It's official: China Unicom chairman Chang Xiaobing has disclosed that his company has indeed been negotiating with Apple to bring the iPhone to China. We had reported rumors of such talks late last months - but now that chairman Chang has spoken, the talks have been elevated in newsworthiness.
When the latest 13- and 15-inch MacBooks were announced in October 2008, a similar revamp of the larger 17-inch version of the MacBook Pro was conspicuously missing from the lineup.
Flying under the radar of Tuesday's broad desktop overhaul were quiet updates to Apple's MacBook Pro notebook line, which now includes a faster 15-inch model, new high-end chip options, and larger solid-state drive (SSD) choices that are also offered alongside the company's 13-inch MacBooks.
Beginning today, the high-end 15-inch MacBook Pro now comes standard with a 2.66GHz processor, up from the 2.53GHz. For an extra $300, it can be upgraded to a 2.93GHz chip, which replaces the previous 2.8GHz build-to-order option.
Well, here's what we've all been waiting for. Apple put out a couple of announcements on Tuesday related to its desktop computers. The company unveiled a new Mac Pro high-end desktop powered by Intel's "Nehalem" processor, a new and more graphics-intensive Mac Mini machine, and updated iMacs that include the lowest price point yet for the consumer desktops.
Apple is poised to introduce new versions of its Time Capsule wireless backup appliance and AirPort Extreme 802.11n wireless routers, regulatory filings with the Federal Communications Commission reveal.
A filing for a new AirPort Express (ID Label diagram) was originally lodged in January and granted on Monday, while a filing for a new Time Capsule (ID Label diagram) was first made back in August of 2008 and also granted this week.
At last month's Gartner Wireless and Mobile Summit, the iPhone was the elephant in the room -- an enormous IT challenge that's here to stay, no matter how hard enterprises try to ignore it.
In his annual update on mobile devices, Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney described the iPhone as a consumer-class mobile device with increasingly universal enterprise impact. Apple Mac OS X smartphone sales overtook Windows Mobile in 3Q08. At 13% and climbing, the iPhone is now rapidly approaching RIM's BlackBerry marketshare.
In addition to expected fixes, Apple's upcoming 10.5.7 update to Mac OS X Leopard is now claimed to recognize Intel's newer Nehalem architecture as well as AMD's ATI Radeon HD 4000 graphics chipsets.
The reported discovery by netkas has produced just five kernel extensions for the video cards and doesn't appear to work perfectly in a bootleg installation for 10.5.6 meant for hacked Mac OS X installations. The retrofitted version doesn't recognize DVI ports fully and doesn't even recognize widescreen resolutions without third-party utilities to force the expanded screen area.
A report intending to portray the iPhone as "hated" in the Japanese market turns out to have been built upon fake quotations from industry writers and observers who were misrepresented by remarks attributed to them that they never made. Their actual comments on the iPhone's prospects in Japan are far more interesting.
In the early days of the Apple App Store, feedback could be given for applications much in the same way you can for products on Newegg, Amazon and many other sites to help people make a purchasing decision. Given that word of mouth is one of the most important advertising tools, this is a good incentive for developers to make good software. Unfortunately, Apple found that their reviews were often tainted, getting both positive and negative reviews from people who hadn't actually used the application in question.
Apple's iPhone has wowed most of the globe — but not Japan, where the handset is selling so poorly it's being offered for free.
What's wrong with the iPhone, from a Japanese perspective? Almost everything: the high monthly data plans that go with it, its paucity of features, the low-quality camera, the unfashionable design and the fact that it's not Japanese.
