Apple Archive

My Neighbor, Steve Jobs

"My neighbor, Steve Jobs, has been in the news lately. The talk of the town is the recent announcement he will be stepping aside to let other seeds grow at Apple. The business press, the general press, the blogosphere, and just about everybody else has waxed poetic about the 'greatest CEO of all time' saying that this 'boy wonder' has shaped the very nature of our lives with his genius. It's all true, but here in Palo Alto, Steve Jobs isn't just an icon, he's also the guy who lives down the street." I like stories that put a human being behind a public figure. As much as I dislike Apple's recent policies, Jobs is still just a regular person, like all of us. It's easy to forget that when you're sitting behind a glass desk 4000 kilometres away.

Apple Shouldn’t Allow Itself To Be A Victim Of Robin Hood

I thought OSNews would be a good forum to talk about a matter that has been weighing on my mind lately primarily because the site has been so focused on Apple's patents and litigation as of late. The news that HP, the largest PC manufacturer in the world is spinning off or getting out of this business is what really prompted me to write this article.

Meet Comex, The iPhone Hacker Who Keeps Outsmarting Apple

Interesting portrait of Comex over at Forbes. "Dino Dai Zovi, co-author of the Mac Hacker's Handbook, says JailbreakMe's sophistication is on par with that of Stuxnet, a worm thought to have been designed by the Israeli or U.S. government to infect Iran's nuclear facilities. He compares Allegra's skills to the state-sponsored intruders that plague corporations and governments, what the cybersecurity industry calls 'advanced-persistent threat' hackers: 'He's probably five years ahead of them', says Dai Zovi."

Apple Forces Amazon, Kobo, Others to Cripple iOS Applications

Petty Apple is petty. Amazon, Kobo, and others have changed their applications to conform to Apple's App Store rules, and if there's one word that describes the situation these booksellers are in, it's petty. Still, it's leading to good things: Kobo has announced it's going to bypass the App Store by writing an HTML5 e-reader for iOS (and thus, for other HTML5-capable mobile devices).

Apple Unveils Lots of New Hardware

It's still Apple time over here. Apple has not only released Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, but it has also refreshed several pieces of hardware. Both the MacBook Air and the Mac Mini have seen spec bumps, and most interestingly, the Mini no longer has an optical drive (about time - that thing has become useless for me anyway; not even my workstation has one). They also got Thunderbolt ports, of course. Apple also unveiled a new Cinema display, called the Thunderbolt Display, for which a Thunderbolt-equipped Mac is required. Also... The plastic MacBook is no more.

Mac OS X Lion Highlights And Letdowns

InfoWorld's Galen Gruman provides a look at the best features Mac OS X Lion has to offer, as well as the biggest disappointments of Apple's latest OS. Whole disk encryption, the new Server application, automatic file versioning and locking against accidental saves, iOS-like configuration policies for IT, automatic syncing across Mac OS X and iOS 5 are among the key new features of Mac OS X. But many of the even the best new features still fall somewhat short, including the new contextual scroll bars, issues with sharing automatically versioned documents, the lack of external disk encryption after the fact, and the complexity of new Mac OS X Lion Server app.

Apple Reports All-Time Record Revenue, Earnings

"Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2011 third quarter ended June 25, 2011. The Company posted record quarterly revenue of $28.57 billion and record quarterly net profit of $7.31 billion, or $7.79 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $15.70 billion and net quarterly profit of $3.25 billion, or $3.51 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 41.7 percent compared to 39.1 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 62 percent of the quarter's revenue. The Company sold 20.34 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 142 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 9.25 million iPads during the quarter, a 183 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 3.95 million Macs during the quarter, a 14 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 7.54 million iPods, a 20 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter."

Former Shake Product Designer: Apple Not Interested in Pro Market

Well, this just got interesting. There's been a bit of a backlash over Apple's Final Cut X Pro, which is considered a step down from previous versions by many professional videographers, as they claim it lacks countless features - leading to the nickname 'iMovie Pro'. Former Shake product designer and former Apple employee Ron Brinkmann has now weighed in on the situation. His advice to professionals? Don't rely on companies like Apple.

Apple’s Developer Site Vulnerable to Phishing Attacks

With all the news about Anonymous, LulzSec, Anti-Sec, and so on, you'd almost forget there are more ethical hacking groups out there as well. One such group, YGN Ethical Hacker Group, informed Apple of several weaknesses in its developers website on April 25. Apple acknowledged the flaws, but so far, hasn't done anything about them. YGN Ethical Hacker Group has now stated they will fully disclose the vulnerabilities if Apple doesn't fix them in the coming few days.

Apple’s Overseas Demand in a Word: Exploding

"In today's world, most companies span several regions and sell across the world. As Foolish colleague Morgan Housel notes, 10 years ago, less than a third of S&P 500 revenue came from outside the United States. Today, more than half of the S&P 500's growth comes from overseas. And that number is growing. The truth is, investors regularly underestimate how much demand comes from abroad. More importantly, for large, multinational corporations that have already established a presence in their home markets, much of their future growth comes from foreign markets. With that in mind, today we're looking at Apple. We'll examine not only where its sales and earnings come from, but also how its sales abroad have changed over time."

Apple Granted Patent on Webpage Behaviours

"So Apple got yet another patent granted today, and now there's yet another media firestorm over whether it means Cupertino will be able to sue every other phone manufacturer out of business, or at least out of the business of making multitouch devices. And, as usual, most of the hysteria is based on a fundamental misinterpretation of what the patent claims actually say, and what behaviors they actually cover in iOS. I don't know why we keep repeating this sad cycle, but I do know that it’s always, always better for us to read the claims and try to figure them out for ourselves - and in this case,they're actually pretty narrow."

The iPad 2: Some Short First Impressions

So, yeah, uhm, I bought an iPad 2 today. I still don't think anyone really needs a tablet, but that doesn't mean I didn't want one. I wanted to wait until the HP TouchPad was announced, but now that it has, it seems it won't be coming to The Netherlands any time soon. As such, the iPad 2 it was. A few quick fist impressions.