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Report: iTunes No. 3 Provider of U.S. Digital Video Subscriptions

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Dejavue All Over Again. Microsoft and RIM plan to launch iTunes rivals.
Dejavue All Over Again. Microsoft and RIM plan to launch iTunes rivals.

When it comes to attracting consumers to video subscription services, convenience wins out over other factors. That’s the message behind new research finding Netflix gets 60 percent of the U.S. digital subscription market, leaving Apple’s iTunes No. 3, with just 4 percent. Cable giant Comcast placed second, according to a NPD Group report on domestic digital video demand between January and February 2011.

The iTunes service tied with satellite provider DirecTV and entertainment behemoth Time Warner. Although the Apple service began in 2006, iTunes began renting movies in 2008 and 99-cent TV episodes in 2010. Despite consumers knowing iTunes had a more up-to-date inventory for rent, Netflix was given the nod due to the “overall shopping experience” and “value for price paid,” NPD announced Tuesday.

Steve Jobs Is The Biological Brother Of Homer Simpson’s Mother [Fun Facts]

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Here’s a weird fun fact for you on a slow news Tuesday: there’s a very real familial link between Apple CEO Steve Jobs and TV’s Homer Simpson. Here’s how.

As some of you may know, Steve Jobs was put up for adoption as an infant. What you may not know is that Steve Jobs’ birth parents are Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, who put him up for adoption because they weren’t married at the time.

Later, when they married, they had another child: Mona Jandali. However, Jandali abandoned both Mona and her mother when Mona was five. Joanne eventually remarried, at which point Mona decided to take her stepfather’s name and became Mona Simpson.

Analyst: 52M Tablets in 2011 – 75 Percent Apple’s

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Desktops? Laptops? The conversation has shifted to tablets, and Apple appears to be at the center of this whirlwind. Yet another research firm is forecasting the global growth of “tab computers.” Canalys expects to see 52 million of the devices shipped this year – and Apple’s iPad will account for 75 percent of the sales.

The numbers mirror an earlier Goldman Sachs forecast for 54.7 million tablets, 37.2 million from Apple. Analysts at JPMorgan had a more dire warning: there could be a tablet ‘bubble’ as rivals push production, yet see limited sales.

A Dozen Gorgeous Gelaskins for iPad2 [Gallery]

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Leave it to Gelaskins, makers of some of the best looking protective “covers” for electronic gear on the market today, to have nearly 300 choices for personalizing your iPad2 already in stock.

Much of the artwork available for these striking gear condoms (printed on feather-light, flexible space-age material invented by 3M) is intricate, busy and wild — taking away, in some eyes, from the elegance of Apple’s iPad design.

Here, for readers’ consideration, then, are a dozen creations of a more subtle bent, which tend to both command one’s attention as artwork, while supporting a showcase for the latest iteration of Apple’s post-PC mobile communication platform.

Each iPad2 skin sells for $29.95 through the Gelaskins website, where you can see the whole mind-blowing collection — along with their vast inventory of skins for other devices.

Report: Apple’s NYC FlagShip Sold 7,200 iPad 2s During First Day

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Although we won’t know for certain how many iPad 2 tablets were sold this weekend until Apple releases actual figures, that hasn’t stopped a patchwork of estimates and insider reports. The latest metric coming to us is that 7,200 of the next-generation devices were sold Friday at the Cupertino, Calif. company’s New York City flagship store, the first day the iPad was available.

While the report cites a “well-connected source,” the numbers seem to echo a statement on weekend iPad 2 consumer demand. Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster and his team found 1,109 people were lined-up at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store this weekend – up from 703 when the original iPad was released in 2010.

To Counter iPad, Samsung Might Drop Price Of Galaxy Tab To $399

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Speaking of Samsung, can you tell that Apple’s biggest rival in the nascent tablet market is feeling the heat from the iPad 2? According to new rumors and the leaked spec sheet above, Samsung’s already readying to counter Apple’s second-gen iPad by dropping the price of their 7-inch WiFi tablet the Galaxy Tab to just $399, undercutting the cheapest iPad 2 by $100 bucks.

It would be a smart move by Samsung. After the iPad 2 was announced, Samsung openly admitted that they would need to reconsider the pricing of their forthcoming Galaxy Tab 10.1, a ten-inch version of the original Galaxy Tab that is more iPad-like in form factor.

Of course, it also implies a certain degree of desperation to take a credible share of the tablet market from the iPad. At $399, Samsung would almost certainly be selling the Galaxy Tab at a loss. $399 is about what I think a Froyo-based 7-inch tablet should cost, but it’s probably not what it does cost to manufacture. Samsung won’t be able to keep this up forever.

A5 Teardown Reveals Chip Almost Twice The Size Of The A4

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If you like staring at silicon without its clothes on, you’ll love this: Chipworks has done a teardown of the iPad 2’s new A5 processor.

It’s a technical read, and frankly, I’m not Cylon enough to understand most of it. The most interesting detail for us laypeople is that it’s actually pretty honking huge: at 120mm, it’s actually more than twice the size of the A4’s 53mm CPU, allowing Apple to cram in more cores, transistors and a bigger GPU for more oomph all around.

According to Chipworks, the SoC is still pretty much off-the-shelf. It’s manufactured by Samsung, despite Apple’s rumored partnership with TSMC to build iPad 2 chips, so it doesn’t look like Apple’s given Sammy the boot just yet for daring to release their own tablet.

iPad 2 Shipping Estimates Slip Again To Over A Month

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Ouch. If you haven’t ordered an iPad 2 yet, I hope you’re willing to wait over a month to get one, as iPad 2 shipping estimates have slipped again, this time to four or five weeks for most models.

iPad 2 shipping estimates have been slipping since mere hours after it went on sale online in the wee hours of Friday. Originally put up for sale online at 1AM PT with a 3-5 business day shipping estimate, that slipped in mere hours to 5-7 days, then to two weeks and now to over a month.

If you haven’t ordered your iPad 2 online yet, your best bet might be to drop by your local Apple Store on the way to work today. Rumor indicates that Apple Stores will open at 9am today to service iPad 2 sales on a fresh shipment, and I can confirm that, at least at the Apple Store I’m currently parked at, Apple employees are already bustling around inside.

Sorry, Bon Jovi, Steve Jobs Didn’t Found Napster [Editorial]

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As we noted earlier, the weekend’s silliest headline came courtesy of hair product Jon Bon Jovi, who ranted to the Sunday Times of London that “Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business.”

This statement is astoundingly ignorant. The iTunes Music Store is easily the most popular record store in the history of the world, having sold more than 10 billion songs in its eight years of existence. One can decry the very notion of digital distribution. It’s impossible to argue with business that big.

Moreover, when iTMS hit the scene in April 2003, it was a godsend to record labels. After all, Apple didn’t invent digital distribution of music. They invented legitimate digital distribution. Napster had hit the scene a full four years previous, making it possible for college students across the country (myself included, briefly) to readily share reasonably high-quality music files with one another over the Internet in simple fashion. As soon as Shawn Fanning flipped the switch in 1999, the music business needed to change itself or disappear.

For years, it chose to disappear, waging costly legal battles with Napster and its near-relatives Audiogalaxy, MP3.com, Gnutella, Kazaa, Morpheus, and LimeWire. Hilariously, the Recording Industry Association of America’s belief that they could sue file sharing out of existence did little but spur its growth and, more critically, its innovation. BitTorrent, the radically distributed and difficult-to-trace open file sharing protocol, hit in 2001, arguably a few years before it would have arrived had the record companies reached a deal to distribute music legally through Napster. Also, Metallica.

It was into this mix that Steve Jobs arrived. And with him, the record industry finally changed. A little. They finally signed on with a legitimate way to purchase music over the Internet, for just 99 cents a song. And it was revolutionary, driving unprecedented volumes and moving a lot of iPods in the process. But, like Bon Jovi, the record industry has a short memory, and immediately began demanding to sell songs for more money on iTunes, as well as demanding a higher percentage of revenue from each tune, even though, at 70:30, they were already doing better than a typical margin at a record store.

Anyway, they got what they wanted again, but still they rant and whine about devaluing music or killing the romance of the art form. Generally, they resent that the vast iTunes library has allowed indie bands to get more attention than they ever were when major labels controlled distribution. And those indie labels are doing great now (see what Merge Records has accomplished with Arcade Fire and Spoon), as are some of the independent record stores that thrive off of their albums.

Honestly, at the end of the day, the Web’s arrival in the early 1990s was a sign that all media would eventually be delivered differently than it previously had. It was obvious that early. But the entrenched media covered their eyes and their ears and hoped things could remain the same. And now that an inevitable reality of digital music, video, books, and periodicals have arrived, everyone wants to get mad at the one company that’s actually helped figure out how to make record labels some money in the last decade. Whether they like it or not.

In short, JonBon: “This Left Feels Right” killed music. Steve Jobs is the one who helped you profit from that murder.

The Sunday Times Magazine: LITD: Jon Bon Jovi, 48, rockstar (paywall)

Smuggle Truck Game Adds Legal Immigration Version

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Responding to critics, Smuggle Truck, the game about illegal immigration has added a legal mode.

The game still hasn’t been approved for iTunes yet, but if and when it is in April, you’ll be able to access Legal Immigration mode via the game’s main menu.

How do you play? Well, you don’t. Not really. You get a screen with 20-year countdown.

When asked why two decades, Owlchemy Labs developer Alex Schwartz said:

“Well that’s the greater than 10 years it takes for someone to obtain a green card. Plus the multiple occurrences of ‘lost paperwork’ that are bound to happen during the process.”

“Smuggle Truck: Operation Immigration” has released a storm of controversy – and free publicity.

In it, players navigate through what looks like the U.S.-Mexican border. As the truck drives over cliffs, mountains and dead animals, immigrants fall off the truck bed. Scores are calculated by the number of immigrants helped into the U.S. Hundreds of news outlets have written about the game, many weighing in on whether it’s in bad taste or a wry commentary on the current US immigration policies.

From the press release released, it sounds like the game makers are keen to keep up that publicity spin cycle:

“Tilt your truck, catch newborn babies, drive over armadillos, and rocket your way over hills, through caverns, and over quicksand to save the people!”

Having  gone through the frustrating, expensive, time-consuming green card process for a family member, the legal mode option gave me a good laugh.

Via Joystiq

AT&T Offers Free Month Of iPad 2 Data For A Limited Time

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Still haven’t bought your iPad 2 yet and wondering which flavor of 3G to get: AT&T or Verizon? Ma Bell’s now sweetening the pot if you’re willing to sign up with them. According to a mailing AT&T is sending around, they’re offering a free month of iPad data for a limited time, with no commitment or associated fees. All you have to do is call them up at 1-888-237-5888 and it sounds like they’ll hook you up.

AT&T phrases this offer as a way to “try your iPad” on their mobile broadband service, but of course, if you bought an AT&T iPad 2, you don’t really have a choice either way anymore.

How To Correct Common Typos Automagically [100 Tips #50]

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In the System Preferences application, you’ll see an icon called “Language and Text”. If you open this, and select the Text tab, you’ll see a list titled “Symbol and Text Substitution”, which provides some useful text shortcuts. You can use these to auto-correct common typos as you make them, or to replace short text mnemonics with longer words or phrases.

Witness the Spectacle of the Apple Popup Store [SXSW]

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In case you missed it, Apple stole the spotlight this year at SXSW by launching iPad 2 in a temporary popup shop right in the heart of Austin.

I had heard that Apple was opening a popup store at a secret location during SXSW, but the location wasn’t a secret for long.

Long lines, big signs, high fives—even dancing ensued once the twitterverse got wind of the popup’s location. It was a crazy fun time, so if you haven’t seen it yet, check the video and let your eyes behold the insanity of this brilliant iPad launch.

PS, excuse the video’s abrupt ending, my camera ate some of my video bytes.

Microsoft’s Zune Is Officially Dead

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Microsoft is killing the Zune player after five years of unsuccessfully trying to compete with Apple’s iPod.

The Zune is being discontinued thanks to weak ongoing sales, Bloomberg reports. It will not be refreshed when current units sell out.

When the Zune was introduced in 2006, in mold-breaking brown nonetheless, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer predicted the player would one day overtake Apple. But it failed to even crack the top five MP3 players. According to NPD, Apple had 77% market share in 2010.

“MSFT abandoning Zune last sign AAPL totally dominated portable music for the last decade,” tweeted industry analyst Michael Gartenberg. “Sony, Samsung, Dell all failed to move needle.”

Gartenberg also predicted that tablets will be the next Zune.

Pundit Paul Kedrosky said: “My main reaction to news that Microsoft is going to stop selling Zunes is … Microsoft still sold Zunes?”

Instead of selling hardware players, Microsoft will shift its focus to putting Zune on smartphones running Windows mobile OS.

With its world class design, Microsoft’s young hip image, and ground-breaking advertising like the spot below, is it any wonder the Zune failed to take off?

(This is a joke, btw)

Man Hijacks Time Square Billboards With iPhone [Hacks]

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Just like CBS I don’t know if this is real or fake. However, it is interesting and intriguing. The video shows a man who uses his iPhone, a video transmitter, and a repeater to hijack video billboards in Times Square.  In a sense it looks like he’s hacked the video feeds going to these video billboards displayed in Times Square.

He starts off with small video billboards at ground level and eventually works his way up to a giant CNN billboard high above the middle of Times Square.

Real or fake? Tell us what you think by leaving a comment.

[via CBS News]

Bon Jovi Says Steve Jobs Is “Personally Responsible For Killing Music”

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Rocker Jon Bon Jovi says Steve Jobs is “personally responsible for killing the music business” with iTunes.

In an interview with The Sunday Times Magazine, Bon Jovi says kids no longer enjoy the “magical” experience of buying and enjoying LPs because of digital downloads. He hates to sound like an “old man,” he says, but it’s all Jobs’ fault:

“Kids today have missed the whole experience of putting the headphones on, turning it up to 10, holding the jacket, closing their eyes and getting lost in an album; and the beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it. God, it was a magical, magical time. I hate to sound like an old man now, but I am, and you mark my words, in a generation from now people are going to say: ‘What happened?’. Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business.”

I’m an old man too, but I’ve never enjoyed music more. I much prefer my fantastic Sonos music system than my old record player. I do recall the excitement of buying a new LP every week. I doubt I’d get the same excitement these days, but that’s not Steve Jobs’ fault.

As for killing music, I’d say Bon Jovi has done more on that front than Steve Jobs.

Incidentally, Bon Jovi sits on a White House panel with Jobs’ wife, Laurene Powell Jobs. Both are members of the White House council for Community Solutions. Might be awkward at the next meeting.

The Sunday Times Magazine: LITD: Jon Bon Jovi, 48, rockstar (paywall)

Apple Files Trademark For Apple Corps’ Official Logo

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Way back in 1978, Apple Corps successfully got Apple to agree never to enter the music industry in court… a ban that Apple was obviously successful at whittling away at, slowly but surely, over the next twenty odd years. That culminated in a 2007 settlement that resulted in most of Apple Corps’ trademarks being given to Apple, Inc… a settlement that ultimately led to the release of the Beatles catalog on iTunes back in late 2010.

Curiously, though, one Apple Corps trademark that Apple never got was for Apple Corps’ distinctive and fruity logo. That’s now changed, with Apple having applied for Apple Corps’ Granny Smith apple logo with the European Treademarks Office on March 11th, 2011, covering everything from computer hardware, online social networking services, musical instruments, games, clothing, advertising and broadcasting.

In trademark disputes, gaining control over your opponent’s official logo is what is called a fatality. After twenty three years, it looks like the dispute between Apple Corps and Apple is over once and for all.

Apple Employs New Audio Jack Design To Make iPad 2 More Waterproof

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Back in September, Apple filed a patent that would make the audio jacks in their iOS devices even smaller, using deflectable pogo pins instead of cantilever beams to extend into the jack’s cavity and conduct audio and electricity to your headphones.

It was an interesting patent, but Apple’s patents have a tendency to never materialize. This one did, though: according to Kevin Fox of Mozilla Labs, the iPad 2 is the first Apple device to use the new pogo pin audio jack.

Daily Deals: $199 8GB iPod touch, iPad 2 Cases, 16GB Unlocked iPhone 3G

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We start another week of deals with bargains for the iPod touch, iPad 2 and iPhone 3G. First in the spotlight is an 8GB iPod touch for just $199 from the Apple Store. Next is silicone and TPU cases for Apple’s latest iPad 2, starting at $5.99. Last in the spotlight is a 16GB unlocked iPhone 3G for $338.

Along the way, we also check out a sliding bluetooth keyboard case for your iPhone 4, a case for your iPod touch, and software for your Mac. As always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Archive Button Gives Mail Some Of That Gmail Magic [50 Mac Essentials #33]

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If you’ve ever used and loved the “Archive” function in Gmail or MobileMe, then found yourself missing it while using Apple’s own Mail application, this simple free plugin is a dream come true.

It’s an Archive button for Mail, and you can guess what it does. Instead of having to mess around with filing messages into folders, a single click will throw them into the archive. It even comes with its own ready-made keyboard shortcut (Command+Option+S), to make archiving even faster and easier.

When you need to find something specific, use Mail’s own search, which is quite up to the task of hunting through enormous archives (I’ve used Mail in this way, as a backup for my Gmail account, for years now).

If you need Mail to be a little more flexible, try Mail Act-On, which we mentioned back in number 8 in this series.

(You’re reading the 33rd post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications: a list of the great Mac apps the team at Cult of Mac value most. Read more, or grab the RSS feed.)

Apple: iPad 2 Demand Is “Amazing”

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Speaking to Jim Dalrymple over at The Loop, Apple spokesperson Trudy Muller says that demand for the iPad 2 has been “amazing.”

How amazing? Amazing enough that they’re admitting that there are supply shortages and they can’t produce them fast enough… at least by implication.

“We are working hard to get iPad 2 into the hands of every customer who wants one as quickly as possible,” said Muller.

Analysts are saying that Apple could have sold as many as a million iPad 2s over the weekend, based upon estimated shipping times online and the long lines outside Apple Stores for the iPad 2s launch.

This isn’t the first time Apple has admitted that they just can’t make iPads fast enough to satisfy demand: at Apple’s EOY earnings call in February, Apple COO Tim Cook admitted that he thought they could have sold even more iPads in 2010 if they’d been able to build more them.

Still trying to get an iPad 2, but unwilling to wait the current four weeks wait by orering online? Reports suggest you’ll have a chance to buy an iPad 2 tomorrow morning, if you get to an Apple Store early.