Apple Inc. - page 143

Steve Jobs is taking a medical leave of absence and handing day-to-day control of Apple over to Tim Cook.

Jobs sent the following message to staff this morning:

Team,

At my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health. I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for all of Apple’s day to day operations. I have great confidence that Tim and the rest of the executive management team will do a terrific job executing the exciting plans we have in place for 2011.

I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can. In the meantime, my family and I would deeply appreciate respect for our privacy.

(Sources: Reuters and Business Insider.)

When will Apple sell its 10 billionth app? Next Friday morning (PST), according to my calculations.

Here’s how I worked it out. We took a screenshot of Apple’s app counter at about 8am on Jan 14th for our first report about the sweepstakes. It showed ~9,775,350,000.

At 8am this morning (Jan 16), it showed ~9,830,422,000. That’s a difference of about 55,072,000 apps in 48 hours, which means apps are being sold at a rate of ~1,147,333 apps an hour. (CNet says Apple is selling 1,000 apps every second, or 1,200,000 apps an hour).

The counter is approximately 170,000,000 apps short of 10 billion. At a rate of ~1,147,333 apps an hour, it would take 148 hours — or 6 days — to hit the 10 billion mark. Hence, early Friday morning.

Now, I’ve flunked math all through my life, and I am in no doubt I’m totally wrong (plus I’ve done a ton of rounding). So please help me out. When will the 10 billionth app be sold?

UPDATE: Reader Allan in the comments reckons it will be Saturday evening PST. Here’s his reasoning: “The counter is running at about four seconds per 1,000 apps (watching the counter), or 15,000 per minute. That’s 900,000 per hour, or 21,600,000 a day. When the counter hits 9.862 billion, there will be 138 million to go. At 21.6 million a day, it will take 551,232 seconds to go another 138 million, or 6.38 days, which is six days and a bit over nine hours. Set your alarms.”

It may be the New Year, but sadly, it appears that the mere turning-over of the calendar isn’t enough to put a stop to the slate of Foxconn suicides: last Friday, a female engineer leaped from her brother’s 10th floor flat to her death after being insulted by a superior, ordered to quit, then sent to a psychiatric hospital on Foxconn’s orders.

The suicide is the fifteenth so far, although the first Foxconn suicide in 2011.

Writing about mobile for a living, it can be hard to keep the names of all of the competing App Stores straight. Apple has the App Store, Google has the Android Marketplace, HP has the Palm App Catalog and Microsoft has the most unwieldy name yet in the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Microsoft seems to be as embarrassed by their app market’s name as we are, because they’re now trying to take Apple to court over Cupertino’s 2008 trademark on the the “App Store,” arguing that the term is too generic to be exclusively used by Apple.

Just like AT&T’s iPhone 4, the Verizon iPhone 4 will feature a Retina display, a front-facing camera, an Apple A4 chip, and HD video recording. Other than the CDMA chip in the Verizon device and the redesigned antenna, the hardware is exactly the same. So, how do you choose the best device for you?

We’ve created a handy comparison chart that will help you identify the difference between the two options. If you’re looking to purchase Apple’s latest iPhone, the chart below will help you choose the best carrier for your device based on price, data allowances, and additional features exclusive to each. Check it out after the break!

Early photos from Engadet’s hands-on shows a picture of the Verizon iPhone 4 sitting on top of an AT&T iPhone 4. They look the same until you notice that the mute button and the volume buttons on the Verizon iPhone 4 has been repositioned.

The mute button has been placed in a lower position than the original iPhone 4 on the left side of the iPhone frame. This has led to an offset in the position of the volume buttons also. This means that existing iPhone 4 cases may not work with the new Verizon iPhone 4 model.

Considering all the time and money invested in case design and manufacturing this has to be a set back to the existing case industry and it will lead to confusion in the retail space. However, since case vendors deal with many different phone form factors to begin with this may not be a big deal to them. I’ll be reaching out to a few of them for comment about this soon.

Is this the fall out from Antennagate? Although Apple representative, Tim Cook, claimed that the antenna changes were made to accommodate the CDMA network. I have to wonder if we’ll see the same changes made to the AT&T version of the iPhone 4 or the next generation iPhone 5.

[photo via Engadget]

[Updated to clarify additional changes in volume button position and to correct some typos.]

Apple has released an announcement, via e-mail, that enhancements to iWork.com Apple’s public beta online service for iWork ’09 users have been released.

This announcement came out of the blue regarding a service that has definitely been off the radar for a long time and in beta for longer than I can remember. It’s future isn’t clear considering the pace at which Apple is deploying features on it. Perhaps that will change this year with the rumored release of iWork ’11.

Let’s flash back a few months to October, when an iOS developer called Applidium ported the indispensable VLC video player to the App Store as a free download. It was a great day for iOS device owners who wanted a more robust way of watching videos across many different codecs, but one of the lead contributors to the VLC project, Rémi Denis-Courmont, decided to get pissy about it. Why? Because VLC was released under a GPL license, and he felt that Apple wrapping a port of VLC in App Store DRM ran counter to that license.

Well, score a victory for VideoLAN, I guess. Denis-Courmont has successfully had VLC pulled from the App Store in response to a claim that the app violated VideoLAN’s licensing agreement.

Apple’s long allowed customers to return or exchange purchases for up to 14 days, no questions asked, but that’s not to say they’ve ever wanted to encourage it: every time you exchange an Apple product, you’re charged a 10% restocking fee for an opened product, which has always seemed a tad miserly and anti-consumer for a company that otherwise so strongly focuses on the customer experience at their retail outlets.

Great news, then. It seems that Apple intends on ditching the 10% restocking fee come Tuesday. They don’t source their assertion, but they seem pretty confident.

It’s not a big deal — unless you’re the sort of person second-guessing a top-of-the-line Mac Pro who has previously had to eat a few bills — but it’s a nice change that should make switching to a Mac for the first time even more painless than it already is.

I had originally experimented with the Mac App Store on my desktop computer installing a number of free and paid for applications. Now, I’ve finally gotten around to trying to install the same applications onto my MacBook Air just to see if I could, but I already know that I can. The licensing model of the Mac App Store allows it.

Unfortunately tonight the Mac App Store isn’t working and according to AppleCare there are two suggested ways to work around this that you need to try when the Mac App Store gives you an ambiguous error message: @@errorNum@@.

I’ve been exploring the Mac App Store and discovered another little tidbit that might pose a problem for some frugally minded people – like me. I was looking for apps that I already owned that might be in the App Store and I found one called RapidWeaver.

I was about to purchase it in the Mac App Store until I found out it would cost more to do so. Why did it cost more? The answer is simple – sales taxes and that is what led me to halt one Mac App Store application purchase this evening.

In a move that might well have Fake Steve quaking in his boots, Apple has just struck down the Twitter account of one of the growing number of tech parodists poking fun at Cupertino and its products.

A few hours before popular rumor indicated it would launch, Apple pumped Mac OS X 10.6.6 down through Software Update … most notably including support for the new Mac App Store, which is launching with more than a thousand apps, including a very sexy new Twitter for Mac client.

iWork ’11 is, surprisingly, not debuting on the Mac App Store, but you can find Aperture, at least, as well as iLife ’11. Check out the press release after the jump, and check in later for more of our impressions.

What were the nigh-implausible terms that Apple agreed to in order to finally compel the Beatles to bring their catalog to iTunes? Did Steve Jobs personally agree to perform on “butt bongos” for Ringo Star’s & His All Star Band? Did Apple’s elite team of corporate espionagers steal back the sentimental leg Sir Paul once gave Heather Mills and return it to his bosom? Did they just liquor Yoko up with a cocktail comprised of a plum floating in perfume served in a man’s hat?

None of the above, sayeth Reuters. Instead, they say — surprise! — it all came down to just paying the Beatles gobs of money directly, instead of paying Sony, who controls most of the song catalog.

Apple’s new 11-inch Macbook Air with a 64Gb SSD drive is said to be very popular and flying off the shelves at Apple Stores everywhere and beyond. It represents  the smallest notebook computer that Apple makes and the default base model ships with the smallest system disk drive available in any Apple notebook. Therefore it makes sense for users to seek ways to optimize the way they use disk space on this tiny new notebook and it was the computer that inspired me to write this How-To — which actually applies to any Mac.

If you need to type a letter or create a presentation, the Apple iWork suite can help get the job done.  If you need to build a desk or fix the video projector, the Sears iWork toolkit might be a better choice.  Complete with 119 dedicated purpose hardware applets in a rugged portable utilities folder, this productivity suite requires no power and never needs updating.

It may not remain on sale for long, however, given Apple’s penchant for preserving their trademarks (and fonts).  A bargain now at only $39.99, who knows how much this may one day fetch on eBay?

[via Macenstein]

Skype’s official iOS client can now make video calls using an iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, or fourth-generation iPod touch. People using any of these devices can share real-time video between themselves and people using Skype clients on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. If you are using an iPad or third-generation iPod touch you can receive video from the other clients, but since you don’t have a camera you won’t be able to send video.

The new client supports video over Wi-Fi and 3G connections and with an installed base of clients greater than those currently using FaceTime it may give FaceTime a run for its money.

Skype version 3.0 for iOS offers the following improvements:

Apple’s deservedly racking up a lot of year-end awards as the New Year fast approaches — from the iPad being named Walt Mossberg’s gadget of the year to Steve Jobs garnering the Financial Times’ Person of the Year award — but you can end this one to the more ignominious trophy pile: CNN has just listed Antennagate as one of their ten biggest tech fails of 2010.

A new lawsuit filed Monday against Apple and a number of app developers including Pandora, The Weather Channel, Dictionary.com and — uh — Pimple Popper Lite is alleging collusion to create secret profiles of iPhone users, including location, and pass that data onto advertisers without users’ consent.

Eager to keep your nubile teenage daughter from using the new iPhone she got for Christmas as a sexting terminal? Cupertino’s just patented technology to keep her blossoming libido as virginal as the App Store.

It’s close to Christmas, but not so close that there’s no stupid to report, so here’s your Yuletide dose: French site La Vie and photohournalist Jordan Pouille are again claiming that Foxconn is Hell on Earth.

Not that you’d come to that conclusion yourself, as the photoessay itself consigns itself to bookending shots of the barred windows at Foxconn’s dormitories (to prevent suicides) with shots of workers going to work, performing coordinated dances, shopping at malls, listening to pop music and shopping for food. What an Auschwitz, right?

You might not agree with her position, but you’ve got to admit that this is one precocious kid: a thirteen year old iPhone owner is set to go into court next month to contest what she and her family claim was an unjust charge levied by Apple Korea to fix an iPhone 3G which they claimed had been water damaged.

Even if Apple thought Antennagate was overblown, let’s face it: their last attempt to put the iPhone’s antenna into the exposed edges of the device didn’t work out so well, prompting a PR catastrophe so bad that Apple was actually forced to hold an emergency press conference… something they never do.

That in and of itself suggests pretty strongly that Apple’s going to try something new for the iPhone antenna in future handsets, and if a new patent is any indication, that new approach to hiding the iPhone’s antenna may be by hiding it under the iconic Apple logo.

In defiance of Apple’s will, you can already stream AirPlay media to your Mac and Ubuntu… and now, if you’re on a Windows machine, the trifecta is complete.

Steve Jobs has a number one fan in the most powerful man in the world. In a recent interview, President Obama cited the Apple CEO as a laudable example of wealth that Americans should be proud to call one of their own.

In response to a reporter’s question, President Obama referred to Jobs as an example of the “American dream” and said his success should be celebrated, not derided.