Apple has cut €100 off of the European price of the Mac mini — the price cut is trans-European, it is also available at the UK store.
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iPhone is the most popular US smartphone while the Android army’s march has propelled that multiplicity of devices to become the most popular OS, Canalsys reports today.
The analysts note massive growth in the sector – the worldwide smartphone market grew by 95 percent over the year ago quarter. Nokia stays ahead of the pack with 33 percent while Apple grabbed 17 percent worldwide, putting it above RIM.
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Apple’s senior VP retail, Ron Johnson, has exercised 150,000 AAPL stock options at a strike price of $11.73, selling these for a total $44.1 million.
Johnson, who has been responsible for Apple’s explosive retail store success, sold his shares at an average $306.07 per share, according to a SEC filing.
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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.
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?
[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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Apple CEO Steve Jobs has issued a comment on yesterday’s report that Apple intends discontinuing its support for Java on OS X.
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Into every life a little rain must fall, or so they say — so hot on the heels of the release of beta Facetime software which lets Mac users chat to their iPhone-using buddies, a German Mac website is warning there’s a nasty security gremlin in the code.
Principally, miscreants can easily get access to a FaceTime user’s Apple ID and reset the password, the site warns.
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Along with releasing XCode 3.2.5, Apple has posted a new area on its Mac Developers site which shows developers how to prepare their Mac Apps for the store. Submissions will begin in November and the Store will roll out to users on Snow Leopard at the beginning of 2011.
A sneak peak of what developers are in for is below:
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Developer Joe Hewitt scored acres of anti-Apple coverage when he slammed the company for its closed iOS development environment — I wonder, then, just how much coverage his latest rant will achieve now Hewitt is slamming Google for claiming Android is “open”, when it isn’t really.
At the center of Hewitt’s argument is that Google’s Android code — which claims to be open in the same sense as Firefox or other open projects — isn’t really developed in the same way. That’s because Google keeps code development of the OS in house until it is ready to release it.
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COMPUTERWORLD: Polish Mac sleuths have uncovered unpopulated Discussion Forums on Apple’s website that suggest we’ll see iMovie 11, iPhoto 11, GarageBand 11, a product referred to as ‘MBA – Need Official Name”, and, of course, “one more thing”…
The Enterprise Desktop Alliance has published survey results which claim that Macs will be the fastest growing systems in the enterprise through 2011.
The EDA claims tech purchasers now see the Mac as more productive machines, and are finding tools to integrate tham into existing networks.
Macs will climb from 3.3% of all systems in 2009 to 5.2% in 2011. Those figureds may be small, but the survey also claims 25% of all new systems to be added in the enterprise will be Macs.
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I’ve spent some time wondering about this — how Apple will integrate iOS within the Mac OS X experience — take a look here and here — now it looks like we’re going to find this out at tomorrow’s Apple event, with iOS scrolling, quick look and popovers all set to reach the Mac.
The integration isn’t finished yet. Mac OS X 10.7 simply borrows elements from iOS which can be translated into a Mac using paradigm. The interface gets an overhaul but remains Aqua-based.
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COMPUTERWORLD: As Apple prepares to announce its fourth financial quarter results later today investment houses are chattering on expectation of strong — perhaps estimate-beating — iPad sales, and we’re watching iPhone 4 sales with great interest. Did ‘antenna-gate’ damage iPhone 4 sales? I’m also anticipating confirmation of anecdotal reports of booming Mac sales.
Autodesk today returned to the Mac with the release of industry-standard AutoCAD. There’s even a 30-day free trial of this most important of 3D CAD software for designers, and its return to the Mac really is a big deal — it has been absent from the platform for 18 years. That’s a generation of Architects that haven’t used the software.
One of the most widely used applications for professional design and engineering, the Mac version brings all AutoCADs features and functionality to Mac-using designers. For PC users, the Mac version works in a similar enough way to the PC that it is easy to move between platforms.
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Android may be catching up to iOS in terms of overall users, but according to Good, a maker of mobile enterprise messaging software, it is nowhere close to Apple in the enterprise. Key findings of the report:
Among its many insights, the report shows that in less than two months from its late June launch, the Apple iPhone 4 became the most frequently activated device among Good’s enterprise customers. The Apple iPad leaped into the top five very quickly as well, showing that enterprise customers want to use these new tablet devices for business. Android continued to grow rapidly as more new devices come to market, with the Droid X by Motorola ranked as the most frequently activated Android device in September.
COMPUTERWORLD: Forget the old myth that Apple isn’t big in the corporate and enterprise sectors. It isn’t true. Last week a hugely corporate gathering of senior corporate treasurers from round the world saw interest in Apple like you’ve never seen before.
Original Mac Mini vs. new AppleTV
We’ve been able to verify that the Limera1n does work on AppleTVs (TUAW also) though no apps run on it and OpenSSH isn’t yet available. But soon, you’ll be able to punch though into your AppleTV box and have a pretty basic Unix machine with a command line interface and a significantly powerful GPU.
So what kind of computer do you get for $99 (and $64 for Apple’s N+1).
…or what fun toys does this have inside to exploit? From the teardown we know it has Bluetooth and FM. We also know from its specs that it has 10/100 Ethernet, Wifi N, USB and 720P HDMI video out (1280×720) which also carries digital audio. Internally it has a 1GHz ARM Cortex A8, 256MB of RAM and 8GB of storage.
With some significant hacking, these could make fantastic little DNS servers or Firewall/VPN/Routers. It shouldn’t be too hard to turn an Ethernet wired AppleTV into an Airport base station for instance. It might be a bit harder (or not) to turn it into a fantastic little NAS with the USB port on the back. At $99/ea these are going to be great hacking toys.
But why stop there?
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COMPUTERWORLD: A note to all the folk out there complaining that Apple isn’t paying any attention to Mac sales– you’re wrong. Just look at the data. Cast your mind back to 2007, perhaps call it up by attempting to remember what your cellphone did for you then. Think back to January that year when Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, introduced the iPhone, then take a look at this data:
It seems not all is well with the Final Cut Studio development team, with a report claiming release of the next version of the insanely widely-used professional video-editing solution has been set back until 2011.
We had originally been expecting Final Cut Studio would ship this year, but development has suffered “significant setbacks”, a French report explains. This has also led the Apple team to scale back the scope of the release.
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We already know Apple has a knack for throwing new features in with updates and today we discovered what looks like to be a future (or dropped?) iPhone 3GS feature. We all know and love that slick HDR photo capability on the iPhone 4 and the question has risen as to where HDR photo-taking is for older iPhone models. There have even been some hacks to allow HDR photography on the iPhone 3GS and now it looks like Apple has planned HDR photography for the iPhone 3GS all along.
As you can see in the visual above, there are two HDR icons within the SDK. As labeled, one is for the iPhone 4’s Retina Display, while the other is for an iPhone without a Retina Display. The iPhone 3GS is the only iPhone that is physically (hardware capabilities) able to capture HDR shots so we figure that non-Retina icon is for the 3GS not the original or 3G model. How do we know the other icon is not for the Retina Display? Apple has a very simple labeling process which places an “@2x” on image titles for the Retina Display and places nothing of that sort next to “iphone” on non-retina iPhones.
Also, by just looking at the image’s sharpness, you can tell one is for a much higher resolution screen, in this case the iPhone 4’s Retina Display. The question is no longer, did Apple plan HDR photography for the iPhone 3GS?, or is the iPhone 3GS capable of HDR photography?, but is when is Apple going to add HDR capability to the still-selling iPhone 3GS? On the other hand, HDR photography on the iPhone 3GS could be a feature Apple simply dropped from the public release.
We already told you that Office for Mac would be launching October 26th, a few weeks ago, and today Microsoft has made it official. Here’s a behind the scenes look at Office 2011 from our friends, Kurt Schmucker and Han-Yi Shaw:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEYt9m1IUoc&w=640&h=385]
Oh! It’s already on Amazon for order.
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Apple has updated Final Cut and Logic Studio, issuing its Pro Applications Update 2010-02.
The update offers improved versions of Final Cut Pro 7, Motion 4, Color 1.5, Compressor 3.5 and Qmaster 3.5, but most changes affect Final Cut Pro.
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Earlier today we reported on a rumor that Office for Mac 2011 will be launching on October 27th, but tonight we’ve discovered otherwise. When browsing for Office for Mac 2011 on Amazon there’s a noted date of October 26th, 2010 on the titles of both the Home/Business and Student editions. Amazon is notorious for revealing product release dates before announcements and with Microsoft stating the software would be launching in October, we are pretty confident the 26th is launch day.
Office for Mac 2011 will launch at $99 (academic license), $119, or $199 depending on whether the Business/Home or Student edition is purchased. The next-gen productivity suite offers new themes, a re-designed interface, better collaboration tools, and improved Windows compatibility.
