News - page 2131

In the early days of the browser wars, Microsoft CEO and co-founder Bill Gates infamously is credited with instructing executives to ‘cut-off the breathing’ of upstart Netscape. Could long-time rival Apple be following Microsoft’s advice when it comes to another nascent computing technology, tablets? After slamming Android-based tablets as “bizarre” and their second-generation as vaporware, Apple quietly signed a $3.9 billion deal to ensure a smooth flow of components to its products.

Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook, filling in for CEO Steve Jobs while on medical leave, described a 2005 $1 billion deal to ensure flash memory for its iPods, iPhones and other memory-intensive devices, as “an absolutely fantastic use” of its growing cash bankroll. The Cupertino, Calif. company has been criticized for letting $59.7 billion in cash accumulate without either making investments or rewarding investors with stock dividends. Tuesday, Cook said Apple had made another deal with suppliers of unspecified strategic components.

Well we finally got to see the Verizon version of the iPhone 4 (big yawn) and I know many iPhone 4 users on AT&T are excited about a chance to own an iPhone that won’t drop calls (Note my iPhone 4 rarely drops calls and I really mean rarely). Although the iPhone 4 on Verizon isn’t actually here just yet it won’t hurt to get prepared for when it finally gets here.

So considering all the above — what’s the most important thing to know about a cellular carrier?

Coverage and now there’s an app for that, but unfortunately you might have better luck checking a carriers site for coverage versus using this app.

Hugh Hefner, founder of the Grandaddy of all girlie mags, Playboy, tweeted Tuesday evening that an “uncensored” Playboy is coming to iPad.

Given that the Playboy website’s metadata “description” reads: “Nude girls, hot girls, naked women and sexy pics with nude girls as well as videos of hot girls posing nude or in sexy positions celebrating girls and women …” — Hef’s tweet would appear to be in direct contradiction of Apple’s prohibition against sexually provocative material in apps designed to run on iOS devices.

Maybe Hef knows something we don’t know; perhaps he’s just hoping to take advantage of Steve Jobs being on medical leave. Or maybe Hef is just a little more hip to the buzz generating capabilities of Twitter than an 84 year-old guy ought to be.

This render is supposed to be Hewlett-Packard/Palm’s upcoming web tablet — or rather, two tablets.

According to Engadget, HP/Palm is working on a pair of tablets for launch February 9 and available later this year, likely September.

There’s a 9-inch webOS tablet codenamed Topaz and a 7-inch model named Opal, which will be pitched as an e-reader.

They feature a front-facing camera, micro USB port and a Touchstone back for wireless charging. There may be versions for different carriers: WiFi-only, AT&T 3G, and Verizon LTE in September; AT&T LTE in July 2012.

Most interestingly, the tabs are buttonless. There’s no Home button. The Home button is something that Apple is also interested in doing away with — and Apple has just introduced system-wide multitouch gestures in the latest iOS beta.

Although stock prices were still down 2% upon the news that Steve Jobs was taking another, this time open-ended medical leave of absence from Apple, the Wall Street analysts taking part in Apple’s Q1 2011 earnings call exhibited a remarkable lack of curiosity about the CEO’s health, or the company’s near future without him.

In fact, of nearly a dozen analysts asking twice as many questions during the Q&A section of the call, not a single one made even a passing reference to CEO Steve Jobs and his health.

Apple’s blowout holiday quarter included the sale of more than 16 million iPhones.

That may seem like a lot, but look at the chart above from The Atlantic: it looks like Apple’s just getting started.

In the last two quarters, Apple sold 30 million iPhones — half of what it sold in the previous three years (60 million units). In other words, iPhone sales are starting to seriously kick up.

Some analysts predict 100 million iPhones sold next year. Yeah, that’s right: One. Hundred. Million.

That’s a big frickin’ number.

Asked at today’s earnings call whether or not he feared that the success of the iPad and the rise in popularity of tablets would cannibalize Mac sales, Tim Cook not only said Apple was not afraid of cannibalization and hadn’t seen it occurring, but even if it did happen, they weren’t worried about it. In fact, Apple welcomed it.

“Last quarter, the Mac grew at eight times the PC market rate of growth, so as far as we can see, there’s no cannibalization on Mac sales by the iPad,” said Cook.

“In fact, there’s the opposite: a Halo Effect from Apple product to Apple product.”

“If this is cannibalization, it feels pretty good,” Cook laughed.

What if the tablet market does cannibalize PC sales, though? Cook downplayed the threat.

“One thing to keep in mind if the iPad and tablets do start cannibalizing, the Mac has a relatively low share in the PC market, so we actually have a lot more to win because of that, while our competitors have a lot more to lose.”

During today’s Q1 2011 earnings call, one consistent strain ran throughout: Apple could not be happier with the success of the iPad, and could not be more contemptuous of the competition.

Apple just concluded their Q1 2011 earnings call, and while Steve Jobs may be taking a leave of absence, he’s leaving his company in good shape: Apple has just had their best quarter ever, racking in over $26.7 billion in revenue, a number which blows away even the most optimistic Wall Street projections.

In Q1 2011, Apple managed to sell 16.24 million iPhones, which was a new record for the company. Even more impressively, they sold 7.33 million iPads over the holiday period, which was over 3 million more than the previous quarter.

On the Mac side, Apple sold 4.13 million Macs, a strong growth of 23 percent year-over-year, largely buoyed by the runaway success of the new MacBook Air. iPod sales, on the other hand, were down 7 percent year-over-year, continuing a steady decline.

Steve Jobs did not appear during the conference call, nor was his health referenced. However, he did provide a quote for the press release, saying: ““We had a phenomenal holiday quarter with record Mac, iPhone and iPad sales. We are firing on all cylinders and we’ve got some exciting things in the pipeline for this year including iPhone 4 on Verizon which customers can’t wait to get their hands on.”

Apple projects $22 billion in revenue for next quarter, as well as earnings per share of $4.90. Given Apple’s history surprising its shareholders, it’s probably going to be a lot more.

Apple has released another  software update for the late 2010 model MacBook Air.  The update isn’t currently showing up in Software Update, but it can be downloaded directly using this link.

Apple’s comments on what the update does are rather sparse all they say is that:

This update resolves an issue with some MacBook Air (Late 2010) systems that prevents the system from sleeping.

The new MacBook Air has had a few problems with the sleep/wake features of Mac OS X as well as video problems being reported by early adopters (myself included).  However, I have not seen or experienced the problems that people continue to complain about regarding external monitors and video.

Try this update out and let us know by leaving a comment how it works out for you.

Police in Louisville, Kentucky used the “Find My iPhone” app to arrest an iPhone thief — well, more some guy who saw an unattended iPhone and took it.

It’s the latest happy ending story for the app, which debuted in June 2010, and first made the police blotter about a month later when cops recovered stolen iPads and iPhones belonging to an Apple employee.

Police say the iPhone perp is 19-year-old Kyle Just, who walked off with the phone he found on a table outside the Golden Nugget Bar. The owner says he put the phone down while having a cigarette, then turned around to find his iPhone missing.

Two members of the Goatse Security group, who outed an AT&T security breach that exposed over 120,000 iPad 3G customers’ personal data, were hit with criminal charges in federal court.

Prosecuters said that Daniel Spitler and Andrew Auernheimer were each charged with a count of fraud and a count of conspiracy to access a computer without authorization.

The charges come seven months after vulnerability was discovered by researchers at Goatse security, who wrote a script that harvested iPad 3G owners’ ICC-IDs (or integrated circuit card identifier, used to identify SIM cards to a network) and email addresses through exploiting a hole on AT&T’s website.

The number of accounts compromised — first thought to be about 114,000 — was upped to 120,000, some of them belonging to celebrities or other notable public figures.

The F.B.I announced that it will be holding a press conference later today to discuss charges against the pair.

Reuters reported that neither Goastse nor Apple had any immediate comment, we’ll keep you posted.

Via Reuters

With many expecting Apple to unveil gangbuster numbers for its first quarter of 2011, analysts early today were busy raising earlier predictions. One observer increased both Apple’s expected earnings to above $24 billion, with 16 million iPhone and 7 million iPads sold.

JP Morgan’s Mark Moskowitz writes Apple could “beat our above-consensus revenue and earnings-per-share estimates of $24.778 billion and $5.38.” Many Wall Street experts had predicted the Cupertino, Calif. company would earn $24.226 billion for the first financial quarter of 2011.

Verizon Wireless appears to be preparing for the sudden onslaught of new customers coming to their network for the Verizon iPhone by making it harder and more expensive to upgrade their phones at the end of two years.

Yup. Sadly, Verizon has quietly discontinued their long-running New Every Two promotion, which allowed any customers who successfully completed a two-year contract to either get a free new low-end phone or rack up credit ranging between $30 and $100 to apply to the downpayment of their next phone.

Case makers don’t necessarily know anything more than the rest of us about what the next iOS devices will look like — see, for example, the insistence of second-gen iPod Touch case makers that the next iteration of the PMP would have a camera, which didn’t happen until the FaceTime-capable model came along a year later — but they are always of interest, as they usually come from information leaking out of the factories of Apple’s own Chinese manufacturers.

The latest case designs coming out of China, then, is interesting for showing off two new openings that we haven’t seen before. The slot for the rear camera and speaker are, of course, there in their usual places, but two new holes have been carved out to fit an SD card slot and either a mini DisplayPort or an HDMI port.

Intriguing. Of course, if the iPad 2 does get an SD card slot, don’t expect to be able to use it to expand your device’s storage: it’ll strictly be for offloading photos and videos with an iPad Connector Kit.

A rather questionable new rumor is coming out of Three Guys And A Podcast. They’re claiming that Apple will not only discontinue iTunes this year but they’ll replace it with Safari. What?

You probably know Bump as the guys behind the iOS app that allows you to exchange contacts by “bumping” your device against someone else’s while the app is running. It’s such a good product that I’m mystified Apple hasn’t stolen their idea, integrated it directly into iOS and put them out of business already.

I’m glad they haven’t, though, because the Bump guys have just posted some interesting statistics gleaned from their 25+ million downloads. According to their figures, over 89% of their users are running iOS 4.0 or above.

If there was a financial cable show about hoarders, Apple could be the subject. Or, at least that’s how a growing number of large investors view the Cupertino, Calif. company’s decision to amass a mountain of cash without issuing dividends. One portfolio manager likens the inaction to getting a cash advance on your 11 percent credit card and squirreling it away in a savings account earning 0.75 percent annually.

“Who would ever do this in their personal lives?” a Delaware portfolio manager asked the Wall Street Journal. With a pile of cash surpassing the GDP of two-thirds of the world’s nations, Apple’s decision to not issue investor dividends “has been beyond the point of being rational for a while now,” one analyst says,

Politicians in Germany are using iPads en masse in the Bundestag, the German parliament chamber.

According to the English translation of this Spiegel article, the iPad is a reasonable expense claim for the politicians, so ownership has spread like wildfire through the chamber.

Although a popular tool for research and answering email, one member has been caught out playing chess during a meeting.

There’s a photo gallery of smiling German politicians and their iPads here, if that’s your sort of thing.

From NAMM this year comes news of one of the coolest synthesizers money can’t buy. The OMG-1 is a one-of-a kind, custom endeavor designed by Eric Persing of Spectrasonics, the grand prize for an upcoming fundraising effort benefiting the Bob Moog Foundation.

The OMG-1 contains a Moog Little Phatty analog synthesizer, Spectrasonics Omnisphere software synth, an Apple Mac Mini, two iPads, two iPod touches, and the Omni TR iPad app. Installed in a beautiful
handcrafted curly maple cabinet, the OMG-1 is designed as a highly versatile live performance instrument.

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

The news of Steve Jobs’ health problems has saddened a lot of Apple fans. Rather than sit around speculating what may or may not be wrong with Steve’s health, we want to do something to try and lift his spirits. But we need your help.

We’re asking all our readers and anyone else who’s a fan of Steve Jobs to use their creativity and join us in making an awesome Get Well Soon video message.

Click on the YouTube video above and submit your own video reply. You can upload video or record a quick message with your webcam. It’s the easiest way we can think of to get a bunch of video messages that we can edit together into a big group message.

Uniquely express your well wishes to Steve and upload it. The more video replies we can get the better. It’s your choice if you wish to make your message funny or dramatic or sincere. Just make it you. Spread it on Twitter with #getwellsteve.

Let’s let the world’s best CEO know that we care about him.

Here are step-by-step instructions showing how to use YouTube’s Video response feature. And again, please spread the word.

Apple COO Tim Cook is a bit of a cypher. Despite being the number two guy at Apple for a good dozen years, his public appearances have been few and brief.

To get better acquainted, check out this video of a commencement speech he gave at Auburn University, his alma mater.

In it, Cook thanks Steve Jobs for changing his life and how joining Apple in 1998, when the company was on the ropes, turned out to be the “best decision of my life.”

Thanks Les!

Apple Insider has a juicy scoop from the same source who revealed the negotiations between Apple, Imagination Technologies and Samsung back in 2008 that ultimately led to the creation of the A4 CPU: Apple is reportedly building a new version of their A4 chip that will bring faster dual graphic cores to the iPhone 5 and iPad 2.

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With the announcement of his leave from day-to-day operations at Apple, Steve Jobs set off a flurry of speculation and sent some stock prices skittering.

Jobs once again asked for privacy and respect — some believe he should have it, others believe Apple will be under too much pressure from shareholders to maintain much reserve.

Do you think Steve jobs will get the privacy he has asked for? And how much does he deserve?

The news of Steve Jobs’ latest medical leave is the top story on the New York Times‘ website right now. The Times‘ top slot is usually reserved for big international news stories, indicting the importance of Apple’s news to the business and technology world. It has pushed out news about Tunisia’s new government and a fresh Wikileaks scandal about offshore banks and alleged tax cheats.