News tagged ‘Apple’

Yesterday Apple filled its 2011 annual report with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The report includes several interesting facts about company:

• Apple now has 60,400 employees comparing with 46,600 employees last year. 36,000 employees work in the retail division of the company.
• Apple enlarged number of stores up to 357. In this year the company opened 40 additional stores. The average number of employees per store grew from 83.6 to 100.8.
• The company spent $933 million on advertising, enlarged number of investment into research and development up to $2.4 billion.
• Apple also mentioned some risk factors for investors:  "if [Apple] is found to have infringed on intellectual property rights", "support from third-party software developers", "the Company’s ability to obtain components in sufficient quantities", and numerous more.
• As of September 24, 2011 Apple has 13.2 million square feet of building space, among them about 7.0 million square feet are leased building space.

According to the Charlotte Observer, Apple has quietly begun building a solar farm at its massive new data centre in Maiden, North Carolina. The new solar farm is said to generate a large amount of power for the facility. Although building permits have yet to be submitted to Catawba County officials, the County has given Apple permission to reshape the slope in preparation of the solar farm.

Apple has quietly begun work on a solar farm that apparently could help power its sprawling data center in southern Catawba County.

Permits issued by Catawba County show that the Cupertino, Calif., company has been approved to reshape the slope of some of the 171 acres of vacant land it owns on Startown Road, opposite the data center, in preparation of building a solar farm.

The Hickory Daily Record confirms that the plot is indeed across the street from the data center and not far from residential houses. Nearby residents haven’t exactly been thrilled with the land work being done. To clear the land, Apple uses fires that cause significant amount of smoke that is drifting into the houses.

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This is step-by-step instructions on how to perform tethered jailbreak of your first generation iPod Touch 3G on iOS 5 firmware using RedSn0w 0.9.9b6 for Windows.

Tethered jailbreak means that each time you restart your device you will need to connect it to a computer and run redsn0w.

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Reuters suggests that Steve Jobs’ authorized biography by Walter Isaacson may become the best-selling book of 2011 on Amazon. But it is not surprisingly. Apple’s fans and others show extraordinary interest in the late Apple CEO’s life, especially after his death early this month.

The book is the best-selling book on Amazon.com and is also listed as the top-selling electronic book on the company's Kindle eBook store.

"The way things are trending, it could very likely be our top-selling book of the year," Amazon spokeswoman Brittany Turner said in a statement.

But now the book is ranked #13 on Amazon’s list of best sellers. Noteworthy, some analysts predict that the digital version of Steve Jobs’ biography outsell the print version. It is know that digital sales of best sellers are typically coming at 50-70% of total sales. Though, Amazon prefers do not comment the difference between digital and physical version of the book.

Rumors of an Apple-branded television have been circulating for years, and now have revived after release of Steve Jobs’ authorized biography, where he claims that he finally “cracked” problem. Some analysts expect that Apple may release a new television set as soon as next year. Among the newly presented evidence is a claim that prototypes of the Apple television set are now "in the works".

- Based on Jan-11 meetings in Asia (not with component suppliers), we believe Apple is investing in manufacturing facilities and securing supply for LCD displays. These displays could range from 3.5" mobile displays to 50" television displays.

- More recently, in Sept-11 we met with a contact close to an Asian component supplier who indicated that prototypes of an Apple television are in the works.

Other evidence is several patents and patent applications filed by Apple that addressing the company's work into television-related technologies.  Our expectations from Apple TV include integration with iCloud that would provide access to iTunes Store video content.  Apple is believed could sell 1.4 million television sets at an average selling price of $1800 in 2012, ramping up to 4.3 million units by 2014 as costs drop to an average selling price of $1400.

Sherwood offering in EasyPay system of Apple's retail store

Apple is planning to launch a new program allowing customers to pickup items ordered through the online store at their local Apple Stores. The program known as Sherwood will allow to order any product available at the online store, including gift-wrapped and engraved products, custom-configured Macs, and a full range of third-party accessories.

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Yesterday Apple quietly released a minor update to its MacBook Pro line. Now upgraded laptops offer better processor, and in some cases graphics and/or storage options at the same price points as the previous models.

13-inch MacBook Pro:

• Processor options move to 2.4 GHz and 2.8 GHz options.
• Hard drive options offer increased capacity up tо  500 GB in the low-end configuration and 750 GB in the high-end configuration.

15-inch MacBook Pro:

• Standard processor options move to 2.2 GHz and 2.4 GHz options. The high-end custom processor option has now a 2.5 GHz speed.
• For discrete graphics, Apple now offers the AMD Radeon HD 6750M to the low-end configuration with 512 MB of memory and given the high-end configuration a Radeon HD 6770M with 1 GB of memory.
• Hard drive has been bumped to a 750 GB.

17-inch MacBook Pro:

• Processor speeds have been bumped to a 2.4 GHz base processor with a 2.5 GHz option.
• Graphics have been improved to the Radeon HD 6770M, also with 1 GB of memory.
• Hard drive has been bumped to a 750 GB.

Ten years ago, on October 23rd, Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod. This music player seems to be partly responsible for Apple’s comeback and success. It also paved Apple the way to the consumer electronics market. Macworld provides a nice story detailing how the iPod came to be:

Behind every successful product lies a problem in search of a solution. The inspirational problem, in the iPod’s case, involved the pitiful state of the young MP3 player market in the late 1990s.

Portable MP3 players had been around since the mid 1990s, but Apple found that every one on the market offered a lackluster user experience. Steve Jobs had a strong term for gadgets like that: “crap”. Everyone at Apple agreed.

Initial reaction to the iPod wasn’t favorable. Customers complained against lack of wireless and space. They called it “lame” and thought that the iPod would never start taking off. But time tells that all those critics were wrong. Now iPod line of  portable music players is one of the most popular worldwide. Ten years after the launch, the iPod has sold over 304 million units.

Investment bank UBS issued a note to investors where it suggested that Apple would sell about 42.5 million iPhones worldwide in this quarter. But they expect that international adoption of Apple's newest handset could be slow when compared to the U.S. This might be caused the fact that Siri, the 4S-exclusive voice-recognition feature, only supports English, French and German. So in the United States sales of iPhone 4S is likely to top 11.7 million in the upcoming quarter.

"If Apple is able to manufacture and sell the estimated 42.5 million units, earnings per share of the company's stock would drive an incremental $3.09 to the estimated $9.47 for the December quarter.”

Both AT&T and Verizon confirm that the iPhone 4S release slowed sales, causing the company to miss analysts' expectations for the last quarter of the 2011 fiscal year. But despite that fact the bank gives Apple a 12 month buy rating with a price target of $510.

The Steve Jobs biography as it was promised have been released today and is available now in all regions. You may download the book on Apple's iBooks or purchase via Amazon.com. The book is an authorized biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Steve Jobs, himself, reached out to Isaacson to suggest the author write a biography on Jobs. Due to the unprecedented level of candor Jobs extended to Isaacson, the book has already made plenty of waves ahead of its public release, which was moved up to Oct. 24 after Jobs passed away on October 5th. Isaacson had asked Jobs prior to his passing why he had agreed to participate:

In order to mask my emotion, I asked the one question that was still puzzling me: Why had he been so eager, during close to 50 interviews and conversations over the course of two years, to open up so much for a book when he was usually so private? “I wanted my kids to know me,” he said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.”

Mac Pro users have been long awaiting updated models from Apple, but their hopes seem not to come true this year. In early September Intel reported that it was planning to launch new Sandy Bridge E processors and their Xeon E5 equivalents suitable for the Mac Pro on November 15th. But now the company has postponed release of its chips to early 2012, having dashed hopes for an updated Mac Pro.

In September, during Intel Developer Forum event in San Francisco, new information came to light implying that Xeon E5 launch is postponed until the first quarter 2012. Indeed, according to the latest Intel roadmaps, all Xeon E5 processors are going to be delayed by one quarter.

Apple will likely to adapt the Xeon E5-2600 series processors (likely, the E5-2620, E5-2650 and E5-2670) in the next Mac Pros, offering options of 12 or 16 cores.

A couple of days ago, we already posted some quotation from the forthcoming Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. The other interesting thing, we have recently known, related to Jony Ive, Apple design chief. The book claims that Steve Jobs grated Ive nearly complete freedom to do as he sees fit.

He [Steve Jobs] called Jonathan Ive, Apple's design chief, his "spiritual partner" at Apple. He told Isaacson that Ive had "more operation power" at Apple than anyone besides Jobs himself - that there's no one at the company who can tell Ive what to do. That, says Jobs, is "the way I set it up."

Ive, Apple's Senior Vice President for Industrial Design, has been at Apple for nearly twenty years, the last fifteen of those as design chief. Ive's team is said to operate out of a secretive high-tech lab on Apple's campus where he is given ultimate flexibility in his work.  Such freedom in works obviously helps to guard against a watering-down effect that could occur if his designs were subject to the approval of and revision by others in the company.

After last week’s iPhone 4S release in the first seven countries, Apple is going to launch the new smartphone in additional 22 countries on October 28th.

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We have already seen some teardowns and estimates of the cost of the new iPhone 4S by iFixit and Chipworks. Now iSuppli offers its teardown and some new facts.

In the case of the iPhone 4S, [IHS iSuppli analyst Andrew] Rassweiler estimates that the BOM cost ranges from $188 for the 16 gigabyte version of the iPhone 4S to $207 for the 32GB version and $245 for the 64GB version. Apple and its carrier partners sell the phones for $199, $299 and $399 respectively, typically with a two-year contract for wireless service that carriers use to subsidize the cost they pay Apple.

iSuppli didn’t find in the iPhone 4S a noise cancellation chip from Audience that was found in the iPhone 4. Such function may be implemented directly into A5 cheap that costs about $15. While iFixit found Toshiba flash memory in its iPhone 4S unit, IHS iSuppli expressed some surprise at finding Hynix memory in its unit. But as far as we know, Apple sources flash memory chips from different manufactures. They didn’t managed to find the manufacturer of the camera sensor, but estimated the cost of the camera module at $17.60.

Apple has long promoted its high resolution Retina" display that was first released in the iPhone 4 with 326 ppi (pixels per inch) resolution. Later this display made its way to iPhone 4S and iPod touch, and now is set to be included in the iPad 3 with Apple planning to offer 2048 x 1536 resolution on the 9.7-inch screen. Toshiba has gone even further and yesterday introduced a new 6.1-inch display with resolution of 2560 x 1600 and 498 ppi.

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