Edible Apple

The Street reports:

After reports earlier in the week that the South Korean technology giant was raising application processor (AP) prices on Apple by as much as 20%, a Samsung Electronics official denied the reports to The Hankyoreh, a Seoul-based newspaper.

Great story from Fast Company:

What vaulted FiftyThree over a hot pile of math was a major insight gleaned from two dead German scientists named Paul Kubelka and Franz Munk. In 1931, they published a paper called Ein Beitrag zur Optik der Farbanstriche, or “a contribution to the optics of paints,” which showed that this color-space question predated computing by several decades. The paper laid out a “theory of reflectance” with an equation which could model color blending on the physical experience you have with the naked eye. That is, how light is reflected or absorbed by various colors.

Today, computers store color as three values: one for red, green and blue, also known as RGB channels. But the Kubelka-Munk model had at least six values for each color, including reflection and absorption values for each of the RGB colors. “While the appearance of a color on a screen can be described in three dimensions, the blending of color actually is happening in a six dimensional space,” explains Georg Petschnigg, FiftyThree’s cofounder and CEO. The Kubelka-Munk paper had allowed the team to translate an aesthetic problem into a mathematical framework.

Cool stuff via the Metro.

TUAW reports:

A report from independent analyst Chetan Sharma suggests text messaging is on the decline in the US. Results from his report published on Monday show that the number of text messages sent each month by wireless customers has fallen. In the third quarter of 2012, mobile phone owners in the US sent 678 texts per month, a decline from Q2 when customers sent 696 texts monthly.

Apple’s line of retail stores yield an average of $6,050 in sales per square foot. In second place, lagging waay way behind is Tiffany & Co. whose stores net $3,017 in sales per square foot.

As for average sales measured on a store by store basis, it makes sense that huge warehouse shopping centers like Costco and Sam’s Club reign supreme.

via CNN

And so the Mapping landscape gets a bit more crowded.

To further extend its location services, Nokia is launching a maps application for iOS under the HERE brand. Based on HTML5, it will include offline capabilities, voice-guided walk navigation, and public transport directions. The application is scheduled to be available for free download from Apple’s App Store in the coming weeks.

I guess in hindsight the Dropbox folks made the right call by refusing Apple’s reported $800 million buyout offer a few years back. The cloud storage solution company that nearly everyone I know seems to use just announced that they’ve reached 100 million users. Not too shabby at all.

Five years pass more quickly than you’d think!

Once upon a time, Dropbox had its humble beginnings in a Boston train station when I forgot my USB stick at home. We’re still unsure if it was fate or fluke, but one thing’s stayed the same all these years: each of us has a unique reason for using Dropbox.

100 million reasons later, we’re still building and improving Dropbox not only for ourselves, but also for all of you and your awesome stories that continue to inspire us.

via Dropbox

9to5Mac reports:

Apple has begun shipping the LTE version of the iPad mini to customers who have pre-ordered. Yesterday, we noted that Apple began shipping the LTE model of the fourth-generation iPad. Like the fourth-generation models, Apple is now telling some customers that their shipped iPad minis will arrive on Friday, November 16th.

In the wake of the Hurricane that ravaged parts of New York and left millions of individuals without electricity for days on end, Apple has stepped up to the plate and donated $2.5 million to the Red Cross in an effort to help out with the relief efforts.

The email below was sent from Apple CEO Tim Cook (and obtained by 9to5Mac) to Apple employees late last week.

Apple is of course no stranger to helping those in dire needs and has in the past routinely set up donation pages via iTunes to help out disaster victims worldwide. Now, it’s nice to see that Apple, under Cook’s direction, is taking an even more active role in its charitable giving.

Apple and HTC settled their longstanding patent dispute this weekend, putting an end to a number of legal battles across multiple jurisdictions. While specific details surrounding the settlement agreement remain confidential, Stern Agee analyst Shaw Wu got in touch with some industry contacts of his and speculates that HTC will be paying Apple about $6 to $8 per each smartphone sold.

With HTC expected to ship between 30 million and 35 million smartphones in 2013, that would result in annual revenue of between $180 million and $280 million for Apple.

“This is apparently lower than the range AAPL initially proposed,” Wu wrote in a note to investors on Monday. “But to put this in context, this compares to press reports indicated HTC pays (Microsoft) $5 per phone running Android.”

It’s nice for Apple to get HTC on board, but the big kahuna remains Samsung. Not only do their products more closely resemble the iPhone but they also comprise the best-selling Android smartphones on the market. And despite Apple’s victory over Samsung in California this past Summer – to the tune of $1.05 billion – that legal battle shows no signs of dying down anytime soon.

via AppleInsider

While Apple has settled its dispute with HTC, its legal battles with Samsung continue to rage on. To that end, we’ve heard a number of rumors regarding Apple’s efforts to look for a Samsung  replacement, but remember that Apple isn’t the only one holding any cards in this game.

Marketwatch reports that Samsung really upped the price it charges for Apple’s mobile processors by 20%.

“Samsung Electronics recently asked Apple for a significant price raise in (the mobile processor known as) application processor,” the person was quoted as saying in the report. “Apple first disapproved it, but finding no replacement supplier, it accepted the (increase.)”

The two firms have started to reflect the new supply price recently, the report added, citing the same person.

Volume wise, the report notes that Apple received about 130 million units from Samsung last year and expects to receive approximately 200 million units this year. So as much as Samsung needs Apple for that cash money, Apple is equally reliant upon Samsung to make their iOS products live and breathe.

And so how much of a cash increase are we talking here per unit? Well according to HIS iSuppli, the A6 processor in the iPhone 5 runs at about $17.50. A 20% bump on that would rise the price to an even $21. By way of contrast, the A5 processor Apple used on the iPhone 4S only ran about $15 according to industry estimates.

All that said, it’ll be interesting to see how long Apple stays with Samsung for its chip production. There have been a bevy of rumors over the past few years suggesting that Apple is looking to move its business over to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). It was even rumored that Apple attempted to purchase exclusive access to the company’s smartphone chips, only to be rebuffed as TSMC wanted to keep its options open and not dedicate all of its facilities to just one product.

It was initially believed that the A6 was going to be produced by TSMC but that obviously never panned out.

Apple yesterday released two brand new iPad Mini ads. Expect more of these to surface as we get closer and closer to the holiday shopping season.

The first one, here, is titled Books.

And the other one, which is much better, is titled “Photos.”