Apple - page 11

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.

In the aftermath of todays iPhone 4S ordering frenzy Apple’s order status system has gone down. If you’ve ordered an iPhone 4S today rest assured that your order has been placed if you receive the order acknowledgement email from the Apple Store online.

There isn’t any need to check your order status after receiving that email until next week. Here are a few tips on how you can track your order later.

Best Buy is offering its customers the option to pre-order the iPhone 4S with delivery on October 14th. The email that I received points out some advantages to shopping at Best Buy. The most eye-catching is the Phone Trade-in program for a $300 Best Buy gift card. That isn’t bad, but the cash I’m getting from Gazelle for mine can be spent in more places.

I’ve taken what amounts to naps all night long and something woke me up again — maybe it was a little voice, but who knows. So I decided to get up and I tried my order again.

Bam! It worked this time since it seems that Apple and AT&T ordered more hamsters to keep their servers powered up and processing orders.  It will even be delivered on October 14th which tells me they still have a good first supply of the new iPhone 4S to ship. I’m not sure how long this will last since there are unconfirmed rumors about supply shortages, which will just drum up more sales.

The surprise was that I even got to keep my unlimited data plan, but I’m not to sure how valuable that is these days considering I still cannot tether with it unless I cheat some how. Maybe someday AT&T will adopt Sprint’s model — an unlimited data plan with an alleged 5GB cap on tethering. Anyhow I’m mumbling and still rubbing the sleep out of my eyes the most important thing is that the ordering system is back up.

So if you haven’t gotten your order placed yet it might not be to late so go go go!

A number of AT&T customers are reporting that it seems that the order processing via Apple’s online store is failing at the point where it tries to contact AT&T for information related to eligibility for iPhone 4S upgrades, orders, or other account information.

The real error message gradually changed as I attempted to work through the process of ordering an upgrade until it finally read as follows and it initially started at a two-minute timer. Now it clearly places the blame on AT&T at this point in the process.

Steve Jobs was no doubt a visionary and leader. People like this come along once in a lifetime, and to say that he changed the world woud be an understatement. In remembrance, I’ve put together this video. Thank you Steve.

Here’s a collection of tweeted reactions we found (when we could access Twitter — it’s intermittently crashing, probably due to a massive spike in traffic) to Steve Jobs’ death — including a Foursquare post from Woz. We’ll update the post with more as we find them

Tim Cook’s email to Apple employees regarding the passing of Steve Jobs is below:

Team,

I have some very sad news to share with all of you. Steve passed away earlier today.

Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.

We are planning a celebration of Steve’s extraordinary life for Apple employees that will take place soon. If you would like to share your thoughts, memories and condolences in the interim, you can simply email [email protected].

No words can adequately express our sadness at Steve’s death or our gratitude for the opportunity to work with him. We will honor his memory by dedicating ourselves to continuing the work he loved so much.

Tim

Apple has announced that Steve Jobs the co-founder of Apple, has died. He was 56 years old.  Apple made the announcement this afternoon and we’ll have more updates on this breaking news throughout the evening.

If you would like to share your thoughts, memories, and condolences, please email [email protected]

Today an AT&T customer service representative (CSR) lays the blame for the current upgrade pricing squarely on Apple, inc. According to the AT&T CSR we spoke to this morning upgrade eligibility dates and the pricing models are all dictated by Apple, Inc. and they cannot be changed.

If you’ve had an iPhone long enough you’ll recall a similar customer service fiasco a couple of years ago with the iPhone 3GS.  If you missed the last time early adopters weren’t able to upgrade and extend their contracts take a look at Apple and AT&T Royally Screw Loyal iPhone 3G Customers it wasn’t pretty.

If you stood in line last year to buy an iPhone 4, the year before that for an iPhone 3GS, etc., and count yourself a loyal Apple customer? Well, we’re all idiots, because Apple and AT&T just screwed us royally and now it looks like history is repeating itself.

Apple’s issued the call to all Mac OS X Lion Developers to submit their iCloud enabled OS X Lion apps today. Shortly after this first request went out Apple also asked iOS developers to submit their iOS 5 apps today.

This is it, folks, we’re here: the future. Remember Dave talking to HAL back in Kubrick’s lethargic masterpiece? It’s real.

Apple has posted an online tool that you can use to check your iPhone eligibility for an upgrade. Basically it tells you if you are allowed to buy an iPhone 4S at full retail price or at a subsidized price.

Get ready for a shock that will piss you off folks. A number of readers are reporting that so far no eligibility dates are being updated to make it easy to get that annual iPhone upgrade that we’ve all been used to in the past.

Hailed as a “kiosk killer” back when it was announced in June at WWDC, there are a few more details available now on the Newsstand app, available Oct. 12 with iOS5.

Despite Apple’s  squabbles with publishers who were complaining about selling subscriptions to digital versions on iTunes, many top titles are will be available including The New York Times, GQ, Wired, The New Yorker, Popular Science, National Geographic and Esquire.

This is a pretty nice spread of titles to start with from the dozens of global publishers who signed up for Newsstand — Hearst Corporation, Conde Nast, Disney Worldwide, Europe’s Sanoma Media and the New York Times Corp.

Confused by the whirlwind of Apple news from today’s Let’s Talk iPhone event? Don’t worry. We got a quick break down of all the new stuff Apple released today, including details on the iPhone 4S, Siri, iPod Nano and the highly anticipated Cards app.

iPhone 4S – Looks just like the iPhone 4 but the guts have been revamped for speed. The  new A5 chip (Same chip in the iPad 2), has a dual-core CPU making it 2x as fast at CPU tasks. Graphic performance on the iPhone 4S will be Up to 7x faster in the previous iPhone. 8 hours of 3G talk time, 14 hours of 2G talk time, 6 hours on 3G browsing. Also of note, the wireless system in the phone has been updated to include two separate antenna. iPhone 4S can intelligently switch between antennas to transmit and receive. This will lead to improved call quality and 2X faster download speeds (Apple was calling it 4G speeds, but we’ll save you the debate on what is and isn’t true 4G).

If you still haven’t heard the news, last week we launched our new “Deals” hub for Cult of Mac. We’re bringing Apple fans the best deals in cutting-edge software and apps. Right now we have the amazing email-app, Sparrow, on sale for $6. With only two days remaining on this deal, users need to act now before our discount is over. Also, we’re hosting a giveaway for five free copies of Sparrow. The contest ends today at 5PM, so sign up while you still can.

We’ll be offering all kinds of deals: free app codes; 72-hour sales on premium packages; and bundles of the best apps — all at savings of 30% to 90% off retail. Teaming up with StackSocial allows us to bring special expertise to Deals.CultofMac.com We will be using our knowledge of what Mac users want to create highly relevant offers designed to cater specifically to the demands of Cult of Mac’s core readership, the Apple enthusiast. We hope you keep checking out deal.cultofmac.com to join the experience.