MacRumors

Earlier this week, BGR noted a growing number of complaints in Apple's support forums regarding problems with echoes on the iPhone 4S when used with a headset, with calls typically degrading over the duration of the conversation. One thread on the issue has reached 14 pages of posts with a number of users reporting the same issue on a variety of different phone models and carriers.

When using the Apple hands free headset with the phone during a call, I get an echo problem. It does not occur immediately. It can very from 30 seconds into a call and as far up to 9 mins in before it begins the annoying echo. If I unplug the headset it goes away but will return when I plug the headset back in. I have tried 3 brand new iphone 4s headsets with the same problems. So far I have tried rebooting, and also restored phone back to factory original settings as a new phone and still no resolution. I have been told by the other person on the line a screech sound is made then the echo begins.

Users seem to be having some success in fixing the issue by briefly toggling the speakerphone option on and off when the echo begins.

A potentially related issue of static on iPhone 4S calls is also being documented in its own lengthy thread, with the issue affecting both incoming and outgoing calls and some users reporting the issue occurring on multiple handsets as they've exchanged devices at Apple retail stores in attempts to address the problem.

Finally, a third issue being tracked in a nearly 300-post thread involves users experiencing no audio on a subset of outgoing phone calls.

Picked up a Verizon iPhone 4S - 32GB and on about 1 in 10 calls I get no outbound audio when dialing. Call shows the timer counting as if the call is progressing but absolutely no ring back and cannot hear the party on the other end when they answer.

As with the echo issue, some users have reported that toggling the speakerphone option may fix the lack of audio on a given call, but others claim that the tactic does not always work. For its part, Apple support staff have been unable or unwilling to specifically diagnose the issue as either a hardware or software problem. At least one user has reported that the first developer beta of iOS 5.0.1 released yesterday does not fix the issue.

Avid today announced new versions of its flagship video editing software products, Media Composer 6, Symphony 6 and NewsCutter 10.

Media Composer version 6, Symphony version 6 and NewsCutter version 10 are rebuilt from the core on an entirely new open, 64-bit architecture that raises the bar for performance, flexibility and productivity. With this version, Avid is also introducing a sleek, new User Interface—designed to speed workflows while simultaneously preserving the same functionality that so many professionals have built their careers on.

- Media Composer 6.0 starts at $2499 with upgrades starting at $299.
- NewsCutter 10 starts at $2499 with upgrades starting at $499.
- Symphony 6.0 starts at $5,999 with upgrades starting at $499.
- Nitris DX starts at $5,499 USD.

Media Composer Academic 6.0 starts at $295 for educational institutions and students.

Avid continues to offer a discount to Final Cut Pro (not FCP X) users who switch to Media Composer. The company is offering Media Composer 6 plus free online training to help users move from FCP for $1499.

The company says it is "investigating" the Mac App Store as a distribution point for its software, but has nothing to announce yet. Media Composer 6, Symphony 6, and NewsCutter 10 will be available on November 15.

Business Insider shares a portion of a research note issued today by Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes, who recently visited with Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer in a meeting that included discussion of Amazon's new $199 Kindle Fire tablet based on Android.

According to the executives, Apple welcomes the entry of the Kindle Fire to the market for its ability to further fragment the Android ecosystem. While the Kindle Fire does utilize Android, it has been heavily modified by Amazon to integrate specifically with Amazon's products and services.

While the pricing at $199 looks disruptive for what seems to be the iPad’s most important rising challenge, the Amazon Fire – it is important to note that it could fuel further fragmentation in the tablet market—given it represents yet another platform. While compatible with Android, the Apps work with Amazon products. The more fragmentation, the better, says Apple, since that could drive more consumers to the stable Apple platform.

Reitzes notes that he believes Apple will eventually lower pricing on the iPad, but will not compromise on quality and customer experience to approach or match its competitors' pricing.

Apple and Amazon are approaching the tablet market from opposite perspectives, with Apple achieving significant profitability on the hardware while selling content and services at near break-even prices. Conversely, Amazon is said to be taking a loss on sales of the Kindle Fire, using the device to attract customers into its content and product ecosystem.

As noted by Domain Name Wire, Apple has filed a complaint under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy in an attempt to gain control of the iPhone4S.com domain name and six other iPhone-related domain names. All seven of the domains currently forward to pornography sites, meaning that readers should obviously exercise caution in visiting the sites.

The complaint is case number D2011-1897 with the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Apple did not gain control of the iPhone4.com domain name until July of this year, a transfer that appears to have been made outside of any formal dispute resolution process. Apple does occasionally turn to UDRP complaints in order to win control of domain names related to its products, although it is unclear why Apple chose that route in this case.

It is possible that the domain name's owner demanded more compensation than Apple was willing to offer or perhaps was unresponsive to Apple's attempts at contact. Alternatively, Apple may simply have proceeded directly to a UDRP complaint due to a sense of urgency given the nature of the sites involved.

Last week, Apple began offering customers the option of having their online orders shipped to their local retail store for pickup, a service especially valuable for those who have difficulty receiving shipments at their home or office. The "ship to store" option initially rolled out in the company's three San Francisco stores, and quickly expanded to include all sixteen Bay Area stores before the four New York City stores jointed the program earlier this week.

Apple has been said to be taking the service full-scale as of today as part of a series of retail enhancements that will also allow customers to use self-checkout for shelf-stocked items at Apple retail stores using the company's iOS app.

Evidence of Apple making minute-by-minute tweaks to the ship to store program is visible in Apple's online store, where just a short time ago customers had the option of using the service throughout the company's 51 California and four New York City stores.

The new expanded program did not last long, however, as Apple now appears to have completely shut down the ship to store option, with all stores listing online-only items as "unavailable for pickup". Items stocked in-store can still be purchased through the system, with California and New York City stores listing those products as "available now".

Apple is said to be viewing in-store pickup and self-checkout as major changes for the future of its retail stores, expecting that the majority of its customers will utilize in-store pickup as their default delivery method for Apple purchases.

Digitimes claims that Apple is going to "completely overhaul" its product lineups in 2012. The site specifically lists the iPad, iMac, iPhone and MacBook Air lines.

It's not clear if this is an all inclusive list or not. Notably absent are the MacBook Pro, Mac mini, Mac Pro and iPod lines.

Apple plans to completely overhaul its product lineups, including iPad, iMac, iPhone and MacBook Air, in 2012 and is expected to finalize order volumes for key parts and components for the next-generation iPad in December, according to sources in the upstream supply chain.

We interpret the report to mean new designs for the listed product lines.

The iPhone seems the most likely of the bunch to get a full redesign. In fact, we may have already seen a glimpse of what the next iPhone might look like. Tapered iPhone 5 case designs leaked in China flooded the market in mid 2011, leading to the belief that Apple would be releasing such a design this fall.

Apple ended up releasing the iPhone 4S instead, which shares the same design as the previous generation iPhone 4. Based on Apple's release pattern, however, it seems certain that the 2012 iPhone will receive a new external design.

The iMac design has remained relatively stable in design over the past few years. Given the constraints of the design, we're not sure how drastic a change we could see in the iMac.

The iPad has only seen two releases, each with a slightly different design. Again, the basic design constraints will limit it to a 9.7" display, but another report has suggested the 2012 design will be an even thinner design.

Finally, the MacBook Air. While we're certain that the MacBook Pro will see new design next year, how it integrates with the MacBook Air line remains to be seen. Rumors of a 15" Air-like design have been circulating since July. We expect that the Air and Pro lines will have to eventually merge into one. Intel believes that the Air form factor will dominate the consumer market in the near future.

When Apple launched OS X 10.7 (Lion) to the public in July, most of the media focus was on the user-facing changes, such as the iOS-like Launchpad, or trackpad scrolling direction. In Lion, Apple also made a number of under-the-hood changes in their security model that may start affecting Mac App Store customers in the near future.

Amongst the many new features in Lion, Apple included a more robust sandboxing system that can prevent 3rd party applications from causing unintended damage. In their Lion review, ArsTechnica explains how sandboxing works in general:

Running an application inside a sandbox is meant to minimize the damage that could be caused if that application is compromised by a piece of malware. A sandboxed application voluntarily surrenders the ability to do many things that a normal process run by the same user could do. For example, a normal application run by a user has the ability to delete every single file owned by that user. Obviously, a well-behaved application will not do this. But if an application becomes compromised, it may be coerced into doing something destructive.

Developers of these sandboxed applications must take special measures to break up their application into individual processes that only are able to do exactly what they need. Apple still allows user initiated actions to perform as expected and override the sandbox, but app-initiated actions in sandboxed applications will be restricted. This means that system wide file access and inter-app scripting and interactions will not be allowed.

Apple had originally told developers that sandboxing would become a requirement for Mac App Store apps as of November, 2011. Tonight, however, Apple emailed developers that the Sandboxing requirement will now go into effect on March 1, 2012.

As of March 1, 2012 all apps submitted to the Mac App Store must implement sandboxing.

While sandboxing will increase the security of Mac App Store apps, there have been concerns that the restrictions will stifle features and innovation on the Mac platform.

In October, Macworld published a pair of articles from Jason Snell and Andy Ihnatko expressing their concerns about the new restrictions.

Snell reported that he had heard that some Mac developers will be removing features from their apps or reducing their functionality to fit them in Apple's sandbox.

Not only does this approach risk turning the Mac App Store into a wasteland of arcade games and one-trick-pony apps, it risks dumbing down the Mac app ecosystem as a whole. While developers can always opt out of the Mac App Store, they’re reluctant to do so.

Examples of Mac Apps that will be affected include iTunes controllers (Tagalicious, CoverSutra), inter-app communication (Fantastical), apps that browse the file system (Transmit), system-wide keyboard shortcut utilities (TextExpander), file syncing, and backups utilities.

While Apple is offering developers some short term exceptions to get around sandboxing, the company promises that those exceptions will be temporary. Some developers have said there is a lot of uncertainty around how long Apple will allow these apps in the Mac App Store after the deadline. With the new delay until March, some developers are holding out hope that Apple may be trying to come up with a better solution than simply pulling these apps off the Mac App Store.

As Snell points out, developers can choose to distribute their non-sandboxed apps outside the Mac App Store, but those developers would be giving up a huge distribution point.

On-again, off-again, industry publication Digitimes is claiming that Apple's next iPad will enter mass production soon and will launch in March 2012. The catch is that according to their sources, this new iPad product is not seen by Apple as an iPad 3, but instead an upgraded iPad 2. Instead they say "the real iPad 3" won't be launched until the 3rd quarter of 2012 at the earliest.

The publication provides no distinction as to what qualifies as a "real iPad 3", but does claim that this interim iPad 2 upgrade will be thinner than the iPad 2 and offer longer battery life.

The most obvious distinction, though not mentioned in the article, could come from the use of a ultra-high resolution Retina display. Talk of a such a display has been ongoing for months, but the most recent reports indicate that Apple's suppliers are finding it challenge to produce such high density displays.

Digitimes has been particularly prolific in the past year with their rumors, but have become particularly spotty in their accuracy. While plans could have obviously changed, their previous iPad 3 report claimed a Fall 2011 launch. So, take this new report with some skepticism. That said, an ultra high resolution iPad-sized Retina display could easily be the production bottleneck for Apple's plans.

Apple has issued Beta 2 of iTunes 10.5.1 to developers tonight to provide further testing for the upcoming iTunes Match service:

iTunes 10.5.1 beta 2 is now available and includes a number of important stability and performance improvements. iTunes Match is also now available for testing on Apple TV.

iTunes Match stores your music library in iCloud and allows you to enjoy your collection from anywhere, any time, on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, computer and now your Apple TV.

iTunes Match is Apple's $25/year subscription service that will match your existing iTunes library with 256-Kbps versions in the iCloud. The service was expected to be launched at the "end of October", but has since missed that target.

Apple has provided no new estimate for a launch date for the iTunes Match service.

Apple issued a statement to The Loop's Jim Dalrymple about customer complaints of poor battery life with the new iPhone 4S and iOS 5:

A small number of customers have reported lower than expected battery life on iOS 5 devices. We have found a few bugs that are affecting battery life and we will release a software update to address those in a few weeks.”

There have been a litany of complaints about iPhone 4S and iOS 5 battery life ever since their release last month. A number of solutions have been proposed by the community for this problem, including turning off Time Zone detection, Bluetooth and others.

Apple has already seeded developers with a 5.0.1 beta that is said to address the issue.

Apple just released iOS 5.0.1 beta to developers. The build number of 5.0.1 is 9A402.

iOS 5.0.1 beta contains improvements and other bug fixes including:
- Fixes bugs affecting battery life
- Adds Multitasking Gestures for original iPad
- Resolves bugs with Documents in the Cloud
- Improves voice recognition for Australian users using dictation
- Contains security improvements

iOS 5.0.1 beta introduces a new way for developers to specify files that should remain on device, even in low storage situations.

The last note about files addresses an iOS 5.0 issue raised by Marco Arment.

There’s no longer anywhere to store files that don’t need to be backed up (or can’t be, by the new policy) but shouldn’t be randomly deleted.

The iOS 5.0 policy introduced issues for apps that wished to store offline data. Apple appears to have addressed this issue in 5.0.1.

With the release of the new Siri intelligent assistant on the iPhone 4S, some users have been curious about how much data the feature uses given that most users are on limited data plans and that Siri must communicate with outside servers in order to function. Ars Technica has now taken a look at a set of common Siri tasks, determined that those specific queries used an average of 63 KB of data.

The testing was broken down into two groups of queries, with the first being local queries requiring data only to interpret the spoken input. Data usage on those queries came in at an average of approximately 36.7 KB.

We performed six tasks that would be considered to be local tasks. These queries included things like, "Set an alarm for 3 hours from now," "Make an appointment for 2pm on Friday" (and then telling Siri to cancel the task), "Remind me to file expense reports when I get home," and "What is the contact info for Ars Technica?"

These tasks added up to a total of 220KB of data usage, or an average of 36.7KB per query. The actual numbers ranged from 60KB down to 18KB, and we believe this is correlated to the complexity of the specific query and language we used to perform it.

For more complex queries bringing results back from the Internet via Wolfram Alpha or Google, the average was 94.7 KB, with a range of 23 KB to 187 KB.

Summing up the data usage, Ars Technica calculated that a user performing all eleven of the sample queries via 3G every single day would consume approximately 20 MB of data in a month. Informal surveys of typical Siri usage revealed that even high-use customers tend to come in at about fifteen queries per day, which would represent in the neighborhood of 30 MB of data per billing cycle depending on complexity of requests.

Most carriers offer customers easy ways to check their current and historical data usage, helping them gauge how much cap space they typically have as they consider how Siri usage will affect their data needs.

The Bookseller reports that Walter Isaacson's authorized biography of Steve Jobs easily topped the best-seller list in the United States and United Kingdom during its first week of availability. Citing Nielsen's BookScan data for U.S. figures, the report claims that the book sold 379,000 copies, outselling second-place The Litigator by John Grisham by more than three-to-one.

Despite being on sale for just six days in the US, Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography is already the 18th bestselling book of the year. It sits one place ahead of John Grisham's The Confession (Dell) and one place behind Rick Riordan's The Son of Neptune (Hyperion) in the year-to-date BookScan US bestseller list.

The report notes that the debut was also the strongest for any book since November of last year.

Nielsen BookScan tracks book sales volumes at their points of sale, developing a picture that encompasses the vast majority, although not all, U.S. sales including those through major online retailers such as Amazon. BookScan data does not, however, include sales of eBooks.

Amazon announced just after the book's launch that it was poised to become the best-selling book of 2011 despite a release late in the year, and the title currently ranks #3 on Amazon's chart for 2011 sales.

Sony Pictures has already acquired the movie rights to the Jobs biography, and is reportedly courting Aaron Sorkin to write the screenplay.