With iPhone 8 frenzy peaking, Apple climbs toward trillion dollar market cap

Cook’s Behemoth

If you thought pundits’ claims that “Apple can’t innovate anymore,” or rumored production delays for the upcoming iPhone 8 had CEO Tim Cook worried or were hurting investors’ views of the company, well, you’d be wrong. Apple reported stellar financials yesterday for what is usually their weakest quarter, and the tech juggernaut is steadily inching towards becoming the first trillion dollar company.

Apple stock opened at nearly $160 a share this morning, putting their market cap above $800 billion. Even with interest in the iPhone 8 at a fever pitch, the company was still able to boost sales of current iPhones beyond most expectations. With a tidal wave of sales expected for the iPhone 8, Apple’s entry into the smart home hub market, and a stated focus on augmented reality tech, it’s not a stretch to predict that Apple will top the trillion dollar mark very soon.

Get that on tape

Remember backing up your data – to tapes? Before monster hard drives and automated programs like Time Machine vastly simplified data redundancy, many businesses made occasional large-scale copies of their data onto specialized tape drives – and surprise, many still do. Why? Because while it’s slow and somewhat finicky compared to hard drives, you can pack a lot of data onto a tape, far more than on any current hard drive or spendy cloud system.

Now, IBM says they can pack just over 200 gigs on a single square inch of a new tape from Sony, which means a single cassette of the tape can hold up to 330 terabytes of data – enough to back up the data from several hundred computers. Backup tape systems available now only hold about 15 terabytes per cassette, so you can see the appeal for big institutions or anyone playing with tons of data, such as video producers. The new tapes should be ready for sale eventually.

Pixel Too, less a Jack

Remember when everyone got all upset when Apple deleted the headphone jack from the iPhone? A courageous move to be sure, but now it looks like Apple was just the first major phone maker to do it, and new leaks around the upcoming Google Pixel 2 phone indicate that, yep, no more headphone jack. Via MobileFun, casemaker Olixar has posted some new protective shells for the Pixel 2 ahead of the expected fall rollout, and it looks like there’s no room for the old plugin.

Otherwise, the phones are expected to have large-coverage front displays measuring just under 5 and 6 inches respectively, and will hopefully feature the “squeezable sides” thing rumored early on. The rear camera should be a single lens affair with a flash, and the phone will be powered by a Snapdragon processor rumored to pack more horsepower than the current 835 chip. Also, it’ll likely be IP68 water resistant as well. There’s no pricing yet for the Pixel 2, but we expect it to be competitive.

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