Cricket Wireless became the first prepaid carrier to offer the iPhone yesterday, but it’s unlikely it’ll be the last. One source claims that both the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S will also be arriving on Boost Mobile later this year.
Apple has begun a hiring push to find lead design engineers to help them make the long-rumored iPizza a reality, Cult of Mac has exclusively learned.
The advert, posted today on Apple’s jobs board, calls for a candidate with at least four years experience in the Neapolitan supply chain. Intriguingly, one of the skills required for the position is the “ability to hand stretch the pizza (without using a rolling pin),” suggesting that the new iPizza will be built with a revolutionary new manufacturing process.
Talk of an iPizza is not new. Over the years, Steve Jobs was spotted many times in Silicon Valley researching slices of pizza, leading to ongoing speculation that Apple was interested in entering the saucy Italian pie industry.
Despite disapproval from its rivals, Apple’s new 4FF nano-SIM format has been approved by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) this morning, edging out other proposals from the likes of Motorola, Nokia, and Research in Motion. The new card is said to be 40% smaller than existing micro-SIM cards, but it offers all of the same functionality.
Well what do we have here. With rumors saying that the next iPhone will feature a taller, 4-inch display, a video has surfaced from Japanese site Macotakara detailing the new screen dimensions on video. After getting its hands on what appears to be the parts that have been floating around in the wild for the last few days, Macotakara’s video shows off a 4.07-inch front panel that could easily house the larger display everyone has been talking about.
Following the Fair Labor Association’s audit into Foxconn working conditions earlier this year, which unearthed several labor violations, including unlawful working hours, poor pay, and a total disregard for health and safety, Apple and Foxconn promised to make some major improvements.
However, two months on, activists say violations “remain the norm,” and that there is no evidence of any significant changes in Foxconn’s Chinese factories.
Today Leap Wireless, parent company to Cricket, announced that it has partnered with Apple to bring the iPhone to the U.S. prepaid market for the first time. Starting June 22nd, customers will be able to buy iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S models from Cricket on a prepaid wireless plan. The iPhones have been substantially subsidized by Cricket, indicating that the carrier is taking a financial hit to hop on the Apple bandwagon.
A pair of new job listings on Apple’s website confirm that the company is seeking two engineers to overhaul the existing 30-pin dock connector currently employed by its iOS devices. The listings strengthen rumors Apple will introduce a new dock connector with its sixth-generation iPhone later this year, that will be significantly smaller than its predecessor.
Mike Daisey, the author behind The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, who was forced to admit that he fabricated some of his claims about worker mistreatment in Apple’s supply chain, has criticized Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher for being too soft on Tim Cook during their interview at All Things D’s D10 conference earlier this week.
After offensively branding Swisher as lazy for her use of the word “fictional,” in a post on his blog, Daisey continues to blast the pair’s “weak” interview questions and suggests how they can “do [their] job better.”
During the last 8 or so years of his career at Apple, Steve Jobs gave his most famous interviews at the annual D: All Things Digital conference. Sitting opposite veteran journalists Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Jobs was know for candidly answering questions and giving his honest opinion on hot topics.
Following the D10 interview with current Apple CEO Tim Cook yesterday, AllThingsD has made its entire collection of Steve Jobs interviews available as a free download in the iTunes Store.
Hollywood screenwriter Aaron Sorkin was interviewed today by Walt Mossberg at the D10 conference in California. Sorkin has been hired by Sony to adapt Walter Isaacson’s official biography of Steve Jobs, and he has already tapped Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to help advise him during the production process.
Sorkin talked about writing his Jobs movie today onstage. He described his writing process and how he wants to approach the film. After affirming that the film is still in the earliest stages of production, Sorkin talked about how he wants the audience to relate to his script and the kind of actor he wants to play Jobs.
MacKeeper is a strange piece of software. There may be no other app as controversial in the Apple world. The application, which performs various janitorial duties on your hard drive, is loathed by a large segment of the Mac community. Check out any blog, site or forum that mentions it, and you’ll find hundreds of furious comments condemning MacKeeper and Zeobit, the company behind it. We discovered this ourselves earlier this month, when we offered a 50%-off deal on MacKeeper. Look at all those furious comments on the post.
The complaints about MacKeeper are all over the shop: It’s a virus. It holds your machine hostage until you pay up. It can’t be completely removed if you decide to delete it. Instead of speeding up your computer, it slows it down. It erases your hard drive, deletes photos, and disappears documents. There are protests about MacKeeper’s annual subscription fees. Zeobit is slammed for seedy marketing tactics. It runs pop-under ads, plants sock-puppet reviews and encourages sleazy affiliate sites, critics say.
But what’s really strange is that MacKeeper has been almost universally praised by professional reviewers. All week I’ve been checking out reviews on the Web and I can’t find a bad one.
Apple has reportedly bought small Italian startup Redmatica, a company that specializes in making digita music-editing apps that all run on the Mac.
This time last week we had very little idea of what the new iPhone may look like. Sure, we had rumors and claims that gave us something to go on, but none of them were supported by any evidence. But in the space of just a few days, we’ve seen several front and back panels from a number of different sources, which have today been backed up by what is purported to be a leaked blueprint for the next-generation iPhone.
Apple isn’t going to debut their new rumored HDTV set at WWDC 2012, but according to a new report, they will unveil the version of iOS that it will run on, and which will be coming to the Apple TV set-top box later this year. Even more interesting? Your Apple TV might soon become the hub through which the rest of your living room connects.
There weren’t many iOS 5.1.1 devices that the Absinthe 2.0 and Rocky Racoon jailbreaks didn’t support from day one, but one of them was the iPad 2,4 — the latest Wi-Fi iPad 2 that Apple released alongside the third-generation iPad earlier this year. Thanks to their latest updates, however, that’s all changed.
During the Q&A session at D10 today Apple CEO Tim Cook was asked an interesting question about how his company names its products. While many have speculated as to why Apple called the fifth-generation iPhone the “4S” back in October, Cook confirmed that the smartphone was named after its flagship feature, Siri.
Apple names its products each generation by either a flagship feature or design change. When a certain product establishes itself, naming conventions are usually dropped altogether, like the iMac and iPod Shuffle.
During his interview at the D10 conference today, Apple CEO Tim Cook was asked point blank by Kara Swisher about how Apple plans to change television.
He replied by praising the current set-top box Apple sells for $100. The Apple TV sold 2.8 million units last year and 2.7 million this year. “It’s an area of intense interest for us,” said Cook, “It’s not a fifth leg of the stool. It’s not the same size as the phone or Mac or tablet business.”
Walt Mossberg, co-interviewer, asked directly if Apple could just make a box and continue leaving the panel to others. Cook replied, “Can we control the key technology? Can we make a significant contribution far beyond what others have done in this area?” That’s the question Apple asks, and Cook seemed to be very interested in what the future may hold for his company’s future contributions.
Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage tonight to sit opposite veteran journalists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg at the tenth D: All Things Digital (D10) conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. It is Cook’s first major interview since he became the official CEO of Apple last year.
Steve Jobs was known for the interviews he gave at D conferences throughout the years, including his famous face-off with Microsoft’s Bill Gates in 2007. Cook took the stage to talk about the state of Apple under his leadership.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been challenging Apple to higher standards for quite some time. Carrying the slogan “defending your rights in the digital world,” the EFF frequently calls out tech companies and related policies when it thinks ramifications could be negative for consumers. The EFF challenged Apple to defend its third-party developers against the Lodsys patent troll, has repeatedly addressed the company’s “anti-competieve” strategies, and so on.
In a new post today, the EFF has proposed that Apple let users of its iOS platform break through the “beautiful crystal prison” and have more control over the OS. The EFF also argues that OS X is becoming more of a restricted platform on the Mac, and that Apple should pave the way for a more open culture leading into the future.
Last week a group of developers banded together to celebrate pricing freedom by launching the Because We May promotion. The promotion, which ends June 1, includes heavily discounted games across multiple platforms. Since its launch, Because We May has received great support and the list of games available has grown tremendously.
The core apps and features in Apple’s iOS operating system have looked largely the same since the original iPhone made its debut back in 2007. Put certain iOS 5 apps — Calendar, Contacts, Maps, YouTube — alongside those from the original iPhone OS and you’ll notice hardly any difference.
However, Apple could be gearing up to make some changes in iOS 6 that will introduce a fresh new look to the iPhone. This summer we could be waving goodbye to that traditional iPhone blue that has adorned iOS apps for the past five years and saying hello to sexy silver.
It could soon be a whole lot easier for Apple to compete with pay TV providers as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) considers a change to the definition of “multichannel video programming distributor.” To date, the term has been applied only to cable companies like Comcast, Time Warner Cable, or DirecTV. But as similar services continue to grow online, the FCC is questioning whether it should also apply to the likes of Hulu, Netflix, and in the future, Apple.
A change would mean that Apple would be free to offer up a number of TV channels just like any cable provider, without having to negotiate with those cable providers over expensive programming deals.
Rumor has had it for the past few months that Apple was going to phase out its reliance upon Google’s Maps API in iOS 6 in favor of its own revolutionary new mapping system, which it has been working on off-and-on since 2009. Now Boy Genius Report has exclusive images of what they say is the new iOS 6 Maps app in action, and boy, if the composite mock-up they put together based on those images is anything to go by, it looks like a total game changer.
You one of the lucky ones who managed to buy a ticket to this year’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference during the approximately two hours while tickets were on sale? Apple’s posted the schedule of events that you can expect, as well as the requisite app making finding and scheduling your itinerary for WWDC 2012 all the easier.
Source: developer.apple.com