Tech Industry

Apple retail’s European expansion continues — now it intends opening a new store slap bang in the center of Amsterdam at the Leidseplein.

The store will be situated in the architecturally impressive building Apple Benelux already holds offices, a local report explains. The store opens on the ground floor in 2011.
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According to a purported Apple employee, Apple is expanding its European presence with a significant increase in new job opportunities in the coming months. Specifically, this employee claims that Apple will be hiring 500+ new staffers for their Cork, Ireland corporate headquarters. Multiple job listings have showed up for the Cork, Ireland center in Apple’s jobs database as well as several more in a local jobs database.

The job listings vary from internships to finance positions to iOS engineers who are bi- and tri-lingual. Apple is expanding its Cupertino HQ and it looks like a few more office spaces will be required in Europe as well.

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Here’s a strange hint of Apple’s growing influence in the financial sector: Citibank intends opening a series of branches all across Europe — branches modelled on an Apple Store!

The bank would be seeking to slim down and target major cities in France, Britain and Germany, the Financial Times claims. The notion is to focus on 100 cities offering large, flagship outlets modelled on the Apple stores.
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COMPUTERWORLD: Apple’s iPad 2.0 is on its way, and a Chinese language newspaper is reporting industry sources who have allegedly revealed five of the future hardware features we can expect to see in the next-generation of Apple’s market-defining tablet-cum-netbook replacing computing device.

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Apple’s Black Friday deal is on now – but it looks as if a price competition between Apple and Amazon is taking place at the UK store. Don’t believe me? Then do take a look:

The 13-inch MacBook Pro with a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB RAM, a 250GB Hard Drive and Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics and SD card costs you £897.90 in the UK on Amazon with free delivery.
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Apple is expected to see monthly MacBook shipments hit one million units, according to component makers.

Apple will reach these one million per month shipment levels in the current quarter, with MacBook Air orders already accounting for 20-25 percent of the volume.
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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA3DLfs-MYY&fs=1&hl=en_GB]

The place: Europe. The time: A NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal. There President Obama was asked to sign yet another iPad. Hey, and as he says, “I’ve done this once before.” Which he did (after the jump).
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The San Jose Mercury News reports today that Apple has purchased HP’s huge Cupertino Campus for around the asking price of $300 million.   Apple has been looking for space and has finally aquiered the aging HP campus which is adjacent to additional land in Cupertino that Apple bought in 2006.

Jobs talks about his reason for purchasing the first bit of land in Cupertino in 2006 (the sound is not synched):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meVQqYNGzYA&w=640&h=505]

One can  only image what Apple is going to do with the new space.  I forecast a city-approved monorail that transports people/freight along I280 between campuses.

The huge, sprawling (former) HP campus can be seen below:

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Hang onto your hats — we already have word of yet one more special event to close out 2010 but Apple’s already plotting to delight and surprise with another update to its MacBook Pro range and that there long-awaited move to ship a new blend of Final Cut Studio — and we only need to wait till April (some say).
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According to Yahoo Richard Branson, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Mobile etc., will be launching an iPad-only newspaper/magazine next week called “Project.” Project will include sections pertaining to entertainment, travel, business, design, and international culture. Branson’s announcement comes only days after News Corp.’s news about their tablet-only newspaper The Daily. Branson will be holding a press conference soon to announce full details.

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COMPUTERWORLD: Apple [AAPL] has so much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving: Mac sales are exploding; the iPad/iPhone/iPod halo is shining; The Beatles have reached iTunes; and in a few weeks time Apple will launch the world’s biggest and most convenient consumer software retailer — the Mac App Store. And next year will be the year of the Mac.

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Yet more dogs of war heard howling in the mists as we learn Apple has been quietly poaching senior enterprise sales staff from competitor, Research In Motion. The Wall Street Journal (via MR) tells us Apple has hired at least five members of the RIM enterprise team — and stresses there could be even more Apple switchers making the move to iPhone.
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Apple’s rumored December special event seems set to see the launch of iOS 4.3, a new version of the mobile OS equipped with mechanisms to enable newspaper and magazine subscription payments — and Rupert Murdoch and Steve Jobs are expected to host the show in which they try to frame the paywall future for publishing.
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We’re looking at serious legal challenges across the mobile phone industry in the next couple of years, with Apple’s case against Motorola now set to be reviewed by the US ITC, which could ban import of Motorola phones into the US if the company is found guilty. Meanwhile, HTC and Samsung have teamed up with that renowned patent rights litigator, Intellectual Ventures, to protect those firms from attack.
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We know you’ve lost sleep waiting for it — now it looks like Steve Jobs is waving his wand to make sure you gonna get it, unleashing a recent Steve Note which promised a new feature is “coming”.

He’s so terse.
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The Daily icon Consomac via MR

It seems like Apple is gearing up for a late in the year event to introduce the world to its tablet publishing platform.  Over the weekend, we first heard about a tablet-only newspaper from the Guardian.   The Daily would be a News Corp exclusively tablet publication that was worked on with Apple and will usher in Apple’s Tablet publishing platform.

Daring Fireball then reported some additional details of an event to be hosted by Apple CEO Steve Jobs and News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch:

My understanding is that this initiative is going to launch with a press event, with Murdoch (and perhaps other newspaper and magazine executives) joining Steve Jobs on stage. This is not going to be a quiet launch, to say the least. But “this month” is effectively already over, considering that Thanksgiving is Thursday, so it won’t happen until next month at the earliest.

(The date I’ve heard is December 9, but that’s a Thursday, which would be somewhat unusual for an Apple press event. My guess is that they’re telling people December 9 but it might slip back to Tuesday or Wednesday the week after. Perhaps it will coincide with the opening of the Mac App Store?)

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COMPUTERWORLD: The holiday season’s approaching pretty fast now, so while I kick iOS 4.2 around a little bit more I thought some readers might enjoy a short collection of adventurous ski and snow-related iPhone apps, as there’s a pretty huge possibility some of you are headed into the mountains in the coming weeks.

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The customary series of unexpected fault reports are coming through the wires this am, with iOS 4.2 reportedly munching music on some iPhones and causing hassles with HDMI on the Apple TV. Here’s what we got so far, and we hope, nay, urge readers with further information to use comments below to help each other out on this.
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Apple’s iPad production is nearing three million units every month in the lead-in to Christmas, with manufacturing partner, Foxconn, opening aditional capacity in its new plants in Chengdu, China.
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That didn’t take long, the Redsn0w team have jailbroken the final version of iOS 4.2.1 — there’s also a how-to guide, so all you more technically literate iPhone users out there can get out there and partay!
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We know it was possible to print to non-HP printers at some point during the iOS 4.2 beta testing process, equally we also know that it was possible to use AirPlay on an iPhone 3G and a second-generation iPod touch. These uses disappeared, but trust to the ever inventive Mac dev community to figure out a workaround — hurrah for them!
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