MacRumors

When Apple launches orders for the iPad Air on Friday, November 1, the company will reportedly accept requests for Personal Pickup, according to a source who notified MacRumors about Apple's plans.

With Personal Pickup, prospective buyers can reserve an iPad Air online beginning at 12:01 a.m. Pacific Time and pick it up at a nearby Apple retail location later that same day without waiting in line.

Launch day availability of Personal Pickup is unusual for Apple, as the company did not offer the choice for the iPad 2, the last tablet that was offered without pre-orders. Apple also did not initially offer in-store pickup of the iPhone 5c, despite the fact that supplies of the phone were readily available.

Though Apple has elected not to accept pre-orders for the iPad Air, it appears that supplies of the tablet are plentiful, with no significant shortages expected. And while supplies of the iPad Air do not appear to be constrained, the same cannot be said for Apple's Retina iPad mini. The tablet, which does not yet have a solid release date, may not be widely available until early 2014.

Revealed last Tuesday, the new iPad Air weighs in at a pound and is 20 percent thinner and 28 percent lighter than Apple's previous fourth-generation iPad. Along with a Retina display, it includes an A7 processor, an M7 motion coprocessor, and a 5-megapixel rear camera.

Available in white/silver and black/space gray, the iPad Air begins at $499 for the entry-level 16 GB Wi-Fi only model with a $100 price increase for additional storage options up to 128 GB and an extra $129 for comparable cellular models.

While online orders will be accepted beginning at 12:01 a.m. Pacific Time in the United States and at varying times in other countries, Apple retail locations will open at 8 a.m. local time in the U.S. and other countries in Europe and Asia to begin in-store sales.

Several tidbits about Apple's upcoming "Made for iPhone" (MFi) gaming controllers leaked out over the weekend, revealing a few new details about products from both MOGA and Logitech. According to a tweet from @evleaks, Logitech's upcoming controller, which was revealed in photos in October, will be called the Powershell, while MOGA's controller is the MOGA Ace Power.

MOGA's upcoming Ace Power controller was accidentally unveiled in a YouTube video over the weekend (via TouchArcade), after images of the controller first leaked last week. While the original images depicted a traditional d-pad along with dual thumbsticks, the video confirms the controller also includes R1/R2 and L1/L2 buttons located at the top.

While there is no prospective release date available for the MFi controllers, the increasingly frequent product leaks suggest that they could come before the end of the year, possibly in mid-November.

A little more than a month since the iPhone 5s and 5c went on sale worldwide, the two devices account for 5.5 percent of all active iPhone devices around the world according to Localytics, though the prior-generation iPhone 5 remains the most popular iPhone by far with a 40 percent share.

Much has been written about the head-to-head battle of the iPhone 5s and 5c including our own research from last week that showed that the iPhone 5c is starting to close the gap on its higher-end sibling. Today, the iPhone 5s and 5c now represent 3.8% and 1.7% of all active iPhones globally seen by Localytics. Meanwhile, the iPhone 5 remains the most popular iPhone with a nearly 40% share.

With the iPhone 5s outselling the iPhone 5c by more than 3 to 1 over its launch weekend, the sales gap has begun narrowing between the two new iPhones, perhaps as the initial early-adopter push begins to fade.

Localytics is an mobile analytics platform that uses mobile and web apps to measure usage across 40 million iPhones.

Philippine carriers Smart and Globe have announced that they will launch the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c on November 15, suggesting that Apple may be planning to roll out its new iPhones in a broader fourth wave of countries on that date. The news comes as Apple launched both new iPhones in the second wave of countries late last week and will also rollout the iPhone to 16 other countries this Friday, November 1.

AppAdvice also has a theory on the matter, giving a potential list of countries for the fourth wave of iPhone 5s and iPhone 5s launches based simply on other countries where the iPhone 5 launched on the same date as in the Philippines last year:

After looking back to the countries grouped with the Philippines for the sixth wave of last year’s iPhone 5 launch, and removing the territories which have (or will have) already received the new smartphones, we’re expecting Apple to bring its iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c to some or all of the following countries on Nov. 15:

Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Ecuador, Grenada, Indonesia, Israel, Jamaica, Jordan, Kuwait, Panama, Paraguay, Philippines, Qatar, South Africa, and Venezuela.

After its November 1 rollout, Apple will have brought the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5c to a total of over 60 countries, which will move the company closer to its stated target of avaliability in 100 countries before the end of the year.

Overall, supplies of the iPhone 5s remain constrained, with shipping times in the United States and a number of other countries still at two to three weeks. Supplies of the iPhone 5c, however, remain plentiful with estimated shipping times of 24 hours.

Update: Several Israeli carriers have announced that they will be launching the new iPhones on November 3.

A growing number of Late 2013 Retina MacBook Pro owners in Apple Support Communities forum threads are reporting various problems with both the 13 and 15-inch models of the laptop, including lockups with the keyboard and trackpad on the 13-inch version, as well as difficulties installing Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 through Apple's Boot Camp utility on both models.
According to users in a support thread spanning over 14 pages, the trackpad and the keyboard on the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro are reportedly locking up at random during use, with a hard reset through the machine's power button appearing to be the only present solution to the problem. Users are also reporting that a reset of the MacBook's System Management Controller (SMC) appears to be ineffective, and a small survey of users within the thread show that the problem is affecting all three configurations of the 13-inch model. Currently, it is unknown as to whether the freezes are a hardware or software problem, as Apple has not officially commented on the errors.

Meanwhile, users in another support thread spanning over 8 pages are reporting occassional failures when trying to install Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 on both the new 13 and 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro. The errors appear to be with the partition that Boot Camp creates in order to install Windows 8, as users in the thread have reported freezes and copy errors with methods such as insallation through a USB drive and DVD installation via external SuperDrive.

However, a post in the support thread directing users to select specific options within Boot Camp Assistant has been marked as a solution to the issue, with users reporting successful installations of Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 after using the method. It is also likely that Apple may issue an official EFI update to address these Boot Camp install errors in the near future, as one for the Late 2013 iMac addressing the problem was issued shortly after its release.

Apple unveiled the new 13 and 15-inch Retina MacBook Pros at its media event last week, which were updated with Intel’s latest processors for enhanced performance and significantly improved battery life. Apple also reduced the pricing of the new Retina MacBook Pros by $200, offering the entry level 13-inch version for $1,299 and the entry level 15-inch model for $1,999. The updated MacBooks are available from Apple's Online Store and at its various retail locations.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh ruled yesterday that Apple, Google and several other large tech companies will face a trial over "no solicitation" agreements that prevented the companies from attempting to hire away each others' employees, reports Bloomberg.

The suit represents software and hardware engineers, programmers, animators, digital artists, Web developers and other technical professionals, according to the ruling. Kelly Dermody, a lawyer representing them, said in an e-mail that there are as many as 64,626 potential class members.

“The court finds that, based on the extensive documentary evidence, economic theory, data, and expert statistical modeling, plaintiffs’ methodology demonstrates that common issues are likely to predominate over individual issues,” Koh wrote in her ruling.

According to the original lawsuit filed in 2011, the "no solicitation" agreements dated back to 2005 and were between Apple, Adobe, Google, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm, and Pixar. The agreements reportedly prevented recruiters from contacting employees at other companies who were party to the agreement, though employees were free to apply for jobs at other establishments.

The anti-poaching agreements were investigated in 2010 by the Justice Department. The claims were eventually settled, with the companies agreeing not to form no-solicitation agreements for five years.

The current lawsuit is a class-action civil suit representing over 64,000 technical employees who said they were harmed by the anti-competitive actions of the defendant companies. According to SFGate, Judge Koh has scheduled the trial for next May, but it is also possible that it could be delayed by possible appeals from the defendant companies.

For their upcoming Sotheby's charity auction to benefit Product (RED), Apple senior vice president of design Jony Ive and designer Marc Newson have created a one-of-a-kind Mac Pro, featuring the new Mac Pro's radical cylindrical design with a shiny red finish that matches the style of other Product (RED) items produced by Apple.

On the auction site, the Mac Pro value is listed at $40,000 to $60,000, and like the rest of the custom-designed products, it will be auctioned off on November 23. It is unclear whether the Mac Pro will be available to the buyer at that date, as Apple has announced that it will officially launch the Mac Pro to consumers in December.

The specs of the red Mac Pro are not listed on the auction site, but Apple's Mac Pros start at $2,999 and come in several different configurations. The entry-level version includes a 3.7 Ghz quad-core Intel Xeon E5 processor, dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs, 12 GB of memory, and 256 GB of PCIe-based flash storage.

The higher-end 3.5 Ghz 6-core version with 16 GB of memory will starts at $3,999, and additional configure-to-order options offer 8-core or 12-core Xeon E5 processors, AMD FirePro D700 GPUs, up to 64 GB of memory and up to 1 TB of flash storage.

Ive and Newson have also collaborated on a number of other products, including a one-of-a-kind Leica camera, an aluminum desk, and solid gold Apple EarPods. Proceeds from the auction will go to Product (RED), a longtime Apple partner. Apple has raised more than $65 million for the charity since 2006.

(Thanks, Anthony!)

Apple's new 13-Inch Retina MacBook Pro has seen some impressive performance gains with its new Intel Iris integrated graphics, according to several benchmarking tests performed by Macworld. The site compared both the entry-level and high-end versions of the new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro to an early 2013 Ivy Bridge model, which utilizes Intel's older HD 4000 graphics.

In the Cinebench r15 OpenGL test and the Unigine Valley Benchmark, the new Retina MacBook Pros saw frame rate improvements of 45 to 50 percent, and in the Unigine Heaven Benchmark, gains were even more impressive, at 65 percent.

The GPU gains are in line with performance estimates provided by Intel in May, which suggested Iris graphics offered double or triple the performance of the Ivy Bridge Intel HD Graphics 4000.

Macworld also did several CPU benchmarks, finding an eight percent improvement with MathematicaMark 8 and a five percent gain with Cinebench CPU on the higher-end Retina MacBook Pro. The lower-end model saw just a one percent improvement on both tests over its Ivy Bridge predecessor. These improvements mirror early Geekbench results published earlier this week, which saw minor speed enhancements with the Haswell processors.

Finally, Macworld took a look at the PCIe-based flash storage that was included with the newest Retina MacBook Pros, finding that the higher-end Haswell model with 256 GB of flash storage was 33 percent faster than the older Ivy Bridge model when copying 6 GB of files from one folder to another. The lower-end Retina MacBook Pro didn't fare quite as well, seeing no speed gains.

To triple-check our findings, we ran Blackmagic's Disk Speed Test on all three 13-inch Retina MacBook Pros and found that the 500GB flash storage in new 2.6GHz model was more than twice as fast in the write test as the 120GB flash storage in the new 2.4GHz system, 710 MBps versus 315.9 MBps.

The read speeds were closer, with the new 2.4GHz's flash storage reading at 700 MBps and the new 2.6GHz reading at 733.9 MBps. The early 2013 2.6GHz Retina system had a write speed of 393.1 MBps, faster than the new 2.4GHz model, and a read speed of 451 MBps, significantly slower than the new low-end model.

Apple's newest Haswell-based 13-inch Retina MacBook Pros debuted on Tuesday and are currently available from both the online Apple Store and retail locations. Apple offers three different models, at varying price points that start at $1,299.

A number of power users of Apple's Pages application have expressed concern over what they see as a step backward in the just-released upgrade of iWork. One blogger, Pierre Igot, called the new release of Pages an "unmitigated disaster", and there is a 26-page thread on the Apple Support forums and several threads on the MacRumors forums examining features that have been removed from the various iWork applications.

From Igot's post:

Apple’s engineers appear to have chosen to keep the emphasis on "simplicity" at the expense of "power". They have not just neglected to add features to bring the feature set of the application closer to that of a word processor like Microsoft Word. They have actually removed many features for no apparent reason other than to bring the application in line with its iOS counterpart, which is, inevitably, much less powerful.

It appears Apple's intention was to increase both usability and cross-platform compatibility of Pages across the OS X, iOS, and iWork in iCloud, at the expense of some more powerful features.

Amongst the missing features, Pages has lost a number of templates, the ability to export to .rtf file formats, keyboard shortcuts to paragraph and character styes, and AppleScript support is not working properly.

This isn't the first time that Apple has seen criticisms from power users over an updated product release. The company was hammered by power users of Final Cut Pro X when it was released in 2011, because a number of essential features were completely missing from the software. Apple offered refunds to unhappy customers and launched a new marketing campaign to win back skeptical users after adding many of the features that were requested.

Of course, the new release is a free update to a consumer-focused software product where many of the missing features were likely never used by the majority of Apple's customers, so the concerns of power users may fall on deaf ears. Igot does note that the company -- perhaps intentionally -- set aside iWork '09 applications in a folder on computers that upgraded to the new versions, so users who prefer the older Pages app can continue to use it, albeit without the iCloud and cross-platform features in the new release.

John Gruber believes Apple may be willing to sacrifice overall functionality to create parity across the iOS, OS X and web versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote over the short-term. However, Apple has not yet given any indication as to what future versions of iWork could look like -- or if they will eventually gain some of the features missing in the new version.

Upset Pages users would be well-served to give Apple feedback on its website.

It may be technically possible for buyers of the new Mac Pro to replace their graphics cards, according to a report from the French site Mac4Ever. [Google Translate]

The site claims the GPU on the Mac Pro is placed on an independent daughter card with a proprietary connection, which would make sense as it would make warranty-repairs of broken GPUs significantly easier. There is no indication if or when third-party graphics cards could be released for the new Mac Pro, but the new device is scheduled for release in December of this year.

From the Google Translation of Mac4Ever's post:

According to our information, it is possible to change the graphics card in this machine. In fact, the GPU is placed on a daughter card, it is possible to remove and thus replace. As you might expect, Apple uses a proprietary connector (as is the case for SSD array present on the rest of the range). But nothing prevents, on paper, a manufacturer decides to offer compatible models on the market

A similar system is used in the MacBook Air's SSD flash storage. In 2010, Other World Computing released aftermarket SSD upgrades for the MacBook Air, allowing larger SSD options than Apple's 256GB maximum -- for a significant price. The MacBook Air uses a proprietary SSD connector and board, but OWC was able to design replacement storage options for the computer.

Apple did specify that RAM in the new Mac Pro would be user replaceable, but said nothing about the graphics cards. It's likely that the graphics cards, if it's even possible to replace them, would not be an Apple-approved user replaceable part and could affect the product's warranty, much like the aftermarket SSD replacement in the MacBook Air.

New touch screen testing conducted by Finnish technology company OptoFidelity has suggested [PDF] the touch displays of Apple's iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c are less accurate than the display of the Samsung Galaxy S3, but the testing has failed to take into account that Apple has designed its iPhones to compensate for different usage angles.

Using its proprietary OptoFidelity Touch Panel Performance Tester, which compares the coordinates of touches by a robot with an artificial finger to coordinates from a touch device, the company measured the accuracy of both the iPhone 5s, the iPhone 5c, and the Galaxy S3. The video below demonstrates how the testing was carried out.

OptoFidelity suggests that this impacts both top and edge screen functionality, making it more difficult to perform tasks like accessing the Q and P keys on the virtual keyboard as they are located towards the edges of the display, but machine testing does not replicate real world usage, where the phone is held at and viewed from various angles.

iOS is designed to compensate for the angle that it expects a phone to be held at, which suggests that some of the discrepancies between screen accuracy between the iPhone 5s/5c and the Galaxy S3 may be intentional on Apple's part, in order to provide a better experience for users that are not holding their phones in static positions.

In addition to testing touch screen accuracy, OptoFidelity also took a look at touch screen latency, which was previously examined by Agawi. As with those initial tests that showed the iPhone 5 to be far more accurate than its Android counterparts, OptoFidelity had similar results with the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5c.

Testing functionality such as web browsing opening time and camera application opening time revealed that the iPhones were more responsive than the Galaxy S3, with the iPhone 5s registering slightly faster response times.

With the first round of launches for the iPad Air scheduled for next Friday, November 1, Apple will be expanding its carrier partnerships in the U.S. for sales of cellular-capable models to include T-Mobile for the first time. The expansion will, however, go even further, as several smaller carriers have announced today that they will begin selling Wi-Fi + Cellular versions of the iPad Air "in the coming weeks".

Mississippi-based C Spire, which became the first regional carrier to offer the iPhone in late 2011, is one of the carriers announcing iPad Air availability in the near future.

C Spire today announced that iPad Air with Wi-Fi + Cellular will be available on its 4G LTE network in the coming weeks.

C Spire will offer iPad Air with a range of attractive data plans that will allow customers to connect to its fast 4G LTE mobile broadband network with speeds up to 10 times faster than previously available.

Kentucky-based Bluegrass Cellular has also sent out a press release announcing availability "in the coming weeks".

We have yet to see word from any other regional carriers about iPad Air availability, but we will update this post if more carriers do confirm plans to offer the device.

It seems likely that those carriers preparing to offer the iPad Air will also offer the iPad mini with Retina display, but Apple has yet to announce an exact date for the first wave of launches of that device. It is also possible that smaller carriers may see somewhat longer delays before they can offer the iPad mini, as supplies of the device are expected to be extremely tight into 2014.

Update: Alaskan carrier GCI has also announced plans to begin offering the iPad Air, as has U.S. Cellular. According to an email sent out today, U.S. Cellular, the fifth-largest carrier in the United States, will begin offering the iPad Air on November 8, the first concrete date release provided by a regional carrier.

After Apple announced support for an upcoming "Made for iPhone" (MFi) program supporting certified game controllers using new APIs in iOS 7, a report indicated that Logitech and MOGA were among the first wave of companies to be working closely with Apple on such accessories.

Logitech's controller has been seen several times already, and now a photo of MOGA's offering has been leaked on Twitter by @evleaks. Apparently called the "MOGA Ace Power", the enclosure controller reportedly includes an integrated 1800 mAh battery and the photo reveals not only the traditional D-pad on the left front and buttons on the right front and shoulders of the device, but also dual thumbsticks on the left and right front.

A second photo shows the controller in closed mode when the iPhone has been removed.

Apple has yet to officially announce the launch of its MFi program for game controllers, but it is clear that third-party manufacturers are gearing up to launch their products. Companies such as ClamCase and Logitech have been teasing their offerings, suggesting that a launch may be rather close, but launch details for the devices have yet to be revealed.