Apple Supplier Pegatron's Hiring Spree Further Fuels Speculation About A Cheaper iPhone
Once again, news from a supplier is fueling rumors about Apple's future product roster. This time it's manufacturer Pegatron's announcement that it will increase its number of workers in China by up to 40 percent in the second half of this year. The hiring blitz at the company, which produces iOS devices, has led to new round of speculation that a cheaper iPhone is in the works.
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Shenzhen's Huaqiangbei Sellers Are Struggling As Phones Get Cheaper
This is the ground floor of one of the electronics malls in Shenzhen’s famed Huaqiangbei district. Huaqiangbei is a stretch of large malls and shops in the Southern Chinese province, and due to its proximity to some of the manufacturing superfactories in the city, it has a cluster of malls that specializes in carrying tech goods. These electronics malls generally start out with booths on the ground floor and individual store units as you go up the floors. They’re typically buzzing with activity from consumers to wholesalers keen to check out the quality of new devices coming out of the factories. But when I visited some of the malls last month, only a handful of the open booths downstairs were tenanted, and the shutters were down on almost every floor of one of the seven-storey malls. when I asked one of the shopowners what was going on, he said his former neighbors packed up progressively over the past months, forced out by the tight competition of hawking nearly identical products ...
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Android Picks Up The Pace In Smartphone Sales Over iOS Globally, While Windows Phone Continues With Modest Gains, Says Kantar
Google's mobile OS Android continues to power ahead as the world's most popular smartphone platform, according to figures out today from Kantar Worldpanel Comtech, the WPP-owned market research company that tracks sales of handsets across key markets on a 12-week rolling cycle. In the nine markets surveyed by Kantar -- Australia, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, UK and the U.S., all detailed in the table below -- the only one where Android did not dominate was Japan, where Apple's iOS just about eked out a lead against it (49.2% versus 45.8% of sales) for the three months ending March 31. Elsewhere, the figures indicate that regardless of whether the market is developed (U.S., UK, Germany) or emerging (China) or struggling financially (Spain), collectively, Android handset makers are winning them all, with sales figures for the platform reaching their high point in Spain, at 93.5% of all smartphone sales.
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Economies Of Scale As A Service
Credit where it's definitely due: this post was inspired by a Twitter conversation with Box CEO Aaron Levie. Don't look now, but something remarkable is happening. Instagram had twelve employees when it was purchased for $700 million; all of its actual computing power was outsourced to Amazon Web Services. Mighty ARM has only 2300 employees, but there are more than 35 billion ARM-based chips out there. They do no manufacturing; instead they license their designs to companies like Apple, who in turn contract with companies like TSMC for the actual fabrication. Nest Labs and Ubiquiti are both 200-employee hardware companies worth circa $1 billion...who subcontract their actual manufacturing out to China.
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Apple faces $118,000 fine in China for e-book copyright infringement
A Chinese writers' union brought the case on behalf of three authors.
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