Biz Break: Apple’s iPhone remains a diamond after 10 years

Top of the Order:

Pop Those Corks: Traditionally, the tenth wedding anniversary is the tin or aluminum anniversary. That may be practical, but try giving your wife a roll of aluminum foil or a picture of the Tin Man from “The Wizard of Oz” as an anniversary gift for putting up with you for a decade and you might not make it another 10 years.

No, better to stick with a gift from the “modern” list, which recommends diamond jewelry. Yeah, it may cost a few bucks more, but sometimes it’s better to be safe than sorry. No one ever really complains about diamonds.

And if there was ever a diamond in the smartphone market over the last decade, it has been Apple’s iPhone.

Yes, 10 years ago today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the stage at the Macworld show in San Francisco and changed the telecommunications industry forever by unveiling the first iPhone. I was at that event. The way the crowd at the Moscone Center reacted to Jobs showing off the iPhone, you would have thought Beyonce had just won the Super Bowl by herself on Christmas Day. All for a touchscreen phone that, for its base model, cost $499 for just 4 gigabytes of storage. It was that kind of crazy.

Go back in time and read the press release Apple put out when it debuted the first iPhone.

Sure, nothing was a given with that first iPhone. You had to be an AT&T customer to get one, and it wasn’t even a 3G phone, at that. This was back in the day when Blackberry was king, Motorola had some muscle and even Nokia was still a popular name. And as we all know, the iPhone left them all in its unforgiving wake.

Remember the Microsoft Kin? Maybe not, but it never stood a chance. The Amazon Fire phone? The e-commerce giant stopped selling it after just a year. The Samsung Galaxy Note 7? It blew up, literally, enough times for the electronics giant to completely pull the plug on it.

Even though iPhone sales have begun to decline, no single smartphone name on the market even comes close to Apple’s signature product. Sure, when Apple reported its fourth-quarter results, in October, iPhone sales were off by 13 percent from a year ago — and yet, Apple still sold 45.5 million iPhones, good enough for $28.2 billion in revenue. Think Google wouldn’t want just half of those numbers from its new Pixel phones?

We’ve covered the iPhone 10th anniversary with a look at some of the device’s milestones over the last decade, as well as how a product that didn’t get universal acclaim at first managed to change nearly everyone’s life. Now, more than 1 billion iPhone sales later, it remains Apple’s world. The rest of us are just living in it, and waiting for the so-called iPhone 8 to arrive.

Middle Innings:

Meanwhile, in Canada: It took two years, but Apple has gotten off the hook north of the border.

In case you missed it, Canada’s Competition Bureau said last Friday that it hadn’t found enough evidence to show that Apple had engaged in anti-competitive behavior with regards to selling the iPhone in Canada.

Since December 2014, the CCB had been looking into allegations that Apple’s Canadian unit had forced mobile-phone operators in the country to hike the prices of other smartphones and had put restrictions on how those operators could market and sell the iPhone. The CCB said that it hadn’t found any evidence to suggest Apple’s business practices had a significant impact on competition in Canada.

Russia moves against LinkedIn: Oh, Russia. Not again.

Authorities in Russia have told Apple and Google to remove LinkedIn’s app from the companies’ app stores in the country, due to LinkedIn violating Russian laws that require internet companies to store data about Russian citizens on servers inside of Russia. LinkedIn’s own site was blocked from use within Russia because it stored the data about Russian citizens outside the country.

Bottom of the Lineup:

Here’s a look at how some leading Silicon Valley stocks did Monday.

Movin’ on Up: Gains came from Ultra Clean Holdings, Rocket Fuel, Barracuda Networks, Natus Medical and Nvidia.

In the Red: Decliners include Pandora Media, Chegg, IXYS, Tessera Holding and YuMe.

The tech-focused Nasdaq Composite Index rose 0.2 percent to end the day at 5,531.82.

The blue chip Dow Jones Industrial Average gave up 0.4 percent to finish at 19,887.38.

And the broad-based Standard & Poor’s 500 Index ended the day off by 0.4 percent at 2,268.90.

Quote of the Day: “One of the most overrated actresses in Hollywood.” — President-elect Donald Trump, who tweeted his comments about actress Meryl Streep on Monday after Streep gave a speech critical about Trump at the Golden Globe Awards Sunday night.

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Published at Mon, 09 Jan 2017 22:47:12 +0000