John Brownlee - page 103

For a good chunk of the last decade, Microsoft has had a hard time getting its employees to use its own products. During the iPod wars, Microsoft was hard pressed to get their employees to carry Zunes; when the iPhone came out, Microsoft employees wanted to trade in their Windows Phones… and one can only imagine the difficulties Microsoft will have getting employees to switch from their iPads to Windows 8 tablets.

So Microsoft, in their magnanimity, has decided to try to push employees along. A new report says that Microsoft’s Sales, Marketing, Services, IT & Operations Group has just sent out an email to employees, saying that they can no longer buy Apple products with company funds.

In most regards, Consumer Reports do great work, but when it comes to Apple’s mobile devices, they’ve historically tended to act like bozos. Quickly jumping upon the Antennagate bandwagon when the iPhone 4 came out, Consumer Reports refused to recommend Apple’s latest handset for over a year. When the iPhone 4S came out, Consumer Reports grudgingly said it was worth buying, but not as good as Android phones. Are you for real?

Anyway, yesterday, in response to reports that the new iPad ran hotter than its predecessor, Consumer Reports eagerly promised to investigate, sniffing another scandal. They’ve now published some preliminary results, though, and surprise! They’re surprisingly sensible.

When third-place carrier Sprint first got the iPhone 4S, it quickly became clear that they had literally bet the company on the notion that Apple’s popular handset could save them from being steamrolled by AT&T and Verizon. In fact, Sprint agreed to pay Apple $20 billion over the next four years just to secure rights to the iPhone, whether they can sell them or no. The whole company is riding on the iPhone.

That could have turned out to be a big mistake suggests a new report today, which says that the nation’s third largest carrier is on the verge of going bankrupt. And what bankrupted them? The iPhone.

Indie musicians have long had a difficult time getting accepted into iTunes, but it’s possible that’s coming to an end. Apple has just released it’s iTunes Producer 2.6.0 software update to a number of users, despite the fact that it has historically only been available to musicians, record labels and other partners of Apple’s iTunes Connect portal.

It’s been an expensive month for many the Apple fan. The new iPad isn’t cheap, and after spending between $500 and $830 on a new top-of-the-line tablet, it might be hard to scrape enough money together to actually furnish your iPad with apps, music or movies.

Don’t worry, we got you covered. Here’s how to save 20% off all App Store or iTunes purchases.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iox5Q2nWi-Q

The staggering difference in quality of the new iPad’s display isn’t hype, it’s real. It’s a jaw-dropping difference, one that finally turns the iPad into the promise of its potential: a living, breathing page through which the wide world can be explored. The new iPad is the best consumer display on the market at almost any price, period…

Which makes it completely befuddling that in a blind test, a surprising amount of Apple Store customers couldn’t tell the difference between the iPad 2 and the new iPad.

It spits out the bullets, laughs in your face, rips out your heart, consumes it as it steams and then, without drawing in a single breath, screams a primal scream as it stares, unblinking, directly into the sun.

No, just kidding. Gorilla glass or not, it turns into Swiss Cheese. Still, beats those stupid drop tests, doesn’t it?

Can’t watch the video above? Click here.

Earlier today, Tim Cook played coy with how many new iPads they had sold opening weekend, but a mere eight hours later, the numbers are in, and it’s a record setting weekend indeed: Apple sold 3 million iPads in the first weekend of sales alone. That’s three times as many as last year… and with plenty to go around for everyone. Press release after the jump.

When asked today why it was going to begin paying out an ongoing quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share to stockholders, one reason Apple cited for the new plan was that it wanted to “generate income” for its investors, and consequently attract investors for whom a dividend was an investment necessity.

It got us thinking. Apple says it wants to generate income for its shareholders, but $2.65 per quarter per share is a pretty small amount. How much stock would you need to own to even earn minimum wage from dividend payments?

The answer might surprise you, and will surely put into perspective the size of the investments Apple is hoping to attract.

Apple’s not exactly the kind of company that boasts lightly. That’s not to say they don’t boast a lot — they’re probably the most bragging of all the companies in tech, and for damn good reason — but every boast is weighted against genuine success, not numbers fudging.

So when Apple debuted the new iPad a couple weeks ago and claimed that their tablet — powered by a dual-core CPU and quad-core graphics — outperformed the quad-core CPU and 12-core graphics of the NVIDIA Tegra 3 SoC, a lot of people arched their eyebrows. NVIDIA raised a stink, saying it couldn’t possibly be true. But we quietly suspected that Apple would be proven right.

So guess which is faster in independent benchmarks?

Apple wasn’t willing to go on record with the new iPad’s initial launch figures just yet, but when quizzed about it during the Q&A session of today’s announcement of an official dividend and stock repurchase plan, Tim Cook did let slip a bit about how well the new iPad had done.

Confirming a press release from just ten minutes earlier, Apple CEO Tim Cook has confirmed that Cupertino will use its vast hoard of cash to initiate a quarterly dividend payment to current shareholders, as well as buy back almost $10 billion in stock to help avoid dilution of employee equity.

The conference call announced for 9 a.m. this morning hasn’t even happened yet, and Apple’s already announced what they are doing with the cash: initiating a $10 billion share repurchase plan, as well as issue dividends and make strategic investments. All told, they expect to spend $45 billion over the next three years.

We’ll give you more details when the call starts, but for now, here’s the press release.

When Apple first announced the new third-generation iPad, there were people — and, I suppose, still are people — who were disappointed. Why they were disappointed is inexplicable; what they envisioned is hard to imagine. The flying car of tablets, one supposes: they called the new iPad an “incremental update” when what Apple had just handed them may as well have come spiraling through a time vortex from the future. It’s that good.

Let’s face facts. In the last year, Android makers haven’t even been able to ship a viable competitor to the iPad 2. The new iPad, with its Retina Display and LTE technology, is unlike anything else on the market. No one is even close to making a tablet as fast, as beautiful, as vivid, as thin or as long-lasting as this, and if history is any guide, when the fourth-generation iPad comes out, they’ll still be trying to catch up.

Make no mistake. If the new iPad isn’t a “beefy” enough upgrade for you, you’re not just spoiled. You’re not just completely out of touch with the state of the tech landscape today. No, you’re bonkers. This is the most advanced piece of consumer mobile electronics tech available today.

This American Life‘s January episode “Mr. Daisey Goes To The Apple Factory” was the show’s most popular episode in history, racking up over one million downloads and setting off a chain reaction of reports that eventually resulted in Apple ordering an independent audit of working conditions in its supply change.

The titular Mr. Daisey has been covered exhaustively by Cult of Mac. He is probably best known outside of his NPR appearance as the man behind the one-man show “The Agony & Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”, which Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak wept at.

Unfortunately, Daisey’s integrity and honesty are being called into question after This American Life took the unprecedented step of retracting the episode earlier today,

In what may just be the speediest jailbreak ever, Dev Team uberlord MuscleNerd has confirmed that he has already jailbroken the iPad 2 and Apple A5X SoC.

If you’re waiting for your new iPad to arrive, you might be wondering about cases. The difference in the thickness between an iPad 2 and an iPad 3 is only about half a millimeter: is that enough to mean you need to buy a new case?

After putting our new iPad through its paces, we’re happy to say that it will probably be a very rare thing indeed for a case to be incompatible with the new iPad.

Just because he co-founded frickin’ Apple doesn’t mean that Steve Wozniak is some sort of wooly, barrel-chested, twinkle-toes GOD. He puts his pants on one leg at a time, just like us. Sure, he does it while balancing precariously on a Segway, but still. He’s definitely a man, and not, in fact, an immortal.

As if to prove it, every time a new iPhone or iPad is released, Woz goes on down and waits in line to pick up the latest Apple product just like the rest of us plebs, and this year is no different, except for one thing: instead of being first in line, Woz is second.

The new iPad’s Retina Display is perfect for reading, so some of the most highly-sought after app updates are going to be the ones that make the best iPad e-reading apps compatible with the doubled resolution. And, in fact, many such apps, like Kindle, Evernote and Readability have already updated.

Unfortunately, when you get your new iPad today, you’ll have to slog through Marco Arment’s best-selling e-reading app Instapaper in fuzzy old SD. But don’t despair, Retina Display support is coming soon.

As we mentioned earlier, those Dr. Jests of the DIY repair movement, iFixIt, have gotten themselves one of the very first new iPads and are already busy hacking away at it. Their server is being crushed right now, but the teardown has already born some fruit, confirming that Samsung is indeed working with Apple to build the new iPad’s Retina Display.

By all accounts, text-heavy apps really shine on the new iPad’s Retina Display, so I’m glad to see that Amazon have already updated my favorite iOS e-reading app to work at native 2048×1536 resolution.

And that’s not all. Amazon has also taken the opportunity to redesign the Kindle library view so that it’s organized in two separate tabs, “Cloud” and “Device,” which should make it easier to tell which e-books you have stored locally and which ones need to be slurped down from Amazon’s databanks.

You can download Kindle 3.0 on the App Store right now for free.

In their normal fashion as dissectors and vivisectionists of the gadget world, the fine ladies and gents over at iFixIt — who flew all the way to Australia to get a literal crack at the new iPad early — have just opened Apple’s latest tablet up, as reported by their Twitter feed:

The first legit-purchased, legit-owned iPad 3 is now also the first legit-opened iPad… in the world.

Stay tuned. We’ll let you know what mysteries they find inside.

Add this to your list of things Apple is worth more than. As the Zero Hedge blog notes, “A company whose value is dependent on the continued success of two key products, now has a larger market capitalization (at $542 billion), than the entire US retail sector (as defined by the S&P 500).” Nuff said.

Every single thing about the new iPad is more power hungry than the iPad 2. The Retina Display requires more power to drive its double resolution display. The LTE capability requires more battery to suck in faster mobile data speeds. Even the doubled RAM capacity uses more electricity.

Despite all of this, though, the new iPad has the same great battery life as the iPad 2: 10 hours of battery using 3G, 9 hours battery using LTE. Apple’s achieved this extraordinary feat by packing almost twice the battery capacity into the same space.

That’s great news when you’re around town. But it comes at a cost: charging the new iPad to full is a total bitch.

For the first time ever, Apple stock briefly touched, then dropped below, the price of $600 per share. Making that milestone even more impressive is the fact that AAPL just reached $500 per share for the first time a month ago.

Mark my words, Woz is right: Apple’s going to reach $1000 per share become the world’s first trillion dollar company.

[via MacRumors]