Edible Apple

Ah, it’s a grand time of year when the Apple rumors start flowing like water. Hot on the heels of a report that Apple will hold a special event – separate from the September 12 iPhone 5 event – to release the iPad Mini comes further details of the device from the Japanese blog Macotakara.

The site, which admittedly has a hit-or-miss track record with respect to Apple rumors, writes that the smaller iPad model will, in fact, be called the iPad Mini. Some other suggested names for the device included the iPad Air.

According to Asian source, the name of Apple’s new product, which are expected to have 7″85′ and called as iPad mini, will be named as “iPad mini” officially. This source expects that “iPad” logo will be printed on back of case same as “iPod” is printed on iPod nano and iPod touch, and it means one new product will be added on iPad’s product brand genre.

The site also provides additional details on the rumored iPod Nano refresh, noting that it may come equipped with Wi-Fi support.

Next iPod nano may equip Wi-Fi antenna on side of that case, and support iTunes Music Cloud in order Apple to provide a iconic product to promote the largest Music Store in the world.

Macotakara previously reported that the next-gen iPod Nano will sport an entirely new form factor and will resemble a mini iPhone of sorts, complete with a home button.

It’s believed Apple will rollout a new iPod lineup this fall, with a number of welcome enhancements. The iPod Touch, for example, will be getting a 4-inch screen to match the one everyone’s expecting on the upcoming iPhone 5.

via MacRumors

Yesterday we highlighted a piece from John Gruber who made the case as to why Apple wouldn’t announce a new iPhone and iPad on the same day. Apple is largely expected to unveil the iPhone 5 on September 12 and some had previously speculated that Apple would use the occassion to unveil an iPad Mini as well.

Gruber, though, astutely pointed out that the iPhone 5, as Apple’s biggest money maker, demands an event unto itself.

“The iPhone is too big, too cool, and garners too much attention — and it’s in Apple’s interest to keep that attention undiluted,” Gruber wrote.

And now it appears that Gruber was certainly onto something.

All Things D is reporting today that Apple will be holding two separate events where it will announce the iPhone 5 and iPad Mini.

Only after the next generation iPhone is out the door and on sale will Apple announce the smaller iPad it’s been working on. That device, which is expected to have a display of less than eight inches, will be uncrated at a second special event, which sources said is currently scheduled for October.

Some have already speculated that Apple would likely separate these two iOS device announcements, particularly since both are likely to be blockbuster events.

All Things D also points out that with two separate media events, Apple can effectively maintain a tight grip on the tech news cycle

With a new iPhone and a new, diminutive iPad in the pipeline, Apple has two opportunities to commandeer the tech news cycle ahead of the annual holiday shopping binge and it’s going to take them both.

It’s also believed that new iPod models are in the works, so taking everything together, this Fall looks like it’s going to be absolutely gangbusters for Apple. Which, for a company that rakes in money by the billions, is no small thing.

Image Credit via Cicarese Design

In the wake of Apple’s important win in US District Court yesterday, 9to5Mac posted an email sent out by Apple CEO Tim Cook to Apple corporate employees.

Today was an important day for Apple and for innovators everywhere.

Many of you have been closely following the trial against Samsung in San Jose for the past few weeks. We chose legal action very reluctantly and only after repeatedly asking Samsung to stop copying our work. For us this lawsuit has always been about something much more important than patents or money. It’s about values. We value originality and innovation and pour our lives into making the best products on earth. And we do this to delight our customers, not for competitors to flagrantly copy.

We owe a debt of gratitude to the jury who invested their time in listening to our story. We were thrilled to finally have the opportunity to tell it. The mountain of evidence presented during the trial showed that Samsung’s copying went far deeper than we knew.

The jury has now spoken. We applaud them for finding Samsung’s behavior willful and for sending a loud and clear message that stealing isn’t right.

I am very proud of the work that each of you do.

Today, values have won and I hope the whole world listens.

Tim

Detractors have been saying that the ruling in favor of Apple stifles innovation, but remember that the very reason Apple brought this suit in the first place was because Samsung wasn’t innovating but rather copying Apple.

Apple must have made a wildly compelling case because it didn’t take the jury long at all to come back with a ruling, in an admittedly complex and nuanced case, in Apple’s favor.

Howard Mintz of the San Jose Mercury News reports:

Legal experts say the jury’s finding of willful infringement enables Apple to seek to triple the billion-dollar damage award, already believed to be an unprecedented judgment in a patent trial. The verdict also sends a threatening message to Samsung and other Apple competitors in the mobile-phone and tablet industry that use Google’s Android operating system, potentially making it harder for them to compete with the

While Apple was found to not have been infringing upon any of Samsung’s asserted patents, the same can’t be said for Samsung.

As for the ‘381 patent which relates to inertial scrolling, the jury found that all of Samsung’s accused devices were infringing.

Regarding the ‘915 patent – which pertains to one finger scrolling and two finger pinch to zoom – the jury found that all but two of Samsung’s accused devices were infringing.

Regarding the ‘163 patent, which relates to the tap to zoom gesture that Scott Forstall helped invent, the jury found that the bulk of Samsung’s accused products infringed.

As for the ‘D677 and ‘D0877 patents – which both relate to the front and back trade-dress of the iPhone, again the jury found that a number of Samsung smartphones infringed upon these.

The ‘D305 patent, which encompasses the trade dress for the iPhone homescreen, the jury found the following Samsung products to be infringing – the Captivate, Continuum, Droid Charge, Epic 4G, Fascinate, Galaxy S, Galaxy S 4G, Showcase, Gem, Indulge, Infuse 4G, Mesmerize and the Vibrant.

If there’s a silver lining for Samsung, and there really isn’t, it’s that the jury found that the Samsung Galaxy Tab doesn’t infringe upon the iPad’s industrial design.

So with that said, the jury ultimately awarded Apple $1.05 billion in damages.

Legal experts were quick to say Apple got just about everything it could want from the much-anticipated verdict. It was “a huge win, a crushing win,” said Santa Clara University law professor Brian Love.

Apple attorney Michael Jacobs told U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh the company would move to block the sale of many of the products in the United States within seven days; she already has issued preliminary injunctions against the Nexus phone and Galaxy 10.1 tablet.

Lastly, speaking to the verdict, an Apple spokeswoman said that the trial showed “Samsung’s copying went far deeper than even we knew.”

The fall out – potential injunctions, inevitable appeals – should be extremely interesting to watch.

There have been a tremendous number of reports over the past week or two all pointing towards Apple taking an increasing interest in the TV space. Most of the rumors in that regard have touched on Apple’s interest in rolling out a set top box, though there have also been some rumblings – yet again – of Apple’s alleged interest in pushing out their own HDTV.

To that end, Fortune relays an analyst report from Andy Hargreaves of Pacific Crest. Hargreaves recently met with Apple executives Peter Oppenheimer and Eddy Cue this past Wednesday and came away from the meeting less than optimistic that an HDTV will hit the market anytime soon.

Relative to the television market, Eddy Cue, Apple SVP of Internet Software and Services, reiterated the company’s mantra that it will enter markets where it feels it can create great customer experiences and address key problems. The key problems in the television market are the poor quality of the user interface and the forced bundling of pay TV content, in our view. While Apple could almost certainly create a better user interface, Mr. Cue’s commentary suggested that this would be an incomplete solution from Apple’s perspective unless it could deliver content in a way that is different from the current multichannel pay TV model.

Unfortunately for Apple and for consumers, acquiring rights for traditional broadcast and cable network content outside of the current bundled model is virtually impossible because the content is owned by a relatively small group of companies that have little interest in alternative models for their most valuable content. The differences in regional broadcast content and the lack of scale internationally also create significant hurdles that do not seem possible to cross at this point.

But as Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt points out, SEC rules prohibit the sharing of inside information that would have a material affect on a company’s share price. That said, even if Apple was working on an HDTV, would it really spill the beans to Hargreaves.

Lastly, it’s not as if it would be out of character for Apple to say they aren’t interested in a product only to release said product months or years later. If you recall, Steve Jobs made disparaging comments about video on the iPod before releasing a video iPod not too long afterwards. Of course, as Hargreaves points out above, entering the TV business is fraught with extremely thorny and intricate problems that puts much of the control outside fo Apple’s hands.

Meanwhile, Jim Darlymple is of the mind that the analyst report is a whole bunch of nonsense.

He came to the conclusion after a meeting with Apple’s Eddy Cue. Basically Cue said Apple will enter a market when its damn good and ready and there are problems with the current television setup. These are the same things Steve Jobs said publicly about television, so there is really nothing new there.

We also don’t know what “near term” is. Next week, next month, two years from now. Hargreaves note just seemed odd to me and not based on anything factual.

Well this is rather amusing. Samsung recently tapped Sports Illustrated Swimsuit model Kate Upton to attend/promote the Galaxy Note 10.1 launch event in NYC which went down on August 15.

So far so good, right?

Well, sorta. It seems that Ms. Upton never got the memo that she should probably put her white iPhone away.

Woops!

via Knotty Celebs

It’s all but assumed that Apple will announce the iPhone 5 at a special media event set to take place on September 12th. What’s more, it’s also been rumored that Apple might use the occasion to introduce the iPad Mini as well.

The idea that Apple would announce two flagship products on the same day has left some people scratching their heads, including Daring Fireball’s John Gruber who raises some interesting points as to why Apple isn’t likely to have the iPhone 5 share the stage with anything, aside perhaps from some refreshed iPod models.

But the more I think about it, the less sense it makes for the iPhone to even share the stage at the announcement with any other product. The iPhone is too big, too cool, and garners too much attention — and it’s in Apple’s interest to keep that attention undiluted.

I’m thinking it makes more sense for Apple to hold two events. First, an iPhone event, focused solely on the new iPhone and iOS 6. Then, the iPhone ships nine days later, and there’s another wave of iPhone-focused attention as the reviews come out. Then, in the first or second week of October, Apple holds its traditional “music event”, exactly along the lines of the events at which they’ve been debuting new iPods for the last decade.

And that, Gruber postulates, is where and when it would make more sense for Apple to introduce its iPad Mini.

All in all, it makes a whole lot of sense. Besides, should Apple release the iPhone and iPad Mini at the same time, can you imagine the hordes of people that would absolutely envelop Apple Stores across the country. It’d be chaos!

Lastly, the incredibly well-connected Jim Darlymple has this to say regarding Gruber’s theory, “Oh that Gruber is a smart fellow.”

So I guess two special media events it is.

So Facebook on Thursday released a brand spankin’ new iOS app that promises to be up to two times speedier for certain tasks. For anyone that uses Facebook on the go, this couldn’t have come soon enough. The older Facebook app, written in HTML 5, wasn’t clunky but could be painfully and terribly slow at times. The new app is written in Objective C and should run a helluva lot smoother.

But not everyone over at FB headquarters is rejoicing. Indeed, many Facebook employees won’t even be able to partake in the goodness that is the new Facebook for iPhone app. Word is that employees at the world’s largest social networking site are being swayed to give up their iPhones in favor of Android devices.

Now before you run off and think that there is some politicking going on, it turns out that there’s a much simpler explanation.

Apparently the Facebook for Android app is so dreadfully bad that Facebook feels the only way to really motivate employees to get it up to snuff is to force them to experience just how bad it is.

Citing some inside sources, along with some ex-Facebookers, BusinessInsider reports that “Facebook management realizes its Android app is subpar—and believes that the only way employees will take fixing it seriously is if they have to deal with its issues day in, day out.”

With all of the hoopla regarding Twitters new terms of service for developers, the always insightful Dustin Curtis drops some knowledge on some key, albeit subtle, differences between Facebook and Twitter.

Curtis also opines on the reasoning behind Twitter’s recent decision to pull a feature (accessible via its API) which enabled Tumblr users to search for Twitter friends who also happen to be Tumblr users.

Twitter has an enormous advantage over Facebook in one key area: while people on Facebook tend to friend their friends, people on Twitter tend to follow their interests. The following graph from Twitter is worth far more on a per-account basis because it is directly monetizable in a way that Facebook’s generally isn’t…

I suspect the reason that Twitter is cutting off apps from using its “friend finder” feature is because most people do not create content in Twitter and therefore have no incentive to use Twitter outside of the value of its graph. Unlike replicating or using the Facebook graph externally, relocating the Twitter graph can have disastrous consequences for Twitter. Lots of celebrities use Tumblr, and if you can instantly relocate your Twitter graph into Tumblr, then what value does Twitter have, other than a more restricted set of content? What about App.net? Twitter is in an even worse position than MySpace to fight off a disruptive competitor.

In the face of complaints about sluggishness, Facebook today released a completely rewritten version of their iOS app that promises to be a whole lost faster. The updated app does away with HTML 5 and is built using Objective C, making it much more like a native iOS app.

You’ll be hard pressed to notice any significant aesthetic differences in the new app from the older version, but with Facebook promising a user experience that’s much much faster, and upwards of twice as fast at carrying out certain tasks.

Some of the noted features include:

* Scrolling through news feed is faster than ever
* New banner lets you tap to quickly see more stories – no need to refresh
* Photos open fast and close with one downward swipe
* Instant access to your notifications

In a blogpost detailing the technical changes made to the app, Facebook’s Jonathan Dann writes:

One of the biggest advantages we’ve gained from building on native iOS has been the ability to make the app fast. Now, when you scroll through your news feed on the new Facebook for iOS, you’ll notice that it feels much faster than before. One way we have achieved this is by re-balancing where we perform certain tasks. For example, in iOS, the main thread drives the UI and handles touch events, so the more work we do on the main thread, the slower the app feels. Instead, we take care to perform computationally expensive tasks in the background. This means all our networking activity, JSON parsing, NSManagedObject creation, and saving to disk never touches the main thread.

Also worth mentioning is that when a user attempts to access their newsfeed, they’ll be able to view a previously cached instance of their newsfeed instead of staring at a spinner and waiting for the entire newsfeed to re-load with fresh content.

via Facebook

The smartphone repair company SmartPhone Medic recently got their hands on some iPhone 5 front panels along with some additional iPhone 5 components like flex cables.

Naturally, they decided to compare the parts from Apple’s next-gen iPhone to the current iPhone 4S. Check out the video below, though the screen grab from above really drives the point home – the iPhone 5 screen is significantly and rather noticeably bigger than what we’ve seen before. Couple that with likely support for 4G LTE, and the iPhone 5 is bound to sell like hotcakes.

As first discovered by 9to5Mac, an iPhone 4 prototype was up on eBay yesterday and as you’ll note from the photos below, it’s running Apple’s diagnostic software while the bottom has no screws.

At one point, the auction had a single bid for $4,500, though bidders also had the option to purchase it immediately for $10,000.

Lastly, note the presence of the word “Prototype” on the back, indicating that the device has not yet been approved by the FCC and is consequently not available for sale.

That said, the listing has already been removed from eBay.