Archive for June 5th, 2011

The first ‘authorized’ biography of Jobs by Walter Isaacson is now available for pre-order from Amazon for $19.80 in paper, or $14.99 for the Kindle edition. Curiously iSteve: The Book of Jobs will be released on March 6th, 2012, the fourth anniversary of the release of the iOS SDK. The description of the book from Amazon provides:

From bestselling author Walter Isaacson comes the landmark biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. In iSteve: The Book of Jobs, Isaacson provides an extraordinary account of Jobs’ professional and personal life. Drawn from three years of exclusive and unprecedented interviews Isaacson has conducted with Jobs as well as extensive interviews with Jobs’ family members, key colleagues from Apple and its competitors, iSteve is the definitive portrait of the greatest innovator of his generation.

According to Apple’s schedule, next versions of its Mac OS X were revealed every summer. So the next version of OS X, Lion, was also scheduled for a summer 2011, but, as usual, the exact date was not specify. 9to5 Mac today claims that it got some portion of information from several sources that suggests Lion will launch on Tuesday, June 14th.

Apple is said to be planning one of their product launch-indicative “visual updates” for the morning of Tuesday, June 14th

Moreover, the retail supplies of Snow Leopard are dwindling, solidifying the possibility of a mid-June launch of Lion. The report also suggests that the release of Mac OS X Lion will be beginning of reduced software presence within Apple stores, starting with the possible removal of Snow Leopard.

MacRumors recently found out that iTunes is now showing a new sentence on the My App Updates page: “Or if your device has Automatic Download enabled for apps, your updates will download to your device without having to sync.” So we may suppose that iOS 5 will have a new option that will automatically grab applications updates to your iOS device. Now you have to sync or download updates yourself through the App Store application. Though, the new   “Automatic Download” function may be available not only for iOS applications. But recent updates show that Apple has already removed that message from the iTunes, killing the service completely.

Apple could not achieve such success without its 324 retail stores, employing 30, 000 employees. Though it is not easy to become Apple’s employee, but it is worth it. Apple pays its employees much more than its competitors. For example, Geniuses on average make $18 dollars an hour, with the helpful blue shirts earning around $16 dollars an hour as they guide customers to new products, show them how to use services, and make sales. So it is clearly that Apple’s employees are highly motivated and expected to work hard and sell the Apple experience. Not surprisingly that in the first two fiscal quarters for 2011, Apple’s retail division has already earned $7.04 billion in revenue of Apple’s $51.41 billion. Apple’s retail stores offer a level of convenience and friendliness that big retail chains just can’t match.

Apple reportedly could release new versions of Time Capsule next week, during WWDC. Rumors claim that Time Capsule will receive some important updates: the Time Capsule would recognize known devices on a network, check for software updates available, download them in the background, and later seed them to all devices in a few seconds without having to wait for a download process. Such process would allow users to store content on iCloud. The new Time Capsule is said to run the A4 or A5 processors, just like the second-generation of Apple TV, and iOS operating  system.

Such Time Capsule that will run iOS and be capable of caching content for other devices, will allow iPhones and iPads to connect to iCloud, as well as will increase streaming speed and overall quality of media content. iOS-based Time Capsule could also be used for a broader set of functionalities such as serving content to Apple TVs or enabling additional options in Lion’s.