News from category ‘Official’

Apple has announced that the WWDC 2012 keynote will take place on June 11th at 10:00am PST.

The full conference schedule has now been posted here (available for attendees only).

The New York Times claims that Facebook is drawing upon former Apple engineers and has hired "more than half a dozen former Apple software and hardware engineers who worked on the iPhone" to develop its own phone. The New York Times’ report also said that Facebook is interested in buying a smartphone company. It raised $16 billion during its recent IPO, enough to purchase either Research in Motion or HTC.

One tipster suggested that the current effort is the company's third attempt to build a smartphone. People who reportedly worked on the first attempt told the Times that the project fell apart because it proved to be more difficult than expected. As a result, Facebook is believed to have realized that it needs industry-experienced veterans to develop hardware, specifically Apple alumni.

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According to several sources russian Apple fans will be able to buy New iPad 3 officially starting May 25.

The prices are as follows:

New iPad 16Гб Wi-Fi — 20490 RUB (~$650)
New iPad 32Гб Wi-Fi — 24490 RUB (~$780)
New iPad 64Гб Wi-Fi — 28490 RUB (~$900)

New iPad 16Гб Wi-Fi + 3G — 26990 RUB (~$850)
New iPad 32Гб Wi-Fi + 3G — 30990 RUB (~$980)
New iPad 64Гб Wi-Fi + 3G — 35490 RUB (~$1130)

Following a string of complaints across the globe (especially in Australia and the United Kingdom) regarding Apple’s branding of the 4G-LTE compatible iPads, Apple has tweaked the name of their cellular-connecting iPad in some regions. The new name is simply “iPad WiFi + Cellular” and this is a shift from the former “iPad WiFi + 4G” branding. The source of the criticism of the 4G third-generation iPad models is the fact that the 4G LTE only functions in the U.S. and Canada, on a total of five carriers.

Apple did not simply make this iPad name change in the affected Australia and UK regions, but they changed it in the UK, Australia, the U.S., Canada, UAE, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, New Zealand, Malaysia, Ireland, and Hong Kong.

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Gossip site TMZ.com published photos of actor Ashton Kutcher wearing Steve Jobs' iconic black turtleneck, jeans and sneakers outfit. Kutcher is preparing to act in the independent film about the late Apple co-founder.

Everybody knows that Jobs so liked the black turtleneck that he reportedly owned hundreds of them. Mona Simpson, Jobs' sister, remarked at his memorial service last October that he had probably owned enough copies of the shirt for everyone in attendance.

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iMore reports that Apple indeed plans to launch its 7-inch iPad in October. The device will be priced in the $200-$250 range

According to our source, which has proven reliable in the past, the reason for such aggressive pricing is to do to the tablet market what Apple did to the MP3 market in 2004 with the expansion of the iPod product line -- leave absolutely no space for competitors.

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Portuguese-language website G1 discovered that Apple announced the May 11 launch on its official Brazilian iPad page. Apple's new iPad will launch in a total of 30 new countries this weekend, with the largest among them Brazil. Most launches will occur this Friday, May 11, but a handful more in the Middle East will have a launch this Saturday, May 12.

Apple's assembly partner Foxconn recently began manufacturing devices in Brazil, and has opened plants intended for iPhone and iPad production there. Apple began selling iPhone 4 units built in Brazil in their home country in February, but thus far, production has been limited to the 8-gigabyte handset model, model number "MD198BR/A," and has not extended to version of the latest-model iPhone 4S.

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Apple and Samsung have greatly reduced the number of patent infringement claims against one another in their California lawsuit. Late on Monday, Apple made a filing in the suit that roughly cut the number of patent infringement, and five hours after Apple reduced the scope of its complaint, Samsung responded in kind, and offered to drop five of its 12 asserted patents.

But these actions were caused by the court order. The Judge Lucy Koh last week ordered the companies to cut down the number of claims they are making against each other. "I think that's cruel and unusual punishment to a jury, so I'm not willing to do it," Koh said of the multitude of patents and products included in the case. "If you're going to trial in July, this is not going to be acceptable”.

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Fortune has recently published its annual ratings of the 500 largest corporations in America and placed Apple on the 17th place. That means that the company managed to leap 18 spots from the last year 35th place.

According to Fortune, the iPhone maker's performance in the "Computers, Office Equipment" industry was topped only by Hewlett-Packard, which finished 10th overall. HP's revenue totaled over $127 billion compared to Apple's $108 billion, however the percent of change from 2010 was a stark contrast between the two companies which grew 1 percent and 66 percent, respectively. Apple's profit skyrocketed to nearly $26 billion representing an 85 percent change from 2010, while HP saw negative growth of 19 percent with a little over $7 billion in profits.

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NPD, market research firm, suggests that Apple’s tablet market share will drop to just over 50 percent by 2017. Android and Windows-based devices will, obviously, have a hand in it, and, as NPD expects, will begin continue to eat into the iPad's overwhelming lead by 2014.

The overall tablet market will swell from 81.6 million units in 2011 to 424.9 million units by 2017, and tablet shipments will surpass those of notebooks by 2016.

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Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg mentioned in an interview with ABC News that his friendship with Steve Jobs and his liver transplant that extended his life came to mind as he worked on a plan to increase the number of organ donors.

"That definitely, I think, was something that we all had in mind as we were building this out," Zuckerberg said. "His story is just one of many, of people who both were able to have an organ transplant that made his life longer, and he was extremely thankful for that."

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comScore released on Tuesday quarterly data from its MobiLens service, which surveyed 30,000 mobile subscribers users, revealing that the  iPhone made up 30.7 percent of the U.S. smartphone market and 14 percent of the mobile market in the first quarter of 2012.

Apple's share of the smartphone market grew 1.1 percent when compared to the fourth quarter of 2011. The figures were up 0.5 percent from Apple's three-month average from February.

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The NPD Group has found that about 25 percent of buyers in the U.S. have made the iPad their first-ever Apple product.

"iPad sales are growing much faster than any other Apple product has this soon after launch," said Ben Arnold, director of industry analysis at NPD. "In fact, one-in-five Apple owner households has one— nearly equivalent to the number that own an Apple computer. This demonstrates the appeal of both the new form factor and Apple’s app ecosystem."

A majority of the U.S. households that do have Apple products — 67 percent — own an iPod, and 82 percent of iPod owners polled said the media player was their first Apple product.

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The San Jose Mercury News reports that on Tuesday the Planning Commission unanimously approved the project of 21,468-square-foot cafeteria near Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters. The non-Apple employees will not be welcomed in the cafeteria that will allow Apple employees to speak freely about their business without fearing that competitors are eavesdropping.

"We like to provide a level of security so that people and employees can feel comfortable talking about their business, their research and whatever project they're engineering without fear of competition soft of overhearing their conversations," said Dan Wisenhunt, Apple's director of real estate facilities. "That is a real issue today in Cupertino because we've got other companies here in our same business."

The cafeteria will be a two-story building that will include a cafe, meeting rooms, lounge areas and courtyard space. The second floor will be intended for cafeteria employees for storage, locker rooms, restrooms and more. The site will also include 70 parking spaces housed in an underground garage.

Apple announced the company results for Q2 2012. Apple has $110 billion in cash reserves, which is up from $81.5 billion in September 2011. Apple was also up in every other segment with $18.4 billion in short-term marketable securities (up from $16.1 billion) and long-term marketable securities at $81.6 billion, which is up from $55.6 billion in the previous six-month period ending September 2011.

Here are some interesting numbers that Apple reported for the quarter:

iTunes and App Store:

• $1.9 billion in iTunes revenue (a 35 percent YOY increase)
• 600,000 apps (200,000 iPad specific apps)

iOS devices:

• 365 million iOS device sales
• $22.7 billion in revenue from iPhone and accessories
• 6.6 billion in revenue from iPad and accessories.
• 7.7 million iPod sales
• 94 percent of Fortune 500 and 75 percent of global 500 testing or deploying iPad

iCloud:

• 125 million iCloud users—up 25 million from February

Retail Stores:

• $4.4 billion in retail store revenue, up 8 percent
• 363 Apple Stores
• 826,000 Macs sold in store—half to new customers
• $12.2 million average revenue per-store (up from $9.9 million)
• 85 million visitors to retail—18,000 per store, per week

Here is official press release:

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