August 9, 2011
Wall Street Journal:
Customs officials discovered people sending iPhones and iPads from Hong Kong to Shenzhen by placing the devices in tote bags and hooking them to a pulley that reached across the border, according to the Chinese news report over the weekend, which was also posted on Youtube. The smugglers, who allegedly did the exchanges overnight, were caught with more than 50 iPhones and 50 iPad 2s, worth some 300,000 yuan ($47,000).
Apparently the smugglers used a cable and pulley stretched over the Shatoujiao River, between a Hong Kong high-rise building and a building in nearby Shenzhen. The ruse was done to avoid stiff border taxes.
AllThingsD:
Among the top six notebook vendors — Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP and Samsung — Apple ranked last in global market share in the second quarter of 2011, according to Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore.But that’s without the iPad.With it, Apple was the single largest notebook vendor during the period, with a 20 percent market share — greater than the 15 percent held by PC giant Hewlett-Packard.
That’s a mighty big leap. Steve Jobs is the first person to trump the iPad as the harbinger of a “Post-PC” era, so I’m not sure adding the iPad into that mix is a meaningful statistic. But it does go to show that the iPad is an incredibly important product for Apple right now.
August 8, 2011
Apple Support Web site:
The Lion Recovery Disk Assistant lets you create Lion Recovery on an external drive that has all of the same capabilities as the built-in Lion Recovery: reinstall Lion, repair the disk using Disk Utility, restore from a Time Machine backup, or browse the web with Safari. This drive can be used in the event you cannot start your computer with the built-in Recovery HD, or you have replaced the hard drive with a new one that does not have Mac OS X installed.
QNAP Systems on Monday announced the release of version 3.5 of its Network Attached Storage (NAS) management software for its Turbo NAS series. The new release makes QNAP Turbo NAS devices compatible with OS X Lion. The firmware update is available for download from QNAP’s Web site. (more…)
Skype for Mac, the popular video and audio conferencing software, has been updated to 5.3. The new version is available for free download from the Skype Web site. (more…)
Game maker Blizzard recently caused a stir in the gaming community when it revealed that its forthcoming dungeon crawl game Diablo III would require a persistent online connection, even though the game touts a single-player mode. A Blizzard executive says they’re doing this to reduce the likelihood of cheaters exploiting the system, not because of Digital Rights Management (DRM). (more…)
Comcast has announced plans to offer $10 per month Internet access to low-income families. The “Internet Essentials” plan also nets families who meet the qualifications with a $150 voucher to help them buy a free computer. (more…)
Apple on Monday began to offer a 21.5-inch iMac computer tailored specifically for educational institutions. The model cuts a bunch of features available in the base model iMac, which is priced $200 more at $1199 ($150 more with the education discount). (more…)
August 5, 2011
Dan Frommer:
Jumptap, a mobile ad network, just published its latest monthly metrics dump, including this map, which highlights the dominant smartphone platform in each state. In particular, it seems that the south and west are Google Android country, while the north and midwest favor Apple’s iPhone.
9to5Mac:
We’ve gotten word from some readers that AT&T is moving forward and removing unlimited plans for users who jailbreak iPhones to tether or hotspot off of AT&T’s unlimited data plans (for those grandfathered).
Brian S. Hall:
If you have a monopoly business and generate monopoly profits and take those monopoly profits to another industry and *gave away* what your competitors (must) charge for, which led you to quickly capture the *dominant* maret share, would you……whine like a bitch?
What he said.
Cult of Mac yesterday afternoon:
We’ve gotten word from a previously reliable source that Apple is discontinuing the Magic Mouse in favor of the Magic Trackpad.
Cult of Mac last night:
Our source in Apple inventory has followed up with us, and it appears that Apple has instead discontinued the Magic Mouse’s old part number in favor for a new one.
Cult of Mac talking about its mistake:
I’m sure we’re not alone in saying we’re glad the rumors of the Magic Mouse’s demise have proven to be an exaggeration.
There were no rumors besides the ones you started, so the exaggeration comes from your own story.
PCalc is ideal for scientists, engineers, students, programmers, or indeed anybody looking for a feature rich calculator. It includes an optional RPN mode and multi-line display, a choice of button layouts, an extensive set of unit conversions, a paper tape, multiple undo and redo, engineering and scientific notation, as well as support for hexadecimal, octal, and binary calculations.
The latest update also adds support for external Bluetooth keyboards. PCalc and PCalc Lite are available from the App Store.
DigiTimes:
Acer founder Stan Shih has commented that the fads for ultrabooks and tablet PCs are both short-term phenomena and urged companies in the notebook supply chain to come out with more value-added products through innovation.
You keep telling yourself that.
Some more perspective from Jon Fingas at Electronista.
August 4, 2011
Harry Marks talking about Steve Jobs’ ability to say no:
RIM needs to take the same approaches to their products – learn to say “No” and focus resources where they’re needed. The PlayBook was a disaster, but it didn’t have to be had upper management actually thought like a consumer for 10 seconds.
Remember when Steve came back to Apple? He cut many products and focused the company on several things that would drive Apple forward.
AppleInsider:
After a number of fake Apple retail stores in China gained publicity online, Apple appears to have taken legal action, undoubtedly looking to shut down the counterfeit locations designed to look like its own operations.Apple has gone on the offensive against a number of defendants, including 50 John Does and unnamed businesses, in a new trademark infringement suit. The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of New York remains under a court seal, so the specifics of the complaint are not known.
They had to see this coming.
Square Enix announced Thursday that, at long last, Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions is now available for iPhone and iPod touch. The game costs $15.99. Square Enix indicates that an iPad version is coming later this month. (more…)
Market research firm IDC on Thursday released its worldwide smartphone market numbers for the second quarter of 2011 and Apple is in the lead. (more…)
My good friend Matthew Panzarino at TNW sent this to me today. Pretty much sums up what I’ve been trying to say. Apple innovated; everyone else followed; RIM stayed the same. (more…)
Take a look at these photos. The 8700c was released in 2004 (I have one of these) and the 9900 was released this week. RIM had seven years to change the design or do something, but they look pretty much the same. I suppose RIM has a dozen other models to choose from, but it seems amazing that the company is still selling something with the exact same design. (more…)
A forum user at CrackBerry.com made a suggestion to fellow PlayBook owners to help save the device. (more…)
Ed Sutherland at Cult of Mac:
The good news for Apple came in a study of 216 smartphone users by Piper Jaffray Apple-watcher Gene Munster. The study found 67 percent of BlackBerry owners plan to buy an iPhone as their next handset. Just 26 percent of BlackBerry owners want to keep the RIM handset. This compares to 94 percent of iPhone owners who said they will buy a new Apple smartphone.
This must be a devious ploy by RIM’s co-CEOs.
IndustryGamers:
“As Nintendo’s share price continues to plummet, it is fair to ask if they are an acquisition target,” observed Panoptic Management Consultants CEO Asif Khan to IndustryGamers. “With a market capitalization around $20 billion, there are a handful of tech companies that could afford to make an offer. Apple, Google, and Microsoft would be the leading candidates in my opinion. Another less likely outcome could be a merger with Panasonic or Sony as neither of those companies could afford to buy Nintendo outright.”
This article’s author, James Brightman, points out that no such plans are in place, nor have there even been rumors to suggest it might happen. But figuring out how Apple should spend its billions in cash seems to be favorite masturbatory pastime of just about every analyst out there, Asif Khan included.
Edge Magazine:
While Apple has been widely credited with expanding the gaming market, [Seamus] Blackley believes it was never its intention to do so. “They hated videogames,” he says. “The victory of games is utterly complete with Apple. It’s a total victory.“They tried real hard to make the iPad about word processing and music, and the audience just doesn’t want it. It’s beautiful. You don’t need to have a games strategy anymore.”
Historical revisionism like this burns my ass.
Seamus Blackley is the guy credited with initially coming up with the concept of the Microsoft Xbox; he’s a really smart guy and the game industry and gamers owe him a debt of gratitude. Blackley’s opinion of Apple and its infamous antipathy towards games is widespread throughout the game industry, and it’s not without historical precedent, at least on the Mac side of the fence. But Blackley is absolutely, unequivocally wrong about the iPad.
By the time the iPad was ready for service, the Games section was already the single biggest segment of the App Store. Loads of game developers had signed on to create content for the burgeoning platform. Apple was already focusing development and engineering to improve the gaming experience on iOS, and it knew full well that iPad users would be playing plenty of games.
Ina Fried:
Earlier this week I noticed the 32GB model at Costco for $479 — $120 off the standard $599 price. Then, a few minutes ago, while watching ABC’s “Modern Family,” I caught an HP TouchPad ad touting that the entry level model is being offered for $399, a Benjamin Franklin less than the original asking price.
No matter how you look at it, two price cuts a month after releasing a product is not good.
A great video from Russ at the Air Users Blog on how to use Beat Detective and Elastic Audio to bring guitars and bass in time with the drum kit. (more…)
August 3, 2011
Instagram:
On October 6, 2010 we launched Instagram in the App Store as a way for people to easily share their lives through photos taken on their iPhones. Since then, we’ve seen more than 7 million people from all around the world share photos on our platform. Today, we’re excited to announce that more than 150 million photos have been shared on Instagram and Instagrammers now share photos with one another at a rate of 15 photos per second.
Well that proves it. Clearly the iPhone is not a successful platform for developers.
David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer:
But Android’s success has yielded something else: a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.They’re doing this by banding together to acquire Novell’s old patents (the “CPTN” group including Microsoft and Apple) and Nortel’s old patents (the “Rockstar” group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didn’t get them; seeking $15 licensing fees for every Android device; attempting to make it more expensive for phone manufacturers to license Android (which we provide free of charge) than Windows Mobile; and even suing Barnes & Noble, HTC, Motorola, and Samsung. Patents were meant to encourage innovation, but lately they are being used as a weapon to stop it.
AppleInsider:
Publisher Time Inc. announced on Wednesday that all 21 of its magazines will be available on Apple’s iPad this year, including currently unavailable titles like Entertainment Weekly and InStyle.In addition to the iPad, Time’s magazines will be available on “all leading tablet platforms,” with Android, the HP TouchPad, Barnes & Noble Nook specifically named. The press release issued this week made no mention of Research in Motion’s BlackBerry PlayBook.
I can hear the slap in the face to RIM from here.
IndustryGamers:
“The thing is, it may take another year or two before [Apple] starts to decline, but it has to – everything does. Everything revolves so much around Steve, and no matter how good his lieutenants are, they’re not Steve. None of us is going to live forever, though I hope he lives for a really long time,” [Hawkins] added.
Trip Hawkins founded Electronic Arts (EA), the world’s largest independent video game publisher. These days he runs Digital Chocolate, which makes games for platforms including iOS. Hawkins doesn’t have it out for Apple – in fact, he makes a point to note “Digital Chocolate’s games will always be in the App Store,” but he thinks that such declines are a natural part of the life cycle of any company or industry.
Hawkins also complains about Apple’s unwillingness to support Flash and Apple’s “closed model;” two familiar complaints from other developers that, to date, haven’t affected Apple’s ability to sell iOS devices very much at all.
