Category Archives: Apple Hardware

AT&T, Apple scramble to keep up with heavy consumer demand

On July 11th, when the new iPhone 3G hit Apple and AT&T store shelves across America, one million units were sold in the first weekend alone.

If conditions all around Maine and other parts of New England are any indicator of what’s happening across the nation….

For every happy new iPhone user, there are at least a few dozen others left out in the cold, still waiting for their new equipment.

At the Maine Mall AT&T store location in South Portland, Maine, a line stretched out dozens deep at six a.m. on July 11th.

Any customer wandering in on their lunch break with the hope of scoring a new iPhone was disappointed at best to be turned away with the hopeful promise of another delivery for the next morning. Read more

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Get ready for the iPhone 3G tidal rush….

Apple stores are preparing for the feeding frenzy Friday morning as the new iPhone 3G hits the shelves all across the country. Last summer the first generation sold out of stock the very first weekend; has Apple prepared better for this new release?

If you are determined to catch this first wave and not chance the iPhone 3G selling out before you can get one, you may wish to park yourself outside the Apple stores the night before and wait for the doors to open like an eager concert fanatic camped out on the sidewalk, waiting for the tickets to go on sale for their favorite band’s next show.

If lines aren’t your thing, or if you are just too busy or cool to wait in such a fashion, you could give the AT&T stores a try, where lines are likely to be much shorter with more locations to spread the business between. Read more

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More than ‘just a phone,’ iPhone 3G is open to third-party software

Apple launched it’s iPhone App Store this morning, a full 24 hours ahead of the release of the new iPhone 3G.

What’s more, Apple has opened the door to third party software with a software developers kit. There is sure to be much competition among developers to come up with better and more popular applications, which will be available to consumers online through Apple’s iPhone App store.

Sources report that 25% or the first 500 applications will be free, and about a third or so are expected to be games (good news for lucky commuters, kids, and kids at heart everywhere). Of the commercial applications, about 90% are expected to be $9.99 or less (more good news for those on a budget!). Read more

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Does the huge MacBook Air price drop suggest an imminent revision?

Apple is becoming better known for tooting it’s own horn, especially where price point/performance improvements are concerned. Yet, the recent drop of $500 off the price of the high-end MacBook Air ($400 less for the SSD drive and $100 for the 1.8GHz CPU) breaks with that pattern; no press releases or fanfare of any sort. Why?

Popular speculation is that a newer, faster, better Air may be just around the corner.

Lack of attention to the price drop may indicate a wish on Apple’s part to sell off the older models faster, if not in larger volume….then perhaps in order to clear space for the new MacBook Air.

Such a price drop could facilitate an early clear out of the old models to make room for the new models in time to avoid an even bigger price drop down the road. Read more

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Rumor: New iPhones to require contract before purchase?

With the price of the new iPhone 3G significantly lower than the original price for the EDGE phone, by half in fact, many are wondering how Apple managed to cut the price so much. It is possible that Apple simply decided to lower their profit margin on the hardware itself, but typically Apple cuts prices in small amounts, like lowering the AppleTV from $299 to $229. The lowering of the iPhone 3G price to $199 for the entry model strongly suggests that Apple is allowing AT&T to subsidize the cost of the phone directly.

Previously AT&T could count on getting substantial service fees over the lifetime of the Phone, with Apple receiving a significant percentage of those fees, further increasing the profit margin on each phone sold. Read more

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Mac Nano a reality with “Fusion”?


As TUAW notes, evidence has appeared suggesting Apple may be releasing a new Mac, dubbed Fusion, as an ultra light but powerful machine, possibly for developer use. If true this is quite obviously the Mac Nano everyone has been talking about for quite some time, but as with any rumor we will see what happens at WWDC tomorrow. The language of the pages is a bit unlike Apple, especially the focus on developers with a machine that will obviously replace the Mini and be desired by just about everyone, but they do stray from their straight consumer talk when targeting developers and power users, as this page appears to suggest they are doing with Fusion.

The screenshots appear to be unreleased Apple website pages, which state the following:

“Building your applications for the Mac has never been easier. Read more

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Apple is not dropping Carbon support, PowerPC code


Since the Intel switch, everyone has been waiting for Apple to set a hard deadline for support for PowerPC based Macs. Some have significant numbers of PowerPC machines in use and want to be able to continue using them with new OS X releases in the future, others are clamoring for Apple to go Intel-only.

While it is a given that Apple will eventually drop support for the last PowerPC based macs at some point with a future release of OS X, it is unlikely this will happen as soon as 10.6. Apple does set arbitrary but hard cutoff points for older hardware, but those are specific machines lacking certain features. For Apple to cut support for PowerPC hardware would mean cutting an entire architecture out of the operating system. Read more

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Apple introduces new iMacs clocked at up to 3.06GHz(!)

Although this announcement comes as no surprise to many on the grapevine who have been reporting on it regularly over the past several weeks while most of the Rumors staff was on leave or sabbatical….many in the community expressed great enthusiasm for the new machines which form the backbone of Apple’s family of Macs.


The new iMacs sport an enclosure and display panels (20in 1680×1050 and 24in 1920×1200) which look on the surface, as well as on paper, identical to the previous generation but according to some of our oldest and most reliable sources at the highest levels within Cupertino’s Mac Hardware engineering division.

There is a lot more going on here than meets the eye in this latest update, even if you dig deep into Apple’s published specs so far. Read more

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Future macs to include coprocessor chips?

Apple recently made a bid for PA Semi, a semiconductor design company specializing in high performance, low power processors. The company is a licensee of IBMs POWER architecture, previously used by Apple as the PowerPC chip line, leading some to believe that Apple may be moving its Mac line back to PowerPC chips.

The truth however is less dramatic. Apple may be working on differentiating its hardware lineup by including discrete coprocessors for tasks such as video encoding, graphics design acceleration, and other high performance applications.

This sort of acceleration has been possible for a while now with the OS X Acceleration Framework, which takes advantage of whatever hardware is available on a machine, like SSE or Altivec instructions, graphics processors such as the Intel GMA or Nvidia chips, and in the future, dedicated coprocessors. Read more

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Apple announces new Macbooks, Macbook Pros

As recently predicted by Rumors, Apple has updated the remainder of its laptop line-up following last month’s introduction of the Macbook Air.

Sporting powerful “Penryn” 45-nanometer mobile Core 2 Duo processors from 2.1 to 2.6GHz, these new laptops are poised to crush the competition and expand Apple’s market share considerably. Read on for specs, analysis and more details!

Both the Macbooks and MBP’s have received significant enclosure/industrial design tweaks — notably, both sport the same “modern raised-button” keyboard design as the Macbook Air and Apple’s latest stand-alone ‘board.

Most of the new laptops are build around the “standard” Penryn chip, running at 2.1-2.4GHz with 3MB of enhanced on-chip cache memory; as Rumors reported previously in this article about Penryn & future Macbook Air specs, this new cache is faster and more intelligent than previous Merom/Santa Rosa based designs which included 4MB of cache. Read more

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Apple updates iDevices – 16GB iPhone, 32GB iPod Touch

Today Apple announced relatively straightforward storage capacity upgrades for both of the “multi-touch” iDevices, doubling the standard versions of each to 16GB and 32GB for the iPhone and iPod Touch, respectively.

Other than the storage space upgrades, according to reliable sources in Cupertino, the new iDevices use a somewhat different type of Flash storage that should offer substantial transfer performance improvements (especially for large files, since part of the difference is better buffering and sustained stream optimizations, as well as some improvements in the loading of large numbers of small {1024K or less} files — such as in a Web browser’s cache).

Overall, the iPod Touch should see between 50 and 300% depending on the size of the file, and an average of about 75-125% faster when syncing typical-sized MP3/AAC songs to the iPod. Read more

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Macbook Air begins to ship; hard drive units expected Feb. 1st

Many readers have been writing in to say that they have received shipment notifications on their Macbook Air pre-orders; many are now just leaving overseas (China) fulfillment centers near the manufacturing plants, and it appears that solid state models are going to reach customers first — in the next few days.

Those who pre-ordered models with hard disk based storage have received updated shipment date estimates, or in a few cases, shipment notifications with an expected arrival time around the 1st of the month.

We will be covering developments very closely, and many “streaming articles” with continuous live updates will be posted over the coming days as the first MBA’s reach the United States.

If you are a Macbook Air early adopter, or just want to weigh in on the latest developments, don’t hesitate to email us with your thoughts: rumors@macosrumors.com! Read more

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Is Apple planning a desktop version of “Macbook Air”? A “Mac Air”?!

As long-time readers of Rumors know, we were among the first to break the initial rumor of a stripped-down, mid-range Macbook designed to target the “ultraportable” market and further raise the bar with stunning industrial design that couldn’t have come from anywhere but Cupertino.

We have also been among the first to reexamine long-standing rumors of a major overhaul to the Mac Mini…..some have even gone so far as to speculate that the Mini as we know it is coming to the end of its lifespan and will be replaced with something categorically similar — but with a different name and striking differences. At this time, however, Rumors is confindent that the Mini, more or less as we know it today, will be around for a while yet — instead of replacing the Mini, we believe we will see an all-new model designed to sit in between the Mini and iMac in the desktop product matrix. Read more

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Macbook Air may be updated a lot sooner than one might think….

According to reliable sources in Cupertino who our Macworld reporting team have been visiting now that the Expo is over, the Macbook Air was originally designed around Intel’s 45-nanometer mobile processors but was instead modified to accept slower-clocked “Santa Rosa/Merom” class Core 2 Duo CPUs at 1.6 and 1.8GHz.

It will take some time, but after the Macbook Pro is moved over to Penryn sometime in late Winter, the Air won’t be too terribly far behind. It will be a solid update, but we don’t necessarily think that readers should play the waiting game

The first 45nm “Penryn” mobile Core 2 Duo processors, sometimes referred to as “Santa Rosa Refresh,” will be shipping at the end of the month but Apple won’t be satisfied with supply levels until somewhere in the late February/early March ballpark. Read more

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Sony pouting over Macbook Air: thinks they did it first, better

In an interview with Gizmodo, Sonys senior vice president of VAIO product marketing Mike Abary gives Apple credit for getting a machine like the Macbook Air so small and thin, but thinks the concessions necessary to do so make the device unwanted by consumers. In his view consumers just don’t care that much about the ultra thinness factor, making the price premium to design and sell a laptop of this sort more than consumers are willing to pay, and he may be right but only to a point. There remains a significant market for the Macbook Air even if it isn’t for everyone.

Mr. Abarys animosity may have something to do with the fact that Sony tried to go down this path in 2004 with a concept model called the X505, which would have been slightly thicker than the Macbook Air and made of carbon fiber. Read more

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