Feed your mind. Feast your eyes.
Apple has reported its highest quarterly revenue ever:
$91.8 billion in its financial quarter ending December 28,
2019, a rise of 9% from the corresponding quarter a year
ago. Not only was this unexpected, but it came as a
result of a strong recovery in demand for iPhone,
resulting in “double–digit growth” in iPhone revenue.
With the release of the iPhone 11 line in September, in
fact, Apple became the world’s number one smartphone
vendor, according to Strategy Analytics, which estimates
Apple’s global market share at 19% in the quarter.
Services and Wearables also hit new all–time records.
Services grew 17% year over year, with double–digit
growth in all five of Apple’s geographic segments. Apple
has over 418m paid subscriptions across all platforms
including the App Store, up 120m from the previous year.
This number is expected to exceed 500m in the March
quarter, and hit 600m by the end of calendar year 2020.
Wearables also hit a new high, despite supply
constraints for Apple Watch Series 3 and AirPods Pro all
quarter, and this segment of Apple’s business is now the
size of a Fortune 150 company. More than 75% of Apple
Watch buyers were new to Apple Watch, Apple said.
In another first, revenue from Wearables overtook
revenue from the Mac. Both Mac and iPad revenue fell,
but CEO Tim Cook pointed out that the new products
shipping in the quarter, the MacBook Pro and Mac Pro,
aren’t aimed at holiday sales, unlike new releases in the
year–ago quarter, the new MacBook Air and Mac mini.
Geographically, Apple’s Greater China region
returned to growth, with revenue up by more than
$400m year–over–year, but Apple cautioned that it was
impossible to forecast the impact of Coronavirus.
The Americas were up by about $4.5bn, but
Japan fell by about $600m. Tim Cook attributed this
to regulatory changes — a new cap on carrier discounts
with two–year contracts has badly affected
smartphone sales.News in brief
Apple hits new high
Image rights: Apple.
investigation... it has concluded that one or more
wireless carriers apparently violated federal law.”
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that major American telecoms carriers, including
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and sold the location data of users without their
knowledge or consent. The data was sold through
intermediaries to a variety of customers including
law enforcement agencies, bounty hunters,
tracking services, and even alleged stalkers.
As we go to press, it is unclear whether the
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concerned say they have stopped collecting and
selling user location data.
SECURITY BUT NO PRIVACY
Users of Avast antivirus and security tools on
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collecting user data, which Avast then sells on via
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identify individuals, despite anonymization.
The data collected reportedly includes Google
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anonymized, included the date and time of the
visit and other tracking data.
Avast reportedly has more than 435m active
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packages to third parties, including Google,
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user’s behavior and movement across websites.
One marketing company reportedly paid more
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countries around the world.
This included users’ “entire URL string” with
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user completely reinstalled Avast, making it
possible to track individual users’
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Ta ke yo u r sma r t
home offline
see pGO
maclife.com APR 2020 9