Two British tabloids, the Sun and the Daily Mail, reported that actor Bruce Willis was going after Apple’s iTunes to let him pass down purchased media to his heirs. It’s too good a story to pass up…except, according to the actor’s wife, it is not true.

[tweet https://twitter.com/EmmaHeming/status/242631258310594562]

The story of passing along iTunes media rights is an interesting story, however. You have always been able to burn music to optical and keep copies around. In that case, retention rights are a little more straightforward. As for apps and other media, it gets more murky.

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Ahead of Apple’s apparent October event to show off its upcoming “iPad mini,” two reports are showing physical mockups of the device. These mockups appear to both be identical to the iPad mini design information and previously leaked iPad design schematics that we reported on. The smaller iPad physical shown above comes by way of Apple.Pro, and it is sourced from online commerce website Taobao. The physical mockups show the skinnier side bezels – that we previously reported on – in addition to a very-thin design, a smaller dock connector and more. Additionally, this particular mockup features cutouts for a SIM-card slot and an an antenna cutout at the top of the device.

Earlier today, Giga.de posted its own series of photos of a physical iPad mini mockup. Unlike the first mockup above, this physical mockup is constructed of pure metal. However, these photos give an idea of size compared to an iPhone.

Full image gallery after the break:

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With the September 12th Apple event approaching, anticipation for a redesigned iPhone is heating up. Besides the legitimate information leaking over the course of the past months, there has been fake information, mockups and hoaxes about the device floating around. Over the past few days, the increasing anticipation and speculation for the new iPhone has led to a new level of mockups and hoaxes.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV9y-bQ4-qM]

GSMIsrael, this weekend, claimed a world exclusive iPhone 5 hands-0n. Though, their hands were actually on a plasticky mockup built by a case maker.

It gets much worse…

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As part the International keynote presentations at IFA this year, AMD exec and president of the HSA foundation, Phil Rogers, took the stage to give an update on the current state of the not-for-profit alliance. For those of you unfamiliar with the foundation, HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture), is described as “a heterogeneous compute ecosystem, rooted in industry standards, for combining scalar processing on the CPU with parallel processing on the GPU while enabling high bandwidth access to memory and high application performance at low power consumption.”

While the addition of Samsung, among other partners Texas Instruments, ARM, AMD, and Imagination Technologies, was the big news of the day for most, a short demo by partner Apical was what really caught our attention.

Apical’s “Assertive Display” technology is already present in a few devices, such as Sharp’s AQUOS PHONE SH-01D, but during its demo for the HSA keynote, Apical showed off the tech working on an iPad…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQUTHGE3qs0]
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Gx5MA1tBfKY

Vietnamese website Tinhte, which has a solid record of procuring pre-release Apple products, has headphones that it claimed  the new iPhone will come with next month. The current iOS device headphones have remained largely unchanged since the launch of the original iPhone in 2007, and many complain they fit poorly or fall out often (guilty!). Apple also makes in-ear headphones that many consider over-priced and under-performing (also guilty!).

These headphones appear to be a hybrid of the two current versions that Apple offers. It is not certain if they will be offered with the product or as a new add-on accessory.

Some stills from the website are below, including the comparison to current iPhone headsets, and the telltale “Designed in California, Made in Viet Nam” written along the cable:

If the accessory in the video above turns out to be legit, it would certainly indicate Apple is making some improvements to its headset…or at least trying.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fctZx8_Naa8]

We had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with Sharp today at its IGZO display booth. While they would not say which Apple products would incorporate their new displays, they did seem to insinuate these were the best displays on the market, and Apple is the type of company that uses the best displays.

So why are these the best?

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Another “iMac” has shown up on Geekbench (July, May), as AppleBitch notes, which adds to its speculation that an iMac refresh is forthcoming at around the time of the iPhone launch. This one notably has an unlocked Intel processor, 1333MHz RAM and runs a standard 10.8.1 build, which significantly diminishes its likelihood of being real.

But there have been some recent shortages on Apple resellers’ websites and now Apple’s own retail stores.

KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo interestingly revised his estimates (via MacRumors) today on 27-inch iMacs shipping to being much further out in the year due to issues in the supply chain. However, it is not just the iMac. Kuo is pushing all of his predictions further as we end the month of August:

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The shipping gap would imply a very unorthodox Apple release of the 21-inch iMac about two months ahead of the 27-inch iMac. Also unorthodox: Kuo is calling for the 13-inch Retina Pro to be released ahead of the new iPhone and just a quarter after Apple released all-new MacBook Pros including a 15-inch Retina version. (Interestingly—Samsung just announced a 13-inch ‘Retina’ laptop).

Also, in the wake of the recent October iPad Mini event news, Kuo is pushing his iPad mini shipping estimates out a month from mid-September to late October.

These figures vary widely from his estimates from just a month ago, where all of Apple’s new products were to hit the pavement by the end of September and the Touch and Nano were to ship at the end of August:

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD5baNX7Q4c&feature=youtu.be

Sprint, which offers unlimited data on its iPhone handsets (and promises to continue—even with a LTE iPhone), released a video today that makes fun of the Data Sharing plans its U.S. competitors, AT&T and Verizon, have recently debuted.

AT&T sparked even more controversy by only allowing FaceTime over its network with the purchase of Data Sharing plans last month.

This looks to be the same group that did a great “Happy Accidents” commercial for its Virgin subsidiary, which is also very nicely done.

Well played Sprint. Well played.

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As the September 12th Apple iPhone media event approaches, new images show an interesting new look at how the rumored next-generation iPhone design compares to both an iPhone 4S and iPhone 3GS. iColorOS (via NoWhereElse) appears to have assemled exterior next-generation iPhone pieces to build these comparisons. Notice how much thinner this new iPhone design is in comparison to the iPhone 4S and iPhone 3GS. In addition, these new photos showcase how much taller the new iPhone design is in comparison to older models. More photos are after the break.

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In June, Apple announced that its longtime Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, Bob Mansfield, would be retiring after transitioning the role to iPad Hardware VP Dan Riccio over several months. However, earlier this week Apple announced that Mansfield would not be leaving the company.

While Riccio was named SVP of Hardware Engineering, Apple said that Mansfield would stay at Apple to “work on future products” under Apple CEO Tim Cook’s direction. With Riccio’s promotion to Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, Mansfield was still noted as a Senior Vice President of Hardware, meaning that Apple had two hardware chiefs. Apple’s other major divisions are governed solely by a single Senior Vice President, making this transition all the more interesting.

However, today, Apple has updated its Executive Profiles webpage to note that Mansfield is still a Senior Vice President, but not of Hardware Engineering. He, unlike every other member of Apple’s executive team, is simply noted as an SVP, but not of any specific division within Apple.

Before and After

There’s been some speculation that Apple CEO Tim Cook wanted to keep Mansfield on Apple’s payroll rather than let a competitor hire the longtime Apple hardware leader as a consultant in his “retirement”. The amount of knowledge of the inner-workings of Apple’s magical hardware building process that Mansfield had would be a goldmine to competitors like Samsung or HP among others.

Recent Apple Mac OSX head Bertrand Serlet recently joined Parallel’s board after “retiring”, though that move probably didn’t ruffle too many feathers at Apple. Parallels makes the most popular OS virtualization software for Mac, including a recent update, and is considered ally to Apple as far as we know.

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Japan-based Sharp Corp is failing to keep pace when it comes to manufacturing screens for Apple’s latest iPhone just weeks prior to the much-reported Sept. 12 launch event.

Reuters, which cited an unidentified source, reported today that Sharp is floundering due to high costs eating into its iPhone screen margins. The struggle is apparently raising questions about whether Apple will need to offer “financial incentives” to encourage speedier production:

The source, who is familiar with Sharp’s production operations, did not give an indication of how far behind the output had fallen. The source spoke on condition that he not be identified because of the sensitive nature of the disclosure.

Sharp President Takashi Okuda said on August 2 that his company would begin mass production and shipments from its Kameyama LCD plant in central Japan this month. The facility is widely known to make screens for Apple, but Sharp has declined to acknowledge that Apple is a customer.

Sharp’s rumored delay comes as it also deals “with a cash crunch amid approaching debt repayment deadlines,” The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this morning. The company holds “$15 billion in interest-bearing debt…Sharp has forecast a net loss of 250 billion yen ($3.18 billion) for this fiscal year through March, as its core businesses remain unprofitable.”
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-OT9Fh8GAA&start=25]

Marco Arment, developer of the Instapaper App, found a few new devices in his logs: iPad2,5 and iPad2,6. He did not say where these devices were geo-located, but the fact that he is now totally convinced these are new Apple products, and not an easy jailbreak-faking, leads us to believe he found them on Apple’s Cupertino network (or his logs do not record geo-location and he is taking a leap of faith). Update: Arment clarifies (or muddies?) his logging a bit:

[tweet https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/241543413063884800]

It should also be said that Apple’s newest 2,4 iPad, the new die shrunk version of the iPad 2, could also be expanding to GSM+CDMA versions, which would naturally follow 2,5 and 2,6. However, ignoring that possibility and adding together the other evidence and rumors of the upcoming iPad Minis, let us assume these are new iPad Minis.

The two versions mean there is likely a 3G or 4G version and a Wi-Fi version. That goes along with many of the iPad Mini case assemblies we found (right) in which some have gaps at the top where Apple traditionally uses cell radio transparent plastic in its iPads.

Arment assumes there is a 2,7 version out there somewhere that does CDMA, but he’s assuming the iPad Minis will use the older 3G chips and not the newer 4G LTE Qualcomm GOBI chips that do both CDMA and GSM as well as many versions of LTE.

We are inclined to believe that Apple, if all of the above is indeed true about the iPad mini, will build 4G LTE chips into this device. With the iPad 3 and now the new iPhone both utilizing LTE chips, Apple will have the type of scale and cost reduction down on these devices to make them cost effective enough to put in a lower-cost Mini. So, expect a $100-ish premium for an LTE iPad Mini—perhaps $349 with 32GB of storage?

Take my money!