Apple’s iWork program became available Tuesday for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. Each of the three programs in the productivity suite costs $9.99.
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iWork now out for the iPhone
Making more news ahead of its developer conference next week, Apple said on Tuesday that it is bringing its iWork collection of productivity apps to the small screen. Already available for the iPad, Keynote, Numbers and Pages are now available for the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and the two most recent versions of the iPod touch. …
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Apple Brings iWork Apps to iPhone and iPod Touch
Last week, a report surfaced claiming that Apple could launch its annual back-to-school promotion in the United States as early as this week, offering educational customers free or discounted iPod hardware with the purchase of a qualifying Mac product. With it now appearing that the offer will not debut this week, BGR is reporting that Apple may wait until next month’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) to announce the promotion.
One of our Apple sources has informed us that they’ve been hearing Apple’s yearly back-to-school special will be announced at WWDC next month. We have been told Apple will continue to offer educational discounts on computers and either a free iPod touch, or $229 towards the purchase of any other iPod.
The report also indicates that Apple may be preparing to include a $200 discount on the iPad as an option for those participating in the promotion.
Lat year’s promotion offered rebates of up to $199 on Apple’s full line of iPod models, but did not include the iPad. Apple has also never included iPhone discounts in the promotion, which typically runs through early September, around the time the company traditionally introduces new iPods.
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Apple will reportedly outfit the iPhone 5 with a curved glass display, same as the one seen on the iPod Nano 4G, according to unnamed sources cited by DigiTimes. Originally posted at News – Apple
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Rumor: iPhone 5 may use curved glass screen
Will Apple ever release a smaller form-factor iPhone? It will if its market-share aspirations for the device are anything like the ones it had for the iPod. In a research note today, Oppenheimer analyst Ittai Kidron says it’s only a matter of time before Apple releases a lower-tier version of the iPhone, extending its …
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More Mini-iPhone Mania
Former Engadget editor Joshua Topolsky has revealed possible new information on the upcoming iPhone 5, but that information seems to contradict other recent claims. Topolsky reiterates from his previous Engadget report that the next iPhone is to be completely redesigned, and that it looks more like the iPod touch than the iPhone 4. The new phone will be thinner and have a “teardrop” shape which goes from thick to thin, similar to the MacBook Air.
Meanwhile, the home button will be doing “double duty” as both a button and and a gesture area.
this falls in line with testing weve seen for gestures on the iPad, and our sources say that gestures are definitely coming in a future version of iOS. The home button will likely be enlarged, but not scrapped altogether.
He also details that the screen will occupy nearly the entire front of the phone leaving almost no bezel. This information is consistent with some earlier rumors that suggested an “edge to edge” screen. In addition Apple is said to be doing very “interesting things” with bonded glass technology and even exploring designs where the earpiece and sensors are behind the screen itself.
Topolsky is also hearing that the screen may go up to 3.7 inches while keeping the same resolution. This would keep the DPI within the “Retina” display moniker at 312dpi. Finally, there are some hints that there may be some form of inductive or touch charging but this seems unconfirmed.
Joshua Topolsky is the former editor-in-chief of Engadget and is well connected with his previous rumors being published to Engadget. This information, however, contradicts some previous reports from Reuters which suggest the iPhone 5 will carry a very similar form factor as the iPhone 4. Notably, in the same original Engadget report that detailed the “completely redesigned” iPhone 5, Topolsky/Engadget had previously predicted that the iPad 2 would carry a higher resolution screen and SD card slot, neither of which came true.
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Business Insider reports that Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has just released a new research note sharing data from NPD on Apple’s first quarter Mac and iPod sales in the United States. According to the data, Apple’s new MacBook Pro released in late February led to a tremendous surge in Mac sales during the month of March, with total Mac unit sales up 47% year-over-year.
That strong performance follows 20% year-over-year growth in January and 12% growth in February, yielding a cumulative year-over-year Mac growth rate of 27% for the quarter. Consequently, Munster estimates quarterly Mac sales at close to 3.7 million units, slightly ahead of Wall Street consensus estimates. Apple shipped just under 3 million Macs in its March quarter last year, a quarter that is usually one of Apple’s lighter sales periods following strong back-to-school sales in the September quarter and holiday sales in the December quarter.
On the iPod side, NPD’s data suggests quarterly sales of 9.8-10.3 million units, in line with Wall Street estimates and down 5-10% from last year as Apple’s maturing iPod line continues to shrink as consumers increasingly turn to the iPhone and iPad for their needs. Munster notes that the iPod data is somewhat less accurate than the Mac data, given the high international representation in iPod sales and NPD’s focus on only the U.S. market.
Apple is set to announce earnings this Wednesday at approximately 4:30 PM Eastern Time after the stock market close.
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Dow Jones Newswires reports that Cirrus Logic, Apple’s long-time supplier for audio chips in its iOS devices, has disclosed manufacturing issues with a new device, presumed to be an Apple product, that went into high-volume production last month.
Cirrus supplies analog chips for use in various energy and audio applications, most notably Apple devices such as the iPod and iPad. Apple makes up about half of Cirrus’s revenue, helping the semiconductor company post strong sales and increased profitability in recent quarters as the popularity of Apple devices continued to rise.
But Cirrus late Thursday said it had determined an earlier test for a particular function of a new audio product–which analysts assume is for Apple–was insufficient to guarantee that all products met a certain standard. After a more rigorous test was developed, Cirrus found fewer working chips than previously expected, with that yield loss rising as volumes increased.
While Cirrus has reportedly addressed the issue without meaningfully impacting any device launch, the company has taken a charge against its earnings that will result in decreased gross margins reported for the first quarter of 2011.
Speculation suggests that the device in question may have been the iPad 2, which was in very short supply in the first few weeks of availability and has only recently begun to see shipping times and in-store availability improve. While demand for the iPad 2 has clearly been high, there have been claims that certain issues with components such as the device’s display have slowed production and contributed to the shortages.
Analysts have, however, left open the possibility that the device experiencing issues could be an unreleased device, although one of the primary candidates, the fifth-generation iPhone, is not expected to be released in its usual June timeframe this year and appears to have not gone into production yet.
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Today marks the tenth birthday of Mac OS X, which officially debuted on March 24th, 2001 as Mac OS X 10.0 with an internal codename of “Cheetah”. As noted by Macworld, the release in retrospect was a milestone in Apple’s transformation from a struggling computer company into the major technology behemoth it is today.
On March 24, 2001, the iMac was less than three years old, the iPod was still more than six months away, and Macs ran at astounding speeds of up to 733MHz. But most importantly, Apple on that day released the first official version of Mac OS X, changing the future of its platform forever.
Though nobody knew it at the time, the release, codenamed Cheetah, was the first step in transforming Apple from a company poised on the verge of disaster into the second most valuable company in the world.
While the impact of Mac OS X on Apple’s products and the user experience they provide is undeniable, the early days of the operating system were anything but perfect, from a shaky public beta released in late 2000 through the public launch of Cheetah that necessitated rapid fixes and improvements that led to the release of Mac OS X 10.1 “Puma” just six months later. As Ars Technica noted in an extensive review of Mac OS X 10.0.0, the release showed “tremendous promise” despite obviously still being a work in progress.
Mac OS X shows tremendous promise, which is a nice way of saying that the 10.0 release is not quite ready for prime time. This is most certainly an early adopter’s OS release. Interface responsiveness and effective stability are the two biggest fundamental problems, but missing features and compatibility issues rank just as high if you actually intend to use OS X as a full Mac OS 9 replacement: the 10.0 release cannot view DVD movies; printer drivers are still scarce; CD burning is not yet supported, even by Apple’s own iTunes CD authoring application; and a lot of hardware (like my G3/400′s serial port adapter to which my printer is attached) seem destined to be orphaned forever.
Mac OS X has obviously come a long way in the ten years since its initial release, but Apple has also become much more than a computer company: revolutionizing music consumption with the iPod, recreating the smartphone market with the iPhone, and most recently finally catapulting the tablet market into consumers’ awareness with the iPad. In the process, Apple’s operating system for mobile devices, iOS, has itself matured and yielded a number of new innovations and features.
Consequently, Apple has chosen to position the next step in the evolution of Mac OS X as “Back to the Mac”, an effort to bring some of the most popular features of iOS to the Mac platform for the first time while retaining the familiarity, flexibility, and horsepower of Mac OS X. That next step, Mac OS X Lion, is set to debut sometime this summer, and developers and users should be able to learn much more about Apple’s efforts at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference presumably set to occur in June or July.
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Cult of Mac claims to have some details of how Apple will take advantage of NFC (Near Field Communications) technology in their future mobile devices. Unfortunately, their source can’t specify when Apple will introduce the technology, but their source confirms that Apple is working with several iPhone prototypes with NFC built in. But beyond the expected financial payment system, Cult of Mac’s source indicates that the NFC may also be used as a portable login system:
According to our source, who asked not to be named, when a NFC-equipped iPhone is paired with a guest machine, part of the users profile includes the apps theyve purchased through the Mac App Store. The icons for their apps appear on the remote Mac, but arent downloaded, our source said.
Users will reportedly be able to launch apps which will be downloaded on demand. Documents can then be saved and synced back to MobileMe so you can access your documents where ever you are. Once the NFC connection is broken, the apps and files are deleted from the guest computer, leaving it untouched.
The system is somewhat reminiscent of the Home on iPod feature that was originally advertised for Mac OS X Panther, but pulled at the last minute. In that incarnation, your Home directory would be saved on your iPod and “When you find yourself near a Panther-equipped Mac, just plug in the iPod, log in, and you’re “home,” no matter where you happen to be.”
Cult of Mac claims that these features will be rolled into Lion, though can’t be certain it when it will be deployed, if ever.
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