Posts in news

Apple To Sell Around 3.6 Million Macs This Quarter

At the Q1 2011 earnings call in January, Apple posted record revenue of $26.74 billion with 4.13 million Macs sold. That was a new record for the company, which sold 3.36 million Macs in the Q1 2010 quarter. Piper Jaffray’s analyst Gene Munster believes, basing on data from research market firm NPD, that in the fiscal quarter ending this month Apple will sell between 3.5 and 3.7 million Macs – somewhere below the expectations following last quarter’s results.

For January and February, Apple is trending up 16 percent over the year-ago quarter. That would put Apple at about 3.6 million Macs for the quarter. The street consensus is for Macs to be up in the 22 percent range year over year. The 16 percent gain would put Apple within, but at the low end, of Munster’s expectations of 15 percent to 25 percent.

The fact that Apple was readying its new line of MacBook Pros in February might reflect in slowdowns in sales as consumers were anticipating the new products. But, then again, that could lead to an increase in sales in March – although the figure won’t be included in this fiscal quarter’s results.

One thing is for sure: in the past quarters, Apple usually surpassed analysts’ general consensus on unit sales and revenue, especially thanks to the explosion of iOS devices outside and in the US. Whether the new MacBook Pros and Airs could lead to similar surprises is still to be seen.

Bon Jovi Hates Steve Jobs For Killing Music with iTunes

Everybody loves iTunes, right? The user-friendly experience of clicking the buy button, the huge catalogue of artists and albums available on it (with The Beatles, too), the integrated environment with iOS devices and Macs. Everybody loves iTunes.

Actually, no. Bon Jovi hates it and he thinks Steve Jobs is “personally responsible” for killing the music business. Seriously, according to Bon Jovi the man just took away the magic of buying physical records and firing up your walkman. In an interview with The Sunday Times Magazine, Bon Jovi went ahead with the following statements:

Kids today have missed the whole experience of putting the headphones on, turning it up to 10, holding the jacket, closing their eyes and getting lost in an album; and the beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it. God, it was a magical, magical time. I hate to sound like an old man now, but I am, and you mark my words, in a generation from now people are going to say: ‘What happened?’. Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business.

On a related note, Gutenberg is personally responsible for killing handwritten books. Oh, the magic of manually writing thousands of copies of the same book. And that Simjian guy? Man, he totally took the beauty of manually withdrawing cash away from me. Not to mention the insane operation by Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner: with the invention of lighters, he killed the pleasure of manually lighting my cigars.

Let me tell you something, Bon Jovi. This little thing you hate is called “progress”. Yes, the same progress that allows your guitars to be amplified on stage. So perhaps next time, instead of blaming Steve Jobs for a digital market revolution that came after years of research at Apple, you’d like to think about it and consider that if some artists still manage to produce their records, it’s because of the ease of use of digital downloads. [via Cult of Mac]

Apple Using New Headphone Jack in iPad 2?

An Apple patent published in September 2010 revealed the company was working on a new headphone jack design that would allow to place significantly smaller headphone jacks in future iPhones and iPods. According to Kevin Fox at Fury.com, Apple might have implemented the new design in the iPad 2, which features a headphone jack to fit the iPad’s smaller form factor and it’s set “in to a steep curve”.

The original iPhone also placed the headphone jack on a curved exterior surface, but did so by insetting it, with the disastrous side-effect that only headphone plugs that strictly adhered to the spec would fit deep enough into the recessed space to complete the connection.

This time however it looks like there’s no recession at all. In fact, the opposite seems to be true: A plug fully inserted into the jack will have a surprisingly large portion of its ground ring (the outermost metal band) exposed to the elements.

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AT&T iPad 1 Owners Experiencing Issues with iPad 2 Upgrade

iLounge reports of a series of data activation issues experienced by original iPad owners when trying to upgrade the AT&T service for the iPad 2. As noted by the iLounge staff, an iPad 2 registered with a an existing, fully paid AT&T data service failed to activate; the second iPad 2 unit, set up with a new account, activated “almost immediately”. AT&T is offering two data plans for the iPad with the first one starting at 250 MB (at $14.99 per month) and a second tier with 2 GB traffic at $25 per month.

iLounge details the two issues original iPad owners may run into:

First, the iPad 2 will not activate. Second, the user will either have to manually swap the Micro-SIM cards between the iPad and iPad 2 units, or AT&T will disable the iPad’s Micro-SIM in order to allow the iPad 2’s Micro-SIM to work. The AT&T representative claimed that a user who chooses the latter option will have to buy a replacement card should they want to restore 3G service to the older model, as the first Micro-SIM will no longer be usable.

To enable the service on multiple iPads, AT&T customers will need to set up different accounts as the carrier’s system isn’t able to register two devices at once. While Apple didn’t make any specific mention of iPad 2 WiFi + 3G upgrade plans for iPad 1 owners, many expected the procedure to be simple and easy as swapping the SIM cards at any time with the same account on multiple devices.

Survey: iPad 2 Selling Mostly To New Customers

Market analyst Gene Munster surveyed just under 250 line-waiters at the iPad 2 launch last Friday and one of the most interesting findings was that 70% of the iPads being sold were to consumers who did not own the original iPad. Furthermore Munster estimated that Apple would have sold around 400,000 to 500,000 iPad 2’s, close to what analysts were predicting prior to the launch and well above the original’s 300,000-unit figure.

Munster said of the results “We believe this shows Apple is expanding its base of iPad users, which is critical to maintaining its early lead in the growing tablet market,” and this was backed up with statistics that whilst the original iPad had a predominantly Mac audience, iPad 2 owners were split 49% to PC and 51% Mac users. In addition Kindle users opting for an iPad 2 were at 24% compared to 13% for the original.

Munster also got some statistics on the break up of which model people were purchasing with more WiFi + 3G models chosen and the 32GB variant the most popular size chosen at 41% (up from 32%), although Munster notes that this increase could be in part due to the 16GB variety selling out faster. Finally another analyst, Chris Whitmore from Deutsche Bank, decided to call up around 100 stores (50 Apple Retail, 20 Best Buy and Walmart plus Verizon and AT&T stores) and found zero stock in all the stores which he called “shocking”.

[Via Cult of Mac]

iFixit Tears Open The Smart Cover To See How It Works

In what is quite a first, iFixit has done a tear-down on Apple’s new Smart Covers and found that Apple has used a whopping 31 magnets to make the Smart Cover system work with 10 in the iPad and 21 in the cover. To the disappointment of the iFixit team, the magnets were the plain old two-pole kind, not the more intriguing correlated magnets, however the way in which the magnets were placed is what allows the Smart Cover to effectively clip on with relative ease and accuracy.

One of the magnets in the Smart Cover is used by the iPad to work out when the iPad should be locked and unlocked whilst the rest are used to “either clamp to the iPad on the right side (the far-right column of magnets), or to form the triangular shape used to create a stand for the iPad 2.” Finally the magnets inside the iPad 2 were polarised + - + - whilst the Smart Cover complemented this and had the opposite being - + - + (obviously to snap to together the magnets in either part must be opposite to attract each other).  Jump the break for some more break down images by iFixit!

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Reports Suggest Apple Won’t Include NFC Technology In The iPhone 5

An article today by The Independent (a UK publication) has suggested that the previously rumored inclusion of Near Field Communication technology in the iPhone and iPad will not be coming this year. The technology is perceived to become a new way for consumers to pay for goods and services and it was hoped by many in the retail industry that Apple could set the standard by adding the technology to the iPhone.

It appears however, according to several sources in UK mobile operators, that Apple had decided against the inclusion of NFC technology in the next version of the iPhone. One source told The Independent “The new iPhone will not have NFC, Apple told the operators it was concerned by the lack of a clear standard across the industry.”

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Apple Showcasing “Great AirPlay Apps” In The App Store

With the release of iOS 4.3, Apple enabled third-party developers to implement the AirPlay streaming technology in their apps, a feature that was previously exclusive to Apple’s own software on iOS 4.2. On the new iOS 4.3, not only does Safari allow you to stream video content from the browser to an Apple TV, developers also got the possibility to use the AirPlay APIs (after several requests) in their applications. Apps like Air Video or StreamToMe greatly benefit from the addition of AirPlay without any manual hacking.

To celebrate the new feature for all developers, Apple has put up a section on the App Store to showcase the first apps that make great use of AirPlay. “AirPlay-Enabled Apps” collects 11 different apps that have been updated to support wireless streaming, The list includes the VEVO Player, Air Video, ESPN Magazine, and Discovery Channel HD. All these apps let you beam video from your iOS device to the Apple TV in your local network.

You can find the section here, and we hope Apple will soon update it to feature more great apps for the iPhone and iPad. The problem? If you have a Verizon iPhone you might be out of luck.

iPad 2 Is Jailbroken

Jailbreaking the iPad 2 is quickly underway, as revealed by @comex and @chpwn this evening on Twitter. The Jailbreak has yet to be packaged, and no release date has been announced. Shown to be running on a white 3G iPad 2, Cydia is displayed as ready to launch – a replacement exploit found in the latest version of iOS 4.3 enabled the hackers to install Saurik’s directory. Previous works by @comex include an iBooks fix in the 4.2.1 jailbreak that enabled users to read DRM’d content, and a universal jailbreak web tool for iOS devices.