Apple's new Magic Mouse brings multitouch technologies first exposed on the iPhone and MacBook touchpad to the venerable mouse.
The new design presents a solid acrylic surface on a low-profile body, lacking any physical buttons or the scroll ball of Apple's previous Mighty Mouse.
“It’s not going to be impossible to jailbreak even if the exploit we used is gone,” a statement from Eric McDonald – a member of the iPhone Dev Team – goes, referring to the newly shipping iPhone 3GS units. The hacker crew is notorious for developing and distributing tools (including the Pwnage tool) to hack Apple devices including the iPhone and iPod touch.
Apple revamped its desktop and laptop lines Tuesday, dramatically redesigning the iMac all-in-one and MacBook laptop, and also adding a few updates to its Mac Mini line of small-scale desktops. It also introduced a handful of updated peripherals, with a multitouch mouse bringing the most thorough changes.
Apple enjoyed its most profitable quarter ever, as the company set sales marks for both Mac and iPhone sales. The company announced earnings for its fiscal fourth quarter on Monday.
For the quarter ending September 30, Apple reported a net profit of US$1.67 billion, or $1.82 per share, on revenue of $9.87 billion. Those numbers blew away analysts' earnings and revenue estimates of $1.42 a share and $9.2 billion in sales, respectively.
Retail sales of Mac OS X Snow Leopard upgrades, boosted by a new low price, resulted in strong sales that doubled the previously record-setting launch of Leopard.
Speaking in the company's Q4 earnings conference call, Chief Operations Officer Tim Cook said that "the upgrade sales of Snow Leopard, which we include family and box sets, were more than double what we experienced from Leopard over the same five-week sales period."
Cook noted, "that was much more than we planned, very pleasantly surprised."
It’s no secret that the iPod Touch is capable of more than Apple lets on – or rather, more than Apple will let the device do.
Last month a ‘teardown’ of the third-gen iPod Touch by iFixit revealed the presence of a Broadcom wireless chip which packs an FM receiver and FM transmitter (along with 5GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi). A refresh of the iPod Nano, released at the same time as the new Touch, added an FM radio along with support for ‘live pause’ and iTunes Tagging.
Apple has released a "performance update" for a hard drive problem with its Snow Leopard operating system. The company said in a statement that a feature in Snow Leopard causes the hard drive to "pause".
The statement said that the problem affects only a small number of users.
Steve Wozniak, the chief scientist of Fusion-io and a co-founder of Apple, said in an interview that although solid-state drives (SSDs) do offer a number of advantages over conventional hard disk drives (HDDs), they would not replace traditional storage based on the spinning media completely. In addition, Mr. Wozniak said that SSDs for PCI Express offered great benefits compared to SATA devices and thus would gain popularity.
The newest model of the iPhone 3GS includes a change in the phone’s bootrom designed to keep hackers from using the usual entry points to unlock the popular Apple mobile device.
There are at least 10 good reasons why Apple shouldn't fear the release of Microsoft's Windows 7. In fact the release of Windows 7 on Oct. 22 could well prove to be a golden opportunity for Apple to win more converts to Macintosh PCs and Mac OS X, if the recent history of earlier Windows releases is any guide. Factors such as more imaginative marketing and superior security could help Apple make deeper inroads into Microsoft's desktop dominance.
