Apple - page 10

Fragmentary and occasional reports suggest that Apple has been negotiating with China Mobile for three years without reaching a deal over official support for iPhones on the carrier’s network.

The sticking point: China Mobile wants a percentage of app revenue.

Many US pundits have written that Apple should bend over and do whatever China Mobile wants. Why? Because China Mobile is so ginormous that Apple could make a killing from all those new customers, even if it shared app revenue.

I think they’re flat-out wrong. Apple should hold firm, and refuse to make an exception for China Mobile. Here’s why.

Microsoft opened doors on its first retail store in Northern California just a few steps away from an Apple store.

Apple employees at the Westfield Valley Fair mall in Santa Clara must have had a strong sense of  déjà vu watching people camp outside waiting for the doors to open on Microsoft’s 4,000-square-foot shop today. The proximity is unlikely to go unnoticed, since the mall is about 7 miles away from Apple’s Cupertino headquarters.

“I feel bad for those guys in Apple,” said Blake Contreras, a 12-year-old from San Jose who stayed overnight so he could be first in line for the grand opening. “Microsoft’s having this big party and the Apple employees just have to sit there and watch.”

A high school in Bulgaria is reportedly going to dump Lenin as its namesake for Steve Jobs. And if it does, it probably won’t be the first school named after the Apple co-founder.

If reports are to be believed, a technical secondary school in Bulgaria would topple communist politician Vladimir Ilyich Lenin as its namesake in favor of the symbolic innovation and insight offered by Steve Jobs. (Or a famous scientist. The decision hasn’t been made, yet.)

Microsoft allegedly aborted a deal with a Swedish mobile blogger because he uses an iPhone.

Toni Johansson, at the helm of site winMobile.se, said that responding to an email with the “sent from my iPhone” signature cost him a funding deal from Microsoft. As a result, he’s closing the site.

A few years ago, everything was peaceful in the Valley of Silicon. The relationship between Apple and Google was cozy and friendly. The two rising and dominant superpowers pursued compatible, non-overlapping businesses, for the most part, and helped each other fight mutual competitors like Microsoft, Amazon and others. Google’s founders worshiped Steve Jobs. Eric Schmidt was on the Apple board.

But then Google recklessly chose to attack Apple head-on with Android.

The future of Apple’s most profitable businesses will run iOS, including iPods, iPhones, iPads and probably laptop and desktop systems of the future — not to mention TV. Google’s decision to compete head-on with Apple for multi-touch platforms ended the alliance.

Steve Jobs took it personally, and told biographer Walter Isaacson that he was “willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

But what did he mean by that?

A handy way to link up with friends? You bet. Evil? Quite possibly. Lame? That’s what a friend of mine thought. Find My Friends, Apple’s newest app, is a new location tool that can be used to great effect — or become one huge, scary headache.

Here’s an FAQ with all you need to know about navigating safely through the app.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6kZ89OzsPY

The iPhone 4S arrives in Italy today – along with another 22 countries – and the Italians are so into it, they are apparently standing in orderly lines to get it.*

Outside the Roma Est store in the country’s capital, however, Apple employees went on strike.

You can hear a collective sospiro of relief from Italian Apple fans today after a judge in Milan denied a request by Samsung to block sales of the iPhone 4S in a preliminary hearing.

At stake was the launch of the iPhone 4S on October 28, the device that some Italians have already been buying on eBay  just to say they’ve established intimate relations with Siri before anyone else.

Here’s a question for the nervous flyers: would you be reassured to know that an iPad was scheduling your plane’s upkeep?

Flightdocs, a Florida-based company that helps airlines keep track of the moving parts that keep the friendly skies safe, has just launched an iPad app.

David Kelley and Steve Jobs have a lot in common. Kelley, the designer of Apple’s original mouse, was diagnosed with throat cancer back in 2007.

In addition to working with Apple on the mouse project, Jobs introduced Kelley to his wife. When Kelley was in the hospital, Jobs came to visit his old friend. And just like any well-wisher, he didn’t come empty handed.

Instead of flowers or candy, Jobs brought Kelley, who went on to found seminal design firm IDEO, the very first iPhone as a “get well” present. There was just one small problem: Jobs couldn’t get the iPhone to work.

  I arrived at this party pretty late — I’m probably the junior member here at the Cult of Mac, as far as Apple adoption goes. I haven’t discussed it directly with the entire staff, but I’m almost certain everyone else here had been using Steve’s gadgets long before I started.

My wholesale defection from PC to Mac finally happened in 2005, when I walked out of the Stonestown Galleria Apple Store, beaming, with a 12-inch iBook G4, never to return to the world of Windows. But the journey began two years earlier, when I met and fell in love with my first Apple product.

Yes, it was an iPod.

Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor invoked Apple co-founder Steve Jobs as an example of fairness that the U.S. should emulate in the heated ongoing debate about income equality.

Not all of us on the Cult of Mac staff walk around with an Apple logo shaved into the back of our head. Actually, none of us do because we value our furs too much. However, there are a few hardcore Apple fans out there that represent the cult with pride. Example #1: As pictured above, this fan had not one, but two iconic Apple images shaved into his hair to commemorate Steve – the famous portrait, as well as the silhouette of Steve’s face inside the Apple logo.

The details are a little blurry, but it could be an interesting case so here goes: a photographer is suing Apple claiming that two apps in its iTunes store have ripped off 80 of her pics.

Shanti Deva Korpi filed a suit on Oct. 18 in Texas for copyright infringement. That much we know. In the complaint, Korpi is described as an “avid photographer and artist” who regularly posts to Flickr groups.

Teams in the National Football League are experimenting with iPads to substitute unwieldy playbooks, even though they are forced to turn them off before taking to the field because of NFL rules.

The Baltimore Ravens, for example, have sidelined their old school three-ring binders with iPads. Team organizers bought 120 of them to give players better access to a wealth of info – film sessions, nutrition guides and team calendars.

To honor Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Apple retail stores around the U.S. will close for around 90 minutes on Wednesday, October 19.

From 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. (PST) tomorrow, Apple’s iconic stores will be shuttered so employees can take part in a memorial service for Jobs. They’ll watching a live broadcast of the event being held at an outdoor amphitheater at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino. Apple employees outside the U.S. will be able to view a re-broadcast of the celebration.

Reuters reports that in preparation for the closure, stores across California aren’t accepting online bookings for Wednesday morning, either for tech-support or tutorials.

Via Reuters

The MacRumors forum has a cautionary little tale about an iPhone 4S which says that it helped locate a cheating wife.

Titled “Divorcing wife. Thanks iPhone 4s and Find My Friends,” the post claims that a husband loaded up his wife’s new phone with the “Find my Friends” app – without telling her about it. (Like any story that starts “so I was checking his/her text messages/emails/browser history,” you know this will end badly).

Although Apple has slashed international shipping times for many countries, eBay auctions may bring the iPhone 4S to early adopters before they can buy them in stores.

eBay currently lists a whopping 8,000 iPhone 4S for sale on its international circuit, in addition to individual country markets.

Some 22 European countries await the iPhone 4S launch on October 28, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying to sell them now via the online marketplace.

Apple’s made another good PR decision this week in regards to AppleCare+ and the policy about the requirement that you had to buy AppleCare+ at the same time as your iPhone 4S or iPhone 4 8GB model. If you are a long time Apple customer like I am you were surprised to find out that you had to buy the two together since this isn’t the norm for AppleCare. Usually you could add AppleCare to any Apple hardware product as long as it was still under the first year warranty.

The change caused a stir among Apple’s customers so the company changed the policy, but only until November 14, 2011.

Historic but now down-at-heel retailer Sears isn’t known for its cool stores, but the company is hoping a massive iPad and iPod deployment will change that.

Sears Holdings is equipping 450 stores nationwide with Apple’s sleek devices to train sales people and boost productivity by allowing them to check inventory, order products online and access product information before customers get frustrated and go somewhere else.

Here is a quick run through of what you can expect when you start the process of moving from MobileMe to iCloud.

This step-by-step process transitions your email, calendars, contacts and bookmarks to iCloud.

Existing MobileMe customers will be happy to find out that Apple is giving them access to the 20GB iCloud storage plan until June 30, 2012. The total allotted storage comes to 25GB, but the plethora of storage plans I expected to appear didn’t. Instead Apple is only offering three storage plans.

A few magazines have begun to populate Apple’s Newsstand app on the eve of the October 12th release of iOS 5. Right now the only two magazines that I could add to Newsstand were Wired and Popular Science. They only showed up on an iPad I wasn’t able to find anything for the iPhone.

Although the iPhone 4S just went on sale this past Friday the first wave of iPhone 4S shipments from China have started with a delivery date of October 14th. The carrier in my case is UPS.

I received my shipping notification this morning and other reports are cropping up about customers receiving their shipping notices from Carriers like Sprint and AT&T. I haven’t heard if Verizon models have shipped yet from either Apple or any of the carriers.

Have you received your shipping notification? Let us know if your iPhone 4S has shipped, from where and what the estimated delivery date is in the comments.

This might be a record folks since iPhone 4S ship times have hit the one to two-week waiting period in less than 24 hours after going on sale October 7th. As you can see from the picture above all models from all three carriers have sold out for pre-order launch day delivery.

If you want an iPhone 4S of any type at this point your only option, if you want one on launch day October 14th, is to stand in line at your local Apple Store or other iPhone retailer. However, if history repeats itself we all know that the best place to find stock will be at the local Apple Stores.

It looks like Apple has yet another iPhone hit on their hands and I’m anxious to see what happens next year when LTE service becomes more widely available.