On average, men at Apple’s U.K. operations earn 5 percent more than women, the company revealed on Tuesday, a day ahead of a deadline for British companies over 250 people to disclose their gender gaps.
AppleInsider – Frontpage News
The average lifespan of a range of Apple devices have been revealed, and they actually last rather well if Asymco analyst Horace Dediu’s research is anything to go by.
[ Continue reading this over at RedmondPie.com ]
The average lifespan of an Apple product is just over four years which is roughly twice as long as Android devices, according to new research published by a researcher for analytics firm Asymco. Analyst Horace Dediu proposed that knowing how many active Apple devices there are, as well as the cumulative number of devices sold, […]
Its widely known that Apple devices enjoy a longer lifespan than products from other competing products. It is how many people have tried to justify the ‘Apple tax.’ However, no one exactly known what’s the average lifespan of an Apple device. Apple itself has never revealed any such number. Asymco analyst Horace Dediu, however, has managed to come at an estimate thanks to some maths wizardry and by basing his maths on some numbers revealed by Apple. Continue reading 
Dediu’s research on this topic was propelled forward when Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed the total number of active Apple devices — 1.3 billion worldwide — during the company’s most recent earnings call. Now, the analyst proposed that to determine the average lifespan, you can subtract the known active devices number from cumulative devices sold to determine “cumulative retired devices.”
Dediu then said that to estimate the average lifespan, you calculate the time between “cumulative devices sold” at the beginning of a product’s lifespan, and the current “cumulative retired devices.” He ultimately determined that the average Apple device lifespan is about 4 years and three months, when looking at the data of Apple products sold in Q2 2013 and retired in Q4 2017, a time when the 2013 devices died or otherwise stopped working and their owners sought to purchase new versions.
Dediu gave a detailed breakdown of his calculations:
Here’s how to compute this yourself: Visually, the lifespan is the distance horizontally between the two vertical bars such that the bars are the same length. The top vertical bar measures the gap between the area (cumulative devices) and the curve (active devices) and the lower bar is the gap between the area and the x-axis, i.e. the cumulative devices. When those two bars are the same size the distance between them is the lifespan (at the time of the top bar.)
Arithmetically, the average lifespan at a given time t is the duration between t and the moment when the cumulative devices sold reached the cumulative retired devices at time t.
For example today–as the visual above represents–the lifespan is the time since cumulative devices sold reached the current total retired devices. The cumulative retired devices can be calculated as 2.05 billion cumulative sold minus 1.3 billion active or 750 million. The time when cumulative devices sold reached 750 million was the third quarter 2013. The lifespan is thus estimated at the time between now and Q3 2013 or 17 quarters or about 4 years and three months.
He noted that cumulative devices sold for Apple includes Macs, iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, and the iPod touch, although of course the lifespan average number is just that — an average — and doesn’t perfectly apply to each individual product. Just over four years is likely in the ballpark for how long Mac users keep around their computers, but if looked at on a product-by-product basis that statistic would likely be different for iPhone and Apple Watch owners.
For more details on the topic, check out Dediu’s full post on Asymco.com.
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MacRumors: Mac News and Rumors – All Stories
The average lifespan of an Apple device is probably just over four years, according to analysis into figures released during the fourth quarter investor conference call, suggesting that iPhones and iPads remain in active use for twice as long as the typical consumer iPhone upgrade cycle.
AppleInsider – Frontpage News
Airbnb is rolling out programs like hotel bookings and loyalty programs that make it look more like the industry it is trying to disrupt.
Airbnb, after years of battling with the hotel industry that it seeks to somewhat supplant, is beginning to look more like that very foe.
The $ 30 billion company unveiled Thursday a series of additions to its product that thin the lines between Airbnb and hoteliers. Airbnb said that guests would be able to book rooms through the portal in boutique hotels, bed-and-breakfasts and vacation homes, allowing its customers to have the option to nab stays on the turf of its rivals.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky argued that the changes were about making the service less niche and more attractive to a broader range of customers. He conceded that the company’s image perhaps scared some higher-end guests away, worrying that “people felt like it’s not for them.”
“Airbnb is still an alternative,” he said at a splashy product rollout on Thursday in San Francisco, in front of a screen that read ‘Airbnb for Everyone.’ “We still haven’t done the ‘everyone’ part.”
All told, the changes amount to a morphing of the company’s 10-year-old zero-sum ethos toward the hotel industry: Airbnb is acknowledging that the hotel industry has some draws that their platform does not, and it’s taking a step to encroach onto that stream of revenue and customers.
While some hotel rooms have already been listed quietly on the platform, the formal addition of rooms at boutique hotels or vacation rentals will pose a threat to booking competitors like Priceline and Expedia.
Airbnb also said it would create a Superguest program that sort of resembles a hotel loyalty program, expected to launch in full by the end of the year. The company will also soon offer a new luxury line of homes and experiences, called Beyond, for stays like at a remote coutryside villa.
And as part of a broader new focus at the company to clean up the lower-quality homes offered on the platform, it is also launching what it calls Airbnb Plus, a tier of properties that the company says it will have inspected in person and verified as top-of-the-line — homes that are “insanely nice,” as Chesky called them.
The company is also allowing customers to more finely cull its listings through expanded categories in the portal, such as searching for a home with rustic architecture or a host who can play guitar.
The launch comes amid recent tension at the company that forced out the company’s chief financial officer, Laurence Tosi, who was expected to take Airbnb public as soon as this year. With his sudden departure earlier this month, the company has ruled out an IPO until at least 2019.
OpenSignal regularly releases reports of how well US carriers are performing against each other based on millions of crowd-sourced data points collected from the app of the same name. Today, OpenSignal released a report that analyses the state of LTE on a global scale, measuring average LTE speeds availability on a per-country basis. According to the report, average LTE speeds have pretty much plateaued toward an average of 50Mbps. This means that the growth of average speeds has slowed down (if that makes sense) and in the past several months, networks have succeeded in expanding LTE…
Apple has outlined the HomePod’s power consumption in an environmental report [PDF] about the speaker published today.
Apple says the HomePod consumes less power than an average ENERGY STAR certified LED household light bulb during music playback. The comparison is true, as a classic-shaped A-series LED bulb usually draws around 9-10 watts, while the HomePod draws around 8.74 watts with 115V of line voltage.
The environmental report includes a chart with a complete breakdown of the HomePod’s power consumption based on different line voltages. For those unaware, around 115V is standard in the United States and Canada, and around 230V is standard in many other countries like the UK. 100V is standard in Japan.
Interestingly, Apple says the HomePod automatically enters a low power mode after eight minutes of inactivity. In this mode, the speaker draws between only 1.71 and 1.76 watts of power. We’re not entirely sure what this means, as one would assume the HomePod is always in lower power mode when it’s not being used, beyond listening for Hey Siri. We’ve reached out to Apple for comment.
The environmental report also notes the HomePod is free of brominated flame retardants, PVC, and beryllium, and adds that 100 percent of its packaging fibers are sourced from responsibly managed forests or recycled paper.
On a related note, an Apple support representative told 9to5Mac that the HomePod comes with a two-meter power cable in the box that is color matched in Space Gray or White. The representative said the cable is removable and user replaceable, but this wasn’t the case on demo units, so it may be wrong information.
Apple began accepting HomePod orders today in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia for $349, £319, and $499 respectively. The speaker can be used elsewhere in English for now, with French and German coming this spring.
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The average price of smartphones rose at record pace in Q3 last year and then again in Q4. Data by GfK shows that consumers were paying $ 363 on average, a 10% increase year on year. This also represents the fastest quarterly rise. The number of smartphones sold in Q4 was almost flat – just 1% up. But the revenue from those sales rose significantly, 11% globally. This increase was the biggest in Central and Eastern Europe where unit sales went up 7% but revenues are up 28%. In Western Europe and China, unit sales are down 3% but revenues still increased by a solid 17%. 4Q…
