Are iPhone Sales Waning The Numbers Don\'t Say So

Reports last week suggested that people might finally be tired of Apple’s iPhone, citing sources that said sales were weaker than expected. But the latest numbers do not support that conclusion.

On Tuesday, Verizon Communications said in its quarterly earnings report that the iPhone was its top-selling smartphone. It sold 9.8 million smartphones over the past quarter, 6.2 million of which were iPhones. Nearly half of the iPhone sales were of iPhone 5s, Verizon said.

AT&T, the second-biggest American carrier after Verizon, will report its earnings Thursday, but it has already said that its iPhone sales were strong. In a preliminary report issued this month, it said its fourth quarter brought in its “best-ever quarterly sales of Android and Appl smartphones.”

Corroborating healthy iPhone sales, Kantar Worldpanel Comtech, a research company, said that the iPhone was the top-selling smartphone in the United States over the fourth quarter. It estimated that the iPhone accounted for 51.2 percent of smartphone sales in the United States over the quarter; sales of Android phones in that time period remained flat with about 44 percent of the market.

These numbers come contrary to a report last week from The Wall Street Journal, which said that Apple had cut orders of parts for the iPhone 5 from its manufacturers because of weaker-than-expected demand. However, some analysts said Apple might ! have cut down on orders for parts because it placed a large order last quarter to keep up with high demand, leaving some inventory left over for the coming quarter.

Chetan Sharma, an independent mobile analyst, said in an interview that he did not find the reports about weak iPhone demand to be credible.

“The iPhone is seeing significant competition from Samsung, but that doesn’t mean the demand for iPhone was waning,” Mr. Sharma said. “It just means there’s more pressure to produce a better iPhone next time around.”

A New Group Aims to Make Programming Cool

The presence of technology in the lives of most teenagers hasn’t done much to entice more of them to become programmers. So Hadi Partovi has formed a nonprofit foundation aimed at making computer science as interesting to young people as smartphones, Instagram and iPads.

Mr. Partovi, a successful Seattle-based technology investor and entrepreneur, founded Code.org with the goal of increasing the teaching of computer science in classrooms and sparking more excitement about the subject among students. Mr. Partovi, who is an adviser and investor in Facebook, Dropbox and Airbnb, was inspired to create the Code.org after seeing technology companies struggle to find enough programming talent.

“Living in the tech industry, it’s very clear to me their No. 1 problem is the shortage of engineers,” said Mr. Partovi, 40, who is working on the foundation with his twin brother, Ali. “There’s no end to what’s going to be touched by software.”

Code.og’s initial effort will be a short film, currently being edited, that will feature various luminaries from the technology industry talking about how exciting and accessible programming is. Two of the most famous programmers and entrepreneurs in history â€" Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, and Bill Gates, the chairman and co-founder of Microsoft - were among the people interviewed for the film, according to a person with knowledge of the project who wasn’t authorized to discuss details about it.

Lesley Chilcott, a producer of the documentaries “Waiting for ‘Superman’” and “An Inconvenient Truth,” is making the film.

Mr. Partovi’s nonprofit is part of a much wider push by the technology industry to figure out how to train more people in computer science at a young age. While bitter rivals like Microsoft and Google don’t agree on a lot of things, one topic on which they do is the alarming mismatch between the relatively small number of Americans being t! rained in computer science and the employment opportunities that await them.

There are several statistics that tell that story: the number of United States students receiving bachelor’s degrees in computer science, and the percentage of high school students earnings credits in the field, are both on the decline â€" even though there will be 150,000 computing-job openings every year for the next seven years, by one estimate. Microsoft has gone so far as to send its engineers into high schools to help teach computer science.

Not all of those opportunities are at sexy Internet companies like Google, which can be notoriously picky about the people it hires. Many of them are in government, banks and other areas. Many of the jobs in life sciences and other fields are expected to be programming-related because of the growing importance of big data tothose professions.

“There are so many wild ideas about where technology will take us,” said Mr. Partovi, who was also a member of the founding teams of iLike and Tellme. “All of that will be powered by software.”

Code.org will also create a database to help parents find schools where computer science is already being taught and to advocate ways of making it more available to students.

These will not be easy challenges to overcome. Mr. Partovi and others in the technology business believe a lack of qualified teachers is one of the most serious problems blocking greater access to computer science in classrooms. Even programmers with a passion for teaching have a difficult time turning down more lucrative job offers, especially if they’ve got piles of student debt.

“It’s difficult to convince people who are getting the highest salaries in industry to get one of the lowest-paying jobs,” said Mr. Partovi, who is initially funding the foundation with his brother.

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It al! so isn’t clear that Code.org’s film will succeed where modern technologies themselves have failed: in getting young people excited about programming. Mr. Partovi’s theory is that devices like the iPhone do a much better job at concealing their complexity from their users, which is great for people who truly have no interest in fussing around with code.

Operating PCs in the early days meant learning arcane DOS commands, which helped get people like Mr. Partovi, a computer science graduate from Harvard, interested in programming.

Mr. Partovi believes that pop culture depictions of programmers - think Mr. Zuckerberg in “The Social Network” - have not helped dispel the image of the typical coder as a “freakish, white boy genius stuck in a basement.” He said the film will seek to broaden the appeal of programming by showing women programmers and emphasizing its collaborative nature.

“The goal of the video is to challenge stereotypes,” he said.

Prince Harry Compares War to PlayStation and Taliban Is Not Amused

A Taliban spokesman said on Tuesday that Prince Harry must have “mental problems,” following the broadcast of remarks by the royal in which he said that killing militants from an Apache helicopter was similar to playing video games.

As soon as Britain’s ministry of defense announced on Monday that Prince Harry had left Afghanistan, ending his four-month deployment there, the British news media rushed to broadcast video of the royal officer at war, which was recorded with his cooperation on the condition that it not be released until his tour was over.

Britain’s Channel 4 News broke into its bulletin on Monday night just minutes after the announcement to broadcast its edit of the footage, which was shot last month at Camp Bastin in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province by the British Press Association.

A video report from Britain’s Channel 4 News shot during Prince Harry’s recent deployment to Afghanistan.

The Channel 4 News report drew attention to how frequently the prince, whose mother was being chased by photographers when she died in a fatal car accident, mentioned his distaste for the British press.

At one stage in the interview, Prince Harry said that he was not troubled by killing militants. “Take a life to save a life,” he said. “If there’s people trying to do bad stuff to our guys, then we’ll take them out of the game.”

In another! edit of the footage, posted online by The Guardian, Prince Harry, who is known as Captain Wales in the army, explained that he was glad to have been “pushed forward to the front seat,” the one reserved for the attack helicopter’s gunner. That was, he said, “a joy for me because I’m one of those people that loves playing PlayStation and Xbox, so with my thumbs I like to think I’m probably quite useful â€" if you ask the guys I thrash them at FIFA the whole time,” referring to a popular video game series.

“This is a serious war, a historic war, resistance for us, for our people,” a Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, told Agene France-Presse in response, “and now this prince comes and compares this war with his games, PlayStation or whatever he calls it.”

But the spokesman added, “we don’t take his comments very seriously, as we have all seen and heard that many foreign soldiers, occupiers who come to Afghanistan, develop some kind of mental problems on their way out.”

In another part of the interview, posted online by The Telegraph, Prince Harry said that his brother, Prince William, was jealous of him. “He’d love to be out here and, to be honest with you, I don’t see why he couldn’t,” Harry said. “No one knows who’s in the cockpit. Yes you get shot at, but, you know, if the guys who are doing the same job as us are being shot at on the ground, then I don’t think there’s anything wrong with us being shot at as well. Yeah, people back home might have issues with that, but we’re not special.”

Video of remarks by Prince Harry about how much his brother would like to serve in Afghanistan.

TSMC Anticipates Big Orders. Is Apple One of Them

Analysts expect Apple to drop Samsung Electronics as a chip supplier, but when

In business, it’s not usually wise to be funding your competition. Unfortunately for Apple, processor chips for iPhones and iPads are made by Samsung, the South Korean company that is its top competitor in smartphones.

Most analysts expect Apple will eventually change suppliers. One potential suitor that keeps popping up in the rumor mill is the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chip maker, and for good reason.

TSMC is one of the few companies that have the capacity and the technology to meet Apple’s demand. The company had $17.5 billion in revenue in 2012 and its net income rose 32 percent in the fourth quarter. The chairman and chief executive, Morris Chang, is planning a record $9 billion in capital expenditures to expand production in 2013. TSMC makes some of the smallest and most powerful chips, and these chips go into both computers and smartphones.

p>The added incentive is, TSMC solely makes chips by contract, and probably will never compete with Apple in finished consumer electronics as Samsung has.

“This is the reason that companies such as Nvidia and AMD, which actually compete against each other in PCs, both go to TSMC (to make their chips),” Patrick Liao, an analyst at Nomura Securities, said. “They never worry about technology theft.”

For the last year and a half, industry watchers have tried to predict when TSMC will receive its first big order from Apple.

TSMC’s latest 28-nanometer chip was oversubscribed by existing customers to the point of shortage in 2012, and many believe the company does not have enough capacity for a large Apple order in 2013.

However, the 20-nanometer chip, which TSMC expects to go into full production in 2014, looks promising, analysts say. (Connections within a chip are measured in nanometers, or one-billionth of a meter.)

At an earnings conference on Thursday, Mr. Chang! declined to comment on Apple, but he bullishly predicted the 20-nanometer would outsell the 28-nanometer in its first two years.

“Enough discussions have taken place, with enough customers who have large requirements (on 20nm), to lead us to believe that the volume will be very large,” Mr. Chang said.

That bullishness leads analysts to believe that Apple could be a customer involved in these discussions.

“That language makes you feel like the direction is headed where we all expect,” said Steven Pelayo, regional head of technology research at HSBC.

If Samsung cuts capital spending this year, Mr. Pelayo says, that will add another piece to the puzzle of when Apple plans to exit.

“2013 is really a status quo year. Samsung ramps down, TSMC ramps up. We’ll see what happens in 2014.”

TMSC Anticipates Big Orders. Is Apple One of Them

Analysts expect Apple to drop Samsung Electronics as a chip supplier, but when

In business, it’s not usually wise to be funding your competition. Unfortunately for Apple, processor chips for iPhones and iPads are made by Samsung, the South Korean company that is its top competitor in smartphones.

Most analysts expect Apple will eventually change suppliers. One potential suitor that keeps popping up in the rumor mill is the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chip maker, and for good reason.

TSMC is one of the few companies that have the capacity and the technology to meet Apple’s demand. The company had $17.5 billion in revenue in 2012 and its net income rose 32 percent in the fourth quarter. The chairman and chief executive, Morris Chang, is planning a record $9 billion in capital expenditures to expand production in 2013. TSMC makes some of the smallest and most powerful chips, and these chips go into both computers and smartphones.

p>The added incentive is, TSMC solely makes chips by contract, and probably will never compete with Apple in finished consumer electronics as Samsung has.

“This is the reason that companies such as Nvidia and AMD, which actually compete against each other in PCs, both go to TSMC (to make their chips),” Patrick Liao, an analyst at Nomura Securities, said. “They never worry about technology theft.”

For the last year and a half, industry watchers have tried to predict when TSMC will receive its first big order from Apple.

TSMC’s latest 28-nanometer chip was oversubscribed by existing customers to the point of shortage in 2012, and many believe the company does not have enough capacity for a large Apple order in 2013.

However, the 20-nanometer chip, which TSMC expects to go into full production in 2014, looks promising, analysts say. (Connections within a chip are measured in nanometers, or one-billionth of a meter.)

At an earnings conference on Thursday, Mr. Chang! declined to comment on Apple, but he bullishly predicted the 20-nanometer would outsell the 28-nanometer in its first two years.

“Enough discussions have taken place, with enough customers who have large requirements (on 20nm), to lead us to believe that the volume will be very large,” Mr. Chang said.

That bullishness leads analysts to believe that Apple could be a customer involved in these discussions.

“That language makes you feel like the direction is headed where we all expect,” said Steven Pelayo, regional head of technology research at HSBC.

If Samsung cuts capital spending this year, Mr. Pelayo says, that will add another piece to the puzzle of when Apple plans to exit.

“2013 is really a status quo year. Samsung ramps down, TSMC ramps up. We’ll see what happens in 2014.”

Daily Report: Even if It Outrages the Boss, Social Net Speech Is Protected

As Facebook and Twitter become as central to workplace conversation as the company cafeteria, federal regulators are ordering employers to scale back policies that limit what workers can say online, reports Steven Greenhouse in Tuesday’s New York Times.

Employers often seek to discourage comments that paint them in a negative light. Don’t discuss company matters publicly, a typical social media policy will say, and don’t disparage managers, co-workers or the company itself. Violations can be a firing offense.

But in a series of recent rulings and advisories, labor regulators have declared many such blanket restrictions illegal. The National Labor Relations Board says workers have a right to discuss work conditions freely and without fear of retribution, whether the discussion takes place at the office or on Facebook.

In addition to ordering thereinstatement of various workers fired for their posts on social networks, the agency has pushed companies nationwide, including giants like General Motors, Target and Costco, to rewrite their social media rules.

The decisions come amid a broader debate over what constitutes appropriate discussion on Facebook and other social networks. Schools and universities are wrestling with online bullying and student disclosures about drug use. Governments worry about what police officers and teachers say and do online on their own time. Even corporate chieftains are finding that their online comments can run afoul of securities regulators.

The labor board’s rulings, which apply to virtually all private sector employers, generally tell companies that it is illegal to adopt broad social media policies â€" like bans on “disrespectful” comments or posts that criticize the employer â€" if those policies discourage workers from exercising their right to communicate with one another with the aim of ! improving wages, benefits or working conditions.

But the agency has also found that it is O.K. for employers to act against a lone worker ranting on the Internet.