Oh Apple, what are you up to? Just like we saw right around this time last year in preparation for Apple’s new iPhone 3G and updated iPod touch, Apple is placing huge orders of NAND chips thereby threatening the supply in demand by other tier-one vendors.
Apple is acknowledging the white MacBook’s legendary hairline cracks along the bottom enclosure, and will actually fix it, regardless of your warranty.
Remember all the fun everyone had watching Palm and Apple’s legal wordplay regarding multitouch patents? If you missed it, Apple delivered a very thinly veiled threat to Palm, flouting how it had touch-sensitive intellectual rights up the wazoo to protect itself from the competition.
The results of Piper Jaffray’s 17th bi-annual teen survey are in, showing Apple to have broadened its lead in the areas of iPod consumption and iTunes usage — both of which are nearing their saturation point — as the company moves to translate these successes to its iPhone business.
Popular domains on the Web are mapped to the Tokyo Metro and organized by how they are most related to the cities. Heights represent success in traffic and branding. Subway lines are colored by area of interest. For example, take the orange line to find the creatives. Notice that there are several colors passing through Apple.
Hodejo1 writes “Steve Jobs vowed weeks ago that when iTunes shifted to a tiered price structure in April, older tracks priced at {content}.69 would outnumber the contemporary hits that are rising to .29. Today, several weeks later, iTunes made the transition. While the .29 tracks are immediately visible, locating cheaper tracks is proving to be an exercise in futility. With the exception of 48 songs that Apple has placed on the iTunes main page, {content}.69 downloads are a scarce commodity. MP3 Newswire tried to methodically drill down to unearth more of them only to find: 1) A download like Heart’s 34-year-old song Barracuda went up to .29, not down. 2) Obscure ’90s Brit pop and ’50s rockabilly artists — those most likely to benefit from a price drop — remained at {content}.99. 3) Collected tracks from a cross-section of 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s artists all remained at {content}.99. Finally, MP3 Newswire called up tracks in the public domain from an artist named Ada Jones who first recorded in 1893 on Edison cylinder technology. The price on all of the century-old, public-domain tracks remained at {content}.99. (The same tracks are available for free on archive.org.) The scarcity of lower-priced tracks may reflect the fact that the labels themselves decide which price tier they want to pursue for a given artist; and they are mostly ignoring the lower tier. Meanwhile, Amazon’s UK site has decided to counter-promote their service by dropping prices on select tracks to 29 pence ({content}.42).”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
What has two “Nehalem” Xeon processors, eight cores, a non-workstation class graphics card(?!), and a positively stratospheric sticker price? The answer is, of course, Apple’s new Mac Pro tower, an aluminum-clad whale of a machine that art director Dave Girard put through its media-creation paces in this massive review.
Satellite radio will die soon anyway, but Apple will accidentally perform a mercy killing of Sirius XM Radio this summer. A new iPhone and iPod Touch, plus new software for older devices, will enable people to stream any audio (iTunes, Pandora, podcasts, audiobooks, etc.) to car stereos. Meanwhile, Sirius needs strong car sales to survive.
Kelson writes “The W3C Widget specification is running into a problem: Apple claims a patent on automatic updates and is unwilling to license it royalty-free in the event that it impacts the spec. The W3C is investigating to determine whether the spec includes anything covered by the patent, and decide what to do.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Apple’s tendencies for tight control of its products ultimately drove U2 to abandon the company for sponsorship in favor of Research in Motion’s BlackBerries, the music group’s frontman Bono said. By refusing to grant control over hardware or software, Apple “pushed” U2 away from iPods.
