How to Find an iPhone’s Phone Number

Whether you just got a new phone number, changed a number from an old one, or you happened upon someone else's iPhone and want to know the number of who it belongs to, you can easily retrieve an iPhone's associated mobile number. The obvious solution might be to call another phone, but if the device has no service or the service has been disconnected, don't despair. There are two super simple ways to find the number on the device itself – even if the phone no longer has any service and no sim card – but you can also get it from iTunes and sometimes even on the sim card itself.

Finding an iPhone's Number on the iPhone Itself

The easiest way to find an iPhone's number is from Settings where it will be visible at the top of a preference screen:

• Open Settings then choose "Phone"
• Find the number at the top of the screen

If for some reason it's not there, you can also find the devices associated number in Contacts:

• Open "Phone" and then choose the "Contacts" tab
• Pull down from the very top to reveal the iPhone's associated number

If the phone is dead you'll obviously want to charge it before you can retrieve this information, but apparently some mobile carriers actually print the phone number on the SIM card, so that's another place to look if it's a found device.

Find the Phone Number with iTunes

Speaking of charging, if the phone is connected to a Mac or PC through USB, iTunes can also reveal the devices phone number by selecting it and then looking at the primary device screen, it will be visible right alongside the iPhone's serial number:

This even works through wireless syncing if that has been configured, though that obviously won't be the case with a device that has not been associated with iTunes yet.

If you've found someone elses iPhone and can't figure out the owner, just leave the device on and better yet, charge it up so if they're attempting to use Find My iPhone they can track the device down and ping it. If that doesn't happen, keep in mind that the modern dependencies on cell phones usually means that if someone has lost a phone they will typically have it replaced within a week or two, meaning you'll often be able to call the number discovered on the iPhone itself and track down the original owner after some time passes. Another option would be to just start calling the lost owners contacts for obvious relationships, like moms, dads, grandparents, but that may be a bit intrusive. Anyway, if you have found someone elses iPhone, be a good citizen and try to track down the rightful owner, they'll appreciate it!

Got an Older Mac? MLPostFactor Installs OS X 10.8.3 on Old Unsupported Macs

Many older Macs lost out on the ability to run OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3!), but some hard working fellows have created a free third party tool called MLPostFactor that allows for the newest version of OS X to be installed on older, officially unsupported Macs. The process used to be quite complicated, but with MLPostFactor it's easier than ever and can now be done by creating a partition, running the MLPF app, installing OS X as usual, then using the MLPostFactor app again to patch the 'failed' installation. Reboot and automagically OS X Mountain Lion will be running on the older Macs, breathing new life into older hardware.

• Check out the full how-to thread with instructions on MacRumors forums

This makes for an excellent weekend project, and if you're interested in trying this out yourself, review the compatible older Mac list to see if the machine you want to install is supported.

MLPostFactor Compatible Macs

• Mac released from 2006 to 2008 with Core 2 Duo CPU and Lion installed – PPC, Core Duo, and Core Solo chips are not supported
• MacBook late 2006, 2007, and 2008
• MacBook Air, mid 2007
• MacBook Pro late 2007 and mid 2007
• iMac 2006
• Mac Mini 2006
• Mac Pro 2006, 2007
• Xserve 2006, and early 2008

The requirements are basically such that if it supports Lion, it will now support Mountain Lion. Do note that some of the older Mac Pro and Xserve models have specific GPU requirements as well, so be sure to read the full MLPostFactor tutorial before beginning in order to determine if there is anything incompatible with the specific Mac model you are looking to install this on.

If you meet the requirements, you'll need to download the MLPostFactor app (link here), re-download Mountain Lion from the App Store, and, ideally, create a installer drive as if you were going to perform a clean install on a regular compatible Mac.

If your older Mac doesn't fit the compatibility list, don't feel too bad, but try out some tips to speed it up instead to breathe some new life into it. It won't be running a new OS, but at least it'll be a bit quicker.

Thanks to hackerwayne for the tip, and for creating MLPostFactor!

Analysis: That sub-$400 AAPL share dip – what does it really mean?

Predictably, AAPL's brief dip below $400 yesterday is resulting in a lot of excited reporting in the press, but how much does it all really mean?

The 5.5 percent slide yesterday was a combination of two factors. First, yesterday was a bad day for the market as a whole, with broad selling across a range of US stock triggered by the government reporting slower growth in hiring than the market had expected (via The Economic Times) …

For Apple, the effect was worsened by a key chip supplier, Cirrus Logic, blaming a poor revenue forecast on excess inventory. Since Apple is its biggest customer, the market concluded this meant lower than expected demand for the iPhone and iPad. Whether this is true is a matter of conjecture. As Forbes pointed out:

There is an alternative explanation.  It is conceivable that Cirrus sales are no longer a good indicator of iPhone sales because Apple has found other suppliers.  Apple is a highly secretive company and there is no way to know for sure.  However, the stock market so far seems oblivious to this alternate explanation.

AAPL investors have certainly had a roller-coaster ride over the last 12 months, with the stock trading above $700 in September due to high demand for the iPhone 5 before falling to today's level just above $400:

There is some genuine bad news in there. As CNN points out, amidst all the speculation about what might happen in the future, there is one cold, hard fact: Apple's margins – some of the highest in the world – have fallen in the last year.

There are three key reasons: Investors are concerned that the iPhone market has peaked in the western world, supply issues have plagued production of iPhones and iPads, and Apple's profit margins are falling at an alarming rate.

The margins problem grew worse last quarter as many customers opted to buy older iPhones and the cheaper iPad mini — devices that are less profitable to Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500). Overall, the company's gross profit margin fell six percentage points over the year to 38.6%.

But most companies – including any of Apple's competitors – would kill for margins of 38%.

Much of the ride says more about analysts and investors than it does about Apple. With record performance after record performance, analysts started worrying about how long the trends could continue before sales flattened.

Apple had always made pessimistic revenue forecasts, and always beaten them, so it came to be expected that the company's performance would always exceed expectations, resulting in some over-heated projections. When Apple failed to meet the more optimistic of these, the market responded with disappointment. Never mind that Apple was the most valuable company in the world, never mind that it was setting new sales records, never mind the huge cash reserves: what counts in the market is reality versus expectations, however inflated those expectations may have been.

Apple switched to providing realistic revenue forecasts, giving a range of figures representing what it expected to be the upper and lower numbers. Whilst this was an understandable attempt to quash the wilder analyst projections, it carries with it the risk of missing the company's own guidance figures, and the market responding nervously to that.

There is also, of course, the Steve Factor. There is a view that only founder can build value, while managers only maintain it. Apple, perhaps more than any other major company, had one public face: that of Steve Jobs. His successor, Tim Cook, was seen as an excellent ops man rather than an innovator. What has Apple done that's genuinely new and innovative since Cook took over, came the question?

But Apple's innovations have never been annual events. The iPod was launched in 2001. The first iPhone was launched in 2007. The iPad in 2010. It's reasonable to expect something new – be it the long-rumoured HDTV or iWatch or something else altogether – sometime around this year, but it's not reasonable to complain that it hasn't happened yet.

Take out the roller-coaster element of what's happened in the past twelve months, and what we're left with since Cook took over is a flattening of the stock price – something that might be expected when a founder is no longer around and a manager takes over, while the market watches to see what happens next.

If Cook is guilty of anything, it is perhaps failing to understand the need to maintain excitement in the marketplace. Jobs was flamboyant; Cook is understated. While Apple has always been tight-lipped about its plans, with Jobs there was always the sense that something exciting was bubbling away beneath the surface. With Cook, perhaps some of that sense of anticipation has been lost.

And let's put both yesterday and the past year into context:

As the (alternating) most valuable or second most valuable company in the world, Apple isn't doing too badly.

Update Fri 19th April: The dip below $400 is now not so brief. As at 14:48, the stock was trading at $387.