Late last week, Apple's online store for refurbished products began offering 128 GB fourth-generation iPad models for the first time. Wi-Fi models in black and white are currently being quoted shipping times of 5-7 business days with pricing set at $679, a discount of $120 from brand-new units.
The only cellular model currently available through the refurbished store is the white AT&T model, which carries an identical 5-7 business day shipping estimate and is priced at $789, a $140 discount compared to brand-new pricing.
Apple launched the 128 GB fourth-generation iPad in early February, several months after the release of lower-capacity models that saw updated internals and a move to Apple's new Lightning connector.
The fifth-generation iPad is expected to debut as soon as next month with a redesigned body taking design cues from the iPad mini, giving the full-size iPad a significantly narrower and thinner profile.
Yahoo has updated its ad-free premium Yahoo! Sportacular Pro app with new iPad support, a redesign for iOS 7, and a number of new features, including custom alerts for specific events during a sporting match such as game start and scoring situations, new content and stats for all major American sports as well as various international soccer leagues, and full integration with Yahoo Fantasy Football player stats in game details.
What's New in Version 4.2
Big update: - Redesigned with more content, stats and iPad support. - Sign in to Yahoo to save your favorite teams across web and mobile devices. - View your Yahoo Fantasy Football player stats on game details. - New breaking news alerts for the most important stories in sports. - iOS7 fixes for favorites, alerts and picks. You may need to reset your favorites if you have already upgraded to iOS7.
Yahoo also updated its ad-supported Yahoo! Sports app last month with full Mixed Martial Arts coverage along with a refined interface, and also updated its Fantasy Football iOS app with mobile drafting capabilities in July. Yahoo! Sportacular Pro is a $4.99 universal app for the iPhone and iPad and can be downloaded through the App Store. [Direct Link]
As it is has done in past years, Apple is once again giving its corporate employees the entire week of Thanksgiving week off with pay, offering additional vacation days of Monday, November 25 through Wednesday, November 27 beyond the typical Thursday-Friday holiday period.
Retail and customer support employees will not have the week off as those divisions will need to continue operating, but they will be able to take their extra days off at staggered times. International teams will also be able to take their extra time off at times more convenient for their schedules.
The extra vacation days were announced in an email to employees from Apple CEO Tim Cook, as shared by 9to5Mac. The email praises employees for their work over the past year, from the launches of the new iPhones and iOS 7 to the unveiling of upcoming Mac hardware and software and more. Cook also highlights the company's "contribution to the society", including charitable, human rights, and environmental efforts.
Team-
It’s been an exciting summer. For the first time, we’ve launched two new iPhone product lines. iOS 7 was created from a deep collaboration between our design and engineering teams, bringing to our customers a stunning new user interface and amazing new features. We unveiled OS X Mavericks and the most powerful Mac ever. The App Store celebrated a new milestone — 50 billion downloads. And we continued to express our love for music with iTunes Radio and the iTunes Festival.
I had the opportunity to visit a few of our stores during the iPhone launch. There is no better place to see and feel why Apple is special. The best products on Earth. Energy. Enthusiasm. The best customers in the world. Passionate team members focused on enriching people’s lives. Innovative products that serve humanity’s deepest values and highest aspirations.
And I am proud to tell you that Apple is also a force for good in our world beyond our products. Whether it’s improving working conditions or the environment, standing up for human rights, helping eliminate AIDS, or reinventing education, Apple is making a substantial contribution to society.
None of this would have been possible without you. Our most important resource is not our money, our intellectual property, or any capital asset. Our most important resource — our soul — is our people.
I realize many of you worked tirelessly to bring us this far. I know it required great personal sacrifice.
In recognition of your incredible efforts and achievements, I’m happy to announce that we’re extending the Thanksgiving holiday this year. We will shut down with pay on November 25, 26, and 27 so our teams can have the whole week off. Retail, AppleCare and a few other teams will need to work that week so we can continue to serve our customers, but will receive the same number of days off at an alternate time. Please check with your manager for details. Our international teams will schedule the vacation days at a time that is best suited for their specific country.
I hope you find the extra time restful and relaxing. You deserve it. Details will be available on AppleWeb soon.
I am exceedingly proud of all of you. I am in awe of what you’ve accomplished and couldn’t be more excited about the future. Enjoy the time away!
The Thanksgiving week will be a busy time for Apple's retail team, with the traditional Black Friday kickoff for the holiday shopping season coming the day after Thanskgiving. While Apple does not traditionally offer the massive discounts seen at some other retailers, the company does offer modest sales on a number of its products.
Staples sales associates also received training for Mac sales earlier this year, although those products have yet to be launched by the retailer.
Expanded availability of its products through Staples offers Apple not only additional visibility and convenience for customers shopping for themselves, but also new options for businesses that may already do significant business with the office supply chain, making it easier to include Apple product purchases under existing billing arrangements they already have with Staples.
Last Monday, Apple began offering in-store pickup for online orders of the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c, despite extreme shortages of the iPhone 5s following its launch the previous Friday. Just a day later, Apple halted the in-store pickup option for the iPhone 5s, perhaps because of the lack of supply.
But in line with a report from late last week, Apple has now resumed in-store pickup for the iPhone 5s, allowing customers to check availability at their local retail stores when placing orders.
Availability remains extremely tight, with very few stores showing any stock of most models. As has been the case since launch, silver and gold models are seeing very limited supplies, but even space gray models remain unavailable for in-store pickup at most locations.
Apple continues to quote "October" shipping estimates for all new online orders in countries where the iPhone 5s has launched, suggesting that the company is still experiencing some uncertainty about how quickly it will be able to meet demand. The first minor expansion in availability of the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c is set occur tomorrow when Virgin Mobile USA and a number of regional carriers in the U.S. and Canada are scheduled to begin offering the devices.
Back in June, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) struck a three-year deal with Apple to produce A-series chips for iOS devices beginning in 2014. The move was seen as part of Apple's strategy of moving away from rival Samsung for component supplies, although Samsung was soon after reported to have landed its own deal to once again produce chips beginning with the A9 in 2015.
According to Korean news outlet Hankyung [Google Translate] (via The Verge), Samsung will also remain involved in next year's A8 chip family, with TSMC handling 60 to 70 percent of the manufacturing load and Samsung picking up the remainder.
Today's rumor about the A8 chip still makes it unclear as to whether TSMC and Samsung will both produce A9 chips for Apple in 2015, but it seems that Apple is working hard to diversify its supplier relationships and will be drawing on both TSMC and Samsung for the foreseeable future as the two companies compete to push their technology forward.
A look into the A7 processor last week revealed that Samsung was indeed the manufacturer for the chip, with the chip produced at a smaller 28-nm node compared to the 32-nm A6. Currently, the A7 chip is used in the iPhone 5s, and an updated "A7X" version of the chip is almost certainly set to arrive in Apple’s next-generation iPad and perhaps an upcoming iPad mini with Retina display.
According to a report from identity and brand consulting company Interbrand, Apple has overtaken Coca-Cola as the new most valuable brand in the world, knocking the beverage corporation from its 13-year tenure in the annual “Best Global Brands” survey, reports The New York Times.
Every so often, a company changes our lives, not just with its products, but also with its ethos. This is why, following Coca-Cola’s 13-year run at the top of Best Global Brands, Interbrand has a new #1—Apple. Few brands have enabled so many people to do so much so easily, which is why Apple has legions of adoring fans, as evidenced by the record-breaking launch of the iPhone 5c/5s. For revolutionizing the way we work, play, and communicate—and for mastering the ability to surprise and delight—Apple has set a high bar for aesthetics, simplicity, and ease of use that all other tech brands are now expected to match, and that Apple itself is expected to continually exceed.
From our perspective, Apple’s internal brand strength has remained steady. CEO Tim Cook has assembled a solid team that is aligned around the Apple vision, which has allowed them to deliver against the promise time and time again. There’s been a lot of change at the top in the last 12 months, but the alignment of both hardware and software design under Jonathan Ive is a major step toward maintaining focus. A shrewd move, perhaps, given the stiffer than ever competition over the last 12 months: Samsung is now the world’s most profitable smartphone manufacturer, Google has expanded Android and its maps still seem to be the “preferred” route, and Windows Phone 8 certainly raised more than a few eyebrows.
The survey, which has been done since 2000, saw Apple come in at the second most valuable brand in the world in 2011, ahead of technology companies such as IBM, Google, and Microsoft. This year, Apple bested Google who is now the current runner-up to the most valuable brand in the world, and is also ahead of rival Samsung, which moved up to #8 from #9 in last year's survey.
Apple has made significant updates to much of its product line this year, including the recently released iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c, with the company announcing that it sold a record 9 million iPhones during the products’ launch weekend. The company also claimed that 200 million iOS devices are running the new iOS 7 mobile operating system, making it the fastest software upgrade in history.
Following the ongoing legal threats to iOS developers by patent holding firm Lodsys, an East Texas judge has tossed Apple’s original legal challenge of the patent firm, ruling that Lodsys is free to settle all its cases, reports Ars Technica.
Now, after two years of litigation, it's back to square one. The East Texas judge overseeing Lodsys' systematic patent attack on app developers has refused to even consider Apple's motion. Instead, he allowed the patent-holding company to settle all its cases—and then dismissed Apple's motion as moot. By doing so, US District Judge Rodney Gilstrap—who has inherited the patent-happy East Texas court that once belonged to patent-troll favorite T. John Ward—has enabled Lodsys to threaten developers for months, and perhaps even years, to come.
The legal actions by Lodsys originally started in May 2011, where the firm threatened to sue App Store developers over In-App Purchases and upgrade links, claiming that it had a patent to the process which was originally filed in December 2003 as a part of series of continuations on earlier patent applications dating to 1992. The patent in question was credited to Dan Abelow, who sold the patent portfolio to Lodsys in 2004. The move prompted Apple to back developers against the patent threats, stating that iOS developers were “undisputedly licensed” later that month in 2011.
At that point, Lodsys also targeted Android developers with patent infringement claims, and Apple eventually filed a motion to intervene within the Lodsys lawsuits. While Apple was granted limited permission in April 2012 to intervene in the Lodsys case, this permission was overturned today.
This past April, Lodsys specifically targeted Disney’s “Where’s My Water?” title among others in a new round of lawsuits over in-app purchasing, stating that Disney had infringed its ’565 and ‘078 patents had been infringed upon by the entertainment corporation. However, Lodsys agreed last month to dismiss a patent case against developer Todd More, for a charitable donation. Overall, Apple has been the number one target for patent trolls with 171 cases in five years, with U.S. President Barack Obama targeting patent trolls such as Lodsys, announcing proposed legislative changes this past June.
Chinese parts supplier sw-box.com has posted a video and photos of the upcoming the slate-gray enclosure of the upcoming iPad 5.
iPad 5 parts have been floating around for a number of weeks with other videos also showing the new enclosure. This latest video does a good job detailing the physical differences between the iPad 4 and iPad 5.
As shown in the video, the iPad 5 will adopt a similar design to the currently shipping iPad mini. The new iPad is expected to debut in October.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Atari founder Nolan Bushnell held an hour-long talk at the C2SV Technology Conference which MacRumors attended today in San Jose, CA, with the two speaking about a variety of topics including reminiscing about Steve Jobs and the early days of Apple.
The duo started out remembering how they first met, which was due to the influence of Jobs. Wozniak started out by remembering Jobs wanting to apply to Atari:
I'd known Steve Jobs for a long time. And I had seen Pong in a bowling alley and I had to have one. And pop in my head: I know how televisions work and I know how to design anything so I built my own Pong. And Steve came back from Oregon at the time, where he had been going to school, and I gave him my board. He wanted to run down and apply for a job at Atari.
Wozniak then mentioned how he was "so thankful" Atari hired Jobs even though Jobs wasn't an engineer, noting that he must have impressed Bushnell and Pong designer Al Alcorn with his high energy and enthusiasm. Bushnell agreed and related a story about how Jobs came in after just a couple of days on the job to tell Bushnell how no one at Atari knew how to solder.
He said: 'This stuff won't work for more than a few weeks without having failure. You've got to up your game a little bit.' And I say: well, do you know how to solder? And he says 'absolutely, this is shit'.
Prompted by that anecdote, Wozniak reminisced about how when he and Jobs were working on Breakout for Atari, Jobs avoided soldering and instead used wire wrapping.
Later in the conversation, when talking about the lack of venture capital in the early days of the Silicon Valley, the two had a lighthearted back-and-forth about Apple's early Apple I pitches to Atari and Commodore. Wozniak mentioned how Apple had to take on an investor at a certain point, prompting Bushnell to jokingly reply he wished that he had been that investor. Wozniak then countered, reminding Bushnell that he had rejected Apple's proposals:
We offered to Commodore directly making proposals and to Al Alcorn at his house making proposals, but you guys had the first Pong handle coming out and that was millions of dollars for you so your mind was so focused. You said 'we don't have time to make a computer also' and that came about later.
The two then debated what the original deal was, with Bushnell claiming the deal was $50,000 for a third of Apple while Wozniak said the deal was a few hundred thousand dollars, a position at Atari, Atari company stock, and to be in charge of the project. Eventually, Wozniak conceded, noting that he may not have known about Bushnell's claimed deal and quickly remembered how he wanted to keep quiet as he was amazed that Jobs was trying to get $300,000 from Commodore during that proposal.
Some time later, Bushnell praised Wozniak for creating the Apple II and noted that the computer's eight expansion slots turned out to be a "prescient" idea. Wozniak then admitted Apple didn't plan that and lucked into adding eight expansion slots because he insisted on them from his "geek" perspective.
The two wrapped up talking about Jobs by discussing the intensity of the young Jobs and how that is the one quality any future books or movies should hone in on. Wozniak noted that Jobs' intensity caused him to fail with some projects, like the Lisa and the early Macintosh effort, and only once Jobs learned patience to complement his intensity is when things really took off.
Apple today published a new YouTube video highlighting some of the best moments of its 2013 iTunes Festival in London, which featured 60 artists over the course of 30 days.
Artists that performed included Lady Gaga, The Lumineers, Queens of the Stone Age, Kings of Leon, Vampire Weekend, Robin Thicke, Justin Timberlake, Thirty Seconds to Mars, and Jack Johnson.
Though the festival was limited to attendees in the U.K. who won a free ticket via an iTunes lottery system, Apple also provided access through its iTunes Festival app and a dedicated channel on the Apple TV.
The festival will come to a close on September 30 with a performance from Katy Perry. Apple is expected to release a live EP from the show through the iTunes Store after the event ends, as it has done each year.
Following the culmination of a long-running class action lawsuit, AT&T and Apple are set to pay out $40 to customers who were affected when AT&T ended its unlimited data plan for the iPad 3G back in June of 2010, reports GigaOM.
In a ruling issued this week in San Jose, California, US District Judge Ronald Whyte signed off on a plan that will see Apple pay $40 to everyone in the US who bought or ordered an iPad 3G before June 7, 2010. In addition, those who did not sign up with AT&T will get a $20/month discount on the carrier’s 5GB monthly plan for up to a year.
Prior to June 2010, AT&T offered a no-contract $29.99/month unlimited data plan for iPad owners, replacing it with a 2 GB for $25/month plan. While AT&T grandfathered in users who had the unlimited plan before June of 2010, the company did began throttling its unlimited users in October of 2011.
In addition to accusing Apple and AT&T of baiting-and-switching customers by selling iPads that had advertised unlimited data, the lawsuits also suggested that without the prospect of an unlimited data plan, consumers had overpaid for their tablets.
The deal is subject to final approval in February, and Apple will begin sending out checks after that date. While AT&T is required to offer customers a $20 discount on the $50/month 5 GB data plan, the deal is only available to customers who do not have another data plan with AT&T due to no-class action provisions in their contracts.
On Monday, Apple began offering a Personal Pickup option for the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5c via its online purchase page and through its Apple Store app, giving customers a way to check in-store availability for each phone model and place orders for in-store pickup.
The following day, Apple removed the in-store pickup option for iPhone 5s orders, leaving shoppers with the option of placing an online order for delivery in October or visiting local retail stores in person to check in-store availability. There was no explanation given for the feature's removal, though the continued constrained supply of the iPhone 5s could have contributed.
According to 9to5Mac, Apple will reinstate the in-store pickup option for both the app and its website beginning on Monday, September 30, once again allowing customers to check stock and place orders for pickup.
Apple's supplies of the iPhone 5s remain tight, with all models and capacities displaying a ship time of October. iPhone 5c supplies are plentiful, with all models and capacities shipping within 24 hours.
Earlier this week, Canadian firm Chipworks released some photos showing the interior of Apple's new A7 chip from the iPhone 5s, as well as the new M7 "motion coprocessor" and other components.
The firm has now had a chance to look at the A7's transistor die photo in detail and make a preliminary effort at identifying the various components of the chip. Chipworks stresses that the identifications are still tentative pending full circuit analysis, but that most of the identifications appear to make sense.
We publish this with the caveat that these are best guesses – we have not done any real circuit extraction to confirm them. The dual-core CPU and cache make up ~17% of the die area, and the quad-core GPU and shared logic about 22%. The CPU itself is not packed the same way as the A6 (see below), it looks much more like a conventional automated layout; although Linley Gwennap thinks that it’s still Apple designed, not the first ARM A53/57 usage.
The analysis identifies the CPU portion of the chip as being at the lower left of the image, with the quad-core graphics located at lower right. Previous work by AnandTech has identified the graphics as Imagination Technologies' PowerVR G6430 configuration, a member of the new "Rogue" series of GPUs from the company.
Also of interest is a large block of static RAM (SRAM) located along the right edge of the chip just above the graphics cores. Chipworks says that based on its size it represents approximately 3 MB of storage and that it could be the "secure enclave" used to house data associated with the Touch ID fingerprint sensor found on the iPhone 5s. No equivalent SRAM block is included on the previous-generation A6 chip from Apple.
The A7 is otherwise a fairly standard chip compared to Apple's previous designs, measuring only slightly larger than the A6 but offering significantly greater performance.
Apple today posted a new job listing seeking a Maps Web User Interface Designer to "design, develop, and maintain complex front-end code for a new secret project."
While the job listing briefly mentions Maps, it appears that the position could have a broader web development focus. According to the posting, the designer would join a small team that is working on an advanced web platform that will be the backbone of many future Apple services.
Qualifications for the position include a minimum of three years of experience building both applications and web services, along with understanding of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, DOM, XML, JSON and various Javascript testing frameworks.
Design, develop, and maintain complex front-end code for a new secret project
Document and build unit tests for your code.
Work with operations, QA, and product management to maximize product effectiveness
Though it is unclear what the secret project alludes to, it is possible that Apple is working on building up a more prominent web presence, developing a series of web-based apps that would extend the Apple experience outside of Apple products.
For example, the company could build a web-based Maps app, similar to Google Maps, which could possibly be incorporated into iCloud or other Apple products in the future. At the present time, Apple still uses Google Maps for Find My iPhone in iCloud, and a new web-based Maps app could present a unified Apple mapping solution for the company.
It is also possible, however, that this position involves the building of internal web tools to manage Apple services that would not be public facing.
Apple has been working on expanding the reach of its products in recent months, introducing iBooks and Maps apps for the Mac with Mavericks and debuting iWork for iCloud, which allows Apple's iWork apps to be accessed anywhere.
A German court has invalidated an Apple patent on a specific "rubber-banding" feature in iOS because it was demonstrated in Steve Jobs' iPhone introduction keynote in 2007, reports FOSS Patents.
In the United States, inventors are allowed a twelve-month grace period between any public demonstrations of a new technology and the filing of a patent. However, Europe has no such grace period and public demonstrations prior to the filing of a patent -- even by the inventor of the technology being patented -- can be used as prior art to invalidate a patent. A subtle demonstration of the rubber-banding technology is barely noticeable at 33:40 in this video.
In this case, Steve Jobs demonstrated the rubber-banding technology at the launch of the iPhone in January of 2007 and Apple applied for the German patent on the technology after that date. As a result, Apple's patent was dismissed because of its own prior art.
The Munich-based Bundespatentgericht (Federal Patent Court of Germany) today sided with Samsung and Google's Motorola Mobility in declaring an Apple iPhone patent, EP2059868 on a "portable electronic device for photo management", invalid within the borders of Germany because a video of the original January 2007 iPhone presentation already showed the famous bounce-back effect in the photo gallery, which is what this patent is all about. The court also rejected various amended claims proposed by Apple, which were an attempt to distinguish the patent from what was shown in the video, because it found them to be, at best, obvious over the Steve Jobs video, which Google's lawyers from the Quinn Emanuel firm submitted to the court in April 2013. In other words, even an amended version of the patent would be trivial, but not over what others created before -- only over Apple's own public demo.
Apple can appeal the decision, and FOSS Patents has much more on the patent and some related lawsuits and claims.
Another rubber-banding patent was used extensively in the billion-dollar jury trial between Apple and Samsung, though that trial is still going through a lengthy appeals process.
Apple has hired former Nike design director Ben Shaffer, claims 9to5Mac, citing a source at Nike. Shaffer worked as the Studio Director of the "Innovation Kitchen", Nike’s research and development lab, which produced popular Nike products like the Nike Fuelband and the Flyknit shoe.
While it is unknown what position Shaffer will take on at Apple, it seems likely that he will be involved in the development of the iWatch, given his expertise in wearables. Apple has been aggressively hiring for its iWatch team in recent months, acquiring a number of experts in the health sensor field. The company also recently hired fitness expert and former Nike consultant Jay Blahnik.
At the D11 conference in May, Apple CEO Tim Cook called the idea of smart watches and other wearables "incredibly interesting" saying the market was "ripe for exploration." Since then, Apple has filed for "iWatch" trademarks in a number of countries across the world, including Jamaica, Russia, Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, Turkey, Colombia, Chile, and India.
The most recent rumors have suggested Apple's iWatch will not make an appearance until late 2014 due to "hard engineering problems" that have yet to be solved.
Update: According to Fast Company's Austin Carr, though Shaffer did oversee Nike's Innovation Kitchen, he was not a part of the Nike Fuelband team, making it unclear what his role at Apple will be.
Last month, we revived our Roundups feature with new pages covering the iPhone 5s, iPhone 5c, iOS 7, and Apple's rumored iWatch, offering a frequently updated one-page summary of the latest news and rumors about each product.
With the new iPhones and iOS 7 now launched, we're continuing to update those articles with information to help site visitors stay on top of the latest developments, but we're also launching a number of new roundups today to address Apple's upcoming iPad and Mac product launches expected over the next several months.
As with the original set of iPhone and iOS roundups, the goal of each of the new roundups is to simply answer the question of "What are you expecting" for any given product. That opinion is certain to change over time as new rumors are revealed, and the roundups will be updated regularly to reflect that. Roundups for recently updated products will also include details on the new models to help bring visitors up to speed on what they have to offer.
Our roundup index page continues to include a full list of our available roundups ordered by most recently updated. Roundups are also accessible directly through the "Roundups" tab in the navigation bar on all MacRumors pages. We will continue to update the existing roundups and add new ones for other products over time.
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