Apple Archive

I'm sorry, but I can't get around it any more. Over the weekend, we had a story in the reputable Wall Street Journal that Steve Jobs had a liver transplant two months ago in a hospital in Tennessee. This story got all over the Apple media - obviously - and was later confirmed by the hospital in question. All the usual questions arose about privacy, Warren Buffet had a remark about it, and so on. Let's get all these stories out of the way in one go.

Apple has issued a statement in which is said it has sold over 1 million iPhones during the first three days of the device being on sale. "Customers are voting and the iPhone is winning," said Steve Jobs, "With over 50,000 applications available from Apple's revolutionary App Store, iPhone momentum is stronger than ever." In addition, version 3.0 of the iPhone has been downloaded 6 million times. This also happens to be the first careful official word from Jobs since he took medical leave earlier this year.

During last week's Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple introduced a new iPhone model, the iPhone 3GS, which comes, among other things, with a faster processor and more RAM. Since this is a developers' conference, there were also numerous sessions on iPhone development, and the last session was about publishing on the App Store. Since every session at every WWDC is always followed by an open Q&A session, you'd figure this'd be the perfect opportunity for iPhone developers to ask about Apple's App Store policies. Well, no.

According to various rumours, Steve Jobs would make a surprise appearance during last week's keynote address at the WWDC, marking the end of his sick leave. While that rumour turned out to be false, Apple has now confirmed that Jobs will return to Apple at the end of June.

Despite the beating Apple often receives for its controlling behaviour of the App Store and its Mac OS X EULA, the company really does know how to market itself and its products. At the WWDC in San Francisco, currently under way, the company found a very illustrative way of showing the sheer size and success of the App Store.

At the WWDC today, Apple has lifted the veil on a number of features of its upcoming operating system, Snow Leopard. Most of the work on Snow Leopard has gone into under-the-hood technologies and optimisations, but there are also a number of interface tweaks. The company also updated some of its laptops, while also lowering their prices. We got all the news from MacRumorsLive.com.

The latest entry-level MacBook rolled out by Apple a week ago offers more than just an improvement on the white laptop it replaces in Apple's notebook line. According to Macworld Lab tests, this new system outperforms the 2GHz aluminum unibody MacBook that costs US$300 more.

We all know Apple's App Store policies are a bit willy-nilly, inconsistent, and completely unreliable. This issue has been going on for a while now, and it doesn't see like anything has changed. The latest interesting App Store rejection is especially interesting, as it involves Apple rejecting an application related to one of its detractors: the EFF.

If you thought Psystar was the only company making Macintosh "clones", then you are seriously mistaken. There is also German PearC, and the latest addition to the clone family is a Russian company called RussianMac, who debuted several Mac clones this week.

Apple's latest Get a Mac commercial targets the recent laptop hunters ads coming from Microsoft. It shows a number of PC characters and Mac, with a woman in between who wants to buy a computer. She mentions a number of features she wants, and the number of PCs becomes ever smaller. Then she says she wants a computer without "viruses, crashes or headaches", which makes all the remaining PCs leave, with only the Mac left standing.

Collect3 is an Australian iPhone development house that has released a number of successful utilities sold in the App Store. In this lengthy interview two of the founders discuss the pitfalls iPhone developers face and how they managed to find success in the increasingly crowded app store. They also discuss Collect3's sister company, Revolutionary Concepts, which is designed to be a collective to aid aspiring iPhone devs with marketing, know-how and other support.

Normally, this isn't something you'd find on the front page of OSNews, but the amount of craftsmanship and attention to detail going into this project is just mind blowing. In fact, it's so mind blowing that many Apple rumour websites posted this as a possible shot of an upcoming Apple netbook. Well, yeah, if Apple started making laptops out of wood...

While we generally don't really report on Apple rumours (for obvious reasons) I thought the one currently making its rounds across the countless copying/pasting Apple websites is pretty interesting discussion material. According to the ominpresent and omnipotent "people familiar with the matter", as told by AppleInsider, Apple is preparing to compete on... Price.

Engadget reports that "just two weeks after the last revision went up, Apple's released iPhone OS 3.0 beta 4 to the developer community alongside an iTunes 8.2 pre-release. No word yet on what has / hasn't been updated, but we do know the new iTunes is required to activate beta 4."