iPad (2021)

Tommy Ljunggren is senior vice president of Swedish wireless operator TeliaSonera and he’s got some “nice” words about mobile prospects of his valued partner, Apple. Ljunggren told Telecoms.com that Apple is no longer as relevant a factor in mobile as it used to be, saying the company is set for failure unless the next iPhone adopts chips that support fourth-generation cellular networks based on Long Term Evolution radio technology, being deployed by carriers around the world:

If you asked me two years ago I would have said Apple would be very important. But now it will be a bad mistake not to include LTE in the iPhone 5 as otherwise they will really be run over by the others. Apple are not unique enough and there is disappointment over the 4S – it was too small step for them.

He then slammed Apple over LTE, admitting that the current batch of 4G LTE chips consume too much power:

I don’t think Apple will decide if LTE will fly or not. My expectation is that in 2013/14 we will really see low-end smartphones having LTE as well. The big question is what frequency bands they will put in for smartphones. They will be true LTE smartphones – not the ones that the US has right now with two radios. These drain the batteries flat very quickly as they have one LTE terminal for data and a CDMA voice terminal. It’s basically a dongle and phone that they glue together. They work – just not for long.

Interestingly, this is the very reason Apple CEO Tim Cook dismissed a 4G LTE iPhone. Ljunggren, of course, is confused and here’s why.

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Samsung manufactures the Apple-designed A5 chip found inside iPhone 4S and provides 512MB DDR2 RAM for the processor.

Samsung and Apple are working towards a resolution to the differences that have been plaguing their long-standing relationship, which culminated with some twenty patent infringement claims filed before courts in a dozen countries around the world. Quoting industry sources, Korea Times, asserted Monday that Samsung might provide Apple with custom-built A6 chips for upcoming new iPhone and iPad models.

Today, Yonhap News reports that Samsung COO Lee Jae-yong said his company would continue to supply the Cupertino, California client with crucial components, including Apple’s in-house designed A-family of chips powering their iOS devices. The supply chain ties with Apple, he told reporters upon arriving at a Seoul airport, continue to be long-term. The executive sat down the previous day with Apple CEO Tim Cook following a private memorial service for Steve Jobs, to which he had been invited. His two-hour meeting with Apple’s boss touched on parts for the 2013-2014 period, he told journalists:

For the 2013-2014 period, we discussed how best to supply even better parts.

The executive, pictured below the fold, also spoke of “a need to compete in a fair manner for the benefit of the consumer”, adding “this stance existed in the past, is taking place now and will occur in the future”. Another indication of attempts to diffuse the ugly legal brawl comes in another report quoting Samsung’s mobile chief Shin Jong-kyun as saying that the Galaxy Nexus smartphone, which was unveiled yesterday with great fanfare, is designed to bypass potential legal attacks from Apple:

Now we will avoid everything we can and take patents very seriously. We will see if it will be 100 percent free [from Apple lawsuits]. I think it is just a start and [the lawsuits] will last for a considerable time. I don’t think there is much gain [from lawsuits against Apple]. What we are losing is the pride in our brand.

Now, despite Apple’s rumored chips deal with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Apple reportedly isn’t taking risks. The company sold a quarter billion iOS devices to date and hopes to grow sales even faster in the years ahead.

Apart from Samsung’s semiconductor fab in Austin, Texas, other chip vendors may not be capable of producing mobile processors for Apple in volume, without affecting quality and all the while meeting Apple’s high standards. Remember, we’re talking up to 200 million chips for iPhones, iPads and iPods in 2012. As for Apple cozying up to TSMC…

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There have been signs and indications of China’s growing importance to Apple’s bottom line before. In the June quarter the company grew China revenues sixfold, to an astounding $3.8 billion, or nearly eight percent of its total revenue for the quarter. Just three months later, however, the business in China has ballooned to $4.52 billion, an impressive sixteen percent of Apple’s total $28.27 billion revenue for the September quarter. China contributed with twelve percent in the more than $108 billion of fiscal 2011 revenue, or about fifteen billion dollars. Last year revenue from China was just three billion dollars and in 2009 only two percent of Apple’s total revenue.

In other words, one in six dollars of Apple’s quarterly revenue came from China (almost one-in-eight looking at fiscal 2011). The 1.33 billion people country is now Apple’s second-best revenue market. Moreover, revenue for the entire Asia Pacific region grew by 139 percent year over year to $6.53 billion, with CPU units climbing by 61 percent (three percent revenue and eighteen percent CPU units sequential growth). Compared to a 34 percent annual revenue growth in the Americas ($9.64 billion) or a 36 percent growth in Europe ($7.39 billion).

It’s clear now that the Asia Pacific region is Apple’s fastest-growing market, outpacing Europe and the Americas by nearly four times. In fact, Asia Pacific raked in nearly two-thirds of the Americas’ revenue, Apple’s top revenue market. And at four times larger growth, the Asia Pacific region could become Apple’s #1 revenue generator by this time next year.

Click for larger

CEO Tim Cook said in a conference call with Wall Street analysts that “the China progress has been amazing”, calling it an “enormous opportunity” for Apple. It’s bound to grow even bigger as Apple builds more stores to increase its distribution footprint there. Apple operates five flagship retail stores in China which combined had the most traffic in the quarter. The company has managed to build an impressive thirty retail stores worldwide during the quarter, including massive outlets in Hong Kong and Shanghai, the latter being pictured below.

There were as of this writing more than seven thousand points of sale for the iPhone in Greater China. In total, iPhone has 120,000 points of sale around the world and iPad and iPod are now carried in 40,000 and 50,000 points of sale, respectively. They should open at least 25 new stores in China within the next few years and 40 outlets around the world in the next quarter, with 30 outside the United States.

Other markets to watch? More after the break…

Apple’s Nanjing East Road store in Shanghai

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We’ll be following along with Apple’s earnings call in a few minutes here. Also expect some separate posts for the “Best Quarter Ever” Press Release and any other news that comes our way.

Apple’s summary of the earnings data:

Update: Apple announces Q4 earnings Live blog archived below:

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We were all ready to start making fun of these guys for being wacko gun nuts and wasting a perfectly good $650 iPhone until the slo-mos came in about halfway through the video. OK, that was cool.  Where’s the Android version?  Via Giz (of course)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=B489u_1ZBIA#!]

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US department store, Sears, announced today that they are rolling out iPads and iPod touches to 450 retail stores nationwide. The rollout is to better the relationship between the customer and sales associate to improve the shopping experience. Sears will train their employees to utilize these devices to order products online for customers, access product information and videos, and show customers how to utilize enhanced purchasing tools to buy products they desire.

Sears isn’t the first company to rollout Apple products across their fleet. Lowe’s did something similar by bringing 42,000 iPhones to their stores to process sales. Old Navy, Home Depot, and of course Apple also use iOS devices to enhance the sales experience.

In the press release, Sears also said they’re working to upgrade their technology infrastructure so that customers can use their mobile devices to compare products (Wi-Fi). Sears will also use the iPads and iPod touches to train employees. Cheers, to a better shopping experience!

From 9to5Toys.com:

The online Apple Store is having a clearance of the original iPad for three select WiFi and WiFi + 3G models, including the flagship 64GB WiFi + 3G iPad. Now available for up to $200-$230 less compared to their original list prices, these products come looking like new and with the same 1-year warranty that other Apple products receive. All refurbished iPad models also include a brand new battery and outer shell. Supplies are time-limited, as indicated by the Special Limited Time Price designation. Availability is guaranteed upon receipt of full payment.

• Refurbished 64GB Wi-Fi iPad: Now available for $399, down from $599, a $200 savings
• Refurbished 32GB Wi-Fi + 3G iPad: Now available for $399 down from $629 a $230 savings
• Refurbished 64GB Wi-Fi + 3G iPad: Now available for $499, down from $729, a $230 savings
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The teardown is in progress. Notes of interest:

• The extra .05W/hrs battery increases talk time by an hour but for some reason (likely additional background processes with notifications), standby time is reduced from 300 to 200 hrs
• “Pentalobe Screws, again?”
• The A5 processor is rated at 1GHz (like iPad obv.) but is underclocked for battery saving purposes. That doesn’t mean an update (or hack) in the future could boost speed to iPad levels.
• The iPhone 4S logic board bears a close resemblance to its stateside CDMA counterpart.
• The Qualcomm chip updated from MDM6600 to MDM6610. There isn’t much out on the 6610 right now but we’re investigating.
• It looks like there really is only 512MB of RAM. AnandTech says:

The second confirmation iFixit’s teardown gives us is the size of the A5’s on-package memory: 512MB. A quick look at the image above yields the Samsung part number: K3PE4E400B-XGC1. Each highlighted E4 refers to a separate 2Gb LPDDR2 die. The A5 features a dual-channel LPDDR2 memory interface, thus requiring two 32-bit die to fully populate both channels. The final two characters in the part number (C1) refer to the DRAM’s clock period, in this case 2.5ns which indicates a 400MHz clock frequency (F=1/T). My assumption here is Samsung’s part number is actually referring to clock frequency and not data rate, implying there are a pair of LPDDR2-800 die in the PoP stack. It’s not entirely uncommon to run memory at speeds lower than they are rated for, a practice we’ve seen in graphics memory in particular for as long as I can remember, so I wouldn’t take this as proof that Apple is running at full LPDDR2-800 speeds.

We’re updating as things develop.

As indicated by the chart above, just released iOS 5 is showing many speed improvements over iOS 4. iOS 5 was faster in almost every category — as indicated by green — except for the first generation iPad. The chart was put together by GigaOM using GeekBench, Gague, BenchTest, and SunSpider, comparing many later versions of iOS 4 to iOS 5.

When iOS 4 was released last year, it didn’t show these types of speed improvements over iOS 3, and when updating the 3GS to iOS 4 it saw drastic speed issues and bugs. Speed improvements in iOS 4’s case were made update-to-update.

To much of their credit, Apple was able to roll these types of speed updates in one release for iOS 5. And in fact, speed will probably get better as Apple rolls out more updates. Now, how about those activations?

Curious to see how the iPad 2 compared? Check it out after the break:

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Here you go. The 103MB download isn’t immediately visible from the iTunes home screen but clicking download reveals the 10.5 download button.  It is also hitting Software Update.  This is the first step in Apple’s upgrade to iOS 5 and iCloud.  Other updates, including iOS 5 tomorrow should be hitting shortly.

Full release notes below (via MacStories):

What’s new in iTunes 10.5

• iTunes in the Cloud. iTunes now stores your music and TV purchases in iCloud and makes them available on your devices anywhere, any time, at no additional cost.

• Automatic Downloads. Purchase music from any device or computer and automatically download a copy to your Mac and iOS devices.

• Download Previous Purchases. Download your past music, TV, app, and book purchases again, at no additional cost. Previous purchases may be unavailable if they are no longer on the iTunes Store.

• Sync with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iOS 5.

• Wi-Fi Syncing. Automatically sync your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iTunes any time they’re both on the same Wi-Fi network.

For information on the security content of this update, please visit: support.apple.com/kb/HT1222
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Ah, to be European with an overzealous package fulfillment service (DHL). Deliveries have already started including one of many Macerkopf readers:

Update: In an email, iPhone Italia said they ‘disassembled’ the iPhone 4S but from the site, it appears only to be spare parts.

iPhoneitalia has taken it upon themselves to compare iPhone 4S parts with the iPhone 4.

In the old camera was attached to the solenoid lenses and the whole group moved to focus the image, in this new camera is outside the solenoid, and moves only slowly, so we think this is also an effect on the improved shooting speed. The CCD is unchanged in size.

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Here’s the initial observations (machine translated):

The ‘Touch LCD and have remained virtually unchanged, the only differences are:

1) screw placement, which is changed according to the new shell with antenna diversity;
2) the patina around the proximity sensor is now placed in a slightly different way, to solve definitely the problem with the sensor that some users complain. Also now more visible is the area of ​​the light sensor, presumably to make it more sensitive.

As for the back of iPhone 4S:

Slightly bigger battery (5.25 -> 5.3 Whr or 1420 mAh or 1430 mAh) detailled below:

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The first SunSpider and BrowserMark benchmarks 9to5Mac told you about yesterday confirmed the iPhone 4S as being “twice as fast”, per Apple’s tagline. Today, AnandTech published a more thorough analysis based on Javascript, CPU and GPU benchmarks of Apple’s latest handset. Thanks to the dual-core A5 chip first outed with iPad 2 this Spring, Javascript performance on iPhone 4S “finally catches up to Tegra 2 based Honeycomb devices, while general CPU performance is significantly higher than the iPhone 4” – about 68 percent, to be precise.

More importantly, Geekbench results (seen below) tell us that iPad 2 is clocked around “25 percent higher than the iPhone 4S”. Overall, the Apple-designed dual-core A5 chip inside iPhone 4S is estimated to run at 800MHz versus iPad 2’s 1GHz A5 processor. This isn’t entirely unexpected due to the battery concerns and the handset’s much smaller 5.25 Whr battery. Furthermore, Apple says iPhone 4S has “up to seven times faster graphics” versus the advertised “nine times faster graphics” on the iPad 2 – another proof that the two device’s graphics processing units are not clocked equally.

As we predicted, Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR SGX543 graphics units ticking inside the iPhone 4S is also significantly speedier compared to the ARM-based Mali-400 GPU found in the Samsung-designed 1.2GHz Exynos 4210 processor (they recently announced the improved 4212 chip) used in the Galaxy S II smartphone. By all accounts, the iPhone 4S has the fastest graphics in a smartphone yet. Anand Lal Shimpi and Brian Klug explain:

Chart courtesy of AnandTech

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Finding the perfect instant messaging client on the App Store is a pretty big challenge, but a new app called Verbs is pretty close to it. Verbs is available on both the iPhone and iPad and includes support for Google Talk, AIM, MobileMe, and Facebook. With all of these services bundled in one, Verbs becomes the perfect place to chat with friends. Instant messaging is really direct and sleek and the WebOS cards-like feature (seen after the break) makes switching between chats easy. But, Verbs has a lot more to offer.

Other supported services included in Verbs are CloudApp and Droplr for sending images, an iWork and Office document viewer, Instapaper, and the ability to link your AIM and Gtalk buddies with your Address Book.

Verbs Pro in-app update costs a one time fee of $5 and includes Push Notifications (a biggie while chatting) and encryption.

This app blows every other IM app out of the water, because it’s simple, but yet feature packed. Verbs is available on the iTunes App Store for $.99. If it makes you feel better, most of the 9to5 Staff uses this app on a daily basis. Two promo codes are after the break (get them while they last):

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Update: It is live, we’ve taken a walkthrough below.

According to The Verge (formerly known as This is my next), the elusive Facebook for iPad app is about to go live “momentarily” on the App Store. The iPhone app will also get updated, the publication has it, with bookmarks to apps, a new Requests dialog that will display app notifications, and support for Facebook Credits for in-app payments. VentureBeat quoted Facebook engineer Leon Dubinsky as describing the software on the Facebook blog, but no such post had gone live at press time. While the social networking giant has yet to formally announce the program, they already have a dedicated URL up and running at facebook.com/mobile/ipad.

The page invites users to download the free Facebook for iPad app here. That URL actually leads to the existing iPhone app, which indicates that both the new iPad app and the existing iPhone client have been merged into a universal binary. The official list of features doesn’t disappoint: You can chat on the iPad’s beautiful 9.7-inch canvas, browse and flip through your friends’ photos, as well as play games and watch high-definition movies in full screen mode.

What’s best, it supports AirPlay technology so you can easily and wirelessly beam your videos and snaps to that big telly in your living room through the Apple TV set-top box, which is also up for an update with 1080p video output via the A5 chip. At post time, the US App Store still had the iPhone app hosted at the URL, but it shouldn’t take too long before changes propagate throughout regional App Stores. Go past the break for release notes, more screenies and a hands on video.

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Update: Simon and Schuster have announced that the book will now be released on October 24th.

The WSJ reports that Steve Jobs and biographer Walter Isaacson knew that he was dying weeks before the end.

According to a person familiar with the matter, Isaacson last interviewed Jobs four weeks ago, right before, and right after he stepped down from his post as the CEO of Apple.

Jobs indicated at that time that he knew he was going to die soon. The scene will appear at the end of the book.

From Isaacson’s upcoming Essay in Time Magazine:

A few weeks ago, I visited Jobs for the last time in his Palo Alto, Calif., home. He had moved to a downstairs bedroom because he was too weak to go up and down stairs. He was curled up in some pain, but his mind was still sharp and his humor vibrant. We talked about his childhood, and he gave me some pictures of his father and family to use in my biography. As a writer, I was used to being detached, but I was hit by a wave of sadness as I tried to say goodbye. In order to mask my emotion, I asked the one question that was still puzzling me: Why had he been so eager, during close to 50 interviews and conversations over the course of two years, to open up so much for a book when he was usually so private? “I wanted my kids to know me,” he said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.”

In the wake of Jobs’ death, his biography has catapulted to the top of the Best Sellers list at Amazon. Also the “Movers and Shakers” top two is the bio and I, Steve: Steve Jobs in his own words.

Perhaps ironically (because I read almost everything on an iPad now), this might be the last hard cover book I ever buy.

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Kill Apple’s streaming servers here.

Update: Now posted to iTunes.
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Bluetooth 4.0 theoretically allows iPhone 4S devices to connect to the new MacBook Airs (And other BT 4.0 devices) at an extremely low power mode up to 50 meters away.

Do you know what time it is? It is one hour before this iPhone event – and Apple is updating its Store. That means new toys obviously. You ready already?

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[brightcove vid=1197914933001&exp3=635367679001&surl=http://c.brightcove.com/services&pubid=711930521&pk=AQ~~,AAAAACpvMpk~,rAvHhAS7JOpa4tlt0CXVebDvGzQCdYY2&w=650&h=400]

Specifically, he said:

“Steve Jobs actually gave it to me, a little bit early. Yeah, it was cool. I got it directly from him.”

Last time the two met publicly was at the “Silicon Valley Summit” in February where Jobs sat next to Obama (picture below). That was about a month before iPad 2 rolled out to the public.

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Funny, because it is true? SNL’s Seth Meyers tackles the Fire vs. iPad debate at 48 secs in (YouTube).

[vodpod id=Video.15495947&w=650&h=420&fv=]

You know, no one is really talking about this, but at a smaller 7 inches and priced at $199, the Kindle Fire is more of an iPod touch competitor than a iPad competitor…at least as far as budgets and capabilities are concerned.

We’ve heard there are some iPod touch price cuts coming on Tuesday which should make them even more competitive.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Samsung has offered Apple a secret deal to sort out the mess surrounding the Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet launch in Australia. The report has it that Samsung proposed a cunning solution that would allow them to release the device in the country next week. Apple’s legal counsel Stephen Burley allegedly told Justice Annabelle Bennett that Samsung’s “inconvenience would be diminished and we would be comforted” if the deal was accepted.

What incentive Samsung might have in store for Apple in exchange for releasing its tablet in Australia as early as next week is anyone’s guess. I asked patent expert Florian Mueller, who runs the FOSSPatents blog, about this. He responded on Twitter that Samsung “might promise not to infringe certain patents, make a payment, and perhaps also procedural concessions”.

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