The iPhone is reportedly getting 5G in 2020

The first 5G phones are set to start arriving next year. Motorola plans to bring next-gen connectivity via a Mod for the Z3, and companies like LG and OnePlus have promised to deliver the tech baked into handsets at some point in 2019. iPhone users, on the other hand, may have to wait a bit longer.

The technology is, of course, an inevitability for Apple (along with everyone else, really), so it’s just a question of when. A new report from Fast Company (via the Verge) puts the timing around a year and half out.

The “source with knowledge of Apple’s plans” put the 5G iPhone’s arrival at some point in 2020, with Intel supplying the tech this time out. Apparently Apple and Intel are going through a bit of a rough patch of late, courtesy of heat/battery issues with the 8060 5G modem. Of course, things aren’t rough enough for the company to hit up Qualcomm again.

Given the on-going battle between the two companies, that’s probably a bridge too far. Instead, Apple’s holding out for Intel’s 8161 chip. 5G presents a solid opportunity for Intel to regain some of the substantial ground it ceded to Qualcomm in the mobile market the last time out.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2CZdvuQ

Apple, Amazon, Google and others sign letter opposing Trump’s attempt to redefine gender

A list of 50-plus companies, including some of tech’s top names, joined forces this week to pen a letter calling out the Trump administration over a reported plan to narrow gender definitions.

Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco and more drafted the letter (full text below) in response to a recent New York Times story about a planned federal rollback of Obama-era civil rights protections for transgender and gender non-conforming citizens. The move by the Trump administration set off a spate of protests around the world in support of transgender rights, and the response from the tech industry soon followed.  

“We oppose any administrative and legislative efforts to erase transgender protections through reinterpretation of existing laws and regulations,” the note reads. “We also fundamentally oppose any policy or regulation that violates the privacy rights of those that identify as transgender, gender nonbinary, or intersex.”

Rights groups and activists are mobilizing against a reported Trump administration plan to narrowly define gender, a move that could dramatically reduce federal protections for and recognition of transgender people on October 28th, 2018 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. In Amsterdam people gathered Sunday night during a rally which was a call-to-action to all to members and allies of the trans, LGBQIA, black and brown resistance, immigrant and social justice movements to stand side by side with trans men, trans women and non-binary & intersex people, and to send a message of resistance and strengthen around the world. (Photo by Romy Arroyo Fernandez/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The initial Times report stems from a memo proposing that the gender of individuals be solely based on their biological traits at birth.

“Proposed Definition: Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the memo reads. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

This isn’t the first time a Trump administration LGBTQ policy has united some of the industry’s biggest competitors. In February of last year, Apple and Google among others spoke out against the administration’s plans to roll back Obama-era guidelines surrounding transgender bathroom use in public schools.

Here is the full text of the letter:

We, the undersigned businesses, stand with the millions of people in America who identify as transgender, gender nonbinary or intersex, and call for all such people to be treated with the respect and dignity everyone deserves.

We oppose any administrative and legislative efforts to erase transgender protections through reinterpretation of existing laws and regulations. We also fundamentally oppose any policy or regulation that violates the privacy rights of those that identify as transgender, gender nonbinary, or intersex.

In the last two decades, dozens of federal courts have affirmed the rights and identities of transgender people. Cognizant of growing medical and scientific consensus, courts have recognized that policies that force people into a binary gender definition determined by birth anatomy fail to reflect the complex realities of gender identity and human biology.

Recognizing that diversity and inclusion are good for business, and that discrimination imposes enormous productivity costs (and exerts undue burdens), hundreds of companies, including the undersigned, have continued to expand inclusion for transgender people across corporate America.

Currently more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500 have clear gender identity protections; two-thirds have transgender-inclusive health care coverage; hundreds have LGBTQ+ and Allies business resource groups and internal training efforts.

Transgender people are our beloved family members and friends, and our valued team members. What harms transgender people harms our companies.

We call for respect and transparency in policymaking, and for equality under the law for transgender people.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2RpqYAa

Apple News will launch a real-time election results hub on November 6

Apple is preparing to launch a new way for its customers to track election results. The company, on 8 PM ET on November 6, will swap out the existing Midterm Elections section in the Apple News app, and replace it with a new Election Night section instead. This section will also replace Apple News’ Digest tab at the bottom-center of the app, in order to lead users directly to the special section where they’ll be able to track the live results, updates on key races, latest developments and more.

The company is partnering with the Associated Press for its real-time election results, as do many news organizations thanks to AP’s history and experience with verifying results.

Here, Apple will use that AP data to inform a number of dynamic infographics as well as offer a complete list of federal election results in every state, including House and Senate seats.

These results will update every minute, or you can just “refresh” the page manually to force the update at any time.

If the balance of power in either the House or the Senate is determined by way of the incoming results, Apple News will publish a special alert at the top of the feed and a pop up notification, as well.

The Key Races section, meanwhile, offers another set of live updating infographics, showing the live results from the most interesting House, Senate or Gubernatorial races.

Another section will focus on the latest developments – meaning breaking news headlines and stories related to election night coverage. This will feature news from a variety of sources including Axios, Politico, The Washington Post, Fox News, CNN, The New York Times, CBS, and others.

CBS News, CNN, and Fox News will also contribute video clips to the Election Night hub, while ABC will offer a live video feed. Another live video feed from NBC News will appear in a widget alongside the Live Results infographic.

Apple says users won’t have to authenticate with their TV provider on election night to watch the videos in the hub.

A diversity of news sources was important to Apple, which wanted to have a range of options for people to read, as well as a way to present the news so people could see how it’s being processed across the ideological spectrum.

More importantly, all the news coverage in the hub isn’t being driven by algorithms. For Apple News’ team, Election Night is an all-hands-on-deck type of situation involving real human editors. In fact, human editorial oversight is a key difference between Apple’s approach to news aggregation and curation, compared with competitors like Google, Twitter and Facebook – all of which have come under fire for their outsized roles in the spread of information, and, at times, disinformation.

Apple has been taking the opposite approach, by staffing up an editorial team of former journalists, insteading of leaving news curation to technology.

Apple News is available across iPhone, iPad, and as of this year, Mac devices.

 

 

 

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2CZhKa6

Apple will stop sharing numbers on how many devices it’s selling

Apple shared its latest quarterly earnings report today, but during its call with investors the company’s CFO Luca Maestri also delivered an unexpected announcement: it won’t be sharing unit sales of its iPhone, iPad or Mac anymore.

This gives analysts (and the public) one less item to determine the health of the company, but according to Apple’s leadership, devices sold aren’t a very good indication of the company’s financial health anymore because the company is selling devices at so many price points.

“Our product ranges for all the major product categories have become wider over time and therefore a unit of sale is less relevant for us at this point compared to the past because we’ve got these much wider sales prices dispersion,” Maestri said in the call. “So unit of sale per se becomes less relevant”

The move perhaps reflects just how much Apple’s pricing has stretched toward the high-end in the past year.

The iPhone XS Max starts at $1,099, the Apple Watch Series 4 starts at $399, the new iPad Pro starts at $799 and the new MacBook Air starts at $1,199. The company is keeping prices pretty consistent on the low-end for iPhone and iPad as it continues to sell older units; that isn’t as true of Mac, which has seen a fairly uniform price bump in the most recent generations of devices (with a $4,999 iMac Pro rounding out the high end).

Unit sales tell a small part of the story. While Apple shipping 46.89 million iPhones this quarter represented flat unit growth, the company’s iPhone revenues jumped 29 percent. That’s because the average sale price of the iPhone went from $793 versus $618 a year ago.

Maestri noted in the call that some of the company’s biggest competitors in smartphone and tablet sales (Google, Samsung) do not break out unit sales in their quarterly earnings reports either. Nevertheless, more data on a company’s performance is better for analysts, so the lack of transparency from Apple here leaves some room for speculation on why they’re making this change now.

Apple beats on Q4 earnings thanks to price hikes, stock still falls 7% after-hours

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2RtKzPL

Apple beats on Q4 earnings thanks to price hikes, stock still falls 4% after-hours

Despite a beat on its Q4 quarterly earnings, Apple shares still managed to take a beating Thursday.

Shares are down 4 percent in after-hours trading after the company released its Q4 quarterly earnings report, detailing $62.90 billion in revenue beating analyst expectations of $61.57 billion, with earnings per share hitting $2.91 beating an expected $2.78 EPS. The results represent a 20 percent year-over-year growth in revenues at the company.

Apple shipped 46.89 million iPhones this quarter with unit sales staying flat but revenue jumping 29 percent, a result of Apple’s strategy this past year to hike prices of their most high-end devices. The company shipped 9.7 million iPads (a 6 percent decrease YoY with a 15 percent revenue decrease) and 5.3 million Macs (a 2 percent decrease YoY).

Beyond wrenching more money from users with hardware upgrades, Apple has continued the trend of pulling more revenue from user services like Apple Music, Apple Care and iCloud. The company reported that its Services division reached an all-time-high of $10 billion in revenue, climbing 17 percent year-over-year.

It’s been a rough past few weeks for the Nasdaq, tech stocks have been floundering though Apple has weathered the storm far better than most on the heels of several new hardware announcements. Earlier this week, the company introduced new models of the iPad Pro, MacBook Air and Mac Mini at an event in New York. This comes on the heels of the release of three new iPhone models and a redesign of the Apple Watch.

Over the past several months, the company has been bumping the prices of its newest devices promoting a broader spread between their older releases and newest devices. The iPhone XS Max starts at $1,099, the Apple Watch Series 4 starts at $399, the new iPad Pro starts at $799 and the new MacBook Air starts at $1,199.

We’ll have more details later this afternoon during the company’s investor call.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2AFvCo4

Google walkout organizer: ‘I hope I still have a career in Silicon Valley after this’

Shouting “women’s rights are worker’s rights” and a number of other #TimesUp and #MeToo chants, upwards of 1,000 Google employees gathered in San Francisco’s Harry Bridges Plaza Thursday to protest the company’s handling of sexual harassment and misconduct cases.

Staffers from all of Google’s San Francisco offices were in attendance. An organizer, who declined to be named, told TechCrunch there were 1,500 Google employees across the globe that participated in the 48-hour effort to arrange a worldwide walkout. The effort was a major success. More than 3,000 Googlers and supporters of the movement attended the New York City walkout alone. As many as 1,000 Googlers and others came out for the San Francisco walkout, which the organizers said, was double the number they expected.

Cathay Bi, a Google employee in San Francisco and one of the walkout organizers, told a group of journalists at the rally that she was conflicted with participating in the walkout and ultimately decided not to go public with her own story of sexual harassment.

“I experienced sexual harassment at Google and I didn’t feel safe talking about it,” said Bi, pictured above. “That feeling of not being safe is why I’m out here today. I’d love it if everyone felt safe talking about it.”

[gallery ids="1740837,1740838,1740839,1740841,1740840,1740843,1740845"]

“There were many times over the course of the last 24 hours that I emailed the group and said ‘I’m not doing this because I’m scared’ but that fear is something everyone else feels,” she said. “I said to myself last night, I hope I still have a career in Silicon Valley after this.”

Other organizers declined to go on the record.

There were protests around the globe today, including in London, Dublin, Montreal, Singapore, New York City, San Francisco and Cambridge, following a New York Times investigation that revealed Google had given Android co-creator Andy Rubin a $90 million exit package despite multiple relationships with other Google staffers and credible accusations of sexual misconduct. That story, coupled with tech’s well-established issue of harassment and discrimination toward women and underrepresented minorities, was a catalyst for today’s rallies.

At the rally, Googlers read off their list of demands, which includes an end to forced arbitration in cases of harassment and discrimination, a commitment to end pay and opportunity inequity and a clear, inclusive process for reporting sexual misconduct safely and anonymously.

They’re also requesting that the search giant promote chief diversity officer Danielle Brown to a role in which she reports directly to chief executive officer Sundar Pichai, as well as the addition of an employee representative to the company’s board of directors.

Here’s the statement from Pichai Google provided to TechCrunch this morning: “Earlier this week, we let Googlers know that we are aware of the activities planned for today and that employees will have the support they need if they wish to participate. Employees have raised constructive ideas for how we can improve our policies and our processes going forward. We are taking in all their feedback so we can turn these ideas into action.”

Now, employees around the Globe will await Google’s highly-anticipated course of “action.”

“These types of changes don’t happen overnight,” Bi said. “If we expected them overnight we would have the wrong expectations of how these movements take place.”

from Android – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2Qi866g
via IFTTT

Google employees across the globe are walking out now to protest sexual harassment

Google employees are fed up with the search giant’s lack of transparency when it comes to handling sexual harassment and misconduct allegations.

This morning, thousands of Googlers from San Francisco to Dublin are walking out in hopes of bringing real change to the company. The protest follows a New York Times report last week that revealed Google had provided Android co-creator Andy Rubin a $90 million payout package despite credible allegations of sexual misconduct made against him.

The protestors have five key asks:

1. An end to forced arbitration in cases of harassment and discrimination.
2. A commitment to end pay and opportunity inequity.
3. A publicly disclosed sexual harassment transparency report.
4. A clear, uniform, globally inclusive process for reporting sexual misconduct safely and anonymously.
5. Elevate the chief diversity officer to answer directly to the chief executive officer and make recommendations directly to the board of directors. And appoint an employee representative to the board.

Plans of the walkout emerged earlier this week, just days after the bombshell NYT report was released. According to BuzzFeed, some 200 Googlers began staging the protest; the group quickly grew to thousands, including non-U.S. Googlers. Google CEO Sundar Pichai had reportedly condoned the protest in an internal e-mail to employees Tuesday.

“Earlier this week, we let Googlers know that we are aware of the activities planned for today and that employees will have the support they need if they wish to participate,” Pichai said in a statement provided to TechCrunch today. “Employees have raised constructive ideas for how we can improve our policies and our processes going forward. We are taking in all their feedback so we can turn these ideas into action.”

Pichai also responded to the NYT report with a letter co-signed by vice president of people operations Eileen Naughton, admitting that 48 people had been terminated at the company for sexual harassment in the past two years alone, including 13 senior employees.

We’ll be at the San Francisco protest, which begins at 11:10 a.m. PST. Here’s a look at protestors around the globe this morning.

The #googlewalkout in Zurich has impressive numbers! @googlewalkout pic.twitter.com/bgLHDLYfez

— Ted (@TedOnPrivacy) November 1, 2018

Google employees in Montreal have gathered up the street from their office on the campus of McGill University – #GoogleWalkout @GoogleWalkout – No one willing to speak on the record, but one explaining that the action says it all. pic.twitter.com/lB8siMeWMj

— Elias Makos (@eliasmakos) November 1, 2018

#GoogleWalkout Cambridge — seems like the whole office is here. Can't get a photo that accurately expresses the magnitude. pic.twitter.com/94rIbQJ9Ls

— mc #YesOn3 millen (@mcmillen) November 1, 2018

More signs from Google NYC’s pre-walkout sign making! #GoogleWalkout pic.twitter.com/4hjTJaHtqS

— Google Walkout For Real Change (@GoogleWalkout) November 1, 2018

Google NYC #GoogleWalkout pic.twitter.com/5BJ0u5EZCJ

— Google Walkout For Real Change (@GoogleWalkout) November 1, 2018

#GoogleWalkout Dublin. pic.twitter.com/joL1uHGavJ

— Ciara O'Brien (@ciaraobrien) November 1, 2018

The first of many coordinated #GoogleWalkout protests has begun – this is at the firm’s office in Singapore. (Pic via https://t.co/h44RZYGGHV ) pic.twitter.com/QeFgmPbHnN

— Dave Lee (@DaveLeeBBC) November 1, 2018

Hello from Google in London. A groups just came out for the #googlewalkout pic.twitter.com/nTeZ9rSAKC

— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) November 1, 2018

Google terminated 48 employees for sexual harassment in the last two years

from Android – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2QdkSD0
via IFTTT