Happy St. Patrick’s Day (one day early)! Today’s Apple World Today News Update Podcast includes a pot of gold and a leprechaun, as well as the usual important and informative news bits:
- Apple World Today has launched the new Team AWT Community Forum, an online discussion group for Team AWT members
- Are you a developer in Paris? If so, look in your email inbox for an invitation to an Apple event next Friday
- That Steve Jobs job application from 1973? It sold at auction for $174,000
- Apple’s R&D expenditures this year are going to be HUGE
- Apple World Today has launched the new Team AWT Community Forum, an online discussion group for Team AWT members
- Are you a developer in Paris? If so, look in your email inbox for an invitation to an Apple event next Friday
- That Steve Jobs job application from 1973? It sold at auction for $174,000
- Apple’s R&D expenditures this year are going to be HUGE
The text version of the podcast can be read below. To listen to the podcast here, click the play button on the player below. Apple News readers need to visit Apple World Today in order to listen to the podcast.
Text Version
This is Steve Sande for Apple World Today, and you’re listening to the AWT News Update podcast for Friday, March 16, 2018. Have fun tomorrow on Saint Patrick’s Day…but not TOO much fun. Stay safe out there…
Yesterday I mentioned that an email was being sent out to all of the members of Team AWT, which is our subscription-based premium service that we use to help support the website and podcasts. That email has been sent, and our Team AWT members are now viewing our new Team AWT Community Forum. It’s a place where you can discuss the news and posts on Apple World Today, ask questions, provide answers, get hints and tips about how to use your Apple devices, and a lot of information you won’t get unless you’re a member of Team AWT. If you’d like to find out more about Team AWT, please head to the website at appleworld.today and click on the Join Team AWT button on the right side of the site.
If you’re listening to the AWT News Update from Paris, France and you’re a developer, we have some great news for you. Apple’s going to be holding a developer workshop in Paris next Friday, March 23 at the Station F startup incubator. It will cover app development with the goal of helping developers improve and promote their software. In case you’re wondering why Apple’s doing this, it’s most likely a PR move designed to help Apple before its day in court in France. French finance minister Bruno Le Maire accused both Apple and Google of treating developers unfairly with abusive contracts and wants fines of almost $2.5 million levied against the company. On their part, both tech giants say that their contractual setups with developers work just fine, that they have tens of thousands of French developers, and that those developers have earned over a billion euros just from the Apple App Store.
You may remember a post from a few weeks ago talking about an auction that was selling several Steve Jobs-related items. One of the items was a job application from 1973 that was filled out by the Apple co-founder. Now that single-page handwritten job application doesn’t even identify what job the 18 year old Jobs was trying to get, but he does list himself as being an English literature major at Reed College on the form. That job application ended up selling for $174,000 to an anonymous Internet entrepreneur from England. That shows you just how any document signed by a person who became famous can end up being valuable someday.
Our final note has to do with Apple’s spending on research and development. The company’s R&D expenditures are set to skyrocket this year, with an expected $14 billion to be spent in the 2018 fiscal year. That’s double the amount spent on R&D in 2014, and more than the total amount spent on R&D between 1998 and 2011. Above Avalon says “The dramatic rise in Apple R&D expenditures raises questions regarding the company’s product pipeline and whether management’s overall approach to R&D is changing.” I’d settle for Siri becoming a bit more useful than it is.
That’s all the news for today – join me tomorrow afternoon for another edition of the AWT News Update.
