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Apple files SEC Report, detailing executive team income for 2014

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On January 22, Apple filed a report to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in which it detailed the monetary and equity compensations that have been paid to the top ranking company executives. According to the report, which is available for online viewing here, Tim Cook took home $9.2 million which is twice as much as last year. While the basic salary of Apple’s CEO was $1.75 million, he was also awarded a non-equity incentive compensation of $7.45 million.

Peter Oppenheimer, the company’s former Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, had a base salary of a little under a million and $3.4 million in incentives for a total of $4.5 million. His successor, Luca Maestri, started off with a base salary of $711.211, an incentive package of $1.6 million and $11.3 million in Apple stock. This made his total income for the year a little over $14 million.

Often seen on the keynote stage, Eddie Cue was awarded a total of $24.4 million. With a base salary just shy of one million, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services was given an additional $3.4 million in non-equity incentives as well as $20 million in stock. The Senior Vice President of Operations, Jeff Williams, saw a very similar reward for his work – a total of $24.4 million. Starting off with a base salary just under one million, he was given a non-equity incentive compensation of $3.4 million as well as $20 million in stock.

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Source: SEC

The newest addition to company’s executive team, Angela Ahrendts started her career at Apple with a base salary of $411.538, a $500.000 bonus, a non-equity incentive plan compensation of $1.6 million and a whopping $70 million in Apple stock. Leaving her old position as the CEO of the luxury clothing company Burberry, Ms Ahrendts joined the Cupertino team in May of last year as the Senior Vice President of Retail and Online Stores, becoming the first female in Apple’s top ranks and making $73.3 million in the process.

If you haven’t paid (pardon the pun) much attention to the earnings of Apple’s top executives, you may be surprised to find out that Tim Cook, the CEO, isn’t the one getting the most money this year. In fact, he’s fifth on the list. And to make things even more bizarre, the newcomer Ms Ahrendts made eight times more. There is, of course, a perfectly reasonable explanation for the difference in numbers: whenever a new employee starts his or her contract, they are given restricted stock units (RSUs). These are stocks that become unlocked over time as the contract of the person progresses. For example, in previous CES filings we can see that Tim Cook was awarded an astonishing $376 million in stocks alone when he was named CEO back in 2011.

That explains compensations of Angela Ahrendts and Luca Maestri, but what about Jeff Williams and Eddie Cue? They both received $20 million in stock despite being with the company for a while. It comes down to talent retention. As observed by John Gruber of Daring Fireball and Guy English, since the release of the iPhone and iPad, many very talented people have left Apple in search of the next big thing. In that sense, it is perfectly understandable why Apple would attempt to retain its most talented employees by giving them more money and stocks, making them literally invested in the company.

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New Mac OS X vulnerabilities publicly disclosed by Google’s Project Zero Team

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Ars Technica reports that Google’s Project Zero team has made public three security vulnerabilities found in Mac OS X. Fortunately, Apple has been made aware of the issues prior to their public release and has already fixed one of the vulnerabilities while the other two will be fixed in the upcoming release of Mac OS X Yosemite 10.10.2 which is currently in beta.

Project Zero is a white hat hacking group formed and funded by Google that attempts to breach the security of all major systems that everyday users depend on. Once the group finds a system vulnerability, they get in touch with the company that maintains the software, informs them of the problem and even gives them proof-of-concept source code that demonstrates the issue. The developers of the software product then have three months to implement patches and release them to their customers. As soon as the three months expire, Project Zero publishes the “0day” vulnerability on their website along with the proof-of-concept source code.

Apple is not the only company that has had their vulnerabilities publicly released. Microsoft has also recently experienced the uncomfortable situation of having unpatched Windows bugs in the wild. Fortunately for Apple customers, the issues discovered by the Project Zero team are rather isolated since they require the attacker to have local access to the Mac. In other words, either someone needs to have physical access to your machine in order to hack it, or they need to combine the 0day exploits with other vulnerabilities that will grant them local access.

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The three exploits found by the Project Zero team are the following:

– The first issue has to do with a sandbox bug.

– The second vulnerability exposes an exploitable NULL pointer in the kernel.

– The third 0day bug has do to with a security loophole in Apple’s Bluetooth stack.

Leaving aside whether it’s good of the Project Zero team to publicly release information about vulnerabilities that will soon be patched, these recent events have once again raised the question: Is Apple doing too many things at once and not devoting enough time to solidify the performance and security of its platforms?

A growing number of users support the opinion that Apple has too many balls in the air and the amount of time it can spend on each one is very limited. Between the annual software release cycles of iOS and OS X (and possibly Watch OS going forward), Apple engineers have less and less time to iron out bugs and streamline the operation of the operating systems. The solution brought forward is that Apple needs to take a year during which to focus not on new features, but on making sure that all the features and functionality “just work”. We’ve already seen the Cupertino company do this with the move from Mac OS X Leopard to Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

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Tweetbot for Mac reaches token limit, gets pulled from Mac App Store

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Tweetbot, one of the most popular twitter clients on iOS and OS X has seen its desktop version pulled from the Mac App Store on January 25 2015. While we still don’t have an official explanation for the app’s disappearance, 9to5Mac believes it is due to Tweetbot reaching the Twitter token limit. During an earlier conversation with between 9to5Mac and Tweetbot’s creator, Paul Haddad, the developer hinted that he expects his Mac app to reach the token limit by the end of 2014 at which point the product would have to be pulled from the Mac App Store, discontinuing all future sales.

To make matters even worse for Tweetbot’s maker, users have been reporting login issues with the Mac app, allegedly caused by the token ceiling. Paul Haddad has reached out to Twitter and is waiting for a response.

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Tweetbot for Mac

Twitter introduced its token limit for 3rd party apps along with its 1.1 API on August 16, 2012. In essence, each Twitter app is given 100,000 user tokens. Every person who logs into Twitter with a 3rd party app is using up one token. It gets worse, though – if a user has multiple Twitter accounts, multiple tokens will be used up so that every account has a token associated with it. And when the tokens run out, Twitter will deny access to new accounts trying to connect to the service via the 3rd party app, essentially rendering it obsolete. While it is possible for tokens to be released by revoking an app’s Twitter access, very few people do so when they delete the 3rd party Twitter client.

For more than two years now Twitter has been maintaining its stance on token limits, even though this has forced many popular clients from all platforms to be pulled from their respective stores. So why is Twitter being so aggressive towards developers? While there’s no universally agreed upon explanation, a large portion of it is money-related. Or more specifically advertising revenue. Since its listing on the New York Stock Exchange in late 2013, Twitter has been attempting to monetize its large base of users by trying different advertising strategies. But those ads will only show up if you’re using Twitter’s own app or website. So the desire to limit the growth of 3rd party Twitter clients is understandable albeit frustrating as Paul Haddad had the misfortune of finding out.

If you didn’t get a chance to buy Tweetbot for Mac and you’re determined not to use the official Twitter app, take a look at a few alternative Twitter clients that are available in the Mac App Store including Echofon, Twitterrific, Tweetings, Osfoora, and Head.

Update: Apparently Tweetbot is reporting their app will be available again soon, after working closely with Twitter.

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Apple may start using ARM-Based Chipsets in future Macs

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Ming-Chi Kuo, a KGI Securities analyst, recently offered the prediction that Apple may be making a shift away from Intel to their own ARM-based systems-on-a-chip for future lower-end MacBook models. As reported by MacRumors, the prediction is based on the increasing power and capability that the A-series chips have to offer. The A8X can easily compete with Intel’s Atom processors and even the Core i3 line.

Apple has been rumored to be working on new ARM-based Macs and MacBooks for some time now, but so far we haven’t seen any definitive evidence that they are indeed entering mass production. It is not surprising that Apple is experimenting with MacBooks running on ARM instead of Intel, however. In fact, it’s to be expected.

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Source: KGI Research

Prototyping every possibility when it comes to future products should be considered good practice and we would be surprised, if not shocked, if Apple didn’t have the MacBook Air and other models sporting the A8X chipset in a basement somewhere in Cupertino. The same thinking goes for Macs with touchscreens, eye tracking, TouchID and other technologies that are possible but not yet implemented.

Moving away from Intel does have its drawbacks, however. The biggest hit will come from the fact that you will most likely lose Windows compatibility. Since the internals of today’s Macs are very similar to those of PCs, it is very easy to install and run Windows without any problems. The move to the A-series chipsets will likely see the end of BootCamp as we know it.

But the compatibility issues don’t stop there. Virtualization software like VMware Fusion, Parallels Desktop and VirtualBox all rely on that underlying Intel architecture to make their virtual machines speedy and easy to set up and use. So in that sense a move away from Intel will also disrupt any workflows that individuals and businesses using virtual machines have come to depend on.

The last area that might take a hit if Apple begins transitioning to their own chips will be games. Or more specifically game ports from Windows. Just like with the virtual machine conundrum, many games also rely on the fact that your Mac’s underpinnings aren’t all that different from a PC. Once the transition is underway, game developers will have a much harder time porting their titles to OS X.

It is important to understand that the question regarding the ARM transition is not “if”, it is “when”. As the A-series chipsets become more and more powerful, it makes more and more sense to begin the switch. Fortunately for consumers, Apple has already gone through two system architecture transitions (PowerPC and Intel) so the ride shouldn’t be too bumpy. In fact, the transition to Intel was one of the smoothest that the computer industry has ever seen.

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A bug found in OS X Spotlight can compromise your privacy

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A glitch in the way Spotlight works on OS X can transmit private information such as your IP address to spammers. Discovered by the German technology site Heise, the bug appears to affect all OS X users who also use the default Mail.app to manage their email. Spotlight can endanger your privacy by not checking if the “Load remote content in messages” option in Mail.app is disabled and loading remote images anyway in the process of compiling relevant search results.

So how can the loading of remote images affect your privacy? Spam emails often contain web bugs called “tracking pixels” that get downloaded with other images embedded in an email. Once an email containing such a bug has been downloaded and opened, the tracking pixel notifies the server that the email has been successfully delivered and viewed. This is actually how read receipts work. But the information sent back to the spammer is more than just a mere read receipt. It can contain your IP address, browser information, OS X version and even the version of Spotlight you’re using. What makes matters even worse is that whenever Spotlight starts going through your mail, it will access every message – even the unopened ones in your Junk folder.

As of yet, there is no official response from Apple regarding the glitch.

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The best way you can protect yourself from this glitch is to disable the automatic searching of emails and messages in Spotlight’s preferences. To do so:

– Open your System Preferences via its dock icon or by going into Launchpad.

– Once it’s open, select the Spotlight section.

– Now leave the Mail & Messages option unchecked, it is number twelve in the list by default.

That’s it, feel free to close System Preferences. This solution is far from optimal since it will disable not only searching for emails, but for conversations in the Messages app as well. If that’s a deal breaker for you, you can opt for the alternative solution which is to use a 3rd party email client instead of the standard one.  Some of the better email client options for OS X include Airmail, Mail Mate, Postbox and Mail Pilot.

If you do decide to go down this path, make sure that Mail.app will no longer receive new emails. You can do this by going into the System Preferences, located on your dock and in Launchpad, and opening the Accounts section. Once it loads, click on every account there and make sure that if there is a Mail option, it is left disabled. You can also accomplish the same task by opening the Mail app, clicking on Mail in the menu bar and choosing Preferences. Then just switch to the Accounts tab and remove every registration by selecting it and clicking on the minus button.