This Week's Sponsor:

HomeSnap

A Private, Read-Only Window Into Your HomeKit Home

Posts in news

Apple’s Data Center, Tailor-Made

It’s not terribly difficult to drive by Apple’s data center in Maiden, North Carolina, to witness Apple has something rather big planned, especially when you start seeing the plans for a parallel building in the unassuming clearing. A single Apple data center has over 447,142 square feet available for sever racks, power, and cooling whose purpose remains a mystery. Details continue to pour in from local news outlets, however, meaning Carolinians get to be on the front lines of witnessing some serious tech installments when leaked.

“This data center has truly changed the playing field in terms of size, efficiency, and engineering, and we were thrilled to have the opportunity to bring our expertise to the table to make it a reality,” said Todd Schneider, Senior Product Manager at Electrorack.

Instor and Electrostak have been creating a custom architecture for Apple, hired by Holder Construction to provide power, cooling, and custom mounting equipment needed to host a slew of unnamed, third party equipment. The solutions deployed at the Apple data center are noted to be unique in design, though I read that as: “There’s a crap load of pretty braided white cable attached to endless rows of aluminum racks.” Maybe I’m breathing too much of the Apple mantra, but I am inherently interested in Apple’s storage solution vs. a company like Google who sports systems are generally cheap, disposable, and exist in large quantities to prevent downtime. In jest, I’m assuming Apple’s data center is just a field of Mac Minis until I hear otherwise.

[via Data Center Knowledge]

New York Times Giving iPhones To Reporters

It’s no secret that the camera of the iPhone 4 has dramatically increased the quality of photos and videos shot with the device. The New York Times noticed this as well, and has decided to provide iPhone 4s to reporters for news video gathering. The reporters will be able to record videos and upload them to the NYT’s servers using Aspera’s file transfer tools.

Speaking to Beet.TV, Editorial Director for Video and Television Ann Derry called the Apple iPhone 4 a “game changer” for mobile video shooting and uploading, confirming that reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin used the device during Davos. Videos have become prominent in the paper’s website homepage, and the adoption of the iPhone as a portable camera will extend the staffers’ capabilities of recording videos in almost real-time, as events happen.

Check out the interview below. Read more

Verizon To Throttle Data Speeds, Compress Images & Videos To Keep Its Network Up

Early reviews of the Verizon iPhone were clear about one point: it’s a great phone, but data is slower than AT&T’s network. The Verizon iPhone gathered good phone call points among reviewers, but each one of them mentioned the fact that, both in download and upload, AT&T was faster. And it looks like things are only getting worse.

As reported by BGR, to handle the flock of new iPhone users on its network Verizon will begin throttling data speeds for the top 5% data users:

Verizon Wireless strives to provide customers the best experience when using our network, a shared resource among tens of millions of customers. To help achieve this, if you use an extraordinary amount of data and fall within the top 5% of Verizon Wireless data users we may reduce your data throughput speeds periodically for the remainder of your then current and immediately following billing cycle to ensure high quality network performance for other users at locations and times of peak demand.

But it gets even worse than data throttling. To keep its network capacity at an optimal level for customers, Verizon will compress images and videos over the air (to save bandwidth) before they’re served to a device. Here’s what the PDF memo says:

These techniques include caching less data, using less capacity, and sizing the video more appropriately for the device. The optimization process is agnostic to the content itself and to the website that provides it. While we invest much effort to avoid changing text, image, and video files in the compression process and while any change to the file is likely to be indiscernible, the optimization process may minimally impact the appearance of the file as displayed on your device.

While it’s likely that these “optimizations” (we think “compressions” is a more appropriate term) will happen only during the first period of Verizon iPhone on sale, it’s still inconvenient for customers to not have access to high-quality media on 3G. Full excerpts and link to the PDF document available on BGR. Pre-orders of the Verizon iPhone went live last night.

Pre-Order’s for Verizon iPhone Now Live


As confirmed yesterday by Apple, Pre-Orders for the Verizon iPhone 4 are now live on Apple’s website here and also on Verizon’s site here.  Be quick though if you want one, demand is expected to be high and orders will be fulfilled on a first come, first served basis.

If you are purchasing from the Apple Store you have to be an existing Verizon user and you have to sign up to the two year contract.

For the full pricing details head over here.

UPDATE: People on Twitter are noting that the Verizon site is having difficulties and crashing. It’s really hit and miss, some on Twitter have had seamless experience, others having errors. Perhaps try the Apple site, no reports of it going down, also some are recommending to avoid Firefox which seems to be having issues with Verizon’s site.

UPDATE 2: More and more people are having troubles with Verizon pre-orders, some have then tried going through Apple and it has worked without issue. Highly recommend people to try through Apple here.

The Verizon iPhone 4 is being sold for $199 for the 16 GB model and $299 for the 32 GB model with a two-year contract. Sales in Apple retail stores and 2,000 Verizon Wireless stores will begin on Thursday, February 10th and 7 AM — just like AT&T did for the iPhone 4 last year.

iOS 4.3 To Be Released Within Two Weeks?

Rumors and nuggets of information circulating around the web seem to suggest that the next update to iOS, 4.3, will come within the next two weeks. These suggestions come from a few sources, from David Pogue to John Gruber and The Daily’s launch.

As 9to5Mac was able to pick up on, David Pogue’s review on the Verizon iPhone contained a snippet that was later updated and removed. It was the statement that AT&T’s iPhone will get the Hotspot feature on February 13, there was no insinuation by Pogue that this was his guess but just written plain out as a fact.

Read more

All the Verizon iPhone News From Today

So today has brought quite a bit of Verizon iPhone news, if you’ve struggled to keep up, this post has links to all our recent coverage. Plus there’s even more news after the break which includes information that Verizon is urging it’s staff not to buy the iPhone, you may need to save old voicemails if moving to the iPhone and Apple Stores adding antenna’s to boost Verizon reception inside.

Today

First Verizon iPhone Reviews Are In

Verizon Contact Transfer App for iPhone Now Available

Verizon iPhone Coming to Best Buy on February 10

Apple Confirms Verizon iPhone Available for Pre-Order Tomorrow

Previously

iPhone 4 Cases Now Available On Verizon’s Website

iTunes 10.1.2 Now Available, Adds CDMA iPhone Compatibility

Verizon iPhone Plans Now Live on Apple.com

AT&T and Verizon Finally Together In Apple’s New Ad

Read more

March 31st The Deadline For In-App Periodical Subscriptions?

Apple is keeping the whole in-app subscription thing hush for the time being, but the Wall Street Journal claims that March 31st will be the magic date for publishers to have their apps ready by according to a tip from UK publishing developers, Yudu. Clearing up confusion about Apple’s required subscription model, publishers should still be able to offer services outside of the App Store, but a payment option through iTunes is mandatory. Mostly likely Apple will want a 30% cut of all periodicals sold through the App Store, and whether or not we’ll see services like Kindle and Barnes & Noble jumping ship remains to be seen. For the customer, ultimately unifying the subscription experience in the App Store and getting publishers to price competitively with The Daily will benefit consumers who otherwise pay outrageous fees – individual issues of magazines can cost up to $5.00 per issue, a subscription to The Economist totals $110 a year, and the New York Times can total an incredible $240 a year. Current workarounds for selling periodicals simply aren’t working: Apple’s “fix” should appeal to a much larger consumer base skeptical about the future of digital media.

March 31st is a likely date: with iOS 4.3 and the second generation iPad expected soon, publishers will have a solid month to prepare their content for Apple’s latest device.

[WSJ via Engadget]

Mac App Store Developers Fall Into Open Source Rabbit Hole

Lugaru, the game that is available for the Mac and other platforms about a violent rabbit is now available on Mac App Store. Except there are two apps for the same game, one at $10 and one at $2, the pricier one called Lugaru HD is made by the original developers whilst the other called Lugaru is made by a Michael Latour from iCoder. The original developers of the game have no idea who Latour is and are quite understandably angry that someone else has started selling the exact same game at a much cheaper price.

Lugaru’s developers claim Latour’s app is a complete fraud of their own app with their own source code being sold by a guy with no affiliation to them. Jeffrey Rosen, one of the Lugaru developers told Kotaku “We are not happy about this situation. It is not uncommon for people to sell pirated copies of our game, but we were completely caught off guard that Apple would approve this for sale on the App Store without any due diligence.”

Read more

First Verizon iPhone Reviews Are In

It begins. The usual TechCrunch, Walt Mossberg and Engadget got their Verizon iPhone units and have just posted reviews online. A few interesting quotes about sound and call quality:

Mossberg:

Calls on the Verizon unit were mostly crisp and clear, including speakerphone calls and those made over my car’s Bluetooth connection. On my first full day of testing, I did have several Verizon calls that dropped out for a few seconds, before recovering. Apple attributed this to a very minor glitch I’d encountered in my initial setup of the phone and urged me to reboot it. I did and suffered no more momentary dropouts.

TechCrunch: (MG Siegler)

This Verizon version of the iPhone 4 seems to have none of the same antenna issues. Try as I might, using the “death grip” and every other grip I can actually do, I can no longer reproduce the same attenuation problem that the previous iPhone 4 model had. I death grip the thing, and no bars drop. More importantly, calls don’t drop and data doesn’t stop. Again, Apple won’t comment, but problem, apparently, solved.

Engadget: (Joshua Topolsky)

So, does the phone exhibit more favorable behavior in regards to dropped / failed calls? The answer is yes – with a caveat. We had many, many perfectly connected and sustained calls while on the Verizon iPhone (many times during testing we actually had to switch from our AT&T device to the Verizon device just to complete the call). After a couple of days of use, the fear that normally sets in about five minutes into a connected call with an AT&T iPhone all but disappeared, and we found ourselves wanting to have longer talks and not worrying so much about the potential for dropped and interrupted calls.

But on to that caveat. While the phone did connect much more reliably and consistently, it wasn’t impervious to broken connections and sound quality issues. In areas where we had a weak signal, or when moving around, we experienced call interference (our callers noted this as well), and in two instances, we did drop a call when moving from one place to another (clearly an area with less Verizon juice).

So it seems like Antennagate is officially a thing of the past, some dropped calls were experienced, but it depends on your area. No surprise there. It’s just the same iPhone 4 on a different carrier, which means a great device on the network people were waiting for.