MacBook Air drops from 1000 feet at 200km/h from an airplane and survived!

This MacBook Air was accidentally drop of from airplane at 1000 feets at 200km/h when the pilot forgot to do the proper pre-takeoff checks before taking off on his light aircraft, resulting in the Thule bag, which the Macbook Air is kept. flew out of the aircraft.

The pilot searched for his MacBook Air frantically after landed safely on the airport, with the help of willing strangers and the local police. Fortunately for him, his bag was found by a farmer when the bag drops just 1 meter away from him and contacted the pilot through Facebook.

Amazingly, the Macbook Air survived the fall with only busted cooling system, a shattered trackpad and a bent chassis. What more surprising is that there is no crack on the screen and it still work perfectly despite the fall from 1000 feet. Whether or not this is a testament to Apple products' build quality is debatable but the fact that the product is still functioning well deserved a praise.

How China manipulates App Store ranking

How would the services claimed to promote your apps to top ten ranking works in reality? Yes, this is a picture a women sitting before a rack of iPhone 5C all set to the Apple App Store, which has been circulating around social media claiming to be a ranking manipulation service that allow developers to pay to boost their app into the top ten ranking.

The women is supposedly downloading, installing, and uninstalling the same app over and over again to artificially boost its number of downloads in the App Store. But this service does not come cheap. The price list show that it costs RMB 70,000 (abour RM40,000) to boost a single app into the top ten ranking while costs RMB 405,000 (about RM233,000) to keep it there every week.

Getting to the top ten is often a massive visibility boost for developers, which would get their work to be noticed and have more people start to download it, and eventually mean an increase in revenue.

Xiaomi Redmi 2 get enhanced, now with double the RAM and storage

Apparently Xiaomi has listened to their customer and provided an upgrade to the Redmi 2, with RAM upgraded from 1GB to 2GB and storage upgraded from 8GB to 16GB. This is particular good for heavy user as I often found that 1GB of RAM is not enough since MIUI itself has taken lots of RAM space.

Xiaomi will name the upgraded Redmi 2 as the Enhanced Edition. Even though the hardware is upgraded it, it only cost additional 100 yuan compare to original Redmi 2, selling at 799 yuan about (RM465)

Penang Motorola two-way radios factory for SALES?

People familiar with the matter said that Motorola Solution Inc, the maker of walkie talkie or radio equipment to emergency workers and scanning devices for retailer are exploring the option of sale. However the company does not comment on this rumors and speculation.

Motorola Solution is what left after the company spin off its mobile phone business in March 2008 due to pressure from activist shareholder Icahn. Rumor of interested buyers include Raytheon, Honeywell International, General Dynamics or even private-equity firms. The company has see its earning per share drop 33% as sales declined 6% with its outlook for this year remains stagnant.

Apple earnings: 74.5M iPhones sold, record-breaking $18B profit and closes the gap on Samsung

Tim cook surely can have a big smile this time as Apple has a block blaster Q4 in 2015 with earning results of $74.6 billion in revenue and net profit of $18 billion. Apple earning beat Wall Street's forecast of  $69 billion in revenue and leave last year's holiday quarter revenue of $57.6 billions in pale.

Here is the break down in terms of device sales:

• 74.5 million iPhones, up from the 51 million sold a year ago.
• 21.4 million iPads, down from the 26 million a year ago.
• 5.5 million Macs, up from the 4.8 million a year ago.

The 74.5 million iphones sold are a record for Apple. To put that into the perspective of transaction going on, 34,000 iPhones were sold every hour, 24 hours a day. Tim Cook even mentioned that with the introduction of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus, he believe there are a lot of people has switch from Android to iOS. Clearly iPhone has contributed quite significant to the overall Apple company revenue.

With the success of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus, Apple has manage to close the gap with World No.1 smartphone vendor, Samsung. Despite being far more profitable, Apple's shipment still trailed Samsung but has narrow the gap to just 600,000 units in the fourth quarter. Other than Samsung, Apple has to start paying attention to other low-cost Android OEM like Lenovo, Huawei and Xiaomi which see their market share increase at their expense.

Xiaomi's Mi Note sells out in within three minutes

Apparently Xiaomi's Mi Note and MI Note Pro are another hit products and the china-based company announced on its Weibo social networking page that they were sold out within 3 minutes of availability last Tuesday. However, the company didn't release any info on how many units were actually available for purchase during that time.

Xiaomi has always position itself as the Apple of China but with lower selling price at near cost and it has always been alleged for copying Apple. Their similarity with Iphone has never been gone unnoticed and Apple is not happy about it.

Jony Ive, Apple's hardware and software design chief, has criticized Xiaomi for alleged copycatting. "I don't see it as flattery," he said last year in an interview with Vanity Fair. "When you're doing something for the first time, you don't know it's going to work. You spend seven or eight years working on something, and then it's copied. I have to be honest, the first thing I can think, all those weekends that I could have at home with my family but didn't. I think it's theft, and it's lazy."

Right now Xiaomi only focusing on Asia market but soon or later, they would have to enter US or Europe market if they were to keep on growing. This would be a big problem for Xiaomi as those countries has more respect for rules of law and Xiaomi could face a lawsuit from companies like Apple. In fact, Xiaomi was sued by Ericsson in India claiming its phones infringed on Ericsson's wireless technology and the court blocked all sales of Xiaomi phones in India last December before partially lifted the ban. Other than that, Xiaomi also might need to beware of other companies like Unwired Planet which owned a lot of pattern and actively pursuing royalty from other phone manufacturers.

In order to maintain its aggressive growth and hardened their armor chest, Xiaomi is working hard on their patent portfolio. Last year they applied for 2318 patents and Xiaomi plans to get "ten of thousands" more in the coming year. But what is foreseen for Xiaomi in near future is lot of lawsuit as it entering more and more markets and people are aiming to get a piece of their profit.

IBM rumored to lay off 110000 employees

Last week, there is a rumor that IBM is going to lay off 110,000 employees, which is about 25% of their global 430,000 workforce. IBM confirmed that they do have plan for the layoff but it could be perhaps 10,000, not 110,000 that was spread in internet like wild fire.

I believe that rumors always started somewhere. Perhaps the CEO did present his 110,000 layoff plan, maybe exiting some unprofitable business, to board of directors for approval but got shoot down and only 11,000 was approved and that's could be where the rumor started.

They sold their laptop business to Lenova, and sold their server business to Lenova as well last year. They give cash to Global foundry to beg them to agree to take their foundry business away from them. So it won't surprise me if the CEO has presented a business spin off plan to board of director that will affect 110,000 employees since IBM has been busy selling off their lower profit margin business units.