Verizon Wireless may have boasted 3.2 million iPhone activations in its first-quarter 2012 results last week, but onetime exclusive carrier AT&T is still the king, announcing 4.3 million units sold for Apple’s handset in the first three months of this year.
AT&T has posted its Q1 2012 earnings, beating Wall Street estimates thanks to a 27.2 percent increase in its wireless operating income margin. In fact, wireless, wireline data (DSL, U-verse broadband) and managed services made up 78 percent of the company’s total fortunes — up 6.2 percent from the same quarter last year.
While overall smartphone sales also exceeded the first quarter of 2011 with 5.5 million, the real story comes with the company’s disclosure that 4.3 million of those handsets were iPhones, with 21 percent of those customers new to AT&T. While that’s a dip from last quarter’s 7.6 million, keep in mind that the January through March period is historically slower after the holidays, and 4.3 million is still a bump from the same period last year, which saw 3.6 million iPhones activated.
Despite so many vocal critics of AT&T, customers appear to be staying put, with a postpaid wireless churn rate of only 1.1 percent, which Ma Bell calls the “lowest level in seven quarters.” Roughly 30 percent of the company’s smartphone customers are using a “4G-capable” device, but that doesn’t mean much since the carrier includes “faux G” and LTE under the same shingle.
Although AT&T didn’t break out iPads from the rest of its tablet offerings, the company claims Q1 2012 was “its best-ever first-quarter sales for branded computing subscribers,” which includes tablets, tethering plans, aircards, mobile Wi-Fi hot spots and “other data-only devices.” Ma Bell added 460,000 such devices to reach 5.8 million, a 70 percent bump in subscribers from a year ago.
These numbers don’t show the results of AT&T’s recent push with Windows Phone handsets led by the Nokia Lumia 900, which started shipping earlier this month. We’ll have to wait for July to see those Q2 numbers — meanwhile, Apple will have their own numbers out later on Tuesday, so stay tuned for those.
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Apple is a bit tardy with new MacBook Pros, with rumors swirling that the beefed-up notebooks are going to become more like the MacBook Air, and at least one analyst predicting the death of the super-sized 17-inch model.
MacRumors is reporting that research analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has predicted a bleak future for Apple’s 17-inch MacBook Pro. According to a new report on Monday from KGI Securities, “falling shipments” (i.e., weak sales) are being cited as a good reason why Apple may kill off the giant-sized notebook as more pro users switch to smaller, lighter more nimble MacBook offerings.
“Apple’s Mac business in 2Q12 will be boosted by several factors,” Kuo explains. “Three of which are: (1) Mountain Lion, which integrates iOS features with Mac OS, Apple TV’s interaction function, will be launched in June; (2) upgrading to Ivy Bridge; and (3) back-to-school demand. We forecast Apple will sell 5.32mn units of the Mac series (up 28.5% QoQ and 35.2% YoY) in 2Q12, making it the main growth driver.
“We also predict Apple will roll out a fully new MacBook model in early 3Q12, boasting strong performance and easy carryability by combining the advantages of MacBook Air and MacBook Pro,” the report continues. “While adding new products, Apple is likely to stop making the 17-inch MacBook Pro this year due to falling shipments, in order to maintain a lean product line strategy.”
According to the report, Apple moved “roughly 3.1 million notebooks” in the first quarter of this year, and almost half of those were the more popular 13-inch MacBook Pro, which MacRumors calls “far and away the company’s best-selling Mac product.” Kuo predicts that the 17-inch model may have sold a mere 50,000 units, with the 15-inch nabbing only half a million customers.
Apple will be announcing their Q1 2012 financials on Tuesday, which could provide further insight into where they plan to take the MacBook Pro line in the months ahead.
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The Creative Cloud icon soared high above Golden Gate Park’s museum campus for today’s launch event at the DeYoung Museum.
Adobe held a launch event today for Creative Suite 6 and the brand-new Creative Cloud. If you’re a creative type, you can watch the entire hour-long presentation and demos (it’ll be rebroadcast continuously until 4pm Pacific today, and starting tomorrow you can watch it on-demand at tv.adobe.com), but let me just tell you why I’m so hyped about Creative Cloud.
(In fact, Robin Dick, our art director, and I attended this event together, and when we got back to the office one of the first people we happened to encounter was our friendly IT tech, and we immediately accosted him to explain why we needed Creative Cloud, like, yesterday.)
First of all, Creative Cloud is software-as-a-service. Instead of shelling out ,299 to ,499 for a Creative Suite collection, you pay monthly. It’s .99 per month for a yearly membership, and if you’re already using CS3, CS4, or CS5, your first year is only .99 per month. (Month-to-month is .99 per month — good for test drives or if you only need CS6 for a one-time project.) For that you get access to the entire Creative Suite 6 — that’s all 14 CS6 apps, from the heavy hitters like Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and Illustrator, to ones you may have never played with, like Fireworks, SpeedGrade, and Encore. They can all be downloaded to any machine you’re working on with the new App Store-like application manager.
You even get access to two new apps, Adobe Muse and Adobe Edge preview, that aren’t available in any boxed version of CS6. These are new tools for design and development of HTML5 content, and their inclusion in Creative Cloud points to Adobe’s commitment to pushing out innovations to Cloud users as soon as they are ready. More updates are on the horizon, too.
Creative Cloud also includes 20GB of cloud storage for your Adobe files and projects. The Creative Cloud Connection app works like Dropbox on the Mac, adding a folder in your Finder and syncing its content up to the cloud automatically. You can access your files locally or on a slick web-based interface. But it’s got more power than Dropbox, since it recognizes your Adobe files. Dropbox can go, “Hi, I’m Dropbox, here’s an InDesign file,” but all you can do is download that file and open it in InDesign. If you upload that same InDesign file to your Creative Cloud storage, suddenly you can share it with other users who can preview each page of it right in the Web interface (even if they don’t have InDesign), leave comments on it, download a copy, and so on. Photoshop files can show you their color palettes. It’s all incredibly cool.
And I feel like a game show host, BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE. You also get access to Adobe’s touch apps: Photoshop Touch and Adobe Ideas, for starters, and a few more currently Android-only apps that are coming to iPad soon. They let you sketch out ideas, mock up concepts, and then save those files and color palettes right to Creative Cloud, so they’ll be waiting for you back at your computer.
Creative Cloud will even have publishing services, letting you host up to 5 websites, and it’ll make it easy to publish your work on iPad, iPhone, and Android devices. You also get access to Adobe Typekit, with more than 700 web fonts you can use in your projects.
And the cloud wouldn’t be the cloud without some social features. Besides being able to collaborate on your projects with coworkers, you’ll be able to join communities (think Flickr groups) and share inspiration, work, and tips. You’ll be able to access training and support too—there’s a lot of new mojo packed into the CS6 apps, but Adobe wants to make sure you stay up to speed.
Pretty cool, right? Creative Cloud is available for preorder now. We’ll have a full review in our August 2012 issue, along with the major CS6 apps. Stay tuned!
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