Apple still owns movie downloads
Despite fierce competition, iTunes commanded a 64% share of the (legal) market in 2010 The online movie market may be Apple's (AAPL) to lose, but it hasn't lost it yet. According to an IHS Screen Digest report issued Monday by iSuppli, the iTunes Store's share of the U.S. market for downloaded movies (see below re...
The Kindle kerfuffle – updated
Apple's rejection of a Sony Reader app has analysts leaping to conclusions about Amazon [Apple has clarified, sort of. See below.] Here we go again. A New York Times story Tuesday quoting a frustrated Sony (SNE) executive has triggered a flurry of similar-sounding headlines: Electric Pig: Apple bans Sony ebooks in iTunes app store: is...
Angry Birds voted “best app ever”
At Macworld, an avian slingshot game wins top spot in seven categories Angry Birds hardly needs any more accolades. The game -- in which players use a slingshot to launch small flightless birds at pigs protected by increasingly complex but unstable structures -- dominated Apple's (AAPL) App Store for most of 2010. The $4.99 version...
A fantastic use for Apple’s cash
Tim Cook thinks he knows how to put $59.7 billion to good use One of the things that's keeping Apple's (AAPL) market cap from overtaking Exxon Mobil's (XOM) -- besides Steve Jobs' health problems and the world's unquenchable thirst for petroleum products -- is the fear that the company will do something stupid with the...
The teens who build the iPhones
Rare photos and a video of life outside Foxconn's factory complex in Shenzhen, China French journalist Jordan Pouille, who reported last May on the working conditions at Foxconn's giant Shenzhen factory complex, paid a second visit recently. He came back from China with photos, a videotape and a clearer picture than we've seen before of...
A smartphone race to the bottom
In a turf war between Android and Windows Phone 7, Apple's iPhone could be the winner "The major event in the [past] quarter," writes Needham's Charlie Wolf in a note to clients issued Friday, "was the successful launch of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft's new smartphone operating system." With so much at stake, he expects Microsoft...
E-readers: It’s a two-horse race
A ChangeWave survey finds Apple's iPad gaining fast on Amazon's Kindle The e-reader market has become a two horse race between the Amazon (AMZN) Kindle and the Apple (AAPL) iPad, according to a ChangeWave survey of 2,812 American consumers released Tuesday. Demand is strong, with 5% of respondents saying they are Very Likely to buy...
Gartner: iPhone sales ‘stellar’
But Google's Android now has a quarter of the global smartphone market to Apple's 16.7% Gartner published its worldwide mobile phone sales estimates overnight Wednesday, nearly two weeks after IDC released its survey. The results, as usual, differ in detail (see explanation below), but the broad picture is the same. The good news for Apple...
Why Apple won’t buy Facebook – or Sony
Or Disney, Yahoo, Adobe, Tivo, Netflix, EA or any of the big names tossed out last week The $51 billion in cash and marketable securities that Apple (AAPL) reported last Monday -- double its holdings two years ago (see chart) -- has been burning a hole ever since in everybody's pocket but Steve Jobs'. The...
How Apple is sucking the profit out of the mobile phone business
The iPhone's growing share of the spoils could spell bad news for Google's partners On Tuesday we posted a pair of pie charts that showed Apple (AAPL) selling 3% of the world's mobile phones in the first half of 2010 and taking 39% of the industry's profits. (See Apple's outrageous share of the mobile industry's...
This man makes 137,000 iPhones a day
Foxconn's production rate is one of many revelations in a new profile of its chairman "I should be honest with you," Foxconn founder and chairman Terry Gou told Bloomberg Businessweek on the subject of the suicides at his company's massive factory complex in Shenzhen, China. "The first one, second one, and third one, I did...
