Last year at least 11 fifteen-year-old children were working in 3 factories that supply Apple. They are situated in China, but Apple also has factories situated in Taiwan, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Czech Republic, Thailand and of course United States.

Cupertino's company claims children are no longer used for work or at least they are no longer underage:

"In each of the three facilities, we required a review of all employment records for the year as well as a complete analysis of the hiring process to clarify how underage people had been able to gain employment".

This is a citation from Cupertino's Supplier Responsibility 2010 Progress Report. After studying of it we summed up a whole bunch of interesting facts...

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After the unveiling of iPad in January most of us understood that it looks like enlarged iPod Touch. French web-resourse Begeek.fr decided to think about what should we expect from Apple in the next years,  so look what they concocted:

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Yesterday the Associated Press announced plans to create a new unit named "AP Gateway". It will focus on creating an application for mobile platforms and particularly for iPad tablet device.

It is likely that their app will require a paid subscription, but at first it may appear as free, according to AP senior vice president Jane Seagrave.

AP Gateway will work with local news affiliates to create package of their own content.

Other publishers are still expressing concern over the profit that will be shared with Apple and the latter's unwillingness to report information about subscribers (which is important for marketing and tailoring publisher's content).

Since only one month remains to iPad's launch, such hardware manufacturers as SDI Technologies, Gelaskins Inc., Sanho Corp. and Griffin Technology gear up their production of chargers, sticker covers and other accessories for a new device. And it is not surprising - according to Poper Jaffray & Co, overall sales of iPod and iPhone accessories in 2009 were about $3.7 billion.

But while these companies want to release their products as soon as possible, some other accessory manufacturers are taking a wait-and-see approach. Jonathan von Rentzell, a representative for Blue Microphones commented on this:

"If you're making it for a product, you want to make sure there's a market."

Steve Jobs already showed 2 key accessories for the iPad - a case and a keyboard dock with charging function. Both of them are created by Apple and will be sold separately with iPad.

Grooveshark is a web app that allows you to listen to music on-demand through the Internet without any charge (it requires only a Grooveshark VIP subscription for $3/month). The song can be chosen from the gigantic 7-million song catalog.

Grooveshark creators claim it supposed to be released in App Store but it wasn't because Apple has been "ritually rejecting" the app for "primarily selfish reasons". TechCrunch reports there were spent months of waiting for Apple approval. After Grooveshark's patience gave out they decided to release its iPhone application via Cydia.

From now on you can download it from the Big Boss Cydia Repository.

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What firmware version do you expect Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, to use on his iPhone? Probably something like 3.2 beta or 4.0 beta with many new unannounced features.

Mike from Macsoda got a response from Steve Jobs to his email wondering about the future of Final Cut Pro (40 Final Cut Pro developers were recently let go). Typically brief, Steve Jobs said:

No worries. FCP is alive and well.
Sent from my iPhone

Now let's look at the header information from the email as well:

The email looks legit as it originates from an internal Apple 17.x.x.x IP address. Here is an interesting part: Steve Jobs iPhone is listed as iPhone Mail (7D11) which means he's using firmware 3.1.2. That's not even the current version of the iPhone OS (3.1.3 - 7E18), let alone the 4.0 Beta we're were hoping to see.

Apple has been granted a patent relating to the iPhone's IM Chat. Apple's invention relates generally to a user interface for displaying an exchange of messages during an instant messaging session, and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for displaying instant message exchanges in a manner that graphically differentiates the participants in a conversation.

The patent number is 7,669,134, originally filed in Q2 2003. For more information, read this patent.

Flash might be quite power consumptive. Adobe posted a video through its blog where the new version 10.1 refutes all previous data.

The phone plays a video on YouTube for 17 minutes. After that the battery has fallen by 6%. So the battery provides several hours of video playback via the FlashPlayer and this new data is not bad.

Patently Apple reports that Apple filed for the 'magic trackpad' trademark. US Patent & Trademark Office published application on February 26, 2010. 'Magic Trackpad' likely refers to an external peripheral device for desktop computers or laptops plugged into external displays. There has been speculation about some sort of multi-touch "trackpad gadget" from Apple. Maybe Apple will provide desktop users a way to take advantage of some external multi-touch system.

The application requests registration in International Class 009 under a number of categories relating to computer hardware and software, as well as several types of peripheral devices:

International Class 009: Computers; computer software; computer operating system software; computer utility software; computer hardware; computer peripherals; scanners; touchscreens; keyboards; computer mice; trackballs; trackpads; touchpads; light pens; joysticks; game controllers; graphics tablets; digitizers; cables and connectors; flash memory drives; USB drives; solid state storage devices; barcode readers.

The number of jailbreak utilities for iPhones and iPod Touches with the latest iBoot is dramatically increasing. All of them are FAKE. Some of them will fill your computer with viruses, which is not good.

gull1hack, spartanbr3ak, br0k3n_appl3 are just some of these new programs that in one way or another deceive the user and then run malicious code. We therefore ask you to stay away from ANY such software. Some time in the future GeoHot or DevTeam will release new jailbreak and unlock software. Other than that is fake and dangerous. Install only programs you trust or the ones recommended by iPhoneRoot.

Here is a twitter comment from DevTeam:

The Wall St. Journal published a small article about Adobe Chief Executive Shantanu Narayen's talk at the Goldman Sachs technology conference this week. Adobe's CEO spoke on his view of why the iPad wasn't equipped to play Flash:

Narayen said Apple's decision likely had everything to do with its business model as it tries to keep a proprietary, closed system so everything goes through its iTunes store, and has nothing to do with the Flash technology. He said about 85 of the top 100 Web sites in the world use Flash, and 75% of the video on the Web today is in Flash, including Google Inc.'s (GOOG) YouTube, News Corp.'s (NWS) Hulu and broadcasters such as ABC and Fox.

Flash will be on every Android device sold at the end of the year. It will also be on Nokias, Palm Pres, Windows Mobile, Blackberries and just about anything else with an ARM Cortex processor. Not to mention 98% of all the Macs and PCs (and Windows/ChomeOS Tablets) throughout the world. It looks like Apple has it's own vision of what is good and bad for the business.

Though iPad will be launched only in March, some geeks are already creating interesting accessories for it. Designer Hiphandmaids is among them - he created the wildly risqué quilted cotton sleeve and named it iMaxi. It snugly wraps around the iPad and keeps it dry and clean, while you're feeling embarrassing every time you open it. The author said about it:

"It shields your iPad from all those unsightly data leaks that would make any motherboard worry!"

Shareholders meeting started at 1 p.m. EST Thursday. For almost 2,5 hours they discussed different topics and revealed some interesting information.

First of all, Apple is going to open 25 retail stores in China. As you know, the first Chinese store was built in 2008, and since then only plans about revealing another store were announced.

Secondly Steve Jobs told Apple will build its reserves to make big investments in the future. He also mentioned it is a better way of dealing with profit than paying dividends or doing stock buybacks. At this moment Apple has ~40 billion dollars in their chest.

An interesting fact was revealed by Admob Mobile Metrics when they ran an opt-in surveys on iPhone, iPod Touch, webOS and Android devices to understand how they are engaging and interacting with applications.

As you see on the photos below, it becomes obvious that iPod Touch is more popular for teenagers. Moreover, as latter are mostly supported by their parents, they use these devices differently, and that is why the number of free downloads is so high for iPod Touch users.

Apparently, iPods make a high profit to Apple, but is this so because of children?

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Gull1hack, the tool that promises to jailbreak all iPhones and iPod Touches with the latest iBoot, is a fake. Here is a twitter comment from MuscleNerd, hacker from DevTeam:

It looks like the guys who created Gull1hack used two different iPhone 3GS's (or perhaps 3GS and 3G) - one with the old iBoot and one with the new one. Here is a quick conversation between MuscleNerd and Gull1hack:

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