Apple Computer

By editors@tidbits.com (TidBITS Publishing) The combination of mobile broadband and Wi-Fi in the iPhone has long been one of its selling points, and seamless data roaming between cell and Wi-Fi, location discovery, and free access to Wi-Fi networks operated by cellular carriers in some countries make Wi-Fi seem essential. Not so i...

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) 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) Back at Macworld Expo in January 2009, Apple released iWork '09 and announced the beta of iWork.com, a Web-based service aimed at giving iWork '09 users a way to share files online and perform limited collaboration (see "iWork '09 Adds Catch-up Features," 2009-01-06). iWork.com was to be f...

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...

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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...

July 20th, 2009, marks the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and the first human steps made on extraterrestrial soil. While a lot of attention is being paid to the three men who made the trip - and the two who left their boot prints in the surface - my inner geek is once again in awe of...

By Casey Johnston Are dogs unusually attentive to, or angry at, your new iPhone 3G S? The folks over at Boy Genius Report have an inkling as to what might be causing it: when a iPhone 3G S user sends a text message or locks the screen, the phone's speaker (the grille on the bottom left-hand side of the device) emi...

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...

By ace@tidbits.com (Adam C. Engst) Cook led off by noting that in the last reported quarter, Apple sold 2.5 million Macs overall, which is not only a record, but also the continuation of a significant upward sales trend for Macs. That's in contrast to the rest of the computer industry as well, apparently, since Cook claimed th...

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...

These unit sales and revenue numbers are even more interesting because Apple doesn't recognize the revenue for the iPhone - show it in their earnings - when an iPhone is sold, but instead spreads out the income over many quarters. Apple chose to stop accounting for income from any new iPhon...

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...

While revenue was high - down from the Q1 2008 holiday quarter that encompassed the last three months of 2007 but significantly above year-ago sales - it excludes an enormous amount of current iPhone revenue due to Apple's accounting practices. Apple chose to recognize iPhone revenue in...

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) Officials suspect the virus first appeared at Macworld Expo, quietly infecting unprotected users. Apple employees were likely another vector, as the next wave of infections seemed centered on Apple retail stores. The virus has since entered the broader Mac community, moving beyond en...

By ace@tidbits.com (Adam C. Engst) I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The place where Microsoft could experiment with rebranding in a useful and interesting way is with the Macintosh Business Unit, which would benefit from independence from the overall Microsoft Windows brand, given the way many Mac users see Win...

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 glenn@tidbits.com (Glenn Fleishman) Here's my view of the timeline: Leopard ships 26-Oct-07. Apple announces a new iPhone model (perhaps with 3G cell data support; see "3G Cell Data iPhone Now Feasible," 2007-10-14) at Macworld Expo on 15-Jan-08. The new model ships along with an updated operating system that's based entir...

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...