News from category ‘Official’

Bloomberg reports South Korea's communications regulator investigates whether Apple is breaking the law by forcing iPhones to save data on the location of their users.

The Korea Communications Commission have already asked the company to explain why and how often this data is saved on devices, may users delete it and whether Apple copies it to its servers.

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One of Engadget’s reader claims to have purchased a long-awaited white iPhone 4 through Vodafone in the UK. That deal seems to be true because the Vodafone UK's inventory systems were showing the white iPhone 4 as shipping in. The carrier has reportedly been gearing up to receive shipments of the device, but it now appears that the units may in fact be arriving and have slipped out for sale in a few instances.

Engadget reports: “Now, we've secured a few images of a 16GB model from a separate source that has seemingly made its way into the hands of one lucky customer over in Britain.”

Interestingly, the iPhone appears to show a modified proximity sensor, utilizing an open slot over the earpiece instead of the previously-seen fine grating. Remind  you that the most most recent rumors claim that the white iPhone 4 will be launched next Wednesday, April 27th.

Current Mac Pros’ design deputed in the form of the Power Mac G5 in mid-2003, almost eight years ago. Since then, the Mac Pro has received processor, RAM and storage updates, but the exterior design is basically the same. So, it’s not surprisingly that Apple is now toying with the re-designed version of the Mac Pro. A Mac Pro prototype is now in testing that features a narrower (just about 5 inches wide) and shorter (about 19 inches) design. One of the reasons that Apple might be making this particular Mac Pro prototype smaller is because it is able to fit on to a standard server rack. This makes sense in that a rack-mountable Mac Pro could easily replace the gaping hole in the product line left by the discontinued Xserve. The rumor says that the new Mac Pro features stacked drives with two drives per sled for a higher storage density than is currently available. The sleds can be configured either with SSDs or conventional hard drives. New Mac Pros would also have a Thunderbolt port and perhaps even BluRay options for the Final Cut Professionals.

Apple’s huge data center in North Carolina has attracted attention of Greenpeace. Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple have gone under the scrutiny of Greenpeace in a recent report which evaluates the companies’ transparency in energy usage, the decisions that go into choosing a location and how those facilities are powered, and willingness to correct and pursue green technologies.

Apple’s decision to locate its iDataCenter in North Carolina, which has an electrical grid among the dirtiest in the country (61% coal, 31% nuclear), indicates a lack of a corporate commitment to clean energy supply for its cloud operations. The fact that the alternative location for Apple’s iDataCenter was Virginia46, where electricity is also comes from very dirty sources, is an indication that, in add it onto tax incentives, access to inexpensive energy, regardless of its source, is a key driver in Apple’s site selection.

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In response to Apple’s lawsuit, which accused the Korean electronics giant, Samsung, of copying the look of the iPhone and iPad, Samsung has filed a suit against Apple over patents related to cellphone transmission technologies.

According to a company spokesperson, Samsung's suits relate to patents for transmission optimization and reduction of power usage during data transmission, 3G technology for reducing date-transmission errors and a method of tethering a mobile phone to a PC to enable the PC to utilize the phone's wireless data connection.

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Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, security researchers, discovered a file in Apple’s iOS local backup system that keeps track of your location history, in format readable by a computer, and the researchers claim it’s present both on iPhones and iPad 3G units. Such file is kept unencrypted in the iOS database that can be backed up to a computer using iTunes. The researchers have also created an app called iPhoneTracker that recognizes the file from your local iOS backup, and displays your most-visited locations on a map (see the screenshot above). The app is also allows you to encrypt this file.

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Yesterday Apple reported its financial results for the second fiscal quarter of 2011. In this quarter Apple earned $24.67 billion and net quarterly profit amounts to $5.99 billion. In the year-ago quarter the company’s revenue was $13.50 billion and net quarterly profit was $3.07 billion. Gross margin was 41.4 percent, compared to 41.7 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 59 percent of the quarter’s revenue.  This fiscal quarter is also the best quarter for the iTunes Store with $1.4 billion revenue. $2 billion was paid to developers in App Store.

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Yesterday The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published the filing of another Apple's patent entitled "Touch Screen RFID Tag Reader". It describes "the efficient incorporation of RFID circuitry with touch sensor panel circuitry".

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Last week Apple had officially upgraded its forums and renamed its Apple Discussion board to Apple Support Communities. The refresh reveals new design and social network features. Here what the official introduction reads:

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According to Reuters, Foxconn is considering investing up to $12 billion in manufacturing facilities to start producing monitors and displays for mobile devices, such as iPhone and iPad, in Brazil. At that moment, the Brazilian government is studying Foxconn's investment plan. Brazilian minister of Science and Technology Mercadante has been negotiating with Foxconn for more than three months to convince the company to invest $12 billion throughout the next 5 years. Не also reported that Foxconn is preparing to begin manufacturing the iPad in Brazil by the end of November. The project would involve the recruitment of 100,000 new employees (including 20,000 engineers) as Foxconn already has three factories in Brazil to assemble products for Sony, Dell, and HP.

Yesterday Apple previewed a new version of Final Cut Pro version X at the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas.  The upgrade will be available on the Mac App Store in June for $299. Apple promised that the new version of Final Cut Pro will be "as revolutionary as the first version of FCP."

Apple is promoting the new FCP X as a complete and total rebuild. As reported by Photography Bay, new features in Final Cut Pro X include:

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Microsoft released its first application for tablets, Bing for iPad that is now available on the US App Store. It looks really beautiful on the iPad large screen. The first thing you’ll notice in the application is the daily image. The application gives you information about Weather, News, Movies  and more. Like the iPhone app it features a Voice Search alongside with the search by text and Bing Maps that let you search for address or business. The iPad app is curiously only available in the US iTunes App Store which is certainly odd considering the web version does have international editions, that even have a different daily picture.

It seems that jailbreaking of iOS devices become a really profitable business, at least for Kevin Lee, a George Mason University senior, who managed to earn $50,000 a year by jailbreaking and unlocking iPhones. At first, it was a hobby for him that eventually grew into a real business with 30-40 clients per week asking for jailbreak, Cydia installations, graphical customizations and “unlocks” to use the iPhone on wireless carriers otherwise unsupported by Apple.  To achieve success, Kevin posted posting a “Get Your iPhone Jailbroken Today” ad on the popular online community. That helped him to get hundreds of requests. But his business goes against Apple’s rules and as far as we know, at that moment his ad was already removed from the site.

StorageNewsletter.com reports that Apple has placed a order for about 12 petabytes of storage from Isilon Systems. According to an inside source, the company will use this storage to support iTunes video downloaded by its customers. This order will make Apple the largest Isilon’s customer.

A petabyte of data is a huge amount of data; it's 1024 terabytes. Consumer hard drives nowadays top out at 3 TB. If you tried to store a petabyte of data on dual-layer Blu-ray discs (50 GB each), it would take almost 21,000 discs to fit it all... and Apple just bought 12 of those. It'll be interesting to see what they do with all of that storage

Microsoft is reportedly preparing to release Office for Mac 2011 Service Pack 1 in next week. This major update will bring a number of fixes, some stability and security improvements plus some feature additions. Performance is also receiving a boost in the update. But the most significant new features are said to come in Outlook, including support for syncing calendars to iOS devices via Sync Services.

The update will enable calendar syncing between Outlook for Mac and Apple's Sync Services. This means you can now sync your Outlook calendars, as well as your contacts, notes and tasks with any service or device that supports Sync Services.