Today only, Amazon offers the OCZ 90GB Agility 3 2.5″ Serial ATA 6Gb/s Internal SSD, model no. AGT3-25SAT3-90G, for $99.99 with free shipping. That’s the lowest total price we could find by $30. This Sandforce-controlled drive advertises 500MB/s+ read write times when connected to a SATA3 controller.
The Guardian reported that Sony Music, upon hearing of the death of its recording artist Whitney Houston, lifted the price of her album to reap extra money.
The music giant is understood to have lifted the wholesale price of Houston’s greatest hits album, The Ultimate Collection, at about 4am California time on Sunday. This meant that the iTunes retail price of the album automatically increased from £4.99 to £7.99.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOV-TJdLZ-4]
outside US, click here
The Recording Academy announced in December that Steve Jobs would be honored with the Trustees Award for “outstanding contributions to the industry in a nonperforming capacity.”
On behalf of Steve’s wife, Laurene, his children, and everyone at Apple, I’d like to thank you for honoring Steve with the Trustees Grammy Award. Steve was a visionary, a mentor, and a very close friend. I had the incredible honor of working with him for the last fifteen years.
Accepting this award means so much to me because music meant so much to him. He told us that music shaped his life…it made him who he was. Everyone that knows Steve knows the profound impact that artists like Bob Dylan and The Beatles had on him.
Steve was focused on bringing music to everyone in innovative ways. We talked about it every single day. When he introduced the iPod in 2001, people asked “Why is Apple making a music player?” His answer was simple: “We love music, and it’s always good to do something you love.”
His family and I know that this Grammy would have been very special to him, so I thank you for honoring him today.
YoYo Ma, the world renowned Cellist and friend of Jobs, paid tribute:
Update: We’ve been told by a source at AT&T that those micro-SIMS are for the forthcoming Pantech Burst and Element which are also on the way to AT&T this week.
A regular AT&T SIM card (left) and a 4G LTE Micro-SIM (right). Click for larger.
A new batch of Micro-SIMs arrived at AT&T stores. We would normally pass on the news—if those were normal non-miniaturized 4G LTE Micro-SIMs. Based on an anonymous tip, Phone Arenanoted AT&T now getting LTE Micro-SIM cards “could be an indication that the next iPhone will finally support 4G LTE connectivity.” If you ask us, those are likely for the Nokia Lumia 900 that is hitting the AT&T network on March 18.
Granted, it is not entirely out of question that AT&T LTE Micro-SIMs are in anticipation of a sixth-generation iPhone that is presumably scheduled for an announcement this summer. Apple was the first major handset maker to switch to tiny 3G SIM cards with iPhone 4, which was a move born out of necessity due to space constraints in the 9.3mm device. The iPhone 4/4S are the only Apple products compatible with the Micro-SIM standard.
The CEO of JC Penney Ron Johnson sat with CBS “This Morning” to defend his company’s new spokesperson Ellen DeGeneres from attacks by the religious group One Million Moms that seeks to boycott the retailer if it did not axe DeGeneres over her sexual orientation. Putting the controversy aside, the interview (available on the CBS website and over at YouTube) gets interesting at mark 3:50 when Johnson reflects on his long tenure as Apple’s Vice President of Retail. The “Steve Jobs of the retail industry,” as some have dubbed him, said retailing is anything but a walk in the park:
Retailing is hard and that’s what Steve said when we started stores at Apple. But you look, you know, dozen years later and the stores are really popular with people. And they’re really popular because people know that the store cares more what the product does for them than just selling the products. At Apple, in many ways, the relationship with the customer begins when they buy.
Johnson, 53, drew parallels to how he built the Apple Stores on experience. Before joining Apple in January 2000, Johnson served as Target’s Vice President of Merchandising. He left Apple in November 2011 to take the reins at JC Penney. Apple hired CEO of Dixons John Browett as Johnson’s replacement, prompting pundits to opine how folks consider Dixons stores “the worst of Best Buy and Radio Shack combined.” When asked about the lessons he learned from Apple’s cofounder, Johnson responded:
MacMall is offering 9to5 readers an additional 3 percent off its already lowest prices on Mac Minis and iMacs this month to yield the lowest prices you will find anywhere (by as much as $50) with free shipping via this link. The 3 percent is deducted at checkout and MacMall does not charge tax in most states.
All discounts, including higher end models, are listed below:
Apple’s blockbuster holiday quarter sent shares to an all-time high of $431 a share, which is enough to close in on a market valuation of $400 billion. However, that was last month. Today, AAPL briefly passed a record $460 billion market cap with new historical stock price high at $493.97 a share. Exxon Mobil Corporation’s [XOM] market valuation is just $402.72 billion. Analysts featured onBloomberg Television said Apple is an “absolute phenomenon.”
Both Needham and Canaccord raised their price target for Apple shares to $620 and $650, respectively, maintaining a Buy rating on the stock. At the current market cap, Apple weighs more than 10 percent of NASDAQ and has 52 times Research In Motion’s [RIMM] valuation of just $8.45 billion.
Apple’s market capitalization is double the size of IBM and almost double the size of Microsoft [MSFT]. Heck, it is now almost the size of IBM and MSFT combined, and it surpassed the joint GOOG ($198.9 billion) and MSFT ($256.7 billion) market cap. However, some analysts still deem the company’s valuation “tepid.”
Federal Bureau of Investigation has posted on its website an interesting and exhaustive file on Apple’s Cofounder and late CEO Steve Jobs. According toGawker, which first spotted the file, the 191-page document reveals that Jobs was considered for a “sensitive position” in the Bush I White House back in 1991. It also contains results of an investigation into a 1985 bomb threat against Jobs.
How did Jobs do in High School? 2.65 GPA – hallmark of all geniuses.
An excerpt also includes comments from several people who noted Jobs’ reality distortion field, included right below.
We are so in love with Logitech’s new touch-sensitive Touch Mouse M600 that it would most likely be a replacement if we broke our mouse. Akin to Apple’s Magic Mouse and Microsoft’s Explorer Touch Mouse, the M660 is all about gestures and touch. It also looks great with its sleek design and smooth curvature. Moreover, just like Apple’s mouse, the M600 lets you swipe, scroll, and flip through pages, bookmarks, and websites. The device fetches $70 and it will be available in the United States and Europe beginning in February 2012…
iPad 3 parts are supposedly cropping up all over China. Following yesterday’s spy shots of a purported iPad 3 enclosure (here and here), Japanese blog Macotakara today published the above photo allegedly depicting a high-resolution panel manufactured by Sharp. According to the blog, the part was obtained by parts reseller Eye Lab Factory, which means take this with a few pinches of salt. It looks like 9.7-inch panel, and Macotakara said its flat cable corresponds to a similar cable connecting the iPad 2’s LCD panel to the motherboard.
The display is said to be a XQGA variety equaling 2,048-by-1,536-pixel resolution. Macotakaraclaimed last month that Foxconn and Pegatron Technology began assembly of next-generation iPads for an early March launch (and iLoungeconcurs). Unnamed sources also told Macotakara that Sharp would supply 2048-by-1536 resolution panels for iPad 3, which is a notion in line with earlier reports by DigiTimes and the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, another source revealed new iPad 3 replacement parts….
Siri is an AI-driven virtual assistant that launched last October as an iPhone 4S exclusive, and it currently speaks English (United States, United Kingdom, and Australia), French, and German languages. The official Siri FAQ from the onset made it clear that in 2012: “Siri will support additional languages, including Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Italian, and Spanish.”
9to5Macdiscovered job openings last December indicating possible Siri enhancements, including a prettier interface and a Siri API to extend the functionality to third-party iOS programs. We also uncovered this LinkedIn profile belonging to Apple’s language technologies engineer Chen Zhang that proves Apple’s been at work completing Siri support for the Chinese market. According to today’s article by Tech Asia, Mandarin-only support for the Chinese language could be released as early as next month…
Consumer groups SumOfUs and Change.org are waging a war over the working conditions at Apple’s (and the rest of the electronics industry’s) main outsourced manufacturer Foxconn. The groups said that over 35,000 people signed their “Stop Worker Abuse” online petition in just 24 hours. Today, the groups announced they would deliver a quarter million petition signatures to Apple.
Furthermore, a protest will be staged tomorrow at 10 a.m. outside Apple’s new Grand Central Terminal retail store and representatives from both SumOfUs and Change.org promised to join the protesters. Change.org’s Mark Shields called abusive working conditions at Foxconn factories “appalling,” adding he was shocked to learn about them.
The two consumer groups are demanding that the iPhone maker release a worker protection strategy for new product releases because these are the instances “when injuries and suicides typically spike because of the incredible pressure to meet quotas timed to releases.” They are also pressuring Apple to publish the results of Fair Labor Association’s audit (to which the company willfully agreed): “Including the NAMES of the suppliers found to have violations and WHAT those violations are, so that there is transparency around the monitoring effort.” The petition (found here) opens with an interesting paragraph:
United States carrier Sprint, the nation’s third-largest wireless telecommunications network, announced today holiday quarter earnings containing a couple interesting tidbits related to Apple’s iPhone, which helped bring in most of its new customers. Sprint reportedly ponied up $20 billion to land Apple’s iconic smartphone last October, calling the handset launch in today’s statement “successful.”
Forty percent of Sprint’s 1.8 million iPhone sales in the fourth quarter were to new customers.
This means some 720,000 Sprint iPhones went into the hands of new customers—once again highlighting Apple device’s proven ability to attract new consumers. Sprint only added 539,000 net additions to the postpaid base, so it would likely have lost around 200,000 customers without the iPhone in its lineup.
According to Sprint’s internal estimates, high costs associated with subsidizing the iPhone —combined with the impact of iPhone and Network Vision costs— are to blame for wider than expected short term loss, which reached an astounding $1.3 billion in Q4 2011 and $2.9 billion for 2011. These factors also reduced fourth-quarter adjusted operating income before depreciation and amortization (OIBDA) of $842 million by approximately $684 million.
Reutersreported in October 2011 that Sprint paid about 40 percent higher subsidy to Apple than the industry average, amounting to $200 more per device.
Sprint CEO Dan Hesse has some nice words for Apple’s phone:
After taking a beating by Motorola over FRAND patents this month, Apple issued a letter to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute asking the body to establish consistent royalty fees for patents deemed essential to wireless standards, reported the Wall Street Journal. The body has a role in setting the standards related to GSM, 3G UMTS, and 4G LTE radio technologies.
Apple is involved in nasty patent disputes with Motorola, HTC and Samsung in courtrooms around the world, and it previously asserted in court documents that handset maker Motorola refused to license its essential patents on “Fair, Reasonable, and Nondiscriminatory” (FRAND) nature at rates offered to Nokia, Samsung and other vendors. According to the Journal:
Many mobile technology companies, such as Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., hold patents that became part of industry-wide standards. Standards bodies often require the patent holders to offer to license their patents to any company on a basis known as Frand, or fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory. Questions about such commitments have arisen amid a flurry of patent suits between rivals in the mobile-device market.
Apple’s lawyer wrote in the letter: “It is apparent that our industry suffers from a lack of consistent adherence to FRAND principles in the cellular standards arena.” A copy of Apple’s letter was posted online by the FOSS Patents blog. Motorola recently likened its enforcement of FRAND patents to bank robbery: “It only takes one bullet to kill.” Samsung and Motorola reportedly demanded that Apple pay a 2.4 percent and 2.25 percent royalty, respectively, illustrating what the iPhone maker called are unreasonable FRAND licensing terms.
VoIP startup Vonage is determined to continue challenging Skype and other VoIP incumbents, so today it issued a brand new iPhone app called “Vonage Mobile.” Replacing the previous iOS offerings Time to Call and Vonage Mobile application for Facebook, the new program boasts up to 30 percent lower international per-minute calling rates compared to rival Skype. This is based on per-minute rates to the top 50 countries called. Vonage Mobile offers as much as 70 percent lower rates compared to major wireless carriers.
Calling and texting other Vonage Mobile users or Vonage’s VoIP home or business customers is free and outgoing calls are placed using the user’s existing cell phone number. You do not need to be a Vonage phone service customer to use the app. Calling credits are available for in-app purchases through the iTunes billing system in increments of $4.99 and $9.99. Vonage Mobile is a free download for the iPhone and iPod touch in over a hundred countries. Our Android friends can also download the program on Android Market.
Guitarworldnoted the new Paul McCartney album Kisses on the Bottomlaunches this week, and the pop-rock legend will perform live from Capital Studios in Los Angeles on iTunes to celebrate the release. [iTunes link]
Paul McCartney will commemorate the release of his new album, Kisses On The Bottom, with a free streaming performance that takes place 7 p.m. PST Thursday, February 9, from Capitol Studios in Los Angeles, where much of the new album was recorded.
Kisses on the Bottom, which comes out Tuesday, February 7, via Hear Music/Concord, is a collection of standards McCartney grew up listening to, plus two new McCartney compositions — “My Valentine” and “Only Our Hearts” (which feature guest turns, respectively, from Eric Clapton and Stevie Wonder).
Recorded with the aid of Tommy LiPuma and Diana Krall and her band — who will back McCartney for the Capitol live-stream event — Kisses On The Bottom is a personal journey through songs that, in some cases, a young McCartney first heard his father perform on the family piano.
The February 9 Capitol Studios streaming event will be the first time ever that the reverent and adventurous performances of Kisses On The Bottom will be brought to life in a live setting
McCartney’s former band, The Beatles, was a favorite of Steve Jobs, but getting the band on iTunes appeared to be his White Whale due to issues with the band’s label Apple Records and EMI. A deal was struck last year and Apple heavily promoted the band.
Research firm Gartner just released its estimates for PC shipments in the Western Europe region during the holiday quarter, and only Apple and Asus made any meaningful progress, with Apple recording the strongest gains in France and the United Kingdom.
While the Mac maker remained absent from the Top 5 rankings in Western Europe and Germany, it was a sole first-tier PC brand to grow sales in the United Kingdom during the holiday quarter. Specifically, Apple’s Mac business in the country grew 17.2 percent, enough to rank fourth with a 9.1 percent market share.
Everyone else’s business shrunk: Hewlett-Packard (No. 1) was down 27 percent, Dell (No. 4) declined by a whopping 32.2-percent, Toshiba (No. 3) fell 5.4-percent and Acer (No. 5) was by far the biggest loser with a 62.4-percent year-over-year decline. The same story is in France where Apple placed No. 5 by growing 15.3-percent for an 8.2-percent market share. Only Asus (No. 2) grew slightly faster than Apple at 17.4-percent, while shipments of PC desktops and notebooks from HP, Acer, and Dell plummeted.
VooMoteZapper is a universal remote control for iOS devices created by a company called Zero1.tv, and it is now available at the online Apple Store.
The app-enabled accessory does away with multiple remote control apps for individual consumer electronics products, replacing them with a single software solution for home device management. At about the size of a paperclip, this product connects to the 30-pin dock connector and does not need batteries to work nor do you have to pair it.
The remote can control an HD TV, DVD player, home theater, and almost all your A/V equipment. The gizmo works with the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad running iOS 5, and an accompanying app supports gestures. It also features an edit mode, and it packs one-touch room control and other features. The VooMoteZapper is $69.95 at the online Apple Store, and it is available in a variety of refreshing colors including red, green, blue, pink, and gray. Spec sheet is available below.
Apple’s digital secretary named Siri, an iPhone 4S exclusive, is now responsible for nearly 25 percent of all searches conducted on Wolfram Alpha, an answer-engine developed by Wolfram Research.
As you know, Apple collaborated with Wolfram Alpha on Siri (Microsoft is another licensee), and took advantage of algorithms powering Mathematica, another Wolfram Research product. It lets users type in complex factual queries, and then Wolfram Alpha computes accurate answers from its structured data containing hundreds of datasets.
The Cupertino, Calif.-based Company fancies Wolfram Alpha’s curated knowledge database, which is a nice fit for the iPhone 4S’s factual question answering feature. According to the New York Times’ Steve Lohr, Siri accounts for a quarter of all Wolfram Alpha queries after four months:
Siri accounts for about a quarter of the queries fielded by Wolfram Alpha, whose staff has grown to 200.
Google should be worried, as this could be another sign of Siri users becoming accustomed to retrieving factual answers from Wolfram Alpha and not Google. For example: Telling Siri to “Google the iPhone” launches Safari with Google search results accompanied by text-based adverts, but just asking “How many days are there until Easter” produces a formatted answer from Wolfram Alpha with no advertising whatsoever. This is also important knowing that a quarter of all searches on mobile devices are conducted through voice commands.
Adobe just revealed (viaThe Verge) pricing information and more details on its new cloud-based offering called Creative Cloud.
Announced last October along new touch apps for tablets, Creative Cloud is billed as a service that “radically redefines the content creation process” by offering a central web-based repository to store, share and view content across devices. Prices start at $49.99 a month, which buys you a one-year access to 20GB of cloud storage shared across the upcoming Creative Suite 6 apps. This translates into an annual fee of $600 versus the $2,000 (or much less) for the CS license, which could lure those who consider CS too pricey (assuming you only use a license for a year or two).
A membership also gets you all the Creative Suite tools, Adobe Touch Apps and services, device syncing capabilities, in addition to new features, products, and services as soon as they are released. It also includes Lightroom 4 (once it exits beta) and the new Muse and Edge web authoring tools. Volume licensing for businesses will be available this fall for $69.99 a month per seat.
Canada’s largest newspaper, the Globe and Mail, today said Apple has been working with wireless and wireline providers including Rogers and Bell to partner with the AppleTV.
“They’re not closed to doing it with one [company] or doing it with two,” said one source who is familiar with the talks. “They’re looking for a partner. They’re looking for someone with wireless and broadband capabilities.” Another source, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Rogers and Bell already have the product in their labs.
More interestingly, some details of this new AppleTV are provided:
The product reportedly integrates Siri, Apple’s voice-recognition software that acts as a personal assistant on the latest iPhone, into television sets to help viewers make programming choices.
Viewers can then control the TV by voice or hand gestures, all from the comfort of a couch. An on-screen keyboard, meanwhile, can also be activated in a similar manner, allowing viewers to surf the web, conduct video chats and use social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook – all without any physical interface.
The Globe and Mail goes on to quote analysts including Jefferies & Co. analyst Peter Misek that we discussed earlier who also said Apple was collaborating with ISPs to deliver TV content to a next generation AppleTV. Perhaps the biggest proponent of an AppleTV outside of Cupertino, Gene Munster, gave his latest assessment of the situation last week, calling for one of three scenarios happening before the end of the year. Expand Expanding Close
Intel announced today the new 520 Series solid-state storage code-named “Cherryville” and a number of tech websites and blogs already have their reviews up. The Verge has a nice review round up, and MacWorld’s own review provides an extensive overview of the pros and cons of the device. Fabbed on Intel’s 25nm Multi-Level Cell process, the 520 boasts sequential read/write performance of 550/520MBps when using a system with a SATA 3.0 6Gbps interface. The spec sheet positions the 520 Series as a solution for media creators and tech enthusiasts.
Still, Samsung’s comparable 830 Series came in fastest during Tech Report’sreview (see the chart below the fold), with sequential read/write speeds of 500/350MBps on a SATA 3.0 6Gbps interface. We reviewed the Samsung 830 and found it to be the fastest available. In addition, the 830 SSD is almost $150 cheaper and it is going into MacBook Airs soon, unlike the 520 Series that comes in a 2.5-inch form factor—so it only fits inside MacBook and MacBook Pros.
MacWorld’s review achieved read-writes of 303/324MBps (sequential) and 303/338MBps (random) with Xbench 1.3 and 456/241MBps in read/writes using Blackmagic benchmarking software with 4K blocks. The 520 Series also has lower-than-usual power requirements and delights with strong data protection and compression features…
Software giant Microsoft will release in the second quarter a high-profile productivity tool for Android-toting business professionals. Accompanying Microsoft’s CRM Dynamics 2012 platform update is a preview guide that specifically mentions Android support, as noted byZDnet. The document also includes a screenshot depicting Dynamics CRM mobile client for iPad (as seen on the right). In addition to native clients for Android devices and iPads/iPhones running iOS 5.x, Dynamics CRM will also be available on devices powered by Microsoft’s Windows Phone software.
As opposed to a web client that comes with significant limitations, the mobile client comes with all the bells and whistles so it should be Godsend for road warriors. Many businesses rely upon Dynamics CRM to manage their interactions with customers, clients, and sales prospects. Dynamics CRM mobile client will be priced at $30 a month per seat versus rival Salesforce’s mobile client which starts at $65 a month per seat. Expand Expanding Close
