News from category ‘Official’

The first ‘authorized’ biography of Jobs by Walter Isaacson is now available for pre-order from Amazon for $19.80 in paper, or $14.99 for the Kindle edition. Curiously iSteve: The Book of Jobs will be released on March 6th, 2012, the fourth anniversary of the release of the iOS SDK. The description of the book from Amazon provides:

From bestselling author Walter Isaacson comes the landmark biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. In iSteve: The Book of Jobs, Isaacson provides an extraordinary account of Jobs’ professional and personal life. Drawn from three years of exclusive and unprecedented interviews Isaacson has conducted with Jobs as well as extensive interviews with Jobs’ family members, key colleagues from Apple and its competitors, iSteve is the definitive portrait of the greatest innovator of his generation.

Apple could not achieve such success without its 324 retail stores, employing 30, 000 employees. Though it is not easy to become Apple’s employee, but it is worth it. Apple pays its employees much more than its competitors. For example, Geniuses on average make $18 dollars an hour, with the helpful blue shirts earning around $16 dollars an hour as they guide customers to new products, show them how to use services, and make sales. So it is clearly that Apple’s employees are highly motivated and expected to work hard and sell the Apple experience. Not surprisingly that in the first two fiscal quarters for 2011, Apple’s retail division has already earned $7.04 billion in revenue of Apple’s $51.41 billion. Apple’s retail stores offer a level of convenience and friendliness that big retail chains just can’t match.

comScore has released the results of its April survey (comScore surveyed over 30,000 mobile phone subscribers.) of mobile phone usage in the United States. Surpassing Research in Motion, Apple took the solid second place among smartphone platforms and now iOS holds 26.0% of market. Google’s Android leads the pack with 36.4% of the market, an increase of 5.2 percentage points over the three month period. Research in Motion's BlackBerry operating system has slipped to 25.7%. When looking at mobile phone manufacturers overall, Apple is now the fourth largest vendor with a share of 8.3% of the US market. Samsung remains number one with 24.5% of the market, followed by LG and Motorola.

Apple’s new data center in Maiden, North Carolina, is now visible in Google Maps. The building hasn’t changed at all – it’s the same constriction we’ve seen in different shots during the past months. But it is interesting that only now Apple allowed Google to display the data center in theirs Maps service after Apple’s announcement concerning the WWDC where Apple confirmed that Steve Jobs would appear at the conference keynote and that the company will unveil the iOS 5, OS X Lion and iCloud. It seems that such sudden appearance of the data center in Google Maps may be a confirmation of Apple’s intention to use this massive facility for iCloud and cloud-related services.

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Yesterday we reported that Apple had released the Security Update for Snow Leopard users to automatically find and remove the known variants of the Mac Defender malware. Apple enables OS X to update malware definitions daily to make sure that new versions of Mac Defender and other malware software will be discovered and removed. But despite all Apple’s efforts, there was found a new variant of Mac Defender that manages to circumvent Apple’s new security update and work exactly like Mac Defender.

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Apple has released a software update that is able to automatically find and remove known variants of the MacDefender malware. The company added a “OSX.MacDefender.A” definition to the malware check  and while installation the malware should be find and removed, then users should be notified that the MacDefender is removed.

Apple maintains a list of known malicious software that is used during the safe download check to determine if a file contains malicious software. The list is stored locally, and with Security Update 2011-003 is updated daily by a background process.

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Yesterday Apple released the iWork suit for iPhone with the same future set of the iPad. iWork for iPhone lets you easily manage and create documents, print them through AirPrint, and share them with iTunes. All three applications - Pages, Numbers and Keynote - come with a new document manager to organize documents into folders, Keynote brings deeper compatibility with the Keynote Remote and Pages sports a new feature called “Smart Zoom” for viewing and editing data.

“Now you can use Keynote, Pages and Numbers on iPhone and iPod touch to create amazing presentations, documents and spreadsheets right in the palm of your hand,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “The incredible Retina display, revolutionary Multi-Touch interface and our powerful software make it easy to create, edit, organize and share all of your documents from iPhone 4 or iPod touch.”

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A new report issued by Research2Guidance shows that Apple dominates among other mobile application stores in terms of application downloads. In first quarter of 2011 59% of all applications were downloaded from the Apple’s App Store. Though the numbers are quiet large, they demonstrate a fall in 22% comparing with 81% then the App Store first opened. During the report 58 application stores were surveyed. Noteworthy, there were only 18 application stores when the iPhone App Store launched in July of 2008. The Android Market is the strongest competitor to the App Store that led to 24% fall of the App Store’s share of application downloads.  Though, resent numbers show 2% increase of App Store’s share. Moreover, users, who already spent significant amounts of money on apps, unlikely want to switch to other mobile platform.

Yesterday Apple confirmed through the press release that Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs will be on stage at the WWDC keynote on June 6th. While keynote iOS 5, Mac OS X Lion and iCloud, the upcoming cloud service from Apple, will be officially unveiled. Noteworthy to say that it is not clear yet whether the upcoming iCloud will be focused only on music service, or it will be a part of rebranded MobileMe.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs and a team of Apple executives will kick off the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with a keynote address on Monday, June 6 at 10:00 a.m. At the keynote, Apple will unveil its next generation software – Lion, the eighth major release of Mac OS X; iOS 5, the next version of Apple’s advanced mobile operating system which powers the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch; and iCloud, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering.

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This Saturday, price of MacBook Air refurbs at the Apple Store dropped. Now, the price of the base model is just $829, which is $30 lower than it was before. There is an opinion that Apple is preparing for refresh by means of clearing some inventory out. It should be noted that there is a big difference between such notions as "used" and "refurbished". The latter is supported by Apple one-year warranty, can hardly be distinguished from a new one and can serve you almost as long as an unused model.

The Washington Post reports that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission violated procurement law having purchased computer equipment in April, 2008. Total amount the SEC paid for equipment is almost $ 1 million. The SEC violated federal regulation then it avoided seeking competitive bids and placed order immediately with Apple. The SEC was seeking to purchase updated equipment in order to help meet its expanded duties in regulating the financial industry. Apple relied on the know budget (originally $200,000) of the SEC and forced the Commission to purchase essential equipment that cost the SEC another $773,000. The SEC responses that it has already taken appropriate actions against the employee, who was responsible for purchase.

Samsung’s lawyers have asked Apple to hand over “final, commercial versions” of the next-generation iPhone and iPad and the retail packaging design of the devices. The company wants to evaluate if their future products, like the Droid Charge and the Galaxy Tab 10.1, could have similar features with them. This countersuit was filed after Samsung was asked to hand over Apple its prototypes of the Droid Charge, Galaxy Tab 8.9, Galaxy Tab 10.1, Infuse 4G and Galaxy S 2. In order to avoid future confusion with the Apple’s products, Samsung is asking the court to apply the same procedure that granted Apple’s lawyers access to Samsung’s upcoming products.

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As far as we know, WWDC, set for the 6th June, will be about software and the future of iOS and Mac OS X. TechCrunch believes that the forthcoming iOS 5 will be unveiled at the WWDC because Apple invited journalists and the iPhone PR team that usually covers major iOS announcements. As expected, Apple will introduce a completely revamped notifications and widgets. Apple’s fans’ videos in the past weeks showed how Apple could change notifications and bring new voice-recognition features and implement Lion-like Dashboard and home screen widgets. Other interesting feature, Nuance’s voice-recognition, which Apple is rumored to implement with some licensing deals on iOS and OS X Lion, will unlikely to be introduced  in a new version of Voice Control (functionality that allows users to quickly call a contact or control music playback only using their voice) for iOS 5.

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A new iPhone game, The Heist, hits the Apple’s App Store. In just a few days it managed to knock off famous Angry Birds from the top of the paid applications in the App Store, making huge well. According to the Loop, during the first day the application was downloaded 25, 000 times, but during the second day it had 89, 798 downloads. Taking into account that there are 86,400 seconds in a day, The Heist was selling more than 1 copy per a second. The price of the application is $ 0, 99 and now revenue of developers approaches $100,000 and sales already well above the 100,000 figure. Perhaps, the application will be next best-seller in the App Store that will manage to keep off even  the legendary Angry Birds.

Hollywood advertisements makers are afraid of online video streaming and a recent studies proves that. IPG Media Lab studied people’s behavior when they watched TV. They found out that people usually had the TV on, but they were not actively engaged and watched. The company studies 48 participants and about 94% of them were distracted during the 30 minutes of watching. The iPhone and other smartphones account for 60 percent of the distractions from TV ads, according to a behavioral survey. It’s not surprisingly, because it’s obvious that when you glance away, you miss the commercials on TV.