carnegie

AppleInsider said:...

The "Oracle of Omaha" divulged the figure in a Schedule 13-F issued to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday. A separate 13-G, mandatory for parties who own more than 5 percent of a public company's outstanding stock, notes Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway holds shared voting power in Apple amounting to 255,300,329 shares, with the number including investments made on behalf of insurance companies represented by the investor.

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maestro64 said:

Let see, he bought stock in the run up to earning and sold before the number came out which were neither good or bad, and he made a profit doing exactly what anyone else who follows apple has done. Gee I been doing similar things for the last 20 yrs on Apple so am I using inside information. I would like to see what information he specifically had that made a difference during this time periods. Now if they told me he sold at the end of Dec 2019 right before the earnings update that tanked the stock then I would say that was insider information.

Keep in mind he was making the trades when the market was predicting FUD on Apple. He knew the number were good, but he could not predict how much FUD the market was going to throw out.

I suspect what  matter was he was trading during the blackout period that no exec is allow to do no matter how well or not so well a company is doing. These rules were designed to keep insiders from bailing right before bad news hit the market, not when good news is coming out and the stock is going up, but that is bad now too.

rob53 said:

ericthehalfbee said:

carnegie said:

ihatescreennames said:

karmadave said:

There is major distinction between the San Bernardino and Stone cases. In the San Bernardino case, the FBI also wanted Apple to provide a backdoor into the shooter’s iPhone. 

The government can legally obtain a warrant to search your iCloud account (stored on Apple’s servers) however, even with a legally obtained warrant Apple will NOT provide the contents of the device nor will they provide a backdoor.

Since data, such as iMessages and iCloud mail go through Apple’s servers the government can usually get their hands on what they need anyway. All perfectly legal...

Since iMessages are end-to-end encrypted can Apple really provide access to them if I don’t have an iCloud backup?

No. It can't provide the contents of such messages. 

But it will provide iMessage capability query logs pursuant to an 18 USC §2703(d) court order.

If you have selected to back up iMessages to iCloud, then Apple can provide the contents. What do you think happens when you get a new iPhone and do a restore from an iCloud backup? All your iMessages get restored as well.

If you're really concerned about security you wouldn't back anything up to iCloud and do local encrypted backups to your computer via iTunes. Just be aware that if you lose the password for your encrypted backup you lose your data. Apple can't recover an encrypted iTunes backup.

For me I have just about everything set to backup to iCloud. The convenience of having a continuous and up-to-date backup (plus having items shared between devices) far outweighs my worries that the police or other agency are going to ever need to read my iMessages.

Are you sure iMessages aren’t encrypted when stored on iCloud? There’s no reason why they wouldn’t be. Messages are encrypted with the senders and recipients keys aren’t they? Doing a restore decrypts them just like encrypted email, which unfortunately isn’t the default way Mail is run. 

avon b7 said:

carnegie said:

avon b7 said:

lkrupp said:

ireland said:

The blue collar worker pays their due taxes, and so should the biggest corporations.

Typical simplistic response. Apple DOES pay its taxes, just not enough in the opinion of some. It’s the tired old argument about “fair share”. Apple negotiated a tax agreement with Ireland for example, but the EU wants Ireland to back out of it to get more money out of Apple. When’s the last time you voluntarily sent some extra money to your government just because you wanted to be fair?

Well, to be absolutely fair, according to a three year investigation by the EU into the Irish agreement, Apple not only decided how much it would make available for taxation but when it did, it paid less than 1%.

We'll see how things play out but you should at least see that doesn't look very fair at all.

No, that's not what happened - even according to the European Commission. That's a misleading characterization of what happened that was offered and meant to obscure the reality of the situation.

This has been discussed at length elsewhere, so I'll try not to get lost in the weeds here (though I'm willing to dive back into the details of the situation). But Apple didn't just decide how much profit would be taxable in Ireland. It applied a method for determining what was properly taxable in Ireland - i.e. which was properly attributable to the Irish branches of the corporations at issue - which Ireland decided was acceptable under its tax policies. That method wasn't akin to - just pick a number you like. It was a reasonable method that is sometimes used between unrelated parties. In other words, it is in accordance with an arms-length principle even though Ireland is under no obligation to require the application of an arms-length principle in such regards. (Again, we can get into what that method was if some are interested.)

Then, having determined what amounts of profit were taxable (in Ireland), the regular Irish tax rate - not less than 1% - was applied to those amounts. That's how tax determination works. You first have to figure out what is taxable - e.g., after acceptable expenses are accounted for, and applicable deductions or exemptions are accounted for. Then you apply the appropriate rate. Essentially no one pays the statutory rate on all money that comes into them. Determining how much of it is actually properly taxable is the most important part of the process, and that's what was in dispute in the Ireland-Apple European Commission case. The rate that was applied to what was taxable wasn't in dispute. The European Commission doesn't think that the method - which Apple used and Ireland approved - for determining profit allocation between different branches of Irish companies was proper.

This the part we will have to wait on. We know how Apple worked through things to its own advantage following Irish tax rulings. The EU argument is that that situation artificially reduced Apple's tax burden. It isn't a mischaracterisation to claim that Apple effectively decided to establish how much it made available for taxation. That is what the EU investigation summary actually points very clearly to. Independently of how the figures themselves were worked out.