Apple CEO Tim Cook's India itinerary is getting more interesting by the minute.

After a temple visit and a Bollywood bash hosted by none other than Shah Rukh Khan Wednesday night, Apple CEO Tim Cook's entourage is now heading to Kanpur to watch an Indian Premier League game between Gujarat Lions and Kolkata Knight Riders Thursday evening. 

Kolkata Knight Riders is owned by Shah Rukh Khan. 

"He's coming on my invitation," said IPL chairman Rajeev Shukla, confirming that Cook is travelling to Kanpur from Hyderabad where he announced a new technology development dedicated to maps and signed an MoU with the G Narayanamma College to train students fusion technology for creating Apple maps. 

Apple on Thursday said that it is opening a new office in Hyderabad that will focus on development of Maps for Apple products. The investment will accelerate Maps development and create up to 4,000 jobs.

Cook, 55, took charge of Apple in August 2011, having been chosen to take over by Jobs after the latter was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. An MBA from Duke University and Bachelor of Science in industrial engineering from Auburn University, Cook was then the company's chief operating officer responsible for Apple's worldwide sales and operations, including the Mac business. 

The Indian government is expected to try and persuade Apple to invest in smartphone and computer manufacturing facilities in the country, in line with the government's 'Make in India' campaign.

HOME NEWS TECHNOLOGY

08:43

There isn’t any big-ticket item to ogle at from Apple’s SE Event that was held last night. There’s a new iPhone that is not a flagship and a new iPad Pro. There were a few other announcements as well and Tim Cook reaffirmed Apple’s commitment to user privacy and said, “We need to decide as a nation how much power the government should have over our data and over our privacy.” Here’s everything you should know from the SE Event.

1. iPhone SE

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The new iPhone is called iPhone SE with the SE being an abbreviation for Special Edition. It has a smaller-four inch display but gets the same powerful A9 processor as the iPhone 6S. Built for new iPhone users, the SE feels like an upgraded iPhone 5S and the 12 MP camera and fingerprint scanning give it the power of the flagship 6S. The phone is priced at Rs 39,000 in India according to Apple. It is expected to launch in India in early May.

2. New 9.7 inch iPad Pro

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The other big announcement apart from the new iPhone was this iPad Pro that is now available in 9.7 inch size instead of the earlier 12.9 inch model. The weight of this new iPad is now under one pound! The 32 GB version costs $599 while the 128 GB and 256 GB versions cost $749 and $899, respectively.

3. Cheaper Apple Watch

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There’s no update for the Apple Watch but they are going to get cheaper soon. Apple brought down the price to $299 from $349 and introduced it in new colours and variants including a new band model made from a four-layered woven nylon.

4. Social Responsibility

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Keeping up with its promise to run all its facilities on renewable energy, Apple showed off a robot called Liam that tears down used iPhones to recover valuable minerals while discarding the rest in what Apple said is “safe for your data and safe for the planet.”

5. iOS 9.3

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Apple launched the latest update for its operating system that adds one cool new feature. The Night Shift feature will allow updated devices to adjust its lighting depending on the time of the day. There are updates to Touch ID and Apple News and security bugs have been fixed. The update is available for download from today.

TECHNOLOGY

12:25

The Rs 251 smartphone Freedom 251 is a bad advertisement for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ambitious Make in India programme. Make in India is a very high profile initiative which wants to make India a world class manufacturing hub of everything – starting from mobile phones to aircraft.
The Make in India website says, "The Make in India program was launched by Prime Minister Modi in September 2014 as part of a wider set of nation-building initiatives. Devised to transform India into a global design and manufacturing hub, Make in India was a timely response to a critical situation: by 2013, the much-hyped emerging markets bubble had burst, and India’s growth rate had fallen to its lowest level in a decade. The promise of the BRICS nations had faded, and India was tagged as one of the so-called ‘Fragile Five’. Global investors debated whether the world’s largest democracy was a risk or an opportunity. India’s 1.2 billion citizens questioned whether India was too big to succeed or too big to fail. India was on the brink of severe economic failure."




Very ambitious plan indeed. India often claims that it does not want to be another China, which is known as low cost factory of the world. India does not want to produce cheap, low cost and low quality products under Make in India. It wants to be like Germany, France, United Kingdom, Japan and USA, the manufacturers of world class iconic products.
The Rs 251 phone which has taken the technology world by storm is not going to help the cause. While there are both fans and sceptics of the Freedom 251, the lingering question is how Ringing Bells will manage to sell a feature rich smartphone at such a low price.

Undeniably what makes a nation a true economic powerhouse in the long run is the quality of its manufacturing and service sectors. By producing cheap, low quality things in large scale no country can become a world class manufacturer overnight. These hotchpotch inventions can make some news, get some eyeballs and also generate some income and jobs for a while. In the long run, they ruin the image of a nation and its capability to produce the best in the world.
Cheap products may have put China on top of world economy in the last two decades. But, Chinese manufacturing sector does not have the credibility and consumer confidence, the products of Western nations or Japan have. Chinese economy is slowing down because of its cheap products.
India should follow the model of Western nations and Japan. Certainly not that of our immediate neighbour China. The populist launches like the Rs 251 mobile phone defeat the very purpose of a big initiative like Make in India.

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13:21