MacRumors

Following this morning's release of an open letter from Tim Cook apologizing for issues with the new Apple-driven Maps app in iOS 6 and mentioning some alternative map options available to users, Apple has also added a new featured section to the App Store highlighting some of those map alternatives.

A host of alternative apps ranging from free to Magellan's $49.99 "RoadMate USA" are available from such brands as Waze, Mapquest, Garmin, Bing, and MotionX.

Apple's embrace of alternative map options seems to be a sign that the company is taking criticism of its own offering seriously, although directing users to downloads through the App Store is still of benefit to Apple. Cook's letter did, however, also promote web-based alternatives such as Google's and Nokia's maps.

Earlier this month, the WSJ reported that Apple was working on a streaming radio service to rival Pandora. Apple was reportedly in licensing negotiations with record labels, but was months away from launching the service.

Today, the New York Post reports that negotiations with music publisher Sony/ATV have hit a snag over the fee Apple would pay for each song streamed by its customers.

Apple’s plan to have its own music-streaming service built into the iPhone 5 was dramatically dashed when talks between the tech giant and Sony/ATV hit a last-minute snag, The Post has learned.

Sony/ATV, the world’s largest music publisher, and Apple couldn’t agree on a per-song rights fee, sources close to the situation said.

Those rights are usually tenths of a penny per stream, sources said. Sony/ATV was looking for a higher rate.

The Post reports that Apple wants better licensing rates than Pandora because it will direct record sales through the App Store, and Apple's restrictions on playing an artist multiple times would be looser than Pandora's.

Reuters reports that Sharp has publicly stated that it is now producing "adequate volumes" of the display for the iPhone 5, bolstering Apple's efforts to catch up with high demand for the device.

Sharp Corp is making "adequate volumes" of displays it is known to supply for Apple Inc's new iPhone5, a company executive said, indicating that a possible bottleneck in supplies of screens may have eased.

Analysts had blamed a shortfall in supplies of display for leaving Apple with too few iPhones to meet burgeoning demand at its launch this month.

Deutsche Securities analyst Yasuo Nakane estimates that Japan Display and LG Display are capable of producing roughly eight million displays per month each, while Sharp's capacity is pegged at six million displays. With Sharp reportedly having not been ready for the initial batch of iPhone 5 units, over 25% of display production capacity appears to have been offline until just two weeks ago.

Sharp's full production of the iPhone 5 display comes as existing shortages in Apple's first round of launch markets are being compounded by today's expansion to 22 new countries and several more carriers in existing markets.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has published an open letter to customers on the company's website addressing the criticism over the new Apple-powered Maps app in iOS 6. In the letter, Cook apologizes for not meeting expectations and mentions a number of alternative mapping solutions customers may wish to use while Apple is refining its Maps.

To our customers,

At Apple, we strive to make world-class products that deliver the best experience possible to our customers. With the launch of our new Maps last week, we fell short on this commitment. We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better.

We launched Maps initially with the first version of iOS. As time progressed, we wanted to provide our customers with even better Maps including features such as turn-by-turn directions, voice integration, Flyover and vector-based maps. In order to do this, we had to create a new version of Maps from the ground up.

There are already more than 100 million iOS devices using the new Apple Maps, with more and more joining us every day. In just over a week, iOS users with the new Maps have already searched for nearly half a billion locations. The more our customers use our Maps the better it will get and we greatly appreciate all of the feedback we have received from you.

While we’re improving Maps, you can try alternatives by downloading map apps from the App Store like Bing, MapQuest and Waze, or use Google or Nokia maps by going to their websites and creating an icon on your home screen to their web app.

Everything we do at Apple is aimed at making our products the best in the world. We know that you expect that from us, and we will keep working non-stop until Maps lives up to the same incredibly high standard.

Tim Cook
Apple’s CEO

AppShopper also lists a list of both free and paid alternatives to Apple Maps.

Netflix has updated its iOS app to support iOS 6 and to provide support for the iPhone 5's 4" screen. The update also claims to improve the browsing, searching and watching experience.

Support for the iPhone 5's taller screen is particularly useful in video/movie apps such as Netflix as it allows many widescreen movies to be viewed in their native aspect ratio. The Netflix app is a free download from the App Store [Direct Link] but requires a Netflix account.

Many popular apps are being quickly updated to support the iPhone 5's larger screen. Yesterday, Instagram was updated, and several iOS games have also seen updates.

MacGameStore.com has released a new Mac app to facilitate easy purchase and organization of games from the store. The app is similar to Steam, but specifically focused on digital game downloads for the Mac and includes many major titles from big studios like EA and Aspyr.

One particularly useful feature is a "Game Compatibility Checker" that compares the user's Mac to the game's requirements in real time, making life easier for users with slightly older machines. Another is the ability to delete purchased games and redownload them from the cloud at any time, a useful feature for MacBook Air owners with limited storage space.

The Mac Game Store can also act as a repository for all the user's games, even those not purchased through the MGS, organizing them in one place for easy access. The store also gives access to demos for many games, as well as game reviews and ratings, and more.

The app is available free from Mac Game Store's website.

Apple is launching the iPhone 5 in 22 new countries and on a number of regional carriers in the U.S., one week after it went on sale in the U.S. and a number of the larger international markets.

Though the iPhone is sold out at Apple's online store -- it currently lists a 3-4 week wait-time on the U.S. branch -- the iPhone 5 goes on sale tomorrow in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

The iPhone 5 is also going on sale at a number of U.S. regional carriers, including Cricket, C Spire, Bluegrass Cellular, Cellcom, GCI, Golden State Cellular, Nex-Tech Wireless, Pioneer Wireless, Appalachian Wireless, MTA Solutions, and nTelos.

Energy efficiency company Opower today released a study calculating the annual energy cost for charging the iPhone 5 at just $0.41. While any user's actual cost would vary based on use and electricity rates in their areas, Opower's estimate assumes a full charge once per day at a U.S. average of 11.8 cents per kWh.

But while an individual iPhone 5 uses a minuscule amount of energy, the massive popularity of Apple's devices results in significant energy demand in aggregate.

Even if we consider just the 170 million iPhone 5’s that are projected to be sold globally in the next year, their aggregate electricity requirements are nothing to sneeze at. The collective annual electricity consumption of the iPhone 5’s sold within 12 months will be equivalent to the annual electricity usage of 54,000 US households (roughly equivalent to the size of Cedar Rapids – the second largest city in Iowa). That’s just for one smartphone model over one year.

Still, the study notes that smartphones use significantly less energy than other entertainment devices, and a shift from more traditional entertainment sources to smartphones can result in an overall benefit to energy consumption.

The explosion in smartphone usage is of course just one part of a surge in consumer electronics, which now represent approximately 13% of U.S. household energy usage. That growth, which comes even as the efficiency of appliances and other devices has significantly improved, has been driven by a massive increase in the kinds and numbers of devices being used in homes, from televisions to gaming systems to computers.

Unwired View takes a look at a newly-published Apple patent application addressing the company's interest in flexible displays and related inventions enabled by that technology.

In the patent application, Apple details various iPhone form factors with concave and convex displays, and while such concepts have seen relatively significant work by a host of companies, Apple takes things a step further by using substantial flexibility in its proposed display to integrate features such as a tactile keyboard and microphones and speakers embedded under the display.

E.g. – by placing an array of piezoelectric actuators below the display and activating them on demand for tactile feedback. This way you have a perfectly smooth surface when you browse the net or read your e-mail. Call up a keyboard, actuators pop up and now you can feel the letters as you type.

Since your display is flexible – it could be able react to the sound vibrations as you speak. So why not put a laser microphone behind the display to capture those vibrations, and get rid of traditional mic holes?

And if you can capture sound vibrations via flexible display, how about generating sound waves? No problem. Just put a transducer behind it to transform electric current into vibrations, add some support structure/barrier around it and that part of your flex display becomes a speaker membrane.

Many of the inventions addressed in Apple's patent applications never see the light of day, but they can provide insight on the company's areas of interest and long-term vision for the future of its products.

Deep in its lengthy review of the iPhone 5, iLounge has performed an analysis on the battery life of the iPhone 5. The site tested the device under a number of conditions, including both cellular and Wi-Fi web browsing, voice calls, FaceTime calls, video recording, and video and audio playback.

The phone performed fairly well but iLounge found battery life struggled when transferring cellular data or making voice calls, which they speculated was due to a weak signal:

if you’re using your iPhone 5 in places a with a very strong (4- to 5-bar) LTE or 3G signal, your cellular battery life may approach that number, but if not, the cellular antenna will struggle to maintain a signal, and fall well short. Because LTE and 3G/4G towers are in a state of build-out flux right now, our tests suggest that many LTE users won’t come close to Apple’s promised numbers.

iLounge has the detailed results on its battery testing in its iPhone 5 review, but unsurprisingly, mileage will vary greatly depending on a number of factors including health of the battery, signal strength, screen brightness, and other considerations.

Reports about the high-profile split between Apple and Google that saw Apple replace its Google-powered Maps app for iOS with its own solution have continued to trickle out, with AllThingsD now reporting that the lack of turn-by-turn directions on Google's Maps app for iOS was the key motivator for Apple.

[M]ultiple sources familiar with Apple’s thinking say the company felt it had no choice but to replace Google maps with its own because of a disagreement over a key feature: Voice-guided turn-by-turn driving directions.

Spoken turn-by-turn navigation has been a free service offered through Google’s Android mobile OS for a few years now. But it was never part of the deal that brought Google’s maps to iOS. And Apple very much wanted it to be. Requiring iPhone users to look directly at handsets for directions and manually move through each step while Android users enjoyed native voice-guided instructions put Apple at a clear disadvantage in the mobile space. And having chosen Google as its original mapping partner, the iPhone-maker was now in a position where an arch rival was calling the shots on functionality important to the iOS maps feature set.

Apple reportedly pushed hard for voice navigation in Google's maps on iOS, but Google was unwilling to hand over the functionality without concessions from Apple. As detailed by other sources, Google was seeking greater control over the mapping experience on the iPhone, such as Google branding and Google Latitude integration, concessions Apple was unwilling to make.

Combined with the deterioration of the overall Apple-Google relationship and Apple's concerns that Google was collecting too much information from iOS users, Apple ramped up its mapping efforts in order to bring its own turn-by-turn directions to the device, ultimately deciding that it could afford to do away entirely with Google's maps.

While Apple's MacBook Air is already extremely thin and the new Retina MacBook Pro has reduced the thickness of the company's flagship notebook by 25%, work naturally continues on new ways to shave even more thickness from future versions of Apple's notebooks.

Digitimes reports that Apple is working with suppliers on a new process that will enable the company to shave 0.15 mm from the thickness of the light guide used to distribute lighting for the company's illuminated keyboard in the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.

Apple will reduce the thickness of light guide plates for the illuminated keyboards in its MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models from 0.4mm currently to 0.25mm in 2013, according to sources in Apple's supply chain.

Since the current injection process for the production of 0.4mm light guide plates has been optimized to its limit, makers utilizing extrusion processes are likely to win orders for 0.25mm light guide plates, the sources indicated.

A difference of 0.15mm seems a negligible reduction in thickness that would by itself be essentially imperceptible by users if it were even to translate to slightly thinner overall profiles for the machines, but the company is likely pursuing the reduction for some purpose. Apple is unlikely to significantly alter the overall form factor of next year's MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, but combining small reductions in thickness for multiple components would pave the way for more significant overall reductions down the road.

Kyle Wiens from iFixIt speculates that the added thinness for the keyboard may help prevent the keyboard leaving residual marks on the screen when the laptop is closed.