Tech Roundup: Apple Blowout Quarter, GameStop Stock-Buying Frenzy & More

[A recurring feature on the latest in Science & Technology.]

• Apple says there are now more than 1 billion active iPhones (and 1.65 billion Apple devices in total), shipping over 90.1 million iPhones in the during the period October-December, as the company's quartely revenues for Q1 2021 hits $111.4 billion for the first time, with sales jumping 21% year over year.
• CEO Tim Cook said Apple "loves to work on" products where hardware, software, and services come together, adding "We believe that the magic really occurs at that intersection"
• The company is expected to expand production of iPhones, iPads, Macs, and other products in Vietnam and India amid wider shift from China as part of a larger trend of global tech giants reducing their production dependence on China owing to rising labor costs, continued U.S.-China trade tensions, and the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic that's severely disrupted the supply chain.
• Facebook reports US$28.1 billion in revenues for the period October-December (Q4 2020), with 1.84 billion daily active users, 2.8 billion monthly active users, and 3.3 billion "monthly active people" using one of the company's "family" of apps (such as Instagram or WhatsApp) at least once a month; warns of significant uncertainty in 2021 notably as a result of tracking protections implemented by Apple in iOS 14.
• Apple recently released so-called nutrition labels which focus largely on metadata apps collect rather than the privacy and security of people's actual messages," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. "But iMessage stores non-end-to-end encrypted backups of your messages by default unless you disable iCloud, so Apple and governments have the ability to access most people's messages."
• Weird enough, WhatsApp media and messages that are backed up aren't protected by encryption while in Google Drive either.
• Calling iMessage a key "linchpin" of Apple's ecosystem, Zuckerberg said "Apple has every incentive to use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps work, which they regularly do to preference their own."
• The recent tensions between Apple and Facebook began last year when the iPhone maker announced it was introducing a new feature called App Tracking Transparency (ATT), which mandates app developers to get users' explicit permission to track them across apps to create personalised ads. The move is set to dent Facebook's advertising business and that of its customers.
• Meanwhile Google, the other major online ad platform, has announced plans to stop collect device advertising identifiers (known as IDFA or Identifier for Advertisers) once Apple's ATT policy goes into effect this year. "To help improve iOS monetisation rates, we encourage developers to upgrade to version 7.64 of the Google Mobile Ads SDK for new features like SKAdNetwork support," the search titan said.

• Reddit once again comes under the scanner after one of the subreddits "r/WallStreetBets," a forum for retail investors with over five million users, triggers a frenzied coordinated buying of ailing brick-and-mortar video game retailer GameStop's shares, leading to a vertical surge in its share price from US$ 19 earlier this month to US$ 347.5, prompting concerns that such stock manipulation could serve as a template to monetise an influence operation.
• The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said that it was "actively monitoring" the situation.
• "This story is so much bigger than me," Keith Gill, the mastermind behind the triple-digit gains in GameStop shares who goes by the name DeepFuckingValue on r/WallStreetBets, said. "I support these retail investors, their ability to make a statement."
• Jaime Rogozinski, founder of r/WallStreetBets who left the subreddit last April, likened the surge in GameStop shares to a "train wreck happening in real time." But current moderators claimed Rogozinski "attempted to monetise the sub for personal gains."
• The roller-coaster trading on Wall Street has led retail stock trading apps such as Robinhood (and other fin-tech platforms) to block purchases of GameStop, AMC, and Nokia stocks citing "internal risk to the company", a move that has come under intense scrutiny, although the company has begun allowing "limited buys" by placing restrictions on more than 50 stocks and restraining the purchase of some stocks, like GameStop, to a single share — a move that could come back to haunt it for a long time.
• For Robinhood, the risk is a lot more reputational than legal or regulatory liability. Arbitrarily changing the rules of what a retail investor can and can't buy at a moment's notice, while hedge funds are freely able to trade the stock, is unlikely sit well with the users of the platform, which has the motto "everyone should have access to the financial markets" baked right into its mission statement.
• Short selling is a risky betting strategy in which institutional investors such as hedge funds borrow shares of a stock — especially if the company is likely to decline in value and eventually go bankrupt — to sell them at a higher price in expectations that the market value will fall below that level when it's time to pay for the borrowed shares. It's a lot like "Buy low, sell high" but in reverse.
• The spiking share price has helped to create a short squeeze, where dealers are forced to buy shares of a rising stock to cover their positions, resulting in a feedback loop that drives the stock even higher.
• If there's one thing that's obvious, it's that the same tools used for orchestrating mass movements can be used by bad actors to game and manipulate the system. GameStop's eye popping rally (and that of others), though, is a sign of shifting power dynamics brought about the democratisation of financial information. Which can only be a good thing.