Edible Apple

The Associated Press reports:

Proposals for Internet addresses ending in “.pizza,” ”.space” and “.auto” are among the nearly 2,000 submitted as part of the largest expansion in the online address system.

Apple Inc., Sony Corp. and American Express Co. are among companies that are seeking names with their brands. Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. sought dozens of names, including “.app,” and “.play.” The wine company Gallo Vineyards Inc. wants “.barefoot.”

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers announced the proposals for Internet suffixes, the “.com” part of an Internet address, in London on Wednesday. They now go through a review process that could take months or years.

“The Internet is about to change forever,” ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom declared, adding that new innovations could find homes in the new addresses.

Some notes of interest from iFixit’s MacBook Pro teardown which is apparently the hardest Mac to repair!

– The new battery packs quite a punch: 95 Wh at 10.95 V compared to last year’s puny 77.5 Wh.

– The Retina display LCD is situated in the display assembly, and it’s not going anywhere. Chances are if anything related to the display goes bad, you’ll be replacing the whole kit’n’caboodle.

Bloomberg reports that Apple, as part of its inclusion of Baidu as a search engine option in iOS 6 for its Chinese customers, will receive a slice of advertising revenue.

The revenue-sharing agreement with Apple follows similar accords between Baidu and manufacturers of handsets that useGoogle’s Android operating system, Wang Jing, vice president at Beijing-based Baidu, said in a phone interview today. He declined to disclose the commercial terms.

Apple said this week it will offer Baidu’s search-engine as an option for iPhone and iPad customers, and add Chinese- language support for its Siri voice technology, as the world’s most valuable company tailors its products for Chinese consumers. Baidu, which fields about 80 percent of China’s Web searches, is prepared to incur costs to add smartphone users by offering services such as music streaming for free, Wang said.

Apple’N’Apps reports:

When you’re on a Mac, you can stream music without any files being stored on your device. On your iOS device, if you tapped to play a song, the song plays automatically, but downloads too. In iOS 6, that’s changed, at least in the first beta. Now when you tap to play a song, it begins playing, and you still have the option to download it. With iOS 6, you can choose to just listen right now with an online connection, or download for offline listening. iTunes Match has become a streaming service in the beta. We confirmed it, by playing a few songs, then turning off iTunes Match, and seeing that the music folder then had no music. In iOS 5, the few tracks you listened to are stored.

All Things D reports:

Apple and Time Inc. have settled their differences: The giant publisher is now selling subscriptions to its iPad magazines directly from the apps themselves.

If that seems like non-news, consider that it took the two companies two years to figure this out.

Up until now, Time Inc. has been the notable exception to Apple’s digital subscription plan, which lets publishers sell access to their digital titles from within its iTunes store, in exchange for certain concessions. For instance, the publishers don’t automatically get to see all of a subscriber’s personal information, and Apple collects a 30 percent fee for each subscription it sells at its store.

When Apple released its latest iPad a few months ago, one of its more heavily touted features, aside from the Retina Display, was its support of 4G LTE networks.

The only rub, though, was that the iPad was 4G if you happened to reside in North America.

You defnititely wanted to read the fine print before picking up the new iPad if you lived abroad and had a thing for 4G, but the fine print wasn’t good enough for Australian regulators who were quick to accuse Apple of misrepresenting the device’s wireless capabilities by including the “4G” phrase in its advertising materials.

As a result, Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) filed suit against Apple accusing the Cupertino-based company of violating Australian consumer Law.

Apple of course defended its use of the 4G terminology while asserting that Australia’s 4G networks were improperly labled, not Apple’s own advertising materials – a fight which of course centers on what exactly can be considered 4G. Apple also claimed that its advertising materials sufficiently indicated that the iPad was not compatible with Australia’s 4G LTE network.

Now, a few months later, the saga has een resolved with Apple agreeing to pay the Australian consumer rights group $2.25 million, an ammount that ACCC representative Colin Golvan described as “substantial” and one he hoped would help deter others from making similar claims.

The Cupertino-based firm told a Federal Court hearing today that it has agreed the pay-out, after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) brought charges against it in March. The watchdog claimed that Apple deliberately advertised the 4G compatibility despite knowing that the third-generation tablet did not support LTE networks in the country.

The settlement is yet to get final approval from the judge but, if granted, the payout will bring to a close the long-running issue that has dogged the new iPad’s arrival in Australia.

Apple will also reportedly take care of the Commission’s court costs which amount to about $300,000.

via The Next Web

Check out the list over here.

Tim Cook! Phil Schller! Scott Forstall! All of Apple’s all-star lineup doing their thang at WWDC 2012 can now be checked out over here via streaming from Apple’s website.

If you’re hoping to get your hands on Apple’s brand new 15-inch MacBook Pro with the Retina Display, it looks like you’re going to have to wait awhile.

Shipping times have been pushed back to 2-3 weeks and encompasses all configurations. Apple’s other upgraded notebooks – the MacBook Air and the non-Retina MacBoko Pro – can be ordered and shipped in just about 3 days depending on the configurations chosen.

Stay up to date with all the latest WWDC announcements at these lovely destinations.

The Verge

Engadget

Ars Technica

MacRumors

9to5Mac

9to5Mac reports on a rumored new native app Apple might announce later today:

Apple is working on a new in-house application for iOS called “Organize,” but we’re not sure if Organize will be announced with iOS 6 at WWDC, or if it is a future App Store app from Apple, a future iOS enhancement, or something scrapped all together. The application is said to be a virtual pocket, and the app’s purpose is to be able to replicate a person’s pocket and store things such as coupons, travel information, credit card info and more. We speculate that Apple will be using the neat camera-based scanning software that we reported to be in development for the scanning in of business cards, receipts, and using that to provide virtual items that get used when shopping and travelling. We can’t help but think that this application will eventually tie into the rumored Apple wallet/NFC service at some point in the future.

And meanwhile, Clayton Morris of Fox News claims that Apple has another native app in the works for this afternoon.

T – 1 hour!

One of the reasons Apple followers and a few tech analysts remained confident that Apple had what it took to succeed in the wake of Steve Jobs’ passing was that Jobs assembled an extremely reputable and capable team of executives well prepared to push Apple to even further heights.

We’ve been able to learn quite a bit about Tim Cook over the past few months, and stories about Jony Ive and his design prowess are not terribly hard to find. But one Apple executive we don’t know too much about is Phil Schiller, Apple’s Senior VP of Marketing.

BusinessWeek recently ran a profile on Schiller, and while there are no groundbreaking revelations therein, it provides a more complete picture of one of Jobs’ most trusted lieutenants.

Though Schiller’s title might make him seem like a marketing guy exclusively, the article is quick to point out that Schiller has played an integral role in coming up with and positioning Apple’s products in the marketplace. Indeed, Schiller was the one who came up with the idea for  the iPod’s revolutionary scrollwheel. And yes, on top of that, there is the advertising that Schiller oversees – just a $1 billion marketing budget is all, nothing too fancy.

Highlighting Schiller’s role within Jobs’ inner circle, the article points out that when Jobs first alerted Apple employees in 2004 about his fight with cancer, Schiller “was one of only two other people in the room.”

When Jobs cut short a vacation in Hawaii to deal with complaints about the iPhone 4 antenna in 2010, Schiller spent a tense weekend by his side crafting the company’s response, says Regis McKenna, a longtime Silicon Valley marketing consultant who was also there. During Jobs’s final medical leave, Schiller often attended weekly sessions at his Palo Alto home, where the CEO met with Apple’s advertising firm to refine ads and brainstorm new campaigns.

And fleshing out Schiller’s professional duties with some new information about Schiller’s personal life, we find out that Schiller has a thing for expensive sports cars and is an avid sports fan.

Yet in business, Schiller channeled Jobs’s perspective so consistently that he was known within Apple as Mini-Me. He found the nickname flattering and kept a cutout of the Austin Powers character in his office. Like Jobs, he is ruthlessly disciplined when it comes to choosing new products or features, which has yielded another nickname: Dr. No, for his penchant to shoot down ideas, according to one former manager.

Some other points of interest include Schiller’s vigilant efforts to control product leaks, and his hand in Apple’s arguably onerous app developer guidelines that some say give Apple too much nebulous power to exclude apps for no reason at all.

Naturally, the article delves into whether or not Schiller, as one of the arbiter’s of cool at Apple, can keep the Apple train going.

To a certain extent, it’s not an entirely fair question. Apple doesn’t succeed by making “cool” products per se. Rather, Apple releases intuitive and technologically advanced products that, as Steve Jobs once said, leapfrog the competition. The technology is what makes Apple products “cool”, and with iOS 6 set for its unveiling in just a day or two, it should be abundantly clear, rather shortly, that Apple is on the right track.