As expectation builds that Apple will soon announce a new version of its original iPad, one financial house projects the overall tablet market will become a $35 billion business by 2012, with more than a third of the devices reducing demand for netbook and notebook PCs.
“We expect tablets to have an increasingly negative impact on PC shipments,” JPMorgan Securities analyst Mark Moskowitz told Reuters Monday. More than 35 percent of the tablets will cannibalize the market for low-cost netbooks and notebook computers.
The old joke about technology is that if you want to setup that new gizmo, go get yourself a 10-year-old. We saw electronics retailer Best Buy follow that bit of wisdom with its consumer-oriented Geek Squad, an army of white-shirt and clip-on bow tie experts that could install that wireless router or a flat-screen television for a price. Apple is doing something similar by exporting its retail Genius techs for small business. The Cupertino, Calif. company reportedly will unveil Wednesday Joint Venture, a $500 per year service with the motto: “Get Setup. Get Trained. Keep Running.”
Sunday retail employees reportedly received word of the new service, which could be launched along with Apple’s much-rumored next-generation Apple iPad 2 during a San Francisco, Calif. media event. The new service would be offered to businesses purchasing a Mac, covering five systems with more unit support costing an additional $99 per year.
This is awesome: an iPhone 5 front panel that its leakers swear confirms that the next generation of Apple’s handset will have a larger, 4-inch display. Of course, who could tell without any point of reference?
This is either the most inept leak ever, or one of the best gags of the week. They should do a whole series of these leaks: the large iPhone 5 display next to, say, an equally “large” radioactive ant, or the world’s longest index finger.
To be fair, it does seem to confirm the iPhone 5 might have a thinner bezel at the sides…. but with the iPhone 5 still months away, this might just be an idea Apple’s toying with.
Despite Apple’s struggle with the white iPhone 4, a new iPad digitizer discovered by the iFixYouri iPhone repair shop suggests the company’s second-generation tablet may also be available in white. The part comes from Shenzhen City in China, where many of Apple’s products are assembled.
Closer inspection of the white digitizer above shows a small circular cutout along the top bezel, for what we expect to be the iPad 2’s front-facing camera, and it’s a perfect match for 9to5 Mac’s recently discovered iPad 2 screen protectors from Asia.
Just like all of Apple’s unreleased products, details and specifications regarding the second-generation iPad are under lock and key at Apple HQ until the device is announced on March 2nd, however, reports have suggested the upcoming device will be thinner, lighter, and faster.
I’ve had my 13-inch MacBook Air since they were first released and although I encountered video problems initially after the plethora of updates that Apple has released the video problems haven’t returned.
The updates included an EFI firmware update, a specific software update for the MacBook Air 2010 model, and the Mac OS X 10.6.5 software update. I even offered not one, but two suggested solutions to try.
These updates and suggested fixes worked for some, but unfortunately they didn’t work for everyone. People are still complaining on Apple Discussion Forums about problems they are encountering when connecting their MacBook Airs to external displays.
Steve Jobs is on medical leave and now one of his key lieutenants reportedly wants to return to his native U.K.
Apple’s head designer Jonathan Ive wants to return England to live, reports the Sunday Times. Ive, of course, is one of the key geniuses behind Apple’s string of blockbuster hits and is perhaps the world’s most influential industrial designer.
British-born Ive has reportedly proposed a plan to “commute” to Cupertino, Calif., from his $4 million manor house in Somerset, but Apple’s board is none too thrilled with the idea. Ive is said to be at “loggerheads” with the board, reports the Sunday Times.
A friend of the family told the paper: “Unfortunately he is just too valuable to Apple and they told him in no uncertain terms that if he headed back to England he would not be able to sustain his position with them.”
According to The Times, Ive has just reaped about $30 million from a ‘golden handcuffs’ deal signed in 2008, which has now expired. He and his wife Heather want to educate their twins in their native country.
Apple refused to comment on Ive’s employment status and said it was “speculation” that he wanted to return to the U.K.
Mike Daisey performing "The Agony & Ecstasy Of Steve Jobs"
Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, was moved to tears by a play about the working conditions of Apple’s factories in China.
Woz went to see “The Agony and the Ecstacy of Steve Jobs” by Mike Daisey on Tuesday night at the Berkeley Repertory Theater. The one -man show, which describes the working conditions in the massive factories that make gadgets for Apple, Hewlett-Packard and others, made Wozniak cry.
“The shocking things that Mike said which brought me to tears were so because they came as a first-person story,” Wozniak said. “Mike was living the pain of what he was describing as he told it.”
The monologue describes Daisey’s trip to Shenzhen last year, where he met workers at Foxconn’s plant as young as 12 and 13, and heard tales of the long, repetitive work. As many as 17 workers have committed suicide at the Foxconn plant.
Wozniak also said: “I will never be the same after seeing that show.”
The Verizon iPhone 4 has the same antennagate issue as the GSM version, Consumer Reports says. And even though the iPhone 4 is one of the publication’s most highly-rated smartphones, it can’t recommend it.
The Verizon iPhone 4 has a problem that could cause the phone to drop calls, or be unable to place calls, in weak signal conditions, Consumer Reports engineers have found in lab tests.
That’s all weel and good, but in real life, Verizon’s customers aren’t complaining about dropped calls or signal degradation. On Verizon’s network, the antennagate issue is largely theoretical. Even though it’s possible to show signal degradation in the lab — as Consumer Reports claims it did — you can put as many fingers as you want across the gap and it still won’t drop a call.
Apple’s new Mac OS X Lion adds support for a recovery partition as part of the OS installation and while this may not seem important to most users — it is. Apple is making the tools and resources available to you that will allow you to perform disk repair and recoveries on your mobile Mac while on the road or on your desktop Mac at home. The utilities will be readily available and therefore you won’t have to go hunting for that always elusive DVD or USB stick.
This is because the new partition labeled Recovery HD acts just like the DVDs and USB sticks that Apple has traditionally shipped with its computers. You simply press and hold the Option key after starting your Mac. You are eventually presented with a list of the available boot partitions.
You use the arrow keys to select the boot drive and press Return. The system will then boot from the selected disk. In this instance you would choose the Recovery HD disk to access the Mac OS X Lion recovery partition.
It looks like Apple is going to have another blockbuster OS release later this year. I don’t know about you, but I cannot wait until Lion hits store shelves (virtual or otherwise).
Here’s a quick video tour of the new Mail client in OS X Lion. It’s got a three-pane view, nicely threaded “Conversations,” and a goes full screen. It’s very good. Mail alone is a good reason to upgrade to Lion.
Curious about the changes in OS X Lion? Starting at noon PST or 3pm EST, our own Jose Guitierrez will be doing a live screencast of OS X Lion, in which he’ll field questions, demonstrate features and even test software suggested to him by Cult of Mac’s readers.
If you’d like to take part, see Lion in action and ask Jose some questions, the screencast is embedded above, or you can go to the Livestream directly by clicking here.
According to Jose, the show will last at least an hour, but will probably last until he’s fielded all questions. Why not join us and see Lion in all its glory on this slow Friday afternoon?
An Apple shareholders' proposal presses for CEO succession plan transparency.
Maybe its a need for Silicon Valley to compete with the Oscar ceremony this weekend in Los Angeles. Maybe its just a slow news day. For whatever the reason, people have gone through Apple’s SEC Form 8-K and discovered almost 4.8 million votes against keeping Steve Jobs on the Cupertino, Calif. company’s board of directors.
Although the Apple co-founder kept his chair, a relative unknown outvoted Jobs as perhaps the most popular board member. Despite not appearing all in black or unveiling some of the sexiest technology, Ronald D. Sugar garnered the most share votes for re-election to the Apple board of directors.
Analysts began to weigh-in on the import of Apple’s update of the MacBook line. Along with more powerful processors and the souped-up Thunderbolt connection, the Cupertino, Calif. company may also get a boost – on Wall Street.
“Every incremental 100,000 portable Mac units would add about two cents per share in EPS in [the second quarter of the fiscal year], assuming a slightly lower gross margin,” UBS analyst Maynard Um wrote. There are six weeks remaining in the second quarter.
If you prefer a tactile sensation closer to leather than ice cold aluminum, Dodocase’s Bookback self-adhesive skins will allow you to coat the back of your iPhone or iPad in a Moleskine-like shell. The iPad version will cost you $20, while the iPhone version is just $9.
We loved Sparrow for Mac when we reviewed it a couple of weeks ago for treating your inbox more like Twitter, describing it as “the equivalent of skipping stones, not piloting a submarine.”
Much as we loved it, though, that approach to email isn’t for everyone, especially power users. If you’d like to give Sparrow a try without paying, though, you now can: Sparrow Lite is now available on the Mac App Store, allowing you to use Sparrow to drive a single Gmail account for free, if you don’t mind an advert subsidizing the experience.
Give it a shot. You can download Sparrow Lite for free by clicking here, or searching for it on the Mac App Store.
This is welcome: OS X 10.7 Lion adds support for the TRIM command. The addition of this deep little function will mostly be of interest to new MacBook Air owners, as it’s essential to the long-term performance of an SSD drive.
Engadget’s now reporting that “engineering issues” have led Apple to make last-minute design changes to the iPad 2 that will cause it to launch without a Retina Diplay. What a load of total crap.
As is their wont, the boys and girls over at iFixIt rushed out to the Apple Store and picked themselves up a new 15-inch MacBook Pro to spill its guts for all of us to see.
Although externally not much has changed, internally, there’s some nice design revisions that have led iFixIt to bump the MacBook Pro up a notch on their repairability scale. It now rates a 7 out of 10, which makes the new Pros one of the more self-repairable Apple computers of recent memory: Cupertino’s engineers chose to eschew their new pentalobe torx screws entirely in the 2011 Pros.
The RAM of the new Pros has been upgraded to PC3-10600, which is the same RAM used in the 2010 revision of the iMac line, and a welcome speed boost over earlier models. The wireless card has also gotten a bit of a bump and now includes four antennas instead of three, so it might hold onto your wifi connection a little bit better.
The biggest eyebrow archer about the new MacBook Pros is this observation from iFixIt:
We uncovered gobs of thermal paste on the CPU and GPU when we removed the main heat sink. The excess paste may cause overheating issues down the road, but only time will tell.
This alarms me. The original MacBook Pros similarly used too much thermal paste, and their consequent overheating issues are now legendary. As iFixIt says, only time will tell, but it’s enough to be wary about.
Ever since Apple purchased Lala back in 2009, it’s been assumed that iTunes was going to make a leap into the cloud with a streaming music on demand service pretty much any minute now.
According to a new report by the Financial Times, though, Apple’s just been messing with us: Apple has no intention of undermining the market for paid music downloads that it absolutely dominates.
Instead, Apple keeps its plans for the cloud and its Lala acquisition as a form of insurance. An ace up their sleeve, in case the likes of Spotify, Rhapsody or Last.fm looks posed to become an industry-shaking juggernaut, similar to the way Netflix is changing the home video market.
Here’s a quick overview of Mission Control and Launchpad in OS X Lion, Apple’s upcoming major update to OS X.
Mission Control is like Expose, Spaces and Dashboard on steroids: Hit a hot corner and all the open windows fly away. You then get an overview of all the running applications, with thumbnails of open windows. There’s also your Dashboard widgets and virtual desktops in Spaces. When it was first previewed by Apple last year, critics said Mission Control was a mess, but I think it’s pretty good. It works really well. It’s much clearer than Expose, and I can see it becoming a central part of my workflow.
Launchpad, on the other hand, won’t be. Launchpad is like the Home screen on the iPad. Icons for all your apps are displayed in a grid. But it suffers from the same problem as the iPad — it’s hard to find the app you’re looking for among the clutter. Much easier to launch a search. Same in Lion.
The new MacBook Pros are seemingly superior to the last generation in every possible way, one notable downgrade seemingly lies in battery life: while old MacBook Pros were rated between eight and ten hours of battery life, the new models only get “up to 7 hours” across the board.
What’s the story? You might think it’s because of the bump to Sandy Bridge: after all, faster processors often suck up more juice. In fact, that may be part of the cause, but overall, the reason the battery life has “decreased” is because Apple is now reporting it more honestly.
It’s extremely common for computer manufacturers to wildly exaggerate battery life. That laptop you bought with ten hours of battery life might be lab tested as such just by leaving it open, idle, with the WiFi off and the display notched down to quarter brightness.
Apple’s now using a more honest testing method to arrive at battery life. Called Wireless Web protocol testing, they take each device, set the display to 50 percent brightness and then surf the 25 most popular websites, performing the main function of those sites over and over again, including playing Flash video.
So when the new MacBook Pros say they get up to 7 hours of battery life, it’s not really a downgrade: unlike the ten hours of battery life you were supposed to get last gen, but would be lucky to get half of, you can really bank on that 7 hours.
Lion is the next version of Mac OS X that will be released later this year. Apple released a developer preview today and it included a surprise inside — Mac OS X Lion Server. Mac OS X Lion Server is now a core feature of OS X Lion and included for the time being at no extra cost. You will be able to selectively setup your Mac as either a regular Mac OS X client or as a Server during the OS installation.
Once your Mac is transformed into a server you will be able to perform local or remote administration and implement server features that include: configuration of users and groups, file sharing, contacts, chat, Time Machine, VPN, mail, calendaring, push notifications, web, and wikipedia — all services that run under Mac OS X Lion Server.
The single and family license packs of MobileMe have gone AWOL in Apple online and retail stores and according to AppleInsider resellers have been advised that these products have been declared end-of-life by Apple.
The abrupt departure by these apps from retail channels indicates that something is going to happen and some of it might happen tonight during a scheduled outage that will last about a half-hour later tonight.
As you’ve probably heard, touchpad scrolling is backwards in OS X Lion. Instead of pulling your fingers down to scroll down a window, you know push your fingers up.
Confused? You will be. It undoes years of muscle memory. So why would Apple do this?
It’s easy: because of iOS. It’s the same gesture you make on the screen of an iOS device when you scroll up and down the screen. You want to scroll down? You pull the content up.
It’s another example of the influence of iOS on OS X.
