Author Archives: Staff

Mac OS X 10.5.7 build 9J56 seeded to developers with Bluetooth 3.0

Despite the previous build of Mac OS X 10.5.7 code-name “Juno” appearing nearly ready for release within days (it’s now been over a week), Apple has delivered a new seed — build 9J56 — to developers, and it looks like a little bit of work still remains before we’ll see 10.5.7 in Software Update.

From Apple’s build notes on 9J56, the following headline changes were highlighted for developers to test against:

  • Fixed an issue when a process is killed or crashes while using AFP
  • Bluetooth compatibility and stability fixes
  • Crash reports missing application’s short version info fix
  • Crash log file missing machine’s name fix
  • Fixed an issue with Personal File Sharing where an AFP volume was not a valid Time Machine backup disk

Although these seem relatively minor, set against the full “Juno” project changelist which is nearly 200 items long at this point (and doesn’t include subtle tweaks of relatively little interest to third party developers for whom the change logs are written)….of particular note is the focus on Bluetooth in this build. Read more

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Apple announces $1.33/share Q2 profit, shatters Wall Street estimates

As nearly everyone notes right from the start when they begin to dig into the numbers that Infinite Loop has disclosed, the company’s profits — up 15% overall — have been driven primarily by strong sales & margins in the iPhone sector of its business.

That is to be expected, and will continue to be the case; however, in about seven weeks’ time (WWDC, June 8-12th) we are increasingly confident that more than just new iPhones & iPods will be announced. Whether the new iDevice(s) will be Apple’s answer to the netbook, the “iTablet,” or both in one device…whether they will be marketed as a Mac, given an i-Name, or one of each….these are the questions that we’ll be digging into over the coming days. Read more

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Apple to announce Q2 financial results today

In a highly anticipated announcement & analyst/investor conference call later this afternoon, Apple Inc. will disclose their second quarter financial numbers and answer long-standing questions about the performance of the company’s business under the most challenging (external/marketplace) conditions in the company’s history even as it offers its strongest line-up of products in that history.

AT&T has already posted their Q2 results, and among other interesting tidbits we’ll dig into later on, announced that they have activated 1.6 Million iPhones in the just-completed quarter; this dovetails closely with the grapevine’s expectations and strengthens our confidence in the “insider” picture we’ve been given regarding sales numbers across all of Apple’s product lines.

Overall, we’ve been led to expect by many reliable sources and industry power players, analysts & so on that this quarter’s AAPL financial results will out-perform the vast majority of standing Wall Street estimates. Read more

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Third “iPhone OS” 3 beta seeded to developers

Apple on Wednesday seeded a third beta of iPhone OS 3.0 to developers with numerous unannounced/under-the-hood changes (which we will be detailing in coming days) as well as a handful of specific improvements developers have been asked to test.

Among the officially disclosed changes are:

*Overall performance improvements (removal of debug code, re-writing of several key system routines which have been identified as sluggish since firmware 2.0, some even going back to 1.x….also, a lot of attention has been paid to app launch times and fine-grained optimization of the graphics system which is most noticeable in visually intensive games or apps with very active visual interface behavior).

*MMS multimedia messaging now works properly on a range of foreign (mostly European and Middle Eastern) networks and is fully compatible with the alternative “carrier bundles” used by some service providers overseas. Read more

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Mac OS X 10.5.7 release imminent

With the latest series of seeds — no less than three in the past week, culminating in yesterday’s distribution of build 9J50, and with one more possible prior to release — numerous indications have been given that the approximately 450-megabyte update package (or ~780MB “Combo Update”) will be hitting Software Update within the next week or so….possibly as soon as Friday.

Next Monday (4/20) has been mentioned as a possible release date by two separate sources familiar with Mac OS X & “iPhone OS” development at Infinite Loop, but according to these sources — who are generally quite reliable — the timing is now entirely dependent on how long it takes to quash current bugs as well as what if any new ones are submitted by developers in the interim. Read more

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Supplier orders already in for over four million new 2009 iPhones?!

A recent China Commercial Times report on Apple’s next generation iPhones includes the suggestion that an order is already in for more than four million units(!). But how does this report fit into the overall picture of the 2009 iDevices — and what do experienced rumor-mongers say about the other details in the CCT article?

Although the number — four million units — is consistent with previous insider reports, very little else about the China Times’ reporting makes very much sense according to anyone that Rumors has spoken to.

Whether “insiders” or simply fellow rumor-mongers playing the great game of Grapevine Telephone, based on first-hand knowledge, internal documents or just deductive reasoning consensus based on publicly available information…..a very consistent tone of doubt and contradiction has emerged about several things in the CT/CCT article. Read more

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Next-gen iDevice picture coming together

Already, the grapevine has sussed out a tremendous number of details about the four (planned, if not necessarily all shipped at the same time this summer) new iDevices:

*A huge order of NAND Flash memory storage chips, the same (but of higher density & performance — even lower power draw, in most cases) used in current iDevices for data storage, has been placed by Apple with several suppliers including Samsung. That in and of itself isn’t news….Apple has become a key buyer of these chips. What’s news is that the order is so incredibly massive that it will strain the market and might even make it challenging for the entire market for this class of Flash memory to become “constrained.” It could even have a significant effect on the market pricing of these chips going forward. Read more

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Apple to announce its quarterly financials in just over two weeks

With both the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference in Las Vegas (Sunday the 19th) and Apple’s second quarter financial results announcement/conference call (Wednesday the 22nd) coming up in about two weeks’ time, excitement and speculation are running high over what might be unveiled this month.

Many have already catalogued what we can probably expect to *not* see/hear during the course of these events — news of Steve Jobs, any new Macs (or iDevices for that matter, most likely), or major strategic shifts.

But most of those reports are based on basic logical reasoning, public information, historical trends/behavior patterns and simple speculation….not hard evidence or “insider information” of any sort.

At the upcoming NAB conference, we expect several significant new software announcements including major new versions (or at least previews of summer releases) of its major video/animation apps such as Motion, Compressor and Final Cut as well as the very significant possibility of two entirely new video production related Pro applications which we are in the process of seeking to bring out from under source embargo so we can speak about them in more detail soon…. Read more

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Mac OS X 10.5.7 build 9J39 seeded to developers

According to numerous reports from developers and other sources, this new build is considerably closer to being ready for prime time, but is most likely still at least 2-3 seeds away from being “done” which puts a release date at about a month from now. Stability in build 9J39 is solid but still far from perfect, and quite a few issues still arise from the new bundled Flash Player engine which was introduced in the last seed.

Given the fact that the last officially road-mapped release of Leopard, 10.5.8, is supposed to ship at or around the same time as Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” (WWDC, June 8-12)….and several of the 10.5.x “debugging” team will switch over to work on Snow Leopard after 10.5.7 is out the door….we believe that this will be the last release anywhere near this ambitious and that future updates (whether they be point-upgrades or “security updates”) will be smaller, more frequent, and considerably less dependent on third party developers for hands-on testing. Read more

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iPhone OS 3.0 New Features

Since the launch of the original iPhone in 2007, users have been demanding various features like copy and paste, MMS, and stereo headphone (A2DP) support for instance. Today apple announced the addition of all those things and more. We will run through some of the major ones to give users an idea of what will be possible with new Apps in the future. Read more

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LIVE Coverage of iDevice OS 3.0 Preview Event

The event has begun! RELOAD OFTEN FOR LATEST POSTS.

There are now over 25,000 programs in the App Store, with over 800 Million downloads to date. Apps are almost entirely (98%) approved within 7 days, at a 96% approval rate.

Scott Forstall has been invited onto the stage to show off “iPhone 3.0.”

Over 1,000 new APIs and Frameworks in the new system.

Additional payment/subscription models added to the App Store: three, primarily – Traditional one-time purchases, subscription/service payments based on periods of time, and in-app purchases such as extra levels or content (eBooks, mini-games, etc).

At this time, only paid apps can utilize the new in-app payments system. Free apps cannot, but this is something that is being worked on. Read more

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MOSR Live Coverage of March 2009 event begins at 10AM PT/1PM ET!

Stay tuned for LIVE coverage of today’s “iDevice OS 3.0 Preview” Event and ongoing follow-up throughout the day! We expect that if no hardware products are announced at this Event that such announcements will follow within a matter of days, so don’t miss out — keep a browser window open and reload often for the latest updates! Read more

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Pre-Release Review of Twittelator 2.0 for IPA

Whether or not you’re a user (yet), it’s nearly impossible these days to be unaware of Twitter — growing at stratospheric speeds as it becomes an ever-more ubiquitous part of the lives & businesses of countless people across the planet, the social network is rapidly becoming as important to the average net-savvy person as names like Google, Facebook, and yes, even Apple.

If you have an iDevice and want to make the most of Twitter, we think you’ll want to check out Twittelator from our old friends at Stone Design.

Available in both free and $5 “Pro” (worth every penny, if you ask us!) versions, Twittelator 2.0 has been one of the most interesting and exciting beta tests we’ve ever participated in. Read more

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Steve Jobs dream – iPod without buttons

Apple today updated its online store with a new Shuffle, the third generation of the matchbook sized iPod.

We will of course pause to allow readers to salivate over it (or not).

Shuffle

With that out of the way, the obvious change is, no buttons. None. The Apple community has long suspected that Jobs hates buttons, but with this 3rd generation Shuffle our suspicions were validated. The thing has only a headphone jack, and the power/shuffle switch. The controls are left to the earphones, and soon Apple will release a small adapter with 3 buttons on it allowing users to connect any headphones they wish to the device.

The second most significant change, the device has 4GB storage now. There doesn’t seem to be any other model, it’s just the 4GB Shuffle and the price is $79. Read more

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Why the Mini has 2 different video ports


Since the introduction of the Mini in 2005, one of Apples main pushes for the machine was to be your first Mac, the one that swept you away from the PC world without breaking the bank. To that end one of the marketing slogans for the mini was BYODKM: bring your own display, keyboard, and mouse. The mini includes none of these things in the box, it is simply the machine, with a power cord, and in the past a DVI to VGA adapter to enable connection to the monitor a user already has. In the past that monitor was probably VGA, however now with the introduction of the new Mini, not only is Apple moving half way to Mini Display port as all the rumors predicted, they are shrinking the remaining DVI port to Mini DVI. Read more

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