Free Republic

Executive Summary Apple controls costs associated with purchases and workers’ in the supply chain. In manufacturing the IPhone, over 80% of materials are purchased by Apple. In addition, Apple supplies the manufacturing equipment whilst factories only purchase cases, screens, circuit boards, packaging and other materials. In the assembly department, labor costs include workers’ costs which are calculated according to the minimum wage standard for the region. in addition to management fees for the factory. Since Tim Cook became CEO of Apple, the company has required suppliers to not only increase their productivity but to also decrease costs at a rate...

Earlier this summer, we reported on a “Celebration Edition” Apple I that would be going up for auction. Initial estimates pegged a value of over $1 million for the computer, but the auction today came to a close with a final selling price of $815,000. 10 percent of the proceeds from the Charitybuzz auction will benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Near the end of the auction, the Apple I reached a peak of $1.2 million, but the final bid was apparently cancelled at the very last second, giving the device a final sale price of $815,000 with 39 bids.The...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Seven months after a federal judge ordered the State Department to begin releasing monthly batches of the detailed daily schedules showing meetings by Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state, the government told The Associated Press it won't finish the job before Election Day. The department has so far released about half of the schedules. Its lawyers said in a phone conference with the AP's lawyers that the department now expects to release the last of the detailed schedules around Dec. 30, weeks before the next president is inaugurated. The AP's lawyers late Friday formally...

PARIS (AP) -- Apple says it is issuing a security update after powerful espionage software was found targeting an activist's iPhone in the Middle East. Computer forensics experts tell The Associated Press the spyware takes advantage of three previously undisclosed weaknesses in Apple's mobile operating system to take complete control of iPhone handsets. Two reports published Thursday by the San Francisco-based Lookout and internet watchdog group Citizen Lab outline how the spyware could compromise an iPhone with the tap of a finger, a trick so coveted in the world of cyberespionage that one spyware broker said last year that it...

People all over the world mail their broken iPhones to microsoldering specialist Jessa Jones. Aided by powerful microscopes and precision soldering irons, experts like Jessa pluck tiny chips off logic boards, swap them for new ones, and resurrect devices over which AppleÂ’s Genius Bar would say a eulogy.Jessa can fix practically anything. But these days, she spends most of her time fixing just one thing. Because every single month, more and more iPhone 6 and (especially) 6 Plus devices show up at her shop, iPad Rehab, with the same problem: a gray, flickering bar at the top of the display...

Tim Cook will mark his five-year anniversary as the CEO of Apple by doing something that his predecessor Steve Jobs typically avoided: hosting a fundraiser for a presidential candidate. On Wednesday, Cook and Lisa Jackson, Apple's (AAPL, Tech30) head of environmental initiatives, will host an event in California to raise money for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Those invited have reportedly been asked to contribute as much as $50,000. Cook is just the latest in a growing list of tech executives and venture capitalists working to raise big money to help Clinton beat Donald Trump, who has repeatedly attacked tech companies...

SUMMARY Half of Android users are stuck on software platforms from 2013 or earlier. This translates into a performance pitfall and major security flaw for Android users. As a result, Google is at risk to a major security breach, resulting in a exodus of users to Apple's iOS platform. Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Android 7.0 is finally here! It looks smooth and makes several improvements, but does it actually matter? Most Android users won't see this update for quite some time, as Android updates typically have a very slow adoption rate. Demonstrated below, half of Android users are running their devices...

There’s always a very interesting period of smartphones comparison whenever a manufacturer introduces a new device into the market. The majority of non-technically au fait consumers will simply make their decisions based on the manufacturer of the hardware or the underlying operating system, but there’s always another particular subset of enthusiasts.Such users are not only passionate about how a new device performs, but also how it performs in comparison to the competition that’s already available. With that in mind, it was inevitable that Samsung’s latest 2016-released Galaxy Note 7 was going to be compared with Apple’s 2015 iPhone 6s range.The recently...

The Windows 10 Anniversary Update for PCs started rolling out more than two weeks ago. While many have been happy with the new features and improvements it brings, thousands of others are reportedly experiencing critical issues, that are rendering their machines unresponsive. The news of the OS causing system freezes broke out a couple of days after the rollout of the Anniversary Update began, and now a new report suggests that the update has caused another frustrating issue for users around the globe. Brad Sams on Thurrott.com reports that the Windows 10 Anniversary Update broke millions of webcams. He states...

(Notice the subtle difference in the two requestors. The one on the bottom is the fake one.— Swordmaker) No 9to5Mac reader is going to be at risk from malware that directs users to a scam website and asks them to download software, but Malwarebytes has discovered a previously unknown piece of Mac malware that could easily fool less technical users.Thomas Reed, lead researcher at Malwarebytes, told us that he found the malware on a scam page hosted on the official Advanced Mac Cleaner website … It does rely on a naive user approving a request to install Advanced Mac Cleaner on their machine, but...

Last night (August 17, 2016) a friend of mine want to take some friend to see "Hillary's America — The Secret History of the Democratic Party," the newest documentary film by Dinesh D'Souza. It had been showing at quite a few theaters locally but he suddenly could not find any theaters showing it near Modesto, Stockton or Lodi. He asked me to see if I could find where it was showing. I tried Sacramento. None. . . not a single theater in a city with a metropolitan population over over 1.5 million was showing that film, when just last week...

Berkshire Hathaway, led by Warren Buffett, now owns about $1.4 billion of Apple. Occasionally we hear about various “celebrity investors” taking positions in the company or exiting those positions. The last one I remember was Carl Icahn. He seems to have exited Apple before Berkshire entered. There are some who will act because of these decisions. You should not be one of them. Nor should the management of the firm act in response to investor decisions or concerns. Management is specifically distinct from ownership in the corporate construct precisely in order to bring professionalism to the role. The manager must set priorities...

Tim Cook: Privacy Is Worth Protecting Apple CEO Tim Cook leans on the Founding Fathers to suggest the company did the right thing when asked by the FBI to unlock a terrorist's iPhone. It's an issue that affects IT professionals who need to protect company data, as well as consumers and their personal information. iPhone Encryption: 5 Ways It's Changed Over Time(Click image for larger view and slideshow.) Apple caused quite a stir earlier this year when it refused a request from the US Department of Justice to unlock a suspected terrorist's iPhone. At the time, Apple argued that the...

Mac Man tries to gobble up all the Apples. Illustration: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac Cult of Mac 2.0 bugYou don’t see long lines for the latest Lenovo PC or LG Android phone. But take a quick peek on the internet and you’ll find plenty of people lining up to say how much they hate Apple. Every successful person or company has its critics, but the expressions of vitriol for Apple are more complex than the popular refrain ‘haters gonna hate’. Some are bugged by the price of Apple gadgets, others sneer over the enthusiasm of Apple fans, mockingly referring to...

The “Quadrooter” vulnerabilities in Qualcomm-based Android phones might grant total control over target devices, but Google reckons attacks should hardly ever reach users. The Chocolate Factory reckons the Verify Apps feature in its Play Store was already blocking apps that tried to take advantage of Quadrooter. Only a reckless user would be compromised in the first place, since you'd have to download a compromised app from a non-Google source – and that's where Verify Apps comes in. Google pointed out to Android Central that the four-year-old feature, along with its SafetyNet, was designed to protect users from non-Play Store malice....

Redmond races to revoke Secure Boot debug policy Microsoft leaked the golden keys that unlock Windows-powered tablets, phones and other devices sealed by Secure Boot – and is now scrambling to undo the blunder. These skeleton keys can be used to install non-Redmond operating systems on locked-down computers. In other words, on devices that do not allow you to disable Secure Boot even if you have administrator rights – such as ARM-based Windows RT tablets – it is now possible to sidestep this block and run, say, GNU/Linux or Android. What's more, it is believed it will be impossible...

FBI Director James Comey gestures during an address to the American Bar Association annual meeting SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The FBI's director said Friday the agency is collecting data to present next year in hopes of sparking a national conversation about law enforcement's increasing inability to access encrypted electronic devices. Speaking Friday at the American Bar Association annual conference in San Francisco, James Comey said the agency was unable to access 650 of 5,000 electronic devices investigators attempted to search over the last 10 months. He said the problem is only going to get worse without a discussion about the...

Jeannine Buck took this selfie, using her iPhone moments before she accidentally dropped it out the window.— image credit: Submitted Almost everyone knows that sinking feeling when their beloved smartphone slips from their grasp and falls victim to the laws of gravity. The seconds between falling, hitting the ground and picking the phone up again to assess the damage can seem like an eternity.For one Abbotsford woman, that ordeal took over three hours after she dropped her phone 2,500 feet from the small Cessna 1-40 feet she was riding in on Monday night.One minute Jeannine Buck was taking pictures of...

The flaws affect devices containing Qualcomm chips Serious security flaws that could give attackers complete access to a phone's data have been found in software used on tens of millions of Android devices. The bugs were uncovered by Checkpoint researchers looking at software running on chipsets made by US firm Qualcomm. Qualcomm processors are found in about 900 million Android phones, the company said. However, there is no evidence of the vulnerabilities currently being used in attacks by cyberthieves. "I'm pretty sure you will see these vulnerabilities being used in the next three to four months," said Michael Shaulov, head...

Image: Salvador Mendoza/YouTube A security researcher has discovered limitations in Samsung Pay's security, which, if exploited by an attacker, could be used in another phone to allow someone else to fraudulently make payments.The magnetic-based contactless payment system, which comes standard in many newer Samsung phones, works by translating credit card data into tokens so that a hacker can't grab credit card numbers from the device.But those tokens aren't as secure as one might hope.Salvador Mendoza found that the tokenization process is limited and the sequencing of the tokens can be predicted. In an email prior to his Black Hat talk...