Outside Apple Store, people excitedly line up to buy iPhone 6. The crowd is remarkably eclectic. Tattoos here. Mohawk there. Someone wearing a prim business suit chats with a burly biker wearing sleeveless T-Shirt. Everyone's clothes beam bright, vibrant colors. Loud laughter and uproarious chatter is everywhere. This is one happy group of buyers.

The store's doors exit onto a green pasture of sheep. Each wears a chain around its neck, with iPhone 6 attached. Cow bells appear on the screens, and clanging sounds against the chirping of birds. One animal looks up: "Baaaaaaa!" Then another, and another. An announcer asks: "Do you really want to be an iSheep?" Then the Android logo and robot flash across the screen.

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I should read Harvard Business Review more often. There, Juan Pablo Vazquez Sampere offers insightful and fresh perspective in post: "We Shouldn’t Be Dazzled by Apple’s Earnings Report". Of course, I would agree, having written something similar in past BetaNews posts. Point is the same, just the context changed. I lack his prestige and venue, and that's okay. The observations we both make aren't rocket science, or shouldn't be.

Simply stated: Atop the pinnacle of success, Apple stands at the precipice of failure. The scrappy innovator is gone, replaced by the, ah, Establishment cofounder Steve Jobs and his renegades challenged with years of guerrilla tactics. Apple has in this decade achieved huge success. But managing success is challenging, if your business model is innovation. The two objectives often work cross-purposes.

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After buying Acompli late last year, Microsoft didn’t take long to rebrand the mobile email app as Outlook and launch Android and iOS versions. But it seems that in the rush to get the app out of the door, Microsoft failed to ensure that it was suitably secure.

In fact, IBM developer René Winkelmeyer suggests that enterprise users stop using the app immediately. He was shocked to discover a trio of security issues in the mobile version of Outlook. Perhaps the most worrying discovery is that users' personal credentials are stored in the cloud -- username and password included.

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Perhaps you have seen such statement somewhere on the InterWebs sometime during the last couple of months and increasingly the past few weeks. It's a meme slowly growing -- and for good reasons. While others innovate, Apple iterates and succeeds unblushingly well. The company is mountains more successful today innovating less and taking fewer risks.

Apple is the new Microsoft, where maximizing margins matters more than innovation. Look how much more successful Apple is by being boring and following where innovators lead. Consider today's Strategy Analytics report that puts Apple and Samsung tied for calendar fourth-quarter smartphone shipments. Such scenario was all but unfathomable two quarters earlier. Yet the foundation laid long before Apple cofounder Steve Job's death, when logistics genius and now CEO Tim Cook managed day-to-day operations. Risk-to-innovation defined Jobs' management style. Cook is more tactical.

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The official number for calendar Q4 2014 (fiscal Q1 2015), ending December 27, is 74.688 million. Got to admit, that sure looks like a rather large number of iPhones. But how big is it? Really? Apple sold in the one quarter more iPhones than during fiscal years 2007-10 (73.946 million) combined, or twice as many as sold (37.044 million) during the same three months in 2012.

On its own, iPhone generated more revenue, $51.182 billion, than all of Apple in any quarter in fiscal 2012 and, singly, three of the four quarters in each of FY 2013 and 2014. The amount also exceeds every fiscal year through 2009, which revenue was $42.905 billion.

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Approximately two-thirds of Britons hate how much time they spend using their smartphone, according to a new survey by Voucher Codes Pro.

A poll of 2,500 UK adults found that 62 percent resent the fact that they find it so difficult to stop using their phone.

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It’s weird to think that this time 10 years ago we still hadn’t been interrupted from our feature phones to grasp hold of Apple’s smartphone revolution, which in fact didn’t take place until mid-2007. Those gray (or off-yellow) and black tinged days when all we wanted to do was type a text that was longer than 161 characters and play games about slithery animals on small screens.

So grab a hold of your eBay account details as these five beauties will have you bidding on bricks to help you relive those days.

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You have to take a little (sometimes a lot) of salt with some of the revelations made by Edward Snowden, but his latest claim is, on the surface at least, a damning one for Apple.

According to the NSA whistle-blower’s lawyer, the iPhone has special software installed which can be remotely activated, and used to keep tabs on your whereabouts. A spyPhone, if you will.

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Maybe disposing of Android creator Andy Rubin was dumb. Maybe buying into the "Year of Chromebook" meme was dumber. Maybe making strategic decisions in anticipation of European Union trustbusters was even dumber. Maybe selling Motorola was dumbest. Take your pick, or add to the list, because all of the above apply. Google has squandered what should be in 2015 platform riches, ceding to Apple what shouldn't have been.

In October 2009, I asserted (before anyone else) that "iPhone cannot win the smartphone wars", as the stage was set for Android and iOS to mimic the platform battle between Windows and Macs during the PC era. By the large number of Android devices shipped that analysis is true today. But Apple's mobile platform wins the mindshare—and by other measures profit-share—wars, something Google could have, and should have, easily prevented. Time is overdue for course correction that requires smarts, not dumb-ass thinking.

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A man has been arrested for attempting to smuggle 94 iPhones into China by strapping all of them to his body.

Custom officers at Futian Port on the Chinese border were alerted to some suspicious activity when they noticed that the individual had a "weird walking posture, joint stiffness and muscle tension".

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If asked to name the top camera brands, the chances are you’ll start with Canon and Nikon, followed by names like Samsung, Sony, Olympus, and Fujifilm. Apple probably wouldn’t make most people’s top five, but it’s long been incredibly popular on Flickr.

The photography website has released its yearly list of the most popular camera brands (based on the number of photos uploaded) and reveals that in 2014 Apple claimed the second spot, behind Canon, nudging photography giant Nikon into third place.

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We're only eight days into 2015, and Apple is already celebrating bumper sales in the App Store. Buoyed by impressive pre-Christmas hardware purchases, New Year's Day proved to be the biggest day ever for App Store sales. And in the first week of January, Apple enthusiasts spent almost half a billion dollars on apps and in-app purchases.

Sales and income are very much on the rise. Last year was a record-breaker for developers who managed to pull in more than $10 billion in revenue. iPad, iPod and iPhone owners have already helped to earn developers $25 billion, and spending shows no sign of slowing down.

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Digital rights campaigner Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched its own EFF mobile app with the aim of alerting users to issues and campaigns.

Users will get a notification and be able to one-click connect to the EFF action center to help fight for freedom online. Unless they happen to be iPhone users.

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Apple has filed a patent for a flexible phone (or more broadly a flexible portable device), which can be bent or even folded up without damaging its internal components.

Given the bendgate controversy of last year, whereby Apple’s new iPhone 6 models were found to bend slightly (as pictured above) in some cases -- but then, as was later proved, so can any thin metal phone -- there are bound to be a few jokes cracked about this one.

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Jump on the iDevice bandwagon and one of the first decisions you'll need to make is choosing capacity. This may be determined largely by budget, but what if you run out of space further down the line? Not many people are in a position to just invest in the same device with more space, but Leef iBRIDGE is a neat plug-in solution.

Just as you can expand the storage space of your computer or laptop with a USB drive, Leef iBRIDGE works in much the same way for your Apple device. Available in 16GB, 32GB, 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacities, the little plug-in modules give you a little breathing room for more music and photos.

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