Tesla gives its self-driving cars a performance boost with custom chips

Miles Branman/Digital Trends

Tesla has a need for silicon speed when it comes to the company’s ambitious plans for autonomous driving. After confirming late last year that it was working on its own artificial intelligence chips, CEO Elon Musk revealed more details on an earnings call with investors, stating that the chip is “the world’s most advanced computer specifically for autonomous operation.” Called Hardware 3, Tesla’s new in-car computer is said to be more powerful than the Nvidia hardware that it replaces.

“Musk said that the new chip, due out next year, will deliver an ‘order of magnitude improvement in operations per second’ compared to ‘current Nvidia hardware,’” Ars Technica reported. Tesla currently uses Nvidia’s Drive PX2 platform in its cars, but that chip debuted nearly two years ago. Since then, Nvidia has announced a new PX 2 Pegasus chip, which the company claims delivers 10 times the performance of the original chips that Tesla adopted.

During his call, Musk did not clarify whether Tesla was benchmarking its custom silicon against the older PX 2 chipset or Nvidia’s newer PX 2 Pegasus. If Tesla’s claims are against Nvidia’s newer chip, then investing in its own chip design could give Tesla an edge over competitors relying on off-the-shelf components from suppliers like Nvidia. According to Musk, Tesla’s custom processor costs about as much as Nvidia’s chips.

“We had the benefit of having the insight into seeing what Tesla’s neural networks looked like back then and having projections of what they would look like in the future, and we were able to leverage all of that knowledge and our willingness to totally commit to that style of computing to produce a design that is dramatically more efficient and has dramatically more performance than what we have today,” Tesla’s chip architect Steve Bannon said of his company’s efforts. Bannon, a former employee of Apple, was also responsible for developing the iPhone’s custom A5 processor.

Musk said that Tesla’s strategy is to run the neural network “at a bare metal level” and to do the calculations in the circuit and not in emulation mode, TechCrunch reported. Tesla is able to overcome some of the constraints experienced by competing systems when data is transferred between the CPU and GPU by locating the memory required to store the computations next to the circuits doing the matrix calculations. The result of Tesla’s chip engineering is that the chip is able to handle 2,000 frames per second with full redundancy and failover compared to just 200 frames per second with Nvidia’s hardware.

Because of a backward-compatible design, owners of current Tesla models will be able to upgrade to the new chips and benefit from the same performance gains. Musk said that the connectors are the same, and users will be able to swap in the new computer into their Model S, X, and 3 vehicles. Details of Tesla’s upgrade plans were not made available.

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Microsoft’s latest patent application hints to ‘page flipping’ on Andromeda

A patent application published on Thursday, August 2, describes a two-screen pocket-sized device that is likely tied to Microsoft’s Andromeda project. Labeled “Navigational Aid for a Hinged Device via Semantic Abstraction,” it describes how the hinge can be used to locate specific sections of content displayed on the two screens. Thus, rather than visually scanning page by page, these sections can be grouped together on both displays.

According to the patent, sections are pulled from the content using a variety of different information stemming from said content, the device owner, other users, and the content’s author(s). The hinge is not only responsible for shifting through these sections, but it also controls the speed of the shifting.

In one diagram, Microsoft illustrates the two-screen device in a held open-book position. The pulled sections are drawn as icons in strips along the outer edges of the screens. For instance, the left screen renders four thumbnails on the left side pertaining to the content, such as a domestic dog, a squirrel, a car, and so on. Links will generate icons, too.

“The abstracted views are generated based on the subject matter of the particular section of content that they represent,” the patent states. “The abstracted views can provide the user with a sense of relative location within a document or within the content. Rather than simply relying on a page number, the abstracted views can give the user a sense of which subject matter is proximate to the right and left of currently displayed content.”

That said, you tap on a specific abstracted icon, the device will automatically navigate to the source within the content. This method serves as a makeshift table of contents even though the content doesn’t actually provide a built-in table of contents. This method doesn’t organize the content into specific sections either.

As for using the hinge, Microsoft is attempting to emulate flipping through physical pages. With a hardback or paperback, you bend the spine and quickly flip through pages using your thumb. In the case of this device, you would touch a location on the right screen and slightly turn the hinge to initiate the virtual flipping forward through the content. Touch the left screen and move the hinge to flip backward.

“Rotational movement (bending) of the hinge is detected by the sensors and used as at least a portion of the input signal to initiate or control the rifling operation,” the patent adds. “In response, the notes are semantically abstracted to present abstracted views of the notes to the user in a rifling state and enable the user to quickly understand the subject matter of a particular section of the notes.”

This patent is just one of many that describe a two-screen pocket-sized device code-named Andromeda. The device is expected to arrive in late 2019 possibly packing Intel’s upcoming 10nm “Cannon Lake” processor. The device was presumed dead in the water based on previous reports, but Microsoft merely went back to the drawing board to overhaul the project.

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• Everything we know about Microsoft’s ‘Andromeda’ Surface Phone device

Microsoft’s latest patent application hints to ‘page flipping’ on Andromeda

A patent application published on Thursday, August 2, describes a two-screen pocket-sized device that is likely tied to Microsoft’s Andromeda project. Labeled “Navigational Aid for a Hinged Device via Semantic Abstraction,” it describes how the hinge can be used to locate specific sections of content displayed on the two screens. Thus, rather than visually scanning page by page, these sections can be grouped together on both displays.

According to the patent, sections are pulled from the content using a variety of different information stemming from said content, the device owner, other users, and the content’s author(s). The hinge is not only responsible for shifting through these sections, but it also controls the speed of the shifting.

In one diagram, Microsoft illustrates the two-screen device in a held open-book position. The pulled sections are drawn as icons in strips along the outer edges of the screens. For instance, the left screen renders four thumbnails on the left side pertaining to the content, such as a domestic dog, a squirrel, a car, and so on. Links will generate icons, too.

“The abstracted views are generated based on the subject matter of the particular section of content that they represent,” the patent states. “The abstracted views can provide the user with a sense of relative location within a document or within the content. Rather than simply relying on a page number, the abstracted views can give the user a sense of which subject matter is proximate to the right and left of currently displayed content.”

That said, you tap on a specific abstracted icon, the device will automatically navigate to the source within the content. This method serves as a makeshift table of contents even though the content doesn’t actually provide a built-in table of contents. This method doesn’t organize the content into specific sections either.

As for using the hinge, Microsoft is attempting to emulate flipping through physical pages. With a hardback or paperback, you bend the spine and quickly flip through pages using your thumb. In the case of this device, you would touch a location on the right screen and slightly turn the hinge to initiate the virtual flipping forward through the content. Touch the left screen and move the hinge to flip backward.

“Rotational movement (bending) of the hinge is detected by the sensors and used as at least a portion of the input signal to initiate or control the rifling operation,” the patent adds. “In response, the notes are semantically abstracted to present abstracted views of the notes to the user in a rifling state and enable the user to quickly understand the subject matter of a particular section of the notes.”

This patent is just one of many that describe a two-screen pocket-sized device code-named Andromeda. The device is expected to arrive in late 2019 possibly packing Intel’s upcoming 10nm “Cannon Lake” processor. The device was presumed dead in the water based on previous reports, but Microsoft merely went back to the drawing board to overhaul the project.

Editors’ Recommendations

• Microsoft patent points to a 2-screen device for 3-way video calls
• Lenovo wants to give the convertible PC a flexible, wraparound display
• The iPhone’s viewfinder might soon let you see both cameras simultaneously
• Microsoft’s foldable Andromeda PC could transform into five distinct modes
• Everything we know about Microsoft’s ‘Andromeda’ Surface Phone device

Think ‘World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth’ can play on any PC? Think again.

World of Warcraft is 14 years old. Its success comes with challenges most games never face, and graphics are chief among them. Blizzard’s MMO released the same year as Battlefield Vietnam, Half-Life 2, and Gran Turismo 4. Load those games today, and you probably won’t like what you see.

Blizzard is in a running battle with its own art. Expansions like Battle for Azeroth introduce new worlds, but the game’s artists must refresh the old as well, selectively polishing what’s most important. That polish has consequences for performance. The game has new graphics features, new textures, and new character models with higher polygon counts. The latest expansion even upgrades the game with DirectX 12 compatibility, while ditching DirectX 9 support.

What do you need to run World of Warcraft’s latest incarnation, and what settings should you change to improve performance?

The results are in

Before we dive into specific recommendations, we need to set a baseline. How does World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth perform on a modern computer? Might modern systems struggle with it? Or can virtually anything run it?

We fired up one of our most powerful test rigs, packing an AMD Threadripper 1920X processor and 32GB of RAM, all slapped on an Asus ROG Zenith motherboard. We tested with a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, GTX 1060, and GTX 1080 Ti. Of course, not everyone has such a powerful system, so we also tested on a Dell G3 gaming laptop. It had an Intel Core i5-8300H processor, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics chip, and eight gigabytes of RAM.

Our test loop began in Kul’Tiras, a major city in the new expansion, and ended in the wilderness of Tiragarde sound.

The results weren’t what you’d expect.

That’s right. The laptop significantly outpaced the beastly Threadripper 1920X system at every resolution and every detail setting. We also saw small differences in performance between each video card. Strangely, the GTX 1080 Ti wound up slightly slower overall than the GTX 1050 Ti.

Old man Warcraft

These are puzzling numbers, but they’re correct. We tested several times over and double checked every parameter we could imagine. This is how the game performs. The question is, why?

Blame its age.

World of Warcraft was released in 2004, which of course means its development began years earlier. At the time, most people were running Pentium III or AMD Athlon processors, and most developers believed that single-core processors running at insanely high speeds was the future. Dual-core processors weren’t found in gaming PCs. World of Warcraft, like its peers, was developed to make as much use of a single core as possible.

That doesn’t translate well to modern computers. There’s no shortage of games that make poor use of multiple cores, but World of Warcraft is exceptionally bad. It generally hammers just one core, leaving a few scraps of code to another three, and the rest remain untapped.

Our numbers make sense if you keep that in mind. Geekbench’s single-core test reached a score of 4,456 on the Dell G3 with its Intel Core i5-8300H processor. The AMD Threadripper 1920X hit a score of 4,364. Though its has fewer cores, the Core i5-8300H is quicker in single-core tasks, and that seems to be a deciding factor here.

We wanted to further confirm the result, though, so we took an even more direct route. We overclocked the Threadripper 1920X, upping the base clock from 3.5GHz to 4.2GHz.

As you can see, overclocking the processor netted a performance boost of about 10 percent. That’s not massive, but it was consistent enough to be noticeable, and reinforces our belief the processor is holding back performance.

It’s fair to say World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth is CPU-bound, but that’s not the entire story. You can’t pair it with any processor and expect the best results. You’ll need a processor with fast cores. That means Intel hardware is likely your best bet, and you’ll want to give preference to processor frequency over core count.

Direct X 12 processor performance comparison

World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth isn’t blessed with the most modern game engine, but Blizzard has made efforts to modernize it over the years. Patch 8.0, released just ahead of the new expansion, makes that obvious by ditching DirectX 9 support and adding DirectX 12. DirectX 11 remains available, and it’s the new default option.

That’s for the best, because DirectX 12 doesn’t fare well in World of Warcraft.

We saw a major performance hit with every tested configuration, and most configurations saw the DX12 option performance 10 to 15 percent behind DX11. That’s a big gap, enough that you’d likely notice it in gameplay.

Just ignore DirectX 12 for now and stick with DirectX 11, the default setting.

Apple Closes Apple Watch Heart Rate Study to New Participants

Apple and Stanford University’s School of Medicine are no longer allowing new participants to join the joint heart rate study that they’re conducting using data gathered from the heart rate monitor of the Apple Watch, according to an updated notice on the Apple Heart Study website.

As of August 1, 2018, an enrollment termination date Apple and Stanford first announced when the study launched, enrollment is officially closed. While enrollment has ended, the study does not end until January 31, 2019, and Apple plans to continue collecting data from current participants until the completion of the study.

Note: Enrollment for this study is closed to new participants as of August 1, 2018. If you are currently enrolled, your participation will continue until the end of the study.

The Apple Heart Study is designed to use data from the Apple Watch to identify irregular heart rhythms to determine whether the wrist-worn device can accurately detect life-threatening conditions like atrial fibrillation.

The study was previously open to anyone in the United States who was 22 years older with an iPhone 5s or later and an Apple Watch Series 1 or later.

Participants were instructed to download and install the Apple Heart Study app and wear the Apple Watch. When an irregular heart beat is detected in a study participant, a consultation with a Study Telehealth provider from American Well is offered, with some people asked to wear an ePatch monitor for up to seven days for further investigation.

One MacRumors reader shared his story using the Heart Rate Study app and the accompanying patch after an abnormal rhythm was detected:

I believe that many of you don’t understand just how much effort and expense Apple has spent on developing this research program. I signed up late last year, and several weeks ago they notified me that they had read an irregular heart rhythm on my app.

I called them, talked to a Dr. on line, they sent me a state of the art medical monitor the size of an Apple watch which is applied with a sticky tape over my heart for 7 days, I kept it attached for a week, sent it back (post payed) and they contacted me within 3 days, they had me contact one of their research Drs. who went over the results of the week long monitor, they saw no further arrhythmia, and gave me confidence that the earlier abnormal pattern was not a problem, readings showed my heart strong, and healthy.

With the study now closed to new participants, the Apple Heart Study app has been removed from the App Store. Apple has also removed its dedicated Apple Heart Study webpage from its site.

Apple’s Heart Rate Study in collaboration with Stanford Medicine first launched in November 2017. Atrial fibrillation, a common form of heart arrhythmia that is covered in the study, can indicate serious medical conditions like heart failure and stroke. Afib affects millions of people but often goes undiagnosed, with the study aiming to determine if the Apple Watch is able to alert people of this dangerous condition and accompanying health problems.

Other studies conducted by the team behind the Cardiogram app and researchers at the University of California, San Francisco have suggested that the Apple Watch is able to detect an abnormal heart rhythm with 97 percent accuracy. It may also be useful in detecting early signs of other diseases like diabetes, hypertension, and sleep apnea.

Currently, the heart rate monitor built into the Apple Watch (Series 1 models and later) will send an alert if a faster-than-normal resting heart rate is detected, a feature that has saved multiple lives. This heart rate monitoring option can be activated by opening up the Apple Watch app on the iPhone, selecting the heart rate app, and setting your high heart rate notification to the desired level.

While the Apple Watch sends alerts for a high heart rate, it does not notify people of abnormal rhythms or other issues that have been detected, but that could change in the future depending on the outcome of the study.

Rumors have suggested that 2018 Apple Watch Series 4 models will include enhanced heart rate detection features that could bolster the Apple Watch’s ability to detect diseases linked to higher heart rates and abnormal heart rhythms, but it is not entirely clear what the enhanced heart rate features consist of.

New Apple Watch models, which are expected in September alongside the 2018 iPhones, are also said to include a new design with a 15 percent larger display.

Related Roundups: Apple Watch, watchOS 4, watchOS 5Tag: Apple Heart StudyBuyer’s Guide: Apple Watch (Caution)
Discuss this article in our forums

How to Start an Activity Competition With a Friend in watchOS 5

In watchOS 5, there’s a new Apple Watch activity feature that’s designed to motivate people to work out and get active through competitions with friends.

You can challenge any friend to a seven-day competition on Apple Watch, with each person earning points for filling their rings each day.

How to Start a Competition

You can begin a competition on the Apple Watch itself or within the Activity app on the iPhone, with the latter method being the easiest way to get going.

Before a competition can start, you need to be sharing your activity information with the person you’re challenging, which you can do by following these steps:

Open up the Activity app.
Tap the Sharing tab.
Press the “+” button to invite one or more contacts with an Apple Watch.
Choose the “Send” button to send them an invite to share activity data with you.
Wait for your friend to accept the invitation.
Once you’re sharing data with someone, you can begin a competition. Again, this is easiest in the Activity app on the iPhone.

Open the Activity app.
Tap the Sharing tab.
Choose a friend you’re sharing data with.
Tap on “Compete with [friend’s name].”
Wait for your friend to accept the challenge.
You can invite friends you’re already sharing with to competitions using the Apple Watch if preferred.

Just open the Activity app on Apple Watch, tap on a friend’s name, and then tap “Compete” twice through the subsequent menus to launch a competition.

Competition Rules

Your friend will have 48 hours to respond to your invite, with a competition officially starting after 48 hours if the invite was accepted. Competitions will last for seven days, so if your competition started on a Saturday morning, for example, it will end on the following Friday evening.

Competitions start in the morning so no one is caught off guard and so each person has seven full days to complete all of their movement goals. You can have more than one competition going at once, but you can only compete with one person per competition, so you can’t have three or more people competing together.

Each person earns points for closing the Stand ring, the Move ring, and the Exercise ring. Points are awarded for exceeding each goal and hitting additional move and exercise goals.

As with all activity sharing, you will receive notifications whenever your friend completes a workout. If you want to mute these notifications, open up the Activity app, choose the Sharing tab, select a competition, and the scroll down to the bottom of the screen to find the “Mute Notifications” option.

How Points Are Calculated

Each person participating in the competition receives one point for every percent added to the Stand, Move, and Exercise rings, with up to 600 points available to be earned per day.

So, for example, if you exceed your move goal by 300 percent, you’ll receive 300 points for the day. Similar calculations are used for the stand and exercise options.

A total of 4,200 points can be earned for the week, with the award going to whoever earns the most points.

Checking on Your Competition Status

You can view how many points you have compared to the person you’re competing with either through the Activity app on iPhone or the Activity app on Apple Watch.

It’s best to view this data on the iPhone because you can see more information about how the competition is going, with full data for each day of the competition available.

Open the Activity app.
Select the Sharing tab.
Tap the relevant competition listing under the “Competitions” header.
In this section of the Activity app, you can see the total of number of points each person has earned and then a breakdown of the points earned each day of the competition.

You can also see your friend’s total movement, exercise, and stand rankings for the current day, plus steps and total distance traveled.

Sending Kudos

When your competitor completes a workout during the challenge, you’ll get a notification, and you can send a message using the Apple Watch. You can also initiate conversations within the Activity App on the Apple Watch or the Activity app on iPhone by selecting the person’s name and tapping on “Send Message.”

Winning a Competition

When you win a competition with a friend, you earn a badge for completing a competition and a separate badge for being victorious.

From there, you can start a new challenge with the same friend, and under the sharing interface, you’ll see your respective number of wins and losses.

All of your badges can be viewed in the Activity app either on the Apple Watch or on the iPhone.

Related Roundups: Apple Watch, watchOS 4, watchOS 5Buyer’s Guide: Apple Watch (Caution)
Discuss this article in our forums

Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S first impressions: Looks great, handles like a dream

We got our hands on a Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S a while back, and for the past week or so I’ve been using it as my daily driver. It released back in April for about $530, which puts it in a similar category to OnePlus’ signature price point.

What follows are my generally unfiltered first impressions of the Chinese-made flagship killer, with a full review coming in a few weeks.

The very first thing I noticed when pulling the Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S from its box was its striking design. In a world filled with glass-encased smartphones that all generally look and feel about the same, the Mi Mix 2S stands apart with a ceramic back and a wildly garish face that features a front-facing camera in the lower-right hand corner.

It’s hefty as hell. At 191 grams, it’s nearly a full ounce heavier than the Samsung Galaxy S9. But, that weight offers a certain security when holding it.

The ceramic backing doesn’t have the painfully fragile feel that plagues glass-backed phones – don’t get me wrong, though if you drop the thing, I’ve no doubt it’ll shatter.

Regardless, that ceramic back is both aesthetically unique and gorgeous, and the people I’ve shown the phone to have all been immediately intrigued by the design. If nothing else, it’s an eye-catcher.

The decision to place the selfie camera in the lower-right corner of the device is a dubious one, but I can see why Xiaomi did it. In order to maximize viewing area at the top of the device, Xiaomi decided to move all the components that normally take up space there – camera, light sensor, proximity sensor – to the bottom of the device. The result is a little bit of a “chin” at the bottom with minimal bezels along the top and sides.

In my opinion, that shin is just begging for a row of capacitive buttons to maximize the screen usage further, but that’s just me.

MIUI’s Evolution

MIUI has come a long way; I remember back in the early days of Android, MIUI was just an iOS clone with questionable compatibility and a great theme engine. But, it’s really come into its own over the years, developing into more of a stock Android experience with a few tweaks and a custom launcher.

The firmware is quick and crisp, and is more much more Android than Apple at this stage. The MIUI Launcher is really limited in its options, and I suspect most people – like me – will switch it to Nova or something similar in short order.

MIUI’s Gesture controls are really crisp – much more so than Google’s. A Left or Right edge-swipe takes you Back (with an animated Arrow icon), while swiping up from the bottom goes Home.

Swiping up and holding it briefly brings up your recents – and that’s the gesture that really stands out from Google’s, which requires a much longer “hold.” I find myself struggling with Google’s gesture controls, but thoroughly enjoying MIUI’s. It’s a fine balance, and while I’ve no doubt that Google’s will evolve in time, currently Xiaomi’s have the edge.

Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S Specs at a Glance

• Display: 6″, 1080×2060 IPS LCD (403ppi)
• Processor: Snapdragon 845
• RAM/ROM: 8/256GB or 6/64(or 128)GB
• Rear Camera: 12+12MP dual-sensor
• Selfie Camera: 5MP
• 3.5mm jack: Nope
• Connectivity: 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 5, USB-C 2.0
• Battery: 3,400mAh, Qi Charging
• Firmware: MIUI 9.5 (Based on Android 8.0)

Hardware-wise, this thing really cooks. With a Snapdragon 845 processor and 8GB of RAM, you have to work hard to slow it down. It comes loaded with 256GB of onboard storage, though there’s no MicroSD card slot, sadly. The 3400mAh battery is pretty standard for flagship-caliber phones. The battery life I’ve gotten so far is decent, about on par with similar phones like the OnePlus 6.

Verdict

I’ve only spent about a week with the Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S, but early returns on the device are great. It’s got a unique design, great aesthetic, phenomenal, flagship-caliber specifications and a much-improved UI that’s just different enough to set it apart.

A couple design quirks like an oddly-placed front-facing camera make you tilt your head in confusion, but so far I’m thoroughly impressed with the Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S.

More to come, Android guys. Stay tuned!

How self-driving car tech could help forensic scientists find murder victims

Lidar, the radar-style detection system which works by bouncing laser light, is most commonly associated with self-driving cars. However, it may have another useful, albeit morbid, application: Helping find bodies which have been buried in unmarked graves.

Sound like something out of an episode of CSI? In fact, it’s a new piece of research coming out of Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where scientists have been investigating how lidar could be used a forensics tool to find missing murder victims — potentially even from an aircraft.

“Missing persons investigations pose a significant societal challenge, as well as a time-sensitive technological challenge,” Dr. Katie Corcoran, one of the researchers on the project, told Digital Trends. “Of the millions of missing persons worldwide who are unaccounted for, some are thought to be deceased and buried in unmarked graves. A gravesite can go unnoticed because of natural processes, where the site becomes covered with grass or leaves, for instance. Or the site could have been deliberately masked by a perpetrator trying to hide the body. In either case, the longer the gravesite goes unnoticed, the more difficult it is to locate.”

In the Oak Ridge researchers’ experiment, they used lidar to scan an area containing three human graves of various sizes (containing the buried corpses of individuals who had donated their bodies for research), alongside one control pit and surrounding undisturbed ground. They then compared the rates of surface elevation change, based on the data collected from each scan. This was done one day after the burial, four months after the burial, and 21 months after.

What they discovered was that the most obvious surface elevation changes are observed immediately after a grave is created, when it takes the form of loosened soil. However, these changes persist as the surface loses elevation during the period of body decomposition and soil settling. Although they may not be noticeable by the human eye, the changing ground elevations could nonetheless help narrow sites which could then be further examined by forensics crews.

“Our approach is intended to augment the grave discovery process, which may include other established methods such as pedestrian surveys, soil probing, and sampling, or ground-penetrating radar (GPR),” Corcoran continued. “Lidar is advantageous in that the visual results are more intuitive than GPR, a method commonly used for grave detection but notoriously difficult to interpret.”

A paper describing the work was recently published in the journal Forensic Science International.

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Apple takes the title as first $1 trillion U.S. company

Apple is officially the first publicly traded United States company to be valued at $1 trillion. The news comes only a couple days after revealing its strong third-quarter earnings.

The company specifically reached $1 trillion early on Thursday, August 2, when its stock rose almost 3 percent — reaching a high of $207.05 per share.

Predictions that Apple would hit the $1 trillion mark started surfacing in January. If its share prices continued to climb at the same percentage as they did in 2017, it was inevitable the company would end up at the top spot. The company’s valuation of $869 billion at the time (which is created by taking the share price of each company and multiplying it by the number of shares available), put it $140 billion ahead of Google parent company Alphabet, and $200 billion ahead of Microsoft.

While the Cupertino, California, giant is the first to reach $1 trillion, it likely won’t be the last. Amazon is trailing closely behind following its third-quarter earnings. The company revealed that in July, it exceeded $900 billion in market value.

As for Apple, the company said during its earnings call that it expected revenue next quarter to be between $60 billion and $62 billion. To reach that estimate — which is ahead of Wall Street expectations that come in at $58.47 billion — Apple would need to see a 15 percent increase over the same quarter last year.

A majority of the company’s growth could be credited to its “services” category — such as Apple Music, Apple Pay, iTunes, iCloud, and more. Apple saw $9.55 billion in revenue for the category, bringing it up 28 percent from the same quarter last year. Apple says the increase in revenue is attributed to high Apple Pay usage, along with an increase in paid subscribers through the App Store.

When it comes to actual units, Apple also sold 41.3 million — the same amount of iPhones as did during the same quarter laster year. It’s also doing well in the wearables market, with a 60 percent growth in the category which includes the Apple Watch, AirPods, and Beats headphones.

The company will continue to see even more growth in revenue in the near future. At its upcoming event this fall, it’s out with the old and in with the new — Apple will unveil its next-generation iPhones, among a variety of other new hardware.

Editors’ Recommendations

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Apple takes the title as first $1 trillion U.S. company

Apple is officially the first publicly traded United States company to be valued at $1 trillion. The news comes only a couple days after revealing its strong third-quarter earnings.

The company specifically reached $1 trillion early on Thursday, August 2, when its stock rose almost 3 percent — reaching a high of $207.05 per share.

Predictions that Apple would hit the $1 trillion mark started surfacing in January. If its share prices continued to climb at the same percentage as they did in 2017, it was inevitable the company would end up at the top spot. The company’s valuation of $869 billion at the time (which is created by taking the share price of each company and multiplying it by the number of shares available), put it $140 billion ahead of Google parent company Alphabet, and $200 billion ahead of Microsoft.

While the Cupertino, California, giant is the first to reach $1 trillion, it likely won’t be the last. Amazon is trailing closely behind following its third-quarter earnings. The company revealed that in July, it exceeded $900 billion in market value.

As for Apple, the company said during its earnings call that it expected revenue next quarter to be between $60 billion and $62 billion. To reach that estimate — which is ahead of Wall Street expectations that come in at $58.47 billion — Apple would need to see a 15 percent increase over the same quarter last year.

A majority of the company’s growth could be credited to its “services” category — such as Apple Music, Apple Pay, iTunes, iCloud, and more. Apple saw $9.55 billion in revenue for the category, bringing it up 28 percent from the same quarter last year. Apple says the increase in revenue is attributed to high Apple Pay usage, along with an increase in paid subscribers through the App Store.

When it comes to actual units, Apple also sold 41.3 million — the same amount of iPhones as did during the same quarter laster year. It’s also doing well in the wearables market, with a 60 percent growth in the category which includes the Apple Watch, AirPods, and Beats headphones.

The company will continue to see even more growth in revenue in the near future. At its upcoming event this fall, it’s out with the old and in with the new — Apple will unveil its next-generation iPhones, among a variety of other new hardware.

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