News tagged ‘Apple’

On Wednesday Apple released a MacBook Air EFI firmware update 2.0 to resolve issue with display. The update is recommended for all new 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air models and requires Mac OS X 10.6.5. It addresses problems where the MacBook Air is unresponsive or displays just a black screen after booting or waking. Despite scattered reports of issues with the MacBook Air, the laptop has continued to sell well, especially the 11-inch model. Analysts tracking retail activity on Black Friday found that the 11-inch MacBook Air was "flying off the shelves" and a "customer favorite."

Download the MacBook Air EFI firmware update 2.0

Today Apple has begun offering 90-second previews of songs in the iTunes Store. All songs longer than 2 minutes 30 seconds will now have a 90-second preview available. Songs shorter than this length will continue to offer only 30 second previews. Good news for us, consumers! But Apple literally forced labels to accept new terms. Any labels who do not wish to agree with the terms must withdraw their music from the iTunes Store.

MobileMe users report about multiply bugs in the service. Some of them do not satisfy with service's email, photo/file hosting, and syncing capabilities and experience performance and access issues while others believe that the $99 annual price is too high. It’s reasonableб because the "Find My iPhone" service that had previously required a MobileMe subscription is free for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch users running iOS 4.2.

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Yesterday Apple released a new 7.6.9 version of QuickTime media software, which has 15 vulnerabilities patched, including issues with FlashPix, PICT, GIF and JP2 images and AVI, MPEG, Sorenson, QTVR and other movie files. Most of it could cause an arbitrary code execution in case of exploit or unexpected application termination.

The security update is necessary only for Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 and Windows users, as Mac OS X 10.6.5 already has fixes to the vulnerabilities included.

QuckTime 7.6.9 can be installed through Software Update or by visiting the QuickTime website.

Yesterday Mike Lazaridis, who is a co-CEO at Research in Motion, revealed that the company's upcoming Playbook tablet will have a QNX-based BlackBerry Tablet OS that will eventually appear on multi-core BlackBerry smartphones and other tablets coming in the next ten years.

In his interview with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg at D: Dive Into Mobile conference, which was taking place in San Francisco, California, Lazaridis showed RIM's upcoming 7-inch tablet and said it has "the perfect size", though the company plans to produce tablets of other sizes too.

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DisplaySearch has published results of their research, which reveals that Apple is the number one mobile PC manufacturer in North America and third overall in the world. But these results are given for all Apple’s mobile computers, so the iPad alone gets 8% of mobile computer shipments in the third quarter alone. Of course, that percentage will be increased, because Apple pushes their device into other markets, such as Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Hewlett-Packard’s mobile PCs remained number one with 17.3 percent of the market share. Acer came in second with 16.5 percent. Apple finished third with 12.4 percent. Noteworthy that HP and Acer market shares are only getting smaller.

Ticongera Securities analyst Brian White provided another update for investors while touring the Far East. In his note he says that iPhone 4, iPad and 11-inch MacBook Air are the most difficult products to purchase in China.

Local carrier China Unicom cannot fulfill almost a third of preorders, and people wait for their devices for around two months. That creates wide growth opportunities in China, and White says Apple's interest in this market is definitely positive.

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New Consumer Reports reader survey reveals that AT&T, which is an exclusive American wireless provider of the iPhone, had dropped significantly in customer satisfaction in this year.

Moreover, the company received the worst-possible scores in service, value and customer support, and the texting service was the only one exclusion of this list. According to the survey, more than a half of AT&T consumers have iPhones. That's why Consumer Reports electronics editor Paul Reynolds thinks that bringing iPhone to Verizon will be a successful step for Apple.

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Foxconn, manufacturer of the iPad, reports that it plans to begin shipping the iPad 2 within the next 100 days. The initial shipment will be approximately 400,000-600,000 units. Apple reportedly planed to start mass production of the next-generation tablets in January,2011, but they had to postpone it, because of the ongoing testing of the new iPad's firmware. Of course, Apple will decrease the production of the original tablets to prepare market and users for a launch of new device.  The next-gen iPad is rumored to be equipped with the FaceTime front camera, will support both GSM and CDMA standards, allowing it to work on a variety of networks.

Yesterday AppleTell revealed that Apple asked developers to prepare their applications for a launch as soon as possible. According to an unknown source, the upcoming Mac App Store will be revealed on Monday, December 13. But initially Steve Jobs planned to launch it even sooner than today, said the author of the note Kirk Hiner.

"That obviously didn't happen, but Apple appears to be way ahead of schedule on the Mac App Store nonetheless, and looks to take advantage of the Christmas rush".

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New $100,000 pilot program is now under its way at two Hancock County elementary schools to allow hundreds of kids to have iPads and start doing math, reading books and other school assignments. The program is sponsored with the help of federal grant money and teachers are already concentrated on complete customizing the Apple's tablet experience for every child.

With this new plan students at Allen T. Allison and Weirton Heights elementary schools will be able to send papers via email directly to teachers, as every classroom will be provided with a WiFi connection. The teachers are aimed to make iPad as useful as it can be in students' daily work.

Frank Cary, who is a Weirton Heights Principal, is thrilled with this program:

"They're tired of the paper. This is exciting. It's got color. It brings it to life".

Last week two hands-on videos have been posted on YouTube revealing the new Sony Ericsson's 'PlayStation Phone'.

As it can be seen from the video, the device called Zeus has slide-out physical controls like in Sony PSP but with rumored multi-touch touchpad, 4-inch display and runs on Android "Gingerbread" 2.3.

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Apple surprised everybody when it decided to discontinue its Xserve line on November 5th.  The company officially offered a faster Mac Mini and the Mac Pro, both with Snow Leopard Server installed, as the replacement of the Xserve. IT professionals who maintain data centers small and large claim that these aren’t complete solutions compared to the density of the Xserves. About a third of Xserve shops will be migrating to other hardware within the year.  Some Apple’s System Engineers assure that Apple has another solution in the pipeline beyond what they’ve announced.  Nobody knows what it could be, because Apple builds its own A4 processors, running in parallel, and a data center for cloud services.

Some new promo materials appeared in Apple Stores around the United State. They have an interesting signage which claims that the white iPhone 4 will be available Spring 2011. That confirms an earlier report.  Though, we may hear rumors about the fifth-generation iPhone handset, which also is expected to be released spring 2011. Steve Jobs will most likely announce the device at WWDC ’11. Many believe that Apple sooner will simply release a modified version of the iPhone 4 or a white version of its fifth-generation handset than the white iPhone 4.

Graviboard is an upcoming interesting iOS jailbreak application, which will be soon available in the Cydia Store for $2.99. The application allows iDevice owners to set their icons free by abolishing the gravity that holds them on their places on the Springboard. You may drag these “floating” icons around the screen, and there still might open the apps by touching.