Matt Ryall’s Weblog

Dan Frommer has some great charts of Apple’s quarterly results.

Apple has announced their financial results for the last quarter, including an astonishing revenue figure of $46.33 billion. MacRumors writes:

Apple shipped 5.2 million Macintosh computers during the quarter, a unit increase of 26 percent over the year-ago quarter. Quarterly iPhone unit sales reached 37.04 million, up 128 percent from the year-ago quarter, and the company sold 15.4 million iPods during the quarter, representing 21 percent unit decline over the year-ago quarter. Apple also sold 15.43 million iPads during the quarter, up 111 percent over the year-ago quarter. Apple set new company records for iPhone, iPad, and Mac sales during the quarter.

An amazing story of continued growth, especially compared to their competitors in the computing and mobile phone industries.

The word “sustainable” is unsustainable.

Classic XKCD.

A Y-Combinator “Request for Startups”:

Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise.

In our ongoing effort to help you find more high-quality websites in search results, today we’re launching an algorithmic change that looks at the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result.

Google’s search is going to start penalising pages without relevant content “above the fold”. While they don’t spell out what “above the fold” actually means (800px? more?), this should punish the more egregious use of pages top-loaded with advertisements.

In around four hours, Wikipedia is going to start a 24-hour protest against the two pieces of US legislation proposed to regulate the internet:

Today, the Wikipedia community announced its decision to black out the English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours, worldwide, beginning at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18 (you can read the statement from the Wikimedia Foundation here). The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States – the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate – that, if passed, would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia.

From the community announcement:

In late 2011, the United States Congress proposed two legislative bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), which legal scholars and others have advised have the potential to significantly change the way that information can be shared through the Internet. It is the opinion of the English Wikipedia community that both of these bills, if passed, would be devastating to the free and open web.

Estimating software development is hard, let’s go shopping!

Shawn Blanc:

Getting junk mail and advertisements from companies I don’t do business with is annoying enough. But getting it from the companies which I have been a long-time and deeply invested customer is quite annoying.

I imagine it’s easy to fall into this trap when you have a database with all your customers’ email addresses and a campaign to run. Good marketing is hard.

Apple has just published their 2012 Supplier Responsibility Report:

In 2011, we conducted 229 audits throughout our supply chain — an 80 percent increase over 2010 — including more than 100 first-time audits. We continue to expand our program to reach deeper into our supply base, and this year we added more detailed and specialized audits that focus on safety and the environment.

Well worth a read.

Interesting list by the Telegraph.