Only Sprint is still making the free with trade in offer.
Verizon said it would stop giving customers a free iPhone 7 for a trade in of an older model after Friday, leaving Sprint as the only carrier still offering the hot promotion.
Verizon VZ -0.27% was the last of the big four carriers to announce an iPhone 7 giveaway. T-Mobile, which kicked off the promotion spree, and AT&T ended their free iPhone offers last week.
The offers, which required that customers trade in a working iPhone 6 or 6S, came as competition heated up in the wireless market around Apple’s annual phone launch. T-Mobile TMUS 0.56% and Sprint S -0.45% said the free iPhone 7 promo prompted massive increases in sales from prior years, while AT&T T -0.15% and Verizon said it led to more modest increases.
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Analysts said the promos may have aidedApple more that the carriers, since all four were making almost the same offer. The offers also required that customers stay with the carrier for two year or pay back a pro-rated share of the $650 price of a new iPhone 7.
With previously low expectations on Wall Street for iPhone 7 sales, Apple’s stock price has gotten a nice bounce from the carriers’ disclosures. Analysts had not anticipated that the big four wireless carriers would all offer such aggressive promotions.
Verizon officials have been among the least enthused in the industry about the iPhone 7 and the free offers.
“I know some of our competitors have made a big, big announcement around the iPhone 7 and how great it is. Of course, it’s great—it’s free,” Verizon CFO Fran Shammo said last week at the Goldman Sachs Communacopiaconference in New York. “We saw some increase in our volume from ’15 to today, but I kind of attribute that to zero—it’s free to the customer.”
An Apple a Day: How to Get a Headphone Jack for iPhone 7
All the Apple news from the last week.
An Apple a Day is a weekly roundup of the biggest Apple news this week. To see last week’s roundup, click here.
Apple’s decision to eliminate the headphone jack in its new iPhone 7 is still annoying some users.
In the past week, two separate unofficial workarounds have emerged for adding a 3.5mm headphone jack to the iPhone. The trouble is that only one of them actually works—and requires a phone case to implement—and the other permanently damages the device and fails to provide a wired alternative to listening to music using Bluetooth earbuds.
But that’s just one of many Apple AAPL 0.76% topics this week. In the last several days, two new reports about Apple’s massive $14.5 billion tax fine in Europe and how the company failed to aggressively lobby for a better deal, and speculation kicked into high fear about when the company will next debut new products. Along the way, there’s been talk of iPhone hacking and an admission by Apple executives that they may have been overly ambitious in their roadmap for Apple Music.
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Read on to check out the latest edition ofAn Apple a Day:
- A recent YouTube video got a lot of attention showing someone drilling a 3.5mm hole into the bottom of the iPhone 7. Unfortunately, some iPhone 7 owners seem to have thought the video was legitimate and said in comments on YouTube that they had tried to copy the technique to make their phones compatible with wired headphones. The result? A bricked iPhone 7. The video is a joke, folks. Put…the drill…down.
- Hardware developer Diego Prince this week announced a new case that fits both the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, and that comes with a headphone jack. Dubbed the Fuze, the case the comes with Lightning-to-3.5mm-headphone-jack adapter built in, allowing users to plug in their headphones and enjoy tethered audio listening. It’s available to back now on crowdfunding site Indiegogo.
- According to The Wall Street Journal,Apple spent about $1.1 million on lobbying the EU in 2015. Sources told theJournal said that Apple should have spent a lot more on lobbying to improve its chances of getting a smaller fine for allegedly shifting profits to Ireland. The anemic lobbying, those sources said, likely left Apple in the dark about the EU’s tax probe until the company was slapped with its $14.5 billion bill.
- According to a Bloomberg report, Apple plans to appeal the EU’s tax ruling andaccuse investigators of failing to share details about their investigation with Apple, in violation of their rules. Ireland, which supports Apple in the case despite the possibility of netting billions of dollars in additional revenue from the penalty, will also appeal the case on the same grounds. The EU told Fortune, however, that Apple knew all along how the investigation and how it was progressing.
- Apple could be updating its MacBook Pro later this month. The company is reportedly working on a new MacBook Pro with a touchbar above the keyboard and a Touch ID sensor for additional security. The computer could be introduced as early as the end of October.
- Jimmy Iovine, head of Apple Music and a longtime music industry executive, said this week in an interview with BuzzFeed that Apple tried to do too much too soon with Apple Music. Since its launch last year, Apple has scaled back on its Apple Music plans, Iovine said, but he added that the company is working on new features that no one expects.
- Following a change in how it encrypts backups to its iOS 10 devices, Apple’s new mobile operating system is about 2,500 times easier to hack than iOS 9-based products. Apple acknowledged the problem in a statement to Fortune this week, and said that it would issue an update to fix the flaw in an upcoming security patch. Until then, it’s possible for hackers to obtain passwords, credit card data, and other information from backups completed via iTunes.
- Insurance giant Aetna said this week that it would start offering Apple Watches to some of its largest customers this fall. While it didn’t reveal the size of the Watch discounts, customers will be able to pay off what they do owe through monthly payroll deductions.
- Zerodium, a seller of security vulnerabilities, announced it would pay hackers $1.5 million for an exploit that would allow it to gain access to an iPhone or iPad user’s data, even if they’re running a fully patched version of iOS 10. Zerodium previously paid $500,000 for the same hack. Apple pays up to $200,000 for hackers to uncover weakness in its security so the company knows how to fix the problem.
For more about the iPhone, watch:
One more thing…A man was caught on video on Thursday destroying iPhones, Macs, and other Apple hardware in an Apple Store in Dijon, France. He was reportedly upset with a “repayment problem,” leaving him with no other choice, at least in his mind, but to destroy thousands of dollars of Apple hardware.
This Farm Is Betting Big on Chocolate-Eating Cows
Cadbury’s-fed Wagyu is the new luxury beef, an Australian producer claims.
Forget the days of premium grass-fed beef. Nowadays, chocolate-fed Wagyu is the new luxury beef, an Australian cattle farm claims.
Scott De Bruin, managing partner of 171-year-old Mayura Station, wants everyone to know his cows are eating what he calls only “the best”: Cadbury’s chocolate, along with gummy bears and other ingredients.
“A happy cow is a good cow,” he tellsFortune in an interview.
De Bruin believes the term “Wagyu” is overused on menus, so his company is simply renaming its products “Mayura beef.” Overall, the “Wagyu” label has become too generic, which doesn’t do suppliers any favors in relaying the different qualities of beef available, explains Mayura’s distributor, Jason Lo.
“Everyone starts trying to cash in by using the name,” says Lo, managing director of Waves Pacific. “From my perspective, as a distributor, it hurt me. Because we’re bringing products in that type of premium quality … but then people would then compare from a price point.”
De Bruin points to his competitors in Australia, where he says an estimated 90% of branded Wagyu beef comes from crossbreeds of cattle that would otherwise command less expensive prices in the market, such as angus cows.
“It’s much cheaper to do a cross, and cross it with another breed. In actual fact, it’s probably half the cost,” he says. The company wanted to capitalize on the fact that “we actually produce 100% pure Wagyu.”
For a farm that traces its roots back to 1845, the decision to shift from the globally recognized “Wagyu” name is a relatively bold marketing play. Mayura hopes to “break away from the herd” and produce “something that can be directly attributed to our brand,” De Bruin says.
Feeding chocolate to cows isn’t particularly new. Farmers have turned to the sweets in the past to help keep costs down amid high corn prices, and candy has also turned up in the feeds of dairy farmers, who’ve used it to boost the content of butterfat in their cows’ milk.
But De Bruin says his regime—which involves weekly deliveries of 10 tons of chocolate—has a few secret ingredients, and, overall, brings his costs up about 25%.
“To actually include this in the feed is actually quite expensive for us,” he says. “It’s much more expensive than feeding corn. So for us, it’s not about lowering the cost or producing it more economically. This is about producing an item that distinguishes itself in flavor.”
To optimize the feed, De Bruin says he consulted the Wagyu breeder who sold Mayura Station its cattle, a Japanese gentleman he calls Takeda-san. “One of those key ingredients [named] was geographically a long way away from where our farm is located, and it was very hard to buy,” he says.
“A lot of similar ingredients are found in a bar of Cadburys.”
About six months later, customers were telling De Bruin, “‘your beef has this really unique flavor. It’s quite different not only to normal beef, but to the other Wagyu beef that’s out on the market,’” he says.
Taste tests, of course, are always subjective. But so far, the chocolate-fed beef has won approval from some of Hong Kong’s Michelin Star chefs, and clients swapping out “Wagyu” on their menus include restaurants at the Four Seasons Hotel and 8 ½ Otto e Mezzo Bombana.
“This beef is by far the best beef on the market,” Shane Osborn, a two Michelin-starred chef who started his own restaurant, told Bloomberg. “When people come into restaurants like Arcane, and they see the Mayura beef on the menu, they’ll buy that, and they consistently say that’s some of the best beef they’ve ever eaten.”
So discerning are his customers, says De Bruin, that they even noticed once when he switched chocolate out of the feeds to create pinker and more marbled meat.
“Visually, it looked good,” he recounts. “But then it would have been only probably two months after that, we started getting calls from our customers, saying, ‘What have you done? The beef doesn’t taste the same anymore. We’re getting complaints from our customers.’”
De Bruin calls this week’s rebranding an opportunity to announce a more consistent product—and to help stabilize prices.
He says he’s not worried about getting orders. “At the moment, the demand for our products far exceeds our production,” he adds.
The farm, which currently processes only about 100 head of cattle each month—“boutique” numbers compared to other producers—is planning to ramp up production in December, says De Bruin. Over the next two years, Mayura Station will double its current output to about 50 metric tons of beef each month.
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