Apple - page 41

The number of apps downloaded from the App Store has passed a cool 2 billion, Apple said on Monday.

That’s means the App Store is growing like a weed. In late April, Apple announced the App Store hit one billion downloads, and 1.5 billion three months later in July — on the store’s first birthday.

The latest 500,000,000 mark took just two-and-a-half months to hit. That means about 6 million apps are being downloaded EVERY DAY. That’s a pretty mind-boggling number.

In addition, the number of apps is now 85,000 from 125,000 developers, Apple’s press release said.

Apple’s full press release after the jump:

Here’s some pictures of the rare Apple I that will be up for auction on eBay early next week. Hit the jump for more.

As reported earlier, the historic machine will be up for auction shortly, likely next week. The owner, Monroe Postman, hasn’t announced the date of the auction.

Postman picked up the Apple I at an estate sale around 1980. He doesn’t remember the details, including how much he paid.

At the giant Tokyo Game Show, everyone’s freaking out about Apple, the New York Times reports.

Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft are more worried about Apple and it’s new iPhone/iPod platform than the worst recession in decades, the Times says.

Apple’s recent foray into video games — with the iPhone, the iPod Touch and its ever-expanding online App Store — is causing as much hand-wringing among old industry players as the global economic slump, which threatens to take the steam out of year-end shopping for the second consecutive year.

The industry sees a big shift to casual gaming on cellphones and other handhelds, rather than expensive, overpowered consoles. Consumers are buying $0.99c games, rather than dropping $50 on big, blockbuster titles with multimillion dollar budgets and massive development teams. Of the 758 games debuted at the show, 168 are for cellphone platforms, the most ever.

Some game developers say Apple’s App Store is the biggest recent breakthrough in gaming, and the industry is better off trying to find new business models rather than new consoles.

“We are going to move away from a market where it’s the hardware that fights against each other,” one developer said during a presentation. “We are going to be moving to an era when different software stores fight against each other.”

It’s always a little dicey doing a “Best of” Apple t-shirts post because the really, truly best Apple t-shirts have always been the limited edition, short-run t-shirts that Apple prints up for employees and other associates, the ones Guy Kawasaki wrote about in his 1990 book, “The Macintosh Way.” In it he draws a flow chart depicting Apple’s process for making great products and the first step is: Order t-shirt.

In fact, there’s a whole book on the subject, by Gordon Thygeson – “Apple T-Shirts: A Yearbook of History at Apple Computer” – with 1000s of pictures of such shirts from over the years.

However, for those of us not lucky enough to get our bods into one of these rare and memorable pieces of Apple attire, there are a number of outlets in the US and the UK (and probably elsewhere as well) where you can pick up some cool threads and show the world where your allegiances lie.

Hit the jump for a gallery of 10 we think are worth checking out.

Here’s a rumor we can get behind — the next-gen iMac will get quad-core processors and a SD-Card slot, according the French website Mac4Ever.

New iMacs are just around the corner, according to reports, and may be released in a matter of weeks. While some recent rumors suggest the machine may get a Blu-Ray drive, a SD Card reader seems much likelier, especially as card readers are now included in the 13″ and 15″ MacBook Pros.

The iMac is also rumored to get new processors, but reports are all over the place. Mac4Ever says the iMac will get quad-core chips, and possibly Xeon processors, while MacRumors says the iMac will stay with dual-core chips.

Mac4Ever also predicts a mouse with a surface that is 100% touch-enabled, allowing for advanced configuration options. There’s alos an aluminum remote in Apple’s pipeline, which sounds nice and classy.

Meanwhile, AppleInsider is saying the entry-level MacBook may also get a revamp shortly. The MacBook may split into a couple of sub-$1,000 models, AI says, thanks to the crummy economy, and may also be available in weeks.

Via MacRumors.

For a company with a hippie-influenced CEO famous for a six month sojourn in India in the early 1970s and widely reported to have had major personal revelations after dropping acid, Apple hasn’t had much of an environmental image over the years. Despite Al Gore’s presence on the company board, Apple didn’t perform free computer recycling until April 2006, far later than Dell and HP.

Apple’s reluctant environmental attitude has been changing, however. Steve Jobs personally made it clear in May 2007 that he intended to change all of that in a letter to the public that temporarily appeased Greenpeace. And now, the company is the first in the industry to provide full disclosure of its carbon footprint.

Anyone can look behind the curtain at Apple.com/environment. It’s pretty amazing. The first thing that jumps out at you is that Apple claims that it is responsible for pumping 10.2 million tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere every year. That exceeds HP’s 8.4 million tons and dwarfs Dell’s 471,000. That would be horrifying, were it not for the fact that both HP and Dell specifically exclude the carbon impact of people using their products (and some manufacturing impact), which Apple says is 53 percent of its total.

The other major contributor, not surprisingly, is manufacturing, 38 percent of the footprint. I was personally surprised to see that transportation was only 5 percent of Apple’s total, given how many online sales it has for hardware and the fact that all of its product are manufactured in Asia. I imagine this figure would be significantly higher if Apple hadn’t so dramatically reduced the size of its packaging (and products) over the last several years.

All in all, I love this move. It’s about time Apple threw down the gauntlet and tried to lead its industry to places its competitors are uncomfortable going.

Via BusinessWeek

A redesigned iMac with a slimmer chassis, a lower price tag and possibly Blu-Ray is coming in the next few weeks, says AppleInsider.

Citing two sources, the new iMac is already rolling off production lines in Taiwan, says the website. It could be launched as early as next week, though early- to mid-October is likelier.

The new machine will likely be cheaper and sport a thinner industrial design, along the lines of Apple’s latest LED backlit Cinema Displays. It may also have Blu-Ray, AppleInsider suggests, though not very strongly.

“People familiar with Apple’s thinking have suggested in recent months one of these moves could see the company finally embrace Blu-ray — a technology once derided by Chief Executive Steve Jobs as a “bag of hurt” from a licensing perspective.”

CoM is betting against Blu-Ray. The format isn’t yet ready for prime time on computers. Until software and other media ships on Blu-Ray, it’s a format that makes sense only for movies on home theater systems.

If Apple does add Blu-Ray, it’s likely to be at a premium, AppleInsider says, suggesting Blu-Ray may be available as an option, which sounds reasonable. Customers wanting a Blu-Ray drive can pay extra for it.

Earlier today, Gizmodo posted a pair of pictures of what are presumed to be the fruits of Microsoft’s Project Pink — long-rumored to be the so-called ZunePhone. The merits of the designs have already been debated endlessly online (most people seem to like the one above, called “True” “Pure” and are puzzled about the one below, “Turtle”). For what it’s worth, they seem perfectly fine to me and could even make a pretty big splash if they come to Verizon, have a great OS, a decent app library, and Xbox-linked games; as I’ve said before, it’s not about the product, it’s about the platform and the network.

But since this is a Mac blog, I’m not going to spend a long time analyzing what Project Pink might or might not mean. I’m more interested in how this major leak, likely months before official announcement or release, shows just how difficult it is to handle the innovation thing the way Apple does: in secret, on time, and with big impact.

Consider what we knew about the iPhone prior to its release: That Apple would make a phone. Maybe. That’s it. Honestly, I wasn’t sure there actually was an iPhone until Steve announced it at MacWorld. We’d seen a million renderings from designers, none of which turned out to be even close to what Apple released. Compare that to what we knew about the Google G1: EVERYTHING. With the Pink phones, we now know virtually everything about the industrial design and the hardware, we know the OS, and we have a sense of the UI.

This doesn’t happen because Apple’s competitors are incompetent — far from it. It’s just the fact that in the media environment we have today, it’s almost impossible to keep secret anything that people want to know about. One slip-up by any of thousands of people can send your top-secret project out to the world. We don’t know the source of the Pink leak — it could literally be anyone — a Microsoftie, a Sharp employee, someone at the ODM, someone at the ad agency, someone at the PR agency, or even an embargoed journalist gone rogue. It’s incredibly hard to trace, and even harder to prevent from happening in the first place.

And this is why Apple’s ability to create, sustain, and often exceed hype is such a remarkable thing. There have been leaks at times, but nothing this big, ever. Instead, Apple manages to stoke the rumor fires just enough that we all have some notion of what it might make next — we’re all convinced that Apple’s making a tablet — but none of us have any idea of what the actual thing will be. We don’t even know which operating system such a tablet will run.

Maintaining that mystique requires incredible loyalty from your employees, extreme paranoia, and even an unwillingness to let any of your partners touch or see the final devices. It’s obviously so hard that Apple doesn’t even try to do it for incremental or non-surprising products, which could explain how all those case manufacturers leaked the nano with the video camera all those weeks ago.

It’s the stumbles of Apple’s competitors that remind me just how special Steve Jobs and team are when they’re at the top of their game. The reason the entire tech media corps went insane for the iPhone was that it was a great product and a huge surprise at once.

And in the connected age, that’s just as hard as a solid multitouch implementation.

Changes to accounting rules will allow Apple to record revenue from sales of the iPhone and Apple TV at the time of sale, rather than spreading it over 24 months, Dow Jones newswire is reporting.

Financial experts predict the rule change will add significant revenue to Apple’s quarterly results, and haveupped their stock targets accordingly. CNBC’s Jim Cramer, for example, predicts Apple’s stock will hit $264 a share, in part because of the rule change (it’s trading at about $188).

Apple currently spreads revenue from iPhone and Apple TV sales over two years, like a subscription.  As a result, blockbuster sales quarters for the iPhone — like this summer’s release of the iPhone 3GS — aren’t reflected in the company’s quarterly revenue statements.

Apple uses subscription accounting for the iPhone and Apple TV because it allows the company to update the devices with new software without charging customers for new features. Apple does not do this for its iPods, which is why customers are charged nominal fees for software upgrades.

Apple lobbied the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) for a change in the accounting rules. The changes were widely expected.

Apple’s shares are up about 2 percent in midday Wednesday trading.

In an embarrassing turn of events, Palm has gotten the smackdown from a USB industry group over a software hack that enables Palm’s Pre smartphone to sync with iTunes.

When Palm released the Pre earlier this year, the company cleverly spoofed Apple’s unique USB identifier to fool iTunes into thinking the Pre was an Apple device, allowing it to sync songs and playlists. It was a sneaky but daring move for Palm, ensuring the Pre was compatible with the market-leading music software.

But Apple repeatedly disabled the hack with a series of iTunes updates, so Palm sent a letter to the USB Implementers Forum, an industry group that oversees the USB standard, claiming Apple is “hampering competition.”

But in a response to Apple and Palm on Tuesday, the group sided with Apple, saying Palm’s spoofing of Apple’s ID likely violates USB-IF policy.

“Under the Policy, Palm may only use the single Vendor ID issued to Palm for Palm’s usage,” “the group said in a letter obtained by Digital Daily.

“Usage of any other company’s Vendor ID is specifically precluded. Palm’s expressed intent to use Apple’s VID appears to violate the attached policy,” the letter continued.

Embarrassing. Clearly not the response Palm was hoping for.

The USB Forum asked Palm to clarify its position and respond within seven days. Palm told Digital Daily it is reviewing the Forum’s letter and will “respond as appropriate.”

Un-fuckin-believable. Like Apple, Microsoft is also secretly developing a multitouch tablet, according to this report on Gizmodo.

But where Apple’s device will be designed for your fingers, Microsoft’s includes a pen! WTF? Is this the nineties? Has Microsoft learned nothing from the iPhone at all?

Yeah, Apple’s tablet will also support a pen. For detailed graphics work, and maybe even text input, a pen will work better than your fingers, but the primary input device?

Says Giz:

“The Courier user experience presented here is almost the exact opposite of what everyone expects the Apple tablet to be, a kung fu eagle claw to Apple’s tiger style. It’s complex: Two screens, a mashup of a pen-dominated interface with several types of multitouch finger gestures, and multiple graphically complex themes, modes and applications.”

Microsoft’s tablet is actually a dual-screen booklet, very much like the OLPC XO-2 design concept that made the rounds last year (and I personally was hoping would be Apple’s secret “Brick project).

Codenamed Courier, it has two multitouch 7-inch screens joined by a central hinge, which has a single iPhone-like “Home” button. It’s a late prototype, Giz says, and may have nifty hardware features like inductive pad charging.

But if you have to use a pen to control it, it’s fucked.

Apple has shot three new TV ads for the iPhone: Dine in Dine Out, Pass Test Pass Time, and Nature Lovers.

Above is the Nature ad, the other two ads are after the jump.

Staff at an Apple retail store in Seattle are planning a walkout over “abusive” management, the first labor dispute to hit the company’s super-successful retail chain, IFOAppleStore is reporting.

Employees at Apple’s Alderwood Mall store claim the store’s management is “abusive” and cite unspecified violations of state and federal labor laws.

Apple’s human resources department hasn’t properly investigated their complaints, and even an appeal to the head of the chain, Ron Johnson, went unheeded, the staff told IFOApplestore.

Workers are planning a walkout at 1PM on October 3 if no action is taken before then.

The threat of industrial action is unusual for Apple’s stores, which have a reputation as a good place to work and an unusually high retention rate for retail.

Apple claims the turn-over rate for Apple store employees is just 20%, compared to an industry average of well over 50%.

Microsoft is attempting to hire Apple retail managers to staff its new stores, Jim Dalrymple of The Loop reports.

Citing anonymous sources, The Loop says managers are being offered better money and in some cases, relocation expenses. They are then encouraged to recruit their former colleagues with similar incentives.

The strategy seems to be in line with Microsoft’s playbook. Earlier this year, Microsoft reportedly tried to lure iPhone developers to the Zune platform with cash incentives.

Which means that Microsoft’s retail strategy can be summarized thus:

• Copy the idea of retail stores
• Hire Apple’s former real estate head George Blankenship as a consultant
• Locate Microsoft’s stores next to Apple’s stores
• Put in face-to-face help desks, but call them Guru Bars instead of Genius Bars
• Hire Apple’s staff

What’s next? Stock the stores with Apple products?

Microsoft’s first retail store is scheduled to open in October near Apple’s retail store in Mission Viejo, Calif., at The Shops.

Google says categorically that Apple has rejected its Voice app for the iPhone. Apple denies this, saying several times that the app is still under consideration. Apple has said this in official documents submitted to a government inquiry by the FCC, and most recently today in a statement to the press.

Someone is lying. Who is it?

Well, the test is quite simple:

Apple has responded to Google’s charge that Phil Schiller rejected Google’s Voice app: “We do not agree,” says a spokesman.

Apple says it has NOT rejected the Google Voice app and continues to evaluate it. In a statement, Apple PR says:

“We do not agree with all of the statements made by Google in their FCC letter. Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application and we continue to discuss it with Google.”

Earlier today, Google unredacted its response to the FCC, claiming that Phil Schiller had personally killed the Google Voice app in a phone conversation in July.

Who’s lying?

As reader Steven points out below, a good test is whether Google’s app is available in the app store — which it is not. “Until the application does appear in the App Store, we can all say with 100% certainty that it has been denied,” he says.

Apple’s Phil Schiller personally rejected Google’s controversial Voice app, new documents reveal.

Schiller rejected Google’s VOIP app because it “duplicated the core dialer function of the iPhone,” Google said in documents released on Friday. The documents were published by the company and the Federal Communications Commission, which is investigating Apple’s rejection of the app.

Google’s version of the story directly contradicts Apple’s version of events. According to Apple, the app hasn’t been rejected; it is still under evaluation.

But according to Google, Schiller personally told Alan Eustace, Google’s senior vice president of engineering and research, that the app had been rejected during a phone call on July 7.

“It was during this call that Mr. Schiller informed Mr. Eustace that Apple was rejecting the Google Voice application…” Google says.

Curiously, the revelations didn’t come to light until today because Google kept parts of its response to the FCC secret to protect “sensitive commercial conversations” between the two companies.It decide to relax its request after Apple published its response and groups requested the info under the Freedom of Information Act, Google explains in a blog post.

Google’s full response to the FCC’s questions about the rejected app are here (PDF).

One year after disgruntled iPhone App developer Mike Ash wrote about his frustrations trying to get his software approved by Apple, he says nothing has changed. The App approval process is so bad, in fact, he’s giving up altogether.

“I have abandoned the platform,” he writes. “Apple’s nonsense is just too much for me. There’s no joy in iPhone development, and an enormous amount of frustration.”

Last year, Ash wrote a high-profile blog post about his experience working with Apple. Detailing all the hoops he had to jump through, and several rejections of his software, Ash’s post drew a lot of attention from blogs and a lots of comments from developers who’d had similar experiences.

Apple’s approval process has long been the subject of criticism and frustration. The process is secretive and opaque, and developers often complain apps are often rejected or held up without good reason. Google’s Voice App, for example, is still undergoing approval — a roundabout way of rejecting an app from a big and important partner without actually rejecting it.

Apple’s head of marketing, Phil Schiller, has tried to smooth ruffled feathers by reaching out to unhappy developers. The biggest problem with Apple’s process is the sheer volume of apps submitted for approval. Apple’s 40 full-time testers must scrutinize about 8,500 apps a week, according to information from Apple in response to an FCC inquiry. Each app is reviewed by two testers, so that’s about 80 apps a day, per reviewer — every day.

In his latest post, Ash says the consumer’s experience of the App Store has marginally improved, but behind the scenes, nothing has changed for developers.

“Apple VP Phil Schiller has been making noises about trying to improve things, but so far this is just talk,” Ash writes. “Apple’s improvements, virtually insignificant already, have mostly gone to improving the store, not the development process.”

It’s so bad, he’s given up completely. Ash says he’ll write software for the Mac instead, which requires no approval process.

The music industry is planning to introduce new laws that would require Apple to pay for music in downloaded movies and TV Shows — and iTunes’ 30-second song previews.

The move comes from the industry’s royalty-collection agencies — ASCAP, BMI and others — which collect royalties on music that’s broadcast or performed.

The agencies collect royalties on songs played on the radio or your local dive-bar jukebox, but say they are left out of the digital revolution. Artists are not being paid for music downloaded in movies and TV shows, or previews on Amazon, iTunes and other digital outlets, the agencies say. So they’re lobbying Congress to bring Apple and others in line with cable and broadcast outlets.

On the one hand, the agencies make a compelling point about the consumption of music. Music used to be public. It was broadcast on the radio of performed at concerts, and the industry had mechanisms for collecting royalties on this. But now music is private. It’s loaded onto iPods and played through computers — but there’s no mechanisms for monetizing these new consumption patterns.

“This is really a fight about the future,” one industry spokesman tells CNet. “As more and more people watch TV or movies over an Internet line as opposed to cable or broadcast signal, then we’re going to lose the income of the performance.”

This doesn’t sound unreasonable, but 30 second song previews? As CNet notes: “For many, this would also undoubtedly confirm their perception that those overseeing the music industry are greedy.”

Look at this fascinating graph of Apple’s rollercoaster stock price over the last year, charted against major news events, courtesy of Silicon Valley Insider’s Chart of the Day.

The low point was last winter, with investors spooked about global economic meltdown and Steve Jobs’ unexpected medical leave. But in the last year, the stock has doubled, fueled by the run-away success of the iPhone and building ecitement about the upcoming tablet.

As SVB notes, Apple’s stock is nearing its all-time high, while Microsoft’s stock is trading at a about a third of its highest price.

Via 9to5Mac.

Jim “Mad Money” Cramer boosted Apple’s stock last night on his CNBC show, and today it’s up 3.83% to $181.87.

Earlier in the day Apple’s stock was $182.72, Apple’s best since August 2008, just before the global economic meltdown.

This is the same Jim Cramer that told The Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart how easy it is to manipulate Apple’s stock. See the video after the jump.

In this case, Cramer seems to be sincere. Cramer pumped the stock on the prospect that changes in accounting rules will realize significantly higher quarterly revenue for Apple. At present, Apple spreads revenue from Apple TV and iPhone sales over 24 months, like a subscription. If new accounting rules come into effect, Apple will be able to report this revenue immediately.

As a result, Cramer estimates that Apple’s 2011 earnings will likely jump from $9 to $12 per share.

“I’m raising my price target on Apple,” he said during the show. He raised his price target for Apple stock from $200 to $264.

Some analysts, like the Yankee Group’s Carl Howe, have said for a long time that Apple’s subscription revenues aren’t being accounted for properly by Wall Street.

The Financial Services Accounting Board is reviewing a draft rule change after strong lobbying from Apple. The new rules are likely to come into effect in weeks.

Cramer told investors to act fast before the big funds got wise. Looks like it’s too late now.

Snow Leopard can give your Mac a 50% performance improvement when running optimized software, a developer has found.

Running a Mac Pro from 2007, programmer Christophe Ducommun compared Snow Leopard to Leopard while encoding and decoding video with his MovieGate software.

Ducommun is optimizing MovieGate to take advantage of two important new technologies in Snow Leopard: Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL. While OpenCL allows powerful graphics processors to perform work for applications, Grand Central Dispatch takes advantage of multiple cores, distributing work among all the available cores.

Together, they apps a pretty big speed bump, according to MacBidouille, which published Ducommun’s results:

Snow Leopard
150 frame/s for encoding in MPEG-2
70% CPU load for decoding
130% CPU load for MPEG-2 encoding (ffmpeg)

Leopard
104 frame/s for encoding in MPEG-2
165% CPU load for decoding
100% CPU load for MPEG-2 encoding (ffmpeg)

Overall, the optimizations give an overall performance increase of about 50%. Ducommun’s Mac Pro is a 2.66 GHz Quad Core machine with a GeForce 8800 GT video card.

The iMac will get a design refresh in coming weeks, according to a report from Wall Street analysts, and everyone’s hoping Apple will finally add Blu-Ray.

Wedge Partners predicts the introduction of an updated iMac with “thinner, organic design, likely with smoothed or rounded edges,” reports Tech Trader Daily. Sounds like the iPhone 3GS to me. The iMac is already styled after the iPhone, and the 3GS is more rounded and organic than previous models. (The MacBook will also get a refresh, Wedge says, but design and hardware changes are likely to be minimal)

There have been rumors of new iMacs for several weeks. AppleInsider reported that an iMac release was imminent, and that the machine would get two “compelling new features.” The iMac is overdue for a refresh, according to MacRumors Buying Guide, which says the current models are 197 days old and the average period between upgrades is 220 days.

Most intriguing is whether the refresh will bring new capabilities. High on everyone’s wishlist for compelling new features is Blu-Ray — see this thread on MacRumors with 850+ comments. What could be better than adding high-def movies to Apple’s premier home machine?

Unfortunately, it’s not going to happen any time soon. Here’s why.

Hilarious edit of last week’s keynote. There’s a point when Phil just won’t stop saying “great” that’s just hypnotic.

Incredible

Youtube via Fortune

The whole thing is here on The Joy of Tech site.