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Apple today announced financial results for the fourth calendar quarter of 2012 and first fiscal quarter of 2013. For the quarter, Apple posted revenue of $54.5 billion and net quarterly profit of $13.1 billion, or $13.81 per diluted share, compared to revenue of $46.33 billion and net quarterly profit of $13.06 billion, or $13.87 per diluted share in the year-ago quarter. Apple's quarterly profit and revenue were both all-time company records.

Gross margin for the quarter was 38.6 percent, compared to 44.7 percent in the year-ago quarter, and international sales accounted for 61 percent of revenue. Apple also declared another dividend payment of $2.65 per share, payable on February 14 to shareholders as of the close of trading on February 11. The company currently holds $137.1 billion in cash and marketable securities.


Quarterly iPhone unit sales reached 47.8 million, compared to 37 million and the company sold 22.9 million iPads, up from 15.4 million in the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 4.1 million Macintosh computers, compared to 5.2 million in the year-ago period, as well as 12.7 million iPods, down from 15.4 million a year ago. Apple set new sales records for both iPhone and iPad sales.

“We’re thrilled with record revenue of over $54 billion and sales of over 75 million iOS devices in a single quarter,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We’re very confident in our product pipeline as we continue to focus on innovation and making the best products in the world.”

Apple's guidance for the second quarter of fiscal 2013 includes expected revenue of $41-43 billion.


Apple will provide live streaming of its Q1 2013 financial results conference call at 2:00 PM Pacific, and MacRumors will update this story with coverage of the conference call highlights.

Philip Elmer-Dewitt has assembled his quarterly list of analyst predictions ahead of Apple's earnings report this afternoon. The list includes estimates from 67 analysts: 28 "independent" and 39 "institutional" who work for large investment houses or research organizations.


As usual, the independents are much more bullish than the institutional analysts. The independent consensus expects earnings per share (EPS) of $15.11 on revenue of $58.84 billion. The institutional consensus is EPS of $13.45 on $54.74 billion in revenue. Across all analysts, the median expectation is for earnings of $14.20 on $55.96 billion in revenue, a year-over-year increase of 10% and 30% respectively. 2011's holiday quarter was the strongest in the company's history.

Last quarter the company earned $8.2 billion in profit on revenue of $36 billion. For this quarter, Apple issued guidance of $52 billion in revenue with profits of $11.75 per share. The company has, in the past, exceeded its guidance by a significant margin.

Apple will announce its earnings for the first fiscal quarter of 2013 (fourth calendar quarter of 2012) and host a conference call regarding the release this afternoon at 5:00 PM Eastern / 2:00 PM Pacific. The earnings release itself typically comes in around 4:30 PM Eastern. MacRumors will have live coverage of the proceedings.

Apple is running a Valentine's Day promotion on its online store, drawing attention to its free engraving offer and signature gift-wrapping service. The campaign features the iPad and iPad mini as ideal gifts for the holiday, with the iPod touch and iPod nano also being highlighted.


Apple has also posted a specific webpage with ordering deadlines to ensure delivery by Valentine's Day. Deadlines for standard shipping range from January 30 to February 5 depending on the product and whether or not it is being engraved.

A red email gift card option is also available for the holiday.

Steve Jobs threatened to file a patent suit against Palm if they didn't agree to not hire Apple employees, according to a Reuters report on a court filing (via AppleInsider) made public Tuesday. The court filing is a part of a class action lawsuit against Apple, Google, Pixar, Lucasfilm and others over an agreement those companies made to not hire each other's employees.


The companies attempted to keep an array of documents secret, but that request was rejected in parts by Judge Lucy Koh, which is why a statement from former Palm executive Edward Colligan has become public record. Colligan said that Jobs proposed the agreement to Palm, and that Jobs suggested that if Palm didn't agree they could face lawsuits "alleging infringement of Apple's many patents." Colligan responded to Jobs with an email:

Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other's employees, regardless of the individual's desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal.[...] Palm doesn't target other companies-we look for the best people we can find. l'd hope the same could be said about Apple1s practices. However, during the last year or so, as Apple geared up to compete with Palm in the phone space, Apple hired at least 2% of Palm's workforce. To put it in perspective, had Palm done the same, we'd have hired 300 folks from Apple. Instead, to my knowledge, we've hired just three.

Colligan also told Jobs that he was not intimidated by patent litigation and said that Palm had recently acquired some patents from Siemens that it could use against Apple and its iPhone patents. Jobs responded:

Just for the record, when Siemens sold their handset business to BenQ they didn't sell them their essential patents but rather just gave them a license. The patents they did sell to BenQ are not that great. We looked at them ourselves when they were for sale. I guess you guys felt differently and bought them. We are not concerned about them at all. My advice is to take a look at our patent portfolio before you make a final decision here.

Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs revealed that Jobs was angry at Palm for hiring former employees, although the threat of patent litigation in Colligan's statement is certainly a new revelation.

"Jobs was so furious that Palm was hiring some of his former employees that he complained to Bono, who was a cofounder of a private equity group, led by the former Apple CFO Fred Anderson, that had bought a controlling stake in Palm."

These aren't the only instances that Jobs became angry at the poaching of Apple employees, however. In January 2012 it was revealed, also according to a court filing, that Jobs complained to then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt about the hiring of Apple employees at Google.

Recently, current CEO Tim Cook was ordered to give a deposition in this case, so more nuggets of information are likely to be released as court filings are made public.

As TechCrunch reports, Apple has pulled photo sharing app 500px for iOS from the App Store because of concerns over nude photos. Though the company says that its recent acquisition ISO500 for 500px from Pulpfingers was also removed from the App Store, it remains available for download.

500px is a popular website for both professional and amateur photographers, and according to 500px COO Evgeny Tchebotarev, the company's mobile apps have been downloaded by more than a million users. TechCrunch has a rundown on what happened:

The apps were pulled from the App Store this morning around 1 AM Eastern, and had completely disappeared by noon today. The move came shortly after last night's discussions with Apple related to an updated version of 500px for iOS, which was in the hands of an App Store reviewer.

The Apple reviewer told the company that the update couldn't be approved because it allowed users to search for nude photos in the app. This is correct to some extent, but 500px had actually made it tough to do so, explains Tchebotarev. New users couldn't just launch the app and locate the nude images, he says, the way you can today on other social photo-sharing services like Instagram or Tumblr, for instance. Instead, the app defaulted to a "safe search" mode where these types of photos were hidden. To shut off safe search, 500px actually required its users to visit their desktop website and make an explicit change.

Tchebotarev said the company did this because they don't want kids or others to come across these nude photos unwittingly. "Some people are mature enough to see these photos," he says, "but by default it's safe."

According to Tchebotarev, 500px does not allow explicit pornographic images, and he explains that most of the nude images on 500px are "artistic."

Though the app has been in the App Store for 16 months, it runs off of the 500px site, which is currently limited to community moderation for inappropriate photos. 500px is working on a solution that will automatically flag questionable photos to prevent them from appearing in searches, but the technology is not yet finished.

Flickr, Tumblr, and other photo sites that function in the same way, with user-based moderation, remain available in the App Store.

500px has created a fix to address the nude photo issue, which has already been submitted to Apple and could result in the return of the apps to the App Store shortly.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today officially granted Apple a patent (via AppleInsider) describing methods for automatically adjusting screen brightness to suit the content being displayed. The patent, which was originally filed for in mid-2006 and can actually be traced back to a separate 2002 application, addresses techniques for saving battery life on portable devices.

The improved techniques reduce power consumption by lowering display intensity at appropriate times. In one embodiment, the display intensity can be controlled depending on the type of content being displayed. For example, when displaying certain types of content, the display intensity can be lowered from its otherwise high, constant intensity level. In another embodiment, the display intensity can be controlled depending on the characteristics of the content being displayed. For example, when displaying images that are light, the display intensity can be lowered from its otherwise high, constant intensity level. In still another embodiment, the display intensity can be controlled depending on the type and characteristics of content being displayed.

Apple's battery-powered devices have long had the capability to automatically dim displays based on such criteria as power source (battery vs. wall power), ambient light levels and usage (dimming the display of a device that hasn't been used for a particular time interval). Dimming the screen based on content, such as when a particularly bright image is displayed, requires a more sophisticated approach, something that Apple has clearly been working on for some time.


Apple actually now uses a variation on this invention for its Passbook application in iOS 6 for the iPhone, automatically boosting the display's brightness to maximum when the app is launched in order to make it easier for scanners to read the 2D barcodes used on passes within the app.

The patent suggests that Apple's plans for content-sensitive automatic brightness adjustment could even extend as far as frame-by-frame or scene-by-scene adjustments when viewing videos, with users also being able to configure their own preferences for content-based brightness.

After its announcement at CES earlier this month, Hippih has begun selling its hipKey smart sensor in the U.S. through the Apple Online Store for $90. It launched on European Apple Online Stores back in December, but quickly sold out. It's now back in stock on both the U.S. and European stores.

The hipKey is a high tech way of keeping track of your valuables. Simply attach the device to the item of your choice and you’re ready to go. Made of a sculptured one-piece anodized aluminum ring surrounded by high-quality plastic parts, its sleek oval form fits perfectly in your palm or pocket. You can even attach it to your keys.

Alarm mode - Warns you if you forget your iPhone or iPad or if someone attempts to steal it.

Child mode - Alerts you if your child wanders too far away from you.

Motion mode - Put hipKey in your bag and you are alerted if someone moves it.

Find Me mode - Quickly find your iPhone, iPad, or your keys at any time.

The hipKey's battery is supposed to last between two and four weeks between charging. The iPhone app is available free on the App Store, while the device itself is $90 through the Apple Online Store.

Following Digitimes' report (and then debunking) that Apple planned to launch a 5-inch iPhone later this year, Russian site AppleDigger.ru has created a mockup of what such an iPhone could look like [Google Translate].

The original rumor was always suspect, but is even more so now that DigiTimes is backtracking on its own story. We post this video now mostly for discussion purposes.

Earlier this week, China Times published a rumor that Apple could release an "iPhone Math", a larger iPhone with a 4.8" screen that could compete with "phablets" like the Samsung Galaxy Note. Though the name is particularly suspect, it's possible that Apple would want to get into that product category. Samsung has had some success in the area, and similar products were popular at CES this year.

Russian site AppleDigger.ru has created a mockup of what such an iPhone could look like [Google Translate]. One significant part that the video gets incorrect is that the original rumor claimed the larger phone will come with an 8-megapixel camera, whilst the video says it will have a 12-megapixel camera. Instead, an update to the iPhone is said to come before the holiday season this year, upgrading the lens to 12-megapixels.


Considering the sketchiness of the "iPhone Math" rumor and the lack of any specific claims about how Apple would handle the larger display in iOS, the mockup video should primarily be viewed as a concept giving a general idea of what such a device might look like.

Microsoft today announced that its Surface Pro tablet will go on sale on February 9 in the United States and Canada. Originally slated to arrive in January, the Surface Pro tablet is priced at $899 for the 64GB model and $999 for the 128GB model.

The Surface Pro sports an Intel Core i5 processor with Intel HD Graphics 4000, 4GB of RAM, and a more robust battery. Unlike the RT version of the Surface, it is able to run the full version of Windows 8 as well as Windows 7 applications.

Both versions of the Surface Pro ship with a Surface pen, but the Touch or Type Covers, which retail for $100, are not included.

Anandtech took a preliminary look at the tablet, and created a chart comparing the Surface Pro to the Surface RT and Apple's iPad.


Beginning on February 9, the Surface Pro will be available for purchase on Microsoft’s website, at Microsoft retail outlets, and third party retailers like Staples and Best Buy.

Alongside the Pro, Microsoft is planning to release a 64GB standalone version of the Surface RT for $599, $100 less than the version that ships with the included Touch Cover, and a slew of new Surface accessories.