Tag Archives: iPod

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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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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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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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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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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Mark Papermaster, subject of IBM/Apple lawsuit, starts work in April

A former big-wig within IBM’s PowerPC processor division, Apple employee Mark Papermaster will at long last begin actively working at his job as head of the iDevice group at Infinite Loop now that a settlement betwen the two companies has been achieved. Some debate has taken place over whether a relevant contract expires before mid-June, but a press release from Apple today specified April 24th as Papermaster’s start date.

Originally hired in October of last year, Papermaster has been a key player in several divisions at IBM’s technical centers — notably its PowerPC development team — over the years and was vital to the project that brought the POWER4 architecture to the Mac in the form of the PPC 970 “G5.”

Papermaster will replace Tony Fadell, who ran the iDevice Division through November and who remains a technical consultant with the company. Read more

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iStat for iPhone review

App Store link

To start off, we would like to thank Bjango for making such a nice application and for allowing us to take it for a test drive. We think they have a real winner here that could be of use to many people for different purposes. Those who manage servers day to day will be glad to have a nicely presented and easy to use view of their servers statistics on the device they already carry around every day (you DO carry an iPhone everywhere you go just like us, right?). While the server daemon is OS X only right now, Bjango tells us that a Windows and Linux server daemon are a definite possibility for the future, and we think their success with this app will skyrocket once a Linux daemon is available since many IT admins use Linux on the back end. Read more

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The Mac’s 25th Anniversary — Founder’s Column, Part 1

25 years ago this past weekend, an upstart development team within Apple Computer brought to market a cheaper, faster, better alternative to Steve Jobs’ pet project the “Lisa” (named after his daughter).

Though Jobs’ own feelings about the Macintosh were mixed, he undertook a famous event to introduce it to the world with a unique, historic advertisement (“1984”) and a demonstration that blew away the crowd: the very first Mac 128K seen in public spoke to the crowd that day, using a first-of-its-kind speech synthesizer technology developed specifically for that first Mac — a technology that has been a unique strength of the Mac platform ever since.

This weekend, even as the moment of the announcement event’s anniversary passed us by, the Rumors team was watching an amazing film called Welcome to Mac. Read more

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Latest WebKit nightly build includes built-in update functionality

As of the current nightly build (39852), WebKit — the developmental version of Safari, available for public testing — has added the capability to update to the latest build within Webkit.app itself, obviating the need for third party software like NightShift.

The Rumors team has been a very active part of WebKit development/testing since its very first day — just as we are known throughout the industry for being prolific beta testers of both hardware & software.

(If you are a hardware and/or software developer with a developmental, beta, or pre-release product you’d like us to help test — and with your explicit permission, review for our readers who are very interested in such technology — please contact us as soon as possible: rumors@macosrumors.com to make arrangements!)

We do of course use other browsers, notably Mozilla Firefox, for various purposes….but have always been passionate supporters of Safari/Webkit and its underlying technology. Read more

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Conflicted over the lack of an Apple netbook while Sony announces one?

As we watch with a certain degree of envy the announcement at CES 2009 that Sony is introducing a new 8-inch display based “netbook” Vaio ‘lifestyle PC,’ many in the community are experiencing a duality of appreciation and frustration at Apple’s apparent disinterest in this space. But it may be with good reason.

Already, the iPhone and the Macbook Air nicely bracket the netbook product space.

Between the two, one really doesn’t have much need for such a device…..but nonetheless, when one looks over the specs of the new Vaio Lifestyle PC and its elegant little industrial design, it’s hard not to feel a little bit envious that Apple didn’t do it first.

Specs like these: 1.33GHz x86 processor, 1600×768 (!!!) pixel 8-inch 16:9 widescreen display, built-in micro webcam, two USB 2.0 ports, combined display/network breakout port, audio I/O ports, SD and Memory Stick slots, and a built-in 60GB hard drive or 128GB SSD drive. Read more

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Apple posts hidden link to iPhone 2.0 software!

If you would like to be one of the few to sneak in behind an unpublished link and download the iPhone 2.0 firmware a day early, you need merely click here! (225MB)

To use the package once it has been downloaded (using the command-line curl or ftp utils, or another downloading application which won’t auto-expand the file after download, is recommended), simply option-click on the “Check for Update” button in iTunes, and select the file.

The update will wipe all data from your phone, so it is wise to ensure that all your bookmarks et cetera are backed up. It is not generally possible to specifically backup/restore your Home Screen icons, so be prepared to start from scratch in that regard. Read more

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Live Keynote Updates STREAMING

Click through to the full page for streaming updates from WWDC 2008! 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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