MacRumors

Virgin Mobile USA today announced that it will begin selling the iPhone 5 next Friday, June 28, offering the device on its no-contract Beyond Talk service plans. The plans start at $35/month for 300 minutes plus unlimited text and data, although the carrier begins throttling data speeds after a monthly soft cap of 2.5 GB. A $45/month plan offers 1200 minutes, while a $55/month plan adds unlimited calling, and customers can earn a $5/month discount on their bills when they sign up for automatic payments.

As for the iPhone itself, Virgin Mobile is offering a $100 discount off of Apple's standard unsubsidized pricing, selling the 16 GB iPhone 5 for $549.99 with the 32 GB model priced at $649.99 and the 64 GB model at $749.99.

We noted last October that Apple had Virgin Mobile-specific iPhone 5 models ready to go, although it was unclear at the time when they would be released and it remains unknown why it took approximately nine months after the device's launch to appear at the carrier. The iPhone 5 has been available through other prepaid carriers such as Cricket since as long ago as September.

MacRumors has received several images that appear to show both the interior and rear shell of Apple's upcoming iPhone 5S. The device appears to carry the same redesigned logic board that appeared earlier this week, suggesting that this is indeed a new iPhone.

Among the interesting observations from the images:

- Based on the observable features, the logic board appears to be an exact match to the one that appeared in photos earlier this week, with a slightly narrower profile and a new layout for connectors and other components.

- The main chip on the logic board is interestingly not labeled with an A-series name such as on the A6 seen in the iPhone 5. It is unclear whether the chip name has been removed somehow or if it was never printed in the first place.

- A date code visible on the bottom of the main chip reads "1243", signifying that the chip was manufactured in the 43rd week of 2012, corresponding to late October. This would seem to be much earlier than would be expected for a new handset, so it is unclear whether this is a very early prototype that could still be running the same A6 chip found in the iPhone 5 or if it is in fact a different chip.

- The battery carries a more recent Apple Part Number of 616-0652 compared to the iPhone 5 battery, which has carried several different part numbers including 616-0611 and 616-0613. The new battery also has a higher capacity of 5.92 Whr, compared to the 5.45 Whr capacity of the iPhone 5's battery. The battery also has several blank boxes printed on it where various regulatory logos would be, suggesting that this is a prototype battery yet to receive final certifications.

- The rear shell photo shows a vertical pill-shaped window for the LED flash as opposed to a round window, supporting rumors of a dual LED flash for the iPhone 5S. A similar pill-shaped flash window was depicted on a case maker's design drawings that also leaked earlier this week.

- Regulatory identifiers shown on the back of the device such as the FCC ID appear to be placeholders, in several cases reading X1234X.

Apple is expected to launch the iPhone 5S later this year alongside a lower-cost iPhone with a plastic shell that will be available in an array of color options. Rumors have suggested that Apple is likely to release the new iPhones around the September timeframe.

After slightly more than two weeks of litigation, USA v. Apple, Inc. concluded with closing arguments from Apple and the Department of Justice.

AllThingsD reports that Orin Snyder, Apple's lead counsel, closed out the trial with a slick Keynote presentation, as the company's lawyers have been doing throughout the trial.

At one point, the PowerPoint presentation the Government's lawyers were using failed to play audio, with the Judge noting that they weren't using a Mac.

"Apple did not conspire with a single publisher to fix prices in the e-book industry," Snyder said, arguing that the negotiations under scrutiny in this case were nothing more than "standard, lawful business activity." And the DOJ’s claim that they were more than that, a nefarious plot over which Apple served as ringmaster, is entirely unsupported. "All of the government’s evidence is ambiguous at best," Snyder argued, lambasting the DOJ’s case as one built on "word games and inferences."

Snyder's final slide shows an iPad with the text "It's time to close the book on this case".

The Department of Justice has argued that Apple was the "ringmaster" of a scheme to raise e-book pricing across the industry. The government says Apple convinced publishing companies to work together to set pricing above the $9.99 price point that Amazon was selling books at before the iPad came out. The DOJ's slide deck is available from AllThingsD as well.

U.S. District Judge Denise Cote is expected to have a final judgement within a few weeks. Both sides agreed to have a judge hear and decide on the case rather than present it to a jury.

On Wednesday, Apple released a long awaited update that brought new channels to its Apple TV, including WatchESPN, Sky News, and HBO GO.

HBO GO has been available on other platforms like the iPhone and iPad, Roku, and Xbox 360 for quite some time, but it was only in January that reports surfaced suggesting that Apple and HBO were in talks to bring HBO content directly to the Apple TV.

In a post that includes an interview with HBO chief technology officer Otto Berkes, The Verge details some of the reasons why it took so long for HBO to get its content on Apple's set-top box.

According to Berkes, the primary reason for the delay was the creation of the app itself, as it was developed entirely in-house. It is unclear if HBO used an existing SDK to create the app, but that the app was devised by HBO suggests that other companies may be able to create similar apps in the future.

Nothing is more time consuming than writing all the code involved and encoding HBO's massive video library, said Otto Berkes, HBO's chief technology officer, in an exclusive interview with The Verge. He said “optimizing the compression formula to deliver the high-quality video to the lowest bandwidth” is a massive undertaking.

Getting HBO Go on the Apple TV might have taken longer had HBO not begun to boost the number of engineers working at the company's new development center in Seattle. Apple TV was the first app that HBO created completely in-house, said Berkes, a former Microsoft executive who started at HBO two years ago. Prior to Apple TV, HBO teamed with third parties on its apps, but “this was 100 percent created by our software and design staff,” Berkes said.

Despite hiring extra engineers to complete the Apple TV project faster, HBO faced other delays. As highlighted by The Verge, complicated negotiations with cable companies are always involved when attempting to bring channels like HBO and ESPN to set-top boxes.

For instance, Charter Communications has refused to authenticate HBO Go for Apple TV. Comcast blocks subscribers from receiving HBO fare on the Roku, according to HBO’s site. Dish won’t authenticate ESPN but it does authenticate HBO Go for the Apple TV as well as many other gadgets. Yesterday morning, when Apple announced it would offer HBO and ESPN, DirecTV wasn’t authenticating the device. By late afternoon, however, the satellite TV provider had reversed itself.

Though HBO GO is now available on the Apple TV, accessing the content is still dependent on a cable TV subscription. While many hope that content providers like HBO will at some point offer channels on a piecemeal basis that are not tied to cable providers, HBO garners the majority of its revenue through cable operators, which means cutting the cord is a risky prospect at best.

Historically, the Apple TV has taken a backseat to the iPad and the iPhone, which also explains why HBO GO has been available on iOS since 2011 but didn't come to the Apple TV until 2013. Apple has, in the past, referred to the Apple TV as a "hobby project," though the company is rumored to be exploring new product lines that could eventually include an Apple television set.

At the D11 conference in May, Apple CEO Tim Cook reiterated that television continues to be an "area of great interest" for Apple and that the company has a "grand vision" in place.

Facebook today hosted a press event at its Menlo Park campus to unveil new video capturing capabilities for image sharing product Instagram, which Facebook acquired back in April of last year.

As expected, Instagram will now support short video uploads, positioning it as a serious competitor for Twitter's Vine, which allows users to capture six seconds of video footage.

To use the new video capabilities, users will tap on the capture button, which adds a new video icon to activate video mode. Holding down on the video icon will allow users to take up to 15 seconds of footage, more than double the time that Vine permits.

As with Vine, Instagram users can capture collages of video, taking a few seconds of footage at a time before moving on to a different angle or shot. Instagram also includes simple editing tools, allowing users to remove unwanted clips.

In addition to intuitive editing tools, Video for Instagram includes 13 new custom filters that have been specially designed for video plus “Cinema,” which is cinematic stabilization for videos that will “change video forever.” In an on-stage demonstration, Cinema provided sample videos with a noted improvement in stability, heavily cutting down on motion blur.

Unlike Vine videos, Instagram videos play just once right inside the Instagram feed and do not loop. Videos will have a cover photo and will be displayed alongside photos.

While on stage, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom also revealed some usage statistics. Instagram now has 130 million active members that use Instagram every month, and those users have shared more than 16 billion photos. The service also receives more than a billion likes per day.

The newly updated Instagram 4.0 with video is available now on the App Store for free. [Direct Link]

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today published an Apple patent application (via AppleInsider) filed in February of this year which addresses a system for packaging fingerprint sensors alongside conductive bezels in a single structure. The bezels deliver a small amount of electrical current to the user's finger, allowing the fingerprint to be read by the sensor.

The present disclosure is related to integrated circuit packaging, and more specifically to methods and apparatus for integrally molding a die and one or more bezel structures, with portions of each exposed or at most thinly covered, for fingerprint sensors and the like. [...]

Traditionally, the bezel and the encapsulated die have each been separate elements, brought together in the process of assembling or packaging the sensor apparatus. That is, the bezel and die are not encapsulated together.

The patent application goes on to describe some of the issues with previous fingerprint sensor assembly methods:

Current fingerprint sensor structures require a number of discrete assembly steps. As the number of discrete elements and manufacturing steps increase, manufacturing cost increases and the potential for faulty or inaccurate assembly that negatively affects product consistency and yield losses increase. Discrete element sub-assembly is also a more time consuming process than integrated manufacturing. As in the general art of IC production, there is significant, ongoing commercial pressure to reduce cost, number of components, and number and complexity of manufacturing steps, and size of the completed structure.

Furthermore, the separate bezel and encapsulated die structures are often undesirably large final devices. Further still, it is desired that the bezel be as physically close to the sensors as possible to optimize the sensitivity of the sensor.

While the patent application was filed in February of this year, it actually appears to date much further back, as it is a continuation of a previous patent application filed in March 2010 and originally assigned to UPEK, Inc. That company was a 2004 spinoff of STMicroelectronics' fingerprint biometrics business. UPEK merged with AuthenTec in September 2010, and Apple ultimately gained the rights to the intellectual property when it acquired AuthenTec last year. Only one of the three inventors on the patent, Giovanni Gozzini, continues to work for Apple today.

Apple has been rumored to be adding a fingerprint sensor to its upcoming iPhone 5S as a differentiating feature compared to the iPhone 5. Rumors and speculation about Apple's interest in fingerprint sensor technology have been driven largely by its acquisition of Authentec, although evidence of the company's interest in fingerprint recognition dates back considerably further.

As it has in prior years, Apple is offering free summer camps for kids 8-12 at its retail stores, this year focusing on filmmaking with iMovie. The classes span three days, 90 minutes per day, with an introduction to the basics of movie making, GarageBand on the iPad, iMovie on the Mac, and then a film festival on the third day to screen movies for family and friends. The screenings are optional.

Apple also provides an optional, one-hour Parents Workshop on the first day that teaches parents how to set up parental controls on Apple devices.

At Apple Camp, kids ages 8-12 learn how to shoot their own footage, create an original song in GarageBand on an iPad, and put it all together in iMovie on a Mac. This free workshop, held at Apple Retail Stores, spans three days and ends with campers debuting their masterpieces at the Apple Camp Film Festival. Space is limited and workshops fill up quickly, so sign up now for a super-creative adventure.

The first groups begin in mid-July, running through early-August. Some stores are already filling slots, but others have wide-open availability.

Interested parents can register for sessions on Apple's website for U.S. and Canadian stores, while parents in Australia, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, can register to be notified when registration opens in their countries.

Apple and TBWA Media Arts Lab have won a Grand Prix for Press award at the Cannes Lion International Festival of Creativity, one of the most prestigious awards in advertising.

The award is for the iPad mini campaign where Apple put actual covers of magazines on a life-size mockup of the mini to show how magazines could be read on the device. The ads ran on the back of the magazine from which they took their cover. A number of publications received the treatment.

AdAge reports that Apple won largely because, according to category judge Marcello Serpa, "we were looking at a piece that makes print, the category itself, a hero."

Apple's iPad Mini campaign by TBWA Media Arts Lab won the Grand Prix in press, a category that the tablet once seemed designed to kill but now is offering what jury president Marcello Serpa described as redemption by enabling readership of print products.

[…]

Why it won: "It has a kind of guerrilla feeling," Mr. Serpa said. "It's a product that goes inside the media and says I'm going to kill you, [then] I'm going to save you. Let's embrace. It's redemption."

Gizmodo reports on a growing number of complaints from owners of Apple's newly updated MacBook Air regarding Wi-Fi performance issues. The issues are being documented in Apple's support forums and a few users in our own forums have also seen similar problems.

The problems they’re seeing sound eerily similar to those we’re experiencing with our machines: Wi-Fi will initially connect, but after a minute or two the connection will stop working, and a total reboot is needed to be able to connect again. [...]

An anonymous source at one of Apple’s retail stores in London has also told me they’ve had “well above average” complaints and returns (in a few cases) of Airs owing to Wi-Fi issues.

It is not uncommon for users to raise issues following the launch of new hardware as they put machines through their paces and discover differences in their behavior. Some of these issues are more significant and widespread than others, however, and Apple generally addresses many of the most significant ones with subsequent software or firmware updates.

Apple's new MacBook Air adopts the latest 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard, offering faster connectivity and bandwidth. Apple's new AirPort Extreme base stations also offer better signal strength by taking advantage of beamforming to focus their Wi-Fi signals toward connected 802.11ac devices such as the new MacBook Air.

Last month, J.P. Morgan analysts made their case for why Apple will position its rumored lower-cost iPhone as a "mid-end" device priced in the range of $350-$400 without subsidies, addressing a relatively sparse segment of the market while still maintaining the ability to offer a quality user experience.

Mac Otakara now points to a pair of reports from the China Times including claims from Pegatron chairman T.H. Tung supporting that notion. Pegatron has been said to be the primary assembler for the lower-cost iPhone, with Foxconn focused on the iPhone 5S.

According to the first report [Google translation] from the China Times, Tung addressed the iPhone at a meeting of the company's shareholders, expressing his displeasure with reports referring to the lower-cost iPhone as "cheap" and noting that the "price is still high". Tung apparently believes that attaching the "cheap" description to the lower-cost iPhone gives the impression of a low-value feature phone rather than the full-featured smartphone it will actually be.

A second report [Google translation] quotes Tung as saying that Pegatron's factories remain busy with nonstop production. The company has been reported to be undertaking a significant expansion of its workforce for the second half of this year, presumably to support production of the lower-cost iPhone. China Times indicates that Pegatron is ramping up for shipments of 13-15 million units of the device during the third quarter.

Apple's lower-cost iPhone is expected to launch around the same time as the iPhone 5S, with September being the most commonly cited timeframe. The lower-cost iPhone is said to be very similar to the iPhone 5/5S but with a slightly thicker plastic shell that will be available in a number of colors.

As we noted last week, Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference came and went without seeing the introduction of updated MacBook Pro models, to the surprise and disappointment of many observers.

But just like with Apple's upcoming Mac Pro, benchmarks for an updated MacBook Pro have begun appearing in the Geekbench results database. The result was posted two days ago, and was noticed by pikeralpha (via forum member Sneakz) yesterday.

As with the Mac Pro, this MacBook Pro appears under a code name of "AAPLJ44,1" and appears to correspond to a 13" MacBook Pro, and while it is not exactly clear whether it refers to a Retina or non-Retina model, the two machines would perform roughly equally when using the same processor. Apple has, however, been rumored to be phasing out the non-Retina models, and if true this result would seem to point to a new Haswell-based Retina MacBook Pro.

The machine shown in the benchmark results is running a dual-core Intel Core i5-4258U processor running at 2.4 GHz with 8 GB of RAM and a Boot ROM dated June 5. Like the Mac Pro, this MacBook Pro is running a special build of OS X Mavericks, termed Build 13A2050.

Primate Labs' John Poole has put together a graphic showing how the Geekbench performance of this new machine compares to that of other recent 13-inch MacBook Pro models, revealing a 5-8% boost in performance compared to the previous low-end models while running at a lower clock speed.

As seen in the MacBook Air released last week, one of the major benefits to Intel's new Haswell platform is reduced energy consumption, with Apple choosing to offer only a modest boost in performance while bringing massive increases in battery life that see the new 13-inch MacBook Air reaching 12 hours or more of battery life.

It has been unclear exactly how Apple will prioritize battery life and performance in the MacBook Pro, but it appears that the company may be pursuing a similar strategy to that seen in the MacBook Air, boosting performance only slightly while pushing much of the energy savings into increased battery life.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro currently offers 7 hours of battery life, and while Apple may not be able to duplicate the 80% increase in battery life seen with the MacBook Air's switch to Haswell due to other power-hungry components such as the MacBook Pro's Retina display, the company may still be able to offer substantial battery life improvements in its new machines.

While Apple offered a sneak peek at its dramatically redesigned Mac Pro at its Worldwide Developers Conference, the new machine is not scheduled to launch until "later this year" and the company has yet to reveal detailed specs and pricing information.

But if a new Geekbench result is authentic, it appears that the new machine is already starting to show up in public benchmarking databases. Rather than showing up as a "MacPro6,1" as would be expected for Apple's next-generation Mac Pro, the new machine is dubbed "AAPLJ90,1", perhaps a reference to a J90 code name following Apple's usual format.

Also supporting the authenticity of the entry is the listing of a custom build of OS X Mavericks, 13A2054, running on the machine. The listed motherboard ID is also one which was discovered in OS X Mavericks as corresponding to the new Mac Pro.

The machine in question is running a single 12-core processor from the upcoming Ivy Bridge-E family, specifically the Xeon E5-2697 v2 running at 2.7 GHz. It is also equipped with 64 GB of RAM.

A comparison of this new Mac Pro entry with Apple's current high-end 12-core Mac Pro running a pair of 3.06 GHz Westmere processors reveals improved performance on Geekbench benchmarks by most measures, ranging from slight improvements for certain tasks to substantial improvements for others.

We chatted with John Poole of Primate Labs, who highlighted the substantial improvements in many single-core measures and in memory performance, suggesting that lower multi-core scores later in the Integer Performance testing run could be indicative of thermal issues.

Poole notes that with a public launch of the new Mac Pro likely still many months away, it is entirely possible that Apple is still ironing out both software and hardware issues on the new Mac Pro and that the company's work could lead to even more substantial performance gains once those issues are addressed.

Update: Poole has now shared some of his thoughts on the Mac Pro result in a blog post.

...Apple's claim of "up to 2x faster" floating point performance may be optimistic. The new "Ivy Bridge" Xeon processor in the new Mac Pro has instructions that can process twice the amount of data as the "Westmere" Xeon processors in the current Mac Pro. The problem is that only certain kinds of software can take advantage of these instructions.

Apple has launched an iPhone repair pilot program for Apple Certified Service Providers in Canada that will allow certain certified centers to offer iPhone repairs after store technicians have completed Apple-required iOS Certification.

According to a tipster, the third party service sites will be able to offer repairs for the battery, camera, speaker, and more, after the program launches in the next few weeks. In addition to passing an iOS Qualification exam, Service Provider technicians have also been required to attend several training sessions to learn how to disassemble the iPhone.

While the program is currently limited to Canada, it seems reasonable to suspect that it may roll out to other countries in the future should the test run prove successful.

Documents given out to technicians suggest that Apple is aiming to provide a quality alternate repair option for its customers in Canada, while cutting down on unauthorized Apple repairs.

Program Overview – Goals
1. Provide APR with authorization to provide iPhone repair service to walk in customers as alternate channel
2. Provide same service level for iPhone as our Apple Retail Stores
3. Reduce proliferation of unauthorized repair centres and third party parts

Apple has furnished its Apple Certified Service Providers with a detailed set of rules and requirements that must be met, including troubleshooting all cases and providing same day service with a maximum of six hours in turn around time for devices with a warranty.

Out of warranty requests follow similar rules, with a 12-hour deadline for potential repairs. While the documentation estimates that the majority of repairs will be replacements, it requires each repair location to hit a Same Unit Repair rate of 10% or higher.

In early June, Apple began offering in-house iPhone 5 display replacements in an effort to cut down on repair costs. The company is also planning to offer additional same device repairs later this year, which could save more than $1 billion per year.

Apple's move to allow Apple Certified Service Providers to offer iPhone repairs is likely part of the same initiative, designed to cut down on overall repair costs while providing greater convenience to customers who might otherwise seek out unauthorized repairs. Even in the United States, few Certified Repair centers are able to offer iPhone service at this time, which could change as Apple continues to expand its repair options.

Update: According to a tipster, Apple's Canadian test run is an expansion of a beta test that began in the United States last year. Approximately 20 Apple Authorized Service Providers are able to execute iPhone repairs and offer unit swaps in the U.S.