News Roundup 7/21: Earnings, Car Execs, More Court Drama, Outages, And Default Podcasts

Apple Gets All The Cash

Apple’s earnings call was today. They made all of the money again, and are facing questions about how many more iPhones they could possibly sell. Macs were up. iPads were down, meaning we have another quarter of stories about its oncoming doom. Lots of questions are swirling around the Apple Watch, and its a dud or a hit depending on the perspective of the writer. Six Colors has a nice a transcript of Tim Cook’s interactions with investors, and Mac Stories has a good round up of the numbers.

Apple Snags A Chrysler Exec

Ensuring that we’ll never stop reading about Apple’s entry into self-driving cars, Apple has hired another auto exec. Doug Betts has been hired on at Apple with the vague title of Operations. As a quality expert he may be involved in a host of different manufacturing processes, but his time at Chrysler has ensured that everyone is talking about the rumors that Apple is building a car. The story was broke by the Wall Street Journal but you’ll need to subscribe to see it, so I’ll link to iMore with their pull quote.

Apple Channels Bruce Lee

Apple’s battles with Samsung have been a long drawn out brawl in court. Inside Sources reports that Facebook, Google, HP, and pretty much every other big player in Silicon Valley has filed a friend of the court brief in the appeal to try and overturn the judgement against Samsung. They all cite a tide of lawsuits that will stem from the decision to award Apple such a large settlement, citing that ordering Samsung to hand over all of the profit from their devices was an excessive punishment. Apple already snapped back, advising that Google’s brief should not be considered because of their obvious interests in the case.

VMA Announcement Kanye Apple’s Servers

I had shared yesterday the story about Beats 1 hosting the VMA nominations this morning. Apparently those were far more popular than even Apple anticipated, as they ended up with a massive server outage. Motherboard had the story that the outage was caused by the influx of traffic, though all of the services were back up pretty quickly. It’s interesting to think that Apple could survive the launch of the Apple Music service itself, but not millions of pop music fans hitting the stream all at once. Not a good sign for the next keynote. I kid, kinda.

Tyranny Of The Default Comes To Podcasts

A research report by Clammr found that 82% of podcast listening is coming from iOS, and nearly 3/4’s of that is coming from Apple’s Podcasts app. It shouldn’t surprise anyone at this point, as the default is what most casual users stick to. This certainly explains why Overcast’s arrival preceded the death of Instacast as there isn’t a big audience for the third party apps. I think some of this has to do with legacy subscriptions that were already in iTunes migrating over to Podcasts and it’s a bit of a pain to move all of your subscriptions. Podcasts isn’t as crappy as it used to be, but if you’re using Podcasts try one of the other apps.

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Mac geek? Gamer? Why not both? Mike is a writer from Wisconsin who enjoys wasting immense amounts of time on the Internet. You can follow him on Twitter.