MacRumors

Just like early reports on the new MacBook Air released yesterday, the new Mac mini is also showing significant improvements in raw performance over its predecessor machines. Mac mini web hosting company Macminicolo.net has obtained both standard and server models of the new line and put them through some preliminary benchmarking using Geekbench.

The testing reveals significant performance improvements for the Mac mini, with the entry-level 2.3 GHz Core i5 model showing an over 50% jump in Geekbench scoring over earlier generations and the 2.0 GHz Core i7 server model showing even more impressive results with its Geekbench score coming in at well over double that of its predecessor.

As we noted on yesterday's MacBook Air report, Geekbench focuses on raw processor and memory performance, and real-world performance will also depend on other aspects of a system including graphics capabilities and data storage components.

The report also offers a few unboxing photos and some shots of the initial setup process in which the Mac mini server model offers to migrate from an existing server setup. Also noted is the fact that the server edition includes iLife apps, as the server portion of Lion is simply an add-on for the basic OS X Lion. Under Mac OS X Snow Leopard, iLife apps were not included on server machines.

Apple announced today that more than 1 million copies of OS X Lion have been downloaded from the Mac App Store worldwide in the day it has been available. Apple notes users are buying Lion faster than any other OS release in Apple's history.

Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller:

Lion is off to a great start, user reviews and industry reaction have been fantastic. Lion is a huge step forward, it’s not only packed with innovative features but it’s incredibly easy for users to update their Macs to the best OS we’ve ever made.

At 3.7GB per download, this totals more than 3.5 petabytes of data -- 3,700,000 gigabytes.

In 2005, it took more than a month for Apple to sell two million copies of Mac OS X Tiger. Two years later, Apple sold more than two million copies of Mac OS X Leopard in its first weekend.

In 2009, it was estimated that sales of Snow Leopard -- which, like Lion, was priced considerably cheaper than either Tiger or Leopard -- were double that of Leopard, although Apple didn't tout sales numbers in a press release like they have with Lion.

I just care that what I sell every day are authentic Apple products, and that our customers don’t come back to me to complain about the quality of the products.

This is what an employee at the fake Apple Store in Kunming, China told a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Earlier this week we reported on these counterfeit Apple Store that appeared in China, that closely mimicked the layout of Apple's own retail stores.

The WSJ couldn't get in touch with the owner or manager of the store, but did get in touch with a salesperson who confirmed that the store was not an authorized reseller -- but did sell genuine Apple products at the same prices as those on Apple's website.

The salesperson said it didn't "make much of a difference" if they were authorized. Instead, as the quote above illustrates, the staff in the store simply want to do a good job selling Apple products -- just like the authentic employees at an Apple Retail Store.

Regarding the counterfeit stores, the salesperson felt his "store should be one of the best in terms of scale and the level of professionalism," noting that the employee t-shirts and name lanyards give it a similar look and feel to the authentic Apple Stores in China, in Beijing and Shanghai.

Teardown and repair firm iFixit is well underway on a teardown of the new 13-inch MacBook Air, and while most of the computer's internals are nearly identical to that of its predecessor, a few items of note have been discovered.

- Apple is continuing to use a modular design for the MacBook Air's solid-state storage, meaning that it can be replaced or upgraded if necessary, although it is not officially supported as a user-replaceable component by Apple. A report in the weeks leading up to the machine's debut had claimed that Apple might be shifting to new Toggle DDR 2.0 flash memory, which would be soldered directly onto the motherboard. This is not the case, however, with Apple continuing to use a separate, pluggable board for the solid-state drive.

- A review of the new MacBook Air's wireless card shows two chips from Broadcom: a BCM4322 Wi-Fi chip and a BCM20702 Bluetooth 4.0 chip. As we briefly touched on in our "notes of interest" article yesterday, Bluetooth 4.0 is supported on both the new MacBook Air and Mac mini and offers lower power, decreased latency, and greater security.

- The teardown of course also reveals the new keyboard backlight cable for evenly illuminating the computer's keyboard in dark conditions. The system includes several fiber optic channels to ensure that the illumination is distributed evenly.

iFixit will be looking further into other changes such as the Thunderbolt connectivity to learn what else is behind the updated machine's capabilities.

We'll update this post with any additional information of note as the teardown continues.

TUAW reports that Adobe has posted a list of known issues for its products running on OS X Lion. The list is unfortunately extensive, but the company's discussion of Flash Player issues stands out for the revelation that OS X Lion may have disabled hardware acceleration.

Flash Player may cause higher CPU activity when playing a YouTube video. Possibly related to disabled hardware acceleration.

Other issues with Flash Player include a loss of response to mouse clicks in the setting dialog and problems with animation of custom native mouse cursors.

In addition to the Flash Player issues, Adobe's support document lists a number of other issues with its products under OS X Lion, as well as a few general notes for users to be aware of:

- With OS X Lion now hiding the user Library folder by default, users may need to use Finder's "Go to Folder" command to access preferences and other user settings for Adobe applications. Alternatively, users can use the command line to make the Library folder permanently visible.

- OS X Lion's new reverse scrolling may throw off some users, not just in Adobe's applications but across the entire experience. Reverse scrolling can be disabled in System Preferences.

- A lack of Rosetta support in OS X Lion means that some older Adobe software such as CS2 or earlier will not run on the new operating system.

- Adobe is considering how it may adopt some of OS X Lion's new features such as Autosave, Restore, Versioning, Full Screen Mode, and new multi-touch gestures, but they haven't been implemented yet. Adobe specifically notes that the Restore feature which reopens all windows and files to their previous state when an application is relaunched does not function on Adobe applications.

Update: Adobe corrected their post to say that hardware accelerated Flash is supported in Lion.

The final release of Mac OS X Lion (10.7) provides the same support for Flash hardware video acceleration as Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6). The previous “Known Issue” described in a tech note suggesting that video hardware acceleration was disabled in Lion was incorrect and based on tests with a pre-release version of Mac OS X Lion that related to only one particular Mac GPU configuration. We continue to work closely with Apple to provide Flash Player users with a high quality experience on Mac computers.

Earlier this month, an Apple-led consortium beat out Google in an auction of thousands of patents from bankrupt Nortel, bidding $4.5 billion for the entire package of patents. As noted by @SammyWalrusIV (via Business Insider), Apple 10-Q quarterly report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that Apple's contribution to that effort totaled $2.6 billion.

On June 27, 2011, the Company, as part of a consortium, participated in the acquisition of Nortel's patent portfolio for an overall purchase price of $4.5 billion, of which the Company's contribution will be approximately $2.6 billion. This asset acquisition is subject to approval by various regulatory agencies.

Apple's partners in the deal included EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, Research in Motion, and Sony. Apple's $2.6 billion contribution represents 58% of the entire purchase price of the Nortel patent portfolio. The large number may add credence to the rumor to have paid $2 billion for "outright ownership" of Nortel's LTE (4G) patent technology.

And Apple may not be finished with its efforts to purchase intellectual property on the open market, as the company is said to be considering going up against Google again for a portfolio of 1,300 patents related to mobile phone technologies being offered by InterDigital.

As noted by the Financial Times, Apple has officially passed Nokia to become the world's top smartphone vendor. Apple's rapid growth paired with a sharp drop in shipments for Nokia allowed Apple to turn a 5.5 million unit deficit during the first quarter into a 3.6 million unit lead in the second quarter.

Shipments of Nokia smartphones declined by 34 per cent to 16.7m units, compared with the 20.3m iPhones shipped by Apple in its second quarter.

Apple was already the biggest smartphone maker by revenue and profits, but the April-June period marked the first time it had surpassed Nokia in volume.

Apple has been climbing the rankings of top smartphone vendors as longtime leaders Nokia and Research in Motion have faded. Apple passed Research in Motion in global shipments back in the third quarter of last year, and rapidly closed the gap on Nokia to claim the lead this past quarter.

Apple has of course faced stiff competition from Android over the last couple of years, but with dozens of manufacturers pushing out Android devices, no single vendor has been able to approach Apple's shipment volumes. Samsung and HTC lead the Android pack and have experienced very strong growth, but each company's smartphone shipments remains about half that of Apple's.

While Apple's plans for a stunning new corporate campus in Cupertino have received a significant amount of attention, that facility won't be ready to open until at least 2015, and Apple certainly hasn't stopped growing to wait for the new campus to come on line.

The San Jose Mercury News is now reporting that Apple has agreed to lease a nine-building office campus in Cupertino capable of housing up to 1,300 employees.

The lease deal in the old Measurex campus, now known as Results Way Corporate Center, allows Apple to rent 373,000 square feet. City officials and industry experts with direct knowledge of the transaction confirmed the rental deal.

"This is all good news for the city," said Kelly Kline, Cupertino's city economic development manager. "Apple is the premier corporation in Cupertino."

Real estate brokers note that Apple's move puts a further squeeze on the Cupertino and Mountain View markets that are nearly out of potential space for future office space needs, as Google, Facebook and others have also snatched up significant amounts of space. The dearth of additional available space leads to questions about where else Apple might be able to expand if even more space is required before it can open its new 12,000-employee facility on an old HP campus in Cupertino just a short distance from Apple's current headquarters campus.