Ο Στιβ Τζομπς γνώριζε καλά ότι το όνομα iPhone ανήκε στη Cisco. Πριν από την παρουσίαση του smartphone του, είχε τηλεφωνήσει στον Τσαρλς Τζιανκάρλο, τότε στέλεχος της Cisco, για το θέμα.  

Φορώντας την «στολή» του τζιν και μαύρου ζιβάγκο που δημιούργησε «σχολή», ο συνιδρυτής της Apple, Στιβ Τζομπς ανέβηκε στη σκηνή του συνεδρίου Macworld στο Σαν Φρανσίσκο πριν από ακριβώς 15 χρόνια για να παρουσιάσει αυτό που περιέγραψε σαν «μία επαναστατική συσκευή… που αλλάζει τα πάντα». Μπορεί να μην ήταν μετριόφρων, είχε όμως δίκιο. 

«Ένα iPod, ένα τηλέφωνο και μια συσκευή που επικοινωνεί με το ίντερνετ. Ένα iPod, ένα τηλέφωνο (phone)… Το πιάνετε; Αυτές δεν είναι τρεις διαφορετικές συσκευές, αυτή είναι μία συσκευή και την ονομάζουμε iPhone», είπε. Ήταν η γέννηση του πιο επιτυχημένου προϊόντος στη σύγχρονη ιστορία της τεχνολογίας.

Αυτό που λίγοι γνωρίζουν είναι η Apple δεν είχε τη στιγμή εκείνη τα δικαιώματα του ονόματος iPhone. Αυτά ανήκαν στην Cisco, η οποία είχε κατοχυρώσει το συγκεκριμένο brand name το 2000 (όπως και το «IOS»), αφότου εξαγόρασε μία εταιρεία που ονομαζόταν Infogear. Μάλιστα, η Infogear πουλούσε συσκευές τηλεφώνων υπό την ονομασία iPhone για καιρό. 

Ο Στιβ Τζομπς γνώριζε καλά ότι το όνομα iPhone ανήκε στη Cisco. Πριν από την παρουσίαση του smartphone του, είχε τηλεφωνήσει στον Τσαρλς Τζιανκάρλο, τότε στέλεχος της Cisco, για το θέμα.  

«Ο Στιβ με πήρε και είπε ότι ήθελε να το χρησιμοποιήσει», θα θυμόταν αργότερα ο Τζιανκάρλο. «Δεν μας πρόσφερε κάτι ως αντάλλαγμα. Ήταν σαν μια υπόσχεση ότι θα ήταν ο καλύτερος φίλος μας. Και εμείς είπαμε: ‘Όχι, σκοπεύουμε να το χρησιμοποιήσουμε’». 

Ο Τζομπς ρίσκαρε, ανακοινώνοντας το όνομα iPhone έτσι και αλλιώς. 

Την επόμενη ημέρα, η Cisco κατέθεσε αγωγή, με τις δύο εταιρείες να λύνουν τη διαφορά αυτή μέσω ενός ασαφούς συμβιβασμού λίγο αργότερα. 

Εκ των υστέρων, όμως, η απόφαση του Τζομπς να ανέβει στη σκηνή και να παρουσιάσει ένα προϊόν που θα έκανε πάταγο με ένα όνομα που δεν του ανήκε, ήταν σίγουρα ένα από τα μεγαλύτερα ρίσκα στην ιστορία του branding. 

Και δικαιώθηκε. Ο οραματιστής επιχειρηματίας μίλησε εκείνη την ημέρα για ένα «επαναστατικό και μαγικό προϊόν που είναι κυριολεκτικά πέντε χρόνια μπροστά από οποιοδήποτε άλλο κινητό τηλέφωνο». 

Έξι μήνες αργότερα, χιλιάδες καταναλωτές έκαναν ουρές έξω από τα καταστήματα της Apple, για να είναι ανάμεσα στους πρώτους που θα έπαιρναν στα χέρια τους το iPhone. 

Το μοντέλο των 4GB κόστιζε 499 δολάρια και εκείνο των 8GB πωλούνταν αντί 599 δολαρίων. 

Τον Νοέμβριο του 2007, όταν είχαν ήδη πουληθεί περισσότερα από 1,4 εκατ. iPhones, το περιοδικό Time του έδωσε τον τίτλο της εφεύρεσης της χρονιάς.  

Το iPhone άρχισε να πωλείται σε μέρη της Ευρώπης κοντά στα τέλη του 2007 και σε μέρη της Ασίας το 2008. Τον Ιούλιο του 2008, η Apple εγκαινίασε το App Store. 

Το 2012, πέντε χρόνια από το ντεμπούτο του iPhone, είχαν ήδη πουληθεί πάνω από 200 εκατ. συσκευές. 

Το iPhone μετέτρεψε την Apple σε μία από τις πιο επιτυχημένες επιχειρήσεις που υπήρξαν ποτέ, καθώς πριν από μερικές ημέρες έγινε η πρώτη που έσπασε το φράγμα των 3 τρισ. δολαρίων κεφαλαιοποίησης.

No fewer than seven serious Thunderbolt security flaws have been discovered, affecting machines with both standalone Thunderbolt ports and the Thunderbolt-compatible USB-C ports used on modern Macs.

The flaws allow an attacker to access data even when the machine is locked, and even when the drive is encrypted …

The vulnerabilities are present in all machines with Thunderbolt/Thunderbolt-compatible USB-C ports shipped between 2011 and 2020.

Security researcher Björn Ruytenberg found seven vulnerabilities in Intel’s Thunderbolt chips, and nine ways to exploit them.

1. Inadequate firmware verification schemes

2. Weak device authentication scheme

3. Use of unauthenticated device metadata

4. Downgrade attack using backwards compatibility

5. Use of unauthenticated controller configurations

6. SPI flash interface deficiencies

7. No Thunderbolt security on Boot Camp

There is no way to detect that a machine has been compromised.

Thunderspy is stealth, meaning that you cannot find any traces of the attack. It does not require your involvement, i.e., there is no phishing link or malicious piece of hardware that the attacker tricks you into using. Thunderspy works even if you follow best security practices by locking or suspending your computer when leaving briefly, and if your system administrator has set up the device with Secure Boot, strong BIOS and operating system account passwords, and enabled full disk encryption. All the attacker needs is 5 minutes alone with the computer, a screwdriver, and some easily portable hardware.

These vulnerabilities lead to nine practical exploitation scenarios. In an evil maid threat model and varying Security Levels, we demonstrate the ability to create arbitrary Thunderbolt device identities, clone user-authorized Thunderbolt devices, and finally obtain PCIe connectivity to perform DMA attacks. In addition, we show unauthenticated overriding of Security Level configurations, including the ability to disable Thunderbolt security entirely, and restoring Thunderbolt connectivity if the system is restricted to exclusively passing through USB and/or DisplayPort. We conclude with demonstrating the ability to permanently disable Thunderbolt security and block all future firmware updates.

Macs are fully vulnerable to all of the Thunderbolt security flaws when running Bootcamp, and ‘partly affected’ when running macOS.

MacOS employs (i) an Apple-curated whitelist in place of Security Levels, and (ii) IOMMU virtualization when hardware and driver support is available. Vulnerabilities 2–3 enable bypassing the first protection measure, and fully compromising authenticity of Thunderbolt device metadata in MacOS “System Information”. However, the second protection measure remains functioning and hence prevents any further impact on victim system security via DMA. The system becomes vulnerable to attacks similar to BadUSB. Therefore, MacOS is partially affected.

Further details of the Mac vulnerabilities can be found below.

Ruytenberg informed both Intel and Apple of his discoveries, but says that as the Thunderbolt security flaws are present in the controller chips, there is no way to fix the vulnerabilities via a software update.

Below is a description of how the vulnerabilities can be exploited on a Mac running macOS. This is essentially performed by fooling the Mac into thinking the attack kit is an Apple-approved Thunderbolt accessory.



3.4 Exploitation scenarios for vulnerabilities 2-3, 7 on Apple Mac systems

3.4.1 Cloning an Apple-whitelisted device identity to an attacker device (MacOS) 4

Threat model

We assume an “evil maid” threat model, in which the attacker exclusively has physical access to a victim system. The system is in a locked (S0) or sleep (S3) state, while running MacOS.

Preparation

1. Acquire a MacOS-certified Thunderbolt device.

2. Disassemble the MacOS-certified device enclosure. Obtain the firmware image from the Thunderbolt controller’s SPI flash of the MacOS-certified device.

3. Disassemble the attacker device enclosure. Obtain the firmware image from the Thunderbolt controller’s SPI flash of the attacker device.

4. Connect the MacOS-certified device to the attacker system. On the attacker system, using e.g. tbtadm on Linux, obtain the UUID of the MacOS-certified device.

5. Locate the DROM section by searching for the string DROM in the attacker device firmware image. Figure 6 depicts the DROM data structure. Using the figure as a reference, locate the appropriate offsets and replicate the MacOS-certified device UUID.

6. Compute uid crc8 and replicate the value at the appropriate offset.

7. Write the image to the attacker device SPI flash.

Procedure

1. Connect the attacker device to the victim system.

Verification

1. Observe that the victim system identifies the attacker device as being a MacOS-certified device. Figure 2 demonstrates an example scenario, showing a forged Thunderbolt device identity in the MacOS “System Information” application.



Intel commented:

In 2019, major operating systems implemented Kernel Direct Memory Access (DMA) protection to mitigate against attacks such as these. This includes Windows (Windows 10 1803 RS4 and later), Linux (kernel 5.x and later), and MacOS (MacOS 10.12.4 and later). The researchers did not demonstrate successful DMA attacks against systems with these mitigations enabled. Please check with your system manufacturer to determine if your system has these mitigations incorporated. For all systems, we recommend following standard security practices, including the use of only trusted peripherals and preventing unauthorized physical access to computers.

Η Apple προχώρησε στην αναβάθμιση των MacBook Pro 13 και 15 ιντσών, η οποία κρύβει μερικές εκπλήξεις.

Στο επίκεντρο των νέων μοντέλων βρίσκεται η 8η γενιά των τετραπύρηνων επεξεργαστών της Intel σε ότι αφορά το MacBook Pro 13 ιντσών με ενσωματωμένη Λωρίδα Αφής (Touch Bar).

Στο μοντέλο των 15 ιντσών υπάρχουν πολύ πιο σημαντικές διαφορές στις ταχύτητες, αφού η Apple παρουσιάζει για πρώτη φορά και MacBook με 8πύρηνο επεξεργαστή.

Στο συγκεκριμένο μοντέλο οι χρήστες θα πρέπει να περιμένουν διπλάσια ταχύτητα σε σχέση με το τετραπύρηνο μοντέλο, ενώ στο μοντέλο με εξαπύρηνο επεξεργαστή, η αύξηση στην ταχύτητα υπολογίζεται στο 40%.

Σε ότι αφορά το MacBook Pro 13 ιντσών με Λωρίδα Αφής (Touch Bar), υπάρχει αύξηση στο χρονισμό του τετραπύρηνου επεξεργαστή στα 2.4 GHz, με το Turbo Boost να φτάνει τα 4.7 GHz.

Με τα καινούρια MacBook Pro, η Apple προχωρά και σε μια νέα κίνηση που αφορά το πληκτρολόγιο και το μηχανισμό "πεταλούδας" που παρουσίασε πριν μερικά χρόνια, και αποτελεί κατά γενική ομολογία ένα από τα μειονεκτήματα των φορητών της εταιρείας, πηγή παράλληλα πολλών τεχνικών προβλημάτων.

Έτσι μετά την αθόρυβη προσθήκη μιας μεμβράνης στα πλήκτρα που θεωρητικά θα εξαφάνιζε το διπλό πάτημα πλήκτρων και θα τα προστάτευε από τη σκόνη -δύο από τα σημαντικότερα προβλήματα-, η Apple προχωρά στα νέα MacBook σε τρεις σημαντικές αλλαγές:


1. Η πρώτη αφορά το μηχανισμό του πληκτρολογίου και τη χρήση των υλικών που έχουν χρησιμοποιηθεί για την κατασκευή του, με τις αλλαγές στο συγκεκριμένο κομμάτι να προορίζονται στο να εξαφανίσουν το λανθασμένο διπλό πάτημα των πλήκτρων.


2. Αν και η παραπάνω αλλαγή αναμένεται να λύσει οριστικά το πρόβλημα, η Apple περιλαμβάνει όλα τα MacBook που διαθέτουν πληκτρολόγιο με μηχανισμό "πεταλούδας" σε πρόγραμμα επισκευής, με την εταιρεία να προχωρά σε δωρεάν αντικατάστασή του, είτε ο υπολογιστής βρίσκεται σε εγγύηση είτε όχι.

Τα μοντέλα MacBook, MacBook Air και MacBook Pro που περιλαμβάνονται στο πρόγραμμα αντικατάστασης πληκτρολογίου είναι τα εξής:

MacBook (Retina, 12-inch, Early 2015)

MacBook (Retina, 12-inch, Early 2016)

MacBook (Retina, 12-inch, 2017)

MacBook Air (Retina, 13-inch, 2018)

MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2016, Two Thunderbolt 3 Ports)

MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2017, Two Thunderbolt 3 Ports)

MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2016, Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports)

MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2017, Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports)

MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2016)

MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2017)

MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2018, Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports)

MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2018)

MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2019, Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports)

MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2019)

Εντυπωσιακό είναι το γεγονός ότι στη λίστα περιλαμβάνονται και τα νέα MacBook που μόλις ανακοινώθηκαν, κάτι που σίγουρα προκαλεί απορίες... Σύμφωνα με την ιστοσελίδα της Apple, οι ενδιαφερόμενοι θα πρέπει να επισκεφθούν είτε ένα Apple Store αν υπάρχει στη χώρα τους είτε ένα επίσημο εξουσιοδοτημένο κέντρο service.


3. Οι χρόνοι επισκευής και αντικατάστασης ενός τέτοιου πληκτρολογίου δεν ήταν οι καλύτεροι, με την εταιρεία να προχωρά σε σημαντικές αλλαγές προκειμένου να επιταχύνει την όλη διαδικασία.

Ένα πολύ σημαντικό κενό ασφαλείας αποκαλύφθηκε πριν λίγες ημέρες.

Μερικές από τις εφαρμογές στο App Store για Mac, συλλέγουν κρυφά τα δεδομένα των χρηστών και τα ανεβάζουν σε Analytics Servers χωρίς την άδεια των ανυποψίαστων χρηστών.

Δημοφιλείς εφαρμογές όπως οι Dr. Unarchiver και Dr. Cleanerand, καθώς και άλλες εφαρμογές της εταιρείας ανάπτυξης "Trend Micro Inc.", συλλέγουν και ανεβάζουν πληροφορίες των χρηστών στους servers τους, από το ιστορικό των Safari, Google Chrome και Firefox.

Όλα αυτά μέσω πρόσβασης στον Φάκελλο του Χρήστη (macOS Home Directory).

Οι "πονηρές" αυτές εφαρμογές συλλέγουν δεδομένα κι από άλλα εγκατεστημένα apps εντός του συστήματος, στα οποία ξεκινάει η περισυλλογή μόλις τα εκκινήσετε, σύμφωνα με το 9to5Mac. Το πρόβλημα εντοπίστηκε αρχικά από χρήστη του Malwarebytes forum.

Οι αναφορές επιβεβαιώθηκαν από το 9to5Mac, όταν μετά από εγκατάσταση της εφαρμογής Dr. Unarchiver και σκαναρίσματος του home directory μέσω του "Quick Clean Junk Files", η εφαρμογή ξεκίνησε να συλλέγει σωρεία από περιττές πληροφορίες.

Αυτές περιείχαν δεδομένα από διάφορους browsers, αποκλειστικά αρχεία από πρόσφατα Google searches και έναν πλήρη κατάλογο από όλες τις εγκατεστημένες εφαρμογές που υπάρχουν στο σύστημα (συμπεριλαμβανομένων Code Signatures, εάν είναι ή όχι συμβατές με 64-bit και πληροφορίες σχετικά με το από που έγινε το download).

Κατά την διάρκεια της έρευνας, το Dr. Unarchiver ήταν η 12η δημοφιλέστερη εφαρμογή στο Αμερικάνικο Mac App Store, αλλά πλέον το έχουν αποσύρει από την αρχική σελίδα.

Ενώ το macOS Mojave έρχεται για να βελτιώσει την ασφάλεια σχετικά με τις εφαρμογές που έχουν πρόσβαση στο Home Directory, η διαδικασία ελέγχου του Store θα έπρεπε να είχε αντιληφθεί την συγκεκριμένη παραβίαση περί ασφάλειας του χρήστη και να μην είχε επιτρέψει την κυκλοφορία των εφαρμογών στο Mac App Store.

Επιπλέον τα νέα αυτά αμαυρώνουν την φήμη του Αμερικανικού κολοσσού, καθώς η Apple θα έπρεπε να παρέχει μεγαλύτερη ασφάλεια από την στιγμή που έχει πιο αυστηρή προσέγγιση σε ότι αφορά τις εφαρμογές, τουλάχιστον σε σύγκριση με την προσέγγιση της Google.

Τα νέα αυτά έρχονται μετά την αποκάλυψη πως μια άλλη διάσημη εφαρμογή του Apple Mac App Store, το Adware Doctor, ήταν τελικά ένα μυστικό spyware το οποίο έστελνε το ιστορικό του browser στην Κίνα.

Προτού αφαιρεθεί, το Adware Doctor (αξίας 4,99$) ήταν 5ο στην λίστα με τις επί πληρωμή εφαρμογές του App Store.

Η εφαρμογή είχε λάβει πάνω από 6000 βαθμολογήσεις 5 Αστέρων, αλλά είναι αμφίβολο κατά πόσο οι θετικές βαθμολογήσεις ήταν πραγματικές.

Πρόγραμμα Ανακλήσεως και Αντικαταστάσεως Πληκτρολογίων στα νέα MacBook και Macbook Pro από την Apple

https://www.apple.com/support/keyboard-service-program-for-macbook-and-macbook-pro/



BAD TECHNOLOGY - BETA CULTURE: A Call for Revolution Against Beta Culture



I'm tired of this. This sense of permanent discomfort with the technology around me. The bugs. The compromises. The firmware upgrades. The "This will work in the next version." The "It's in our roadmap." The "Buy now and upgrade later." The patches. The new low development standards that make technology fail because it wasn't tested enough before reaching our hands. The feeling now extends to hardware: Everything is built to end up in the trash a year later, still half-baked, to make room for the next hardware revision. I'm tired of this beta culture that has spread like metastatic cancer in the last few years, starting with software from Google and others and ending up in almost every gadget and computer system around. We need a change.

Take the iPhone, for example, one of the most successful products in the history of consumer electronics. We like it, I love mine, but the fact is that the first generation was rushed out, lacking basic features that were added in later releases or are not here yet. Worse: The iPhone 3G was really broken. For real. Bad signal, dropped calls, frozen apps. This would have been unthinkable in cellphones just five years ago. They were simpler, for sure, but they were failure proof. Today's engineering and testing is a lot more sophisticated. In theory, products can't go out into distribution with such glaring problems undetected.

Another recent example is my iMac 24, which had the infamous video card problem out of the box. How can a machine with such an obvious problem—instantly detected by the user base—be sold like that? The same happened recently with Nvidia video boards. In fact, graphic cards—being always in the cutting edge of technology—are perfect examples of beta hardware being sold as final hardware, with many released with beta-quality drivers and requiring firmware patches.

From that to the now-universally-accepted Blue Screen of Death, from buggy Blu-ray players to the Xbox 360's red ring of death and PS3's bugs, even from kitchen ovens to faulty DSLR cameras, the list of troubled products is endless. Just this week, the eagerly anticipated BlackBerry Storm launched to mixed reviews, in part because of its crashy, apparently unfinished software.

On the other side, my parents have a Telefunken CRT TV and a Braun radio from the '70s which are still in working condition. They were first generation. They never failed. Compare that to my first plasma TV from Philips, which broke after less than a year of use. Mine wasn't the only one. The technology was too young to be released; it was still in beta state. Philips wanted to be the first in the world with a flat TV and beat the competition, so they released it. This probably wasn't a good move: Today, Philips' TV business is struggling, and is nonexistent in the US. Meanwhile, my Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Apple IIe from the 1980s still work like they did from day one, perfectly.

For sure, today's products are far more complex than those of 20 or 30 years ago. But back then, the manufacturing was also a lot worse. It was less automated, often purely manual, and imperfect. Today, in a world where automated factories run 24/7, there's less chance of error. Yet still, there are countless problems in the final products, and those problems affect every unit in an entire model line. In the age of manufacturing perfection, there are still major recalls concerning products that burn or break.

Clearly, the problem is the development process and the time to market, with product cycles shortened and corners cut to keep a continuous stream of cash flowing in. The rush to feed these cycles with increasingly more complex engineering seems to be at odds with shortened development and quality assurance processes, resulting in beta-state first-generation products. This beta culture, the same one that already plagues the web, breeds people who are willing to accept bugs in the name of cutting-edge gear.

Who's to blame? Google and their web apps? Apple and their iPhone 3G problems? Microsoft and their countless buggy versions of operating systems and the Xbox 360's RROD? Philips? Sony? Samsung? LG? We all are. The manufacturers, who are driven by a thirst to expand and satisfy their shareholders at all costs. The consumers, who are so thirsty to drink in the shiniest, newest technology that they are willing to sacrifice stability. And the press too, who pours more gasoline onto the consumerism bonfire by writing glowing reviews and often minimizing things that are simply not acceptable.

Personally, I'm tired of all this. But I'm mostly tired about the fact that it seems that we all have given up. Tired because now we see "upgrades" as an opportunity to protect our investment, but in reality, it's laziness and a poor job on the manufacturer part that we have accepted without questioning. Instead of calling foul play and refusing to participate, we keep buying.

That's the key: We have surrendered in the name of progress and marketing and product cycles and consumerism. Maybe those are good reasons, I don't know, but looking at the past, it feels like we are being conned. Deceived because the manufacturers of electronic products have taken our desire to progress faster and even embrace the web beta culture as an excuse to rush things to market, to blatantly admit bugs and the rushed features sets and sell the patches as upgrades.

Maybe the recession will put some order in this thirst of new stuff and change the product cycles. As the economy slows down, people will think twice before buying the latest and greatest; they'll keep older hardware for longer. Then, manufacturers will have to rethink their product lines, and lift their feet from the accelerator, which will result on slower cycles and better products. Maybe that's our ticket for better electronics that actually make sense.

Or maybe... maybe that will be another excuse for the manufacturer to cut even more corners and keep lowering prices so that consumers keep spending and ending up with worse products than we have now.


Πηγή: http://gizmodo.com/5083371/a-call-for-revolution-against-beta-culture

The Origins of the GUI

“What I saw in the Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface, you point and you grunt. A massive winding down, regressing away from language, in order to address the technological nervousness of the user.”

- An IBM technician lambasting the Apple Lisa’s GUI



Once upon a time, way back in the Stone Age, lived two cavemen, Ugh and Glug. Ugh was a handsome, sportsy, outdoorsy type, with a stunning physique and the mental capacity of a waterbug. His pal Glug was just the opposite: nervous, toothy, skinny (except for the little pot belly he’d earned from eating too many delivery pizzas), and smart. Damn smart. One day, while Ugh was out hunting game and posturing for the caveladies, Glug was sitting morosely in his cave, absently scratching under his loincloth and telling himself that he was not jealous of that lout Ugh. Directly over his head, a chunk of rock trembled and shook as it pulled free from the ceiling. It snapped free and dropped directly onto Glug’s pointy head with a thunk.

When Glug awoke, it was to the annoying feeling of water being sluiced into his face, and the equally annoying scent of Ugh’s aftershave Mammoth Musk. Ugh was bent over him, concern in his perfect blue eyes. “Glug okay? Rock whack Glug.”

Glug shoved his friend out of the way and said, “Give Glug room! Must think!” Glug dashed from the cave and into the grassy meadow beyond the cave entrance. Panting, he snatched up shards of coconut shells, wads of tall grass, smooth flat rocks, and several mammoth bones left over from breakfast. He lugged his haul inside the cave and, almost as an afterthought, picked up the rock that had knocked him unconscious earlier. Ugh looked wonderingly at his friend, then went outside to stare at bugs (he was endlessly fascinated). With a pointy stick, Glug began to draw strange diagrams in the dirt. Ugh peeked inside hours later and, seeing his friend engrossed in his odd cave drawings, shrugged and went to the third cave over to spend the evening with his ladyfriend Oohlala.

Days passed. Ugh quickly learned to stay out of the cave, as Glug snarled and threw bits of rock and coconut shell at him if he entered. Besides, it was more fun staying with Oohlala. On the fourth day, Glug came outside for the first time. He squinted at the harsh sunlight, then motioned for Ugh to come inside. Ugh shoved Oohlala off of his lap and followed his friend inside the cave.

In the corner, hidden by a bearskin, was a squarish object. Dull light seemed to come from underneath the animal skin. Wonderingly, Ugh approached the object, ready to bolt at the first odd noise or threatening motion. Glug said, “Ugh behold!” and whipped the bearskin off of the object.

Whatever it was, it was built of coconut husks and pieces of mammoth bone, with a large hollowed-out coconut shell sitting atop the large, flattish hunk of rock that had brained Glug earlier. Hanks of grasses were twisted together and shoved into the backs of the various objects. A flat rectangular rock covered in tiny river barnacles sat in front of and slightly below the main body of the object, connected to the main housing with a braid of grasses. Dark light poured from the large, centrally placed coconut shell. Ugh stared in fearful awe at Glug’s creation.

“Look, Ugh!” Glug exclaimed. “Glug build wonder thing!” As Ugh gaped, Glug hunched over the flat, barnacle-studded rock and began poking it, apparently at random. But…lines, tiny bright green ones, appeared in the dark light of the coconut shell. Apparently the more Glug poked at the barnacle-covered flat rock, the more the green lines appeared in the shell.

After a few moments, Ugh began to grow impatient. Oohlala was waiting outside, after all. “What good this thing?” he asked. “Not good to eat. No good for wearing in snow. Maybe good for whacking mammoth….”

“No, no, no!” Glug snarled. “Can do things. Count mammoths Ugh kill. Watch.” He began to poke the barnacle board in short, sharp jabs, and one by one, lines appeared in the shell. “One…two…here one you kill last month…here one that you chase over cliff…here one that washed up in river…” He kept poking, and finally he stopped. “See? Ugh kill seventeen mammoths since first thaw. Good to know, uh?”

Ugh was interested, despite himself. “Can Ugh use?” Glug motioned him to sit in front of the shell and placed Ugh’s dirty fingers on the barnacles. “Okay, Ugh pay attention. First, must log in.”

“Log in?”

“Log in…we create Ugh a user name. We call it…Ugh.” Over Ugh’s shoulder, Glug poked at the barnacles, to Ugh’s mounting confusion. “Now Ugh can get in system. Good. Now we go to C: prompt….”

“See prompt? Where? Ugh confused.”

“Ugh wait. Good, we in. Now we access file directory.”

“File directory? User name? See prompt?” Ugh shoved himself away from the strange object and stood up, towering angrily over Glug. “Glug confuse Ugh! Make head hurt! You want Ugh to use strange thing, give Ugh pretty pictures! Bright colors! Point and click, not barnacles and see prompts! Ugh leaving!”

Ugh shoved Glug aside and made his way to the cave entrance and outside. He failed to notice that he had shoved Glug too hard, and poor Glug went reeling headfirst into the cave wall. For the second time in a week, Glug’s skull impacted solid rock.

It was dark outside when Glug finally awoke. Ugh was nowhere in sight. Glug sat up, cradling his injured head in his hands. “Whoof, head hurt big time,” he muttered to himself. “But Glug have better idea!” He found his pointed stick and began drawing in the dirt again. “Him want bright colors, pretty pictures, Ugh, him get bright colors, pretty pictures. Glug call it…Graphical User Interface. But Glug not tell Ugh that. Him hardheaded as cave bear, fancy name scare Ugh. What me call it?” Glug thought and thought. Finally he decided to go for the simple, straightforward approach. “Ugh make baby talk OK,” Glug thought. “Just stick with baby noises. Glug call it…GUI. Gooey. Even Ugh smart enough to say that one. Gooooooeeeeeey.”







“"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." ”

“– Ken Olson, President, Chairman and Founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977”

The story is part of the computer world’s mythology. December 1979, an ordinary afternoon: young computer whiz and entrepreneur Steve Jobs leads a band of his homeys into the rarefied enclave of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Jobs and friends tour the plant with wide-eyed admiration, doing their best Norman Rockwell gee-whiz kids-in-the-dugout impression (“Golly, Dr. Kay, can we have your autograph, huh?”), while behind guileless eyes and black-framed glasses, mental notes are being taken and schematics memorized.



Jobs leads his friends out of the building, waves bye-bye to the nice lab geeks inside, and dashes back to his shabby warehouse, where he and cohort Steve Wozniak stuff every idea and process they can remember from the Xerox tour into their new product, the Macintosh. Xerox is befuddled, Microsoft’s Bill Gates is enraged, and Apple gets the jump on everyone with a new dance craze, the GUI. “Do the GUI” sweeps the computer world and everybody else scrambles to get on the gravy train. Gates takes Jobs’ thievery one step beyond Jobs’ own and brings out Apple-clone Windows, Microsoft does a pas de deux with the local judiciary to dodge an Apple lawsuit, Windows takes over the world, and Apple is relegated to cult status among the renegade hackers and Mac addicts of the computer industry.

Nice story to read your kids to sleep with. It has everything: drama, criminal behavior, ruthless rivalry between former associates, everything except sex (which the stereotyped computer geeks are unfamiliar with, anyway). Hell, it would even make a good David Allen Coe drinking song. The only problem with it is that it isn’t true.

The Real History of the GUI

The real history of the Graphical User Interface is more complex and interwoven than the simplistic “It Takes a Thief” conception.

“"So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.’" ”

“– Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and HP interested in his and Steve Wozniak’s personal computer”

From Small Seeds…

Apple was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in Jobs’s garage in 1976. Jobs and Wozniak met at Hewlett-Packard and began their collaborative careers by building (Wozniak) and selling (Jobs) “blue boxes” illegal devices that scammed free phone calls from Ma Bell. Both shared an interest in the “primitive” computers of the time and enjoyed cobbling together electronic goodies with solder and breadboards. Eventually they decided to start a company and build computers that wouldn’t take up an entire basement, didn’t need supercooling, and didn’t require platoons of guys in jumpsuits to take care of them. In other words, they envisioned building personal computers for the masses. Of course, neither Jobs nor Wozniak were the first to think of personal desktop-sized computers (common wisdom gives that honor to the MITS “Altair,” a 1975 kit-based creation running Microsoft’s BASIC OS and based on Intel’s 8080 chip), but that’s another story. They put their heads together and decided to call their company Apple.

In March 1976, Wozniak built the first Apple, the Apple I. It was a cobbled-together curiosity made of circuit boards and LED displays stuffed into a wooden box, but it stirred enough interest in the computing community to inspire Jobs and Wozniak to found Apple on April Fools’ Day, 1976 to sell their little beasties. Jobs sold his VW minibus, and Wozniak his HP scientific calculator, to finance the startup. They only managed to sell about 200 of the Apple I’s, so the fledgling company now consisting of Wozniak, Jobs, and a few friends/employees used the money they managed to raise from Apple I sales to start work on the Apple II (Wozniak has reputedly said that a large part of his desire to build the Apple II was due to “Breakout,” a classic video game he had designed for Atari. Wozniak wanted to program it for a PC). In 1977 the Apple II debuted, featuring a sleek plastic case (as opposed to the “orange crates” that houses the Apple I’s), game paddles, and color graphics on the video display. Being descendants of Ugh, people were fascinated by the bright colors and the flickering images, and the Apple II began to move off the shelves.

Jobs realized that he had started something that could mushroom into a serious business concern, and he laid on more employees, more workspace, and buckled down to the task of meeting the sudden consumer demand for his goodies. When Apple added the inboard floppy disk in 1977 (abandoning the slow and clumsy tape storage facility), the II’s sales really took off, and Apple was suddenly at the crest of a wave of interest in personal computing. Never mind that many novices bought an Apple II without a clear idea of what to do with it… the mere concept of the average Joe being able to own and operate a “personal computer” was catching people’s imaginations.

“WILL SOMEONE PLEASE TELL ME WHAT A PERSONAL COMPUTER CAN DO? ”

“– 1982 Apple Computer ad”

Which brings us to Jobs’ infamous trek to Xerox’s PARC facility. Actually, we need to look further back in time to set the stage for Jobs’ visit.







The 40s – GUI Forefathers: Bush and Engelbart

Let’s back up to 1945 (!) and a visionary named Vannevar Bush. Bush, a scientist and futurist, went public with his ideas of the “memex,” a computing device that would use what we’d call hyperlink technology to bring information to every user’s fingertips.

Bush’s ideas sparked some visionary thinking in a scientist named Douglas Engelbart. As early as 1962, while Jobs and Wozniak were still drinking Ovaltine and watching Saturday morning cartoons in their jammies, Engelbart was creating several items of interest to the personal computing crowd that would follow. He invented the first “mouse,” which he called an “X-Y Position Indicator,” a little gizmo housed in a wooden box on wheels that moved around the desktop and took the cursor with it on the display. Engelbart saw the mouse as being an integral part of a “graphical windowed interface,” and invented what he called "a windowed GUI" that fascinated co-workers but wasn’t considered useful outside the lab. In 1968 Engelbart created NLS (oNLine System), a hypermedia groupware system that used the mouse, the windowed GUI, hypermedia with object addressing and linking, and even an early version of video teleconferencing to wow its audience, a group of technicians, engineers, and scientific types at Stanford University.



However, Engelbart was not the only visionary in the history of GUI. In 1963 a grad student at MIT, Ivan Sutherland, submitted as his thesis a program called “Sketchpad,” which directly manipulated objects on a CRT screen using a light pen.

“"Sketchpad pioneered the concepts of graphical computing, including memory structures to store objects, rubber-banding of lines, the ability to zoom in and out on the display, and the ability to make perfect lines, corners, and joints. This was the first GUI (Graphical User Interface) long before the term was coined." ”

“- from a Sun Microsystems biography of Ivan Sutherland”

The idea of direct manipulation of objects on a screen is integral to the concept of a graphic interface. In fact, the idea of a GUI derives from cognitive psychology, the study of how the brain deals with communication. The idea is that the brain works much more efficiently with graphical icons and displays rather than with words words add an extra layer of interpretation to the communication process. Imagine if all the road signs you saw were uniform white rectangles, with only the words themselves to differentiate the different commands, warnings, and informational displays. When the “Stop” signs hardly look different from the “Resume Highway Speed” signs, the processing of the signs’ messages becomes a slower and more difficult process, and you’d have even more wrecks than you have now.

Combine this with Alan Kay’s concept of “biological computing,” where computer components function like organic “cells,” either independently or in concert whenever appropriate, and you have an idea of the thinking behind both modern computing, and the GUI.

The 70s – SmallTalk and Xerox

“"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." ”

“– informal PARC slogan”

The underground buzz stayed underground, but Engelbart’s and Sutherland’s creations were not lost on the creative fellows at Xerox’s PARC facility. PARC was (and is), at least in some respects, a computing “think tank,” where brilliant and brilliantly erratic minds cranked out ideas and tried, with varying success, to implement them on the workbench.

In the early 70s, as part of a (sadly abortive) project called “Dynabook” that envisioned notebook-sized, hyperlinked computers, Alan Kay and others developed an interactive object-oriented programming language called Smalltalk. Kay had previously worked with a team at the University of Utah that developed a programming system called Flex. This was a design for a flexible simulation and graphics-oriented personal computer, with many ideas derived from the Norwegian-developed Simula programming language, another programming language called LISP, and Sutherland’s Sketchpad. Kay also borrowed ideas from a highly graphical language called Logo, which was designed to teach programming to children. Smalltalk featured a graphical user interface (GUI) that looked suspiciously similar to later iterations from both Apple and Microsoft.

Smalltalk didn’t stop with an innovation in user interface: it featured a multi-platform virtual machine years before the folks at Sun came up with Oak/Java, object orientation, overlapping “windows,” and the first instance of bit-blt or "bit-blitting," the last two contributed by Dan Ingalls (the object-oriented language featured in ST actually showed up in the Simula-67 program in the late 1960s; “bit-blitting,” or bit block transfer, is, in simplistic terms, the protocol by which objects on a screen can be manipulated). A lot of observers feel that ST’s clean, easy-to-use interface has yet to be surpassed even today. The first program to be written under Smalltalk was Pygmalion, which is most notable for its demonstration that computer programming could be graphically based and not restricted to text. The idea of using icons to stand for data was reflected in Pygmalion.

The first real-life, usable GUI appeared in Xerox’s Alto computer, which debuted in 1974 and was envisioned as a smaller, much more portable replacement for the mainframes of the time. The Alto, which didn’t have a GUI as you and I are used to using, but instead featured graphically driven applications, was about the size of a Volkswagen (well, not quite, but the thing was big) and certainly not useful for the average user, even though it started its life showing an image of Sesame Street’s “Cookie Monster.” The Alto featured a bit-mapping display, which was essential for displaying graphics and WYSIWYG printing. Kay, David Canfield Smith, Bill Verplank, and others also developed iconic representations for various programs for the Alto, most noticeably the drawing program “Markup,” the text editor “Bravo,” and the painting program “Superpaint.”

In 1981, the design and concepts which gave birth to the Alto led to the development and production of the much more streamlined, and more usable Xerox Star the first true GUI-driven PC. According to Bruce Horn, an ex-Xerox employee who wound up working for Apple, the software architecture for Smalltalk and the Star were much more sophisticated than the Mac or Windows equivalents. While the Apple machines incorporated much of Xerox’s brainstorms, many of the most innovative and sophisticated ideas never made it into the Apples, mostly due to Apple’s insistence on keeping costs down. The Star featured the first “computer desktop,” as well as overlapping, resizable windows, and the sophisticated PARC mouse, a gee-whiz gizmo that ran with no moving parts and used laser beams and a metal grid to track the cursor’s movement (though employees found that the mouse worked just as well on Levis as it did on the metal grid). The interface was known as WIMP Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointers. PARC’s consensus was that once these ideas were implemented on a wide scale, computing efficiency would increase dramatically.







1979 – Apple Visits PARC

Jef Raskin, a project manager with Apple, first told Jobs and Wozniak about the research being done at PARC. It’s a mistake to envision this scene as taking place in some deserted parking garage, with Raskin hiding in the shadows and doing his best Deep Throat impersonation. A closer scenario is that Raskin wanted to work more directly on a GUI, and dropped a bug in Jobs’ ear about the neato keeno work being done at PARC. Jobs was reluctant to go at first, but eventually Raskin, who wrote his master’s thesis on a WYSIWYG graphical interface back in 1967 and was seeing some of his ideas brought to fruition by the folks in PARC, piqued his interest.

At any rate, Jobs, who was first told by Raskin about the fun going on at PARC in 1976, decided that he wanted to bring a team of Appleniks into PARC and see what was causing such a buzz but again, the idea of Jobs coming in like a kid touring Epcot with a tape recorder hidden under his shirt is mistaken. Apple negotiated a deal with Xerox; in return for a block of Apple stock, Xerox allowed Jobs and his team to tour PARC in December 1979, take notes, and implement some of the ideas and concepts being bounced around at PARC in their own creations. I’m not sure how Xerox felt about Apple subsequently hiring half perhaps the better half of PARC’s staff away from them, but the process was relatively above-board; no night kidnappings or bribes under the table at Jack In the Box. Xerox allowed Apple to use their ideas in their machines. As Wozniak says on his Website, “Steve Jobs made the case to Xerox PARC execs directly that they had great technology but that Apple knew how to make it affordable enough to change the world. This was very open. In the end, Xerox got a large block of Apple stock for sharing the technology. That’s not stealing outright.”



“"The reason why Jobs got the reputation of being so brilliant in human-centered computing is because he neglected to tell anyone at PARC that his perceptive questions about GUIs and so on were drawn from his discussions of such things with Raskin at Apple a month or two earlier. He masterfully made it appear as though he was encountering bitmapped GUIs for the first time in his life instead of having discussed them with someone who had visited PARC himself." ”

“– Neil Franklin”

At any rate, Jobs and the Apple guys came back from their PARC tour with stars in their eyes. They were entranced with the idea of a “windowing GUI” and loved the flexibility and power of Smalltalk. They had a new vision, and were determined to unleash it on the computing world ASAP. Development immediately began on the Apple “Lisa.”

1979 – Birth of Apple Lisa

Lisa is worth a paragraph or two on her own. Jobs and his buds envisioned Lisa (named for the original chief engineer’s daughter, and also standing for Local Integrated Software Architecture) as the first of a new, GUI-based PC family, but developed her primarily for business use. It’s notable that the new product line came on the heels of the 1981 failure of the Apple III line, which was so flawed that it had to be recalled. Apple had some ground to recoup. The Lisa line featured the warhorse Motorola MC68000 microprocessor which trundled along at 5MHz, boasted 512K of RAM (upgradable to 2MB), had every bell and whistle that the Apple design team could stuff inside her, and cost more than $10,000. Lisa was rather large and clunky, though many veterans of the PC wars insist that she is still one of the most efficient and usable machines of her type ever built.

Initial development on Lisa began before the 1979 field trip to PARC (Raskin says that Lisa was first envisioned as a text-driven PC along the lines of the Apple II), but she didn’t appear on the market until January 1983. Eventually the cheaper, pared-down Lisa2 appeared, but neither sibling did well on the market they were too expensive, and the Apple II family was still riding high on the market, even with the competition from other machines like the Commodore 64 and VIC-20, the IBM PC, and the Radio Shack TRS-80. Even later, after the Macintosh had begun to take the PC market by storm, Apple decided to unload some of their Lisa stockpile by repackaging it as the “Macintosh XL.” The buyers weren’t fooled, and many Lisas ended up in a California landfill. Interestingly enough, Lisa featured a set of integrated software called “7/7,” that included a word processor, a spreadsheet, chart builder, outline manager, project scheduler, drawing program, and modem communication utility. 7/7 may well have been the first integrated “works” package.

“"A few months after looking at it [the Xerox Star] we made some changes to our user interface based on ideas that we got from it. For example, the desktop manager we had before was completely different; it didn’t use icons at all, and we never liked it very much. We decided to change ours to the icon base. That was probably the only thing we got from Star, I think. Most of our Xerox inspiration was SmallTalk rather than Star."”

“– one of the Lisa development team”

Jobs and the Lisa design team worked hard to integrate the Xerox/PARC concepts they had obtained into their own design. Lisa’s GUI was, indeed, based on Smalltalk as it ran on the Alto, but much of Lisa’s design was Apple’s own, including click-and-drag capability, and the pull-down menu — this according to Jef Raskin, who headed the Macintosh design team and should know, but other sources give the credit for click-and-drag and pull-down menus to PARC. Whether this is another example of PARC’s ideas being implemented at Apple, or it’s an example of side-by-side independent development is uncertain. As they say, it steamboats when it’s steamboat time. Apple also worked with psychologists, artists, teachers, and ordinary users to improve their interface. In one famous example, Apple provided a California elementary school with free machines for every student’s use. During the summers, the Apple programmers worked with the teachers and kids to enhance the software and the GUI, because they felt that kids gave the truest reaction to basic interface issues, e.g. “These menu things are cool!” or “That picture sucks!”

“"The [Lisa] user will be able to carry out many functions simply by pointing to a picture of what he wants done rather than typing instructions." ”

“– Time Magazine, 1983”

1983 – Mac Arrives

Jobs was no longer the only alpha male in the Apple pack (if he ever was). John Sculley, the corporate executive brought in to reshape Apple into a “grown-up” business, took Jobs off the Lisa project because of Jobs’ poor project management skills, and turned him loose on the next Apple project, a slimmed-down and considerably cheaper “daughter” of Lisa, eventually to be known as the “Macintosh.” The Mac was named for team leader Jef Raskin’s favorite strain of apple, but spelled differently in order not to offend audio manufacturer McIntosh. Under development since September 1979, the Mac lost much of Lisa’s bulk and price tag (the first Mac sold for $2500), and was the first popular PC to feature a graphical user interface. The Mac also bundled MacPaint, which brought computer “art” design to the average user (and not unimportantly, sold the average user on the mouse), and MacWrite, a simple word processor that was the first WYSIWYG product of its kind on the consumer market.

Raskin left Apple in 1982, but the Mac team labored on, and the Mac hit the market in January 1984, heralded by the famous “1984” commercial that aired during the Super Bowl and depicted the Apple PC demolishing the gray, faceless world of IBM computing. Prophetic. Many average users fled screaming from the aggravating world of the DOS command line to the friendly Mac GUI, and while power users and DOS fans dismissed the Mac as a Playskool product, the Mac’s user-friendly interface made friends throughout all levels of the computing community. Later iterations of the Mac boosted the underpowered 128K of RAM, giving it the gumption it needed to compete with the button-down IBM machines. In 1986, Aldus released its desktop publishing app, PageMaker, for the Mac, and the Mac suddenly became everyone’s PC of choice for graphic arts and desktop publishing. GUIs were all the rage (later made even more tasty by the addition of color displays in the Mac II), the Mac ruled the PC universe, Microsoft was scrambling to catch up, and all was right with the world. Even though Jobs had been forced out of Apple in May 1985 by no-fun CEO Sculley, Apple was riding the tiger.

There are supposedly reliable sources that claim everything original in the Macintosh was cooked up at PARC and transposed wholesale into the Mac; other equally “reliable” sources claim that the Mac is virtually a homegrown Apple creation, with very little influence from PARC-generated concepts. Both ideas are wrong; it’s plain that the Mac is a product of intense cross-fertilization between both creative sources. As Raskin says, “The years of study, thinking, and experimentation by many talented people on the Macintosh project and elsewhere have gone largely unreported, though they led to the breakthroughs that made the Macintosh and the systems that have been built since its introduction so much of an improvement over what went before. Against this complex reality we have the powerful mythological image of Jobs drinking from a Well Of All Knowledge, having an ‘aha!’ experience and coming back at full cry to Apple to create a fantastic project.” In fact, the Lisa owes more of a creative debt to the PARC designs than does the Mac. Many of Lisa’s features were borrowed wholesale from PARC, down to the fonts and their nomenclature. As Raskin notes, “We were somewhat more pure while I was running the Mac project.”

“"The future lies with a graphical windowing interface, mouse cursor control, pull-down menus, dialog boxes, and the like [and computers based on such interfaces] are destined to take over the IBM PC and compatible world as well." ”

“– W.F. Zachmann, 1987”







In the Meantime at Microsoft…

Meanwhile, in the Pacific Northwest, a great evil was stirring… Oh, please. To cast Microsoft and its head honcho Bill Gates as the Great Satan, or as Sauron to Apple’s brave little band of hobbits, is ridiculous. Both co-founders, Jobs and Gates, are much more alike than they are different. Neither one is a lily-white altruist just trying to bring personal computing to the masses, nor is either a black-moustachio’ed villain bent on destruction. While I doubt either Jobs or Gates would recognize a code of ethics if it hit them in the mouth, neither one belongs on the Ten Most Wanted List, either. Both wanted to carve out a place for themselves in the PC market, both were willing to cut corners to get what they wanted, and both were tremendously successful at what they did.

“"640K ought to be enough for anybody." ”



“– Bill Gates, 1981 (possibly apocryphal)”

Microsoft began just as small and insignificantly as Apple did. Starting out as a two-man operation out of the backseat of Bill Gates’s car, Gates and cohort Paul Allen saw the MITS Altair and in the span of a month had a BASIC interpreter ready to go for the beastie. The code wasn’t tested until they demonstrated the program for MITS, and Allen’s first time even touching an Altair was when he inputted the code into MITS’ machine. MITS bought the product the first programming language written specifically for a personal computer and Allen joined MITS as Director of Software. By July ’75, BASIC 2.0, a Microsoft creation, was running the new, more powerful Altairs. The name “Microsoft” wasn’t chosen until November ’75.

“ALLEN: "We would almost always overestimate our competitors’ ability to compete."”

“GATES: "Or we’d assume that they were going to execute competently."”

“– from a 1995 interview with Bill Gates and Paul Allen”

1977 – Microsoft and Apple Team Up

Allen rejoined Microsoft in time to christen the company’s new offices in Alberquerque. In early 1977 Microsoft licensed “AppleBASIC” to Apple for the flat fee of $21,000, which turned out to be a steal of a deal, as Apple sold over a million computers with AppleBASIC running the show (Wozniak actually wrote the integer BASIC for the early Apples). By the end of 1979, Microsoft had participated in porting both FORTRAN and COBOL languages to microcomputers, moved to Washington State, entered into agreements with ASCII Corporation of Japan, and expanded into Europe. The two-man operation was now employing 40 people and bringing in over $7 million. Microsoft’s congenial association with Apple continued into the 1980s, with Microsoft bestowing the Z-80 SoftCard upon Apple in 1980. The SoftCard allowed the Apple II to run most of the CP/M programs currently featured on most smaller computers.

Interestingly, Microsoft was working out the details of a secret deal between themselves and Big Blue for a new operating system, which they called DOS (Disk Operating System). MS-DOS (which was spawned from an operating system called Q-DOS written as a CP/M knockoff by Seattle Computer Products, and bought by Paul Allen in 1980) appeared as the operating system for the first IBM machine, the IBM PC, in August 1981. Since Gates had insisted on keeping the rights to MS-DOS for his company, he was able to license the operating system to any number of “clone” computer and application manufacturers. IBM made an effort to keep DOS to themselves by releasing machines that ran their own version, PC-DOS, but with Microsoft’s willingness to license MS-DOS to all comers, PC-DOS never caught on. As late as 1993, IBM was still trying to market PC-DOS as a viable alternative to the Microsoft operating systems, but by then DOS was waning in market appeal mass-market users liked the various GUIs and had little use for further command-line interfaces) At the end of 1981, Steve Jobs paid a visit to Microsoft to give them a look at the embryonic Mac, and authorized Microsoft to develop apps for the new, GUI-based system. From 1981-1984, Microsoft folks were all over the Apple labs, working alongside Apple techs to develop applications for the Mac. In the process, Microsoft acquired an intimate familiarity with the inner workings of the Mac design.

A note on the above: Microsoft’s DOS 1.0 code structure was virtually a clone of Digital Research’s CP/M 1.4 operating system…one source calls it a “bug-for-bug” copy. Digital Research (DRI) began working on an updated version for 16-bit computers called CP/M86, to be used with machines featuring Intel’s 8086 processor; unfortunately for DRI, CP/M86 wasn’t ready for prime time when IBM came looking for an operating system, and they went with Microsoft’s DOS instead. In 1982, Digital Research finally released CP/M86, and converted it to their own DR-DOS system in 1987. Digital Research sued Microsoft over the CP/M DOS imbroglio, but the lawsuit fizzled. One source very hostile to Microsoft alleges that Microsoft did their level best to sabotage DR-DOS when it was released, including making spurious claims that Windows would not run under DR-DOS, as well as hustling their own updates to MS-DOS onto the market to cut the legs out from under Digital Research’s product, and using illegal marketing practices to force PC manufacturers to use their own system in lieu of DR-DOS.

Naturally, this isn’t the only version of this story, but the bare facts are that DR-DOS never impacted the market in the way that Microsoft’s competing MS-DOS did, at least partially due to Microsoft’s energetic and possibly underhanded attempts to push their own system over DRI’s. Digital Research later sold DR-DOS to Novell in 1991. After attempting to integrate it into their own Networking Operating System and releasing versions under the name “Novell DOS,” Novell sold it to Caldera in 1996, almost three years after Novell’s final attempts to work with DR-DOS. Caldera transformed DR-DOS into an open-source product, called OpenDOS. Caldera also sued Microsoft for illegal marketing practices over the DR-DOS affair, and Microsoft settled the lawsuit out-of-court in January 2000. Had CP/M86 been ready for use when IBM came calling, it’s possible that Microsoft would never have gotten the “in” with IBM that propelled it to glory, and we’d all be cussing Digital Research today, instead of Microsoft. Who can say?

Two months before the Macintosh officially hit the market, in November 1983, Microsoft announced that it was working on its own GUI-based operating system (actually, a “shell” that rode atop the DOS OS) to be known as “Windows” (which Gates wanted to call “Interface Manager,” but slicker heads prevailed). Microsoft had already caused a stir in April ’83 by giving a “smoke-&-mirrors” demo of their prototypical Interface Manager, using overlapping windows to simulate multiple programs running simultaneously. IBM executives were not happy with Microsoft’s little toy, as they were working on their own DOS-based program manager, to be called “Top View.” Gates had tried repeatedly to interest IBM in Windows, and was rebuffed each time; IBM felt that the interest in GUIs was a passing phase. Top View was released in 1985 and discontinued in 1987; its graphical interface influenced IBM’s much more noticeable OS/2, even though a GUI-driven version was never made public.

Windows 1.0 made its official debut almost two years after it was announced, in November 1985. Apple was stunned by the similarities between the Mac and Windows interfaces, but as there were almost no applications available for the Windows environment (Aldus’s PageMaker for Windows was a notable exception), Win 1.0 came and went on the consumer market without much fanfare. The failure of Win 1.0 to capture a decent market share, along with plateauing Mac sales, caused some to wonder if the GUI craze was a fad that had peaked. Ironically, in light of the bad blood to come between the two companies, Microsoft’s Excel (a GUI-based spreadsheet that was similar to its predecessor VisiCalc, but easier to use) gave the Mac much-needed viability at this time.







1983 On – Other GUIs Hit the Market

Were the Mac and Windows GUIs the only ones on the market? Hardly. In fact, the first consumer-oriented, PC-based GUI was made not by either company, but by VisiCorp, the makers of VisiCalc. Called VisiOn, it debuted in October 1983, shortly before the Lisa, but was crippled by the lack of popular software written to run under it. The same story can be told of DRI’s GEM (Graphical Environment Manager), which appeared in September 1984 and disappeared shortly thereafter, partially because it, like VisiOn, lacked the ability to run DOS apps, and had no software of its own. Worse luck for GEM: Apple didn’t like GEM’s similarity to the Mac desktop, and threatened to sue. Rather than fight, DRI revamped the GEM desktop to get Apple off its back. Both VisiOn and GEM had their proponents, but neither made a major dent in the consumer market, which continued to be dominated by the twin monoliths Apple and Microsoft .

And there was Quarterdeck’s DESQView, the first program to bring multitasking and windowing capabilities to a DOS environment. DESQView wasn’t a full-fledged GUI OS, but its GUI “shell” over DOS won many fans and intrigued many folks at Microsoft, including Gates, who by some accounts based his first iteration of Windows as much or more on VisiOn, GEM, and DESQView than on the Mac interface (this conflicts with the stories passed around the campfires of the Apple fans, who portray Gates as a petty thief who snarled to his Windows team, “Make it look just like a Mac!”). Berkeley Softworks’ GeoWorks (GEOS) is another GUI OS worthy of note; it was used on the Commodore 64, some Apple IIs, and still survives in an altered form as software for the PalmConnect system. GEOS was lauded as a slick, stable operating system, but the lack of software for it developer software did not appear for six months after GEOS’ debut ensured that most PC users never gave it a second thought.



Apple was not happy at all with Windows. Even before the system appeared on the shelves, Apple was threatening Microsoft with lawsuits that alleged patent infringement, intellectual theft, what have you. In an ingenious move, Microsoft signed a licensing agreement with Apple that stated Microsoft would not employ Apple technology in Windows 1.0, but made no such agreement for further versions of Windows. It took a while for Apple to realize that Microsoft had thoroughly skunked them; the realization took longer to hit because of Windows’ dismal failure on the consumer market.

Nevertheless, both Apple and Microsoft forged ahead with their own plans for world domination…er, rather, their plans to expand their niche of the PC market. As always, though, these two were not the only bands marching in the parade. In 1985 Commodore launched its Amiga line of home PCs, and won the hearts of millions of users. The Amiga was the first PC to truly introduce the idea of “multimedia” into PC-dom, although since most users didn’t know what to make of their new multimedia capabilities, they played games on it instead. Great-looking games. Amiga’s advanced sound and video capabilities went along with its sophisticated GUI-driven OS (which also featured preemptive multitasking, shared libraries, messaging, scripting, multiple simultaneous line consoles, a real use for the right mouse button, and other features not found in the Apples and IBMs of the day). To add insult to injury, Amiga featured Apple/IBM interface emulation. Apple or IBM users who preferred their old interface could have Amiga mimic that look instead of its own.

So why didn’t Amiga wipe both Apple and IBM/Microsoft off the PC market? As usual, we have a patchwork of reasons. The best guess is that Amiga made the same mistake as the Tucker passenger auto made… it was too far ahead of its time too fast, and couldn’t take advantage of its own capabilities. The heated competition that existed between Amiga and Atari worked to Microsoft’s advantage, as did Amiga’s spotty ability to keep their dealers and customers happy. Adding to Amiga’s problems were the first machines’ failure to settle on a single GUI (one Amiga user tells me that the early models had different interfaces depending on which program was running). But whatever the reasons, Amiga was one sharp puppy, and deserved a better fate though today Amiga is neither gone nor forgotten; a new OS called “The Digital Environment” is being touted as the next step in GUI-driven operating systems. We may hear from Amiga again before all is said and done.

Yet another mid-80s contender in the GUI wars was the Atari ST. Atari, much better known for their video games, produced a PC that featured the GEM OS. Like the Amiga, the ST couldn’t compete with the big boys, nor could it compete with Amiga for gamers, but its sophisticated sound processing capabilities earned it a niche with audio editors and musicians.

Sometime around the debut of the Amiga, the first UNIX GUI appeared as well. Many UNIX heads had long sneered at the simple-minded, overly convoluted operating systems and playtoy PCs that were populating the consumer market. But some UNIX users decided to see if they could overlay a GUI on UNIX in the same fashion as Microsoft overlaid Windows atop DOS, and thus X was born. X (sometimes called “X Windows,” and sometimes incorrectly called “X for Windows”) was born at MIT, fathered by a Stanford University windowing system called W and mothered by Sun’s “SunView” environment. X became the main graphics system for most RISC-based UNIX operating systems. While X was a well-written and easily handled OS shell, it never settled on a particular “look and feel,” and as a result at least three different interfaces, or “windows managers,” floated around for it.

This isn’t the main reason why X never caught on much outside the UNIX community, but it’s certainly one reason. X is still a viable GUI shell, and has a relatively small but vocal following. X is making something of a resurgence among UNIX users: the battle between “windows managers” has shaken itself out, the interfaces are more polished and easier to use, and it’s very useful for high-end computer graphics production. X is also the underlying GUI for most Linux graphical interfaces. The “several GUIs” are more correctly known as the various *nix windows managers, and users can run desktop environments such as Gnome or KDE for additional functionality. X-driven interfaces are popping up in such non-PC devices as TiVo, Web pads, and PDAs, and one X user speculates that as these devices become more widespread, we may see X actually being used more than either Apple or Windows GUIs.

It’s also worth mentioning that Three Rivers Computing Company manufactured a graphics workstation called PERQ in 1981 that incorporated a UNIX-based GUI, and was marketed in the U.K. by ICL. This GUI actually predates all of the above, including VisiOn, but as far as I know, it was never made available for personal computers.

Completists will point out that IBM’s MVS (Multiple Virtual Systems) mainframe system included an optional program known as ISPF (Interactive Structured Programming Facility) that allowed split-screen windows to be supported on terminal displays. Considering that ISPF was created in the late 1970s, it’s one of the first “windows-like” systems that became available. Of course, it’s highly unlikely that home PC users would have ever seen this.

It’s worth noting that many, many graphically-driven applications were released independently of any of the abovementioned systems. One of the very first was Bill Budge’s Pinball Construction System, which appeared in 1985 for the Atari and quickly became famous among both gamers and programmers for its sophisticated ability to manipulate objects using click-and-drag. Programs like PCS made their mark on the operating systems that followed them into the PC marketplace.

““I had an enormous reservoir of goodwill towards Microsoft because it and it alone unlike Xerox, Apple, Amiga and many others who tried before it was the one that finally delivered a usable graphical interface on ubiquitous, inexpensive hardware. Microsoft often wasn’t the first, and its software wasn’t often the best, but it was inarguably the one that delivered on the early promise of personal computing in a way no other software maker did. Microsoft more than any other company opened up computing for ordinary people. I loved Microsoft for that.” ”

Fred Langa







Back to the big guys. December 1987 saw the release of Windows 2.0, to the consternation of Apple but the yawns of the consumer. Although Win 2.0 looked more like the Mac than ever, with icons representing files and programs, cascading windows, and the like, Mac users weren’t leaving the Apple flocks to buy the IBM/Windows machines (especially since the hunky Mac II’s were all over the shelves). Apple hemmed and hawwed a few more months, and finally sicced the long-threatened lawsuit on Microsoft, claiming that Windows stole the Macintosh’s “look and feel.” 1988 saw the market all but ignore Apple’s GS/OS for the Apple IIGS, but the Mac continued to dominate the market. By 1989, the general buzz was that Windows was a mammoth flop. Microsoft continued to work with IBM in developing the fully graphical OS system, but kept pounding on Windows, hoping to eventually get one version right. As the cliche says, “even a blind squirrel finds an acorn every now and then.” It was about to be acorn time in Redmond.

Windows in the 90’s

“"I think Windows 3.0 will get a lot of attention; people will check it out, and before long they’ll all drift back to raw DOS. Once in a while they’ll boot Windows for some specific purpose, but many will put it in the closet with the Commodore 64." ”



“– John Dvorak, 1990”

A great, orchestrated hullabaloo welcomed Windows 3.0 to the market in May 1990. Steve Ballmer led the chant of “Windows! Windows! Windows!” at Microsoft HQ in Redmond, Washington; the great beast that was, and is, Microsoft’s marketing machine took care of the rest of the world. Microsoft unveiled dozens of applications written specifically for Windows at the same time it released the new version of Windows, which now featured the OS/2 style “sculpted buttons” credit to icon designer Susan Kare for the much more appealing button styles; Kare also worked on the Mac more color support, real multitasking, and a much-improved program manager, among other things. These new features and fresh software releases finally got the market’s attention. Impelled by the popularity of its own Win-compatible versions of Word and Excel, and numerous other 3rd party apps, Microsoft sold over 3 million copies of Win 3.0 in its first year of release, and Apple was feeling the chill. Win 3.1 (April ’92) added scalable TrueType font support and better multimedia capabilities, and Apple was on the run. For the first time, Windows-equipped PCs were outselling the Macs. Windows 3.1.1, called "Windows for Workgroups," did relatively well in the corporate world, as well as bequeathing much of its design to later versions of Windows.

1993 saw the first version of Windows NT (New Technology), which abandoned the crash-prone kernel of its predecessors for a new, much more stable kernel. NT started out as a new version of IBM’s OS/2 system, part of Microsoft’s and IBM’s joint venturing. It was originally known as OS/2 3.0 or OS/NT, but during early development, Microsoft and IBM split, and Microsoft walked away with the program, combining IBM’s OS concepts with their own, rewriting the code, and eventually releasing it under the Windows umbrella. Problem was, Microsoft marketers couldn’t decide what to do with it. Obviously it was more useful for business usage, so, being Microsoft, they tried to sell it to anyone but business users. It quickly became known as “Windows No Thanks”, and catty observers decided that Microsoft had shot itself in the foot. Not so fast… it turns out that a lot of people who were using Unix had decided to give NT a go, and liked what they saw. By early 1995, many European corporations had shifted over to version 3.5, the second “official” version of NT. By mid-1995, NT had established itself among technical and business users, and by the time the “bulletproof” (read: virtually crashproof) version 3.51 was available, Win NT was firmly entrenched. NT worked very well in the corporate and office environment, but less so in the home: it wasn’t engineered to run older DOS-based software, which made it the wrong choice for gamers and folks with less-than-cutting edge software.

The lawsuit wasn’t going well, either. Apple’s strategy was to prove that Windows had illegally copied the “look and feel” of the Mac GUI, but that strategy sprang some significant leaks after the Microsoft lawyers pointed out that both systems “borrowed” liberally from the original Xerox concepts. To Jobs’ accusation of theft, Gates made the damning retort, “No, Steve, I think it’s more like we both have a rich neighbor named Xerox, and you broke in to steal the TV set, and you found out I’d been there first, and you said, ‘Hey, that’s no fair! I wanted to steal the TV set!'” The fact that Windows’ interface design looked, if anything, more like the old Alto GUI than the Mac designs didn’t help Apple’s case. Suddenly Microsoft was the buzz, and Apple seemed to be yesterday’s news.

Apple’s Torrid Ride

The long-running lawsuit was finally settled in Microsoft’s favor in June 1993, and the doomsayers thought that Apple’s fate was sealed. Wozniak and Jobs were long gone. The company was in financial trouble (though the reports of imminent bankruptcy were wrong). Their long-anticipated “Newton” personal data assistant was a bust. Management seemed more interested in fighting among themselves than righting the company. Orders went unfilled due to production problems. Some predicted that Apple would fade into complete irrelevance when, in August 1995, Microsoft unveiled its groundbreaking Windows 95 OS. Win 95, the first operating system to take advantage of Intel’s powerful 32-bit chips, and a near-clone of the Mac GUI, seemed to be the irresistible force destined to finally run Apple out of business once and for all. Apple tried to recoup by pushing its “Performa” line of low-end PCs (basically older, repackaged Macs) over its higher-end “PowerPC” line, and failed miserably Performas sat gathering dust in the Apple warehouses, while buyers found it difficult, if not impossible, to get hold of the PowerPCs they wanted. More and more first-time users chose Windows-driven PCs over Apples, in large part because the fierce competition between the Windows-clone manufacturers were keeping the Windows machines’ prices relatively competitive, while Apple’s relentless refusal to let others manufacture clones (only partially loosened in 1994 and yanked in 1999), its embarrassing quality-control problems, and its comparatively high sticker prices, soured many buyers on the Apple name. Microsoft’s decision to slap a modified version of the Win 95 interface onto Win NT 4.0 boosted the NT platform’s popularity, and detracted that much more from the Apple market share.

In October 1994, IBM tried unsuccessfully to yank some of Microsoft’s market share with the third version of its own operating system, OS/2 Warp. OS/2 was originally a Microsoft/IBM joint venture, but Warp was IBM’s own offering, and featured a Windows-like GUI. It managed to stay afloat and win some loyalty, but it never really became anything more than a weak alternative for IBM-machine users who didn’t want to use Windows. And while we’re on the topic of weak alternatives, now’s the time to give a sardonic nod to Microsoft Bob, the “next-generation” GUI that rode atop of Windows and “assisted” novice users with a happy, chatty, virtual assistant named Bob. Bob tanked hard, and became a figure of fun among the computer cognoscenti. His only legacy was the equally annoying Office Assistant, the “dancing paper clip” that currently plagues Microsoft Office.

“"Software is getting to be embarrassing." ”

“- Alan Kay”

Meanwhile, Apple wasn’t cored just yet. Steve Jobs had founded a company called NeXT, and while the NeXT computer failed in the marketplace, the sleek and sophisticated NeXT OS (an OS built on the UNIX MACH kernel and featuring a fabulous GUI) was quite attractive to Apple. Apple’s Mac operating system was showing its gray hairs, and Apple wanted something new and glitzy to throw up against Microsoft’s monolithic offerings. In December 1996, Apple bought out NeXT, thus acquiring NeXTStep, elements of which would turn up in the new Mac OS, Rhapsody. Jobs came along for the ride, and it wasn’t long before he was again at the helm of the company he had founded.

Apple fans weren’t happy with the return of their hero for long. In August 1997, Jobs announced a formal liaison with Microsoft, to the dismay of the rank and file. Microsoft bought $150 million of Apple stock, and both companies agreed to once and for all end the GUI dispute. Many disgruntled Apple users, already disturbed by Apple’s continuing inability to build enough machines to fill orders, along with Apple’s failure to license the Apple system to clone manufacturers, leapt off the Apple bandwagon once and for all; it’s no coincidence that the new surge of interest in “alternative” OS’s such as Be and Linux began about the same time as Jobs’ perceived “sellout” of Apple to Microsoft. Certainly the ex-Apple minions fleeing their former home didn’t start the Linux/Be/etc. buzz, but they made their contribution, especially when Apple yanked its support from the Be platform, originally designed to run on the PowerPC.

Note, though, that most Appleniks didn’t dive overboard solely because of the “sellout” of Apple to Microsoft. The more knowledgeable in the Apple community understood that Microsoft’s commitment meant more stability for Apple, as well as continued development of MS Office for the Mac. Microsoft’s $150 million purchase was a small fraction of the Apple stock base, and Microsoft’s shares were strictly non-voting. According to some stories, Apple fans had a reaction similar to a church congregation whose preacher announced that Beelzebub was being named as head deacon. But the real reasons why so many Apple fans were disaffected are much more complex.

Apple gained ground with the successful release of the Mac OS 8 “Platinum,” a popular and stable OS. Unfortunately, some of that ground was lost in the confusion that followed OS 8. The original idea was to give Apple users a “next-generation” system to be called Copland. Instead of releasing it in mid-1996, Apple squelched the project in favor of working with the newly acquired NeXT OS. Apple then announced a new system under development, Rhapsody, which would combine elements of the NeXT OS on top of a UNIX core. The aforementioned OS 8 appeared in July 1997, and featured some of the more touted elements from Copland. Rhapsody also failed to materialize, and eventually transmogrified into the OS X project, announced in May 1998. An upgrade to the “Platinum” system, OS 9, was released in October 1999. The next-generation OS X was finally released for the PC in March 2001, and many of the features promised for Rhapsody appeared in this system.

In 1998 Apple reinvented the PC market with the now-ubiquitous iMac. The iMac, withas its cutesy color scheme and user-friendly design, won the hearts of many users and the scorn of many reviewers. “Serious” Apple users gravitated to the ever-more powerful PowerMac line, but millions chose to perch the cute little iMacs on their desks. Along with the modestly successful PowerMac and PowerBook laptop/notebook PCs, the iMac gave Apple the recharge it so badly needed. The iMac comes with either OS 9 or OS X installed. The trend of other folks copying Apple continued, with Daewoo’s eMachines drawing Apple’s fire for looking and acting like the iMac. This time Apple prevailed.

Today…

In Redmond, Microsoft barrels along. Its hyped-to-the-max release of Windows 98, launched in June 1998, failed to live up to expectations. Most users, who were led to expect a revolutionary new product, were annoyed when Win 98 proved more of an upgrade than a groundbreaking new product. Feelings are much the same about Windows 2000, or “Win 2K,” the latest and last iteration of the NT line, and even more so about Windows Millennium, which after all the ballyhoo settled, turned out to be little more than a minor upgrade to Win 98. Microsoft is betting its OS fortunes on its integration of the 9x and NT lines in its upcoming Windows XP system. Microsoft hasn’t fared so well in its latest court outing, with the Department of Justice doing what Apple was unable to do, obtaining a ruling that Microsoft was a monopoly and was acting against the best interests of the market and the competition (though as I write this, the DOJ has abandoned its attempts to break up Microsoft). Apple continues to push their latest iteration of the Mac OS, OS X, and promises a new version, 10.1, by the time you read this. Both corporations are poised to continue their dominance of the PC market for the foreseeable future, though UNIX fans remain firm and Linux is steadily gaining ground.

And the future of the GUI? Well, considering that well over 90% of the world’s users employ one GUI-faced OS or another, considering that new GUI-driven OS’s such as Be seem to be catching on, and considering that this season’s darling, Linux, is usually used with any of several GUI’s from Caldera, Corel, and Red Hat, among others, the future for the GUI seems secure. Comrade Gates and others have proposed a much more “involved” interface, with voice recognition, touch screens, retinal and fingerprint scans for security, holographic representations, and virtual “avatars” that interact with the user much more directly than, say, that damned MS Office paper clip. Ugh would be pleased. I’m not sure what Glug would think.

Note: I am indebted to the many people who responded with commentary, corrections, and criticism of the original version of this article. In particular, Jef Raskin was of enormous assistance through the revision process; I appreciate both his cooperation and his patience. The many respondents on the Slashdot message boards were also very helpful, as were the dozens of people who took the time to e-mail me with their own commentary and enlightenment. Thanks to one and all.

MT, September 7, 2001



http://www.sitepoint.com/real-history-gui/

Την μήνιν και τη μήνυση δύο Αμερικανών πολιτών, κατοίκων Mαϊάμι, αντιμετωπίζει η Apple. Η αιτία, σύμφωνα με τους μηνυτές είναι η μη ενημέρωση των χρηστών σχετικά με τον διαθέσιμο αποθηκευτικό χώρο που καταλαμβάνει το λειτουργικό σύστημα σε iPhone και iPad.

Η μήνυση κατατέθηκε σε δικαστήριο της Καλιφόρνια και σύμφωνα με τους Paul Orshan και Christopher Endara αφορά το γεγονός ότι το iOS 8 αφήνει στις συσκευές πολύ λιγότερο διαθέσιμο αποθηκευτικό χώρο από αυτόν που ισχυρίζεται η εταιρεία ότι παραμένει, όταν το λειτουργικό εγκατασταθεί σε αυτές.

Αποτέλεσμα του παραπάνω είναι ότι οι χρήστες δεν έχουν την δυνατότητα να αποθηκεύσουν το δικό του περιεχόμενο στο βαθμό που θα ήθελαν.

Οι ενάγοντες αναφέρουν μάλιστα ότι το iOS 8 μπορεί να δεσμεύσει μέχρι και το 23.1% του διαθέσιμου χώρου στις συσκευές της Apple, ενώ η αναβάθμιση από iOS 7 σε 8 μπορεί να προκαλέσει απώλεια έως και 1,3 GB μνήμης, σύμφωνα πάντα με την μήνυση.

Ο καταλειφθείς από το iOS 8 αποθηκευτικός χώρος, συνεχίζει το περιεχόμενο της μήνυσης, εξαναγκάζει τους χρήστες στο να αποκτήσουν συνδρομή στην υπηρεσία online αποθήκευσης δεδομένων iCloud.

Οι Orshan και Endara ζητούν αποζημίωση εκατομμυρίων δολαρίων από την Apple, για όλους όσοι έχουν υποστεί το εν λόγω πρόβλημα του ανεπαρκούς υπολειπόμενου αποθηκευτικού χώρου. 'Οπως είναι λογικό ο ισχυρισμός των δύο Αμερικανών αφορά περισσότερο τους κατόχους των iPhone χωρητικότητας 16GB όπως επίσης και εκείνους που διαθέτουν τα iPad Air ή κάποιο iPad mini της μικρότερης διαθέσιμης χωρητικότητας των 16GB. Μέχρι στιγμής η Apple δεν έχει τοποθετηθεί στο συγκεκριμένο ζήτημα.

Η αλήθεια είναι ότι τόσο η Apple όσο και η Google, έδωσαν αρκετές αφορμές στους χρήστες για να παραπονεθούν, καθώς η έλευση των iOS 8 και Android 5.0 στα τέλη του 2014 συνοδεύτηκε από ουκ ολίγα προβλήματα. H ειρωνεία της υπόθεσης ήταν μάλιστα ότι στο 8.0.2 update του iOS ένα bug προκάλεσε σε αρκετούς χρήστες την μόνιμη απώλεια των αποθηκευμένων αρχείων τους στο iCloud, κάτι που διορθώθηκε σε επόμενη αναβάθμιση από την εταιρεία.

Το φαινόμενο πάντως του μειωμένου αποθηκευτικού χώρου δεν απασχολεί μία εταιρεία ή συσκευή, ούτε πρόκειται για κάτι καινούριο, καθώς και η Samsung είχε γίνει αποδέκτης σωρείας παραπόνων για τον μικρό υπολειπόμενο αποθηκευτικό χώρο στα Galaxy S4 και S4 mini, εξαιτίας του μεγάλου όγκου δεδομένων που καταλάμβαναν στις συσκευές οι προεγκατεστημένες εφαρμογές της εταιρείας.

Ο CEO της Apple, Tim Cook "νιώθει βαθιά προσβεβλημένος" από τους νέους ισχυρισμούς για κακές εργασιακές συνθήκες στα εργοστάσια ενός από τους μεγαλύτερους προμηθευτές της εταιρείας, που βρίσκεται λίγο έξω από την Σαγκάη.

Όπως είναι γνωστό η Apple έχει αναθέσει το έργο της κατασκευής και της συναρμολόγησης των προϊόντων της σε Κινέζικα εργοστάσια -όπως των Pegatron και Hon Hai Precision. Οι εταιρείες που τα διοικούν έχουν εκτεθεί στο παρελθόν για τον ίδιο λόγο, αλλά παρόλο που η Apple έχει κάνει κινήσεις -και προληπτικά- για να βελτιωθεί η κατάσταση, μία νέα έρευνα της εκπομπής Panorama του BBC αποκαλύπτει ότι τα προβλήματα παραμένουν.

Δημοσιογράφοι που -κρύβοντας την ταυτότητά τους- εντάχθηκαν στο εργατικό δυναμικό της Pegatron ανακάλυψαν ότι οι εργάτες πολύ συχνά κοιμόντουσαν από εξάντληση στις γραμμές παραγωγής. Επειδή οι δωδεκάωρες βάρδιες συνηθίζονται, οι εργαζόμενοι μετρούν έως και 60 ώρες στο πόδι στη γραμμή παραγωγής κάθε εβδομάδα, αρκετά πάνω από το όριο των 44 ωρών που έχει θέσει η Κίνα, αλλά πιθανότατα νόμιμο από την στιγμή που η χώρα επιτρέπει την υπερωριακή εργασία (έως και 36 ώρες κάθε μήνα).

Το ρεπορτάζ του BBC δείχνει επίσης ότι δεν τηρούνται κανόνες ασφαλείας, ότι ορισμένοι εργάτες δεν φορούσαν την ειδική ταυτότητα, ότι προσλαμβάνονται ανήλικοι εργάτες και πως δεν προσλαμβάνονταν όσοι δεν μπορούν να εργάζονται σε νυχτερινή βάρδιες ή σε βάρδιες που απαιτούν πολύωρη ορθοστασία. Πριν την πρόσληψη και κατά την διάρκεια εξετάσεων που αφορούσαν στην υγεία και στην ασφάλεια, οι εξεταστές βοηθούσαν τους υποψήφιους δίνοντας τις σωστές απαντήσεις κ.ά.

Το ζήτημα με τις απάνθρωπες συνθήκες εργασίας ήρθε στο φως της δημοσιότητας το 2010, όταν οι αυτοκτονίες στα εργοστάσια της Hon Hai Precision (Foxconn) έφτασαν τις 14 σε αριθμό. Τότε, η Apple πήρε μέτρα ώστε να μην επαναληφθεί κάτι τέτοιο, αλλά φαίνεται πως δεν τηρούνται οι κανονισμοί και οδηγίες που έχει θέσει.

Όπως ήταν αναμενόμενο, η Apple κινήθηκε γρήγορα για να απαντήσει και να μειώσει την αξία της έρευνας του BBC. Σε ένα εσωτερικό γράμμα προς τους υπαλλήλους της εταιρείας στην Μ. Βρετανία, ο Jeff Williams, Senior Vice President of Operations της Apple γράφει ότι "Ο Tim Cook και εγώ είμαστε βαθιά προσβεβλημένοι" από τους ισχυρισμούς του BBC.

"Καμία άλλη εταιρεία δεν κάνει τόσα πολλά όσα κάνει η Apple για να εξασφαλιστούν δίκαιες και ασφαλείς εργασιακές συνθήκες" και θυμίζει ότι έχει δικούς της μηχανικούς και υπεύθυνους στα εργοστάσια αυτά που διαρκώς επιβλέπουν την παραγωγή και πως ενθαρρύνονται να αναφέρουν προβλήματα που αφορούν σε θέματα ασφαλείας ή εργασιακής κακομεταχείρισης. Επίσης διευκρίνησε ότι στα εργοστάσια της Pegatron ο μέσος όρος κυμαίνεται κοντά στις 55-56 ώρες, την ώρα που το όριο βρίσκεται στις 60 ώρες την εβδομάδα.

Αλλά σύμφωνα με όσα δείχνει το ρεπορτάζ του BBC, οι προμηθευτές της Apple πολλές φορές παραβιάζουν τους κανονισμούς, και σύμφωνα με το ρεπορτάζ με την ανοχή της αμερικάνικης εταιρείας.

Το γράμμα προς τους υπαλλήλους της εταιρείας στην Μ. Βρετανία:

UK Team,

As you know, Apple is dedicated to the advancement of human rights and equality around the world. We are honest about the challenges we face and we work hard to make sure that people who make our products are treated with the dignity and respect they deserve.

Last night, the BBC's Panorama program called those values into question. Like many of you, Tim and I were deeply offended by the suggestion that Apple would break a promise to the workers in our supply chain or mislead our customers in any way.

I'd like to give you facts and perspective, all of which we shared with the BBC in advance, but were clearly missing from their program.

Panorama showed some of the shocking conditions around tin mining in Indonesia. Apple has publicly stated that tin from Indonesia ends up in our products, and some of that tin likely comes from illegal mines. Here are the facts:

Tens of thousands of artisanal miners are selling tin through many middlemen to the smelters who supply to component suppliers who sell to the world. The government is not addressing the issue, and there is widespread corruption in the undeveloped supply chain. Our team visited the same parts of Indonesia visited by the BBC, and of course we are appalled by what's going on there.

Apple has two choices: We could make sure all of our suppliers buy tin from smelters outside of Indonesia, which would probably be the easiest thing for us to do and would certainly shield us from criticism. But it would be the lazy and cowardly path, because it would do nothing to improve the situation for Indonesian workers or the environment since Apple consumes a tiny fraction of the tin mined there. We chose the second path, which is to stay engaged and try to drive a collective solution.

We spearheaded the creation of an Indonesian Tin Working Group with other technology companies. Apple is pushing to find and implement a system that holds smelters accountable so we can influence artisanal mining in Indonesia. It could be an approach such as "bagging and tagging" legally mined material, which has been successful over time in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We are looking to drive similar results in Indonesia, which is the right thing to do.

Panorama also made claims about our commitment to working conditions in our factories. We know of no other company doing as much as Apple does to ensure fair and safe working conditions, to discover and investigate problems, to fix and follow through when issues arise, and to provide transparency into the operations of our suppliers.

I want you to know that more than 1400 of your Apple coworkers are stationed in China to manage our manufacturing operations. They are in the factories constantly - talented engineers and managers who are also compassionate people, trained to speak up when they see safety risks or mistreatment. We also have a team of experts dedicated solely to driving compliance with our Supplier Code of Conduct across our vast supply chain.

In 2014 alone, our Supplier Responsibility team completed 630 comprehensive, in-person audits deep into our supply chain. These audits include face-to-face interviews with workers, away from their managers, in their native language. Sometimes critics point to the discovery of problems as evidence that the process isn't working. The reality is that we find violations in every audit we have ever performed, no matter how sophisticated the company we're auditing. We find problems, we drive improvement, and then we raise the bar.

Panorama's report implied that Apple isn't improving working conditions. Let me tell you, nothing could be further from the truth. Here are just a few examples:

Several years ago, the vast majority of workers in our supply chain worked in excess of 60 hours, and 70+ hour workweeks were typical. After years of slow progress and industry excuses, Apple decided to attack the problem by tracking the weekly hours of over one million workers, driving corrective actions with our suppliers and publishing the results on our website monthly - something no other company had ever done. It takes substantial effort, and we have to weed out false reporting, but it's working. This year, our suppliers have achieved an average of 93% compliance with our 60-hour limit. We can still do better.

And we will.


http://www.engadget.com/2014/12/19/apples-tim-cook-deeply-offended-by-fresh-allegations-of-facto/

Αίτημα εξαίρεσης από την DMCA

Ο φόβος για ενδεχόμενη εμπλοκή με τον αμερικανικό νόμο αποτρέπει πολλά δημιουργικά μυαλά από την ανάπτυξη εφαρμογών σε περιβάλλον ελεύθερο, σημειώνει το Ίδρυμα Ηλεκτρονικού Μετώπου.

Στο Γραφείο πνευματικής ιδιοκτησίας των ΗΠΑ απευθύνεται το Ίδρυμα Ηλεκτρονικού Μετώπου σε μια προσπάθεια να εξαιρεθεί το rooting και το jailbreaking από τον νόμο που τα εντάσσει στις απαγορευμένες πρακτικές για την παράκαμψη των μεθόδων που προστατεύουν περιεχόμενο με copyright σε tablet και smartphone. «Ό,τι δεν είναι εγκεκριμένο από τον κατασκευαστή δεν είναι απαραίτητα παράνομο», σημειώνει ο μη κερδοσκοπικός οργανισμός για τα ψηφιακά δικαιώματα.

H νομοθετική πράξη Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) θεσπίστηκε στις ΗΠΑ στις αρχές του 2000 -την εποχή της μεγάλης μάχης δισκογραφικών εταιρειών και του Χόλιγουντ κατά της «πειρατείας»- και απαγορεύει τη διάθεση στο κοινό οποιουδήποτε μέσου, το οποίο αναπτύχθηκε για να παρακάμπτονται οι μέθοδοι που προστατεύουν περιεχόμενο με copyright (και μπορεί να αφορά και σε λογισμικό).

Η προτεινόμενη από το EFF εξαίρεση στον νόμο DMCA για το 2015 αφορά την παράκαμψη των μεθόδων που προστατεύουν το firmware σε smartphone και tablet σε iOS, Android και Windows Phone με σκοπό την εκτέλεση προγραμμάτων που αποκτήθηκαν νόμιμα.

To EFF αναφέρει ενδεικτικά στο αίτημά του προς το αμερικανικό γραφείο πατεντών πως το CyanogenMod, μια ελεύθερη έκδοση του Android είναι εγκαταστημένη σε περισσότερες από 10 εκατομμύρια συσκευές στις ΗΠΑ (έως τον Δεκέμβριο του 2013). Το ίδιο έτος, το Cydia, το εναλλακτικό και «απαγορευμένο» app store, το οποίο προϋποθέτει jailbreak του iOS για να εγκατασταθεί, διέθεσε apps σε 23 εκατομμύρια iPhone και iPad στις ΗΠΑ.

Σχεδόν όλες οι φορητές υπολογιστικές συσκευές στις ΗΠΑ είναι κλειδωμένες έτσι ώστε να αποτρέπουν την εκτέλεση καθ'όλα νόμιμου λογισμικού ή την εγκατάσταση εναλλακτικού λειτουργικού συστήματος, εξηγεί το Ίδρυμα.

Ο bootloader, το λογισμικό που εκτελείται κατά την εκκίνηση της συσκευής, απαιτεί την κρυπτογραφημένη υπογραφή του προ-εγκαταστημένου λειτουργικού για να ξεκινήσει.

Επίσης, το λογισμικό που έρχεται με την συσκευή περιλαμβάνει δικλείδες ασφαλείας που περιορίζουν τι μπορεί να εκτελεστεί από τις εφαρμογές ή δεν επιτρέπει την εκτέλεση λογισμικού τρίτων ολωσδιόλου. Αυτό σημαίνει πως μόνο το λογισμικό που φέρει την κρυπτογραφημένη έγκριση της Apple από το iTunes Store μπορεί να εκτελεστεί, επηρεάζοντας το 42,1% των smartphone στις ΗΠΑ (Ιούνιος 2014) και το 51% των tablet.

Ομοίως, στο Android οι περιορισμοί στην πρόσβαση για τους προγραμματιστές (root access) αποτρέπει την εκτέλεση πολλών λειτουργιών στις συσκευές αυτές, το firmware απαγορεύει την εγκατάσταση εναλλακτικού συστήματος. O μόνος τρόπος για την παράκαμψη των απαγορεύσεων αυτών είναι το jailbreak στην περίπτωση της Apple και το root στο Android.

Γιατί κάνουν root, γιατί κάνουν Jailbreak;

Αναλύοντας τους λόγους για τους οποίους η παράκαμψη των μέσων προστασίας που εμπεριέχονται σε iOS, Android και Windows Phone δεν θα έπρεπε να θεωρείται παράνομη, το EFF αναφέρει κάποιες από τις έννομες χρήσεις:

Το Android μπλοκάρει εφαρμογές που λειτουργούν ως τείχος προστασίας από την διαρροή προσωπικών δεδομένων από άλλες εφαρμογές, καθώς και λογισμικό για την δημιουργία εικονικών ιδιωτικών δικτύων (VPN) που κρυπτογραφούν τα πακέτα δεδομένων που μεταφέρονται. Επίσης, οι χρήστες Android δεν μπορούν να διαγράψουν εφαρμογές που είναι προεγκαταστημένες στο σύστημά τους, αν και σπαταλούν ενέργεια, μειώνουν την διάρκεια ζωής της μπαταρίας ή στέλνουν προσωπικές πληροφορίες σε διαφημιστές.

Οι χρήστες συσκευών της Apple έρχονται αντιμέτωποι με ακόμα περισσότερους περιορισμούς, σημειώνει το EFF. Στο iTunes Store δεν γίνονται δεκτές εφαρμογές που χαρακτηρίζονται «προσβλητικές» ή «όσες σχετίζονται με μαριχουάνα». Επιπλέον, οι χρήστες δεν θα δουν ποτέ εφαρμογές που ανταγωνίζονται ένα προϊόν της Apple ή που δεν έγιναν αποδεκτές στο κατάστημα της Apple για διάφορους λόγους, ενώ δεν έχουν εναλλακτικό app store.

Ακόμα, σημειώνεται πως οι κατασκευαστές συνήθως καθυστερούν να διαθέσουν ενημερώσεις στο λειτουργικό σύστημα αλλά και διορθώσεις για τις κερκόπορτες που ανακαλύπτονται, καθιστώντας τους χρήστες ευάλωτους σε επιθέσεις.

Σε ότι αφορά το jailbreak, το EFF αναφέρει πως η απαιτούμενη αντιγραφή του firmware ή μέρους του θα έπρεπε να θεωρείται σύννομη αφού εξυπηρετεί τον σκοπό της εκτέλεσης λογισμικού τρίτου που αποκτήθηκε νόμιμα. Σημειώνεται δε πως από τότε που το Γραφείο έθεσε ως εξαίρεση στην νομοθετική πράξη DMCA το jailbreak στα smartphone, οι πωλήσεις τους δεν επηρεάστηκαν, αντίθετα αυξήθηκαν με εκθετικό ρυθμό. Η εξαίρεση θα έπρεπε να επεκταθεί σε όλες τις πλατφόρμες και στα tablet, καταλήγει το αίτημα του EFF.

Διαβάστε επίσης για την δράση του Ευρωπαϊκού Ιδρύματος Ελεύθερου Λογισμικού με τον χαρακτηριστικό τίτλο «Ελευθερώστε το Android σας» ή για το Spark, ένα tablet με χαρακτήρα ελεύθερο. Μπορείτε επίσης να διαβάσετε για το πάθος με το οποίο επιδίδονται σε επιχειρήσεις απόδρασης από τα δεσμά της Apple οι ειδήμονες στο jailbreak.

Την στιγμή που το Ίδρυμα Ηλεκτρονικού Μετώπου επιχειρεί να αφαιρέσει την ρετσινιά από το root στο Android και το jailbreak στο iOS, ένας Κινέζος με όνομα xyq058775 έχει γίνει διάσημος στην κοινότητα του Reddit αφού δημοσίευσε την μέθοδο που ακολούθησε για να εγκαταστήσει τα Microsoft Windows 98 σε ένα Apple iPhone 6 Plus.

O χρήστης χρησιμοποίησε το iDOS, έναν emulator του DOS για iOS που επιτρέπει την εκτέλεση παιχνιδιών για το λειτουργικό σύστημα από την γραμμή εντολών του παρελθόντος και δεν χρειάστηκε να κάνει jailbreak στην συσκευή της Apple.

O προγραμματιστής που έφτιαξε το iDOS, o Li Chaoji, έχει επίσης διαθέσει επί πληρωμή στο Google Play έναν emulator που μετατρέπει σε υπολογιστή 486 συσκευές με Android, επιτρέποντας την εκτέλεση εφαρμογών για PC από το μακρινό παρελθόν στο σύγχρονο υπολογιστή τσέπης, το smartphone.

Apple CEO Tim Cook tells Investors Who Care More About Return on Investment than Climate Change: Your Money is No Longer Welcome.

As Board Member Al Gore Cheers the Tech Giant’s Dedication to Environmental Activism, Investors Left to Wonder Just How Much Shareholder Value is Being Destroyed in Efforts to Combat “Climate Change”.

Free-Market Activist Presents Shareholder Resolution to Computer Giant Apple Calling for Consumer Transparency on Environmental Issues; Company Balks.

Cupertino, CA / Washington, D.C. – At today’s annual meeting of Apple shareholders in Cupertino, California, Apple CEO Tim Cook informed investors that are primarily concerned with making reasonable economic returns that their money is no longer welcome.

The message came in response to the National Center for Public Policy Research’s shareholder resolution asking the tech giant to be transparent about its environmental activism and a question from the National Center about the company’s environmental initiatives.

“Mr. Cook made it very clear to me that if I, or any other investor, was more concerned with return on investment than reducing carbon dioxide emissions, my investment is no longer welcome at Apple,” said Justin Danhof, Esq., director of the National Center’s Free Enterprise Project.

Danhof also asked Apple CEO Tim Cook about the company’s green energy pursuits. Danhof asked whether the company’s environmental investments increased or decreased the company’s bottom line. After initially suggesting that the investments make economic sense, Cook said the company would pursue environmental goals even if there was no economic point at all to the venture. Danhof further asked if the company’s projects would continue to make sense if the federal government stopped heavily subsidizing alternative energy. Cook completely ignored the inquiry and became visibly agitated.

Danhof went on to ask if Cook was willing to amend Apple’s corporate documents to indicate that the company would not pursue environmental initiatives that have some sort of reasonable return on investment – similar to the concession the National Center recently received from General Electric. This question was greeted by boos and hisses from the Al gore contingency in the room.

“Here’s the bottom line: Apple is as obsessed with the theory of so-called climate change as its board member Al Gore is,” said Danhof. “The company’s CEO fervently wants investors who care more about return on investments than reducing CO2 emissions to no longer invest in Apple. Maybe they should take him up on that advice.”

“Although the National Center’s proposal did not receive the required votes to pass, millions of Apple shareholders now know that the company is involved with organizations that don’t appear to have the best interest of Apple’s investors in mind,” said Danhof. “Too often investors look at short-term returns and are unaware of corporate policy decisions that may affect long-term financial prospects. After today’s meeting, investors can be certain that Apple is wasting untold amounts of shareholder money to combat so-called climate change. The only remaining question is: how much?”

The National Center’s shareholder resolution noted that “[s]ome trade associations and business organizations have expanded beyond the promotion of traditional business goals and are lobbying business executives to pursue objectives with primarily social benefits. This may affect Company profitability and shareholder value. The Company’s involvement and acquiescence in these endeavors lacks transparency, and publicly-available information about the Company’s trade association memberships and related activities is minimal. An annual report to shareholders will help protect shareholder value.”

Apple’s full 2014 proxy statement is available here. The National Center’s proposal, “Report on Company Membership and Involvement with Certain Trade Associations and Business Organizations,” appears on page 60.

The National Center filed the resolution, in part, because of Apple’s membership in the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA), one of the country’s largest trade associations. In its 2013 “Retail Sustainability Report,” RILA states: “Companies will often develop individual or industry voluntary programs to reduce the need for government regulations. If a retail company minimizes its waste generation, energy and fuel usage, land-use footprint, and other environmental impacts, and strives to improve the labor conditions of the workers across its product supply chains, it will have a competitive advantage when regulations are developed.”

“This shows that rather than fighting increased government regulation, RILA is cooperating with Washington, D.C.’s stranglehold on American business in a misguided effort to stop so-called climate change,” said Danhof. “That is not an appropriate role for a trade association.”

For even more information on RILA, read “The Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA): A Cartel that Threatens Innovation and Competitiveness,” by National Center Senior Fellow Dr. Bonner Cohen.

“Rather than opting for transparency, Apple opposed the National Center’s resolution,” noted Danhof. “Apple’s actions, from hiring of President Obama’s former head of the Environmental Protection Agency Lisa Jackson, to its investments in supposedly 100 percent renewable data centers, to Cook’s antics at today’s meeting, appear to be geared more towards combating so-called climate change rather than developing new and innovative phones and computers.”

After Danhof presented the proposal, a representative of CalPERS rose to object and stated that climate change should be one of corporate America’s primary concerns, and after she called carbon dioxide emissions a “mortal danger,” Apple board member and former vice president Al Gore turned around and loudly clapped and cheered.

“If Apple wants to follow Al Gore and his chimera of climate change, it does so at its own peril,” said Danhof. “Sustainability and the free market can work in concert, but not if Al Gore is directing corporate behavior.”

“Tim Cook, like every other American, is entitled to his own political views and to be an activist of any legal sort he likes on his own time,” said Amy Ridenour, chairman of the National Center for Public Policy Research. “And if Tim Cook, private citizen, does not care that over 95 percent of all climate models have over-forecast the extent of predicted global warming, and wishes to use those faulty models to lobby for government policies that raise prices, kill jobs and retard economic growth and extended lifespans in the Third World, he has a right to lobby as he likes. But as the CEO of a publicly-held corporation, Tim Cook has a responsibility to, consistent with the law, to make money for his investors. If he’d rather be CEO of the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, he should apply.”

“As in the past, Cook took but a handful of questions from the many shareholders present who were eager to ask a question at the one meeting a year in which shareholder questions are taken,” added Ridenour, “leaving many disappointed. Environmentalism may be a byword at Apple, but transparency surely is not.”

The National Center’s Free Enterprise Project is a leading free-market corporate activist group. In 2013, Free Enterprise Project representatives attended 33 shareholder meetings advancing free-market ideals in the areas of health care, energy, taxes, subsidies, regulations, religious freedom, media bias, gun rights and many more important public policy issues. Today’s Apple meeting was the National Center’s third attendance at a shareholder meeting so far in 2014.

The National Center for Public Policy Research is an Apple shareholder, as are National Center executives.

The National Center for Public Policy Research, founded in 1982, is a non-partisan, free-market, independent conservative think-tank. Ninety-four percent of its support comes from individuals, less than four percent from foundations, and less than two percent from corporations. It receives over 350,000 individual contributions a year from over 96,000 active recent contributors.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/03/02/mind-blowing-apple-ceo-tells-deniers-to-get-out-of-apple-stock/

Apple released OS X Yosemite. By now you should recognize this as a familiar refrain from yours truly, but I'm going to say it anyway: Don't upgrade. Just don't do it. At least not yet.

Yosemite's been in developers' hands since June, when it was announced at Apple's WWDC event in San Francisco, and it's also been in the public's hands — in the form of a public beta version that's been iterated several times since its release this summer.

So I, for one, am hoping for a more stable release than we saw of Mavericks, which took months to sort out after it made its debut last fall.

But I'm not counting on it.

Ever since iOS 8 dropped in September there's been incessant chatter on tech blogs armchair-quarterbacking Apple's internal development processes. I've also seen at least a few blogs suggest that Apple's quality assurance measures have gone downhill; that Apple's no longer focusing on quality. Some have even hauled out the well-worn "This never would have happened with Steve Jobs" trope that's been beaten to death since his passing in 2011.

It's all bullshit.

Apple's QA has been a lot worse. Just ask any of us old Mac vets who lived through the "Classic" Mac OS days. And there were a few stinkers on the OS X road too.

Certainly stuff like iOS 8.0.1 shouldn't have happened - killing your new flagship product with an over the air update was just baffling, and I hope some day to learn the story of just how that got out the door.

But the fact is that iOS and OS X are both complex, intricate systems. And Apple has a pretty aggressive update schedule that brings major new versions of its operating systems each year. Sometimes it takes a bit of time for Apple to shake out the problems.

The problem as I see it is that Apple has now made it trivially easy for many of us to upgrade the second we get a notification, so upgrade we do. Anyone on the bleeding edge of an upgrade who experiences problems is likely to complain about it, and social media makes it simple for us to find like-minded people and band together. Even Apple's own discussion forums sometimes give us a distorted sense of the magnitude of technical problems we have with our Apple products.

Before I wrote I had a career in IT, and it was drilled into me by my bosses that we should never be on the bleeding edge of anything because doing so carries risk, and risk costs us profitability. It was a problem, sometimes, because vendors promised the moon if we'd just agree to upgrade our software or hardware. The temptation is to increase productivity — and therefore profits.

That risk aversion is easy to lose when it's not a question of making money, but just of having the newest thing you can. It's easy when Apple releases the software updates for free, too.

It's especially compelling this year, because many Mac users have iOS devices too, and already have upgraded to iOS 8 or may have purchased a new device that already has iOS 8 installed on it. And iOS 8 and Yosemite sport benefits together — in the form of Apple's "Handoff" technology — that promise an experience greater than the sum of their parts.

But if your Mac is stable and working well enough right now with Mavericks, I'd caution you to consider waiting just a little bit of time before upgrading to Yosemite. You really ought to wait and see where the pitfalls are before you jump.

Some of you are reading this and scoffing. You've been using the public beta and you see no reason to wait. Or you really want or need those Handoff features to work right. Or you mistakenly upgraded to iCloud Drive when you switched to iOS 8 and you want to get access to your iCloud documents again.

Before you start crafting an angry retort scoffing at my suggestion, please understand that my advice is not offered as a one-size-fits-all recommendation to everyone — just to those of you reading this who may not have a compelling reason (or think you know better). For those of you, just hang on a bit and see where the problems lie. Then decide when it's time to make the jump to Yosemite.

Την δύσβατη πορεία που ακολούθησε η δισκογραφική βιομηχανία πριν φτάσει σήμερα στις υπηρεσίες διάθεσης μουσικής με τεχνολογία ροής θα επαναφέρει στην μνήμη μας η δίκη που ξεκινά στις 2 Δεκεμβρίου σε ομοσπονδιακό δικαστήριο των Ηνωμένων Πολιτειών. Στο εδώλιο του κατηγορουμένου για αθέμιτο ανταγωνισμό κάθεται η Apple, με την κατηγορία ότι ζημίωσε τους καταναλωτές επιβάλλοντας ως μονόδρομο για την ακρόαση μουσικής το iPod, σε αυξημένη τιμή.

Συγκεκριμένα, η δίκη που ξεκινά στο Όκλαντ των ΗΠΑ αφορά μαζική μήνυση που υποβλήθηκε εκπροσωπώντας 14 εκατομμύρια καταναλωτές το 2005 με αφορμή μια διαμάχη ανάμεσα στην RealNetworks και την Apple. Οι ενάγοντες ισχυρίζονται πως η Apple χρησιμοποίησε αθέμιτες πρακτικές ανταγωνισμού στην αγορά διάθεσης μουσικής μέσω Διαδικτύου. Κι αυτό καθώς, η Apple απέκλεισε από το λογισμικό της, το iTunes, το Harmony, την εφαρμογή της RealNetworks που επέτρεπε την αναπαραγωγή μουσικής από το δικό της δισκοπωλείο στο iPod.

Το πρώτο iPod κυκλοφόρησε το 2001. Το iTunes Store εγκαινιάστηκε το 2003. Εκείνη την εποχή, οι δισκογραφικές εταιρείες κυνηγούσαν ανηλεώς υπηρεσίες διαμοιρασμού αρχείου μεταξύ ομότιμων δικτύων, όπως το Napster και το Kazaa, όταν ο Στιβ Τζομπς κατόρθωσε να τις πείσει να συνεργαστούν με το δικό του διαδικτυακό κατάστημα θέτοντας το πλούσιο ρεπερτόριό τους υπό την προστασία του δικού της λογισμικού διαχείρισης ψηφιακών πνευματικών δικαιωμάτων. Το επονομαζόμενο FairPlay θα είχε τον έλεγχο της αναπαραγωγής μουσικής και από το iPod.

Την ίδια περίοδο, η RealNetworks διαχειριζόταν το ανταγωνιστικό RealPlayer Music Store, μουσική από το οποίο δεν μπορούσε να αναπαραχθεί στην συσκευή της Apple. Ομοίως, μουσική από το iTunes Store δεν μπορούσε να αναπαραχθεί σε άλλες συσκευές πλην του iPod, όπως το Microsoft Zune ή το δημοφιλές Rio της Diamond Multimedia.

H RealNetworks αντέδρασε με την διάθεση του λογισμικού Harmony, με το οποίο επέλυε το πρόβλημα. Σύντομα όμως, με μια ενημέρωση στο iTunes, η Apple μπλόκαρε την εκτέλεση του Harmony ξανά και ξανά (τον Σεπτέμβριο του 2006 νέα ενημέρωση του iTunes απέκλειε ανανεωμένη έκδοση του Harmony).

Σύμφωνα με την μηνυτήρια αναφορά, η Apple χρέωσε 7,5% περισσότερο το iPod στον τελικό καταναλωτή και 2,5% περισσότερο στους μεταπωλητές, προκαλώντας επιβάρυνση ύψους 352 εκατομμυρίων δολαρίων. Εάν η Apple χάσει την δίκη, οι ζημίες μπορεί να τριπλασιαστούν, ξεπερνώντας το 1 δισεκατομμύριο δολάρια, αναφέρει σχετικό δημοσίευμα στο BusinessWeek.com.

To Associated Press εκτιμά ότι την περίοδο στην οποία αφορά η μήνυση, η Apple πούλησε 150 εκατομμύρια iPod μέσα σε δυόμισι χρόνια με κόστος από 79 έως 349 δολάρια.

Η Apple σταμάτησε το FairPlay το 2009, εντούτοις οι ενάγοντες υποστηρίζουν ότι οι καταναλωτές δικαιούνται αποζημίωση για την ζημία που υπέστησαν από τις τεχνητά αυξημένες τιμές στα iPod που πουλήθηκαν την περίοδο από τις 12 Σεπτεμβρίου 2006 έως τις 31 Μαρτίου 2009.

Οι ενάγοντες θα επιχειρήσουν να υποστηρίξουν ότι η Apple και συγκεκριμένα ο επικεφαλής της, Στίβεν Τζομπς έγινε έξαλλος όταν πληροφορήθηκε την διάθεση του λογισμικού Harmony και για να το αποδείξουν θα προβληθεί βιντεοσκοπημένη κατάθεση του Τζομπς ενώπιον των ενόρκων. Ο Στιβ Τζομπς απεβίωσε τον Οκτώβριο του 2011 από καρκίνο στο πάγκρεας.

Αν και η επιλογή των ενόρκων έγινε πολύ προσεκτικά, η προεδρεύουσα Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers στο Περιφερειακό Δικαστήριο του Όκλαντ προειδοποίησε αμφότερες τις πλευρές πως η επίκληση του ονόματος Στιβ Τζομπς από την μια ή την άλλη πλευρά μπορεί να έχει απροσδόκητες συνέπειες. Οι ενάγοντες μπορεί να τον εμφανίσουν ως έναν «αδίστακτο διευθύνοντα σύμβουλο που έγινε έξαλλος όταν πληροφορήθηκε για το Harmony».

Από την άλλη, οι συνήγοροι της Apple θα επιχειρήσουν να τον παρουσιάσουν ως «οραματιστή» που δεν είχε λόγο να εφαρμόσει αθέμιτες πρακτικές υπό την ασήμαντη απειλή της RealNetworks και θα επικαλεστούν ακόμα και την θανατηφόρα ασθένειά του για να προκαλέσουν το συναίσθημα στους ενόρκους. Εντούτοις, η δικαστής πρότεινε ανακωχή.

[11/29: Update added at the bottom of this post. Also, the author was long YHOO and BABA at the time of writing]

I am a big fan of both Apple and Tim Cook. I have been for a while. I said Cook would do a great job as CEO 6 months before Steve Jobs died and defended his record 2 years ago when people were saying he wasn’t “innovative” enough.

However, I do have a big problem with one choice Cook has made over his tenure as CEO of Apple. It’s not the lack of a bigger screen iPhone sooner or his original choice of head of Apple Retail before Angela Ahrendts. It’s his decision to spend $100 billion and counting of Apple cash on a capital return program.

The program was announced in April 2012. It was the first time since 1995 (before Jobs returned to the company) that Apple had paid a dividend. To date, it’s been estimated that Apple has used more than $100 billion of its cash on dividends and stock buybacks. To me, that’s madness.

Prior to Cook’s decision to start spending cash on dividends and buybacks, Apple was content to let it accumulate on its balance sheet. The company had gone through a near death experience in 1997 and obviously wanted to ensure it had a sufficient cash cushion to continue to fund its operations in case the markets ever turned against it.

By 2012, lots of Wall Street analysts had begun complaining that Apple simply had too much cash sitting idle on its balance sheet and it should either invest it through R&D or M&A or return it to shareholders.

There are generally 3 points of view regarding Cook’s decision to start this capital return program:

(1) Carl Icahn and most other observers affiliated with Wall Street think it was smart and, if anything, hasn’t gone far enough.

(2) Chamath Palihapitiya – a former Facebook (FB) exec who is now a venture investor and a part-owner of the Golden State Warriors basketball team – and most tech people affiliated with Silicon Valley think it was dumb and signals that the company believes it has run out of areas to innovate in.

(3) Apple blogger John Gruber thinks there’s no harm no foul in spending money on the dividends and buybacks and supports not spending money excessively on M&A because part of Apple’s success has been staying focused – “a thousand no’s for every yes.”

I believe the capital return program has been a total waste of Apple’s hard-earned $100 billion. I believe – although this is impossible to prove – that Apple’s stock price would be just as high as it is today (or more likely higher) had they spent that $100 billion on a combination of smart M&A and smart R&D that would have continued to extend Apple’s lead over other Android phone makers.

Had Apple not spent any money on a capital return plan, it would now have over $255 billion in cash on its balance sheet – a quarter of a trillion dollars.

If I had a chance to have a coffee today with Tim Cook and he still had $250 billion (with access to much more zero interest cash through debt which he’s only used to date for funding the capital return plan), I would suggest he do five things before Monday morning:

Buy Tesla (TSLA) for $45 billion (representing a 50% premium over yesterday’s closing price) – and before he complained that that’s too much money, I’d point out that if he’d listened to me on February 20th and bought Tesla, it would have been 16% less that what he has to pay now.

Buy Twitter (TWTR) for $39 billion (representing a 50% premium over yesterday’s closing price) – unfortunately that’s 4x what it would have cost Apple to buy Twitter back in April 2012 when I suggested to just after Facebook (FB) had bought Instagram for $1 billion.

Buy Pinterest for $15 billion (a 50% premium over what the private company is rumored to now be worth, although it might be more now).

Spend $10 billion on better batteries through R&D. To be fair, you’d get some of this already through the Tesla acquisition. But is there anything more frustrating to current iPhone users than poor battery life?

Spend another $10 billion on other materials or features which are going to corner the market on some features that consumers will love yet will be difficult for Android makers to copy. How about $10 billion just to make iCloud work properly?

Altogether, this M&A and R&D spree would cost Apple $119 billion. Their cash levels would be $136 billion today instead of $155 billion. They wouldn’t have much revenue to show for that $119 billion but how much higher would Apple’s market cap be than the $700 billion it is today? If Apple owned Tesla, Twitter and Pinterest? That would be worth at least another $50 – 100 billion in stock value.

It seems like many on Wall Street believe the capital return program is the reason for the renewed vigor in Apple’s stock price which is up 48% this year alone. They say that new kinds of institutional investors plus widow and orphan type retail investors have been attracted to now own Apple stock because of the dividend yield they receive.

However, recall that the capital return program was announced in the Spring of 2012. Apple’s stock price initially dropped in the first few weeks afterwards. It then rushed up through September 2012 to all-time highs before losing half its value. The stock price bottomed out in mid-2013 and only really started taking off this year after a very bullish April earnings report.

Correlation is not causation. It’s not the Apple capital return program that made people want to buy (or sell) the stock. Rather, it’s Apple’s product cycle, margins, and top-line revenue growth.

Two years ago, people worried that Apple was a “hits-based” business relying on new phones each year. It seemed like margins had peaked and Cassandras were shouting that no consumer electronics company – certainly not one without Steve Jobs any more – could keep competitors from eating away at that margin. Samsung seemed ready to ascend to Apple’s throne. Tim Cook seemed to be a care-taker.

Sentiment about Apple the stock didn’t change because they started paying a dividend in my view. Sentiment turned around when Apple kept crushing earnings, people realized that the Apple ecosystem was a lot stickier than first thought, and Eddy Cue said in May that Apple had a product roadmap which was the best he’d seen in the last 25 years.

It’s always been the product which has driven Apple’s stock and always will be.

The day Apple decided to get on the treadmill of paying out money to investors forever through dividends and buybacks is that day they admitted to the world that they can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. A lot of potential innovation inside Apple died that day.

John Gruber – whom I respect immensely, and who humorously referred to me as “Action Jackson” for imploring Apple to “do something” with their cash – defended Cook’s decision to do the capital allocation because (A) he thought it was smart for Apple to adhere to a policy of focus over willy-nilly acquisitions and (B) he believed it would be marginally positive for the stock which helps with employee retention. (I’m going by memory from a Twitter exchange I had with Gruber 9 months ago, but I’m pretty sure that was his reasoning.)

Here’s why I think John Gruber is wrong on this issue. Anti-M&A Apple enthusiasts always say that, because Apple has never done big acquisitions, and Apple has been successful, Apple therefore shouldn’t do acquisitions. This is mixing correlation with causation again though in my view.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with acquisitions. They have to be value-enhancing and help extend the business in a direction it wants to go. If done right, they can be very value-enhancing. Don’t forget: Apple itself wouldn’t exist in its present form had it not been for an acquisition – the 1996 acquisition of NeXT Software for $400 million, returning Steve Jobs to Apple. I’d say that was a good use of $400 million versus if they’d simply paid it out in a dividend.

Even Apple seems to acknowledge this logic of the benefit of big acquisitions with its recent $3 billion buy of Beats to supplement its iTunes business.

In terms of the focus argument, Apple has about 45,000 non-retail employees today which is about the same number as Google (GOOG). If Apple bought Tesla, Twitter, and Pinterest, they’d gain 9,000 additional employees (although surely there’d be some redundancies here – 5800 for Tesla, 3000 for Twitter, 200 for Pinterest). That’s about a 20% increase in headcount. I think a company like Apple can surely handle that and keep its focus. I just don’t think things are so sacrosanct at Apple that they can’t manage these additional people.

Oh and I’m not alone in pushing for Apple to buy Tesla (which would represent 5,800 of the new 6,100 employees Apple would gain through the 3 acquisitions I’m advocating). Chamath is – I think — the guy who originally argued for this deal. John Gruber agreed with my idea of buying Tesla. Jay Yarow of Business Insider also recently extended my original argument. So, we’re all in agreement that this would be a brilliant – and frankly breath-taking – acquisition Cook should make. In some ways, it would very much resemble the NeXT deal and how important Musk could be inside Apple the way Jobs was.

Now, I’ve argued that Apple should make other acquisitions in the past. Some will say here goes “Action Jackson” again. But let’s review what I said.

I argued in the past that Apple should buy Yahoo (YHOO) for $23 billion back when Yahoo’s market cap was $18 billion. Now Yahoo’s market cap is $50 billion. I believed that deal would have helped given Apple some real web services which it still is lacking, plus a great partner in China through owning (what at that time would have been) 40% of Alibaba (BABA).

I also argued that Apple should have bought Facebook for $100 billion back in 2011 when it was being privately valued at $50 billion and critics were screaming that was way too expensive.

Would all of these deals shown a lack of focus?

Apple’s still doing something – who knows what? – with iAd. They’re putting some focus there. If you’re going to do that, why not have just bought Facebook for $100 billion and let Mark Zuckerberg continue to run it (if he would have accepted Cook’s offer). You don’t have to worrying about losing your focus. You’re paying Zuck $100 billion to have focus for you over that asset. (And wouldn’t Google have just hated Apple had they had the moxie to do this?)

Apple’s still focusing on web services and messing around with that area – not impressively. If they’re going to devote some focus there, why not just own Yahoo and have Marissa Mayer run that area for them? Oh and they would have acquired a 40% interest in Alibaba which is today worth $112 billion (pre-tax).

And, while it wasn’t something I argued for at the time, you can understand now what the value to Apple would have been if they’d bought Dropbox for “nine figures” (which is less than $1 billion for those math-challenged) back in 2009. Why did Steve Jobs stubbornly push back from the table and say Dropbox’s price was too high? Every time I interact with iCloud, I curse the day Jobs got cheap and thought Apple was better off staying focused and not buying Dropbox.

So, please don’t lecture me about focus when I criticize the folly of Apple for being too “stand pat.” Apple – and only Apple due to its size and cash balances at the time – could have spent $124 billion on Facebook, Dropbox and Yahoo and today control assets worth $338 billion (just for Facebook’s equity value, Dropbox’s estimated $10 billion in value, and the 40% stake in Alibaba). That means Apple would already be a trillion dollar company today easy.

Apple’s still focusing on iAd and web services today and they’ve still blown $100 billion on dividends and buybacks but they don’t have anything to show for it. Let’s not try and defend these lack of decisions as Tim Cook being focused or a thousand no’s for every yes.

Apple could have a quarter of a trillion dollars today in cash to put to work today. They could become the overnight leader in smart cars by buying Tesla. They could – more importantly – acquire our generation’s single greatest technological leader in Elon Musk and give him carte blanche to paint his canvas. (Somehow, I think Musk could find a better use of $100 billion than handing it over to shareholders.) They could acquire the single most unique and intriguing asset in the social networking world today in Twitter which, despite the recent management criticisms, is only going to be more important to our culture moving forward. They could acquire the single greatest threat to Google search in the last 15 years by buying Pinterest.

Tim Cook could make all this happen before we return to work from Thanksgiving next Monday. He could make Apple – a fundamentally great company – into a remarkably exciting company unlike any other in the world.

He should do this, but I doubt he will.

I doubt he will because he’s married a fickle lover in Wall Street. He’s paid Wall Street $100 billion to date and promised countless more billions in the future. This doesn’t make Apple a better company or promise a brighter future. And it doesn’t raise the stock any higher than it would rise anyway on the hopes of the latest round of new products.

There are times I agree companies should pay out cash to shareholders in dividends or buybacks instead of doing pointless M&A. I’d rather see Yahoo do that right now than spend billions more on another Tumblr and 3 dozen nameless acqui-hire companies.

But Apple can do much better for itself now with its billions rather than continue wasting them on nameless, faceless Wall Street mutual fund managers. No one else can put $100 billion to use on M&A and R&D other than Apple to transform itself for the better.

Only Apple can spend $100 billion wisely.

It’s time for Tim Cook to think different.

Update [11/29]: Comments and tweets are running about 99 to 1 anti-Eric’s argument above. I basically have Jay Yarow (partially) in my corner and some random guy on Twitter and that’s it.

However, I want to add to the argument above based on the reaction so far.

1. I would rather have seen Apple keep $100 billion over the last 2.5 years instead of paying it out to shareholders. Either you agree with me or you shrug your shoulders and say “what’s the big deal?” I think it is a big deal. It’s $100 billion! That’s nothing to shrug your shoulders at. It took Apple as a company a lifetime to be in the fortunate position to have generated that much capital and I think they should have kept it than paid it out. At the least, they should stop this capital return plan and keep everything from here.

I don’t think Apple’s stock price would be any different today with our without the capital payout program. I can’t prove that obviously but, guess what? Neither can those saying it is perfectly correlated to the recent rise in Apple’s stock price.

Apple’s stock initially dropped after they announced their plan in 2012. Wall Street never perfectly prices in what it perhaps it economically should. That’s why – for years – Wall Street didn’t seem to give any credit for the cash Apple was accumulating.

There are lots of companies who do buybacks and dividends and it seems to benefit those companies. But they’re generally not innovative ones. They’re generally at the top of their S-curved growth.

I believe the most important determinant of Apple’s stock price – two years ago and now – is how investors perceive the coming cycle of new Apple products. In my view, that’s what caused the 50% drop in Apple’s price two years ago (on a negative perception of that coming cycle) and it’s what’s caused the recent ramp up this year in the stock (on a positive perception). The dividends and buybacks are correlated with the stock’s rise recently but not the cause – in my view.

2. I think there are many tech-minded people who believe that the day your company starts paying a dividend is the day you say “I can’t think of anything creative to do with the money myself so I’m going to give it back to the shareholders.” Again, it suggests you’re at the top of the S-curve and you’re simply going to milk your profits from here on out.

There are lots of ways Apple could still grow. I think few who argue against that. I’d rather see Apple keep all its cash ready to attack those problems through R&D or M&A.

3. The Focus thing. For me to mention buying Tesla, Twitter, Pinterest, Yahoo, Dropbox, and Facebook in the post, I think it came across that I was arguing to do all those acquisitions and more big ones in the future at the drop of a hat. Any of those deals would have made financial sense but I recognize that cultural fit is important.

Apple might have looked at buying Yahoo 2 years ago. They might have believed it was attractive to own 40% of Alibaba years before folks were talking about it here and the potential ways Alibaba could help them in China, but they still might have decided against buying Yahoo because of the potential headache digesting 13,000 Yahoo employees who had been running on auto-pilot for years.

So, yes, cultural fit is important. And, yes, none of those companies might not have agreed to sell – like Zuckerberg. But Apple is still doing stuff in ads. They are focusing there. Either get in or get out of the pool. Do ads or not. And, if you’re going to do ads, you probably need some help. So acquire someone (else, because they’ve done some alread). You’ve got ample cash unlike any other company in the world so go for it. If you’re going to play around with Ping, go all the way with it.

Of all the potential acquisitions I suggested, I think the most interesting by far is Tesla. If I was Cook, that’s the first one I’d do. If it was the only one he did, I’d be happy.

I still think Twitter and Pinterest could also be huge assets in the future for Apple so I’d also grab them now at lower prices than what they’ll be in 5 years and I’d get to work on integrating them now rather than waiting and having more of an integration issue later.

4. Why did Cook choose to do the dividend and payout? I think that’s worth thinking about. Sure he was getting pressure from David Einhorn and Carl Icahn to do it but I don’t think either of those guys (who I respect) forced Tim to do it. I believe Cook thought Apple had way too much money than it could spend and this was a way to increase the stock price. He seemed to go out of his way when the stock dropped in 2013 to buy more stock to aid the stock price. I think he probably worried that a low stock price would hurt employee morale and retention. So, I think it came from a “it can’t hurt, only help” place for Cook. And, by the way, I think Cook’s a great leader and any one who’s read my stuff for years knows I defended him when others – who really knew nothing – were calling for his head.

However, despite this all coming from a good place, I think Cook simply misjudged what drives Apple’s stock price. It’s the product cycle, period. So, this $100 billion has been wasted and I think it could have been better spent.

5. Apple shouldn’t be doing big acquisitions every year. But they should be thinking “what’s the NeXT acquisition we could do today which would propel our company into a totally new and exciting vector that makes sense?” I think Tesla is it for reasons I’ve argued before.

6. People talk about Apple’s patience, its focus, its culture as things that have led to its success. They worry that doing a big acquisition might hurt Apple’s specialness.

I think it’s obvious Apple has a dominant bias to build vs. buy. That’s fine, but I think those biases – which have made it a very special company – can also sow the seeds of future mistakes. The concern I have with Apple is that it is missing a big transformational acquisition – Tesla for example – because it defaults back to these biases (that’s too big, we don’t do that, a thousand no’s for every yes) and misses a huge opportunity.

7. Maybe Apple’s worried about falling into an anti-trust trap with the government like has happened to Microsoft and Google. Maybe that’s the real reason they’re avoiding big acquisitions today. That’s fair. But I can’t see how a Tesla acquisition would concern antitrust regulators.


http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2014/11/27/apples-100-billion-waste-tim-cooks-single-biggest-mistake-as-ceo/2/

Apple CEO Tim Cook has publicly come out as gay for the first time ever in a heartfelt first-person testimony published at Bloomberg BusinessWeek. “While I have never denied my sexuality,” he wrote, “I haven’t publicly acknowledged it either, until now. So let me be clear: I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.”

Among the ways being gay has affected his life, Cook explained that it’s “provided a window into the challenges that people in other minority groups deal with every day,” as well as making him “more empathetic” and giving him “the skin of a rhinoceros, which comes in handy when you’re the CEO of Apple.”

Back in May, the New York Times wrote how there were no openly gay CEOs at any of the nation’s 1,000 biggest companies. The paper later clarified that none had discussed their sexuality openly, at least, but many were already familiar with Cook’s story. In fact, during a June CNBC segment on the topic, host Simon Hobbs suggested, “I think Tim Cook is fairly open about the fact that he is gay,” which he quickly followed with, “Oh dear, was that an error?”

But it’s no longer an error, and Cook is adamant that though his privacy is important to him, he is coming out because he feels it’s the right thing to do for others: “If hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.” In addition being gay, he’s also still “an engineer, an uncle, a nature lover, a fitness nut, a son of the South, a sports fanatic, and many other things.”

Indeed, studies have shown that being out at work is good for both the well-being and productivity of gay employees and their colleagues. When employees feel safe to come out, they are more likely to advance in their career and stay with the same company. Likewise, working with openly gay people actually improves the productivity of their coworkers, who can more easily build trust without being distracted by the way somebody is hiding their private life.

Though Cook is now the first openly gay CEO at a major corporation, 91 percent of Fortune 500 companies include sexual orientation in their nondiscrimination policies and 67 percent offer same-sex partner benefits to employees.

Cook concluded by noting that he greets framed photos of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy every morning at work and is inspired to do his own part to help others. “We pave the sunlit path toward justice together, brick by brick,” he wrote. “This is my brick.”


http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2014/10/30/3586327/tim-cook-apple-comes-out/

Το ρεπορτάζ μιας οικονομικής εφημερίδας που εκδίδεται στην Ταϊβάν κάνει το γύρο του Διαδικτύου από την Παρασκευή καθώς αναφέρεται στην επικείμενη παρουσίαση αλλά και κυκλοφορία του iPhone 6 4,7'' τον Αύγουστο καθώς και ενός μοντέλου 5,5 ιντσών υψηλότερων προδιαγραφών που θα κυκλοφορήσει τον Σεπτέμβριο.

Το ρεπορτάζ ανήκει στην Economic Daily News και αναφέρεται επίσης, στον όγκο των εξαρτημάτων που εκτιμούν οι εγχώριοι κατασκευαστές ότι θα χρειαστεί να κατασκευάσουν για να καλύψουν τη ζήτηση μιας ολόκληρης χρονιάς από την Apple: 80 εκατομμύρια iPhone 6, από τα οποία η συντριπτική πλειονότητα (80%) θα αφορά στο μοντέλο των 4,7 ιντσών, με το υπόλοιπο να αφορά τις προτιμήσεις στο "phablet" των 5,5 ιντσών με οθόνη 1920x1080/401 ppi από ζαφείρι.

Πάντως, η εκτίμηση για την κυκλοφορία του ευμεγέθους iPhone 6 τον Σεπτέμβριο του 2014 αμφισβητείται και από άλλους τοποθετείται στο 2015. Άλλη εφημερίδα στην Ταϊβάν και συγκεκριμένα η Commercial Times γράφει πως είναι δύσκολη η μαζική του παραγωγή στις εκτιμώμενες ποσότητες λόγω της απαίτησης για το πάχος της μπαταρίας σε ένα τόσο λεπτό σώμα smartphone, όπως το φημολογούμενο iPhone 6 των 5,5 ιντσών, το οποίο ήδη στην Ταϊβάν οι προμηθευτές της Apple αποκαλούν iPhone Air.

Η δίκη μεταξύ Apple και Samsung έχει και μια κρυφή, ως τώρα, χείρα βοηθείας από το Google που διατίθεται να βοηθήσει οικονομικά και όχι την Samsung μόνο αν χρειαστεί.

Όπως αποκαλύπτουν emails που ήρθαν στην επιφάνεια κατά την διάρκεια της νέας δίκης μεταξύ Apple και Samsung, το Google έχει προσφερθεί να καλύψει μέρος των εξόδων από το κόστος της δίκης αλλά και μέρος της οικονομικής ζημιάς που θα πληρώσει η Samsung σε περίπτωση που χάσει την δίκη.

Η συνεργασία και η υποστήριξη της Samsung από το Google είναι μέρος της συμφωνίας του Mobile Application Distribution Agreement που επιτρέπει στην Samsung να χρησιμοποιεί Google apps στα smartphones και tablets που πουλάει (πχ Play Store, Gmail, Google maps) με αντάλλαγμα την επίσημη σφραγίδα Android από το Google.

Πρόσφατα, Samsung και Google υπέγραψαν 10ετή συμφωνία για πατέντες και όχι μόνο με την επίσημη ανακοίνωση να αναφέρει ” [...] global patent cross-license agreement covering a broad range of technologies and business areas. The mutually beneficial agreement covers the two companies’ existing patents as well as those filed over the next 10 years [...] “. Η συμφωνία έγινε γνωστή στον τύπο λίγο πριν από την αρχή της νέας δίκης μεταξύ Apple και Samsung.

I love my Apple products. I’ve used Macs since day one. My desk right now has on it my MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iPad Air, Thunderbolt Display and iPhone. Oh, and an Apple Bluetooth keyboard and Magic Trackpad, of course.

My friends are convinced that I’m incapable of leaving the house without my iPad, and I have to confess that the evidence is on their side. My car has an iPhone dock so I can listen to music and podcasts. If I’m on a plane, train or tube, it’s a near-certainty that I’ll be using my iPad or listening to music on my iPhone - or both.

I love Apple hardware design. Sleek, minimalistic, beautiful. There aren’t that many other really attractive laptops out there, and most of the ones that are have essentially copied Apple’s designs...

I love OS X and iOS. Not everything about them, of course: there are glitches and anoyances, and iOS in particular is showing its age a little with the lack of live data on the homescreen, but both Just Work. Windows 8 is pretty good, but just the other day helping a friend update her CV on her Windows laptop, I was reminded of just how many nice touches I take for granted in OS X.

I love the seamlessness of iCloud. Again, we all know it’s not perfect, but it’s still incredibly impressive that syncing is now something that happens, rather than something I have to do. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I can pick up any of my iDevices, and the same, up-to-the-minute information will be on each.

I also really like Apple as a company. The reason the products are so good is precisely because Apple has strong values around quality, attention to detail and refusal to compromise. I love the fact that Apple concentrates on doing a small number of things very well, and doesn’t do what most companies in its position would do and slap an Apple logo on everything from baseball caps to cars.

I love the fact that Apple supports its technology with real people. Admittedly not everyone lives within easy reach of an Apple Store, but for those who do, anyone can wander in, ask the dumbest question and get individual help, free of charge. Compare that to attempting to get help with a Windows laptop or Android phone, and there is just no comparison.

So why, then, would I feel even a tiny bit embarrassed to be seen using them? Three reasons...

I was in a certain well-known coffee store the other day, and I paused from what I was writing to look around. The first thing I noticed was that almost every single customer was using an electronic device, busily immersed in a smartphone, tablet or laptop. Second, out of around 30 devices in use, I think only three or four of them didn’t have an Apple logo. In central London, at least, it seems the default choice.

Perhaps I’m being snobbish, but I can remember when spotting someone else using a Mac was almost an event. We were the unusual ones, the ones who had given the matter more thought, and were prepared to step out of the mainstream and buy something that was, honestly, at the time, a bit eccentric. People would ask you why.

But hey, I can live with being one of the masses (for a certain demographic value of masses, anyway). The second reason is the fashionista thing.

Apple has a lot of discerning customers. People who are perfectly well aware of the alternatives, know full well how the prices of competitor products compare and have made a choice to pay a premium price for a superior product. The type of people you’d find reading 9to5Mac, in fact.

But even I have to agree with my Apple-ribbing friends that there are those … other type of Apple customers. The sheeples, as they are unkindly dubbed. The type of people who buy Apple because it’s expensive and fashionable, and because they have no clue what else is out there.

Perhaps worse than the fashionista, though, are the third reason: the fanbois.

Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t use the term to describe people who love Apple products. I’m one of those. By fanbois, I mean those who are so utterly fanatical about it that they will scream and shout and stamp their feet if anyone so much as dares to level the slightest hint of criticism at Apple, or to say anything even vaguely complimentary about Windows or Android.

I’d rather not be mistaken for a fashionista (though perhaps my dress sense saves me there). I would most definitely not like to be mistaken for a fanboi. It was in that coffee shop when I realised I might, to the casual observer, have given that impression. The wifi was hopeless, so when I needed to google something, I pushed aside my MacBook Air, and got out my iPad Air to do the search. At which point, with perfect timing, someone called me – on my iPhone. I did feel just a twinge of embarrassment about sitting at a coffee shop table simultaneously using three pieces of Apple technology.

I supposed I should just have been grateful I couldn’t yet be wearing an iWatch...


http://9to5mac.com/2014/02/17/opinion-why-i-love-apple-products-and-am-just-a-tiny-bit-embarrassed-to-be-seen-using-them/

Κατά τη διάρκεια της δίκης μεταξύ Apple και Samsung που βρίσκεται αυτή τη στιγμή σε εξέλιξη στις ΗΠΑ στελέχη της κορεάτικης εταιρείας απεκάλυψαν ότι ο θάνατος του Steve Jobs στις 5 Οκτωβρίου του 2011 μία μέρα μετά την παρουσίαση του iPhone 4S ήταν μια «ευκαιρία» για να επιτεθούν στο iPhone.

«Δυστυχώς ο θάνατος του Steve Jobs έχει δημιουργήσει ένα τεράστιο κύμα κάλυψης στον Τύπο για την ανωτερότητα της Apple και του iPhone», ανέφερε ο τότε αντιπρόεδρος πωλήσεων της Samsung Telecommunications America, Michael Pennington. «Αυτή είναι η καλύτερη ευκαιρία για να επιτεθούμε στο iPhone».

Η επιχειρηματολογία της Samsung έχει να κάνει με την αντίληψη που έχει ένας καταναλωτής για ένα προϊόν που έχει δημιουργηθεί από έναν “καινοτόμο”, “τελειομανή”, “παθιασμένο”, “οραματιστή”, κτλπ. «Ποιος καταναλωτής δεν θα ένιωθε υπέροχα αγοράζοντας μια συσκευή που έχει δημιουργηθεί από έναν τέτοιο άνθρωπο», υπογράμμισε ο Pennington. «Ξέρω ότι αυτή είναι η καλύτερη ευκαιρία για να επιτεθούμε στο iPhone».

Υπάρχει ένα ενδιαφέρον στο ότι μέχρι εκείνο το σημείο η Samsung ήταν διστακτική στο να επιτεθεί απευθείας κατά της Apple και του iPhone γιατί η Apple ήταν πολύ σημαντικός και μεγάλος πελάτης. Μάλιστα, η Samsung ήθελε να αφήσει την Google να κάνει τη «βρόμικη» δουλειά.

Με την προτροπή του Pennington, ωστόσο, δόθηκε το πράσινο φως για διάφορες διαφημιστικές καμπάνιες που κορόιδευαν τόσο το iPhone όσο και τους ίδιους τους καταναλωτές που το επέλεγαν.

Μπορείτε να διαβάσετε όλα τα e-mails που δημοσιοποιήθηκαν στο πλαίσιο της δίκης εδώ.

Amidst rumors of OS X 10.10 gaining a visual overhaul commissioned by Human Interface Chief Jonathan Ive, the Cupertino company is preparing to let go one of the very people that helped create the iOS and OS X interfaces, Greg Christie.

Christie is a veteran at Apple. He has been instrumental in the creation of the iOS operating system (referred to as “iPhone OS” at the time of inception), and he helped shape OS X into what it is today, answering only to Craig Federighi. However, a falling out with Ive has left him with no choice but to resign, according to people who are familiar with the situation.

It isn’t clear if Christie has signed the papers yet, but Apple confirmed the planned departure to the Financial Times. The company refrained from offering details about his resignation, as the Cupertino giant doesn’t comment on rumors and speculation.

If the reported reasons are true, Christie would be the second key Apple executive that leaves, or is forced to leave Apple because of clashing with Jony Ive, the company’s design guru. It’s never too clear who is right and who is wrong in these situations, and since we hardly have any facts, speculation is pretty much all we can hear.

One rumor is that Christie doesn’t agree with Jony Ive’s redesign plans for the OS X 10.10 interface.

“When Ive tasked Apple’s Human Interface team with redesigning iOS 7 to include an entirely new look, Christie and Ive reportedly clashed over design direction, after which Ive is said to have circumvented Christie’s leadership of the team during the new operating system’s development,” according to 9to5mac.

It appears Christie is not a fan of Ive’s work with the flat look and feel of iOS 7, and neither are many users out there. However, it appears that Ive is marching forward with his plans to extend the flatness to the desktop.

While we may never know the full scope of the Ive/Christie fallout, we will catch a glimpse of OS X 10.10 at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, which starts on June 2 and ends on June 6.

The Cupertino computer giant usually hands developer preview builds of its next-gen OS X at WWDC, and this year should be no different. Apple most likely has a preview of iOS 8 planned as well. The mobile software is expected to retain the same flat UI while adding new features.

Likely to arrive in developer-preview form at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference this summer, OS X 10.10, codenamed Syrah, is receiving its final UI touches led by Human Interface chief Jonathan Ive.

A report covering iOS 8 and OS X 10.10 in anticipation of WWDC14 this June (with many more leaks likely on the way) reveals that Apple has ambitious plans with the user interface refresh planned for OS X 10.10. Rather than focusing on features, the new OS “will focus on aesthetics”.

These sources reportedly said that “Apple Senior VP of Design Jony Ive is leading a ‘significant’ design overhaul for OS X, and the new design will be the operating system’s cornerstone new feature (none of the mockups online, like the one above, are a good indicator of what to expect).”

The sources further said that “The new design will not be as stark as iOS 7, but it will include many of the flat elements and white textures instead of re-creations of life-like elements. The end-to-end redesign is said to be a top priority at Apple right now, with the specific details about the changes being sworn to extreme secrecy.”

New features set to make their way into OS X include Siri and support for iOS AirDrop, though it remains to be seen if they will make it into version 10.10, which is the planned update for this year.

The same report holds that “Apple is also working on some lower-cost iMacs and standard MacBook Air/Pro updates,” but these don’t have a definitive launch date set.

As far as iOS 8 is concerned, no new details are provided other than what we already know. Apple has a Healthbook application planned for it and an updated version of Maps. The codename for iOS 8 is Okemo, and there will be a preview of the software offered to developers in June at WWDC.

The Healthbook application “is capable of tracking data for various bloodwork details, heart rate, blood pressure, nutrition, blood sugar, sleep, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, weight, and activity,” which lends credence to rumors about Apple launching a sensor-packed wrist-worn device.

Healthbook will also include an Emergency Card that holds important health information about the user, in case he / her becomes lost or loses consciousness, complete with “contact information, weight, and a list of medication prescriptions.”

Από την εταιρεία Critterism έρχεται μία έρευνα που καταλήγει στο συμπέρασμα ότι η iOS 7.1 είναι η σταθερότερη έκδοση του iOS έως σήμερα, ωστόσο τα ποσοστά που ανακοίνωσε πριν λίγο καιρό, δεν δείχνουν και τόσο ωραία σε σχέση με τα ποσοστά που αποκάλυψε πρόσφατα για το Android.

Η έρευνα προέρχεται από την εταιρεία Critterism, η οποία επεξεργάζεται περισσότερες από 30.000 αιτήσεις το δευτερόλεπτο σε πραγματικό χρόνο από περισσότερους από 1 δισεκατομμύριο χρήστες φορητών συσκευών. Η έρευνα λαμβάνει υπόψη της την πολυπλοκότητα (hardware, έκδοση OS και πάροχος κινητής τηλεφωνίας), την απόκριση κάθε εφαρμογής και το χρόνο χρήσης κάθε εφαρμογής. Σύμφωνα με την έρευνα, το iOS 6 «κρασάρει» σε ποσοστό 2.5% του χρόνου χρήσης, με το iOS 7 να «κρασάρει» σε ποσοστό 2.1% και το iOS 7.1 σε ποσοστό 1.6%.

Σύμφωνα πάντως με την έρευνα της εταιρείας, το Android αποδεικνύεται σταθερότερο, με το Gingerbread (2.3) να «κρασάρει σε ποσοστό 1.7% και όλες οι εκδόσεις από το Android 4.0 και μετά να «κρασάρουν» σε ποσοστό 0.7%, κάτι που σημαίνει ότι το iOS 7.1 «κρασάρει» σε ποσοστό μεγαλύτερο το διπλάσιου από το Android 4.x.

Σε επίπεδο κατασκευαστών, η Samsung είχε τα χαμηλότερα ποσοστά προβλημάτων του είδους τόσο στα κινητά τηλέφωνα όσο και στα tablets στο λειτουργικό σύστημα Android. Επίσης το iPhone 5 (1.7%) αποδεικνύεται πιο σταθερό από το iPhone 5s (2%).


http://www.phonearena.com/news/Android-4.x-is-more-than-twice-as-stable-as-iOS-7.1_id54459

The annual Pwn2Own hacking contest has ended with another round of vulnerabilities discovered and exploited in the world’s most used platforms, including Apple’s own Safari web browser, which took a great deal of effort to crack.

China's Keen Team reportedly had to exploit two chained vulnerabilities to successfully compromise the Safari web browser, and declared Apple’s OS X operating system the toughest nut to crack.

Liang Chen of the Keen Team said they used a heap overflow in the Safari Webkit that opened the door to arbitrary code execution, but the bug could not be exploited alone on Apple’s OS X Mavericks. Chen said he had to use a second vulnerability to successfully exploit the browser.

“We utilized another system vulnerability to bypass the sandbox to get a process running in the user’s context,” he said.

According to threatpost.com, the flaws were immediately disclosed to HP’s Zero Day Initiative, a longtime sponsor of the Pwn2Own contest. Apple representatives were also present for the disclosure, according to the report. In other words, the company is now aware of these flaws and will deliver a patch in a future software update.

“I think the Webkit fix will be relatively easy,” Chen said of the flaws. “The system-level vulnerability is related to how they designed the application; it may be more difficult for them.”

Chen also said, “For Apple, the OS is regarded as very safe and has a very good security architecture. Even if you have a vulnerability, it’s very difficult to exploit. Today we demonstrated that with some advanced technology, the system is still able to be pwned. But in general, the security in OS X is higher than other operating systems."

One of the more notable figures present at the event was George Hotz, also known as Geohot. He is the author of the very first iPhone unlock and several subsequent iOS jailbreaks. He got sued by Sony for hacking the PS3, and he has made dozens of headlines thanks to his hacking prowess.

Geohot had a brief stint at Facebook (to our knowledge). He worked as a software engineer for the social network. Hotz got a congratulatory email from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak after the maker of the first Apple computers heard of his feat.

Woz reportedly told The New Yorker in 2012, “It was like a story out of a movie of someone who solves an incredible mystery. I understand the mind-set of a person who wants to do that, and I don’t think of people like that as criminals. In fact, I think that misbehavior is very strongly correlated with and responsible for creative thought.”

The latest iOS 8 leak is out by means of a list containing some of the refinements and tweaks planned by Apple for the next major revision of its mobile operating system. Focus areas include Notification Center, inter-app communication, Voice Memos, Messages, Game Center, and CarPlay.

Notification Center is one of the major elements Apple is looking into for some imminent changes. The sources said the translucent drop-down menu for managing alerts “may be simplified,” and that Apple is considering reducing some views from the panel to only include “Today” and “Notifications.”

Apparently there’s a bit of uncertainty regarding the inclusion of these tweaks in the first builds of iOS 8.

Apple is planning to implement an “XPC” service to enable apps to communicate better with one another and share data: “For example, a future photo editing application could have the ability to push the edited content for upload via the Instagram or Facebook apps.”

The feature was initially planned for iOS 7, but somehow it never made it inside the OS. Apple could just as well delay it again, the sources said.

The Voice Memos app will be enhanced so that its controls become more visible. The confusing interface will be tweaked so that people can understand better what buttons to tap to perform a certain action.

Game Center will be removed as an individual app, but not as a service. Gamers will sill be able to access the interface in games that are made for Game Center. CarPlay will be usable both with a Lightning cable and over WiFi when iOS 8 debuts.

The leak also includes information about the general functionality of the operating system, and how Apple plans to enhance its performance and run faster than iOS 7.

“In addition to the in-app tweaks, Apple has been working to speed up iOS 8 in comparison to iOS 7. Applications are said to launch more quickly, close more quickly, and overall system navigation is said to feel much smoother and more stable. Apple sped up animations and improved stability in the recent release of iOS 7.1, but the enhancements in iOS 8 are said to go a bit further.”

A lot of changes are expected to go down before Apple unveils iOS 8 at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference this summer. iOS 8 is also likely to drop support for some old-generation hardware, like the iPhone 4.

iOS 7.1 is packed with interface refinements, bug fixes, improvements, and new features. Apple CarPlay introduces a better way to use iPhone while driving. And you can now control exactly how long Siri listens and more. Getting the update is easy. Go to Settings. Select General. And tap Software Update.

http://www.apple.com/ios/ios7-update/

«Δεν πρέπει ποτέ να επιτρέψουμε στην πλειοψηφία να στερήσει τα δικαιώματα της μειοψηφίας». Με αυτά τα λόγια ο Τιμ Κουκ, διευθύνων σύμβουλος της Apple και διάδοχος του Στιβ Τζομπς, παρέλαβε την περασμένη εβδομάδα στην εκδήλωση της Σχολής Ανθρωπιστικών Επιστημών του Πανεπιστημίου Ομπουρν το τιμητικό βραβείο για τη ζωή και το έργο του.  

Ηταν μια από τις σπάνιες στιγμές που ο Τιμ Κουκ ανέβηκε στο βήμα σε μια εκδήλωση άσχετη με τις δραστηριότητες του αμερικανικού κολοσσού της ψηφιακής τεχνολογίας. Η διαδοχή ενός γίγαντα της εποχής μας, του Στιβ Τζομπς, είχε εγκλωβίσει τον 52χρονο σήμερα επιχειρηματία σε μια ατραπό ασταμάτητης δουλειάς και αποκλειστικής αφοσίωσης στην Apple.

Ωστόσο σε αυτήν την εκδήλωση ο Τιμ Κουκ δεν μίλησε για την πρωτοπορία και τις καινοτομίες της Apple, ούτε καν για το γενικότερο θέμα του πώς η σύγχρονη τεχνολογία θα απελευθερώσει τις κοινωνίες και τους ανθρώπους. Μίλησε για τον ρατσισμό, τον κοινωνικό ρατσισμό, τον ρατσισμό εναντίον των αφροαμερικανών που γνώρισε από μικρός μεγαλώνοντας στην καρδιά του αμερικανικού Νότου στην Αλαμπάμα, ως τον ρατσισμό κατά των μεταναστών τώρα, για αυτά τα δικαιώματα των μειοψηφιών που δεν πρέπει να τα στερήσει η πλειοψηφία. 

Και ήταν μια αποστροφή της ομιλίας του που απέσπασε τα περισσότερα χειροκροτήματα. «Πάντα είναι η σωστή ώρα για να κάνεις το σωστό. Σήμερα έχουμε μια ευκαιρία. Εχουμε μια ευκαιρία να συνεχίσουμε να προοδεύουμε στον σεβασμό των διαφορετικών φυλών και επίσης να αγκαλιάσουμε τις μεταρρυθμίσεις σχετικά με τους μετανάστες» είπε και έπειτα, ανεβάζοντας τον τόνο της φωνής του, τόνισε: «Και να εξαλείψουμε τις διακρίσεις εναντίον της γκέι και της λεσβιακής κοινότητας!».





Αφοσιωμένος επί δεκαετίες στην Apple και ζώντας στη σκιά μιας προσωπικότητας διεθνούς ακτινοβολίας όπως ο Τζομπς, ο Τιμ Κουκ κράτησε την προσωπική του ζωή μακριά από τα φώτα της δημοσιότητας.

Στις αρχές του Οκτωβρίου το περιοδικό «Out» - η βίβλος της αμερικανικής ομοφυλοφιλικής κοινότητας - τον ανακήρυξε ως τον πιο ισχυρό γκέι του κόσμου. Δεύτερη ήταν η Ελεν ντε Τζενέρις.

Με μια ομιλία σαν και αυτή στο Πανεπιστήμιο Ομπουρν, ο Τιμ Κουκ, τακτικός συνομιλητής του ζεύγους Ομπάμα και ο άνθρωπος που οδηγεί με επιτυχία την Apple στην μετά Τζομπς εποχή, αποδεικνύει ότι είναι όντως ο πιο ισχυρός γκέι του πλανήτη. Και ότι πλέον έχει αρχίσει να μιλάει για αυτό.


Πηγή: http://www.tanea.gr/tanea360/article/5066283/o-tim-koyk-ths-apple-milaei-ws-o-pio-isxyros-gkei-toy-planhth/

Οι κοίλες οθόνες περιλαμβάνονται στα σχέδια της Apple, επιβεβαιώνει πηγή του πρακτορείου Bloomberg, σύμφωνα με την οποία ο αμερικανικός κολοσσός πρόκειται να διαθέσει όχι ένα αλλά, δύο κοίλα iPhone πριν το τέλος του 2014. 

Τα κοίλα μοντέλα βρίσκονται ακόμα στο στάδιο της σχεδίασης, πρόκειται όμως για iPhone με μεγαλύτερες οθόνες και συγκεκριμένα 4,5 ιντσών αλλά και 5,5 ιντσών, αποκαλύπτει η ίδια πηγή, διαγώνιος που έχει συνδεθεί με τα λεγόμενα phablet -όπως τα είχε ονομάσει η LG- αφού αυτά τα smartphone θεωρούνται αρκετά μεγάλα για να είναι τηλέφωνα (>4,5 ίντσες), αλλά αρκετά μικρά για να ονομαστούν ταμπλέτες (7+ ίντσες).

Η πηγή του Bloomberg αναφέρεται επίσης, στα σχέδια της Apple να επενδύσει στην κατασκευή προηγμένων αισθητήρων, οι οποίοι θα εισάγουν μια νέα μέθοδο εισόδου «εντολών» του χρήστη. Οι αισθητήρες λέγεται ότι θα μπορούν να διακρίνουν ένα... χάδι από ένα χτύπημα και να προκαλέσουν την αντίστοιχη αντίδραση. Ωστόσο, η τεχνολογία της αυξημένης ευαισθησίας των αισθητήρων βρίσκεται ακόμα στο στάδιο των δοκιμών και δεν αναμένεται να εισαχθεί ούτε στα iPhone που θα διαδεχτούν το iPhone 5S και το iPhone 5C, ούτε όμως στα μεγάλα κοίλα iPhone που προαναφέρθηκαν.

Πριν από λίγες ημέρες, η Apple έκανε γνωστά τα σχέδιά της να ανοίξει ένα εργοστάσιο στην Αριζόνα των ΗΠΑ για την κατασκευή εξαρτημάτων για τις συσκευές της, αφορά όμως μάλλον την κατασκευή κρυστάλλων για τις οθόνες των συσκευών της, κρίνοντας από την μακροχρόνια συνεργασία με την GT Advanced Technologies.

Το iPad Air διαθέσιμο για την επίδειξη της νεότερης έκδοσης της ταμπλέτας της Apple εξερράγη την Παρασκευή 8 Νοεμβρίου 2013, στο κατάστημα Vodafone στην πόλη Κανμπέρα της Αυστραλίας -πρωτεύουσα της Κοινοπολιτείας της Αυστραλίας-, επιβεβαιώνουν πολλαπλές πηγές.

Το iPad Air έβγαζε φλόγες από την υποδοχή σύνδεσης του καλωδίου φόρτισης και ο καπνός από την φωτιά κατέκλυσε το κατάστημα, το οποίο εκκενώθηκε και κλήθηκε η πυροσβεστική υπηρεσία. Από το περιστατικό δεν υπήρξαν τραυματισμοί, υπαλλήλων ή πελατών. Το news.com.au μεταφέρει πως ενημερώθηκε σχετικά ο αντιπρόσωπος της Apple για να παραλάβει το (καμένο) iPad Air, ωστόσο καμία σχετική ανακοίνωση για τα αίτια της ανάφλεξης δεν έχει δημοσιοποιηθεί.

Αυτή είναι η φωτογραφία που δημοσιεύει το αυστραλιανό μέσο ενημέρωσης:

About the new iWork for Mac: Features and compatibility

Learn about the new iWork for Mac.

The new iWork applications—Pages, Numbers, and Keynote—were released for Mac on October 22nd. These applications were rewritten from the ground up to be fully 64-bit and to support a unified file format between OS X and iOS 7 versions, as well as iWork for iCloud beta.

These apps feature an all-new design with an intelligent format panel and many new features such as easy ways to share documents, Apple-designed styles for objects, interactive charts, new templates, and new animations in Keynote.

In rewriting these applications, some features from iWork ’09 were not available for the initial release. We plan to reintroduce some of these features in the next few releases and will continue to add brand new features on an ongoing basis.

Some features in upcoming releases in the next 6 months:

Pages
▪ Customize toolbar
▪ Vertical ruler
▪ Improved alignment guides
▪ Improved object placement
▪ Import of cells with images
▪ Improved word counts
▪ Keyboard shortcuts for styles
▪ Manage pages and sections from the thumbnail view

Numbers
▪ Customize toolbar
▪ Improvements to zoom and window placement
▪ Multi-column and range sort
▪ Auto-complete text in cells
▪ Page headers and footers
▪ Improvements to AppleScript support

Keynote
▪ Customize toolbar
▪ Restoring old transitions and builds
▪ Improvements to presenter display
▪ Improvements to AppleScript support

In the meanwhile, you can continue to use these features by accessing the previous versions of the iWork applications which remain installed on your Mac. The previous versions can be found in Applications > iWork ’09.

Reverting documents created in the new iWork for Mac applications to the previous version’s file format

New or existing documents you open in the new versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote use the new unified file format. These files can’t be opened in the previous versions of the iWork applications. To revert the document file format to the previous version, you can do one of the following:

1. Documents that you haven't edited can be reverted to the iWork ’09 version by selecting File > Revert To.

2. If you have edited the document and want to preserve the edits, you can save it as an iWork ’09 document by selecting File > Export To, then choosing Pages ’09, Numbers ’09, or Keynote ’09. 


EndNote Compatibility

For information about using EndNote with Pages 5.0 and later, see About the Pages for Mac EndNote plug-in.


Additional Information

For more information about importing and exporting iWork ’09 documents, click here.

For iWork for Mac help, click here. And to provide feedback, click here.


http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6049?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

Η Apple αναγνώρισε πως υπάρχει πρόβλημα με την μπαταρία ενός τμήματος της παραγωγής των iPhone 5S που έχει ως αποτέλεσμα την ταχύτατη αποφόρτισή της, χωρίς να αποκαλύψει πάντως την έκτασή του.
 
Όπως σημειώνει η εταιρεία, ανακαλύφθηκε ένα κατασκευαστικό σφάλμα "σε πολύ μικρό ποσοστό" τής παραγωγής των iPhone 5S, το οποίο μπορεί να προκαλέσει γρήγορη αποφόρτιση ή αργή φόρτιση της μπαταρίας τής συσκευής.
 
Όσοι πελάτες αντιμετωπίζουν το συγκεκριμένο πρόβλημα, η εταιρεία δήλωσε πως θα αντικαταστήσει τις συσκευές τους.
 
Στο website της Apple, αναφέρεται πως η διάρκεια της μπαταρίας τού iPhone 5S είναι κατά μέσο όρο 10 ώρες ομιλίας σε 3G, έως και 250 ώρες σε αναμονή, έως 8 ώρες σερφαρίσματος σε 3G, και έως 10 ώρες σε δίκτυα LTE και Wi-Fi.

Γνωρίζουμε, εδώ και καιρό, ότι ο αρχισχεδιαστής της Apple, Jony Ive, συνεργάζεται με το φίλο του και σημαντικό designer Marc Newson, "αναμορφώνοντας" ή σχεδιάζοντας από την αρχή διάφορα αντικείμενα για φιλανθρωπικούς σκοπούς.

Σ' αυτό το πλαίσιο, ο νέος ιδιαίτερος σχεδιαστικά Mac Pro της εταιρείας γίνεται RED, σε μία αποκλειστική έκδοση που θα δημοπρατηθεί από τον οίκο Sotheby, με στόχο να συγκεντρωθούν από 40.000 έως 60.000 δολάρια για φιλανθρωπικά σωματεία.

Αν μη τι άλλο, μία μοναδική πρόταση στο στιλ των υπόλοιπων "RED" προϊόντων που έχει λανσάρει κατά καιρούς η Apple και η οποία αναμένεται να δημοπρατηθεί στις 23 Νοεμβρίου.

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File Size: 17.11 MB
System Requirements
▪ OS X Lion 10.8.5

The iMac OS X v10.8.5 Supplemental Update 1.0 is recommended for iMacs (Late 2013) using NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M graphics and running OS X Mountain Lion v10.8.5.
This update:
▪ Fixes an issue that may cause external drives to be ejected after the computer goes to sleep
▪ Fixes an issue that may prevent certain USB Bluetooth adapters from working

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File Size: 11.28 MB
System Requirements
OS X Lion 10.6.8 or later

This tool prepares libraries from iPhoto 7 or earlier so they can be upgraded with the current version of iPhoto.

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File Size: 5.61 MB
System Requirements
Mac OS X 10.7.5 and later

This update provides compatibility for migrating to a Mac running OS X Mavericks.

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File Size: 2.70 MB
System Requirements
Mac OS X 10.6.8 and later

This update provides compatibility for migrating to a Mac running OS X Mavericks.

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File Size: 3.81 MB
System Requirements
▪ OS X 10.6 
▪ OS X 10.7

The 3.5.4 update is recommended for all Apple Remote Desktop clients and addresses issues related to overall reliability, usability and compatibility.

For information on the security content of this update, please visit: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222

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File Size: 19.61 MB
System Requirements
▪ OS X 10.7
▪ OS X 10.8 
▪ OS X 10.9

The 3.7 update is recommended for Apple Remote Desktop users and addresses several issues related to overall reliability, usability and compatibility. This update also provides:
 
- Support for OS X Mavericks
- Automatic copy and paste between local and remote computers
- Improved support for Mac systems with multiple displays and multiple IP addresses
- Enhanced multi-observe with gesture support for swiping between screens
 
For detailed information on this update, please visit this website: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5896

Two weeks ago, when technology companies were accused of indiscriminately sharing customer data with government agencies, Apple issued a clear response: We first heard of the government’s “Prism” program when news organizations asked us about it on June 6. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer content must get a court order.

Like several other companies, we have asked the U.S. government for permission to report how many requests we receive related to national security and how we handle them. We have been authorized to share some of that data, and we are providing it here in the interest of transparency.

From December 1, 2012 to May 31, 2013, Apple received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement for customer data. Between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in those requests, which came from federal, state and local authorities and included both criminal investigations and national security matters. The most common form of request comes from police investigating robberies and other crimes, searching for missing children, trying to locate a patient with Alzheimer’s disease, or hoping to prevent a suicide.

Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it.

Apple has always placed a priority on protecting our customers’ personal data, and we don’t collect or maintain a mountain of personal details about our customers in the first place. There are certain categories of information which we do not provide to law enforcement or any other group because we choose not to retain it.

For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers’ location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form.

We will continue to work hard to strike the right balance between fulfilling our legal responsibilities and protecting our customers’ privacy as they expect and deserve.

http://www.apple.com/apples-commitment-to-customer-privacy/

Apple's user-privacy standards are abysmal compared to its peers, and so is its refusal to explain them. Maybe you don't care. Here's why you should.

AThe next time you're thinking about buying a new smartphone, there's one more spec you might want to consider. If the FBI or the IRS wants to read your texts, will Apple hand them over? Would it require the feds to get a warrant first? And would it even bother to let you know that federal agents made the request in the first place?

If you're looking at a shiny new iPhone, the answers are not comforting. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's latest digital privacy report, Who's Got Your Back?, awards Apple its secondthe Electronic Frontier Foundation gives Apple a paltry one out of six stars. While Apple got credit for supporting efforts to defend users by modernizing electronic privacy laws, its apparent willingness to hand over your personal information to the government without a warrant and its failure to tell its users how it handles such requests put it in the dock.

Worse Than Comcast: Apple's Privacy Black Box

Apple came off much, much worse than most of its peers — here defined as major non-ISP mobile-computing players. Apple fared worse than Amazon (two stars), Facebook (three), Microsoft (four) and Google (five). Even Comcast, the cable conglomerate consumers love to hate, scored one star higher than Apple. 

The EFF chides Apple for not publishing a transparency report as companies like Google and Twitter do. Without that, users have no idea what kinds of information the government asks for, because Apple won't tell them, nor does it let them know what its guidelines are for dealing with law enforcement data requests. 

(See also: EFF: Twitter Scores, Verizon Fails At Protecting User Privacy)

Apple certainly wasn't the worst-ranked company overall. The major telcos and ISPs almost always get raked over coals on privacy. In this report, Verizon got no stars, while AT&T racked up a grand total of one. MySpace also got no stars and Yahoo only got one. Amazon's showing is also pretty disappointing, especially considering its vast storehouse of consumer-purchase data and its rumored plans to enter the smartphone market. 

But Apple dominates mobile computing in a way few other companies do. And as the proprietor of a mobile operating system that runs on more than half a billion devices, Apple has its hands on a lot of data. Its approach to privacy matters to an awful lot of people — and its lousy performance is a big deal considering how deeply its devices are embedded into our lives.

That integration is only getting deeper as Apple prototypes wearable devices and dreams up more screens to dominate. 

Not Just A Computer Company Anymore 

It's not all together shocking that Apple has some catching up to do in the privacy realm. Until recently, it didn't deal with all that much information about its customers. For most of its history, the company was called Apple Computer, because that's what it sold: computers.

In the early days, the only way for the government to snoop through your MacIntosh was to get a warrant to search your apartment. Today's Apple's computers are smaller, constantly connected to the Internet and, increasingly reliant on iCloud to sync and share data across devices.

Whereas Google has been handling (and profiting from) user data since day one, Apple is only just getting started. If you use iCloud, its servers house your calendars, email, photos, notes and any other data you choose to feed it. If you're using iOS 5 or higher, you're also entrusting Apple with whatever percentage of your personal text messages go through its iMessage protocol.

To its credit, Apple built iMessage using end-to-end encryption that makes its harder for others to snoop on the contents of messages. Of course, if the FBI — or the local cops — really want to know what you're iMessaging back and forth, they can go directly to Apple, with or without a warrant. 

Of course, if the texts in question aren't iMessages, the authorities could just do what they've always done: Ask the mobile data provider to see them. Such requests have seen a dramatic uptick in recent years, and the major ISPs don't approach them with the same level of transparency that a company like Twitter or Sonic.net would. 

Why Consumers Should Care

Apple has never been lauded for having a forward-thinking and open approach to user privacy issues. That hasn't stopped millions of people from trying to predict the company's next gadget and then eagerly standing in line to purchase it. 

Part of that may have to do with awareness. Digital privacy reports excite a certain breed of data nerd (OK, guilty as charged), but they don't approach the media attention lavished on Apple product announcements. Nor is the EFF's chart plastered all over billboards, bus stops and television sets. 

Even for those of you who already knew that Apple doesn't treat your privacy with kid gloves, the risk of the government peeking into law-abiding texts and calendars is too remote to worry about. To some, this is just a side effect of the hyper-connected, digitally-immersed society we're becoming. Even if they don't particularly like it, it's just not their battle to fight. 

Trouble is, that sort of complacency puts no pressure on Apple to get more proactive about keeping your digital life safe from prying eyes.

If you fall in this category, you might still luck out, of course. Even if there's some major privacy gaffe down the line, it might not affect you. And if you're fortunate, IRS agents aren't currently reading your Apple email or iMessages, looking for possible evidence of tax evasion.

But given Apple's current practices in this regard, if they are, you'd never know. Maybe ignorance really is bliss.

Πηγή: readwrite

Apple violates German data protection law by asking for users’ broad, overall consent in its privacy policy, the Regional Court of Berlin ruled.

Apple’s terms for sharing personal information with the company are too broadly formulated, the court ruled on April 30, according to a verdict published by the Federation of German Consumer Organisations (VZBV) on Tuesday.

The VZBV demanded in 2011 that Apple Sales International should stop using unfair contractual clauses in its privacy policy as posted on its German website, said Helke Heidemann-Peuser, a lawyer and head of the VZBV’s legal enforcement section. After this warning, Apple committed to change five of those clauses, but this was not enough, which is why the VZBV decided to sue Apple in February 2012, she said.

After Apple was sued, the company committed to change two more clauses, after which the lawsuit continued over the eight remaining disputed clauses, said Heidemann-Peuser. The court found that Apple violates the law with all those clauses, she added.

In its German privacy policy, which is similar to the one used in the U.S., Apple states for instance that when someone contacts Apple and its affiliates, they may share information about that person with each other. Apple also states that this information may be combined with other information to provide and improve products, services, content and advertising.

This clause violates the law because customers are unaware which data is used and to what extend, the court ruled, according to the VZBV.

Another problematic clause gives Apple the right to collect the information someone provides about friends and family such as name, mailing address, email address and phone number when someone sends a gift certificate or products or invites others to join a user on an Apple forum, Heidemann-Peuser said. This is illegal because Apple would need consent from the third party to process this data, she said.

Apple also states that it may collect, use and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of a users’ Apple computer or device, in order to provide location based services like advertising on Apple products. The data, as collected, is anonymous, according to Apple’s policy. However, when location-based services are used, the data can always be traced back to an individual, according to the court, so this clause was also prohibited.

Apple now needs to change these clauses, said Heidemann-Peuser. “They need to be very specific,” she said, adding that Apple needs to ask for users’ explicit consent instead of letting them agree to an overly broad privacy policy.

However, the company does not need to do so immediately because Apple can appeal the verdict, which the VZBV expects the company to do.

Apple did not reply to a request for comment.

Πηγή: MacWorld

Η Apple το προηγούμενο χρόνο είχε αναθεωρήσει την πολιτική εγγυήσεων που ακολουθεί στην Ιταλία με πρόστιμο της τάξεως των €900,000 για τη μη συμμόρφωση με τη νομοθεσία της Ευρώπης, που υποχρεώνει κάθε εταιρεία να ακολουθεί πολιτική εγγύησης δύο χρόνων.

Μέχρι τώρα η Apple προωθούσε την εγγύηση που παρείχε στα προϊόντα της διάρκειας ενός χρόνου, με αποτέλεσμα να ασκηθούν εναντίον της ένα πλήθος κριτικών από κυβερνήσεις και από καταναλωτικές. Όμως πλέον η εταιρεία αναθεώρησε την πολιτική της και σε άλλες ευρωπαϊκές χώρες προκειμένου αυτή να συμφωνεί με τους νόμους, σε Γαλλία, Γερμανία, Βέλγιο, διευκρινίζοντας την υποχρέωσή της να παρέχει διετή εγγύηση σε προϊόντα Apple, έπειτα από την αγορά τους.

Δεν διευκρινίζεται από πότε θα ισχύσει η νέα τακτική της εταιρείας, αλλά αναμένεται σε σύντομο χρονικό διάστημα. Να υπενθυμίσουμε ότι μέχρι σήμερα παρείχε δύο χρόνια εγγύηση μόλις σε πρόσθετα, επιπληρωμή AppleCare πακέτα που διαθέτει.

H Apple δέχτηκε να καταβάλλει 53 εκατομμύρια δολάρια για να δώσει τέλος στις μαζικές μηνύσεις καταναλωτών που διαμαρτυρήθηκαν στο περιφερειακό δικαστήριο στο Σαν Φρανσίσκο για την πολιτική εγγυήσεων που ακολουθούσε η εταιρεία με βάση, εσφαλμένες όπως υποστήριξαν, ενδείξεις υγρασίας στους αισθητήρες iPhone και iPod Touch. H Apple αρνιόταν την κάλυψη της ζημιάς από την εγγύηση, όταν οι ενδείξεις άλλαζαν χρώμα.

Η Apple επέμεινε ότι οι αισθητήρες δεν ενεργοποιούσαν εσφαλμένα τις σχετικές ενδείξεις υγρασίας (συγκεκριμένα, υπήρχε μια κόκκινη φωτεινή ένδειξη μέσα στην υποδοχή σύνδεσης των ακουστικών). Σύμφωνα με την πολιτική της, εάν ο αισθητήρας προκαλούσε την αλλαγή του χρώματος στην σχετική ένδειξη, τότε η εγγύηση δεν θα κάλυπτε την ζημιά. Η αλλαγή του χρώματος υποδείκνυε ότι iPhone ή iPod touch είχαν βυθιστεί σε νερό ή είχαν βραχεί τόσο ώστε να μην καλύπτεται από την εγγύηση της Αpple, όπως δήλωνε ρητά.

Οι ενάγοντες υποστήριξαν ότι οι αισθητήρες της 3M Co. ενεργοποιούνταν από την υγρασία του περιβάλλοντος κατά την συνήθη χρήση. Σύμφωνα με την εφημερίδα Wall Street Journal, η υπόθεση αφορά 153.000 πελάτες της Apple.

Το Bloomberg διευκρινίζει ότι αναλογούν 300 δολάρια ανά πελάτη, ανάλογα με το μοντέλο iPhone και iPod touch.  Αφορά πελάτες τους οποίους αρνήθηκε να καλύψει την ζημιά η εταιρεία πριν τις 31 Δεκεμβρίου 2009 και για iPod Touch πριν τον Ιούνιο του 2010. Οι δικηγόροι μπορούν να διεκδικήσουν έως και το 30% από το ποσό που συμφωνήθηκε για την αμοιβή και τα δικαστικά έξοδα.

Στοιχεία που αφήνουν να εννοηθεί ότι η Apple πρόκειται να προσθέσει ένα μοντέλο με 128 GB μνήμη στα υπάρχοντα μοντέλα των 16 GB, 32 GB και 64 GB της τέταρτης γενιάς iPad έχει συγκεντρώσει ο δικτυακός τόπος 9to5Mac.com.

To νέο μοντέλο δεν θα έχει καμία άλλη ουσιαστική αλλαγή, πλην της σημαντικής αύξησης της διαθέσιμης μνήμης, αφού φαίνεται να διατηρεί τα λοιπά τεχνικά χαρακτηριστικά, τα διαθέσιμα χρώματα, την δυνατότητα πρόσβασης στο Διαδίκτυο μέσω Wi-Fi ή/και 3G.

Σύμφωνα με πληροφορίες του Commercial Times, στη γνωστή Ταιβανέζικη εταιρεία κατασκευής ημιαγωγών TSMC, ανατέθηκε από την ίδια την Apple, το έργο παραγωγής των A6X chips.

Η κίνηση αυτή, η οποία έχει σχολιαστεί έντονα από τα μέσα ενημέρωσης τους τελευταίους μήνες, λέγεται ότι θα ελαχιστοποιήσει την εξάρτηση της Apple από τη Samsung που για πολλά χρόνια ήταν υπεύθυνη για την παραγωγή των chips των συσκευών της. Aς μην ξεχνάμε άλλωστε ότι η πρώτη εξόπλισε με το A6X chip, το iPad τέταρτης γενιάς που κατέφθασε τον περασμένο Οκτώβριο και η παραγωγή του συγκεκριμένου επεξεργαστή αναμένεται επισήμως να περάσει στα χέρια της TSMC το πρώτο τρίμηνο του χρόνου.

Όσον αφορά την TSMC, αρκεί να αναφέρουμε ότι είναι η μεγαλύτερη ανεξάρτητη εταιρεία κατασκευής ημιαγωγών στον κόσμο. Η παραγωγή των προαναφερθέντων chips θα είναι αρχικώς σε δοκιμαστική φάση καθώς μένει να φανεί αν θα μπορέσει η εταιρεία να ανταπεξέλθει στις αυξημένες απαιτήσεις της Apple.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/01/07App-Store-Tops-40-Billion-Downloads-with-Almost-Half-in-2012.html

App Store Tops 40 Billion Downloads with Almost Half in 2012

Record-Breaking December with Over Two Billion Downloads

CUPERTINO, California―January 7, 2013―Apple® today announced that customers have downloaded over 40 billion apps*, with nearly 20 billion in 2012 alone. The App Store℠ has over 500 million active accounts and had a record-breaking December with over two billion downloads during the month. Apple’s incredible developer community has created over 775,000 apps for iPhone®, iPad® and iPod touch® users worldwide, and developers have been paid over seven billion dollars by Apple.

“It has been an incredible year for the iOS developer community,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “Developers have made over seven billion dollars on the App Store, and we continue to invest in providing them with the best ecosystem so they can create the most innovative apps in the world.”

In 2012, the husband and wife team at Imangi Studios saw their game Temple Run downloaded more than 75 million times; Backflip Studios and Supercell, two emerging game development studios, brought in over $100 million combined for their leading freemium titles DragonVale and Clash of Clans; and emerging services including Uber, Flipboard, HotelTonight, and AirBnB attracted millions of users on iOS. Companies including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Autodesk, Marvel and Major League Baseball continued to expand their iOS offerings, while developers like JJ Abrams’ Bad Robot Interactive and Bottle Rocket Apps continued to push the boundaries of what iOS apps can do.

“The success of our game Temple Run in 2012 was nothing short of astonishing,” said Keith Shepherd, co-founder of Imangi Studios. “We were simply looking to create a game that was fun and easy to play, but once it hit the App Store, the game took off. This past year, we saw more than 75 million downloads of Temple Run on iOS.”

“Our success on iOS has been incredible,” said Samir Hanna, vice president of Consumer Products for Autodesk. “We set off with the modest goal of bringing SketchBook to iPhone users as a way of introducing them to Autodesk. Fast forward three years, we now offer 20 apps to iOS users that have achieved more than 50 million downloads, and we continue to roll out new creativity and design tools that appeal to both professionals and consumers.”

“The App Store provided us with opportunities beyond our wildest dreams,” said Bad Robot Interactive’s JJ Abrams. “Our app Action Movie FX was designed to bring Hollywood special effects to anyone’s self-made video, whether that be on an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, and we’re just thrilled that millions of fans around the world were as excited as we were about the possibilities that this app brings.”

“Bottle Rocket Apps now employs over 100 full-time employees, dedicated to nothing but building great apps,” said Calvin Carter, president of Bottle Rocket Apps. “In my 20 plus years in technology, I have never seen such a vibrant marketplace for software like the App Store.”

Apple offers developers a wealth of resources and tools to help them make great apps, plus a robust ecosystem and marketplace which provide customers a safe and easy way to discover them. Apple also provides developers great ways to monetize apps including in-app purchase, subscriptions and advertising, and helps market and support developer efforts in the App Store and beyond.

The revolutionary App Store offers more than 775,000 apps to iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users in 155 countries around the world, with more than 300,000 native iPad apps available. App Store customers can choose from an incredible range of apps in 23 categories, including newspapers and magazines offered in Newsstand, games, business, news, sports, health & fitness and travel.

*40 billion unique downloads excluding re-downloads and updates.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.

Επικαλούμενα πηγές της βιομηχανίας παραγωγής ηλεκτρονικών, κινεζικά sites και blogs τεχνολογίας ισχυρίζονται πως Apple και Intel συνεργάζονται επάνω σε ένα «έξυπνο» ψηφιακό ρολόι καρπού, το οποίο θα συνδέεται μέσω Bluetooth με iOS φορητές συσκευές, όπως τα iPhone και iPod.

Σύμφωνα με το σύνηθες και σχεδόν πάντα εμπορικά αποδοτικό παιχνίδι των φημών, ιδιαίτερα όταν πρόκειται για προϊόντα της Apple, αυτό το «έξυπνο» ρολόι δεν αποκλείεται να παρουσιαστεί μέσα στο πρώτο μισό του 2013 και να αποτελέσει το νέο πολυπόθητο αξεσουάρ για τους ενθουσιώδεις κατόχους του iPhone.

Εικάζεται ότι θα έχει οθόνη με διαγώνιο 1,5 ίντσας, ειδικά ενισχυμένο κρύσταλλο και η συνδεσιμότητά του θα βασίζεται στο Bluetooth 4.0, το οποίο η Apple έχει υιοθετήσει σε όλα τα νέας γενιάς προϊόντα της -όπως τα MacBook, τα iPad και iPad mini και τα iPhone 4S και 5.

Είναι γνωστό ότι η Intel εργάζεται πυρετωδώς και επενδύει σημαντικούς πόρους στην ανάπτυξη νέων μικροεπεξεργαστών για smartphones και tablets, θέλοντας να προφτάσει τον εντεινόμενο ανταγωνισμό στη συγκεκριμένη κατηγορία.

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Version: 2.1.1
Post Date: Dec 20, 2012
Download ID: DL1455
File Size: 45.23 MB
System Requirements
Microsoft Windows Vista SP2,
Windows 7, or Windows 8
Safari 5.1.7 or Internet Explorer 9 or later (for bookmarks)
Microsoft Outlook 2007, 2010, or an up-to-date browser (for Mail, Contacts, Calendars) 
Broadband Internet access

About iCloud Control Panel 2.1.1 for Windows

The iCloud Control Panel makes it easy to keep your contacts, calendars, and bookmarks up to date automatically between your iOS devices, Mac, and Windows PC. 
It also includes Photo Stream, which wirelessly pushes photos you take with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to the Pictures library on your PC — no cable syncing required. 
You can also share select photos with friends and family using Shared Photo Streams, complete with notifications and comments.
iCloud Control Panel 2.1 and later includes support for Windows 8. 
 
Note: To create an iCloud account you need an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iOS 5 or later, or a Mac with OS X Lion v10.7.5 or later. Microsoft Outlook 2007, 2010, or an up-to-date browser is required for accessing email, contacts, and calendars.

Learn more about iCloud at http://www.apple.com/icloud

Version: 6.0.2
Post Date: Dec 18, 2012
Download ID: DL1621
License: Update
System Requirements
iPhone 5
iPad mini

About iOS 6.0.2 Software Update

Fixes a bug that could impact Wi-Fi.

Available via OTA

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Version: 2.0
Post Date: Dec 17, 2012
Download ID: DL1618
License: Update
File Size: 4.32 MB
System Requirements
Mac OS X 10.8.1 and greater, EFI version 010A
iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2012)

About iMac EFI Update 2.0
This update is recommended for the iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2012).
This update contains general performance fixes pertaining to sleep and Thunderbolt, and improves compatibility when using the 5GHz band in Wi-Fi.
Boot ROM or SMC Version Information: After Update is complete:

Build version: 010A.05
ROM version: IM131.88Z.010A.B05.1211151146

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Version: 1.0
Post Date: Dec 17, 2012
Download ID: DL1620
License: Update
File Size: 1.49 MB
System Requirements
OS X 10.8.2 

About Mac Wi-Fi Update 1.0

This update is recommended for all late 2012 Mac systems. This update improves compatibility when using the 5GHz band in Wi-Fi.

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Version: 1.1
Post Date: Dec 17, 2012
Download ID: DL1619
License: Update
File Size: 4.76 MB
System Requirements
Mac OS X 10.8.1 and greater, EFI version 0106.01 

About MacBook Pro Retina EFI Update v1.1

This update is recommended for all 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display (late 2012) models. This update improves sleep performance, enhances Thunderbolt router support, fixes an HDMI display issue, and improves compatibility when using the 5GHz band in Wi-Fi.

Boot ROM or SMC Version Information: After Update is complete:

Build version: 0106.03  

ROM version: MBP102.88Z.0106.B03.1211161133

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Version: 4.03
Post Date: Dec 13, 2012
Download ID: DL1604
File Size: 5.07 MB
System Requirements
OS X 10.8.2 or later
Mac OS X 10.7.5 or later
Supported Languages
Deutsch, English, Français, 日本語, Español, Italiano, Nederlands

About Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Update 4.03

Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Update 4.03
 
This update adds RAW image compatibility for the following cameras to Aperture 3 and iPhoto '11:
 
Canon EOS 6D
Nikon 1 V2
 
For more information on supported RAW formats, see http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5371.

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Version: 11.0.1
Post Date: Dec 13, 2012
Download ID: DL1615
File Size: 84.83 MB
System Requirements
 • Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later, 32-bit editions of Windows Vista, or 32-bit editions of Windows 7, Windows 8
• 64-bit editions of Windows Vista or Windows 7 require the iTunes 64-bit installer
• 400MB of available disk space
• Screen reader support requires Window-Eyes 7.2 or later; for information about accessibility

About iTunes 11.01 for Windows 64

This update to the new iTunes addresses an issue where new purchases in iCloud may not appear in your library if iTunes Match is turned on, makes iTunes more responsive when searching a large library, fixes a problem where the AirPlay button may not appear as expected, and adds the ability to display duplicate items within your library. This update also includes other important stability and performance improvements.

For information on the security content of this update, please visit: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222.

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Version: 11.0.1
Post Date: Dec 13, 2012
Download ID: DL1614
File Size: OS X (191.08 MB ) Windows (83.01 MB) Windows64 (84.72 MB)

System Requirements

Software:

Mac OS X version 10.6.8 or later
Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later, 32-bit editions of Windows Vista, or 32-bit editions of Windows 7, and Windows 8
Safari 4.0.3 or later
400MB of available disk space
iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match availability may vary by country.

Hardware:

Mac computer with an Intel Core processor and 512MB of RAM
To play 720p HD video, an iTunes LP, or iTunes Extras, a 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo or faster processor and 1GB of RAM is required. 
To play 1080p HD video, a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo or faster processor and 2GB of RAM is required. 
Screen resolution of 1024x768 or greater; 1280x800 or greater is required to play an iTunes LP or iTunes Extras
Broadband Internet connection to use the iTunes Store
Apple combo drive or SuperDrive to create audio, MP3, or back-up CDs; some non-Apple CD-RW recorders may also work
Apple SuperDrive to back up your library to DVDs; some non-Apple DVD-RW drives may also work

About iTunes 11.0.1
 
This update to the new iTunes addresses an issue where new purchases in iCloud may not appear in your library if iTunes Match is turned on, makes iTunes more responsive when searching a large library, fixes a problem where the AirPlay button may not appear as expected, and adds the ability to display duplicate items within your library. This update also includes other important stability and performance improvements.

For information on the security content of this update, please visit: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222.
 
Windows
SHA1 = 8f4a9261bfba2876b24763848a0745179fba8a3a
 
WIndows 64
SHA1 = 36004574ad0c0e44aede9146183fa005e402e1f6 

Mac
SHA1 = 83e703e3ab604fdc1f8eba492e153f4d81c5e94f

DOWNLOAD

Version: 2.28
Post Date: Dec 11, 2012
Download ID: DL1398
License: Update
File Size: 1.04 GB
System Requirements
OS X Mountain Lion
OS X Lion
Mac OS X 10.6 or later

About Epson Printer Drivers v2.28 for OS X

This update installs the latest software for your EPSON printer or scanner.

For more information about printing and scanning software, see http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3669#epson

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Version: 3.0
Post Date: Dec 11, 2012
Download ID: DL1397
License: Update
File Size: 181.31 MB
System Requirements
Mountain Lion
Mac OS X 10.6 or later
OS X Lion 10.7 or later

About Lexmark Printer Driver v3.0 for OS X

This update installs the latest software for your Lexmark printer or scanner.

For more information about printing and scanning software, see http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3669#lexmark

DOWNLOAD

Version: 1.7
Post Date: Dec 10, 2012
Download ID: DL1616
License: Update
File Size: 4.53 MB
System Requirements
Mac mini (Late 2012)

About Mac mini EFI Firmware Update 1.7

This update addresses HDMI video flicker issues on Mac mini (Late 2012) computers and is recommended for all users.

The Mac mini EFI Firmware Update will update the EFI firmware on your computer.

Your computer's power cord must be connected and plugged into a working power source. When your Mac mini restarts, a gray screen will appear with a status bar to indicate the progress of the update. It will take several minutes for the update to complete. Do not disturb or shut off the power on your Mac mini during this update.

Mac mini EFI will be updated to 0106.03

DOWNLOAD

Version: 9.3
Post Date: Dec 4, 2012
Download ID: DL1563
File Size: 316.7 MB
System Requirements
OS X Lion 10.7.4
OS X Mountain Lion 10.8

About iWork 9.3

iWork Update 9.3 adds support for iWork for iOS 1.7 apps.

This update is recommended for users of iWork 9.0 and later.

For detailed information on this update and individual application changes, please visit this site: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5534. 

DOWNLOAD

Version: 1.1
Post Date: Nov 27, 2012
Download ID: DL1612
File Size: 442 KB
System Requirements
▪ OS X Lion 10.7.4 or later

About Thunderbolt Firmware Update v1.1

This update addresses an issue with MacBook Pro (mid 2012) and some Thunderbolt cables that may prevent bus-powered Thunderbolt devices from functioning properly.

DOWNLOAD

Version: 2.0
Post Date: Nov 20, 2012
Download ID: DL1611
License: Update
File Size: 26.65 MB
System Requirements
OS X Mountain Lion v10.8.2

About OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2 Supplemental Update 2.0

This update addresses an issue with Keychain that can affect 2012 Mac systems.
This update is recommended for all Mac systems introduced in 2012. 

DOWNLOAD

Version: 3.4.3
Post Date: Nov 12, 2012
Download ID: DL1610
File Size: 550.73 MB
System Requirements
OS X Lion 10.7.5
OS X 10.8.2 or later

About Aperture 3.4.3

Addresses an issue that could cause a licensed copy of Aperture to prompt for a serial number with each launch

Included in Version 3.4.2
 
▪ Photos received via My Photo Stream or shared streams can now be added directly to other shared streams
▪ Multiple email addresses can now copied and pasted in the "Shared with" field for shared streams
▪ When more than five subscribers "Like" a photo in a shared stream, all their names are now displayed correctly
▪ The Info panel for a shared stream now includes an Unsubscribe button
▪ The status line in the toolstrip now displays the number of new photos added to a shared stream
▪ Faces are now properly detected on photos imported into a library from a shared stream
▪ Adjusted photos added to shared streams are now published with EXIF metadata properly preserved
▪ Addresses the reliability of Shared Photo Streams when switching between iPhoto and Aperture with the same library
▪ Custom keyboard shortcuts are now properly preserved when upgrading from earlier versions of Aperture
▪ Double-clicking a photo in Viewer-Only mode now correctly toggles to the Browser view
▪ Addresses a problem that could prevent the Viewer from displaying images with correct color after Auto White Balance and Auto Enhance are applied
▪ Addresses an issue that could cause JPEGs exported with a custom ICC profile to render incorrectly
▪ A dialog now displays progress when deleting large numbers of photos using the Empty Aperture Trash command
▪ Fixes a problem that could cause duplicate detection on import to fail when the "Auto-Split Projects" option is enabled
▪ RAW files are no longer displayed in the Import window when the "JPEG files only" option is enabled
▪ Key photos made from panoramic images are now displayed at high resolution
▪ Addresses a problem that could cause the Info panel in the Inspector to display the wrong metadata view
▪ Fixes an issue that could prevent Microsoft Outlook from being used to email photos from within Aperture
▪ Improves stability when working with AVCHD video files
▪ Fixes a problem with using the Zoom navigator on a second display
▪ Addresses issues that could cause web journals to export incorrectly
▪ Includes stability improvements

Η Apple έχασε την έφεση που είχε υποβάλλει στο ανώτερο δικαστήριο του Λονδίνου κατά της πρωτόδικης απόφασης του Ιουνίου σύμφωνα με την οποία η Samsung δεν αντέγραψε το σχεδιασμό των iPad τα οποία ήταν πολύ "cool" κατά τα λόγια του δικαστή.

Η εταιρία με έδρα το Cupertino εξακολουθεί να έχει την επιλογή να προσφύγει στο ανώτατο δικαστήριο του Ηνωμένου βασιλείου διαφορετικά η απόφαση έχει ισχύ σε όλη την Ευρωπαϊκή Ένωση.

Το πρωτότυπο της υπόθεσης είναι ότι η Apple είναι υποχρεωμένη να αναρτήσει με δικά της έξοδα διαφημίσεις σε έγγραφο και ηλεκτρονικό τύπο ευρείας κυκλοφορίας της Μ.Βρετανία για να "διορθώσει την εσφαλμένη εντύπωση που δημιούργησε ότι η  Samsung είναι αντιγραφέας". Επίσης είναι υποχρεωμένη να κάνει ανάρτηση και στο δικό της ιστότοπο η οποία θα παραπέμπει στην απόφαση για περίοδο ενός μηνός.

Δεν υπήρξε σχολιασμός της απόφασης από μεριάς της Apple ενώ εκπρόσωπος της Samsung δήλωσε ότι ορθογώνια τάμπλετ με στρογγυλεμένες γωνίες προϋπήρχαν του iPad και ότι τέτοιες νομικές κινήσεις εν τέλη βλάπτουν την καινοτομία και τον καταναλωτή.

Σύμφωνα με τους Times της Κορέας, ύστερα από τις τελευταίες έντονες δικαστικές διαμάχες μεταξύ της Apple και της Samsung για θέματα ευρεσιτεχνιών, η τελευταία πρόκειται να σταματήσει την παροχή LCD οθονών στην ανταγωνίστρια εταιρεία της. Ο ρόλος της Samsung στην τροφοδότηση της Apple με οθόνες ολοένα και γινόταν μικρότερος το τελευταίο χρονικό διάστημα, με το αποκορύφωμα να είναι η μηδενική συμμετοχή της στην τροφοδότηση κομματιών για το φημολογούμενο iPad mini.

Όπως αναφέρεται η Apple ξεκίνησε να μειώνει τις παραγγελίες της από τη Samsung τον περασμένο Σεπτέμβριο, δίνοντας μεγαλύτερη βαρύτητα στις παραγγελίες από την LG και τη Sharp. Αν και θα περίμενε κανείς η Samsung να δει ιδιαίτερη μείωση στα έσοδά της ύστερα από αυτή την κίνηση, ίσως αυτά να εξισορροπηθούν από τον ολοένα αυξανόμενο αριθμό παραγγελιών που δέχεται από την Amazon.

Η τιμολόγηση της οθόνης από την Apple στην τελευταία γενιά iPad είχε ως αποτέλεσμα η Samsung να κερδίσει μόλις τα μισά χρήματα ανά pixel σε σύγκριση με τα προηγούμενα μοντέλα. Οι κινήσεις της Apple για την απαγγίστρωσή της από κάθε είδους εξάρτηση από ανταγωνίστριες εταιρείες ξεκίνησε από την απόφασή της να τροποποιήσει το σχεδιασμό των επεξεργαστών της αλλά και να αλλάξει προμηθευτές RAM και NAND chips.

Αυτό που απομένει να δούμε είναι εάν θα καταφέρει η Apple μέσα στον επόμενο χρόνο να τροφοδοτείται αποτελεσματικά από άλλες εταιρείες, έτσι ώστε να μην προκύπτουν προβλήματα έλλειψης κομματιών κατά την κατασκευή των συσκευών της.

H Foxconn παραδέχθηκε ότι παρανομεί, απασχολώντας ασκούμενους ανηλίκους μεταξύ 14 και 16 ετών σε εργοστάσιό της στην πόλη Yantai της Κίνας, το οποίο κατασκευάζει ηλεκτρονικές συσκευές για διάφορες εταιρείες.
 
Η εταιρεία δήλωσε πως κατόπιν εσωτερικής έρευνας, διαπιστώθηκε πως τα σχετικά ρεπορτάζ που είχαν δημοσιευθεί στην Κίνα ήταν αληθή και μερικοί μαθητές οι οποίοι βρίσκονται σε σύντομο πρόγραμμα εργασιακής άσκησης είναι κάτω των νόμιμου ορίου εργασίας των 16 ετών.
 
Πρόσθεσε δε πως δεν παραβιάζεται μόνο ο κινεζικός εργασιακός νόμος, αλλά και η πολιτική τής εταιρείας, η οποία δεν προβλέπει να απασχολούνται ανήλικοι στα εργοστάσιά της.
 
Η Foxconn συμπλήρωσε πως θα διενεργήσει πλήρη έρευνα σε συνεργασία με τα εκπαιδευτικά ιδρύματα των ασκουμένων, για να διαπιστώσει πώς συνέβη το γεγονός αυτό, ενώ θα ληφθούν και όλα τα απαραίτητα μέτρα για να μην ξανασυμβεί.
 
Η εταιρεία τα τελευταία χρόνια έχει βρεθεί πολλές φορές στο επίκεντρο της δημοσιότητας παγκοσμίως, εξαιτίας των κακών εργασιακών συνθηκών που επικρατούν στα εργοστάσιά της και πρόσφατα, δημοσιογράφος του κινεζικού πρακτορείου ειδήσεων Shanghai Evening Post κατάφερε να προσληφθεί και περιέγραψε τα όσα έζησε.

Κατά την παρουσίαση του iPhone 5, η Apple διαφήμισε το iOS 6 και τα περισσότερα από 200 νέα χαρακτηριστικά που αυτό εισήγαγε. Αυτό που "ξέχασε" όμως να αναφέρει, είναι οι νέες διαφημιστικές δυνατότητες που προσφέρει.
 
Το iOS 6 υποστηρίζει την τεχνολογία IFA ή IDFA (Identifier for Advertising) η οποία "παρακολουθεί" τις συνήθειες του κατόχου της κάθε συσκευής με την βοήθεια του UDID (Unique Device ID).
 
Η τεχνολογία IFA λειτουργεί περίπου όπως τα cookies στον browser, είναι προσωρινή και μπορεί να απενεργοποιηθεί. Αυτό που κάνει στην πράξη, είναι να δημιουργεί μία αίτηση για διαφήμιση ανάλογα με τις εφαρμογές που χρησιμοποιείτε ή τα site που επισκέπτεστε και στην συνέχεια να στέλνει αυτό το αίτημα σε κάποιον Ad Server.
 
Με αυτό τον τρόπο, οι διαφημιστές είναι σε θέση να γνωρίζουν πως η τάδε συσκευή ενδιαφέρεται για συγκεκριμένα πράγματα, ώστε να του σερβίρουν την κατάλληλη διαφήμιση.
 
Αντίστοιχη δυνατότητα παρακολούθησης υπήρχε και στο παρελθόν, με τη διαφορά όμως ότι γινόταν σε επίπεδο εφαρμογής, με την Apple τότε να απειλεί τους developers πως αν δεν σταματούσαν να "παρακολουθούν" το UDID θα κατέβαζε τις εφαρμογές τους από το App Store. Πλέον, η επιλογή είναι σε επίπεδο λειτουργικού, είναι ενεργοποιημένη εξορισμού, και η παρακολούθηση γίνεται με τις "ευλογίες" της Apple. 
 
Εάν αυτή η πρακτική σας ενοχλεί μπορείτε να την απενεργοποιήσετε, αν και πάλι εδώ η Apple έχει φροντίσει ώστε να... "κρύψει" την σχετική επιλογή σε διαφορετικό σημείο από ό,τι θα περίμενε κανείς.
 
Όσοι λοιπόν από εσάς έχετε iOS 6, μπορείτε να πάτε στις "Ρυθμίσεις > Γενικά > Πληροφορίες" (και όχι στο Απόρρητο) και κάνοντας scroll down θα βρείτε την επιλογή "Διαφήμιση". Επιλέγοντάς την, ανοίγει καινούργιο μενού με την επιλογή "Περιορισμός της Παρακολούθησης", η οποία είναι απενεργοποιημένη. Ενεργοποιήστε την και από δω και στο εξής οι διαφημιστές δε θα μπορούν να μάθουν τις συνήθειές σας...

To our customers,

At Apple, we strive to make world-class products that deliver the best experience possible to our customers. With the launch of our new Maps last week, we fell short on this commitment.

We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better.

We launched Maps initially with the first version of iOS. As time progressed, we wanted to provide our customers with even better Maps including features such as turn-by-turn directions, voice integration, Flyover and vector-based maps. In order to do this, we had to create a new version of Maps from the ground up.

There are already more than 100 million iOS devices using the new Apple Maps, with more and more joining us every day. In just over a week, iOS users with the new Maps have already searched for nearly half a billion locations. The more our customers use our Maps the better it will get and we greatly appreciate all of the feedback we have received from you.

While we’re improving Maps, you can try alternatives by downloading map apps from the App Store like Bing, MapQuest and Waze, or use Google or Nokia maps by going to their websites and creating an icon on your home screen to their web app.

Everything we do at Apple is aimed at making our products the best in the world. We know that you expect that from us, and we will keep working non-stop until Maps lives up to the same incredibly high standard.

Tim Cook

Apple’s CEO

http://www.apple.com/letter-from-tim-cook-on-maps/

It’s hard to say exactly what percentage of desktop and laptop computers run Apple OS X, but it’s clear that the operating system has made slow but steady gains at chipping away at that the sizable lead Microsoft established in the ’90s with its Windows operating system. Some figures put the number at about 6 to 7 percent of the desktop market.

But one thing’s for sure: OS X has been more successful than Linux, the open source operating system that has found a home on data-center servers but is still a rarity on desktops and laptops. Linux may have seen a surge last year, but it still hasn’t seen the sort of growth OS X has, nor the growth that Linux supporters have long hoped for.

Why is that? Miguel de Icaza — one of the original creators of GNOME, a Linux desktop interface that has struggled to take hold — believes that a large portion of the software developers that could have taken Linux to greater heights defected to other platforms, including not only Apple OS X but — more importantly — the web.

Some might blame the slow progress of desktop Linux on the fragmentation of the desktop user interfaces used by the major Linux distributions. In 2010, Canonical announced that it would replaced the popular GNOME desktop environment with its own homegrown Unity environment in the Ubuntu distribution, much to many Linux geeks’ chagrin. But many are also unhappy with the direction GNOME has taken, including Linux creator Linus Torvalds, who posted a tirade about it on Google Plus last year.

Torvalds switched to Xfce, a desktop environment originally created as a lighter-weight alternative to the dominant GNOME and KDE environments (Update: He has since switched back to Gnome, but he’s not happy about it). The audio and video centric Ubuntu Studio completed a transition to Xfce last month, and earlier this month, the venerable Linux distribution Debian dropped GNOME as its default desktop environment and replaced it with Xfce.

But de Icaza says the desktop wars were already lost to OS X by the time the latest shakeups started happening. And he thinks the real reason Linux lost is that developers started defecting to OS X because the developers behind the toolkits used to build graphical Linux applications didn’t do a good enough job ensuring backward compatibility between different versions of their APIs. “For many years, we broke people’s code,” he says. “OS X did a much better job of ensuring backward compatibility.”

But at the same time, development was shifting to the web. Open source on the desktop became a lot less important than open source on the server. The need to develop native applications was diminishing and at the same time OS X provided a good enough Unix-like environment that programmers could develop on a Mac and then deploy to a Linux server.

The web is where open source truly thrives. Even Steve Ballmer admits that Linux is beating Windows in the web server market. Even if you don’t have a single open source application installed on your laptop, if you use the web you’re probably being served by several open source technologies, including web servers like Apache and Nginx and programming languages and frameworks like PHP and Ruby on Rails all running on an open source operating system. The latest trends in web technology, from cloud computing to big data, are also built on open source technologies such as Apache Hadoop, MongoDB and the Xen hypervisor.

Open source powers the server side of the web, but there’s no guarantee of openness on the user-facing side. And that’s where open source advocates are focusing much of their efforts now, even if they have started using Macs. “Many people who were talking about Free Software are the people talking about the open web now,” de Icaza says.

One of them is Stormy Peters, the former executive director of the GNOME Foundation. She’s still on the GNOME Foundation board an like de Icaza she still keeps some Linux machines around. But as director of websites and developer engagement at the Mozilla Foundation, her focus is now on the open web.

“The reason I’m personally at Mozilla is that I saw a lot of websites that weren’t designed with the principles of free software,” she says. Thanks to AJAX and HTML5, the web has become the dominant platform for applications she says.

In what ways can the principles of free software be applied to the web? Peters says one of the most important aspects of open source software is that you, or someone you trust, can examine an application’s source code and see what it’s doing. One way to bring this level of insight to the web is help users control their data and how it is used by web applications. That’s the goal of Mozilla Identity team, who are working on Mozilla Persona, a browser-based identity and authentication system.

Another big change since the early days of the Linux desktop is the rise of the mobile web. “There’s a huge portion of the world who are going to first experience the internet through the mobile devices,” Peters say.

To that end, Mozilla is working on its Boot to Gecko open source mobile operating system, but possibly more importantly is the Mozilla Marketplace. These applications will run anywhere that the Firefox web browser will.

Mobile development is also on de Icaza’s mind. Since 2001 he’s been working on Mono, an open source framework for running Microsoft’s .NET languages on non-Microsoft operating systems like Linux and OS X. Now the project is available on Android and iOS as well.

Meanwhile, through all of this, GNOME and the Linux desktop are still chugging along. GNOME 3.6 will be out soon, and is working to improve the developer experience.


Πηγή: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/08/osx-killed-linux/

Η παραγωγή του νέου iPhone 5 των 16GB, κοστίζει στην Apple περί τα 207 δολάρια, σύμφωνα με ανάλυση της IHS iSuppli. Οι εκδόσεις των 32GB και των 64GB κοστίζουν κατά προσέγγιση 217 και 237 δολάρια αντίστοιχα.

Το λεγόμενο "Βill of Μaterials" (BOM), το κόστος των υλικών δηλαδή, για τις εκδόσεις των 16GB/32GB/64GB είναι αντίστοιχα 199/209/230 δολάρια και επιπλέον 8 δολάρια είναι το κατασκευαστικό κόστος.

Η Apple πουλάει τα αντίστοιχα μοντέλα στη λιανική αγορά προς 649, 749 και 849 δολάρια, ενώ για να κάνουμε και τις σχετικές συγκρίσεις, στην Ευρώπη και πιο συγκεκριμένα στη Γαλλία και τη Γερμανία, οι αρχικές τιμές διαμορφώθηκαν στα 679, 789 και 899 ευρώ για τα μοντέλα των 16GB/32GB/64GB αντίστοιχα.

Το πιο ακριβό τμήμα του iPhone 5, δεν είναι ο επεξεργαστής του, όπως αρκετοί θα περίμεναν, αλλά ο οθόνη του, τεχνολογίας in-cell, η οποία κοστίζει 44 δολάρια, 7 δολάρια παραπάνω από όσο κόστιζε η οθόνη του iPhone 4S.



Αν και στα παραπάνω, δεν περιλαμβάνονται τα κόστη της συσκευασίας, των μεταφορικών, του software, πιθανά δικαιώματα προς τρίτους κλπ. η διαφορά του κόστους παραγωγής σε σχέση με τις τιμές λιανικής, φαίνεται από μεγάλη έως και... αδικαιολόγητα τεράστια, στα ακριβότερα μοντέλα.
 
Μπορείτε να δείτε την πλήρη ανάλυση της IHS iSuppli εδώ.

You might think that the remote vehicle "start" capabilities offered through some car companies, like OnStar via General Motors, for example, is a "cool" thing to have. If so, realize this: A company that can remotely start your vehicle and unlock your door can also remotely shut you out of it or shut it down completely, especially if forced to do so by authorities (who may or may not have a court order to do so). That kind of technology works both ways, so to speak.

That's an important thing to consider, given the fact that Apple, Inc., was recently granted a patent enabling the company to wirelessly disable the camera function on specific iPhones in certain locations, "sparking fears that such techniques could be used to prevent citizens from communicating with each other or taking video during protests or events such as political conventions and gatherings," PrisonPlanet.com reported.

In this electronic day and age, just about all of us are aware that cellphone-generated video is easy to take and easy to upload to an audience of millions within moments. Most of us have seen the cellphone video of a fight or a confrontation or another impactful incident involving civilians and authorities. It's a powerful medium that very often offers a point of view not available to the mainstream media - but carried by them, nonetheless.

That may all be about to change.

Freedom is not a given

Theoretically, according to U.S. Patent No. 8,254,902, published recently, "apparatus and methods of enforcement of policies upon a wireless device" could be implemented with the flick of an electronic switch.

According to the patent:

Apparatus and methods for changing one or more functional or operational aspects of a wireless device, such as upon the occurrence of a certain event. In one embodiment, the event comprises detecting that the wireless device is within range of one or more other devices. In another variant, the event comprises the wireless device associating with a certain access point. In this manner, various aspects of device functionality may be enabled or restricted (device "policies"). This policy enforcement capability is useful for a variety of reasons, including for example to disable noise and/or light emanating from wireless devices (such as at a movie theater), for preventing wireless devices from communicating with other wireless devices (such as in academic settings), and for forcing certain electronic devices to enter "sleep mode" when entering a sensitive area.

What that means is, an encoded signal could possibly be transmitted to all wireless devices entering "a sensitive area" (and who defines what that is?) which would command them to disable all recording functions.

Feeling safer now?

The fear, obviously, is that this capability can and will be used by authorities at given times to control what you can and cannot document on your personal device, based on their whims and needs.

Not a good development for those who love freedom.

Just when technology was set to make more of the world instantly accessible...

This development comes on top of an innovation by technology companies to make wireless connectivity a major component of the latest cameras; this would not bode well for photographers and citizen journalists who are already having their first and fourth amendment rights trampled.

Says Michael Zhang at the tech site Peta Pixel:

"If this type of technology became widely adopted and baked into cameras, photography could be prevented by simply setting a 'geofence' around a particular location, whether it's a movie theater, celebrity hangout spot, protest site, or the top secret rooms at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California."

The same site offers some soothing advice as well:

"Companies often file patents for all kinds of random technologies that never end up seeing the light of day, so you shouldn't be too concerned about this latest document. It's just a warning of what the future could potentially hold."

Knowledge is power. We'll be keeping an eye on this development for our readers.

Sources:

http://www.naturalnews.com/037220_iPhone_recordings_patent.html

http://www.prisonplanet.com/apple-granted-patent-to-disable-cameras-according-to-location.html

http://www.petapixel.com/2012/08/30/apple-moves-a-step-closer-to-location-based-camera-disabling/

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=
%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=36&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PTX
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Mετά τις πολυάριθμες δικαστικές διαμάχες ανά τον κόσμο με κολοσσούς και εταιρίες από των χώρο της τεχνολογίας, όπως η Samsung, η Apple φαίνεται να αποφάσισε πως πρέπει να προστατεύσει τα πνευματικά της δικαιώματα και σε άλλους επαγγελματικούς κλάδους. Έτσι λοιπόν σύμφωνα με Πολωνικό site η Apple απαίτησε από το Πολωνικό Γραφείο Διπλωμάτων Ευρεσιτεχνίας στις 29 Αυγούστου, να ακυρώσει το trademark που ανήκει στην εταιρία A.PL Internet SA και πρόκειται ουσιαστικά για ένα online οπωροπωλείο με την ονομασία a.pl το οποίο δραστηριοποιείται στην Πολωνία.

Έτσι ο συνδυασμός της κατάληξης για τα Πολωνικά domains .pl, με το πρώτο γράμμα της Πολωνικής αλφαβήτου a, θεωρούνται ικανά από τον Αμερικανικό κολοσσό για να βλάψουν τα συμφέροντά του. Προφανώς η Αpple θεωρεί πως το εν λόγω διαδικτυακό οπωροπωλείο αντιγράφει την ηχητική του ονόματός της. Επίσης είναι πιθανό η Apple να μηνύει την a.pl και για το λογότυπό της ιστοσελίδας fresh24.pl το οποίο επίσης ανήκει στην Πολωνική εταιρία. Έτσι, όπως και στις περισσότερες αντίστοιχες περιπτώσεις, η Apple κατηγορεί τη a.pl πως εκμεταλλεύεται την δυναμική και την φήμη της και πως υπάρχει πιθανότητα σύγχυσης στο καταναλωτικό κοινό.

Από την μεριά της η a.pl προφανώς προσπαθεί να υπερασπιστεί του λογότυπού και της επωνυμίας της και δηλώνει πως οι δυο εταιρίες δραστηριοποιούνται σε εντελώς διαφορετικούς επιχειρηματικούς κλάδους και οπότε δεν υπάρχει περίπτωση σύγχυσης των καταναλωτών.

Εάν δεν βρεθεί κάποια εξωδικαστική λύση τότε είτε θα απορριφθεί το αίτημα της Αpple είτε το online μανάβικο θα χάσει το δικαίωμα να χρησιμοποιεί την επωνυμία του. Σίγουρα όμως η όποια απόφαση θα αργήσει να βγει και πιθανώς εμείς θα συνεχίσουμε παρακολουθούμε την Apple να πρωταγωνιστεί και σε μελλοντικές δικαστικές διαμάχες με διάφορες εταιρίες ανά την υφήλιο.

H Apple επιβεβαίωσε τις φήμες για την ανακοίνωση του iPhone 5 με οθόνη 4 ιντσών, διαφορετική υποδοχή σύνδεσης και την υποστήριξη των ταχύτερων δικτύων κινητής τηλεφωνίας τέταρτης γενιάς. Πρόθυμη να ανταγωνιστεί το Nokia Lumia 920 και τις ικανότητές του στην λήψη φωτογραφιών στο σκοτάδι και σταθερών βίντεο, δήλωσε η εταιρεία για την βελτιωμένη κάμερα iSight.

Η Apple έκανε τα αποκαλυπτήρια του iPhone 5 την Δευτέρα 12 Σεπτεμβρίου, χωρίς ωστόσο να περιοριστεί σε αυτό. Το λεπτότερο και ελαφρύτερο iPhone έχει οθόνη 4 ιντσών 1136 x 640 pixel @ 326ppi (διατηρώντας το πλάτος, αυξάνοντας το μήκος της συσκευής), αξιοποιεί τα δίκτυα 4G/LTE και το Wi-Fi σε δύο συχνότητες.

H Apple ξεκινά να δέχεται παραγγελίες από την Παρασκευή 14 Σεπτεμβρίου σε τιμές iPhone 4S (με συμβόλαιο) και ρίχνει την τιμή του iPhone 4S 16GB στα 99 δολάρια με συμβόλαιο, κατά τη συνήθη πρακτική της. Η συσκευή θα κυκλοφορήσει στην ΗΠΑ και 20 συνολικά χώρες στις 21 Σεπτεμβρίου 2012 με πολλές ακόμα να ακολουθούν τον Οκτώβριο.

Θετικά σχόλια απέσπασε η δημιουργία ενός πιο λεπτού smartphone με μεγαλύτερη οθόνη και αυξημένη αυτονομία, γεγονός που χαρακτηρίστηκε «εντυπωσιακό τεχνολογικό επίτευγμα». Το iPhone 5 «αντέχει» 8 ώρες ομιλίας αν και σε LTE και 10 ώρες χρήσης σε Wi-Fi.

Το iPhone 5 αντλεί την επεξεργαστική του ισχύ από τον A6, ο οποίος σύμφωνα με την Apple επιτυγχάνει διπλάσιες επιδόσεις από το τσιπ της προηγούμενης γενιάς (το iPhone 4S είχε διπύρηνο A5).

To iPhone 5 δεν δέχεται κάρτες microSIM, αλλά nano SIM.

Σημαντική είναι η βελτίωση στον χρόνο λήψης των φωτογραφιών, με την Apple να κάνει λόγο για 40% πιο γρήγορη ανταπόκριση. Το iPhone 5 θα αναλαμβάνει επίσης την λήψη πανοραμικών φωτογραφιών (με αποτέλεσμα φωτογραφίες στα 28Mpixel), υποστηρίζει την αναγνώριση προσώπων και επιτρέπει την ταυτόχρονη λήψη φωτογραφιών και βίντεο. Στην λήψη βίντεο, η κάμερα υποστηρίζει 1080p με τεχνολογία σταθεροποίησης της λήψης. Η μπροστινή κάμερα είναι "FaceTime HD" 720p, με δυνατότητα βιντεοκλήσεων και μέσω των δικτύων κινητής τηλεφωνίας.

Πάντως, ανάμεικτα ήταν τα συναισθήματα για την αλλαγή της υποδοχής σύνδεσης του τηλεφώνου σε κάθε λογής περιφερειακά, με την Apple να αλλάζει τον connector των 30 pin εννέα χρόνια μετά την πρώτη παρουσίασή του με έναν οκτώ ακίδων, πλήρως ψηφιακό που τοποθετείται αμφίπλευρα. Μετά το Thunderbolt, η Apple παρουσιάζει το Lightning και υπόσχεται σύντομα νέα ηχεία και άλλα περιφερειακά από γνωστούς κατασκευαστές. Επιπλέον, για την αξιοποίηση των υπαρχόντων περιφερειακών η Apple προτείνει τη λύση των adaptor, πλήθος από τους οποίους θα διαθέσει επίσης η ίδια στην αγορά.

Επί σκηνής, έγινε επίδειξη του iOS 6 στο iPhone 5, δίνοντας έμφαση στα Shared Photo Streams για την άμεση κοινοποίηση φωτογραφιών σε ένα δίκτυο επιλεγμένων φίλων και συγγενών, αλλά και του νέου βελτιωμένου Siri και των χαρτών της Apple με εκατομμύρια σημεία ενδιαφέροντος.

Το iPhone 5 θα κυκλοφορήσει σε λευκό (χρώμα αλουμινίου στην πλάτη) και μαύρο χρώμα (με μαύρη πλάτη).

Σύμφωνα με ρεπορτάζ των Korea Times, η Samsung ετοιμάζεται να μηνύσει την Apple για πατέντα της, που αναμένεται να χρησιμοποιείται στο επερχόμενο iPhone 5, όσον αφορά στη 4G LTE συνδεσιμότητα.

Οι πηγές, αναφέρουν πως η Samsung θα στοχοποιήσει την Apple στην Ευρώπη και τις ΗΠΑ.

Η Apple ετοιμάζεται για την παρουσίαση του νέου iPhone, το οποίο αναμένεται να έχει συνδεσιμότητα 4G LTE, αφού ήδη το πιο πρόσφατο iPad ενσωματώνει την αντίστοιχη λειτουργία.

Οι κορεάτες φαίνεται πως δεν το βάζουν κάτω, παρά το ότι στις περισσότερες περιπτώσεις μέχρι στιγμής, μάλλον χαμένοι έχουν βγει παρά κερδισμένοι, με αποκορύφωμα βέβαια, την ήττα στη μεγάλη δίκη στις ΗΠΑ και το πρόστιμο του 1 δισ. δολαρίων που της επιβλήθηκε για την οποία και έχει υποβάλη έφεση.

To FBI απάντησε στους AntiSec/Anonymous δηλώνοντας ότι «δεν υπάρχουν αποδείξεις ότι υπήρξε παραβίαση σε λάπτοπ ειδικού πράκτορά της, ή ότι το FBI αναζήτησε ή κατείχε λίστα» περισσότερων από 12 εκατομμυρίων «ταυτοτήτων» iPad, iPhone και iPod touch μαζί με στοιχεία πολλών κατόχων.

«Πριν όμως τα αρνηθείτε όλα, θυμηθείτε ότι καθόμαστε πάνω σε ακόμα 3 TB δεδομένα», λένε οι Anonymous μέσω Twitter.

Το thenextweb.com παρέχει ένα εργαλείο με το οποίο οι κάτοχοι iPad και iPhone μπορούν να ελέγξουν εάν το UDID, το username και ο τύπος της συσκευής τους βρίσκονται στην λίστα των 1.000.001 UDID που δημοσιοποιήθηκε (αν και χωρίς προσωπικά στοιχεία). Οι ενδιαφερόμενοι μπορούν να εισάγουν μόνο μέρος του UDID, μιας συμβολοσειράς με 40 αριθμούς ή/και γράμματα.

Πάντως, οι Anonymous και το κίνημα AntiSec υποστηρίζουν πως η λίστα που καταγγέλλουν ότι κατείχε ο ειδικός πράκτορας του FBI Cristopher Stangl περιείχε 12.367.232 UDID, πολλά από τα οποία είχαν προσωπικά στοιχεία (μεταξύ άλλων, αριθμό κινητού τηλεφώνου, διεύθυνση).

Η παρουσίαση από την Apple μιας υπηρεσίας στα πρότυπα των Spotify, Pandora και Deezer φημολογείται εδώ και καιρό και όπως φαίνεται είναι θέμα χρόνου να γίνει πραγματικότητα σύμφωνα με την πιο αξιόπιστη πηγή φημών για την Apple, την Wall Street Journal.

Όπως στο Spotify και στο Pandora, η μουσική υπηρεσία της Apple θα επιτρέπει την μετάδοση μουσικών κομματιών μέσω Internet μέσα από την τεράστια βάση της εταιρείας, δίνοντας έτσι τη δυνατότητα στον χρήστη να δημιουργήσει τις δικές του playlists με τραγούδια που επιθυμεί έναντι μιας μηνιαίας χρέωσης. Τα κομμάτια αυτά δεν θα αποθηκεύονται στο σύστημα του χρήστη αλλά θα είναι διαθέσιμα ανά πάσα στιγμή για μετάδοση μέσω της υπηρεσίας.

Το σχέδιο αυτό της Apple βρίσκεται στις σκέψεις της εταιρείας ήδη από το 2010 όμως για διάφορους λόγους δε προχώρησε κυρίως εξαιτίας του υψηλού αντιτίμου δικαιωμάτων που ζητάνε οι δισκογραφικές εταιρείες αλλά και από το φόβο της Apple να μην επηρεαστεί η υπηρεσία πώλησης μουσικών κομματιών μέσω του iTunes.

Σύμφωνα με τη Wall Street Journal η Apple μόλις πρόσφατα ξεκίνησε ένα νέο γύρο διαλόγου με τις δισκογραφικές εταιρείες συζητώντας διαφορετικό τρόπο χρέωσης το οποίο πιθανόν να περιλαμβάνει και διαφημίσεις. Ακόμα η Apple επιθυμεί την παράκαμψη ορισμένων περιορισμών που ισχύουν σε άλλες παρόμοιες υπηρεσίες όπως η απαγόρευση αναπαραγωγής ενός κομματιού το οποίο έχει αναπαραχθεί από τον χρήστη πολλές φορές.

Όποτε και αν παρουσιαστεί τελικά τέτοια υπηρεσία από την Apple, θα διατεθεί για την πλειονότητα των προιόντων της εταιρείας όπως iMac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV ενώ υπάρχουν σκέψεις να διατεθεί και για υπολογιστές με Windows λειτουργικό σύστημα. Το σίγουρο πάντως είναι ότι η υπηρεσία δε θα τρέχει στην Android πλατφόρμα.

Aναταραχή επικρατεί στους δικτυακούς κύκλους καθώς η ομάδα ακτιβιστών χάκερ AntiSec δημοσίευσε στο διαδίκτυο 1.000.001 UDID από συσκευές της Apple ενώ δήλωσε πως στην κατοχή της έχει συνολικά περισσότερα από 12.000.000 UDID μαζί με τα στοιχεία των κατόχων τους καθώς και push notification tokens. Η υπόθεση αποκτά ενδιαφέρον καθώς εμπλέκεται και το FBI.

Οι AntiSec ισχυρίζονται πως βρήκαν την λίστα στο φορητό υπολογιστή ενός πράκτορα του FBI, στον οποίο απόκτησαν παράνομη πρόσβαση εκμεταλλευόμενοι ένα κενό ασφαλείας της Java.

Εδώ ξεκινούν τα ερωτήματα. Γιατί ένας πράκτορας του FBI είχε πρόσβαση σε αυτή τη λίστα; Προφανώς 12.000.000 χρήστες είναι πολλοί για να έχει για όλους ένταλμα παρακολούθησης.

Το επόμενο ερώτημα, είναι που βρήκε αυτή τη λίστα. Πιθανολογείται πως μπορεί να του την έδωσε κάποια εταιρεία που έχει πρόσβαση τουλάχιστον σε τόσες συσκευές χρηστών, μια εταιρεία που μάλλον φτιάχνει μια δημοφιλή εφαρμογή για το iPhone. Μια άλλη περίπτωση, δεδομένου των ευαίσθητων στοιχείων που περιλαμβάνουν, θα ήταν τα δεδομένα να είναι προϊόν υποκλοπής, το οποίο είναι περισσότερο ανησυχητικό.

Το FBI πάντως σε ανακοίνωσή του, αρνείται πως είχε οποιαδήποτε σχέση με τα δεδομένα που διέρρευσαν.

Ευθύνες όμως φέρει και η Apple, που παρά τις προειδοποιήσεις χρησιμοποίησε τα UDID με αυτόν τον τρόπο στις συσκευές iOS και ενθάρρυνε την χρήση τους. Ωστόσο η Apple έχει ξεκινήσει τις διαδικασίες για την απομάκρυνση του UDID από το 2011 και στο iOS 5 θεωρούνται deprecated (δηλαδή παραμένουν για λόγους συμβατότητας αλλά στο μέλλον θα καταργηθούν).

Τέλος, μεγάλο μερίδιο ευθύνης πέφτει σε εταιρείες που χρησιμοποιούν τα UDID για δουλειές για τις οποίες δεν φτιάχτηκαν, όπως πιστοποίηση των χρηστών. Σημαντικό παράδειγμα αποτελεί το OpenFeint, η δημοφιλής υπηρεσία που αποθηκεύει online τα σκορ για πάρα πολλά παιχνίδια του iOS αλλά και του Android. Το OpenFeint χρησιμοποιούσε μέχρι πριν λίγο καιρό τα UDID για να πιστοποιήσει τους χρήστες που δεν έχουν φτιάξει δικό τους account.

Οι κίνδυνοι από αυτή την διαρροή διαφέρουν από χρήστη σε χρήστη. Κάποιοι δεν θα επηρεαστούν καθόλου, κάποιοι κινδυνεύουν να δουν δεδομένα τους στα χέρια τρίτων ενώ οι πιο άτυχοι κινδυνεύουν να χάσουν τα account τους σε διάφορες σελίδες, όπως το twitter και το facebook. Κάποιοι ίσως δεχθούν και push notifications στις συσκευές τους από υπηρεσίες που δεν έχουν εγκρίνει, ενώ άλλοι ίσως δουν μέχρι και την τοποθεσία τους στο χάρτη να φτάνει στα χέρια τρίτων.

Οι ερευνητές ασφαλείας προειδοποιούν εδώ και καιρό για τους κινδύνους που επιφέρουν τεχνικές όπως το UDID αλλά τόσο οι εταιρείες λογισμικού όσο και η Apple τους αγνοούν σε μεγάλο βαθμό.

Οι AntiSec δικαιολογούν την πράξη τους από το γεγονός πως οι δημοσιογράφοι και οι χρήστες δεν δίνουν ιδιαίτερη σημασία στα ευρήματα και τις προειδοποιήσεις τους για τους κινδύνους που διατρέχουν. Τώρα όμως θεωρούν πως θα αναγκαστούν να ενδιαφερθούν.

Από τις προσκλήσεις προς τον δημοσιογραφικό κόσμο που απέστειλε την Τρίτη η Apple, επιβεβαιώνεται ότι το επόμενο iPhone θα ονομάζεται iPhone 5, χωρίς ωστόσο να αποκαλύπτεται τίποτα περισσότερο πριν την 12η Σεπτεμβρίου.

Η ημερομηνία (12) εμφανίζεται πάνω στην σκιά που διαγράφεται από το σχήμα του αριθμού 5. Η ανακοίνωση του iPhone 5 θα γίνει στις 12 Σεπτεμβρίου 2012 και αναμένεται να κυκλοφορήσει στην αμερικανική, και όχι μόνο, αγορά μια ή δύο εβδομάδες αργότερα.

Το iPhone 5 θεωρείται βέβαιο ότι θα έχει μεγαλύτερη οθόνη και θα υποστηρίζει τα νεότερα δίκτυα τέταρτης γενιάς, τεχνολογίας LTE στις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες. Τίποτα από όλα όσα φημολογούνται δεν έχει επιβεβαιωθεί.

Η πρόσκληση δεν αφήνει να εννοηθεί ότι οι φήμες για το iPad mini θα επιβεβαιωθούν, τουλάχιστον όχι στις 12 Σεπτεμβρίου.

"An Italian regulatory agency has taken action against Apple for its sale of AppleCare extended warranty programs that overlap with standard warranties required by European law, effectively selling customers warranty protection that they do not need.

Apple's standard warranties are good for one year, with AppleCare extended warranties pushing that coverage out to a total of two or three years depending on the product. EUROPEAN LAW REQUIRES, HOWEVER, A STANDARD TWO-YEAR WARRANTY, OVERLAPPING OR ENTIRELY COINCIDING WITH APPLE'S SEPARATE APPLECARE OFFERINGS. Complicating the issue are differing warranty requirements for manufacturers and sellers, requirements that Apple has apparently argued are being satisfactorily met but with which regulators disagree.

The actions taken by the Italian consumer agency could result in fines levied against Apple and serve as the basis for civil actions by customers."


"FOLLOWING FINE, APPLE ALERTS ITALIAN CUSTOMERS TO THEIR FREE 2-YEAR WARRANTY.

Apple has begun alerting its Italian customers that they have a right to a two-year warranty on Apple's products as provided by Italian law. The move comes after Apple was issued a $1.2 million fine for allegedly misleading customers—the court decision documenting Apple's violation is now linked directly from the store.apple.it page.

Italy's Consumer Code provides all Italian customers with a two-year warranty that covers products that were defective at the time of sale. In December, Italy's Antitrust Authority accused Apple of obscuring this fact by pushing its own AppleCare Protection Plans, which extend coverage beyond the company-provided one year to three years.

The court decision linked from the Italian Store page details how Apple must change its marketing language for its AppleCare Protection Plans to reflect the existence of the two-year consumer code warranty. Directly linking the document, which also details the fines Apple had to pay, is an oddly transparent move by the company, but may be used to support the company's court appeal to the fine."


Πηγές:

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/05/27/apple-hit-with-tax-lobbying-protest-italian-investigation-into-applecare-offerings/

http://www.setteb.it/procedimento-dellantitrust-italiano-contro-apple-sulle-garanzie-11157

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16339651

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/12/apple-hit-with-12-million-fine-for-misleading-italian-consumers.ars

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/01/apple-alerts-italian-customers-to-their-free-two-year-warranty.ars

http://store.apple.com/Catalog/it/Images/comunicazione_a_tutela_dei_consumatori.pdf


Η ΣΧΕΤΙΚΗ ΕΥΡΩΠΑΪΚΗ ΝΟΜΟΘΕΣΙΑ, Η ΟΠΟΙΑ ΟΡΙΖΕΙ 2 ΕΤΗ ΕΓΓΥΗΣΗ ΓΙΑ ΟΛΑ ΤΑ ΠΡΟΪΟΝΤΑ:

http://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/shopping/shopping-abroad/guarantees/index_el.htm

Θέλοντας να βελτιώσει τις χαμηλές επιδόσεις της στην κοινωνική δικτύωση, η Apple έχει ολοκληρώσει προκαταρκτικές συνομιλίες με το Twitter για ενδεχόμενη στρατηγική επένδυση στην υπηρεσία, γράφουν οι New York Times επικαλούμενοι πηγές που «έχουν ενημερωθεί για το θέμα».

Σύμφωνα με το δημοσίευμα, η Apple δεν βρίσκεται αυτή τη στιγμή σε διαπραγματεύσεις, έχει όμως συζητήσει το ενδεχόμενο να επενδύσει ένα ποσό της τάξης των εκατοντάδων εκατομμυρίων δολαρίων, εκτιμώντας πιθανώς ότι η συνολική αξία του Twitter υπερβαίνει πλέον τα δέκα δισεκατομμύρια δολάρια.

Με τις υπηρεσίες κοινωνικής δικτύωσης να αντιστοιχούν πλέον σε ένα σημαντικό μέρος της διαδικτυακής ζωής των χρηστών, η Apple θα είχε κάθε λόγο να θέλει να αξιοποιήσει την εμπειρία του Twitter και ενδεχομένως να το συνδέσει με δικά της προϊόντα.

Η εταιρεία είχε εξάλλου αποτύχει στο σχέδιό της να συνάψει συμφωνία με το Facebook, προκειμένου να ενσωματώσει ορισμένα από τα χαρακτηριστικά του στο Ping, μια δική της υπηρεσία δικτύωσης που εστιάζεται στη μουσική.

To Facebook φέρεται άλλωστε να αναπτύσσει δικό του κινητό τηλέφωνο, και ένα μικρό τμήμα του ανήκει ήδη Microsoft, ανταγωνιστή της Apple. Στο μεταξύ, η Google, που ανταγωνίζεται την Apple στα κινητά τηλέφωνα, προωθεί το δικό της Google Plus.

Σε πρόσφατο συνέδριο τεχνολογίας, ο διευθύνων σύμβουλος της εταιρείας Τιμ Κουκ είχε δηλώσει ότι «η Apple δεν χρειάζεται να έχει στην ιδιοκτησία της ένα κοινωνικό δίκτυο. Χρειάζεται όμως να είναι κοινωνική».

Λιγότερο σαφές είναι ωστόσο τι θα είχε να κερδίσει το Twitter από μια τέτοια συμφωνία, δεδομένου ότι, σύμφωνα με τους New York Times, η εταιρεια έχει αυτή τη στιγμή αποθεματικό άνω των 600 εκατ. δολαρίων.

Το Twitter αναμένεται εξάλλου να εισέλθει κάποια στιγμή στο χρηματιστήριο, ανεξαρτήτως του εάν θα συνάψει νέες συμφωνίες με επενδυτές όπως η Apple.

Άλλη μια έκδοση του ανοικτού Android, το Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, ανακοινώθηκε και όσοι αγόρασαν πρόσφατα smartphone αναρωτιούνται εάν το έξυπνο κινητό τηλέφωνό τους πρόκειται να γίνει πιο έξυπνο, «τρώγοντας» Jelly Bean. Φανταστείτε για παράδειγμα, να έχετε μόλις αγοράσει ένα HTC One X ή ένα Samsung Galaxy S III. Δεν θα θέλατε Android 4.1 το συντομότερο;

Ο επικεφαλής του τμήματος των μηχανικών λογισμικού για το Android στην Google, Hiroshi Lockheimer έκανε σαφές στην βρετανική εφημερίδα Telegraph ότι, η Google (με το Android) δεν θα γίνει ποτέ Apple.

Στην περίπτωση της Apple, κάθε φορά που η εταιρεία ανακοινώνει μια νέα έκδοση του λειτουργικού, σχετικά σύντομα όλες οι συσκευές της αναβαθμίζονται.

Αντίθετα, το οικοσύστημα του Android λειτουργεί εντελώς διαφορετικά. Όποια περίοδο κι αν κοιτάξει κανείς, θα βρει διαφορετικές εκδόσεις του Android σε χρήση, δηλαδή θα παρατηρήσει αυτό που από κάποιους ονομάζεται «κατακερματισμός».

Για παράδειγμα τώρα, σύντομα, στην πίτα θα προστεθούν οι πρώτοι που θα έχουν smartphone με Jelly Bean -γνωρίζουμε ήδη ότι εκτός από το Nexus 7, θα διατεθεί ενημέρωση για το Motorola Xoom, σε smartphone, τα Nexus και το Samsung Galaxy S III. Αυτοί θα αποτελούν στην παρούσα φάση -και ίσως και για τους επόμενους δύο ή και τρεις μήνες- τους μόνους που θα έχουν μερίδιο Android 4.1 στην πίτα, με πολλούς να ακολουθούν με Ice Cream Sandwich, με Gingerbread και ίσως, κάποιοι δεν έχουν κάνει ακόμα αναβάθμιση από το Froyo.

Ο χρόνος αλλά και η απόφαση για την αναβάθμιση ή όχι ενός κινητού τηλεφώνου είναι απόφαση των κατασκευαστών, τονίζει ο Lockheimer.
Κι αυτό καθώς, όταν η Google ανακοινώνει μια νέα έκδοση του λειτουργικού, οι κατασκευαστές μπορεί να βρίσκονται εν μέσω μιας παραμετροποίησης της προηγούμενης έκδοσής του για να βάλουν τις δικές τους πινελιές (όπως κάνουν για παράδειγμα η HTC με το HTC Sense, η Samsung με το Touchwiz, ή η Motorola με το Motoblur). Για αυτό, το Android είναι λειτουργικό ανοικτού κώδικα, είπε ο Lockheimer, γιατί θέλουμε να απολαμβάνουν αυτή την ελευθερία οι κατασκευαστές.

Παρεμπιπτόντως, δείτε πως θα ελευθερώσετε εσείς το Android σας, με τη βοήθεια του Ευρωπαϊκού Ιδρύματος Ελεύθερου Λογισμικού!
Άλλοι πάλι, επιλέγουν να είναι οι πρώτοι που θα διαθέσουν την ενημέρωση, θεωρώντας ότι έτσι θα αποκτήσουν ένα συγκριτικό πλεονέκτημα, πίστη και αφοσίωση από όσους τους επιλέγουν.

Άλλοι πάλι, θέλουν να ξεχωρίζουν μεταξύ άλλων Androidειδών, προσθέτοντας στο λειτουργικό που έχουν όλα τα νέα Android κάτι περισσότερο και συχνά χρήσιμο (αρκετά τα βλέπουμε να υιοθετούνται σε επόμενες εκδόσεις του λειτουργικού). Αυτές όμως οι επεμβάσεις απαιτούν χρόνο και κυρίως δοκιμές, οι οποίες καθυστερούν την διαθεσιμότητα της νέας έκδοσης του Android που μόλις κυκλοφόρησε.

Πάντως, η Google ανακοίνωσε στο συνέδριο I/O ένα πακέτο εργαλείων, το οποίο ονομάζεται platform developer kit (PDK) για να ενθαρρύνει προγραμματιστές και κατασκευαστές να εργαστούν πάνω στο Android. Έτσι, δίνουμε τη δυνατότητα σε όσους εργάζονται πάνω στο hardware να δουλέψουμε παράλληλα, είπε ο Lockheimer. Κάτι τέτοιο θα επιτάχυνε την διάθεση ενημερώσεων, αν και αυτό που επιδιώκει η Google είναι να δώσει τον απαραίτητο χρόνο στους κατασκευαστές να βελτιστοποιούν τα προϊόντα τους πάνω στην πλατφόρμα. Το λογισμικό του τηλεφώνου είναι σημαντικό, δεν ενδιαφέρονται όμως όλοι για την τελευταία ενημέρωση: «η μητέρα μου για παράδειγμα, χρησιμοποιεί τηλέφωνο με Android αλλά το πιθανότερο είναι ότι δεν γνωρίζει την έκδοση που τρέχει, σε αντίθεση με εμένα που αποτελεί σημαντικό θέμα», κατέληξε.

Εποικοδομητικά σχόλια και παρατηρήσεις από τους γείτονες επί των σχεδίων της για την κατασκευή «του καλύτερου επαγγελματικού συγκροτήματος στον κόσμο», συγκεντρώνει η Apple. Η εταιρεία έχει ήδη αποστείλει πολυσέλιδο έντυπο όπου παρουσιάζονται τα πρώτα σχέδια για το Campus 2 σε όσους πρόσκεινται στην έκταση που καταλαμβάνει περισσότερα από 64 στρέμματα στο Κουπερτίνο της Καλιφόρνια. Το νέο κτίριο της Apple μοιάζει με διαστημόπλοιο.

Στην σχεδίαση του κτιρίου συμμετείχε ενεργά ο Στιβ Τζομπς, ο οποίος μάλιστα το παρουσίασε στο αρμόδιο δημοτικό συμβούλιο στις 7 Ιουνίου 2011.

Το Campus 2 δεν θα αντικαταστήσει το κτίριο στο οποίο στεγάζονται μέχρι σήμερα τα κεντρικά γραφεία της Apple. Αυτό φέρει την χαρακτηριστική ονομασία Infinite Loop («ατέρμονος βρόχος», όρος γνωστός στους προγραμματιστές) και θα συνεχίσει να εξυπηρετεί τις καθημερινές δραστηριότητες της εταιρείας.

Στο γυάλινο, στρογγυλό κτίριο που θα πάρει τη θέση 26 κτιρίων που θα γκρεμιστούν, θα προσέρχονται καθημερινά περίπου 13.000 άνθρωποι. Αντικείμενο της εργασίας τους θα είναι η έρευνα και εκεί, λέγεται ότι είναι πιθανό να γίνονται τα αποκαλυπτήρια των επόμενων προϊόντων της Apple. Το Campus 2 δεν θα είναι όμως ανοικτό για επισκέψεις από το κοινό, καθώς δεν θα περιλαμβάνει μουσείο ή άλλους χώρους εκδηλώσεων.

Η Apple δηλώνει ότι το 80% της έκτασης θα καταλάβουν 6.000 δέντρα και η οροφή του κτιρίου θα καλύπτεται από αναρίθμητα φωτοβολταϊκά πάνελ. Το κτίριο εκτιμάται ότι θα είναι έτοιμο το 2015.

Πηγή: http://tech.in.gr/news/article/?aid=1231197185

Kaspersky Lab last week detailed why the increasing market share of the Apple Mac means more malware on the platform. Eugene (Yevgeny) Kaspersky, co-founder and CEO of the security firm, has now gone further in statement made at the Infosecurity Europe 2012 conference.

“I think [Apple] are ten years behind Microsoft in terms of security,” Kaspersky told CBR. “For many years I’ve been saying that from a security point of view there is no big difference between Mac and Windows. It’s always been possible to develop Mac malware, but this one was a bit different. For example it was asking questions about being installed on the system and, using vulnerabilities, it was able to get to the user mode without any alarms.”

Kaspersky is of course referring to the Flashback malware that has infected hundreds of thousands of Macs. He then reiterated what his employees and many security researchers have been saying for years: Apple needs to step up its game.

“Apple is now entering the same world as Microsoft has been in for more than 10 years: updates, security patches and so on,” Kaspersky said. “We now expect to see more and more because cyber criminals learn from success and this was the first successful one. They will understand very soon that they have the same problems Microsoft had ten or 12 years ago. They will have to make changes in terms of the cycle of updates and so on and will be forced to invest more into their security audits for the software. That’s what Microsoft did in the past after so many incidents like Blaster and the more complicated worms that infected millions of computers in a short time. They had to do a lot of work to check the code to find mistakes and vulnerabilities. Now it’s time for Apple [to do that].”

Kaspersky, the privately-held company, produces antivirus and other computer security products. Excluding the energy sector, Kaspersky Lab is considered one of Russia’s few international business success stories. The company makes excellent security software and I have personally recommended some of its products a few times.

That being said, Kaspersky, both the man and his company, of course would benefit from a malware epidemic on the Mac. That’s important to keep in mind, while acknowledging that the numbers are indeed growing and the Mac security situation is getting worse. Just how bad it’s getting, and will get, is a matter of perspective.


Πηγή: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/kaspersky-apple-10-years-behind-microsoft-in-terms-of-security/11706

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN — Enjoying the occasional Steve Jobs email that trickles onto the Internet? Prepare for the deluge.

Undaunted by their current travails, WikiLeaks has released 140,000 emails written by Apple’s enigmatic leader. While Scoopertino is only beginning to dig into this treasure trove, a richer picture of Steve Jobs is already beginning to emerge.

Overall, the emails reinforce the image of Steve as a man of few words. A cursory review of this massive email dump reveals that 88% of his messages contain three or fewer words, with 84% of those offering only one: “No.”

He did get a bit wordier in an exchange with North Korean bad boy Kim Jong Il. Kim, aching to get a pre-release iPod touch for his son back in August, wrote to Steve requesting “a favor from one dictator to another.” In this case, Steve doubled the syllable count with a quick “Hell no.”

Interestingly, Steve’s most verbose message seems to have been directed to his old partner, Steve Wozniak. With the Woz preparing for his third appearance on Dancing With The Stars, Steve sent an eight-word tome offering his own personal merengue tips: ”Stand proud. Hips loose. Mouthwash five minutes before.”

Most surprising, Steve’s emails show that he’s developed a “holy father/son” relationship with Pope Benedict XVI — a bond that formed when Steve sweet-talked the pontiff into appearing in the Pope Rock iPod commercial earlier this year. “Benny,” as Steve often addresses him, has been trying to get Apple to sponsor his next world tour. Steve emailed back that he’s happy to consider, “if you can just tone down the religion thing a little.”

Apple declined to make an official comment on this story, but leaves open the possibility that they will leak one later.

A few years ago, Apple sold me a $4,000 computer with a defective graphics chip/logic board. The defective part was the Nvidia 8600M GT GPU, and when it was discovered that the machine was defective, Apple refused to take it back and issue me a refund. Instead, they promised to replace the 8600M GT boards when they failed, up to 4 years from the date of purchase.

Three years later, the board failed, and predictably, Apple refused to replace it. Instead, they used the fact that the machine wouldn’t boot (due to the failed logic board) to deny the repair. Not only that, but in addition, they tried to charge me a hefty sum of money to have it replaced, knowing full well that Nvidia pays for the full repair cost.

Three and a half months ago, after having my repair denied, I announced on this very site that I was going to sue Apple. Reading these lawsuit threats often, many people assumed that I was bluffing or blowing off steam, but true to my word, I did exactly what I said I was going to do. I sued Apple.

I did not take this step lightly, however. In the months following the announcement, I did everything in my power to keep my dispute with Apple out of the court system.
First, I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. In their rebuttal to the BBB, Apple blatantly lied about the diagnostics they had run on my computer, and the BBB promptly closed the case, leaving Apple’s “A+” rating intact.

Next, I spoke with Apple Executive Services … three separate times. Each time, I was told that “We value each customer and hope that they have a positive experience with Apple, and are sorry that you did not have this experience, but you will get nothing.” … or something to this effect.

After that, I sent a demand letter to Apple via certified mail. I informed them that if I did not have my issue resolved within 10 days, I would sue.

Only then, after Apple failed to reply, did I file a Small Claims lawsuit.

Last week, the trial was held.

I arrived at the King County Courthouse shortly after 8am, and about forty five minutes later, the clerk performed roll call. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Apple had sent not one, but two people to represent the company. When Apple told me that I would get nothing, they really meant it.

After calling roll, and before calling the docket, the clerk went down the case list and asked each litigant if they would be willing to try mediation. Mediation keeps cases out of the court system, and keeps the outcomes confidential. This is especially beneficial to companies, as having judgements issued against them by customers is bad PR.

Always one to exhaust all good-faith remedies before resorting to more drastic measures (really, nobody can say I didn’t try my hardest to stay out of court), I agreed to try mediation, and to my surprise, so did Apple.

Since everything said in the mediation room is confidential, I cannot go into details about what happened there, but I will tell you that it failed, and the case was sent back to the courtroom.

In retrospect, I am glad that mediation did fail. After seeing that Apple sent two guys … two guys who were in continuous contact with Apple legal via text and cell … I knew that I was outgunned, outspent, and out-everything elsed. $500,000,000,000 vs. $37 and a pack of chewing gum is not a fair fight. Because of this, I offered settlements that were ridiculously favorable to Apple and unfavorable to myself, but even these were rejected. Thank goodness that they were.

After failing mediation, shortly after 11am, we were called before the judge, sworn in, and I read my opening statement. I said basically everything I’ve been saying on this blog for the last several months. I stuck to the facts, handed my exhibits to the clerk (several printed pages), and was as professional as possible.

When it was Apple’s turn, their representatives opened by throwing a hail mary pass. While holding up the press release outlining the 8600GT replacement program, they claimed that, because the CPU in my MacBook Pro was clocked at 2.6Ghz, and not 2.4Ghz, or 2.5Ghz as stated in the release, that I had a completely different computer … one that was not subject to the 4 year replacement program.

You see, when I ordered my MacBook Pro, I paid about $300 extra for them to up-clock the chip from 2.5Ghz to 2.6Ghz. Yes, it was a classic Apple ripoff, and yes, I was dumb to order it, but I did it, mea culpa.

I had absolutely no idea that it would be used against me in a court of law to explain to a judge why I should not be covered by an extended warranty, and it caught me off-guard. Perhaps, despite everything, I am still a bit naive, because not even I expected Apple to just … lie. At least not in such a silly manner.

Remember, I was not going up against the owner of some taco stand, I was up against the most profitable company in the USA. I honestly expected more than a silly fib.
After listening to Apple, the judge turned to me and asked for my response, and I explained to him, in detail, that the chips, logic boards, and GPUs in all of the MacBook Pro models were the same, regardless of the speed at which the CPUs had been clocked.

Confused, the judge turned to Apple and asked, “Is this true?”

There was some awkward silence as the Apple guys exchanged uncomfortable looks between each other, before one of them finally said “Yes, it is.”

“So, this machine IS covered by the 8600GT repair program?”, asked the judge.

“Yes it is, your honor”, replied Apple.

So, there we were. Not more than 2 minutes into the trial, and Apple conceded to trying to hoodwink the judge.

This is more or less the way the rest of the trial played out. I made a point, Apple rebutted it with something completely off-the-wall and irrelevant, and I explained to the judge why Apple’s rebuttal was nonsense. I took the time to explain everything clearly, I answered all of the judge’s technical questions in detail, and at one point, the judge even declared that he would accept my testimony as that of an “expert witness”.

Apple, well, they didn’t really have a defense. They just kept repeating things like “It’s Apple’s policy to do this”, and “It’s Apple’s position that we do that”. The Apple guys seemed genuinely surprised that I knew as much as I did about computer hardware. I’m not trying to insult iPeople, at least not in this article, but during both mediation and the trial, I realized that Apple has a strong expectation that their users not be tech-savvy and, as such, Apple seems used to infantilizing and bamboozling their customers with silly and nonsensical explanations of highly technical matters.

Years ago, I remember debating the Mac vs. Everything Else issue with a friend of mine, and every time I would bring up the relative attributes of a particular component, he would always respond with “Specs don’t matter!”

I thought he was just being stubborn, but after this experience, I realize that this type of “I don’t care about gigahertz and whatchamajiggers, I just know that Macs use pixie dust and purple elephant dung to make magic!” mentality is a part of the Apple culture from the top down. From the lowest-level sales rep all the way up to the corporate guys.

As the trial went on, I showed the judge evidence that the 8600M graphics cards were known to be defective, I showed him that I had an 8600M in my machine, and I explained to him that, despite their promise to do so, Apple refused to replace my board because it would not boot, and it would not boot because the 8600M had failed.

The judge accepted these explanations, and when he asked Apple what it would cost to replace my logic board if I paid in cash, I interjected and explained to the judge that if Apple replaced only the logic board, it would simply be another logic board with a defective GPU, therefore, such a solution would not be acceptable.

The judge responded by asking Apple if my machine could be fitted with a different GPU, and when they replied “No, that machine will only accept an 8600M GT”, the judge declared my make & model of MacBook Pro to be defective and unrepairable by any means.

Eventually, over the continued objections of the Apple folks (one of the guys kept arguing that I should give Apple one last chance to fix it), I was awarded a cash amount. The amount I was awarded is enough to replace the computer, which means that I should once again have a 17″ laptop. Assuming Apple actually pays me.

Now, I didn’t get everything I asked for. When I filed the suit, I was pissed off, so I asked for the kitchen sink … a refund of Apple Care (which I only purchased when I learned the machine was defective), compensation for loss of use, and even some punitive damages.

Had I been able to show loss-of-use damages, I probably would have gotten them, but the judge awarded what would “make me whole” … essentially, putting me back in the same place that I was before Apple wronged me. This being the case, I received compensation for the machine itself, plus court costs, costs of service, etc.
It was a fair ruling, a little more than I expected actually, and I thanked the judge.

The Apple guys, well, they were none too happy. By the time I stood up, they had already beat a hasty path to the courtroom door. I was going to offer my hand, thank them for their time, and explain that it was nothing personal, but they weren’t interested in any of it.

And that was that.

I guess what they say is true. The sun even shines on a dog’s butthole every now and then, and on this day, I got myself a nice tan.

David faced Goliath, and not unlike the AT&T case a couple of months ago, David somehow, someway, came out on top.

Even though I’m glad it turned out the way it did, one question still nags me:

Why?

Why did it have to come to this?

At one point, the judge asked Apple how much it would have cost them to have simply replaced my logic board when I had taken it in, and one of the Apple guys said “Oh, it wouldn’t have cost us anything, Nvidia foots the bill for each board we replace.”

The judge’s face almost hit the floor as he shot me a quizzical look, to which I just shrugged. I knew that he, and everyone else in the courtroom was thinking the same thing:
If Apple could have replaced my logic board at no cost to themselves, then why in the hell did they drag this out for so long, and why did they send two people to court to try and make sure that I got absolutely nothing? Friends, this is a question I have been asking myself for three months, and it is a question that I do not have the answer to.

You know, I fully respect a person or a company that stands up for himself/itself when they are in the right. It’s the correct thing to do.

What I don’t understand, however, is why Apple fought so hard against me when they were clearly in the wrong. It wasn’t even a judgement call. I knew they were wrong, the judge knew they were wrong, the clerk knew it, the audience knew it, and you could tell … you could just tell that Apple knew it as well.

And what of the shareholders? What should they make of this? Apple’s stock has been an E-ticket ride lately, but this incident should really give shareholders pause. I mean, what kind of judgement are the current leaders of Apple using?

Think about it … instead of repairing my computer under the repair program that they, themselves, announced … at absolutely no cost to themselves … Apple paid two guys to come to Downtown Seattle, and … well … lie, so that I would not have a non-defective computer. When you factor in the time it took them to get here, the time spent in court, and the time to get home, Apple paid two guys a day’s wages to defend this suit.

In addition, instead of paying nothing for the repair, they paid a legal team to oversee the case, and, oh yeah … you guys, the shareholders, are buying me a new computer too. Thanks.

As far as I can tell, Apple spent all of this time and money, solely to be a bully. Was that really money well-spent? I mean, you can almost excuse the holy wars against Adobe, Samsung, Android, and the prototype guys … but a local blogger?

The obsessiveness of crushing all perceived enemies, no matter how big or small, regardless of whether they are wrong or right, should be of concern to all iFans and financiers. It’s getting to the point where it’s really, really just sick.

Gone are the days of the scrappy underdog, throwing a hammer through the window of conformity, and what has emerged is … well, it’s far worse than what it was rebelling against.
Apple has become the Orwellian nightmare that it warned us about some 30 years ago. A huge vehicle of sameness backed by legions of newthink practitioners, gleefully cheering as Big Bully annihilates one thoughtcriminal after another.

Apple may be profitable, but it’s not well. Something is wrong at the highest levels, and if I was strongly tied to the company financially, I might be worried. Although blinded by Apple’s success in the near-term, I don’t think history will judge the company favorably.

Anyway, now comes the hard part.

Collecting the money. A judgement is only a piece of paper. It’s worth nothing if you can’t collect.

If what I have seen from Apple is any guide, they will spend $50 Million to get out of paying my four-figure judgement, simply out of spite. Just how much of the shareholder’s money will Apple end up spending because they tried to screw Seattle Rex remains to be seen.

I’ll fight on, though. No matter how many obstacles Apple throws in my way, I’ll keep going. After all, it’s what I do. I guess you can say I …

Think Different.

Update: Wow, this article really set off a firestorm. I’ve received scores of emails from people who were given the same “it won’t boot so we won’t repair it” explanation that I was, and were forced to pay for the repair out of their own pocket.

This really is a larger suit, perhaps a class-action suit in the making (as much as I detest class-actions for their unfairness toward the class), and I am exploring the possibilities of bringing a second suit against the company for fraud, misrepresentation, etc.

I’m simply astounded by how many people received the same treatment as myself over the 8600M issue.


Πηγή: http://www.seattlerex.com/seattle-rex-vs-apple-the-verdict-is-in/

Πηγή: Bloomberg

Στη δημοσιότητα δόθηκαν οι φάκελοι του FBI για τον Στιβ Τζομπς. Οι φάκελοι περιγράφουν τον ιδρυτή της Apple ως έναν άνθρωπο που έχρηζε σεβασμού για την πρωτοπορία του, ωστόσο αμφισβητούν την ειλικρίνεια και την ηθική του.

Διαβάστε εδώ τα έγγραφα.

«Αρκετά άτομα αμφισβήτησαν την ειλικρίνεια του Στ.Τζομπς, λέγοντας ότι ο κ. Τζομπς θα διαστρεβλώσει την αλήθεια και θα αλλάξει την πραγματικότητα, προκειμένου να επιτύχει τους στόχους του» αναφέρει η περίληψη της έρευνας του FBI.

Πρώην συνεργάτης του Τζομπς, που κατηγορούσε τον ιδρυτή της Apple, επειδή δεν έλαβε μετοχές που πίστευε ότι άξιζε, χαρακτήρισε τον Τζομπς ως «ειλικρινή και άξιο εμπιστοσύνης. Ωστόσο, ο ηθικός χαρακτήρας του είναι αμφισβητούμενος».

Ορισμένοι από τους συνεντευξιαζόμενους δήλωσαν ότι ο Στ.Τζομπς ήταν δύσκολος συνεργάτης, κάτι που έχει ξαναειπωθεί και μάλιστα αναφέρεται και σε βιογραφία που κυκλοφόρησε πέρυσι. Ο Στιβ Τζομπς πέθανε τον Οκτώβριο του 2011, μετά από μακροχρόνια μάχη με τον καρκίνο.

Τα έγγραφα αποκαλύπτουν ότι ο Στιβ Τζομπς είχε πέσει θύμα μιας εκβιαστικής απειλής για βόμβα το 1985.

Αναφέρονται, επίσης, στην επιλογή του να στραφεί στον Βουδισμό και στην παραδοχή του για χρήση ναρκωτικών ουσιών.

Ο φάκελος συστάθηκε το 1991, όταν η τότε κυβέρνηση Μπους σκεφτόταν να του δώσει κυβερνητικό πόστο.

Παρά τα μη κολακευτικά σχόλια, ο ιδρυτής της Apple διορίστηκε αμισθί σε θέση συμβουλευτική του προέδρου για θέματα πολιτικής εξαγωγών.


Πηγή: http://news.in.gr/science-technology/article/?aid=1231149656

Why do we love Apple products? Because Apple makes products they want to use.

This quote from Steve Jobs in 1997 says it all (it's from 30 minutes into the video, below - though, it's worth watching the whole thing):

"I think every good product that I’ve ever seen in this industry and pretty much anywhere, is because a group of people care deeply about making something wonderful that they and their friends wanted. You know? They want to use it themselves. And that’s how the Apple I came about, that’s how the Apple II came about, that’s how the Macintosh came about. That’s how almost everything I know that’s good has come about. It didn’t come about because people were trembling in a corner worried about some big company stomping on them. Because if the big company made the product that was right, then most of these things wouldn’t have happened. If Woz and I could have went out and plunked down 2000 bucks and bought an Apple II, why would we have built one? We weren’t trying to start a company; we were trying to get a computer."

Right after that, Jobs also made the excellent point that:

"It’s incredibly stupid for Apple to get into a position where for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. That’s really dumb. ... Apple can win without having Microsoft lose."

And, that has, in fact happened.


Πηγή: http://www.esquiremac.com/blarg/2011/10/6/why-we-love-apple-products.html

The “CEO of the Decade” is no longer CEO.

After the initial shock, a general impulse seems to have seized commenters, which is to reassure everyone that everything will be OK.

“Apple will do amazingly well without Steve Jobs,” says Slate’s Farhad Manjoo.

PC World‘s Tony Bradley says we shouldn’t panic, because “Apple Is Still Apple.”

“Apple will continue to shine without Jobs at the helm,” says Seeking Alpha‘s Carl Howe.

Why? Because Apple “is more than Steve Jobs,” according to Christina Rexrode of the Associated Press.

All these headlines are technically true, but add up to wishful thinking that masks the larger truth. Yes, Apple is more than Steve Jobs.” But Apple without Steve Jobs is less than Apple with him. A lot less.


Why Steve Jobs was the Greatest CEO Ever

Some CEOs are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.

In Jobs’ case, all three are true.

Jobs’ entire life was a “perfect storm” of elements for the man to lead Apple and make it the company it has become. Jobs was born at exactly the right time in exactly the right place with exactly the right personality to become the ultimate consumer electronics visionary.

Jobs was born with a personality containing equal parts perfectionism, narcissism, impatience and a quality you might call extremism.

Above all, Jobs was born with the DNA of a writer. (It’s not a coincidence that both his biological sister and daughter are successful writers.)

Writer DNA predisposes the victim to gravitate to the larger issue, whenever confronting particulars, to larger truths when confronting facts. For example, Jobs never viewed Apple as a company that makes computers and consumer electronics gadgets. To him, Apple makes culture accelerators. It manufactures human experience. Apple doesn’t “succeed in the marketplace.” It “changes the world.”

Critics always slam Jobs as “merely a salesman.” But that’s wrong. Jobs thinks like a writer, understanding and obsessing over larger truths and aspirations, and conveying them with piercing, emotive and unforgettable language. This is what great novelists do.

Jobs was born with qualities that made him the greatest CEO ever, but he also acquired greatness as a CEO. The hard way.

Throughout all his personal transitions, from wandering hippy to enfant terrible to pop-collar douchebag to hard-nosed businessman to the impossible-to-stereotype person that he is today, Jobs has been constantly confronted by challenge after challenge. And each one of them has made Jobs grow as a leader.

The kid who couldn’t be trusted by investors to lead the company as CEO in the 1970s had no idea what he was doing. The man who strode back into Apple in the 1990s as part of the NeXT acquisition was an unprecedented master of the art of running a technology company. During those two decades, Jobs experienced an education like no other. NeXT enabled him to take all he had learned at Apple, and apply it to a startup. Then he took all he had learned at the startup and applied it to Apple.

This perfect storm of DNA, experience and circumstance transformed Jobs into the CEO of the Decade. But what is it about Jobs as CEO that brought Apple from the brink of failure to the most valuable technology company in history?


How Jobs Ruled Apple

The trouble with dictatorship or absolute monarchy is that success or failure depend entirely upon the quality of the despot. That’s why they fail. And that’s why a democracy that limits the power of leaders is best — it still works, more or less, even when incompetent morons are in power.

But what about when the dictator is literally the single best person to lead? In those almost non-existently rare instances, despotism is by far the best form of government. Heaven, for example, is not a democracy.

In the case of Apple, it’s not just that Steve Jobs had become an amazing CEO, but that within Apple, he ruled unchallenged. Sure, he had a razor sharp vision for how things should be. But equally important: Nobody could over-rule Jobs. Not the owners of the company (the shareholders), not the board, not the desires of the users — literally nobody.

People outside the industry often fail to appreciate how powerful this is.

You will note, by the way, that all the most successful companies in technology are run by their visionary founders (Apple, Google, Oracle), and lose focus after those founders depart (Microsoft, HP).

The reason is that without the visionary despot, “groupthink” takes over. Everyone’s got their own agenda, and all these disparate visions tend to cancel each other out. Ultimately, the only criteria for deciding anything is either what’s best for shareholders (short-term thinking) or what users want (obsolete thinking).

At Apple, Jobs’ rule was so absolute that if Jobs wanted decision A, and most of the board, most of the executives, most of the user surveys and most of the shareholders wanted decision B, there was no question: We go with A.

I once heard an eye-opening talk by Palm Pilot creator Jeff Hawkins, who said that in bringing the Palm Pilot to market, he spent much of his time overcoming groupthink. The engineers made compelling arguments for why more buttons would be better, a faster processor would be better, more applications would be better. Ultimately, the original Pilot succeeded only because Hawkins was able to bat down all these disparate visions, which were all based on false assumptions like “more is better,” “more powerful is better,” and realize his own vision “simplicity is better.”

It didn’t take long after the Pilot’s initial success for Hawkins to lose control. The result was a company dominated by multiple agendas and classic groupthink ending ultimately with the announcement last week that the Palm line would be terminated.

Jobs’ power and influence within Apple did not come from his title. His vote was the only one that counted not because his business card said CEO, but because he’s fricken Steve Jobs, and this is fricken Apple. Who is going to over-rule him?

Apple isn’t just getting a new ruler. It’s getting a new form of government. Yesterday, Apple was a totalitarian dictatorship. Today, it’s a democratic oligarchy.

Unlike Jobs, Cook will have to balance the competing interests of various VPs and board members, taking into account the interests of shareholders and users on every decision.

Yes, Jobs is still Chairman, still Cook’s boss. But it was Jobs’ involvement in every little detail that made Apple what it is today. Google’s Vic Gundotra told the story yesterday of getting a call on Sunday from Steve Jobs over a color on an icon. It wasn’t the absolutely perfect shade of yellow, and therefore it was an urgent crisis that had to be resolved immediately. Every. Little. Detail.

Those days are gone.

Apple will continue to be a successful company. This is in part because Jobs has put such a great team in place. The governing criteria for all decisions for the time being will be: What would Steve do?

Over time, however, Apple will and must gravitate toward normalcy, toward average, toward mediocrity. In fact, the success of Apple as a company has always perfectly correlated to the degree of Jobs’ control.

Nobody wants to hear this. I don’t want to say it. But the truth is that Steve Jobs is perfectly irreplaceable. And it was his unprecedented, unrepeatable leadership that made Apple what it is today.

Tomorrow, it will become a different Apple, a lesser Apple.

Companies are only as great as the people who lead them. And today we’re forced to admit that it was, all along, Steve Jobs who made Apple think different.

Apple will continue to be a great company. But it was Steve Jobs who was insanely great.


Πηγή: http://www.cultofmac.com/110518/no-apple-wont-be-the-same-without-steve-jobs/

To survive its late founder, Apple and Steve Jobs planned a training program in which company executives will be taught to think like him, in 'a forum to impart that DNA to future generations.' Key to this effort is Joel Podolny, former Yale Business School dean.

Reporting from San Francisco— Apple Inc. now has to get down to the business of surviving its founder.

It's something that Apple — and Steve Jobs himself — had been painstakingly planning for years.

Deep inside its sprawling Cupertino, Calif., campus, one of the world's most successful and secretive companies has had a team of experts hard at work on a closely guarded project.

But it isn't a cool new gadget. It's an executive training program called Apple University that Jobs considered vital to the company's future: Teaching Apple executives to think like him.

"Steve was looking to his legacy. The idea was to take what is unique about Apple and create a forum that can impart that DNA to future generations of Apple employees," said a former Apple executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve his relationship with the company. "No other company has a university charged with probing so deeply into the roots of what makes the company so successful."

Jobs oversaw the most remarkable corporate turnaround in Silicon Valley history after returning to Apple in 1997. For more than a decade, he was behind every crucial decision as Apple rolled out blockbuster hits from the iPod to the iPad, changing how people listen to music and watch entertainment, reshaping entire industries and making Apple the world's most valuable tech company.

The challenge of maintaining that momentum came into sharp focus Tuesday when Apple's newly minted chief executive Tim Cook took Jobs' place on stage to show off an updated version of the world's best-selling smart phone. Without its master pitchman, Apple didn't get the kind of adulation for the iPhone's new features to which it's accustomed.

Apple would not comment on Apple University. But people familiar with the project say Jobs personally recruited the dean of Yale's Business School in 2008 to run it. Joel Podolny's assignment: Help Apple internalize the thoughts of its visionary founder to prepare for the day when he's not around anymore.

"One of the things that Steve Jobs understood very well is that Apple is like no other company on the planet," said longtime Apple analyst Tim Bajarin. "It became pretty clear that Apple needed a set of educational materials so that Apple employees could learn to think and make decisions as if they were Steve Jobs."

Podolny tasked leading business professors including Harvard University's Richard Tedlow, who wrote a biography of former Intel chief Andy Grove with researching the company's major decisions and the top executives who make them. Those executives — including Cook — have used those case studies to teach courses that groom the company's next generation of leaders.

Analysts say Jobs drew inspiration for the university from Bill Hewlett and David Packard, whose greatest creation was not the pocket calculator or the minicomputer, but Hewlett-Packard itself. Hewlett and Packard famously set out their company's core values in "The HP Way."

With Apple University, Jobs was trying to achieve something similar, people familiar with the project say. He identified tenets that he believes unleash innovation and sustain success at Apple — accountability, attention to detail, perfectionism, simplicity, secrecy. And he oversaw the creation of university-caliber courses that demonstrate how those principles translate into business strategies and operating practices.

The idea of building an ivory tower on a corporate campus goes back decades with the best-known — and oldest — run by General Electric. Corporate universities fell out of favor in the 1990s, considered too expensive, bureaucratic and out of touch with the companies they were supposed to serve. Even Apple shut down its corporate university.

But Jobs' interest in a corporate university never wavered, former employees say. For years he pressed for a way to study the success of Apple's executive team as well as Apple's culture and history. His model was Pixar. The animation studio that Jobs sold to Disney for $7.5 billion in 2006 runs Pixar University, a professional development program that offers courses in fine arts and filmmaking as well as leadership and management to steep employees in the company's culture, history and values as well as its craft.

"He had the university concept at Pixar, and he believed in it," said a former Apple executive who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve his relationship with the company.

What Jobs needed was someone to carry out his vision.

Apple began approaching Podolny and other academics about five years ago, according to people who were contacted. The project took on greater urgency in 2008 shortly before Jobs took his second medical leave from Apple.

Podolny, an accomplished scholar and administrator whose resume includes teaching at two of the nation's top business schools, Stanford and Harvard, is an economic sociologist who focuses on leadership and organizational behavior.

Podolny didn't just study leaders; he became one. In 2005, at the age of 39, he left Harvard for the Yale School of Management where he rethought how the faculty taught future MBAs to better prepare them for the business world. Yale scrapped its staid single-subject courses in marketing and accounting for more holistic, multidisciplinary programs that focused on "the employee," "the innovator" and "the state and society."

By all accounts, Podolny lifted the fortunes of the young business school. He was credited with helping applications rise 50% during his 3½-year tenure. He recruited top scholars, increasing the size of the faculty by 20%. And his prodigious efforts on the stump helped the school raise more than $170 million. He was also in the classroom more often than most deans and responded to every email, frequently by 4:30 a.m.

"I remember scratching my head and thinking, 'This guy is not going to last at this rate.' Sure enough, he left sooner than we had hoped," Yale business professor Doug Rae said.

In October 2008, Podolny was at the top of his academic game with many expecting he would go on to become a university president. He stunned colleagues by abruptly stepping down as dean in the middle of the term and officially joining Apple in early 2009.

"The timing surprised everyone. Deans are typically in these positions for significantly longer; a decade would not be an unusual term. He had gone to really put the Yale School of Management on a different trajectory and that takes time," said Garth Saloner, dean of Stanford's Business School.

But Podolny was someone who had flouted convention to work on the cutting edge of academia. "Joel is an innovator and very creative and he's always looking for new areas to apply that talent," Saloner said.

Like others Jobs has recruited over the years, observers say Podolny fell under Jobs' spell. Podolny said he decided to leave Yale for the chance to work with a modern-day Thomas Edison.

Podolny recalled writing his first computer program on an Apple II and pulling an all-nighter to watch his Laserwriter print his undergraduate thesis at the rate of seven minutes a page.

"While there are many great companies, I cannot think of one that has had as tremendous personal meaning for me as Apple," he wrote in a farewell note to Yale students.

The importance of his new position at Apple was apparent from the first day. Podolny moved into an office in between Jobs and Cook, he confided in former colleagues. And, in a testament to Jobs' faith in Podolny, he was later named vice president of human resources.

Columbia University social scientist Peter Bearman, who was Podolny's advisor for his thesis on the role of Juan Carlos I in helping Spain establish a parliamentary democracy, said Podolny pursued his career-long interest in leadership at Apple.

"The idea that he was helping to build a structure for Apple into the future probably appealed to him," Bearman said.

jessica.guynn@latimes.com

Πηγή: LA Times

You know when you used to have no choice but to use Windows XP, either because you couldn’t afford a Mac or you had to use a PC at work? Well, you must remember, then, how annoying it was to have the same bugs and weird glitches happen over and over again; those endless days and nights trying to work on something important when, no matter how many fingers you crossed and cracks in the pavement you avoided, you knew once error message X appeared, crash Y and endless pop-up Z would inevitably follow and there was nothing you or anyone else could do to avoid the inevitable restart / reinstall / dance on one leg chanting, “I’m a little teapot short and stout”.

No amount of closing that self-opening “Something has gone horribly wrong” error box would save all that work you’re still able to look at, but not save. At first you threw tantrums and screamed expletives at the top of your voice, about how Bill Gates was going to “pay for this”, but eventually you just resigned yourself to the fact that it was happening and decided life’s too short to care. “One day”, you said to yourself, “I will own a Mac and all of this will be in the past”.

At one point, when Windows Vista was announced, you hoped beyond hope that all, or at least most of these nightmares would end. But that day came and went with no change. Sure, Vista wore a different perfume to cover the stench and yes, the ‘aero’ interface wasn’t so bad after all. But, underneath it all, was the same pustulating tripe that had ruined your life for the past millennia and, to make it worse, you knew for a fact no-one at Microsoft lost any sleep over it. “This wouldn’t happen if I owned a Mac”, you said. “Just you wait, Steve Ballmer, me and my mate Steve Jobs will show you good and proper, one day… one day!”

And then, it arrived. You magic’d that pay rise at work into Cupertino’s finest export quicker than you could say, “I need it for work” to your wife and “I don’t play games anyway” to your kids. “It’s here!”, you exclaimed. “I can’t believe an actual Apple Mac is in my house and it’s all MINE!!” You unboxed it like a kid at Christmas, pealing back each layer of the delicious packaging; smelling the inside of the box like a wine expert on a major four week bender around the French vineyards.

But wait! What’s this? Four years have passed in the blink of an eye! “Ohh! A new Mac Operating System, OS X Lion is coming out! Yummy, I’ll have me some of that!” you gushed!

Well, how stupid do you feel now? You drank the Kool-Aid and, for a while it refreshed the parts other sugar water can’t reach. But then, like realising in the middle of a stage hypnotist’s comedy act, that while you thought you were eating an Apple, you were really munching an onion, this happened:

Control + Scroll screen zooming randomly turns itself off.

Even basic Spotlight Searches in a window (Command + Shift + F) crash Finder.

Mail crashes all the time.

Safari has been replaced by a pile of turds. When it isn’t refreshing inactive tabs from the network instead of cache, so you lose everything you’re uploading, it’s secretly closing windows for no rhyme or reason when you’re not looking.

iTunes boot time is measured in aeons.

The “Something has crashed, send a report to Apple” window might as well be your Desktop Picture.

Finder periodically decides you don’t need to see all your windows any more.

The list of applications that no longer work, if printed out, would stretch from here to the moon.

Launchpad is pointless. Utterly and completely pointless.

Opening Mission Control is like walking through molasses with cream cheese in your socks. It doesn’t support a second display and the graphics layer tears through the UI like a hammer through porridge.

Fullscreen apps have a habit of just vanishing. They’re running, but they’re not showing.

Video playback in iTunes defaults to fullscreen but the playback controls go missing if you switch to another app without coming out of fullscreen first. Handy.

Command + Control + D pop-over dictionary takes a week to load and mysteriously insists on spinning up all your USB hard drives—as does unmounting all your USB hard drives.

Garage Band now hates you. So does Steam. And Pages. And Photoshop. And Automator. And Call of Duty. And Tweetdeck. Oh and you know how half the reason you put your Mac in your spare room was so you could use FrontRow as a media centre? Yeah, that’s gone now. You can’t do that any more. Sorry. You have to buy an Apple TV.

Question: Most of us would agree, without sounding sycophantic, that the MacCast is one of the premier Mac podcast anywhere on-line, yes? So, in the last, say, two years, how many Mac users who comment here, e-mail Adam and otherwise engage in the extended Apple community on a regular basis, have you heard say something like, “I hope Apple subtly change all the things that are already perfectly fine, before they fix all the things that have been broken since OS X Tiger”?

By way of example: Drag and drop a selection of JPEG files you want to upload to your image hosting service of choice, from the Finder into the Open box in Safari. If the wind is blowing from the North and it’s the second Tuesday of the month, the destination path will change to the location you’re dragging the files from and the selection you want to upload will be highlighted, so all you have to do is click Send and await for the transfer to complete. But, if it’s half past 4 and your second cousin twice removed is called Jennifer, they spring back into Finder and Safari looks at you like, “Pfft, since when have I been able to do that?” So you try again. Same thing. You try a third time. “Oh!”, says Safari. “THAT kind of drag and drop! I thought you were losing your mind, you silly user! Sure, I’ll do that for you!”

It’s just a litany of silly little frustrations, which have always been there, but are now ten times worse. The most frustrating part being, someone, somewhere at the world’s largest computer maker; the richest company in America, if not the world, has signed off on each and every one of these things as if they’re ready for prime time. Senior department heads and top management—Jobs, Ive and Schiller included—the very people who RUN the company with more cash in the bank than the US government—has looked at each of these pointless tweaks and decided they’re good to go!

It beggars belief. They should be paying us to beta test this for them, but because they were so afraid of having to delay it, because it just isn’t ready, we’re expected to tow the party line, nod politely and ramble on about having a slightly different User Interface, as if that somehow makes up for the fact iPhoto still sucks.

I mean, why on earth do I still have to open a music player to sync photos to my phone? And why couldn’t they have done something about that, before they changed the way TextEdit Finds and Replaces text, so it’s now harder to use than it was before?

Goofy scrolling, by default? Really? Let’s put it like this. How many Windows users, with their sloping brows and their smug determination never to switch to Mac, have walked into an Apple retail store, in the last month, idled up to a spare machine and had all their preconceptions about the Mac being esoteric and “weird” confirmed in ONE touch of the upside down mouse?

Why do I now have to click three times to autofill my information on a form in Safari, when before I clicked once?

Why can’t I Command + Shift + L any highlighted text to search for it on Google anymore? Which “genius” thought turning that feature off was a wise move? Yes, I know I can redefine my own shortcut key in System Preferences. No, I don’t think that makes it OK. What does my Dad do when that no longer works? I tell you what he does, he rings me and says, “That bloody Mac you told us to buy keeps going funny! It won’t search Yoogle anymore!”

Simply put, who, at Apple, in the full knowledge of their line manager, went into the source code for Finder and thought, “You know, I really should spend this month figuring out why Finder has been crashing every time you create more than 50 shortcut files at once, ever since OS X Panther, but I think what I’ll do instead is disable the shortcut key that turns the volume up and down by single units instead of ten at a time.”

How is turning features OFF an ‘upgrade’? In what reality is OS X Lion worthy of the Apple name? IT’S A DOWNGRADE! Apple have become the thing they fear the most. They are the new Microsoft and Lion is their Vista. There, I said it.

Oh, sure, you’ll come back at me with some pithy retort about Versions and Autosave and how “awesome” it is to swipe your fingers across a £60-a-pop mouse. But the fact remains, they’ve tinkered with things that weren’t broken and ignored or made worse things that have needed fixing for nearly 10 years. You know it. I know it. We all know it. I think it’s about time we started staying as much out-loud and force Apple to put this thing right as soon as possible.

UPDATE:
Since writing this article OS X Lion 10.7.1 has been released and it does address some of the stability issues with Safari and Mail. I also note that Boxee for Mac is a vast improvement on FrontRow and works well with the Apple Remote Control. I’d also like to thank whoever submitted this to Hacker News, but for the record I do not carry Google ads on this blog.


Πηγή: http://howgoodisthat.wordpress.com/2011/08/20/os-x-lion-apples-vista-moment/

Η Apple είναι βέβαια απρόθυμη να το συζητήσει δημόσια, σίγουρα όμως έχει έτοιμο ένα «σχέδιο διαδοχής» για τη μετά Στηβ Τζομπς εποχή. Όλοι όμως αναρωτιούνται αν αυτή η εποχή θα είναι ανθόσπαρτη όπως το πρόσφατο παρελθόν της εταιρείας.

Ο Τζομπς, εξάλλου, ήταν ο άνθρωπος που έσωσε μια σχεδόν χρεοκοπημένη Apple με την επιστροφή του στα ηνία της εταιρείας το 1996 (απουσίαζε για σχεδόν μια δεκαετία μετά την εκδίωξή του το 1985) και σε 15 χρόνια την κατέστησε τη μεγαλύτερη εταιρεία παγκοσμίως σε χρηματιστηριακή αξία.

Το σημαντικότερο όμως είναι ότι ο Τζομπς είχε την πρώτη και την τελευταία λέξη όσον αφορά το σχεδιασμό των συσκευών και την αίσθηση που δίνουν, πιστεύοντας ότι «η τεχνολογία από μόνη της δεν αρκεί».

«Είναι η τεχνολογία παντρεμένη με τις τέχνες και τις ανθρωπιστικές επιστήμες αυτό που δίνει αποτελέσματα που κάνουν την καρδιά μας να ξυπνά» είχε δηλώσει πρόσφατα.

Μένει να επιβεβαιωθεί αν οι άνθρωποι που αφήνει πίσω του έχουν εμπεδώσει αυτή τη νοοτροπία.


Mετά τον Στηβ Τζομπς, o Στηβ Τζομπς

Σε πρώτη φάση, ο Τζομπς θα παραμείνει κεντρικό πρόσωπο στην εταιρεία του: Παραιτήθηκε μεν από τη θέση του διευθύνοντος συμβούλου, ανέλαβε όμως τη θέση του προέδρου του ΔΣ, οπότε θα συνεχίσει να έχει λόγο στην κατεύθυνση που θα ακολουθήσει η Apple.

Σύμφωνα εξάλλου με το Bloomberg, ο Τζομπς εργαζόταν όλη μέρα στην Apple την Τετάρτη, παρόλο που τις προηγούμενες εβδομάδες παρέμενε κλεισμένος στο σπίτι. Και όπως αναφέρει η ίδια ανώνυμη πηγή, δεν υπάρχουν ενδείξεις ότι η κατάσταση της υγείας του έχει επιδεινωθεί το τελευταίο διάστημα.

Εντούτοις, η βρετανική Daily Mail δημοσιεύει μια φωτογραφία όπου ο Τζομπς εμφανίζεται εξαιρετικά αδυνατισμένος, περισσότερο από ποτέ, να προσπαθεί να σταθεί με βοήθεια.

To Bloomberg γράφει επίσης ότι ο Τζομπς θα παραμείνει στο ΔΣ της Disney, στην οποία είχε πουλήσει το επιτυχημένο κινηματογραφικό του στούντιο, την Pixar.


Τιμ Κουκ: νέος πρωταγωνιστής

Κάποια στιγμή, όμως, το εμβληματικό αφεντικό της Apple θα αποσυρθεί εντελώς από την αυτοκρατορία του. Η αγορά, όμως, έχει τα καλύτερα λόγια να πει για τον διάδοχό του, τον Τιμ Κουκ, που ήταν μέχρι σήμερα εκτελεστικός διευθυντής της Apple.

Ο Κουκ, σήμερα 50 ετών, είχε αντικαταστήσει προσωρινά τον Τζομπς όταν το μεγάλο αφεντικό έλειπε σε αναρρωτική άδεια ανά διαστήματα από το 2004 έως το 2011.

Και τα πήγε μια χαρά σε αυτό το διάστημα: ολοκλήρωσε την ανάπτυξη του iPad και έφερε εξαιρετικά οικονομικά αποτελέσματα, με τη μετοχή της εταιρείας να έχει ανέβει από τα 300 δολάρια στις αρχές του έτους στα 400 περίπου δολάρια σήμερα.

Ο Κουκ έχει εξάλλου στο πλευρό του μια ομάδα οκτώ αντιπροέδρων, ανάμεσά τους κορυφαία ονόματα στη βιομηχανία πληροφορικής, όπως ο Σκοτ Φόρστολ.

Με το iPhone 5 να ετοιμάζεται για λανσάρισμα το φθινόπωρο, και με ένα ακόμα iPad στα σκαριά για του χρόνου, κανένα απρόοπτο δεν προβλέπεται για το προσεχές διάστημα.

Όπως σχολιάζει το BBC, ο Κουκ είναι άριστος γνώστης της αλυσίδας προμηθευτών και της διαδικασίας παραγωγής, καθήκοντα που ακούγονται ανιαρά αλλά παίζουν σημαντικό ρόλό. Ο Κουκ φέρεται να είναι επίσης ο άνθρωπος που αύξησε τα περιθώρια κέρδους για το iPad και τo iPhone.

Σε email που απέστειλε στους εργαζόμενους, o ίδιος διαβεβαιώνει ότι «η Apple δεν πρόκειται να αλλάξει» και πως «τα καλύτερα χρόνια βρίσκονται μπροστά μας».

Σημαντικό ρόλο στην Apple παίζει ακόμα ο Βρετανός σχεδιαστής Τζόναθαν Άιβι, υπεύθυνος για το σχεδιασμό του iMac, του iPhone και του iPad, μεταξύ άλλων.

Σύμφωνα όμως με πρόσφατες φήμες, ο Άιβι εξετάζει το ενδεχόμενο να αποχωρήσει από την Apple για να επιστρέψει στην πατρίδα του. Σύμφωνα με τον Guardian, αυτό θα ήταν «ο χειρότερος εφιάλτης για την Apple».


Και κάτι ακόμα

Ένα από τα ερωτήματα που παραμένουν αναπάντητα είναι το ποιος θα αντικαταστήσει τον Στηβ Τζομπς στη σκηνή κατά τις παρουσιάσεις νέων προϊόντων.

Έχοντας ένα ιδιαίτερο επικοινωνιακό ταλέντο, και επιμένοντας να φορά μπλου τζιν και ένα μαύρο ζιβάγκο, ο Τζομπς είχε το ταλέντο να σαγηνεύει τα πλήθη με τη χαρακτηριστική ατάκα «Και κάτι ακόμα», λίγο πριν παρουσιάσει κάθε νέο, καινοτόμο προϊόν.

Δεν είναι καθόλου σίγουρο ότι ο Τιμ Κουκ, εξαιρετικά ήπιων τόνων, θα μπορεί να κρατά κι αυτός το κοινό με κομμένη την ανάσα.

Ακόμα κι αν πρόκειται μόνο για τη σκηνική παρουσία, σίγουρα κάτι θα λείπει πλέον από την Apple... ή μήπως όχι;


Τελικά, ποιος πουλάει, το προϊόν ή ο Τζομπς;

Κάποιοι υποστηρίζουν ότι η ανοδική πορεία της Apple οφείλεται στην ανωτερότητα των προϊόντων που επινοεί, σχεδιάζει, κατασκευάζει και προωθεί η εταιρεία παρά στο γεγονός ότι τα παρουσίαζε ο αδιαμφισβήτητα χαρισματικός Τζομπς. Αλλοι πάλι ότι, ο Τζομπς ως CEO είχε ένα χάρισμα: να πουλάει προϊόντα που όλοι ήθελαν αν και δεν τα χρειάζονταν.

Οι προκλήσεις που έχει να αντιμετωπίσει ο Τιμ Κουκ είναι πολλές, καθώς οι συγκρίσεις είναι αναπόφευκτες. Πάντως, τουλάχιστον η Apple θέλει να πιστεύουμε την άποψη που λέει ότι οι ηγέτες φροντίζουν πάντα να περιτριγυρίζονται από ομάδες ισχυρών ταλαντούχων ανθρώπων, που μπορούν να κάνουν τη δουλειά ακόμα και εν απουσία τους.

Από την άλλη, αυτό δεν σημαίνει ότι  αποχώρηση ενός ανθρώπου στον οποίο έχουν προσαφθεί τόσοι χαρακτηρισμοί -έως και για εκκλησία του Τζομπς έχει γίνει λόγος- είναι πάντοτε ομαλή. Για παράδειγμα, η αποχώρηση του Μπιλ Γκέιτς από τη Microsoft, αν και σχεδιάστηκε προσεκτικά και υλοποιήθηκε σταδιακά εντός δύο ολόκληρων χρόνων, τελικά δεν φαίνεται να άφησε πίσω της κάποια ομάδα που διατήρησε την αίγλη της εταιρείας στα επίπεδα που την άφησε ο ηγέτης της, αναγνωρίζοντας βέβαια ότι οι εποχές και οι προκλήσεις στην αγορά πληροφορικής αλλάζουν, αλλά αυτό συνέβαινε και επί Γκέιτς.


Πηγή: http://tech.in.gr/analysis/article/?aid=1231125636

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs and the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They are not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do, is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."

Πηγή: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/07/25/138674736/china-investigates-fake-apple-stores-exposed-by-american-expat


The Chinese government has launched an investigation into fake Apple stores that have popped up around the southwestern city of Kunming. As Mark reported, last week, an American expat blogger who goes by BirdAboard spotted what she called "the best ripoff store we had ever seen (and we see them everyday.)"

In short, the stores copied everything from the winding staircase to the blue T-shirts used by Apple Store employees in authentic shops. But as that blog post gained international attention, the Chinese authorities got involved.

The AP reports that Chinese authorities found five fake Apple stores in Kunming and shut down two of them. The AP adds:

"Officials couldn't do anything about the other three stores — which prominently displayed Apple signs and logos — because they did not find any fake Apple products for sale, according to a report by a local newspaper posted on the Kunming city government's website."

After the blog appeared on Wednesday, the Kunming Trade and Industry Bureau inspected more than 300 electronics stores in Kunming...

The store featured in BirdAboard's blog post is still open. The Wall Street Journal talked to store's manager, who gave his name as Li and said his store wasn't in violation of the law.

Li said his store isn't an authorized reseller of Apple, but he'd like to be one. "We have a business license and we are running or business by the law," he told the Journal. "All of our products are authentic Apple products."

Apple has stayed quiet on the issue. But China's state-run news agency Xinhua reported, today, that Apple was planning its 5th store in the country. They reported that Apple was planning a third store in Shanghai. Apple already has two stores in Beijing.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs today sent the following email to all Apple employees:


Team,

At my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health. I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for all of Apple’s day to day operations. I have great confidence that Tim and the rest of the executive management team will do a terrific job executing the exciting plans we have in place for 2011.

I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can. In the meantime, my family and I would deeply appreciate respect for our privacy.

Steve


Πηγή: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/01/17advisory.html

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs and the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They are not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do, is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."

From the “Tiny Zone” collumn of MacFormat magazine (9-12-2000):

This month BETT, the Educational Technology Show, again showed the difference between Apple and Micro$oft, and I don’t mean just Micro$oft’s relative prominence on the show floor.

Consider Apple’s show guide entry:

"Apple’s mission is to offer tools and solutions wich embrace and extend the best educational practices, enchancing teaching, facilitating life long learning and simplifying communications. Always leaders in inovation, Apple delivers solutions offering clear advantages of power, ease of use, multimedia capabilities and compatibility... View the great solutions that help empower individuals and groups to address the challenges of the future today".

In an interview in the “Guardian”, Micro$oft’s general manager for education, Liz King, listed her company’s priorities in education:

"First, to make money, second, to increase Micro$oft΄s market share in schools and third, "education is a startegic marketplace for us. We are educating the next generation of workers who will purchase our products"".

As the “Guardian” commented, “These are priorities that significantly don’t mention improving the quality of education or ensuring equality of access to education.

Different thinking indeed.