Apple Computer

By Jason D. O'Grady In Episode 119 of the PowerPage Podcast Rob Parker and I discuss the recent spate of Apple tablet rumors, the end of AT&T's iPhone exclusivity, the possibility of an iPhone on Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile, the latest drama from Psystar and a mammoth, holiday edition of "What's on yo...

By editors@tidbits.com (TidBITS Publishing) I'm glad I waited both for the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone OS 3.0. I won't bore you with the many reasons why I'm thrilled with the former (passable camera, video capabilities, and GPS are among them), but I needed copy and paste for my iPhone to be more than an expensive toy. So thank you Apple, for m...

By editors@tidbits.com (TidBITS Publishing) In my article "Snow Leopard Snubs Document Creator Codes" (6 September 2009), I described, and discussed the implications of, a change in Snow Leopard's Launch Services behavior, where double-clicking a document in the Finder ignores the creator code metadata signifying what appli...

By editors@tidbits.com (TidBITS Publishing) Syncing data from your Mac to various different devices is easy in theory, but often troublesome in practice, and truly annoying when something goes wrong. Whether you'd like to figure out how to sync contacts to your non-Apple smartphone, get your head around how your Apple TV syncs, hel...

By editors@tidbits.com (TidBITS Publishing) We may not be quite up to Thanksgiving here in the United States, but all the stores have been displaying their Christmas decorations and displays since Halloween was over. We don't entirely approve of starting the holiday season so early, but we need the time to collect all the reader-dri...

By editors@tidbits.com (TidBITS Publishing) For anyone who is perplexed by their iPhone or iPod touch, or who feels that they'd get more out of it if only they understood it better, two new Take Control ebooks are now available and ready to help. Much as we wanted to release these ebooks shortly after Apple released iPhone OS 3 and the iPh...

By editors@tidbits.com (TidBITS Publishing) Paris, which has been my home since mid-2007, has pretty much everything anyone could want in a world-class city: outstanding restaurants, famous museums, striking architecture, fantastic public transportation, and a rich history that stretches back thousands of years. Besides be...

By editors@tidbits.com (TidBITS Publishing) Recently, TidBITS reader "Rene Belloq" alerted us to a large and growing thread on Apple's Support Discussion forums (currently at over 20,000 views and nearly 300 replies). The thread details various user encounters with an iPhoto '09 bug that prevents the Faces feature from recogniz...

By editors@tidbits.com (TidBITS Publishing) International iPhone Expansion -- Apple said that the iPhone would start being sold in China later in October, and that carrier relationships in the UK and Canada were expanding - more than one carrier in each country will now offer the iPhone. China has been a long-anticipated market, wi...

By editors@tidbits.com (TidBITS Publishing) Apple has notified iPhone developers that the In App Purchase feature, previously restricted to paid apps, is now available for free apps as well. This is a huge change, and an about-face from the "Free apps remain free" response Apple originally gave in response to the question of using I...

By editors@tidbits.com (TidBITS Publishing) At first I had been inclined to propose a theory that maybe some external force, such as a bad scripting addition, might be messing things up somehow. This was a reasonable guess, because the Snow Leopard transition to 64-bit has in fact caused existing 32-bit scripting additions to becom...

By editors@tidbits.com (TidBITS Publishing) I do wish Apple would give more hints about how to continue using a theoretically supported Apple printer under Snow Leopard. Suggestions for Ethernet-to-parallel/serial print servers and an explanation of what Normal, Raw, and BSP mean with respect to connection types would be welco...

By editors@tidbits.com (TidBITS Publishing) The folks at iFixit, who disassemble and examine new hardware, found a Broadcom chip that uses single-stream 802.11n in the new, faster iPod touch models released last week. Does that mean the iPod touch is suddenly much zippier on the network? Not quite. The 802.11n standard - finally ratif...

At Daring Fireball, John Gruber doesn't attempt to hide his entirely justified outrage at the news that Apple repeatedly rejected the Ninjawords dictionary app for the iPhone until the developers excised "objectionable" words, many of which have entirely common senses (consider th...

At this year's Black Hat security conference, one of the largest conferences on Internet and computer security, researchers demonstrated the potential for SMS-based attacks on the iPhone that could disable the device or extract sensitive information from it. Although Apple reporte...

Sanford tried to explain all this to Apple, but to no avail. He submitted PasswordWallet three times, each time upping the rating after being rejected. For the final attempt, he gave PasswordWallet the highest possible rating, since each rejection took 8 to 10 days, and he couldn't afford...

Apple has released a major update to its professional sound and music editing bundle, Logic Studio. The latest version includes Logic Pro 9, MainStage 2, Soundtrack Pro 3, Compressor 3.5, and WaveBurner 1.6. While Apple boasts of over 200 new features, a handful of those make Logic Studio's...

Apple reported "record non-holiday quarter revenue and earnings" for the third quarter of its fiscal 2009, boasting a profit of $1.23 billion on revenue of $8.34 billion, or $1.35 per diluted share. (Those numbers compare to a profit of $1.07 billion on revenue of $7.64 billion in the year-ago...

Call me obsessive, call me retentive, but just don't call me on an "iPhone 3G S," since Apple has quietly started changing the new iPhone's name to "iPhone 3GS," removing the space before the trailing S. As I said in "New iPhone 3GS Boosts Power, Performance, and More" (2009-06-08), "Techn...

Apple has announced that one million iPhone 3GS units were sold during the phone's first three days of availability. Interestingly, this is the exact amount of time it took the iPhone 3G, released on 11-Jul-08, to clear one million units. The iPhone 3GS also launched in just eight countrie...

This reduced price may be an attempt to woo "value" customers, who see $199 or $299 as too much to spend on an iPhone 3GS, but can justify $99 for an iPhone 3G. The $99 iPhone 3G might also lure some potential buyers who are looking at a Palm Pre or Android-based phone.

Apple released iMovie '09 8.0.3 this week, a seemingly minor update that "addresses general compatibility issues, improved overall stability and fixes a number of other minor issues." However, I've discovered that this small iteration turns out to have two new features, along with some...

Following a day-long eruption of protest on Twitter and in blogs, on Wednesday afternoon Apple removed an app from the App Store that allowed iPhone and iPod touch users to shake a picture of a baby to stop it from crying. The Baby Shaker app, which was posted for sale for 99 cents on Monday, is...

By editors@tidbits.com (TidBITS Staff) iPhone Stats -- With sales of 13.7 million iPhones in 2008, Apple exceeded its goal of 10 million unit sales. That makes for a total of 30 million iPhone OS devices sold to date, comprising 17 million iPhones and 13 million iPod touches.

Activate the location application on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Once selected, any available location information will be transferred to your iPhoto library and associated with the photos in the selected event(s). Select an iPhone or iPod Touch from your list of named devices. Once selec...

As Apple clearly states on its support pages, "Liquid damage repair is not covered by the Apple one year limited warranty or the AppleCare Protection Plan." Thus, if your MacBook Air or iPhone receives an accidental dunking, you're not going to be able to convince Apple to repair it for fre...

Consultant Scott Rose has isolated a potentially dangerous problem in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard that could cause data loss for people who rely on the Dock or the Apple menu's Recent Items submenu as a launcher for in-progress documents. The steps to reproduce the problem aren't likely to bite ca...

Despite the poor state of the economy, Apple has good news for its latest quarter of results. The computer company hit $10.2 billion in revenue and $1.6 billion in profit, and sold oodles of products: 4.4 million iPhones, 22.7 million iPods, and 2.5 million Macs in the quarter ending 27-Dec-08 (...

Abandoning the AirPort Express for the time being, I turned to another device that could stream audio: my Apple TV. I still haven't purchased a high-definition television, so the Apple TV was connected to an LCD display upstairs in my office (see "DRM Foils iTunes Rentals for Some Apple TV...

Just because you're old enough to issue a press release doesn't mean you're too old to listen to some common sense from your mother. What's this I hear about how you don't plan to come to Macworld Expo in 2010? I've been reading about it in the tech tabloids, and I'm shocked, just shocked, to he...

In 2002, Apple decided to stop exhibiting at the mid-year Macworld Expo, which had taken place for many years in Boston, then moved to New York in 1998 (see "Apple, IDG World Expo Play Hardball Over Macworld Expo," 2002-10-21). Apple did show up at the 2003 Macworld Expo in New York, albeit i...

Apple dropped a bombshell in one of its typically unsigned quasi-blog posts last week, noting that the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) that prevented developers of software for the iPhone and iPod touch from publicly discussing their work had been dropped for iPhone software that had...

I admit to some trepidation regarding Apple's "Let's Rock" special event tomorrow. It's likely that - given the title, Apple's past history of music-related announcements in September, and the constant beat of the rumor drums - we'll see updates to the iPod line and perhaps a revision to...

The full 90 days of membership extension add up to $24 for an individual subscriber who paid .Mac/MobileMe's full $99-per-year cost. (Tip: Buy boxed editions of MobileMe for new accounts or renewals to save money; Amazon sells the $149 MobileMe Family Pack for $109.99, for instance.) Altho...

The initial outpouring of information from Apple about the iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software, and .Mac's metamorphosis into MobileMe left us dazed. Here are a few additional details that we glossed over at first. The iPhone 3G definitely feels faster overall - it's unclear whether this is due t...

But now comes a string of reports that Apple may be on the verge of renaming .Mac. Apparently the first hint came more than a week ago on the Russian-language site Deep Apple, on which there's a screenshot of some strings buried in a pre-release version of iCal that imply .Mac is going to get a new...

Apple confirmed for me last week that a feature for using hard drives attached via USB to an AirPort Extreme Base Station is an unsupported feature. The company declined to provide further information. This feature was available in the betas of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, as has been widely report...

By rich@tidbits.com (Rich Mogull) As a Mac enthusiast and security professional, I spend a lot of time talking and working with the research community. Most feel that Mac users are relatively safer than Microsoft Windows users, but that Mac OS X has lost its lead as a secure consumer operating system. This was, in many ways, b...

By glenn@tidbits.com (Glenn Fleishman) The venerable AirPort Express now sports 802.11n, the fastest flavor of Wi-Fi, while weighing in at a light-on-the-pockets $99 in the United States. Apple released its revised compact base station today. The AirPort Express can also stream music from iTunes over a network through a built...

By mark@steamermedia.com (Mark Boszko) Chris Breen of Macworld has also discovered that there is an identical viewing time extension available if you have transferred your rental to a 3G iPod nano with TV playback. One might assume this would also apply to other iPod/iPhone models, although I've heard that the reason movie ren...

By ace@tidbits.com (Adam C. Engst) A few weeks ago, in "Amazon MP3 Scores DRM-Free Music: What About Apple, 2008-01-10" I called Apple on Steve Jobs's claim that Apple expected to see more than half of the songs on iTunes in versions that were free of all digital rights management (DRM) by the end of 2007. I was hoping that Jobs...

By glenn@tidbits.com (Glenn Fleishman) My first reaction to Steve Jobs's announcement at the Macworld Expo keynote that Apple would offer downloadable rentals was, oh, good, my wife and I can finally give up on the pretense that we actually watch movies via our Netflix subscription, rather than simply let the discs gather dus...

By glenn@tidbits.com (Glenn Fleishman) In a rare public appearance, Crazy Apple Rumors Site (CARS) was seen ingesting massive quantities of fluid extracted from the pineal gland of an iguana, before shouting, "iPod socks forever!", pulling out a fake banana, and plunging it repeatedly into its own midriff. That failing, it p...

By ace@tidbits.com (Adam C. Engst) But despite the numerous vendors showing iPod and iPhone cases at Macworld Expo, and a wide variety of iPod-compatible speaker systems, numerous companies exhibited products that have little to do with Apple's primary markets.

By ace@tidbits.com (Adam C. Engst) A week before Steve Jobs was set to take the stage at Macworld Expo, Apple cleared away any need to talk about professional-level Macs to concentrate on what we presume are more interesting announcements. When a new Mac Pro that Apple advertises as "the fastest Mac ever" (sure, the latest p...

By ace@tidbits.com (Adam C. Engst) According to CNet, Apple originally sued Think Secret three years ago to get an injunction against the further release of trade secrets and to learn the site's sources for an article (via the Wayback Machine) that revealed details about the Mac mini in advance of its Macworld Expo releas...

By joe@tidbits.com (Joe Kissell) A couple of months ago, Mark Anbinder mentioned in "Boot Camp Beta on the Chopping Block" (2007-10-14) that, per Apple's repeated statements, the beta period for Boot Camp would officially come to an end once Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was released. Apple's plan had always been to beta-test Boot...

By ace@tidbits.com (Adam C. Engst) Apple has quietly updated the MacBook and the MacBook Pro, although the upgrades are so minor that they didn't warrant a press release. The MacBook Pro's upgrade is limited to two new build-to-order options for the high-end 15-inch MacBook Pro and the 17-inch MacBook Pro models: a 2.6 GHz I...

By ace@tidbits.com (Adam C. Engst) This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Mac OS X Server software (the "Mac OS X Server Software") on a single Apple-labeled computer. You may also install and use other copies of Mac OS X Server Software on the same Apple-labeled computer, provided that you acquire an indiv...

By editors@tidbits.com (TidBITS Staff) Regardless, I find myself agreeing with my colleagues that Apple is making a mistake here, particularly with respect to breaking the native iPhone applications. I can understand why they're doing it - Steve Jobs is notorious for wanting complete control over a platform, and there have b...