mpantone

rezwits said:

Does it have the trackball or not?

Re-read the article. It actually covers this in the last sentence of the second paragraph: "It uses a 70 percent layout with a built-in trackball, deep blue housing, and rounded keycaps that match the eerie aesthetics of the series."

randominternetperson said:

That scrutiny led to the CDTFA's 2023 audit. The agency concluded that tax revenue from Apple's online transactions should be distributed across the state based on where purchases were actually made or delivered -- not where the company is headquartered.

So, why is the money refunded to Apple, and not those other municipalities across the state?

The previous linked article from October 2024:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/10/04/cupertino-wins-and-loses-millions-over-californias-apple-tax-ruling?utm_medium=social&utm_source=ai_forums

explains that in a little more detail.

Basically the City of Cupertino gets to keep the tax revenue from 2023 (when the investigation started) until now (2025). A new system will be put into place by the State of California where digital sales tax revenue is collected will go into a new system designed to spread the revenue statewide based on where the digital buyer placed the transaction.

This is just a short term reprieve for the City of Cupertino. They need to figure out fairly quickly how to set their budget accordingly due to a change in expected sales tax revenue from 2025 onward. Apart from Apple, Cupertino is basically a bedroom community with very little retail. It doesn't even have a proper legacy downtown district and its one shopping mall, Vallco failed and is mostly dead.

Read the other article carefully. But the basic gist is that the state has not yet set up the process to disperse that tax revenue yet. As the other article mentions, the ruling affects other California companies with digital retail sales. I'm guessing that companies like Meta (Menlo Park), Alphabet (Mountain View), Netflix (Los Gatos) will be affected as well as maybe others such as Sony Interactive Entertainment (a.k.a. PlayStation) which is headquartered in Redwood City.

Note that for physical goods, there is a long standing system in place that collects sales tax calculated at the point of sale (defined as where the buyer takes possession of the purchased goods). California has a base sales tax however many counties and some municipalities have add-on taxes that increase that amount. So someone buying Gadget A in San Francisco will pay a different sales tax rate than someone in Mendocino County.

This ruling is for digital sales so there is no localized sales tax collection system yet in place. This probably means additional work for Apple (and other digital merchants) who will need to use things like FIPS county codes, ZIP codes, etc. to determine exact sales taxes to be collected just as they do for physical goods (like buying AirPods from store.apple.com).

Until now Apple just collected sales tax based on their location in Cupertino, CA (Santa Clara County) and remitted what was required to the state and county. They did not collect anything more or less. The CDTFA's decision is not retroactive.

The stock market reacts far less on past results: instead it is forward looking. This is why Apple (or another company) can announce admirable quarterly earnings but get dogged the following day because of weak guidance.

While Apple is a very visibly traded stock, most of the share volume is from the big boys: fund managers, BlackRock, FMR, Vanguard, CalPERS, etc., not your coked-up playboy investor types, little Aunt Millies, or snotty fanboys on Reddit with three shares.

And it's not just Apple that's tanking, it's the entire market. Speculative gambling types simply don't have the capital to move global markets that much. Yes, they can muck around with one minor company like GameStop but not the entire S&P 500, Nasdaq Composite, Russell 2000, FTSE, DAX, CAC, Nikkei, HSI, etc. Remember that the safety locks kicked in and stopped futures trading on the Nikkei 200 the other day. It's not just a handful of spastic gamblers doing this.

It's worth pointing out that the Russell 2000 has gotten hit harder YTD than the S&P 500. The small caps and mid cap companies are getting clobbered far more than the Apples, Nvidias, Alphabets, and Amazons of this world. Hell, even DELL, HPQ, and HPE share prices have been brutalized way more than AAPL as a percentage drop YTD.

India's central bank just cut their interest rates by 25 basis points as new tariffs kick in. There's no coke-snorting gambler fraternity who drove that decision.

Anyhow tomorrow (Wednesday April 9, already on the East Coast) is going to be another tricky day for the market. We live in especially interesting times.

This makes zero sense. This is a low volume product, they don't need a 12 month production ramp. Even iPhone generally has a 2-2.5 month production ramp.

Remember that this is a cutting edge product. Having 1.5 year old technology in a premium-priced VR HMD at launch isn't a competitive advantage. It'll be obsolete when the first UPS truck delivers the first package.

This rumor is a load of $%#8!

decoderring said:

Wow, I think this is the first time I’ve ever not wanted to install an update.

I’ll do it because there are likely some security updates, but I wish it were possible to not have all the AI stuff that, for me, just creates bloat.

The storage change between iOS 18.3.2 and 18.4 is very minor.

On an iPhone 16 that was factory reset, there was 232.74 GB free space available on iOS 18.3.2 (Apple Intelligence off, iCloud off).

I installed iOS 18.4, ensured that both Apple Intelligence was off (the iOS 18.4 upgrade did *NOT* enable Apple Intelligence) and iCloud remained unconfigured, and shut down the phone. I rebooted and the iPhone 16 had 232.18 GB free space left.

So we're really talking about a 560 MB delta between 18.3.2 and 18.4. If you already have iOS 18.3.x on your phone, you might as well upgrade to 18.4 regardless of whether or not you use Apple Intelligence features.