On a past Apple conference call, Tim Cook said "one thing we'll make sure is that we don't leave a price umbrella for people". What's that? A price umbrella is when a company with dominant market share maintains high prices, leaving an opening for new competitors to enter at lower price points. In the case of the iPad, the price umbrella until recently was at $499. Someone could enter that market at lower prices and exhibit classic disruption to push them out from the bottom up.Source: iamconcise
Apple has already solved this problem twice, with the iPod and iPhone. So let's look at what they did.
Its devices are ubiquitous, its annual new product releases are among the most anticipated in the world and it recently announced it would begin issuing a dividend to its stock owners–expected to generate $10 billion in the first year alone. But ho do Apple’s eye-popping statistics translate to the real world?Source: Best Computer Science Degrees
The first misconception I had about Foxconn’s Longhua facility in the city of Shenzhen was that I’ve always called it a ‘factory’ -- technically, it is. But after you enter the gates and walk around, you quickly realize that it’s also a city -- 240,000 people work here. Nearly 50,000 of them live on campus in shared dorm rooms.Source: MarketPlace
There’s a main drag lined on both sides with fast-food restaurants, banks, cafes, grocery stores, a wedding photo shop, and an automated library. There are basketball courts, tennis courts, a gym, two enormous swimming pools, and a bright green astroturf soccer stadium smack-dab in the middle of campus. There’s a radio station -- Voice of Foxconn -- and a television news station. Longhua even has its own fire department, located right on main street.
This is not what comes to mind when you think "Chinese factory."
A British company called Gamma International marketed hacking software to governments that exploited the vulnerability via a bogus update to iTunes, Apple’s media player, which is installed on more than 250 million machines worldwide.Via: The Telegraph
The hacking software, FinFisher, is used to spy on intelligence targets’ computers. It is known to be used by British agencies and earlier this year records were discovered in abandoned offices of that showed it had been offered to Egypt’s feared secret police.
Apple was informed about the relevant flaw in iTunes in 2008, according to Brian Krebs, a security writer, but did not patch the software until earlier this month, a delay of more than three years.
