O'Grady's PowerPage

Tag: fight

  • Apple, Epic Games begin court battle over online store policies

    There’s no place like the courtroom to settle a dispute.

    Apple’s court case with Epic Games began yesterday. The case, which could have wide-reaching consequences, is being overseen by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers and will decide whether Apple has to let Fortnite back into the App Store and make Epic’s own payment option available. Furthermore, she will provide a ruling on whether Apple is able to block third-party apps that use Epic’s Unreal Engine development software.

    Judge Rogers ultimately has to decide whether Epic’s antitrust claims are likely to succeed, and whether the company will suffer irreparable harm without an injunction.

    “Epic faces an uphill battle,” said Mark Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School. “Apple’s pricing policies are problematic, and antitrust law should probably do something about it. But courts are very reluctant to dictate who a company, even a monopolist, has to do business with.”

    The dispute at the heart of the case stems from the way Apple accepts fees for in-app purchases on its App Store. A ruling on this case could affect other online marketplaces, such as the way Google claims similar fees through its Play Store.

    Story tuned for additional details as they become available.

    Via The Mac Observer and Bloomberg News

  • Director David Leith shoots amazing “Snowbrawl” movie using iPhone 11 Pro cameras

    This qualifies as awesome.

    David Leith, the director of John Wick and Deadpool 2, shot an incredibly epic snowball fight using only an iPhone 11 Pro in what appears to be 4K video at 60 frames per second.

    The 90-second ad, titled Snowbrawl, follows a young girl who teams up with her friends in a sprawling snowball fight against her older brother and his cronies with a teddy bear at stake. Packed with tons of action stunts and gorgeous slow-mo shots you wouldn’t expect to be shot on a phone, the new ad will have you hyped to shoot your own winter videos.

    Take a gander:

    Still, shooting with a smaller camera opened up a bunch of possibilities that wouldn’t be possible with the type of giant cameras you’d find on a Hollywood production set. That shot of the garbage can lid twirling across the battlefield looks especially great. A couple of iPhone gimbals can be seen, but it looks like a lot of scenes are handheld shots filmed at 4K 60fps.

    Via Cult of Mac

  • 20% Samsung price hike could affect Apple’s margins by 1-2%

    The ne’er ending fight between Apple and Samsung continues.

    Following up on yesterday’s story about Samsung potentially raising the cost of building mobile processors for Apple, such a change would be expected to reduce the company’s overall margins by as much as 2 percentage points.

    Per AppleInsider, Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray noted on Wednesday that the processors built by Samsung at its chip fabrication plant in Austin, Tex., are the core component of Apple’s iPhone and iPad. The chips tend to represent between 6 and 9 percent of the total component cost of a given iOS device.

    A report surfaced this week that claimed Samsung has increased the price of its mobile processors for Apple as the two rival companies are driven further apart.

    Munster said a 20 percent increase in chip prices would result in a hit to Apple’s margins between 1 and 2 percentage points. He also said that he would not be surprised if the price increase turns out to be accurate, “given the legal tension” between the two companies.

    But he also buys in to rumors that Apple plans to move its chip production away from Samsung, and will have assembly of its custom processors like the A6 found in the iPhone 5 handed to another company, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.

    “We believe that if Apple were to move to another vendor in the next year or two, they may be able to negotiate better chip prices, which would roll back the impact from the Samsung price increase,” he said.

    But in the meantime, Munster said it appears Apple has no choice but to continue its partnership with Samsung, even if the Korean electronics maker did put a massive price hike in place.

    Piper Jaffray has projected that while Apple’s margins will dip during the December quarter in the face of a number of major product transitions, margins will quickly improve in the company’s fiscal year 2013. Munster has called for Apple to earn gross margins of 41.5 percent for calendar years 2013 and 2014.

    “It does not appear that new product launches for iPhone 5 and iPad mini carry significantly different margins than prior launch margins for the same product lines,” he said.

    Margins have been a major concern among investors in recent weeks, as Apple’s stock has taken a major hit. But most analysts have stood by Apple. Chris Whitmore of Deutsche Bank said last month that concern over Apple’s margins has been “overblown,” and that the reduction is “nearly entirely cyclical and not structural.”

    Stay tuned for additional updates as to the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys as they become available.