As Apple has just posted record-busting sales figures for the opening fiscal quarter of 2012, the amount of intrigue in the company based in Cupertino, California is at an all-time high.
After strong holiday sales and the launch of the new iPhone 4S, allied to the much-delayed drop of iOS 5, we did indeed expect Apple’s earnings call to break records once again, and like clockwork, Tim Cook’s company did not disappoint shareholders.
This year's CES has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that 2012 is going to be the year that the computer market at large is going to catch up with Apple. At least, it will in the world of ultra-light, ultra-portable notebooks like the MacBook Air.
If you take a journey back into the not-too-distant past, and ask people to give a breakdown of the makes and models of mobile devices they used before they made the leap across to a smartphone, I am pretty confident that a small number of handsets will appears in everyone's list who is of a certain age. If I go back approximately a decade, Nokia was probably the dominant handset manufacturer with the latest release being the must-have phone amongst school kids and business men alike.
The iPhone 4S-owning world have been enjoying the many benefits of Siri for over three months now, taking advantage of all of the features which the next generation intelligent assistant provides. Such was the hype surrounding Siri, that we have even seen a number of applications trying to enter the Android Market, trying to pass themselves off as the real thing before being pulled from sale by Google.
If anyone wondered whether Apple's entry into the world of digital textbooks was a good idea, then they should feast their eyes on this not inconsiderable number - users have downloaded 350,000 textbooks in just three days.
The ongoing patent ware between Apple and Samsung has been promising to brew beyond control since September 2011 when Apple notched notable rulings over the Korean giants which related to the sale of certain Samsung tablet devices. It is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with who is actually launching lawsuits against who in the mobile industry, with Apple and Samsung continuously going at each other and Motorola Mobility also being dealt a blow recently with the ITC making an initial ruling against their suit against Apple.
Phil Schiller and associates took to the Guggenheim Museum in New York today to hold a special event which couldn't have been further away from the traditional format that we grace Apple product launches for. In a smaller, stripped down event, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing introduced a strategy which was all about education. No specifications, aesthetics or launch dates for the media to speculate and report on, instead we saw a straight to the point presentation which featured innovation, new applications and a vision to change the face of education across the world, not for profit, but for the good of change.
Roger Rosner demonstrated the beautiful new iBooks 2 application for iPad, which allows users to view and interact with beautifully presented, and highly engaging virtual books, but just where do these books come from? Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, there is an app for that.
Phil Schiller took to the stage in New York to open the much anticipated Apple education event and took little time in introducing the first of the three new releases. One of the first concerns he addressed was the state of the US education system, stressing that even the lucky kids who graduate may find themselves unable to compete in the global business world.
