In the background check system for gun licensing and sales. Homeowners in states with the highest property taxes are looking to prepay 2018 bills ahead of a 10,000 cap on the deduction for property taxes. The new laws come with the gop tax overhaul President Trump signed last week. Tens of thousands of puerto rican residents remain withouttl power more than three months after Hurricane Maria destroyed the u. S. Islands electrical grid. A study conducted this month by local engineers estimated roughly 50 of the island 3. 3 Million People remain without power. Global news 24 hours a day powered by more than 2700 journalists and analysts in more than 120 countries. Im nabila ahmed. This is bloomberg. Cory im cory in for emily chang, and this is bloomberg technology. Coming up, apple shares take a hit after lackluster demand for the iphone x. The tech giant can the jets can the tech wrong . Rove the analysts plus, amazon celebrate a very strong holiday season. We will look at how the smart home tech gadget fits into amazons plans for 2018. Bitcoin, what a ride, rallying . At 16,000 after last weeks big selloff. What does this mean about the bitcoin bubble . First to our lead. Apple analysts lowering the iphone x shipment projections for the first quarter, citing weak demands during the holiday season. Shares falling more than 2. 5 . 10 million fewer units will be sold in q1 2018 compared to the current quarter. Blaming the phones higher price and lack of interesting innovations. Joining us right now is alex. Covering apple for us. We talked about this on Bloomberg Radio a while ago, and this is really interesting because it is a projection of what is about to happen in the quarter that starts next week and what just happened. Alex it has been one of the concerns heading into the christmas quarter. Of course the iphone x was released six weeks after the iphone 8. There was a fear that maybe if they got too close to the release date of the samsung next highend smartphone, which would probably come in march, the close to that and it will not be enough demand to sustain the numbers. Cory competition is another highend smartphone, which would part of this . Alex exactly, yes. Particularly in china, a lot of local manufacturers coming out with a far lower price point than what apple is able to offer, and of course with very similar features. None of them have the face id 3d sensor that apple has come up with, but as some analysts were writing today, that has not been enough. Cory it seems a big part of apples strategy with this phone release, both these phones up potentially new applications that we have not seen. It could do potentially cool facial recognition stuff, but there are not a lot of applications for that. There is no real usage for it yet. Alex the curse of being apple. It could do potentially cool facial recognition stuff, buttht they have in the pipeline in terms of hardware. When they unveiled the phone in september ahead of its release in november, that is not a huge timeframe for developers to start coming up with new tools which you can download in the app store. It may be over the next 12 or 18 months where we see much more compelling innovations that use these 3d sensors. Cory what analysts do not take into account is we will never know the mix between iphone 8 and iphone x, but if they sell out more iphone x, both the top line and bottom line are going to do so well. There is always chatter that china and india will not buy the expensive phone. What we have seen is the opposite. China loves the expensive phone and is willing to pay up for the luxury item. Alex the iphone 8 is largely the same form factor, shape and design as the iphone 6. Not a huge amount of difference between those phones. That means the material has come down for the iphone 8 but the price point is still high. Not the end of the world if apple sells more iphone 8 than iphone x. The three or four years they had of the phone has made components cheaper. Cory they are so close margins on the eighth even . Alex it is hard to tell. Not significantly worse than on the 10. Cory the estimates even though the numbers have come down are still the biggest quarter apple has had, 10 yearoveryear revenue growth. Not break outdoes any iphone revenue numbers. Cory we will know iphones. Not specifics. Alex which brands they are. Forecastns the revenue for the course of apple itself might already take into account this slackening demand. Cory we will never know about the home pod. Alex even if it had been out this christmas, we saw estimates they would ship 50,000 units. 50,000 units at 300 a pop is not a lot of money. Cory big whoop. Alex i am glad you said it. I would not use that phrase if i could. [laughter] cory thank you very much for your discretion. Coming up, the iphone became the first u. S. Company with a billiondollar market cap back in november. In june, they unveiled the home pod that will ship in early 2018 , or so they say. We will see. Bloombergs emily chang sat down with mr. Cook and asked him about the vision for the companys future starting with the home pod and how tough that is in an already crowded market. What we have tried to do is companys future starting with the home pod and how tough that build something that is a breakthrough speaker first. Music is deep in our dna dating back from itunes and ipods. One, we wanted something that sounded unbelievable. I think when people listen to it, they are going to be shocked over the quality of the sound. Over the quality of the sound. Of course, it does a lot of other things. All of those are important as well, but we wanted a really high quality audio experience as well. Emily you are very focused on how this could reinvent music in the home. What about the other things . Will i be able to make a phone call, order a car, order groceries . There are lots of things you can do with it. One of the advantages we have is there is a lot of things that siri knows how to do from the phone, and so we will start with a patch of those as shown today during the keynote, and you can bet there is a nice followon activity as well. Emily lets talk about ecommerce. Ecommerce is very important to these devices. I can order paper towels on my amazon echo. Does this tell us something about apples aspirations in retail . Tim i would not read into it in that regard. Apple is a company that deeply cares about music and wants to deliver a great audio experience in the home. We feel like we reinvented it in the portable player area and we think we can reinvent it at home as well, and we know that people want a speaker now to do more than that. Obviously we want a speaker to do more than that. We are sort of combining what has been thought of to be two distinctly Different Things until now. And i think people will love it. I know they are. I am a user, and i think they will be blown away with the experience. Emily how long have you been working on this . Tim multiple years. Multiple years. So the Underlying Technology in here is something to behold. To get the experience that we wanted, at the quality that we wanted, like apple products in general take multiple years to do, starting from the Core Technology and building up to the product. Emily you have people out there saying finally what took so long . Tim for us, it has never been about being first to anything. When you think back, we did not have the first mp3 player. We did not have the first smart phone. We did not have the first tablet. There was a tablet shipping a decade before. Very few people used it. Arguably, we shipped the first modern mp3 player. The first modern smartphone, the first modern tablet, but we were not first in any of them. For us, it is not about being first. It is about being the best, and giving the User Experience that delights them every time. We dont let that impatience result in shipping something that is just not great. Emily it is the 10th anniversary of the iphone. You have unveiled the new ios, ios 11. What does that tell us about what is next . Tim i can tell you ios 11 is unbelievable. Both for iphone and for ipad, i mean there are incredible things in it from peertopeer payments. It is the biggest ipad release ever. Great area that i have personal excitement in i am about all of it but i in excited about ar. You saw the demos that were done today. I think this is profound. Think we today as we get this developer release out in the hands of the developers, we will have the largest augmented abouf reality platform in the world, and i think we have launched ar in a way to large numbers of people. I am incredibly excited to see what some of the developers will come up with with an ar kit. Emily you talk a lot about ar and vr with regard to developers, but when will consumers see an apple ar . Tim that is obviously something i am not going to answer, but with a Core Technology and as a platform owner, the first thing in arguably the most important is to build the foundation and from that foundation, you can do many things off of it. But first you have to have a solid foundation. And so i think the developers will like what they find in the developer built on the ar kit. Cory bloombergs emily chang with apple ceo tim cook. Iraqi year at uber ends now. They have agreed to sell its u. S. Prime auto release business. The move demonstrates the ceos focus on costcutting at uber. Financial terms not disclosed. Coming up, amazon could be a big holiday winner again, announcing 4 Million People getting a trial of amazon prime in a week. We look at the king of up ecommerce. Bloomberg technology is Live Streaming on twitter. Check us out. 2 00 on the west coast, 5 00 on the east coast. This is bloomberg. Cory amazon once again could be the big winner this holiday season. The tech titan says tens of millions of alexa enabled devices were sold worldwide. Many tomany to me. Amazon sitting in the top seller spot across all categories on the site. Millions of prime trials and paid memberships in one week over the holidays. Joining us right now is a Capital Markets analyst. I am not kidding. I thought i was going to buy one or two of these echo dots. I think i gave away six or seven over the holidays. There was a sonos device with alexa in it. Mark their top two selling items was an echo, and the other , one was the fire stick that was alexa enabled. The tangential is, how many more alexa enabled devices there are. You can go on amazon and search for alexa enabled devices. You will find your speakers, your phones. They also put in the press release that they saw millions of prime Customers Using alexa t o order products on amazon. It is the convenience which will be easier to turn around in the kitchen and say alexa, order more coffee. Apparently more amazon customers are doing that. Cory i think that is why they open up the platform. This sonos device was like 450, not to nothing. I hope they are not watching. But a really fantastic device. Terrific sound, but it is not made by amazon. Why would amazon give that away . Mark you get the amazon echo system embedded in multiple devices, and amazon has more ways to offer you products and deliver products. Im sorry so you can interact with amazon not just when you are here, your desktop, with your phone, but also when you are driving you can order from alexa. An alexaaw garmin, enabled device for your car. Mark right now, we are too conservative. There are about we thought there were 40 million alexa echo installed devices. The number is probably 50, and even 60 million. Something else mentioned in the press release, the number of prime customers in the u. S. We think there are 60 million amazon prime customers in the u. S. They added 4 in one week. There was another one. Cory it is probably lower than it is other times. Mark there was another 1 the number of units that they prime, sameither day or next day doubled yearoveryear. Cory that is on a revenue run rate or growth rate of about 25 . Mark yeah but the point is there is more than just a price advantage and selection advantage that amazon has. The most they are building around the company is they are Building Products to get to you they are building to get you faster than anybody else. It matters. Is christmasen it and you do is christmas and you do not have the gifts ready to go. You can still order them on the 23rd or 24th and you recognize that advantage and use that when you shop with advantage throughout the year. The convenience is the new mode at amazon. Cory our producer is bailing me out and saying 31 predicted growth. That includes a lot very fast growth at amazon web services. It is intriguing to me too that of all the different businesses we see these guys going into, do they still go back looking at b2c selling physical goods to people . They might into electronics, video, whatever, even drugs, whatever, but it is about selling volume of goods to consumers. Mark i think so. It is building up the customer relationship. One of the strongest relationships we as consumers have is with the people we give our money to in order to get products. That is a very strong retail relationship. You can have a media relationship, but very few companies have that kind of relationship. Maybe netflix, maybe google. But a retail relationship, amazon is providing you goods and services, entertainment, and any kind of convenience where you can find products around the house. Yes, they are breaking into new categories, extending into groceries, the single Largest Consumer product category. They are now the largest vendor of apparel. Cory drugs . Mark there are opportunities for them. I think it is almost inevitable that they go there. I think it is still three to five years out but inevitable. Cory one interesting thing about alexa, is they are really getting brand a little bit, which they have never done. Amazon seems to have a philosophical belief that people migrate to the cheapest thing. Brand is the opposite of that. Mark it creates the opportunity for amazon for a private label and create a revenue opportunity. Philosophical apple, the app store takes a 30 apple, the app store takes a 30 tax on all products sold in the apple store. Google home does the same thing. Right now, amazon does not get any of that tax revenue, but you get 100 million, 200 million alexa devices and alexa enabled devices out there and when the consumer says i need more coffee or diapers or a car service, all of a sudden you will have providers that can bid against each other for placement in the voice search results and you have app platform revenue. Another win. Cory thank you very much. Good to see you. Coming up, some of the biggest banks in the u. S. Are offering techlike perks for their employees. Taking a page out of a playbook, how the financial industry is taking a page out of Silicon Valleys playbook next. This is bloomberg. Cory from startups in Silicon Valley to heavyweights like facebook and google, Tech Companies have prioritized perks for employees from unlimited vacations to preworkout classes. The financial industry is now trying to play catchup. Laura covers big banks for Bloomberg News and joins us in new york. Laura, i love this story. It is kind of like an aspirational story like vogue magazine. Who has it better than me . What are they doing for their employees here . Laura what they have decided to do is really introduce a Pilot Program into the investment bank. So any trader, investment banker who wants to take this is allowed to, provided they have been there 10 years, and they are allowed to take between a fourweek and six week sabbatical for the number of years they have been there. Cory it is intriguing, too. It is not known for its benevolence to its employees, or creativity when it comes to how they take care of people. Laura you are commenting on what and that works at bank of america knows. They are known as one of the stocky banks, bake wall street firms. Describe the to company as a technology company, butbut some of the perks that wd go along with being a technology firm, the advancements whether you are on the Trading Floor or atlarge within the bank there. S, that is not cory i wonder where this goes. You are in new york what are the things that new yorkers look at Silicon Valley companies . There. Cory is it the foosball machine, is it the foosball machine, unlimited time off . What is it that really gets people . Laura to recharge those batteries after being worked to the bone like some of these are. Tment traders are. I think that is something these people tend to salivate over. It raises eyes within the banking community, here is a bank that will offer this. Certainly those sabbaticals is something they look forward to. I dont think that will discount any of the great perks google has in terms of doing your dry cleaning. Autodesk across the street from us in San Francisco offers the same sabbatical, but they are competing with banks for the same technological and programming talent. Laura i think banks understand this. Brian moynihan talked about this he says this allows us to retain some of our people. It is not about grabbing those technology talented people that banks want, but it is keeping people once they are there. Cory thanks so much. Up, Silicon Valley up, silicony titans. Talking about the peng shuai did equilibrium. Equilibrium. It is an interesting idea. It speaks to where we will see innovation in the future. This is bloomberg. It is an interesting idea. It speaks to where we will see innovation in the future. This is bloomberg. Is is bloomberg. Reporter youre watching bloomberg. Bitcoins wild ride is continuing as 2017 draws to a close. They passed 16,000 dollars earlier as it rebounded from a fiveday holiday slump that erased 44 of its value. The advanced suggests that even as financial authorities issue warnings about the risk of a bubble in the asset class, investor interest remains intact. Oil revenue expects forump about 80 by 2023 its first Budget Surplus in a decade, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Officials predict rising crude result in output will billion. From about 17 brought 60 a barrel since mid2015 after explosion hit a pipeline that carries crude to libyas biggest export terminal. Prolong supply opec prolonged supply curbs through the end of 2017. Reporter the indian rupee is xder pressure, but the system we are seeing little enthusiasm for