Global notebook sales may be in the crapper, but according to the chairman of the company manufacturing notebooks for Acer, Dell, Toshiba, HP, and others, the bluebird of sales-revenue happiness will sing again in the second half of this year. On Thursday, Compal Electronics chairman Ray Chen told an investors conference that …

AMD released its financial results for the first quarter of its fiscal year 2013, which bracketed the Wall Street moneymen's predictions with revenues a tad higher than forecast and the all-important earnings per share (EPS) a tad lower.* For the quarter, AMD's EPS number came in at negative $0.19 on revenues of $1.09bn, the …

One of the duties of a modern CEO is to offer as little detail as possible during investors' meetings, and Apple's headman Tim Cook has proved himself a Jedi master of snooze-inducing vapidity. Speaking at Apple's annual investors meeting on Wednesday at the company's Cupertino headquarters, Cook piled bromide upon cliché upon …

Foster-child operating system webOS has been placed in yet another home – but not one in which it will be used for its original smartphone raison d'être. LG Electronics will acquire the peripatetic OS from HP, which got its hands on webOS when it acquired Palm in April 2010 for a cool $1.2bn. Palm had used webOS for its ill- …

Hard drive sales will take a nose drive in 2013, according to a report by the market analysts at IHS. "Facing a relentless onslaught from tablets, smartphones and solid state drives (SSD), global hard disk drive (HDD) market revenue in 2013 will decline by about 12 percent this year," IHS reported in an email on Monday …

Apple will discontinue shipping its long-neglected Mac Pro tower to the EU, EU candidates, and European Free Trade Association (EFTA) member states on March first, sources tell 9to5Mac. According to that "Apple Intelligence" website, Cupertino has informed resellers that the Mac Pro is being retired from the aforementioned …

As these words are being typed, Apple's stock is taking a beating, down around 10 per cent from its $514.01 Wednesday close, in reaction to what Wall Street has clearly characterized as disappointing financial results for the first quarter of Apple's 2013 fiscal year. May your humble Reg reporter take this opportunity to point …

Apple released its financial results for the first quarter of its 2013 fiscal year after the markets closed on Wednesday, and disappointing results immediately drove its stock price down by over 5 per cent. Although Apple posted record quarterly revenue of $54.5bn, a quarterly profit of $13.1bn, and earnings-per-share (EPS) of $ …

AMD, slapped around by what CEO Rory Read and other corporate honchos like to refer to as "the challenging macro environment," looks to regain profitability in the second half of this year. On a conference call with analysts and reporters after announcing its weak financial results for its fourth quarter of 2012, AMD CFO …

AMD has released its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2012, and as expected, the numbers aren't pretty. In early December, AMD slashed its Wafer Supply Agreement with its chip-baking partner, Globalfoundries, and warned investors that it was going to take a sharp hit due to that action. They were right. If that …

The CEO of chip-baker GlobalFoundries, Ajit Manocha, believes that European Union bureaucrats – "Brussels," as he refers to them – need to "wake up" or the continent's industrial base will suffer. "One of the fundamental flaws in [European] thinking [is that] they are focused on innovation. There's no focus on manufacturing in …

The slumping PC market has put the hurt on AMD to the extent that the struggling chipmaker has sharply reduced its Wafer Supply Agreement (WSA) with its chip-baking partner, GlobalFoundries. AMD estimates that it will purchase $115m worth of wafers from GlobalFoundries this quarter under the amended WSA. The previous agreement …

Your notebook is about to become passé. Shipments of tablets will outpace those of notebooks for the first time next year. So says DigiTimes Research analyst James Wang, who predicts global tablet shipments will rocket to 210 million in 2013, an increase of 38.3 per cent on 2012. Of that number, Wang projects that Apple will …

Foxconn, the employee-infuriating, child-employing, and brain-damaging manufacturer of kit for Apple, Amazon, Sony, Nintendo, and others, is exploring the possibility of building plants in the US – Detroit and Los Angeles, to be specific. At least that's what unnamed "market watchers" have told DigiTimes, the Taiwanese online …

When the new fourth-generation iPad made its debut at the iPad mini roll-out event late last month, it was a surprise to many – especially those who had recently opened their wallets for "the new iPad" released just this March. Fret not, fanbois. The tools, parts, and repairs folks at iFixit have just torn apart Apple's latest …

ARM has rolled out a new series of processors – the Cortex-A50 Series – that it says will find their way into everything from smartphones to mega-data centers. The beefier member of the two-chip series has already found at least one data-center home in future ARM-based Opteron server chips, as announced this Monday by AMD. The …

AMD and ARM have entered into a partnership that will see 64-bit ARM-based Opteron server processors appear from the Intel competitors, with release planned for 2014. "We look to disrupt the status quo," AMD CEO Rory Read told reporters and analysts at a San Francisco briefing on Monday afternoon. "We look forward, to drive the …

Apple reported revenues in its fourth fiscal quarter that topped the Wall Street moneymen's predictions – but only barely. Its earnings per share, however, came in lower than most predictions. Cupertino posted quarterly revenue of $36bn, which resulted in a quarterly earnings-per-share (EPS) of $8.67. According to the 47 …

Yes, it's called the iPad mini – and that was one of the few heretofore unknown facts about the new iPad that Apple rolled out at its "a lttle more" event on Tuesday in San José, California. That and its price: $329 for the entry-level, Wi-Fi model. Pre-announcement speculation was somewhere in the $299 range, with some overly …

After his company announced a $157m loss and its plans to lay off 15 per cent of its global workforce on Tuesday, AMD president and CEO Rory Read explained how he and his brain trust plan to pull Intel's only x86 competitor out of its spiral. First, AMD will "reset and restructure" its business model to reduce expenses by 25 per …

One week ago, AMD warned investors that its financial results for its third quarter of 2012 were going to be worse than it had previously estimated, with revenues down about 10 per cent from the previous quarter rather than the 1 per cent, plus or minus 3 per cent, that they had forecasted earlier. They were spot on – not that …

Intel president and CEO Paul Otellini knows that the PC business is in the tank, believes that Windows 8 might lift it out of its funk, and can't predict which form factor will be The Next Big Thing – tablets, convertibles, or Ultrabooks. "We do believe that when the numbers are all in," he told analysts and reporters during a …

On the day that the Dow notched its first triple-digit gain in over a month, Intel joined the party – well, in a minor way, to be sure – by beating Wall Street's lowered expectations for its most-recent quarter. The company reported quarterly revenue of $13.5bn, net income of $3bn, and earnings per share of 58¢. While those …

AMD has announced lowered expectations for its third-quarter financial results, with revenues declining 10 per cent from the previous quarter, down from the 1 per cent – give or take 3 per cent – that it had previously projected. "The lower than anticipated preliminary revenue results are primarily due to weaker than expected …

A 'major Apple (AAPL) investor' citing 'multiple sources' says that Apple will inform world+dog next Wednesday of an event to be held on October 17 to announce the much-rumored iPad mini. So says a Monday report by Fortune, which notes that if said source is correct, and if Apple keeps to its usual announcement-to-release …

Storage megacorp Western Digital dropped a bomb on its investors – and the entire computer industry – by announcing that it was lowering its revenue projections for its first fiscal quarter, which will end on September 28. That quarter, the company said in a press release on Thursday, will now see revenues of between $3.9 …

Apple released its earnings report for the third quarter of its 2012 fiscal year, and its numbers came in well below most Wall Street moneymen's projections – largely, it seems, on a steep quarter-to-quarter drop in iPhone sales. Shares in after-hours trading took an immediate hit, down from just over $600 per share before the …

Networking megacorp and server wannabe Cisco Systems plans to lay off 1,300 workers – about 2 per cent of its global workforce. The company did not immediately respond to our request for comment, but MarketWatch reports that head spokeswoman Karen Tillman downplayed the importance of the move in an emailed statement. "We …

AMD has released its financial results for its second quarter 2012, and as they had warned earlier this month, revenues dipped by 11 per cent from the previous quarter, hitting $1.41bn. "Overall weakness in the global economy, softer consumer spending and lower channel demand for our desktop processors in China and Europe made …

Intel has reported its second-quarter 2012 financial results, and you can almost hear the Wall Street moneymen breathe a muted sigh of relief – although the sound of popping champagne corks is not likely to be heard. Although total Q2 earnings were just under expectations at $13.5bn, the all-important earnings-per-share (EPS) …

Intel is petitioning the EU's General Court to overthrow the massive fine imposed upon it by the European Commission back in 2009, saying that the case against it was fatally flawed from the get-go. "The quality of evidence relied on by the Commission is profoundly inadequate," Reuters reports Intel lawyer Nicholas Green telling …

The long and sordid Psystar saga creaked to its anti-climactic close on Monday: the US Supreme Court has refused to hear the hackintosher's request to review an appeals court's September 2011 decision not to overturn a December 2009 permanent injunction preventing the Florida company from selling Mac OS X–based clones. "We are …

Apple has quietly updated their warranty coverage in the European Union, extending it to two years as required by EU law. That's the good news. The bad news is that Apple's new EU warranty has a loophole large enough through which to drive a Scheuerle EuroCombi. As noted on Apple's website, Cupertino's own Apple One-Year …

An Oracle shareholder has filed a lawsuit against Larry Ellison & Co. for "gross mismanagement" in their handling of a long-running whistleblower case, alleging that by fighting a case they knew to be grounded in fact, they drove the ultimate settlement up to a hefty $200m. "Rather than attempt to settle all claims at that time …

HP's boss-for-six-months Meg Whitman is about to make her first big strategic move since she took the reins at that reeling company, merging its Imaging and Printing Group and Personal Systems Group. So says AllThingsD, citing the ever-loquacious "sources familiar with the matter", who also said that current PSG headman Todd …

Google has partnered with a local water-treatment utility to cool a massive data center using greywater – that's water recycled from residential bathtubs, showers, washing machines, and the like. The data center in question is located in Douglas County, Georgia – that's the Georgia of Sherman's March to the Sea, not the Georgia …

Last year's severe flooding in Thailand may have been human and economic disaster, but if every cloud has a silver lining, that silver has slipped into the pockets of Seagate as it retook the top sales spot among hard drive businesses, unseating Western Digital. "Seagate owes its return to market leadership to a fortuitous …

Although some industry observers – as The Reg recently noted – say that flash memory is approaching a technical brick wall, the cofounder and former CEO and chairman of SanDisk sees things differently. "Industry experts – even the best ones – are often shortsighted, and sometimes outright wrong," said Eli Harari at ISSCC on …

Apple reportedly put pressure on a Taiwanese manufacturer of its popular MacBook Air, asking them to choose between building that Cupertinian laptop or the ASUS Zenbook. According to a story in the Chinese-language Commercial Times (Google Translate), Apple has told the manufacturer, Pegatron, to "choose sides" – 選邊 – between …

If purchases of the successful-if-flawed Amazon Fire bit into iPad sales during the holiday season, Apple CEO Tim Cook didn't see it. "I looked at the data – particularly in the US – on a weekly basis after Amazon launched the Kindle Fire, and in my view there wasn't an obvious effect on the [iPad sales] numbers," Cook told …

Canadian scammers are buying iPad 2s, replacing them in their original packaging with ZipLoc bags filled with modeling clay, "professionally shrink-wrapping" the boxes, then returning them for refunds, absconding with the precious fondleslabs. The precisely weighted, shrinkwrapped packages containing the clay-filled bags are …

IBM has scored a blow in the high-stakes prizefight for the title of next-generation non-volatile memory technology, revealing a prototype "racetrack memory" chip baked using the same silicon fab technologies as run-of-the-mill chippery. Racetrack memory, for those of you who haven't been scoring at home, is competing with such …

Apple is reported to be planning a massive data center just a quarter-mile south of Facebook's facility in Prineville, Oregon. So say a pair of sources "with direct knowledge of Apple's plans," speaking with Oregon Live, the online news service of The Oregonian. Apple and Facebook are already data-center neighbors – but in …

In a surprise move that sent shivers through its competitors, Verizon announced on Friday that it will pay $3.6bn to acquire a broad swath of Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum from SpectrumCo, a consortium composed of Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks. "Spectrum is the raw material on which wireless …

Amazon's Kindle Fire has built up quite a head of steam among gadget fans in anticipation of its Tuesday release – and now a new survey shows that that developers are feeling the warmth, as well. "What we asked in our survey was, 'Okay, Mr. Developer, you've been looking at tablets for the last year, what do you make of the …

AMD beat the Street when reporting its financial results for the third quarter of 2011, with earnings per share of 13¢ on revenues of $1.69bn. According to Thompson Reuters, the consensus of 29 professional analysts was that AMD would report earnings per share of 10¢ on revenues of $1.65bn. "Strong adoption of AMD APUs drove a …

Apple has released its financial results for its fourth fiscal quarter, and in doing so it handed conservative Wall Street prognosticators a rare win: Cupertino failed to meet or exceed analysts expectations for the first time in many a moon. On Monday, Fortune averaged a number of independent analysts's predictions and came up …

This year's Dow Jones Sustainability Index is out, and the news isn't good for Microsoft and HP – both companies were booted from the highly respected investors' guide to companies that demonstrate "Corporate Sustainability". The DJSI defines corporate sustainability as "a business approach that creates long-term shareholder …

HP has announced a pair of all-in-one PCs – one with a touchscreen display – that it hopes will remove any remaining barriers that prevent that unibody form and point-and-flick interface from finding a home on the business desktop. The two new biz-centric all-in-ones met the public on Wednesday along with two consumer-level Omni …

VWware has announced that the hypervisor core of its Cloud Infrastructure Suite, vSphere 5, is now generally available. "The enhancements and new innovations we've introduced in VMware vSphere 5 provide a robust, reliable platform for business applications,' said VMware cloud-infrastructure headman Bogomil Balkansky in a …