MacRumors

Countering earlier reports about the possibility of Apple launching a larger, 12.9-inch iPad next year, KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo states in a new research note that the company will instead release a new sixth-generation 9.7-inch iPad with 30-40% higher pixel density than seen in both the current and upcoming full-sized iPad.

Contrary to speculation that next year’s iPad next year may come in a 12” form, or larger, we think it will not change from the current 9.7” format as we think a 12” iPad would not provide a good mobility experience given today’s technology limitations.

In light [of] advancing Oxide and a-Si technologies, the PPI of iPad 6, which we expect to come out at end-2014, will exceed that of 2013’s iPad 5 by 30-40%, which will offer more competent visuals.

In his research note, Kuo also touches on the third-generation iPad mini, which would be expected to launch alongside the higher-resolution iPad 6. Kuo believes that the second-generation iPad mini expected to be introduced at Apple's media event later this month will adopt a Retina display and that there will be no further changes to resolution for the third-generation iPad mini next year.

Apple is expected to unveil both the fifth-generation iPad and the second-generation iPad mini during an October 22 event that will also showcase other Apple products such as Mavericks and the Mac Pro.

Apple has clarified the shipping times for its iPhone 5s, with new shipping estimates ranging from two to three weeks for all carriers, colors, and capacities in the United States, Canada, and Asia Pacific. Apple Stores in Europe continue to list Apple's previous "October" shipping timeline.

Taking into account delivery times, iPhones ordered today will arrive to customers in late October or early November.

The updated shipping time comes as Apple prepares to launch the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5c to 35 new countries on October 25 and an additional 16 countries on November 1.

Though Apple's shipping times seem to have improved somewhat, a new study conducted by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster reveals that in-store iPhone 5s availability has been slipping over the past two weeks. As a result, it is more difficult to reserve an iPhone for pickup, or walk into a store to purchase one, while previously, some models, such as Space Gray, were readily available.

Apple's iPhone 5s has been available in limited quantities since launch, selling out within a matter of hours after Apple began taking online orders. Gold and silver models in particular have been hard to come by, with supplies of the gold model in particular drying up within 30 minutes of the phone’s launch. The iPhone 5c remains in stock, with new orders shipping out within 24 hours.

Apple’s proposed Apple Campus 2, now in the final planning stages, can be seen in detail in new model photos provided by San Jose Mercury News. The 4-story circular building, which Steve Jobs famously described as "like a spaceship," encompasses more than 2.8 million square feet and is designed to house upwards of 12,000 employees.

As seen in the model, the campus includes the main spaceship building with curved glass windows and polished concrete ceilings, several auxiliary buildings, a massive parking structure topped with solar panels, an underground parking lot, and a huge number of trees. In addition to the main working area, the plans include an auditorium for events, a fitness center, and additional space for research and development. Apple's Chief Financial Officer, Peter Oppenheimer, was on hand to give some details about the campus.

"You see the energy and the love and the attention to detail that we've put into this," he told this newspaper during a sneak-peek of a top-secret, living-room sized model of the building. "We have treated this project just as we would any Apple product. And this will be a place for the most creative and collaborative teams in the industry to innovate for decades to come."

"The concept of the building," said Oppenheimer, "is collaboration and fluidity. It'll provide a very open-spaced system, so that at one point in the day you may be in offices on one side of the circle and find yourself on the other side later that day."

Though only the main buildings will be constructed during the first phase of the project, Apple has plans to add additional buildings to house extra employees at some point in the future.

Following an early October approval from the Cupertino Planning Commission, the campus is still subject to a vote from the Cupertino city council on October 15 and a final vote on November 19. If all parties involved approve the construction, Apple will remain on track for a 2016 debut of the new structure. A full gallery of the model can be seen on the Mercury News site.

Update: As noted by TechCrunch, Apple has begun sending out brochures asking residents of Cupertino to support the new Apple campus by emailing the Cupertino city council and attending the October 15 vote. The company says that it intends to break ground shortly after the campus is approved.

Update 2: The City of Cupertino has posted a nearly three-hour video (via MacGeneration) of the October 1 session discussing Apple's Environmental Impact report on the new campus project. The session includes a presentation by Apple Senior Director of Real Estate and Facilities Dan Whisenhunt, with a brief overview video beginning at the 8:15 mark in the session video.

According to a study by mobile application mangement platform Crittercism, iOS apps are twice as likely to crash on the new iPhone 5s as they are when running on the iPhone 5 and 5c, reports AllThingsD.

The app crash rates on the iPhone 5s are attributed to the unforseen issues that developers have had transitioning to the new internals of the iPhone 5s, such as rewriting drivers and code for the phone's 64-bit A7 chip and M7 coprocessor. Apple notably began allowing developers to submit 64-bit apps for the iPhone 5s on September 16, just four days before the launch of the device itself.

“Anytime there is new hardware or software release, we see issues,” Crittercism CEO Andrew Levy said in an interview. “Inevitably, over time, those issues get resolved.”

Levy said that perhaps the reason the iPhone 5s is seeing more crashes than the equally new iPhone 5c is that, while developers were able to check their apps for compatibility with iOS 7 during several months of beta testing, the new hardware wasn’t available ahead of time. The iPhone 5s packs a new 64-bit A7 chip and an M7 coprocessor, while the 5c is nearly identical, internally, to the iPhone 5.

However, the company compliments Apple for releasing two updates in quick succession for iOS 7, stating that the company is "doing a really good job of addressing these issues as they come up.” Since its launch last month, a number of noteworthy apps have been redesigned or optimized for the iPhone 5s, with more developers stating that they will update their apps to accommodate the new processor in the near future.

While gold and silver models of the iPhone 5s have seen very tight supplies since the device's launch last month, a number of potential customers have noted that availability of even the more plentiful space gray models has been declining. Using Apple's in-store pickup availability system, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has been tracking supplies of the various models and has quantified a significant decline in iPhone 5s availability over the past two weeks.

Supply of the iPhone 5S has declined in the US from 27% of total SKU's available two weeks ago to 6% over the past week, based on our checks of 60 Apple stores. Separately, the percent of stores that had at least one SKU declined from 90% two weeks ago to 40% over the past week.

Munster believes that the decline is a positive sign for demand in the U.S., but also attributes some of the increased shortages to Apple potentially holding back some supplies in order to prepare for upcoming international launches starting later this month.

As another tool for tracking demand, Munster has also been looking at resale prices through eBay and Chinese site Taobao. According to Munster's data, iPhone 5s units have been selling at a 32% premium compared to retail pricing in the U.S., providing further evidence of strong consumer demand. iPhone 5c and Samsung Galaxy S4 units have been selling at 12% discounts to retail pricing, which Munster believes points to demand in line with supplies of the iPhone 5c.

The much-rumored iWatch may be used as a home automation gateway, allowing users to control various functions within their houses, according to a new research note by Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Brian White.

As an Apple supplier, our contact offered insight into the "iWatch" and described this potential new device as much more than an extension of your iPhone but as a multi-purpose gateway in allowing consumers to control their home (i.e., heating/cooling, lights, audio, video, etc.).

This functionality would mirror the abilities of apps by Philips and Nest to power the Hue lightbulbs and Nest Thermostat, allowing users to control lighting and temperature from simple commands on their devices. However, as those services require additional accessories it would likely mean Apple would have to manufacture these accessories itself or create some kind of licensing program for third parties, like AirPlay.

It is not surprising to hear that the iWatch will be far more than an iPhone companion given repeated reports of the health-sensor technology rumored to be built into it, but the potential inclusion of home automation does come as a surprise.

In the past, White has provided somewhat questionable reports, claiming that an Apple television set with an "iRing" motion control remote would be coming this year and that the iPhone 5s would come in multiple sizes. Although he did also predict there would be multiple color choices for the next iPhone.

Two iWatch models, with 1.3- and 1.6-inch 320x320 AMOLED screens, are rumored to be arriving at some point next year.

Apple's senior vice president of design Jonathan Ive and industrial designer Marc Newson have collaborated on more than 40 objects, such as the one-of-a-kind Leica Rangefinder camera and the solid gold Apple EarPods, that will be auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York later this year to benefit Product (RED), Bono's charity that has a long running partnership with Apple.

The duo interviewed with Vanity Fair to talk about the collaborative design process and the exceptional amount of work that went into many of the products that will be up for auction.

Despite differences in aesthetic taste, Ive and Newson work well together due to an uncompromising obsession with detail and a shared belief that design involves more than surface appearance, a point that Jony Ive has spoken about in prior interviews.

"We are both fanatical in terms of care and attention to things people don't see immediately," Ive said. "It's like finishing the back of a drawer. Nobody's going to see it, but you do it anyway. Products are a form of communication—they demonstrate your value system, what you care about."

"You discover that very few people have the level of perfection we do. It is actually very sick," Newson said. "It is neurotic."

Later, waving his hand around the Claridge's suite, Ive said, “All of us in this room see the same things, the same objects, but Marc and I see what's behind them."

Coming up with a theme and deciding what to produce took the two men more than a year and a half, with months spent contemplating what to include, tracking down rare objects, and contacting manufacturers and factories. An extensive amount of time went into each object, especially the two handmade items – a desk and the Leica camera.

"I found it a very odd and unusual thing to put this amount of love and energy into one thing, where you are only going to make one,” Ive said. “But isn't it beautiful?" The camera's dollar worth is hard to estimate, since it is an art piece as much as a functioning object, but the value of the time Ive, Newson, and Leica's own engineers put into it probably totals well into six figures, and possibly seven.

The camera that Ive designed involved 947 prototype parts and 561 models. 55 Apple engineers assisted in the process, spending a collective 2,149 hours. Final assembly of the finished camera took 50 hours and more than six days.

During the interview, Ive also had a few words to say about the care and the precision involved in designing the iPhone, a set of qualities that distinguish Apple and its products from other smartphone manufacturers.

"The most important thing is that you actually care, that you do something to the very best of your ability," Ive told me. "We can't explain it in a fiscal sense, but the care that goes into the iPhone is equivalent to what goes into watches and other things that are significantly more expensive. I love the idea that the phone will be so broadly accessible."

The full Vanity Fair article, which includes further tidbits on the design histories of both Ive and Newson along with detailed information on several other products that will be up for auction, is well worth a read. The Sotheby's auction for Product (RED) will take place on November 23.

Following the announcement of BlackBerry's layoffs that will see a loss of 40 percent of its staff, Apple has begun poaching BlackBerry talent via a recruitment drive near the BlackBerry offices in Ontario, reports the Financial Post.

In the Cambridge Hotel and Conference Centre on Sept. 26, located in Cambridge, Ont. on the outskirts of the Kitchener-Waterloo region where BlackBerry was born, the iPhone maker invited local talent with the aim of luring them to their Silicon Valley operations.

According to a LinkedIn invitation, the majority of positions open at Apple are located within Cupertino, California. Apple has said that it will provide both relocation and immigration assistance to any candidates that are hired, but it is unclear exactly what positions Apple is looking to fill.

Apple's attempt to snap up BlackBerry employees comes as the company itself contemplates a $4.7 billion takeover bid from Fairfax Financial, which BlackBerry initially received on September 23.

Amid worries that Fairfax Financial cannot come up with the full funding, BlackBerry is also reported to be considering a breakup of the company, as other companies like Cisco and Samsung have expressed interest in only parts of the company. Piecemeal elements, such as patents or its enterprise network, could be more valuable than a standard sale.

At the current time, BlackBerry continues to seek out the best option for the eventual sale of the company. BlackBerry has until November 4 to receive other proposals as Fairfax Financial works to get financing to solidify the deal.

During its ongoing financial troubles, BlackBerry has released a new cloud service designed for managing mobile devices and is also set to launch the iOS and Android versions of BlackBerry Messenger in the future. The company previously prepared the release for September 22, but had its servers overwhelmed by an unauthorized Android version of the app which has since delayed the launch.