MacRumors

One of the technologies that we've been looking forward to becoming more prevalent in iOS accessories is the incorporation of low-power Bluetooth 4.0, now known as Bluetooth Smart. The technology allows for low-power long term connectivity between your iOS devices and your accessories. Kickstarter-backed e-paper Pebble watch was one example that generated an enormous amount of interest with over $10 million in pre-sales.

ConnecteDevice today announced the worldwide launch of their COOKOO watch which also begin life as life as a KickStarter project.

The company describes the watch as a designer watch that combines analog movement with a connected digital display. By using a freely available app, users can pick and choose which notifications that appear on their watch.

The watch can display notifications for:

- Incoming Calls
- Missed Calls
- Facebook Messages and Posts
- Calendar Reminders
- When a Smart Device (iPhone, iPad, etc..) is out of range
- When a Smart Device (iPhone, iPad, etc..) is low on Battery

It also has a customizable command button which can find your phone, snap a photo, check-in to Facebook or tag your location on a map.

ConnecteDevice says the watch is shipping now and they will be showing it at CES 2013. Based on comments by early Kickstarter backers, it seems there are some dropped-connectivity complaints with the first version of the software that the company says they are addressing in an upcoming update.

As noted by MacGeneration and in our MacRumors Forums, Apple is now allowing the entry level 21.5" iMac to be configured with a 1TB Fusion Drive.

With Fusion Drive in your iMac, disk-intensive tasks — from booting up to launching apps to importing photos — are faster and more efficient. That’s because frequently used items are kept at the ready on speedy flash storage, while infrequently accessed items go to the hard drive. The file transfers take place in the background, so you won’t even notice.

The 1TB Fusion Drive add-on is a $250 option and was previously only offered on the high end 21.5" iMac, high end Mac mini and 27" iMacs.

According to Web analytics firm Net Applications (via Computerworld) Apple's OS X Mountain Lion is now the most popular version of OS X, just five months after its July 2012 release.

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 New York Times reports on a congressional investigation into the tax policies of technology giants, including Apple.

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.

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, Bloomberg reported 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.

Open Road Films has announced that it is the distributor for the Ashton Kutcher-led film jOBS, and that the movie will receive a full release in April of this year, reports Deadline.

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.

Facebook Messenger for the iPhone is a free download from the App Store. [Direct Link]

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.

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.

Apple's iPhone 5 incorporated a display that uses in-cell technology, and it has been reported that problems with the recognition of rapid diagonal swiping on the screen are due to the display. That may be one reason Apple is looking at new touch panel technology.

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.