Apple picker The departure of some senior Apple employees to AMD and Facebook, the appointment of Jony Ivo as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, the pirated App Store or iCloud outages, these are some of the topics of Sunday's Apple Week with the number 16.
Apple employs four of the five highest-paid corporate executives in the US (15/4)
Four of the five highest-paid male executives work at Apple, none of whom are CEO Tim Cook. Bob Mansfield, Bruce Sewell, Jeff Williams and Peter Oppenheimer were the top earners in 2012, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission. But their biggest gains came from stock compensation rather than regular salary. Bob Mansfield took the most money - $85,5 million, which was the amount that apparently made him stay at Apple, although he originally announced last June that he was quitting. After the head of technology, Bruce Sewell, who takes care of legal affairs at Apple, appeared in the next place; in 2012, he earned $69 million, placing him third overall. Just behind him with $68,7 million was Jeff Williams, who oversees operations after Tim Cook. And finally comes the head of finance, Peter Oppenheimer, who earned a total of $68,6 million last year. Among Apple executives, only Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was wedged in, or rather he surpassed them all with his earnings of 96,2 million dollars.
Source: AppleInsider.com
Google Chairman: We would like Apple to use our maps (16/4)
A lot has already been written about Apple Maps, so there is no need to discuss this case further. Apple builds its maps so that it does not have to rely on those from Google by default in iOS, which the executive chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, does not blame the Cupertino company. But at the same time, he admits that he would be happy if Apple continued to rely on their application. "We'd still like them to use our maps," Schmidt said at the AllThingsD mobile conference. "It would be easier for them to take our app from the App Store and make it the default," the Google chairman said, referring to the numerous problems Apple Maps has encountered in its short life. However, it is clear that Apple will not take such a step, on the contrary, it will try to improve its application as much as possible.
Source: AppleInsider.com
Jonathan Ive is one of the 18 most influential people in the world (April 4)
TIME magazine released its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world, and two men associated with Apple made the list. On the one hand, the long-time head of design Jonathan Ive and also David Einhorn, who pressured Apple to give more money to shareholders. Each person in the ranking is described by some other well-known person, U2 frontman Bono, who has been involved with Apple for many years, writes about Jony Ive:
Jony Ive is the symbol of Apple. Polished steel, polished glass hardware, complicated software reduced to simplicity. But his genius is not only in seeing what others do not, but also in how he can use it. When you watch him work with his colleagues in the most holy of places, Apple's design labs, or on a late-night drag, you can tell that he has a great rapport with his colleagues. They love their boss, he loves them. Competitors don't understand that you can't get people to do that kind of work and results with money alone. Jony is Obi-Wan.
Source: MacRumors.com
Siri remembers you for two years (19/4)
Wired.com magazine reported on how all the voice commands that the user gives to the digital assistant Siri are actually handled. Apple keeps all voice recordings for two years and is mainly used for the analysis needed to improve the user's voice recognition, as is the case with Dragon Dictate. Each audio file is recorded by Apple and tagged with a unique numeric identifier that represents that user. However, the numeric identifier is not associated with any specific user account, such as an Apple ID. After six months, the files are stripped of this number, but the next 18 months are used for testing.
Source: Wired.com
Chinese pirates created their own App Store (19/4)
China is a real paradise for pirates. Some of them have now created a portal that allows you to download paid apps from the App Store for free without the need for a jailbreak, and this is basically a pirated version of Apple's digital store. Since last year, Chinese pirates have been running an application for Windows in which it is possible to install applications in this way, the new site thus functions as a frontend. Here, pirates use an application distribution account within the company, which makes it possible to install software outside the App Store.
However, the pirates try to keep out of the reach of non-Chinese users, by redirecting access originating from outside the most populous country in the world, but surprisingly to the pages of the Windows application itself. Due to Apple's strained relations with China, the American company's hands are slightly tied and it cannot afford a significantly aggressive course of action. After all, this week, for example, Apple was accused of spreading pornography in the country.
Source: 9to5Mac.com
Apple still has problems with Internet services (April 19)
Customers have experienced several outages of Apple's cloud services this week. It all started about two weeks ago with iMessage and Facetime being unavailable for five hours, although some users had problems for several days. During Friday, the Game Center went down for less than an hour and it was not even possible to send e-mails from the iCloud.com domain. Other problems were noted in the past days also regarding the iTunes Store and the App Store, when the launch often ended with an error message. It is not yet clear what caused the outages.
Source: AppleInsider.com
Apple's Director of Graphics Unit Architecture Leaves Back to AMD (18/4)
Raja Kuduri, director of graphics architecture at Apple, is returning to AMD, the company he left in 2009 for a job at Apple. Kuduri was hired by Apple to pursue its own chip designs, where the company would not have to rely on outside manufacturers. This is not the only engineer who left Apple for AMD. Already last year, Jim Keller, head of platform architecture, left the company.
Source: macrumors.com
In short:
- 15. 4.: Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal report that Foxconn has begun to gain new strength and is preparing to produce the next iPhone. The Chinese manufacturer has reportedly been recruiting new employees to its factory in Zhengzhou, where iPhones are manufactured. Between 250 and 300 people work in this factory, and since the end of March, another ten thousand workers have been added every week. The iPhone 5 successor is rumored to go into production in the second quarter.
- 16. 4.: Facebook has reportedly hired the former head of Apple Maps, who Apple fired as a result of criticism of the company's mapping solution. Richard Williams is set to join the mobile software team, and is not the only Apple engineer Mark Zuckerberg's software development company has hired.
- 17. 4.: There are already a total of ten Apple Stores in Germany, but none are yet located in the capital. However, this is soon to change, in Berlin the first Apple Store should open on the first weekend of May. Apple is reportedly planning to open more stores in Helsingborg, Sweden as well.
- 17. 4.: Apple is sending beta versions of the new OS X 10.8.4 to developers like on a conveyor belt. After a week when Apple released a previous test build, another version is coming, labeled 12E33a, in which developers are asked to focus again on Safari, Wi-Fi and graphics drivers.
Other events this week:
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Has anyone tried the Chinese "app store"?
He tried through a friend who lives there, because you really can't get there outside of a Chinese data provider :) and it's not comprehensive ;)
yes, google pp25.exe, install and test… it works ;-)
Facebook has reportedly hired the former head of Apple Maps, who Apple fired as a result of criticism of the company's mapping solution. Richard Williams is to join the mobile siftware team… software fix it :) (I'm not a stickler for spelling, this is the first mistake I've noticed)