Breakdown of Apple's Billions

It’s no secret Apple, one of the most valuable public companies in the world, is making major cash off today’s tech gadgets — but how much?

This week, the company reported a record net profit of more than $13.6 billion for its quarterly report lasting 14 weeks and ending Dec. 31, 2011. A rumored summer release of the iPhone 5 will help keep the money flowing in this year for the more than $400 billion company.

“We’re thrilled with our outstanding results and record-breaking sales of iPhones, iPads and Macs,” Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, said in a statement. “Apple’s momentum is incredibly strong, and we have some amazing new products in the pipeline.”

Cook alone raked in $378 million last year, naming him the highest-paid CEO. In the past three months, Apple brought in four times more profit than Walmart, the world’s largest retailer. [Source: mashable]

QuickShot - Keep your iOS snap roll sync with Dropbox

QuickShot simplifies the process of uploading photos and videos to Dropbox. Everything you capture in the app is immediately uploaded without the need for any additional actions. It has all the familiar camera features found in other apps, plus a few not found anywhere else. Queue multiple items, upload items in the background, and access all of the standard camera functionality from QuickShot's simple interface.

What people think:
"QuickShot is a nice little app to have if you would prefer to have your photos uploaded instantly to the cloud." - appadvice

"Quickshot lets you upload photos to Dropbox but it does this with a polished interface and by completely working in the background" - macstories

Features:
- Select and upload multiple items from your photo library
- Uploads continue even after the app is closed
- Configure flash modes, capture quality, geotagging, and upload path
- All uploads preserve media metadata
- Access both front and back cameras
- Tap to set focus and exposure
- Setting to require Wi-Fi for uploads (on cellular enabled devices)

Notes:
- Since items in the Photo Library may contain location information, iOS requires Location Services to be enabled to access it
- iOS 4.3 or higher is required


Links: iTunes
Download: Version 1.6.3

Trim Enabler - MacOSX

Trim is must-have feature for most Solid State Drives. It not only increases data writing speeds, but it increases the lifetime of the SSD itself. With Trim Enabler, you can bring that feature to Mac OSX. It’s as easy as flipping a switch.

Trim Enabler can also analyze your drive and show information about it’s health and show lifetime statistics.

Features:

TrimWith Trim Enabler, you can enable Trim for third party Solid State Drives in Mac OSX. Trim is a command that is executed in the background by the operative system when you delete files, informing the SSD that the blocks are no longer in use and can be deleted. By doing this, the SSD can avoid slowing down future write operations to those blocks.

S.M.A.R.T

Using the S.M.A.R.T monitoring system, Trim Enabler let’s you view information that is relevant to the health of the drive. Solid State Drives do not last forever, but by using the S.M.A.R.T tool you can detect issues such as rapidly increasing amount of written data, and increase the lifetime of your SSD.

[Download]    [Source]

Why iPhone is made in China?

The NY Times just published an absolutely fascinating piece on Apple and why it builds almost all of its stuff in China. Go read it.

The short of it is that companies like Apple simply cannot manufacture products in the United States.  The cost (though it is cheaper in China) is not the reason, however.  Years ago, the Chinese government subsidized building cities of factories that can hire 3,000 workers to live in a dorm per day —or 8,700 Industrial Engineers in two weeks (it would take 9 months to do this in the U.S.).  Today’s gadgets require thousands of little parts that are all made in the same areas.  This whole global supply chain cannot be moved to the U.S.

The most interesting tale might have been the last minute decision to make the iPhone’s display glass:

In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.

Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.

People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”

After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.

 New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

For over two years, the company had been working on a project — code-named Purple 2 — that presented the same questions at every turn: how do you completely reimagine the cellphone? And how do you design it at the highest quality — with an unscratchable screen, for instance — while also ensuring that millions can be manufactured quickly and inexpensively enough to earn a significant profit?

Other notable tidbits:

1. Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes.
2. Various academics and manufacturing analysts estimate that because labor is such a small part of technology manufacturing, paying American wages would add up to $65 to each iPhone’s expense.
3. “Our customers are in Taiwan, Korea, Japan and China,” said James B. Flaws, Corning’s vice chairman and chief financial officer. “We could make the glass here, and then ship it by boat, but that takes 35 days. Or, we could ship it by air, but that’s 10 times as expensive. So we build our glass factories next door to assembly factories, and those are overseas.”
4. At the Silicon Valley Summit: “I’m not worried about the country’s long-term future,” Mr. Jobs told Mr. Obama, according to one observer. “This country is insanely great. What I’m worried about is that we don’t talk enough about solutions.”

Interestingly, the biggest piece of the iPhone made in the U.S. is the processor, which is manufactured in Texas.

Source: [9to5mac]

Self-Blancing Robot

Murata Boy is really a tech demonstration, cooked up by electronics and component manufacturer muRata as way of showing off the company’s various products and technologies. Inside the 50 cm tall, 5 kilogram bot is everything from Bluetooth, to gyro-, ultrasonic- and shock sensors.

Murata Boy not only balances his fully functional bicycle, he can peddle it forward at up to 2 kilometers per hour (backward or forward), make turns and ride up small inclines. The balancing act comes courtesy of an in-seat gyroscope, which communicates with a large fly wheel in Murata Boy’s chest that keeps him perfectly balanced whether he’s moving or not. As a result, Murata Boy not only balances when in motion, he can do just as well when the bike is perfectly still.

Read More 

iOS Multi-Tasking Explained

We’ve heard a lot of misinformation lately about how multitasking works. A lot of bad advice has been given about killing all of your apps being mandatory for good performance and much of it has come directly from the mouths of Apple Store employees.
This video shows that most of that talk is flat out wrong. If there is a problem with a specific app, it’s frozen or refuses to quit when it should, then killing it by holding down until it ‘wiggles’, then tapping the ‘-’ button can be a good troubleshooting option. But it is definitely not necessary for day-to-day operation of your device.

Read More [Thenextweb]

CodeRunner v1.2 MacOSX Retail by CORE

Description

Edit and run code in any programming language with just a single click. With CodeRunner, It has never been easier to write and test code, run scripts, work with algorithms, or simply experiment with a new coding or scripting language.

FEATURES:

- Edit and run code in AppleScript, C, C++, Java, JavaScript (Node.js), Objective-C, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Shell or any other language you might have installed on your system
- Fully featured editor with tabs, syntax highlighting, great code completion, color themes, intelligent bracket matching and more
- Editable code presets for new documents eliminates the need to keep writing main functions etc.
- Built-in file browser for easy access to your source files
- Fully supported user input in programs, with the ability to run with predefined input sets
- Built-in timing of code execution
- Autosaving, Versions and Fullscreen (Lion only)
- Customizable run commands and compile flags, custom fonts, full encoding support, and much more

What's New in Version 1.2

CodeRunner 1.2 is a major update with many new features and improvements, including:
- Tabbed interface
- Built-in file browser
- Ability to run with arguments

Release Name: CodeRunner.v1.2.MacOSX.Retail-CORE
Size: 2MB
Links: App Store

Download: FiLESONiC

T3 – February 2012 (UK)

T3 magazine is all about gadgets and gizmos with a powerful blend of news, reviews and features which keeps the readers bang up to date with the latest gadgets. Checkout the new February issue.

T3 – February 2012 (UK) - P2P

156 pages | 101MB | HQ PDF | English

Download: HERE

World's Largest 55" OLED TV from LG

Korean electronics company LG caused a worldwide stir when it announced its 55-inch OLED panel last week, and now the company’s rolled out two more pictures that show you what kind of remarkable TV set this is going to be says Mashable

The OLED screen (organic light-emitting diode, read more about OLED technology here) is nothing new, but here’s the innovation: Until now, it’s been difficult to create the screens in a size this big, at a reasonable cost and with a long-enough lifespan. The problem with this announcement is, LG is not saying when this screen will be available, how much it will cost, or how long it will last. [Source: Mashable]

LG says this screen’s color is even more vibrant because of its four-color pixels, making its picture more natural and accurate than other OLEDs. Each tiny pixel emits red, green, blue and white, instead of the red/green/blue used in the pixels of other OLED sets and most other TV sets manufactured today.

As far as the big display makers are concerned, Apple’s relationship with LG is probably the strongest. LG makes iPod Touch and iPhone Retina Displays, some iPad displays, and Apple secured a $500 million dollar investment in LG displays in 2009. [Source: 9to5mac]

Sony also makes OLEDs, but it does not have a strong relationship with Apple – at least as far as displays are concerned. The other big OLED maker is Samsung, and it is currently tangled with Apple in patent disputes, therefore this looks good enough upcoming, rumoured for Apple TV

Apple - Top Smartphone Manufacturer and 9th Top U.S Web Brand in 2011

Nielsen has ranked Apple as the Top Smartphone Device Manufacturer and 9th Top U.S. Web Brand for for the year 2011.

As 2011 comes to a close, Nielsen reviewed the top online destinations, social media sites, and smartphone devices. Google was the most-visited U.S. Web brand, while Facebook held its lead among social networks and blogs. Smartphones were popular in 2011, making up the majority of new phone purchases with Apple as the top smartphone manufacturer and Android as the leading OS. [Source: Nielsen]