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Posts tagged with "apple"

Apple’s Massive Data Center Beginning Operations “Any Day Now”

Apple’s $1 billion million data center in Maiden, North Carolina is where iTunes in the cloud will live. And the Mac App Store. And MobileMe. And whatever Apple has in mind for its cloud-based features.

According to a report by DataCenterKnowledge, the data center “is expected to begin operations any day now”. Which means it’s ready, and as Apple promised in July it’ll be up and running before the end of the year. Read more


Mac App Store and Micro-Apps

Mac App Store and Micro-Apps

MG Siegler:

This weekend, Ryan Block put up an interesting post on gdgt entitled: Will the Mac App Store have enough to sell? He raises a number of good points for why Apple may not be able to replicate their current App Store success with this new desktop store. But I’m left wondering if the store won’t lead to a new class of app: a sort of micro-app for the desktop.

Block makes the following points: a) high-end software like Photoshop won’t be placed in this store because Adobe won’t want to give Apple a 30 percent cut of all sales. b) most paid desktop software is dead or dying due to free replacements on the web. c) Apple’s strict rules will prevent developers from using this new store for test or demo software. I agree with all of those points. And that’s why I’m wondering if this store won’t instead lead to this new type of app environment.

Yours truly, two days ago:

The worst scenario would be: “simple apps” are sold in the Mac App Store, “real apps” are available on the developers’ website. For as much as the Mac App Store is a great opportunity and I’m sure it’ll be huge among consumers, I can imagine some developers, frustrated either with Apple’s restrictions or lack of trial support, will end up selling software only on their websites.

Either “micro” or “simple”, it is clear that the biggest issue Apple has to face is convincing the big names to jump on board. Or maybe Apple doesn’t need them, as they’ll come back on their own once they’ll see the money “simple micro apps” can make.

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iPod: Rise & Fall

Remember when the iPod used to be the most important product for Apple? Now it’s all about the iPhone and iPad. The Mac’s coming back (and frankly, with Lion and the Mac App Store what a comeback), and the iPod sales are slowing down.

The chart below, Sonic-style, gives you an idea of how times change. [via Fortune] Read more


A Tale Of Two Mac App Stores

In our previous Mac App Store coverage we focused on how, among other things, it will be very likely that Apple won’t allow the release of “trials” and “demos” in the new Store for Mac. As Mac developers also noticed and wrote in blog posts, it’s unknown at this point whether Apple will introduce new rules for volume licensing, educational discounts and other purchase systems Mac developers have been using for years on their websites.

The fears and doubts of Mac developers are worth our consideration as Apple has a huge deal on its hands, and nobody wants to see Apple “screw up” with an App Store on the Mac. So let’s just consider this: what if Apple doesn’t change the rules and understands that the Mac is ultimately different from iOS when it comes to customer experience? What if the first version of the Mac App Store that will roll out in January will be a simple “copy” of the one seen on iOS? In that case, there’s a chance for developers’ websites to stay in the game and become the real alternative to the Mac App Store, and not a “system from the past” headed to disappear. Read more


Apple Confirms Macs Won’t Come with Flash Pre-Installed In The Future

So, about the new MacBook Airs shipping without Flash pre-installed: Apple PR just confirmed to Engadget that the same will happen with other Macs in the future, in order to allow customers to go download the most recent version of Flash on Adobe’s website on their own.

We’re happy to continue to support Flash on the Mac, and the best way for users to always have the most up to date and secure version is to download it directly from Adobe.

Simple answer. Of course Apple cares about its customers and computers running software up to date, but there’s clearly more than ” the best way for users” in this story. By keeping Macs Flash-free out of the box, Apple wants users to lack the need of installing Flash, as the web is slowly moving to a broader HTML5 adoption.

Perhaps this won’t happen in a matter of a few months, but that’s a first step.


Apple’s North Carolina Data Center: 1 Million Square Feet?

Interesting tidbit from John Paczkowski at Digital Daily this morning: according to his sources, Apple is considering doubling the size of the massive data center they’re building in Maiden, North Carolina, thus bringing it to 1 million square feet.

Steve Jobs says the MacBook Air is the future of the MacBook and the future of the notebook as well. But if that’s to be the case, the machine — and Apple’s ecosystem — needs to evolve a bit more to appeal to that strata of user tethered to the high capacity hard drives that the Air has summarily dispatched.

This being Apple we’re talking about, that evolution is likely already well underway and perhaps — perhaps — being engineered at the company’s massive new North Carolina data center. With its 500,000 square feet of data center space (currently, sources tell me that Apple is considering doubling that) that facility has been built for something. And what better use to put it to than the cloud services that might completely eliminate the need for high capacity hard drives and give the Air storage to match its performance characteristics.

Read more


RIM Losing Both Inches and Enterprise To Apple

With its upcoming “Playbook”, RIM aims at redefining the rules of tablet devices and ship a tablet that’s both fun and focused on “serious” productivity tasks for businesses.

Many things had happened before RIM finally realized it was about time to take a second look at the mobile in Enterprise, and Apple has taken off.

Read more



So This Would Be Steve Jobs’ Business Card in 1979

Business cards used to be simpler, and even Steve Jobs used to have one. This comes straight from the 1979 archives, discovered by a couple of techies somewhere in California.

Mozilla Labs director and tech-enthusiast Pascal Finette photographed Jobs’ groovy card after a colleague brought it into the office. According to Finette, Apple still uses the phone number seen on the card, but don’t give it a ring thinking you’ll get a direct line to Steve.

I can confirm that number is still active, but it’s definitely not Steve’s number anymore. As Finette also reports (but you can’t notice by the photo), Steve wanted an embossed Apple logo in the business cards.