Tag Archives: apple

By Staff | Published: April 27, 2009

Impressive Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” build 10A335 seeded

Despite being a mere 21 builds apart from the previous seed, 10A314, released earlier this month….the latest Snow Leopard seed (simultaneously released in both Standard and Server versions) has definitely taken a big step forward in many areas.

Several elements of the full internal Mac OS X 10.6 code tree, such as the “Marble” interface revamp and overhauled Finder as well as the entire PowerPC version of the operating system, continue to be withheld from the developer builds — but even absent those more visible features, Snow Leopard is truly beginning to shine and show full potential with the advent of 10A335.

Performance is a notable area of big improvement since build 314 was released at the beginning of April; already stunningly fast, sources confirm that 335 removes a significant amount of debug code which always bogs down developmental versions of OS X as compared to their final-release counterparts. Read more

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By Staff | Published: April 23, 2009

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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By Staff | Published: April 23, 2009

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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By Staff | Published: April 22, 2009

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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By Staff | Published: April 16, 2009

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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By Staff | Published: April 16, 2009

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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By Staff | Published: April 13, 2009

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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By Staff | Published: April 11, 2009

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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Posted in Apple Hardware, Apple Software | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Responses
By Staff | Published: March 29, 2009

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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By Staff | Published: March 3, 2009

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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Posted in Apple Hardware, Articles | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Responses
By Staff | Published: January 30, 2009

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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Posted in Apple Hardware, Apple Software | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Responses
By Staff | Published: January 18, 2008

The iPhone SDK, Hackers, and Malware

Back when the iPhone was officially released in June of 2007, Apple had already made their position on 3rd party applications quite clear, users would never be permitted to install software on the device themselves. Apple releases firmware in an encrypted form to prevent tampering and to protect iTunes purchases, making modification or installation of new apps difficult at best. Apples solution for these 3rd party developers was to treat the iPhone as a web platform, with Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, or “AJAX” providing the needed functionality for anything developers or users would want to use on the phone in the future. Apple expected these AJAX applications to provide users with applications that would have a native look and feel, while still running in the relative protection of the Safari web browser. Read more

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Posted in 3rd Party Software, Apple Software, Articles | Also tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Responses