This Week's Sponsor:

Copilot Money

The Apple Editor’s Choice Award App for Tracking Your Money. Start Your Free Trial Today

Posts tagged with "apple"

Apple’s A6 Chip In Trial Production With TSMC, Might Be A Sign Of Apple Cutting Samsung Ties

A report from Reuters is claiming that Apple has begun trialling production of an A6 processor with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) ahead of an expected 2012 launch. If true it would be a movement away from Samsung, which for the A4 and A5 processor, has been Apple’s sole manufacturing partner.

Such a move would presumably be in part be due to the current legal battle between Apple and Samsung that began earlier this year. As for what the A6 brings, analysts are expecting the processor could be a quad-core chip, a jump from the current dual-core A5 chip and single-core A4 chip.

A final decision has not yet been made on whether TSMC would produce the commercial, high-volume quantities, but TSMC is well prepared for that – they are the largest contract chip manufacturer in the world. CNet notes that analyst Gus Richard told them this month that Intel could be an option as they have been aggressively seeking more business with Apple

[Via CNet]

An Analysis Of Apple’s Adjustment Of International App Store Prices

UPDATED: Included a discussion on various sales taxes to clarify some of sections of the analysis, also corrected a mistake regarding Denmark prices.

For those of you who aren’t located in the United States, Wednesday’s news of Apple re-adjusting their prices in the App Store for international stores might have been pretty big news. For many the headline was welcome news, indeed when I woke up Thursday morning and saw they had finally re-calibrated the iTunes ‘exchange-rate’ I was pretty happy about it. We first discussed the great disparity in global iTunes prices back in January and I was pleased to see Apple eventually act and restore some fairness for international consumers.

Unfortunately I soon figured out it wasn’t all good news; Apple had only adjusted the iTunes ‘exchange-rate’ for apps. For their other stores such as for music, movies, TV shows and books the prices remained unchanged. Nonetheless I have revisited my January analysis, updating that data and doing some further analysis of what the price changes actually bring, what it means for individual countries and who is better or worse off.

Read more

Apple May Bring Back ‘Tech Talk World Tour’ for iOS 5 and iCloud

It’s been a while since Apple’s embarked on a ‘Tech Talk World Tour’, aimed at providing developers with additional sessions, presentations, and the opportunity to ask Apple engineers questions related to development. Macotakara via AppleInsider suggests that Apple may bring the program back online this year, offering additional seats for students at event locations, focusing on iOS 5 and iCloud integration.

The Tech Talk World Tours offer developers a more intimate setting and a second chance to meet engineers at Apple if they’re unable to attend the WWDC event — while Apple’s tours aren’t too extensive, they do try to hit major tech hubs in hopes of reaching out to the largest portions of the iOS developer base. Previous hotspots have been various cities including Seattle, Austin, and New York City. Apple previously ran the developer events in 2008 and 2009 as the iPhone saw a surge in development — new and groundbreaking technologies in iOS 5 would give Apple plenty of reasons to revisit the Tech Talk World Tours. The events would be likely held between October and December.

[Macotakara via AppleInsider]

Nuance Releases Another iOS App, Dragon Go! with Intelligent Voice Search

Voice-powered search has become increasingly popular in recent years as more and more people purchase smartphones such as the iPhone or an Android device. Google has extensive voice-integration on Android and similarly has iOS Apps that include the ability to search by voice commands, others such as Microsoft with Bing, Nuance and Siri have done similar things. Furthering their previous efforts, Nuance yesterday released a new app, Dragon Go!, that combines Nuance’s top-notch voice recognition with the intelligence to do what is actually being said.

It plugs into various services from the typical Google Search to Pandora, Fandango, Wikipedia, Yelp, IMDB and many more – in fact at launch the app supports more than 180 options. Consequently saying, “What’s the weather like?” will pull data from AccuWeather, whereas saying “Super 8 showtimes” will direct you to Fandango.

Not only does Dragon Go! hear what people are searching for, but it understands what they want, giving them direct access to relevant results from 180 of the most trusted and reliable content providers, including AccuWeather, Bing, ESPN, Facebook, Fandango, iTunes, Last.fm, LiveNation, Milo.com, OpenTable, Pandora ® internet radio, Rotten Tomatoes, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yelp, YouTube, Yahoo! and many others – with the list of content providers growing each day

Dragon Go also integrates with the iPhone so that if you say “Play Coldplay” you can play music straight from your device, similarly it will integrate with the Phone app, the Maps app and more. This is now Nuance’s fourth iOS app, and it complements their Dragon Dictation app and the more tradition Dragon Search app. Earlier this year there had been a number of rumors that Apple was set to do a deal with Nuance to integrate a service similar to what this app offers, but at the base iOS level. Dragon Go! is available for free in the US App Store.

[Via AllThingsD]
Read more

Adobe Releases Flash 11 And Air 3 Betas

Adobe yesterday made betas builds available for Flash 11 and Air 3, which tout some fairly significant improvements and feature additions. Perhaps the most interesting is the inclusion of Stage3D APIs (codenamed “Molehill”) which are a set of low-level, GPU accelerated 3D APIs that can enable high performance rendering of advanced 3D scenes. Adobe, in conjunction with Frima Studios has put together a demo of what this can achieve – we’ve embedded it past the break.

The inclusion of native support for 64-bit operating systems and browsers is also welcome news for performance and works on Windows, Mac and Linux in the new versions of Flash and Air. The last point of note is the inclusion of H.264/AVC software encoding for cameras, this will allow higher quality real-time communications from within Flash player.

Jump the break for that demonstration video of Stage3D as well as a full list of improvements in Flash 11 and Air 3. You can download the beta builds of Flash 11 here and Adobe Air 3 here.

[Via 9to5 Mac]

Read more

App Store Volume Purchasing Program Coming To Businesses Soon

In an email to developers, Apple has revealed that it is implementing an App Store Volume Purchasing Program (ASVPP) for Businesses, following a similar system that has existed for educational institutions. This system, which Apple claims is “coming soon” will vastly simplify the process in which businesses can offer their employees the apps they need. The program will initially be US-only and will require a valid Dun & Bradstreet Number (D-U-N-S) and a valid physical address.

Once enrolled, the ASVPP can be accessed from the Apple website. This website is where businesses can purchase their apps in volume. The following screenshots highlight the process of doing so, which includes: searching for the app, setting the quantity and completing the transaction with either a corporate credit card, PCard or PayPal.

All volume purchases will result in an email from Apple and they are then added to a particular institutions purchase history which is located on the ASVPP website. Once purchased, an institution gets a redemption code for each app.

The program website delivers these redemption codes in a spreadsheet format that contains multiple codes, one for each app in the quantity purchased. Each time a code is redeemed, the spreadsheet is updated on the program website so you can track the number of codes that have been redeemed by your users.

Apple offers three ways in which institutions can quickly and easily distribute the app to their employees/users. The first is just a simple redemption URL which includes redemption code so that users do need to manually enter it into iTunes. Secondly they suggest posting the codes or URLs to a company portal or intranet page. The third option is to use a “third-party Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution” which offers an easily manageable system of centrally managing and distributing the apps.

Read more

Apple Updates Prices Of International iTunes Stores

As we reported earlier today, the downtime of the iTunes Store last night and iTunes Connect today seems to be bringing along some interesting price changes for apps and other material available in the iTunes Store worldwide. Whilst we’re still examining the changes (which are rolling out as we speak), we’re getting the first reports of increased prices in the UK for apps (from £0.59 to £0.69 for apps sold at $0.99 in the United States) and lower prices in the Australian iTunes Store. The change for UK customers is a rather important one, raising prices for “cheap apps” – it’ll be interesting to notice how this will affect sales, as writer Craig Grannel points out.

Read more

iTunes Connect Maintenance Could Mean Apple Is Eventually Recalibrating International iTunes Prices

We reported earlier today on news that Apple is preparing to undertake maintenance work on iTunes Connect today from 9am to 4pm PDT. Although we cannot confirm anything, we think there is (strong) reason to believe that this maintenance is being undertaken to rebalance iTunes prices internationally which over the past year have (to be quite honest) spiralled out of control. The above diagram illustrates this fact quite clearly and it also exists for Apps and other iTunes content. Yes, that’s right, there is an 81% surcharge for an Australian buying the same song as an American and those in Switzerland have to pay more than double at a 105% surcharge.

My thinking of this occurring started last Friday when Australian politician, Ed Husic, tweeted that Apple will “be getting back to me in mid July” regarding issues he had raised about (Australian) Apple pricing in Federal Parliament back in March. Now whilst he did (mostly) focus on hardware disparities in his speech, I still felt (on Friday) that Apple’s response could be about “re-calibrating” the iTunes ‘exchange-rate’ - mostly because the Australian dollar has been sitting around US$1.03 whereas the iTunes ‘exchange-rate’ expects it to average at US$0.60.

Fast-forward to today’s news that iTunes Connect is facing maintenance. If you read the notice, it makes it clear that something is happening to the price mechanism, as the letter reads: “pricing changes made between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. PDT will cause the app to become unavailable for purchase until maintenance is complete”.

Whilst that alone doesn’t suggest much, the fact that the notice explicitly mentions that customers may not be able to purchase content from iTunes if in Mexico, U.K., Australia, Switzerland, Japan or Norway really stood out to me. Because (with the exception of Mexico), those mentioned are (mostly) the worst affected regions of the iTunes price disparity - just look at the above or below graphs. Whilst Mexico is the opposite, they have actually been able to purchase content at cheaper than US customers.

To be absolutely clear, I re-iterate that we have no inside knowledge that this is the definite reason for the maintenance today. But the dots (if you will) just all connect: disparity has gotten ridiculous, Ed Husic’s tweet, it being mid-July, the affected portions of iTunes Connect and the regions affected. Nonetheless if by the end of today there isn’t a change, I think it’s still safe to say that Apple will inevitably act and I think that will be sooner than later.

You can read more about this global iTunes price disparity in this article we published in January.

Mac Mini And MacBook To Receive A Refresh In The Very Near Future?

Clarifying a report from two days ago, 9to5 Mac is today claiming that the part numbers posted are not for new Mac Pros but rather refreshed MacBook and Mac Mini models. They still believe that the MacBook Air part numbers are correct. They think it is likely that these new models will be launched soon and the Mac Pro to follow in a few more weeks time.

The “MC914LL/A – J59, BEST – USA” part number is presumed to be for the refreshed MacBook with what one can only assume would come with a Thunderbolt port and a spec bump.

Meanwhile, the following three part numbers are thought to be for refreshed Mac Mini models with similar improvements to that expected of the MacBook and MacBook Air. One being a standard configuration, another being the server version and a third which is likely for the built-to-order Mac Mini.

MC936LL/A – J40, ULTIMATE – USA – Mac mini Server

MC815LL/A – J40I, BETTER – USA – Mac mini standard configuration

MC816LL/A – J40, BEST – USA Faster Mac mini (likely BTO)

[Via 9to5 Mac]