Apple

Earlier this week, we reported on some details and photos of the one-off Leica camera designed by Apple’s Jony Ive and Marc Newson for the Product(RED) campaign. Leica originally shared some interesting tidbits about the functionality and development process of the camera, but now, Vanity Fair has published an extensive interview with Ive and Newson about the process. The report provides an interesting look into Apple PR’s process of organizing interviews of its executives:
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Image: redorbit.com

Evernote, Adobe, even Apple … just a few of the companies who have found their user data compromised by hackers in recent times. The possibility of a hacker being able to access one of your web accounts is worrying enough – but if you use the same email address and password for almost all the websites you use, the risk becomes huge.

The first thing a hacker does when they get hold of a list of usernames and passwords is to use automated software to fire them at a whole bunch of popular websites. That means your online security is only as good as the most vulnerable of the websites you visit. Not good.

The answer, of course, is to use a unique – and strong – password for each website you access. But that creates its own hassles. Strong passwords aren’t easily memorised. Sure, we can ask our browsers to store logins for us, but when you might use several different computers, an iPhone and an iPad, you’d have to login once from each device as soon as you chose the password so it gets stored before you forget it. Not very convenient.

Which is where password managers come in. When you see the instructions, it’ll look like a long process, but it in fact takes only 10-20 mins if you have two or three devices … 
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US Mac sales fell year-on-year as part of the global decline in the PC market as consumers switch to tablets, phablets and smartphones – but the two major market analysts produced wildly differing estimates of the size of that fall.

IDC has a dramatic drop of 11.2 percent, from 2.14M in the third quarter of 2012 to 1.9M in the same quarter this year, while Gartner shows a much more modest decline of 2.3 percent from 2.2M (close to IDC’s number) to 2.1M. The only point on which both agree is this is the first Q3 decline in Mac sales since 2002, a quarter usually assisted by the back-to-school market …

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While a possible deal with China Mobile, one of the world’s largest telecoms, was rumored for quite sometime leading up to launch of the new iPhones, the company said in August that it was still working out “commercial and technical issues” with Apple. Today, Bloomberg points us to an Apple job listing in China that provides some evidence that the company is indeed preparing to launch the iPhone on the carrier’s network:

The manager, who will be based in Beijing, will “support and drive the carrier approval of mobile phones,” Apple said in an advertisement on its China website. The position seeks experience with TD-SCDMA, China Mobile’s own third-generation standard that isn’t used by other carriers.

On top of TD-SCDMA, the job listing is also seeking an engineer with experience in TD-LTE, which is the LTE standard that China Mobile has quickly been rolling out. Back in August the often reliable KGI analyst Mingchi Kuo claimed that Apple was ramping up TD-LTE supported iPhone 5c production and estimated that the iPhone 5s and 5c on China Mobile could account for penetration of 25% and 35% of total shipments for the two devices. Currently the carrier has approximately 756 million subscribers, around 63% of the 1.2 billion wireless subscribers in China.
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Photo: engadget.com

Today’s update to the iOS Flickr app offers auto-uploading of full-res photos to your private Flickr gallery. Couple this to the 1TB of free storage available and you effectively have a Photo Stream style service that can store over half a million photos, rather than simply the last 1,000.

Flickr introduced the 1TB capacity back in May (with parent company Yahoo offering the same free storage to email users yesterday). If you sync iPhoto with Flickr, you effectively get all the benefits of Photo Stream but with 500 times the capacity. You do need to be careful with this, however: the sync is two-way, so if you delete photos from Flickr, they will also be deleted from iPhoto … 
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According to a report from AllThingsD, Apple will debut the next generation of iPad hardware at a media event on October 22.

People familiar with Apple’s plans tell AllThingsD that the company will hold its next invitation-only event on Tuesday October 22. The focal point of the gathering will the latest updates to the company’s iPad line, but new Mac Pro and OS X Mavericks will likely get some stage time as well, I’m told.

We’ve been seeing more and more leaks allegedly showing the slimmer, iPad mini-like design of the next-generation iPad 5 that we first posted images of back in January, and it’s likely Apple will debut the product alongside the much rumored second gen iPad mini later this month. The new iPad 5 is rumored to get the refreshed design and improved internals, while the second generation iPad mini is rumored to include a Retina display. The latest reliable reports claimed the two new iPads will also be receiving an upgraded 8 megapixel camera system.

AllThingsD reports that the event will  include announcements regarding OS X Mavericks and the recently announced all-new Mac Pro in addition to new iPads. We first reported that Mavericks would launch in late October. CE: The Magazine previously pegged the fall Apple event for October 22nd.

There have been unconfirmed leaks showing the new iPads in similar colors to the new iPhone 5s, and even whispers of a TouchID fingerprint sensor for the larger of the two new products, but it’s unclear if those features will make it into the next generation iPads.

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With a U.S. import ban previously issued by the ITC set to lock out certain Samsung devices at midnight last night, Bloomberg reports that the company has failed to obtain a veto from President Barack Obama:

The Korean company had argued that the ban should be overturned on public policy grounds, especially since a similar order it won against Apple was vetoed by the administration in August. Samsung can now seek a delay in the ban from a U.S. appeals court that will consider the entire case on legal grounds.

“After carefully weighing policy considerations, including the impact on consumers and competition, advice from agencies, and information from interested parties, I have decided to allow” the import ban to proceed, Obama’s designee, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, said in a statement today.

In August, the US International Trade Commission ruled in favor of Apple and issued a sales ban on certain infringing Samsung devices in a long-running case that stemmed from a countersuit originally filed by Apple back in 2011. The news came shortly after the Obama administration’s decision to veto an ITC import ban on certain iPhone and iPad models that Samsung won in a separate case. Like Apple, Samsung was going to attempt to get a veto on the decision by the US President, the only person with the power to overturn ITC import bans. 
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Apple’s Senior VP of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller tweeted a link to a National Geographic feature in which photographer Jim Richardson used his iPhone 5s for a photo feature on Scotland in the definitive landscape photography magazine.

iPhoneography http://t.co/1MYjDgV2sj

— Philip Schiller (@pschiller) October 8, 2013

Richardson said that the transition from his usual Nikon kit wasn’t an easy one.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t struggling to make pictures. Walking down the Royal Mile surrounded by all things Scottish nothing seemed worth a picture. Out of desperation I took a few glib shots. Awful! Surrounded by great subjects I could see nothing. Made me feel worse.

But that using it over four days, he came to be impressed … 
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We have a long running series on 9to5Google called “Talking Schmidt” and the Chairman of Google keeps loading it up with amusing quotes on the technology industry.  Today’s comes from the Gartner Symposium where our pro/antagonist was asked by Gartner analyst David Willis about the security of Android (which has taken some hits lately to put it mildly).

To which Schmidt, without batting an eye, said:

“Not secure? It’s more secure than the iPhone.”

The comment drew laughter from the crowd, comprised largely of  CIOs and high level IT personnel. Keep in mind, this is the same quote-smith who forecasted Google TV would have taken over the market last year and called the iPad just a big iPhone.
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Update: Live webcast will be at www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/earningsq413

Apple will hold its quarterly earnings call to announce results on October 28th, as noted on Apple’s investor website. Typically, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer will read prepared statements about the company’s performance, before opening the call to a question and answer session for analysts. The call will begin at 2PM Pacific / 5PM Eastern time. Apple will publish a press release reporting their results about half an hour before the call is due to begin.

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Macs make automated backup childishly easy: simply plug in an external hard drive and OS X will ask whether you want to use it as a Time Machine disk. Say yes, and you’ll then get fully-automatic, hourly, versioned backups without doing anything further.

Unplug it to take your MacBook out & about, and it will catch up as soon as you return and plug it back in. Even easier, get a Time Capsule, and those backups take place over wifi, so you don’t even have to connect a drive.

But I’m a belt-and-braces chap. I like multiple backups, and I like one of those backups to be off-site. That way, if the house burns down, or a burglar takes both my Macs and my backup drives, I still have access to my data. Which is where online backup services come into play. Think of them as your backup of last resort.

iCloud, covered in my cloud storage roundup last week, already backs up quite a lot of your data – but nothing like all of it. The services covered here are ones that backup either your entire Mac, or a large proportion of it …

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Skype has updated its iPhone app to give a “refreshed look and feel for iOS 7” as well as a number of accessibility improvements and bug fixes.

Although the UI is clearly iOS 7 focused, Skype for iPhone 4.13 is compatible with iOS 5 and 6 too. Full details of the update below the fold … 
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A four-month long investigation into Apple’s tax affairs by the Securities and Exchange Commission has cleared the company of any wrong-doing in regard to the way the company accounted for taxes in respect of its overseas operations.

A Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing into Apple’s tax affairs had previously accused the company of seeking “the Holy Grail of tax avoidance” over cash held overseas. The hearing proved anti-climatic, with no wrong-doing established, and the investigation handed off to the SEC. The SEC has now closed the case.

Tim Cook made an unequivocal statement during the Senate hearing that Apple used no tax gimmicks … 
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The iPhone has long been the best-selling phone on AT&T, but the Samsung Galaxy S4 has for some time held that slot at Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile, with the iPhone 5 in second place. No more. September sales figures from Canaccord (reported in Fortune) show that the iPhone 5s now has top billing on all four major U.S. carriers, with the iPhone 5c also beating Samsung on AT&T and Sprint. While the news isn’t unexpected, the numbers do seem to put the lie to one rumor … 
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