2026-01-31 03:57:01
Apple Newsroom, yesterday:
“Today, Apple is proud to report a remarkable, record-breaking quarter, with revenue of $143.8 billion, up 16 percent from a year ago and well above our expectations,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “iPhone had its best-ever quarter driven by unprecedented demand, with all-time records across every geographic segment, and Services also achieved an all-time revenue record, up 14 percent from a year ago. We are also excited to announce that our installed base now has more than 2.5 billion active devices, which is a testament to incredible customer satisfaction for the very best products and services in the world.”
“During the December quarter, our record business performance and strong margins led to EPS growth of 19 percent, setting a new all-time EPS record,” said Kevan Parekh, Apple’s CFO. “These exceptionally strong results generated nearly $54 billion in operating cash flow, allowing us to return almost $32 billion to shareholders.”
John Markoff, writing for The New York Times 20 years ago:
It may not be the last laugh, but on Friday afternoon, after the close of the stock market, Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple Computer, shared an e-mail chuckle with his employees at the expense of Dell, a big rival.
The message was prompted by the 12 percent surge in Apple’s stock price last week, which pushed the company’s market capitalization to $72.13 billion, passing Dell’s value of $71.97 billion.
In 1997, shortly after Mr. Jobs returned to Apple, the company he helped start in 1976, Dell’s founder and chairman, Michael S. Dell, was asked at a technology conference what might be done to fix Apple, then deeply troubled financially.
“What would I do?” Mr. Dell said to an audience of several thousand information technology managers. “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
On Friday, apparently savoring the moment, Mr. Jobs sent a brief e-mail message to Apple employees, which read: “Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn’t perfect at predicting the future. Based on today’s stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today. Steve.”
Dell’s market cap today: $76 billion.
Apple’s: $3,824 billion.
Upton Sinclair coined the oft-cited maxim “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” I propose a corollary: It is difficult to get a company to see that certain of its core competencies are in severe decline when the company is making more money than ever.
2026-01-30 21:28:54
Maybe Trump is right and we should go to war against Denmark.
2026-01-30 05:50:32
Mike Swanson:
What if your car worked like so many apps? You’re driving somewhere important…maybe running a little bit late. A few minutes into the drive, your car pulls over to the side of the road and asks:
“How are you enjoying your drive so far?”
Annoyed by the interruption, and even more behind schedule, you dismiss the prompt and merge back into traffic.
A minute later it does it again.
“Did you know I have a new feature? Tap here to learn more.”
It blocks your speedometer with an overlay tutorial about the turn signal. It highlights the wiper controls and refuses to go away until you demonstrate mastery.
Ridiculous, of course.
And yet, this is how a lot of modern software behaves. Not because it’s broken, but because we’ve normalized an interruption model that would be unacceptable almost anywhere else.
I’ve started to think of this as backseat software: the slow shift from software as a tool you operate to software as a channel that operates on you. Once a product learns it can talk back, it’s remarkably hard to keep it quiet.
This post is about how we got here. Not overnight, but slowly. One reasonable step at a time.
If that lede pulls you in, like it did for me, you’re going to love the rest of the essay. This is one for the ages. It’s so good.
2026-01-30 04:18:48
When I wrote last week about the false narrative that iOS 26 is seeing bizarrely low adoption rates compared to previous years, I neglected one source: Apple itself. Apple’s Developer site publishes a page with iOS and iPadOS usage for devices that “transacted on the App Store”.
The hitch is that they only seem to update those numbers twice a year — once right around now, and once again right before WWDC. As of today, those numbers are still from 4 June 2025. Last year, going from the Internet Archive, the numbers were still from iOS 17 (June 2024) on 23 January last year, but were updated for iOS 18 on 24 January. Here are those iOS 18 numbers from one year ago this week.
iPhones released in the previous four years:
All iPhones:
iPads released in the previous four years:
All iPads:
(Apple itself manages to present these statistics without ever using the plurals iPhones or iPads, instead referring only to “devices”.)
A year prior in early 2024, Apple updated the numbers at some point between 23 January and 6 February. I presume, or at least hope, that they’ll update these numbers for iOS 26 any day now.
2026-01-29 23:22:23
Jeremy Fuster, reporting for TheWrap:
But save for some theaters in Republican-heavy states, the film is unlikely to leave much of an impact at a slumping box office, with theatrical sources telling TheWrap that “Melania” is projected for an opening of around $3 million this weekend.
That would put it below the last right-wing documentary, the Daily Wire-produced Matt Walsh film “Am I Racist?,” which opened to $4.5 million from 1,517 locations in September 2024, finishing with a $12.3 million total that made it the highest-grossing doc that year. The highest projections are coming from NRG with an estimate of around $5 million, though audience interest polls from the company have 30% saying they are “definitely not” interested in watching the film, an unusually high count for any wide release.
These projections are with a $35 million promotional campaign, for a movie Amazon paid $40 million to purchase. (Via Taegan Goddard.)
2026-01-29 23:19:17
Nicole Sperling and Brooks Barnes, reporting for The New York Times:
Amazon paid Ms. Trump’s production company $40 million for the rights to “Melania,” about $26 million more than the next closest bidder, Disney. The fee includes a related docuseries that is scheduled to air later this year. The budget for “Melania” is unknown, but documentaries that follow a subject for a limited amount of time usually cost less than $5 million to produce. The $35 million for marketing is 10 times what some other high-profile documentaries have received.
All of which has a lot of Hollywood questioning whether Amazon’s push is anything more than the company’s attempt to ingratiate itself with President Trump.
This is a good story, with multiple industry sources with experience making political documentaries, but the Times’s own subhead downplays Amazon’s spending on the film: “The tech giant is spending $35 million to promote its film about the first lady, far more than is typical for documentaries.” They’re spending $35 million now, to promote it, but they already paid $40 million for the rights to the film, $28 million of which is believed to have gone to Melania Trump herself. A $35 million total spend would be a lot compared to other high-profile documentaries, but it’s a $75 million total spend. This is not just a little fishy — it’s a veritable open air seafood market.
Back to the Times:
To grasp just how uncustomary Amazon’s marketing push for “Melania” is, consider how Magnolia Pictures handled “RBG,” a portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg during her 25th year as a Supreme Court justice, in 2018.
CNN Films produced “RBG” for around $1 million. The promotional budget, including an awards campaign that helped it land two Oscar nominations, totaled about $3 million. The film debuted in 34 theaters and expanded into 432 locations over several weeks. It ultimately collected $14 million, enough to rank as the year’s No. 1 political documentary.
And:
On Friday, “Melania” will also be released in 1,600 theaters overseas, where FilmNation, a New York company, is handling distribution in more than 20 countries. International ticket sales are expected to be weak, according to box office analysts.
Shocker.
