US telecom giant AT&T Inc on Friday said it has seen an unprecedented demand for Apple Inc’s updated iPhone, with more than 200,000 pre-orders of the latest Apple gadget in the first 12 hours alone.
The iPhone 4S, unveiled on Tuesday on the eve of the death of legendary Apple founder and leader Steve Jobs, goes on wide release on Friday in the US and six other countries, but customers seeking to reserve the new device could start pre-orders a week early.
Two other US carriers — Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp — also released the iPhone for pre-order, but did not post sales figures on Friday.
The device has disappointed some analysts because of its similarity with the earlier iPhone 4, released last year, but the processor is said to be as powerful as the Apple iPad and comes with a sophisticated voice command system, called Siri.
In addition to its standalone appeal, as latest incarnation of the revolutionary device, sales of the iPhone 4S are also expected to benefit from the enormous outpouring of sympathy for Jobs, who died on Wednesday at age 56, after years battling pancreatic cancer.
In the US, iPhone 4S prices will start at US$199 for a 16 gigabyte model and top out at US$399 for a model with 64GB of memory.
Meanwhile, the launch of a hot new Google Inc smartphone was delayed on Friday as the world mourned the loss of Jobs.
Samsung Electronic Co and Google on Friday postponed a “Mobile Unpacked” press event planned for next week at an international wireless telecommunications industry conference in California.
“Under the current circumstances, both parties have agreed that this is not the appropriate time for the announcement of a new product,” Samsung said in a statement at its official blog.
“We will announce a new date and venue in due course,” the South Korean consumer electronics titan promised.
Samsung was expected to unveil a Galaxy Nexus smartphone powered by a yet-to-be released version of Google-backed Android software and designed to challenge market-leading iPhone.
Postponing the launch was seen as a temporary truce of sorts in honor of Jobs.
Separately, a private funeral was held on Friday for Jobs, according to an unconfirmed report in the Wall Street Journal. An intensely private man in life, his family was bidding farewell to Jobs in an intimate gathering at an undisclosed location, the Journal reported.
Apple security and local police have discretely ringed the house, clearing the way for dark vehicles bearing flowers or friends to get through the barricaded intersection and into a driveway of the corner property.
Apple is planning a celebration of “Steve’s extraordinary life” for employees, but has indicated no plans for a public memorial.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts