In the past month, there have been reports that Apple is working on a smaller, cheaper iPhone. But the latest sales numbers do not make it appear that Apple needs to sell one.
Apple released its quarterly earnings report on Wednesday. While its revenue grew 18 percent from last year, profit stayed flat at $13.1 billion. As for iPhones, Apple sold 47.8 million, up from 37 million last year.
Analysts paid keen attention to one particular detail about the iPhone: its average selling price. The theory goes that if the average selling price teetered to the lower side, it would indicate that Apple’s older iPhones were selling much better than the newest model, the iPhone 5. It would therefore behoov Apple to sell a new model of a cheaper and perhaps smaller iPhone, aimed at the lower end of the market.
But the average selling price of the iPhone over the past quarter was $641. That suggests the iPhone 5, which costs $650 at full price in the United States, accounted for the vast majority of iPhone sales. Tero Kuittinen, an independent mobile analyst and vice president of Alekstra, a company that helps people manage their cellphone bills, says that based on the average selling price, the iPhone 5 could account for no less than 70 percent of iPhone sales over the quarter.
Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, would not clarify how many iPhone 5 handsets were sold specifically. But he told analysts that the ratio of iPhone 5 phones sold versus older iPhones was similar to the ratio for iPhone 4S phones sold versus older iPhones in the same quarter of last year. The iPhone 4S was the best-selling Apple phone last year, meaning the iPhone 5 is most likely Apple’s current best-sel! ling iPhone.
So is a cheaper new iPhone necessary A cheaper iPhone would very likely appeal to emerging markets where people have less disposable income. But Mr. Cook noted that the iPhone had the biggest sales growth in China â€" in the “triple digits.â€
“This does not really signal that the low-end iPhone is a must,†Mr. Kuittinen said.
During the earnings call, one analyst asked what Apple would do to defend its market share. Mr. Cook did not reveal any hints that a cheaper iPhone was in the cards.
“The most important thing to Apple is to make the best products in the world,†Mr. Cook said. “We aren’t interested in revenue for revenue’s sake. We could put the Apple brand on a lot of things and sell a lot more stuff. We only want to make the best products. We’ve been able to build market share and have a great track record with iPod of doing different products at different prie points. I wouldn’t view those as mutually exclusive as some might.â€
High-speed Internet, digital TV and digital phone service Sure sounds like the future. But when all those services blow out like a candle, it’ll feel as if you’re living in the stone age. Some AT&T customers are learning that the hard way this week.
AT&T’s U-verse service, which includes its phone, Internet and digital TV services, has been down for three days now in some states in the Southwest and Southeast regions. Mark Siegel, an AT&T spokesman, said less than 1 percent of U-verse’s 7.4 million subscribers were affected by the service disruption, which is related to server problems. He declined to elaborate on what caused the servers to fail, or whether affected customers would be reimbursed.
“This issue currently affects less than 1 percent of our U-verse subscribers, but that is too many and we are working hard to fix this,†Mr. Siegel said in a statement. “We are making progress in resolving the issue, which is related to servers supporting U-verse, and are working to dtermine when service will be completely restored. We apologize for this inconvenience.â€
Wendy Miller, who lives in North Carolina, said in an interview that her U-verse service has been out for three days, and that she has heard nothing from AT&T about what the problem is and when it will be fixed. She said this experience made her miss the old days when the landline would still work even if the power went out.
“You go on U-verse, and the old handy dandy landlines that would work no matter what†she said. “That’s not happening any longer.†She added that her husband, who works from home, had to move somewhere else with a working Internet connection this week.
Dozens of U-verse customers took their complaints to AT&T’s online forums, in the thread “U-verse outage â€" what’s going on†Some talked about switching to another provider, like Comcast, while o! thers said they had to go to to a library or a Starbucks just to get on the Internet.
High-speed Internet, digital TV and digital phone service Sure sounds like the future. But when all those services blow out like a candle, it’ll feel as if you’re living in the stone age. Some AT&T customers are learning that the hard way this week.
AT&T’s U-verse service, which includes its phone, Internet and digital TV services, has been down for three days now in some states in the Southwest and Southeast regions. Mark Siegel, an AT&T spokesman, said less than 1 percent of U-verse’s 7.4 million subscribers were affected by the service disruption, which is related to server problems. He declined to elaborate on what caused the servers to fail, or whether affected customers would be reimbursed.
“This issue currently affects less than 1 percent of our U-verse subscribers, but that is too many and we are working hard to fix this,†Mr. Siegel said in a statement. “We are making progress in resolving the issue, which is related to servers supporting U-verse, and are working to dtermine when service will be completely restored. We apologize for this inconvenience.â€
Wendy Miller, who lives in North Carolina, said in an interview that her U-verse service has been out for three days, and that she has heard nothing from AT&T about what the problem is and when it will be fixed. She said this experience made her miss the old days when the landline would still work even if the power went out.
“You go on U-verse, and the old handy dandy landlines that would work no matter what†she said. “That’s not happening any longer.†She added that her husband, who works from home, had to move somewhere else with a working Internet connection this week.
Dozens of U-verse customers took their complaints to AT&T’s online forums, in the thread “U-verse outage â€" what’s going on†Some talked about switching to another provider, like Comcast, while o! thers said they had to go to to a library or a Starbucks just to get on the Internet.
Video posted online by Syrian opposition activists appears to have been recorded during the second of two explosions at Syria’s Aleppo University last week.
At least one of the two explosions that killed more than 80 people at Syria’s Aleppo University last week was caused by a missile, according to two analysts who examined new video of the attack posted online by Syrian opposition activists.
Traces of what appears to be a missile descending moments before the huge blast can be seen in three still frames taken from the brief video clip, which seems to have been recorded on the university campus as the second rocket shattered a dormitory.
A still frame from video posted online by Syrian activists appears to show, at the very top right of the image, a descending missile, moments before it struck Aleppo University last week.
As my colleague C.J. Chivers noted on his blog, if the new video of the second blast is authentic, those frames and the loud whirr of the missile just before the explosion, appear to rule ! out initial claims from the government that the explosions were caused by car bombs.
another thing u should consider about Aleppo Uni bombings. first claim by regime was mortars, then a car bomb, then to rebel rockets #Syria
Like another clip of the second explosion posted online last week, the new video does not resolve the question of whether the rockets were fired by Syrian Air Force jets, as some activists claimed, or were ballistic missiles. Late on the day of the attack, Syrian officials cited by the state-run news media claimed that the rebels had fired two rockets at the school, although the insurgents are not known to possess ballistic missiles.
While no image of a jet has yet appeared, some opposition activists insisted that they did see a plane before the explosions. An Aleppo blogger who has been critical of the armed rebellion on his @edwardedark Twitter feed wrote last week that he heard what he took to be a jet just before the blast.
I myself was driving up the road, just a few miles away from the jet strike. I clearly heard a jet fighter swooping, then a blast #Syria
As my colleagues Michael Gordon and Eric Schmitt reported in December, Obama administration officials said that President Bashar al-Assad’s military had fired at least six Soviet-designed Scud missiles â€" not known for their precision â€" at rebel fighters north of Aleppo last month from a base outside Damascus.
An undated YouTube clip, apparently recorded from Syrian state television by an Israeli defense news magazine, appears to show that Syria’s military has openly test-fired Scuds and other missiles.
Video of Syria’s military testing missiles apparently recorded from Syrian state television by an Israeli defense news magazine.
According to Joseph Holliday, a former Army intelligence officer and a senior analyst at the Institute for the Study of War who studied the clip for The Lede, the video strongly suggests that a missile struck the university. “There’s no jet noise before or after the strike and only missiles would be supersonic - the ripping noise at the end is just the missile ripping through the air,†he wrote in an e-mail. “Add to all that the size of the blast definitely seems more like a ballistic missile than a bomb.â€
Mr. Holliday added:
This also solves the mystery of who would target the university and why, and I think the answer is that the regime didn’t mean to target the university, but their Scuds just aren’t accurate enough and they screwed up - big time. I say Scuds here, but I can’t confirm whether or not it’s a different type of ballistic missile, it’s just that they have more Scuds in inventory than anything else.
! Mr. Holli! day showed the video to another analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, Christopher Harmer, a former Naval officer, who observed: “I am 90 percent confident that is either a Scud or a large surface to surface rocket - that is much bigger than a Qassam or Katyusha. Might be a Fajr-5 rocket.†He arrived at that conclusion, he wrote, by the following process of elimination:
R.P.G. No â€" explosion is too big. Mortar No â€" explosion is too big for the size of mortars in theater. Artillery No â€" explosion is too big for any of the artillery pieces in theater. Also, if it were fired by artillery, they would have heard firing. Air-dropped bomb Possible, but unlikely. No visual indication of jets in the area.
Based on size of explosion, sound of inbound projectile, assess this is either a large rocket (Fajr-5) series or a Scud ballistic missile.
On the possibility that the bob might have been dropped by a jet, Mr. Harmer wrote:
I don’t buy it. You can hear something like an aircraft engine at 0:40, but it sounds more like wind to me than jet engine. Also, if this were an air attack, I think there are enough photographers up there that somebody would have caught it on video. The day is clear - no clouds or fog. The aircraft would have been visible.
Separate technical issue - Syrian Air Force has old jets. They make a lot of noise. At the altitudes they have been flying at, we almost certainly would have heard the jet engine noise. It is possible it was an air attack, but if so, it would have been a fairly high altitude attack, high enough that the jet was not visible to any of the amateur photographers on the ground, and high enough that we did not clearly hear the jet engine.
In a note to The Lede, Mr. Chivers, a former marine who has reported from Syria and written extensively about the insurgent arsenal for The Times and his personal blog, observed: “this now appears to have been a military strike, with ordnance that the Free Syrian Army does not have.â€
He added:
The thing about these kind of attacks is they seem to be inherently inaccurate. I’ve been going to craters in Syria in recent days trying to figure out exactly what types of missiles are involved. So far, still stumped, though I have some scraps of their remains and have circulated pictures to some friends. But they simply do not seem to come near their targets in many cases â€" they miss by a kilometer or more. And that may be what happened here.
Exploring distribution outlets at the Sundance Film Festival. Kit Eaton reviews audio recording apps. Jonathan Perez, creator of "Washington Heights," on reality TV.
Exploring distribution outlets at the Sundance Film Festival. Kit Eaton reviews audio recording apps. Jonathan Perez, creator of "Washington Heights," on reality TV.
Federal authorities charged three Eastern European men with using a computer virus, nicknamed Gozi, that surreptitiously infected over a million computers worldwide, including at NASA, to steal what prosecutors said was at least tens of millions of dollars from personal bank accounts.
The Justice Department unsealed indictments on Wednesday morning in Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York. The case highlights the multinational criminal networks that develop and rent out computer malware. In this case, a Russian national, Nikita Kuzmin, is accused of developing the virus. Dennis Calovskis of Latvia is accused of modifying it so it could mimic a bank’s Web page, prompting account holders to divulge their personal information. Ionut Paunescu of Romania is accused of hosting command and control servers, shielding them to evade detection.
Federal law enforcement officers arrested Mr. Kuzmin as he visited California in 2010 and persuaded him to cooprate. He helped prosecutors nab the other two men, who were arrested in late 2012 in their home countries and are awaiting extradition.
Most of the infected computers were in Europe. Federal law enforcement officials said that although NASA computers were among the 25,000 devices infected inside the United States, they did not believe sensitive strategic information was stolen. The criminal network was motivated by commercial gain, officials said.
Federal authorities charged three Eastern European men with using a computer virus, nicknamed Gozi, that surreptitiously infected over a million computers worldwide, including at NASA, to steal what prosecutors said was at least tens of millions of dollars from personal bank accounts.
The Justice Department unsealed indictments on Wednesday morning in Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York. The case highlights the multinational criminal networks that develop and rent out computer malware. In this case, a Russian national, Nikita Kuzmin, is accused of developing the virus. Dennis Calovskis of Latvia is accused of modifying it so it could mimic a bank’s Web page, prompting account holders to divulge their personal information. Ionut Paunescu of Romania is accused of hosting command and control servers, shielding them to evade detection.
Federal law enforcement officers arrested Mr. Kuzmin as he visited California in 2010 and persuaded him to cooprate. He helped prosecutors nab the other two men, who were arrested in late 2012 in their home countries and are awaiting extradition.
Most of the infected computers were in Europe. Federal law enforcement officials said that although NASA computers were among the 25,000 devices infected inside the United States, they did not believe sensitive strategic information was stolen. The criminal network was motivated by commercial gain, officials said.
If you want to signal to software engineers that your tech start-up is a cool place to work, you can let them bring their dogs to the office, offer free energy drinks or put up a billboard with a Web address that can only be accessed after solving a math equation.
WibiData, a 22-person San Francisco start-up that develops big data applications, has come up with its own gimmick for telegraphing its engineering street cred to job applicants: a custom version of Portal 2, a devilishly addictive cult video game from Valve.
Although it resembles a first-person shooter with a science fiction twist, Portal 2 is actually a spatial puzzle game in which players use a weapon called a portal gun to create openings that allow them to pass from on section of the game to another. One of the most enjoyable aspects of the game is its realistic physics. If you blast one portal in the ground two stories below you and another on a wall, then you’ll come flying out of the wall portal at the same velocity that you jumped into the ground portal, catapulting you across an otherwise unbridgeable chasm.
“It makes me feel like I exercise the same part of my brain that programming and problem-solving does,†Christophe Bisciglia, the chief executive of WibiData, said in a phone interview.
Mr. Bisciglia got the idea to use the game as a recruiting tool after seeing the work of Doug Hoogland, who helped create a custom version of Portal 2 (called a mod in the gamer community) for a man who used it as a wedd! ing proposal. Mr. Bisciglia estimates that half of the engineers at WibiData play Portal 2, which Valve encourages people to mod.
WibiData flew Mr. Hoogland to San Francisco to tour its offices and provided him with architectural renderings of the space so he could faithfully create a virtual version of it in the game. The finished product, available on the jobs section of WibiData’s site, requires players to enter each of the conference rooms in the company’s offices, then take an elevator down to a test chamber (which doesn’t exist in real life) and solve a series of puzzles before moving on to the next level.
A robotic narrator in the game jokes about killing previous job applicants, according to Mr. Bisciglia, who said he is made fun of throughout the game.
“I think a lot of people will think, ‘That’s really cool that they created a video game to recruit people. I want to work there,’†Mr. Bisciglia said.
The Lede is following Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks on the American Consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi, Libya.
The Lede is following Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks on the American Consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi, Libya.
For their maker, Research in Motion, BlackBerrys have always been the gift that keeps on giving. Until now, every BlackBerry handset has continued to generate monthly service fees for the company until it falls apart or is stuck in a drawer.
In preparation for next week’s debut of the BlackBerry 10 phones, on Wednesday the company will release software that corporate and government users will employ to manage those phones. And as comments made last month by Thorsten Heins, the company’s chief executive, revealed, that software release may raise concerns about the future of RIM’s lucrative service business.
BlackBerry 10 is an all-new line which RIM hopes will revive its fortunes. But the attention is also being focused on the service fees that accounted for about 36 percent of RIM’s revenue in its last quarter. Unlike its handset business, RIM’s service operation remains proftable, perhaps even very profitable, many analysts agree.
So there was some alarm among analysts in late December when Mr. Heins said during an earnings call that sweeping changes coming in the BlackBerry 10 operating system mean that consumer BlackBerrys and even some phones used by corporations and governments will no longer generate monthly fees for the company.
All data sent to and from current BlackBerrys is run through RIM’s own global network. It compresses Web pages and e-mails to boost the speed of browsing and lower the amount of wireless data users consume. That service will vanish on consumer BlackBerry 10s and, with it, those fees to RIM.
Corporate and government users add special BlackBerry Enterprise Servers to their networks and gain, among other things, high levels of security. On Wednesday, RIM will allow those users to download a new BlackBerry 10 version of its server software, one that will also allow companies to manage employees’ iPhones and Android-ba! sed phones.
The price of that server software and the associated monthly fees, which are levied through cellphone service providers, have become an issue at some cost conscious corporations. In an apparent bid to address that concern, Jeff Holleran, the senior director of enterprise product management at RIM, said that the company has dropped license fees for the server software. Corporate users will, however, continue to pay license fees for every phone they connect to their BlackBerry servers. (In a promotion, those device license fees will be waived until December for companies currently using BlackBerrys who switch users to BlackBerry 10.)
Despite repeated questions, Mr. Holleran would not say what BlackBerry 10 means for the second half of the cost equation: the monthly charges to business and corporate customers for RIM’s network services. Before a spokeswoman ended the line of questioning, Mr. Holleran said he would “defer†queries about fees to the company’s financial side. Asked later by e-mail for clarification, the spokeswoman, Kim Geiger, said the company’s only comment remained Mr. Heins’s remarks from last month. In investor notes, many analysts faulted Mr. Heins for his lack of clarity. At the time, Mr. Heins said that companies would be able to pick and choose which services they use which will affect their monthly bills. But he offered no specifics.
“It’s a little bit of a menu thing that you can choose and pick and that then will basically govern the pricing,†he told analysts.
When Ehud A. Gelblum, an analyst with Morgan Stanley, followed several other analysts in pushing for details about service charges during that conference call, Paul Carpino, RIM’s vice president of investor relations, stepped in before Mr. Heins replied.
“You’ll have to wait until we start to launch some of these services to get more detail,†he told the analyst.
Even before the World Conference on International Telecommunications took place last month in Dubai, Internet activists anticipated trouble. So did Congress, which issued a resolution calling it “essential†that the Internet remain “stable, secure and free from governmental control.â€
The worries proved prescient. The conference, which supposedly was going to modernize some ancient regulations, instead offered a treaty that in the eyes of some critics would have given repressive states permission to crack down on dissent. The United States delegate refused to sign it. Fifty-four other countries, including Canada, Peru, Japan and most of Western Europe, voted no as well.
The OpenNet Initiative estimates that about a third of Internt users live in countries that engage in “substantive†or “pervasive†blocking of Internet content. They tended to be among the 89 countries that signed the treaty, including Russia, Cambodia, Iran, China, Cuba, Egypt and Angola.
Those in favor of a free and open Internet have long had a problem with the International Telecommunication Union, the affiliate of the United Nations that ran the conference. They see the I.T.U., which dates back to 1865, as longing for the pre-Internet era, when its influence and fortunes were greater. As a result, activists think, the I.T.U. has become aligned with, and a tool of, countries that desire more governmental control over public speech.
In the wake of the Dubai meeting, there are renewed calls to scale back United States financing of the I.T.U. drastically. The logic is, why are taxpayers supporting an organization whose motives they oppose
“Paying for both sides of a conflict is unsustainable and illogical, and should simply be corr! ected,†says the De-Fund the I.T.U. Web site, which has posted a petition on the White House Web site.
The De-Fund site notes that the petition is not asking the United States government to take an unprecedented first step. “Many of our free-market democratic allies, led by Germany, France, Spain and Finland, have already de-funded the I.T.U. Likewise, right-thinking American companies like I.B.M., Cingular, Microsoft, Fox, Agilent, Sprint, Harris, Loral and Xerox, and others, have already withdrawn their private-sector contributions from the I.T.U.â€
The petition was the brainchild of Bill Woodcock, the Berkeley-based research director of Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit institute. “This is really about whether people should be allowed to say what they think,†Mr. Woodcock said. “The Internet enables free speech, and that makes it very dangerous to countries that try to control public discourse.â€
The United States government contribute about 8 percent of the I.T.U.’s budget. The 55 countries that voted against the treaty contribute about three-quarters of it. If the White House receives 25,000 signatures by Feb. 10, it will review and quite possibly act on the petition. As of Tuesday, it had about 600 signatures with minimal publicity.
A spokesman for the I.T.U., which is based in Switzerland, did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.
Microsoft is in talks to help finance a takeover bid for Dell that would exceed $20 billion, report Michael J. de la Merced and Nick Wingfield in The New York Times. Microsoft is expected to contribute up to several billion dollars.
They write that an investment by Microsoft could be enough to push a leveraged buyout of the struggling computer maker over the goal line. Silver Lake, the private equity firm spearheading the takeover talks, has been seeking a deep-pocketed investor to join the effort. And Microsoft, which has not yet made a commitment, has more than $66 billion in cash on hand.
The private equity firm was part of a consortium that sold Skype, the online video-chatting pioneer, to Microsoft for $8.5 billion nearly two years ago. And the two companies had discussed teaming up to make an investment in Yahoo in late 2011, before Yahoo decided against selling a minority stake in itself.
Why Microsoft would put is money into Dell, which has been losing market share of the PC business, is clear. A vibrant Dell is an important part of Microsoft’s plans to make Windows more relevant for the tablet era, when more and more devices come with touch screens. Dell has been one of the most visible supporters of Windows 8 in its products.
That has been crucial at a time when Microsoft’s relationships with many PC makers have grown strained because of the company’s move into making computer hardware with its Surface family of tablets.
Dell, the third-biggest maker of PCs in the world, recorded a 21 percent decline in shipments of PCs during the fourth quarter of last year from the same period in 2011, according to IDC.
Microsoft has been willing to open its purse strings in the past to help close partners. Last April, Microsoft committed to invest more than $600 million in Barnes & Noble’s electronic books subsidiary, in a deal that ensures a source of electronic bo! oks for Windows devices. Microsoft also agreed in 2011 to provide the Finnish cellphone maker Nokia billions of dollars’ worth of various forms of support, including marketing and research and development assistance, in exchange for Nokia’s adopting Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system.
