Tag Archives: Apple Software

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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Apple updates iMac, Mini today with nVIDIA chipsets instead of Intel

In a move that surprised even some of our sources and was in several key ways quite (but not entirely) contrary to our published projections as to the iMac’s specs, Apple announced new iMacs and Mac Minis today.

Although we are quite confident that Core i7 (“Nehalem” and “Gainestown” for desktop and Xeon products respectively) will indeed make its way into the Mac platform over the rest of the year, clearly the issues we’ve previously reported with Intel’s chipsets and the outstanding issues with some of the prototypes we’ve had the chance to examine (bugs, largely — though supply and timing were also reportedly issues; we had some internal debates over whether March 24th was really a remotely realistic announcement date, no less ship date) convinced the company’s decision makers to go with a Core 2 Duo based lineup using basically identical processors to previous models….merely adding more powerful memory, graphics, and nVIDIA chipsets. Read more

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Posted in Apple Events, Apple Hardware, Apple Software | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Responses

iMac and possibly Mini to be updated at March 24th Apple Event

The grapevine has been set on fire this weekend by a breaking rumor, strongly suggesting from multiple quarters/sources that the much awaited “Nehalem” Core i7 iMac, and perhaps also a revamped Mac Mini, will be announced at an Apple Event on the 24th of this month.

Although there is less certainty about whether or not the Mini, despite being quite long in the tooth, will be updated at the event….a consensus is rapidly forming across the entire Grapevine to the effect that this event is confirmed (though not yet officially announced; that will most likely take place later this week or early in the next) and that the new iMacs as we have envisioned them here on Rumors will indeed be introduced there. Read more

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Will Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” really support PowerPC?!

Ever since we posted our first ‘sneak peek’ at Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” two weeks ago, one of the most frequent questions and lingering doubts amongst readers surrounds the issue of support for PowerPC (G4/G5) based Macs. Will it really be present in the final version? Tonight we took a moment to answer that question as best we could for a reader who asked about it in the comments section of the aforementioned article.

“Mizhou” wrote: “A friend of mine just tried to install on a 1.8 GHz G5, and the installer just says that it is an unsupported architecture.”

Quoted from the response by our founder, Ryan C. Meader (@dalaixerces on Twitter):

Internal builds we’ve worked with have (and continue to) support PowerPC but there are increasing signs that the final version may not. Read more

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Mac OS X 10.5.7 enters beta; broadly seeded to devs

As Rumors has recently reported, the development of Mac OS X 10.5.7 has been proceeding at a slow but steady pace…and in the past few days, has crossed over into “beta” status with a new build that has been seeded to the full developer community.

Seeded to devs in a full distribution Apple Developer Connection (ADC) release earlier this week, Mac OS X 10.5.7 build 9J22 weighs in at a hefty 400MB (770MB for “Combo” version) and continues to grow in size at a blistering pace — particularly given the relatively small number of builds that have been made of 10.5.7 to date (a mere 22, apparently).

As usual, the OS X Server variant of the 10.5.7 package will be significantly larger and is expected to end up close to a full gigabyte in its Combo version. Read more

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Will my GPU be fully supported by Snow Leopard’s OpenCL?

According to reliable sources, if you own an Intel Mac other than the Mini or an original Macbook — either of which shipped with Intel’s GMA950 integrated GPU — then you are already good to go for support of the full range of OpenCL acceleration features.

If you have a Mac with the Intel GMA950, then you will get most of the benefits of OpenCL though the performance level of those functions will be significantly lessened due to the lack of dedicated graphics RAM and absence of support for many programmable GPU features that exist in other chips/cards going back to the ATi X1000 series.

To get that full support, GPUs as “old” as the ATi X1600, X1800 and X1900 (the latter of which was available for PowerMac G5s with PCI Express slots, based on the PowerPC 970MP dual-core processor while the former shipped in early Intel iMacs and its X1600M cousins in Macbook Pros) will do the job….but certain nVIDIA cards from the GeForce 7000 series, which shipped in iMacs and PowerMacs during the G5 era, most likely will not. Read more

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Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” – First Sneak Peek

Even as Mac OS Rumors worked to prepare our first in-depth look at developmental “alpha” stage builds of Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” earlier this week…the first builds (10A250 and later) seeded to third-party developers in quite some time and the first to be nearly feature-complete hit the grapevine like a shock wave. We have modified this first Sneak Peek to incorporate some of these reports, notably on the most recent 10A261 seed, and will be posting smaller more frequent Snow Leopard updates in the days ahead.

To begin with, let’s review the straightforward nature of Snow Leopard’s mission: eschewing “innovation” at the user level for primarily under-the-hood upgrades, Snow Leopard is a one-year project that Apple has embarked on to catch up with its backlog of ambitious architectural and technological plans for the Mac OS X operating system. Read more

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Will new iDevice features (Flash, multitasking) premiere first on Pro devices?

Recently, Rumors was among the first to report on references to an “iPhone 2,1” in last week’s v2.2.1 iDevice OS firmware release, and suggest that this was almost certainly the forthcoming iPhone Pro. Now, along with emerging suggestions of a corresponding high-end iPod Touch, the grapevine is abuzz with rumors about background tasking, Adobe Flash and other features which may be tied to the powerful new “Pro” iDevice hardware.

These are fast-emerging & -developing rumors which we are monitoring around the clock with the help of our sources and the grapevine at large….so keep a close eye on this site for ongoing posts which will add detail and analysis to these early reports.

That said, in the wake of the exciting early iPhone “2.1” Pro rumors we have been able to talk to our oldest, most reliable sources who have shared with us significant new information. Read more

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OS X 10.5.7 nearing beta phase; supports new macs, bug fixes

Despite somewhat less hands-on time that we usually like to have in our first sneak-peeks of developmental Apple software — particularly system updates — we are taking a look under the hood of Mac OS X 10.5.7 which is fast approaching the ‘beta’ phase when it will be seeded to third-party developers for testing & feedback. Interestingly, our examinations turned up not just software dirt, but hints of what’s to come for the iMac, Mac Pro & even Macbook Air.

As the introduction and subject-line suggest, the late-alpha builds of Mac OS X 10.5.7 that Rumors has been able to explore through source reports, “batphone” streams, and limited direct hands-on usage by our Silicon Valley team thus far have all brought us to one conclusion. Read more

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iDevice OS 2.2.1 points to “iPhone 2,1” product

According to numerous readers and grapevine-lurkers who’ve looked under the hood of the new 2.2.1 iPhone OS firmware, it contains multiple references to a new iPhone — version “2,1” in the terminology used by Apple in all its operating system/firmware variants — better known to some as the “iPhone Pro.”

Given how soon a new iPhone would have to be introduced for it to make any sense at all to include references & support code inside as minor and early-in-year of a release as 2.2.1….we don’t think that this is a replacement for the 3G model. Rather, it is a complementary model intended to broaden the range of options that iPhone adopters have when they decide to purchase one.

Since the 8GB 3G is already as low as $199, we think that this “iPhone 2.1” (not to be confused with the “2.5G” 1.0 or “3G” 2.0) will instead be a high-end model similar to the iPhone Pro we’ve reported on previously, with some or all of these enhanced features:

*Major overhaul/upgrade of the ARM based system mainboard which handles almost everything but the functions dedicated to the “iPod” and “Phone-Modem” chips which are unto themselves nearly complete system boards….those chips will most likely remain unchanged, but the ARM based mainboard will most likely be upgraded to something similar to, or faster than, the ARM Cortex A8 used in the Palm Pre. Read more

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iDevice firmware 2.2.1 released

Apple released version 2.2.1 of its iPhone/iPod Touch operating system firmware today with many under the hood changes & bug fixes but relatively few “front end” changes — most of them in Mobile Safari.

From Apple’s release notes for the iPhone version of the 2.2.1 package, which weighs in at 247MB:

iPhone Software Update 2.2.1

This update contains bug fixes and improvements, including the following:
– Improved general stability of Safari
– Fixed issue where some images saved from Mail do not display correctly in the Camera Roll

Products compatible with this software update:
– iPhone
– iPhone 3G

The iPod Touch version does not appear to include release notes, but is believed to have the same Safari changes and kernel revision. Read more

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