Apple - page 51

If you’ve ever wondered why some developers can’t stand Apple, perhaps Marco Arment can help.

Arment makes useful websites in New York, according to his bio. He’s the lead developer of Tumblr, the Web 2.0 sharing sensation, and creator of the very popular iPhone application Instapaper, which allows users to save web pages on their devices for reading later.

Arment penned a revealing blog post Monday that serves to highlight the frustration even established developers must endure in navigating the uncharted, fickle waters of Apple’s approval process for third-party iPhone and iPod Touch applications.

After submitting an update to Instapaper that included the mobile phone icon shown in the screen capture above, Arment was informed his update could not be accepted because it ran afoul of SDK guidelines that prevent “use [of] the Apple Logo or any other Apple-owned graphic symbol, logo, or icon … except pursuant to an express written trademark license from Apple.”

A friend of Arment’s had designed the icon and offered it to him for use with Instapaper.

Arment concedes the App Store is “an amazing deal for independent developers” but laments the fact that “problems seem so arbitrary, avoidable, and developer-hostile.”

In the end, the frustrated developer must resolve to “make a different icon from scratch that doesn’t contain any depictions of any Apple products,” with Arment asking, “can I use arrows, or does that violate the arrow key on Apple’s keyboards?”

And the bottom line, something with which even Apple is undoubtedly familiar, is that a developer in Arment’s position is forced to resubmit, wait another 7 -14 days, hope to be accepted, and lose a few weeks of the increased sales that the new version will generate, all the while chalking it up to “another annoying cost of doing business on the App Store that [you] can’t do a thing about.”

Who knows when the happy moment will come, but when it does, Apple is ready to trumpet the news that a billion apps have been downloaded from the iTunes AppStore.

So says the Brazilian website Mac Magazine, anyway.

A reader, identified only as JOSZé claims to have discovered a counter embedded in Apple’s website that, when advanced to the number 1,000,000,000 will return the page you see above.

As the editors at Mac Magazine said, “sorry to spoil the surprise.”

Thanks to Rafael for the tip!

UPDATE: Rafael, from Mac Magazine, tells Cult of Mac the secret to revealing the waiting “Thanks a Billion” page lies in changing the time and date on your Mac to something in advance of the date you might expect the magic number to be reached. A recent check of the App Store’s counter says more than 990,000,000 apps have been downloaded as of this writing.

I get asked a lot why I prefer Macs to PCs. Sometimes it’s from a Windows fan trying to pick a fight, sometimes it’s from a platform agnostic who’s interested why I care enough to choose. But the intent is the same — what makes you so passionate?

And after citing obvious reasons like the elegance of Apple’s hardware and software design or the way everything just works out of the box, I almost inevitably bring up something that seems to dull to get excited about: OS upgrades. Not that they happen, but that it’s always easy for me to know which edition of OS X to buy, and I never feel like Apple is needlessly squeezing pennies out of me by charging more for the features that make it worthwhile to upgrade. Leopard was Leopard. Snow Leopard will be Snow Leopard. Easy.

This is the opposite of the Windows experience, in which there will be seven (!) versions of Windows 7 to choose from, some of which are hopelessly crippled. The worst of these is Windows Starter, designed just for Netbooks.

We all know that the vast majority of personal computers run Windows, with a significant but smaller number using Linux and Mac OS X, and then teeny slices using other operating systems like Solaris and Amiga OS. What might not be so obvious is that Microsoft has become equally dominant in the new Netbook market, with Windows XP or Vista shipping on 95 percent of the tiny lappies compared to just five percent for Linux.

And Microsoft, sitting on top of a dominant market position in netbooks, is quickly formulating a plan to actively screw over their potential customers. In the fall (if they’re lucky) MS will roll out Windows 7, which, from my testing of it, is a lot like Vista without all of the most glaring problems. Alongside Windows 7 will be a version custom-designed for netbooks called “Windows 7 Starter,” which will, I swear to you, only be allowed to run three simultaneous applications and won’t feature the same UI as more expensive flavors of the OS. Those features are present — you’ll just need to pay Microsoft for an upgrade code to access them. So forget about running Word, Firefox, iTunes, and Outlook at the same time if you’re on Windows Starter.

Here’s why this is a brain-dead strategy. The only reason to get a Windows netbook is to run Windows applications. If you’re limited to only three apps at a time, it’s actually saner to use Cloud apps in a Web browser. And if you’re going to do that, it makes more sense to just go with Linux or another alternative. Starter is intended to make people want to buy the nicer versions of Windows 7. I think it’s net effect is more likely to be that people seriously consider alternatives.

And that’s why Apple’s dedication to making OS X available in just normal and server versions is one of the best decisions Steve Jobs has ever made. Apple has ignored the netbook market up until now, but it’s safe to say if Apple did release a netbook, it would be a premium offering at the high-end of the market and run a full version of Mac OS X. That’s just how Apple rolls.

Apple is back in Fortune magazine’s elite Fortune 100 list for the first time since 1994, according to new rankings released in the magazine’s issue dated May 4 but made available this week online.

Thanks in part to the declining performance of companies previously ranked ahead of it, Apple jumped 32 spots above its 2008 ranking, to rejoin the list of the 100 largest US corporations for the first time since Steve Jobs returned to lead the company in 1997.

Among Apple’s largest U.S. competitors, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) came in at No. 9, Dell (DELL) at No. 33 and Microsoft (MSFT) at No. 35. Apple (AAPL) placed at No. 71 on revenues that grew 35.3% to $32.479 billion in 2008.

See the full Fortune 500 list here.

Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s CEO, has been calling on Apple to see about extending the carrier’s deal as the exclusive US service provider for the iPhone, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Having already received a one-year extension of its original two year deal, with its current exclusivity protection set to expire sometime in 2010, AT&T is reportedly seeking to sweeten the pot somehow to keep Apple’s revolutionary mobile device out of competitors’ hands for another year.

Well, of course. AT&T added 4.3 million iPhone subscribers in the second half of 2008 alone — about 40% of whom were new customers, according to the company. In an era when landline customers are dwindling rapidly, anything that brings in new wireless subscribers is a good thing for the phone company.

But is the AT&T exclusivity deal good for anyone other than AT&T?

From Apple’s perspective it’s likely good insofar as it keeps things simple, having only one behemoth service provider to potentially screw up the tightly controlled customer experience around which much of Apple’s mystique has been been built. And to be fair, AT&T appears to have done a reasonably good job of deploying iPhones in the field. As the Apple spokeswoman in the WSJ article was quoted, “We have a great relationship with AT&T.”

But how about the consumer? Even if technical issues cannot be overcome that prevent iPhones, as they are currently manufactured, from working with Sprint and Verizon’s CDMA-based services — and surely they could be overcome in this day and age — having a choice between AT&T and T-Mobile is better than having a choice between AT&T and not using an iPhone at all.

Many people howled furiously about AT&T being the exclusive US provider when the iPhone was introduced in the summer of 2007. Looking back, it’s now easy to see how revolutionary and wildly transformative the device was; it was likely a good strategy for Apple to reduce its integration bandwidth to a single carrier in each market where it deployed the phone because it could have turned out to be more problematic a transformation than it actually was.

But now Apple has many millions of happy iPhone users the world over and it knows how its device performs in the field. It’s time for Apple to reclaim dominion over the user experience with its mobile communication device. And the single biggest change that would add to customer happiness (other than video recording capability and Flash functionality) would be to open it up up and let customers choose whatever service provider they can stand.

Half way into Steve Jobs’ six month medical leave, the Wall Street Journal looked into whether Jobs still has a hand in the running of the company.

Citing “people familiar with the matter,” the paper maintains he is “keeping a grip” on Apple:

“People familiar with Apple’s operations say they still expect to see Mr. Jobs return in June. Some of these people also say members of Apple’s board of directors are monitoring the situation directly, communicating regularly with Mr. Jobs’s physicians.

People inside the company, business partners and others who are familiar with the situation say life at the Cupertino, Calif., company remains much the same as it did before.

Those at other corporations who deal with the company also say their interactions with Apple haven’t changed. Mr. Cook, who had already been handling most of Apple’s day-to-day operations, has kept tight control over the company, say business partners and those inside Apple.”
The article also speculates about the future of Apple management, stock prices and employee turnover.

There are a number of excellent reasons to be bullish on Apple (AAPL) stock, according to Wall Street analyst Shaw Wu. Despite already having risen 45% on the year, Wu believes Apple could bake another 25% or more of profit into its share price, based on expectations around what the Kaufman Bros. high-tech analyst calls “several catalysts in the months ahead.”

“We anticipate [Apple’s] new iPhone 3.0 software to ship” in time for the 2009 WWDC in June, Wu said in a report released Monday. He’s also expecting consumer interest in Apple to remain strong with the introduction of new iPhone hardware, also in time for WWDC.

The expected launch of Snow Leopard should be a further catalyst for the Mac business, which has already seen a boost from recent desktop refreshes (iMac, Mac mini, and Mac Pro). “And last,” Wu said, “the potential for a new form factor, perhaps Apple’s answer to the netbook, with a large screen iPod touch-Mac hybrid” could end up pushing AAPL from its current $119 price to something more like $152.

Less than a month ago, on March 24, Wu removed Apple from his “Focus List” citing the appreciating stock (then up only 19%) and the fact that “many of the product catalysts we were looking for, namely the new iMac, have occurred.” But that was at a point just after the overall stock market had been tanking since January; in the last several weeks the market’s been on a tear and some in the financial analysis business believe the worst of the “recession” is behind us.

For a little more perspective on the inscrutable science of stock price analysis, recall that less than a year ago, when Apple was opening its AppStore and releasing the iPhone 3G, Wu and many other AAPL analysts expected the company’s stock to go as high as $225. AAPL had already topped out just over $200 prior to the AppStore launch and nose-dived to well below $100 by January of this year.

Watching Microsoft try to strike back at Apple with the Laptop Hunters series of commercials is almost hilariously tragic. Inevitably, the “ordinary people” (actors) who star in the spots go in “open-minded”, which means they’re looking for a very cheap laptop with a huge screen, which is a category Apple obviously doesn’t offer. The latest entry, with “Lisa” and “Jackson,” finds the hunters dismissing Macs as “cute” while making ultimate gasface, before getting really excited about a Sony VAIO with a 16.4″ screen and a Blu-Ray drive. Excuse me, “Blu-RAYYYY!” Because, as we all know, there is nothing more important than being able to watch a movie at 1080p on a plane. That’s just a fact.
Honestly, it’s a relatively smart ad campaign, but you can practically envision the ad agency pitch meeting, in which the research department notes that Apple’s cheapest 17″ laptop is almost $3,000, while Dell, HP and the rest make really cheap 17″ laptops — critical vulnerability. Here’s the thing. Very, very few people like 17″ laptops. They’re huge, heavy, and really hard to fit onto a cafe table at a coffee shop. Far more people are happier with something small, light, and thin — which is why Netbooks are all the rage right now. Not to give Microsoft free advice or anything — or to do Crispin, Porter and Bogusky’s job for them — but this would be a way more effective ad campaign if they had their shoppers walk out with four Eee PC 904HAs and had some change left over. All this ad campaign is showing is that if you want to get a big, heavy laptop with lots of stickers from Intel and Nvidia plastered on the wrist rest, you want a PC.

Meanwhile, Netbooks are actually a market phenomenon, and they offer something that Apple hasn’t delivered yet. But why play up innovation when you can play up cheapness? I suppose that’s the core difference between Apple and MS, after all these years. Apple always makes a big deal out of quality and design. Microsoft tries to hook you with a killer low price.

(Also, in writing about Microsoft’s “comeback campaign,” BusinessWeek noted that this ad shows the family choosing a PC because it has Blu-Ray, “on which many games are printed.” Um… for PS3, maybe. Has anyone ever released a PC game on Blu-Ray as an option, let alone as an exclusive?)

Image © BasiCMYK

BasiCMYK is a talented photographer and self-described geek who was lucky enough to get one of the 300 limited edition PodBrix Young Woz and Jobs playsets when they were issued not long after the iPhone’s debut in 2007.

He’s also apparently a big Steve Wozniak fan, allowing in the description of the accompanying photo that “every time there’s a Stevenote I secretely hope The Woz will pop up on the screen.”

Something tells me there’s no limited edition Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer Lego knock-off playsets lurking out there anywhere.

Apple sits atop BusinessWeek‘s list of “The 25 Most Innovative Companies” for the fifth year in a row, according to a statement released Thursday by the magazine and the Boston Consulting Group.

The news should come as no surprise to anyone who keeps up with trends in the computer, telecom and entertainment industries, though the report does contain undercurrents of weariness with Apple and the #2 company, Google. Both firms received more than 30% fewer votes in the 2009 survey than they got last year, with some respondents complaining about Apple and Google both “resting on past glory” and relying on “improvements [to] previous technology.”

The special report, “The World’s Most Innovative Companies,” will be featured in BusinessWeek’s April 20th issue, on newsstands April 10th.

BusinessWeek.com will also feature expanded content, including an interactive table of the full ranking of the top 50 most innovative companies, a slide show on 50 up-and-coming innovative companies, and a full description of the methodology used to compile the lists, at www.businessweek.com/go/09/innovative09.

The full list is after the jump.

Well, sorta. I think this project is going to be more about his acting.
Jimmy Kimmel via Gizmodo

Proving the universal appeal and applicability of Apple’s marketing template, the Spanish agency Shackleton gives us the iHam.

And if you’ve ever been to Spain, you understand the ubiquity of meat on the hoof hanging from the ceilings of tapas bars and restaurants and know, perhaps, how the Spanish love their ham.

Comes complete with a full line of accessories, an introductory video (which must be seen), and a PDF manual.

Simply brilliant.

Thanks to Adrian for the tip!

Follow after the jump for a screen shot of the accessories page.

Came across the Italian edition of CoM founder Leander Kahney’s book on Steve Jobs (“Inside Steve’s Brain“) the other day in a shop in Milan.

The title in Italian has been translated as “Inside Steve’s Head.” Perhaps the idea of being in his brain was considered a little too graphic?

It looks like the Spanish edition took the same route…Curious to see if there are any other differences in title translations, if you spot any, let me know…

Apple filed for patents last September that suggest the company may be working on biometric security technology together with optical and voice recognition software to enhance traditional password security for its devices.

According to a report published for the first time this week, the patent filing describes methods for embedding sensors beneath touchscreens and trackpads to recognize fingerprints and vein patterns; device cameras and microphones would authenticate retinal patterns or facial features and recognize a user’s distinctive voice. There is even a suggestion of collecting DNA samples to recognize a user’s genetic sequence. Biometrics could also be context-sensitive and detect the shape of a user’s ear before allowing a call to go through, for example.

Makes that neural interface revolution seem a little more likely, doesn’t it?

Grab your parka, hat and gloves and book your tickets early for WWDC 2009, June 8 – 12 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center West.

Apple announced the dates Thursday via its Developers Connection website for the annual conference that provides developers and IT professionals with in-depth technical information and hands-on learning about iPhone OS and Mac OS X technologies from over 1000 Apple engineers who created them.

Easily one of the most eagerly anticipated Geek festivals on the calendar, this year’s conference should draw even more interest than usual due to the impending arrival of iPhone 3.0 and Mac OS X 10.6, known as Snow Leopard.

Early-bird registration for the conference is $1,295 until April 24th, after which the entrance fee goes up $300. Current ADC Student Members and student Team Members in the iPhone Developer University Program can apply for a WWDC Student Scholarship for free admission to the conference.

Apple must have the sweetest distribution deal in the entire retail universe, if a report published Wednesday at TechCrunch is to be believed.

The AppStore refund policy allows purchasers a full refund up to 90 days from the date of download of any application purchased in the iTunes AppStore. Which seems questionable enough in the light of, say, the Android Market’s 24 hour return policy.

But a clause in the developer’s contract all iPhone developers must sign in order to have their apps sold in the AppStore indicates that in addition to a three month return policy, “Apple will have the right to retain its commission on the sale of that Licensed Application, notwithstanding the refund of the price to the end user.”

In effect this means Apple will charge 100% of the sale price to a developer for every refund given, even though the developer only got 70% of the price of the sale in the first place.

Many iPhone app developers are on the record as having no problem with Apple’s 30% sales commission for applications sold through the iTunes AppStore. The thinking goes that independent developers gain access to many more potential customers by having their products in the widely visited venue, save tons of money on marketing and transaction costs and generally benefit from being associated with the legitimacy of the Apple brand.

When consumers get wind of this policy, which may be a new development, according to the TechCrunch report, developers of some widely purchased though basically useless apps could be in for a rude awakening.

UPDATE: No developer is likely to go bankrupt in the real world, according to a level-headed explanation posted Thursday by Erica Sadun, a developer/blogger for ArsTechnica.

The reason, which makes perfect sense when you think about it, is that Apple never gives refunds, except in extreme circumstances and then, only after causing the customer many headaches.

All the Fart app people can rest easy now.

Apple released a firmware update Wednesday for owners of 2009 unibody 17″ MacBook Pros meant to resolve issues with Nvidia graphics processors that have been causing display anomalies for some users.

Reports on March 6 described complaints related to the Nvidia GeForce 9600 graphics processor in new 17″ MacBook Pros that were causing lines to appear all over some users’ notebook displays, as reported in Apple support threads and in comments to Cult of Mac’s original post.

The firmware update released Wednesday applies only to 2009 model 17″ MacBook Pros. Users wishing to apply the firmware fix should consult Apple documentation for information on how to apply the update.

Let us know in comments whether the firmware solves the problem.

After a decade of being the clear leader driving market trends in computing, Apple’s influence could wane in the post-Steve Jobs era, according to a thoughtful piece posted Tuesday at TG Daily.

Industry analyst Rob Enderle describes Apple’s amazingly diverse impact on wider market trends:

* The iPhone immediately became the gold standard for mobile phone manufacturers, resulting in an explosion of new devices and innovation across every mobile software platform;

* Apple created integration between power and graphics in computer processors that would not have been possible without the company’s commitment to OpenCL, a framework for writing programs that execute across CPUs and GPUs;

* Apple’s focus on design and higher margins resulted in the introduction of products such as the recently released Dell Adamo, a PC notebook designed and marketed to emulate Apple’s attention to every detail from the packaging inward, down to the absence of stickers promoting Microsoft Windows and Intel;

* The elegance of the user experience in Mac OS X virtually doomed OEMs’ embrace of Linux to a competition not with Apple but with Windows, an outcome which will affect the introduction of Google’s Android when it comes to market next year as well.

In short, Enderle writes, “Apple is at the core” of all recent change in the computer industry, that “as a result Apple’s efforts, the products we will see from a variety of vendors will be vastly more amazing than they otherwise would have been.”

None of the above is really subject to debate. Enderle goes on to question whether Apple can keep it up in the post-Jobs era, however, and this writer disagrees. Follow the jump to find out why.

UPDATE: This post corrects a post written and originally published on 4/18 that contained incorrectly attributed information.

The single most talked about and demonstrated feature of iPhone 3.0 software at Tuesday’s launch event — push notification — remains absent from the beta release distributed to developers, with no indication thus far forthcoming from Apple when it will become available.

Scott Forstall, Apple’s Senior VP for iPhone software spent over half an hour Tuesday extolling the virtues of push notification and explaining why — although promised by the company over a year ago — it has taken so long to roll out. Developer “demand we didn’t anticipate” caused Apple to “completely re-architect the server infrastructure for push notification,” he said.

Developer representatives from a half dozen companies were trotted out for a dog and pony show to demonstrate how amazing push notification is going to be in the next version of iPhone software, and yet, despite distributing documentation of how the service is intended to work, Apple has yet to provide developers a method for implementing and testing push notification in their apps.

Forstall spoke plainly in his presentation Tuesday (see 26:45 into the video) “It is now really scalable, and we’re ready to go.”

Apparently not.

Calls to Apple for explanation were not returned as of press time, but we’ll be sure to keep readers apprised as this story develops.

A tiny authentication chip in the headset with on-cord control shipped with the just-released iPod shuffle is raising concerns among some that Apple will extort licensing fees from third-party headset manufacturers who wish to make headsets compatible with Apple’s new music playing devices.

First reported Friday in a review of the new shuffle at iLounge, the authentication chip was then derided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation as Apple’s attempt to invoke the Digital Millennium Copyright Act not to stop piracy, but to impede competition and innovation.

Saturday night, Boing Boing Gadgets posted pictures of the curious chip, along with a thoughtful piece pondering whether Apple’s engineering really amounts to DRM: “For all we know, it could be something the FCC made them put in so that it doesn’t interfere with whalesong.”

The EFF raises a great point, actually, wondering why more reviewers have not seized on Apple’s proliferating instances of hardware DRM: “If it were Microsoft demanding that computer peripherals all include Microsoft “authentication chips” in order to work with Windows (or Toyota or Ford doing the same for replacement parts), … reviewers would be screaming about it.”

In the final analysis, however, if Apple is in fact, as Boing Boing put it, “attempting to eat the headphone industry whole,” the company will lose. Consumers have the last vote and to the extent it may seem Apple products are stifling competition, raising prices and limiting choice, Apple’s tiny devices will go unsold.

There are already many many alternative music players on the market for consumers to choose from – some of the best even made by Apple itself – making the new shuffle a stillborn product if consumers perceive an inability to use it as they see fit.

I grew up with 1980s home-computer gaming: Atari, Commodore, Spectrum, Amstrad. In the UK, we had, comparatively speaking, no money (yuppies aside), and, rather than being lucky enough to follow our disk-happy American chums, had to make do with cassettes. Inevitably, with tapes being cheap, publishers soon realised that affordable games were very saleable games, regardless of quality. Eventually, the number of £1.99 and £2.99 games being churned out was astonishing, as was the ever-diminishing amount of time it would take full-price releases to show up on budget labels.

Towards the end of the 1980s, it got to the point where almost no-one bought full-price games in the UK, because everyone would just wait for a price-drop. Watching apps on the App Store brings back these memories, and so perhaps it was inevitable that the other bastion of 1980s software—the compilation—would at some point make its way to the App Store.

On March 9, the 5 Fingers Games Bundle appeared, mashing together BurnBall, Chopper, Up There, Sneezies and Blackbeard’s Assault. Time will tell if this process works in the present day. It certainly has the potential to give exposure to poor-selling but quality games. However, compilations were the other thing that broke 1980s gaming in the UK, since almost every half-decent game ended up on a compilation eventually. I’m hoping people will continue to buy and support indie devs, rather than wait for a now seemingly inevitable price-drop or compilation entry that will ultimately lead to cheaper entry points and fewer development resources.

Speculation that Apple is poised to release a touchscreen netbook remains persistent as winter snows, with dozens of outlets reporting again today that unnamed “sources” in Taiwan and China “confirm” the new product will be released as early as the 2nd half of this year.

So what the heck, as long as we’re talking about something that may or may not come to pass, why not talk about what it may or may not look like?

16 year-old German artist Darakas, who also goes by the name Jesse, gets the conversation started with this 3D modeling rendition of his vision for the Apple MacTouch.

Until the badly lit spy photos start showing up, we think this is a pretty good jumping off point. Have you finished your Apple netbook mock-up, or see any others out there? Let us know in comments and we’ll feature them here.

Evil Panda says: See me inside Tweetie. I like Tweetie. Apple, stop being stupid, or Evil Panda will get you.

UPDATE: All’s now well in the land of Tweetie. Apple relented and, in double-quick time, posted Tweetie 1.3 to the App Store today. However, this episode highlights that if you’re going to censor things, you really have to censor the ‘right’ ones, and also have some consistently enforced guidelines to work towards. And so Evil Panda is sated for now, but he’s still watching, Apple.

I recently moaned about the App Store on my blog, Revert to Saved, when the South Park app rejection debacle highlighted Apple’s inconsistency regarding application approval. (Short version: South Park app gets rejected for “potentially offensive” content, despite entire South Park episiodes being for sale on iTunes and therefore watchable on an iPhone.)

Today, however, things took a turn for the crazy. Tweetie, an iPhone Twitter client—in fact, the very best and top-selling iPhone Twitter client—just got its latest update rejected. The reason is so staggeringly bonkers that I’m hoping it’s an early April Fool jape. Apple rejected it, according to the developer, because there was an offensive word in the Twitter trends list, which Tweetie provides access to. No, really.

This is so astonishingly stupid that I am still reeling that Apple could be so dumb. Are apps now supposed to police the entire internet? Does Safari filter out rude words? Is Apple suddenly going to wrench Tweetie and every other Twitter client from the App Store? For that matter, maybe Apple should remove the likes of WriteRoom, because, hey, I can write the word “fuck” in it, and I might offend myself.

Sort out your App Store approval process, Apple, because you’re looking stupider by the second. And while competition is currently non-existent, it certainly won’t be that way for long.

Apple plans to launch a netbook computer with a touch screen monitor as early as the second half of this year, Dow Jones reported.

Two Apple unnamed sources told the newswire that the mini laptop computers will likely have monitor screens  between 9.7-inches and 10-inches, other specifications and functions are still under evaluation.

Dow Jones was pessimistic about new netbook:
“Apple’s entry may come in what is expected to be a very tough year for computer sales. Desktop-computer shipments in particular are expected to fall by nearly one-third globally in 2009 as consumers increasingly shift to laptop computers, according to projections released by research firm Gartner Inc. earlier in March.”

A Mac netbook has long been rumored since the success of smaller lighter laptops, typically with a 10″ screen, from companies such as Asus, Acer, Dell, HP and MSI Wind.

Times are tough for Blair Saldanah.

“My wife needs medical care; and we don’t have health insurance,” he explains on the website he just put up, where he is selling quite a collection of Apple memorabilia, including posters, brochures, cards, stickers, manuals, annual Apple fact books, t-shirts, even a vintage Apple ProMouse that was Steve Jobs’ gift to attendees at the Macworld New York keynote address in 2000.

“Don’t be intimidated by the prices!” Saldanah writes on the portal page. “Most items have some bargaining room built-in, and we’ll do quantity discounts too, so find what you want and let’s talk. You might be suprised!”

That’s a good thing, too, because — for example — he’s got eleven t-shirts from various Apple Store grand openings priced at $200 each.

These economic times are difficult for so many people and one never wishes on anyone the need to sell things near and dear to them in order to raise funds for medical bills. We wish Saldanah and his wife the best.