Posts tagged with "apple"

Market Share Research Reveals That The Swiss Love Their Macs

The Pingdom blog did a little statistical research using Statcounter to figure out which countries had the highest percentage of Macs and found that Switzerland topped that list with 17.61% market share. Meanwhile Luxembourg, USA, and Iceland were also countries with high Mac market share, all above 15%.

The UK was notably missing from the top 10 whilst as a region, Asia only had an average of 1.61% of market share – a very low figure, but one Apple is likely trying to increase with a recent push into that market with its retail stores. As for the region with the lowest Mac market share, Asia comes close but it is in fact South America, which has only 1.08% market share of Macs.

[Via TUAW]

AT&T Cracking Down On Unauthorised Tethering

Update: In the email AT&T do explicitly sate that if users do not contact AT&T or stop tethering, they will “automatically enroll you into DataPro 4GB after March 27, 2011”, if the user stops then no change will occur. It would seem that to be automatically upgrading/changing users contract plans, AT&T should have a fairly fool-proof method of checking which users are tethering compared to those just using large amounts of data.

Numerous AT&T users who use MyWi, a jailbreak tweak that allows you to enable tethering without a subscription, yesterday began receiving text messages and emails from AT&T reminding the users that to use your phone for tethering requires a subscription to an AT&T tethering plan.

The notices for most began with a text message that said:

AT&T Free Msg: Did you know tethering your Smartphone to a computer requires a tethering plan? Pls call 888-860-6789 for details or visit att.com/dataplans.

Following this text message many users also received an email (included after the break) which told the user that to “take advantage of [tethering], we require that in addition to a data plan, you also have a tethering plan.” The email also said if the user wishes to continue tethering to sign up to a tethering plan – but did not specify any consequences for continuing to use MyWi without purchasing such a plan.

At this point it is unclear how AT&T knows which users to issue the notices, the presumption is that the notices are going out to any user that uses a large amount of data (some are saying more than 10GB) and are not subscribed to a tethering plan.

Read more

Report Finds Mac App Store Is Dominated By Paid Apps

According to a market research report by Distimo, Apple’s Mac App Store is adding applications at a less frequent rate than the iOS App Store and a much larger of those in the Mac App Store are paid apps. The report tracked data from a variety of ‘app stores ‘ from the iOS App Store, Android Market, Windows Phone 7 Marketplace and more as well as the Mac App Store – which was the only ‘app store’ for computers it tracked.

As the above graph demonstrates, the Mac App Store is very small in comparison to the other App Stores surveyed at this point in time, however more interestingly is that a whopping 88% of apps in the Mac App Store are paid apps, leaving only a slither of 12% being free. Prices are also on average much higher with the average selling price of a paid app in the top 300 applications being $11.21 on the Mac App Store whilst only being $4.19 for the iPad and $1.57 on the iPhone/iPod Touch App Store.

Read more

Kickstarter Project - Hanfree: A Handsfree iPad Stand

We’re spotlighting yet another Kickstarter project. Why? Because we love to see handy, unique creations come to life. This one is an iPad accessory called the Hanfree. It makes the iPad handsfree, thus the name, for anytime you’re in bed, sitting down on your couch, in the kitchen using a cooking app, or anywhere you can find a place to use it; all without holding the device on your lap or in your hands.

Video after break. Read more

The New York Times Will Use Apple’s iOS Subscriptions

With the June 30 deadline approaching for publishers willing to implement recurring subscriptions in their iOS apps, Apple just got the first big name on board with the new iTunes subscription system: the New York Times will comply to Apple’s terms and offer in-app subscriptions by June 30 to give iPhone and iPad users to subscribe to the NYT with the one-click option touted by Apple.

As reported by All Things Digital, the New York Times decided to play Apple’s game rather than pull their iOS apps from the App Store. The New York Times will give 30% of revenue from subscriptions away to Apple, and give up on customers’ data as Apple’s subscriptions are based on opt-in sharing of personal info with the publisher. Read more

2011 MacBook Pro Users Having Issues With iTunes Home Sharing

A support thread in Apple’s Discussion forums is abuzz with 2011 MacBook Pro owners having issues with iTunes Home Sharing. The users are having issues connecting to certain iOS devices as well as having devices disconnect and display error messages.

The user who started the discussion thread; ‘themacbear’, reported that his new 17 inch MacBook Pro initially seemed to work fine using Home Sharing with his Apple TV. However later on in the day “…although the Apple TV could see the name of my iTunes library, it wouldn’t connect to it, or sometimes, would report that “There are no movies in this library”. I tried every solution I could think of, but no dice.” He went to an Apple Store, which managed to replicate the issue on a different MacBook Pro, but couldn’t resolve the problem and consequently gave ‘themacbear’ a full refund. Others too have contacted Apple through their retail stores and via phone support but so far there is no fix for the problem.

Apple recently beefed up its Home Sharing features with iOS 4.3 and iTunes 10.2 and it could be that the issues these users are facing are related to these updates. Furthermore there are also some users with older Mac’s also having similar issues, although this seems to be a more isolated group of users.

[Via AppleInsider]

New “If You Don’t Have An iPhone” Ads Feature Apple’s Three E-Commerce Stores

Apple has today added three new adverts for the iPhone to their website and YouTube which have the general theme of “If you don’t have an iPhone” and what you miss out on. The three specific features that the ad’s highlight are the App Store, iPod + iTunes and iBooks which highlight Apple’s strong integration between the iPhone and their three e-commerce stores.

Jump the break to watch the three 30 second ad’s which also all finish with the “Yup, if you don’t have an iPhone, well, you don’t have an iPhone.” phrase - which in typical Apple style is a little self-congratulatory (which you either like or dislike).

Read more

WordPress for iOS Updated, Quashes Bugs and Improves UI

The WordPress iPhone and iPad app just got updated to version 2.7 and it’s a big bug-quashing update that supposedly fixes 117 bugs to vastly improve performance and reduce crashes.

UI has also been retooled with the ‘Post Editor’ interface improved to “make it easier to write and edit posts and pages” with quick access to edit post settings, view attachments and add media. Finally multiple attatchments can be added simultaneously, you can use the “pull down to refresh” feature to quickly update comments, posts and page lists and email and URLs left in comments are now able to be clicked on.

[Via WordPress Blog]

The Daily Launching in the UK by June 2011

Are you iPad owners still using the over-hyped and very criticized iPad newspaper, The Daily? Well, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is going to launch The Daily in the UK by June 2011. You can read MacStories’ thoughts on The Daily here.

Jonathan Miller, the chief digital officer at News Corporation, said “Western Europe is up first in not too long from now,” saying that a launch will be in the first half of 2011.

The European version of The Daily is dependant on the geographical roll-out of Apple’s subscription model, which is only US based right now.

Mr. Miller said that charging for The Daily in the US will begin next week. “We will charge for it but we haven’t started yet. We have our beginning moment of truth next week when we start to ask people to get out their wallets,” he said.

The Daily, which will be begin charging next week in the US, is aimed at a younger, mobile audience. He added that there are hundreds of thousands of people reading The Daily, I think that number will drop significantly once the trial period ends this week.

It does skew younger. If you follow what’s happening with news consumption around the world, it’s aging. And younger people as a generalisation are not consuming news at least in the ways they used to. So we want to make a product that has broad appeal and that means it has liveliness to it, its very graphic and is very pictoral - a lot of video on it, all media in the same place. It is skewing much younger than newspapers.

For anyone that doesn’t already know, The Daily brings users more than 100 pages of daily content, including news, opinion and sports. It also has video, 360 degree photography, 3D technology, interactive charts and read-later functionality all built into the app. If you’re interested in checking it out or subscribing, here’s a direct link.

[via The Telegraph]