From 9to5toys.com:
Best Buy’s Black Friday deal on iPads is now live. Take $45 off all iPad 2s. That’s the lowest price we’ve seen across the board but we have a strong suspicion the 64GB iPad 2s will be cheaper tomorrow at the Apple Store.
From 9to5Toys.com:
Best Buy gets the Black Friday started early with some pretty incredible deals this morning:
Buy an 8GB iPod Touch for $195, get a $50 Best Buy Gift Card sent to you.
iPad 2s are $45 off across the board.
iTunes Gift Cards are 20% off
And the current Macbook Airs start at an impressive $849
More below:
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Like everyone, we’re gearing up for Black Friday with the best online and offline deals on electronics products that our readers are after. Always ongoing, 9to5Toys.com has the best deals on Apple products and accessories from around the web, including some cool new stuff you might not have seen elsewhere. However, starting on Black Friday morning at Midnight, we’ll be promoting the best deals throughout the day on 9to5mac.com, making sure you have the lowest price options on all of your Apple products and accessories.
As always, we aren’t just going to barf out a list of prices from retailers. We curate to only find exceptional deals. For instance, we were the first to find the Apple Store Black Friday Ad which showcases the 11.6″ MacBook Air starting at $898.
Also, no one touches this Best Buy $200 off 13-inch MacBook Air we dug up earlier this week. We’re seeing 1080P displays falling below $100 (here and here) at MacConnection already. We’re finding iPods and iPads which will be at their lowest prices ever and often be bundled with free accesories and giftcards. There is tons of Free Music at Amazon. The list goes on and on.
Make sure to stop by on Black Friday and as always 9to5Toys for the latest deals.
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Image courtesy of AnimationMagazine.net
According to E! Online, screenwriter, producer and playwright Aaron Sorkin is “strongly considering” writing a screenplay for a rumored Sony movie about the life and work of Steve Jobs. Sorkin was quoted as telling the publication at the P.S. Arts Express Yourself 2011 event in Santa Monica:
Sony has asked me to write the movie and it’s something I’m strongly considering. […] He was a great entrepreneur, he was a great artist, a great thinker. […] He’s probably inspired my 11-year-old daughter Roxy more than he’s inspired me. She plays with all his toys.
Sony Pictures recently acquired feature rights to film a flick based on Walter Isaacson’s authorized bio. As we already informed you, someone from ER is likely to play Steve Jobs. The choice could come down to George Clooney (50) and Noah Wyle (40). The latter played Jobs in Pirates of Silicon Valley and recently said he would give his eye teeth, in the heartbeat, to play Apple’s charismatic co-founder.
Sorkin’s work includes the well-received television show The West Wing. He also wrote screenplay for the controversial movie The Social Network which covers how Facebook came to be while portraying its co-founder Mark Zuckerberg as a ruthless young entrepreneur who stole an existing idea from the Winklevoss brothers, tweaked it and made it his own.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8akOCfqe-v0]
Microsoft and Apple tackled touch interfaces in diametrically opposing ways. As Apple set out to bring multitouch on mobile devices to the masses with the 2007 release of the original iPhone, Microsoft created a blown up version with its Surface multitouch tabletop (which can now be yours for a cool $8,400, shipping in early 2012).
Microsoft also progressed natural user interfaces with the Kinect motion controller for the Xbox 360 console while Apple charted its way into the future with an artificial intelligence-driven personal assistant dubbed Siri.
So, when Microsoft’s chief strategy and research officer Craig Mundie sat down with Forbes’ Eric Savitz to talk the company’s planned expansion of the new user interface, he did what Microsoft executives typically do when challenged with a cool tech developed outside the Windows maker’s labs: He stuck his foot in his mouth over Apple’s groundbreaking digital secretary exclusive to the iPhone 4S.
In the above clip, he said (mark 1:45):
People are infatuated with Apple announcing it. It’s good marketing, but at least as the technological capability you could argue that Microsoft has had a similar capability in Windows Phones for more than a year, since Windows Phone 7 was introduced.
Windows Phones, seriously? Mundie couldn’t acknowledge Siri as an ace up Apple’s sleeve and barely accepted that Microsoft could learn a lesson or two about “productizing” technology. He then went on to describe how their version of Siri works on Windows Phones:
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Taiwanese handset maker HTC’s lawsuit against Apple over infringement of S3 Graphics’ patents has suffered a fatal blow (in addition to this one) as the United States International Trade Commission (ITC), which can block the import of products, reversed its earlier decision and ruled in favor of Apple on November 21. The Commission has officially ended its investigation of the case and HTC shares fell 4.9 percent on the news.
And now, Bloomberg reports that HTC “will reevaluate” its planned purchase of S3 Graphics following the ITC ruling.
HTC Corp. will reevaluate its planned purchase of S3 Graphics Co. after the target company lost a U.S. International Trade Commission ruling it brought against Apple Inc. over patent infringement, the Taoyuan, Taiwan-based company said in a statement today.
Just yesterday, HTC’s general counsel Grace Lei told DigiTimes yesterday his company “will consider an appeal”. But after closer inspection of the ITC ruling, the company clearly concluded the best course of action is to consider dropping the $300 million acquisition of graphics maker S3 Graphics announced back in June, which only proves this acquisition may have been planned as a leverage in HTC’s other legal dealings with the iPhone maker.
You’d think one of the top-rated smartphones by Consumer Reports would become a smash hit in tech-crazy South Korea where people don’t settle for anything less but the very greatest gadgets. Heck, even Hong Kong shoppers turned to South Korea because pre-orders in their home country sold out in ten minutes. But according to Korea Times, local carriers SK Telecom and KT are struggling to hit the promised sales target agreed with Apple.
They apparently sold below 150,000 pre-orders since the device hit South Korea November 4. The story came from the mouth of an unnamed SK Telecom executive and a 31-year-old iPhone 4 user who dropped a planned iPhone 4S purchase due to “hardware-related issues”.
Seriously? Didn’t we establish battery woes as software-driven? The report cites other woes such as noises during 3G-based calls and while operating video functions. Let’s be honest here, iPhone 4S does have its share of teething problems, just like any other Apple product. But the South Koreans appear to be really freaking out over a lack of 4G LTE:
The rising appetite for LTE smartphones in South Korea replaces any desire for the Apple iPhone 4S, officials and experts said.
4G LTE has hit the ground running in the country. Carriers SK Telecom and LG Uplus sold over 500,000 pricey LTE plans since late-September introduction. The Korea Communications Commission expects the number of LTE phone users in the country to top 1.5 million by the year’s end. Not having support for 4G LTE radio technology on the iconic device in the 48 million people market that is leading the world in Internet speeds and is defined by the demanding, tech-savvy consumers? Yeah, this can lead to some friction.
Besides, Siri doesn’t speak Korean (yet) and South Korea is also Samsung’s home turf. And it’s not like iPhone 4S users in some other markets aren’t feeling buyer’s remorse. Us? Forget the handset, it’ll be old news by the next summer anyway. What matters is that with the iPhone 4S came Siri, an exclusive feature deemed a world-changing event, and rightfully if we may add.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6h5JSojJN3Y]
Additional variations of the concept are available on Samsung’s YouTube channel. The version included right below challenges a notion that only iPhone has the best apps. A third clip is right after the break.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO5Il_rvZj8]
VMware, the maker of a popular virtualization software Fusion, seems to be backpedalling on the last week’s release of VMware Fusion 4.1 for the Mac. As originally noted by Macworld, Fusion 4.1 was released with support for virtualization of Lion, Snow Leopard and Leopard clients. A dialog box pops up when installing an operating system client in Fusion 4.1, asking user to “verify” that they are in compliance with their software’s licensing terms.
In essence, this removes VMware from the position of having to evaluate and enforce Apple’s operating-system license, and instead leaves the decision in the hands of users.
In a new blog post today, VMware hinted an upcoming update will “fix” their “mistake”.
When the license verification step was added in VMware Fusion 4.1 the server edition check was omitted. We are preparing an update. […] Users should always ensure they remain in compliance with any applicable software license agreements.
Of course, per Apple’s EULA only server software is supposed to be virtualized and the above wording pretty much spells doom for Snow Leopard or Leopard client virtualization in the next Fusion release. At the end of the day, VMware is fixing Fusion the same way people fix their dogs. What is Apple’s official stance on this issue?
Mere hours after we verified the connection between DigiTimes display predictions and the J2 prototype found in iOS 5 code strings, DisplaySearch analyst Richard Shim told CNET that production of a QXGA 10-inch 2048-by-1536 Retina Display for iPad 3 “has started”, as previously hinted:
It’s happening – QXGA, 2048×1536. Panel production has started [for the next-generation iPad]. There’s three suppliers. […] It takes a couple of weeks for the production to go to the ODMs (the manufacturers). Then the manufacturer puts them in the housing. Then, that goes off to shipment. We could start seeing finished devices produced in December. And then being ready to be shipped in January. With volumes gearing up in February and March
J1 and J2 are code-names DigiTimes outed as next-generation iPad models allegedly in the works for 2012. Acknowledging possible issues with volume manufacturing of such a high-resolution display, the analyst stressed Apple should be able to meet targets because it is sourcing parts from three display manufacturers: Samsung Electronic, LG Display and Sharp.
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Ron Johnson, the CEO of J.C. Penney and the former senior vice president for retail at Apple, ran a guest post detailing his Apple tenure over at the Harward Business Review blog, accompanying a monster interview which appears in the December 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review magazine.
Apple doesn’t owe its success in retail to shiny products, he said. “You don’t need to stock iPads to create an irresistible retail environment”, he said. “You have to create a store that’s more than a store to people”. Even though Apple products can be purchased for less elsewhere, people visit Apple’s stores for the experience, not products, he argued:
People come to the Apple Store for the experience — and they’re willing to pay a premium for that. There are lots of components to that experience, but maybe the most important — and this is something that can translate to any retailer — is that the staff isn’t focused on selling stuff, it’s focused on building relationships and trying to make people’s lives better. That may sound hokey, but it’s true.
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A precision aluminum unibody enclosure gives Mac notebooks structural integrity, providing all of the mounting features in a single part.
Makers of Ultrabooks, ultra-thin notebooks that conform to Intel’s recommended specs, are facing difficulties replicating Apple’s unibody process, citing limited capacity and price restrictions on the unibody process. They’ve come to realize that unibody construction requires expensive CNC equipment to machine a sturdy notebook case from a single block of aluminum, including internal parts and mounting features. Apple’s contract manufacturer Foxconn and supplier Catcher Technology own thousands of CNC machines and you can imagine where their priorities lie.
According to DigiTimes, the makers of would-be MacBook Air killers are turning to the cheaper high-density fiberglass chassis for the low-end, said to cost up to $30. For the high-end, Apple’s rivals are combining the exterior aluminum enclosure with plastic parts inside. Such a semi-unibody case is said to cost between $40 and $80:
The new aluminum chassis with plastic internal parts design will allow Ultrabooks to feature a metal appearance, but all the internal parts will be made from plastic stuck to metal parts using glue.
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/?v=AN6wy0keQqo]
We’ve seen examples of the Siri interface running on prior iPhones and a proof-of-concept video allegedly showing the full Siri port running on iPhone 4. And now, a St. Louis developer @plamoni has figured out how to run a proxy server on his computer to fool Siri into thinking it is talking to Apple’s servers.
The proxy server acts as a middleman that intercepts Siri commands and returns answers. According to the project page, “the idea is to allow for the creation of custom handlers for different actions”. It works by setting up a DNS server on your network to forward requests for guzzoni.apple.com (the Siri servers) to the computer running the proxy.
He used the proxy server to run a custom plug-in that can manage his radio-controlled thermostat via Siri (Tony Fadell should love this). It doesn’t require a jelabroken iPhone since everything is going on off the device. As you can see in the video, Siri responds to commands such as, “What’s the status of the thermostat?”, or “Set the thermostat to 68 degrees”, or even “What’s the inside temperature?”. What’s best, his hack lets any device with a plug-in to be controlled via Siri. A sign of things to come from Apple? Two more videos follow right after the break.
ChangeWave Research in a new survey polled 3,043 consumers on consumer tablet demand for the holidays, including a close-up look at demand for the Amazon Kindle Fire vs. the Apple iPad. Overall, tablets are big this holidays as sales in the United States increase an estimated 130 percent.
Everybody wants a tablet, it seems. A total of 14 percent of respondents plan on buying a tablet in the next 90 days, an eight percentage points increase over an August ChangeWave survey and more than triple the level of a year ago. However, nowadays shoppers no longer have to pick between an iPad or an array of same-looking Android tablets because Amazon is now the second most-popular tablet brand (people clearly want an Amazon tablet).
According to ChangeWave:
The Amazon Kindle Fire is going to leapfrog the competition and become the number two product in the tablet market, as long as it can provide a quality user experience. But the Amazon surge may also contain a silver lining for Apple, by damaging the tablet market hopes of the remaining competitors in the field.
Nearly two-thirds of respondents (65 percent) plan on buying an iPad, or two out of three tablet buyers. People are loving their iPads and it shows in satisfaction ratings. A total of 74 percent of all iPad owners are Very Satisfied versus 49 percent for all other tablet manufacturers combined. More than one in five, or 22 percent, eye an Amazon tablet and just four percent plan on buying a Galaxy Tab from Samsung. Apple’s score is in line with iPad’s IDC-estimated 68 percent share of the tablet market. In addition, Canalys projected Apple will overtake Hewlett-Packard to become the #1 PC maker globally on the heels of iPad 3 release, although not everybody is down with counting iPad as a computer. More tidbits and charts after the break.
Research firm Canalys on Monday said it expects Apple to overtake Hewlett-Packard to become the world’s leading PC maker before the second half of 2012. That is, if you count tablets as computers (many people don’t). The launch of iPad 3 early next year is predicted to boost Apple’s share of the global PC market. Canalys Analyst Tim Coulling:
Apple has seen its PC market share expand from 9 percent to 15 percent in just four quarters, though iPad shipments in its core market – the United States – are likely to come under pressure in Q4 due to the launch of the Fire and Nook at extremely competitive price points.
Charlie Wolf of Needham and Co last week said the Mac passed the magic five percent global market share. Canalys’ data includes computer and tablet sales. Earlier this month Canalys pegged Apple’s share of the global PC market at 15 percent, right behind the #1 HP with 16 percent share. CAnalys predicts that 2011 PC sales will grow 15 percent to hit 415 million units, of which 211 million should be notebook units where Apple absolutely dominates.
Ultrabooks? “For Ultrabooks to become widespread, prices have to drop considerably”, Canalys said. As for other tablets, DigiTimes expects high inventory levels of non-Apple tablets following the holiday season. This is partly due to the launch of the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet which undercut other Android tablets, meaning “several waves of price cuts are expected in the new year”. Meanwhile, white box tablets, which dropped below $100, are not expected to affect iPad sales.
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As Apple’s former retail chief Ron Johnson sets its sights on re-inventing the shopping experience at the J.C. Penney department stores and the search for his replacement continues, the Cupertino, California-headquartered gadget designer isn’t resting on its laurels. Future plans call for continuation of an aggressive retail expansion that includes 40 new stores during fiscal 2012, thirty of them outside the United States.
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From 9to5toys.com:
Staples has the 16GB SanDisk SDHC Card for $14.99 with free shipping. That’s the lowest price we’ve seen for a 16GB SDHC card. Class 4 represents a minimum speed of around 4MB/sec.
Staples also offers a Sandisk Cruzer 16GB USB stick for $14.99. 8GB is $8.99 and 4GB is $5.99. Staples currently offers free shipping sitewide with no minimum.
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Source: Financial Times, 2011
Financial Times didn’t blink when Apple removed their native iPhone and iPad apps late August for failing to comply with strict in-app subscription policies. Actually, they took us aback with an excellent HTML5 web app which more than adequately replicates a native app experience. We weren’t terribly shocked when their web app became more popular than the iOS app.
Today, Financial Times announced the web app passed one million registered users. They put together a nice infographic to highlight the milestone (included below the fold), but it’s the section shown right above that intrigued us. Based on usage data collected from users, turns out registered users of the Financial Times web app prefer getting their financial news on smartphones and tablets in the morning hours, usually between 6am and 9am.
For most, this means mobile devices have become the go-to source for morning and evening news. As a day at the workplace progresses, most workers consume their news on computers until about 6pm, when smartphones and tablets take over as we commute, dine, watch evening news, check stocks and tuck kids to bed.
To us, this paints an interesting picture. The graph proves average folks get their news outside the workplace on mobile devices, resorting to computers only during office hours because we’re required to use them at workplace anyway. In other words, computers are for water cooler chit chats, iPhones are for breakfast browsing and iPads are for evenings. Go past the fold for the full infographic.
2012 will be an exciting year for tablet fans as Apple brings out a new iPad and competition heats up. 2012 will also be the year when tablet players find it difficult – if not impossible – to compete with two major market approaches: One is that of Apple, leveraging content ecosystem to drive sales of hardware, and the other strategy by Amazon is based on gradually recouping losses on hardware with content sales.
As for Apple, per supply chain chatter relayed by DigiTimes this morning, component suppliers have begun shipping parts for iPad 3 assembly in January 2012 by Foxconn Electronics, Apple’s long-standing contract manufacturer:
Samsung Electronics, LG Display and Sharp reportedly shipped a total of one million units of high-resolution flat panels for next-generation iPads to Apple in October and will ramp up shipments to two million units in November.
TPK Holding and Wintek are set to ship up to a million touch modules per month beginning mid-November, the publication reports. This story is a follow-up to DigiTimes’ Wednesday report claiming Samsung and Sharp have begun shipping iPad 3 displays. Note that Apple might have begun winding down iPad 2 manufacturing.
The Korea Times also reported that LG Display is in talks with Apple involving 7.35-inch displays for a smaller iPad and today’s DigiTimes report confirms this by saying Apple is “reportedly developing a new panel in 7.85-inch size”. Sources are claiming that AU Optronics and LG Display have already delivered samples of this display to Apple for verification.
Tablets aren’t just a fad, mind you. That being said, the space is apparently so hot and getting so crowded than some branded vendors are believed to be giving up on tablets. If DigiTimes is to be trusted, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Acer and Asustek will “gradually phase out” of the tablet market in 2012.
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Skype announced in a blog post today a new version of its desktop client that supports Facebook0-to-Facebook video calls and other enhancements such as smoother video rendering on the Mac platform and group screen sharing for Windows users with a Premium subscription, which is currently available for Mac users. Users who are chatting one-on-one will also be able to screen share with live video streaming.
The Facebook video calling is obviously the most interesting feature. You could previously see your Facebook friends’ social feed, like posts and update your Facebook status from within the Skype app and now you can call them in-app:
Initiating a Facebook-to-Facebook call from within Skype is quite easy; all you need to do is connect your Skype and Facebook accounts. Then, select a Facebook friend and hit the video call button in Skype- your friend simply picks up the call from Facebook.
If Skype weren’t such a unwieldy app, we’d be tempted to consider it as a replacement for Facebook clients. To get the aforementioned features, download Skype 5.4 Beta for Mac or Skype 5.7 Beta for Windows.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v=DO5GbYHv7HM]
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For the first time in fifteen years, Apple’s Mac has passed five percent global market share for computers. The writing has been on the wall since Intel switch was announced in the summer of 2005. With sales outpacing the industry for the 22nd consecutive quarter, Mac biz was revitalized and benefitted tremendously from Apple’s successes with iOS devices.
Apple sold 4.89 million Macs in the September quarter, a 26 percent annual growth. That’s more Macs sold in Q3 2011 than any entire year before 2006. Charlie Wolf of Needham and Co observed in a note to clients Thursday that Macs perform well in both business and home markets, adding:
The growth in Mac shipments in the past year represented 20 percent of the growth in worldwide PC shipments.
Macs in enterprise grew 43.8 percent versus just 4.8 percent industry growth. In the home market, the analyst said, Macs grew 25.6 percent versus four percent growth for the overall PC home market. Put simply, Macs outpaced the industry growth in business and home markets more than ninefold and sixfold, respectively. However, Macs grew just 2.9 percent in education versus the industry average of 16.9 percent and sales to government declined by 0.6 percent, both due to iPad cannibalization.
The so-called halo effect is real. Gartner pegged third-quarter Mac sales growth in Western Europe at 19.6 percent as rivals Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Acer Group all lost ground. Analysts expect Mac sales to quadruple in China, the 1.33 billion people market that contributed to $13 billion in Apple’s fiscal 2011 revenue, up from just above $3 billion in fiscal 2010.
Meanwhile, another report by research firm iPass (please, no jokes) indicates that the iPhone has become the smartphone of choice for mobile workers previously married to their BlackBerrys…
Do you currently have any of the following smartphones?
Update: We’ve run this by a few developers who’ve seen this before. Their take is that it is code copied from desktop OS X and may not be indicative of new features. Basically, Apple has a general messaging framework. This framework covers text chat and video conferencing. FaceTime, iChat, and iMessage apps are all based on this framework, furthermore some code references will spill over between apps. The image above is simply a list of the Apple software built on top of this chat framework.
We already know of code strings suggesting that the iMessage messaging service between iOS devices could be supported in iChat on Mac OS X, allowing people who own an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch to exchange instant messages with Mac owners.
Now another developer named John Heaton found some hooks in the iOS code, pictured above, indicating an iChat-like service in iOS or at least suggesting additional instant messaging services. As you can see from the above screenshot, code strings mention a variety of instant messaging services such as iMessage, FaceTime, Jabber and AIM. Even though iChat is not directly referenced, the discovery is intriguing nonetheless.
iOS currently supports iMessage via the iMessage app and FaceTime video calling through the phone app. Even though dozens of third-party IM apps exist on the App Store for AIM and Jabber connectivity, Apple is yet to formally support those in iOS software. In addition Apple’s recent trademark filings indicate the company could be working to eventually integrate FaceTime, iMessage and iChat into a unified messaging solution on both the Mac and iOS devices.
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If Apple is to announce a next-generation iPad some time in the first quarter of next year, as they did with both the original iPad and iPad 2, components to build the device should be shipping to Apple’s contract manufacturers in Asia as we speak. According to a new report by Asian trade publication DigiTimes, Apple has tapped Samsung and Sharp for iPad 3 panels:
Samsung and Sharp already began shipping panels for the next-generation iPads to Apple in October, and Taiwan-based touch panel makers TPK Holding and Wintek will begin to ship touch panels for the new iPads to the supply chain in November-December
A CNET report last month suggested that iPad 3 could boast the rumored Retina Display with a 2048-by-1536 pixel resolution, provided Samsung and LG Display can produce them in large numbers. Apple is thought to be exploring a dual-LED light bar design for iPad 3 which should maintain or strengthen the brightness of the high-resolution panels. Be advised that DigiTimes has become notoriously unreliable lately. The publication recently called for two iPads next year, one a minor refresh with thinner design and better battery due in March and the other slated for the year’s end. The publication also touched on a recent claim that Apple cut holiday iPad orders by 25 percent, which caused quite a stir among industry watchers…
You don’t need this software to hack an AppleTV but it makes things easier.
aTV Flash (black) is a user-friendly software package that supercharges your new black AppleTV, unleashing a plethora of new functionality. Don’t worry about the technical details – aTV Flash (black) is simple to use and safe for your AppleTV. Installation is a snap and doesn’t require any physical changes to the AppleTV.
MacUpdate has it for the sale price of $19.99 today only. AppleTV (2010) went on sale for $89.99 at Amazon matching Best Buy so you are looking at $110 for the whole shebang. If you have an old AppleTV, they’ve got you covered there as well. Full features below:
