Cooking

Apple admits to middle age truth: It's finally slowing down

By any measure, Apple's supercharged 2012 is making this year pretty tough. So much so that CEO Tim Cook in effect cautioned Wall Street analysts against making comparisons.

"Fiscal 2012 results were incredibly strong, and that's making it difficult," Cook said on Apple's second-quarter earnings conference call, rattling off all that made last year so good: high growth, high demand, fatter gross margins, and historically low costs for components.

And yet that's what investors do: They make comparisons to prior years and make a bet on the stock based on what the future looks … Read more

Apple and Wall Street religions are out of sync

After climbing to more than $700 eight months ago, Apple's shares continued their steep decline on Wednesday. After falling below $400 for the first time since 2011, the shares closed at $402.80, down $23.44, or 5.5 percent.

This has been a slow-motion stock rout as many Wall Streeters have soured on Apple, reducing forecasts for the company while adopting a decidedly negative opinion about its future prospects. The trigger for today's sell-off was Cirrus Logic, which supplies analog and audio chips to Apple. The company issued a disappointing quarterly forecast, which got interpreted as a … Read more

Apple's senior execs dominate top 5 best-paid

When it comes to compensation, these days it's good to be one of Apple's top executives.

During Apple's 2012 fiscal year, four of its executives landed in the top five for highest compensation at a Standard & Poor's 500 company. But the folks that made it into that list might surprise you.

According to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which collected compensation data from some of the world's top executives, Apple senior vice president of technologies, Bob Mansfield; CFO Peter Oppenheimer; general counsel Bruce Sewell; and operations chief Jeff Williams all made it into the top five for … Read more

Egg spinner scrambles your breakfast in the shell

Isn't it tedious to crack open your morning eggs, beat them, and then scramble them? It's messy and taxing enough to make your life look like a bad infomercial GIF.

Fortunately you can now scramble eggs in their shell, and it doesn't involve spinning them in a shirt or plastic tubes like those tricks on YouTube.

A company called Hikari Tec Hong Kong recently showed off an egg-spinning machine that helps scramble the whites and yolks without breaking the shell. Once spun enough, and after some boiling, the contents of the egg come out of the shell as a semisolid, creamy pudding. Check out the demo below. … Read more

The 404 1,247: Where we hop in the ball pit with Emily Dreyfuss (podcast)

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Hi-fi reviews based purely on the feel of the knob .

- Which celebrities can you pay to message on Facebook?

- Can you bully a celebrity? Short answer: no.

- How the hell do you pronounce GIF anyway?

- Follow Emily Dreyfuss on Twitter.… Read more

Apple patent envisions wireless charging on convertible laptop

Despite Apple CEO Tim Cook having knocked the idea of a convertible MacBook-iPad hybrid device, the company has filed a patent application for just that. The proposed patent, titled "Wireless display for electronic devices," was published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today.

The application describes a computer display that is removable from its base -- basically a convertible laptop. But, what's different about this idea from other convertibles made by other companies is that it has wireless display technology. That means the device could be charged wirelessly.

Here's how Apple describes it in … Read more

Apple CEO apologizes to China over warranties, offers fixes

Following weeks of scrutiny over its warranty policies in China, Apple now says it has improved services in the region.

That message came from the top, in an apology note from Apple CEO Tim Cook, posted in Chinese on Apple's Chinese site today.

In it, Cook apologized for a lack of communication on the matter, and said that the company is implementing improvements in three areas of its warranty policy and related services.

Those changes:

A new repair policy for the iPhone 4 and 4S that provides a new phone exchange or new parts replacement for a year after … Read more

Rare Apple photos: Cook in high school, Jobs back on the job

OK, fanboys and -girls, it's time once again to haul out your digital scrapbooking materials and add to your collection of Apple-related odds and ends.

It's been a fun month for Apple miscellanea. We saw the surfacing of a rare video of Woz circa 1984, which was digitized from a videotape found in a basement. And earlier there was the Fast Company interview with Ying Hang "Hannah" Zhang, the young Starbucks employee who took the "prank" call Steve Jobs made during the unveiling of the iPhone in 2007 ("I'd like to order 4,000 lattes to go, please. … Read more

Well-liked: Zuckerberg tops employee-driven CEO rankings

Lots of CEOs make the news for being gruff, domineering, or brilliant, but oftentimes their employees have different impressions. Every year, careers site Glassdoor surveys hundreds of thousands of employees across all industries and then publishes its rankings of the 50 highest rated CEOs (see list below).

And, for 2013, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg took the top honor.

Despite shareholder lawsuits over its botched IPO and mixed reaction to Timeline and Graph Search, the social network's employees gave Zuckerberg a 99 percent approval rating over the past 12 months, which ended February 24. This is up 14 percentage points … Read more

Spin control: Apple goes on offense against Android

If he were the marketing chief for any company other than Apple, people would rightly figure that Phil Schiller's public bashing of Android was just part of the job description. And yes, there's that. But context is everything and Schiller's recent media offensive is part of a much bigger story with higher-than-normal stakes.

Schiller started the trash talking last week with a random tweet urging people to "Be safe out there" with a link to a report from F-Secure focusing on Android mobile security threats.

Then, on the eve of Samsung's Galaxy S4 announcement, … Read more