Apple Watch Display Quality Judged ‘Excellent’, Calibrated to Match iPhone 6

DisplayMate Technologies has extensively tested the Apple Watch’s flexible OLED display and shared the results today based on several categories, including screen reflection, brightness and contrast with ambient light, color gamut with ambient light, and viewing angle variations. Overall, the company found the Apple Watch to have an “excellent smart watch display” with accurate colors and picture quality.

In a side-by-side comparison with the iPhone 6 display, the display calibration company found that Apple has taken measures to ensure that the Apple Watch display has the same colors, color calibration and color accuracy as the larger smartphone screen. The stainless steel and gold Apple Watches with sapphire crystal displays, however, have much higher reflectance in ambient light and mandatory automatic brightness control to preserve battery life.

“Since the Apple Watch is often used right next to the iPhone 6, Apple has gone to considerable lengths to give them the same colors, color calibration, and color accuracy. The two most significant differences (other than size) are the much higher Reflectance of the Apple Watch with a sapphire crystal (8.2 percent compared to 4.6 percent), and the aggressive Brightness control using a mandatory Automatic Brightness Ambient Light Sensor in order to increase the running time on battery for the tiny watch.”

The full-length report offers a comprehensive look at the Apple Watch’s ion-strengthened and sapphire crystal displays, and reiterates that enhanced sapphire, which lowers the screen reflectance of sapphire to be much lower than glass, will soon be available for use in smartphones, smartwatches and other mobile devices. Additionally, DisplayMate’s previous tests of the Samsung Gear 2 and Sony SmartWatch 2 displays provide good comparisons to the Apple Watch.

Apple Forecasted to Report Double-Digit Growth in Second Quarter as Sales Remain Strong

Apple will report its financial results later this hour for the second quarter of the 2015 fiscal year, a three-month period spanning January through March that directly followed the holiday shopping season. Apple has offered guidance of between $52 billion and $55 billion in quarterly revenue, while the average of all analysts combined forecasts the company’s revenue during the quarter marginally higher at $56.84 billion.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt at Fortune has compiled a pair of charts that aggregate all predictions by independent and professional analysts for Apple’s revenue, EPS, gross margin and number of iPhones, iPads and Macs sold during Q2 2015, and it’s believed that Apple will report double-digit growth year-over-year as sales remain strong and the company’s momentum continues in 2015.

Amateur analysts are bullish, predicting average quarterly revenue of $58 billion and sales of 60.1 million iPhones, 13.6 million iPads and 4.7 million Macs, while professional analysts remain more conservative with an average estimate of $55.69 billion quarterly revenue and sales of 55.7 million iPhones, 14.2 million iPads and 4.6 million Macs. Apple is also forecasted to have a gross margin of 39.4% based on the average of all analysts.

MacRumors will be providing live coverage of Apple’s financial results as they are reported around 1:30 PM Pacific (4:30 PM Eastern), including the subsequent earnings conference call with CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri at 2 PM Pacific (5 PM Eastern). At that time, we’ll have a clearer picture of just how well Apple managed to perform in the quarter.

Apple Reports Record March Quarter Results of $13.6B Profit on $58B Revenue, Boosts Dividend and Buybacks

Apple today announced financial results for the second fiscal quarter and first calendar quarter of 2015. For the quarter, Apple posted revenue of $58 billion and net quarterly profit of $13.6 billion, or $2.33 per diluted share, compared to revenue of $45.6 billion and net quarterly profit of $10.2 billion, or $1.66 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter.

Gross margin for the quarter was 40.8 percent compared to 39.3 percent in the year-ago quarter, with international sales accounting for 69 percent of revenue. Apple also declared an increased dividend payment of $0.52 per share, payable on May 14 to shareholders of record as of May 11. The company currently holds $193.5 billion in cash and marketable securities.

In addition to the increase in the dividend payment, Apple said it will once again expand its share repurchase authorization to $140 billion from $90 billion and the company says it expects to spend over $200 billion in cash under its capital return program by the end of March 2017. Since the start of its capital return program in August 2012, Apple has returned over $112 billion to shareholders, including $80 billion in share buybacks.

Apple sold 61.2 million iPhones during the quarter, up from 43.7 million a year earlier and a new March quarter record, while Mac sales were also strong with 4.56 million units sold, up from 4.1 million units in the year-ago quarter. iPad sales were down, however, falling to 12.6 million from 16.35 million.

“We are thrilled by the continued strength of iPhone, Mac and the App Store, which drove our best March quarter results ever,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We’re seeing a higher rate of people switching to iPhone than we’ve experienced in previous cycles, and we’re off to an exciting start to the June quarter with the launch of Apple Watch.”

Apple’s guidance for the third quarter of fiscal 2015 includes expected revenue of $46-48 billion and gross margin between 38.5 and 39.5 percent.

Apple will provide live streaming of its fiscal Q2 2015 financial results conference call at 2:00 PM Pacific, and MacRumors will update this story with coverage of the conference call highlights.

Conference call and Q&A transcript is after the jump
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App Store Sees Record Performance in Q2 2015 With 29% Increase in Revenue Year Over Year [iOS Blog]

During today’s Q2 2015 earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the App Store saw its best quarter ever, with 29 percent growth year over year. The entire services category, which includes the iTunes Store, App Store, Mac App Store, iBooks Store, AppleCare, ApplePay, licensing, and other services also reached a record quarterly revenue of $5 billion, up 9 percent year over year, with growth largely coming from the App Store.

According to Apple CFO Luca Maestri, the App Store remains “incredibly popular” with customers around the world, and in the March quarter, it saw 70 percent more revenue than Google Play.

Apple also an update on HealthKit-based apps, which are part of Apple’s recent health and fitness initiative, aggregating all of a user’s health and fitness data. According to Cook, HealthKit has been highly successful, and there are now 1,000 HealthKit-based apps in the App Store.

Along with HealthKit, Cook also touched on apps for the Apple Watch. There are now 3,500 Apple Watch apps available for download. Cook said customer response to the Apple Watch was “overwhelmingly positive” and that Apple “can’t wait to see more inspiring apps” for the Apple Watch as we creep closer towards the 2015 Worldwide Developers Conference.

MCX Member Best Buy Begins Accepting Apple Pay in App, In-Store Support Coming [iOS Blog]

On an Apple Pay update shared during today’s second quarter earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that Best Buy will begin accepting Apple Pay in its iOS app today, with full Apple Pay support coming to Best Buy stores later in 2015.

Best Buy’s move to adopt Apple Pay is notable because Best Buy was previously a member of MCX, the Apple Pay competitor that’s pushing the CurrentC payments service. CurrentC, which uses barcodes rather than NFC for payments, remains in testing and will launch later this year.

Best Buy follows MCX member Meijer in offering Apple Pay to customers, and while both companies signed exclusivity agreements, MCX CEO Dekkers Davidson has said that there are no penalties or fines for leaving the MCX program. MCX members are not able to accept both CurrentC and Apple Pay at the same time, so it remains unclear if Best Buy remains a part of MCX.

Apple also announced that the number of locations accepting Apple Pay has now tripled since the service first launched in October of 2014.

Update 4:10 p.m. Pacific Time: According to sources that spoke to Re/code, Best Buy won’t begin accepting Apple Pay until later in 2015 because its MCX exclusivity agreements don’t expire until the summer of 2015. A Best Buy spokesperson told Re/code that the company remains invested in MCX, but did not say the company will offer MCX when it launches. “We are actively monitoring their pilots. It’s too early to declare whether we will take it at launch.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook: We’re ‘Working Hard’ to Remedy Apple Watch Supply/Demand Imbalance

During today’s earnings call covering the second fiscal quarter of 2015, Apple CEO Tim Cook did not share information on Apple Watch sales, but there were several analyst questions on the new wearable, leading Cook to shed a bit of light on Apple’s efforts to fulfill orders.

According to Cook, demand for the Apple Watch is much greater than supply, but the company is “working hard to remedy that.” He said that Apple made a lot of progress on that over the past week, and was able to deliver the Apple Watch to more customers than Apple had originally anticipated.

“We’re going to keep doing that,” Cook said, noting that some customers would begin receiving updated info on improved shipping estimates today. Apple is “generally happy” with its efforts to boost supply and get the Apple Watch out to customers as soon as possible, and Apple Watch availability may expand to other countries in late June. “It is a new product for us. With any new product, you wind up taking some time to fully ramp.”

I think we’re in a good position and sometime in late June we currently anticipate being in a position where we could begin to sell the Apple Watch in additional countries. That’s our current plan.

Cook said that it was difficult to gauge demand without a product in stores, and that customer response has been “overwhelmingly positive.” Apple is also “far ahead” of where it expected to be from an application point of view. According to Cook, the iPhone had approximately 500 apps available at launch, while the iPad had 1,000. Apple hoped to meet or beat the iPad’s 1,000 available apps at launch internally, but far exceeded that with 3,500 available apps. “We couldn’t be happier about how things are going from that point of view.”

Cook noted that Apple is “learning quickly about customer preferences between the different configurations” and that the company will be making adjustments to get in line with demand.

Tim Cook: Component Cost Breakdowns on Apple Products Are Nowhere Close to Being Accurate

During today’s Q2 2015 earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook noted that Apple Watch margins are lower than the company average, and on a followup question about those margins in the context of the Apple Watch Edition’s high price, Cook commented on the inaccuracy of estimated cost breakdowns on Apple products.

“I haven’t seen [them for Apple Watch], but generally there are cost breakdowns around our products that are much different than the reality. I’ve never seen one that is anywhere close to being accurate,” Cook said. He went on to say that the Apple Watch’s functionality is “absolutely incredible” with a lot of new features and innovative technology.

We haven’t seen cost breakdowns on the components of the Apple Watch hinting at a possible base unit price that would reveal Apple’s profit margin, but such component breakdowns are often shared by analysts following device teardowns. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, for example, were estimated to have a parts and labor cost of approximately $200, resulting in a 69 percent gross profit margin based on the device’s $649 base selling price.

iPhone 5s component cost was estimated to begin at $199, and iPad Air component cost was estimated to begin at $274. All of these estimates, which come from IHS iSuppli, include only part costs, leaving out other expenses like research and development, software creation, marketing, and distribution, which may explain Cook’s comments on inaccuracy.

According to Cook, it’s “intuitive” that Apple Watch margins would be lower than the company average during the first quarter, as the first quarter of any new product is “a learning period.” Cook declined to provide guidance beyond the current quarter, but Apple Watch profit margins could improve in the future as component costs drop as they do over time with any new technology.

Apple Watch Tips and Hidden Features: Handoff, AirPlay, and More

The Apple Watch is a brand new product platform for Apple, offering a significantly different experience compared to Apple’s already established platforms, iOS and Mac OS. As the device is getting onto more and more wrists over the coming days, weeks and months, we’ve collected a bunch of helpful tips to help users acclimating to Apple’s brand new platform in this video.

We’ve also highlighted some of the tips from the video, below.

Fast switching between apps – If you need to bounce between two apps, or one app and your watch face, it can become fairly cumbersome and take some time. Instead, it’s easier and quicker to simply fast switch between apps by double tapping the Digital Crown. Double tapping a second time goes back to the last thing you were doing. This way, you can spend some time on the watch face, quickly zoom over to the Music app to select a new song, and then double tap again to go back to the watch face.

Use Siri to launch apps – The app icons on Apple Watch can be fairly small, and their tiny touch targets can make it difficult to accurately choose which app you want to launch. An easier way to launch an app is to use Siri, which can be launched by either saying “Hey Siri” or holding down the Digital Crown. Once that’s done, a user just has to say “launch” or “open” followed by the name of the app.

Handoff Any Apple Watch Notification Back to the iPhone – It was already known that the Apple Watch would be able to handoff app activities from the Watch to the iPhone, but it can also be used to handoff any push notification back to your iPhone. Users can go back through the Apple Watch notifications they missed by swiping down on the watch face and hand those off at a later time. The original iPhone app doesn’t even have to be built to support it.

AirPlay Controls – Using Force Touch in various apps on the Apple Watch can yield new ways to interact. One of the more useful (yet hidden) ways Force Touch changes an app is within the Music app, where Force Touching while playing a song, allows you to choose your iPhone’s Airplay target for your music. This Airplay option isn’t available from any other screen in the Music app except for the song-playing screen.

You can also play music straight off your Apple Watch. Choosing “Source” from the same menu, lets you play music straight off your Apple Watch to any Bluetooth target.

Battery and Control Center Glances – On the watch face, swiping up reveals your Glances, which are quick looks at your various apps. They let you do certain things without having to open your app, and there are some Glances from Apple that can make using the Apple Watch a lot easier. The Battery glance allows you to check your battery percentage and manually start Power Reserve mode, while the Control Center glance allows you to turn on Airplane mode, Do Not Disturb, mute sound and ping a sound on your iPhone if you can’t find it.

Taking a Screenshot – One of the social phenomena emerging from the first week of the Apple Watch is people showing off how they’ve customized their watch faces and how they’ve arranged their home screen. Taking a screenshot is the best way to show off how personal users have made Apple’s most personal device, and to do so all one has to do is click the Digital Crown and the button underneath that at the same time.

You can watch the above video for even more tips and tricks, and if you’ve just got your Apple Watch and need help setting it up we’ve got a guide to help you get it up and running. Additionally, you can head over to our forums, where new Apple Watch users are discussing Apple’s newest device and sharing their home screens and watch face customizations.