Archive for June 15th, 2011

An interesting report from Asymco estimates that it costs Apple $1.3 billion per year to run the iTunes store.

Asymco analyzed recently announced numbers like the total number of songs, movies, TV shows, apps, download rate, iTunes accounts and how much Apple has paid out to developers. They put these numbers in a complex formula and estimated that Apple's monthly content margin cost for iTunes at $113 million, which is more than $1.3 billion per year.

That's a lot. It looks like all the iTunes profits go right back into its maintenance and expansion.

Some time ago several high resolution images were found in iPad iBooks app. The resolution was twice the size of the iPad screen 1024x768. This resulted in rumors that iPad 2 would have retina display and the same double pixel strategy used in the iPhone 4. While iPad 2 was released with the same screen resolution of 1024x768 new evidence of retina iPad was recently found.

iPhone developer @Frankrockz found iPad Retina Display sized graphics hidden in the Twitter frameworks of the iOS 5 beta firmware.

As I was going through the iOS SDK I came across some images in the new Twitter .framework. The resolution appears to be 1,536 x 2,048.

This means that iPad 3 might eventually get retina display. Well, we shall see.

Nokia announced that it had entered into agreement with Apple, and now the prolonged legal argument between two corporations is coming to an end with two parties withdrawing their complaints to the International Trade Commission.

A press release that announced the signed patent license agreement was issued by Nokia early Tuesday. Agreement stipulates that Apple have to make a one-time payment to Nokia as well as ongoing royalties. But exact details of the agreement are kept in secret. The statement also reads that Nokia has put about 43 billion EUR into research and development in the course of last 20 years, creating a patent portfolio that consists of  10,000 patent families.

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It is surprising how good the first beta version of iOS 5 is, but if for any reason you need to go back to iOS 4.3.3, we’ll show you how. There are at least two ways to do that:

Downgrade via XCode (Mac Only + dev license)

This is the easiest way to get back to a previous version of iOS. The bad part is that it can sometimes put you into a never ending DFU loop. You can typically use iRecovery to kick you out of it.

1. Download the iOS 4.3.3 here (it is better to use Firefox).

2. Open XCode and from the top select Window and then Organizer.

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