Apple Christmas sales surge to $111bn amid pandemic
Apple sales have hit another record, as families loaded up on the firm's latest phones, laptops and gadgets during the Christmas period.
Sales in the last three months of 2020 hit more than $111bn (£81bn) – up 21% from the prior year.
The gains come as the pandemic pushes more activity online, fuelling demand for new technology.
Apple now counts more than 1.65 billion active devices globally, including more than 1 billion iPhones.
Apple's gains follow the release of its new iPhone 12 suite of phones, which executives said had convinced a record number of people to switch to the company or upgrade from older models.
The firm said growth in China – where the pandemic has already loosened its grip on the economy – was particularly strong, helped in part by demand for phones compatible with new 5G networks.
Sales in the firm's greater China region, which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan, jumped 57%. In Europe, sales roles 17%, and they rose 11% in the Americas.
"The products are doing very well all around the world," said Luca Maestri, Apple's chief financial officer. "As we look ahead into the March quarter, we're very optimistic."
Analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities said he thought the firm was just at the beginning of a "super-cycle" as Apple devotees finally trade in old phones, coinciding with upgrades to telecommunications networks.
"With 5G now in the cards and roughly 40% of its 'golden jewel' iPhone installed base not upgrading their phones in the last 3.5 years, [Apple chief Tim] Cook & Co have the stage set for a renaissance of growth," he wrote.
Big Tech is having an exceptionally lucrative pandemic.
It's hard not to be wowed by some of these figures.
That Apple recorded more than $100bn in sales in just three months is simply astonishing.
Facebook figures are also well up on where they were last year.
As other companies have struggled to survive, Big Tech has flourished.
There are other reasons for some of these incredible figures. Certainly it seems iPhone enthusiasts were holding out for the new 5G enabled iPhone12.
But it's not just Apple and Facebook, all of the massive tech companies are having a bumper year.
Covid-19 means people are spending more time indoors – buying things online, watching things online and chatting online.
Perhaps then it's no surprise that these companies are posting record breaking figures.
But others point to these figures as yet more evidence that Big Tech has become too big to fail.
These figures are impressive. But they also attract the attention of politicians who are increasingly asking difficult questions – like are these tech mega companies operating in a market that is fair and with enough competition?
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Apple said profits in the quarter reached nearly $28.8bn, up 29% compared with the same quarter last year.
The gains seen by technology firms like Apple contrast with losses hitting many other economic sectors, as the virus restricts activity and keeps shoppers at home.
Other tech firms, such as Microsoft and Facebook, have also enjoyed strong growth.
Facebook on Wednesday said increased online shopping during the pandemic helped lift ad revenue in the quarter by 30%.
The number of people active on its apps – which also include WhatsApp and Instagram – also rose to 2.6 billion daily, up 15% compared to 2019.
It said ad spending could slow as the Covid crisis relaxes and shopper appetite returns for services like travel rather than products.
It also warned that plans by Apple to change how it shares user data could weigh on growth.
Read from source: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55835504
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independent– BlackBerry phones, once the height of mobile devices, are finally being shut off.
The company announced that services for the older devices will be brought to an end on 4 January. At that point, they will "no longer reliably function", BlackBerry said, and will be unable to get data, texts or make phone calls, including to emergency numbers.
It is just the latest in a series of endings for the once equally beloved and hated name, which helped drive the mobile revolution and was at the forefront of business and technology. While the BlackBerry has been declared dead a number of times before, the latest move means that the phones themselves will actually stop working.
In 2016, after its phones had been replaced largely by smartphones from Apple and others, BlackBerry announced that it had transitioned away from phones and into making software and that it would focus on providing security tools to companies and governments. It has sold the BlackBerry brand to other companies, who have created devices bearing the name.
In 2020, BlackBerry said that with that move complete, it would start taking offline the legacy services that allowed those old devices to keep working. Phones that run any of BlackBerry's own operating systems – BlackBerry 7.1 OS and earlier, BlackBerry 10 software – were given an "end of life or termination date" at the start of 2022.
Next week, that date will finally arrive and support will end. While the phones will still be able to perform some of their functions without BlackBerry's services, many of their central features will be removed, and the phones will not work reliably.
BlackBerry said the support was being removed in recognition of the fact that it now works in security software and that the old products did not reflect its business. It had prolonged support in the years since that transition "as an expression of thanks to our loyal partners and customers", it said.
independent– A team of astronomers discovered at least 70 'rogue' planets in our galaxy, the largest collection ever found to date.
While conventional planets (like those in our Solar System) orbit a star, rogue planets roam freely without travelling around a nearby star.
"We did not know how many to expect and are excited to have found so many," said Núria Miret-Roig, an astronomer at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux.
­It would usually be impossible to detect rogue planets because they are hard to spot far from a star's light. One key fact of their existence made them visible: these planets still give off enough heat to glow millions of years after their creation, making them visible to powerful telescopes.
This heat allowed the 70 planets – each with masses close to that of Jupiter – to be discovered in the Scorpius and Ophiuchus constellations.
"We measured the tiny motions, the colours and luminosities of tens of millions of sources in a large area of the sky," explained Ms Miret-Roig. "These measurements allowed us to securely identify the faintest objects in this region, the rogue planets."
The astronomers' study suggests there could be many more elusive, starless planets yet to be discovered, numbering in the billions in the Milky Way alone.
By studying these planets, astronomers believe they could unlock clues as to how the mysterious objects come to be. It is hypothesised they are generated from the collapse of gas clouds too small to create stars, but they could also have been ejected from a parent system.
"These objects are extremely faint and little can be done to study them with current facilities," says Hervé Bouy, another astronomer at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique. "The ELT [Extremely Large Telescope, currently being built in Chile] will be absolutely crucial to gathering more information about most of the rogue planets we have found."
The exact number of rogue planets discovered is vague, because the observations made by the researchers do not allow them to measure the mass of the objects. Bodies with a mass 13 times greater than that of Jupiter are unlikely to be planets, but relying on brightness makes this figure unclear.
The brightness of these objects is also related to age, as the older the planet is the dimmer it will be. The brightest objects in the sample could have a mass greater than the upper limit but be older and therefore dimmer. Researchers estimate there could be as many as 100 more planets yet to be discovered because of this uncertainty.
independent– The price of cryptocurrency is seemingly in constant flux which causes a gauntlet for investors to run week to week and day to day.
Bitcoin remains in limbo following last week's flash crash, which some analysts mistook for the start of a bear market that would see its price continue to tumble in the short term.
None of this is new with cryptocurrency making headlines for years, but its unpredictable nature and complex myriad of currencies means for many it is an area too daunting to delve into.
For those who have taken the plunge and invested there have been those who have become millionaires and even billionaires as a result, while there are those who have also lost a considerable amount as the price proves to be a constant rollercoaster for investors.
To decipher exactly how cryptocurrency works, how to invest and what the future looks like for the likes of bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Cardano (ADA),The Independent is hosting an expert panel to explore the ins and outs of digital money.
The virtual event, which is free to attend, will be hosted by our own crypto expert, tech writer Anthony Cuthbertson and he will be joined by digital currency leaders who will be able to give their first-hand account of trading in the online market.
One of the panellists is none other than Fred Schebesta, a co-founder of financial comparison website Finder, self-made entrepreneur with an estimated net worth of $214million.