Xinhuanet reports that Foxconn will be replacing some of its workers with 1 million robots in the next three years to cut rising labor costs and improve efficiency.
The robots will be used to do simple and routine work such as spraying, welding and assembling which are now mainly conducted by workers, said Gou
The company currently has 10,000 robots and employs 1.2 million people. It's not clear how many jobs will be replaced by the robots.
Foxconn is Apple's primary partner in assembling the popular iPod, iPad, and iPhone lines and has been criticized for poor working conditions that may have contributed to a series of suicides at the plant.
In April, Engadget had previously pointed to this concept model FRIDA by ABB as the likely models for Foxconn, though the new report doesn't specify.
Apple has started refunding users who were charged multiple times for their Lion purchases. We reported last week on a user whose checking account was drained of nearly $4,000 when he was charged 122 times for Lion. The email above was sent to a user who was charged 8 times.
John Christman, the user who was charged 122 times was eventually made whole:
Apple kept me on a very need-to-know basis all along, but once I confirmed the money was in my PayPal account, he then asked for a list of fees to review. Once he saw the fees (very minimal), he offered to pay them and give me a bit extra to pay any additional fees I incur.
Other users who were double charged may see similar emails soon.
Apple seems to have extended iTunes song previews to 90 seconds internationally. Apple first rolled out 90 second previews in the U.S. back in December, 2010. International song previews had been stuck at 30 seconds.
According to a number of reports, the new preview lengths are available in at least Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK and parts of Europe. As with the U.S. launch, not all songs will have 90 second previews.
In the U.S., Apple had made the change unilaterally in an email to labels telling them that they would automatically extend previews from 30 seconds to 90 seconds in the iTunes Store in the U.S. It's unclear what was the reason for the delay for international markets.
MICGadget reports that the early iPhone 5 cases are "now everywhere" in China. The site has posted another gallery of these case designs, which show a mute switch on the opposite side of the device.
The design is also said to be slightly larger than the existing iPhone 4 and has a slight tapering from top to bottom in thickness. This particular design was originally reported by ThisIsMyNext back in April. At the time, we had expressed doubts about it due to our own tipster about the validity of the design. But now, with the influx of these case designs, we have to reconsider.
It's clear that some Chinese case manufacturers are confident enough in these designs that they are starting to mass produce these cases. As we've said before, there is a massive financial incentive for companies to have case designs for new Apple products ready on launch day. In fact, three people were sentenced to prison in China for leaking details of the iPad 2 case design prior to its launch.
As frequent as these case leaks are, it's notable that they have been remarkably accurate in the past. The iPad 2 cases, of course, were quite accurate. iPhone 3G cases were real, as were 6th Generation iPod Nanos, and 5th Generation iPod Nanos. Not all case leaks turn into actual products, however. The iPhone Nano never came to be, and the iPod Touch with Camera cases were legitimate but the product was canceled/delayed.
Apple is expected to launch the iPhone 5 in September of this year.
iPhones make up close to two-thirds of mobile devices using Gogo's inflight Wi-Fi service, according to All Things Digital. iPod touch devices cover another 20%, while Android makes up just 12% of devices using Gogo.
BlackBerries account for 6 percent while Windows Mobile and other mobiles aren't used enough to count.
AllThingsD notes the iPad isn't included in the mobile numbers. Mobile devices pay slightly lower charges than larger devices like tablets and laptops do. Though, the iPad is popular too, clocking in with more than a third of larger devices. Windows as a whole counted as 41% and Macs just under 20%.
If new images of purported iPhone 5 cases obtained by 9 to 5 Mac are to be believed, it appears that the next-generation iPhone will offer a somewhat longer and wider form factor than the iPhone 4. The cases also reiterate other apparent changes such as the mute switch being moved to the opposite edge of the device and the form factor including a very slight "teardrop" design and rounded edges.
The most important change certainly appears to be the size, although it is difficult to say for certain just how much bigger the iPhone 5 would be than the iPhone 4 based on these cases, given that only exterior case dimensions and not interior dimensions are known.
Our new images are clear and there are appears to be a slight – not major – tear drop in the design. The case goes thick to thin from top to bottom. In addition, the sources who provided us with these two new cases have shared some dimensions. According to them, the case is 5 inches tall and 2.8 inches wide. These are tight cases so the iPhone 5 dimensions should only be a few millimeters smaller than those numbers. For comparison, the iPhone 4 is 4.5 inches tall and 2.31 inches wide.
A larger form factor naturally points toward Apple using a larger screen in the new iPhone, a claim that has been made by a number of sources. It is unclear, however, how Apple would deal with potential issues related to screen resolution, either keeping the same pixel density and increasing pixel count by a small amount or decreasing the density and maintaining the same 960x640 resolution.
AT&T announced today that they will be throttling high end users with unlimited data plans.
Starting October 1, smartphone customers with unlimited data plans may experience reduced speeds once their usage in a billing cycle reaches the level that puts them among the top 5 percent of heaviest data users. These customers can still use unlimited data and their speeds will be restored with the start of the next billing cycle. Before you are affected, we will provide multiple notices, including a grace period.
Early AT&T iPhone customers were offered an unlimited data plan for their devices. Even after AT&T stopped offering an unlimited plan, they allowed existing customers to retain their unlimited plan through device upgrades.
This change will affect any of those users who still have an unlimited plan and are considered to be in the "top 5 percent of heaviest data users". For those users, download speeds will be reduced until the next billing month. By definition, this should affect 5% of users each month.
AT&T claims that users can still "send or receive thousands of emails, surf thousands of Web pages and watch hours of streaming video every month and not be in the top 5 percent of data users."
Google today announced that it is rolling out several enhancements to the google.com search experience on the iPad and other tablets, simplifying page layouts and increasing the size of objects on the page to make for more prominent touch targets.
The search button located below the search box provides quick access to specific types of results like Images, Videos, Places, Shopping and more. Just tap to open the search menu and select an option to see results in one category.
For image results, we focused on improvements that enhance the viewing experience such as enlarged image previews, continuous scroll, and faster loading of image thumbnails.
Google has deployed enhancements and new features for the iPad on a frequent basis since the device's introduction, but of course is now also putting a priority on tablets running its own Android operating system. The new search features will be making their way to both platforms across 36 languages in the coming days.
Nortel today announced that it has officially completed the $4.5 billion sale of over 6,000 patents to a consortium of companies led by Apple. The proposed sale had previously passed muster with both bankruptcy courts and Canadian regulatory authorities, and antitrust concerns regarding the bidding process appear to have also been satisfied.
Nortel Networks Corporation announced that it,its subsidiary Nortel Networks Limited (NNL), and certain of its other subsidiaries, including Nortel Networks Inc. and Nortel Networks UK Limited (in administration), have completed the sale of all of Nortel's remaining patents and patent applications to a consortium consisting of Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, Research In Motion and Sony, for a cash purchase price of US$4.5 billion.
As previously announced, the sale includes more than 6,000 patents and patent applications spanning wireless, wireless 4G, data networking, optical, voice, internet, service provider, semiconductors and other patents. The extensive patent portfolio touches nearly every aspect of telecommunications and additional markets as well, including Internet search and social networking.
Apple last week revealed that it had contribution $2.6 billion to the total purchase price and it has been claimed that Apple's stake entitles it to outright ownership of the LTE-related patents as well as others that could be used to hinder Android.
Update: The Wall Street Journal reports that even though Nortel has announced the completion of the patent sale, U.S. antitrust regulators are continuing their investigation of the Apple-led consortium.
The Justice Department is interviewing consortium members on whether they have plans to file patent infringement suits against handset makers using Google's Android software, those people said. They are also talking to others that could be adversely affected.
The deal closed on Friday but Justice could still impose conditions on the parties. In April, the department forced a consortium of companies including Microsoft, Apple and Oracle Corp. to promise not to use a portfolio of patents it had acquired to unfairly hurt rivals. Microsoft was forced to give up the patents it was buying and license them instead.
The U.S. Department of Justice is said to be looking to determine whether an implicit or explicit agreement exists among the consortium members to use the patents to hinder Google's Android platform.
The next version of iTunes will get a full facelift and extensive iCloud integration, according to a report from iDownloadBlog.
From what we’re hearing, the UI would be much more cleaner and “slick.” iCloud is also going to be more closely integrated with iTunes. Rather than the iTunes Store being essentially a web browser, the Store will actually be integrated into the entire app— much like Spotify is currently.
We’re also hearing that iCloud backups will be integrated into iTunes. This means if you back up your iDevice to iCloud, that same backup will be stored locally on your computer. Also, app data from iCloud will be synced closely with iTunes. For example, if you beat a level in Angry Birds, that level data will be synced to iCloud and then to your iTunes library.
It would make sense -- the iCloud is meant to be "the truth", with all other devices (including your Mac and PC) backing up to it.
This can be seen currently with the limited iCloud support Apple has already implemented. If you purchase an App within iTunes (and have the appropriate settings saved), it automatically downloads to your iOS device. I've begun doing all my app shopping within iTunes for this reason.
iDownloadBlog is a completely unproven source, with no track record, so take this report with a grain of salt.
By coincidence, in yesterday's anonymous "unproven source" report that Apple was considering an acquisition of Barnes & Noble, BGR's tipster said iTunes 11 would be released in September along with iOS 5 and iCloud, and would support reading iBooks on the Mac.
Apple is currently beta testing iTunes 10.5, along with developer previews of iOS 5. This could have placeholder code for iCloud, while hiding a larger redesign of the application itself.
Thomas Brand was a Genius at an Apple Retail Store. Now he does other things, including writing Egg Freckles, a collection of opinions and analysis about technology.
Today, Thomas has some advice and secrets for customers considering purchasing AppleCare for their Apple devices:
Portable computers can still be sent out for flat rate mail-in repair. The cost of a flat rate repair outside of the standard warranty it almost equal to the cost of AppleCare. If you own a portable computer that is outside of its original one year warranty you only need to have it repaired once before the cost of AppleCare pays for itself.
Desktop Macs are never eligible for flat rate repairs. Each part must be purchased individually, and the cost of a single Xeon Mac Pro processor or 27 inch iMac display is several times the cost of AppleCare.
I always buy AppleCare for desktop Macs. iMac AppleCare is cheap considering it covers a difficult repair and cost of the integrated display. Mac Pro AppleCare is an investment on an expensive machine that will last at least three years.
I would never buy AppleCare on a iPod, iPhone, iPad, or AppleTV. These devices are more likely to be dropped or stolen than require repair for a manufacturing defect.
AppleCare covers a AirPort Express Base Station, AirPort Extreme Base Station, or Time Capsule purchased no more than two years before your Mac purchase or during the term of your AppleCare Protection Plan coverage.
Here are some additional AppleCare tricks:
AppleCare (and the standard 1-year warranty) is good worldwide. You can go to any Apple Authorized Service Provider worldwide and get service -- or ship it, if you aren't near an AASP. Apple will cover the cost of parts and labor, but you are liable for any shipping costs, duties, VAT or other taxes.
It is fully transferable. If you sell your machine, AppleCare follows it to the new owner. It's a great selling point for a used device.
You can return AppleCare at any time for a pro-rated refund, just call the 800-number.
I once had my entire MacBook Pro replaced with a brand new model, two and a half years into my AppleCare warranty, because my machine was such a problem child.
AppleCare may not be right for everyone, but for the less tech-savvy, having 800-APL-CARE to call can be a relief and if something does go wrong, the cost of parts can easily be much higher than the cost of AppleCare.
If you're really interested, give the AppleCare terms and conditions a read. All the info you need is buried in there, somewhere.
During the U.S. overnight hours, a number of readers noted that Apple's online store had been taken down for updating, and with Friday not being a typical day for new products and nothing rumored to be launching, the downtime was assumed to be for store maintenance. Such maintenance windows are not infrequent, and thus there was relatively little anticipation for the store's return beyond simply noting that it was offline.
The occasional maintenance periods frequently result in no changes visible to end users, but AppleInsider notes that the latest downtime appears to have focused on updating Apple's online order status pages for at least the North American markets. Those pages had long featured an outdated look, and the company has now brought them in line with the modern look found throughout much of the rest of its site.
An internal memo regarding the matter distributed on Friday stated that the improvements were designed to "enhance the overall look, feel, and functionality for a better customer experience."
Gone are the archaic blue and white order status pages that identified purchased items by part numbers and a string of abridged specifications more commonly found on point of sale (POS) systems operated by staffers rather one of the world's most popular online stores for consumers.
In their place, Apple has adorned the new order status pages with more of a Web 2.0 feel, including product images, graphical buttons for returning and pre-signing for shipments, and a drop-down menu tied to each item with quick-links for returning orders or re-printing invoices.
Apple's online order status pages went down for several days back in May leading up to minor makeovers of the company's physical stores and an updated iOS application. That downtime did not, however, result in visible changes to order status pages, and today's changes suggest that the earlier downtime may have involved behind-the-scenes preparations for the refreshed look.
Apple's share of profits raked in by the world's top publicly-traded mobile phone vendors rose once again this quarter, as asymco's Horace Dediu notes in the latest edition of his quarterly tracking reports. According to Dediu's calculations, Apple's share of profits among the eight companies tracked rose to 66%, up from 57% last quarter.
This quarter saw a slight sequential decline in overall profit for the sector, but four vendors did not manage a profit from selling phones. Nokia, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson and LG all saw losses. The other vendors split the slightly decreased pie with Apple getting two thirds of it (66.3%)
This share is up from 57% in Q1 and 50% in Q3 and Q4. Samsung’s share went to 15%, though that’s not a peak level historically. In Q1 2008 the company was at 21%. RIM was at 11%, a level in a range that has been unchanged for three years. Finally, HTC captured 7.4%, a new high and an increase from 6% since last quarter.
Dediu notes that smartphones have become the primary driver of mobile phone vendor profitability, giving Apple a significant edge over most of the competition with its smartphone-only offerings.
Apple first grabbed the profit share lead from Nokia way back in the fourth quarter of 2008, and hit the 50% mark a year ago in the third quarter of 2010. Apple of course only holds about 5.6% unit share in the total mobile phone market, but earns much more profit on its premium-priced iPhones than other vendors do with their offerings.
Yesterday, we noted that Logitech had slashed the price of its Google TV-powered Revue set-top box to below cost following a quarter in which customer returns actually exceeded new sales. We reported that development within the context of Apple's measured steps into the television market that have seen the Apple TV primarily function as a media hub for iTunes Store content and a handful of streaming services.
Apple does indeed appear to be having some moderate success with the Apple TV, as industry checks by Concord Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reveal that Apple shipped approximately 480,000 Apple TV units during the second quarter, as reported to AppleInsider. The performance represents more than 70% year-over-year growth as Apple transitioned from the larger hard-drive based first-generation Apple TV to the iOS-powered second-generation streaming device.
Kuo's industry sources claim, however, that Apple is not planning a hardware update for the Apple TV during the current quarter, putting a damper on the excitement of those hoping that changes in iOS 5 would open the door to a true 1080p Apple TV. Instead, Apple is said to be relying on iOS enhancements to boost the AirPlay capabilities of the Apple TV to better support Apple's latest iOS devices.
Apple's new computers shipping with Lion do not include physical restore media and instead utilize a hidden recovery partition to allow users to reinstall their system software should the need arise. But as noted by Macworld, reinstallation of the iLife '11 software included on new Macs occurs via the Mac App Store, which recognizes the machines' iLife licenses and links them to users' Apple IDs during the initial setup process.
But one key feature of the Mac App Store is that a single purchased license permits downloading of the software to any machines owned or controlled by the person linked to that Apple ID and logged in with the account. That key feature means that the iLife licenses issued to new computers via the Mac App Store permit users to download the software to their other Macs that may not have been upgraded to the latest version of iLife.
Purchase an app on your laptop, and you can launch the Mac App Store app on your iMac, click the Purchases button, and install that same app without having to purchase it again.
The iLife license you get when you set up one of the latest Macs is no different. Which means that if you haven’t yet gotten around to upgrading to iLife ’11, buying a new Mac mini or MacBook Air essentially gets you iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand for all your Macs running OS X 10.6.6 or later (since you need at least that version of Snow Leopard to run the Mac App Store). And this isn’t sneaky or dishonest—it’s right there in the Mac App Store’s software license.
The report notes that the policy only applies to iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand, as Apple is in the process of phasing out iWeb and iDVD and does not offer them for download via the Mac App Store or include them on the new MacBook Air and Mac mini. The applications were included in the boxed version of iLife '11, but did not receive any meaningful updates from the iLife '09 versions, meaning that users with fully-updated iLife '09 installed are already running the most up-to-date versions of iWeb and iDVD anyway.
Even as its smartphone sales explode and appear set to cruise past Apple during the current quarter to take the top spot in the market, Samsung has instituted "a new information policy" that will see the company cease public reporting of its quarterly phone sales numbers, according to The Wall Street Journal.
While industry analysts will still be able to make some reasonable estimates of Samsung's phone shipments going forward, the new tight-lipped policy will make performance comparisons between market leaders more difficult.
"As competition intensifies, there are increased risks that the information we provide may adversely affect our own businesses," Robert Yi, Samsung's chief of investor relations, said on the call. He declined a request for further explanation.
The report notes that Samsung may have implemented the new policy at least in part due to its legal dispute with Apple, fearing that concrete comparisons between its shipments and Apple's could harm its case. Apple has accused Samsung of copying Apple's designs with its own Android-based products, which have seen tremendous success over the past several years.
Portion of MacBook Air motherboard with Eagle Ridge chip outlined in teal (Source: iFixit)
AnandTech takes a look at the Thunderbolt controller used by Apple in the new MacBook Air, finding that the company has opted to use a scaled-down "Eagle Ridge" controller chip from Intel instead of the "Light Ridge" chip found in larger Thunderbolt-enabled machines.
[Light Ridge] features four Thunderbolt channels (4 x 10Gbps bidirectional = 80Gbps aggregate bandwidth) and up to two DisplayPort outputs. It's used in the 2011 iMac, MacBook Pro and Mac mini. ...
Eagle Ridge is available in two form factors (normal and SFF [small form factor]) and is effectively half of a Light Ridge chip. That means you only get two Thunderbolt channels and one DP output. Apple used the small form factor version of Eagle Ridge in its new MacBook Air to cut cost and save on motherboard real estate.
With Eagle Ridge only supporting a single DisplayPort output, MacBook Air users are only able to drive a single external display via the Thunderbolt port, although the machine's integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000 would also preclude the use of two external monitors on the MacBook Air as it does on the 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Thunderbolt adoption has thus far been limited to high-end devices in part due to high costs associated with inclusion of the technology. Use of the scaled-down Eagle Ridge controller could help push Thunderbolt into lower-end products, presuming that the smaller chip carries some cost savings for manufacturers.
After the release of the purported iPhone 5 design document, we've received a couple of mockups what the iPhone 5 might look like. While we don't normally indulge the purely speculative mockups, the recent rumors have given us some guidance as what the iPhone 5 might look like.
The first comes from MacRumors user bikr who we asked to try to closely approximate the leaked document, with a tapered design and elongated home button.
The design has a slightly sloping taper to it from top to bottom, reminiscent of the MacBook Air.
Meanwhile, CiccareseDesign has created their own mockup but was a little more free with their design choices. They retained the top-to-bottom taper, but ignored some of the other elements. They call this the "iPhone Air".
A few of the other images show that the designer took some liberties, retaining the squared off design of the iPhone 4. Obviously, this is not likely to be predictive of what the actual iPhone 5 might look like.
Biggest design overhaul since iOS 7 with Liquid Glass, plus new Apple Intelligence features and improvements to Messages, Phone, Safari, Shortcuts, and more. Developer beta available now ahead of public beta in July.
Biggest design overhaul since iOS 7 with Liquid Glass, plus new Apple Intelligence features and improvements to Messages, Phone, Safari, Shortcuts, and more. Developer beta available now ahead of public beta in July.
The next version of iTunes will get a full facelift and extensive iCloud integration, according to a 
Thomas Brand was a Genius at an Apple Retail Store. Now he does other things, including writing 
Apple's new computers shipping with Lion do not include physical restore media and instead utilize a hidden recovery partition to allow users to reinstall their system software should the need arise. But as 
