The less-expensive versions of the iPad (16GB and 32GB) have become the Zhu Zhu Pets of the tech world. Remember the news footage of parents going from store to store, only to find shelves bare of the mechanical hamsters? The same thing is happening to Apple fans searching for something other than the 64GB iPad.
J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz surveyed 15 stores this week, finding 11 stores had the 64GB iPads compared to just four stores able to sell a 16GB or 32GB version of the popular tablet device.
Lengthily discussing Apple’s heroic focus on iPhone OS 4.0 for the past few month’s, Daring Fireball says not to expect the next version of Apple’s other operating system until at least 2011.
Gruber writes:
A few months ago, I heard suggestions that Apple had tentative plans to release a developer beta of Mac OS X 10.7 at WWDC this June. That is no longer the case. Mac OS X 10.7 development continues, but with a reduced team and an unknown schedule. It’s my educated guess that there will be no 10.7 news at WWDC this year, and probably none until WWDC 2011.
Frankly, this doesn’t concern me too much. Snow Leopard was a solid effort that deep cleaned and tightened the bolts on an already excellent operating system. Short of the addition of multitouch or the addition of deeper integration with the iPhone OS, I’m hard pressed to think of any new features I would really like to see in OS X… although knowing Apple, they’ve thought of some I have not.
Either way, even in 2011, OS X 10.7 won’t be overdue: Snow Leopard’s barely been out for eight months, and it took thirty months to see Tiger transition to Leopard. The real question is whether or not the proud and noble Bornean Clouded Leopard (pictured) can gain enough support in the next two years to get the nod as 10.7 spirit cat.
Atomic Antelope’s Alice in Wonderland app for the iPad is certainly plenty frabjous — and makes a strange case for the iPad as the twenty-first century’s digital successor to the pop-up book — but what I really want to see is how the iPad changes the reading game when it comes to drier books.
As beautiful as this adaptation of Alice in Wonderland is, it’s also an easy approach. But how will people use the iPad’s capability to expand upon the text of a book like Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan or Nabokov’s Ada, or Adror, or Eco’s The Name of the Rose, or other less playful and anarchic works? I can’t wait to see.
To help you handicap next week’s earnings report set for April 20, we’ve compiled analyst expectations for iPhone sales during the second quarter of 2010. The range is from a high of 7.85 million from independent Apple analyst Turley Muller, who blogs at Financial Alchemist, to a low of 6.0 million from Citigroup analyst Richard Gardner. Even if Apple’s results are on the low side, it would mean a 58 percent increase over the same period in 2009.
If Muller is correct — and he’s often right on target — Apple could announce a 107 percent jump in handset sales. You be the judge.
Woe be Verizon. After chasing AT&T for a share of the iPhone piggy bank, a report recently emerged claiming the carrier could sell a CDMA version this summer. That word was quickly pounced upon by doubting analysts. Now another expert suggests even if Verizon could sell iPhones, the handset would be a drain on revenue. The iPhone would be a “mixed blessing” Bank of America analyst David Lynch told investors Monday.
“While clearly accretive to market share in our view, it is not accretive to earnings, even assuming steady pricing, until 2013,” Barden writes. In other words, although the iPhone would boost Verizon’s market share, it wouldn’t see any money from the deal until another three years.
As we reported eariler the Apple Store was closed this morning when I went for my ‘O-Dark-Thirty’ run, and as anticipated, we’ve got new i5 and i7 Macbook Pros to enjoy. I will be picking one up today if possible and will give a full rundown later in the week for an in-depth hands on.
Pricing looks great too, with $200 off the 17″ model. The 17″ configured as I’d buy it with an i7, is just $200 more (or in other words back to the original pricing).
No updates today for Macbook Air, or Macbook Pro… Which is good ’cause I don’t think I could justify to even my generious and understanding wife, upgrading two three thousand dollar machines at once!
Beautiful. Thanks Steve.
Check back here this weekend for a deep-dive hands on.
Steve Jobs appears to still be banging out email replies to regular Joes and Janes. His latest customer missive was sent out to German Apple owner Niko, who wanted to know whether Apple would still be supporting or updating the iPhone 2g.
The death knell for the 2g isn’t super surprising, it wasn’t part of the iPhone 4.0 presser and in device years, the original iPhone was pretty long in the tooth, discontinued in the US in summer 2008.
For those of you curious about what device Jobs used to send this answer, this one came from his iPhone, not his iPad.
Pilgrims trekking Italy to ogle the the Shroud of Turin, on public display for the first time in a decade, now have iPhone apps to help them see more.
Last time thousands of visitors flocked to peek at the yellowed cloth said to depict the face of Jesus, the best mobile option was probably some lame WAP browser.
This time around, iPhone apps can help negotiate the challenges of Italian travel — opening hours, monuments off the grid — with the flick of a finger.
iSindone (“sindone” is Italian for holy shroud) costs $0.99, and offers opening times, directions for getting there and info on the cathedral. There’s also a hi-res image of the shroud, rumored to be a medieval fake, which may give you a better look than the quick drive-by visitors get of the real thing.
Instant Turin, gratis for the next two weeks in honor of the shroud unveiling, promises to steer you clear of restaurants with dreaded tourist menus and get you to the Mole on time.
The official app, also called Sindone, hasn’t been released yet. Registering on the web site will give you details when it launches, we’re going to hope before the shroud display ends May 23.
And, if you need to walk off the chocolate and Barolo, try the sprawling gardens of Venaria Reale outside Turin — just remember to get bus times and hours handy or printed out or you will risk getting stranded.
Had you bought stock in Apple Computers when the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, you’d have received quite a nice return on your investment over the past 25 years. Had you bought Apple stock in 2001, when iTunes was introduced, your nine-year ROI would look pretty stellar, too. Heck, if you’d bought some AAPL in 2007, when the iPhone came out, chances are you’d have doubled your money in three short, mostly lackluster stock market years.
But what about now? Is 2010, the year of the iPad’s introduction, time to buy or time to sell shares in the company Steve Jobs founded?
Self-described mobile industry enthusiast, author and chronicler Tomi T Ahonen is unequivocal: “[Apple’s] time of ascendancy has come to an end.”
Apple’s upcoming iPhone OS 4 removes any mention of Google from the iPhone’s search feature, the latest step by the Cupertino, Calif. company to erase any connection with the Mountain View, Calif. Internet giant.
Already part of iPhone OS 3.2 used by the iPad, the elimination of the word “Google” from the iPhone’s Safari Web browser is part of iPhone OS 4, currently in beta stage. The current iPhone 3.1.3 includes a “Google” button in the bottom right corner of the handset’s touchscreen keyboard. The beta software will likely be made public this summer.
The iPhone 3GS. Creative Commons-licensed photo by Fr3d: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fr3d/2660915827/
We already know Apple has a lock on consumers, particularly teens. However, the world of the corporate cubicle has been dominated by Microsoft and the Blackberry. That picture may be changing, according to a new survey finding corporate interest in the iPhone increasing.
Apple share of the corporate smartphone market reached 27 percent in February, up from 22 percent in November, according to ChangeWave Research. The three chief reasons: demand by employees, more corporate applications available on the “cloud” via the iPhone, and improved security.
This heavily modded iMac G4 boasts a touschscreen, courtesy of Windows 7. Photo: Jon Berg/YouTube
Jon Berg injected some fresh life into his broken 17-inch iMac G4 by cramming a touchscreen PC’s guts inside and re-skinning the desktop to resemble OS X.
I wonder, though, why he didn’t decide to make it a dual-boot hackintosh. Windows 7’s multitouch is a total hack job. It’s hardly worth sacrificing OS X as your day-to-day operating system.
It’s certainly exciting that the iPhone is getting multitasking… but with only the very last generation of iDevice’s supported, a lot of people are going to be left behind. Even Apple seemed a little bit embarrassed not to be rolling multitasking out across all devices.
Presumably, the issue is one of horsepower, but not complete inability for pre-3Gs devices to multitask. A developer has discovered that by switching just one variable, you can enable multitasking on the iPhone 3G fairly easily.
Personally, I wonder if Apple wouldn’t have been wise to be a little more flexible on their rigid performance expectations for multitasking. When Apple introduced the App Store, they essentially eliminated the biggest and most obvious reason why the average iPhone owner would choose to jailbreak their devices: the ability to run third-party software. Getting multitask on older iPhones and iPod Touches is going to be a big reason for people to start jailbreaking again.
The evidence continues to mount that the next iPhone, iPad or both will support video conferencing. Just a few days after the iChatAgent process was found running under iPhone OS in the 4.0 Beta… and now 9to5Mac has unearthed the motherload of all video chat references.
According to Mark Gurman, “We’ve found references to moderators, chat rooms, encrypted video conferences and other features which could be even be used by developers in the future to add video chat to gaming applications, perhaps with ties to Gamecenter.”
A built-in video chat API for game developers to use in their apps is exciting enough, but 9to5Mac have also found that Apple is testing iPhone video conferencing services and have opened four servers (one external, three internal) to test out the feature.
Finally? According to 9to5Mac’s sources, iPads and iPod Touches are going to get video in the fall, simultaneous with the next iPhone release. And you thought you’d have a year before you had to upgrade your iPad.
Introduced way back in iPhone OS 2.2, the “Rate on Delete” feature was a great example of how even Apple sometimes get it wrong.
The intention, of course, was to prompt users to actually rate the apps on their iPhone in a non-intrusive way, but if you never deleted an app, you were never prompted to rate it. Combined with the fact that people deleting apps tend not to care much for them and you had a system that promoted app reviews but with a slant to the negative.
Now MacRumors is reporting that Apple has fixed its mistake and removed Rate on Delete from OS 4.0
I’m not sure this is the right tack. You still want user ratings, it’s just the current system skews towards bad ratings. Why not supplement Rate on Delete with a one-time Rate prompt the fifth time you open an app? That would cover all the bases.
When it comes to teen and electronics, there’s seemingly only one company on the playing field: Apple. “Apple’s dominance in the (consumer electronics) and online music markets is going seemingly unchecked,” Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster told investors Monday.
At the head of that urge to own anything with the Apple logo is the iPhone. Nearly a third – 31 percent – of teens the financial analyst surveyed said they plan to buy an iPhone in the next half year. That’s up from 22 percent last fall and almost double the 16 percent found a year ago.
Who knows how the iPad will ultimately be used? Certainly no one at this early date.
Is it merely an ebook reader, or is it a gaming device? Could it be an honest-to-goodness tool for business?
Like so many things, it all depends on your expectations.
It’s well known by now that early impressions of the iPad find it pooh-pooed by the technorati and generally lauded by the great unwashed as a fantastical window (if you’ll excuse the pun) into the future of mobile computing.
The highly regarded founder of Daily Kos, one of the Internet’s most widely read blogs, weighed in Sunday with a wide-ranging, detailed review of Apple’s latest creation and pronounced the iPad a gadget that “scored big as … a device that makes my life easier,” calling it “better than a laptop.”
Update: This article is not intended for the Irony challenged.
So I’m a hypocrite. After swearing that there was no way I’d ever own a tablet with a phone operating system, I broke down and got one. At this price point, I don’t see how I couldn’t. The wife couldn’t be happier, one needs just look at my bathroom above to see why. Gone are the endless stacks of magazines and books. Gone, is the image of her husband stuck behind his desk, nose in the computer (now, I’m on the couch, nose in the iPad, but at least being in the same room gives the impression of being engaged with the family).
Follow me after the jump for my impressions after week one.
Apparently MicroCenter has got new part numbers in their system for Macbooks, the pricing and models seem to line up nicely to the Macbook Pro lineup. Will this Tuesday be upgrade day? Steve only knows, but my fingers are crossed.
As noted in my last review, I’m not a big fan of iPhone cases (or any sort of cases, really. Or even clothes — when I was a kid, I ran around nak…uh, but back to the case). When I saw Incase’s Perforated Snap Case, and heard it was one of the lightest and leanest iPhone cases, I expected to find a case I would finally keep permanently attached to my 3GS. Well, not quite.
Golf aficionados — or viewers agog about Tiger Woods’ emergence from hibernation — might have noticed a curiously new AT&T in a TV spot during the start of the PGA Masters in Augusta on Thursday.
The introduction of the iPad is a clarion call for major music labels to finally recognize the future of the music industry and embrace the development of applications made to run on Apple’s new device, according to a feature article in the latest issue of Billboard Magazine, which officially hits news stands Saturday.
Once the province of industry insiders, filled with reams of stats and reportage on music industry minutiae, behind-the-scenes comings and goings and gossip, Billboard is now a smart and snappy magazine with its finger on the pulse of the larger forces at work in the music industry, with articles seemingly targeting a more general audience while remaining the go-to source for the numbers that drive the industry.
The cover of the current issue promises a look at The Next Killer Apps, though what the article inside actually suggests is that – generally – the next killer apps on the iPad are going to be music-related offerings tied to artist branding that will give consumers something more than the aural experience provided by CDs and music downloads, and will provide the industry new realms of revenue producing products that go well beyond the marketing value of the web content and promotional aspirations of most mobile offerings produced to date.
What is clear is that Apple has timed this purposely to hurt sales of CS5. This has nothing to do whatsoever with bringing the Flash player to Apple’s devices. That is a separate discussion entirely. What they are saying is that they won’t allow applications onto their marketplace solely because of what language was originally used to create them. This is a frightening move that has no rational defense other than wanting tyrannical control over developers and more importantly, wanting to use developers as pawns in their crusade against Adobe. This does not just affect Adobe but also other technologies like Unity3D. […] Now let me put aside my role as an official representative of Adobe for a moment as I would look to make it clear what is going through my mind at the moment. Go screw yourself Apple.
Note: this is an earlier version of the post copied by Via 9to5Mac.com before someone at Adobe ordered edits.
