Posts Tagged ‘Apple’
No, really, Apple still isn’t avoiding UK tax
THE Sunday Times has done yet another of its pieces on how tech comapnies are avoiding tax in the UK. Given that that paper’s gated, here’s the Telegraph telling us all about it. The real problem here is that Apple just isn’t indulging in tax avoidance: this is what the system is set up to encourage it to do
Apple is estimated to have avoided more than £550m in tax in Britain in 2011. Its latest accounts show UK turnover at just over £1bn and profit at £81.3m, generating a tax bill of £14.4m.
However, analysis of its filings in America suggest a more realistic figure for UK turnover is £6.7bn. This would imply an estimated profit of £2.2bn and, at the then corporation tax rate of 26pc, a £570m tax bill, the Sunday Times reports.
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Posted: 5th, February 2013 | In: Money, Technology | Comment
Apple’s sales rise, profits rise, shares tank: WTF?
A USEFUL little reminder of something that economists keep trying to tell people but which often doesn’t seem to get through. Stock markets are forward looking.
So, we have Apple reporting its financial results for the most recent quarter. Profits were up (only very slightly, but they were). Sales were well up. Everything’s looking pretty rosy in hte Cupertino garden. At which point the shares drop 10% in minutes.
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Posted: 29th, January 2013 | In: Money, Technology | Comment
Apple’s iOS 6 offers users the Mildura mystery
HAVE a good journey. And buy a map. In a book. Apple’s iOS 6 system is mystery ride:
Tests on the mapping system by police confirm the mapping systems lists Mildura in the middle of the Murray Sunset National Park, approximately 70km away from the actual location of Mildura.
Police are extremely concerned as there is no water supply within the Park and temperatures can reach as high as 46 degrees, making this a potentially life threatening issue.
Some of the motorists located by police have been stranded for up to 24 hours without food or water and have walked long distances through dangerous terrain to get phone reception.
Posted: 10th, December 2012 | In: Technology | Comment
Woman buys new iMirror – the ultimate Apple product that reflects the real you
JALONTA Freeman of Arlington, Texas, is the proud owner of an iMirror, the iPad that retails at $800 but she bought for just $200.
The iMirror is only available from unmarked cars in McDonald’s car parks. The iMirror is delivered in a sealed iCan’tSeeWhatiBought ibox, to be opened after the seller has left the area lest a stampede occur when everybody sees one and wants one.
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Posted: 12th, November 2012 | In: The Consumer | Comment
Your Kindle books, iTune songs and online videos are worthless
I’M sure we’ve all done the trudge down to the second hand bookshop when the shelves get overloaded. Get back 50 p a copy for the old paperbacks sorta stuff. Or the equivalent at the CD shop, even bundled up the stuff and gone to a car boot sale.
The big question in this modern digital age is whether we’re going to be able to do the same with out Kindle books, online videos and MP3 music files.
The short answer is: No.
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Posted: 8th, November 2012 | In: Money, Technology, The Consumer | Comments (3)
Help us choose what Apple will say in its Samsung ads
THIS is rather a fun little court ruling. After all the piling onto Samsung that Apple have done in courtrooms around the world now they’ve got to run ads in the UK praising them.
Well, Apple has just lost the High Court appeal to have that decision overturned, meaning that despite the backhanded compliment, it will still have to run adverts in the press stating that the Korean giant had not copied its tablet designs.
Most, most amusing.
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Posted: 19th, October 2012 | In: Money, Technology | Comments (3)
Apple’s troubling relationsip with Foxconn
ARGUABLY, most technology firms use companies to make their components that aren’t exactly nice. Giant hangars of workers soldering away like battery hens enable us to have nice, tiny gadgets. However, Apple have a rather troubling relationship with a company called Foxconn, which has seen underage workers and suicide getting too many depressing column inches.
Foxconn are the world’s largest contract electronics maker, and they have admitted using students as interns as young as 14 in their Chinese factory. Workers have been pushed so hard that suicides have been alarmingly prevalent, to the point where Foxconn saw fit to install a net around the building to stop employees from throwing themselves off the top of the factory. Recently, there have been riotous breakouts.
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Posted: 17th, October 2012 | In: Technology | Comment
NFL legend Jim Marshall trials Apple maps during match (epic fail)
WHAT happened when American NFL star Jim Marshall agreed to trial a beta version of Apple Maps during a game:
Spotter: JeremyVine
Apple’s suing Samsung: Yes, =again
WE’VE only just had the news that Apple has won big by suing Samsung over certain patents on mobile phones. What seems to have been missed is that there’s another case coming through the system. Yes, Apple v Samsung again. But over a different set of patents:
Last week’s resounding victory over Samsung in a patent trial in California mostly centered on hardware developed by the South Korean electronics maker, while including some features related to Google’s Android mobile software.
Another Apple suit, which the company filed in February, contends that all eight of the patents it is asserting are being infringed by features related to Android. They include features found in Android versions of popular Google apps like YouTube, Google Maps and Gmail as well as Google’s Quick Search Box that lets users search multiple types of data at the same time.
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Posted: 31st, August 2012 | In: Money, Technology | Comments (2)
Apples VS Starship Enterprise (video)
APPLE VS Starship Enterprise:
Posted: 30th, August 2012 | In: Technology | Comment
Both Apple and Samsung found guilty!
BOTH Apple and Samsung Guilty! Probably the best result possible in the ongoing patent wars between the two companies. They’re both very naughty little boys. Unfortunately this is the verdict in the South Korean case, not in the girt big one in California.
A South Korean court has fined both Apple and Samsung, ruling that each infringed the other’s patents in building their mobile devices and banning some of their products from sale in the country.
The Seoul central district court ordered Apple to remove the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad 1 and iPad 2 from shelves in South Korea, citing they infringed two of Samsung’s telecommunications patents. The court also ruled that Samsung infringed one of Apple’s patents related to the screen’s bouncing back ability and banned sales of the Galaxy S2 and other products in South Korea.
Sales of devices recently released by Samsung and Apple including the iPhone 4S and the Galaxy S3 smartphones were not affected.
The basic problem is that so many damn patents are being issued on so many damn stupid things (Apple appears to have one on a rectangular shape with rounded corners for God’s Sake!) that it’s pretty much impossible for anyone to do anything in the high tech space without falling afoul of one patent or another.
The best hope of cutting through this mess is that more of the cases are decided as this court has. You’re all fucking up so you’ll all have to sit down and sort it out properly. Given that the politicians have no real clue about what is happening here it will have to be either that or the courts themselves imposing some sort of solution.
What is really annoying though is that government is for sorting out these sorts of things. And, as above, they’re clueless and can’t/won’t do anything. So we in hell do we have to pay for all this government which isn’t sorting out the problems which government is there to sort out?
Posted: 24th, August 2012 | In: Money, Technology | Comment (1)
“I promise I am not smoking crack” declares Apple lawyer to judge
THIS Apple v Samsung patent fight is actually getting rather interesting at last. The judge asked one of Apple’s lawyers yesterday whether he was smoking crack, leading to distinguished counsel having to deny it.
Judge Lucy Koh has grown increasingly irritated with lawyers on both sides of the ongoing lawsuit between Apple and Samsung, but she hit a new boiling point on Thursday when Apple presented her a 75-page list of potential rebuttal witnesses for the four hours it has remaining in the trial.
“This is ridiculous,” the San Jose Mercury News reports Koh as saying. “Unless you’re smoking crack, you know these witnesses aren’t going to be called.”
The judge has ruled this trial with an iron fist, allowing each side only a limited amount of time to present evidence to the jury. One reason being that if Apple could drag the trial out over months and months then they would have won: Samsung currently isn’t allowed to sell some of its products in the US and won’t unless they win this case.
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Posted: 17th, August 2012 | In: Money, Technology | Comment
Apple doesn’t do it for the money – oh no, Jonathan Ive!
APPLE does not do it for the money. This is a nice claim but I wouldn’t want to run too far with it.
Sir Jonathan Ive, the man credited with shaping the iPad and iPhone and whose personal fortune is estimated at $130m, said today that Apple’s guiding principal was nothing to do with its balance sheet, instead it simply wanted to make “great products”.
“Our goal isn’t to make money. Our goal absolutely at Apple is not to make money. This may sound a little flippant, but it’s the truth,” said the British designer. “Our goal and what gets us excited is to try to make great products. We trust that if we are successful people will like them, and if we are operationally competent we will make revenue, but we are very clear about our goal.”
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Posted: 1st, August 2012 | In: Money, Technology | Comment
Apple pays $60 million and still doesn’t get iPad trademark in China
I DO like this story. It appears that Apple has handed over $60 million in China to buy the Chinese rights to the “iPad” trademark and yet it still doesn’t actually own those rights.
Apple may be waiting some time yet before it gets the rights to use the IPAD name in China after reports from the region suggested that lawyers of its court room opponent Proview are requesting temporary seizure of the trademark until they are paid.
A report on technology news portal Sina Tech (via Marbridge Daily) claimed that Grandall Law Firm has submitted an “asset protection application” to Shenzhen’s Yantian District People’s court.
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Posted: 28th, July 2012 | In: Money, Technology | Comment
Apple’s not so green any more
ONE could take this as a storm in a teacup or one could take it as the destruction of a great iconic brand. But Apple’s computer kit is now officially not green. In fact it’s now so not green that it’s probably illegal for any part of the UK government to buy it:
The city authorities of San Francisco have banned departmental purchases of Apple hardware after Cupertino dropped out of the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) green-standards scheme.
“We are disappointed that Apple chose to withdraw from EPEAT,” Melanie Nutter, director of San Francisco’s Department of Environment, told The Wall Street Journal, “and we hope that the city saying it will not buy Apple products will make Apple reconsider its participation.”
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Posted: 12th, July 2012 | In: Money, Technology | Comment
Idiot complaints about Apple’s Foxconn
THERE are reasonable complaints one can make about conditions in the Foxconn factories that make all of Apple’s kit (and most of those for Microsoft, Dell, HP and so on). Excessive overtime, short holidays and so on.
Then there are truly idiotic complaints one can make such as this:
a living wage for Chinese workers, whom it says are paid half the salary of workers in Foxconn’s Brazilian factory,
Eh?
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Posted: 31st, May 2012 | In: Money, Technology | Comment
If Facebook’s worth $96 billion then Apple’s worth $2.7 trillion
THE big thing in the tech investing markets at the moment is the long awaited Facebook IPO. This is where they actually bring the company to the public markets and let the general public try to buy a piece of it.
The valuation they’re trying to put on the whole company is $96 billion. Which is, if we’re honest about it, a pretty heady price for what is essentially a website, even if it is one with 900 million users.
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Why should Apple pay US taxes?
APPLE’S results are out and they’ve had another giganticly stonking quarter. But there’s something I do wonder about. There’s a campaign in the US to make companies pay US corporation tax: at the moment, if a US company makes money offshore and doesn’t bring it into the US then it doesn’t pay tax on those profits.
We’ve had a similar argument here over Vodafone. That was all about whether a Luxembourg part of Vodafone should pay UK tax on the profits it made selling phones in Germany to Germans.
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Posted: 25th, April 2012 | In: Money | Comment (1)
Smuggling iPhones into China – the airtime plan piracy
THIS is a slightly weird case. A woman found smuggling Apple’s iPhones into China. When, erm, all iPhones are actually made in China:
A Chinese woman has been stopped at the border after trying to smuggle over 200 iPhone 4S devices from Hong Kong into the Apple-mad nation hidden inside empty beer bottles.
The woman was caught red-handed by customs officials at the Sha Tau Kok border between Hong Kong and Shenzhen and claimed she was taking the bottles to be recycled, according to MIC Gadget.
However, on closer inspection the bottles reportedly felt suspiciously heavy, and showed signs that they had been cut in half and taped back up. In total 216 shiny new iPhones were discovered, shoved in three to a 750ml bottle.
Obviously something weird is happening, as with PJ O’Rourke’s point that you can’t get Cuban cigars in Cuba. But here, with Apple, it’s not the stupidities of communism, it’s the way that mobile phones are generally sold. That is, with an airtime plan.
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Posted: 23rd, April 2012 | In: Technology | Comment (1)
Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, eBay: are all tax dodging scumbags
FACEBOOK, Google, Apple, Amazon and eBay are all tax dodging scumbags. At least this is what the Daily Mail would have you believe, that the big five internet firms, Facebook, Google, Amazon, eBay and Apple are all tax dodging bastards:
Figures from the companies’ American filings suggest that the five made revenue of £12.2billion in Britain in 2010 from British consumers and advertisers.
On the basis of their global profit margins for the year, that would mean profits for the five from sales to British customers would have amounted to almost £2.5billion. Corporation tax at 28 per cent would have seen them pay £685million.Instead, subsidiaries established by the five in Britain paid just over £19million in 2010, or 0.8 per cent.
The problem with this is that it’s all entirely bollocks: because we’re in the European Union.
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Posted: 16th, April 2012 | In: Money | Comment (1)
Ashton Kutcher to play Steve Jobs in humourless biopic
THE past 12 months has been the year of men upsetting women, but enjoying something of a renaissance with their careers on the back of it. Chris ‘knocks seven shades out of Rihanna’ Brown has seen his stock soar and Ashton Kutcher, who, allegedly, shagged a young woman in a hot tub on the anniversary of his marriage to Demi Moore has since got a rake of work.
While Demi Moore cries herself inside out while reportedly having issues with drugs and an eating disorder, Kutch heads up Two And A Half Men and, apparently, will play Steve Jobs in one of the two biopics about the late founder of Apple. Dude, Where’s My Hair Gone? in the later stages, presumably.
Of course, Kutcher has a little likeness to the young Jobs (long hair, occasional beard) and the role will see him going from vaguely wayward hippie to founder of Apple.
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Posted: 2nd, April 2012 | In: Film | Comment (1)
New iPad not greeted by rioting mobs – is this the start of the end of apple?
SOMETHING really rather strange has happened over at Apple. They’ve released a new product and yet we have no reports of stampeding crowds or rioting mobs screaming into the stores to get their hands on one.
Indeed, it’s rather the opposite:
Braying hordes of fanbois hungry for new iPads failed to turn up outside Blighty’s Apple stores today despite months of rumour, hype and speculation. Although slab shoppers were nonchalant in London, they were positively wet in Scotland. A queue of hundreds swiftly ebbed away outside the fruity tech titan’s Regent Street outlet, allowing at least one punter who rocked up at 9am to grab the improved fondleslab five minutes later.
The line was much more muted than previous iPad launches during which unlucky fans were turned away empty-handed.
A queue that only lasts an hour after the doors have opened just isn’t what we’ve come to expect from an Apple launch.
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Posted: 16th, March 2012 | In: Technology | Comment
Steve Jobs immortalised as the iCEO doll
STEVE Jobs has been stuffed. The Apple founder is now available to own as a plush doll. It’s just all the other toys only with less buttons and the Rupskin (TM) operating system. The iCEO, the plush doll, produced by Throwboy, stands 15 inches tall, features rimless glasses, black turtle neck, 100% denim jeans and Scousebrows. It’s yours for…$60. And due to limited supply, you can only order two at a time.
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Posted: 14th, March 2012 | In: The Consumer | Comment
Apple is Not worth more than Poland!
APPLE is worth more than Poland?! Gaaah. This is the sort of thing that annoys. Nonsense, rubbish, ignorance…
Following an email announcing the iPad 3 launch, Apple’s share value hit an unprecedented $500bn in pre-marketing trading this morning, making the company worth more than Poland and many other things.
OK, so this is all terribly geeky but it just isn’t true to say that because Apple is worth $500 billion and the GDP of Poland is $500 billion then Apple is worth the same as Poland.
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Posted: 29th, February 2012 | In: Money | Comments (16)
Apple’s Chinese factories: they’re grrreeat!
APPLE’S Chinese factors are great. Really. You’d really have to have a heart of stone not to laugh over this. Various idiot and weepy lefty types over in the US have been decrying the labour conditions at the Foxconn factories in China where so much of Apple’s gear is made.
Petitions flying around, My God, it’s appalling, they only make $17 a day, they’re slaves, immoral capitalist bastards and….well, you get the picture.
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Posted: 16th, February 2012 | In: Technology | Comment
