG is closing its Nutley, New Jersey, campus, where Valium was developed in the 1950s, and opening a center in New York that will bridge drug development and clinical practice. Pfizer Inc., Novartis AG, Amazon.com Inc. and Google Inc. are building or expanding facilities in Cambridge, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. New York City expects to break ground next year on a 12-acre tech-school campus on Roosevelt Island that will be run by Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. Philadelphia’s 50-year-old University City Science Center, near Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania, is planning to become a world nanotechnology center. And in San Francisco, Twitter Inc. recently signed a lease for a building that encompasses more than 300,000 square feet in a seedy downtown neighborhood that local officials hope will become a similar magnet. The company’s co-founder, Jack Dorsey, has arranged its interior explicitly as an urban street grid.

The pendulum’s swing between urban and rural headquarters goes back to Thomas Edison himself, who moved his shop from New Jersey’s industrial hub of Newark to still-isolated Menlo Park - – and then back again to East Orange, near Newark. About 1900, industry was located in cities large and small, and research laboratories were usually not far from the factory floor. General Electric Co.’s Schenectady, New York, center was one of the first and biggest; E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co.’s DuPont Experimental Station was and remains near the company’s historic mill in an otherwise residential neighborhood of Wilmington, Delaware. In 1900, Western Electric Co., AT&T Corp.’s manufacturing subsidiary, constructed a 13-story laboratory in downtown New York; it became the headquarters of a new independent AT&T unit, Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc., in 1925. New York’s concentration of corporate headquarters led the Computing Tabulating Recording Co. (later International Business Machines Corp.) to relocate research from its Endicott, New York, manufacturing complex to the city in 1922.

In chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing, there were enough bench researchers and executives in New York by 1911 to warrant a handsome Chemists’ Club building near the New York Public Library with the usual amenities -– plus a research library and even laboratory space on the top floors.

Attractive Alternatives

World War II may have been the high point of American urban science. The Manhattan Project’s code name belied its expanse: Thousands of workers, almost all unaware of plans for a nuclear bomb, were dispersed in projects across New York’s boroughs. (The Wall Street Journal recently revealed that traces of radiation can still be found around the city.) And a consortium of pharmaceutical companies, prodded by the war effort, cooperated in one of the most striking accomplishments of chemical engineering: scaling up the production of penicillin. Pfizer, which still maintains its headquarters and laboratory space in the city, opened the world’s first penicillin factory in Brooklyn in 1943.

Then the trend began to reverse itself. By the early 1940s, Bell Labs was moving researchers into a new facility in Murray Hill, New Jersey. The invention of the transistor in 1947 there, along with other Nobel Prize-caliber work, suggested to other companies that exurban laboratories could help create breakthroughs of their own.

Mass postwar automobile ownership and the expansion of interstate highways and shopping centers made the landscaped suburban headquarters an attractive alternative to the city office tower -- especially for commute-weary executives who made the site decisions. RCA Corp. consolidated its research and development operations from its urban New Jersey complexes to a then-quiet stretch of U.S. 1 near Princeton University. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Finnish-born architect Eero Saarinen designed striking complexes for IBM’s new Thomas J. Watson Laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, and for Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, both in outer suburbia.

Ironically, these very laboratories helped set in motion personal computing, mobile telephones and other innovations that forced their parent companies to adapt. Vertically integrated giants such as IBM and AT&T changed their strategies, reducing the need for in-house basic research. Many of their stars accepted university professorships; a few prospered as technical analysts in venture capital and private equity. The day of the technological citadel seemed to be over. One of Bell Labs’ successors, Alcatel-Lucent, finally closed its iconic Holmdel facility in 2007.

Apple’s Gamble

Apple is thus betting against the industry in building a vast, self-contained headquarters in the heart of relatively open Silicon Valley. It may be right. Who needs openness when secrecy and speculation -– along with exacting attention to design -– have helped make your brand so universally admired? Perhaps the security, and the end of the old Apple campus’s souvenir shop, will only heighten the mystique, even if the site is less impregnable in our era of cyber-espionage and superhacking. In any case, Apple sold 33.8 million iPhones in the last quarter alone. Its systematic refinement of products may be planned obsolescence, but it has breathed new life into the old Detroit formula of the annual model change.

Obsolescence: There’s the rub. A structure on this scale commits a company to a philosophy over at least a generation as technology, tastes and priorities continue to shift. Alcatel-Lucent’s headquarters was also designed by a superb architect to support multidisciplinary research that was the envy of the world. But the structure locked in a technical style after the world had moved on, just as AT&T completed its landmark Philip Johnson office tower in New York in 1984 -– the year it finally broke up. Here’s hoping Apple can remain an exception to the curse of Xanadu.

(Edward Tenner is the author of “Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences” and “Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity.”)

Click on “Send Comment” in the sidebar display to send a letter to the editor.

To contact the writer of this article: Edward Tenner at edward.h.tenner@gmail.com.

To contact the editor responsible for this article: James Gibney at jgibney5@bloomberg.net.

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Apple Stresses 'Value' Not Cash For Black Friday Discounts - Forbes

In an interesting departure from previous years, Apple is using a combination of cash and gift card discounts worldwide to attract shoppers to its on-line and retail stores on Black Friday. The gift card option focuses on creating more value for the same price, rather than giving shoppers a cash discount they could spend for other expenses. But beyond the practical differences, the discount change seems to signal a change in philosophy that directly affects Apple’s revenue stream. [I am an Apple stockholder.]

The cash-off discount is standard in the retail industry, and is based on the attraction of obtaining a product at a cheaper price. That attraction doesn’t exist for a gift card discount, since shoppers will eventually spend the same amount of money. Instead, a gift card discount offers buyers marginally more products for the same price. The discount technique stresses value rather than savings.

Starting at midnight today, the Australia, Canada and U.S. stores began offering gift cards worth from $25 to $150 (US) for the purchase of select accessories and certain configurations of iPads, iPods and Macs. For reasons likely related to commerce or business regulations, the UK and Europe stores are still offering cash off for Black Friday purchases.

The gift card discounts include up to $150 for an iPad Air, $50 for an iPod touch, $150 for a Mac desktop or laptop, and $50 for an AirPort Time Capsule 2Gb. Third-party product include the GoPro Hero 3+ ($50 gift card), Beats by Dr. Dre headphones ($50) and the Nike + FuelBand SE ($25). The new iPhone 5s and 5c models, and the iPad mini Retina display model are not discounted for Black Friday.

In previous years, Apple offered simple cash discounts on select products for its only sale day, ranging from about eight percent to 13 percent. By reducing the price of certain products, shoppers could save perhaps $100 on a more expensive product, and then use that money to buy accessories from another retailer, or even pay a part of their ordinary monthly bills.

But by offering a gift card discount, Apple captures the entire standard price of the on-sale product, because shoppers can only “spend” the savings by redeeming the card with Apple. Most likely, the additional products that shoppers would purchase with the gift card are lower-priced, higher-margin accessories. Essentially discounting these extra purchases doesn’t reduce Apple’s revenue as much as a cash discount would on a major product. The result is a “discount” with a much smaller reduction in revenue than would occur with a straight cash-off discount.

Interestingly, insiders have said that Apple retail store employees received a similar gift card discount as their 2013 holiday present. Store staff can reportedly receive a $50 gift card at the discounted price of $40—a $10 gift. Essentially, each employee participating in the gift program would generate $40 in additional revenue for the company—a gift to Apple more than to the retail employees.

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Apple's European Black Friday deals offer discounts instead of gift cards - Apple Insider

By AppleInsider Staff

Unlike its Australian Black Friday deals, Apple is discounting products instead of handing out gift cards, suggesting the company is tailoring this years sales based on the demands of each geographic location to which it caters.

At this point, major markets like the UK, France and Germany are showing discounts on various Macs, iPads and accessories, with nary a mention of the gift card strategy introduced in Australia and New Zealand earlier on Thursday.

A quick look at the discounts shows moderate savings from six to eight percent in most cases. For example, the UK Apple Online Store is taking £31 off the 16GB iPad Air, or £25 off the iPad 2. The MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and iMac are all getting £81 taken off their retail price, while the iPod touch and the Apple TV are priced at £25 and £15 off.

It is unknown which discount system Apple will implement when Black Friday hits North America, but the company has traditionally offered discounts to customers on the biggest shopping day of the year.

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Apple's Black Friday Sales Begin Launching Internationally with Gift Card Deals - Mac Rumors

Apple's online stores for several countries including Australia and New Zealand have launched their Black Friday one-day shopping events, also giving an idea of what promotions will be like as the event launches in a number of other countries over the coming hours.

As rumored, Apple is offering offering gift cards with purchases rather than direct discounts on most items. While many customers would prefer discounts over free gift cards, others may appreciate that the gift card offers typically represent better deals than seen with discounts in past years.

Gift cards are available with the purchase of the following items (prices from Australian store):

- iPad Air: A$ 75 gift card

- iPad mini: A$ 50 gift card on non-Retina models, no gift card on Retina models

- iPad 2: A$ 50 gift card

- iPod touch: A$ 50 gift card

- iPod nano: A$ 25 gift card

- MacBook Air: A$ 150 gift card

- MacBook Pro: A$ 150 gift card for both Retina and non-Retina models

- iMac: A$ 150 gift card

- Apple TV: A$ 25 gift card

- AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule: A$ 50 gift card

- Various accessories: Gift card amounts vary

Gift card amounts for customers in the U.S. and other countries should be similar and cover the same products. Sales in Apple's U.S. store should begin at midnight Pacific Time.

Some third-party retailers such as MacMall may be offering even better deals than Apple, particularly when sales tax difference and discounts vs. gift cards are taken into account, and we've put together several overviews of deals for Macs and iPads. Additional deals are summarized in our Black Friday roundup.

Related roundup: Black Friday 2013

What?? No discount on the retina iPad mini?? Thats dumb.

How so? They can't make them fast enough to sell right now.

What?? No discount on the retina iPad mini?? Thats dumb.

So, if I buy say an iMac, I get a gift card I can't use right away, but rather have to spend at Apple at a second occasion?

Quite crappy offer if you ask me. Sure, it's a bit more value than before, but would rather have had to discount up front.

bah humbug.

now, Apple never did have Great Black Friday deals but these deals seriously SUCK!

I totally understand though, why discount when you can just have them buy more from you later. gets you coming back. I HATE these "deals"

oh well

weakest black friday offer ever. lame

i'm happy to use my gift card for Applecare after the original purchase. I was going to put it in the cart with an iMac but this is fine too.

It's annoying when people support Apple's every decision .

This is the mother of all straw men in the MR forums. I have never ever met a single person in these discussions who supports every single decision that AAPL makes.

@xNYMetsx : can you please cite a single person who "support[s] Apple's every decision"?

If you can, please provide your evidence. How do you know this [hypothetical] person supports every single decision that AAPL makes?

If you can't, please explain to us why you make nonsense claims like that here. And please stop making this silly claim. Thanks.

when you make an average of what. 45%+ pure profit margin on your devices,

Your numbers are incorrect. AAPL's gross margins were 37% in the last quarter (http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/10/28Apple-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-Results.html) -- compared with 40% margins a year ago.

and the BIGGEST sale you can muster up is a measly 5% discount....

This number is also incorrect. The iPad Air sells for A$ 598 today (http://store.apple.com/au/buy-ipad/ipad-air). The A$ 75 gift card you receive amounts to a 12.5% discount of the retail price.

when you no longer even want to do a discount, but offer a gift card which obligates the buyer to continue shopping and spend more money at your location just to get a "deal"

It does not. You could either give or sell the gift card to someone else.

That's three factual errors in one message.

a $20 discount on that 500.

And that's four. :eek:

Did you actually read the offers that you are criticizing?

when you make an average of what. 45%+ pure profit margin on your devices, and the BIGGEST sale you can muster up is a measly 5% discount....

you're greedy.

There are two sides to this supply/demand equation.

You obviously flunked Econ 101 and would likely go bankrupt if you became an entrepreneur.

Anyone want to buy a Surface?

Yet another Apple profit-making ploy (as if they don't have enough cash already)...instead of giving their customers a real discount (real cash back in our pockets), they give us a certain amount of Apple Dollars (which equate to about 50% or less real dollars on their bottom line). So, customers are happy spending their $75 in Apple Dollars on accessories that cost Apple about $35.

Business 101 does not equate to a long lines at Apple tomorrow.

Bestbuy, on the other hand, gave me a $70 discount on an iPad Air during their Monday Elite pre-event.

I actually prefer this, I usually end up buying accessories and they're not cheap. This in turn will end up being cash saved.

----------

when you make an average of what. 45%+ pure profit margin on your devices, and the BIGGEST sale you can muster up is a measly 5% discount....

you're greedy.

when you no longer even want to do a discount, but offer a gift card which obligates the buyer to continue shopping and spend more money at your location just to get a "deal"...

you're a greedy *******.

Apple.

This is a crappy deal. Probably the worst you have ever had. I dont expect much from your deals. 5% is pathetic. MOST people who are looking to buy a $500 tablet aren't going to suddenly go "OMG BEST DEAL EVER MUST BY TODAY!!!" for a $20 discount on that 500.

I remember feeling like you once, then I realized hey I could just not participate in buying stuff from companies if I choose to and I quit being a self righteous little panzy.

Will these gift cards be Apple Store gift cards or iTunes gift cards?

+1

I'd also like to know. I would at least be able to use an iTunes gift card. $75 at the apple store doesn't go very far...

This black Friday thing has been a huge fiasco for me. Tried to upgrade to a 32gb air for cheap so I returned my 16gb version. After a couple false starts I bought from staples but it is stuck processing and based on others experiences they may have sold more than they actually had in stock so who knows if I'll actually get it. I was hoping to have Apple as a backup in case that fell through but now that is a bust. Does anyone know if best buy is offering the $50 discount on the higher storage models? Sigh...

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Huskies, Cougars enter Apple Cup with hope, winning records - The Seattle Times

Originally published November 28, 2013 at 3:55 PM | Page modified November 29, 2013 at 12:50 AM

Bragging rights are only a small part of the story entering the 106th Apple Cup. This year, there’s more.

For the first time since 2002, the Huskies and Cougars each enter the Apple Cup with winning records. They enter with bowl eligibility, with momentum and with hope — real hope — of something more, something better in the future.

In their regular-season finale, Washington (7-4, 4-4 Pac-12) and Washington State (6-5, 4-4) are each fighting to finish above .500 in conference games. Only one of them will.

Kickoff at Husky Stadium is Friday at 12:30 p.m. for a national broadcast on Fox (Ch. 13).

“I think it’s great,” UW coach Steve Sarkisian said. “That’s what these types of rivalries are about and that’s what makes the Apple Cup so special. The better the two teams are performing, the better the environment for the game, and I’m hoping in the near future this game is deciding who is playing for the Pac-12 championship. I think our fans — theirs and ours — deserve that.”

The Cougars are slightly ahead of projections in Year 2 of the Mike Leach era. A second straight Apple Cup win would assure the Cougars of their first bowl game since 2003.

Leach traced the Cougars’ success this season to their stunning rally from an 18-point, fourth-quarter deficit against the Huskies last season. WSU wound up winning in overtime, 31-28.

“I think it started to reveal some of the potential our team had,” Leach said. “I think that’s the thing we’ve got to continue to do — we’ve got to continue to unfold what our potential is. ... I don’t think we’ve reached that point, where we’ve realized what we can do.”

The Huskies, coming off one their most dominating performances of Sarkisian’s tenure — a 69-27 win at Oregon State last Saturday — enter the Apple Cup as a 16-point favorite. The sting from their shocking loss in Pullman last season hung with the Huskies all offseason — literally, in fact. A sign with the score from that game is still hanging in the UW locker room, a constant reminder of the biggest collapse in Apple Cup history.

“It’s huge motivation,” said UW senior quarterback Keith Price, who had two turnovers in the fourth quarter and overtime in Pullman last year. “It was one of my main motivations this offseason and in training, not making mistakes.”

It’s unclear if Price will be available to make his third straight Apple Cup start. He injured his throwing shoulder in UW’s loss at UCLA two weeks ago, and redshirt freshman Cyler Miles was efficient in his first start in the victory over Oregon State.

Just like the Oregon State game, the public won’t know who starts at quarterback for UW until just before kickoff. Price said this week that he isn’t 100 percent healthy, but added that he would be “very disappointed” if he doesn’t get the start.

“I feel good about either one of them,” Sarkisian said about his quarterbacks.

An eighth win would certainly feel good for Sarkisian and the Huskies, after three straight 7-6 seasons. UW hasn’t had eight wins since 2001.

“I might have been 9 or 10 years old (then). That’s crazy,” Price said.

Sarkisian said that eighth victory is an important stepping stone for the program.

“I can tell you, today we’re a better football team than we were a year ago at this time,” Sarkisian said. “But a win Friday, I think for so many people justifies, ‘OK, they are better.’ And maybe for our players, quite honestly.”

For UW, it’s also about redemption.

Senior kicker Travis Coons, after a poor snap, missed a 35-yard field goal on the final play of regulation last season that would have given UW the victory.

“I would love to do that again,” Coons said this week. “Hopefully we do better than that, but if it comes down to it, I’m ready.”

Looking back
The Huskies’ and Cougars’ records going into the Apple Cup the past 12 years:
Year	UW	WSU
2013	7-4	6-5
2012	7-4	2-9
2011	6-5	4-7
2010	5-6	2-9
2009	3-7	1-10
2008	0-10	1-10
2007	4-7	1-10
2006	4-7	6-5
2005	2-8	3-7
2004	1-9	4-6
2003	5-6	9-2
2002	6-5	9-1

Adam Jude: 206-464-2364 or ajude@seattletimes.com. On Twitter: @a_jude.

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How STEVE JOBS saved Apple's bacon with an outstretched ARM - Register

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Feature The chip designers at ARM Holdings have turned the computing world upside down, shaken Intel to its core, pulled AMD into its orbit, and broadened its range beyond mobile into every nook and cranny of the digital world, from toys to servers.

But where did this UK wonder company come from? How does it earn its living? And how did Apple help create the company that helped Steve Jobs save Cupertino from annihilation?

At the recent ARM TechCon developers conference, ARM's training and education manager Chris Shore answered those questions and more – such as what "ARM" stands for.

"ARM doesn't stand for anything," he said. "Officially, it stands for nothing. It used to stand for Advanced RISC Machines, which was the company's first name on its foundation. Prior to that it stood for something else – it stood for the Acorn RISC Machine, because the original architecture was actually designed by another company, called Acorn."

However, when ARM joined the NASDAQ and London's FTSE stock exchanges in 1998, the name was officially changed to ARM – which stands for, well, just ARM.

Shore said that he continues to be asked whether ARM makes chips – which, of course, they don't. They create and license designs for a broad range of chips. "If you phone us up and say, 'I'd love to buy a Cortex-A9, how much are they, please?' we can't quote you for a single device or even 10,000 devices – you'll have to go to someone like TI or Freescale or Samsung, who actually license and produce the chips, in order to buy one," he said.

"But we could quote you several tens of milions of dollars for a license to build one of your own, if you wanted to."

He also said that many people are surprised that ARM is a UK company [Some anti-UK prejudice, y'think? — Ed.], seeing as how they play in an industry that's dominated by the US and the Asia-Pacific region. ARM was founded in Cambridge, where its headquarters remain today.

Another misconception that people have about ARM, he said, is that many believe that the company knows all about how its licensees use its designs. "People put those into all kinds of end uses," Shore said. "They go into fridges, toys, wireless baseband modems, network switches, servers, tablets, phones – goodness knows what they go into."

Not only does ARM not track what its partners – Shore's preferred term for licensees – do with their designs, some of those partners wouldn't tell them even if they asked.

"We produce a lot of products in secure marketplaces for things like banking cards," he said, "and our partners in those fields are quite rightly very secretive about what they do. They certainly don't tell their customers that they use our IP, and very often they don't tell us what they do, either. They prefer to keep that very quiet, and keep it to themselves."

From little Acorns...

The ARM architecture didn't originate from ARM, the company. About five or six years before ARM was founded, a Cambridge company called Acorn Computers, which made desktop PCs primarily for the education market, was casting about for a processor for the next generation of their machines. Nothing on the market at the time quite suited their needs, Shore said, so they decided to design their own.

From a farmhouse outside Cambridge, UK, to a company worth well over £12bn

"That processor was designed by a very small team of only four engineers," he said, referring to the group led by Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber. "One of whom designed the instruction set, one of whom did the microarchitecture, and two others who assisted with the designing of the supporting chipset." That tiny team produced the processor in 14 months, and it first ran code in Acorn's offices in Cambridge on 26 April, 1985. "And ARM still occupies that office."

That architecture was called the ARM1, for Acorn RISC Machine, and went into a system that became wildly popular in the UK education market. "Everybody my age in the UK used one of those machines at school," he said – Chris is a middle-aged chap – but "they're long gone now."

Acorn is long gone, as well. "It split itself up towards the end of the 1990s, and eventually the final pieces of it were bought by Broadcom and it now forms the chunk of Broadcom's research group." Its legacy, however, lives on in ARM Holdings, which was founded in 1990, headquartered in a farmhouse 10 miles (about 16km) outside of Cambridge.

ARM's first CEO was Robin Saxby, who wasn't the founder of the company, but instead had been headhunted by the founders to run the show. Smart move, seeing as how Saxby came up with the licensing business model that has turned ARM into a global powerhouse.

That business model was born partly out of necessity. With only 12 employees, it didn't have the resources to turn its chips designs into products. "Very neat design," Shore said, "but putting it through a fab and actually turning it into a physical product was a huge risk and a very expensive thing to do, and they simply didn't have the resources to do that."

Those resources, by the way, were provided by ARM's first funders: Apple, Acorn, and VLSI. "It was well-funded, but not lavishly funded," Shore said, and so Saxby came up with the licensing model, which he essentially invented. "It's an industry that ARM has gone on to dominate. We effectively invented it, and for the last over 20 years we've been fortunate enough to dominate it."

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Apple Won 76% of Japan October Smartphone Sales, Kantar Says - Bloomberg

Apple Inc. (AAPL) sold three of every four smartphones in Japan last month after the country’s largest carrier, NTT Docomo Inc. (9437), began carrying the iPhone, according to a market researcher.

Apple, which released new iPhone 5S and 5C models in September, won 76 percent of Japanese smartphone sales last month, market researcher Kantar Worldpanel ComTech said yesterday.

Apple’s share of smartphone sales at NTT Docomo was 61 percent after it began offering the iPhone for the first time, Kantar said in a post on its Twitter account, confirmed yesterday by Dominic Sunnebo, an analyst with the company in London.

Japan’s three wireless carriers all sell iPhones after NTT Docomo, the nation’s largest, ended its holdout against Apple’s handset as it attempts to regain market share from smaller rivals which already stock the devices. NTT Docomo had 45.7 percent of Japanese mobile subscribers in October compared with 29 percent for KDDI Corp. (9433) and 25.3 percent for SoftBank Corp. (9984), according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

NTT Docomo had resisted offering the iPhone to focus on handsets from Sony Corp. (6758) and Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) and protect its online store, called dmarket, from competition with Apple’s iTunes.

Shares of NTT Docomo rose 0.5 percent to 1,640 yen as of 10:34 a.m. in Tokyo. SoftBank fell 1.4 percent to 8,310 yen and KDDI dropped 1.5 percent to 6,460 yen. The Topix index declined 0.2 percent.

“It is true that iPhone sold well,” Jun Ootori, a spokesman for NTT Docomo in Tokyo said yesterday. He declined to comment further because the company doesn’t know details of Kantar’s research.

Apple introduced two new iPhones, including a cheaper version in bright colors and an updated high-end device that NTT Docomo began selling in Japan on Sept. 20.

To contact the reporters on this story: Grace Huang in Tokyo at xhuang66@bloomberg.net; Takashi Amano in Tokyo at tamano6@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Tighe at mtighe4@bloomberg.net

The first customer who purchased the Apple Inc. iPhone 5S at the company's store poses for a photograph in the Ginza district of Tokyo, Japan. Photographer: Akio Kon/Bloomberg

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