David Leonhardt writing on the Economix blog of the New York Times business site:
With a market value of about $460 billion, Apple is worth more than Google, Goldman Sachs, General Motors, Ford, Starbucks and Boeing combined.
This comes hot on the heels of AAPL being up 3.46% at $493.17 today, as they rapidly close in on that $500 target price. Just incredible.
Tech site AllThingD has just broken the story that Apple will be holding a special iPad 3 event in the first week of March:
Sources say the company has chosen the first week in March to debut the successor to the iPad 2, and will do so at one of its trademark special events. The event will be held in San Francisco, presumably at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Apple’s preferred location for big announcements like these.
Jim Dalrimple “yep” confirms this is actually happening.
I hope the 2048×1536 Retina Display rumours turn out to be true this time around. I can’t think of much else that I’d want out of a new iPad to be honest.
The launch of Microsoft Kinect for Windows looks like another fantastic waste of time for anyone but software developers. It doesn’t do anything. Paul Thurrott writes:
Long story short, there’s only one reason to get a Kinect for Windows right now: You’re a developer that wishes to create Kinect-compatible apps for Windows. How Microsoft could have shipped this thing without at least a few games, or at least configuration utilities, however, is beyond me. It’s a weird chicken-and-egg thing right now: Users might want a Kinect to play games, but there aren’t any. Yet.
I have Kinect for my Xbox 360 and I’ve used it precisely once. I can’t imagine any situation where I’d ever want that technology attached to my computer. But if you disagree, you can get your Kinect Sensor for Windows now for just $249.99. And hope some enterprising software developer builds an application that makes the Kinect do something beyond stare back at you.
Blogger Dustin Curtis writes about iOS applications secretly uploading and storing copies of your address book on their servers:
I did a quick survey of 15 developers of popular iOS apps, and 13 of them told me they have a contacts database with millons of records. One company’s database has Mark Zuckerberg’s cell phone number, Larry Ellison’s home phone number and Bill Gates’ cell phone number. This data is not meant to be public, and people have an expectation of privacy with respect to their contacts.
I’m amazed Apple has allowed this problem to go unchecked for so long. The problems discussed pre-date the release of iOS 4.3. The Wall Street Journal ran a story on this kind of thing back in December, 2010.
App developers should be forced to request user permission before they gain unrestricted access to information such as names, addresses and phone numbers of friends and work colleagues. It surely wouldn’t be very difficult to implement this requirement in the operating system. For a company that claims proudly to be focused on protecting users privacy, Apple has done a pretty piss poor job of it in this instance.
One of those concerned UK citizens I wrote about yesterday took the time to email his concerns to Apple CEO Tim Cook about the appointment of John Browett to the position of Senior Vice President of Retail.
Blogger Tony Hart shares his story and the email:
I talked to many people and John was the best by far. I think you will be as pleased as I am. His role isn’t to bring Dixons to Apple, it’s to bring Apple to an even higher level of customer service and satisfaction.
I have no doubt Apple think he’s the best man for the job. Only time will judge whether this turns out to be an accurate assessment or not.
