News from category ‘Official’

The BBC reported on Friday that Jonathan Ive, Apple's senior vice president of industrial design, has been named a Knight Commander of the British Empire in the U.K.'s 2012 New Year Honours list for "services to design and enterprise”. In 2005 he was awarded the title of Commander of the British Empire. Ive responded that he was "both humbled and sincerely grateful" by the commendation.

"I am keenly aware that I benefit from a wonderful tradition in the UK of designing and making," he said. "I discovered at an early age that all I've ever wanted to do is design."

Ive’s father was the first who inspired him to study design. Ive went on to study Industrial Design at Newcastle Polytechnic University. It was there that he first realized the potential of designing on the Mac.

"I discovered the Mac and felt I had a connection with the people who were making this product," he said. "I suddenly understood what a company was, or was supposed to be."

After graduating, Ive worked at the U.K. design agency Apple cooperated with. Then the company noted his talent and offered him a full-time position. During his 19 years at Apple, Ive and Steve Jobs became close friends and even "spiritual partners", according to Jobs' biography. While Jobs and Ive were close friends, Ive did admit to Isaacson that he felt Jobs had stolen some of his ideas.

"[Jobs] will go through a process of looking at my ideas and say, 'That's no good. That's not very good. I like that one,'" Ive told Isaacson in an interview. "And later I will be sitting in the audience and he will be talking about it as if it was his idea. I pay maniacal attention to where an idea comes from, and I even keep notebooks filled with my ideas. So it hurts when he takes credit for one of my designs."

Digitimes now claims that it has obtained new portion of information on the rumored Apple’s television. The main role in manufacturing and assembling of the new TVs is expected to be played by Foxconn, Apple's primary iOS device manufacturing partner.  The company is likely to win the contract for assembly of the television set products.

Following sources' claims that Samsung Electronics and Sharp will manufacture chips and displays, respectively, for the so-called Apple "iTV," others have suggested that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE) and Siliconware Precision Industries (SPIL) have the potential to win orders for Apple's smart TV.

Foxconn Electronics (Hon Hai Precision Industry) likely will obtain assembly orders for the Apple smart TV, according to industry sources.

We have already reported that Apple is going to finalize Apple’s TV design by the end of the second quarter and launch the television sets by the end of the year. Moreover, the analyst Shaw Wu at Sterne Agee has suggested that Apple may be interested in disrupting the television industry on the content side by launching its own television services which, obviously, will be connected with Siri.

"This is obviously much more complicated (than current offerings) from a licensing standpoint," Wu wrote in a note to investors on Wednesday. "And in our view, would change the game for television and give AAPL a big leg-up against the competition."

Hardware and technology are not the issues holding back Apple from releasing a television set, he said. Instead, Apple must negotiate unique content deals that will allow the company to differentiate its product from other televisions on the market.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office published on Tuesday that Apple won a core multitouch patent that describes how touch events are recognized by a touchscreen device. The patent blog Patently Apple also noted that this patent was one of the "200+ Patents for new inventions" Jobs lauded when the iPhone first debuted in 2007.

The newly granted patent focuses on the oscillator signal and circuit of a touchscreen-equipped device, an integral invention directly related to how users interact with their multitouch products.

Apple states in the filing: "In general, multi-touch panels may be able to detect multiple touches (touch events or contact points) that occur at or about the same time, and identify and track their locations."

One way to record multiple touches is to generate an oscillating signal circuit that can power and clock inputs over a substrate as in a capacitive touchscreen display. But it is difficult to create a precise circuit-based oscillator. According to Apple's patent, the solution to capacitive touchscreen problem is to calibration logic circuitry which compares the signal oscillation against a reference signal and tunes the clock frequency accordingly. The invention provides for an accurate capacitive display that can not only sense multiple touches, but also detect hover or near touches which are also recognized as "touch events."

In the first 20 days of December, mobile device activations tracked by analytics firm Flurry were around 1.5 million each day. As for December 25, it indicated that devices running Apple's iOS and Google's Android platforms saw a huge spike in activations, growing 353 percent from average totals earlier in December. The previous record tracked by Flurry belongs to Christmas Day in 2010. On December 25, 2010 the users activated 2.8 million devices.

Flurry's statistics come from the company's analytics software, which is found in more than 140,000 applications. Peter Farago, vice president of marketing with Flurry, claimed that his company's statistics detect "roughly" 100 percent of new iOS and Android devices activated each day. Application downloads on both iOS and Android also grew by 125 percent on Christmas Day, reaching 242 million. For the first 20 days of December, downloads averaged 108 million.

Flurry expects that by the end of the year 2011 Apple's App Store will exceed 10 billion application downloads. Moreover, iOS applications rake in 300 percent more revenue than their Android counterparts. During Apple’s last quarterly earnings conference call Apple has not revealed daily iOS activations in over a year, but announced that more than 250 million iOS devices had been sold during the quarter.

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Reuters reports that Apple has been fined 900,000 euros, or $1.2 million, in Italy in response to complaints of "unfair commercial practices" related to product warranty disclosures. Apple sold its products with a standard one-year warranty. The customers had an option to buy a second year through AppleCare, but local laws require companies to protect buyers with a free two-year warranty.

According to the report, Italy's antitrust regulators ruled that Apple has not been providing adequate disclosures about the two free years of product warranty assistance required under Italian law that is why Apple was fined 400,000 euros for not providing adequate information to customers about the length of product guarantees, and another 500,000 euros stemmed from Apple not giving customers enough information about its AppleCare extended warranty.

The authority said Apple Sales International, Apple Italia and Apple Retail Italia did not properly inform customers that they were entitled to two years of free assistance under Italian law. Three Apple spokesmen contacted by Reuters weren't immediately available for comment.

Information provided about an extra guarantee scheme, the "AppleCare Protection Plan," encouraged customers to buy the service without clearly explaining that it overlapped with the free assistance required by law, the competition authority said.

The Argentinean government has temporarily blocked sales of certain electronics including Apple's iPhone and RIM's BlackBerry. Such measures were attempted in order to stabilize the country's ailing economy, to slow rising inflation and correct the disparity between the pesos and U.S. dollar, while suggesting that companies must build plants in the country to resume sales.

In order to continue smartphone sales in Argentina, Apple must build a plant or partner with a local company to manufacture the iPhone. RIM is reportedly looking to partner with an existing plant so that it can continue sales in the region. Other handset makers like Motorola, Nokia and Samsung have already moved or built plants in Argentina's Tierra del Fuego free zone after the government passed the Internal Revenue Law of 2009, which added a 20.48 percent tax to the existing 21 percent VAT for certain imported electronic devices.

According to Argentinean site Fortunaweb, iPhone and BlackBerry sales comprised 60 percent of the total market in October. And to strengthen the Argentinean economy, the government made decision to support local manufactures, banning some electronics manufactures from sales in this country. The Economist reported in December article that "a slowing year-to-year GDP blamed on decreased demand for agricultural commodities and huge government subsidies have caused the country to enact tighter controls on capital flight".

China's People's Daily reported this week that  Apple had met all of the requirements for the iPhone 4S to launch in mainland China, and Ministry of Industry and Information Technology granted China Compulsory Certification for the iPhone 4S on December 22. The report claims that the handset will be launched in mainland China before the Chinese New Year that takes place on Monday, January 23, 2012.

Filings with the Chinese government show a WCDMA phone manufactured by Apple was granted approval. Though it does not specifically reveal that the device is the iPhone 4S, it is listed as model number A1431, which is the same number Apple used to obtain a network entry permit for the iPhone 4S. The approval process and anticipated release of the iPhone 4S has dragged out in China as Apple has quickly launched its latest smartphone in other major markets around the world. It's been the fastest rollout ever for a new iPhone model.

Some regional branches of China Unicom have already started taking preorders for the iPhone 4S in anticipation of the device’s launch. Moreover, Siri, Apple's voice-controlled personal assistant application, is rumored to gain support for Mandarin by March of 2012 that will obviously drive sales of the iPhone 4S in China.

Chinese language newspaper China Daily reported on Monday  that Apple’s Chinese manufacturing partner  - Foxconn – plans to double the size of its iPhone-producing plant at Foxconn Science Park in Zhengzhou that now produces over 200,000 iPhones a day. The company is expected to spend $1.1 billion to expand the plant that, after the massive expansion, would bring Foxconn $20 billion in sales revenue in 2012. Moreover, the plant is expected to become the largest smartphone-producing facility in the world after the $1.1 billion construction.

Apple's primary iPhone manufacturer will increase the number of production lines to 95 and add to its over 1 million mainland China employees, 130,000 of whom work at the Zhengzhou facility. Foxconn currently employs a total of 1.2 million people and supplies electronics to a number of worldwide companies.

Foxconn also owns a production facility in Brazil. The plant also produces some iPhone models. The company now tries to come to a decision with local authorities concerning a $12 billion investment to build an iPad manufacturing plant in the region. Rumors claim that Foxconn will begin producing the iPad 3 with Retina Displays in January.

AllThingsD has decided to have a look at how the launch of Apple's Newsstand iOS 5 feature has affected subscription sales. Popular Science magazine was an object for the study that has revealed that the prominent placement of the Newsstand app and easy access to updated content has driven a substantial increase in new subscriptions. In fact, Apple’s Newsstand is a new way for users to keep track of their subscriptions, house them in a dedicated folder.

The chart comes to us courtesy of Mag+, Bonnier’s tablet-publishing software business. And as Mag+ CEO Staffan Ekholm points out, the really promising indicator for Pop Sci isn’t the one-week sales leap of 13 percent — it’s that the the magazine’s growth picked up after that week, with more velocity.

If you look at the graph above, you will find out that Popular Science appears to have been adding new subscribers at a constant rate of about 700 per week during the several months. Noteworthy, the magazine was a leader among digital media even before the debut of iOS 5. But a month after iOS 5 launch, we see a significant bump in Popular Science subscription sales at nearly double the rate seen before the arrival of Newsstand.

A study by retail analysis firm RichRelevance released on Friday notes that Apple's iOS dominated mobile online shopping in 2011, holding just over 92 percent of the market, reports Market Watch. iOS users spend 19 percent more than those using Google's platform on mobile purchases.

The study has analyzed 3.4 billion shopping sessions between April and December 2011. The iOS devices share in mobile sales grew from 88 percent in April to over 92 percent in December. This proves that Apple's iOS growth continues to lead the market in many ways including online browsing.

“The numbers across our retailing partners sites demonstrate just how powerful the iOS platform is enabling mobile web shopping and, while still below 5 percent in total conversion, mobile traffic’s doubling in eight months is a trend we only see accelerating,” said Rich Relevance CEO David Selinger.

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The recent rumors claim that Apple may launch a smaller 7.85" iPad sometime in 2012 to compete against the new 7" Kindle Fire tablet from Amazon. Though Apple has never tried to compete spec for spec against their competitors. For example, the iPhone has kept the same basic form factor across 5 different generations.

The supply chain has actually been very specific about the screen size of this rumored iPad. According to Chinese manufacturers, Apple is buying up 7.85" screens for this upcoming mini iPad. So, we asked our friends at CiccareseDesign to put together these mockups of what a 7.85" iPad would look like in comparison to the existing 9.7" iPad.

The 7.85" iPad is actually a lot smaller than the existing iPad. Icons are smaller than the 9.7" iPad, of course, but still bigger than the icons found on the iPhone. The on screen keyboard also seems quite usable at this size.

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When a 21-year-old Steve Jobs was starting his Apple’s empire, he was met with skepticism in Silicon Valley. The handwritten note, brought to light this week by Bloomberg, was written by  Mike Rose, who ran an advertising agency in Los Altos, Calif., in 1976, and where he expressed concern over Jobs and his partner, Steve Wozniak, who he felt were "flakey" after having met them. In the letter, Rose referred to Jobs as a "joker." When a young man, Jobs displayed some of the same characteristics that would eventually become known around the world.

Rose noted that Jobs looked like a secretive men, who "wouldn't trust" him. Rose and Jobs met because he needed someone to print the manual for the Apple I computer, the first product he and Wozniak had created.

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This week the Recording Academy announced the winners of its annual Special Merit Grammy Awards. One of the awards will go to Steve Jobs who was named one of several recipients, including Brazilian composer and arranger Antonio Carlos Jobim, of a Trustees Award for 2012. The Trustees Award category is designed to recognize those who have made significant contributions to music in areas other than performance.

As former CEO and co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs helped create products and technology that transformed the way we consume music, TV, movies, and books. A creative visionary, Jobs' innovations such as the iPod and its counterpart, the online iTunes store, revolutionized the industry and how music was distributed and purchased. In 2002 Apple Computer Inc. was a recipient of a Technical GRAMMY Award for contributions of outstanding technical significance to the recording field. The company continues to lead the way with new technology and in-demand products such as the iPhone and iPad.

The ceremony honoring the winners of Trustees Awards will be held on Saturday, February 11th.

The new study entitled iPad Usage Patterns On-the-Go and at Work from the Software Usability Research Laboratory was highlighted on Thursday by Jim Dalrymple of The Loop. A new survey has found that an overwhelming majority of iPad owners (83.65 percent) were satisfied with the iPad, while 62 percent ranked Apple's device as "excellent," 10 percent said "best imaginable," and 21 percent said "good."

The survey was also aimed at finding out how people are using Apple’s tablet. 52 percent of participants reported they carry their iPad only when traveling, while 21 percent carry their iPad every time they go out, and 17 percent only carry it on them for work.

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Last month we reported that Samsung released a revised Galaxy Tab 10.1N design in Germany in order to avoid an injunction over the sale of the device due to design issues. Apple quickly filed suit in an attempt to bar the new design, claiming that changes in the design were not significant. Though, the judge seems not to support Apple’s point of view and may not going to issue a ban on Galaxy Tab 10.1N sales in Germany, giving customers opportunity to choose between Apple’s and Samsung’s tablets. However, the final decision on Apple's request is scheduled to be released on February 9.

The Dusseldorf court that banned sales of the Galaxy 10.1 on Sept. 9 is unlikely to grant Apple an injunction against the Galaxy 10.1N, Presiding Judge Johanna Brueckner-Hofmann said at a hearing today. Samsung has changed the device’s design sufficiently to distance it from the iPad, she said, adding that the view is preliminary. [...]

“Consumers are well aware that there is an original and that competitors try to use similar designs, so buyers are vigilant when looking at products,” Brueckner-Hofmann said. “We don’t think that someone buys a Samsung to make his table neighbor at the coffee house believe he owns an iPad.”