Apple just released its third quarter earnings. Here is a quick summary:

• Revenue: $15.7 Billion (record)
• Profit: $3.25 billion ($3.51/share)
• Margin: 39.1% (vs 40.9% last year)

International sales accounted for 52% of revenue

Sales:

• Macs: 3.47 million
• iPods: 9.41 million
• iPhones: 8.4 million
• iPads: 3.27 million

Here is the official press release:

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday Silicon Alley Insider reported that Palm had a chance to be acquired by Apple, but eventually HP’s bid was higher. Referring to an anonymous source that was familiar with the negotiations, author Dan Frommer wrote:

“Apple was mostly interested in Palm’s huge library of intellectual property and patents (450+ patents on file, another 400+ applications on file). And unlike some other bidders, Apple even seemed committed to funding Palm’s operations, perhaps to challenge RIM’s dominance in the keyboarded segment of the smartphone industry, our source says.”

It is reported that Google also wanted to purchase Palm to spite Apple, but the company didn’t know whether Apple was actually bidding for Palm, so no moves were made in that direction.

Eventually HP acquired Palm and now has plans to use its webOS in company’s future tablet devices that will compete with Apple’s iPad.

Mashable reports about new Chinese iPad clone and this time it’s called very originally -- the iPed. Its price is only $105, and it runs Android OS. With Intel chip, 16 GB of storage space and 128 MB of RAM the iPed is available only in China. Let’s watch this cute video with people describing the device on a Chinese language:

Apple released information on self-publishing for those authors who would like to sell their writings in iBookStore.

So the works must adhere to these criteria:
Read the rest of this entry »

Several web-resources including Gizmodo and TechCrunch confirmed that HP stops working on its “HP Slate” tablet device. The decision is caused by this week’s deal that will end soon with acquiring Palm. Now Hewlett-Packard is rumored to integrate Palm’s WebOS instead Microsoft WIndows in their tablet (which can take a year or more) and reconsider using Intel-based hardware in it because of its excessive power requirements.

So now it looks like HP changes it course and is going to convert webOS to a tablet OS and compete with Google’s Android and Chrome on the market of operational systems.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has also cancelled working on its own booklet-style tablet device called “Courier”. Gizmodo sources say the project will be no longer supported. Anyway, the device had never been publicly announced, though it could be very interesting with its two touch-sensitive screens in a foldable format and handwriting recognition input.

Yesterday Apple closed a deal of acquiring Intrisity, a small company in Austin, Texas, that specializes on mobile computer chips producing.

This is a second time for the last two years when Apple buys a small chip company to have the facilities for making fast and power efficient processors. In 2008 Apple purchased P.A. Semi for $278 million, but with the lapse of time many chip maker employees had left company because of inadequate compensation (by the way, some of them are now in Agnilux, another company that was recently acquired by Google).

Well-known chip analyst Tom R. Halfhill has information from his sources that Apple paid $121 million for Intrinsity, but company’s representative Steve Dowling didn’t comment on this information.

Such a deal isn’t expensive for Apple at all, thinks Tom Halfhill:

“The purchase price is like pocket change to Apple, and they get a lot of benefit”.

It is widely speculated that iPad’s A4 chip is based on Intrinsity technology that improved its processing power from 650 MHz to 1 GHz without increasing the battery consumption. With acquiring this chip making company Apple will be able to increase that 350 MHz by itself. Moreover, the company seems to be looking forward for creating its own version of ARM chip. Some other companies like Qualcomm, Marvell and Nvidia had the same experience and spent millions of dollars to gain a satisfactory result.

It is interesting that rumors about this deal started when some people saw that a significant number of Intrinsity employees changed their employer section to Apple in LinkedIn.

Also Apple’s desire to create its own mobile chip contradicts to its strategy of purchasing Intel chips for computers.

Dan Primack from Pehub.com reported yesterday that Google acquired Agnilux. The latter is a startup company in San-Jose comprised of former Apple, P.A. Semi, Cisco and TiVo employees. It is intriguing that there almost no public information about the reasons why Google bought it and what Agnilux has recently been working on. One of the Google representatives confirmed the information but didn’t comment it on.

Agnilux’s website is currently unavailable, so we have no information about the company. But because of former P.A. Semi employees it seems like Agnilux may be working on a new chip that can be a rival to Qualcomm’s SnapDragon or Apple’s A4 SoCs. But, according to an investigation made by New York Times in February, one of the employees named Mark Hayter said:

“We want to make a splash. We don’t want our manufacturer to take our intellectual property before we’re ready”.

So it looks like the company’s main purpose in kept in a big secret. But it is known that later NYT heard from another Agnilux employee that the company is working on server and has a partnership with Cisco. Well that might be interesting to Google whose thousands of servers till this moment have been made by the company’s engineers but not purchased.

According to the sources from Apple Insider, AMD representatives have been seen recently on the meeting with Apple’s top brass. The discussion was about the possible partnership between these two organizations as Apple looking forward in bringing AMD’s CPUs to workstations and notebooks. The main reason for changing its main processor supplier is probably the try to increase the flexibility and competitive options of Cupertino’s company. Another explanation is problems, that were encountered with Intel recently (they include limited availability of recently produced processors and new chipset designs that don’t allow using any video chips except its integrated graphics chip).
Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Rand is not a well-known person, but it was he who created logos for such famous companies like ABC Television, UPS, IBM and NeXT. He didn’t actually design any of the logos for Apple, but he was chosen to be portrayed with an Apple logo for a print ad.

In 1993 Steve Jobs gave an interview to Alan Pottasch and Doug Evans. That was a time when he was a chief executive officer of NeXT and concentrated on porting their NeXTSTEP OS for x86 processors. That year Apple changed the guard from J. Sculley to M. Spindler.

At that interview Jobs spoke much about Rand as of an artist who became a “gem” for the company. He also says:

“When you scratch the surface of any of his work, you find out the depth of the intellectual problem solving that’s taken place.”

His speech reflects the ideal of current Apple’s products. It is not only the hardware design that attracts people, it is also a software and the forseen interaction beneath it.

California-based company MicroUnity System Engineering filed a lawsuit against Apple, Acer, HTC, LG, Google, Nokia, Motorola, Palm, Samsung, Spring, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and AT&T. It accuses these companies in infringement of 14(!) separate patents about mobile processors.

The lawsuit was filed few days ago in a District Court in the Eastern District of Texas, a place where patent complaints are filed commonly in hopes to get a favorable outcome. The devices named in the document are iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch (32 Gb and 64 Gb versions), Motorola Droid, Google Nexus One, Palm Pre and Nokia N900.

The patents that were named in the suit are listed below:

Read the rest of this entry »

It seem like Apple have always been concentrated on Macs and iPhones/iPods/iPads, so their Apple TV product may be considered more like a hobby. But the company’s main rival thinks of  it as of another field to work on.

Intel, Sony and Google created a team to work on the device called GoogleTV. The latter already has its prototype. The New York Times says it consists of Intel’s Atom processor and Android OS with Chrome web-browser. The project has been under development for a few months and there is still a work to do, but preliminary the device will be introduced this summer. To test their set-top box Google cooperates with Dish Network.

The NYT’s source say:

“Google wants to be everywhere the Internet is so they can put ads there.”

It sounds plausible, because GoogleTV device is planned to allow users to browse the Internet, watch YouTube videos, check out Hulu content and even run Web apps and games.

There are so many iPhone 4G concepts created by different our users. Some show futuristic devices that are hard to create, while others are closer to reality.

Today we have an interesting concept designed by Francesco Maisano. It shows iPhone with more rounded design than the current one. We can also see some implementation of the future Firmware 4.0 – a special SpringBoard with Widgets for weather, calendar and clock. As for hardware there is a front camera, a flash for main camera, an intelligent Home button and much more. Take a look:

Analyst Ashok Kumar of Northeast Securities shared his ideas about the future Apple Tablet device. Kumar said the tablet processor will be manufactured by Samsung and will be based on the Cortex-A8 ARM architecture with a speed of about 1GHz. There are also rumors that the tablet, along with the next generation iPhone, would be based on ARM’s new Cortex-A9 architecture with two or four cores.

Also this week, Jeffrey Fidacaro of Susquehanna Financial provided a projection of how much the internal components of Apple’s tablet might cost without even knowing for sure what they are. The analyst assumes the device will run on an Intel Atom processor, would include 2GB of DRAM, and sport a 3.2 megapixel camera. If Apple went with an ARM-based processor, Fidacaro said, the tablet’s cost could be reduced by as much as $50. If Apple will use a 128GB SSD, the price will be increased by several hundred dollars. Here is a quick list:

Many users are unable to sync their iPhones on PCs equipped with Windows 7 and Intel P55 Express chipset. Gigabyte is the first company who fixed this issue. They’ve released a beta BIOS that addresses the problem. Asus and MSI, which also use the P55 express on their motherboards, haven’t issued any updates yet, but hopefully will soon.

Microsoft Windows 7 will probably be a very popular OS. iPhone is already one of the most popular phones. So compatibility between the two is expected, right? Well, many users report in Apple forums that they get “error 0xE8000065″ message whenever they attempts to sync. The problems might be in Intel P55 Express chipset’s USB controller. We hope that either Intel or Microsoft will find a solution.