Posts in news

Apple: New iPad Arrives in China on Friday, July 20

Apple has just issued a brief press release to announce that the new iPad will finally launch in China on Friday, July 20th. The recommended retail prices of the new iPad in China will match the current US prices at $499, $599 and $699 for the WiFi version (16 GB, 32 GB and 64 GB respectively) and $629, $729 and $829 for the WiFi + Cellular models (16 GB, 32 GB and 64 GB respectively). Meanwhile, from today the iPad 2 is available for $399.

Customers will be able to purchase the new iPad in China from the Apple Online Store, select Apple Authorized Resellers and by reservation from Apple retail stores. The reservation process will run daily between 9am and 12pm and begin on Thursday, July 19 and allows a customer to reserve an iPad for pick up the following day.

Apple® today announced the new iPad®, the third generation of its category defining mobile device, will arrive in China on Friday, July 20. The new iPad features a stunning new Retina™ display, Apple’s new A5X chip with quad-core graphics and a 5 megapixel iSight® camera with advanced optics for capturing amazing photos and 1080p HD video. The new iPad still delivers the same all-day 10 hour battery life* while remaining amazingly thin and light.

Apple Cracking Down On Sites Selling Access To iOS Betas

Last month, Andy Baio wrote a story for Wired detailing the world of selling access to Apple beta software to non-developers. Specifically, Baio’s piece focused on sites that, for a price, allowed regular people to have their UDID (unique device identifier) activated for installation of iOS betas, which Apple makes available for developers only. To install an iOS beta, a developer has to register his/her account with Apple, which costs $99 per year and allows for the configuration of 100 devices in the so-called “Provisioning Portal” through the aforementioned UDID.

While becoming a registered developer costs $99, sites selling UDID activation did so for a low price, usually within the range of $10. Baio wrote:

For a small developer, unauthorized activations are a lucrative business that’s likely worth the risks. UDID Activation publishes their order queue on their official site, which shows more than 2,300 devices activated in the last week alone. At $8.99 for each activation, that’s more than $20,600 in revenue, with $2,277 paid to Apple for the 23 developer accounts. Their homepage claims that more than 19,000 devices were activated so far, and that’s only one of several services. And since device activations only last for a year, each service can reuse their expired slots with no additional cost.

After noticing several of the sites mentioned in Baio’s article had become unavailable in recent weeks (activatemyios.com, iosudidregistrations.com, activatemyudid.com, udidregistration.com, instantudidactivation.com), we reached out to some of them asking whether Apple was behind the takedown of their “services”, which infringed on Apple’s developer agreement. While most of our emails bounced, we heard back from one of the site owners (who asked to remain anonymous), who confirmed his hosting provider took down the site after a complaint for copyright infringement by Apple. Similarly, the CEO of Fused tweeted in a reply to Andy Baio that Apple had been “fairly heavy-handed” with DMCA requests to UDID-selling sites hosted on their network.

In the email, the site owner said that their website made $75,000 since last June, when Apple released the first beta of iOS 6 to developers. “We do not believe our service was infringing and our services did not violate their guidelines for iOS 6”, the site owner commented, adding that they will soon launch another similar site, “with better and more secure data lines to handle Apple”.

The owner of another site replied to our emails with a “no comment”. According to him, “the Wired article has caused all these sites to go down”.

Indeed, it appears Apple has started taking action against these sites recently, and more precisely after Wired ran the story on UDID activation. Last year, Apple reportedly closed developer accounts of people who sold their available UDID slots to other users; this year, it appears Apple has chosen the more direct path of shutting down websites and their services by filing DMCA requests to their hosting providers.

When Wired published its story, Apple added that “unauthorized distribution is prohibited, and may be subject to both civil and criminal liability”. It is unclear whether Apple terminated memberships to the Developer Program this year as well.

Surprisingly, one of the most popular sites selling access to iOS betas, udidactivation.com, is still online. However, their “UDID order queue” – a webpage displaying the amount of total sales – fails to load, and the same page on their “backup site”, udidactivation.us, displays the latest sales as being from June 28.

Apple seems to have taken action against sites selling access to OS X beta downloads, as well. A popular one, iMZDL.com, put a notice on their website saying “we will no longer be putting up downloads on iMZDL.com for Apple Betas”. Their website is still up, and rather than hosting the download links themselves, they have now switched to torrents for sharing links to iOS and OS X betas.

As we previously wrote, access to Apple beta software should be restricted to developers, as they know how to provide meaningful feedback and report bugs to Apple.

Get A Sense Of What A 7.85” iPad mini Would Be Like

Rumors of a smaller iPad were back again this week with a report from Bloomberg and since then the rumor mill has been in full swing. Not much detail was in the rumor, other than it’s a smaller iPad and that it’ll launch later this year. Earlier in the year, the display was rumored to be around 7.85” and A.T. Faust of AppAdvice gave compelling reasons as to why it makes sense. That number seems to have stuck around with this latest round of iPad mini rumors.

“The reason we [won’t] make a 7-inch tablet isn’t because we don’t want to hit [a lower] price point,” Jobs said. “It’s because we think the screen is too small to express the software. As a software driven company, we think about the software strategies first.” - AllThingsD

When I read the rumors this week I sighed, not again. I wasn’t the only one either, an iPad mini seems like a compromise, with little advantage. Plus the old Steve Jobs quote about 7 inch iPads just kept circling around. But others weren’t so closed minded and were considering whether it might actually have a place in Apple’s product line.

The biggest issue I have is with the screen, and whether the screen can still be sufficiently useful at the smaller size. To find out, I decided to do the old hack of making a little paper template of the iPad mini and see how it looked. I decided to stick with the 7.85” diagonal display size suggested and use a bezel only slightly smaller than those on the current iPad. For comparison I also made a paper template for the current iPad and versions of both with the bevel colored in. You can download, print and cut them out for yourself.

Note: make sure when printing that it isn’t being scaled up or down, as that will adjust the size of the “screen”. Check the little measurement guides to ensure it printed out correctly.

That was all good and well, but it didn’t really give me a sense of what the UI might look like on an iPad mini. So I decided to take some screenshots and shrink them down to the appropriate size. But I also made a duplicate copy of the screenshot and using Photoshop, reconfigured the UI to fit on a 7.85” display without adjusting the size of the buttons. To my mind that’s the only way that Apple would do this - Apple does frequently remind iOS designers to keep buttons at a tappable size (mentioned prominently in iOS Human Interface Guide), just shrinking the current iPad display would make buttons more difficult to tap.

Finally I put it all together into a Keynote presentation so that I could view it on my iPad and visibly see and compare how it would look. I’ve uploaded it, so you can do the same yourself. You just need Keynote for iOS and go into presentation mode to look at it yourself. If you want to go the extra step, cut your iPad mini template out and place it on top of your iPad whilst viewing the screenshots.

Read more

Why Apple’s Passbook Doesn’t Do Credit Cards (Yet)→

Why Apple’s Passbook Doesn’t Do Credit Cards (Yet)

Jessica E. Vascellaro of The Wall Street Journal writes:

Apple’s head of iPhone software, Scott Forstall, was interested in the idea, say people familiar with the matter, and engineers on his team began to brainstorm a comprehensive “wallet app.”

They discussed whether Apple should facilitate payments to merchants directly, one of these people said. The idea didn’t go very far, on account of the complexity, including the possibility that the company would need to become a bank.

[…]

Apple’s Mr. Schiller was worried that if Apple facilitated credit-card payments directly consumers might blame Apple for a bad experience with a merchant.

The executives ultimately opted for the more scaled-down version of Passbook, which engineers still referred to as the “wallet app.”

However, what Passbook ended up doing is far more interesting than simply tying in your credit cards. Passbook integrates store cards, movie tickets, flight tickets, concert tickets, and more into a single application. Rather than strictly being a digital wallet solely for bank cards, Apple took the idea of managing paper and plastic (tickets and extraneous store cards that add sometimes senseless bulk to our wallets) and utilized the screen to display the required barcode — not necessarily revolutionary, but it’s simple and effective. Utilizing the iPhone, Passbook can even display location aware notifications on the lock screen, “handing” you your ticket when you reach the airport for example. If the next iPhone does enable some sort of NFC payment system, then that’s great. But from what we already know, Passbook seems like a solid step in the right direction.

Honestly, you only have to look so far as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and Verizon to understand why Apple executives weren’t so keen on the idea of introducing their own “wallet.” Mobile payments may be a “gold mine,” but it’s a gold mine that’s in a state of flux. When the Galaxy Nexus launched on Verizon, the carrier disallowed the ability to run Google Wallet, Google’s mobile payment app that works with NFC. Instead, Verizon wanted to focus on Isis, a separate mobile wallet being developed in tandem with AT&T and T-Mobile.

Secondly, companies like Square and PayPal are bringing the point of sale straight to mobile devices through innovative combinations of hardware and software. While Square offers features that allows customers to simply have merchants add a bill to their tab, their hardware dongle for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices depends on credit and debit cards for the payment of goods. While it’s early in the game, Square has certainly disrupted the idea of payment processing, allowing virtually anyone to become a seller and distributer of goods practically anywhere Square is supported. Where NFC focuses on modernizing traditional payment systems, companies like Square are focused on turning that idea on its head.

When (not if) Apple does decide to further integrate Passbook with our wallets, they’ll want to be sure that both sides of the spectrum (how to pay and how payments are accepted) are resolved. While companies like Google and Microsoft are testing the waters, Apple’s a company known for making the right moves when it counts.

We can agree that while everyone (okay — just the people who read tech blogs a lot) want the future now, Apple is justifiably err’ing on the side of caution. They clearly can’t ignore mobile payments, but what they can do is build a platform that allows them to utilize the stuff that’s… well, not in flux. It’s not like what we’re using right now is going away anytime soon. And it looks like Apple certainly have a good solution, at least in the meantime, towards managing all of the annoying stuff that also goes in your wallet — the stuff that often seems to be ignored in the course of discussing wallets vs. mobile payments. So while we clamor for phones to become an instant portal into our bank accounts and account balances, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It looks like mobile payments have a long way to go before people not only get comfortable with the idea, but companies finally agree how to do things.

 

Permalink

Apple Removes Negative Reviews From Apps Affected By DRM Bug [Updated]

Earlier this week, an error in Apple’s DRM code generation for App Store apps caused a number of app updates to crash on launch. The issue, initially reported by Instapaper developer Marco Arment, began spreading to more than 100 iOS and Mac app updates including GoodReader, Angry Birds HD Free, and The Early Edition. As the bug was causing updated apps to crash immediately after launch without even displaying an error message, several users became upset with the developers of the apps – as they didn’t know the issue was on Apple’s servers – and began leaving negative reviews on the App Store. Developers, on the other hand, had to deal with a issue that they couldn’t fix, while explaining to customers how they should back up their data and wait for a solution.

Last night, Apple officially acknowledged the issue and explained it was associated with DRM code generation on the App Store. Apple said they had fixed the issue, and Macworld reported that, according to their sources, Apple would also remove all negative reviews that had been left during the hours the bug was spreading on various international App Stores.

As of this morning, it appears Apple has indeed removed negative reviews from apps affected by the bug. Apps like Instapaper, GoodReader, and The Early Edition are showing no reviews for the latest versions available, which are the ones that were crashing earlier in the week. We haven’t checked on every single app that was affected, but it is safe to assume at this point Apple will remove all reviews (not just negative ones) from any app that received a corrupted update.

Apple hasn’t issued a public apology to developers, but the removal of reviews will definitely help in leaving this issue behind without having to deal with the aftereffects on the App Store as well.

Update: As noted by several readers on Twitter, it appears Apple didn’t completely wipe the old reviews left during the DRM outage – it re-issued app updates for the same version of the app, and moved the “Current Version” reviews to “All Versions”.

In spite of the version being the same – for Instapaper, the affected version was 4.2.3 – the old reviews are not showing up in the Current Version section of the App Store. This helps hiding possible negative reviews from the section that it loaded by default in iTunes.

By re-issuing the old version as an update again, Apple is making sure customers can re-install the fixed version of an app without having to delete it first, as noted by Marco Arment. It is unclear whether the old reviews will still affect overall ranking of an app.

Apple Rectifies Corrupted App Store Downloads, Advises Users to Delete and Reinstall Broken Apps

Late Tuesday evening, Instapaper developer Marco Arment was met with a nasty surprise when some users updating to Instapaper 4.2.3 found that their updated app instantly crashed after opening. Upon investigating and hearing similar reports from other developers, Marco found that the App Store itself was corrupting app updates, leaving users with broken apps and developers with one star reviews from confused and upset customers. Writing at Marco.org, Marco addressed the issue to his audience and began gathering a large list of apps that were also affected, calling on Apple to quickly resolve the problem as developers dealt with the consequences.

On Thursday evening, Apple acknowledged the problem to AllThingsD and Macworld, informing the publications that the issue had been resolved.

Lex Friedman from Macworld writes,

Around 6:00 p.m. PT, Apple acknowledged the problem to Macworld, describing it as “a temporary issue that began yesterday with a server that generated DRM code for some apps being downloaded.” Apple added: “The issue has been rectified and we don’t expect it to occur again.”

Customers with affected applications should be able to delete and reinstall a working application through the App Store.

Additionally from Macworld,

Sources told Macworld that Apple will be removing one-star app reviews developers earned unfairly because of the company’s server issue.

As Matthew Panzarino from The Next Web points out, both Apple customers and developers have little to no recourse when problems like this occur. Developers currently have no way of effectively communicating with customers outside of developer blogs.

When the one-star reviews started rolling in, there was very little that developers could do to notify users of their app that it was an issue with Apple’s packaging of their apps, not the apps themselves. The users just saw that the app was crashing on launch and rated it accordingly.

Reinstalling applications also leads to users possibly losing information — Glasshouse Apps’ is still dealing with the aftereffects as the company prepares an app update and advises users on the best course of action that will keep their news feeds and data intact. The developers of GoodReader have also written a step-by-step guide that helps customers back up, reinstall their app, and restore data onto their devices.

While Apple has acknowledged and fixed the issues disrupting application updates on the App Store, they have not yet issued an apology to developers, nor did they want to themselves acknowledge that they’d be removing one-star app reviews apps received because of the error. If Apple should do anything more, they certainly need to reach out and apologize to developers, who’ve unfortunately had to run damage control to prevent one-star reviews and angry customers.

[Sources: Macworld via AllThingsD]

Some App Updates Resulting In Instant Crashes Due To Presumed Apple CDN Issue

In the last 24 hours or so, a number of apps that have been updated by users have crashed on launch due to a problem presumed to be connected to the App Store’s content distribution network (CDN). A number of popular apps from Instapaper, Readdle Scanner Pro, Angry Birds Space HD Free and CommBank Kaching amongst others have been just some of the affected apps. The issue, not affecting every customer, occurs when a user updates their apps and goes to launch them but instead the app crashes before it can load.

Instapaper was one of the first to be affected by the issue with an update that went live late on July 3rd. Developer Marco Arment was instantly “deluged” by support requests complaining of instant crashes with the latest version. After a bit of digging and looking at his support requests, Marco believes it comes about due to a corrupt version of the updated app being distributed by the App Store CDN in some regions. For Instapaper the issue was resolved (a non-corrupt version propagated to all regions) within two hours but it isn’t known if it was due to Marco’s emails to the App Review team or just an issue resolved with time.

If you’re a developer, and you have a non-critical update pending release, I suggest waiting a few days for this to presumably get sorted out before releasing it. [Marco Arment]

Apple has yet to make any statement on the issue and Marco and the other developers affected by the issue have yet to receive responces from any of the developer relations groups at Apple either. You can view a tentative list of apps affected by the issue over at The Next Web and at Marco’s personal blog which also goes into detail about the issue.

It may be wise to hold off from updating any apps for the time being as well, with the issue affecting people across all regions and all different apps. If you’ve already been affected by the issue, the only real way to fix it is to delete the app and try re-installing the app - but this will only work if the app is no longer corrupted on Apple’s side.

[Sources: Marco.org and The Next Web]

Ars Technica Investigates The Future Of Thunderbolt Cables→

Ars Technica Investigates The Future Of Thunderbolt Cables

In an investigation for Ars Technica, Chris Foresman explores why Thunderbolt cables, more than a year after Thunderbolt debuted, remain at the expensive $50 and greater price range. Foresman dug into what the current situation was and discovered that apart from Apple, there is currently only one volume supplier of Thunderbolt cables that are likely rebranded by Belkin, Elgato, Kanex and others that offer Thunderbolt cables.

While other vendors are now offering their own Thunderbolt cables, prices have mostly stayed the same—in fact, some have gone up. We found this surprising; typically more vendors offering competing products leads to lower prices. And as the high cable price represents a fairly high barrier to entry for Thunderbolt devices, it relegates the standard to niche, early-adopter territory.

Foresman found that prices won’t really drop until early 2013 when a second generation design by Intersil will enter production. The current “first-gen cables” are based on a Genum transciever from Semtech that is built with silicon germanium which makes it much more expensive to produce.

It’s likely that Intel and Apple chose the Semtech part because it was either an already existing part that fit the requirements for Thunderbolt’s high 10Gbps bi-directional data rate, or Semtech had something similar that was easily adaptable.

The new design from Intersil does things differently by combining the cable’s microcontroller and transciever into a single processing chip and the power management and voltage regulators into another single chip - meaning the number of integrated circuits in the cable will go from 4 to 2. Intersil’s John Mitchell says to Ars that their solution is “half the chips, half the size, uses half the power, and cheaper conductors can be used. By the end of the year, cables will be less expensive.”

The chips are manufactured on a lower cost, 40nm CMOS process, improving yields and lowering costs significantly. The 40nm process also dissipates less heat, reducing the need for bulky heat sinking within the cable plug.

Permalink

Apple Announces Q3 2012 Conference Call for July 24: Quarter Recap & Estimates

Earlier today, Apple updated its Investor Relations webpage to include a placeholder for the company’s next earnings call, scheduled for July 24. As usual with Apple’s conference calls, the event will be provided as an audio webcast for investors and listeners.

Apple plans to conduct a conference call to discuss financial results of its third fiscal quarter on Tuesday, July 24, 2012 at 2:00 p.m. PT.

Ended on June 30, Apple’s third fiscal quarter will provide insight into the company’s recent performances with the new iPad (launched on March 16 in 10 initial countries), iPhone 4S (which is entering its late-stage product cycle), and revamped Mac line. In the previous quarter, Apple set guidance for Q3 at $34 billion and diluted earnings per share of about $8.68. Currently, consensus by Wall Street analysts averages $37.34 billion in revenues for the third-quarter.

The new iPad has been Apple’s fastest product rollout to date, and Q3 will be the first full quarter for device sales in all the countries where it’s been released. Apple added 56 launch countries in 42 days, and recently expanded to the Middle East and Latin America through official distribution channels and retailers.

With 12 million units sold in Q2 2012, Apple said the new iPad was “off to a great start”, and Q3 2012 will provide the first real opportunity to measure to device’s impact on a wider level. During the past earnings call, CEO Tim Cook noted how he was confident the company would be able to “supply a significant number of iPads during the quarter”.

The iPhone 4S, on the other hand, was released eight months ago, and amidst speculation of a new model coming this Fall – perhaps as soon as October – Q3 2012 will be key to understand the device’s sales over the past four months and, more importantly, its performances in China.

The iPhone 4S launched on its second Chinese carrier – China Telecom – on March 9th, and Q3 2012 will be the first “full quarter” to measure sales in the region. With 35.1 million iPhones sold in the past quarter, Apple reported a 5x growth year-over-year in Greater China, noting how “the incredible quarter” was the result of efforts to understand the market – where more people are moving to the middle class – “as good as we can”.

In Q2 2012 – the company’s biggest non-holiday quarter to date – Apple posted revenue of $39.2 billion, with 11.8 million iPads,  35.1 million iPhones and 4 million Macs sold. Apple sold 7.7 million iPods, a 15 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter. The company posted quarterly net profit of $11.6 billion, or $12.30 per diluted share.

In the year-ago quarter, Apple posted revenue of $28.57 billion, with 9.25 million iPads, 20.34 million iPhones and 3.95 million Macs sold. Apple reported record quarterly net profit of $7.31 billion, or $7.79 per diluted share.

In his own estimates for the upcoming Q3 results, Asymco’s Horace Dediu forecasted the following numbers:

  • iPhone units: 28.5 million (40%)
  • Macs: 4.5 million (15%)
  • iPads: 24 million (160%)
  • iPods: 6 million (-20%)
  • Music (incl. app) rev. growth: 35%
  • Peripherals rev. growth: 20%
  • Software rev. growth: 15%
  • Total revenues: $41.9 billion (46%)
  • GM: 44.8%
  • EPS: $11.54 (48%)

In their initial projections for Q3 2012, Seeking Alpha estimated higher Mac sales due to the new models released during the quarter (Apple also dedicated a new commercial to the Retina MacBook Pro) and quarterly revenues around $39 billion. As noted by Philip Elmer-DeWitt at Fortune, “as usual the indies are more bullish than the pros”, with independent analysts projecting earnings on average $5 billion higher than the Street’s consensus.

To put these possible numbers in better context, here’s a graphical representation of how Apple performed in the past quarters.

Apple’s quarterly dividend won’t begin until the fourth fiscal quarter of 2012. We will provide live updates from the call on our site’s homepage on July 24 starting at 2 PM PT. For a recap of news and events that may have affected Apple’s results in the quarter, check out our Month In Review roundups here.