During December, 32% of all Macs that went online were running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Usage of Lion, the previous iteration of OS X, dropped from 30% to 28%.
OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, first introduced in 2009, remains widely used despite its age. As of December 31, it still represented 29% of Mac Internet usage. Snow Leopard remains for sale on the online Apple Store and has been lauded for its stability.
Easily accessible and reasonably priced upgrades have always enticed Apple users to embrace operating system updates. Apple famously boasted about selling a million copies of OS X 10.7 Lion in its first day of availability, and Mountain Lion also saw rapid adoption numbers.
Net Applications collects its data by tracking browser usage of 160 million monthly visitors from around the world on approximately 40,000 websites, offering a picture of the active user base of browsers and platforms at any moment.
The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is nearly finished with a year-long investigation into the methods that large technology companies use to avoid paying U.S. corporate income tax. Apple, for its part, allocates some 70 percent of its income to overseas affiliates where tax rates are much lower.
It appears that all of Apple's techniques are legal by U.S. law, though some politicians have said that corporations going to extraordinary lengths to avoid paying income tax and that they are violating the spirit of tax laws.
In its statement, Apple said it paid “an enormous amount of taxes” to local, state and federal governments. "In fiscal 2012 we paid $6 billion in federal corporate income taxes, which is 1 out of every 40 dollars in corporate income taxes collected by the U.S. government," it said.
Apple was one of the first companies to use the accounting scheme called a "Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich", where profits are routed through Irish and Dutch subsidiaries before finally landing in the Caribbean. Now, hundreds of companies use those methods.
Apple also has moved revenue to its Braeburn subsidiary in Nevada and International locales where the company pays little to no tax.
Note: Due to the inevitable political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.
A bug in Google's text-to-speech engine is causing Google Now and Google Translate to interject the phrase "he now praises the iPad" into sentences that end using phrases such as "end with," "enraged with," and "filled with."
The mysterious phrasing, which first came about in October 2012 on the Android support page, was publicized by Hacker News last night, resulting in some hilarious sentences.
One altered spoken sentence, for example reads, "Larry Page used to use an Android. But that is now at an end, he now praises the iPad."
This bug can be easily reproduced using Google Translate. Type any sentence, end it with one of the key words, and the text-to-speech option on the site will add "he now praises the iPad" to the sentence.
There's no word on why this phrasing exists in the code, but Hacker News speculates that it is an error in the algorithm. The original sentence came from a MacNN article posted in 2011, quoting Hearst Magazine president David Carey: "Describing the negotiations last spring as being filled with 'so much drama,' he now praises the iPad."
Theoretically, Google's algorithm improperly incorporated this sentence, causing the bug. Thus far, Google has not resolved the problem, so for the time being, Google Now and Google Translate can still be used to create humorous sentences.
More than $600,000 worth of counterfeit Lighting cables were seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at a routine customs search in Anchorage, Alaska (via 9to5Mac). The cables had arrived from China via plane and were designed to look like Apple's $19 Lightning to USB cables, complete with fake Apple logos and UL icons.
But the knock-off logos weren't enough of a disguise. The items stood out as counterfeits, Frank Falcon, CBP spokesman said. They were packaged for retail sale in cardboard blister packs that were sub-standard compared to Apple's trademark white packaging.
Falcon said a manufacturer in China is responsible for the shipment. He noted that while it is “difficult to deal with a manufacturer in another country,” the bust will “bring more scrutiny” to future shipments from the company.
This is a large bust for such products. As one can imagine, over $600,000 in cables and adaptors means there was “quite a bit of stuff” seized, Falcon said.
Apple products are frequently counterfeited, and even Apple's retail stores are sometimes knocked off.
Former Apple employee Don Melton is sharing a unique look behind the scenes of the Safari development team. Melton was the team leader on both the Safari and WebKit products that are now used by millions of users on both iOS, the Mac, and Windows.
Previously, Melton explained how the Safari name came about, but today he shares the tale of Safari's User Agent string and the strategies his team used to keep the project under wraps.
Twitter and Facebook didn’t exist then. Nobody at Apple was stupid enough to blog about work, so what was I worried about?
Server logs. They scared the hell out of me.
When a Web browser fetches a page from a Web server, the browser identifies itself to that server with a user agent string — basically its name, version, platform, etc. The browser also gives the server an IP address so the server knows where to return the page. This exchange not only makes the Web work, it also allows the server to tell who is using what browser and where they’re using it.
You can see where this is going, right? But wait, there’s more…
Back around 1990, some forward-thinking IT person secured for Apple an entire Class A network of IP addresses. That’s right, Apple has 16,777,216 static IP addresses. And because all of these addresses belong together — in what’s now called a “/8 block” — every one of them starts with the same number. In Apple’s case, the number is 17.
The Wall Street Journal notes that several retailers including Best Buy and Toys "R" Us have complained to attorneys general in a handful of states about advertising practices of Walmart. Generally, the complaints stem from comparison ads by Walmart in which competitors assert that Walmart is using inaccurate pricing or non-equivalent items to claim that it offers the lowest pricing.
But Best Buy also alleges that Walmart was deceptive with its iPhone 5 holiday sale in which it dropped pricing to $127, although the article quotes $150 pricing.
Best Buy said it lost about $65,000 in profit the day Wal-Mart's promotion first ran on Facebook, because it was compelled to match Wal-Mart's advertised $150 price, even though it concluded that Wal-Mart didn't actually have a sufficient number of iPhones available.
Walmart claims that it did have sufficient stock of the iPhone 5, quoting 98% availability at its stores carrying the device. Walmart had noted as the sale launched that it was working closely with Apple on the promotion and was securing significant numbers of iPhones, but that the sale was first-come, first-served with no rain checks offered at stores where the device was out of stock.
Best Buy had already been selling the iPhone 5 for $149.99 when Walmart announced its own sale, but it is unclear if Best Buy used the $73 difference from regular price or $23 difference from Best Buy's sale price in calculating its profit loss. Assuming the latter, Best Buy would have price matched on approximately 2800 iPhone 5 sales in one day.
BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield is predicting that Apple will debut its long-rumored Pandora-like iRadio service to complement iTunes at some point in 2013. Previously, there were reports that Apple and the major music labels weren't close in negotiations, but Greenfield says they're still negotiating on song catalogs.
"Consumer behavior (is) increasingly shifting toward access to a music catalog from ownership of specific songs. We expect iRadio to be incorporated into the iTunes iOS app with personalized radio functionality akin to Pandora, integrated with iTunes to purchase music and other music related content such as concert information/tickets/merchandise via Live Nation (LYV) and Ticketmaster."
Back in October, Bloombergreported that Apple and music labels had re-entered intense negotiations and iRadio was set to debut in early 2013. CNET then reported in December that the sides were far apart because Apple's terms left the labels "cold."
Apple SVP of Internet Services and Software Eddy Cue is considered Apple's "master negotiator" for content deals, so any potential negotiations with music labels would likely go through him. Greenfield also predicts that Apple's long-rumored Apple TV won't debut in 2013 because of content restrictions.
Directed by Joshua Michael Stern, written by Matthew Whitely, shot by Oscar- winning cinematographer Russell Carpenter and produced by Mark Hulme, jOBS details the major moments and defining characters that influenced Steve Jobs on a daily basis from 1971 through 2000. jOBS plunges into the depths of his character, creating an intense dialogue-driven story that is as much a sweeping epic as it is an immensely personal portrait of Steve Jobs’ life. The filmmakers were granted unprecedented access during shooting to the historic garage in Palo Alto, that served as the birthplace to Apple Inc. jOBS stars Ashton Kutcher, Dermot Mulroney, Josh Gad, Lukas Haas, J.K. Simmons and Matthew Modine. Inferno Entertainment is handling international sales on jOBS.
The film will premier at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah later this month.
Corning, provider of the Kentucky-made glass for the iPhone and iPad, has announced the third iteration of its Gorilla Glass panels. The glass both reduces scratches and increases overall strength significantly.
Gorilla Glass 3 has been improved at the molecular level, incorporating a proprietary feature called Native Damage Resistance (NDR). According to Corning, NDR reduces the propagation of flaws, the appearance of scratches and does a better job of maintaining the overall retained strength of the glass. As a result, GG3 claims a three-fold improvement in scratch resistance, 40 percent reduction in the number of visible scratches and 50 percent boost in retained strength after the glass becomes flawed.
Gorilla Glass was mentioned in the Steve Jobs biography with Jobs personally calling Corning Glass CEO Wendell Weeks, before the first iPhone launched, to request the company begin to scale production of Gorilla Glass for the device.
Gorilla Glass 2 was announced at CES last year. It seems likely that Apple will adopt the improved glass for future iOS devices.
Corning will also announce new optical Thunderbolt cables, available in lengths up to 30 meters. Earlier this week, Japanese firm Sumitomo Electric Industries announced its own optical Thunderbolt cables.
As noted by The Guardian earlier this week, the netbook industry will be winding down in the first quarter of 2013, as major players Asus and Acer will be shutting down production of the tiny notebooks.
Actually, the number sold in 2013 will be very much closer to zero than to 139m. The Taiwanese tech site Digitimes points out that Asus, which kicked off the modern netbook category with its Eee PC in 2007, has announced that it won't make its Eee PC product after today, and that Acer doesn't plan to make any more; which means that "the netbook market will officially end after the two vendors finish digesting their remaining inventories."
Asustek and Acer were the only two companies still making netbooks, with everyone else who had made them (including Samsung, HP and Dell) having shifted to tablets.
The report points to four factors that likely contributed to the demise of the netbook: the overall PC market including the rise of more powerful ultrabooks, the global economy, poor profit margins on netbooks, and the iPad leading a charge of tablets to the market.
Going a bit further, Slate argues that Apple is the primary culprit in the demise of the netbook, with the MacBook Air and iPad squeezing netbooks from both sides and leading to a transformation in personal computing.
Apple alone stood against the tide of netbooks. Apple’s brilliant insight was that despite netbooks’ popularity, nobody really wanted a netbook per se. Instead, Apple realized that people who were buying netbooks were looking for one of two things—they wanted full-fledged laptops that were very portable, or they wanted cheap machines that allowed them to easily surf the Web, use email and do other light computing tasks. Rather than building a single netbook that fit both these audiences poorly, Apple built two machines that were, each in its own way, much better than any netbook ever sold.
Slate's Farhad Manjoo goes on to note that Apple simply couldn't compete in the netbook market given the pricing model, and it had no interest in building an inferior product in an attempt to do so. Steve Jobs himself said at the iPad's introduction in 2010 that netbooks were simply a non-starter for Apple.
If there's going to be a third category of device it is going to have to be better at doing these types of tasks than a laptop or a smartphone; otherwise it has no reason for being. Now, some people have thought 'that's a netbook!' The problem is that netbooks aren't better at anything. They're slow, they have low-quality displays, and they run clunky old PC software. So they're not better than a laptop at anything, they're just cheaper. They are just cheap laptops. And we don't think that they're a third category of device.
With the MacBook Air and iPad emerging as Apple's alternatives the entire computer industry was spurred to follow its lead, ultimately squeezing netbooks out of existence.
Facebook will update its Facebook Messenger app later today, adding two significant new voice-related abilities, reports The Next Web. The first will allow Facebook users to record a voice message to send to friends in addition to the standard text and photo messages.
The second is potentially more significant -- though is currently in limited beta testing for Canadian iOS users only. Facebook users will now have the option to make a VoIP phone call from one user to another.
Facebook has also said it will also begin the beta testing of a new VoIP calling feature within its iOS Messenger app, allowing users to establish a peer-to-peer connection and make calls without making a dent in their call allowance (although it will use existing data plans).
The only drawback is that voice calls (messages are available to all) will be available to Canadian users of the iOS Messenger app at launch.
To use the service, Canadian users will be able to log into their Messenger app, open a conversation with the person they want to call, hit the ‘i’ button in the top-right corner and selecting ‘Free Call.’ To send and receive calls, users will need to have the latest version of the app that is available today.
Facebook's efforts create a calling system that can potentially reach its more than 1 billion users, providing a massive competition to other VoIP services like Skype.
A previous version of this article said it was the Facebook iOS app that was updated. It is the standalone Facebook Messenger app that gained the new voice features.
Hundreds, from the makers of Canabalt and Solipskier, is a minimalistic puzzle title that’s making waves with its simplistic design and clever gameplay.
Previously a Flash game, Hundreds has been ported to iOS with great success, incorporating intuitive multi-touch controls.
The idea is to tap a series of circles on the screen. With each tap, the number on the circle increases, until it reaches 100. As they grow, circles turn red, and if they collide, the game will end. Each level incorporates new challenges and gameplay elements. From the App Store description:
Simple in concept, deep in design, Hundreds is a puzzle game that requires quick fingers and deep thinking.
The goal of Hundreds: Grow at least 100 points between the circles in each puzzle. Circles turn red and volatile while being grown and if they collide, it's game over. It's that easy.
So far, Hundreds has received rave reviews from our sister site Touch Arcade and Kotaku, which has already named it 2013's potential Game of the Year.
According to a rumor from The China Times [Google translation], Apple is planning to adopt new touch panels with "Touch on Display" technology for the next iteration of the iPhone. The panels, which have been developed by Apple supplier Innolux, are said to be in testing at the moment.
The China Times concurs, pointing to the slow response speed of the iPhone 5's touch panels along with interference issues as the deciding factor behind the switch.
There isn't much information available about the Touch On Display panels, but they are said to be thin and tough, with a thickness of 0.5mm and improved optical performance and sensitivity.
The new display would presumably be used in Apple's iPhone 5S, which could be entering production as early as the first quarter of 2013.
Rumors about the next-generation iPhone are already surfacing, with a report earlier this week claiming that the iPhone may launch in mid–2013 in several different colors and sizes, and a leaked photo in December of what might be the rear shell of the next phone.
Yesterday, TechCrunch reported that Apple was interested in purchasing Waze, the social turn-by-turn navigation company. According to the report, Apple was offering approximately $400 million plus an additional $100 million in incentives, but Waze was holding out for closer to $750 million.
TechCrunch's MG Siegler now reports that there is no deal in sight.
And while Mike Butcher also claimed multiple sources in his original post, you’ll note that he was quick to qualify the information as a “rumor” (or in British parlance — Mike is English — a “rumour”). Because that’s exactly what it was. This isn’t a rumor (of a non-deal). There is no deal is happening. At least not now or anytime soon.
Siegler goes to note that Apple and Waze have in fact probably had low-level conversations about a closer partnership given that the two companies are already working together on Apple's mapping products, but he says that the talks are so far nothing more than the typical interactions seen between partner companies on a daily basis.
comScore today released the results of its monthly rolling survey of U.S. mobile phone users for the September-November period, finding that 18.5% of U.S. mobile phone subscribers are now using an iPhone, up 1.4 percentage points from the June-August period. Samsung continues to lead the market at 26.9% on 1.2 percentage point growth, while the remainder of the top five vendors all lost share.
Apple overtook LG for the second spot in last month's survey, and solidified its lead in the latest data on continued growth paired with a small decline by LG.
In looking only at smartphones, which now account for 53% of the U.S. mobile market, Android has continued to expand its lead and now holds 53.7% of the market. The iPhone 5 launch has, however, allowed Apple to continue its growth and the company now holds 35% of the smartphone market as the fall of RIM and Microsoft have increasingly turned the smartphone market into a two-horse race.
Notably, comScore's data tracks installed user base rather than new handset sales, making it more reflective of real-world usage but slower to respond to shifting market trends than some other studies.
In late December, it was reported that Apple was one of three companies, with Google and Microsoft being the others, in talks to acquire home automation firm R2 Studios. The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that Microsoft has acquired the firm to beef up its Xbox unit.
The company, id8 Group R2 Studios Inc., was created by entrepreneur Blake Krikorian in May 2011. Mr. Krikorian will be joining the Redmond, Wash., software giant with a small team. As part of the deal, Microsoft also acquired some patents owned by the startup related to controlling electronic devices.
The price of the deal couldn't be learned.
R2 has reportedly been working to expand its existing business focused on Android software to control Crestron home automation systems to develop technology for distributing digital media to television sets.
The report notes that Microsoft has been working hard to transform its Xbox platform into a digital media hub, striking deals with HBO, Netflix, YouTube, Comcast, and Time Warner for on-demand and Web video.
Apple is of course also rumored to be interested in the television market beyond its existing Apple TV set-top box. Apple has reportedly been working on both new set-top boxes and Internet-connected television sets as part of an effort to remake the television viewing experience, but progress has been slow due to complicated negotiations with content providers.
Apple today updated its investor relations page to note that it will announce its earnings for the first fiscal quarter (fourth calendar quarter) of 2013 on Wednesday, January 23. The earnings release typically occurs just after 4:30 PM Eastern Time following the close of regular stock trading, and the conference call is scheduled to follow at 5:00 PM Eastern / 2:00 PM Pacific.
MacRumors will provide running coverage of the earnings release and conference call.
The release will provide a look into the strength of iPhone 5 and iPad mini sales across their first quarter of widespread availability. Apple reported strong results three months ago with iPhone and iPad sales both up significantly year over year.
The company provided guidance for the first quarter of fiscal 2013 for revenue of $52 billion and earnings per diluted share of $11.75. If it meets that guidance, it would count as the strongest quarter for Apple in history.
Some users discovered that the scheduling portion of the "Do Not Disturb" feature in iOS 6 failed to work after New Year's Eve. The scheduling would turn itself on as scheduled, but would fail to turn itself off again.
Apple reports in a support article that Do Not Disturb scheduling will begin working properly again after January 7, 2013.
Symptoms
After January 1st, 2013, Do Not Disturb mode stays on past its scheduled end time.
Resolution
Do Not Disturb scheduling feature will resume normal functionality after January 7, 2013. Before this date, you should manually turn the Do Not Disturb feature on or off.
To turn off the scheduling feature, tap Settings > Notifications > Do Not Disturb and switch Scheduled to Off.
The New York Times 
A bug in Google's text-to-speech engine is causing 
Former Apple employee Don Melton is 
BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield is 
Facebook will update its 
According to a rumor from 
Yesterday, TechCrunch reported that Apple was 
In late December, it was 
