Enterprise

We continue to get reports of the new Final Cut Pro suite and thought we’d share this one from a notable major network video editor:

I am definitely expecting the new FCP to be previewed [at NAB]. This is a really cheap, yet effective way to launch this product. 99% of the room will be very pro-Apple people. The buzz from this could be huge. I met with one of the guys who was at that secret meeting in Cupertino and he told me that Apple will ship it this Spring and that “it is to editing what Henry Ford was to Cars.” He also said that “It was more focused on maximizing multicore hardware utilization.” Other vague notes were that it was typical of Apple to make software “for the masses and not just for the ‘pros.'” In my opinion, It seems that Apple is not necessarily trying to please Editors with this iteration of the software so much as it has made some revolutionary new product that will please any Creative. Also, he hinted to some sort of iOS-feeling interface. Finally, as with Avid, there will probably be some element of “cloud” or “remote” editing abilities.

He also noted that Kevin Smith’s talk for Avid had been shuffled around, possibly to make room for an Apple Keynote. Thanks MK!
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We’ve been hearing all kinds of Chatter that the next version of Final Cut Pro will debut in Vegas at NAB next week.  Thing is, we hear this every year and Apple hasn’t really done a NAB properly in awhile.  That’s OK, we’ll take that we can get.

Rumors are flying that Apple will be using the Vegas Supermeet to announce the next version of Final Cut Pro. Supposedly, Apple will be taking over the entire event for their announcement, cancelling all other sponsors, including AJA, Avid, Canon, BlackMagic, Autodesk and others, who were set to give presentations.

Philip Bloom just confirmed with me that Canon has canceled his appearance at the Supermeet. Canon was told last night that Apple has demanded ALL “lecturn” or stage time exclusively. Some sponsors who were not using presenters may continue to sponsor the Vegas event, but none of them will be presenting on the stage. I can’t imagine any news that would warrant this kind of “take-over” other than to announce and demonstrate the next full version of Final Cut Pro and possibly an entirely newly designed FCS4.

(UPDATE: Avid confirmed that Supermeet (Michael Horton) told them last night that their sponsorship had been cancelled. According to Avid, “Apple doesn’t want anyone to have stage time but them.”)

Who’s up for Vegas?
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If you are a Macintosh application developer but don’t want to spend the $99 to get into the Mac Developer program (and don’t mind missing out on early OS builds) Apple might just have the program for you.  You see, now that XCode 4 has gone final, you can now download it at the Mac App Store for only $4.99.  (Yeah it is free otherwise but Apple has some accounting issues to deal with).

Related articles

• Collected: What we know about the Mac App Store (9to5mac.com)
• Mac App Store Downloads Top One Million in First Day (9to5mac.com)

We broke the JointVenture news over the weekend but Apple officially launched JointVenture yesterday underneath all of the iPad 2 excitement.  We pretty much covered it all before so we won’t bore you…
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Apple laid the first stages of JointVenture out to Apple Retail staff today and as West Coast employees exit the meetings we are getting our first information on the new small business program.  JointVenture will be launched on Tuesday and Wednesday this week.

First the price: Apple will charge $499 for up to 5 users and $99 for each additional user/year.  They really want to hit the under 10-person organizations hard.  Apple thinks Microsoft is exposed in this area because small businesses of this size are more agile, aren’t as likely to be connected to a complicated Microsoft infrastructure and don’t have a dedicated IT person to steer them wrong.

That $500 is also on top of the 3-year Applecare (not instead of), but retail employees were told that they business customers could receive enough in discounts to offset some, if not all of the price of JointVenture.

What does that $500 buy you?
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From Lion’s Install notes:

– The Recovery partition may not be created when installing Lion on a drive with an unsupported partition scheme.

This is a pretty interesting addition to the OS.  When you install Lion, it puts a little partition on the boot drive with some of the OS utilities.  If something goes wrong with your Lion build, you restart with the option key pressed and you boot into this new partition.

For me this worked a bit different.  I installed Lion on a Firewire hard drive.  The recovery partition was installed on my Snow Leopard internal disk(!).  So when I turned off my Mac and rebooted with the Firewire Lion disk removed, it defaulted to the recovery partition (scary).  Changing the startup disk fixed this pretty quickly but installer beware.

The repair partition is basically all of the repair/utilities you find on a OSX Installer DVD.

The obvious reason that Apple does this is because Apple will soon be going to more devices without optical media.  Having the repair partition built-in makes it easier to fix your machine if things go bad.  And who wants to keep a OSX Install/repair disc or USB stick with them wherever they go?
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We first detailed Apple Joint Venture service a year ago and it appears that Apple is getting ready to launch the service. BGR is reporting that Apple is readying the Joint Venture small businesses services:

Joint Venture is an extension of Apple’s current Genius Bar services that is aimed at small businesses and prosumers. Subscribers of the new service will be able to speak with a store-based Apple technician — lovingly referred to as Geniuses — over the phone for one-on-one consultation and troubleshooting, or they can request an on-site visit. Currently, Apple’s Geniuses are not allowed to provide support remotely via the phone or in-person outside of Apple’s retail locations. A source has confirmed that Apple will reveal these plans to retail employees this Sunday, explaining how to properly position, explain, and sell the new offering.

It will be interesting to see how this affects small to mid-sized Apple IT shops who often serve the market Apple will be targeting with ‘Joint Venture’.

Some of the verbiage from the original trademark, below:

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kKerSnyIZw&fs=1&hl=en_US]

Yeah it had to happen. Fits pretty good with this one..
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COMPUTERWORLD: The iPhone ‘iWallet’ becomes even more real today as Visa Europe launches the first commercial deployment of its own iPhone payments App today. This news as NFC-capable iPhones should show later this year, with AAPL apparently pondering ways to offer a merchants cheap and easy set-up for payment kiosks — mobile payments are nothing without the infrastructure to accept them.

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If you look over at Active Storage today, you’ll notice a little ticker that corresponds to the end of the Xserve in less than three days.  Under wraps is the replacement.  Boom!  9to5mac readers knew about this a few days ago of course :D

We’ve been told the boxes will run “a webmin variant with Darwin” and to think of it as a “Web ServerAdmin”.

There was no screen shots at the briefing, but our source described it as looking like a Apple wiki page with the function of Server Admin.  It isn’t clear if the Desktop ServerAdmin will be able to connect to these boxes in the same way as it connects to current OSX servers.

Apple has been telling enterprise reps about this solution for a few months saying that this will be the go-to hardware for Apple Enterprise Datacenters.  We’d imagine some of these will be making their way to North Carolina as well.

Also, we heard that OSX was heading to virtual machines that ran on Non-Apple hardware next month as well.

While the Xserve will be officially discontinued next week, Apple has updated the Xserve buy page to reflect an April shipping date. This could very well mean that the product’s final orders will only ship in April of this year, or could simply be an automated date based on the amount of units Apple has in stock. Apple is looking to replace the Xserve for business customers with their already existing Mac mini server product and the new Mac Pro server.  Heh.

Recent rumors claim that Apple’s upcoming Mac OS X Lion Server will be the last Mac server operating system, and also claim the current versions of Final Cut Server and Xsan to be Apple’s last. Oh, and about that XServer replacement… here is what’s next…

We’ve heard that Apple has already begun recommending a product sold by ActiveStorage that will eventually  replace Apple hardware XServes.  It should be ready next week.

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Including iPad sales, Apple is the world’s third-largest PC maker, according to the latest Canalsys figures, published today. The PC industry saw general gowth of 19 percent — clearly boosted by Apple’s strong performance.

I’ve said this before — the iPad is a PC, limited only by the power and utility of the Apps you run on the device. Canalsys agrees that iPad sales should be counted as PC sales, with the analysts latest figures confirming that Apple’s PC shipments climbed an astonishing 241 percent in Q4 2010 (including the iPad).
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Proving good products do their own marketing Apple’s taken a giant thumbs-up from its growing enterprise market with no less than Deutsche Bank declaring there’s “no going back” to BlackBerry after an “overwhelmingly positive” iPhone trial.

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November saw Apple and Oracle confirm the loss of built-in Java in future Macs in favor of a jointly developed open source Java implementation, to be maintained by the OpenJDK project. Now the first code under the deal has landed.
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Microsoft is taking on Apple, protesting at the latter firm’s claim to a trademark on the name ‘App Store’. Ballmer’s boys are arguing that the term is generic and competitors should be able to use it.

Apple applied for the trademark in 2008. It is to be applied in goods and services, including those for computer software solve via the Internet. The App Store is now available for iOS and OS X devices.
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Open source advocates are breathing a sigh of relief this afternoon — and that’s not because the iPhone has reched Verizon, but because a Microsoft-led, Apple-supported consortium has withdrawn from attempts to buy a host of Novell patents.

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Disparate reports this morning shed a little more light on the Verizon iPhone deal we expect to hear about at 11am (Eastern). It seems the deal may cost Verzon as much as $5 billion in subsidies in year one — but is also set to steal share from AT&T while flatlining Android device sales.
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CUPERTINO, California—January 7, 2011—Apple today announced that over one million apps have been downloaded from the Mac App Store in the first day. With more than 1,000 free and paid apps, the Mac App Store brings the revolutionary App Store experience to the Mac, so you can find great new apps, buy them using your iTunes account, download and install them in just one step.

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Something for our professional DTP and publishing readers (we know you’re out there) Quark today announced that customers who purchase one new, qualifying full license of graphic design and page layout software QuarkXPress 8 between now and 31st January 2011 can receive one additional full license of QuarkXPress 8 for free.
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Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg didn’t use his keynote address today at CES 2011 to announce the iPhone is on its way to his network, despite AT&T slashing iPhone 3GS prices and certain reports claiming Apple retail staff have been told to forget about vacation time — though that latter shocker won’t be until February/March. Wonder what’s coming?
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Twitter for Mac has arrived, as have 999 other Apps at the all-new Mac App Store — so why are we mentioning Twitter? Because it keeps a promise made by MacHeist, offering exclusive access to secret Twitter features.

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