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Apple’s Plan to Move Production Back to U.S. Gets Shape Chief executive officer of Apple this week revealed to the members of the U.S. Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations that the company has invested about $100 million into a production facility in Texas, which will assemble Macintosh computers. In addition, he said that components for the new PCs will be manufactured across various states. “We are investing $100 million to build a Mac product line here in the U.S. The product will be assembled in Texas, include components made in Illinois and Florida, and rely on equipment produced in Kentucky...

<p>As most readers are now aware, technology giant Apple Inc. has in the past few days been the recipient of juvenile attacks from U.S. Senators on both sides of the political aisle. Its alleged misdeed: the legal shielding of overseas earnings from corporate taxation stateside.</p>

By The Editors At a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday, federal lawmakers hauled in America’s most successful corporation to investigate why it had so precisely followed the laws those solons have passed.

At a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday, federal lawmakers hauled in America’s most successful corporation to investigate why it had so precisely followed the laws those solons have passed. The targeting of Apple should be no particular surprise, in Congress’s crass calculus: True, even if reducing one’s tax burden and shifting profits overseas were a crime, Apple would probably not be the first company to investigate for such behavior — as chief executive Tim Cook pointed out, Apple paid $6 billion in corporate-income taxes to the U.S. Treasury in 2012, which is enough to run the entire Transportation Security Administration...

Apple made business decisions that saved it billions in taxes. What was so illegal about doing such a thing? Nothing, absolutely nothing, but don't tell that to the Democrats...

Apple's Bite Apple and its CEO Tim Cook are making history, superseding very serious Administration scandals from the MSM’s consciousness and from the front pages, as they endure a very public assault by Congress for having obeyed corporate and tax laws of the countries in which they conduct business. For decades international corporations have used all tools available to them which might strengthen their business, their health, their market penetration, and their profitability.  For decades most corporations, even small companies, when licensing intellectual property, have followed the rules Congress established, just as Apple has done.  Now, Congress, led by Sen....

In our age of sclerotic growth and sprawling, dysfunctional government, Apple, Inc., represents an astonishing success story. Since its nadir in 1997, the company has increased in value by 6,413 percent. Today Apple, which is estimated to have created around 600,000 jobs, is worth more than the entire American aircraft-carrier fleet. They’re good for the government, too: “To our knowledge Apple is the largest corporate taxpayer in America,” CEO Tim Cook noted yesterday morning. “We paid $6 billion in cash to the U.S. Treasury [in 2012] — that’s $16 million each day. And we expect to pay even more this...

On Tuesday, KY Sen. Rand Paul launched a spirited defense of Apple, whose tax strategies were subject to a hearing of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. "I frankly think the committee should apologize to Apple," Paul said. Paul went on to accuse the committee of "bullying" one of America's greatest companies, prompting Sen. John McCain to quickly defend the inquiry and say that Paul's remarks were "frankly, offensive."

Today was supposed to be a fun one for liberals on the Investigations subcommittee for the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. They were going to haul in Apple’s CEO, CFO, and head of Tax Operations to browbeat them over their lack of — what, patriotism? Dumbness? — for having avoided tax liability last year. This was supposed to provide a little diversion from a week of wall-to-wall Obama administration scandals. Instead, Sen. Rand Paul rained on everyone’s parade, providing an exemplary rebuttal of the brain-dead populism that politicians so often engage in when it comes to corporate...

“I’m offended by a government who convenes a hearing to bully an American success story.”

Apple Inc. paid little to no corporate income tax to any national government on tens of billions of dollars in overseas income over the past four years, Senate investigators found, a revelation that fuels the debate over whether the U.S. tax code needs an overhaul. The disclosure follows a lengthy examination of the technology giant's tax practices by the U.S. Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which is expected to air its findings at a hearing on Tuesday. Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook is preparing to testify at the hearing, and is expected to propose changes to a tax code that...

When Apple introduced the iPad in 2009, it rolled out its own suite of Microsoft Office-like applications. It had "Pages" for word processing, "Numbers" for spreadsheets, and "Keynote" for presentations. Since Microsoft never rolled out a version of Office for the iPad, each of those three apps sold well for Apple. Pages is the most popular paid app of all-time. Keynote is the tenth most popular and Numbers is eleventh. After Apple introduced those apps in 2009, it's largely left them alone. There have been some minor tweaks, but nothing major. That could be about to change. Apple has been...

Add another one to the man's list of prudent business decisions. As relates to his previously documented loathing of Fox News, it's now known that the late Steve Jobs backed up his harsh words by wisely withholding Apple's advertising dollars, according to an upcoming book about the 2012 presidential campaign. The book's author, Jonathan Alter, a Bloomberg political columnist and contributor to MSNBC, tells of Jobs "personally ordering that Apple ads be removed from Fox News," according to a blog post in the New York Times over the weekend. Alter's book, "The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies," is scheduled...

--snip- To understand how big of a deal this is, you need to understand that Apple, the world’s most profitable technology company, works through a large and complicated array of offshore companies to hold its taxable profits overseas. By creating subsidiaries in tax havens like Ireland, Luxembourg, the British Virgin Islands and the Netherlands, the company saves billions in taxes.

Full Title:*********************************************************************How carjacking victim of Boston bombers left his iPhone in his Mercedes so police could track them and thwart their plans to drive to New York ******************************************** FBI officials released surveillance video of suspected bombers on April 18 Hours later Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hijacked a Mercedes'Danny,' the car's owner says the men discussed traveling to NYC Officials have confirmed the Tsarnaevs were carrying a pressure cooker device and 5 pipe-bombs to detonate in Times Square Driver managed to escape when the brothers refilled on gasDanny says he left his iPhone in the Mercedes so police could track the...

Gangnam style is trouncing Cupertino’s when it comes to high tech pre-eminence. You may remember the wild popularity of Psy’s video celebrating the upscale Gangnam shopping district of Seoul, Korea. And a look at Samsung’s latest financial report suggests that Cupertino-based Apple is falling behind fast. After all Samsung — the world’s leader in computer memory chips, televisions, mobile handsets and LCD panels — took a huge chunk out of Apple’s hide in the first three months of 2013. How so? According to Strategy Analytics, Samsung took about 33% of the global smartphone market in the first quarter to Apple’s...

As Apple mildly beat Wall Street expectations for its fiscal second quarter today, CEO Tim Cook continued to promise a rich array of new products will arrive starting this fall–including not just improvements on existing products but “new product categories.” Cook had a lot to prove in Apple’s just-reported results. Amid a seemingly sparse (or at least murky) product roadmap, increasing competition in smartphones and tablets, and a sudden, serious decline in the personal computer business, worried investors have slashed $285 billion off Apple’s market value in just the past six months. Cook delivered–mostly–with stronger-than-expected iPhone sales in particular, highlighting...

Many Apple fans have dreamed of one day getting the chance to drive a car crafted by people behind the iPhone and the iPad. In fact, according to the New York Times, just before he died, Steve Jobs said he wanted to build an Apple car. Now Volkswagen hasteamed upwith the computermakerto deliver the next best thing until Apple decides to actually make its own. The vehicle is called the iBeetle, and while it doesn't look like a sleek iPhone-on-wheels, it does include a decidedly Apple-centric dashboard. Unveiled at this month's Shanghai Auto Show, the iBeetle features an embedded iPhone...

Siri isn't just a pretty voice with the answers. It's also been recording and keeping all the questions users ask. Exactly what the voice assistant does with the data isn't clear, but Apple confirmed that it keeps users' questions for up to two years. Siri, which needs to be connected to the Internet to function, sends all of its users' queries to Apple. Apple revealed the information after Wired posted an article this week raising the question and highlighting the fact that the privacy statement for Siri wasn't very clear about how long that information is kept or what would...

Report: Apple returned 8M shoddy iPhones to Foxconn Manufacturer feeling financial pain after botching a batch By Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor, 22nd April 2013 Foxconn has apparently botched a batch of iPhones, which Apple returned to the contract manufacturer because they were not fit for sale. Details of just what went wrong are sketchy, as the source for this tale is an anonymous Foxconn staffer chatting to China Business. That report, after being forced through a couple of translation engines, suggests Apple sent back at least five million iPhones, and maybe as many as eight million, “due to appearance of...

Apple may be the world’s most celebrated electronics company, but its formerly high-flying stock price has plummeted to Earth over the past six months, declining 40% since last September. On Wednesday, that trend continued when Apple shares tumbled 5.5%, briefly pulling company shares below $400 for the first time since December 2011, and wiping out more than $20 billion in shareholder value. Wednesday’s decline was apparently triggered by a disappointing sales forecast from one of the company’s key suppliers, which fueled fears of weakening demand for Apple’s signature iPhone and iPad products — and added to growing concern about a...

Apple (AAPL) tumbled to its lowest level in over a year as investors continued to dump shares of the tech company amid worries over second-quarter iPad mini shipments. The once-darling tech giant of Wall Street shed more than 3 percent Wednesday, falling to its lowest level since last January, following a report from DigiTimes that iPad mini shipments could fall 20 to 30 percent quarter-over-quarter to 10 to 12 million in the June quarter due to "lacking demand in the market." "We continue to see risks to [Apple's] consensus estimates, primarily with respect to the June quarter," wrote Edward Parker...

Don't blame Windows 8 for plummeting PC sales, a retail analyst said today. "It wasn't about Windows 8, it was much more about the price challenges facing OEMs," said Stephen Baker of the NPD Group, citing U.S. retail sales data the firm collected in the first quarter. "People want cheap touch devices, and that's where Windows 8 devices can't compete right now." While IDC and Gartner last week said U.S. PC shipments dropped 13% and 10% in the first quarter compared to the same three-month span in 2012, Baker said retail sales were essentially flat. And rather than blame Windows...

The U.S. government is struggling to crack into Apple's encrypted messaging system for domestic lawful wiretapping, according to an internal U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) document. Because Apple stores data sent over iMessage and runs the service and encryption in-house, the iPhone and iPad maker is still open to being served a subpoena or a court-ordered search warrant. As a result, Apple is also lagging behind other companies on transparency by not disclosing how many government requests have been made.

Sometimes, the best way to get a handle on the unpredictable is to label it with a completely random numerical value. Oddsmaking is a combination of magical thinking, intuition and sheer chance. With that in mind, here are the odds that Vegas bookmakers might want to give to the following world events: 1. North Korea starts a war with South Korea: 10% My biggest fear is that the West believes that North Korea does not actually feel threatened and is simply posturing. But that assumption has almost never, ever held water for any conflicts. It's been a huge blind spot;...

Whether it’s because of product fatigue, a botched Maps application launch, or increased competition from rivals like Samsung (PINK:SSNLF) and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has found it increasingly difficult to please its shareholders. Since hitting an all-time high of $702.10 in September, Apple shares have slid some 35%. The drop is worse when you consider that the Nasdaq (INDEX NASDAQ:.IXIC) has risen 2.32% while the Dow (INDEX DJX:.DJI) has gained almost 7% in the same time period. One USA Today columnist has even said that Apple’s reign over the tech world “may be over.” “[Apple’s] phone market, tablet market, and...

El Rushbo's Favorite Apple Tech Blogs March 22, 2013 BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Rosie in Lake Havasu, Arizona, it's great to have you here. Hi. CALLER: Hi. I just wanted to start off by saying that I'm 16, I'm in the 11th grade, and I'm also a freshman in college. I just wanted to start off in saying, thank you for helping me. In one of and has us debate certain thingslike immigration, national debt, unemployment -- and, my favorite, Obamacare.It's really refreshing to go home and, like, listen to you and realize,no, I'm not crazy.Because, as classical liberals, they...

Gnome project cofounder and current Xamarin CTO Miguel de Icaza says he's done wrestling with Linux on the desktop, and that he now uses Apple kit exclusively for all of his workstation needs. De Icaza is well known in the open source community for developing a number of client-side technologies for Linux, including the Midnight Commander file shell, the Gnome desktop environment, and the Mono project. But in a blog post on Tuesday, de Icaza wrote that not only does he no longer use Linux for his day-to-day computing needs, but he hasn't actually booted his Linux workstation since October...

The Greatest Investment Opportunity Since 1984 Companies / Sector AnalysisMarch 12, 2013 - 06:03 PM GMT By: Investment U Andrew Snyder writes: There are three reasons investors absolutely must have their eye on the world’s booming unmanned aircraft market. Not one of them involves a 13-hour rant by Rand Paul or Obama’s ability to kill American citizens on American soil. But the recent political brouhaha is proof that you need to move. If you’ve followed the press, you’ve undoubtedly heard today’s drone market compared to the computer industry in the early 1980s. In fact, on January 25, Yahoo!ran a headline...

Analysis Rumors are again swirling that Apple and Intel are in discussions about Chipzilla baking the chips Cupertino uses to power its iDevices. "A source close to one of the companies says Intel and Apple executives have discussed the issue in the past year but no agreement has been reached," Reuters reported on Thursday. This isn't be the first such report. Similar rumors swirled in May 2011, when an analyst from Piper Jaffray said, "Based on a number of inputs, we believe Intel is also vying for Apple's foundry business." Vying, possibly. Succeeding, not yet. But things have changed since...

STOCKS HIT NEW BULL MARKET HIGHS AS APPLE PLUNGE CONTINUES: Here's What You Need To Know Sam RoMarch 4, 2013 Stocks continue to march toward their all-time highs. And they're doing it without the help of Apple. First the scoreboard: Dow: 14,127, +38.1 pts, +0.2 percent S&P 500: 1,525, +7.0 pts, +0.4 percent NASDAQ: 3,182, +12.2 pts, +0.3 percent And now the top stories: * It was a quiet day in the markets and the economy. This is the first full week with the federal budget cuts known as sequestration ripple across the economy. Yet, the markets continued to grind...

Apple's iWatch, which is reportedly coming this year, could kill three birds with one stone for Apple. 1. It gives Apple an experimental entry in the wearable computing market which is said to be the next big thing 2. If done well it would kill the Apple-can't-innovate-without-Steve Jobs meme 3. It could be super profitable. Let's tackle the third one. Bloomberg, citing a Citigroup report, says the global watch industry will do $60 billion in sales this year, with average gross margins of 60 percent. Apple's iWatch, should it be released, will probably not fit neatly into the watch industry,...

The strength of Apple's iPad business is collapsing as lower priced, smaller tablets eat into sales, says Citi's Apple analysts in a new note this morning. The 9.7-inch iPad's unit sales were only up 1.8% on a year-over-year basis in the fourth quarter, says Citi, citing IDC data. In developed markets like the U.S. and Japan, unit sales were actually down quite a bit. The bigger iPad is being replaced by Apple's iPad Mini, as well as the 7-inch tablets sold by Samsung and Amazon. According to IDC, Apple has 38.8% of the tablet market, which is industry leading, but...

Apple CEO Tim Cook will sit with First Lady Michelle Obama during President Obama's State of the Union address on Tuesday night. It marks the second year in a row the invitation has been extended to the Apple family. Last year, Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, joined Michelle Obama in the coveted spot. During an appearance on CNBC, White House economic advisor Gene Sperling confirmed Cook's participation. "Apple is a great American company, and it stands for our sense of innovation, invention, entrepreneurship, and risk taking and I think that's quite an appropriate person to be...

Back in the 1970's Steve Wozniak worked for Hewlett Packard designing its hit product, engineering calculators. At night and on the weekends, often in his HP cubicle, he tinkered on a little project that would one day become the Apple I computer. Woz designed the hardware, circuit boards and operating system for the Apple I. Woz took his pet project to HP and "begged" them to manufacture the PC, he told Georgia State University students on Wednesday. "Five times they turned me down," the Atlanta Business Chronicle quotes Wozniak from his lecture. When Steve Jobs saw the Apple I, he...

It was one of one of those grand summits in the journey through life, when the entire landscape is set before you in ultra-high definition. Suddenly, you know where you are, where you are going and what you have to do to get there. I upgraded my iPhone....

Sure, the retail "investors" are coming back into the "markets"... They are coming back in shifts. And just so they know what to expect, here is what happened to Apple stock in the last second of regular trading today, courtesy of Nanex. Unlike traditional flash crashes where the trade is an HFT error, or a few shares traded through the entire bid or offer stack, in this case it looks like a very premeditated unloading of some 800K shares (some $350 million worth) of AAPL in the last second, with the full knowledge it was shake the market. Why anyone...

Last night, Apple reported fourth quarter earnings of $13.81 per share, which was well above the $13.44 that analysts were expecting, but the stock cratered in after-hours trading and is down more than 10% so far today. Typically, when a company blows away analyst estimates for its quarterly earnings you can expect to see a big jump in the stock, but in this case, there were other indicators that bothered traders. As we noted in our earnings preview yesterday, no matter what results Apple published, we were going to see a big move in the stock, and that is exactly...

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Al Gore Nets Another Fortune on Apple Stock By Javier E. David Former U.S. vice president Al Gore recently netted a huge payday by selling his cable station. Now, it appears he's making another big profit buying Apple's (AAPL) stock on the cheap. Al Gore According to a filing with the Securities and Exchanges Commission, Gore -- a director on Apple's board -- exercised an option to purchase nearly 60,000 shares of the tech giant at the bargain basement price of $7.48, costing him a total of about $445,000. But with Apple's current market price at about $500 a share,...

Reports say iPhone 5 demand is now half of planned figures. Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is said to have slashed component orders. The pre-market stock price is falling fast, heading below $500.

MOSCOW, January 9 (RIA Novosti) – A memorial to world renowned tech innovator and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was unveiled in St. Petersburg on Wednesday. The monument, a giant replica of a black, late model iPhone with a screen that displays a photo and video slideshow of Jobs’ life, is located in the courtyard of the St. Petersburg National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics. On the back, the monument features a QR code which observers can scan before being directed to a website commemorating the Apple co-founder

Apple is believed to be secretly developing a 'smart watch' with a touchscreen. Chinese online sites have reported the computer giant is working with chipmaker Intel on a wrist-worn gadget that has a 1.5inch screen and uses Bluetooth to communicate with other gadgets, which could include an iPhone.

Sales of the Windows 8 operating system, which was launched on October 26, were driven by upgrades rather than users purchasing the software on new machines, according to Reuters. Microsoft sold 60 million Windows 7 licenses in two months, compare to 40 million licenses of Windows 8 in one month. Tami Reller, finance and marketing head of Microsoft's Windows division, said yesterday: "Windows 8 upgrade momentum is outpacing that of Windows 7," speaking at an investor conference held by Credit Suisse. Previous versions of Microsoft operating systems sold considerably fewer licenses than Windows 8 in a comparable period, with XP...

Google has nearly completed work on a new version of Google Maps for the iPhone. Citing sources familiar with Google's plans, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google is now field testing the app outside of Google. It should soon be ready for Google to submit to Apple for approval. Apple booted Google Maps from the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch earlier this year with the introduction of iOS 6. Google Maps was a part of iOS from the very first iPhone through September of this year -- a partnership that lasted more than five years. But Apple has been...

Dan Crow, another former Apple employee from the 1990s, also says Apple has shown itself to be doomed without Steve Jobs, in a piece for The Guardian headlined “We’ve Passed Peak Apple�: Why do I think Apple has passed its peak? There are a number of signs. The most visible recent one is the Maps debacle. Replacing Google Maps with an obviously inferior experience shows how much Apple has changed. Apple’s success had been all about offering users the best possible experience; suddenly it is willing to give users a clearly worse experience to further its corporate interests - in...

UK court orders Apple to pay Samsung's legal fees in full after 'false and misleading' notice The Court of Appeal of England and Wales has ordered Apple to pay the legal fees of competitor Samsung on an 'indemnity basis' after the company published a "false and misleading" notice in the wake of a patent lawsuit over the iPad. The judgement, intended to humiliate Apple, will require the company to pay for all expenses associated with Samsung's legal defense, with any disputes over the exact amount likely to be resolved in the latter firm's favor.

By most indications, Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT  ) foray into hardware is meeting, if not exceeding, expectations. Of course, you'll never hear that from CEO Steve Ballmer, and by extension the rest of Microsoft's management team. Ballmer is notoriously hush-hush about sales results, and not just those pertaining to Microsoft's new Surface tablet; most anything to do with what he views as "predictions" are taboo.For example, when the Wall Street Journal asked about early sales of Microsoft's Surface a week or so back, his response was vintage Ballmer, "Numerically there's not really much that's interesting to report. If you were to call...

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer claims that Microsoft has sold 4 million upgrades to Windows 8 in the first three of its launch -- more than the 3 million upgrades of Mountain Lion sold in the first four days of its launch. That sounds impressive -- but is it really good news for Microsoft? During Microsoft's BUILD Conference today, Ballmer said, "In just the last three days, we have sold 4 million Windows 8 upgrades. The level of embrace from enthusiasts is very, very high." He later called the results "stunning. Computerworld's Gregg Keizer notes that those numbers are likely downloads,...