A Memory of Gateway

2007.08.28   prev     next

jump to bottom

ABOUT a dozen years ago or so, I was coming out of H&H Music after purchasing a large fake-book in what would ultimately prove a futile attempt to figure out how hit songs are composed. Nearby, in the set of strip centers just outside Baybrook Mall, was a “Gateway Country” store, easily visible from a zillion miles away by its big, black and white cow colors.

Every time I saw that Gateway store, it depressed me. As an Apple aficionado I had watched my favorite computer decline steadily throughout the late ’80s and into the mid ’90s under the stewardship of stiff CEOs from Planet Suit’n’tie. Both the company and its products seemed to get bleaker by the year. The computers looked more and more like generic, beige boxes, not significantly different than their market-dominating cousins on the Windows side. OS 8 and 9 looked more like a copy of Windows than ever, the interface items becoming greyer and squarer with each iteration. And Apple’s retail presence was almost completely confined to obscure, local, niche stores that didn’t do a particularly good job of showing off the product in any public way. As if to cement the certainty of Apple’s demise, Gateway, the then-juggernaut of the PC world, suddenly built their stores all over the place.

I never set foot in that Gateway store (something I now regret) — not out of spite but because I thought that my depressing feeling about Apple’s fate would only get ten times worse once I had seen the Gateway glory firsthand. So in my mind, I imagined a stunning, clean interior with gleaming, screaming-fast computers neatly arranged, and friendly, bright, knowledgeable employees brimming with answers to every doubt one might have about why to buy a Gateway PC. “If only Apple had something like that,” I thought at the time, “but I guess you have to command Gateway-like volume to support the cost. Oh well.”

And then, as in the old cartoon with the scientists at their blackboard ... a miracle occurred. First, in what seemed like a wildly improbable move, Apple bought out NeXT, and reinstalled Steve Jobs back at the helm — at first in a so-called “interim” position, but then as time went by in what became clearly a permanent leadership post. Mac OS got a complete overhaul and became OS X. The first iMacs appeared, and I’m ashamed to say my honest initial reaction was, “Oh no, a tiny, cute, all-in-one Mac! This time in candy blue! Steve’s back and he’s crazier than ever!” But that reaction would turn to new respect and admiration just months later when, to my surprise, iMac sales turned out to be quite robust.

And the miracles didn’t stop. Just as suddenly as they had appeared, the Gateway stores all closed! Just like that. And at about the same time, Apple announced that they would be opening a set of retail stores around the country. Pundits quickly predicted dismal failure for these stores — after all, if Gateway couldn’t do it, how could Apple? — but I had a gut hunch it would work, especially when I heard that Apple’s goal for these stores was just that they break even. Exactly: Don’t lose money on them, and get people seeing Apple from a pro-Apple perspective for the first time ever. That sounded right to me. And, as if we didn’t all know by now, it worked beautifully. The Apple stores were everything I imagined the Gateway stores had been, and more.

Then came the iPod. As soon as I saw the first commercial for it, with a Cosmo Kramer-like New Yorker jamming his way out of his apartment to the hopping sounds of the Propellorheads, I breathed a sigh of relief: I had almost taken the bait and bought a Creative Nomad just weeks earlier when my all-things-tech buddy Jim Kluka (now an Indianapolis home theater designer) showed me one in the Vegas Harrah’s. Cool indeed, but not quite portable enough and not quite user-navigable enough, I thought. Better wait until they come out with a smaller, easier-to-use model. And they did — Apple did. Imagine that!

No sooner did the iPod take off than the pundits once again predicted doom. Here comes Microsoft with their own music store technologies and DRM, and they’ll license it to anyone who wants to buy! Meaning everyone but Apple. Too bad, said the naysayers, it’s going to be a repeat of Windows beating out the Mac all over again. And VHS beating out Beta. But a few pro-Apple voices said no — Beta only ever had dominance of an infant market, and the Mac never rose above 10% market share. Neither product was beaten out of a dominant share of a mature market. That position has been enjoyed only by VHS, by Windows — and now, by iPod. Needless to say, the iPod is still going strong, years after the Beta/Mac analogy wore thin and dropped off the op/ed radar.

Need I even mention iPhone? Icing on the cake. Its the PDA and the cell-phone both finally done right, and with an even better iPod thrown into the bargain. Who will confidently predict its failure? Anyone? Anyone? And hey, I think I just heard someone say that Apple’s market share in computers (not handheld devices) is rising towards 10% for the first time since the mid ’80s. How high will it go this time? Wait, did I just hear the sound of Windows proponents grumbling that Vista is a basket of headaches? And how about all those viruses swarming all over the Windows community? I’ve never installed anti-virus software on my Mac, never even configured a firewall. It just doesn’t seem to be a problem.

In my mind’s eye, I can still see that Gateway store with its white paint blazing in the insane Texas heat. Now comfortably relegated to the status of memory. Thank you, Steve. Miracles do happen.

September 3 ⋅ Just heard that Gateway has now been bought out by Acer, for a small fraction of their valuation back when I used to see that Gateway store at Baybrook Mall. Oh, and Baybrook now has an Apple store. In the mall. I’ll have to check it out if I’m ever back in Texas.

Hyperlinks inside quoted text are not necessarily from the quotation source.

2 0 0 8

January ⋅ You know those somewhat-cool-looking Dell kiosks you see in many malls? The kiosks where you can play with Dell products, but not actually buy anything? Dell’s just announced they’re getting rid of them. Too sweet. (Update: After a near-four-year hiatus, the Dell kiosk has reappeared at one of my local malls, Polaris Fashion Place. It looks significantly cooler than the old one, but still doesn’t seem to be attracting crowds.) (Update: That new kiosk lasted a little over a year; now it’s gone again.)

March ⋅ At its peak (in the latter half of the ’80s) the Mac had nearly 10% market share, then sunk to 5% or less for a very long time after that. NPD just reported that the Mac hit 14% last month, and was 25% by revenue. It has begun. (Note: 25% / 14% = 1.8, which means that, on average, Mac users paid 80% more for their computers. That does not, however, mean that a Mac costs 80% more than a similarly equipped PC — do a price comparison and see for yourself. It simply means that the average Mac user buys a better-equipped model than does the average PC purchaser.)

April ⋅ This is just getting better and better every few months. Gartner analysts say Windows is collapsing due to bad design. Apple just had a record quarter, in the middle of a recession, no less. And check this portentous analysis of Microsoft’s situation at RoughlyDrafted.

May ⋅ Joel On Software’s very negative assessment of Microsoft’s “architecture astronauts”, which reminds me of Surface, and how you can’t use Windows-dominance leverage against successful third-party products when those successful third-party products don’t actually exist. (And don’t miss this hilarious episode of Fake Steve gloating over the iPhone SDK and the equally hysterical first reader response and its counter-response!) (Update 2009.11.25: Sadly, all the original comments are now gone. But the article itself is still available here.)

July ⋅ Apple passes Acer to become the #3 U.S. PC vendor. (Say, didn’t Acer recently buy up Gateway?) Satoshi Nakajima, chief architect of Windows 95 and 98, switches to Mac, and “says that he’ll never touch a PC again.” Steven Smith, most ardent Zune supporter, gives up, and says he will hide his Zune tattoos.

October ⋅ iPhone is now the top-selling smartphone beating out second-place BlackBerry by 25%.

November ⋅ iPhone is now the #1 selling model of mobile phone (not just smartphone) in USA, beating out the former #1, Motorola’s RAZR.

December ⋅ Worldwide, iPhone now outsells all Windows Mobile devices combined.

2 0 0 9

January ⋅ Microsoft is getting ready to lay off 5,000 people. Apple’s experienced steady revenue growth throughout the Bush recession.

February ⋅ Microsoft shareholders enraged at billions and billions of dollars of R&D with nothing much to show for it.

March ⋅ Ages 12, 9, and 6, the children of Bill Gates are prohibited from owning an iPod or iPhone.

April ⋅ iPhone’s web traffic, worldwide, now surpasses all Symbian phones, putting iPhone in first place. Microsoft has its first revenue drop since going public in 1986. Remember this update from one year ago (see above)? Apple had a record quarter in the middle of a recession. Well here we are a year later, the recession is still going strong, and Apple just eclipsed last year’s record quarter with another record quarter. Microsoft’s year-over-year quarterly profits are down 32%.

May ⋅ iPhone market share doubled from the year-ago quarter. Three pieces of malware found on factory-fresh Windows netbook. Dell’s net income falls 63% from the year-ago quarter.

June ⋅ Apple’s New York glass-cube store pulled in revenue of $440 million last year — all during a recession. iPhone 3GS sells over one million units during its opening weekend.

July ⋅ London Stock Exchange to abandon Windows. (Update: It switched to Linux, and it’s been having some problems with that.) iPhone is now the best-selling smartphone in Japan, a country that supposedly wasn’t interested in iPhone. Apple’s market cap passes Goo­gle’s. Apple now accounts for 20% of all profits in the entire mobile phone industry. Apple now receives 91% of all revenue on computers costing $1,000 or more. Apple’s market valuation now greater than HP and Dell combined.

August ⋅ iPhone now pulls in a third of all mobile phone profits worldwide (not just on smartphones). Remember the highly successful IBM ThinkPad line of laptops, that was sold off to Lenovo? Lenovo just reported a $16 million loss for the quarter. iPhone sales increase more than 6x during the second quarter of 2009. iPhone now the bestselling phone (not just smartphone) in Japan.

September ⋅ Of the fifteen entrants in Microsoft’s own app development contest, the only one to develop for a non-Microsoft platform (iPhone) wins the contest. Dell’s latest quarterly year-over-year profits are down 23%.

October ⋅ Mac sales up 17% from the year-ago quarter — and they’re higher than any quarter in Apple’s history, including holiday quarters (which this wasn’t).

November ⋅ iPhone app count now past 100,000. Steve Jobs named Fortune’s “CEO of the Decade.” Apple now has no debt, and greater liquid assets than any other tech company. Apple’s iPhone profits overtake Nokia’s, putting iPhone in the top spot. iPhones are now 17% of all smartphones sold, worldwide. Dell’s net income drops 54% from the year-ago quarter. iPhone is now 50% of all mobile data traffic in the USA, in the UK, and worldwide. Last month, Apple received nearly half of all desktop computer retail revenue in the USA.

December ⋅ In about a year in Japan, iPhone takes close to half of the smartphone market. January-October 2009 data show that more iPhone 3G phones are in use than any other single model of mobile phone in the USA.

2 0 1 0

January ⋅ From the year-ago quarter, Mac sales up 33%, iPhone sales up 100%.

February ⋅ NPD now reports that 90% of all $1,000+ computers sold in the last quarter of 2009 in the USA were Macs; that’s not just by revenue, it’s not just by retail, and it’s not just by laptops. Former Microsoft VP describes Microsoft as a “failing,” “clumsy,” “uncompetitive,” “inept,” and “dysfunctional” company, crippled by “internecine warfare,” that has experienced “a steady exit of its best and brightest;” “It’s not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.” iPhone is now 25% of all smartphones sold in the USA. Apple just sold its 10 billionth song on iTunes.

March ⋅ Apple named Fortune’s most-admired company for the third consecutive year. Microsoft set to spend $9 billion on new R&D. Total remote access Windows trojan found in factory-fresh Energizer USB charger software install. Apple’s market cap now about equal to Walmart’s. Mariposa botnet client found on factory-fresh Android phone. Three pieces of malware found on up to 3,000 HTC phones.

April ⋅ iPhone is now 72% of the Japanese smartphone market. Ap­ple passes Motorola to become the largest U.S. phone maker. Major provider of Windows anti-virus software accidentally breaks large number of its users’ PCs. Microsoft’s Bing division reportedly losing over $700 million per quarter. HP buys Palm for $1.2 billion.

May ⋅ iPad sells a million units in less than a month. Apple’s market cap now larger than Microsoft’s, putting Apple in the number one spot for tech companies worldwide, and the number two spot for American companies of any kind (behind only Exxon). Windows Mobile game silently calls Somalia and Antarctica, costing its users over $6 per minute.

June ⋅ Apple is the only U.S. computer maker to outgrow the market in the January-March quarter. Factory-fresh Olympus cameras found to carry Windows virus. Former high-level Microsoft employee recommends 30,000-40,000 job cuts (about a third of Microsoft’s current workforce). iPad sells three million units in well under three months. Apple stops taking pre-orders for iPhone 4 after receiving 600,000 of them in one day.

July ⋅ iPhone 4 sells 1.7 million units on its opening weekend. Dell reportedly sells many millions of defective PCs and lies about the cause of the problem. (Update: Now a juicy lawsuit.) The just-released-then-cancelled Microsoft KIN phones are alleged to have sold only 503 units in their few weeks on the market. Fortune picks Steve Jobs as the smartest CEO in tech, and Apple’s Jony Ive as the smartest designer. Apple now has more cash than any other American company of any kind. iPhone 4 sells three million units in its first three weeks. Apple has its best quarter ever, with profits up 77% from the year-ago quarter. Dell ships computers with physically undeletable (i.e. hardwired) malware. Dell settles with the SEC for $100 million after being found to have padded their books for about twenty consecutive quarters with under-the-table, don’t-use-AMD’s-chips payments from Intel: “[the SEC] claims that, at their peak, the exclusivity payments from Intel represented 76% of Dell’s quarterly operating income.” After spending $500 million to buy Sidekick, and more money to turn it into KIN, Microsoft is now writing-off the project to the tune of $240 million.

August ⋅ Apple’s already-very-high retail store revenue was increased 73% by iPad. Android trojan discovered to silently send text messages that run up charges on the user’s phone bill. The SEC says over 25% of Dell shareholders want founder and CEO Michael Dell to be ejected from the company. Android’s app DRM quickly cracked; Google says developers are at fault. Apple’s App Store hits 250,000 apps. AutoCAD, one of the last big you-must-use-Windows holdouts, is coming to Mac OS X in about a month. Microsoft allegedly preparing to spend $500 million on Windows Phone 7 promotion over the next few months.

September ⋅ Apple selling iPads a­bout as fast as they can make them, and making about two million per month, pushing its manufacturers for three million. Apple’s manufacturer producing about four million iPhones per month; Apple selling them about as fast as they can make them. Best Buy CEO says that up to half of their notebook PC sales have been devoured by iPad. Apple’s mobile phone profits now higher than Nokia’s, Samsung’s, and LG’s combined. Apple passes PetroChina to become the #2 company in the world by market valuation — just 15% less than #1 Exxon.

October ⋅ Iran’s computing infrastructure being wrecked by a Windows virus. Almost a year after Windows 7’s release, only a fifth of Windows users are using it, and two-thirds of Windows us­ers are using the ten-year-old Windows XP. (Update: Windows version percentages about the same three months later.) Apple’s App Store passes 300,000 apps. Apple has another fantastic, record-breaking quarter. Advertising Age names Ap­ple “Marketer of the Decade.” CNN article calls Microsoft a “dying consumer brand.” In Microsoft’s 2010 summer quarter, during which its revenue rode to a record high on pent-up corporate refreshes from Windows XP to Windows 7 (25% higher than its year-ago quarterly revenue), Ap­ple’s revenue exceeded Microsoft’s by 25%. Last quarter, Apple took nearly half of all profits in the mobile phone industry.

November ⋅ HP pays over $16 million to settle charges of using bribery to get its computers into school districts in Dallas and Houston. Last quarter, Mac sales grew three times as fast as the rest of the computer industry. Oprah Winfrey names iPad her “No. 1 favorite thing ever.” HP sells off 98-acre Cupertino campus; Apple buys it up.

December ⋅ Old Navy trying out Apple’s iPod Touch based point-of-sale system. Apple has likely sold its ten millionth iPad, and the holiday shopping rush is just getting started. MarketWatch names Steve Jobs CEO of the Decade. Since its release a few months ago, the new Apple TV has been selling about 375,000 per month: faster than any similar device. Microsoft announces that its hardware partners sold 1.5 million Windows Phone 7 phones its first six weeks — to stores and mobile service pro­vid­ers: no consumer sales figures are given. The Financial Times names Steve Jobs Person of the Year.

2 0 1 1

January ⋅ Possible botnet trojan found on Android. Apple’s market valuation passes $300 billion. Last quarter, of all major computer makers only Apple and Toshiba experienced unit sales gains from the year-ago quarter, with Apple gaining 44% more units than did Toshiba. Apple’s iTunes App Store passing 10 billion downloads. Ap­ple has another amazing, record-breaking quarter. Apple passes Nokia to become the biggest mobile phone provider by revenue. Microsoft has laid off thousands of workers over the past few years, and is experiencing a huge, upper-management and engineering brain drain. iPad App Store passes 60,000 (iPad-specific) apps. According to a Reuters report, Ap­ple’s quarterly profits are about to beat Microsoft’s for the first time in twenty years. (Update: Apple came close, but not there yet.) Microsoft’s online services lost $2.5 billion last year.

February ⋅ Microsoft’s Bing search engine found to be using Google search to decide what pages to return for some searches. (Update: Microsoft denies this.) The Verizon iPhone 4’s preorders break Verizon’s first-day sales record in 2 hours — and 15 hours after that, they have to stop taking orders so there’ll be some phones to sell on the retail start date. Apple passes Sony and Motorola in total handset sales. Microsoft cancels Drive Extender, the latest in a long line of failed file-system projects. Microsoft paying Nokia at least a billion dollars to use Windows Phone 7 in future Nokia smartphones. Apple, which uses Samsung-manufactured chips in many of its products, is on the verge of becoming Samsung’s biggest customer. During 2010, the “year of Android,” Apple’s iOS App Store was #1 with over 80% of all mobile app revenue. (Android was #4 after #2 RIM and #3 Nokia.) January Mac sales 20% higher than January 2010. Microsoft’s first update to Windows Phone 7 is a huge screwup that renders some users’ phones permanently unusable. Apple’s stock price is up 70% from a year ago.

March ⋅ Apple sells its 100 millionth iPhone, and has paid out $2 billion to iOS app authors. Apple sold 15 million iPads in its first nine months — more than all Windows-based tablets combined over the past ten years. 21 Android apps discovered to be infected with malware. Canadian couple billed thousands of dollars per month when their Galaxy phone goes berserk with data usage — at one point using 30 hours of data in a 24-hour period, according to the couple. Apple is Fortune’s Most Admired company for the fourth consecutive year. Microsoft is reportedly going to release Windows 8 tablets in the second half of 2012 — about a year-and-a-half from now. In a move that no PC maker would have dared attempt back in the ’90s, HP now announces that all its future PCs will ship with not just Windows, but also a totally separate, non-Microsoft OS: webOS. Microsoft, owner of such generic-sounding trademarks as “Windows,” “Office,” and “Word,” is now trying to persuade a court that Apple’s trademark on “App Store” is too generic — and that Apple’s trademark filing uses too small of a font. Last Friday, the iPad 2 went on sale and very quickly sold out everywhere; Apple opened its stores extra early yesterday for the second shipment, and that too sold out completely in a short time. After four years of sliver-of-the-market sales, Microsoft reportedly cancelling the Zune. iPad 2 generating new lines every time a new shipment arrives. WWDC sells out for the fourth year in a row: last year it sold out in eight days, this year in under twelve hours. Barron’s names Steve Jobs world’s most valuable CEO.

April ⋅ Clorox employees, formerly given BlackBerries but now allowed to choose their own phone, adopt iPhone by 92%. In the first quarter of this year, U.S. Mac sales grew 10% over the year-ago quarter, while the rest of the PC market shrank 11% — and Acer fell 42%. Acer is now behind the Mac in U.S. PC sales, and that’s not counting the iPad. March Mac sales up 47% from a year ago. Apple posts yet another incredible, record-breaking quarter, in which revenues were up 83% from the year-ago quarter, and profits were up 95%. Apple has outgrown the PC industry for the twentieth consecutive quarter. Apple passes No­ki­a to become the biggest mobile phone vendor by revenue. J.P. Morgan’s Mark Moskowitz calls Apple a “magical growth story,” and says that Apple’s growth “defies the laws of gravity.” Total sales of Apple TV approaching 2 million. Apple’s cash reserve now greater than the market valuations of RIM, Nokia, and Motorola combined. Three months ago, Apple came close to beating Microsoft’s quarterly profits — this time, it did beat them, by 14%.

May ⋅ Apple now receives 50% of all profits in the mobile phone business. Apple’s April sales more than double what they were a year ago. Skype, which has been operating at a net loss, purchased by Microsoft for $8.5 billion. iPhone “named Fastest-Selling Portable Gaming System” by Guinness World Records. Last quarter, Mac sales grew 66%, almost fifteen times as much as the rest of the industry’s 4.5% growth.

June ⋅ Apple now worth more than Microsoft and Intel combined. Apple is now the world’s largest buyer of semiconductors by a­mount spent. Per current stock prices, Apple now has about e­nough cash to buy RIM, Nokia, Motorola, and HTC combined. i­Pad now at 100,000 apps. Windows now has a several-million-strong, “indestructible” malware botnet.

July ⋅ Apple’s App Store now at 15 billion downloads; Apple’s running at a billion downloads per month and selling nearly five million iPads per month. Apple is the fastest growing retailer, up 80% year-over-year. (Note: “Fastest growing” usually implies “really tiny” — in this case, not so much.) Apple opening 33 new retail stores over the next two months. Since its start ten years ago, Apple retail has seen over a billion visitors. Apple has yet another amazing, record-breaking quarter. Apple’s i­Pad business is now twice as big as Dell’s consumer PC business. Microsoft omits Windows Phone 7 data from its quarterly results report. Apple now selling more smartphones than Nokia, putting Apple in first place. Apple projected to soon pass Exxon in market valuation, which will put Apple in first place for all companies of any type, worldwide. Acer has second consecutive quarterly loss. RIM laying off over 10% of its workforce. A survey shows that over a third of consumers want to buy the unannounced iPhone 5 “sight unseen.” Android phone return rate may be as high as 40%. Microsoft’s Online Services Division (i.e. Bing) has lost money every quarter for the past 22 quarters (typically several hundred million dollars per quarter). Apple now has two thirds of the profits in the mobile phone industry. Apple’s cash reserves now greater than those of the U.S. government. Electronic Arts says iPad is “our fastest growing platform.” Google TV returns reportedly outnumbering sales; Apple TV selling about half a million units per quarter.

August ⋅ Apple now has the highest market valuation of any company in the world. Microsoft’s smartphone market share fell over the past two quarters from 8% to 5.8%. HP kills its much-hyped iPad knockoff, the TouchPad, and plans to spin off its Windows PC business. Apple’s sales overtake Lenovo’s in China. Apple now as valuable as all 32 euro zone banks combined. Acer posts a quarterly loss of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. Android malware surges, while iOS remains malware-free. Apple Retail makes more money per square foot than any other retail chain — 89% more than second-place Tiffany & Co. Google settles with the U.S. DOJ for half a billion dollars, for running illegal drug ads. HP, the largest maker of Windows PCs, is apparently imploding.

September ⋅ Lowe’s now using Ap­ple’s iPod Touch based point-of-sale system. Apple tops computer satisfaction survey for the eighth consecutive year. Microsoft’s Bing division bleeding about a billion dollars per quarter. HP pays its CEO of eleven months $25 million to get lost — its third eight-figure CEO-ejection payoff in about six years. Microsoft employee morale tanking as “droves” walk out of Ballmer’s annual company meeting. Over 40% of U.S. cell phone users plan to buy the unannounced iPhone 5.

October ⋅ iOS App Store now past 500,000 apps. iPad past 140,000 iPad-specific apps. iPhone 4S receives a million pre-orders in one day. Windows Phone 7 estimated to be hovering between 1.3% and 1.6% market share. Investment firm recommends that RIM fire its two co-founder CEOs. Steve Jobs’s death evokes a huge outpouring of sympathy and respects from all o­ver the world. iPhone 4S sells over four million units on its opening weekend. Apple’s latest quarterly results: iPhones, Macs, net profits, and iPads are up 21%, 26%, 54%, and 166%, respectively, over the year-ago quarter. Acer posts second straight quarterly loss. LG Mobile, a major Android phone manufacturer, reports a net loss of $128 million: more than twice last quarter’s loss. Android’s ability to run the most current OS on its phones is reportedly atrocious. Apple’s sales in China more than quadruple from $3 billion to $13 billion in one year.

November ⋅ iPhone is now over 60% of all mobile web traffic. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer dips below 50% of desktop computer web browser market share. Steve Jobs biography is now the top selling book in the USA. New Windows virus takes total control of your PC if you just open an infected Word document. The only phone maker to grow its subscriber base since last June is Apple. The entire mobile phone subscriber base is now over 10% iPhone. Logitech CEO says that its investment in Google TV “was a big mistake” that “cost us dearly.” Android malware reportedly jumps 472% in the last four months. Annie Leibovitz calls iPhone the “snapshot camera of today.” Study indicates that iPhone has passed BlackBerry as the phone of preference in the enterprise. After over four years of hype, Microsoft’s Surface is finally available — to pre-order — for a mere $8,400. If you include tablets, Apple is about to become the highest-volume computer maker in the world. An IBM study indicates that over 10% of all Black Friday online sales (of any kind of product at all) were iPhones and iPads. RAM chip makers who bet big on never-ending PC growth are losing tens of billions of dollars while iPad continues to sell like hotcakes with just half a gig of RAM. Apple now selling more iPads than Dell sells PCs.

December ⋅ RIM loses $485 millon on unsold PlayBook tablets. Mac sales growing more than six times as fast as the computer industry average. Mac App Store tops 100 million downloads. After several years of using the position to announce lackluster products that subsequently flopped, Microsoft says this year’s CES keynote will be its last. Steve Jobs posthumously awarded Special Merit Grammy, and honored by sculpture in Budapest, Hungary.

2 0 1 2

January ⋅ Microsoft reportedly paying $10-$15 bounties to cellular provider retail staff for each Windows Phone 7 phone they sell. The fastest-growing computer language is now Objective-C, the language used almost exclusively for iOS and Mac development. If you include tablets, Apple’s market share is now at least as large as that of any other computer maker. Apple now the eighth most valuable brand, worldwide. For the first time since the mid-1980s, Windows PCs are slightly less than 50% of all personal computing devices, having been on a very consistent, accelerating, percentage-share decline since about 20­05. iOS now ahead of BlackBerry in corporate network usage. RIM fires its co-founder co-CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, promoting COO Thorsten Heins to CEO. Apple’s market valuation now twice Google’s. Apple has an astounding, record-smashing quarter, in which its profits exceeded Google’s revenue, and iPad sales (double the year-ago quarter) exceeded U.S. Windows PC sales. Apple has sold over 4.2 million of the new, iOS-based Apple TV boxes. Apple’s liquid assets nearing $100 billion, and closely following an exponential growth curve for the past six years. Every year since iPhone debuted, it’s sold more than all previous years combined. In the U.S., Macs (just Macs, not iPads) increased 21% from the year-ago quarter, while the rest of the personal computer industry shrank 8.5%. According to Symantec, five million Android users may have been infected by a single malware package. Wisconsin using Microsoft settlement money to buy iPads. If you count tablets as computers, Apple has now passed HP to become the #1 computer vendor. Apple’s iPhone revenue alone is now bigger than all of Microsoft’s revenue, and Apple’s total revenue is more than twice Microsoft’s.

February ⋅ Apple now makes 75% of the profits in the mobile phone industry. Apple now worth more than Microsoft and Google combined. A fifth of all U.S. money consumers spent on electronics this past holiday season went to Apple. Forbes contributor Dave Thier calls Microsoft’s retail stores “very sad places,” “pathetic,” and “a cheap knockoff of Apple.” “Microsoft [is] a company that seems to have no sense of what it is.” HP’s profits down 44% from the year-ago quarter. The iOS app store is on-track to pass 25 billion downloads in a few days. Apple’s market valuation now at half a trillion dollars.

March ⋅ Apple tops Fortune’s Most-Admired Companies for the fifth year in a row. In the corporate world, iPad is beating its closest competitor by 10 to 1. Apple’s market cap now more than twice Microsoft’s, and greater than all U.S. retail combined. Apple’s new, retina-display iPad sells 3 million units on its launch weekend. Apple ranks #1 in J.D. Power’s consumer satisfaction survey for the seventh consecutive year. iPhone now outselling BlackBerry in RIM’s home country, Canada. Even though it makes its processors only for its own products, Apple apparently on-track to become the top mobile processor maker within a year. Half of all U.S. households have at least one Apple product. Google makes four times as much revenue from iPhone as from Android. According to Nikkei BP’s brand survey, Apple is now the top brand in Japan. Apple’s Tim Cook rates highest in Glassdoor’s CEO survey. Best Buy, one of the biggest retailers of Windows PCs, posts a $1.7 billion loss, and announces the closing of fifty stores.

April ⋅ Market analysts now setting stock targets that promise to make Apple the first trillion-dollar company ever. The most popular camera on Flickr is iPhone 4, and the top four phone cameras on Flickr are the iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, i­Phone 3G, and iPhone 3GS. Veterans Administration terminating its Microsoft contract. Over a third of all U.S. teens have iPhones. Microsoft spends $1.1 billion on a bunch of AOL patents. Sony, long-time maker of the VAIO series of Windows laptops, just announced an impending $6.4 billion loss for its latest fiscal year. Sony laying off 10,000 people. HP ships malware-infected network switches. Best Buy CEO resigns. Apple retail stores’ per-square-foot revenue 17 times the U.S. retail average, and over twice the number two retailer, Tiffany & Co. At a Michael-Dell-hosted Dell conference, guest moderator Mads Christensen tells the nearly all-male audience that women don’t belong in tech, and that men should tell women, “Shut up, bitch!” — Christensen apparently well-known for this position long before being invited to moderate the Dell event. After investing heavily in Windows Phone 7, Nokia announces a quarterly loss of $1.7 billion and net sales down 29% from the year-ago quarter. The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, which sold out in twelve hours last year, sells out in less than two hours. CEO of HTC credits the company’s just-announced 70% profit drop to i­Phone 4S. Apple has another great quarter, including a 94% profit increase from the year-ago quarter, and China sales five times the year-ago figure. iOS App Store has over 600,000 apps, and over 200,000 iPad-specific apps. Ap­ple’s still selling iPads as fast as they can make them. Microsoft appears to be slowly morphing into an enterprise-only company. Report finds that 20% of all Macs are carrying Windows malware — i.e. malware that won’t even run on the Mac at all, but can get copied to Windows PCs where it does something bad. Denver Broncos to use iPads as their playbooks for the upcoming season.

May ⋅ Per market data (and despite NPD’s survey-based reports to the contrary) iPhone was 50% of last quarter’s U.S. smartphone market. Apple still making nearly 3/4 of all mobile phone profits, and only two other mobile phone companies are making a profit (one of them just barely). iPad is 95% of all tablet web traffic. Nokia class-action sued for fraudulently “telling investors that Windows Phone would ‘halt its deteriorating position in the smartphone market.’” The e-ink Kindle and the Kindle Fire — the only significant competition to Apple’s tablet and e-book businesses — are estimated to have experienced a dramatic sales plunge in the last quarter. Microsoft paying $300 million for about 1/6 ownership of Barnes & Noble’s NOOK e-book business. Apple, for some time worth more than any other traded company on the planet, is now also the second-fastest growing tech company. In Forbes, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer tops list of CEOs who need to be fired. Microsoft offering to clean the pre-installed bloat-crap-ware off your new Windows 7 PC — for just $99. HP, the only buyer of Intel’s Itanium chip, apparently tried to hide from public knowledge the fact that Intel wants to cancel that chip, and that HP paid Intel over 2/3 of a billion dollars to keep making it (on top of, of course, actually buying the chips). In a year, Apple rises from #35 to #17 in the Fortune 500. HP laying off 30,000 people. British Parliament getting 650 iPads. Amtrak to use iPhone for ticket scanning. Google finishes buying Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. Since Apple’s market valuation passed Dell’s six years ago, Apple’s valuation has risen nearly 600%, while Dell’s has dropped more than 60% — Apple’s valuation is getting close to twenty times that of Dell. TSA buying a thousand Macs and a thousand iOS devices. RIM stock trading temporarily halted as CEO issues warning of looming losses and layoffs, and its unsold inventory balloons to $1 billion. Apple sells and replaces its entire inventory every five days. iPhone is nearly a quarter of worldwide smartphone market.

June ⋅ RIM and Nokia both have a market cap less than their book value (i.e. less than the money they could raise by shutting down the company and selling off its physical assets). Seven months after its release, Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” is on only about 7% of Android devices. Apple’s proposed nano-SIM standard a­dopt­ed by the ETSI. ZDNet contributor Andrian Kingsley-Hughes describes Windows 8 as “awful,” as well as “terrible, horrible, painful and execrable,” and “a design disaster,” and, “I don’t say this lightly.” Total revenue paid out to Apple’s third-party app developers passes $5 billion. Nokia laying off 10,000 people, closing three major facilities in Canada, Finland, and Germany, and warning of larger losses than last quarter’s. Microsoft charging its OEMs about $85 per tablet to run Windows RT. Microsoft buying Yammer for $1.2 billion. HTC stops all sales of its phones in Brazil, due to its inability to turn a profit. About 26,000 iPads purchased by San Diego school system.

July ⋅ Dell buying Quest, an IT systems management company, for $2.4 billion. Microsoft writes off its five-years-ago purchase of advertising firm aQuantive, for $6.2 billion. HTC experiences a 57% drop in its year-over-year quarterly profits. Microsoft Internet Explorer’s share of all web browsing has very steadily declined over the past eight years from more than 80% to less than 17%. Describing Microsoft as a “toxic stew of internal antagonism and warfare,” “heading down the path of self-immolating chaos,” Vanity Fair dedicates nine pages to a scathing Kurt Eichenwald article on “Microsoft’s Lost Decade,” detailing Steve Ballmer’s horrible management policies, bad product decisions, and embarrassingly wrong predictions of Microsoft success. Nokia, exclusive maker of Lumia Windows Phones, suffers a net loss of over a billion dollars for the third consecutive quarter. Microsoft reports its first quarterly net loss ever: almost half a billion dollars. Estimate suggests that each Nokia Lumia (Windows Phone) sold corresponds to AT&T spending $450 marketing the phone. Apple has another excellent quarter, with profits up 20% from a year ago, and Apple TV sales now at 1.3 million units per quarter. Gabe Newell, former Microsoft employee and co-founder and head of Valve, the most influential PC game company, says “Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space.” iPhone is now a third of the U.S. smartphone market.

August ⋅ HTC’s revenues down 27%. iOS now likely the most popular gaming platform ever. iPad approaching 3/4 of the tablet market in China. HP announces impending quarterly net loss of $9 billion. FTC fines Google $22.5 million for purposely and silently evading users’ privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser, which also violated its own 2011-Google-Buzz-case consent agreement. Fresh after being bought by Goo­gle, Motorola Mobility axing 4,000 people — a fifth of its workforce. Last quarter, for which IDC estimated Samsung to have sold 2.4 million tablets worldwide, a court-ordered sales-figure-reveal shows that Samsung sold only 37,000 tablets in the USA: less than 1/60 of IDC’s global estimate. AT&T stores soon to use iPad-based point-of-sale system. iPhone now estimated to be over 40% of all smartphone sales in the U.S. Ap­ple now most valuable company ever, passing Microsoft’s 1999 record. (Microsoft is now valued at less than half of what it was then.) U.S. State Dept. cancels order for 2,500 Kindles. Android malware triples over the past few months. Dell’s profits down 18% from the year-ago quarter, and consumer product revenue down 22%. Apple wins sizable court victory over Samsung’s extremely close mimicry of its products. Windows 8 getting really bad reviews from normally pro-PC people. In 2008, Korean prosecutors reportedly sought a seven-year prison term and $347 million fine against Samsung’s chairman Lee Kun-Hee for bribery, which was bargained to a three-year suspended sentence and a $109 million fine — now he’s back running Samsung. (Update: Lee awards vice-chairmanship to his son.) Walmart testing iPhone-based self-checkout system. Delta Airlines to use 4,500 iPads in its airport hubs. Over the past five years, HP’s stock has lost 60% of its value.

September ⋅ In eight out of the last eight J.D. Power smartphone satisfaction surveys, iPhone ranks #1. American Airlines replacing all pilot flight bags with iPads. In addition to being the highest valued company in the world, Apple is also the eighth-fastest growing. All Yahoo employees given choice of five different smartphones — i­Phone included, BlackBerry not included. iPhone 5 sells 2 million pre-orders in 24 hours. PC Magazine rates iPhone 5 fastest smartphone. Walmart and Target have stopped selling Amazon Kindle e-readers and tablets. iPhone 5 launch-day lines at Apple stores 83% longer than for iPhone 4S. iPhone 5 sells five million units on its opening weekend. Apple named best brand and best design team at the Design & Art Direction A­wards. Simple web-link discovered that erases all user data and settings on several models of Samsung phone. (Update: Via the same technique, it may be possible for a weblink to permanently disable those phones’ SIM cards, rendering the phone unusable by anyone until the SIM card is replaced with a new one.) Piper Jaffray survey finds that 2/3 of consumers plan to make their next phone an iPhone. Texas Instruments, whose mobile processors powered non-Apple tablets including the Playbook, Fire, Xyboard, and various Galaxy Tab models, exiting the mobile processor business. Urban Outfitters getting rid of registers in all 400 stores, replacing them with iPads. iPad’s share of tablet web browsing reportedly at 98%.

October ⋅ In a year, Apple jumps from eighth most valuable brand to second, behind only Coca-Cola. Best Buy targeted for takeover. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen describes Windows 8 as “puzzling, confusing.” To cut costs, Nokia considering selling its headquarters. (Update: No longer considering it — doing it.) Google has blown possibly $20 billion on Android so far. HTC’s profits drop 79% from the year-ago quarter. For the first time since the dot-com bubble burst twelve years ago, year-over-year PC shipments have likely declined. HTC exits the U.S. tablet market. Nearly a third of all U.S. teens have an iPad, and 40% of all U.S. teens use iPhones. Microsoft reportedly building between three and five million Surface tablets this quarter, and estimated to spend at least $1.5 billion advertising Windows 8. Free-to-use iPads built into McDonald’s in Virginia Beach. Panasonic reportedly seeking to exit the TV-making business, and instead make iPad screens. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency switching from BlackBerries to iPhones. As reported by a European blogger, Amazon intentionally remote-wipes a user’s Kindle (deleting all her many purchased e-books), terminates her account, prohibits her from ever creating a new one, and refuses to provide her any coherent explanation of what she did wrong — she’s apparently dumbfounded, and received no warning that anything like this was going to happen. (Update: Amazon apparently has restored her account, but still offers no explanation.) In the third quarter of this year, iPhone was 77% of AT&T’s smartphone activations. Apple has sold a total of 100 million iPads, and they haven’t even started selling iPad mini. Motorola Mobility (now Google-owned) posts a quarterly net loss of over half a billion dollars. Windows virus wipes files on 30,000 of Saudi Aramco’s PCs. U.S. government declares that “jailbreaking” (hacking) your tab­let is illegal. Apple has another record quarter, and now has over $120 billion in cash. From the year-ago quarter, revenue’s up 27%, profits are up 24%, iPhone unit sales are up 58%, and iPad sales are up 26%. Amazon has a quarterly loss of over a quarter of a billion dollars. (Note: iPad sales might actually be up 44% from the year-ago quarter.)

November ⋅ iPad mini and the fourth-generation iPad sell three million units in their first three days on the market. HTC’s October revenue 61% less than it was a year ago. Apple opening more than thirty new stores in 2013. HP’s PC chief calls Microsoft’s Surface tablet “slow” and “kludgey.” Apple pays another $2.5 billion in dividends to its shareholders, while its cash hoard continues to grow. Fierce Wireless names Apple CEO Tim Cook most powerful person in the wireless industry. HP CEO announces that his company was “misled” by Autonomy, a firm HP bought last year for $11.5 billion — it may be worth less than a quarter of that amount. NTSB ditching BlackBerry and going with iPhone. Sales of Macs to businesses up almost 50% from the year-ago quarter, while Windows PC sales to businesses shrank. According to a Nielsen survey, iPad is the most desired tech item among both children and adults. Barclays buys 8,500 iPads. A two-hour Piper Jaffray survey of the Apple and Microsoft stores at the Mall Of America on Black Friday shows the Apple store selling an iPad about every five minutes, and the Microsoft store selling no Surfaces at all. GM announces it will be integrating Apple’s Siri into its cars. Per Statista: In the past year Apple made 20% more profits than Microsoft, eBay, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Amazon combined, over twice the profits of Dell, Intel, Asus, Acer, IBM, HP, and Lenovo combined, 8% more profits than Dell, Intel, Asus, Acer, IBM, HP, Lenovo, Disney, News Corp., TimeWarner, Viacom, and Comcast combined, and over three times the profits of Nokia, Samsung, HTC, and RIM combined. Of the combined profits of all companies (including Apple) mentioned in the previous sentence, Apple takes almost a third. Microsoft sells 40 million Windows 8 licenses — to PC manufacturers. In Microsoft’s home town, the Lake Washington School District’s PCs are being wrecked by a Windows virus. iPad has over 70% of the tablet market in China. Microsoft’s original manufacturing order for 4 million Surface tablets in 2012 now cut by half. NOOK, now 1/6 owned by Microsoft, reportedly losing money.

December ⋅ App developers reportedly shunning the Microsoft Surface. T-Mobile to carry Apple products in 2013. MIT internet entrepreneur Philip Greenspun calls Windows 8 a “Christmas gift for someone you hate.” Japan’s biggest cellular provider blames its recent net loss of over 40,000 subscribers to its not carrying the iPhone. Nokia engineer posts blog entry showing the world how to pirate Windows 8 apps and in-app purchases, and remove in-app ads, without rooting (a.k.a. “jailbreaking”) your Windows 8 phone. Dell exits the smartphone market. Piper Jaffray survey finds that in the USA, more than half of potential smartphone buyers are planning to buy an iPhone 5. In 2012, over 94% of unique new mobile-device malware attacks were for Android. TIME names iPhone 5 gadget of the year. Microsoft asking Apple to take less than its usual 30% if Microsoft brings Office to iOS — Apple not interested. Apple doubles iPad mini display orders from 6 to 12 million. In China, iPhone 5 sells two million units on its opening weekend. iPhone is now over half the U.S. smartphone market. University of Western Sydney distributing 11,­000 iPads to students and faculty. RIM removed from the NASDAQ 100. Popular e-magazine TNW cancels its Android support due to the iOS edition outselling the Android edition 80 to 1.

2 0 1 3

January ⋅ Hyundai to add Siri integration to its upcoming cars. HTC’s quarterly profits down 91% from a year ago. Apple’s App Store passes 40 billion downloads — half of that in just the past year. Samsung reportedly spending ten times as much as Apple on marketing. Microsoft’s business in China is about one twentieth of its business in the USA, while Ap­ple’s business in China is about to pass its business in the USA. Ap­ple wins Technical Emmy award. Steve Jobs memorial created in St. Petersburg. Out of all corporate tax money collected in the U.S. last year, 2.5% of it came from Apple. Fresh from being fired, former Windows chief Steve Sinofsky now apparently using an iPhone. Lynn University in Boca Raton issuing iPad apps, instead of textbooks, to all incoming freshmen. Four months after iPhone 5’s release, still no publicly available hack (a.k.a. “jailbreak”). (Update: Hack now available.) (Update: Less than a month later, hack patched by Apple.) Apple has another record quarter, with higher-than-ever revenue and profits. Apple’s rapidly growing cash hoard now almost one third of its market capitalization. Apple’s 2012 profits higher than any company’s, ever. iPhone is now over a quarter of the global smartphone market. In the last quarter, AT&T’s U.S. smartphone sales were over 84% iPhones. Samsung warns investors of shrinking profits. Hacking (a.k.a. “jailbreaking”) your phone is now illegal in the USA. iTunes serves at least 2.5 times as much online video as any competitor. Siri will be an option in Honda cars this year. Microsoft makes no mention of Windows 8 sales in its latest earnings report. Barnes & Noble, maker of NOOK (1/6 Microsoft-owned), planning to shutter a third of its stores.

February ⋅ Microsoft spending $2 billion and Dell spending over $22 billion to buy back all of Dell’s stock, ending public trading of the company — Apple’s cash hoard now $137 billion. Samsung’s marketing budget now over 13 times Apple’s. HP making computers that run Chrome OS instead of Windows. In China, a spam-sending malware package is controlling 620,000 Android phones. FaceBook reportedly not on speaking terms with Google; instead allying with Apple. Ben Curtis, the actor who played the “Dude, you’re gettin’ a Dell!” guy in the early 2000s, now uses an Apple laptop. In official statement, HP says Dell “has a very tough road ahead.” An update to Kaspersky anti-virus software renders Windows XP users unable to access the internet, nor any local intranet. Australian Department of Treasury switches from BlackBerry to iPhone. Apple sells 25-billionth song on iTunes. Mi­chael Dell releases “Open Letter to Customers,” in which he says, “The agreement to take Dell private represents an exciting new chapter for our company and for you, our customers.” Apple now makes more revenue from iTunes and accessories than any mobile phone maker (save Samsung) makes from mobile phones. Home Depot replacing 10,000 BlackBerry phones with iPhones. Nike decides not to bring FuelBand to Android. Reportedly, every app you buy on Google Play “gives the developer your name, suburb and email address with no indication that this information is actually being transferred.” According to Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Holt, Microsoft is losing $2.5 billion per year by not having Office on iOS. Apple paying out another $2.5 billion in dividends today. New Zealand police buying 10,000 iOS devices. Jim Balsillie, co-founder and former co-CEO of RIM (now BlackBerry), sells all his BlackBerry stock. Staples soon will be selling Apple products. LinkedIn giving 3,500 iPad minis to its employees. HP planning mobile devices that run Android, not Windows. Dell employees’ stock options simply killed in the planned privatization of the company. Steve Ballmer reportedly taken to roaming the halls of Microsoft with a baseball bat, and bringing it with him to meetings. Apple got 20% of all consumer tech revenue in the last year, while Dell got 3%. BlackBerry exiting the Japanese market, and considering the same for Korea. Survey finds business activations of mobile devices last quarter were 77% iOS devices. Apple is Fortune’s “most admired company” for the sixth consecutive year. Robin Jacob, the UK judge who just a few months ago forced Apple to display on its website a notice proclaiming that Samsung did not copy Apple, is now working for Samsung. Barnes & Noble warns that its one-sixth-Microsoft-owned NOOK division will report larger losses than the year-ago quarter. HP sells off webOS (née Palm) to LG. Superbrands names Apple the #1 business brand in the UK. In the last year, Apple grew more than Google, Microsoft, Dell, HP, BlackBerry, and Nokia combined.

March ⋅ comScore says that Apple is now #1 in smartphones with 38% of the market, its closest competitor being Samsung at 21%. Google-owned Motorola Mobility cutting another 1,200 jobs. The number of new malware attacks per quarter jumped from 49 to 96 on Android in the last two quarters of last year, while on iOS it dropped from 2 to 0. Laptop magazine rates MacBook Pro its #1 laptop. Microsoft fined an additional $700 million for failure to comply with the terms of its 2009 EU settlement. Denmark charges Microsoft $1 billion in unpaid taxes. Disney World replacing turnstiles with iPod Touch based scanners. Samsung now has three co-CEOs. CNET’s Molly Wood calls Samsung’s Galaxy S4 presentation “tone-deaf and shockingly sexist.” Hacker who released e-mail addresses of 114,000 iPad users sentenced to 41 months in prison. (Update: Sentence vacated by appeals court after he spent a year and a half in prison.) Cupertino hotel adds Ap­ple TV to every room. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop tosses interviewer’s iPhone on the floor. iCloud is the most used cloud service in the USA. iPhone tops J.D. Power smartphone satisfaction survey for the ninth time in a row. Cleveland Museum of Art installs iPads to facilitate self-guided tours. Walmart expanding iPhone self-checkout system to twelve additional markets. Barrington IL buys its high schools 600 MacBook Airs. U.S. Department of Defense buying 650,000 iOS devices. Corporate raiders now making rival bids to buy out Dell. Microsoft renting its Redmond campus’s office space to its vendors.

April ⋅ iMessages sent from one Apple device to another are uncrackable by the DEA — but crackable if a non-Apple device is the sender or receiver. Ray Lane, co-chairman of HP, resigns, along with two other prominent board members. Microsoft to come out with Office for iOS — in the fall of 2014, about a year-and-a-half from now. Forbes article says, “now it is official that Windows 8 is a flop.” Almost half of all U.S. teens have an iPhone, and nearly two-thirds plan to buy one as their next phone. BlackBerry Z10 returns reportedly exceeding sales. (Update: BlackBerry denies this.) Independent study finds Bing returns five times as much malware as Google. On its first day of carrying iPhone, T-Mobile experiences “lines out the door” at almost all of its 3,000 stores. Of the five highest-paid U.S. executives, only Oracle CEO Larry Ellison doesn’t work for Apple. In the PC industry (iPad not included), the Mac is taking nearly half of all the profits. Intel’s profits down 25% from the year-ago quarter. Popular Windows antivirus software Malwarebytes accidentally “cripples” thousands of PCs. “BadNews” malware package may have been downloaded 9 million times on Google Play. Windows PC manufacturers say “Microsoft is ‘destroying’ the PC industry,” and “Windows 8 has ‘handed over millions of customers to Apple.’” Apple designer Jonathan Ive makes TIME’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people. iTunes is nearly two-thirds of all movie downloads, and fully two-thirds of all TV show downloads. According to Soluto’s crash report database, the most reliable Windows PC is the MacBook Pro running Windows. Apple has a decent quarter, with revenue, i­Phone sales, and iPad sales significantly higher than the year-ago quarter, and Mac sales holding steady while the rest of the PC industry slips badly. WWDC, which sold out in less than two hours last year, sells out in less than two minutes. Nilay Patel in The Verge documents “Dell’s downward spiral,” a ten-year timeline of failed computers and consumer electronics — a nice companion piece to Vanity Fair’s “Microsoft’s Lost Decade.” For the second consecutive time, iPad ranks first in J.D. Power’s tablet satisfaction survey.

May ⋅ HTC still scraping by in break-even mode. Alisher Usmanov, the richest person in Russia, buys $100 million of Apple stock, saying it has tremendous growth potential. Apple’s App Store passing 50 billion downloads, not including updates and re-downloads. In a year, Apple jumps from position #17 to #6 in the Fortune 500. Major investors in Nokia — Microsoft’s Windows Phone hardware partner — tell its CEO to “switch to another road.” Google-owned Motorola hit with EU antitrust charges. Acer president Jim Wong says, “To be honest, there’s no value doing [a tablet that runs] the current version of [Windows] RT.” Microsoft has sold 100 million copies of Windows 8 — to PC manufacturers. International Space Station dumps Windows in favor of Linux because they “needed an operating system that was stable and reliable.” Microsoft asking Apple to develop iTunes for the ex-“Metro” Windows 8 tiles interface — Apple not interested. Which?’s retail satisfaction survey ranks Apple stores #1. Dell’s profits down 79% from the year-ago quarter. Al Lewis in The Wall Street Journal declares “Steve Ballmer’s Epitaph,” in which he quotes former Microsoft executive Joachim Kem­pin saying, “[Ballmer] has no clue about technology. All the guys a­round him agree with him or they get fired,” and, “I’m going to order a gravestone in 2014. It will take between four to six more quarters for this to play out.” For the past eight years, Apple’s iTunes revenue has closely followed an exponential growth curve. Despite paying the highest dividends of any company in the world for the past year, Apple’s cash hoard still following an exponential growth curve. Latest quarterly data says that, while iOS remains malware-free, Android malware following an exponential growth curve. iPads and iPhones cleared by U.S. DOD for military use. U.S. Air Force replacing all paper manuals and flight plans with iPads. For the third consecutive year, Apple takes the top spot in BrandZ’s most-valuable-brands list (for any company in any business). HP’s profits down 32% from the year-ago quarter. iPad’s share of e-commerce-website tablet traffic holding at about 90%. iPhone sales quintuple in India. iPod touch reaches 100 million units sold.

June ⋅ Status from WWDC keynote: WWDC is the longest-running developer conference in existence at 24 years. Two-thirds of WWDC attendees are first-timers. Total registered Apple developers: 6 million. Apple retail now at 407 stores, and seeing a million visitors per day. Apple has over half a billion iOS user accounts, including more accounts with credit cards attached than any other internet store. Apple has paid out a total of $10 billion to iOS developers (half of that in just the past year), which is about three times all other platforms combined. O­ver the past five years, Mac sales grew 100%, while PC sales grew 18%. The latest version of Mac OS X reached 35% adoption in six months, while Windows 8 didn’t reach 5% adoption in the same amount of time. iCloud is the fastest-growing cloud service ever, with 300 million accounts. Total iOS device sales have passed 600 million. Apple’s iBookstore sales grew 100% last year. Feds ask Apple for data from Apple’s users (iMessage, FaceTime, Siri, and Maps activities) — Apple says no, we can’t; it’s all encrypted and we don’t have any way to decrypt it. Microsoft preparing to open copycat mini-stores in Best Buy, just like Apple’s. Apple wins against Samsung with rubber-banding patent. L.A. Unified School District spending $30 million on iPads for every student — Microsoft urges them “not to rely on one platform.” Maine schools — previously required to use Windows computers but now given a choice between that or Apple products — choose Apple by 92%. After its tablet losses more than wipe out its bookstore profits, Barnes & Noble quits the tablet business. BlackBerry posts quarterly loss of $84 million.

July ⋅ Affecting virtually all Android devices released in the last four years, master key vulnerability discovered which makes it possible to add malware to apps without the system being able to tell that the apps have been modified. (Update: Less than a month later, live exploits of this vulnerability found in the wild.) Microsoft’s MSN TV (formerly WebTV) shuts down after sixteen years of failure — Apple TV now selling about 1.6 million units per quarter and growing exponentially. Apple ranks #1 in customer satisfaction in Samsung’s home country, Korea. Google-owned Motorola’s Droid phones found to be silently sending sensitive personal info to Motorola — and doing it without encrypting the data. The most popular Android app — Facebook for Android — found to be silently harvesting the user’s phone number before that user even attempts to sign in or create an account. Nokia buys Seimens for $2.2 billion. Barnes & Noble’s CEO resigns. In the Fortune Global 500, Apple jumps from #55 to #19. In 2012, Apple TV was 56% of the streaming devices market. After trying to copy nearly everything about Apple including its retail stores, Microsoft is now going to a functional, rather than divisional structure, a plan used by pretty much just one large company: Apple. Longtime industry reporter Barb Darrow says, “Every single former Microsoft exec I’ve met with in the past two years — and there have been quite a few — carries a MacBook Air.” BlackBerry’s new Z10 phone found to be silently sending the user’s e-mail account and password to BlackBerry. Microsoft does a $900 million write-down on unsold Surface tablets. (Update: Now the subject of a class-action lawsuit against the company.) Last quarter, iPhone was over half of all Verizon smartphone activations; Verizon’s iPhone sales are up 44% from a year ago. Google is caught blatantly plagiarizing Apple patent illustration. Google-owned Motorola cuts another 5,400 workers. Apple passing 1 billion podcast subscriptions. Electronic Arts now makes more money from Apple’s platforms than from any other company’s. Over the last two months, iPad’s share of web traffic usage has gone up from 81% to 84%. Apple wins Harris Interactive’s “Brand of the Year” in the computer, tablet, and mobile phone categories. BlackBerry sheds 250 more employees. HTC warns of its first-ever operating loss, and says it will focus less on high-end smartphones. Microsoft’s Surface RT and Surface Pro combined revenue is less than the Surface RT write-down alone, and far less than Microsoft’s marketing budget for the same period. Asus chairman Jonney Shih says Windows RT “is not very promising.” Samsung found to be faking benchmark results for the Galaxy S4. At the BBC, the Android development team — three times the size of the iOS team — struggles to match the BBC iOS app’s video playback quality.

August ⋅ PBS Frontline’s iOS app not coming to Android any time soon due to the difficulty of supporting the great variety of Android devices. President Obama vetoes an ITC ban on several models of iPhone and iPad, which was based on Samsung’s complaint that Apple refuses to pay patent fees (and other compensations) vastly greater than what Samsung agreed to take when its patents were included in now-unavoidable wireless communications standards. After a near-one-year stock price slump, Apple now again has the highest market valuation of any company in the world, in any business. Android has another big malware surge. Unpatchable WiFi security vulnerability found in Windows Phone 8. Like Dell, BlackBerry allegedly now considering buying back all its stock and exiting the stock market. Acer posts quarterly loss, says “We are trying to grow our non-Windows business as soon as possible.” BlackBerry’s (then RIM’s) stock price peaked about a month after iPhone launched in mid-2007, and since has lost over 95% of its value. BlackBerry stock trading temporarily halted as its board forms a special committee to sell the company. Apple distributing another $2.8 billion in dividends to its shareholders. If Microsoft had held on to the $150 million in Apple stock they were forced to buy as part of the late-’90s code-stealing settlement, instead of selling it off as soon as they legally could, today it would be worth $9 billion, and would be earning $220 million per year in dividends. Brazil sues Samsung for $108 million over labor violations. Touchscreen laptops, on which Windows 8 depends for its most interesting new features, appear to be tanking in the market. Demolition of the old HP campus in Cupertino begins, to pave the way for Apple’s new spaceship campus. Canalys study of the quality and availability of tablet apps finds iOS to be dramatically ahead of Android. Microsoft’s Windows Phone YouTube app blocked by Google for terms-of-service violation — part of an ongoing back-and-forth feud between the two companies over what kind of YouTube app Microsoft is allowed to create. Study shows that 20% of all iPhone users switched from Android within the past year. After writing down Surface RT inventory to the tune of nearly a billion dollars, Microsoft now giving them away to schools if those schools use Bing For Schools to search the web. Samsung photo contest awards first prize to a stolen photo. Germany deems Windows 8 unsafe for government use due to “back doors that the NSA could use to remotely control any [Windows 8] computers.” Lucky Frame’s game “Gentlemen!” releases on Android, and initially experiences a paid-to-pirated ratio of 8-to-2,462 (0.32%), which later matures to 144-to-50,030 (0.29%). Japanese customer satisfaction survey plac­es iPhone 5 and iPad mini in its top spots. Microsoft announces that CEO Steve Ballmer will be replaced in the next twelve months. Apple starting retail operations in Brazil. Barnes & Noble’s retail CEO sells most of his Barnes & Noble stock. Hawaiian Airlines to offer iPad minis as in-flight entertainment. Ex-Microsoft manager David Auerbach recalls how stack ranking was kept secret from non-manager employees for years, who were “systematically lied” to — managers even pretended the stack rank didn’t exist in the private presence of other managers who already knew about it. “This sort of organizational dissembling skews your psyche. After I left Microsoft, I was left with lingering paranoia for months, always wondering about the agendas of those around me, skeptical that what I was being told was the real story.”

September ⋅ Microsoft buys Nokia’s mobile products division for $7.2 billion — in PCWorld, Mark Hachman describes the merger as “Fail plus fail equals more fail.” Japan’s largest wireless carrier, DoCoMo, reportedly will soon carry iPhone. In a possibly precedent-setting decision, Google-owned Motorola decisively loses its $4 billion suit against Microsoft over the use of FRAND-committed patents: Motorola ordered to pay Microsoft’s legal expenses, plus another $11 million just for trying to sue over these patents at all. HP removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Dyson founder says Samsung is ripping off Dy­son’s patented vacuum cleaner steering technology. (Update: Samsung now suing Dyson just for saying that.) Microsoft’s “Patch Tuesday” is an ongoing, problem-causing mess. Within 48 hours of its release, one out of every three active iOS devices updated to iOS 7. After halting stock trading again, laying off another 4,700 people, putting its three private jets up for sale, and reporting a near $1 billion quarterly loss, BlackBerry now sold for scrap to a holding company. In the U.S. House of Representatives, a majority of Democrats and a majority of Republicans use iPhones. Apple sells nine million 5s and 5c iPhones in three days; alerts the SEC of higher-than-expected margins. Apple apparently planning to double the size of its huge Oregon data center. Boeing creates iPad apps for plane maintenance. BlackBerry cancels its quarterly results call. T-Mobile stops stocking BlackBerry phones. Microsoft-purchased Nokia paying its CEO of three years $25 million to go away. MLB stadiums adopt Apple’s iBeacons technology. Ap­ple hires a top Nike Fuel Band developer. Interbrand finds Apple now the most valuable brand of any company in any business, worldwide.

October ⋅ VW shows off car repair app for iOS. Delta Airlines adopts Microsoft Surface 2 tablets for pilot flight books — the pilots reportedly “fought hard for iPad,” and say that Delta’s IT department long has been “in bed” with Microsoft. Three major Microsoft investors want Bill Gates to be ejected from the board, because his “presence on the board effectively blocks the adoption of new strategies and would limit the power of a new chief executive to make substantial changes.” Apple now has 10% of all U.S. corporate cash. At least fifty Samsung executives inappropriately accessed confidential Apple-Nokia licensing documents that were supposed to be seen only by Samsung’s legal counsel. To get Apple’s rubber-banding patent invalidated in Germany, Samsung cites the existence of prior art: Apple’s own presentation of the original iPhone in January 2007. Samsung caught faking benchmark results again, this time on their tablets. Samsung’s chief mobile products officer resigns. SEC concludes its four-month investigation into Apple’s overseas cash and taxes; takes no action. BlackBerry hit with shareholder lawsuit for “inflating the stock price by painting a misleadingly rosy picture of the business prospects of its BlackBerry 10 smartphone line.” Google’s Eric Schmidt calls Android “more secure than the iPhone,” unintentionally draws laughter from his mostly-CIO audience. President O­ba­ma, who recently vetoed an ITC ban on Apple iPhones over FRAND patents, now declines to veto an ITC ban on Samsung phones over non-FRAND patents. Samsung’s Galaxy Gear ad closely copies Apple’s original iPhone ad. Apple now poaching talent from the disintegrating BlackBerry. Verizon iPhone activations up 26% from the year-ago quarter. Good Technology reports that business activations of mobile devices are 72% iOS devices, tablet activations are 90% iPads, and custom business apps are 95% for iOS. Samsung — about to be fined $18 billion by the EU for illegally suing other companies over standards-committed (FRAND) patents — offers to stop these suits for five years if the EU will drop the charges and void the fine. iPhone coming to U.S. Cellular; will now be on all five top cellular service providers in the USA. New Windows malware, CryptoLocker, scrambles your most important files, then offers to unscramble them for $300. Motorola reportedly “is now on pace to bleed $1 billion a year out of [Google]’s bank account.” Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smartwatch suffering a return rate over 30%. Southwest Airlines to provide in-flight entertainment from Dish on iPads. Dell takes four months to find out why some of its computers smell like cat urine. The “Rockstar” corsortium (which includes Apple) files suit against Google over six of Rockstar’s recently purchased Nortel patents — including a patent on the technique of tailoring ads to relate to a user’s search results. T-Mobile’s CEO joins the ranks of famous people who have used their Apple device to post a public message about how much they like one of Apple’s competitors.

November ⋅ Acer has near-half-billion-dollar quarterly loss; CEO resigns. BlackBerry changes its mind about selling off to a holding company, instead fires its CEO and borrows $1 billion to keep the company going. Forbes ranks Apple the most valuable brand of any company in any business for the third straight year. International Space Station infected with a Windows virus. Apple about to distribute another $3 billion in dividends. Steve Jobs posthumously inducted into the Bay Area Business Hall of Fame. Microsoft ending its employee stack-ranking system. Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft CTO, creates iPad-exclusive culinary app. Pfizer, one of BlackBerry’s biggest customers with 90,000 employees, now ditching BlackBerry. Jon Evans in TechCrunch calls Apple’s Xcode “a joy to work with. It’s slick, fast, powerful, helpful without being intrusive,” plus “[t]he debugger works seamlessly, and the simulator is fast and responsive. But Android? Oh, Android. The current state-of-the-art IDE ... is embarrassingly bad. Slow, clunky, counterintuitive when not outright baffling, poorly laid out, needlessly complex, it’s just a mess.” Mountrath Community College switches its students from physical textbooks to e-books, and experiences “major technical issues with the majority of the HP Elite Pad tablet devices,” causing the principal to declare it “an unmitigated disaster.” Fortune names Apple’s new retail chief, Angela Ahrendts, its #4 Businessperson of the Year. Samsung’s answer to Apple’s Activation Lock rejected by U.S. service providers. Macy’s testing Ap­ple’s iBeacons in two major U.S. cities. Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smartwatch appears to be a big flop. In Japan this past month, iPhone was over three-quarters of the smartphone market. Black Friday sales on mobile devices were over 80% from iOS devices. Futuremark de-lists multiple Samsung and HTC tablets and phones from its benchmark ratings due to cheating.

December ⋅ iPhone about to launch on China Mobile, the biggest cellphone service provider in the world, by subscriber count. Honda to feature iPhone-based, in-dash touchscreen. Soccer legend Franz Beckenbauer tweets his support for Samsung from his iPhone. Just three months old, iOS 7 is now on three-fourths of all iPhones in North America. Analytics firm Parks Associates finds that Apple’s desktop computers are now more desired than any other company’s this holiday season. The Wall Street Journal runs a scathing critique of Judge Denise Cote’s treatment of Apple, calling her and her “prosecutor friend” Michael Bromwich an “abusive” “star chamber” that is “shredding the separation of constitutional powers” — Cote “indulged Justice Department arguments that have no precedent in antitrust jurisprudence” and “essentially ruled before hearing the evidence,” then gave Iran-Contra/BP oil spill fixer Bromwich “flatly unconstitutional” “carte blanche to act as the inquisitor of all things Cupertino.” Noon yesterday at the Fashion Centre at Pentagon City, the Apple store was a “crowded” center of activity, while the Microsoft store was a ghost town with “zero shoppers.” Newly found Android vulnerability allows malware to audio-bug the surrounding area, even when the device is not in use. Microsoft-purchased Nokia may owe India $3.4 billion in back taxes. iPhone sales see huge increase in China. Southwest Airlines now supports Ap­ple’s iMessages in-flight for just $2 per day. Beyoncé releases her new album as an iTunes exclusive; it immediately becomes #1 in more than a hundred countries, selling over 800,000 copies in three days. BlackBerry reports quarterly loss of $4.4 billion and sells off five of its main-campus buildings, plus the land they’re on. Tim Cook rumored soon to be discussing with President Gül a $4 billion iPad purchase for Turkey’s school system. “Evasi0n” team’s hack (a.k.a. “jailbreak”) of iOS 7 found to be funded, to the tune of $1 million, by a Chinese software piracy website. After unsuccessfully bidding $3 billion for Nortel’s patents, Google now asking the courts to preemptively invalidate them.

2 0 1 4

January ⋅ Grocery chains Giant Eagle and Safeway deploying iBeacons at over a hundred stores. HP cutting another 5,000 jobs, bringing its total restructuring layoffs to 34,000. Apple’s App Store sales were $10 billion in the last year alone. Newly privatized Dell reportedly planning big layoffs. In the last quarter, U.S. Mac sales increased 28% from the year-ago quarter, while the rest of the PC market shrank 11%. Intel indefinitely mothballs its new, never-used, chip plant in Chandler, Arizona. HP now offering to sell Windows 7 PCs to consumers, instead of Windows 8. Microsoft losing money on every Surface tablet they sell. Out of 100 e-commerce websites rated by Dashlane for secure password management, only Apple scores a perfect 100. Google selling off Motorola Mobility for almost $10 billion less than they paid for it.

February ⋅ Impending Dell layoffs rumored to hit over 15,000 employees. Apple about to distribute another $3 billion in dividends. Sony, longtime maker of the VAIO Windows PC, posts a billion-dollar loss, announces 5,000 layoffs, and sells off its PC-making division. Samsung reportedly put instructions in its olympic athlete gift bags telling the olympians that they must cover the Apple logo on their iPhones during the opening ceremonies — since the story broke, the IOC says, no, nobody has to cover their Apple logo regardless of any gifts from Samsung, and now Samsung is denying the whole thing happened. Bill Gates spends entire first day back in office at Microsoft trying to install Windows 8.1. If the iTunes content/services system was counted as a separate company, it would be #130 in the Fortune 500. Barnes & Noble lays off its entire NOOK hardware engineering staff. Whole Foods now using iPads for checkout registers. Including desktops, laptops, and tablets, Apple now selling more computers than the entire Windows world combined, and earning 87% of all profits in the mobile phone business. Microsoft reportedly cutting the price of Windows by 70%. Android 4.4 KitKat, launched last September around the same time as iOS 7, has reached only 1.8% of active Android users, while iOS 7 is now on 82% of active users’ iOS devices. iPad Air named “Best Mobile Tablet” by the GSM Association.

March ⋅ Apple TV (unit sales plus post-purchase rentals/sales of movies and TV shows) is now a billion-dollar-per-year business. Apple tops Fortune’s Most Admired Companies for the seventh consecutive year; Microsoft not in the top ten. Cortana, Microsoft’s copy of Apple’s three-and-a-half-year-old Siri, coming to Windows Phone in another month or so. A month after being ousted as CEO, Steve Ballmer calls Microsoft a “2.5-trick pony.” Microsoft’s attempt to recruit tech-savvy individuals to convince others to upgrade from XP generates “a torrent of abuse” from angry Windows 8 users. New Android malware tool, Dendroid, makes it easy to install malware in any Android application and get it through the Google Play store’s anti-malware screening process. Google may be hit with $5 billion antitrust fine in India. Only six months old, iTunes Radio now is used more than Spotify in the USA. Brand Finance names Apple the most valuable brand of any U.S. company in any business. Thanks to software bloat, Samsung’s 16GB S4 gives just 3.7GB more usable storage than an 8GB iPhone 5c. Fortune names Apple CEO Tim Cook among the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders.” Users of Microsoft Word “under active attack” via newly discovered vulnerability which “makes it possible to remotely seize control of computers.” Apple has sold a cumulative total of half a billion iPhones. Nearly half of businesses are offering to let their employees use Macs instead of Windows PCs. BlackBerry suing its own Senior VP of Software, to stop him from taking a job at Apple. Some Google-Play-distributed Android apps are using the device’s battery/processor power to mine digital currency silently, in the background. Microsoft announces Office for iPad; Apple will get its usual 30% cut. BlackBerry posts $420 million quarterly loss.

April ⋅ In “The Fallacy of Android-First,” Dave Feldman, Emu co-founder, recounts all the problems he had trying to release his product on Android, and how he switched back to an iOS-priority business. Angela Ahrendts, Ap­ple’s new head of retail, made a Dame of the British Empire. While iOS remains malware-free, the top-selling Android app is “Virus Shield,” a $4, 4.5-star item that turns out to be a con that doesn’t protect your device in any way at all. Popular Android app “Brightest Flashlight,” downloaded 50 million times, found by the FTC to be sending users’ real-time locations to the app’s creator. All HP buildings demolished; land now cleared for construction of Apple’s new spaceship campus. HP settles SEC bribery charges for $108 million. Samsung suing a newspaper for more than a quarter of a million dollars because they wrote negatively about the S5 phone — the paper says its report was accurate. “Heartbleed,” the massive hole in OpenSSL security, affects millions of Android devices, but not iOS or Mac OS X. Court-exposed documents reveal Android’s prominence in the tablet market to be a massive fraud — iPad probably still is 80-90% of that market. Samsung, the only significantly profitable Android device maker, has been planning for years to ditch Android. ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes calls Android fragmentation a “toxic hellstew of vulnerabilities.” Excepting Apple, the top four Silicon Valley companies by revenue — HP, Google, Intel, and Cisco — make combined revenue less than Apple’s. James Kendrick in Mobile News notices that as he moves around downtown, “I see iPads, lots of them, everywhere I go. ... What I rarely see, almost never in fact, are Android tablets.” iOS malware stealing users’ passwords — but only jailbroken devices are affected. Samsung apparently lied to the court when it said that no third party was indemnifying it over patents: Google was doing exactly that. Samsung opens “innovation museum” that spans from famous early inventors like Bell, Edison, and Faraday, to today’s modern smartphones and tablets — but the only Apple product on display is the Apple II home computer circa 1976. Apple has its best non-holiday quarter ever. Longtime head of Google’s Google+ division abruptly resigns, and reportedly the multi-year push to force Google+ onto Gmail and YouTube users will be stopped. J.D. Power’s latest smartphone satisfaction survey finds iPhone #1 on the four largest U.S. carriers. In France, Google may owe $1 billion in back taxes, plus a “sizable” penalty. Samsung reportedly paying some sites $100 to link (not via ads) to videos promoting Samsung products. iPhone is about to pass Nokia in total phone sales, smart and non-smart combined. European antitrust regulators tell Samsung and Motorola to stop suing other companies over FRAND patents. In CNBC’s list of the 25 most influential businesspeople of the last 25 years, Steve Jobs is #1. iTunes accounts now at 800 million, and very closely following an exponential growth curve for the past six years — doubling every year-and-a-half.

May ⋅ Thanks to twelve years of steady selling (basically since he stepped down as CEO), Bill Gates now is no longer the top individual owner of Microsoft shares, and at the same rate he will sell off all his remaining shares in about four years. In his latest article, Kurt Eichenwald writes, “Sam Baxter, a patent lawyer who once handled a case for Samsung [said] ‘I represented [the Swedish telecommunications company] Ericsson, and they couldn’t lie if their lives depended on it, and I represented Samsung and they couldn’t tell the truth if their lives depended on it.’” New Android malware disables your phone, tells you that your phone “viewed illegal porn,” then demands a $300 “fine” to reactivate the phone. Apple passes Staples, to become the #2 online retailer, behind only Amazon. Samsung’s latest phone, the S5, has serious problems with its fingerprint sensor. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art gives lifetime achievement award to Apple designer Jonathan Ive. Japanese court rules that Samsung has been abusing FRAND patents against Apple. App developer Game Oven discovers gyroscopes on Android devices to be a hit-and-miss affair, with some gyroscopes broken on one axis, some faked with other sensors, and some missing altogether. In the Netherlands, Apple wins broad injunction against patent-infringing products from Samsung. Samsung’s lawyers call Apple a “jihadist,” and say that Apple’s suit against Samsung is “Apple’s Vietnam.” China bans Windows 8 on all government-used PCs. Not long after buying Nest, Google tells the SEC that it may soon start displaying ads on thermostats. HP says it may cut another 16,000 employees. Google shutting down Motorola’s Ft. Worth, TX smartphone factory.

June ⋅ Minnesota’s St. Paul school district dumps Dell and goes with iPads instead. Apple moves up from position #6 to #5 in the Fortune 500, and is the only tech company in the top fifteen. The Durham, NH Police Department has its Windows PCs scrambled by CryptoWall, which is demanding a hefty cash ransom to unscramble them. Costco, which stopped carrying Apple products five years ago, apparently planning once again to carry them. Thousands of secret keys found embedded in Android apps, easily discoverable by examining the compiled apps with a byte-level editor. FaceBook phone goes nowhere; its development team disbands. The much-and-long-ballyhooed shift to Android-first mobile development continues to not occur. Buyers of Google’s Chromebook Pixel, promised 100MB/mo. of Verizon data for two years, are abruptly cut off after one year. Google’s I/O (developer conference) keynote is “strange,” “disorganized,” “unrehearsed,” “boring,” “surprising in all the wrong ways,” “weird,” and full of failed demos that evoke “awkward mumbling from the audience.” In late 2007, Nokia apparently paid millions of euros to extortionists who somehow had obtained Nokia’s app signing keys. Veteran actor Gary Oldman, who has appeared in HTC smartphone ads, apparently using an iPhone. BlackBerry’s U.S. market share hits 0%.

July ⋅ In its latest data, Counterpoint finds iPhone 5s to be the best-selling smartphone. Apple and IBM form major partnership to provide enterprise mobility solutions. Microsoft announces layoffs over three times bigger than its biggest ever: 18,000 persons — or one in every seven employees — will be let go, slowly, over the next year. A few weeks after Apple bought Beats, Samsung announces its own line of headphones and portable speakers. Lenovo stops shipping small Windows tablets in the U.S. due to lack of demand. Samsung, “angry” about its latest quarter’s miserable results, ret­ro­ac­tive­ly rescinds a hundred executives’ bonuses.

August ⋅ Despite iPad sales down 9% from a year ago, Apple still has a very good quarter with profits up 12%, iPhone up 13% (55% in BRIC nations), iTunes sales up 25%, and Mac sales up 18% while the rest of the PC market shrank. After being evicted from San Francisco Bay last winter, Google’s mammoth, four-story, retail showroom barge now is being sold for scrap. Arlington County, VA giving MacBook Airs to all high school freshmen. Microsoft’s MSN Messenger (a.k.a. Windows Live Messenger) shuts down after fifteen years of irrelevance.

September ⋅ Jen Taylor, who did the voice of Microsoft Cortana, apparently using an iPhone. Maroon 5’s Adam Levine, who appeared in a Samsung presentation several days ago, apparently using an iPhone. Getty Images sues Microsoft for massive copyright infringement. Microsoft pays NFL $400 million to use Surface tablets, but TV announcers call them “iPad-like tools.” Microsoft discontinuing the name “Nokia” in its recently purchased Nokia mobile division, bringing the era of Nokia mobile phones to an end. HP pays over $100 million to settle bribery charges in multiple countries. i­Phone 6 and 6 Plus see four million pre-orders in 24 hours. Over a thousand authors sign a letter asking Amazon to stop its strong-arm sanctions against Hachette. Korean brokers brace for another bad quarter from Samsung. Microsoft buys Minecraft (Mojang) for $2.5 billion, as its three founders, including Minecraft author Markus Persson, leave. Microsoft’s Silicon Valley lab, Microsoft Research, shutting down. Comic Neal Brennan, the voice of some Samsung commercials, apparently using an iPhone. Microsoft shutting down its Trustworthy Computing Group. iPhone 6 and 6 Plus sell a record ten million units in three days. Apple leads the American Customer Satisfaction Index’s ranking of PC manufacturers for the e­lev­enth consecutive year. iPhone 6 Plus and 6 capture the top two spots in DxO Labs’ smartphone camera tests. Samsung exits the European laptop and Chromebook markets. L.A. Clippers probably replacing their iPads with Surface tablets — because Microsoft ex-CEO Steve Ballmer bought the team for $2 billion. In its latest quarter, BlackBerry posts a net loss of $207 million, and had revenue 42% less than the year-ago quarter.

October ⋅ Steve Ballmer, “Bill Gates’s longtime best friend and anointed successor,” and Gates are no longer on speaking terms. IDC admits Apple into its top five computer makers for the first time ever (in fifth place), but excludes iPad from its figures while including Windows tablets, netbooks, and netbook/tablet hybrids — if IDC included iPad, Apple would be #1. Despite historically unprecedented stock buybacks, Apple’s market valuation now almost 50% greater than #2 Exxon Mobil, and more than 50% greater than #3 Google. Amazon posts quarterly loss of $437 million — over ten times as bad as the year-ago quarter. Apple to build an average of one new store in China every month for the next two years. Apple now has sold a billion iOS devices. Italy’s Supreme Court bans Microsoft’s contracts that require PC makers to pay for Windows even if a PC is sold without it. iPhone 6 and 6 Plus users discover that they can use Apple Pay at Rite Aid and CVS, despite those retailers being members of the non-Apple “CurrentC” coalition — so, just to block Apple users, Rite Aid and CVS shut down their NFC payment stations at all of their stores, preventing any of their customers from using any mobile payments system at all. After less-than-clear statements from MCX (CurrentC) about what will happen to non-compliant members, big-box discount chain Meijer (a member) refuses to turn off its NFC terminals, and Apple Pay continues to work there. Samsung’s profits drop 60% from the year-ago quarter, while its mobile device profits drop 74%.

November ⋅ Apple’s market cap now greater than all Russian companies combined. Intel has lost $7 billion in the last two years, subsidizing non-Apple mobile devices and their chips. Bluebox Labs discovers many different models of popular Android tablet to be pre-infected with malware, “shocking” security holes, and backdoors. Sony warns of $2 billion net loss for 2014, mainly due to its a­bys­mal­ly performing smartphone division.

December ⋅ Huawei rep says that no company ever made money from Windows Phone. Barnes & Noble ends its e-book relationship with Microsoft. Google’s Nexus 6 phone was planned to have a fingerprint reader, but it was cancelled. United Airlines equipping each of its 23,000 flight attendants with an iPhone 6 Plus. The Financial Times of London names Tim Cook “Person of the Year.” Windows and Android hit by advanced, new malware package, but non-jailbroken iOS is unaffected. Ford dumps Windows Embedded, embraces Apple’s CarPlay. Thanks to his sale of Beats to Apple, Dr. Dre sets the record for most profitable year enjoyed by any musician ever. Real’s decade-long antitrust suit against Apple (for its now-long-defunct FairPlay DRM) ends with the jury deciding that Apple did nothing wrong. 39,000 Windows PCs hit by TorrentLocker ransomware, which is estimated to have earned well over half a million dollars in ransoms. BlackBerry posts $148 million quarterly loss. CNN names Tim Cook “CEO of the Year.” In London, the flagship “Samsung Experience” store (i.e. extremely close copy of Apple retail) shuts down after only eight months, due to lack of business. Worldwide, during the holiday shopping spike, Apple got over half of all new-device activations.

2 0 1 5

January ⋅ Amazon’s Fire Phone flops hard; the responsible executives are promptly eliminated. After “almost two months,” since the release of Lollipop, less than one tenth of one percent of Android devices are using it — even when counting only those devices that can use the Google Play Store. (About a third of those devices are using last year’s version, Kit-Kat; the other two-thirds are on even older versions.) Samsung warns investors to expect yet another disappointing quarter. Google publicly exposes three unpatched Windows vulnerabilities, after giving Microsoft 90 days to fix them. Popular mobile game Monument Valley, available on iOS, Android, and Amazon devices, earns over 80% of its revenue from iOS, and less than 15% from Android. After sixteen years, notorious Microsoft shill Paul Thurrott abandons his Paul Thurrott’s Supersite For Windows — his new site, Thurrott - News & Analysis for Tech Enthusiasts, is non-Microsoft-centric in name only. Apple logos are everywhere in the audience at Microsoft’s Windows 10 press event. BlackBerry CEO John Chen recommends that developers on any platform be required by law to port their apps to all well-known platforms. Apple has the most profitable quarter of any company, in any business, ever — the S&P 500’s bottom 435 companies’ combined profits for the past six years are less than Apple’s profits from last quarter. Sony shutting down its Music Unlimited service.

February ⋅ Apple’s historically unprecedented dividend program rolls on, with another $2.8 billion quarterly disbursement. Millions of Android phones may have been “hosed” by malicious apps from the Google Play store. Samsung issues warning that its smart TVs listen to everything you say, and share what they hear with Samsung and other companies. i­Phone’s extreme success in Japan causing Samsung to consider exiting the Japanese smartphone market. CEO Tim Cook dismisses the oft-cited-against-Apple “law of large numbers,” saying, “We don’t believe in such laws as laws of large numbers. It’s just sort of an old dogma, I think, that was cooked up by somebody.” In the S&P 500, Apple’s profits are now over 43 times that of the average non-Apple member. Only nineteen nations have a GDP bigger than Apple’s market cap. iPad has 83% market share in Samsung’s home country, South Korea. Apple to build biggest-anywhere solar farm, in Monterey County, CA. New Wall Street Journal article says court-appointed Apple overseer Michael Bromwich is a “fixer-for-hire” with “long-time political connections to Judge Cote,” and “no prior antitrust experience but does have the dubious honor of being the first and only involuntary monitor ever in civil antitrust litigation.” The article cites Bromwich’s bill to Apple for $2.65 million — including $1,100/hour for time he spent in court when Apple was arguing for his removal. The author agrees with Apple that Bromwich’s appointment is “illegal and unconstitutional,” and recommends that the court “sack Mr. Bromwich and end what is a major abuse even by the standards of modern antitrust.” The majority of all UK e-mail is read on Apple hardware. Fortune names Apple “most-admired company” for the eighth consecutive year. Lenovo PCs found to be preinstalled with Superfish, which not only injects ads into web pages where they didn’t already exist, but subverts the HTTPS (secure website) protocol in a way that makes it possible for hackers to engineer man-in-the-middle attacks against Lenovo users when they access any secure website — such as their bank’s. Apple’s market cap now about twice that of any other traded company in any business. Apple taking 89% of all profits in the smartphone market.

March ⋅ Apple added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Windows anti-virus software Panda recognizes itself as malware, quarantines and deactivates itself, “bricks PCs.” Businesses still using Windows XP are causing poor sales results for Intel. Its first tablet since it killed the hard-flopping PlayBook three years ago, BlackBerry releases the “high-security” SecuTABLET — only $2,300. Fortune names Tim Cook the World’s Greatest Leader. UK buys iPads for all 650 members of the House of Commons. Samsung, freaked-out about the success of iPhone 6 in Korea, pressuring the government to pass laws that will make it impossible for Apple to compete in that country.

April ⋅ Samsung pays 500 student-like twenty-somethings to come to its S6 phone launch event, as if in spontaneous attendence. Popular Windows antivirus software Malwarebytes identifies Dell’s support software as malware. Intel merges its mobile and non-mobile financials to hide massive mobile losses. After spending billions of dollars on its public cloud service over the past several years, HP reportedly abandoning it. Mac sales grow 8.9% over the year-ago quarter, while the rest of the PC industry shrinks 2.6%. Reportedly, the Android 5.0.2 update “bricks” Google’s own Nexus phones, and Google disavows responsibility, effectively saying “talk to ASUS (our manufacturer).” After trying to find a way around Megacode (Windows ransomware), police departments in Maine decide to pay up, and say that “Next time, we’ll just pay the ransom on the first day and be done with it.” Google may be about to be hit with $6 billion EU antitrust fine. Bloomberg finds Apple’s Tim Cook to be the most pay-efficient U.S. CEO. Apple has its best non-holiday quarter ever, with revenue about equal to its holiday quarter of fifteen months ago. Best Buy, a prominent member of MCX’s CurrentC consortium, decides to support Apple Pay; the next day, MCX replaces its own CEO. Samsung’s profits are down 39% from the year-ago quarter; its mobile division profits are down 57%.

May ⋅ 2014’s highest-paid female executive in the USA is Apple’s Angela Ahrendts. Google’s home town, Mountain View, nixes Goo­gle’s futuristic campus plan. (Eight-month update: Apple gets an enthusiastic green-light for its San Jose development plans, even though it hasn’t really figured out what it wants to do there.) Google study finds that one out of every 25 Google page views is compromised by Superfish or a similar SSL-defeating ad injector. Since Harvard dumped its Apple stock two years ago, those shares have nearly doubled in value. Google reportedly severing its photo service from the “stagnating” Google+ social network.

June ⋅ iOS 9 to support the use of third-party ad blockers. New York’s Mineola school district moves 75% of its curriculum to iPads. After writing off as a loss $8.8 billion of the $10.3 billion it paid for Autonomy, HP now paying another $100 million to settle a lawsuit over that loss. German parliament unable to remove Windows spyware, “may need to replace all [its] software and hardware.” Google’s Chromium browser silently installs audio listening software on PCs. Samsung PCs silently disable Windows Update. Microsoft selling off large chunks of Bing Maps and its advertising business.

July ⋅ Chinese consumer protection group sues Samsung over irremovable smartphone bloatware. Samsung warns of another impending bad quarter. HTC’s market valuation craters to a ten-year low as it reports monthly revenue down 60% from the year-ago June. Microsoft writes off its $7.2 billion purchase of Nokia’s mobile phone division as an $8.4 billion loss, and announces 7,800 layoffs on top of last year’s 18,000. iPhone now earning 92% of all profits in the smartphone business, and has a­bout 50% of the U.S. market. Authors and publishers band together to request DOJ investigation into anticompetitive practices by Amazon. Court rules that 55,000 Xbox 360 users may class-action-sue Microsoft over the device’s tendency to ruin discs. Apple Watch satisfaction rate measures at 97%, substantially higher than either iPhone or iPad in their launch years. Toshiba, long-time maker of Windows PCs, found to have reported over $1.2 billion of fake profits — nine executives, including the CEO, resign. Apple has its best-ever Q3, with revenue up 33% from a year ago. Apple is #15 in the Fortune Global 500. Microsoft posts $3.2 billion quarterly net loss, about six times as bad as its worst ever. iOS device unit sales passing Windows PC unit sales. Microsoft retires the name “Internet Explorer” due to its severe unpopularity. Windows 10’s Solitaire game shows periodic ads, but you can disable them for $1.50/month. Samsung’s mobile division profits down 38% from the year-ago quarter. LG’s smartphone division hovering on the edge of profitability. Firefox CEO’s open letter blasts Microsoft for playing anticompetitive games with Windows 10’s default browser settings. IBM switching up to 3/4 of its workforce from Windows PCs to Apple Macs.

August ⋅ After struggling for seven years to eradicate the Windows botnet Conficker, researchers conclude that a million PCs “might remain infected forever.” Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel, says Google+ is part of a “painfully long list of unsuccessful Google products.” Immediately after launching, Windows 10 hit by new ransomware, “CTB-Locker.” iOS 8 now on 85% of active iOS devices, while Android 5 “Lollipop” stuck at 18% adoption. Upgrading to Windows 10 disables DVD playback until you pay $15 to re-enable it. After the release of Apple Watch, U.S. sales of conventional watches takes biggest dive in seven years. HTC’s market valuation now less than its cash on hand. HTC phones found to be storing users’ fingerprints as plain, unencrypted images. Rite-Aid changes its mind, decides to accept Apple Pay. Android hit with multiple, serious, new vulnerabilities which are unlikely to be patched on most users’ phones any time soon. HTC reports quarterly loss of a quarter of a billion dollars, and 2,250 layoffs. Lenovo announces 3,200 layoffs. According to The New York Times, Amazon has an employee stack-ranking system every bit as bad as — if not considerably worse than — did Ballmer’s Microsoft. CurrentC mobile payment system delayed. Google’s Ara (build your own iPhone-like phone from parts) delayed. Microsoft shutting down Nokia phone plant in Salo, Finland, killing up to 2,300 jobs. Court finds that Samsung stole TSMC trade secrets, then used them to beat TSMC to Apple contracts.

September ⋅ ESPN sports commentator Bill Simmons (now with HBO) says of Microsoft-ex-CEO Steve Ballmer’s ownership of the L.A. Clippers: “Ballmer has shown ZERO evidence that he knows what he’s doing. And it’s been the best kept secret in the NBA for 15-16 months.” Lead audio engineer for Microsoft’s HoloLens leaves for a job at Apple. Apple and Cisco form major partnership to provide mobile networking enterprise solutions. Samsung in its longest streak of monthly valuation losses since 1983. Amazon’s smartphone/tablet development lab hit by layoffs, as “numerous” projects are cancelled. New Android ransomware tells its victim that their phone has been disabled by the NSA, and that they must pay a $500 “fine” to restore it. Samsung’s Gear S2 smartwatch is not an Android device. BlackBerry buys cybersecurity firm Good Technology for $425 million. New, porn-themed Android malware takes your picture with the phone’s front-facing camera, then shows you its photo of you, along with a demand of $500 to re-enable your phone. Microsoft downloading 6GB, Windows 10 installer to Windows 7/8 PCs, without users’ consent or knowledge. Ap­ple rumored to be dumping Samsung and making TSMC its exclusive A10-chip manufacturer. Goo­gle found in violation of Russian antitrust laws. iPhone 6S on-track to beat iPhone 6’s ten-million-units-in-three-days launch record. Apple Pay partner count passes 500. HP axing another 25,000-30,000 people, bringing its total layoffs in the last three years to as many as 85,000. Microsoft’s Zune music service shutting down. Android lockscreen can be bypassed just by entering a long string of random text. In a live demo, Microsoft’s Cortana spectacularly fails to understand what CEO Satya Nadella is saying, causing him to give up after three tries. Appeals court rules that Apple-v-Samsung lower court should have permitted Apple to block use of its patents in Samsung products, instead of allowing only monetary compensation. Despite being paid hundreds of millions of dollars to use Microsoft Surface tablets, NFL announcers and players still calling them “iPad-like tablets” and “knockoff iPads.” Samsung once again warns of gloomy quarterly results, and is laying off 10,000 people at its headquarters. iOS 9 adoption faster than any previous iOS version. After contracting ten years ago to replace Michigan’s 1960s-mainframe, records-management system, HP now being sued for failure to deliver. iPhone 6S & 6S Plus sell 13 million units in three days, exceeding last year’s record-setting launch by 30%. BlackBerry barely exceeds $50 million quarterly profit, announces its first Android phone. Swiss watchmaker TAG Heuer announces imminent launch of its $1,800, Android smartwatch — but warns of tough 2016 ahead. Microsoft about to open a five-story, 5th Avenue retail store, five blocks from Ap­ple’s famous glass-cube store.

October ⋅ Beautiful, futuristic, 770,­000-sq-ft, Sunnyvale campus at Central & Wolfe to be occupied by Apple. Interbrand names Apple #1 global brand of 2015. Samsung’s price-to-book-value ratio hits a 13-year low. Microsoft, which in the ’90s rarely, if ever, referred to its competitors’ products by name, now openly comparing its new products to Apple’s. The world’s #1 smartphone maker just four years ago, HTC now unable to compete at either the high or low end of the market. After buying Motorola Mobility from Google, Lenovo sees its quarterly PC profits mostly erased by near-$300 million mobile device losses. Microsoft Lumia’s U.S. carrier availability has been atrocious for years. BlackBerry CEO says his company may abandon hardware altogether, becoming a software/services outfit. Judge Cote quietly discontinues Michael Bromwich’s involuntary oversight of Apple, without any admission that it was a mistake, while Bromwich calls Apple “its own worst enemy” in his final report. Dell buys IT services firm EMC for $67 billion. Windows 7/8 PCs aggressively nagging users to install Windows 10, with no obvious way to choose no-and-don’t-keep-asking-me. Windows’s ubiquitous “Start” menu now displays ads. IBM, transitioning most of its employees from Windows to Mac, finds that Mac-using employees need tech support 1/8 as much as they did with Windows. Japan’s engineering, architecture, and construction companies standardizing on iPad. ExecRank names Tim Cook top CEO of 2015. Besides earning far less revenue than iOS, Android development also found to be 30% more expensive. Microsoft cuts another 1,000 people. Amazon stops selling Apple TV and other video streaming devices that compete with its own Fire TV. Google Play store lets anyone post transparently abusive, one-star reviews of apps they’ve never even downloaded. Samsung reportedly laying off 30% of its workforce, and forcing managers over 50 to “voluntarily” retire.

November ⋅ Even after being offered $5 million for the product placement alone, actor Daniel Craig opposes Bond’s use of an Android phone, says that “James Bond only uses the best.” After spending $6 million renovating a 5,400-sq-ft planned NYC flagship retail store, Google scraps it. Three new strains of in-the-wild, Android malware can’t be removed even by wiping the phone — the owner must get a new phone (and hope it doesn’t get infected too). AMD, longtime provider of Windows PC CPUs, being class-action sued for lying about the number of cores in its latest processors. Samsung’s Galaxy Note tablet has a stylus that can be easily inserted into its holder in the wrong direction, which permanently damages the device; Samsung’s solution is to affix a warning label telling you not to do that. iPhone now takes 94% of all smartphone industry profits. MIT research finds that “half of the communications connections established by the top [500] free Android apps are hidden to the user, and much of the data is being transmitted for unknown purposes” that have “no bearing on the user experience.” iOS App Store passes 100 billion downloads. After six days on the market, LG pulls its Urbane smartwatch due to hardware issues. Dell installed a self-signed root certificate on its computers that enables man-in-the-middle attacks against Dell users when they access any secure website (like their bank’s). While Google, Facebook, and Qualcomm spend 15%, 21%, and 22% of their revenue on R&D, respectively, Apple spends just 3.5%.

December ⋅ The Boston Consulting Group names Apple the most innovative company of 2015. United Airlines equipping each of its 6,000 customer service reps with an iPhone 6 Plus. HP kills its low-end, Android tablets. Apple’s enterprise business is growing 40%/ year, and by itself would currently place Apple among the fifteen largest tech companies. Toshiba announces $4.5 billion net loss for the year, and “drastic restructuring,” including 7,000-10,000 layoffs. After three years of ridiculous, anti-Apple predictions, Ber­en­berg analyst Adnaan Ahmad is fired. Apple got nearly 50% of new-device activations this holiday season; Samsung got less than 20%. Google to massively alter Android’s API so it no longer violates Oracle’s Java copyrights. Microsoft knew for years that over 1,000 of its HotMail customers had been hacked, and deliberately chose not to tell them about it.

2 0 1 6

January ⋅ Samsung warns of tough year ahead. Scammers pretending to be Dell apparently have obtained access to copious detail of Dell’s customers’ history with the company. Apple’s App Store exceeds $1 billion in sales for the holidays. Normally at least ten years for every version of Windows, the security-patch support life for Windows 8 will abruptly end just three years after its release. Worldwide in 2015, the only computer maker that experienced unit sales growth, not shrinkage, is Apple. Apple and now-irrelevant Motorola reportedly are the only two phone makers who haven’t tried to cheat benchmark tests. AnTuTu’s latest benchmarks indicate iPhone to be much faster than any other smartphone. New, antivirus-resistant, Android malware “can spoof the user interfaces of apps from at least 31 banks from across the world and two mobile payment service providers.” Oracle-v-Google exposes, to Google’s significant dismay, that Google has made less revenue from Android in its entire history than Apple made from iPhone alone in its most recent quarter — and that Google pays Apple $1 billion/year to be the default but easily user-changeable search engine on iOS (which is 1/3 of the revenue they get from showing ads on iOS search results). AFC championship game stalls when Patriots’ tablets stop working — and just like that, the announcers know to call them “Microsoft Surface” instead of “iPad.” Apple once again posts the most successful quarter in the history of corporations, slightly besting its year-ago record. Windows Phone chief Joe Belfiore apparently using an iPhone. In China, Apple is now the most-sold-smartphone brand — the country’s top-selling three models of smartphone are all iPhones.

February ⋅ Apple continuing to issue nearly $3 billion in dividends every quarter. Eli Lilly equipping 15,000 field personnel with iPads. iPad Pro is the top-selling detachable tablet/laptop product of the holiday quarter. Like Apple, Samsung now supports third-party ad blockers in its mobile browser — but when third parties create those blockers for Samsung’s mobile browser, Google removes them from the Google Play store. Russia about to ban Windows on government PCs. Samsung enters “state of emergency” as it becomes official that Apple will use only TSMC for its A10 chip. Despite having almost three times as many paid subscribers as Apple Music, Spotify unable to turn a profit. Google-owned Nest reportedly “a toxic corporate culture” — one former employee calls it “the worst experience of my career ... I still wake up with something like PTSD occasionally from getting yelled at and bullied by Tony Fadell almost literally every day while I was there,” while others called it “an atmosphere of ‘fear’ and said that sitting near Fadell’s office meant hearing a constant barrage of shouting.” After likely-Windows-based ransomware cripples major L.A. hospital’s day-to-day activities for over a week — causing them to use pen, paper, and fax machines, and to redirect patients to other hospitals — the directors decide to pay the $17,000 ransom, and say that the infection was random, not targeted. Likewise with a South Carolina elementary school, which pays half that amount to escape a similar ransomware paralysis. Ap­ple is Fortune’s Most Admired Company for the ninth consecutive year. Similar to Dell’s mall kiosks of several years ago, where you could look at Dell products but not buy them, Samsung to open huge, New York, flagship store where you can’t actually buy anything. Vicious new ran­som­ware, “Locky,” depends entirely on Microsoft Word’s willingness to automatically launch potentially malicious scripts when you open a Word file. Forced updates to Windows 10 are switching users to Microsoft apps involuntarily. Mobile device failures are 85% Android, 15% iOS. Windows 10 now displaying full-screen ads for video games and movies on users’ lock screens; they’re on by default, but can be turned off if you know where to find the obscure control switch, whose name doesn’t say anything about ads. France now actively seeking $1.8 billion in back taxes from Google. The Baidu web browser for Windows and Android found to be silently sending all kinds of personal information about the user’s computer and browsing history to Baidu’s serv­ers, sometimes without encryption — “Researchers also discovered that the browser checks [for] and downloads updates but does not use code signatures. This practice exposes users to MitM (Man-in-the-Middle) attacks that allow an attacker to send malicious files to users disguised as a Baidu update.” A new piece of malware — which has gotten into the Google Play store at least 340 times — invisibly clicks certain ads, making it appear to paying advertisers that users are clicking on their ads, when they really aren’t. About 2/3 of Android phones don’t use encryption on the data they store.

March ⋅ In its first year, Samsung Pay lost $17 million. Quicken — one of the last major apps that sorely neglects its Mac version in the apparent expectation that everyone will soon be on Windows — is bought by HIG, which immediately announces it is doubling the size of the Mac development team. Apple Watch has taken 2/3 of the smartwatch market, by units sold. First in-the-wild Mac ransomware appears, but paralyzes no one, and is quickly defeated by Apple. Involuntary, surprise updates from Windows 7/8 to Windows 10 angering users and disrupting businesses, including medical practices. Apple tops list of companies where executives are treated equally regardless of gender. Two years post-Microsoft, ex-CEO Steve Ballmer now loves Linux. Google ex-CEO Eric Schmidt apparently using an iPhone. FTC warns Android developers to stop using SilverPush spyware, which covertly monitors (via the phone’s microphone) what TV shows are being watched in the same room as the phone. Likely hit by Windows ransomware (they won’t say), major Baltimore/Washington DC hospital chain “very much in crisis mode,” with workers “communicating through a pager system and via courier,” and using “paper transactions where necessary.” Dell selling off its IT consulting division for $3 billion — less than 5% of what it’s paying to buy EMC.

April ⋅ Google-owned Nest kills its recently purchased Revolv home-automation hub — customers who bought lifetime subscriptions are now simply SOL; the device will become a functionless brick in less than six weeks. Mobile malware is 99.9% for Android, 0.1% for iOS. In Kindle Unlimited, fake (auto-synthesized garbage-text) books with fake readers are siphoning off money that should be divided only among the authors of real books with real readers. With a steadily shrinking market for Windows PCs, and no significant headway breaking into the mobile-device processor market, Intel abruptly drops two top executives, announces 12,000 layoffs, and delivers a “forecast for growth dropping to low single digits.” Amid strong indications that Apple will soon use Intel, not just Qualcomm, for baseband phone chips, Qualcomm CEO and his top staff now unable to say “Apple” or “Intel” even when obviously referring to them in their speeches. EU charges Google with antitrust violations. Apple makes 40% of all profits earned by Silicon Valley companies. Cisco discovers total-control backdoor invisibly operating on 12 million Windows PCs around the world. Despite its first year-over-year drop in over a dozen years, Apple still reports more quarterly profits than Google, FaceBook, and Amazon combined, and Samsung’s quarterly mobile-device profits are less than 1/4 that of Apple. Huge, don’t-you-wanna-upgrade-to-Windows-10, nag box appears in the middle of KCCI 8’s live weather report, causing meteorologist Me­tink­a Slater to say, “Ohh, ‘Microsoft recommends updating to Windows 10.’ What should I do? Uh, don’t you love it when that pops up?” Over the past several years, Apple has bought back and retired $117 billion of its own stock. Microsoft changes Cortana so that, from now on, it will search the web only with Bing, and return the results only in Microsoft’s own Edge web browser. Intel cancels Atom, ending its long-running and very expensive attempts to drag the archaic x86 ISA into modern mobile devices. Microsoft not even in the top five tablet makers, while Apple holds at #1 with about as many tablets as the next three makers combined. To its customers, U.S. toy maker unwittingly pushes CryptXXX (Windows ransomware), which demands $500 after encrypting their files.

May ⋅ TIME names iPhone most influential gadget ever. Samsung reportedly giving away its S7 phones to boost their apparent success. Apple and SAP announce major partnership to provide mobile enterprise solutions. Microsoft ending free Windows 10 upgrade program, will now charge $119 for the cheapest version. As an extreme measure to stop ran­som­ware attacks, the U.S. House of Representatives blocks all apps hosted by Google’s appspot.com. True Religion outfitting its salespeople with Apple Watch. Seven years running, Microsoft’s blatant copies of Apple retail are still “pretty empty.” Forbes names Ap­ple the #1 brand of 2016. Italy’s military switching from Microsoft Office to open-source LibreOffice, saving up to $33 million. Both released about half a year ago, iOS 9 now at 84% adoption, while Android 6.0 Marshmallow has reached just 7.5%. Password-skimming, Windows malware infecting ATMs worldwide. As part of its attempt to collect $1.8 billion in back taxes, French police raid the offices of Google France. Microsoft giving up on consumer smartphones, laying off 1,850 more people, and taking a $950 million write-down. When it bought No­ki­a, Microsoft apparently promised to construct a data center in Finland, but it was never built.

June ⋅ Since being bought by Google, Nest has enjoyed a “virtually unlimited budget,” “quadrupled” its employee count, but achieved “no results” and “caused constant bad PR.” Windows ransomware hits U. of Calgary, which suffers for ten days, then pays US $16,000. Hours before Apple’s WWDC, Microsoft buys LinkedIn for $26 billion, then immediately cancels LinkedIn’s internal watch-the-WWDC-livestream party. Like Samsung with Tizen, Huawei has been secretly developing its own mobile OS, so as not to be totally dependent on Android. Ran­som­ware attacks (virtually all against Windows PCs and Android devices) are up 500% over the previous year — an “epidemic” with “no end in sight.” New, “Godless” malware package, found in numerous Google Play apps, “can root 90% of Android phones.” NAS­CAR team pays $500 to free $2 million worth of their data from Windows ransomware. After her business is substantially harmed by an involuntary update to Windows 10, California travel agent sues Microsoft for $10,000, and wins (Microsoft pays, but denies any wrongdoing). Spain raids Google’s Madrid offices over unpaid taxes.

July ⋅ Dell discontinues its Venue tablets and exits the Android tablet business; purchased tablets will receive no further OS updates. The Classic — BlackBerry’s attempt to revive interest in its brand by returning to ’90s-style keyboard phones — has failed at market, and is being discontinued. The Android malware that generates fake clicks on ads may be running on ten million phones. J.D. Power rates Apple Watch #1 in smartwatch customer satisfaction. Windows, which used to be a use-it-forever pre-install on every PC for about $50 per, now slated to become an $84/year rental. New Windows ransomware accepts payment from its victims, but doesn’t decrypt their files, because it actually erased those files irrecoverably. EU brings more antitrust charges against Google. Artist loses 14 years of work when Google-owned Blogger platform deletes his blog. U.S. Army Special Operations replacing Android with iOS because Android “‘freezes up’ and has to be restarted too often,” whereas iOS is “seamless ... The graphics are clear, unbelievable.” To avoid Android fragmentation problems, Salesforce decides to support no Android phones other than Samsung Galaxy and Google Nexus. TSMC, already the exclusive manufacturer of Apple’s about-to-release A10 processor, reportedly also will be the exclusive manufacturer of the next (A11) Apple processor. France finds Windows 10 to be collecting excessive user data, serves Microsoft with formal order to comply with data protection laws. Popular wireless PC keyboards from HP, Toshiba, and others (not Apple) found to use no encryption — keystrokes can be silently intercepted and/or actively simulated “from hundreds of feet away,” and the flaw is fixable only by replacing the entire keyboard. Steam, the extremely popular gaming platform by Valve, allegedly under slow attack by Microsoft, via a plan to make it work less-and-less well on Windows over the next several years — meanwhile, the Mac version of Steam will be unaffected. Microsoft announces another 2,850 layoffs. Last quarter, Google’s (now Alphabet’s) “moonshot” projects lost $860 million — 30% worse than the year-ago quarter. Microsoft hit with two new suits over its upgrade-to-Windows-10 tactics. Now passing a billion sold, iPhone is the most popular product of all time.

August ⋅ After a year-and-a-half of hype, Microsoft starts selling HoloLens, at a price of $3,000. All versions of Windows from the past four years found to leak user account credentials via a bug that was discovered almost twenty years ago and still hasn’t been fixed. Apple’s total payments to third-party app developers pass $50 billion. Over 100 prominent designers and educators contribute to amicus brief urging U.S. Su­preme Court not to upend Apple’s victory over Samsung. QuadRooter, a set of four total-control vulnerabilities in Qualcomm processors used by “hundreds of millions of Android devices,” probably won’t get fixed on any large percentage of those phones any time soon, if ever; the FTC and FCC are now investigating Android’s security update process. Apple’s year-old iPhone 6S easily beats Samsung’s brand-new Galaxy Note 7 in speed tests, plus the Note 7 suffers from “hiccups,” “stutters,” and “delays.” Samsung’s two-year-old music streaming service, Milk, to shut down in one month. After more than six years of paltry sales, Google discontinues the Nexus brand. Nougat, the upcoming version of Android, won’t run on “practically every single Android flagship” that’s more than a year-and-a-half old, nor a lot of newer ones as well.

September ⋅ Google “announced a host of partners for Project Ara at its developer conference in May and said it would ship a developer edition of the product this autumn” — but now is cancelling Ara altogether. Android phone makers seem averse to mentioning, much less promoting, Android. Samsung recalls all Galaxy Note 7 phones worldwide, after some of them explode while charging. Apple Watch is the #2 watch brand, behind only Rolex, and is the #1 smartwatch by far. Dell cutting 2,000 jobs. Apple tops American Customer Satisfaction Index’s PC/tablet category for the thirteenth consecutive year. Aetna giving Apple Watch to its 50,000 employees for free. Apple and Deloitte announce enterprise solutions partnership. Russian government dumping Microsoft Outlook and Exchange from 600,000 PCs. BlackBerry ends all hardware production, “now will focus on security and software.”

October ⋅ Microsoft Band, Microsoft’s me-too answer to the FitBit, cancelled. Interbrand names Apple world’s most valuable brand for the fourth year in a row. In its Pixel phone event, Google touts the unreleased phone as having the best smartphone camera in DXOMark’s tests — but neglects to mention that the test doesn’t include the available-for-purchase iPhone 7 Plus. In less than a month, iOS 10 adoption rate is at least 54%, and possibly 67%. Samsung permanently cancels the Note 7 after less than two months on the market. Bringing a Galaxy Note 7 onto any U.S. flight is now punishable with stiff fines and confiscation of the phone. Samsung estimating the immediate monetary losses alone from the Note 7 fiasco at $5.3 billion, and is still unable to find the cause of the phone’s fires/explosions. In disgust, Patriots coach Bill Belichick dumps NFL-mandated Microsoft Surface tablets, says he will use pen and paper instead. Samsung users whose property was damaged to the tune of thousands of dollars by the Note 7 are angry that Samsung won’t pay for repairs. IBM’s IT head says that thanks to lower support needs, Macs are three times cheaper than Windows PCs. Korean law firm files class-action suit over Samsung Note 7 fires. “[H]alting its rollout in 10 cities and laying off staff as its chief executive Craig Barratt steps down,” Google Fiber appears to be going the way of Google Glass and Project Ara.

November ⋅ Counting the net losses of some smartphone makers as negative profits means that Apple now takes 104% of all smartphone industry profits. For their own good, New Zealand’s telecom industry terminates stubborn Galaxy Note 7 users’ access to the mobile data network, to force them to turn in their phones. Mass transit ticket machines across San Francisco disabled by Windows ransomware — the city refuses to pay the $73,000 ransom, lets everyone ride for free until the system is fixed. “Gooligan” malware infects over a million Android phones, leaking all personal user data to its controllers; 3/4 of all active Android users are vulnerable to infection.

December ⋅ More than a third of U.S. merchants now take Apple Pay. Apple has 2/3 of the premium smartphone market in India. While Samsung has been saying they can’t find the cause of the Galaxy Note 7 fires, an engineering company has independently studied the phone’s internals, and found that the battery was just packed too tightly — it “simply did not have enough physical room for error.” Wall Street brokerage Drexel Hamilton calls Apple “one of the most underappreciated stocks in the world.” In ten days, Samsung will remotely brick all Galaxy Note 7 phones, to force their owners to stop using them — Verizon says it will block this update from reaching its customers. Popcorn Time (Windows ransomware) will re­store your data for $780, or for free if you purposely infect your friends, and at least two of them pay. After years of enthusiastic speculation by its fans, Google apparently dropping out of the self-driving car business. Japan Airlines and Finnair to use iPhone and iPad apps for plane maintenance. After Acacia and Conversant somehow successfully sue Apple over a FRAND patent they bought from Nokia, Apple now countersuing for antitrust violation. Barnes & Noble’s latest tablet found to be pre-loaded with ADUPS total-control spyware. Samsung bought Viv (former Siri developers) to create a Samsung-only Siri-alike, but Google may squelch it with an Android non-compete clause. Apple got over twice as many holiday-season device activations as any competitor, and 30% more than any seven competitors combined. Korea’s Fair Trade Commission hits Qualcomm with record $865 million fine for abusing FRAND patents against major phone makers. LG smart TV infected with Android ransomware.

2 0 1 7

January ⋅ Samsung’s year-ago investor warning to expect a tough 2016 could scarcely have been more accurate; now Samsung warns of a tough 2017 ahead. Google Hangouts shuts down. Huawei’s flagship Android phone to feature Amazon’s Alexa, in lieu of Google’s own Siri-alike. Adobe Acrobat Reader found to silently install itself in the user’s Chrome browser (if any) with its data collection capability “turned on by default.” Although Android has been staying current with the latest crop of emoji, the “vast majority” of Android users can’t see them, due to infrequency of updates. Apple’s entire category of iOS products/services expected to reach a cumulative revenue total of $1 trillion this year. Korean prosecutors seeking arrest warrant for Samsung’s CEO, on bribery charges. LG suffers big losses, mainly due to its failing smartphone division. Apple sues Qualcomm, exposing a long trail of ugly, illegal, extortionist activity by that company. St. Louis public library system paralyzed by Windows ransomware, which demands $35,000 — the library says it will instead “wipe its entire computer system and rebuild it from scratch, a solution that may take weeks.” Hacker of celebrities’ iTunes accounts gets nine months in prison. Cockrell Hill TX police department has eights years of records encrypted by Locky (Windows ransomware), discovers their backups are also Locky-encrypted, consults with the FBI, then decides to wipe the affected systems and give up the data as permanently lost. Sony takes near-$1 billion writedown on collapsing DVD sales, as more people prefer streaming devices like Apple TV.

February ⋅ Apple’s Fifth Ave. glass cube store scheduled to more than double its floor space this year. In Licking County OH, 1,000 Windows PCs used by the local government seized by ransomware; the county shuts down all its PCs and phones to stop further spread, reverts to using paper forms, and calls in the FBI to help. Apple tops Fortune’s “World’s Most Admired Companies” for the tenth consecutive year. Samsung CEO arrested in government corruption probe. HTC to quit making budget phones, instead “will focus on premium devices, which have a higher profit margin.” After giving Microsoft 90 days to fix it, Google publicly exposes the details of an unpatched vulnerability in the Edge web browser. Apple’s market valuation now at least $130 billion above any other company — but Google searches on the subject still feature hand-picked snippets of year-old news stories when Google’s valuation was briefly higher. Korean prosecutors formally charge Samsung CEO and other top execs with bribery and embezzlement.

March ⋅ Federal appeals court overturns $530 million verdict against Apple by patent troll, and nullifies as too vague the patents on which the suit was based. Google discontinues its Pixel Chromebook laptop. After having its grandiose office park rebuffed a couple years ago by its home town of Mountain View, Google now presents plans for a dramatically smaller, conventional office building, with an opaque roof styled to vaguely evoke the memory of what it was going to be — meanwhile, Apple Park (a.k.a. “spaceship”) nearing completion. Microsoft founder and ex-CEO Bill Gates says automation should be slowed by putting special taxes on companies that replace manual labor with robotics. Google Home (Google’s answer to the Amazon Echo) injecting audio ads into its responses. Swatch to ship its own smartwatch OS — in late 2018, at least a year-and-a-half from now. LeEco — a firm whose CEO called Apple “outdated,” “tyranny,” an “arrogant regime,” and a “dusk empire,” who graphically compared Apple to Hitler, and who dresses like Steve Jobs while presenting obvious iPhone knock-offs — has run out of money, and is selling off its 80,000-sq-ft San Jose headquarters. Latest version of Windows no longer gives users the option of preventing the OS from updating itself over metered internet connections. Windows File Explorer now shows ads. Illinois lawyers seeking class-action suit over harm caused by Windows 10 forced upgrades. Streaming music analysis finds Ap­ple Music to have substantially more unique users than any other music streaming service. Beats 1 is the biggest-audience radio station in the world. Angry Toshiba shareholders vent during general meeting, calling the company a “laughingstock around the world,” and telling the CEO, “You have no clue what’s going on.”

April ⋅ Security researcher calls Samsung’s Tizen OS “the worst code I’ve ever seen.” U.S. Labor Dept. accuses Google of “‘extreme’ gender pay discrimination.” In binding (non-appealable) arbitration, Qualcomm loses $815 million to BlackBerry for patent royalty overcharging. Victoria, Australia, equipping its 10,000 police officers with iPhones and iPads. Google Chromebooks continue to collect data about students’ activities and report that data to Google, “usually without a real choice to opt out.” Bose headphones, one of the main competitors to Apple’s Beats, found to be secretly monitoring the listening habits of users, and sharing that info with third parties. Tim Cook receives Newseum’s 2017 Free Expression Award. Apple Pay competitor Plastc goes belly-up, leaving its investors in the lurch. In speed tests, the seven-month-old iPhone 7 easily beats Samsung’s brand-new S8. Popular Windows anti-virus software Webroot quarantines crucial Windows system files as malware, and blocks Facebook and Bloom­berg as phishing sites, resulting in “chaos.” Well into its fifth year, Microsoft Surface revenue still less than Mac revenues were in the mid-’90s, when Apple almost went under.

May ⋅ AirPods get a 98% satisfaction rating. Combined revenue from Beats, Apple Watch, and AirPods now the size of a Fortune 500 company. iOS App Store revenue up 40% from the year-ago quarter. Even after subtracting nearly $100 billion in domestic debt, Apple’s cash hoard still well past $150 billion. Microsoft’s new, education-targeted Windows 10 S forces all users to keep Microsoft Edge as their default web browser, and Bing as their default search. VW makes iPhone its corporate standard phone, while Capital One does the same with Mac and Apple Watch. Apple Pay transaction volume up 450% from the year-ago quarter. 234 Android apps found to be using ultrasonic beacons to track users’ movements and TV watching habits. Apple becomes the first company ever to achieve a market valuation of $800 billion. HP shipping “more than two doz­en models of laptops and tablets” that have just been found to log every keypress to an unencrypted file in the main Windows “C:” drive. Affecting “tens of thousands of machines,” massive Windows ransomware attack “hobbles” UK hospitals, Spanish telecom, Russia’s Interior Ministry, FedEx, and many other large targets worldwide, announcing its demands in “28 languages.” Voice ads reportedly coming to Alexa (Amazon Echo). Google getting into a consistent pattern of releasing new versions of Android before even 10% of active, Google-Play-capable, Android devices are using last year’s version — and the percentage gets significantly worse each year. LeEco CEO resigns while the company reportedly lays off 80% of its U.S. workforce.

June ⋅ Google Pixel phone sales estimated at just a million units so far — much less than 1% as many as iPhone in the same period. Steve Sinofsky, Microsoft’s Windows chief until he was forced out in late 2012, now says, “My view is that iOS is the healthiest developer ecosystem right now.” Latest version of Windows disables Kas­per­sky anti-virus; Kaspersky sues for antitrust violation. Hit by Linux ransomware, Korean web host negotiates ransom down to $1 million, then pays. Amazon buys Whole Foods for $13.7 billion. Windows ransomware hits Japanese Honda plant and Australian traffic cameras. FBI says that the number of ransomware victims is vastly greater than the number of reported attacks. EU orders Goo­gle to pay $2.7 billion fine, and to change its search engine to no longer favor its own shopping sites.

July ⋅ Microsoft starts new layoffs, affecting “thousands” of people. Android malware “SpyDealer” has been active for nearly two years, but “researchers still aren’t sure how it infects victims.” Google discovered to be paying professors and other researchers to release purportedly objective reports that flatter Google or otherwise serve Google’s political agendas. Popular Chrome browser extensions being bought up by adware companies, which use them to inject ads onto users’ computers. Ex-Google-VP Vic Gundotra now says, “If you truly care about great photography, you own an iPhone.”

August ⋅ Unpatchable flaw found in all pre-’17 Amazon Echos, which makes it possible for a visitor — with no physical modification — to turn the device into an audio spy, then remotely listen to everything you say and do in your own home. Apple has another great quarter: compared to the year-ago quarter, overall revenue and Mac revenue are both up 7%, iPad unit sales are up 15%, Apple Watch unit sales are up over 50%, and the active installed Mac base is up more than 10%. Apple’s services business now the size of a Fortune 100 company, and Apple Pay gets 9/10 of all mobile NFC payment transactions worldwide. Microsoft Surface Pro reportedly has the worst hardware reliability, by far, in the entire laptop/tablet space. Google now estimated to be paying Apple $3 billion/year to be the default (but easily user-changeable) iOS Safari web search — triple what they were paying just a few years ago. U.S. teens use Apple’s iMessage more than any other social platform. “Extremely stealthy and persistent” Windows malware using unwitting users’ PCs to mine cryptocurrency. Apple and Accenture form partnership to provide enterprise mobility solutions. Sony loses class action suit over its claims that its iPhone wannabes are waterproof. 500 Android apps, downloaded 100 million times, found to be compromised with spyware. Samsung’s arrested chief Jay Y. Lee sentenced to five years in jail for bribery, hiding assets, embezzlement, and perjury. After spending tens of millions of dollars over the last two years equipping its officers with 36,000 Windows Phones, the NYPD is now scrapping them and replacing them with iPhones. And­y Rubin’s Essential suffers “humiliating” user data leak.

September ⋅ Deutsche Bank finally dumps its BlackBerry phones, standardizes on iPhone and iPad. Apple’s AirPods get an estimated 85% of wireless head/earphone revenue — and more than that by unit share, since AirPods are cheaper than most competing products. As Apple puts the finishing touches on Apple Park — its new, $5 billion headquarters — Amazon announces that it, too, will build a new, $5 billion headquarters (but hasn’t yet decided where). Apple Watch has passed Rolex to become the #1 watch brand in the world, and is also now the world’s most-used heart rate monitor. Apple’s new A11 Bionic mobile processor is much faster than any other company’s mobile processors. Microsoft founder Bill Gates says he regrets Ctrl-Alt-Delete — but blames IBM for starting it, in the IBM PC. Now that Windows Phone is dead, Bill Gates switches to Android. HP Enterprise (HP’s recently spun-off enterprise division) lays off another 10% of its workforce. HTC’s Google Pixel division bought by Google for $1.1 billion. Interbrand names Apple top world brand for the fifth year in a row. Consortium of Apple, Bain Capital, and others submits the winning bid to purchase failing Toshiba’s still-successful memory chip business.

October ⋅ Apple and The Ohio State University partner to create iOS app development lab for “faculty, staff, students, and members of the broader community.” Microsoft’s Groove Music shutting down. Safeway adopting Apple Pay. Qualcomm hit by Taiwan’s FTC with $773 million fine for seven years of antitrust violations, and ordered to change its illegal licensing terms which included “requiring licensees to provide customer names, model names, shipment quantities, and pricing back to the chip supplier [Qualcomm].” Dutch regulator determines that Microsoft, via Windows 10, is illegally collecting information about its users without informed consent. Samsung’s Vice Chairman Kwon Oh-hyun resigns, saying the company is “confronted with unprecedented crisis inside and out.” GE standardizing on iPhone and iPad, and giving all 330,000 employees the option to use a Mac instead of a Windows PC. Delta, after making its flight crews (under protest) use Microsoft Surface tablets for the past four years, now looks like it’s about to switch to iPad. Toshiba announces $970 million net loss for the year. Walmart deploying 100,000 Macs to its employees. Microsoft Kinect is discontinued. Irreplaceable archives of HP’s founders, stored in a hundred cardboard boxes in a wildfire-prone California neighborhood, destroyed by wildfire.

November ⋅ Apple has a great quarter (12% higher revenue than the year-ago quarter), marking the end of its best-ever fiscal year. Pandora lost $1 billion in the last four years. Just a year ago, Pandora rejected Sirius XM’s offer to buy them out for their IPO price — now Pandora is trading at 1/3 of that amount. iOS 11 (released two months ago) and Android 8 “O­re­o” (released three months ago) are on 52% and 0.2% of active devices, respectively. OnePlus (Android) phones found to be preinstalled with Qualcomm’s “EngineerMode,” an app that makes it possible for hackers to root (get full control of) the device. Apple’s sales in Russia up 56% from the year-ago quarter. Now, even brand-new models of Android phone may not have the most current major version of Android. Android found to be sending location data to Google even when location services are explicitly turned off by the user. Meg Whitman, HP’s CEO since 2011, abruptly resigns. HP computers found to be silently loaded with spyware. Microsoft’s me-too, Apple-alike, retail stores now selling Android phones alongside the dead-but-still-in-stock Windows Phone. As Apple Park and Apple’s Central & Wolfe offices both near completion, and Amazon tries to decide where to put its pricey, new HQ, Microsoft announces that it, too, will be spending big on new headquarters. Apple reportedly developing its own power management chips to replace the third-party components it’s been using.

December ⋅ Google blocks Amazon’s video streaming devices (Fire, Echo Show) from accessing YouTube, in retaliation for Amazon’s refusal to stock Google’s streaming devices — in the meantime, YouTube is alive-and-well on Ap­ple TV. Amazon Prime Video now available on Apple TV and iOS devices. Korean prosecutors seeking to extend Samsung chief Jay Y. Lee’s five-year prison term to twelve years. Google quietly discontinues the Pixel C tablet. i­Phone is the top-selling tech device of 2017, outselling the #2 device (Samsung S8/Note 8) by 7-to-1. Some S8/Note 8 phones permanently bricking themselves if run down to zero battery.

2 0 1 8

January ⋅ Spotify sued for $1.6 billion over music copyright violations. Google and Amazon are losing money on every smart speaker sold. Apple’s App Store had a record holiday season, 30% greater than last year’s. Google’s big, splashy, Pixel 2 smartphone product page mentions Android only once, in a tiny footnote at the bottom of the page. Microsoft’s patch of the Spectre/Meltdown processor flaw bricking some Windows PCs. Several major Windows PC makers snubbing Microsoft’s Cortana, featuring Amazon’s Alexa instead. Sixty Google Play (Android) apps, many aimed specifically at young children, expose the user to unexpected porn. Apple tops Fortune’s Most Admired Companies for the eleventh consecutive year, and “ranked first in every subcategory.” Devices on which Siri is actively used are up from 375 million seven months ago, to 500 million now. Steve Yegge, Google engineer for thirteen years, resigns, because Google “can no longer innovate. They’ve pretty much lost that ability. ... they are mired in politics ... Google is arrogant. ... Google does all sorts of things these days that leave everyone scratching their heads ... They are stuck in me-too mode and have been for years. They simply don’t have innovation in their DNA any more.” Shipping giant Maersk loses an estimated $200-$300 million recovering from massive Windows ransomware attack that paralyzed nearly 50,000 PCs and servers.

February ⋅ Apple has a fantastic holiday quarter, with revenue 13% higher than its previous record. Apple Pay now accepted at more than half of all U.S. retail, and more than 2/3 of the top 100 retailers. Of all iOS devices ever sold, nearly 2/3 of them are currently in use. Five months after getting a five-year sentence (much less than the prosecutor’s requested twelve), Samsung’s chief Jay Y. Lee abruptly pardoned, now returning to run Samsung. Windows malware uses European water utility plant to mine cryptocurrency. Frustrated by “manufacturing defects in the microphone,” Google Pixel owners now suing Google for not honoring the phone’s one-year warranty — effectively telling them to keep the phone and go away. iPhone, which for years has been taking the great majority of all smartphone profits, is now also taking the majority of all smartphone revenue. Windows 10 not only force-installs apps that users didn’t want, but now aggressively nags its users to start using those apps, and the feature can’t be disabled. HP now offering to supply its enterprise clients with Macs, not just Windows PCs. Most Windows 7 PCs came with a special, safe partition on the hard drive, separate from the main Windows volume, that contains a Windows 7 reinstaller which can be invoked by holding a particular keyboard button while booting the computer — but forced upgrades to Windows 10 are apparently finding and destroying this safe partition, to prevent the user from reinstalling Windows 7. Apple tops Fast Company’s World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies.

March ⋅ After eight years of hype, Google Fiber appears to be a pricey flop. Rescuecom rates Apple’s computers more reliable than any other brand’s. Atlanta city government hit hard by Windows ransomware; FBI and Microsoft called in to help. New law that requires U.S. government agencies to remove Kaspersky antivirus from their Windows PCs can’t be o­beyed, because Kaspersky has embedded itself so strongly into their systems that no one is able to remove it. All-new jury in the very-long-running Apple-v-Samsung patent trial decides that Samsung owes $540 million to Apple. Google, caught red-handed stealing copyrighted video footage for The Selfish Ledger, a company concept video, still openly refuses to pay the owner, on the grounds that because Google made the video for internal use within Google, it should be allowed to do whatever it wants with anyone’s copyrighted works, for free, and without permission. Appeals court rules that Google’s appropriation of Java’s API was not “fair use” — Google now may owe Oracle $9 billion in damages.

April ⋅ 82% of U.S. teens own an iPhone. Many Android phone makers are issuing fake security updates that actually do nothing. Allo, Google’s attempt at a unified, encrypted messaging standard for Android, shuts down, leaving the carriers to sort out their differences over the unencrypted RCS mess — meanwhile, Apple’s iMessage is working great. Unable to pay the demanded $55,000 to a ransomware payment portal (due to its untimely shutdown), the city of Atlanta now spending “at least $2.6 million” trying to fix their paralyzed Windows PCs. Apple TV viewing hours are up 700% from the year-ago quarter. Wonder Wo­man star Gal Gadot, paid promoter of Huawei, apparently using an iPhone.

May ⋅ Andy Rubin cancels second version of Essential phone, and puts the company up for sale.

June ⋅ Google exits the tablet market. Total revenue paid to Apple’s iOS App Store developers passing $100 billion. “Years of police dashboard camera footage” irrecoverably lost to last spring’s Atlanta Windows ransomware attack, despite the city now having spent more than $5 million to restore its systems. Austrian court rules that Google-owned YouTube can be held “directly liable” for its users’ copyright-violating postings. Intel CEO abruptly resigns under a cloud of sexual impropriety.

July ⋅ Five years after buying back all its stock, Dell decides to go public again — for about $2.3 billion less than it paid five years ago. HTC laying off 1,500 people. EU fines Google another $5 billion for antitrust violations. Apple’s stock buybacks in the first half of 2018 alone are more than the combined market valuations of the bottom 3/4 of the S&P 500. Mat-Su, a borough of Anchorage, Alaska, reverts to typewriters after becoming the 210th victim of BitPaymer (Windows ransomware) — 650 PCs and servers have to be rebuilt.

August ⋅ Apple becomes the first publicly traded company in history to hit a market valuation of US $1 trillion. Despite all the forced upgrades, three years after its release, Windows 10 still not as prevalent as the now-nine-year-old Windows 7. 98% of Amazon Alexa users don’t use it to buy merchandise from Amazon. TSMC, manufacturer of Apple’s mobile processors, loses about $250 million to a huge ransomware attack on its Windows PCs. Valve apparently working on tools to allow its Windows-only titles to run under Linux. Twice-sold Motorola now releasing a new smartphone that reviewers broadly agree to be a “shameless,” “brazen,” and “egregious” copy of iPhone X. Costco adopting Apple Pay. Second hacker in 2014 celebrities’ iTunes accounts case sentenced to eight months in prison, plus three years supervision.

September ⋅ Latest Huawei iPhone-wannabe found to be cheating benchmark tests. Windows 10 now hijacks the Firefox and Chrome installers to shove a warning in front of the user that they really should just use the “safer, faster” Microsoft Edge (née Internet Explorer) browser — installation of Firefox/Chrome continues only if the user clicks the shabby, gray, “Install anyway” button. After numerous pundits spent the last year insisting that iPhone X wasn’t selling well, Apple now moving away from the iPhone 8 home-button models, instead pushing aggressively ahead with three new models of the iPhone X design — huge lines now forming at Apple stores ahead of the new phones’ launch date. After tripling from $1 billion in 2016 to $3 billion in 2017, Apple’s fee to Google to be the default-but-user-changeable Safari search engine has likely again tripled to $9 billion.

October ⋅ Apple tops Interbrand’s Best Global Brands for the sixth consecutive year. South Korea’s ex-President Lee Myung-bak gets fifteen years and an $11.5 million fine for taking bribes from Samsung. Apple’s current mobile processor approaching the speed of “the best desktop CPUs.” After seven years of abject failure, Goo­gle+ (Google’s me-too answer to FaceBook), shuts down. In less than a month, iOS 12 adoption passes 50%. The third “Made By Google” (Pixel 3 phone) presentation mentions Android exactly zero times. Andy Rubin’s Essential cuts “nearly a third” of staff, but says, “We are confident that our sharpened product focus will help us deliver a truly game-changing consumer product.” Samsung sues its own Russian brand ambassador Ksenia Sobchak for $1.6 million for failing to adequately conceal her iPhone when being interviewed on TV.

November ⋅ Google’s developer preview of the upcoming version of Android (“Pie”) not available for any Android tablet. Dutch government determines that Microsoft has committed “‘large scale and covert’ gathering of people’s info via [Microsoft] Office,” and may face “GDPR mega-fines.” Eight “hugely popular Android apps,” downloaded “a total of more than 2 billion” times, found to be faking web traffic to steal “millions of dollars” from advertisers.

December ⋅ Samsung fakes its phone’s me-too “portrait mode” — with a stolen photo. Extremely destructive malware deletes files on 400-500 Windows computers at a major Italian energy company. Apple announces $1 billion expansion to its Austin TX campus, which will allow for an additional 15,000 employees — “without resorting to a theatrical, year-long city auditioning process,” like Amazon did. 3D-printed human head sculpture fools the face-recognition unlocking feature of four major Android smartphones, but iPhone is “impenetrable.” E­mer­gen­cy IE patch leaves many Lenovo laptops unbootable.

2 0 1 9

January ⋅ Even though the post “was almost immediately deleted”, “Huawei punishes staff with pay cuts for sending a marketing tweet from an iPhone ... Both of the workers have been demoted one rank and had their monthly sal­a­ries cut by [$730] ... One person, the company’s digital marketing director, will have his pay rank frozen for a year.” On some Samsung phones, Facebook is a first-party (unremovable) app. Apple tops Fortune’s Most Admired Companies twelve years straight.

February ⋅ Android phone maker OnePlus’s photo contest awards a stolen photo shot with a Canon DSLR. Google paying more to the EU in fines than in taxes. Lots of Microsoft’s business customers still using Internet Explorer, even though it was “officially discontinued in 2015.” Large payroll pro­vid­er Apex Capital pays hefty ransom to free-up its (likely Windows) computers from unspecified malware, but receives bad decryption key that causes further damage — company effectively “destroyed,” now offering to move its customers to a different payroll platform.

March ⋅ Among U.S. states, Android has majority usage only in AK, AR, HI, KY, MD, ME, MT, ND, NE, RI, TN, UT, WI, and WY. Study finds that “[m]ost of the Android antivirus apps in the Google Play store are a complete waste of time and money, and some even make your phone more likely to be infected by malware”. Norsk Hydro, “one of the world’s biggest producers of aluminum,” hit by Windows ransomware (LockerGoga), which “shut down its worldwide network, stopped or disrupted plants, and sent IT workers scrambling to return operations to normal. ... 35,000 employees were instructed to keep computers turned off” until the situation can be rectified. Latest, $1.7 billion penalty brings Goo­gle’s total EU fines to $9.4 billion. Microsoft deliberately suspends, for a few hours, Microsoft Outlook’s syncing to Apple’s iOS Mail, Calendar, and Contacts apps, informing users that this pause is “to give you a chance to get [the iOS] Outlook [app]”, and that if they do that, syncing will immediately resume; otherwise they must wait out the multi-hour outage — the tactic causes ex-Windows chief Steve Sinofsky to say, “This stuff makes me angry,” and, “No one who likes customers would do something like this.” Huawei’s CFO, when recently arrested at a Canadian airport, found to be carrying an iPhone, an iPad, and a MacBook Air. Windows malware (ShadowHammer) “hijacked ASUS software updates” and “installed backdoor” on 500,000 PCs. Due to “poor sales,” Sony letting go 50% of its smartphone workforce.

April ⋅ Android update causes Android-based smart TVs — including “multi-thousand-dollar” high-end sets — to display a row of unwanted ads in the TV’s UI. When Amazon bought Eero for $97 million, Eero executives got “eight-figure salary increases,” while employees and investors were “screwed” when the stock became basically “worthless.” Google’s plan for a 14,000 sq. ft. flagship Chicago retail store falls through. The Weather Channel goes down for over an hour, due to Windows ransomware attack during a “severe weather” period; the FBI is investigating. In Austin TX, Apple on-track to employ more persons than any other non-government employer. Google’s Pixel 3 phone selling less well than last year’s Pixel 2.

May ⋅ ProPublica reports that “firms that promised high-tech ransomware solutions almost always just pay the hackers.” Apple moves up from #4 to #3 in the Fortune 500, behind only Walmart and Exxon. T-Mobile tweets “Of­fi­cial­ly­Switched­To­An­droid” OnePlus 7 Pro “crazy in love” promotion — from an iPhone. Baltimore paralyzed by Windows ransomware (RobbinHood) for the past two weeks, with “no end in sight.” SandboxEscaper, a “serial publisher” of Windows zero-day vulnerabilities, “has published 7 such exploits to date, 3 in the past 24 hours.” Survey finds 71% of college students prefer using a Mac over using a Windows PC. Dell now offering some of its computers with Linux instead of Windows.

June ⋅ Baltimore’s Windows ransomware crisis has cost the city “$18 million, so far” — because they refused to pay RobbinHood’s $0.076 million ransom. “Advanced backdoor” was pre-installed on factory-fresh Android devices from multiple manufacturers in 2017, Google has confirmed; now Germany finds backdoors embedded in the firmware of 20K citizens’ Android phones. Windows ransomware zaps Lake City FL, disabling e-mail, land-line, and “other City networks.” AirPods outselling all its competitors combined. On top of $1 million to replace many affected computers, the Riviera Beach FL council votes unanimously to pay the full $600K to Windows ransomware, which had disabled the city’s e-mail and 911 systems. Google exits the tablet market “again”; the “problem-plagued Pixel Slate will not be getting a follow-up.” Key Biscayne FL hit by Windows ransomware.

July ⋅ Microsoft shut down its e-book store a few months ago, and now anyone who bought books through it is going to lose them this month. More than ten million Samsung users tricked by a fake Samsung update app in Google Play, that actually takes them to ads and payment demands. John McAfee, creator of major Windows antivirus software, hiding out in Cuba to avoid U.S. criminal charg­es. Over 1,000 Android apps found to harvest location data even when the user denies them permission to do so. NYC’s Monroe College’s computer systems taken down by Windows ransomware, which demands $2 million. Apple has its highest Q3 revenue ever, with Ap­ple Pay transaction volume up 2x year-over-year, and wearables-plus-services equivalent to a Fortune 50 company. Apple buys Intel’s cellular modem division for $1 billion, about 70% of what Intel paid for it eight years ago. Apple passes Am­a­zon to become the U.S. organization with the most solar electric generation capacity. Samsung reports 56% drop in year-over-year quarterly profits.

August ⋅ FitBit’s Apple-Watch-wan­na­be drops 27% year-over-year, while Apple Watch is selling dramatically better than last year. SystemBC (Windows malware) installs a proxy server to assist future malware to move around freely and undetected. Apple continues to quietly buy back record amounts of its own stock. After savagely ridiculing iPhone for almost two years over its lack of an analog headphone jack, Samsung now discontinues that jack in its own latest smartphone — and quietly removes those derisive ads from its websites and social accounts. Announced in 2014, Dragonfly Futurefön, the Windows-and-Android-in-one “crowdfunded phone of the future,” turns out to be a “multimillion-dollar scam.” For the past four years, Kaspersky (Windows antivirus) injected a user-unique code into its users’ web activity, enabling anyone to track the activities of individual users, even when they used their browsers’ private-browsing modes. 23 local governments in Texas simultaneously attacked by Windows ransomware. Chase Pay, Chase’s three-year-old, me-too copy of Apple Pay, shutting down in a few months. British Airways supplies each of its 15,000 cabin crew with an iPhone XR. Apple Watch unit sales in China surge 45% year-over-year, making it the country’s #1 smartwatch. Glasgow, Scotland provides 52,000 i­Pads to its students and teachers. Google’s much ballyhooed Pixel Visual Core turns out to be an essentially useless dud. For nearly a year, two Google Play apps that were downloaded 1.5 million times were defrauding advertisers via fake clicks on invisible ads — the process for which also drained users’ batteries, consumed their mobile data allotment, and slowed down their phones during actual, intended use. Baltimore re­al­lo­cates $6 million of parks-and-public-facilities money to instead repair damage from Windows ransomware (RobbinHood).

September ⋅ The Verge says “Google can’t fix the Android update problem”; “No one can”; and “first-party Google devices get updated quickly, everything else takes months or doesn’t get updated at all.” Southwest Airlines now supporting Apple Pay for tickets and all in-flight purchases.

October ⋅ John Hancock’s Vitality life insurance program now includes an Apple Watch Series 5. The NFL, which long has been taking hundreds of millions of dollars to openly promote and mandate the usage of Microsoft products on the field, fines injury-sidelined Steelers QB $5,000 for wearing his Apple Watch during a game — under a rule allegedly unrelated to Microsoft’s payola. Three Alabama hospitals pay Windows ran­som­ware (Ryuk) so they can rebuild their networks and start accepting patients again. Andy “Android” Rubin, whose $90 million Google exit package and huge, celebratory send-off while actually under investigation for sexual misconduct (“accused of coercing a subordinate into sexual acts”) invoked a worldwide employee walkout and a shareholder lawsuit, now quietly departs his new venture firm Playground Global for reasons unknown, and again with a fat parachute, reportedly over $9 million. Goldman Sachs calls the Apple Card “the most successful credit card launch ever.” Interbrand picks Apple as its top brand for the seventh consecutive year. Galaxy S10 owners discover that “anyone’s thumbprint” can unlock their phones. After Google buys Nest, then requires users to run it via a Google account (not a Nest account), “residential builders who formerly integrated Nest products into their construction projects” have now decided to “ditch” it. Top Linux kernel developer la­ments that Intel processors have long had a fundamental security problem which affects any supported OS, and which can be mitigated only by turning off multi-threading and frequently flushing CPU buffers, both of which involve a substantial “performance hit.” Johannesburg, South Africa hit by Windows ransomware (Shadow Kill Hackers), which threatens to release private information and shut down key city systems if its fee is not paid in a timely manner.

November ⋅ After five years of Wear OS market failure, Google buys Fitbit, which “has created an extraordinary number of smartwatch and activity bands over the past few years, none of which have any capacity to run Android”, and “that can’t run Wear OS”. Xerox considering buying-out HP, which has a current market value of $27 billion, less than 1/40 that of Ap­ple. Just three years old, the first Google Pixel phone is no longer supported by Google updates. BitPaymer (Windows ransomware) hits major Spanish companies E­ver­is and Cadena SER, putting tech workers into “hysteria mode.” Xiaomi’s shameless Apple Watch clone “removes everything good about the Apple Watch.” WannaCry (Windows ransomware) has caused U.K. hospitals about £100 million in damages, and 19,000 cancelled appointments, “including operations.” IBM study finds that its 200,000+ Macs have created a happier, more stable, more productive workforce with lower support costs. 100% of Fortune 500 companies use Apple products. Apple’s AirPods estimated to have greater market value than all but thirty (non-Apple) U.S. companies. Ryuk (Windows ran­som­ware) strikes Louisiana, shutting down network services to “the governor’s office, the Department of Health (including Medicare systems), the Department of Children and Family Services, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and the Department of Transportation”. Ryuk also hits Virtual Care Pro­vid­er Inc. in Milwaukee, affecting “virtually all of their core offerings,” cutting off 110 nursing homes from records, and demanding “a whopping $14 million”. Major U.S. veterinary chain NVA “still working to recover from a [Windows] ransomware attack” affecting 400 of its 700 hospitals. When criticizing big tech companies’ privacy indiscretions, Amazon-owned Washington Post glaringly omits all mention of Amazon.

December ⋅ REvil (Windows ransomware) hits dental IT provider CTS, encrypts “more than 100 dentistry businesses” and demands $700,000 — “some CTS clients had usable backups of their data available off-site, while others have been working with outside experts to independently negotiate and pay the ransom for their practice only.” Apple Watch revenue now higher than iPod was at its 2007 peak.

2 0 2 0

January ⋅ Major U.S. fitness centers, including Crunch Fitness, Orange Theory, Basecamp, and Y­M­C­A, adopt the Apple Watch Connected Gym program. Vice and PC Mag investigation finds that Avast (antivirus) harvests sensitive user data, then sells it “to third parties, including Google, Microsoft, and Intuit.” After years of incorrect negative Apple predictions, Rosenblatt Securities analyst Jun Zhang leaves Rosenblatt for reasons unclear, while Rosenblatt announces it will no longer cover Apple. Maze (Windows ransomware) dumps to the public internet the data of “dozens of companies” that failed to pay Maze’s ransom.

February ⋅ Snake (Windows ransomware), in addition to encrypting files, also shuts down industrial control systems used by “dams, electric grids, and gas refineries.” “Even though Android has the vast majority of the market,” “Google has paid Android developers about half of what Apple has.” 26,000 employees of SAP choose to use Macs instead of Windows PCs. Apple Watch enjoys higher unit sales than the entire Swiss watch industry. Andy Rubin, whose only claim to fame is that he transformed the nascent and very un-iPhone-like Android OS into a shameless copy of iPhone, shuts down his startup company Essential; $330 million of outside investors’ money goes up in smoke — if those investors had instead bought shares of Apple on Essential’s November 2015 founding date, their money would have tripled. xHelper (Android malware) reinfects its victims’ phones, and “no one knows how”; it “is so resilient it survives factory resets.” In the “seventh incident of its kind,” six suspected drug dealers go free after the evidence against them is lost to Windows ran­som­ware (Ryuk).

April ⋅ U.S. census replacing its pa­per forms with 500,000 iPhones. Emotet malware deliberately overheats an unnamed bank’s Windows PCs, bringing down its entire network; Microsoft enlisted to help. SpaceX, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin, after failing to pay Windows ransomware, have their confidential data leaked online by the ransomware’s controllers.

May ⋅ Diebold, major provider of ATMs and other banking tech, hit by ProLock (Windows ran­som­ware), shuts down its corporate network to prevent further spread. (ProLock’s ransom is known to range from $175K to $660K.) Google CEO Sundar Pichai defends his Pixel (iPhone wannabe) team — which has enjoyed piss-poor sales for all four years of its existence, and declining sales for the last two — saying, “We’re super committed to it for the long run. Hardware is hard. ... Some of the deeper efforts we are putting in will take three to four years to actually play out.” “Thousands” of Microsoft ASP.NET servers infected by Blue Mockingbird cryptocurrency mining malware, via a “hard to patch vulnerability.” Michigan State University hit by Windows ransomware (NetWalker), which threatens to leak confidential data to the public if its six-day payment deadline is not met. Longtime an­ti-­Ap­ple lackey IDC can’t avoid showing Apple in first place in its “wearables” and “watch” cat­e­go­ries, despite doing its best to bury Apple’s lead by including unit sales of Xiaomi’s sub-$50 “toy-like wrist bands.”

June ⋅ REvil (Windows ran­som­ware) now publicly auctioning off uncompliant victims’ sensitive da­ta to the highest bidder. Lenovo now certifying all its desktop/laptop PCs for use with Linux, and selling computers pre-loaded with your choice of Ubuntu or Red Hat. Unusually stealthy, new, Windows/Linux ransomware (Tycoon) targeting “the education and software industries.” Honda, hit by Windows ransomware (likely Snake), “halts production at some plants.” Florence AL hit by Windows ransomware (Dop­pel­Pay­mer) which demands $300,000; “[c]ity officials now say they plan to pay the ransom demand, in hopes of keeping the personal data of their citizens off of the Internet.” Apple becomes the first U.S. (and worldwide, the only current) company to reach a market valuation of US $1.5 trillion. In response to Windows ransomware attack (DoppelPaymer), Knoxville TN shuts down its entire network, including its “servers, ... internet connections, and PCs”; the city temporarily cancels all court sessions, and contacts the FBI. Knox­ville’s mayor calls these attacks “not a matter of if but a matter of when.” Windows 10 users “treated to a forced tour” of the Microsoft Edge web browser, then discover that it has copied data from Firefox without their permission. After eleven years of money-losing failure, Microsoft’s Apple-alike retail stores shutting down.

July ⋅ Over the last ten years, the installed base of users of Apple’s products has increased from about 100 million people, to about 1 billion people. Sean Hollister of The Verge describes how “Microsoft’s forced Windows updates just sank to a new low,” including forced installation of Edge, forced launching of Edge, forced aliasing (desktop and taskbar) of Edge, and forced retention of Edge (which you now “can’t uninstall”) — “tactics I’ve only ever seen from purveyors of adware, spyware, and ransomware.” Garmin hit by Windows ransomware (probably WastedLocker). After experiencing delays in its attempted move to a 7nm process, Intel fires its “second most powerful executive”. Ap­ple’s stock now about 1,000 times (100,000%) its 1997 low. Apple has its best-ever Q3, 11% better than the year-ago quarter. Google has its first-ever revenue decrease.

August ⋅ To free-up its files, Garmin apparently has paid $10 million to WastedLocker (Windows ran­som­ware). Canon hit by Windows ransomware (Maze). Toshiba, major producer of Windows laptops since the late 1980s, formally exits the laptop market. Apple becomes the first U.S. (and worldwide, the only current) company to reach a market valuation of US $2 trillion.

September ⋅ Losing 8% in one day, Apple’s valuation falls $180 billion, which is more than the full value of any of the bottom 470 companies in the S&P 500 — but still remains over $2 trillion. Windows ransomware (REvil) shuts down all branches of BancoEstado, one of Chile’s top three banks. UK’s Oasis Academies buying its pupils 30,000 iPads. iPad, which was widely thought to be dying when its unit sales declined by nearly half starting in 2013, leveled-off in 2016, and has been slowly growing ever since; it’s now selling about 70% as well as its all-time high, and cumulatively has sold half a billion units. Serious Bluetooth vulnerability affects “billions of devices,” but not i­Phones and iPads.

October ⋅ U.S. Treasury warns that companies who pay ransomware “could face steep fines from the U.S. federal government.” Senior editor of The Verge writes a full editorial complaining about how Microsoft harasses its own users via unwanted restarts, installations, and ads: “Microsoft doesn’t respect your ownership of your own PC.” Spotify posts a $118 million loss for its latest quarter.

November ⋅ Compal, the world’s second-largest PC manufacturer, which “build laptops for Apple, Acer, Lenovo, Dell, Toshiba, HP, and Fujitsu,” and “also builds monitors, tablets, smartwatches, smart TVs, and other computer peripherals,” reportedly hit by Windows ransomware (DoppelPaymer), impacting “around 30% of Compal’s computer fleet.” Windows now using full-screen ads to nag its users to switch to the Microsoft Edge web browser. In tests, Apple’s M1 chip emulates x86 code execution faster than Intel’s x86 chips run that code natively. Released two weeks ago, the M1-powered Mac mini shoots to the top of the Japanese desktop PC market, by a very comfortable margin.

December ⋅ LG’s phones lose money for the twenty-second consecutive quarter. Microsoft rumored to be working on its own custom processors, so it can abandon Intel x­86 chips. Of the top ten models of smartphone activated on Christmas Day, the top nine were iPhones (#10 was an LG). Microsoft ended support for Windows 7 a year ago, but millions of users refuse to upgrade.

2 0 2 1

January ⋅ iOS developer payments now at $45 billion/year, and increasing about $5 billion/year very consistently for almost a decade. Samsung tweets about its upcoming Galaxy phone event — from an iPhone. Intel abruptly replaces its CEO of two years; the new CEO says, “We have to deliver better products to the PC ecosystem than any possible thing that a lifestyle company in Cupertino” makes, and that Intel’s best days are “in front of it.” Google’s nine-year-old Loon (internet balloons) project is discontinued. Apple has its best quarter ever, with revenue 21% higher than its previous record, and strong growth in almost every category. There are now 1.65 billion active-use Apple devices, including over a billion iPhones. AirPods “overwhelmingly dominate” the wireless headset market, outselling the #2 vendor by more than 4-to-1. Brand Finance names Ap­ple “Most Valuable Brand.”

February ⋅ Apple tops Fortune’s Most Admired Companies for the fourteenth straight year. Apple Watch active user count passes 100 million people. Fry’s, the longtime, PC-stuff superstores that peaked in the Windows-dominated ’90s, but more recently have become “sad, pale shadows of their glorious past,” are now shutting down completely. Target installing mini Apple stores in seventeen locations.

March ⋅ Apple Watch outselling its nearest competitor by 4-to-1. At least 30,000 organizations in the USA (“hundreds of thousands” worldwide) have been hacked via four flaws in Microsoft Exchange, resulting in multiple, secret backdoors being installed on their servers — researchers fear mass, simultaneous, ransomware attacks may be next, and Microsoft’s recent patch of the flaws does nothing to disable the already-installed backdoors. In what could be the first big casualty of the Microsoft Exchange attacks, Windows PC maker Acer hit by REvil (Windows ransomware), which demands $50 million, or $100 million if not paid in two weeks, and threatens to release Acer’s private files to the public if not paid at all. LG’s smartphone division lost $4.4 billion last year; now the company is considering exiting the mobile market.

April ⋅ Microsoft Cortana coming to an end. LG exits the smartphone market. Clop (Windows ransomware) now e-mailing its victim’s customers, warning them that their personal data will be posted to the dark web if the victim company does not cooperate. Edinburgh providing 39,000 iPads to its schools’ students and staff. Cring (Windows ransomware) strikes European manufacturing facilities. Google’s “FLoC” proposal for user tracking is widely rejected by pretty much everyone. Eight Google Play apps, downloaded over 700,000 times, found to spy on your text messages, and to silently subscribe you to “pricey services.” Quanta Computer, a major supplier for Apple and other PC makers, hit by Windows ransomware (REvil), which demands $50 million. Apple has its best-ever Q2, with revenue 47% greater than its previous Q2 record.

May ⋅ Android Central reports that “the cheapest iPhone has a more powerful processor than the most expensive Android phone.” Washington DC metro police officers’ “psychological assessments and polygraph tests; driver’s license images; fingerprints; social security numbers; dates of birth; and residential, financial, and marriage histories” posted to the dark web after their department fails to pay $4 million to Windows ran­som­ware (Babuk), which also has threatened “to leak the names of confidential informants to crime gangs.” Twelve-state gasoline pipeline disabled by Windows ran­som­ware (DarkSide); prices at the pump swoop to a six-year high, while stations run dry and cars stack up in late-1970s-style gas lines. (One-week update: Colonial Pipeline pays the $4.4 million ransom.) Ireland’s public healthcare system hit by Windows ransomware (Conti). Bill Gates’s year-ago resignation from the Microsoft board, reportedly to focus on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, now revealed to have been forced, when the board discovered an alleged affair with a Microsoft employee. (Last week, Bill & Melinda Gates announced that they are divorcing after 27 years of marriage.) CNA Financial, “one of the biggest insurance companies in the US, reportedly forked over $40 million” to Windows ransomware (Phoe­nix). Agrius (Windows malware) pretends to encrypt your files and demand a ransom, but really destroys the files permanently.

June ⋅ LineStar, a major gas pipeline services company, has 70GB of its private data leaked to the dark web, because it failed to pay Windows ransomware (Xing). World’s largest meat supplier, JBS, pays $11 million to Windows ran­som­ware (REvil). Owners of Nvidia’s Shield TV streaming box “aren’t happy about” Android banner ads in the device’s UI.

July ⋅ “In one of the worst ransom attacks ever,” “[a]s many as 1,500 businesses around the world have been infected” by REvil (Windows ransomware).

August ⋅ Major Indianapolis hospital turning away ambulances after (likely Windows) ransomware attack, part of a wave of hospital attacks that coincide with the new spike in COVID-19 patients. Scripps, a major hospital chain, says it is losing $107 million to last May’s ransomware attack (likely Windows-based, but they won’t say). Scripps also faces huge, class-action suit over the leakage of confidential patient information to the attackers. In Windows 11, Microsoft makes it much more confusing and difficult to use a non-Microsoft web browser as your default. BlackBerry’s QNX software, used in “two hundred million cars, along with critical hospital and factory equipment,” contained a flaw that left those systems vulnerable to attack; BlackBerry “opted to keep it secret for months” — until other companies discovered it and went public with it. Apple Card ranks first (in the “midsized issuer” segment) in J.D. Powers credit card study.

September ⋅ Windows ransomware (BlackMatter) demands nearly $6 million from large Iowa ag co-op, might “significantly impact the public supply of grain, pork, and chicken”. Nikkei Research chooses Apple as its top brand in Japan for the third year in a row. One piece of Android malware hits over ten million users, stealing “millions of dollars a month” from its victims.

October ⋅ Apple earns billions more dollars from gaming than Sony PlayStation, Microsoft Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and Activision Blizzard combined. New Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger’s spiteful public revenge campaign against Apple, for abandoning Intel’s x86 chips, continues with “Breaking the Spell,” a four-minute, straight-to-YouTube ad, in which mindlessly pro-Apple consumers are woken up to the fact that Wintel PCs are better. In addition to encrypting your files, a new Windows ransomware variant, “Yanluowang,” overtly threatens to launch denial-of-service attacks and otherwise harass your coworkers/colleagues if you don’t cooperate with its demands. Apple tops Interbrand’s brand list for the ninth year straight. Windows ransomware (Macaw) takes down servers at Sinclair Broadcast Group, resulting in “pandemonium and chaos.”

November ⋅ The northernmost German state of Schleswig-Holstein switching all 25,000 PCs from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice — and from Windows to Linux. Tardigrade (Windows malware) hits multiple biomanufacturing facilities, and is “‘actively spreading’ in the biomanufacturing industry.” Microsoft’s Edge web browser “[drawing] criticism from fans and users” for ingraining buy-now-pay-later features: “Microsoft Edge is becoming bloated with shopping features rather than delivering a pure browsing experience,” and, “It’s impressive how quickly you can throw away years of hard work and good will with a ridiculous feature like this.”

December ⋅ Since Harvard dumped its Apple stock eight-and-a-half years ago, those shares have multiplied ten-and-a-half times in value. When Windows 10/11 users navigate to the Chrome download page, Microsoft pops up a snarky message recommending that they not download it. Latest iPhone found to depreciate half as fast as do the latest Google Pixel phones. 75% of Steam’s top thousand games (80% of its top hundred) now run on Linux, not just on Windows. All BlackBerry OS devices (phones, tablets) will cease functioning in less than a week.

2 0 2 2

January ⋅ Apple becomes the first company in history to reach a market valuation of US $3 trillion. New Mexico’s most populous county badly hit by Windows ransomware (exact strain not released). In 2021 Apple had higher year-over-year growth in desktop/laptop computers than any other company. Google’s Sundar Pichai and Facebook’s Mark Zuck­er­berg allegedly illegally conspired against other advertisers by giving each other special, secret advantages to manipulate the outcome of ad auctions. Worldwide, iPhone was the best-selling smartphone of the holiday quarter. Microsoft buys Activision Blizzard for $69 billion. Google ends all support (including security patches) for its three-year-old Pixel 3 phone. DeadBolt (Linux ransomware) attacks 3,600 QNAP data storage devices, demands 50 Bitcoin (about $2 million). Brata (Android malware), active for the past three years, drains your bank accounts, then factory-resets your phone. Apple has its best quarter ever (again), beating its previous record revenue by 11%.

February ⋅ NYC’s World Trade Center replacing office keys with virtual keys that work through iPhone and Apple Watch. Microsoft blog post says that Windows will “need at least eight hours of online time to obtain and install the latest operating system updates successfully.” Apple tops Fortune’s Most Admired Companies for the fifteenth consecutive year. Apple takes majority share of U.S. head­phone/ ear­phone market. Volvo provides Apple Watch to 1,500 of its engineers and technicians.

March ⋅ A million of Google-owned Fitbit’s smartwatches recalled after battery overheating causes more than a hundred burn injuries. When hit with any processor-demanding task, Dell’s latest wan­na­be-MacBook-Pro runs its Intel x86 chip at the boiling temperature of water, with its cooling fans “roaring the entire time throughout most of [The Verge’s] tests,” and achieving “a fraction of the lifespan that a MacBook Pro can get.” Samsung caught throttling the speed of 10,000 popular games and apps (probably to improve battery life), while not throttling benchmark (speed testing) apps. Careless error in Samsung’s implementation of data encryption causes 100 million of its recent Galaxy smartphones to easily leak their most sensitive security keys to hackers. Counterpoint’s global top ten smartphones of 2021 dominated by Apple, with iPhone taking the top five spots, plus the eighth and ninth.

April ⋅ At Windows 11’s release last October, PCWorld called it “an unnecessary replacement for Windows 10” — six months later, they deem it “still unnecessary.” Ry­uk/ Con­ti (Windows ransomware) has “impacted hundreds of healthcare facilities across the United States, including facilities located in 192 cities and 41 states and the District of Columbia. [The NSA’s Errol Weiss said,] ‘The attacks resulted ... in cancelled surgeries and delayed medical care, ... revenue losses ... of nearly $100 million ... [and] an estimated $500 million in costs to respond to the attacks ...’ The figures cited by Weiss appear highly conservative.” Over a hundred different models of Lenovo laptop found vulnerable to attacks which “surreptitiously install malicious firmware that can be next to impossible to remove or, in some cases, to detect.” The U.S. DOD’s OIG (Pentagon oversight body) warns that the U.S. Army may waste up to $22 billion on Microsoft HoloLens headsets that soldiers might never use. Apple has another record Q2, 9% better than a year ago. Half of all Q2 Mac buyers are new to the Mac. Qualcomm’s wannabe-Apple-M1 chip, originally claimed by Qualcomm’s CEO to be coming in 2022, now delayed at least until late 2023. Sales of all non-Apple smartphones fell last quarter, while i­Phone rose 5.5%.

May ⋅ Like Samsung once did, Google has been mocking iPhone over its lack of an analog headphone jack — and like Samsung did almost three years ago, Google now dropping that jack from its latest phone.

June ⋅ Palermo, Italy “shuts down all systems” after being hit by Vice Society (Windows ransomware). Samsung TVs discovered to be intentionally programmed to recognize when reviewer benchmark tests are being displayed, and to modify the image during that test to deliver deceptively perfect results. On 1/3 of the top 100 U.S. hospitals’ websites — and probably in violation of federal law — Facebook harvests patients’ sensitive medical info, “including details about their medical conditions, prescriptions, and doctor’s appointments”.

July ⋅ Steve Jobs posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Intel’s latest PC CPU won’t run Examplify, the most popular (in many U.S. states, required) Windows software for taking the Bar exam. Internal IT systems of St. Marys ON (and possibly also Frederick CO) paralyzed by LockBit (Windows ran­som­ware). Intel posts a $500 million net loss for the previous quarter.

August ⋅ Intel, AMD, and Nvidia “reportedly bracing for declines as [M1, non-x86] MacBook popularity grows.” Research finds that when you visit a web page from a link your friend posted on Facebook, the HTML content of that page is rewritten on-the-fly by Facebook to contain various activity-tracking macros that were not present in the real page, and that Facebook “does not disclose to the user that it is rewriting webpages in this way.” (Six-week update: Now the subject of two class action suits.) After serving less than seven months of a five-year corruption sentence, Samsung Vice Chairman Lee Jay-young pardoned, now returning to run Samsung. Intel’s latest processors using software emulation to maintain backward compatibility with many still-popular older games such as Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. When running processor-demanding activity, HP’s latest wannabe-MacBook gets “too hot to touch” on its “underside,” and “borderline” too hot on the keyboard, with an “8 percent improvement” in fan noise over last year’s model.

September ⋅ Counterpoint Research finds that the base of active U.S. smartphone users is now more than 50% iPhone, and that “over the past four years the flow has consistently been Android to iOS ... This is a big milestone that we could see replicated in other affluent countries across the globe.” Passing Mastercard and Alipay, Apple Pay now processes $6 trillion/year, putting it in second place, behind only Visa. Google’s Pixel phones, “the most interesting consumer products (or services) Google has released in years,” hit 2% North American market share. Google discontinues the Pixelbook laptop. EU fines Google $4.1 billion for “im­pos­[ing] unlawful restrictions on manufacturers of Android mobile devices and mobile network operators to consolidate the dominant position of its search engine.” Microsoft Teams “stores users’ authentication tokens in an unprotected text format,” which means that “Electron-based Teams apps can be easily mined for tokens and used for phishing” — reportedly the flaw “won’t be quickly patched.”

October ⋅ Google’s Pixel 4 phone is end-of-lifed after just three years. CommonSpirit Health, the fourth-largest U.S. hospital chain, hit by Windows ransomware (strain not released). 43% of Windows PCs are unable to run Windows 11. U.S. teen iPhone ownership hits 87%. Developers who spent hundreds of hours writing/porting games for Google Stadia shocked when it shuts down abruptly and permanently. Magniber (Windows ransomware) attacks ordinary PC owners, “using sneaky techniques to stay undetected before encrypting files and demanding a ransom payment of thousands of dollars.” HP’s ad for “The perfect laptop” shows a computer with macOS running on its screen. Google posts an anti-iPhone barb to its Twitter account — from an iPhone. After refusing to pay Vice Society (Windows ransomware), the L.A. Unified School District tries to deal with Vice Society’s retaliatory public release of a half-terabyte of “sensitive data of students who had attended LAUSD between 2013 and 2016, including their Social Security numbers, financial and tax information, health details, and even legal records.” After posting a 20% drop in Q3 sales, “issu[ing] a forecast for even weaker revenue in the current quarter and lower[ing] its full-year outlook,” Intel starts layoffs as part of “up to $10 billion in annualized cost reductions,” and “took a $664 million [Q3] restructuring charge.” Jay Y. Lee, paroled/pardoned/whatever for assorted criminal convictions, now named chairman of Samsung. Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs determines that “for months,” “massive” DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks have been coming from thousands of vulnerable Microsoft Active Directory servers around the world. iPhone grew 1.6% over the year-ago quarter, while all non-Apple smartphones shrank about 12%, and prominent Chinese makers fell 22%. Since reporting yet another great quarter, Apple’s stock is up sharply and climbing, while other big tech stocks are stumbling badly.

November ⋅ The U.S. Treasury Dept. reports that ransomware — virtually all of it Windows-based — extracted $1.2 billion from U.S. banks in 2021, more than double the previous year’s figure. Over a year old, Windows 11 is running on “fewer than 1 in 6 PCs.” In the most recent quarter, Apple “was the only company to post positive laptop results in 2022 and the rest of the industry declined.” Microsoft considering making ultra-cheap PCs subsidized by subscription fees and ads. Apple reaches the market value of Amazon, Facebook, and Google combined. Apple is now the most profitable company in China. Facebook (Meta) cans 11,000 persons (13% of its workforce), which “may be only the beginning.” Medibank, Australia’s biggest health provider, has its patients’ private info leaked to the dark web for refusing to pay Windows ransomware (REvil); the Australian Federal Police are investigating. Amazon becomes the first company ever to lose $1 trillion in market value. (Two-month update: Apple becomes the second.) Apple’s market value surges $191 billion in a single day, “the most ever by a US-listed company.” Facebook’s (Meta’s) wannabe-Apple-Watch, planned since February of 2021, abruptly cancelled. Amazon canning “approximately 10,000 people in corporate and technology jobs.” Amazon’s ten-year-old A­lex­a deemed a “colossal failure,” “on pace to lose $10 billion this year,” and the main reason for Amazon’s recent layoffs. “[U]nbeknownst to millions of users”, tax preparers H&R Block, TaxSlayer, and TaxAct found to be “secretly shar[ing] income data with Meta” (Facebook), and the data “was sometimes generated and shared ‘regardless of whether the person using the tax filing service has an account on Facebook’ or other Meta service.”; “Some services linked user names and email addresses with detailed information like income, refund a­mounts, filing status, and even the amount of dependents’ college scholarships.” (Ten-month update: H­&­R Block, Google, and Meta now hit with a RICO suit.) “GPU market nosedives, sales lowest in a dec­ade,” while Apple’s Macs are selling better than ever with Apple’s own M1/M2 chip and its built-in, high-performance GPU. HP planning “up to 6,000” layoffs, “amid plummeting PC demand”; HP’s laptop sales recently “fell by 26%”. Facebook (Meta) hit with $277 million EU fine for leaking the personal data of “more than half a billion [Facebook] users”. Google and iHeartRadio (“the US’s biggest radio station operator”) pay a $9.4 million settlement for false advertising, because they “paid ra­di­o DJs to say they loved the Pixel 4,” which in fact they had “never used” — the DJs falsely described their favorite features of the phone in detail, without any indication that they were reading a script and not describing their own, actual experience with the device.

December ⋅ CryWiper (Windows malware) attacks Russian courts and mayor’s offices, wiping all files permanently, but demanding an $8,500 ransom under the false promise that the data will be recovered. Samsung and LG leak their Android app signing keys, which are now being used to sign Android malware. Google moves Google Maps to its main domain (google.com), which means its us­ers now will have no choice but to grant location access to all of Goo­gle’s services. Microsoft thinking about trying to replace many Ap­ple and Google products with one, big, Microsoft “super app,” that “combines shopping, messaging, web search, news, and other services.” “[F]our third-party security companies” find that Microsoft-issued signing certificates are being abused by “at least nine organizations” to “sign malware”, which allows those malicious packages to “pass strict security checks designed to prevent them from running on the Windows operating system.” Doom co-creator John Carmack quits Facebook’s (Meta’s) VR team, due to “crippling inefficiency at Meta that he said he was ‘offended by’ and which he compared to a GPU with a measly five percent utilization rate. ‘We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this ...’” GodFather (Android malware) mimics Google Protect to gain high-level control of users’ phones, then uses that control to spoof the login pages of over 400 online banking websites, causing users to unwittingly hand over their login credentials to GodFather’s controllers the next time they try to access their banks’ web sites. Facebook (Meta) agrees to pay $725 million to settle a class-action suit over the nonconsensual sharing of up to 280 million Facebook users’ data with Cambridge Analytica — but “is admitting to no wrongdoing or illegal activity by settling the case.” Apple’s M2-powered MacBook Air is ZDNet’s Product of the Year. In a precedent-setting ruling, Ohio Supreme Court unanimously decides that Owners Insurance does not have to pay for ransomware attack on medical billing firm EMOI Services. Windows Central reports that Microsoft has “seemingly a­ban­doned” its Surface Earbuds (wannabe AirPods): “It’s been over two years since they last got any firmware updates.”

2 0 2 3

January ⋅ Qualcomm unlikely to keep up with Apple’s move to a 3nm process, due to the relative sparsity of high-end Android sales. Amazon’s 10,000 corporate layoffs now expand to 18,000, while its “stock price keeps falling.” Apple developing its own WiFi/Bluetooth chip to replace the one it’s buying from Broadcom, and developing its own screens to replace the ones it’s buying from Samsung. (Update: Apple’s WiFi chip development now paused.) Microsoft’s Surface Duo, announced in 2019 and released in 2020, now discontinued. Meta’s CTO complains, “We have solved too many problems by adding headcount. But adding headcount also adds overhead. And overhead makes everything slower. ... Every week I see documents with 100+ editors ... A meeting with 50+ people that took a month to schedule. Sometimes there is even a ‘pre-meeting’ with its own document. I believe the current situation is un­ten­a­ble.” Android TV box sold on Am­a­zon comes “pre-loaded with persistent, sophisticated malware baked into its firmware.” Microsoft laying off 10,000 people: 5% of its workforce. In India, which overwhelmingly uses Android phones, Google loses its final appeal of an antitrust ruling that requires it “to make a series of changes that could topple its financial viability” in that nation. ProPublica finds that online pharmacies that sell early-pregnancy abortion pills are “sharing sensitive data with Goo­gle”. Google laying off 12,000 people: 6% of its workforce. Mi­cro­soft’s HoloLens, and other, mixed reality projects, apparently ending. Spotify laying off 6% of its workforce. Intel has a “horrible quarter” marked by “inventory glut and underused factories,” and “significant declines in the company’s sales, profit, gross margin, and outlook, both for the quarter and the full year. ... 2023 is shaping up to be tough as well. ... Intel didn’t give full-year guidance for 2023, citing economic uncertainty.” Facebook data scientist says he was fired for refusing to participate in tests where users’ phone batteries were intentionally drained without their knowledge or consent. Intel surprises employees with “drastic pay cuts throughout the company.” Samsung has a “terrible quarter” with its lowest profits in eight years. Wedbush calls Apple’s Tim Cook a “Hall of Fame CEO,” with “no layoffs coming.” Spotify “posts another big operating loss”: $231 million.

February ⋅ Apple’s quarterly rev­e­nue is down 5% year-over-year, largely due to COVID-related Chinese production problems, and despite all-time-high services revenue. Apple now has two billion devices in active use. Amazon reports an annual net loss of $2.7 billion. LG updates its smart TVs to include Apple TV, Apple Music, AirPlay, and HomeKit. Apple tops Fortune’s Most Admired Companies for the sixteenth consecutive year. Dell laying off 6,700 persons: 5% of its workforce. Samsung’s latest Galaxy phone is stuffed with so much bloatware that its “Android build is 4x bigger than Goo­gle’s — twice the size of Windows 11. ... Samsung sells space in its devices to the highest bidder via pre-installed crapware. A company like Facebook will buy a spot on Samsung’s system partition, where it can get more intrusive system permissions that aren’t granted to app store apps, letting it more effectively spy on users.” Google’s latest Pixel phone “having reliability issues” with “camera lenses that suddenly crack for no apparent reason, or buttons that fall off.” Windows 11, even “freshly installed,” found to send “tremendous amount of user data to third parties,” including “various market research companies, advertising services, and the like.” Microsoft involuntarily deletes Internet Explorer from users’ PCs; all links to IE will now automatically redirect to the Microsoft Edge web browser. Former employee says that Google “has lost its way, writing in a recent blog post that Google is inefficient, plagued by mismanagement and paralyzed by risk,” and “is ‘trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal re­views, performance reviews, exec reviews,’ and other bureaucratic processes, and while the employees are capable, they ‘get very little done quarter over quarter, year o­ver year.’” Oakland CA hit by Windows ransomware (strain unreleased), which “forced the City to take all its IT systems offline”. Clop (Windows ransomware) mass-hacks 130 organizations, including Community Health Systems (CHS), “one of the largest healthcare providers in the United States with close to 80 hospitals in 16 states,” from which Clop obtained the data of a million patients. Lenovo reports its biggest revenue drop in fourteen years. i­Phone’s intense popularity with Gen Z spells long-term trouble for Android. Qualcomm’s wannabe-Apple-M1 chip delayed again, this time until 2024.

March ⋅ Via an “unpatchable” flaw, BlackLotus (Windows malware) “can hijack a computer’s boot process even when Secure Boot and other advanced protections are enabled and running on fully updated versions of Windows.” Statcounter reports that Windows’s percentage of all desktop/laptop OS users peaked at 92% at the end of 2008, and since has fallen to 57% (mostly due to macOS, but also Chrome OS) — and that’s letting Windows count tablets while all iPads are excluded. Tests show that Samsung phones are programmed to recognize the moon in photos shot with the phone, and immediately substitute in a more detailed moon image without informing the user. (Eleven-month update: Samsung VP says involuntary moon substitution doesn’t matter, because “actually, there is no such thing as a real picture. ... it doesn’t mean anything. There is no real picture, full stop.”) On top of last November’s 11,000 layoffs, in what it calls a “year of efficiency” Meta letting go another 10,000 persons, and cancelling 5,000 open positions plus a number of development projects. Google Glass, the AR glasses that were publicly discontinued in early 2015 but quietly re-continued as an enterprise-only product, now fully discontinued. After Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN) re­fuses to pay, BlackCat (Windows ransomware) publishes patients’ nude medical photos to the internet; now one of those patients is suing LVHN. Google warns that Android phones with Samsung’s Exynos chip can be infected with malware simply by receiving a phone call from the hackers; “[v]ulnerable devices include the Pixel 6 and 7, international versions of the Samsung Galaxy S22, various mid-range Samsung phones, the Galaxy Watch 4 and 5, and cars with the Exynos Auto T5123 chip.” After years of regulatory delays, Apple finally opening retail stores in India. Amazon’s 18,000 layoffs are expanding again, now to 27,000. After six years of regulatory delays, Apple Pay finally coming to Samsung’s home country, South Korea. (One-month update: taking off like a rocket.) WSJ says the era of FAANG stocks (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) is “apparently over,” with only Apple and Microsoft now dominating the U.S. market. Native support for Apple’s processors increases AutoCAD’s speed by 2x over the x86 version. Lenovo cancels its Legion Android gaming phone, after years of failing to attract game development. E3, the video gaming convention that Apple didn’t attend, now cancelled (probably permanently) after major attendees Nintendo, Ub­i­soft, and Microsoft all pull out. i­Pad’s quarterly sales in India surge 135% year-over-year; Apple now has replaced Samsung as the tablet leader in that country.

April ⋅ For weeks, IRS-authorized eFile.com accidentally served a botnet trojan to its Windows us­ers; Mac users were unaffected. Despite years of record-setting dividends, stock buybacks, and a 15.5% repatriation tax on after-tax international income, Apple’s cash hoard still hovering around $165 billion. Samsung’s profits plunge 96% from the year-ago quarter. MSI, a major PC maker in Taiwan, hit by Money Message (Windows/ Linux ransomware), which threatens to leak MSI’s private data if not paid $4 million in one week. (One-month update: The hackers apparently obtained MSI’s update-signing keys, which is extremely bad for MSI and its customers.) Third-party smart displays based on Google Assistant (wannabe Siri) discontinued, with Google no longer providing software updates to existing devices. Intel now working with Arm to be able to mass-produce Arm-based, non-x86 chips in the future. Kro­ger (including Fred Meyer) starts taking Apple Pay, leaving Walmart, Lowe’s, and Home Depot as the last big U.S. holdouts. Samsung has long sold more smartphones than Apple, because Apple declines to participate in the cheap-junk (sub-$400) category — but now, despite that, Apple has reached a “statistical tie” with Samsung. India’s first Apple retail store opens to huge crowds, including people who “travelled a­cross India” to attend. (Two-day update: Huge crowds also at store #2.) LockBit, notorious Windows ransomware gang, releases samples of Mac versions of LockBit (including, strangely, one that runs on PowerPC Macs that all went out of production sixteen years ago), but there is no sign that any in-the-wild Macs have been affected. 80-acre Google mega-campus, having completed its first demolition phase (which included the destruction and/or relocation of be­loved, historic businesses), now abruptly and indefinitely stopped; the expected $19 billion boon to San Jose looks to become “a long-term eyesore and economic zero.” Jonathan Ive receives the 2023 Edison Achievement Award. Even after its January layoffs, Spotify bleeding a quarter of a billion dollars per quarter. Microsoft’s Edge web browser found to be sending Bing the URL of every site you visit, quietly and without permission. Amazon’s Halo health band/watch products (wannabe FitBit/Apple Watch) now discontinued, and at the end of July, all existing units will abruptly become non-functioning bricks, including models that debuted just five months ago. Meta’s Metaverse losing $4 billion/quarter for the last two quarters. (Three-month update: losses now total $21.3 billion.) Intel posts a quarterly net loss of $2.8 billion, its worst ever, with revenue down 36% and profits down 133% from a year ago.

May ⋅ 4/5 of all iPhone users have an Apple Watch. Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams will now ignore the user’s default browser setting, and instead open all web links in Microsoft’s Edge browser; “IT admins are angry.” AMD, longtime maker of x86 PC processors, experiences a 64% drop in chip sales, resulting in its “first quarterly loss in years.” Dallas TX hit by Windows ransomware (Royal/ Conti); “[c]ity officials ask for patience during recovery period.” Google employees unhappy about CEO Sundar Pichai’s recent raise at the same time as 12K layoffs; meanwhile Apple CEO Tim Cook took a 40% pay cut last year and has had no significant layoffs. Whistleblower reports Google to be massively violating the EU’s G­D­P­R “by hoarding personal data of potential job candidates for years” (data from as far back as 2011), though it was only legal to keep it as long as “is strictly necessary, which generally means a maximum retention time measured in weeks or months.” Other than Ap­ple’s own home country, only Ja­pan has a market capitalization greater than Apple’s. Millions of Android phones worldwide are pre-infected with “malicious firm­ware” fresh from the factory — besides phones, also Android “smartwatches, TVs, and other things are caught up in it.” Revenue of small developers on the i­OS App Store grew 70% over the last two years. Arm calls its new 14-core mega chip its “most powerful cluster ever built,” but — in a multi-year, Arm tradition of mega chips that don’t really exist — no one has built even a single one, provoking ArsTechnica to ask, “will it ever actually be built? Will it ever be more than words on a page?” In 2022, the App Store had $1.1 trillion in sales. Private data of nine million patients published to the internet when MCNA Dental refuses to pay $10 million to LockBit (Windows ransomware).

June ⋅ “Apple plans major retail push,” with 53 new and revamped stores over the next few years. Millions of PC motherboards found to have a backdoor pre-installed in their firmware. Google Pixel smartwatches coming apart when the glue holding them together fails. Via MOVEit, a file transfer utility popular among Windows users, Clop (Windows ransomware) mass-hacks numerous organizations, including the BBC, British Airways, Zellis, and the government of Novia Scotia. Microsoft pays $20 million to the FTC for violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). U.S. appeals court gives the go-ahead to a suit by one Windows antivirus (Enigma) a­gainst another (Malwarebytes) for flagging the former as a “potentially unwanted program”; “[l]egal experts are worried the decision could prevent cybersecurity apps from doing their jobs effectively.” After telling everyone it had halted business with Russia, Acer caught sending Russia “$70 million in PC gear.” Microsoft Edge browser now found to be sending every image you view to Microsoft. In the Western European desktop/laptop market, Apple passes Dell, now behind only Lenovo and HP. BlackCat (Windows ransomware) hits Reddit, threatens to publish “80­GB of confidential data” if not paid soon. Microsoft Xbox lagging in third place behind PlayStation and Nintendo.

July ⋅ BlackCat (Windows ran­som­ware) now threatening to release 70 terabytes of the UK NHS’s patient data, that “include employee identification documents, including passports and driver licenses, and internal emails labeled ‘confidential.’” Microsoft leaks one of its private keys to hackers, “giving them free rein across dozens of Microsoft customer accounts,” “including multiple government a­gen­cies.” Telecom Italia SpA, the then-highly-successful firm that 25 years ago offered to buy out Apple, now “teetering on the brink of failure,” at least $34 billion in debt. AMD’s Zen 2 x86 PC processors found to have a new vulnerability that allows “the theft of protected information from the CPU, such as encryption keys and user logins. The attack does not require physical access to the computer or ser­ver and can even be executed via javascript [sic] on a webpage.”

August ⋅ In just three months, Ap­ple Savings reaches $10 billion deposited. Qualcomm planning layoffs during 25% sales slump (with 52% profit drop), and “doesn’t expect a recovery next quarter, either.” Apple hits one billion paid subscriptions. Google and Amazon selling new, unopened Chromebook computers that have already passed their support life, both in terms of feature updates and security updates. FastCompany says “Google Maps has become an eyesore,” with an overwhelming clutter of unrequested hotel/club/bar pins, working-from-home business pins, unhelpful, large photo pins, and stubbornly missing street names — meanwhile, “Apple Maps has become a stellar mapping service on many fronts.” Google hit with $5 billion suit, because it “secretly tracked the online activity of Chrome users even when they were using the browser in its privacy-oriented Incognito mode” (me-too Safari Private Browsing). Zero-day flaw in Microsoft Exchange “was the cause of one of the UK’s biggest hacks ever — the breach of the country’s Electoral Commission, which exposed data for as many as 40 million residents.” ArsTechnica op-ed reports that “Windows 11 has made the ‘clean Windows install’ an oxymoron”; “the first thing you always did with a new laptop or desktop from a company like Dell, HP, Acer, or Asus wasn’t to open the box and start using it. Instead, you took a Windows install disk directly from Microsoft (a floppy, a CD, a DVD, a USB stick), and you blew away everything on the computer’s internal drive, setting up a Windows installation with only the included Microsoft software and few extraneous apps ... This time-honored practice is colloquially called a ‘clean install,’ and it was a cure for most things that ailed a new Windows PC. ... You can still do a clean install of Windows ... The problem is that a ‘clean install’ doesn’t feel as clean as it used to, and unfortunately for us, it’s an inside job — it’s Microsoft, not third parties, that is primarily responsible for the pile of unwanted software and services you need to decline or clear away every time you do a new Windows install.” The College Board, which “administers the SAT test and Advanced Placement exams,” found to be sharing students’ “GPAs, SAT scores, and other data” with Facebook and TikTok, invisibly and without permission. Microsoft continuing to have ongoing problems with its signing keys leaking to hackers. Microsoft using increasingly invasive, malware-like techniques to detect and harass Windows users who persist in using Chrome and Google Search.

September ⋅ Rare Mac malware (A­MOS) infects users only if they think it’s safe to click on a Google ad. Roku letting go 10% of its staff, and taking “an impairment charge of up to $65 million in the current quarter.” Microsoft Surface annual revenue plunges 24%, wiping out the previous four years of gains. Google’s Bard (AI chatbot) found to be “indexing users’ conversations” “into its search results pages, potentially exposing information users meant to be kept contained or confidential.”

October ⋅ Triada, “advanced” Android malware, irremovably pre-installed on many popular Android devices. After increasing rapidly for the past several years to $9 billion, Apple’s annual fee to Google to be the default-but-user-changeable Safari search engine has likely reached at least $18 billion. IRS says Microsoft owes $29 billion in back taxes from the 2003-2013 timeframe, “plus penalties and interest.” Convoy, the trucking startup founded by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, goes belly-up with zero interested buyers. StripedFly (Windows/Linux malware) infected o­ver a million Windows and Linux computers, “disguising itself as a trivial cryptocurrency miner to help it evade detection for more than five years.” ArsTechnica’s Android 14 review laments, “There’s always next year,” and “Android 14 offers a lightly customizable lock screen and not much else.”

November ⋅ Windows now forcing its users to participate in a survey before it will let them close the open-by-default Microsoft OneDrive application. Smart TVs from Amazon and other manufacturers increasingly stuffed with ads. Am­a­zon dumping Android from its streaming devices and smart displays. Announced last January, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Satellite (me-too iPhone SOS) shuts down after all Android phone makers re­fuse to adopt it. Google-owned Fit­bit abandons “almost 30 countries,” including Mexico and all of Latin America, remaining available in “only 23 countries” worldwide. In “[p]robably the biggest slip of the entire [U.S. Google antitrust] trial,” “Google’s main economics expert, Kevin Murphy” “accidentally blurts out that Apple gets 36%” of Google’s advertising revenue in Apple’s Safari browser — “Google attorney John Schmidtlein ‘visibly cringed’ when Murphy revealed the confidential information.” When hit by BlackCat (Windows ransomware), MeridianLink fails to comply with SEC requirement to report ransomware attacks — but also fails to pay BlackCat, so BlackCat helpfully reports the attack to the SEC. In Samsung’s home country, South Korea, even though Samsung is 84% of the smartphone market, people under 30 favor iPhone by 2-to-1. Eighteen-year Google employee re­flects on how Google has declined badly from its early, creative-culture years, into a “lack of visionary leadership,” and a “spreading contingent of inept middle management. ... [T]he clock is ticking ... The deterioration of Google’s culture will eventually become irreversible, because the kinds of people whom you need to act as moral compass are the same kinds of people who don’t join an organisation without a moral compass.” Unsealed evidence in suit by 33 states’ AGs shows that Meta knowingly received info about millions of pre-teen children, “without parental permission, in violation of a federal children’s privacy law”; within Meta this allegedly is “an open secret that is routinely documented, rigorously analyzed and confirmed, and zealously protected from disclosure to the public.” The fingerprint readers in “most Windows PCs” (as well as some in Microsoft’s own Surface products) are bypassed by researchers at Blackwing Intelligence, despite Microsoft’s SDCP (wannabe Apple Secure Enclave) which is supposed to make such bypasses impossible. “No escape from bloat”: Windows 10/11 users report that the HP Smart app is appearing on their PCs “despite them not having any of the manufacturer’s hardware attached.” (Three-week update: Microsoft releases app that you can download and run on your PC, that removes the HP app.)

December ⋅ Amazon’s Fire TV now displays full-screen ads when you turn on the device, which Amazon calls “immersive,” and “better for customers.” PlayStation users are SOL as a “ton of TV shows” they bought (not rented) will now be force-deleted from their collections. (Three-week update: After some bad PR, PlayStation announces that the force-deletion of these purchased shows will be delayed two-and-a-half years.) Spotify lets go another 17% of its workforce, on top of last January’s 6%. Turtle (macOS ransomware ported from Windows) “would only harm those [Mac us­ers] who were thoroughly determined to be infected,” and its decryption key is easily discoverable without paying any ransom. “A number of popular [Android] password managers” found to be exploitable by malicious apps, easily exposing logins/passwords, in circumvention of Android’s supposedly “secure autofill mech­an­is­m.” “Just about every Windows and Linux” computer found vulnerable to a firmware attack that can be loaded into the startup lo­go, and which results in “infections that are nearly impossible to detect or remove”. Chinese phone giant Huawei planning to abandon Android. Rhysida (Windows ransomware) leaks 1.3 million sensitive files from PlayStation’s Insomniac Games, in retaliation for non-payment. Toshiba delisted by the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Microsoft’s Windows Mixed Reality (VR platform) ending. Lowe’s Home Improvement starts taking Apple Pay, leaving Walmart and Home Depot as the last big U.S. holdouts. Amazon Prime Video (the streaming channel included with a Prime membership) will now have ads. (Nine-month update: Prime’s ad frequency soon to “ramp up.”) ArsTechnica reports that “every large smartphone maker except Apple” (especially Samsung) is investing heavily in foldable phones, which are intended to “revive a lackluster mobile market” but are “still largely failing to attract mainstream consumers” — all foldables combined make up about “1 per cent market share of all smartphones sold globally almost five years after they were first introduced.”

2 0 2 4

January ⋅ Several strains of Windows malware are able to access compromised Google accounts e­ven after the users change their passwords. Apple’s profits in Samsung’s home country, South Korea, increase to 6.5 times last year’s. A few months after buying Blizzard, Microsoft cancels the new game Blizzard had been working on for a year, and lays off 1,900 game developers. iPhone is now the #1 smartphone in Mainland China, selling 50% more units in the latest quarter than #2 HONOR. Ap­ple’s smartphone revenue in India is now higher than that of any other company. Google-owned Fitbit suffering chronic battery-life problems and chronic user frustration at Google’s ineffectual response to the issue, causing PC World Senior Editor Alaina Yee to conclude, “You should see Fitbits as a 1-year purchase in the US and two years in regions with better warranty protections. Any additional time you get is a ‘bonus.’ When you’re looking at the cost of a Fitbit, you should imagine how you’ll feel about paying that on a yearly (or biannual) basis to stay in the ec­o­sys­tem.”

February ⋅ For the seventeenth straight year, Apple tops Fortune’s Most Admired Companies: in the 26 years the list has been published, Apple has topped it more than 60% of the time. The 2023, 8% rebound of annual U.S. smartphone sales is entirely due to i­Phone sales increasing 21%; the rest of the smartphone industry shrank 10%. “Microsoft is up to its old tricks again ... the company is once again nagging [Windows 10 users] to upgrade with full-screen, multi-slide popups.” Google pays $350 million to settle long-running, class-action suit over a massive 2018 Google+ user data breach which Google kept secret until it was exposed by The Wall Street Journal. After buying Autonomy for over $10 billion in 2012, then three years later writing-off 85% of that as a loss, HP is still today trying to claw back $4 billion of that money. (Four-month update: Jury finds Autonomy ex-CEO Mike Lynch not guilty of defrauding HP.) For the past two years, Intel reportedly cheated SPEC benchmarks by making its compiler recognize the benchmark code, and insert hidden optimizations to deliver inflated scores that “weren’t indicative of how end users could expect to see performance in the real world.” Models of iPhone take the top seven spots in 2023 global smartphone sales. LockBit (Windows ransomware) gives Fulton County GA one week to pay up, or else see the public release of files that “could put lives at risk and jeopardize a number of ... criminal trials.”

March ⋅ In “the most serious incident of its kind leveled against a US health care organization,” BlackCat (Windows ransomware) hits Optum, “the biggest US health care payment processor,” disrupting prescription fulfillment at “more than 90 percent” of U.S. pharmacies. Roku surprises all its users (including long-time users) with new terms-of-service (including arbitration agreements) to which you must consent, or else your Roku device ceases to function. Lazarus (North Korean hackers) exploited a serious Windows security hole for six months, during which Microsoft knew about it, and knew that it was being used, but didn’t bother to patch it, nor inform anyone of the active exploitation. Emory Healthcare, “Georgia’s largest healthcare system[,] switches to the Mac”; CIO Dr. Alistair Erskine says, “A lot of doctors use Mac at home and a lot of researchers use Mac. Just because we’ve been in the habit of not using Mac in a healthcare environment, I think they sort of tolerate the Windows-based device.”; “He says that Emory will now supply the MacBook Air as its default laptop for all clinicians.” 15,000 Roku user accounts leaked, sold for as little as 50¢ each, and “used to make fraudulent purchases of hardware and streaming subscriptions” — Roku discovered the breach two months ago, but waited until now to publicly disclose it. Popular Windows utility MOVEit, known to be compromised by Clop (Windows ransomware), is believed responsible for massive leak of 43 million French citizens’ data going back twenty years. For the first time ev­er, Walmart now selling Apple Macs. iPhone is now the majority of all smartphones sold in Australia, selling 89% more units than #2 Samsung. Lenovo-owned Motorola’s latest $300 budget phone is “spoiled [by] bloatware.”

April ⋅ Google Podcasts shutting down. Chrome’s Icognito mode (wannabe Safari Private Browsing) found to have been harvesting browsing history data the whole time; as part of a class-action settlment, Google agrees to delete all that Incognito data (which earlier in the case they claimed to be impossible), and John Gruber comments, “I’m not sure there was ev­er a product in history more purposefully misleadingly named than Chrome’s ‘Incognito’ mode.” After Chinese hackers break into U.S. officials’ emails, the U.S. government’s Cyber Safety Review Board issues a “scathing indictment of Microsoft corporate security and transparency ... describ[ing] shoddy cybersecurity practices, a lax corporate culture and a lack of sincerity about the company’s knowledge of the targeted breach ...” Intel’s chip-making unit suffers a $7 billion loss for 2023, almost $2 billion more than the prior year’s loss. Started a couple years ago, Schleswig-Holstein’s pilot program to convert its PCs from MS Windows/Office to Linux/LibreOffice deemed a success; the migration of all 30K users will proceed. In the latest quarter, Apple is the only computer maker to have double-digit, year-over-year, unit sales growth (15%), while only Acer and Lenovo also grew, HP held steady, and Dell and ASUS shrank. February attack by BlackCat (Windows ransomware) has cost UnitedHealth’s Change Healthcare $872 million so far, and “[t]he company warned that, financially, the total cost of the cyberattack is estimated to be between $1.35 billion and $1.6 billion for calendar year 2024.” (Six-month update: Over 100 million users’ records leaked, making it “the largest-ever US healthcare data breach.”) Qualcomm reportedly “cheating on their Snapdragon X Elite/Pro benchmarks ... the numbers that they are showing to the press ... are not achievable with the settings they claim. Qualcomm is showing a different set of numbers to OEMs and these also are not achievable with the settings they claim.” Windows 11 now has on-by-default advertising in the Start menu. Bug in Android TV gives anyone holding your TV remote easy access to your entire Google account, including your e-mail inbox. CNBC’s Kif Leswing reports, “Intel is the worst-performing tech stock in the S&P 500 this year, down 37%”, as its “long-awaited turnaround looks farther away than ever after the company reported dismal first-quarter earnings”; Leswing traces Intel’s problems all the way back to its turning down Steve Jobs’s offer that it make chips for his upcoming product: iPhone. Microsoft’s Xbox unit sales “cratering,” down 31% from the year-ago quarter — which was already down 30% from the year before that. Anthony Wood, Ro­ku’s founder, chairman, and CEO, announces that for the first time ever, Roku’s home screen will show video ads; “Wood also said the company is testing ‘other types of video ad units’ and is looking for more ways to bring advertising to the Roku OS home screen.”

May ⋅ Windows 11, over two-and-a-half years old, peaked at 28% of all Windows users in February, and has now “plummeted below the 26% mark”; meanwhile the nine-year-old Windows 10 is used by nearly three times as many people. Apple Watch is the first-ever FDA-approved device for storing a­tri­al fibrillation history data. Amazon Prime Video (the streaming channel included with a Prime membership), which started showing ads a few months ago, will now show ads when the user pauses video playback. Black Basta (Windows/Linux ransomware) brings down Ascension, a nonprofit health records system that serves 140 hospitals in 19 U.S. states, plus 40 senior living facilities; Ascension “said in its latest update that it did not have a timeline for restoring” service. (Update: Black Basta “is ravaging critical infrastructure sectors in attacks that have targeted more than 500 organizations in the past two years.”)

June ⋅ “London hospitals declare e­mer­gen­cy” as Qilin (Windows ransomware) takes out Synnovis, a “third-party testing and diagnostics provider critical to care.” Motion interpolation, the TV-manufacturer-hyped but movie-aficionado-despised “feature” that makes 24fps motion pictures look like 60­fps soap operas, now stuck in the “on” position for many Roku TV users after Roku’s latest update. BrandZ (Kantar) rates Apple its first trillion-dollar brand. Indonesia government hit by LockBit (Windows ransomware) which de­mands $8 million to recover data that “was not backed up”.

July ⋅ Amazon’s Fire TV sticks (new and existing) will now show full-screen, 30- and 60-second commercials when they go into screensaver mode; Amazon calls it the “Ambient Experience.” Mic­ro­soft China requires all An­droid-us­ing employees to switch to iPhone in the next two months. Patelco Credit Union, with “half a million members,” which recently suffered a “crippling” ransomware attack (probably Windows-based, but they won’t say), now hit with two class-action suits over failure “to protect clients’ private information.” Apple’s annual sales in India are up 33%. Windows security update by CrowdStrike goes bad, causing the “blue screen of death” on millions of PCs — corporate IT departments, airlines, banks, telecoms, hospitals, and emergency services around the world thrown into chaos; all Macs are unaffected. Google’s URL shortener, active for fifteen years, now shutting down, which will break all links on the web that use it. Biggest U.S. trial court shut down by Windows ransomware. Amazon’s Alexa, despite selling over half a billion devices, lost $25 billion in just four years, and had “no profit timeline”; a “former senior employee” worried that “we’ve hired 10,000 people and we’ve built a smart timer.” PCWorld complains that “Windows 11’s ads are out of control,” and that its latest, full-screen ads for Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud service “can’t be disabled.” “Secure Boot,” which is supposed to block malware that hides in Windows PCs’ BIOS firmware, is now “completely compromised on more than 200 device models sold by Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, Intel, and Supermicro,” due to a leaked cryptographic key. Intel’s latest two generations of processors crashing in a way that can’t be fixed; “any damage is permanent.” Twitch, acquired by Amazon ten years ago for almost a billion dollars, is “still losing money.” Meta pays $1.4 billion settlement for using facial recognition without users’ permission. Dark Angels (Windows ransomware) re­ceives $75 million ransom, beating the previous record of $40 million paid to Evil Corp (Windows ransomware). Meta’s Reality Labs (Metaverse project) loses another $4.5 billion in one quarter, bringing its total losses to about $50 billion. Delta Airlines alone lost $500 million from the Windows-CrowdStrike disaster.

August ⋅ Intel stock drops to fifty-year low, with its biggest one-day plunge since 1982, and plans for “more than 16,000” layoffs. Dell announces layoffs: reportedly 12,­500 (10%) of its workers. Hundreds of millions of AMD (x86) chips have a security flaw which enables infections that are virtually impossible to detect or remove, “surviving even a reinstallation of the operating system,” and which can result in the scenario where “[y]ou basically have to throw your computer away.” As Redbox goes bankrupt, and its Roku app stops working, all of its users’ purchased (not rented) movies and shows will disappear. Apple’s AirPods still handily dominating the market for wireless earphones. Ap­ple Watch still the #1 smartwatch, with unit sales over three times that of #2 Samsung, and over four times that of #3 Garmin. Rhysida (Windows ransomware) hits Co­lum­bus OH, “siphon[s] 6.5 terabytes of the city’s data,” then “offer[s] to auction off the data with a starting bid of about $1.7 million” — the city refuses to pay, claiming the data was “either encrypted or corrupted” and thus unusable, then sues a security researcher who publicly proves otherwise.

September ⋅ Meta hit with $101.5 million GDPR fine for storing 600 million users’ passwords in unencrypted plaintext, “for more than a decade,” to which “around 2,000 engineers” had easy access. Mass, casual piracy on Android continues to be “stunningly rampant,” and totally OK with Google, as an indie app developer relates: “Nine in ten regular long-term users (not first-time users, long-term users) do not pay for our app. And that’s just the users we can see. Practically all major Android apps are a­vail­a­ble in a pirated version. Goo­gle itself makes it easy to pirate apps without downloading anything. You can use any app with a trial without ever paying. To use an app for free, indefinitely, just delete and reinstall it, and your testing period resets. And in China... Long story short, that’s how you can end up with 50,000 users and only 1,000 paying you. And before you know it, people who use pirated apps with ir­re­pro­duc­i­ble bugs hit your support channel and gang up on upvoting bad app store reviews.”

October ⋅ Samsung Galaxy smartphone update bricks many older models, causing their users to lose irreplaceable photos, videos, and other data that was not automatically backed-up to the cloud. Redbox kiosks abandoned by the now-defunct company found to be easily mineable for their former customers’ info which, according to a court filing, “may contain sensitive personal identifying information ... including, but not limited to ... credit/debit card data, email addresses, zip codes, customer names, and associated movie rent­al history.” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff describes Microsoft Copilot as “disappointing. It just does­n’t work, and it doesn’t deliver any level of accuracy. Gartner says it’s spilling data everywhere, and customers are left cleaning up the mess. To add insult to injury, customers are then told to build their own custom LLMs. I have yet to find anyone who’s had a transformational experience with Mic­ro­soft Copilot or the pursuit of training and retraining custom LLMs. Copilot is more like Clippy 2.0.” Huawei officially separates from Android, moving to its own “home-brewed operating system, HarmonyOS NEXT,” which now explicitly “no longer supports Android apps.” Microsoft will continue to provide “‘critical’ and ‘important’ security updates” to the prior version of Windows, but only if you pay a $30 fee.

November ⋅ Intel sued (class-action requested) for hiding defects that cause its 13th and 14th generation CPUs to crash randomly.

prev     next