Another company you've probably never heard of before today is after a slice of Apple's pie. This time it's Swiss company SmartData, who claims Apple is willfully infringing its patent on a "modular computer" with the Apple TV, iPhone, and Remote app.

As noted by Electronista, SmartData doesn't seem to produce any products or have any clients, so this seems to be yet another case of a company seeking to make money solely off its patent portfolio. SmartData was reportedly in licensing talks with Apple as early as 2004, but the companies' communication abruptly ended two years later.

Electronista classifies SmartData's claim as "somewhat tenuous," noting that nothing in the claim actually appears to apply to Apple's products. That, plus the fact that the claim was filed in Apple's San Jose court district rather than the plaintiff-friendly East Texas district, makes it far less likely that SmartData will succeed in its claim.

Swiss company SmartData sues Apple over Apple TV, iPhone originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The iPhone has always had a robust market for used handsets, with even older models still getting rather good returns for their former owners. Priceonomics has done a study of the used smartphone market and compared the depreciation in resale value for the iPhone versus Android and BlackBerry handsets.

Unsurprisingly, the iPhone holds onto its value much better than competing handsets over the same stretch of time. Priceonomics found that after 18 months an iPhone still garnered an average of 53 percent of its original (unsubsidized) price; in other words, you can expect an iPhone that's a year and a half old to fetch around US$300 on the used market.

In contrast, Android handsets only held onto 42 percent of their value, and BlackBerry handsets were a close third at 41 percent. The study also found that most Android handsets depreciate much faster than the iPhone; a used iPhone 4S could probably be sold at or near full retail value months after you bought it, but according to Priceonomics an Android handset would have lost "hundreds of dollars in value" over the same time.

The study suggests that the iPhone's reputation as a premium brand is part of why it depreciates in value slower than its competitors, but other factors are likely at play as well. One important consideration is that older-model iPhones still enjoy software updates and support from Apple; the iPhone 3GS is quickly approaching its third birthday, but it still runs the latest version of iOS. Contrast that with the situation among Android handsets, where many (if not most) models sold in 2011 will be forever stuck on Android 2.3 or earlier.

The sheer breadth of different Android models is probably hurting the resale market as well. Since 2007 there have only been five major iterations of the iPhone, but the same number of Android handsets can come out in a single week, from multiple manufacturers, and with feature sets and names that are difficult for average consumers to sort through.

With all that in mind, it's no wonder the used market for iPhones is paralleling the used PC market, where the Mac reigns supreme in resale value.

Study shows Android handsets depreciate in value faster than iPhone originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Slightly over a dozen protesters from Change.org and SumofUS delivered a petition signed by more than 250,000 people to the Grand Central Terminal Apple Store today. Both organizations are urging Apple to improve working conditions at factories run by its overseas suppliers, particularly Foxconn's massive facility in China.

CNET reports the event was relatively low-key -- there were more people present covering the event for the media than the number of protesters who showed up -- and Apple Store employees seemed well-prepared when they accepted the big box of signatures.

The group claims the same petition will be delivered to Apple's San Francisco store later today as one part of a global action also involving stores in Bangalore, London, and Sydney.

At press time, it was unclear if the protesters were wearing clothing manufactured in the USA, or if they plan similar protests at Best Buys, Walmarts, Gamestops, or the headquarters of Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, HP, Dell, or any of the other retail outlets and consumer electronics companies who also heavily employ Chinese labor to build their products.

Apple Store employees accept petitions from protesters originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Although discontinued for consumer sales last July, the plastic MacBook remained available for sale to educational institutions as a (relatively) low-cost option for schools seeking portable Macs for students. If you were wondering how long that would last, wonder no longer; seven months later, Apple has ceased distributing the MacBook to educational institutions, according to Mac Rumors.

Apple has notified resellers that the plastic MacBook is now classified as "End of Life," meaning it will no longer be produced or sold to anyone. Production of the old model may have ceased as long ago as last July, with Apple selling through surplus inventory to educational institutions over the subsequent months.

Considering its recent focus on using the iPad as a digital replacement for textbooks, it seems likely that Apple will start pushing the iPad to fill the educational niche the MacBook once satisfied. Even the most expensive iPad is still cheaper than the MacBook was, and the iPad has several other potential advantages over the old MacBook.

This represents the end of the road for the plastic MacBook. First introduced in May 2006 as a replacement for the iBook, the MacBook spent most of its life as Apple's top-selling notebook. The low-cost versions of the MacBook Air started stealing some of the MacBook's thunder in the past couple years, and the 64 GB version of the 11-inch MacBook Air now fills the $999 slot the MacBook once occupied.

If it's your thing, pour one out for our dearly departed MacBook, the last vestige of Apple's decade-long fling with devices made out of shiny white plastic.

White MacBook reaches end of life, education sales to cease originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

According to Chinese tech site DoNews (sketchy English translation here), Apple plans on bringing support for Mandarin Chinese to Siri as early as March of this year. Other dialects of Chinese, such as Cantonese, will remain unsupported for the time being. Support for Japanese and Russian is supposedly coming at the same time.

Although the source may sound somewhat suspicious -- a Chinese tech site that claims to have inside information from an Apple engineer working on Siri -- this information does align with Apple's own promise to increase Siri's linguistic acumen in 2012. Apple has also promised to bring support for Spanish, Italian, and Korean to Siri sometime this year.

Siri will supposedly also offer local business information and navigation options to Chinese users, which is something that's been US-only so far. With China being Apple's biggest emerging market, it's obvious why Apple might want to prioritize increased Siri functionality in that country. (As for me and the rest of the New Zealand iOS users, we can probably look forward to full business/navigation support in Siri sometime in 2022.)

These updates to Siri's linguistic capabilities are likely to launch alongside an iOS update, probably iOS 5.1. Like many others, Stephen Millward of Penn-Olson speculates the iOS 5.1 update will launch alongside new iPad hardware; there's obviously no way to know that for certain, but my gut tells me he's probably right.

Siri may speak and understand Chinese, Japanese, and Russian by March originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Apple has released three EFI Firmware Updates for 2010-model Macs, including the iMac, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro. This update enables Lion Internet Recovery on those older Macs. Introduced in OS X Lion alongside the mid-2011 updates to the MacBook Air and Mac mini, Internet Recovery enables access to disk repair or OS X Lion installation options via a broadband internet connection. This is intended for use on a failed hard drive or a blank drive that's never had OS X installed on it.

Together with a series of earlier firmware updates, all Macs introduced from 2010 onward now have access to Internet Recovery features -- with just one notable exception. Even the newest Mac Pro is still excluded from the support list for Internet Recovery.

For both Mac Pro owners and those of you running Lion on a 2009 or earlier Mac, not having access to Internet Recovery isn't the end of the world. If you have a spare external drive, you can either build a recovery disk, or you can roll your own full Lion installer disk.

EFI Firmware Update brings Lion Internet Recovery to 2010-model Macs originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 07 Feb 2012 23:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Soon after the 10.7.3 update to OS X Lion, people started finding subtle differences in the pointer icons for OS X (hat tip to Daring Fireball). Specifically, the link, grab, copy, and screenshot pointers have all been updated with slightly new iterations for the first time since OS X 10.2, released in 2002.

The link pointer features a slightly angled index finger rather than the traditional straight finger that's been a staple of the icon since even before OS X, and the grab pointer has been updated to more closely match the "Mickey Mouse glove" appearance of the link pointer. The copy pointer features a more pronounced green gradient beneath the "+" symbol. The old pseudo-SLR camera icon for the screenshot pointer, which comes up after hitting Command + Shift + 4 and then tapping the spacebar, has been replaced with an icon that matches the icon for the Image Capture application.

Old icon, new icon, Image Capture app icon

Apple has also updated all icons with high resolution versions for Universal Access purposes, so the pointers no longer look badly pixellated when super-sized via the Universal Access settings in System Preferences.

Beware of comically large pointer

"The simplest explanation is that Apple only just now got around to increasing the resolution of these elements for the benefit of users who use the cursor-zooming Universal Access feature," says Daring Fireball's John Gruber. Indeed, these OS X pointer icons hadn't been updated in nearly ten years. Gruber further speculates that this may be an initial step toward higher resolution "Retina Display" Macs, though he admits that we should "take my conjecture here with a grain of wishful-thinking salt."

Many blogs must have skipped that last sentence, because overnight speculation over possible "Retina Display Macs" has been rampant since the updated pointers gained wider attention. But the simplest explanation that Gruber himself cites is the best one; the pointer icons are a very minor detail in OS X and a feature that remained completely static for close to a decade without anyone noticing or complaining. The updated icons aren't terribly likely to have anything to do with forthcoming updated hardware.

OS X 10.7.3 includes new high-res pointer icons, rampant speculation ensues originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 07 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Apple has issued a reminder to developers that it will not tolerate use of third party services to manipulate app rankings in the App Store. "When you promote your app, you should avoid using services that advertise or guarantee top placement in App Store charts," the reminder states. "Even if you are not personally engaged in manipulating App Store chart rankings or user reviews, employing services that do so on your behalf may result in the loss of your Apple Developer Program membership."

This reminder could very well be in response to a well-trafficked post in Touch Arcade where an iOS developer revealed that an ad network guaranteed his app placement in the top 25 apps in exchange for $5000. This third-party service allegedly employs bots to automatically download the targeted app multiple times, automatically increasing the app's ranking and granting the app greater exposure to potential human downloaders.

8 of the top 25 apps were allegedly developed by clients of this bot service. If true, this represents a serious problem to the legitimacy of App Store rankings, and it's therefore no wonder that Apple is reminding developers of its aggressive stance on the issue.

Apple warns of crackdown on App Store rankings manipulation originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

RIM's star just sank a bit closer to the horizon. Halliburton, a household name in the energy industry and once a BlackBerry bastion, is dumping RIM's platform and switching to iOS. The company once relied heavily on RIM's platform, but after evaluating RIM, Windows Phone, Android, and iOS, Halliburton has settled on switching to Apple's platform.

"Over the next year, we will begin expanding the use of our mobile technology by transitioning from the BlackBerry (RIM) platform that we currently use to smartphone technology via the iPhone," the company said. Halliburton representatives confirmed to AppleInsider that only 4500 of the company's 70,000 employees still use BlackBerry devices, so the transition probably won't take as long as it might have a few years ago.

According to AppleInsider's sources, Halliburton actively engaged with Apple in its transition. Halliburton is far from the first company to do so; Clorox ditched the BlackBerry last year, and 92 percent of its employees replaced it with an iPhone.

RIM's platform was once synonymous with business communications, but that status has slowly eroded since the iPhone's introduction. While corporate IT spent the first few years after the iPhone's introduction scoffing at the device, quarterly reports from analysis firms like Good Technology show that iOS has penetrated enterprise markets in a way that even the stodgiest of companies can no longer afford to ignore.

Halliburton dumping BlackBerry, switching to iOS originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Siri has been in widespread use for four months, but so far Apple's "personal assistant" is still only available on one device, the iPhone 4S. We speculated that there weren't any technical reasons Siri couldn't work on some of Apple's other devices, and the jailbreak community later proved us right by porting Siri to the iPhone 4.

AppleInsider did some digging and discovered there may be a technological reason Apple's kept Siri an iPhone 4S-only feature: noise reduction. The iPhone 4 incorporates noise reduction circuitry from a third-party vendor called Audience, and that circuitry lies separate from the A4 chip on the iPhone's logic board. The newer processor in the iPhone 4S (and possibly the iPad 2) incorporates a newer version of this noise-reduction circuitry within the A5 chip itself, reducing overall cost.

Audience's noise reduction chip works similarly to how the human brain processes audio. By sampling audio from multiple sources (the iPhone's main microphone and the noise-cancelling mic), the Audience chip is able to filter out background noise and deliver only the user's voice, just like how your brain filters out noise in a crowded room to focus on a person talking to you.

The newer noise reduction circuitry in the A5 chip is better at "far-field" noise reduction than the circuits in the iPhone 4. Essentially, the iPhone 4S can achieve the same or better noise reduction when held at arm's length that the iPhone 4 gets when held directly in front of a user's mouth.

The implications for Siri use are obvious -- because of its less advanced noise reduction circuitry, Siri wouldn't function nearly as well on an iPhone 4 in an even moderately noisy environment unless you held it up to your ear and talked directly into the microphone. Despite having an A5 processor (and possibly including the newer noise reduction circuitry), Siri might not function well on an iPad 2 either, since the iPad 2 doesn't have a noise-cancelling microphone.

Apple's product perfectionism often leads to scenarios where features that might technically work on a product wind up excluded because they don't work perfectly. I've run into this a few times with older gear; my old PowerBook G3 had no technical barriers to running OS X Panther or Tiger, for instance, but because it didn't run anything newer than OS X Jaguar well, Apple artificially restricted the device to Jaguar. Similarly, jailbreakers discovered ways to get video capture working on the iPhone 3G, but the results were rather lackluster compared to the officially-supported video recording on the iPhone 3GS and above.

Even if Siri technically works on Apple's older iOS devices, if its performance doesn't work to Apple's satisfaction, we may never see Siri ported to the iPhone 4 or current iPads after all.

Siri may be iPhone 4S-only because of noise reduction tech originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The ongoing patent spat between Motorola and Apple has reached an interesting crossroads. Just recently a German court granted an injunction against sales of many of Apple's 3G-bearing products, including older model iPhones and the iPad. That injunction held for less than a day, however, pending further review of Motorola's claims against Apple.

Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents found new information that suggests Motorola has offered to end the patent dispute and license its wireless patents to Apple -- in exchange for 2.25 percent of Apple's sales. It's unclear whether this is a percentage of all Apple revenues or, more likely, a percentage of sales of devices which contain a 3G antenna and therefore potentially fall under the umbrella of Motorola's patent claims. In either case, Mueller finds the 2.25 percent shakedown "excessive," and it only takes a glance at Apple's latest quarterly earnings statement to see that Apple finds it pretty excessive, too.

Revenue from iPhone sales, in aggregate since 2007, amounts to just under US$93 billion. Motorola's cut of those revenues would have been nearly $2.1 billion over those years. Since the iPhone sales juggernaut shows no signs of slowing down, Motorola's cash pile would only grow bigger over time -- and those numbers don't include sales of the Wi-Fi + 3G iPad, which Motorola also claims falls afoul of its patents.

What makes this move seem even skeevier is that Google is in the process of trying to acquire Motorola, meaning that if Motorola succeeds in its claim against Apple, Google would eventually be collecting a patent tax on the iPhone and 3G iPad.

Apple has filed motions to obtain information from several other handset vendors, including Nokia, HTC, LG, and Sony Ericsson, presumably to find out how much they're paying in royalty fees to Motorola for the patents in question. If it turns out that Motorola is demanding more from Apple than it's demanded from those other companies, the judge in the patent case is going to want to know why.

Motorola wants 2.25 percent of Apple sales to license patents originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 04 Feb 2012 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

A silent update to the backend has introduced Genius recommendations for movies and TV shows to the Apple TV. No user action is required to access the new feature, as it's not part of a device firmware update. Instead, Apple has updated its own servers to send this information to the Apple TV from its iTunes Store equivalent.

Based on AppleInsider's screenshots of the updated Apple TV UI, this feature appears essentially identical to the Genius recommendation features already present in iTunes on the Mac and iOS devices. With access to your library and purchase history, the Apple TV can now recommend TV or movie content based on what you've watched before.

Apple TV now offers Genius recommendations for movies, TV shows originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The third update to OS X Lion, 10.7.3, has been released and is now available in Software Update. A list of some of 10.7.3's fixes are below. Of potentially greatest interest is the fix that purports to "resolve a Wi-Fi connection issue when waking from sleep" -- I know both of my Macs have fallen prey to this bug several times under Lion, and it's been a fairly widespread issue. Hopefully this bug has indeed been squashed once and for all.

The OS X Lion v10.7.3 Update includes Safari 5.1.3 and fixes that:

• Add Catalan, Croatian, Greek, Hebrew, Romanian, Slovak, Thai, and Ukrainian language support
• Address issues when using smart cards to log into OS X
• Address compatibility issues with Microsoft Windows file sharing
• Address an issue printing Microsoft Word documents that use markup
• Address a graphics performance issue after sleep on some earlier iMacs that use ATI graphics
• Resolve a Wi-Fi connection issue when waking from sleep
• Address an issue that may prevent Safari from opening before joining a wireless network
• Fix a potential issue authenticating to an SMB DFS share
• Include RAW image compatibility for additional digital cameras

OS X 10.7.3 is available via Software Update, or you can download it directly from Apple's support site.

OS X Lion 10.7.3 released with Safari 5.1.3, Wi-Fi bug fix originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 01 Feb 2012 16:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Freshly available in Software Update are AirPort Utility 5.6 and AirPort Utility 6.0. AirPort Utility 5.6 is a minor update to its predecessor which "Resolves an issue with using network passwords stored in the Keychain," while AirPort Utility 6.0 is a major overhaul of the user interface that matches its iOS counterpart in both appearance and basic functions. In fact, AirPort Utility 6.0 is so similar to the iOS version that it essentially looks as though its been back-ported.

While AirPort Utility 6.0 certainly looks snazzy and features an interface that novice users will find much easier to navigate, AirPort Utility 5.6 is still around for a reason -- AirPort Utility 6.0 can't be used to administer older, 802.11g-only base stations. People like me who still have an old school 802.11g AirPort Express on their network will have to use the older version of AirPort Utility. This is a confusing and unfortunate oversight on Apple's part, and hopefully this is something the company is able/willing to address later on.

Just from my brief interaction with AirPort Utility 6.0, I can definitely say I'll be reverting to 5.6 for reasons other than hardware incompatibility. The graphically-driven interface feels nice and natural on iOS devices, but it feels far too dumbed-down on the Mac. Critically, in AirPort Utility 6.0 the entire program is unusable if you happen to be updating firmware on any one base station; administering any other base station is impossible if you're updating firmware on any AirPort device on your network.

For novice users with supported AirPort devices, AirPort Utility 6.0 will be a much easier way to administrate their wireless networks. The rest of us may prefer to stick with the old interface; I know I will.

AirPort Utility 6.0 for OS X Lion retools interface to match iOS counterpart originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Siri has been getting around lately. When she's not guest starring on popular sitcoms, she's apparently lending her vocal talents to the music scene. The Flaming Lips have produced an experimental song (embedded below) called "Now I Understand," which features both Siri and Erykah Badu as vocalists.

This isn't the first time Siri has been part of a musical collaboration. Just a few days after the iPhone 4S launched, musician Jonathan Mann (perhaps most famous to Apple watchers for the Antennagate song that Steve Jobs actually played at a press conference) posted his own duet with Siri.

To my ears, all these musical experiments show is how far we have to go yet before computerized voices sound truly human. Siri does a much better job than the Mac voices of the mid-1990s did on songs like Radiohead's "Fitter, Happier," but the voicing still sounds very artificial in a musical context. We're still a long way from the vibrant, natural tones of 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL 9000 and his rendition of "Daisy, Daisy."

Then again, with so many human singers over-utilizing autotune and starting to sound more and more robotic themselves, perhaps all we're seeing with Siri is the next step in a weird human/machine convergence in the music world.

[via Electronista]

New Flaming Lips song features Siri on vocals originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Scalping of iPhones is a huge problem in both mainland China and Hong Kong. Scalpers, who will buy the iPhones at stores and then resell them at inflated prices, have exploited both the online and brick-and-mortar availability of the iPhone 4 and 4S and prevented non-scalping customers from having easy access to the devices. The overwhelming prevalence of scalpers in line at the iPhone 4S launch in China caused Apple to scrub the launch at its Beijing store, and the scalpers nearly rioted.

According to Electronista, Apple has apparently had enough of the situation and has instituted measures to combat these scalpers. Earlier this month, Apple suspended in-store sales of the iPhone 4S throughout mainland China, and that policy has been expanded to Hong Kong.

Apple's online Hong Kong store has instituted a lottery system designed to prevent scalpers from using automated services to make online reservations. Prospective buyers have only a three-hour window to enter the lottery; winners are notified later in the day and required to pick up the reserved iPhone the next day. Stricter identification standards are in force, including a requirement for a government-issued photo ID.

Time will tell if this will thwart scalpers and give everyone else fair and easy access to iPhones in China and Hong Kong. It's a fair bet that the scalpers are already looking for ways to defeat or exploit the lottery system.

Apple Hong Kong combats scalpers with iPhone lottery originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The most recent episode of CBS's sitcom The Big Bang Theory rather prominently features Siri in its "B" storyline. Astrophysicist Raj, one of the show's main characters, buys an iPhone 4S and spends most of the episode interacting with the voice-activated "personal assistant."

As is typical for the show, Raj's interaction with Siri rapidly goes off the deep end; the character is notorious for striking out with women due to a psychologically-induced speech block when any females are nearby, but he has no problem talking to Siri. His interactions with his iPhone begin with the initial novelty that all iPhone 4S users likely experience when they first use Siri, but over the course of the episode Raj's attitude toward Siri starts to become increasingly creepier.

Both my wife and I noticed that Siri's real voice isn't used in the episode; we initially put it down to licensing issues, but it turned out there was an in-episode reason for using a human substitute for Siri's voice that pays off at the end.

When I watched this episode last week I thought this storyline was pretty funny (the half-bottle of Merlot I had with dinner probably helped), but watching it again now makes me feel more uncomfortable than amused. I get that The Big Bang Theory derives most of its laughs from over-the-top exaggerations of geeky behavior, but toward the end of this latest episode it got to be a little bit too exaggerated.

What's most interesting about this episode is that it must have gone into production not too long after the iPhone 4S was first announced, and probably no more than a week or two after the handset became available in the States. Within a relatively short space of time the show's writers managed to assemble most of the more humorous Siri interactions into a coherent storyline that's perfectly in line with the show's conventions.

A video of Raj's interactions with Siri is embedded below, or at least until CBS releases the hounds on YouTube.

Siri guest stars on CBS's Big Bang Theory originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Valve has released Steam Mobile for iOS, a free app for the iPhone. According to Valve, "With the free Steam app for iOS, you can participate in the Steam community wherever you go. Chat with your Steam friends, browse community groups and user profiles, read the latest gaming news and stay up to date on unbeatable Steam sales."

That's the promise of the app, anyway; Steam Mobile has launched in "limited beta," meaning you first need to input an activation key on your PC or Mac. Entering your username and password into the Steam Mobile app is apparently enough to "express interest" in the beta, but for now that's pretty much all the app does until you receive an activation key.

It's interesting that this app was approved; Apple has traditionally frowned on apps that require users to register for access in this manner, so it's odd to see Valve granted an exception.

Also worth noting is that Steam Mobile will not serve as a front end to Steam selling games for the iPhone. All Steam Mobile will allow you to do is access the community and buy games for your Mac or PC from your iPhone.

Valve debuts free Steam Mobile iPhone app originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 26 Jan 2012 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Forrester Research recently conducted a survey of close to 10,000 workers in 17 countries to determine which workers are more likely to own and use Apple products. The New York Times has published the results, which show that "business directors" -- in other words, bosses -- are the employee group most likely to own one or more Apple products and use them at work.

Here's a breakdown of the survey results.

Who uses Apple products:

• 43 percent of people earning $150,000 or more per year -- 87 of 200 respondents
• 27 percent of people earning $100,000 - $149,999
• 23 percent of people earning $50,000 - $99,999
• 19 percent of people earning $49,999 or less -- 1300 of 6800 respondents

21 percent of all 9912 respondents in Forrester's survey said they used one or more Apple devices for work.

The New York Times notes that the increasing penetration of Apple products into the workplace, often driven by people bringing in and using their personal devices, is wearing down traditional IT department hostility toward the Mac, iPhone, and iPad. However, as Ars Technica notes, the research also shows that while 50 percent of firms in "mature markets" offer Macs, only 30 percent of respondents said their companies support them, leaving many Mac users to fend for themselves at work.

Coupled with reports like Good Technology's quarterly results on device activations, it seems that the old practice of business and enterprise environments shunning Apple products is shifting quite rapidly. Forrester's claim that "Windows' dominance is at an end" is premature, however; while Microsoft's share of the enterprise pie is no longer as big as it once was, it's still claiming the majority of users in that sphere.

Research suggests business directors more likely to use Apple products at work originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 26 Jan 2012 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Despite multiple media outlets painting it as a "disappointing" update immediately after its debut, the iPhone 4S is Apple's most popular iPhone by far. A consumer survey by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (via AllThingsD) suggests that the new iPhone 4S accounted for 89 percent of all iPhones sold in Apple's most recent quarter. The US$99 iPhone 4 and free iPhone 3GS were both barely blips on the radar, with 7 percent and 4 percent of overall sales, respectively.

iPhone 4S unit sales follow a predictable pattern, with the lowest-priced model being most popular:

• 16 GB: 45 percent of sales
• 32 GB: 34 percent of sales
• 64 GB: 21 percent of sales

Some other metrics found in CIRP's research give some further insight into demand for the iPhone 4S:

• 19 percent of iPhone 4 owners upgraded
• 42 percent of iPhone 4S buyers broke their existing contract for an early upgrade
• 19 percent of iPhone 4S buyers sold their old device

I've inputted CIRP's results into a spreadsheet and compared them against the iPhone unit sales and revenues in Apple's own earnings. The numbers I got for total revenues when going by CIRP's survey results are only about 6 percent higher than Apple's actual reported revenues, so CIRP's numbers look to be quite close to what actually took place.

Keeping that margin of error in mind, unit sales of the iPhone break down approximately as follows:

• iPhone 3GS: 1.48 million
• iPhone 4: 2.59 million
• iPhone 4S 16 GB: 14.8 million
• iPhone 4S 32 GB: 11.2 million
• iPhone 4S 64 GB: 6.9 million

This distribution of unit sales hews very closely to my own analysis of Apple's iPhone sales. Of note, the iPhone 3GS is still the third-most popular smartphone overall, and with just under 1.5 million units sold it outsold all competing Android handsets (considered individually, obviously not in total).

The iPhone 4S is also eating the iPod touch's breakfast and stealing its lunch money; with approximately 10 million iPod touch units sold last quarter, the 16 and 32 GB iPhone 4S models each outsold the iPod touch all by themselves.

Siri, define "blockbuster."

iPhone 4S accounts for 89 percent of iPhone sales originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Every three months Apple announces its quarterly earnings, and we see the company's huge pile of cash grow to increasingly awe-inspiring heights. Like clockwork, a day or two after the earnings announcement comes calls for Apple to give some of that money back to its shareholders in the form of dividends.

Reuters claims that these calls for dividends are getting louder, and some investors are getting restless. Apple's US$98 billion cash horde is so big that it represents a value of $104 per share, a big slice of the current $444 per share stock value.

Several Wall Street analysts are convinced that Apple will pay a dividend to investors in 2012, but they say that every year. Apple has not paid dividends on its stock since 1995, and Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer has stated that the money isn't burning a hole in Apple's pockets. CEO Tim Cook and Oppenheimer revealed that Apple is actively looking at what to do with its money, but neither of the executives would commit to a firm comment on the company's intentions.

One major stumbling block is that most of Apple's cash is tied up overseas -- $64 billion of its $98 billion. Repatriating that money to the US would subject it to a 35 percent tax, skimming over $22 billion off the top... something that Apple has lobbied against.

Within the next few days I predict we'll see another wave of posts predicting huge company acquisitions -- finish your drink if you see "Apple could buy Facebook" in your RSS reader before the end of the week. That's also an unlikely scenario; Apple has a history of buying smaller companies that aren't already household names, and it usually only drops a few billion dollars in the process.

Much like the iPad cannibalizing the Mac, I suspect Apple's executives see the company's cash stockpile as a nice problem to have. It affords the company a great deal of flexibility; Apple could make zero dollars in revenue for the next seven straight years and still be able to sustain its current operating expenses. With dividends and major acquisitions likely out of the picture, there's no way of knowing what Apple intends to do with its money... though I have my own loony ideas about that.

Investors eyeing Tim Cook's management of Apple's cash horde originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Good Technology's quarterly report on device activation statistics among its Fortune 500 clients has been released. Just like previous quarters, the results show a marked dominance of iOS device activations in enterprise environments. In the consumer arena, Android has been running away with the marketshare lead for most of the past couple of years, but iOS continues to rule the enterprise roost.

According to Good's analysis, the relative percentage of Android device activations decreased over the quarter. iOS devices made up 71 percent of net activations in Q4 2011, while Android dropped to 29 percent; these numbers compare to 68 percent for iOS vs. 32 percent for Android in Q3.

The iPhone 4S was a major factor in Apple's smartphone gains for the quarter, accounting for 31 percent of all device activations -- the single most popular device for the quarter. During September and October, Android smartphone activations were steadily closing in on iPhone activations, but that trend sharply reversed in November. By December, iPhone activations were crushing Android phone activations; in fact, during December the number of iPad activations exceeded the number of Android smartphone activations, something not seen since July.

The iPad accounted for 94.7 percent of total tablet activations for Q4, a negligible decline from its 96 percent statistic in Q3. Android tablets accounted for no more than 1 percent of overall device activations in the enterprise, with a 5.2 percent share of overall tablet activations.

"For now, the iPad and iPad 2 remain the de facto enterprise tablet standard -- especially when it comes to the large company-driven deployments in verticals such as Financial Services, Business and Professional Services, Life Sciences, and Healthcare," GT reports. The Financial Services sector in particular had an iPad adoption rate four times higher than any other industry.

Together, Apple's iPhone and iPad models accounted for the top five out of ten most popular devices activated in the enterprise, with the device breakdown as follows:

1. iPhone 4S
2. iPhone 4
3. iPad 2
4. iPad
5. iPhone 3GS

Android smartphones rounded out the top 10. The most popular Android-powered device, the Samsung Galaxy S II, accounted for 1.7 percent of overall device activations.

GT's summary of 2011 as a whole shows a marked lead in iPhone activations over Android smartphone activations, especially in the last quarter. Meanwhile, the iPad is stomping Android's tablets in the enterprise; Android's tablets barely show up at all on Good's graph of 2011.

It's worth noting, as Good itself does, that the numbers for Q4 do not reflect holiday sales. Good Technology expects yet more gains for iOS devices in the enterprise once workers bring their newly-acquired Christmas gifts back to work with them over the first quarter of 2012.

Good does not report on BlackBerry or Windows Phone 7 device activations. However, given what we know about RIM's increasingly dismal performance and Windows Phone 7's lack of traction in the consumer market, it's unlikely that either platform is making a meaningful contribution to the overall trend in device activations.

Good Technology report shows Apple still dominates enterprise activations originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 26 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Not very long after Tim Cook said that Apple sees a "huge opportunity" in Brazil, it turns out the company's CEO may have had more than sales on his mind. Brazil has granted iPad assembler Foxconn special exemptions from Brazilian excise and other taxes, clearing the way for iPad production to begin in South American factories.

For several months in 2011 it looked as though iPad production might begin at Foxconn-owned factories in Brazil, but the proposed US$12 billion deal fell through in September when Brazil failed to meet Foxconn's expectations for tax breaks. Brazilian officials characterized Foxconn's demands as "crazy," but there appears to have been a change of mind. It remains to be seen how Foxconn's secondary worry of Brazil's lack of skilled labor will be addressed.

Mercado reports the tax exemption applies to "tablets with touch screens, no keyboard and weighing less than 750 grams" -- at 600 grams, the iPad 2 comes in comfortably below that limit, as do several competitors' products. "Accessories, cables, power supplies and manuals that are related to the tablets" also fall under the exemption rules.

Our Brazilian readers have said that high local prices for Apple's gear haven't stymied demand for the devices. If produced locally, Brazilian prices for the iPad could fall considerably since import duties will no longer be levied against them, and that could potentially send Brazilian demand for the iPad into the stratosphere.

With a population of 200 million, Brazil represents a great opportunity for Apple to expand its operations in an area of the globe that consumer electronics companies haven't traditionally viewed as a high priority market.

Brazil gives tax exemption to Foxconn, iPad production may follow originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The attention-grabbing numbers from Apple's most recent earnings statement have already made the rounds -- US$46 billion in revenue, net profit of $13 billion, 37 million iPhones sold -- and all of that within three months. Apple didn't just turn in record-breaking performance for a tech company; only Exxon has ever managed to have a more profitable quarter than the one Apple just reported.

Combing through the spreadsheets on Apple's earnings statement provides some additional insight into the company's overall performance, where its strengths and weaknesses lie, and where the company might be headed in the future. These numbers aren't as headline-grabbing as Apple's profits or unit sales, but they tell an important story all the same.

Research and Development

In three months, Apple's expenditures on R&D totalled a staggering $758 million. This compares to expenditures of "only" $575 million the year before. To get an idea of how much money Apple's pouring into R&D, compare its three-month expenditures to the production costs of Avatar, one of the most expensive films ever produced. Avatar cost $237 million; in just three months, Apple's R&D expenditures are enough to finance an entire Avatar trilogy.

The $575 million in R&D Apple spent in Q1 2011 likely went into the iPad 2, iCloud, the iPhone 4S, iOS 5, OS X Lion, the newest MacBook Air, and a whole host of things we haven't even seen yet. Apple's R&D expenditures for Q1 2012 have increased by an additional $183 million, so the company is still clearly focused on innovating like mad.

Mac sales

One of the few minus signs visible in Apple's sales data was its North American Mac sales. Though sales were up by 19 percent compared to a year earlier, compared to the previous quarter Mac sales actually declined by 6 percent. North America was the only market to see a decline in Mac sales during the quarter, but at the same time only Europe and Asia Pacific had double-digit growth in Mac sales.

Oddly enough, sales of Mac desktops actually seemed to perform better over the quarter compared to portable sales (by trend, not by number of units sold):

Desktops

• Unit sales up 16 percent
• Revenue up 15 percent

Portables

• Unit sales up 3 percent
• Revenue up 2 percent

Both types of Mac vastly outperformed the year-ago quarter, but the tapering off of portable Mac sales and the overall decline in Mac sales in North America during the Christmas sales period is intriguing. Several factors may explain this phenomenon.

First, there were no significant Mac notebook updates during the quarter; the MacBook Pro's late October refresh was quite modest, and the MacBook Air hasn't been updated since July. Second, the mid-2011 discontinuation of the plastic MacBook eliminated Apple's "entry level" offering; the smaller and less capacious 11-inch MacBook Air costs the same as the old MacBook, but it may not be as attractive an offering to budget-minded notebook shoppers. Larger economic factors may have been at play, too; North American shoppers in particular simply may not have had the discretionary funds for a Mac purchase over the holiday quarter.

While all of those things likely had an impact on sales of Mac portables, I think what we're really seeing here is the effect of the iPad's cannibalization of the lineup. Over the quarter, the iPad outsold all Mac portables by nearly 4 to 1, and outsold all Macs combined by 3 to 1. Apple has admitted in the past that the iPad has "slightly" cannibalized Mac sales, and classified it as a "nice problem to have." It looks like that so-called "problem" is showing signs of getting worse.

None of this is to say that the Mac is in any danger; in a sharp contrast from the rest of the PC industry, the Mac is still seeing unit sales and revenue growths well into the double digits. Whether that trend continues or not is going to depend greatly on the iPad's growth; Tim Cook has said he expects the iPad to eclipse the PC industry eventually, but in terms of both unit sales and revenues, the iPad has already supplanted the Mac after less than two years on the market.

iPod sales

During its earnings conference call, Tim Cook revealed that the company sold a total of 62 million iOS devices in the past quarter. Subtracting the iPhone and iPad from that number yields a total of approximately 10 million iPod touches sold (assuming Cook wasn't also counting the Apple TV as an "iOS device," that is). This means the iPod touch now accounts for almost two-thirds of all iPods sold; the iPod nano, shuffle, and classic combined are now essentially one drop in Apple's massive bucket. Small wonder, then, that Apple's music-only iPods weren't updated at all this year.

The steep year-over-year decline in iPod sales came as no surprise. The iPod reached its all-time sales peak in Q1 of 2009, with 22.7 million units sold. Three years later, the iPod has clearly lost its mojo. With only 15.4 million iPods sold during the holiday quarter, the iPod barely outperformed its sales during the 2006 holidays. Apple sold five million fewer iPods this holiday season compared to the previous year.

As a matter of fact, Apple sold more iPads than iPods over the holiday quarter. This is a sharp contrast to the 2010 holiday season, when the iPod outsold both the iPhone and iPad. In late 2010, iPod sales were a few million units higher than the iPhone and exceeded those of the iPad by nearly 3 to 1. In late 2011, the iPad pulled just ahead of the iPod, and the iPhone outsold the iPod by more than two to one.

As recently as four years ago, the iPod was by far Apple's biggest cash cow; revenues from iPod sales exceeded even Mac sales by a healthy margin during the 2007 holiday season. iPod sales are rapidly falling, however, making it clear that the device is no longer among Apple's high-priority projects.

Given the yearly declines in iPod sales, it's easy to envision a not-too-distant future where the iPod is relegated to niche status. It's unlikely Apple will stop selling the device altogether, as it still addresses markets not served by the iPhone, but the days when the iPod was central to Apple's fortunes are long gone.

iTunes

Apple's revenues from the iTunes Store, App Store, iBookstore, and iPod-related accessories totalled more than $2 billion over the quarter. Look back to exactly ten years earlier, to the first quarter of 2002; quarterly revenues were a mere $1.375 billion for the entire company.

It's long been speculated that the various iTunes-related retail services operate at break-even or, at best, at a modest profit, and the services exist merely to spur growth in Apple's hardware sales. That scenario may have been true years ago, but with a 42 percent year-over-year growth in revenue, iTunes is starting to look like a pretty lucrative business all on its own.

Peripherals

Apple sold $766 million in peripherals during the past quarter. Again, when you compare that to the company Apple was 10 years ago, the difference is stunning; sales of all Macs combined during Q1 2002 amounted to barely over $1 billion. If Apple's sales of peripherals continue to increase by the same rate, by Q1 2013 it'll be taking in nearly as much money from peripheral sales as it made from the Mac in 2002.

If Apple counts the Apple TV among its peripherals, then the device accounted for a fairly significant portion of the overall sales. With 1.4 million units sold during the quarter, Apple's "hobby" would account for nearly a fifth of all peripheral sales.

iOS

Apple sold 37 million iPhones, 15.4 million iPads, and (going by Tim Cook's numbers as revealed during the conference call) around ten million iPod touches over the holiday quarter. That's a grand total of 62 million iOS devices sold in three months -- all running the latest release of iOS, not some year-old version of it, and all of them virtually guaranteed OS updates for several years.

During the last quarter, iPhone sales reportedly exceeded sales of all Android handsets, from all vendors, combined. The iPad continues to utterly dominate the tablet market; Tim Cook reported no measurable impact on iPad sales even after the debut of the most popular Android (forked) tablet so far, the Kindle Fire.

Apple earned almost $34 billion in revenue from iPhone and iPad sales -- in three months. Google's revenue for 2011 -- all of Google, for the entire year -- was $37 billion.

Clearly, Android is winning.

Average revenue per unit sold

Comparing Apple's unit sales versus its revenues gives us an opportunity to see, on average, how much money Apple takes in with each sale in each product category. In turn, this gives us a general idea of which items in each category gain the most sales.

• Desktop Macs: $1309

With 11 different models ranged over the Mac mini, iMac, and Mac Pro, the average selling price of a desktop Mac is $2072. The Mac Pro's high prices drive that average selling price much higher than the actual revenue/unit number, which leads me to believe that sales of the Mac Pro are negligible at best.

Looking at the numbers, it seems the 21.5-inch iMac is very likely Apple's most popular desktop model, followed by the 27-inch iMac, then the Mac mini. I would be shocked if the Mac Pro accounted for more than 10 percent of overall Mac desktop sales last quarter.

• Portable Macs: $1254

The MacBook Air and MacBook Pro combine for a total of 9 different models at an average selling price of $1588. The revenue/unit numbers from Apple's earnings suggest that the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro account for a majority of Apple's portable sales, with much lower sales for the 15 and 17-inch MacBook Pro models.

• iPods: $164

The revenue/unit numbers for the iPod line are lower than the lowest-priced iPod touch, but higher than the highest-priced iPod nano. With the iPod touch accounting for at least 50 percent and as high as 66 percent of overall iPod sales, this suggests that the 8 GB $199 iPod touch is Apple's most popular iPod, with significantly lower numbers of 32 or 64 GB iPod touches sold.

• iPhones: $659

Unsubsidized iPhones range from $375 for an iPhone 3GS up to $849 for a 64 GB iPhone 4S. With five total models on offer, the average sale price across the iPhone line is $634, lower than the actual revenue/unit numbers in Apple's earnings.

To perhaps no one's surprise, this suggests the iPhone 4S is Apple's most popular iPhone. Given that the revenue/unit average is slightly higher than the $649 price for an unsubsidized 16 GB iPhone 4S, I'd theorize that while Apple's most popular iPhone is likely the 16 GB iPhone 4S, sales of the more expensive 32 GB and 64 GB models must also be fairly brisk to counterbalance the the (admittedly much less popular) iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 on the low end.

In other words, despite being labelled as a "disappointment" by a tech press weaned on months of rumors about a substantially redesigned iPhone 5, it appears Apple sold every iPhone 4S that came off the assembly line.

• iPads: $593

Between the Wi-Fi only and Wi-Fi + 3G options, the iPad 2 is available in six models at an average selling price of $664. With the iPad's revenue/unit number falling below that, but still significantly higher than the $499 price of the low-end Wi-Fi model, the numbers suggest that Apple's mid-range iPads are fairly high sellers.

Sales numbers of the iPad very likely map closely to the models' prices, with brisk sales of 16 GB models, decent sales for the 32 GB option, and comparatively lower (but still more than satisfactory) sales of the 64 GB iPad 2. Unsurprisingly, the revenue/unit number suggests the Wi-Fi only iPads significantly outsell their Wi-Fi + 3G cousins.

Overall

To put it mildly, Apple's earnings report shows a company in a very robust state of health. While iPod sales are in steep decline and some segments of Mac sales are showing signs of levelling off, the astonishing uptick in iPhone and iPad sales more than makes up for it.

The iPad by itself, in one quarter, brought in more revenue than 230 out of the Fortune 500 companies earn in an entire year.

The iPhone by itself, in three months, brought in more revenue than McDonald's made in all of 2010.

Apple has $97 billion in cash. It could buy an iTunes copy of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey for everyone on Earth and still have $27 billion left over. How about a potentially better use of its money? After adjusting for inflation, Apple is a little over halfway to being able to finance its own version of the Apollo Program, all by itself. If you cut it down to just one mission, Apple is easily capable of building its own spaceport, developing and building its own launch vehicle, training its own astronauts, and sending a team of humans to the moon and back -- and it would still have tens of billions of dollars left over.

Apple may not enjoy this level of success forever, but it's showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

Lesser-known facts from Apple's earnings statement originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 25 Jan 2012 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Motorola has filed a new patent suit against Apple and now seeks an injunction against both the iPhone 4S and iCloud. FOSS Patents notes that the terms of Google's proposed acquisition of Motorola stipulate that Motorola can't initiate new intellectual property suits without Google's approval; that makes it sound a lot like Google is using Motorola's patent portfolio in a proxy war against Apple.

Motorola already has one patent suit against Apple in progress, but that suit is too far along in the judicial process for the company to stack on the iPhone 4S and iCloud. Motorola has asserted six patents in its claim against Apple; all six are asserted against the iPhone 4S, and four are claimed to apply to iCloud.

Companies seeking sales injunctions against rivals in patent suits may be an attention-grabbing move, but in fact those injunctions rarely go through. To date, no company has successfully gained a sales injunction against Apple despite numerous attempts, and Apple's own attempts to get injunctions against its rivals have also rarely succeeded.

What's most interesting about Motorola's move is that it's occurred with Google's approval. Apple's suits against various Android handset manufacturers have often been viewed as a suit against Google itself in all but name, and from the beginning it's seemed inevitable that we'll see Apple v. Google on a docket eventually. With Google in the process of acquiring Motorola and giving its consent to new suits against Apple, that may happen quite soon.

Motorola after an injunction against iPhone 4S, iCloud originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

While Apple won a partial victory in December in its patent battles with rival smartphone maker HTC, the scope of the ruling was both fairly tame and narrow enough for HTC to develop a workaround a mere two days after the ruling. According to FOSS Patents, Apple filed an appeal against the International Trade Commission's ruling in the matter and is seeking to broaden the scope of the import ban by including more patents that won't be so simple for HTC to dodge.

"Whatever the scope of Apple's appeal against the ITC may be, I believe Apple has realistic chances of winning a better outcome," says Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents.

Apple initially filed suit against HTC nearly two years ago, claiming the company was in violation of 20 Apple-held patents. As is usual in patent lawsuits, it's been a lengthy tennis match of suits being tossed back and forth with no end in sight.

Apple seeks to broaden HTC import ban originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Apple's next emerging market might not be in Asia, but in South America. During the company's recent earnings conference call, Apple CEO Tim Cook identified Brazil as one of Apple's future growth areas. "I think there's a huge opportunity for us there, and we've more than begun to go deeper into Brazil," Cook said. "But I don't want to signal that that means that Apple retail will be there, because I don't envision that occurring in the near term."

As noted by GigaOm, Brazil is an extremely populous country with over 200 million people, and its economy is the best in all of South America. Per capita income in Brazil isn't great compared to the US, but it compares quite favorably against China, which has been Apple's biggest international success story thus far.

One potential sticking point exists for increasing Apple's Brazilian sales, however. Currently, Brazilians pay some of the highest prices in the world for Apple gear. At launch, an unsubsidized 16 GB iPhone 4S cost the equivalent of more than US$1,400 in Brazil, compared to $849 for a 64 GB model in the US. Those breathtakingly high prices may be due to a number of factors, including Brazil's high import duties, but if Apple is going to attempt to get the kind of traction in Brazil it's seen in China, those prices are going to have to drop significantly.

Apple sees 'huge opportunity' in Brazil originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has scheduled a "Town Hall" meeting with Apple's employees to "review our record-setting results and discuss some exciting new things going on at Apple." The meeting will take place at 10 AM Pacific on January 25, and those employees unable to attend in person will be able to watch the event remotely via Apple's internal AppleWeb service.

It should be stressed that it is virtually certain no product announcements will be made at this town hall meeting. Past meetings that Steve Jobs led focused on the company's overall strategy, and they were occasionally an arena for some choice words about Apple's competitors from the former CEO. This latest town hall meeting will likely focus on congratulating Apple's employees for the phenomenal results of the last fiscal quarter.

The event was brought to 9to5 Mac's notice barely 18 hours before it's scheduled to take place, so it seems to have been assembled on quite short notice. This isn't unusual, however; previous town hall meetings within Apple following the introduction of the iPad and shortly before the original iPhone's launch happened on similarly short notice.

Tim Cook to hold January 25 'Town Hall' meeting with Apple employees originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

In its recent conference call discussing its record-smashing financial results, Apple revealed that its cloud syncing service, iCloud, currently has 85 million users signed up. iCloud debuted alongside the iPhone 4S and iOS 5 as a free-of-charge replacement for Apple's old MobileMe service, and its growth over the past three months has apparently been explosive; during the same period, iCloud signups exceeded unit sales of Macs, iPods, iPhones, and iPads combined.

Apple has called iCloud part of its "strategy for the next decade," and as an iCloud user myself I can see why. The cloud syncing service runs much faster and much more seamlessly than MobileMe ever did, and it's very hard to argue with the price: $0 gets your email, calendars, contacts, and documents synced across all your devices with almost zero effort.

iCloud now has 85 million users originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

During the most recent conference call discussing Apple's quarterly results, Apple's executives did something highly unusual and divulged actual sales figures for the Apple TV. Responding to a question about Apple's future plans for the TV-centric device, Apple dodged the question (as is typical when it's asked to speculate on unreleased products), and said it still classifies the Apple TV as a "hobby."

That hobby still turns out to be pretty lucrative for Apple, though. Apple sold 2.8 million units during the 2011 fiscal year -- a low number compared to sales of its other devices, but the US$99 product still added $280 million or so in revenue for the year. Nothing to sneeze at. According to Tim Cook, however, Apple's sales of the device for its most recent quarter totaled 1.4 million, so even though the device hasn't been updated in quite some time, demand for it remains steady.

Apple is in a very interesting position where it can consider a device that brought in $140 million in revenue over three months a "hobby." Cook and the other execs on the call gave no indication that the Apple TV would be updated in the near future, so the Apple HDTV remains 2012's Little Rumor that Could.

Apple TV: $140 million worth sold in three months, but still a 'hobby' originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Look at the back of your iPhone, or your iPad, or on the bottom of your Mac. You'll see the following words embossed somewhere: "Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China." Many Americans, all the way up to the President himself, have wondered why Apple has outsourced virtually all of its manufacturing overseas. At a dinner with several top US technology executives last year, President Obama asked Steve Jobs flat out what it would take to bring those jobs back to the US. According to Jobs, there's simply no way for it to happen.

Why not? Why can't iPhones, iPads, and all the rest of Apple's magic gadgets be built in the States? More generally, why can't more US-based consumer electronics and computer companies do their manufacturing work domestically, helping to create American jobs and boost the struggling economy?

The New York Times asked that question, and after an extremely well-researched report involving interviews with both former and current executives at Apple, the answer the Times found is both simple and chilling: iPhones aren't made in America because they just can't be. The infrastructure and labor force doesn't exist at the levels necessary to support Apple's operations -- it's not even close.

The Chinese factory where most iPhones reach final assembly employs 230,000 workers. I just asked Siri how many cities in the US have a population higher than that, and the answer was a mere 83 cities -- and that's total population, not workforce. With an average labor force of around 65 percent of the population, only 50 US cities are large enough to provide that kind of labor pool... and even in the biggest US city of them all, New York, 230,000 people still amounts to almost three percent of the city's entire population. Can you imagine three out of every hundred New Yorkers on an assembly line, cranking out iPhones every day?

Over the past couple of years, we have heard a great deal concerning working conditions at factories owned by Foxconn. The Chinese manufacturing company is responsible for assembling consumer electronics for most of the major vendors out there, including Apple. Around a fourth of those 230,000 people live in company-owned dorms or barracks right on factory property; that's almost 60,000 people living and working at the factory. Many of the people at "Foxconn City" work six days a week, twelve hours a day, and they earn less than US$17 per day. It may sound inhumane by American standards, but these jobs are in high demand in China -- so much so that Jennifer Rigoni, former worldwide supply demand manager for Apple, told the New York Times that Foxconn "could hire 3,000 people overnight."

Those are just a couple examples of how the scale, speed, and efficiency of Chinese manufacturing outstrips anything the US is currently capable of. But the Times' report is full of more evidence, and it's damning. Even though the 200,000 assembly-line workers putting part A into slot B could potentially be classified as unskilled labor, the 8700 industrial engineers overseeing the process can't be -- and according to the Times, finding that many qualified engineers in the States would take nine months. Chinese manufacturers found them all in 15 days.

With the notable exception of the A5 processor, most of the components used to make the iPhone are also manufactured overseas, many of them within a relatively short distance of the final assembly plant. Shipping those components to any potential US-based factories would incur greater costs, and even worse from Apple's perspective, manufacturing delays.

Traditional defenses of outsourcing of manufacturing jobs have revolved around cost. "It costs more money to build in America," the reasoning goes; "You have to pay your workers more, you have to pay benefits, insurance, higher taxes. Everything costs more." Since companies want to make a profit, that added cost inevitably gets passed on to the consumer in inflated prices for goods.

To exaggerate the point, many have claimed that an American-manufactured iPhone would cost thousands of dollars. It turns out that's hyperbole; according to the New York Times, the increased cost of paying American wages to workers would add $65 to the cost of an iPhone. The other costs, added together, probably wouldn't drive the unsubsidized price of a 16 GB iPhone 4S over US$1000. But the dollar cost of manufacturing in America isn't the biggest issue that's driving Apple's decision to outsource manufacturing to China. Instead, it's about who can build the greatest number of iPhones within the shortest period of time, all while remaining flexible and instantaneously adaptable to Apple's needs. According to one current Apple executive, "The US has stopped producing people with the skills we need."

The Times provides a telling example from the early days of the iPhone, before it ever hit the market. It's hard to believe now, but originally the iPhone's screen was going to be made from the same scratch-prone plastic that graced the fronts of its contemporaneous iPod models. In mid-2007, just over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to hit stores for the first time ever, Jobs realized the folly of using that plastic when the screen of the iPhone prototype he was carrying in his jeans pocket had accumulated dozens of scratches. "I won't sell a product that gets scratched. I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks."

Anyone who knows how Jobs worked knows that he wasn't bluffing -- if the iPhone didn't meet his standards, it wouldn't go on sale, period. Six months of anticipation had driven demand for the first iPhone into a frenzy, so Apple knew it was going to have to crank them out as quickly as possible. But the last-second change to what was arguably one of the iPhone's most central components meant initiating the kind of mad scramble that simply wouldn't be possible in US manufacturing. Apple would have been an industry laughingstock for as long as it took to overcome the manufacturing delay. Instead, what might have taken months to transpire in the US took place in six short weeks; Apple sourced a virtually scratchproof glass from Corning, and Chinese factories rapidly managed to integrate it into the existing iPhone design.

As it's an American company reaping unprecedented financial rewards, many Americans have lamented the fact that the rewards coming back into America are so comparatively meager. Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States, less than a fifth the number of contractor employees assembling iPhones at one Chinese factory. One could argue that Apple's success has come at the expense of the American manufacturing workforce, but if the New York Times' report is anything to go by, it seems the workforce Apple would have needed in America never existed to begin with.

Why Apple's products are 'Designed in California' but 'Assembled in China' originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 22 Jan 2012 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Vancouver, B.C. resident Mark Sandhu bought a new iPad 2 for his wife for Christmas, but when she opened the box, she found a tablet of another kind: a big chunk of clay. Sandhu took his purchase back to Canadian retailer Future Shop and complained, but the store initially thought he was trying to run a scam on them.

It's only after Sandhu contacted CTV, and after more cases of "clayPads" started showing up in Vancouver-area Future Shops and Best Buys, that Sandhu finally got compensation in the form of a full refund and a replacement iPad 2.

This isn't the first time we've heard of a scam like this, unfortunately. Cases involving bricks or other items inserted into iPod boxes and then returned for full refunds have happened several times in the past, with unsuspecting retail clerks simply returning them to shelves and selling the iBricks to customers down the road. One particularly effective scam I saw when I worked retail security a few years back was when a scammer would buy both a 1 GB and 4 GB iPod nano, then return the 1 GB nano in the 4 GB box. The differences between the two units were too subtle for most returns desk clerks to notice, but the price gap was wide enough for scammers to turn a tidy profit this way.

According to CTV, 10 fake clayPads have been found in the Vancouver area so far. If you live in Vancouver and are planning to buy an iPad from anywhere other than an Apple Store, we'd suggest you shoot an unboxing video when you first open your purchase; if you "win" the lottery and wind up with a clayPad instead of an iPad, at least the video should be proof enough that you're the scammed and not the scammer.

Canadian customers get lumps of clay instead of iPads originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The announcement this morning that textbooks would be sold through the iBookstore wasn't especially surprising. But the price was; full-featured multimedia electronic textbooks being offered for no more than US$15 is exactly the kind of disruptive shakeup the industry needed. While only the K-12 education market is on board so far, I'm looking forward to a future where universities sign up too, and students' book costs drop from the nearly $1000 dollars a year I paid as an undergrad to much more reasonable and manageable levels.

One question on many people's minds has been how Apple and the textbook publishers were able to agree on such a low pricing scheme for textbooks. After all, high school textbooks usually cost $75 each, and thus far publishers haven't been well-known for offering electronic versions of published works at a discount; in fact, in a lot of cases ebooks have cost more than their paper versions despite presumably lower distribution and production costs. So, not that anyone's complaining, why the lower prices?

AllThingsD asked that question of McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw, and it turns out to have a simple answer. Schools will usually hold onto the paper versions of textbooks for about five years, meaning the publishers are only recouping about $15 per year anyway. Via the iBookstore, textbooks can be sold directly to students (who may or may not be offered payment vouchers from their schools), and from the publishers' perspective, the beauty of this arrangement is that those books can't be re-used or re-sold.

After Apple takes its 30 percent cut, publishers will only take $10.50 from a $15 textbook sale, but that's $10.50 they can get from every student, every year, and without the heavy production and distribution costs associated with making and shipping the often giant-sized paper versions of textbooks.

It's obviously too early to tell whether this will work out to be a lucrative arrangement for textbook publishers, but just looking at the way the numbers shake out, at the very least it seems that, contrary to initial appearances, $15 isn't such a shockingly low price for textbooks after all.

Why McGraw-Hill is selling iBooks for $15 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Look at the major PC vendors in the 1970s, then look at the same industry today. You'll find only one name common to both periods: Apple. The company's competitors from the early days of the PC industry have all either gone out of business, been absorbed into other companies, or shifted focus to other industries. Even once-mighty IBM got out of the business of selling PCs to consumers in the mid-2000s.

Not only is Apple by far the most long-lived company in the PC industry -- almost 36 straight years selling computers to everyday people, compared to 24 for IBM and 20 for Compaq -- Apple is also the most profitable PC vendor by a wide margin. Apple has bucked the overall industry trend in terms of both its longevity and profitability; its competitors from the early years have long since flamed out, while its current competitors are, with few exceptions, struggling to stay relevant.

Horace Dediu of Asymco has graphed both Apple's longevity and the number of units it's shipped year over year compared to its competitors, and as usual his graphs provide a very instructive view of Apple's performance (which I'd encourage you to check out for yourself). According to Dediu's graphs, Apple is the only current PC/device vendor shipping more than 100 million units per year; no one else is even close to shipping that much out, and thanks to Apple's tight supply controls, units shipped generally translates very closely to units sold.

When the graph gets adjusted for longevity, that's where the real craziness of Apple's performance becomes clear. Other historical PC vendors like IBM and Compaq enjoyed initial exponential sales growth that eventually tapered off, then ceased altogether. If Apple behaved like the rest of the PC industry, the same thing might have happened to it; Apple's performance looks eerily parallel to that of IBM for most of its life, but the performance takes way off again in the mid-2000s for some reason. Rather than showing signs of tapering off, it keeps increasing exponentially.

Philip Elmer-Dewitt of Fortune analyzed Dediu's findings and says "it puts the lie to Wall Street's consensus view about Apple's future growth." Based on historical performance of other PC vendors, Wall Street analysts keep expecting Apple's performance to taper off and reach a more steady state -- still positive growth in sales and profits, but more of a linear growth than the huge gains of the past few years.

Looking at the big picture, though, that view isn't supported at all. Apple's performance looks nothing like that of its competitors when you look at its entire history; if Apple had behaved as it "should" according to what's happened to its competitors, then it should have gone out of business in the mid-90s as we all feared it would. Instead, Apple keeps redirecting its focus rather than staying the course, and its performance over the past five years clearly reflects that.

If Apple had never introduced the iPhone and iPad, the company's growth almost certainly would have slowed down years ago; man cannot live on Macs and iPods alone. Yet though Apple is by far the longest-lived of the PC vendors, it owes that longevity to a willingness to adapt. Both in terms of the products it sells and its overall focus, the Apple of 2012 is a very different company than the Apple of 1976, and the fact that the company has developed itself into a swiftly moving target means it's unlikely Apple will suffer the fate of its historical competitors anytime soon.

Asymco graphs Apple's distinctive growth curve and longevity originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Apple has posted a video of the education event it held earlier today. The video is available for streaming on Apple's site, or you can download a higher quality version from iTunes.

This is Apple's first public event since October's introduction of the iPhone 4S. In this video you'll see the debut of iBooks 2.0, iBooks Author, the iTunes U app, and Apple's partnership with textbook publishers to offer electronic textbooks directly to students for just US$14.99.

Apple posts video of education event originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Setting up an account to publish books to the iBookstore has always been free, and the new iBooks Author tool has brought that fact into the spotlight. Self-publishing books to the iBookstore does still have a few hurdles you have to leap through, however. As AppleInsider points out, for iOS and Mac developers in particular, one hurdle is that existing iTunes Connect App Store accounts won't allow you to upload books to the iBookstore; instead, you'll need to set up a separate Apple ID associated with iBooks Author.

Account setup also requires you to input credit card information and have a US-based tax ID -- for individuals self-publishing content, a Social Security number will suffice. For some odd reason, iBooks also require an ISBN (a requirement the Kindle Store doesn't have), and those aren't cheap. In the US, purchasing a single ISBN from Bowker costs $125, or you can buy them in discounted packs. Personally, I have no idea why they're allowed to get away with those prices; ISBNs in my country are available for free.

Speaking from personal experience, setting up a publisher account on the iBookstore is a lengthy and somewhat unintuitive process -- but nowhere near as slow and frustrating as dealing with traditional publishers. Developers not being able to use an existing iTunes Connect account to publish iBookstore content is a bit baffling, however, and hopefully it's something Apple will address.

iBooks Author accounts are free, existing developers need a new account originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Every once in a while Apple gets granted a big chunk of patents all at once, and this is one of those times. In addition to an Apple TV patent we've described in its own post, Apple's been granted over 20 other patents ranging from advanced trackpads to iPhone circuit board designs and beyond.

Patently Apple describes the advanced trackpad as "a touchpad that extends into the palm rest areas." Three different touch-sensitive areas would essentially extend Multi-Touch functionality to the entire lower half of a notebook like the MacBook Air, but the design would be smart enough to distinguish between a hand or wrist simply resting on the surface versus a user intentionally tapping and swiping at the surface.

An alternative or possibly supplemental design feature describes a "hand detecting sensor," mounted near or within the current housing for iSight/FaceTime cameras, that would enable tracking of hand movements for user inputs. This sounds similar in principle to the system used in Microsoft's Kinect and Sony's EyeToy.

Another patent describes a context-sensitive earpiece accessory that's capable of knowing whether it's inserted in a user's ear or not and adjusting both its own behavior and the behavior of its linked device accordingly. In other words, the earpiece would be smart enough to switch an iPhone's audio to the earpiece when it's inserted in your ear, but audio would automatically resume playing over the iPhone's built-in speakers once the earpiece is removed.

A patent for "smart garments" expands on the existing features of the Nike + iPod device by potentially expanding beyond the running/shoe focused implementation we have now. Among other things, the sensor is designed to alert a user when the garment reaches its "expected useful lifetime" based on tracked usage -- hopefully this kind of alert is easy to disable, because I for one wouldn't appreciate my shoes prodding me to buy new ones every time I put them on. Apple describes expanding the Nike+ tech beyond running to "cross-country skiing, in-line skating, or outdoor swimming," as some examples, further indication that Nike+ may one day spread beyond shoes.

Yet another patent describes one way Apple may continue to shrink circuit boards for devices like the iPhone and iPad. Rather than being spread over the board like houses in the suburbs, chips get stacked on top of one another like floors in a skyscraper. As best I can tell from the teardowns Apple hasn't actually started doing this yet, but it could be one way to make logic boards for future products take up even less space than they do now.

Some of the recently-granted patents describe items Apple's already had on store shelves for quite some time, but many of them describe features that haven't yet made it to market -- and they may never actually do so. It's still instructive to look at the kinds of patents Apple files and gets granted, though, because they're often a decent barometer of where the company's interests lie.

Apple granted 22 patents including trackpads, iPhone circuit boards and more originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 18 Jan 2012 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Fortune has published a lengthy excerpt from Adam Lashinsky's Inside Apple, a book scheduled to be released next week that provides an unprecedented look inside a company legendary for its secrecy. I'd encourage you to read the entire excerpt at Fortune, and buy the book when it comes out, but I've included a couple summarized items below to stoke your curiosity.

• Many new employees are hired into "dummy positions," and they don't know the details of their work until after their first day on the job.
• No one helps new employees set up their computers on Apple's network; anyone hired by Apple is simply assumed to have the knowledge to do it themselves.
• Plainclothes Apple security agents supposedly hang out at a bar/restaurant right off the Apple campus and listen for employees discussing company matters. No one knows if this is true or not, but just the rumor of it is enough to keep employees quiet.
• Apple has an unwritten hierarchy of "coolness" -- iOS engineers are at the top, with iOS hardware engineers coming in second. iTunes and other online services come next, with Mac employees now considered "second-rate" in the pecking order. Sales, HR, and customer service aren't considered even remotely cool at Apple (no offense, but are they anywhere?).
• According to Lashinsky, "Almost nobody describes working at Apple as being fun."

Just reading through this brief excerpt of Inside Apple, the corporate culture at Cupertino honestly reminds me a lot of my time in the military. The extreme emphasis on secrecy, the "need to know" culture, the compartmentalizing of separate divisions, the emphasis on producing results (and not usually seeing tangible rewards for doing so)... it's all very uncomfortably familiar. I don't think I'd enjoy working at Apple.

Inside Apple will be coming out next week. Quite a few of us at TUAW are interested in seeing what the book has to say about the company, and we'll have a review of the book itself up later on.

Inside Apple: On Apple's legendary secrecy originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

According to Patently Apple, Apple has been awarded a patent that it filed over five years ago related to sorting episodic TV content on the Apple TV. Steve Jobs himself is among the people credited with the patent, which on the surface merely appears to describe the sorting features already present in the Apple TV's interface.

Patently Apple dug a bit deeper, though, and found an interesting tidbit referring to menus that "correspond to television shows that have either been recorded from a broadcast or purchased from a content provider." This seems to suggest that at one point there were plans to include DVR-like functionality in the Apple TV; it's unclear if those plans were shelved indefinitely or if they'll show up in some future iteration of Apple's "hobby."

An updated Apple TV, perhaps integrated within its own dedicated display, is pretty much 2012's Rumor of the Year. An included DVR-like function which combines the existing Apple TV interface with a TiVo-esque recording ability would be a killer feature. As usual, though, Apple's patents aren't necessarily indicative of products it actually plans to bring to market -- particularly a patent filed so long ago.

Steve Jobs awarded patent for episodic TV on the Apple TV originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 18 Jan 2012 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

AT&T has announced new smartphone data plans, outlined below and effective January 22. This is the first significant update to AT&T's smartphone data plans in a year and a half, aside from AT&T's inclusion of an additional 2 GB of data per month for tethering customers. We've provided some comparison with the old plans so you can get some idea of what you're getting for your money under AT&T's new scheme.

New plans:

• DataPlus 300 MB: $20 for 300MB -- extra 300 MB costs $20
• DataPro 3 GB: $30 for 3 GB -- $10 per additional GB
• DataPro 5 GB: $50 for 5 GB, with mobile hotspot / tethering -- $10 per additional GB

Old plans:

• DataPlus: 200 MB for $15 -- extra 200 MB costs $15
• DataPro: 2 GB $25 -- $10 per additional GB
• Tethering: Additional $20/month for DataPro customers and adds an additional 2 GB of data

In summary, overall tier pricing has risen by $5 per month across the board, but the data plans are also more generous by 50 MB on the low end and 1 GB on the middle and high tiers.

AT&T also has two new tablet data plans for the iPad:

• $30 for 3 GB
• $50 for 5 GB

The existing $14.99 for 250 MB plan remains available. These are still month-to-month, contract-free plans available to owners of the iPad Wi-Fi + 3G models.

Existing customers can stick with their current plans if they prefer, but new AT&T customers will be limited to the new options after January 22.

AT&T announces new smartphone data plans originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.