According to Zol.com.cn, which is a Chinese news site owned by CBS, Apple is going to assign 1-2% of its product profits to Foxconn workers.
As we wrote before, Apple decided to investigate the case about suicides at Foxconn plant, and recently found out that employees become unhappy because of low wages. The company sees the way of solving the problem in increasing wages for workers. The additional money will come directly from the profits of those of the products that are assembled there.
Workers who take part in the production of iPad will be first to receive the increased pay. Report reveals that currently Foxconn receives 2.3% of the iPad's total price.
Earlier Foxconn also claimed about its decision to give 20% more wage for its workers.
It is known, that entry-level employees who work at the factory in Longhua receive only $131,80 per month of work. To earn more, they usually sign special "voluntary overtime affidavits".
In his fifth appearance at D: All Things Digital, Steve Jobs speaks with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher about his well-known issues with Flash. Let's watch:
MacStories reader Nik Treiber has found out an interesting feature in the latest iPhone OS 4.0 beta 4. When you push the on/off button three times in a row while in the lockscreen, the iPhone goes in Flashlight mode. We aren't sure if this is a feature or bug, but it certainly would be quite useful.
Here's a new nice and easy tutorial from CNet specialists. Today they will teach us how to turn an iPad into a second monitor for our Mac. Let's watch:
By now you all have seen the iPhone 4G prototype and several photos from Gizmodo and Vietnam. Here is a new video that shows an aluminum cover of future iDevice:
As you can see the central body is different from that of iPhone 3G/3GS. We have to wait another week to know the whole truth. The iPhone 4G (iPhone HD) is expected to be announced on June 7th during Apple WWDC conference.
According to new MobileTech World report, Microsoft had presented its new goal at ReMIX event in France. The company wants to sell 30 million devices with Windows Phone 7 OS by the end of 2011.
Garter revealed that Microsoft had only 16,5 million mobile devices sold in 2008, though later Steve Ballmer claimed there were 20 million. That same year Apple exceeded its goal with 11,4 million iPhones. At the beginning of 2010 it was only 8,8 million iPhones and 3,7 million Windows Mobile phones sold.
It is also known that Microsoft will present its Windows Phone 7 (which is incompatible with previous Windows Mobile OS) in the end of this year, which means the company will have a year to gain its goal. Currently the company has no library of apps, no really installed base of users and only two retail stores.
An open letter was revealed these days by a big group of Chinese sociologists, where it is said that Foxconn employees continue to commit suicides because of a situation with China's migrant workforce. The latter has tremendously increased recently, and such workers are often isolated from their family and friends and instead of looking for good jobs they work and get paid too poorly to settle in new cities. Moreover, they have a limited access to healthcare and education.
"We have made them live a migrancy life that is rootless and helpless, where families are separated, parents have no one to support them, and children are not taken care of. In short, this is a life without dignity."
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:
MuscleNerd from the iPhone Dev-Team announced via twitter that an unlock for iPhone 3GS with 05.12.01 baseband from iPhone firmware 3.1.3 will be released soon:
@MuscleNerd will there be a unlock software coming out for the 3gs 3.1.3 baseband 05.12.01 when the new iPhone 4g comes out??
@EmmanueGT yep..so don't sell or give away your 3GS (at same time, remember not to accept Apple FW upgrades in future)
RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky believes that approximately 600-700 thousands of iPads will be sold in June overseas. If he's right then the iPad will definitely become more popular that Mac as only 500,000 Macs will be reportedly sold in June. Read the rest of this entry »