Apple - page 36

Apple’s January 27th surprise product announcement will see the introduction of the tablet, the iPhone OS 4.0 and an associated Software Development Kit for programmers, the French site Mac4Ever reports.

According to the Mac4Ever (Google translation), the SDK will include a tablet “simulator” to help developers port their iPhone/iPt apps to the tablet’s larger screen.

Several of our sources give us two pieces of information concerning the famous Apple tablet: In late January, in addition to its tablet, Cupertino should have a beta of iPhone OS 4, accompanied by an SDK. Our informants also tell us of a “simulator” specifically adapted for the tablet. Evidently, the major novelty of the SDK therefore concerns the interface, making it easier for developers to adapt to different screen resolutions. The new iPhone could also benefit from a higher pixel density.

Mac4Ever notes that the information should be taken with a grain of salt. But the site recently nailed details of Apple’s new iMac models and Mighty Mouse weeks before they were released.

Mac4Ever also recently claimed that the tablet will be “far different” than most internet mockups, a tantalizing tidbit bolstered by a NYT report that we will be “very surprised how you interact with the new tablet.”

Confirming the rumors, Apple will make a “major” product announcement on Wednesday Jan. 27, reports John Paczkowski of All Things Digital website.

Paczkowski says “it’s going to be a big deal.”

Sources in a position to know tell me Apple (AAPL) is indeed planning a media event later this month at which it will announce a major new product. The gathering is to be held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, a space Apple often uses for media events like these. According to other sources, it will occur on Wednesday Jan. 27, not Tuesday Jan. 26, as had been rumored.

No definitive word on what that product is, but I think we all have a pretty good idea of what to expect.”

As previously noted, the Yerba Buena gardens has no events booked for Jan 25, 26 or 27. Holding a product announcement on a Wednesday is unusual for Apple. The company usually prefers Tuesdays for announcements.

Major Apple Product Announcement Set for Weds. Jan. 27.

With more and more consumers consumers cleaving themselves from the fetid macro-organism of biomassed holiday shopping flesh and doing all of their Christmas shopping online, online customers satisfaction polls are more important than ever. No surprise, though, at the latest polls, courtesy of ForeSee Results: Apple’s simple, pleasant and spartan store did well in consumer’s lists of the best online shopping experience of 2009.

Surveying more than 10,000 visitors to the top forty retail web sites, Apple ranked 82% in customer satisfaction, which is four percentage points higher than their 2008 ranking. Following in Apple’s wake was Newegg.com (8!5), TigerDirect.com (80%), Dell.com (78%), HP (79%) and Circuit City (73%).

That’s not to say that Apple totally destroyed the competition, though. Amazon.com, which is still about the best online shopping experience around, rubbed Apple’s nose in its mess with an astonishing 87% customer satisfaction rating. The reliably stalwart Netflx also did well at 86%, although not being a home television shopper myself, I’m a bit mystified by QVC.com’s impressive 83% rating.

[via ComputerWorld]

Having wrapped up the fairly well-thought-out and fairly grounded predictions for 2010, we thought it would be a good idea to try to take a look further in to the future of Apple. Now, before you proceed, you should be aware that looking beyond a one-year outlook is notoriously difficult. After all, at this point 10 years ago, Apple was more than a year away from shipping iTunes software, let alone making iPods and disrupting the mobile phone industry. So you should be aware that I refuse to stand by any of these five predictions over the long haul and expect to be wrong. With that, let’s take a look into the far future. All the way past the year 2000.

In the Year 2012, Apple Will Buy Both Yahoo! and TBWA/Chiat Day, Simultaneous Entering Both the Internet Services and Ad Industries at the Same Time. I actually don’t think this one’s insane. Yahoo! continues to struggle against Google, the ad industry is in need of grounds-up reinvention, and Apple has more cash on hand than pretty much anyone else. At this point, Steve Jobs is running out of challenges in both Apple’s existing and immediately adjacent businesses. To cement his reputation as the best CEO of the next decade, he should create a juggernaut capable of challenging Google.

Apple has a ridiculously good run over the past ten years. But in true Apple fashion, I’m not here to rest on the laurels of the past but to look into the future. So sit back, relax, and take a daring look all the way into the year 2010. Here are the five things that Apple must do to thrive in 2010.

Many — if not most — people await the future, some with great anticipation, others with more anxiety. But designers are a breed apart. Designers create the future today.

Yanko Design’s brilliant 2009 design retrospective showcases the web magazine’s passion for modern industrial design and original ideas. The feature highlights a number of talented, undiscovered designers, a few of whom chose Apple products and other computer technology ideas as jumping off points for products we’d not be surprised to see in production one day soon.

Check out our gallery selection of Yanko Design’s best thought provoking tech and transportation ideas for 2009, along with a couple creepy borg-like innovations we’d just as soon see remain on the drawing board.

When it rains, it pours — and it’s pouring tablet rumors. The latest is from the NY Times, which says Steve Jobs is “extremely happy” with the upcoming tablet, and that it will have a “surprising” UI.

In a report that’s basically a rehash of tablet rumors, the Times adds a couple of tantalizing morsels.

According to the Times, a senior Apple employee said: “I can’t really say anything, but, let’s just say Steve is extremely happy with the new tablet.”

And another recently-departed Apple staffer added: “You will be very surprised how you interact with the new tablet.”

What this surprising UI is, the Times doesn’t say, unfortunately. It doesn’t even hazard a guess. Gestures? The iPhone’s already there. Voice? Same — and it doesn’t even work that well. Handwriting recognition? Remember the Newton.

What else is there? A little rubbery red button like an old ThinkPad? A virtual scroll wheel?

Link.

“Apple has something big up its sleeve for next month,” says the venerable Financial Times of London.

The company has rented a stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco for several days in late January, according to people familiar with the plans.

Apple is expected to use the venue to make a major product announcement on Tuesday, January 26th.

The prospect of a three-day event is tantalizing, but why would Apple need three days to announce a new product — like the long-rumored the tablet, say? My guess is the company needs a day to set up and another to break down. The 26th is a Tuesday: Apple’s favorite day for new product announcements.

Note, neither Apple nor YBCA would comment to the FT, but the center’s online calendar says the venue is free on January 25, 26 and 27. IE. there are no artsy events scheduled for those three days on a calendar that is otherwise full.

Having pulled out of Macworld, these days the YBCA stage is Apple’s favorite venue for product announcements. With CES in January, and the Apple-less Macworld in February, a January 26 event would be sandwiched right between.

The rumor comes on the back of reports that Apple is wooing TV studios for a new online TV service, which conjures the Apple TV to mind, but perhaps a new TV service would be tablet-centric? In addition,  the company is reportedly talking to magazine publishers about repurposing content for the upcoming tablet. Earlier this year, iLounge predicted the tablet would be announced in mid-January with a May or June sell date to build iPhone-like hype.

Via 9to5Mac.

At this point, it’s not really surprising that the iPhone 3Gs’ graphics are capable of pumping out the polygons needed to bring a sophisticated 3D engine to the handset, but it’s still wonderful to watch Epic Games’ Mark Rein play Unreal Tournament deathmatch on his third generation iPod Touch. You can see a video of it in action after the jump.

If you’re looking for that last minute gift, an Apple Store is a fine destination. But if, like my hirsute Uncle Bob, your wrapping skills max out at wadding a clump of disintegrating newspaper around your gift and entombing it in an impenetrable, inch-thick layer of duct tape upon which you’ve written your season’s greeting in bold, permanent marker, the Apple Store might also have you covered: select Apple Stores are now offering free wrapping.

The way Apple is handling wrapping is smart. Instead of buying your iPod or MacBook Pro and then thrusting it at some beleaguered wrapper temp, already light-headed from papercut induced blood loss, Apple has set up an express line which sells exclusively pre-wrapped gifts.

Good news for last-minute shoppers via Dealnews: The Apple Store offers free shipping via next-day delivery with no minimum purchase required. That’s Apple’s best shipping discount this year. Sales tax is added where applicable. Customized items and gift cards are excluded. Orders of in-stock, non-custom configuration items placed by 1 pm ET on December 23 will arrive in time for Christmas.

So what if Time magazine passed him over for person of the year:  Steve Jobs beat out a couple thousand CEOs around the globe to be named the best-performing CEO by Harvard Business Review.

Researchers looked at what execs brought to the table and to shareholders from 1,999 publicly-held companies worldwide during the entire time of their tenure.

Though they admit “it may come as no shock that Steve Jobs of Apple tops the list,”  it does seem a little surprising that Bill Gates is absent. No shocker: Gates is out of the running because the research only considered execs who took the helm from 1997 on.

Even without Microsoft, tech execs took the lion’s share of the top 10, including Yun Jong-Yong at Samsung Electronics (ranked 2), John T. Chambers, Cisco Systems (ranked 4), Jeff Bezos from Amazon (7),  Margaret C. Whitman eBay (8) and Eric E. Schmidt Google (9).

So what put Jobs ahead of the pack?

Mark your calendars. It looks like we have a date for next year’s World Wide Developer’s Conference.

Thanks to an update to the Moscone Center’s summer schedule, it now looks like this year’s WWDC will be held from Monday, June 28th, 2010 to Friday, July 2nd, 2010. There’s no official confirmation just yet, but the Moscone Center has blocked off those dates for a “Corporate Event.”

That can really only be one thing. It overlaps nicely with the third anniversary of the iPhone’s release… and, not so coincidentally, the presumed lapse of AT&T’s exclusivity deal. Even if Apple doesn’t reveal a new iPhone model at WWDC this year (and they will, if only to bump screen resolution to be competitive with the likes of HTC Droid and the Nexus One Android smartphones), I imagine we will all be happy to hear the announcement of new carrier choices. God knows we need the option.

[via Macrumors]

Fanboys we. Ever since Paramount released the first official Iron Man 2 trailer, we’ve been looking for a reason to post a link to it. After all, Robert Downey Jr’s sublime cockiness and his high regard for the fusion between technology and design is pansexual geek porn for all.

Still, the grim-knuckled assertion that Tony Stark uses a Mac seems like a tenuous reason at best to direct readers of an Apple blog to watch Scarlett Johannson sultrily pose in a leather cat suit, or a shirtless Mickey Rourke to flail a couple of electric whips about.

Luckily, though, Apple accompanies the roll-out of the new Iron Man 2 trailer with a refresh of the Apple trailers page design, which brings it more in line with the way the iTunes Store now displays information. It’s an incremental roll-out, and the only other trailer to get the treatment so far is Shrek Forever After… but I don’t think that’s any reason to link you to a fourth installment of sassy donkeys and fairy tale fart jokes.

Anyway, enjoy the trailer, comforted by the fact that you are edifying yourself in the constantly evolving world of Apple interface design. Then join me in the comments to talk about all the robot smashing going on: is it just me, or does this trailer just sort of run out of steam halfway through?

If 80 percent of success in life is showing up, the Apple board of directors have it made.

Reuters released a list of the best-paid US corporate boards, Apple ranks number three.  In 2008, the seven-member board of directors pulled $633,000 each for attending five board meetings.

That works out to $127,000 per meeting for board members to sit in a conference room and — according to some, do nothing but graze on the pastries provided — while Steve Jobs calls the shots from the head of the table.

That’s the median price of a house in Greer, South Carolina or Pensacola, Florida. (Sure, neither places are likely to see Apple board member Al Gore plunk down his meeting money on a property, but just to give it a little context.)

The top two spots are held by Nabors, a global oil and drilling company, and Intuitive Surgical Ltd.  a robotic health care equipment maker that paid its seven non-employee directors an average of $697,000 last year or about $139,000 per meeting.

Reuters notes that both Shares of both Intuitive Surgical and Apple have more than doubled in 2009. Both companies pay directors largely with stock options, which have become especially valuable in light of their recent performance.
A spokeswoman for Apple declined to comment.

Via Reuters

The App Store approval process might be editorially cryptic, but it is, at least, pretty straightforward: you submit your app to Apple, wait a few weeks, and then get back your yea or nay. Apparently, though, this timely process does not accurately reflect the pressing urgency of millions of translucent-skinned and lanugo-haired Scandinavians, waiting for Apple to approve SVT Play, an app that would allow them to stream Swedish public television to their iPhones and iPod Touches.

Instead, the Swedes have stormed the Apple campus at One Infinite Loop and are threatening to camp out until Steve Jobs personally approves their app.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihXtbB-4GWw&feature=player_embedded#

Remember Lily Sussman, the 21-year-old American tourist whose MacBook was shot up by Israeli security?

TheDailyNewsEgypt interviewed Sussman, who explains what happened. She also gives some different views of the destroyed machine. Look what a rifle round does to a MacBook.

In January of 2009, I spent almost $2,500 on a top of the line, 15-inch unibody MacBook Pro, glutted with as much RAM and hard drive space as its belly could handle. Less than four months later, it was stolen.

Oh, it was my own fault. The whole tale involves a midnight rendezvous with a bartender I had my eye on at the time. She had the face of Natalie Portman, the eyebrows of Roger Moore and the constitution of Oliver Reed; in her presence, one drink became two, and two became twelve, and when we stumbled back to my apartment, I somehow forgot my laptop bag back at the bar… but only for five minutes! Alas, five minutes was too late, and by the time I’d rushed back, it was gone.

Since then, I’ve spent a good amount of time upbraiding myself about the loss. What has always bugged me most about the theft was that I always knew that there were countless programs available (such as Undercover) that would help you track down your Mac if it was stolen. I knew about these programs. I wrote about them, even. But I never once installed one. I just couldn’t imagine the scenario where I would have my laptop stolen. Dumb.

The news feeds bring me further fodder for my self-incrimination this morning. Over at TUAW, they are reporting that one of their readers. Jim, managed to safely recover his stolen Macbook using the MobileMe’s service, Back to My Mac, to take pictures of the perps and gather information about them gleaned from watching them surf the web.

It took Jim many months to get his laptop back: it had changed hands at least five times since it was stolen, at least once as payment in a drug deal. But when he got it back, it was in surprisingly good nick… with most of his files still intact on the disk.

That’s great news for Jim, but as another object lesson in my own amazing stupidity, it’s like a punch to the gut. Guess who also didn’t have a MobileMe account when his MacBook Pro was stolen? Yup. What a maroon.

Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz wouldn’t recognize an understated argument if it politely coughed, tapped him on the shoulder, and then promptly blew his face off with a bazooka, so it’s no surprise that his latest post about the so-called “Apple Gestapo” Godwin’s itself from the start. It’s a hysterical and stupid overreaction to the practices Cupertino employs to maintain secrecy about upcoming products.

But even so, it’s worth a gander, because while Diaz’s interpretations of Apple’s procedures are utterly facile, it’s still a rare and unique look at exactly how Apple manages to keep some of the most widely anticipated products in the consumer electronic market quiet, year after year.

Just a week after Apple quietly upgraded their Mac Pro line to use 3.33Ghz quad-core Xeon CPUs comes our first good look at the processor that will likely drive the next significant refresh of the Mac Pro: the Intel Core i7-980x Processor. Naturally, the ‘x’ stands for ‘eXtreme.’

Hot off the 32nm production lines of Intel’s manufacturing factories, the Intel Core i7-980x shifts away from merely improving frequency towards more tangible performance gains. Although the new chips max out at 3.33GHz, each packs in an astonishing six cores and twelve threads per chip, meaning that a dual processor Mac Pro might boast twelve physical and twenty four logical cores, which would represent a huge performance bump to the video professionals who are Apple’s most expensive desktop’s primary customers.

Additionally, each Core i7-980x CPU boasts a 12MB Intel Smart Cache, hyperthreading support and an integrated memory controller, while supporting DDR1066MHz memory and sucking up 130 watts of power.

In short, despite Apple’s last stealthy refresh of the Mac Pro, you should hold off on buying a Mac Pro if you can until the Core i7-980x is released commercially in February or March. Final Cut Pro will thank you.

With all the discussion of the New York Times’s bizarre decision to run a column that states as received wisdom that the iPhone’s poor network performance in the United States is Apple’s fault and not AT&T’s, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the track record of reporter Randall Stross with regard to Steve Jobs.

So I visited his website, and I remembered where I’d seen his name — on the cover of a book I read in high school that made a tech prognosis so spectacularly wrong that it’s occasionally used as a case study against proclaiming whether a particular technology is a winner or loser. That book? Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing. And its central premise was that Steve would never produce another tech industry hit. Seriously.

A woman traveling to Israel is questioned by security officers who are suspicious of her bag. So they take it out the back and shoot it, killing her MacBook. Amazingly, the hard drive survived.

“The Israeli security’s decision to shoot my laptop was nonsensical on multiple levels – unprovoked, unduly aggressive, a waste of government funds, etc.” the woman, Lilly Sussman, wrote on her blog.

Someone in the comments added: “These guys shoot every day at unarmed people, even children. Why so much surprise about a simple laptop?”

Link.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHRSDWZC_m4

Is this the fabled Apple Tablet so spoken about on the collected gadget rumor sites of the Internet in that hushed whisper usually reserved for mythological artifacts of the gods like Achilles’ Spear or Hercules\ Cod Piece?

Originally posted by French site Nowhereelse.fr, the video purports to show a prototype of the Apple Tablet browsing through an Ikea catalog through a touchscreen interface effortlessly infused with the usual Apple flourishes: multitouch, cover flow and shake to shuffle.

It’s a gorgeous looking interface… but note the bluish tinges around the operator’s swiping, pinching and swishing digits: that’s blue screen technology, my friends.

In other words, to the question “Is this the Apple Tablet?” we must sadly answer: “No, it’s jolly well not.” Still, I have to say, it gives me hope: I’ve long thought of the Apple Tablet in terms of a colossal, book-sized iPhone, which is not a product I’ve ever particularly wanted. If this counterfeit video shows anything, it’s that the potential of the Apple Tablet is far, far greater than the name might first imply.

[via TUAW]

Apple’s patents only rarely give us the first look at new products in Cupertino’s pipeline, but they can still be wholesome brain fodder to chew over, as they at least give us a glimpse at the current problems the company is trying to solve. Let’s mull over, then, Apple’s two latest patents, each as different from each other as it can be.

The first patent Apple has applied for is a “technology” that would allow their Geniuses to know when a device has been “compromised” by being opened. It’s not much of a technology: it’s just a little sticker affixed between an electronics component and the chassis’ removable lid. Think of it like Apple’s own iteration of that venerable classic of anatomic technology, the hymen: Open your laptop or iPhone and the sticker will tear in half, thus letting any future delvers know that your device has been sullied.

Clearly, the aim here is to give Apple an excuse to void warranties on modified machines, which is understandable if not entirely welcome.

Whatever reality-bending substances are being imbibed, chewed or smoked at UPS, sign me up: they tagged Adam Jackson’s iMac Core i7 as a fruit.

And now his work tool is awaiting inspection by the FDA, after UPS did the smart thing by “submitting proper documentation” for what it believed was a 40-pound shipment of possibly forbidden fruit from China.

Sounds like a funny fluke, but there’s more than one burnt bulb at UPS processing centers — MG Siegler at Techcrunch had the same problem just last week.

Note to UPS: the words “apple” “mac” and “core” do NOT necessarily mean foodstuffs.

Or are they just PC people messing with us?

UPDATE: After viewing your comments about other incidents, we asked for a comment. Here’s what UPS had to say about it.