9to5 Staff

Apple launched its online retail store in China this week — and promptly sold out of iPhone 4 units within 10 hours, forcing the company to suspend sales.

With Apple’s recent move to stop iPhone sales in its brick-&-mortar stores in China, this means there’s now nowhere to purchase an iPhone in the country — except from the scalpers who are scooping-up all stocks in the first place.
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COMPUTERWORLD: Intense competition; component cost price hikes; and rapid technology advancement — for most handset manufacturers, mobile’s not a nice market any more. Apple’s iPhone advantages include some Android and others can never match.

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Apple has filed its 2010 annual report with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, revealing higher employee numbers, higher advertising spend and a slight decline in profit margins as it kept iPad prices as low as it could.

The company has raised its employee numbers by over a third from last year, it had 46,600 full-time employees as of September 25, up from 34,300 a year ago and 28,000 in 2008.

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TPK Holdings, a supplier of touchscreens for iPhones and iPads has seen serious business come its way as a result of its Apple connection, raising $200 million from its IPO — the largest such offering in Taiwan this year. Similar happy rumblings too from Apple’s carrier partners in the area, who confirmed rising profits and subscriber numbers on back of the Apple device.
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Apple has removed all mention of the white iPhone from its website, scant hours since some reports claimed the company may have dismissed the product completely.

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Yet more information on the iPhone which doesn’t yet exist! And no, I’m not talking about the mythical, nay, almost unicorn-like white iPhone 4 fantasy creature, but the CDMA iPhone for use on networks outside of AT&T.

Pegatron Technology has been identified as manufacturer of the new model CDMA iPhone, and a report in today’s edition of Digitimes tells us that company expects to ship 10 million of these things next year.
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From the Toys section:

The Adobe Store cuts up to 80% off student and teacher editions of its software for Windows or Mac during its latest sale. That puts each at lowest-we-could-find prices. Discounted are such titles as Creative Suite 5 (pictured), Lightroom, Acrobat X Pro, and more.  Adobe sweetens the deal with free Skullcandy headphones as well.

Of note, you will be required to submit proof of eligibility prior to shipment of your order. Click here for more information.
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COMPUTERWORLD: Keeping your Mac in the best possible shape is the aim of the game, fortunately there’s a plethora of available utilities which can improve your Mac life. Here’s five personal recommendations to boost your experience.

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Speaking of data center speculation, just how big are Apple’s plans for North Carolina? Sure, we already know the company’s almost finished building one of the world’s largest data centers there — and we recently learned it could even be twice the size we originally thought — this morning we learn Apple has also purchased land sufficient to make the center even larger.
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Some speculation exists claiming Apple may be migrating its iTunes services to services hosted at its growing North Carolina data center this Thanksgiving.

This speculation is based on information provided to Apple developers in which the company warns that its traditional Christmas period shut down of the iTunes Connect service will this year also see a similar shut down happen at Thanksgiving.
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A Taiwanese firm has already developed a compelling upgrade for the MacBook Air — a 256GB SSD memory module which doubles the maximum capacity of the machines.

MacBook Air uses an SSD (flash memory) card instead of a hard drive. Photofast plans to offer 64GB / 128GB / 256GB SSD aftermarket upgrades.
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Despite ramped-up competition, Apple should achieve at least 22.5 million iPad sales in 2011 — and that’s not analyst bluster or wishful thinking but the conservative estimate of Apple competitor, ViewSonic.

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Apple’s iPad is seeing the same widescale deployment as any previous tablet device, turning up in people’s homes, the enterprise, in medical and education and — now — also in the US Army, where Textron Systems has developed a troop movement tracking app for iPad.
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The Apple Store now offers free engraving on its entire line of iPads. Up to two lines of text are available, each with support for up to 29 characters. Please note that engraving will add up to three additional business days to your estimated ship date.

Of note, Apple also offers refurbished iPads for $50 off of list price, perhaps with someone else’s engraving.

COMPUTERWORLD: Apple’s new Lion OS will be leaner, keener and meaner than ever; it will teach Mac users a whole new touch-based way to interface with their computer, and borrows heavily from elements of Apple’s also NeXT-based iOS system for mobile devices. So, what do we know about the new operating system?

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzrme9yWens&fs=1&hl=en_GB]

Steve Jobs went ballistic, giving Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer an earful for stealing the most important games developer then on the Mac, Bungie Software, way back in 2000.

As a result of Jobs’ angry call to Ballmer, Ed Fries, the former vice president of game publishing at Microsoft, and the man central to Microsoft’s acquisition of Rare and Bungie, was told to broker a deal with Apple to appease Jobs.

As the video above shows, Jobs was particularly annoyed at the Microsoft deal because he’d hosted a public preview of Halo at a Macworld Apple event just months before. The loss of the game to the platform was a personal blow.
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Looks like you won’t have to wait too much longer if you’ve been hoping/praying/wishing for a nice white iPhone 4 — as these have begun showing up as available to reserve if you’re using Apple’s freshly-updated Apple Store iPhone app….reserve your white iPhone today.

Remember last week’s story which claimed 32 percent of iPad owners never ever downloaded an app? Please ignore the claim, as Nielsen has released a terse statement which basically says it got this one completely wrong. So shred the thought from your memory immediately.
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When it comes to Christmas/Holiday shopping this year, its advantage Apple with kids abandoning traditional gifts and toys in favor of an iPad or some other slice of Cupertino-designed tech gladness.

The most recent Duracell Toy Report claims two-thirds of teens (13-16-year-olds) want Apple products, such as the iPhone 4, iPad and iPod touch.
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Apple continues to test its streaming media systems, this time promising Australian iOS users free streaming access to five performances at this year’s ARIA music Awards.

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I’m taking this with a pinch of salt at this time, but speculation that Apple may be on the verge of making a hugely important acquisition are just beginning to cross financial market news wires this morning.

These rumors follow weekend reports that Apple may be planning to make a bid for Facebook — though Facebook has reportedly rejected such assertions.
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