HUA HIN, Thailand - Consumers either
love them or hate them, but there is no denying
that Apple and its products have had good reason
to dominate the tech headlines this week.
Boosted by holiday sales of iPads, iPhones
and Mac computers, the company announced a 78%
surge in its first-quarter profit, which did
wonders to divert attention from recent health
problems plaguing chief executive Steve Jobs.
Profit at US$6.43 a share beat the $4.47 analysts
expected. The present quarter's profit is now
expected by analysts to exceed the $4.90 the
company predicts.
Net income for the
quarter that ended on December 25 rose to $6
billion from $3.38 billion a year earlier. A
record $26.7 billion was
racked up in sales (up
71%) as customers queued up to get their hands on
iPhone 4s and iPads, of which, the company says,
over 7 million have now been sold.
Apple
stock took a slight dip on news of Jobs' impending
medical leave, but bounced back on announcement of
the bumper profits. Investors are showing that
they may finally be coming to terms with life
after Jobs, coupled with confidence that the
company can keep on churning out winning gadgets -
it has even been speculated that the enforced
absence from the company might create time and
opportunity for developing ideas on how to expand
its reach even further. Chief operating officer
Tim Cook is taking over day-to-day running of
Apple and is widely expected to succeed Jobs as
chief executive.
The company almost ran
out of iPhones at the end of the year, having sold
16.2 million. An expansion to two carriers in the
United States, with the adoption of Verizon
Wireless in addition to the currently favored
AT&T, can only increase the reach of the most
talked about handset in the US.
Apple also
has eyes on Asia, specifically China, where it
recently opened four stores and launched a Chinese
iTunes store. Revenue from China, Hong Kong and
Taiwan totaled $2.6 billion, about 10% of total
revenue and four times the year-ago total,
according to the company. Stores in China recorded
the highest traffic and revenue from Apple's 321
global outlets.
When questioned on the
company's competition after the earnings
announcement, Cooks was dismissive, stating that
rival tablets, especially those running on Windows
operating systems, were no threat.
"They
are big, heavy and expensive ... they have a weak
battery life and they require a keyboard or a
stylus, and from our point of view, our customers
are, frankly, not interested in them."
Perhaps the company's biggest problem:
making enough to meet consumer demand. Revenue
would have risen more had the company been able to
build more iPhones, chief financial officer Peter
Oppenheimer said after the results.
Hardware The battle of the
microchips is always on, and a few recent
developments and new contenders could make the
difference in this highly competitive market. Old
rivals AMD and Intel are still slugging it out for
CPU supremacy but a new alliance between IBM and
ARM could change a few things.
Buoyed by a
surge in demand for mobile devices, the market is
slowly changing its focus from large,
power-hungry, multi-core microchips to smaller,
power-efficient data crunchers. Next-generation
processors optimized for performance and power
saving are now being developed by IBM and ARM in a
joint venture.
IBM Microelectronics
general manager Michael Cadigan said, "ARM's
Cortex processors have become the leadership
platform for the majority of smart phones and many
other emerging mobile devices. We plan to continue
working closely with ARM and our foundry customers
to speed the momentum of ARM technology by
delivering highly advanced, low-power
semiconductor technology for a variety of new
communications and computing devices."
Meanwhile, Advanced Micro Devices
continues to fire salvoes at rivals Intel by
launching a new accelerated processing unit and
platform. The G-Series Fusion APU takes aim at
Intel's low-power Atom embedded processor and
platform.
The platform will be marketed at
Internet-ready devices, set-top boxes,
point-of-sale hardware and pretty much any device
that demands a permanent connection coupled with
high performance data and graphical processing
capabilities. It will offer DirectX 11 support,
which is lacking Intel's latest Sandy Bridge
processors, in addition to Open GL4, and support
for a number of video codecs including MPEG2, WMV,
DivX, H.264 and Adobe Flash.
Internet No corner of the World
Wide Web is free of it and recent reports state
that the scourge of the Internet is on the
increase and, in some cases has doubled in the
past year.
Spam, phishing and malware
attacks on social networking websites have doubled
in 2010 according to Sophos' Security Threat
Report - 67% of Facebook users have reported that
they have been spammed, a figure up from just over
33% in April 2009. It is no surprise that the
surge in popularity of social networking sites
such as Facebook and Twitter have attracted the
attention of cyber criminals and spammers that
prey on unwitting users that are likely to click
their links.
Facebook users are probably
at the greatest risk as many of them reveal a lot
of personal information within their profile. Once
a hacker or spammer has access to this, he/she can
then access a network of "friends" to spam
further. Personal information can also be sold on
to marketing companies or used for criminal
purposes.
Both Facebook and Twitter fail a
lot of security tests and allow unscreened
third-party applications that can employ "click
jacking" methods of tricking users into clicking
malicious links that will infect their computers
or steal identities and personal data.
The
plague is increasing at an alarming rate - long
gone are the days when all we had to worry about
was the odd junk e-mail.
Martin J Young is an Asia Times Online correspondent based in Thailand.
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Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights
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