iPad & iPhone User 187

All eyes were on the tech world last month as Apple capped a string of disappointing results from Google, Meta and Amazon. But Apple managed to buck the trend with another record-breaking quarter. For its fiscal fourth quarter, the company posted revenue of $90.1 billion, up 8 percent year over year, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $1.29, up 4 percent year over year. The quarter was buoyed by its two biggest categories: the iPhone and Mac. Apple enjoyed an extra week of iPhone 14 sales thanks to an earlier release (though that didn’t include the new iPhone 14 Plus, which arrived 7 October). Sales of the iPhone came in at just under $43 billion, an increase of 10 percent over last year, and Mac sales rebounded from a disappointing…

A new report from The Information (fave.co/3EImfVJ) explores Apple’s ongoing project to develop in-house search capabilities but paints a gloomy picture regarding the launch of a direct rival to Google search. According to the report’s sources, an Apple search engine, if it launches at all, cannot realistically happen within the next four years. Apple’s search plan was boosted in 2018 by the acquisition of the news/recommendation start-up Laserlike, which was founded by three former Google search employees. At the time, the project was a significant one for Cupertino, with Laserlike co-founder Srinivasan Venkatachary occupying a senior role in a search-focused team numbering at least 200 employees – and this was separate from, and in addition to, the team in charge of search on the App Store. But The Information reveals that all…

After the European Union passed a law mandating that all new electronic devices that charge with a plug need to support USB-C, all eyes turned to Apple and its Lightning-powered iPhone. Now we have an answer: Apple confirmed that the iPhone will switch to USB-C. In an interview with Joanna Stern at The Wall Street Journal Tech Live conference last month, Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, was surprisingly candid when asked about the future of USB-C on the iPhone: “Obviously, we’ll have to comply; we have no choice.” However, it’s clear that Apple isn’t happy with the move. Joswiak pointed out that the EU Commission originally wanted to use Micro-USB as a global standard over a decade ago, which would have stymied the development of both Lightning and…

Despite positioning itself as a pro-privacy tech company, Apple has been accused by iOS developers of behaviour that ‘should raise many privacy concerns’. It all relates to Apple’s own apps, including the App Store, and the way usage data is allegedly shared with Apple even when the user has turned off analytics sharing and personalized recommendations. The Twitter account Mysk (fave.co/3Gp9VuL), which is run by a pair of developers in Canada and Germany, posted a thread warning that, if you’re using the App Store app in iOS 14.6, “every tap you make” is recorded and sent to Apple. This happens regardless of user preferences and settings, the developers claim. Apple has several toggles designed to reduce tracking, but the developers say that “opting‑out or switching the personalization options off did not…

Apple has begun rolling out its new Rapid Security Responses feature to iOS 16.2 and iPadOS 16.2 beta testers. The mechanism, which is designed to speed up the delivery of security fixes on iPhone, iPad and Mac, was announced at WWDC and began testing back in October and appears to be ready to go – although we don’t yet know when it will first be made available to macOS testers. As Twitter account Appleosophy reports (fave.co/3TQ2KPr), this initial Rapid Security Response does not contain any actual security content. In Apple’s words, it is “for testing purposes only”. But future updates of this sort could be highly significant. At present, Apple’s only way of seeding patches for security vulnerabilities is through updates to iOS, iPadOS or macOS, such as iOS 16.1 or macoS…

Apple’s most recent financial quarter has come and gone, and the company posted (yet again) record revenues, pulling in a zillion dollars and ending its latest fiscal year with just shy of $100 billion in profit alone. Let that sink in for a moment. $100 billion is such a large number as to be utterly incomprehensible to most of us who will never approach anywhere near even a single billion in our lifetime. It’s bigger than the gross domestic product of some countries – and not just a few of them. More than half of the countries in the world. Most of them. And again, that’s profit, not revenue, which was a soaring $316 billion, putting it in around the top 40 countries. On the one hand, good for Apple. There was…