For comparison, around a million iPad 2s were sold during its first weekend. To be fair, the prior model was available in fewer countries at the time. Even so, three million units in three days is nearly 700 every minute.
Subject to declaration by the Board of Directors, the Company plans to initiate a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share sometime in the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2012, which begins on July 1, 2012.
Additionally, the Company’s Board of Directors has authorized a $10 billion share repurchase program commencing in the Company’s fiscal 2013, which begins on September 30, 2012.
No crazy acquisitions, and no store made of gold.
They estimate this will cost them around $45 billion over the next three years. However, over the past three years, Apple has increased their available cash by nearly $80 billion. That means that if they grow at the rate they have been, they won’t even touch their current cash reserves.
Bright and early tomorrow (6AM, PDT) Apple will be hosting a conference call to announce what they’re going to do with (some of) their $100 billion in cash. Craig Hockenberry has a good idea:
Apple has slowly been chipping away at the dependencies they have on other companies. Ask yourself this: what’s the biggest one?
Carriers.
It’ll be up to the SEC if they want to buy a carrier (or build their own), but it would be a good move for consumers and for Apple.
Of course, that’s a big announcement which one would think would be saved for an event, not announced over a conference call. However, it isn’t a sexy announcement that can be demoed and shown off. It’s probably just a shareholder dividend, and perhaps more data centres.
Jiayang Fan:
During a particularly excruciating exchange during the retraction episode, Glass asked Daisey if he was ever worried that all this would come out. “Yeah, I mean, I was kind of sick about it,” Daisey responded. “Because I know that so much of this story is the best work I’ve ever made.
The answer might be the closest thing to an explanation that we’ll ever get.
Ben Brooks has done a great job compiling many of the stories related to the Mike Daisey incident.
Dustin Curtis notes that Apple is taking this contacts-privacy stuff seriously. Nice. I hope this doesn’t turn out like Windows Vista’s myriad of permissions prompts.
Marco Arment introduces one hell of an Instapaper update:
The biggest two changes are the six awesome new reading fonts and the distraction-free, full-screen reading interface.
It’s awesome, and that’s all you need to know. All six new fonts look phenomenal on the retina display I’m typing this on.
A great kickoff to one of my favourite web shows.
A post from Smashing Magazine, the purveyor of such fine trends as “glossy everything” and “recently-waxed floor”:
Am I doing this simply because it looks cool or because it suits the message I’m trying to communicate? Why am I using this ribbon? Does the zigzag border add to or detract from the personality of the website? What does this leather texture have to do with the finance app I’m designing?
Absolutely correct.
Ira Glass:
We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China – which we broadcast in January – contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth.
Daisey says that because it was a dramatic production, it doesn’t have to be judged by journalistic integrity. Glass says that Daisey lied to them while they were fact-checking his story, and This American Life has conversations with his translator to prove it.
The shutdown of Oink wasn’t just out of boredom or engineering focus, then.
It’s not Square, it’s just a droopy triangle.
That Path contacts brouhaha?
An engineer in Singapore revealed the transgression on his blog in February, and Path co-founder Dave Morin got hauled into Apple’s headquarters to be grilled by Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and other executives, according to people familiar with the meeting but not authorized by Apple to discuss it.
Ouch.
Reviews of the new iPad are being published all over and—surprise!—everyone loves the display. Some good takes on various aspects of the new iPad (Gruber’s is the main link):
John Gruber:
[W]hat matters most is not how the new iPad 3 [sic] differs from the iPad 2 and 1, but rather how “The iPad” as a concept differs from what came before it. The iPads 3, 2, and 1 are simply three iterative and successively improved passes at that same concept, and a big part of that concept is that battery life
I’m not being hyperbolic or exaggerative when I say it is easily the most beautiful computer display I have ever looked at. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that you hold this in your hands, or maybe it’s the technology that Apple is utilizing, or maybe it’s the responsiveness of iOS — but there’s something almost bizarre about how good this screen is.
So, what did I like about the iPad? Simple — the experience. Nobody in the market today can touch the Apple experience.
Friday morning is when I’ll get to join in on the excitement, and I can’t wait.
Enlightening to see how a new user takes to a completely different environment. There are some good points in here for UI designers. For example, he minimizes Safari into the Dock with Google’s home page loaded “in case [he] needs it later”. His experience with the Dock echoes some of Siracusa’s criticisms of it from the 10.0 days. On the plus side, Pirillo’s dad (also a Pirillo, obviously) found the searchable Help menu quickly.
Compare and contrast with his experience a day earlier using Windows 8, which he notes is convoluted and confusing. The two different interfaces do not work together at all.
Via Gruber.
It includes a multitouch trackpad for browsing, a keyboard for easy input and a battery that last up to 30 days. Unlike the ASUS Transformer Prime, RIM’s accessory does not have a docking feature and is just a carrying case with an integrated Bluetooth keyboard.
Josh Clark:
In bandwidth terms, pixels are heavy, and four times the pixels means four times the image size for bitmap images, give or take. If you want to take advantage of this gorgeous screen, every image you push down the wire is about to put on a ton of weight. That has implications in lots of places.
Since Condé Nast publishes their electronic magazines as essentially an image slideshow, it will be interesting to see how they respond. Huge implications. Via Shawn Blanc.
The headline is alarmist. The likely solution, buried down in the eleventh paragraph?
New users of the iPhone and iPad might have a choice presented to them on first launch of Safari for iPhone that would allow them to make an explicit choice of search engines.
Very likely, and not alarmist. Seems reasonable.
Josh Lowensohn for CNet:
Also noteworthy: the test confirmed the new iPad has 1GB of RAM, up from 512 in the iPad 2.
Good to hear. It’s far too easy to make Safari crash. This is the single worst element of my iPad 2.
Marco Arment:
Curator’s Code is an attempt to codify and standardize “via” links and attribution from link blogs and aggregators with two new symbols […]
The problems with online attribution aren’t due to a lack of syntax: they’re due to the economics and realities of online publishing.
Absolutely correct. This is a misguided attempt to rectify a problem that doesn’t exist.
Arment followed up by linking to Matt Langer’s piece, and specifically pulled one quote from it:
First, let’s just get clear on the terminology here: “Curation” is an act performed by people with PhDs in art history; the business in which we’re all engaged when we’re tossing links around on the internet is simple “sharing.”
The role of the curator has evolved in the past twenty-odd years [1], and the role that they play in contemporary art and museum circles is inconsistent with what most people believe it is. The role of the curator was essentially redefined by Brian O’Doherty’s excellent collection of essays Inside the White Cube.
At any rate, the English language is an ever-evolving beast. Merriam Webster defines a curator as:
one who has the care and superintendence of something; especially : one in charge of a museum, zoo, or other place of exhibit
No mention of doctorates or art history. In fact, the intent of this definition is arguably consistent with an aggregation and selection process. A person who selects works for an exhibit is doing so under a particular theme or narrative, and is knowledgable about those works, or gains the knowledge in a research process. What’s the difference between that and someone who is particularly knowledgable about a series of links that are selected amongst similar criteria as a curator might, and which fit within a certain theme or narrative?
That is to say that curation is about knowledge, information, context, and intent.
Langer continues:
“Interesting things” or “smart things” are not rubrics that make the collection and dissemination of data that happens on the internet anything closer to a curatorial act; these categories are ultimately still reducible to “things I find appealing,” and regardless of how special one might feel about the highly cultivated state of his or her tastes there is no threshold of how many other people are eager to be on the receiving end of whatever it is we’re sharing that somehow magically transforms this act into curation […]
There are good curators and bad curators in the art world as well. I deliberately left out this final criteria for a curator (above) because one can be poor at something, yet still be involved in the activity.
I agree with the majority of the remainder of Langer’s article, despite the running undertones of resentment.