Month: January 2012

According to a report by GigaOm, Apple has overtaken all of the other large hardware manufacturers to become the number one purchaser of semiconductors.   The report states that Apple spend a total of $17.3 Billion USD last year on semiconductors.  This change in the top rank has been spurred on by the iPhone and iPad’s popularity and demand. Source: GigaOm

Apple will be holding Conference Call at 5pm EST today to report the fiscal year 2012 first quarter profits.   While many in the industry are expecting lower overall numbers, it seems that they are at the expecting high numbers at Apple.   According to ColinW. Gillis at BGC Partners, “analyst expectations are around 33 million iPhones and 12 13 million iPads”.  Others including Mark Moskowitz at JP Morgan is expecting that number on the iPhones to be about 28 Million.

Apple has lost an appeal to have Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet banned from The Netherlands.  The dutch court tossed the appeal from Apple, giving the lower court the final say on the matter.  This decision comes just days after Samsung lost a minor ruling in German courts. Source: Reuters

Fortune has released a new excerpt from the Inside Apple book written by Adam Lashinsky.  The book discusses Apple from the employee and the secrecy and security aspect, goine into detail about how employees are treated, how they are paid, and what the policy at Apple is relating to product releases. The book even goes into the tit-for-tat type fights that erupt between employees and that dressing someone down is acceptable if it is in the interest of making a…

Apple has finally created a support website for the iTunes U.  Introduced along with Apple’s Education Initiative last week in New York City, iTunes U is intended to give students of all ages materials which are downloadable to their iPads as well as instructurs the tools with which to reach the student easily and interactively. Lack of a real support structure has been hindering usage of the facility so far, however Apple eliminated that issue yesterday.   You can check out…

Evi is an app for the iPhone which it’s developers, True Knowledge, as well as several high profile Apple and Mac related websites were claiming was a good replacement for Siri.  However, the reality is much cloudier than that.   After 516 ratings, the average is 1.5 stars with most people complaining that the app can7t even connect to the Evi servers to perform the required tasks. Apple also had issues that were very similar when they first released Siri, however,…

A report by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners states that of all of the buyers who purchased the iPhone 4s from October, 2011 to present, only 21 percent of the buyers chose the 64gb model.  Online sales also decreased from 43 percent of total sales to 33 percent by the end of 2011 Source: Appleinsider.com

A report in CNN Money is claiming that the Apple stores are worth nearly as much as the White House is.   According to the report, a square foot of an Apple store moves an average of $4,709 per square foot while the the White House is worth $4,752 per square foot. Just my opinion but since Apple is doing it every year, wouldn’t that make the Apple store more valuable?

The latest version of the Google Chrome browser has been released.   Version 16.0.912.77 if primarily a maintenance release, fixing a number of bugs. You can download the latest version from the Google Chrome website at: https://www.google.com/chrome

According to a post on the Eamon Adventurers Guild Online blog, the beta version of Eamon Deluxe 5.0 may go out to beta testers as early as today.  Frank Kunze is in the final stages of squashing bugs with the new version and expects that the beta will be in testers hands at end of day.

Virgin America has paid tribute to Steve Jobs by including a saying he used at the 2005 Stanford Commencement on its airplane.   The expression “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” is now gracing the nose of the airplane with the tail number N845VA, just below the cockpit window on the left side of the plane. While Steve used the expression in his speech, it comes from the back cover of a 1970’s Whole Earth Catalog when the catalog was ceasing print.  Now…

Ken Gagne of Juiced.gs has posted a very thorough profile of Mark Simonsen, former Beagle Bros programmer and owner.   Mark attended Kansasfest in 2010, giving its keynote speech and participating in the annual Hackfest event which pits Apple ][ aficionados against the clock in an all out performance of their programming skills. To read the entire article, check out the Kansasfest website at: http://www.kansasfest.org/2012/01/loyal-to-the-core-simonsen/

In the 5 days since the launch of the Textbooks section of the Apple Book Store, they have sold approximately 350,000 books according to Global Equities Research.  They also apparently gave away 90,000 plus copies of the iBooks Author software for textbook production.  If these numbers and trends continue, Apple could well have the largest book store sales in the world within a matter of weeks instead of the normal years that it took Amazon to get to the top….

The Erie Apple Crunchers Users Group has posted the dates for all of their 2012 meetings.  The group serves the Erie, Pennsylvania and surrounding area and has been serving Apple users since 1978.  For more information about the group or for the complete schedule, check out the website at: http://www.erieapplecrunchers.com

If one really thinks about it, text files are a kind of virtual memory.  You can add strings, retrieve strings.  And if the strings are of a fixed length, then you can even replace strings in a text file. But I found the text file commands of DOS3.3 and Basic.system very slow.  Some recommendations were to save your strings to a BIN file instead. So I combined the two and created a sort of semi-Virtual memory for strings Applesoft is…

Soon, people may have to begin thinking of Apple and Harrods in the same sentence.  A report in 9 to 5 Mac is reporting that there will soon be an in store Apple store at Haarrods.  Harrods was sold in 2010 to the Qatar Investment Authority by then owner Mohamed Al-Fayed.   in foot traffic, the Harrods store could have more traffic than any other store other than the grand central station store which was recently opened by Apple, Inc….

This week showed a bit of how fickle the market can be when it comes to stock trading.  In spite of a good announcement from Apple, Inc. on the 19th of January, the stock fell off the pace more than 11 points.   However, RBC Capital recently said that the stock is still a buy and could go as high as $525 a share.  While this might be true, the upcoming Conference Call tomorrow evening (5pm EST) will definitely tell a…

Mike Fort has created a version of Mini vMac which has LocalTalk support included.  The support is through the serial port in Mini vMac. The beta of the release which is based  on the version 3.1.3 of Mini vMac, is now downloadable from Mike Fort’s website at: http://web.me.com/mikefort/Mini_vMac_LT/index.html Mike is also working on a gateway solution which would allow traffic to go beyond the LAN.  The beta requires that you be running Mac OS X version 7.x in 32-Bit Mode.

Gerard Puter has released an update to his Virtual ][ emulator.  The latest release addresses a couple of issues with the 6.4 release.  They include: You can download the update from the Virtual ][ website at: http://www.virtualii.com/

Alex Lee, curator of the What is the Apple IIgs website has written an extensive write up about how Desktop Publishing really changed the computing world.   The article shows the changes between the cut and paste era and the digital editing era and how the differences were reflected in the magazines that were produced. You can read the full article here: http://www.whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/professional-desktop-publishing-and-the-apple-ii/