News tagged ‘Mac’

After The New York Times reported on the working condition of major Apple’s contract manufacturer Foxconn in China, other publications have been conducting their own investigations to find out more information. Today, CNN posted a video from a journalist Stan Grant who recently held an interview with the current employee of Foxconn and assembler of iPad display:

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Last year we reported some interesting rumors concerning Apple’s plans on the ARM (A5) based MacBook Air. The ARM processor is the same one that is used in the iPhone and iPad. An ARM-based MacBook Air, however, would raise a number of questions about what kind of device it might actually be. The use of ARM processor would allow reducing power requirements, but with a corresponding drop in computing power.

Citigroup analyst Richard Gardner who was able to meet with Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer on Thursday reports:

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The Chronic Dev-Team has released an update to its Absinthe jailbreak utility that brings support for Mac OS X 10.5 (Intel + PPC) and fixes several bugs.

@pimskeks announced the update:

#Absinthe 0.4 released greenpois0n.com/?p=173 - OSX 10.5 support (PPC+Intel). Re-jailbreaking not required. Changelog: pastebin.com/DdwGKstR

What's New in Absinthe v0.4:

• Mac: added support for OSX 10.5, PPC and Intel CPU
• added consistency check on startup to make sure required files are in place
• Windows: fixed bug in payload generator that might cause a crash

You can download Absinthe for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from here.

Here are our step-by-step tutorials:

• HowTo untether jailbreak iPad 2 with iOS 5.0.1 (Mac OS X)
• HowTo untether jailbreak iPhone 4S with iOS 5.0/5.0.1 (Mac OS X)
  

• HowTo untether jailbreak iPad 2 with iOS 5.0.1 (Windows)
• HowTo untether jailbreak iPhone 4S with iOS 5.0/5.0.1 (Windows)

Japanese site Macotakara has issued a new report where it clarified earlier claims of an Apple event in February with the cryptic details that Apple will hold a "Strange" event in February to unveil the so-called "iPad 3" and iOS 5.1 with deeper Facebook integration and a Special Event to launch the third-generation iPad in early March.

Citing both an Asian supplier and a source in the U.S., blogger Danbo has now corrected the original claim telling that Apple will indeed hold an event in February, but it will be a "Strange" event rather than a full product launch.

One possibility is that the rumored February event could contain industry-related announcements similar to how last month's education event in New York City to mark the release of iBooks 2 and iBooks Author without showing off new hardware. "Special Event for new products will be hold in early March and will release products during March as usual," Danbo continued.

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Research firm Canalys predicted last year that Apple might become the world's largest PC manufacturer during the fourth quarter of 2011, but with one exception, if tablets were counted alongside more traditional computers. Now Canalys may confirm its suggestions that Apple has indeed taken the lead on the strength of the iPad.

Canalys today announced that Apple, after reporting stellar results, became the leading worldwide client PC vendor in Q4 2011. Apple shipped over 15 million iPads and five million Macs, representing 17% of the total 120 million client PCs shipped globally in Q4. Overall, the total client PC market, including desktops, netbooks, notebooks, and pads grew 16% year-on-year. Excluding pads, the client PC market declined 0.4%. The report notes that tablets such as the iPad accounted for 22% of PC sales during the quarter, with the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook also contributing to the strong tablet performance.

Canalys predicts that the iPad would have been able to top the list even without the help of the Mac. Apple sold 15.43 million iPads during the quarter, while the non-tablet market leader HP's shipments were between 14.7 and 15.3 million units.

Today Julio Semeghini, the Secretary of Planning and Development of the State of Sao Paulo revealed that Apple’s major contract manufacturer Foxconn will construct up to five plants in Brazil with 1,000 employees each.

According to local website Folha.com, Foxconn of Taiwan will leverage the additional factories to manufacture PCs and notebooks, electronic components, precision machine elements, batteries and connectors. According to the secretary, the factories should be located in Jundiai, Sao Paolo and negotiations will continue after the Chinese New Year ends.

Apple has been demonstrating interest in incorporating short-range wireless communication technology Near Field Communication (NFC) into the iPhone for a long time. In March 2011 from the New York Times published the most creditable report, where the newspaper confirmed Apple’s interest in NFC, but was unable to specify when the technology would be incorporated into new iPhone:

According to two people with knowledge of the inner workings of a coming iteration of the Apple iPhone - although not necessarily the next one - a chip made by Qualcomm for the phone's processor will also include near-field communication technology, known as N.F.C. This technology enables short-range wireless communications between the phone and an N.F.C reader, and can be used to make mobile payments. It is unclear which version of an iPhone this technology would be built into.

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At Macworld Autodesk showed off its new program Autodesk Inventor Fusion for the Mac. Autodesk Inventor Fusion is an existing 3D modeling software on Windows, and soon it will become available for the first time on the Mac.

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Among the various topics discussed by Tim Cook during yesterday’s Town Hass session with Apple employees, he revealed some new perks for employees. Cook announced that company’s employees would receive 250$ discounts on Mac purchases and $500 discounts on iPad purchases.

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Given the increasing popularity of Apple’s mobile devices and growing demand for smartphones, it is no surprise that Apple is raising its expenses on chips. The research firm Gartner reports that Apple is now the largest buyer of semiconductors in the world as measured on the basis of Design TAM, or total silicon content in all devices designed by Apple and its rivals. In 2011, Apple spent $17 billion on silicon parts, which accounts for 5.7% of total silicon buying.

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The Chronic Dev-Team has released an update to their Absinthe jailbreak utility for iPhone 4S and iPad 2. So users who failed to jailbreak can try with new version Absinthe 0.3. Chronic Dev-Team also released a version for Linux users.

@pimskeks announced the release over Twitter:

Linux version (x86/x86_64) of #Absinthe #A5 #jailbreak is done!

Also version 0.3 of #Absinthe #A5 #jailbreak is available for OSX and Windows. Nothing really new, so no need to re-apply

#Absinthe 0.3 only has some cosmetic changes, and a potential bug fix for win32 (only really few people seem affected)

You can download Absinthe for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from here.

Here are our step-by-step tutorials:

• HowTo untether jailbreak iPad 2 with iOS 5.0.1 (Mac OS X)
• HowTo untether jailbreak iPhone 4S with iOS 5.0/5.0.1 (Mac OS X)
  

• HowTo untether jailbreak iPad 2 with iOS 5.0.1 (Windows)
• HowTo untether jailbreak iPhone 4S with iOS 5.0/5.0.1 (Windows)

We have already seen Siri competitors making their way to the Android and Windows Phone Markets. Evi is another Siri counterpart that might actually become its true alternative for non-iPhone 4S iOS and Android users.

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AppleInsider claims that Apple is expected to adopt and start supporting the new faster 802.11ac Wi-Fi specification into products this year.

The new 802.11ac standard achieves much faster wireless networking speeds than the existing 802.11n specification (in use on the latest Mac, AirPort and iOS devices) by using 2 to 4 times the frequency bandwidth (from 80 to 160MHz), more efficient data transfers through sophisticated modulation, and more antennas (up to 8; existing standards support up to 4, while Apple's Macs currently use up to 3).

This "Gigabit WiFi" offers speeds 3 times as fast as existing 802.11n wireless networks can with speeds of over 1 Gigabit per second.

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UPDATE: Apple released iOS 5.1 that is only tethered jailbreakable with redsn0w. Apple has stopped signing iOS 5.0.1, so you can NOT restore to 5.0.1 any more (both original and custom), unless you have saved your SHSH keys for 5.0.1. If you are on 5.0.1 you can jailbreak with redsn0w.

This is step-by-step instructions on how to create custom firmware, update to iOS 5.0.1 and perform untethered jailbreak of your iPhone 4 using RedSn0w 0.9.10 for Windows. It will also preserve baseband version if you need carrier unlock.

Untethered jailbreak means that each time you restart your device you will NOT need to connect it to a computer and run utilities.

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UPDATE: Apple released iOS 5.1 that is only tethered jailbreakable with redsn0w. Apple has stopped signing iOS 5.0.1, so you can NOT restore to 5.0.1 any more (both original and custom), unless you have saved your SHSH keys for 5.0.1. If you are on 5.0.1 you can jailbreak with redsn0w.

This is step-by-step instructions on how to create custom firmware, update to iOS 5.0.1 and perform untethered jailbreak of your iPhone 3GS using RedSn0w 0.9.10 for Windows. It will also preserve baseband version if you need carrier unlock. If you have updated the baseband to version 06.15, you can use this tutorial to update to iOS 5.0.1.

Untethered jailbreak means that each time you restart your device you will NOT need to connect it to a computer and run utilities.

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